Secularization replaced religious doctrine with pseudo-natural racial criteria for exclusion.
Evidence
Freudâs error in political prognosis, his blaming the âsocialistsâ for what their German arch-enemies did, is as striking as his prophecy of fascist destructiveness, the drive to eliminate the out-group. As a matter of fact, neutralization of religion seems to have led to just the opposite of what the enlightener Freud anticipated: the division between the believers and the non-believers has been maintained and reified. However, it has become a structure in itself, independent of any ideational content, and is even more stubbornly defended since it lost its inner conviction. At the same time, the mitigating impact of the religious doctrine of love vanished. This is the essence of the âsheep and goatâ device employed by all fascist demagogues. Since they do not recognize any spiritual criterion in regard to who is chosen and who is rejected, they substitute a pseudo-natural criterion such as the race, which seems to be inescapable and can therefore be applied even more mercilessly than was the concept of heresy during the Middle Ages. â Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 206
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies the âsheep and goatâ device â the key concept here.
- CANDY: The crisp line that a racial criterion can be applied âmore mercilessly than heresy during the Middle Agesâ is a memorable provocation.
- XREF: connects to: Empiricism replaced religion as the ideology that blocks totalizing social thought. â Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 721; Race gained social hegemony as religion declined, becoming a secularized civic theology â David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections onâŠ, 1345
Related
- Secularization reifies in-group division more stubbornly than religion did (similarity 0.89)
- Race gained social hegemony as religion declined, becoming a secularized civic theology (similarity 0.80)
- Race is counter-historical in displacing theological modes of rationality and sociality (similarity 0.78)