Postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the private property society

‘Religion’ is part of a classification system that appears to the secular liberal as neutral, given unproblematically in consciousness as corresponding to how the world is, independent of the discursive formations that constitute our collective inter-subjective apprehensions. Yet on the contrary, classification systems embody power relations. Critical religion proposes that religion is a power category that, in dialectical interplay with other power categories such as ‘politics’, ‘science’ or ‘nature’, constructs a world and our own apprehensions according to the interests of private property, and the various beliefs, institutions and practices that have come into the world to protect private property.

The right to the outright private ownership of the earth, including the right to buy and sell for purely personal gain, unencumbered by any effects the practice might have on the lives of other people or the environment, is a historically peculiar idea, one which would have been incomprehensible to most of the peoples who ever existed. And yet this masculinist fiction of the naturally possessive individual and his supposed rights of private ownership – rights for which women had to struggle for centuries to achieve for themselves – has been transformed into our dominant notion of ‘human nature’, and has become the globalising norm of the world order.

The category religion has a unique function in the way it enables the mythical basis of private ownership of the earth, and makes it seem normal and inevitable. The right to unlimited private accumulation of our common organic inheritance, regardless of the effect on the rest, is the default position of liberal and neoliberal capitalism. In putative contrast to the blind faith of ‘believers’, private ownership of the earth is celebrated by generations of secular liberals as an enlightened discovery, a sign of a higher stage of progress and development, our collective arrival at mature knowledge of ‘reality’, including what it means to be human.

Critical religion is a revolutionary practice that seeks to subvert the rhetorical illusions that transform a peculiar way of owning the earth into common sense normality, as though there is an inherent inevitability – betrayed by such common expressions as “that’s the way the world is”, “you can’t change human nature”, or “stuff happens” – that the land, the air, the water, the energy, and even the genes of our collective organic inheritance can be privately owned and privately profited from, with minimal if any responsibility for impact on the remainder.

It follows from this position that there cannot be a genuine postmodern or postcolonial consciousness at least until the modern liberal categories of the understanding have been critically deconstructed and the illusion that they are neutral and objective has been dispelled. To be postmodern and postcolonial is to be post the categories of secular liberal understanding. We are not there yet.

To faithfully pursue this process brings one up against the inflexible resistance of the liberal or neoliberal university and its structures and priorities. This critical challenge to the dominant norms does not win one many friends. The liberal universities within which we work reflect and reproduce these ideological priorities. This is a good reason why liberal academics cannot effectively stand up against the neoliberal transformation of universities into business corporations with top-down, anti-democratic managerial structures, and an obsessive reduction of all values to market commodities.

This article is available, with additional links, here

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© Timothy Fitzgerald is Reader of Religion at the University of Sheffield

This article is one of a continuous series appearing on Ekklesia through our association with the Critical Religion Association (CRA), developed out of the University of Stirling Critical Religion Research Group. CRA is bringing together academics from a wide range of backgrounds to explore the way 'religion' is employed as a a marker, construct and category in public and intellectual discourse. You can also follow Critical Religion on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CriticoReligio (@CriticoReligio).

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