Empiricism replaced religion as the ideology that blocks totalizing social thought.

Evidence

But on the whole it must be said that for the essentially feudal and reactionary world view of religion, with its doctrine of hierarchy, submission to suffering, and insistence on the primacy of the spiritual, more indigenous middle-class thought patterns have been substituted which have proved equally capable of holding the line. For the dominant ideology of the Western countries is clearly that Anglo-American empirical realism for which all dialectical thinking represents a threat, and whose mission is essentially to serve as a check on social consciousness: allowing legal and ethical answers to be given to economic questions, substituting the language of political equality for that of economic inequality and considerations about freedom for doubts about capitalism itself. The method of such thinking, in its various forms and guises, consists in separating reality into airtight compartments, carefully distinguishing the political from the economic, the legal from the political, the sociological from the historical, so that the full implications of any given problem can never come into view; and in limiting all statements to the discrete and the immediately verifiable, in order to rule out any speculative and totalizing thought which might lead to a vision of social life as a whole. I might add that when in the opening chapter of the Anti-Duehring Engels attacks “metaphysical” thinking, it is precisely empiricist thought of the tradition of Bacon and Locke, rather than the school of German idealism, that he has in mind. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 721

Categorization

• XREF: This reframes empiricism as the bourgeois successor to religious ideology — connects to Jameson’s later work on postmodernism and to Adorno’s critique of positivism in Negative Dialectics. — connects to: Empiricism that excludes man-made context becomes ideology — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 454; Modern scientific racism displaced religion from the race concept. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 156; Belief has been replaced by speaking ideological codes one must learn — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 844 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that compartmentalizing the political from the economic is itself a class ideology — a technique (‘separating reality into airtight compartments’) that serves rule, is a dense insight central to dialectical method.

Broader Connections

• Empiricism that excludes man-made context becomes ideology #qualifies (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 454
• Modern scientific racism displaced religion from the race concept. #corroborates (0.75) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 156
• Secularization replaced religious doctrine with pseudo-natural racial criteria for exclusion. #corroborates (0.74) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 206
• Belief has been replaced by speaking ideological codes one must learn #corroborates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 844