CULTURE AND RELIGION

1. You do not buy and sell genuine culture, any more than you buy or sell God. Like God, or godliness, genuine culture, which (being metaphysical) is a religious thing, is above and beyond the scope of the marketplace.

2. That which is less than genuinely cultural and/or godly will, of course, be bought and sold on a commercial basis; for such it has always been.

3. The bourgeoisie strive to render everything accountable to commerce, including much of what passes, in the vulgar imagination, for culture and religion. For economic accountability is the ne plus ultra of respectability to the business mind, which is incapable of appreciating genuine culture or of understanding anything genuinely religious.

4. Thus in a world where the businessman is 'king' or, at the very least, 'lord', things are only meaningful and valuable if they can be sold. Anything that transcends economic or commercial evaluation will be shunned or treated as though it were worthless - which, in one sense, it may well be, though only in the rather limited sense that the bourgeois understands.

5. In a society where economics is 'king', God and culture will be 'beyond the pale' of that which is accorded value. Only false religion and art can flourish there, and they will be hyped-up out of all proportion to their true worth or, rather, nature.

6. The bourgeois loathes nothing so much as genuine culture and religion, both of which he will perceive as a threat to his economic sovereignty and worldly interests.

7. Know that what they sell in the marketplace - whichever shop you care to name - will be culturally false and religiously untrue.

8. For genuine religion, by which is meant metaphysical religion of, in particular, a sensible order, towers above the commercial nature of economics like the air above vegetation, or grace above sin, or God above man, or Heaven above the earth. Such is also true of genuine culture.

9. Any society purporting to be genuinely religious or cultural would not be characterized by an economic hegemony, after the fashion of capitalist societies.

10. On the contrary, a genuinely cultural and religious society (assuming, for the sake of argument, that such a thing were possible and that 'society' and religion, as we are here attempting to define it, are not a blatant contradiction in terms) would be one in which economics had been overcome by religion, subordinated to religion, and was not, in consequence, independent of religion or of religious considerations ... in the free-market manner.

11. It would be equivalent to man having been overcome by God, of the earth by Heaven, and accordingly be significant of the end of the world, not excepting the part played in worldly affairs by democratic politics.

12. A People who, democratically, had exchanged political sovereignty, with its economic and judicial concomitants, for religious sovereignty, with its rights in relation to metaphysical self-realization for 'the best' and physical and/or chemical self-realization for 'the rest', would be saved from the world (of political and economic hegemonies) to the Other World (of religious hegemony), which I identify with 'Kingdom Come'.

13. Such a post-worldly and even otherworldly society, composed of religiously-sovereign individuals, would be one in which not man (and economics) but God (and religion) was sovereign, a society in which truth was free of economic subversion and no longer undermined by knowledge.

14. I call such a society Social Transcendentalist; for it is that in which the individual transcends the collective.