Why is there so much confusion over the nature of Moshiachs Viceroy? I think it has to do with the insular turn in Orthodox Jewish communities in the 1980s. So if we accept the point raised by Samuel that on the day of Judgement Jews and Non-Jews are equal, then logically speaking there is nothing to suggest that the Moshiachs Viceroy has to be Jewish. But because of the insular turn in 1980s Orthodoxy (escape from modernity because modernity was no longer the wholesome modernity that was in say the 18th century......), this moves away from the Samuelian universalism. So the Alter Rebbes statement: “the Moshiach that everyone wants, isn’t coming and the Moshiach that is coming, nobody wants” also applies to the Viceroy (i.e. because of the insular turn in Orthodoxy, it is expected that the Viceroy is going to be Jewish. Even if the use of Roman language, should create a degree of skepticism to such insular-ethnic way of thinking.) So the distinction between universalism (Moshiach-Marx) and particularism (Viceroy-Engels) is not the only distinction between the two. Moshiach understands the religious impulse extremely well, while the Viceroy is fully fluent in natural science, and thus has a lot of trouble understanding the appeal of religious fundamentalist narratives (e.g. Creationism against evolution). So one could say is that most people are governed by reason is the slave to passion (Hume). In contrast, the premise of the Viceroy is inverted Humeanism (i.e he makes an effort to completely sublimate passion (and I consider faith to be a subset of passion) to reason). So the Star Trek episode that illustrates the distinction between Humean assumptions about human nature (represented by Worf), and inverted Humeanism (represented by Data): https://youtube/watch?v=Vf2THIimjgQ The problem is is that there are more people who are closer to Worfs Humean Reason is the slave to passion than Datas Passion is the slave to reason. Hence, Moshiachs Viceroy has trouble understanding religion/fundamentalism/irrationalism et al. because he lives in an inverted Humean worldview that blocks such an understanding of the dominant ideological tendencies of today. This is why the primacy of science is less important than understanding the religious impulses that we see today. Or to put this another, because the Viceroy didnt have any explicit encounters with serious religious thought (most of what he doesnt like, comes from thanatos-filled fundamentalists you hear on TV), he doesnt have a good grasp of how to do a social scientific inquiry into religion itself. So he has this radical dream of a revolution in (critical) social science akin to the Copernican/Newtonian revolution in early modernity, but he doesnt know enough about religion to make this social scientific revolution by himself. As Marx put it, For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism. https://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm But the effects of secularization of religious ignorance, has made it difficult for the Viceroy (Engels) to start with religion as his starting point.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 23:06:13 +0000