“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him — mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”  

- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning 

Frankl [1], in his now classic book (first published in 1946 as From concentration camp to existentialism), wrote of such spiritual/imaginative freedom at a time in human history when political freedom was at one of its lowest points, in Nazi concentration camps during WWII.  Today inside the United States, when political freedom (on many fronts) may be at one of the highest points in human history, many of us are still seeking spiritual freedom through otherworldly religions and metaphysical systems, perhaps partly because we feel that we do not have much real political freedom after all.  I do not say that this pursuit of spiritual freedom is necessarily a bad thing; indeed, in some cases, I may find it to be quite positive.  I must say however, partly echoing the famous and chronically misunderstood statement of Karl Marx [2], that religion can act as an “opium of the people”.  In Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), Marx wrote: 

Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. [Emphasis added]  

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.  

This doesn’t appear to be a wholly negative statement about religion, indeed in many respects it may be interpreted quite positively (at the time Marx wrote this, opium was legal and used as a painkiller for a people for whom medical treatment was not largely available -thus it would have been quite reasonable for a person to use opium, as it was not the dangerous illegal drug it has become today).  There is nothing really wrong, after all, with relieving pain by whatever reliable means are available to us, whether that be physical or spiritual/emotional pain.  But there can be, and often is, a downside to doing this, as this passage may indicate.  As Friedrich Nietzsche [3] (another chronically misunderstood thinker - partly due to his heavy rherotic, as may also be the case with Marx in some respects [4]) once wrote with respect to Christianity, 

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life [5]. 

It should be made clear, when reading these passages, that Marx and Nietzsche seem to be discussing and critiquing a certain version of religion and Christianity that they saw in their own societies, and we should not (as some have) be tempted to generalize their insights any more than is appropriate.  Religion is, after all, an extraordinarily diverse phenomenon [6], and what defines ‘Christianity’ and religious life exactly depends very much on what particular ‘culture’ a person represents, as well as other factors, many quite personal [7].   If we interpret these statements liberally, we can roughly apply them to some aspects of religion in the United States today, though we should be careful here, lest we badly misinterpret either American religion or the writings of Marx and Nietzsche. 

It is widely agreed among many political scientists and scholars of democracy [8] that America suffers, and has suffered for some time, from a serious ‘democratic deficit’ [9], where average citizens do not feel that they play a meaningful role in shaping their political and economic lives.  Huge segments of the population do not even bother to vote or follow politics and current events at all, and it is not hard to guess at one reason why this might be.  There are over 300 million people in this diverse and pluralistic country, and only two political parties that even have a chance to express their ideas and policy proposals (in appropriately concise “sound bites” and carefully engineered slogans) on the major media outlets (those that are broadcast on a wide, almost universal level into American households).  Besides this, newspapers and television consistently seem to represent the specific interests of one party or another, as is the case, generally, with broadcasts like FOX News (which is owned, run, and reported by key figures of a particular sect within the ‘Republican’ party [10]), and major ’liberal’ newspapers like The New York Times, which at least sometimes, though not often, explains its bias [11].  Ownership is almost never discussed.  What all of these large media outlets might have in common, if anything, is that they are owned, run, and at least edited (if not reported) by private corporations that have no legal obligations to the general populace; that is, by decidedly undemocratic institutions [12], with heavy political ties [13].  In recent years, the number of companies that own the vast majority of media outlets, and thus most influence public knowledge and understanding of politics and current events, have been merging and concentrating (as private corporations, to their own economic benefit, tend to do) so that now only a handful of private companies own the vast majority of ’the news’ [14].  Along with this, much that is done in Washington happens almost exclusively behind closed doors and public input is often only desired and allowed when key figures within the American political and economic elite (representing far less than a quarter of the population) have a strong disagreement amongst themselves.  While there has been a little improvement in the level of public participation in decision-making over the years and many see hope with the rise of the internet [15], it is safe to say that judged in terms of popular participation and informed decision-making on the part of the general populace, the United States is extremely undemocratic on many issues, especially with respect to relative wealth [16].

Many Americans realize this on some level, and trust in political, economic, and media institutions may be at one of the lowest points in American history [17].  Those of us who do not quite want to fully dive into the kind of nihilistic and otherworldly religious and metaphysical systems that Marx and Nietzsche may be critiquing ask “What can we do?” 

The answer, as far as I can tell, is fairly simple, even if it may be a long struggle to follow through with it in practice.  We can do almost anything, given our economic and political freedoms.  There may be sacrifices we have to make, but we will neither lose our life or our money if we take the time to figure out how our government and media systems operate and work together to make them more democratic and representative of our best concerns and motives.  And we do not have to give up extraordinary spiritual and religious freedoms or experiences to do this, obviously.  We can enjoy being free in spirit no matter what happens, as Frankl suggests, even as we realize that the possibility for such freedom for all has real sociopolitical and economic prerequisites (it should be noted here that Frankl was a reasonably well-off psychiatrist before the war, and wrote that the intellectual and emotional freedom he had fostered throughout his life actually made him more resistant to brutal working conditions than physically stronger but less intellectually and emotionally developed men he lived and worked in the camps with [18]).  Thus, perhaps ’real’ (socio-political, economic) freedom and spiritual freedom do not have to be in conflict at all, but can work together as they have in the lives of many religious and spiritual as well as political and social radicals, like Sojourner Truth, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, the Berrigan brothers, and thousands of others, most of whom our history does not record.  Marx, Nietzsche, and many other secular critics (myself included here, in some ways) may make the mistake of lodging general ethical critiques against all of religion and (in Nietzsche’s case in particular) Christianity, but if they do this they may be ignoring many (admittedly, often marginal) aspects of those living traditions [19]. 

In conclusion, we can recognize that there is something to what Frankl says in the passage and acknowledge the value of religion for some as spiritual ‘opium’ as Marx wrote, but take into account that no matter what our metaphysical system or beliefs about God, the afterlife, and other matters happen to be (I myself am not terribly concerned with these questions - they seem somewhat too mysterious to me), there are real prerequisites to the contemplation and enjoyment (if not always veneration and worship) of spiritual freedom, namely socio-political freedom (freedom from coercion, except perhaps in certain exceptional cases) and economic freedom (freedom from poverty and hunger especially, and access to education and other resources), which are not enjoyed by all, and which are explicitly denied to some within our country, and many more outside, sometimes by our own government.  The freedom to change our institutions is ours if we are willing to take full responsibility in our own lives and work with others to do what we can.  This will require extended effort throughout our entire lives, and the lives of our children, and their children, but it probably can be done, if slowly and gradually, as it already has been happening in many ways. 

Viktor Frankl, later writing about our country, recommended that “The Statue of Liberty on the east coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast [20].”  His point, I think, is obvious enough to not require further comment.    

- Peter Broady 

Peter Broady is a regular guy (with some irregularities) out of Wasilla, Alaska, who reads and writes in his spare time.  He can be contacted here, at his website, or by email at pbroady@gmail.com.

[1] Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Holcaust survivor; chief founder of logotherapy and ‘existential analysis’.

[2] Nineteenth century philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary

[3] German philosopher of the late 19th Century; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/

[4] for one example of what some see as Marx’s questionable rhetoric, see ”The Jewish Question”, reprinted in The Marx-Engels Reader (Robert Tucker, ed.)

[5] The Birth of Tragedy, pg. 23 (Kauffman trans.)

[6] For a presentation of recent scientific work on religion, which includes a critique of ’Marxist’ and ‘Freudian’ perspectives, see Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained; also interesting, though semi-polemical, is Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

[7] A good example of this is available in studies of early Christianity.  Huston Smith writes in The Soul of Christianity that the historical Jesus probably differed from groups such as the Pharisees and Saducees mostly in where he put his emphasis rather than in what he actually believed, but the results were remarkably different; so it may not be the actual intellectual content of religion (the texts, the tradition) that creates radically different sects and religious cultures but the interpretation and emphasis of the different groups, given the variety found in religious texts such as ’the Bible’.  There is also, at least in Protestant religion familiar to us in the United States, a process of personal, subjective interpretation wherein the believer takes a text to either refer to something in their own life or to find application in a certain situation, whatever the original intent or ‘true’ meaning of the text might be.

[8] for a anthology of articles on the subject, see The State of Democracy in America (William J. Crotty, ed.)

[9] The term is taken from a 1980s pamplet by UK politician Bill Newton Dunn.   

[10] The CEO, chairman, and president of FOX News, Roger Ailes, was a political strategist for successful Republican candidates Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, producing campaign commercials for both (see McGiniss, The Selling of the President: 1968).  Ailes was originally hired by News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch to head his “fair and balanced” (his own description, now an official FOX News slogan) news channel, which includes almost without exception (American, modern) ‘conservative’ Republicans, including presidential speechwriter (Bush I) Tony Snow (now the current administration’s Press Secretary), a flurry of analysts/’experts’ from such American conservative ‘think tanks’ as The Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, near-exclusively ‘conservative’ and ’libertarian’ (denoting historically particular interpretations of these philosophies, which often contradict technical definitions) pundits and writers (for the website), and few American ‘liberal’ commentators or experts presented, especially on popular programs.  One television program, Hannity and Colmes, presents ‘balanced’ debate between Sean Hannity, one of the most ‘conservative’ voices in American media by any measure, and Alan Colmes, who has said he is a ‘moderate’.  The spectrum of political thought presented on the news channel, on radio, and on the news site is American conservative, libertarian, or moderate with perhaps a few exceptions on weekend, lower-rated shows like Fox News Watch.  Media watchdog groups have revealed in detail the extensive and fairly obvious conservative slant of FOX News in contradiction to the challenges of Murdoch to find one example of bias in reporting (Salon, 3/1/01).  For a summary, see http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1067.  Also, a good introduction to the origins and working of FOX News is Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, both the book and the documentary film.

[11] see Daniel Okrent, ‘Public Editor; Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?’, July 25, 2004 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E7D8173DF936A15754C0A9629C8B63

[12] see Robert McChesney, The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century, or Rich Media, Poor Democracy.  McChesney’s article in Boston Review, available at http://bostonreview.net/BR23.3/mcchesney.html, is a good place to start.

[13] See http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11947

[14] For a listing of media ownership, see the website of the Columbia Journalism Review; http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/

[15] See Bill Mckidden, ‘The Hope of the Web’, The New York Review of Books, April 26, 2006; http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18910

[16] See Phillips, Wealth and Democracy

[17] For polling results on the current Congress, presidential administration, judiciary, as well as several other individuals, groups, institutions and issues, see http://www.pollingreport.com/; for studies of trust in media, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/02_05_06mediatrust.pdf

[18] Man’s Search for Meaning

[19] For a short summary of the best aspects of religion now and throughout history, see Huston Smith, The World’s Religions

[20] this is from the second essay in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Logotherapy”.