The Self-Alienation of Cultural Marxism

Msgr. Robert J. Batule: As students head back to school this week, chances are good that campus unrest will also be returning. A reality check is in order.

As students are returning to school this week, chances are very good that campus unrest will return as well with the new academic year. And given the presidential election, the national media – television especially – will bring enormous attention, once again, to the grievances of a class of people that we should call cultural Marxists, whose ideas on alienation harken back to the class antagonism of Europe in the nineteenth century.

But first, who are the cultural Marxists? Let’s start with who they are not.

Historically, Marxism has had a closer association with the economic sphere than with the cultural sphere. Beginning with Marx and Engels, it was heavily focused on the conflict between capital and labor. That conflict would lead inevitably, the Marxists claimed, to the ruination of the worker, for it exploited him and thereby produced in him a deep-seated alienation. (Historically, that proved false.) There is always an alienation, say, from the means of production according to the Marxist analysis, but what about other kinds of alienation?

To mark one hundred years of modern Catholic social teaching, Pope John Paul II wrote Centesimus Annus (1991). A signal achievement of the encyclical is the attention the pontiff gives to culture. He considers culture under the heading of “other spheres of responsibility.” First among these, he writes, is the rule of law and not the arbitrary will of individuals. Included too are structures of participation and shared responsibility. And not to be overlooked is a respect for freedom, especially religious freedom. Neither can there be a disregard of the family and other intermediate communities when it comes to a proper understanding of culture.

Marxism is deeply cynical about human nature’s capacity to experience conflict and still avoid social dissolution. Think about it this way: We have been made for community – all kinds of communities. Beginning with the largest one first – the community of humanity (the human race, as we often say), we also have communities within the nation-state, the town or neighborhood, and, most importantly, within the family through marriage and children. With obviously varying degrees of intimacy and trust in these communities then, we are still going to have disagreements and conflicts.

At the first signs of trouble though, most of us, especially those of us who have drunk deeply from Christian sources, don’t cut and run. We remain engaged because we have already anticipated the conflicts – they’re evident in the first pages of Genesis – and have been given remedies for resolving them. Some of our remedies can – frankly – be awkward, and not all of them lead smoothly to neat and compact resolution. But having them as we do, they reinforce the counsel contained in Centesimus Annus – that totalitarian solutions are simply incompatible with self-governance. We never suppress freedom in a vain attempt to quell the opposition.

Silencing the opposition is what the cultural Marxists prefer to do these days. In many events on college campuses over the last several years, speakers were routinely shouted down and prevented from making their positions known in what ought to have been a free exchange of ideas. It is precisely the opposite of what Pope St. John Paul II says in Centesimus Annus about the human need for structures of participation and shared responsibility. Unfortunately, the absence of participation and responsibility has quickly become the norm on a lot of college campuses.

Fences make good neighbors. But the encampments that popped up on campus after campus earlier this year are self-encapsulating zones of non-participation. The students and the agitators who set up the tents bask in their self-alienation. And they go unchallenged unless rightful authorities – in this case, the presidents of the universities – display the necessary courage to order the removal of the encampments. We may hope that, just maybe, such measures could cause students and the agitators to start to re-think their self-exile.

That few college presidents have been willing to take strong action – and several at our most prestigious universities have been forced out as a result – is no small part of the problem.

The insularity of today’s cultural Marxism is not really in doubt. It’s a further confirmation of John Paul II’s verdict in Centesimus Annus that socialism has failed. But socialism, like all human delusions, is not dead, despite its dismal historical record. It has only reinvented itself in new guises. It still manages, for example, to command the attention of billionaires like George Soros who spreads his wealth around to influence the outcomes of local District Attorney races around the United States.

It’s no wonder that, in these jurisdictions, the cultural Marxists rarely even get a proverbial “slap on the wrist” for destruction of property, occupation of buildings, and disruption of lawful activities. The travesty of injustice in these cases only highlights the weakening of democracy in many places today.

It is also best not to mislabel alienation, thinking, for instance, that many adults today are merely confused intellectually when in fact they are deeply estranged from God, themselves, and others. A reality check is in order. Better to have that reality check sooner rather than later.

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AUTHOR

Msgr. Robert J. Batule

Msgr. Robert J. Batule, a priest of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, is the Pastor of Saint Margaret Church in Selden, New York. He had been a faculty member at two different seminaries and has been a contributor of essays, articles, and book reviews to various Catholic publications throughout the course of his nearly forty-year priestly ministry.

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