Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.
Job 5:7
I title volume three as a home and a resting place, and Lord alone knows I need one the amount of aggravation I’m currently getting. The last chapter is on MacIntyre’s virtuous communities. I can see why Rod Dreher is advocating the Benedict Option. I still go in the other direction, but a large-scale embodiment of the good is looking farther and farther away. Warnings of the fascism to come won’t cut it unless you are prepared to uproot atomism and anomie at the heart of the diremptive modern terrain. Or are we still putting a gloss on this and calling it conflict pluralism?
You want it darker, asked Leonard Cohen. We kill the flame. He saw things sliding in all directions.
Marx’s Socialism from Within, three volumes
Volume One of Marx's Socialism from Within.
In this work I recover the ecological dimension of Marx's critique of political economy. Within the triadic framework of humanity-labour/production-nature, I demonstrate that Marx goes beyond the abstractions of 'Man,' 'Reason,' and 'Nature' to place the emphasis upon mediation. Focusing upon the alienated character of capital's second order mediations, Marx reveals the forces behind the disturbance in the 'metabolic interaction' between humanity and nature. Arguing for regulating this interchange in a 'rational way,' Marx shows what is required for the restoration of healthy growth in the relation between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature.
Volume Two of Marx’s Socialism from Within
I develop Marx's socialism in terms of a concept of rational freedom. This concept holds that the freedom of each individual is conditional upon and co-existent with the freedom of all individuals. In turn I ground this concept in Marx's normative essentialist anthropology, arguing that Marx espouses an ethics of immanence in which human nature and the realization of healthy potentials for flourishing form the basis of socialism. I show that Marx's argument is infused with essentialist categories.
Volume Three of Marx’s Socialism from Within
Here I consider Marx’s relation to religion, arguing that Marx requires the existence of transcendent norms, truths and values in order to make good his emancipatory claims, checking dangers of a ‘men as gods’ delusion that engulfs the world in a universal hatred. I examine ethics in light of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ to show the need for a totalizing political ethics. I end with a substantial chapter on the virtuous communities of Alasdair MacIntyre, arguing that these need to be scaled up to achieve the large scale social embodiment of the good.
In this book I argue for a concept of ecological virtue as a condition for constituting a flourishing earthly commonwealth. I establish the virtues as qualities for successful living within specific social relations, putting character formation and social formation together to deliver a common control of collective forces that is based upon personal (co)responsibility. In conceiving these qualities along ecological lines, then ‘successful living’ takes shape as sustainable living in the ecological society. At this point it becomes possible to call back the old eudaimonistic notion of flourishing well. The book therefore needs to be set against the background of Owen Flanagan’s book The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007), where Flanagan writes of ‘eudaimonistic scientia’, or ‘eudaimonics’ for short, which he defines as the ‘empirical-normative inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human flourishing.’ Establishing these conditions in terms of the institutions, structures, practices and relations in which human and planetary flourishing go hand in hand, I seek to recover the ancient unity of ethics and politics in an ecological context, thereby outlining the contours of the Ecopolis of the future.
Plenty of the arguments in Being at One comes from MacIntyre and Nussbaum in philosophy, Flannery in ecology, Wilson in biology, Robert Wright on the non-zero sum society, (The nonzero-sum moment - our welfare is crucially correlated with the welfare of the other etc.), Stuart Kauffman on the self-organising creative universe, and many more. The originality of this thesis lies in the way these sources are brought together in an integral framework concerning the dialectic of natural dependency, moral independence and social and ecological interdependence.
https://www.researchgate.net/project/Marxs-Socialism-from-Within
There are some deeply troubling elements in the human condition. This was Leonard Cohen's final message to us: God I love you, but I don't love the world you created - I don't like the human beings you have made in your image. If you are the dealer, then I'm out of the game. If you're the healer, I'm broken and lame. And yet for all of that, Leonard Cohen continued to affirm life and God and light and hope. And that is extraordinary. Everywhere, there are broken vessels, but within those vessels is the divine light - that is the power of God's love to reach everywhere:
"I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair
with a love so vast and so shattered it will reach you everywhere."
Leonard Cohen - Heart with No Companion
And that, of course, is the Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and sustains us, each and all.
Even in the midst of darkness there is the light that never goes out.
Marx thought religion the opium of the people, a solace and a consolation in face of real suffering. I will stand by Marx's critique of the inversions at the heart of a world that generates such suffering. But I conclude, yet again, that religious ground is our true ground, and to uproot this is to unleash not emancipation but universal hatred. I write at length on Marx and emancipation above, only to conclude that emancipation doesn't go far enough if it isn't a salvation grounded in servitude. In the end, the social restitution of power is an invitation to a new idolatry if it isn't tempered by humility - a hollow freedom that misses the personal moral effort involved in overcoming alienation through an egoistic need severed from God. We become curved inwards on ourselves when we need to expand our being. Are we doomed? I keep hearing this question. It is a question that fixates on the physical. And if that is the limits of your concern, then of course we are doomed. Inevitable defeat is the human condition as a physical condition. The real question we should be asking is 'are we damned?' And what do we need to do to be saved? Love and Redemption in face of the inextinguishable light is the only hope. If you put your faith elsewhere, then you are indeed doomed.
No one would believe the trouble I have had in writing, editing and organising the materials of these works, doing my best to keep health and sanity together whilst being beset by all manner of devils and demons, of the all-too-human kind. I have a friend who told me that he had no faith other than a 'faith in man.' That's a faith that real life men can surely test beyond endurance. I'll say it plain, being good at being human is hard work, it isn't spontaneous, it requires nurturing the right behaviour and forming the right character so as to create the inner motives that lead to a internal self-control, on the part of both the person and society at large. Failure to do that, out of the view that there is no overarching substantive good, and to say so is repressive of individual liberty, difference and otherness, that instead there are only individuals pursuing the good as they see fit, leaves us all prey to an atomistic society as no more than a congeries of possessors, predators and pursuers. I've seen communities implode from within as a result of this fake subjectivist freedom, and I've been on the receiving end of callous, self-interested behaviour too many times now. We need a culture of discipline training individuals in the cardinal virtues to give society an internal self-control, lest the chaos and disorder that issues results in the imposition of order through the most punitive sanctions involved in external control. Because there is no centre ground in between. Half-way houses fall in on themselves sooner or later, and in recent times the debris has been falling in on me. And if you don't like the harsh tone of the message, then that is tough. I am doing no more than reading the writing on the walls that are still standing at the moment. They won't be standing much longer, not the walls of the true community internally constituted through right relationships. I can see external walls going up all over, as people try to deal with the chaos and disorder of a world falling in on itself. Liberals can do themselves a favour and cease warning of the fascism they see on the horizon - see what it is about the liberal ontology - the false split between individuality and sociality, the assertion of the self-possessed individual as morally and ontologically ultimate, the way that social atomism below breeds political centralism above etc. - that creates these monstrous conditions.