There are many heuristics that people keep bringing out is increasingly interesting. I don’t know what the “material” basis for this is, but even though a Christian can be raised outside of the church, certain forms of thinking seem to linger:
1) The linear view of “social” history–a story of unidirectional “progress” or “regress”–covered up with talk of forms. This has always struck me as a reification and secularization of eschatology. Or in plain speak: shit is shit, like’s like slime mold, it goes all directions at once.
2) You know I used to think the conservative portrayal of “Marxist” “faith in the state” was nonsense, and for the most part I still think that, but there are quite a few Marxists of the Trotskyist and Social Democratic persuasion who seem to really grok the vision of the bourgeois nation state and seem really upset at the atomization as if that means that community is eternally dead somehow. The State is not a manifestation of social will. It is not the representative of social will. The Democratic spirit does not change this because the monopolization and legitimization of force may be necessary but it does not actually mean much of anything. The management of a polis is just that, management. It is not a representative of will. You aren’t so lucky.
3) You do not argue factual truths about the world through textual exegesis alone. Got that? Good. Sola scriptora didn’t work for protestants either with the hybrid texts they were given, so what makes you think you can do it with Keynes, Milton Friedman or Das Kapital.
4) The division between “man-made” and “natural” is imposition, like that between sacred and secular. All is natural, including artifice.
Symptomatic Commentary 