The spectacle?

Human beings easily slip into complacency. They need to be entertained and cajoled. The spectacle must hold their interest; it must enchant, it must inspire, and it is be an escape from the supposedly cruel necessities of everyday life. The spectacle has force when its spectators immerse themselves completely – so much so that it no longer is illusionary, for them. When the spectator seeks meaning from the spectacle, he sinks, with relative ease, into the enchanting wonders of the show. But is necessity even relevant? Necessity is governed by rules, by credos and customs, legislation concocted by those with a genuine calling for such matters. His carefree life, free of politics, fuels his own hubris. He deems himself more moral than those who have to deal with politics. He lives to serve righteousness. He serves self-interest, hence fulfilling his responsibility to his group – his nation-state. He follows laws and legitimates the sovereign who rules for him. But with the triumph of the spectacle, a politics of recurring images and symbols triumphs over a politics of ideas. Thought is not a necessity for the former; whilst the latter cannot be without human thought and engagement.

Feuerbach

From Feuerbach’s Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity, George Eliot trans. (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989), pp. xix-xx

Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity. Hence I do nothing more to religion – and to speculative philosophy and theology also – than to open its eyes, rather than turn its gaze from the internal towards the external, i.e., I change the object as it is in the imagination into the object as it is in reality.

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, this change, inasmuch as it does away with illusion, is an absolute annihilation, or at least a reckless profanation; for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. Religion has disappeared, and for it has been substituted, even among Protestants, the appearance of religion – the Church – in order at least that “the faith” may be imparted to the ignorant and indiscriminating multitude; that faith being still the Christian, because the Christian churches stand now as they did a thousand years ago, as formerly, the external signs of the faith are in vogue. That which has no longer any existence in faith (the faith of the modern world is only and ostensible faith, a faith which does not believe what it fancies that it believes, and is only an undecided, pusillanimous unbelief) is still to pass current as opinion: that which is no longer sacred in itself and in truth is still at least to seem sacred. Hence the simulated religious indignation of the present age, the age of shows and illusion, concerning my analysis, especially of the Sacraments. But let it not be demanded of an author who proposes to himself as his goal not the favour of his contemporaries, but only the truth, the unveiled, naked truth, that he should have or feign respect towards an empty appearance, especially as the object which underlies this appearance is in itself the culminating point of religion, i.e., the point at which the religious slides into the irreligious.