The Love that Seeketh Not its Own

The Love that Seeketh Not its Own

What my eyes saw was nothing mortal

When in your beautiful eyes entire peace

I found . . .

I say that what dies cannot assuage

The desire of living man . . .

Michel Angelo Sonnet 52

George Orwell refers to ‘the crystal spirit’ that ‘no power can disinherit.’ (George Orwell, The Italian soldier shook my hand).

There is a basic human solidarity which we are forever charged with realising in social life:

“A welder with a serious expression and dark spectacles sits opposite me, working intently. Each time I wince from the furnace heat on my face, he looks at me with a sad smile of fraternal sympathy which does me untold good.”

Simone Weil La Condition ouvriere

My work is organised around a view of ‘rational freedom’ which affirms that the freedom of each is coexistent with and conditional upon the freedom of all. At the heart of the concept and tradition of rational freedom is the principle of the absolute moral equality of all human beings. Individuals are unique whilst being the same as all others in possessing an irreducibly moral core, an irrepressible thirst and a hunger for justice which impels a resolute desire for good. This core is surrounded by the accumulation of social, cultural, and historical material.

Beauty is the supreme political category, for the way it lights the path to Truth and Goodness and invites the heart to follow. All human beings have a heart, all can be evangelised by Beauty. Beauty is the supreme mystery by which the soil of the world appears and appeals to the senses. Beauty is the beam which attracts attention, and yet does no more to retain it. Beauty is a promise that is incapable of redemption in itself; it stimulates the thirst and hunger for justice, righteousness, and recognition at the core of the human soul, what Plato called thymos, but does not satisfy in itself. Beauty rouses the appetite to feed beyond the sustenance of this world. Beauty nourishes the part of the soul which gazes beyond the visible, the tangible, and the temporal. Beauty incites desire into immaterial vision and is transmuted into love.

It is not the knowledge of logic and evidence that makes human beings what they are but self-knowledge through the recognition of spiritual realities that are always more than wilful projection and self-creation. Human beings find fulfilment not in the power to create realities and appropriate them as self-creations, but in recognising realities that are not created. How we answer the question as to where value is located determines all else. Is value the creation of the valuer or a property inhering in the valued? Everything in human existence can be conceived as a creation from within and below, or has to be recognized as at least a co-creation with something without and/or above. The question of naturalism and supernaturalism may not be the key question to settle, but will be seen to be a non-question once immanence and transcendence are established in true relation. We are part below, and part above.

In The Price of Leadership, Middleton Murry writes of the love ‘that seeketh not its own’:

It can be no cause for astonishment to the Christian mind that, in an economic order of which the characteristic is that the physical energy at the disposal of society has been multiplied a thousandfold in the last hundred and fifty years, the natural man by his natural actions should be preparing to bring moral degradation and universal catastrophe upon himself. ... It is not enough to admit that the history of post­war Europe has plainly shown that the working-class has no intention and no power to dictate, and that what happens when it is foolish enough to say that it intends to do so is that it is dictated to by a satanic nationalism. It is imperative to realise why this happens and why it must happen. It happens and must happen because, by no conceivable operation of the 'ordinary self of mankind, or any class of mankind, can the 'classless society' imagined by Marxist Socialism be brought into being. Such a society will be brought into being by Christian love - 'that seeketh not its own' - or not at all.

Murry did not belong to any church, but seems plainly to be making the argument for Christianity. Appearances can be deceiving. As far as my reading goes, Murry expressed no belief in the Resurrection and the immortal soul. He doesn’t seem to believe in the Second Coming at the return of Jesus Christ in person. In this, his views seem similar to a favourite character of mine, the seventeenth century Digger Gerrard Winstanley, who viewed resurrection as the rising of the spirit of Christ in each and all to transform society and turn it the right way round. That view seems consistent with the view expressed by Middleton Murry. Murry’s final book was entitled Love, Freedom and Society (1957). In its closing words, Murry writes of Jesus as a presence: 'we know he lives now in the hearts of individual and mortal men, and only there.’ But Murry does nevertheless seem to argue for more than one’s own personal Jesus. If not eternity or immortality, then at least transcendence is implied by the injunction that we place our faith in the love ‘that seeketh not its own.’ A purely per­sonal ethic runs contrary to the essence of the love 'that seeketh not its own.’ The irreducible human core, then, is not self-contained and self-validating, and runs in the contrary direction to solipsism. The love ‘that seeketh not its own’ is concerned with a commonality beyond its own personality.

My favourite singer is Elvis Presley. If ever a singer, or any figure in general, encapsulated the unliveable paradoxes of the age, then it was Elvis Presley. He embodied a genuine multiplicity in music and culture and struck a blow for democracy, and yet was hailed a king and raised to the status of a god. He embodied the contradictions of the age and they finally tore him apart. Lester Bangs’ justly famous obituary on Elvis asks some pertinent questions of the age. Bangs’ Where Were You When Elvis Died? is at least as much an obituary for the human race as a social, moral, and familial species as it is for Elvis. Elvis’ death has “left us each alone as he was,” writes Bangs. Elvis had long ceased to be the democrat he was. He was still making the charts and still packing the theatres out, but “he wasn't exactly a Man of the People anymore.” He was a King, in a world of his own, and separated from the rest of us. His was a personality that was seeking its own, as indeed we all are in a fragmented society of self-seeking individuals. Bangs goes on to explain why, in a culture such as this, “all our public heroes seem to reinforce our own solitude.” We are on our own, and our adulation of idols only confirms this aloneness. Bangs writes that he feels “a hell of a lot sorrier for all those poor jerks” “who loved him [Elvis] without qualification” “than for Elvis himself.” If Elvis was alone, then at least he was his own man, however much he was merely seeking to feed his own ego. The rest of us are merely seeking to feed our own emptiness: “I mean, who's left they can stand all night in the rain for? Nobody, and the true tragedy is the tragedy of an entire generation which refuses to give up its adolescence.” I’d stand in the rain for Bruce Springsteen, who at seventy still gives the impression that he will sing all night for his adoring audiences. Or for Francoise Hardy, who has never remotely given that impression. But point taken, we are living in a world of isolation and emptiness. We start by rejecting a love that seeketh not its own, seeking only our own, and from that narcissism we degenerate into solipsism in which there is only the ego and its ever-inflating own.

I remember the day Elvis died well. I remember the statement that Elvis Presley, the King of Rock’n’Roll is dead. I remember the denials that Elvis was this King. He was now too old to rock; Elvis was the former King of Rock’n’Roll. The claim to the title mattered to me at the time. But it was plain that Elvis’ claim to be the reigning King was certainly contested at the time. Years of Las Vegas concerts in spangly jumpsuits had seen to that. Elvis had disappeared into his own self-created identity. Elvis wasn’t just larger than life, he was larger than any community he could claim to represent. Elvis was very far from being every rockers’ king, and in an age of funk, soul, disco, and punk, it was far from the case clear that rock 'n' roll was the still-reigning music. As Bangs writes: “By now, each citizen has found his own little obsessive corner to blast his brain in: as the sixties were supremely narcissistic, solipsism's what the seventies have been about, and nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the world of "pop" music. And Elvis may have been the greatest solipsist of all.”

Bangs proceeds to make clear what it was about Elvis that made him so much more important than any other singer or band. I’ll not repeat the words, they are self-evident truth to every Elvis fan. He closes with the key passages on the solipsism of the modern world:

“If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others' objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies.

We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.”

Lester Bangs, Where Were You When Elvis Died?, The Village Voice, 29 August 1977

Removed ever further from the love that ‘seeketh not its own,’ we find ourselves alone and adrift in a society in which mutual indifference slowly but surely degenerates into a complete incomprehension of, and contempt towards, each each others' objects of reverence. The commons is lost. Deprived of the public expression necessary for the realization of social being, the pain and suffering of individuals grows as the ecstasies diminish, but these are all privatised experiences incapable of being communicated and shared. Who cares as society continues to fragment until solipsism in ethics and culture reigns supreme as the new king of all? The ethics of a privatized subjective choice seeking only its own trumps all supra-individual goods in the present anti-society. When we said good-bye to Elvis, we were saying good-bye to each other. And good riddance. Because this is the age of a contemptuous indifference. Which is to say that the indifference that prevails in ‘normal’ times quickly gives way to a mutual loathing in times of stress. These are not normal times. Society is not at peace. The war between rival gods that Max Weber predicted a century ago is with us.

The only way to trump the subjective choice that dissolves the world into an irreducible, insurmountable solipsism is to recognize the existence of a reality which is more than purely human value, creation, and projection. Some affirm that reality as natural, others as supernatural. Both seem plausible enough, once we come to recognize the existence of a spiritual reality. Such a view repudiates the purposeless materialism bequeathed by the eighteenth century Enlighten­ment. Whether by intention or unintended consequence, the thinkers of the Enlightenment fostered a self-satisfied anthropocentrism or self-satisfied humanism. Rousseau saw the dangers at the time, and denounced the atheistic materialism of the age as the “philosophy of the comfortable.” That “philosophy” was strengthened by the advances of natural science allied to the technological manipulation of the world, with industry serving as practical proof of human self-creative power. Paradoxically, the revelation of the infinitesimally small stature of the human species in the universe as a result of scientific discovery had the effect of boosting humanity’s anthropocentric conceit.

‘This changes everything’ is a claim that ought to be rejected. It is not merely socially and institutionally vague, it is logically questionable. It seems impossible to employ the term 'everything' without becoming embroiled in an infinite regress. The mere fact of naming everything implies the existence of something from which it is to be differentiated, requiring another term, and so on ad infinitum. I have a feeling I have made a logical error here, and so am seeking to resolve something that is not a genuine philosophical problem, merely trying to make myself look smarter than I actually am. But if there is a genuine philosophical problem here, I really have no concern to resolve it. Although, that said, I have often come close to attempting it when in hospital. The point is simple enough to a trained historian and sociologist – the devil is in the detail and in the precise institutional and social forms. Say nothing there and you are saying nothing period.

Most people seem to grasp the rudiments of time and space in the daily living, but may be a little lost when asked to define and explain them. They are not alone in this. Even the greatest minds, like Saint Augustine, claim to know what time and space are, only to discover they have no idea when they try to think of them. We live time and space as realities, but find them incomprehensible as thoughts. It seems that the mind generates the ideas of time and space as a necessary condition of its own functioning. If they are illusions, then they are necessary illusions foreshadowing aspects of a reality beyond the human mind. The limits of human reason are not the limits of reality, only of a reality that is accessible to and knowable by the human mind. The idea that there cannot be a reality beyond the human mind and its conceptual apparatus seems a remarkable human conceit. It is perfectly possible to take such ideas as axiomatic and employ them as background assumptions without the need to prove and articulate them.

The view that Toulmin and Goodfield present in The Fabric of the Heavens has been the overwhelming consensus in the last century or more. They write:

‘The more that has been found out about the heavens from a scientific standpoint, the less significant they have proved to be from the theological point of view.’

Toulmin and Goodfield, p. 268.

We live under the sway and effects of a disenchanting science. At the same time, though, scientific discovery has also had the effect of extending the realm of the mysterious. The more we have come to know, the more we have to understand how little we know, thereby deepening our sense of the mystery of the world we live in. It’s quite a comforting notion to feel that others are as non-plussed about the word they live in as I am in the world I live in. Here is a case where microcosm and microcosm mirror each other. As above, so below.

I have forever lived in this condition of perplexity, and don’t need science to confirm, or deny, its reality.

I once did a City and Guilds in Web Design. One young fellow on the course was a guitar player interested in the blues. He raved about Robert Johnson and recounted the story of him selling his soul to the devil in return for the blues at the crossroads. ‘I have a little theory about that,’ I said, before speculating that Johnson actually spent a year or so in prison, time enough for him to practice and get good on the guitar. I interested the same guy in Nick Drake. He knew him a little, asking if he was the one who committed suicide. ‘I have a little theory about that,’ I said. ‘You have a lot of little theories’ he commented. I am forever regaling people with my little theories. When you live so much of life in a condition of uncertainty, you develop a theoretical mind just to navigate your path safely through the day.

So I offer the reader a little theory of my life, employing the word ‘theory’ in all of its ancient meanings, Greek and Latin. To take Latin first, the word ‘theory’ comes from theoria, a conception or mental scheme. I think a lot, I scheme a lot, I devise plans. Then there is the Greek theoria from theorein, meaning “to consider, speculate, look at,” from theoros “spectator,” from thea “a view” + horan “to see.” A view to see by. A speculation and a consideration. My interest in philosophy really took flight after reading Bertrand Russell. Not his difficult analytical stuff, of course, but his History of Western Philosophy. The easy stuff, then. In the book, I was struck by a quote from Plato in reference to the ideal world of forms: ‘how can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?’ That notion of being a spectator of all time and space incited a philosophical aggrandisement on my part.

The word 'theory' also applies as “an explanation based on observation and reasoning” is from 1638. So we have spectacle, speculation, and consideration. There is also another aspect, as we might have guessed with the reference to Plato’s spectator. Derived from the Greek theorein, the word ‘theory’ means ‘to look at.’ I have spent my entire life ‘looking at’ the world and others, watching people participate in the everyday social activities that were always in my sights but just beyond my reach. Or well beyond. I watch people drive their cars as I walk the streets. I can’t drive. According to some sources, the word ‘theory’ was employed frequently in terms of ‘looking at’ with respect to the stage at a theatre. This is most interesting. I quickly get bored watching films and TV. I can have something on in the background as I work, listening rather than watching. I tend to see the world as a theatre, ‘looking at’ real life as if it were a play. I’m in there, but as a spectator rather than a participant. I am not a film buff, and get very tetchy watching films. They bore me rigid. I guess I can't empathize with the characters. I'm not much good at play-acting. But one film I do like is the long forgotten The Sandwich Man. The central character walks around London with his advertisement board. His motto, the motto of all sandwich men, is ‘observe everything but never get involved.’ I have never driven a car. I walk everywhere on foot. Even the jobs I have done, mailing and distribution, involve walking the streets, observing life as it passes on by. It’s real life, but to me it is a theatre, a play, a spectacle to observe. In line with this, the word ‘theory’ is sometimes employed as denoting something that is provisional or resembling the real, but not quite. You can see why I would take to philosophy, then. I was slightly detached from society, observing it as a spectator, but not involved. What was real to those participating in the play wasn’t quite real for me. My theory or theories about this reality struck me as more real than the reality they speculated on. But that merely begs the perennial philosophical question as to just what is real. As a noun, the word theoria was used by the philosophers of ancient Greece. Theorein derives from ‘to theion’ (the divine) or ‘to theia’ (divine things) and ‘orao’ (I see), to give us ‘to see the divine’ and to ‘contemplate the divine.’ The ‘Divine’ here is understood as harmony and order, the logos, which permeates ‘the real world’ underlying and encompassing the reality in which we participate. Or in which most participate. I was spectating and contemplating. It should come as no surprise that in developing the idea of ‘rational freedom’ I went back from Marx to Plato and Aristotle, and before them Pythagoras, then in time proceeded further to Aquinas and Dante in order to contemplate the divine.

Over the years I have offered a few theories in my philosophical work. In truth, I am forever offering theories about life. When you have so few facts to go on, you have to theorize a lot; when you are a spectator, you are forced to speculate. In time, you learn to live by speculation. I have inhabited the work of the great philosophers, and the not so great and the not even philosophical. What makes sense/I can make sense of is the approach I take in reading. Maybe I have little original philosophy to offer. I remember my Director of Studies speculating whether I had read a lot and was recycling it without quite using the ideas and arguments as they were presented, or whether I was doing something truly original. I made sense of this by recalling Carl Perkins recording for Sam Phillips at Sun Records, Memphis. Perkins would record a track and express his dissatisfaction with it. Phillips would express his delight and his intentions to put it out as a single. ‘But it’s a big mistake,’ Perkins would say. ‘That’s Sun Records,’ replied Phillips, ‘one big original mistake.’ My intention has never been to regurgitate past philosophers. I have inhabited these philosophers and taken part in their debates and arguments as if they were debates and arguments of the contemporary world. I may present views which may be considered mistakes when offered as the actual views of certain philosophers, but I have been applying these views. My mistakes are my original contributions. It may be hard to separate the two. I am nevertheless of the view that, in living a life of social exile, I have had the madness or developed the genius to alight upon the most important, meaningful, and pertinent questions of the times I have lived through. Living outside of time and place, I could spectate, consider, and contemplate. And write. Those too close to an object to see it lack that vantage point. If there is an Archimedean point, then I have found it. Being in exile, I am on the outside of things looking it. It brings detachment and objectivity. When you don’t have a dog in the fight, you can start to wonder what the fight is all about rather than waste energies wondering which dog is worthy of backing. Even if my ‘theory’ may turn out to be unoriginal philosophically, it nevertheless is socially meritorious in pointing people to where the source of their ills lies.

I just wonder if the ethos I propose makes impossible demands. I write of everything I lack in my life, the community and connection, the solidarity and socialization. If I write well here I do so from a position of exile. The paradox is that it may require a position of exile to be able to understand and live by the social virtues. In that exile I have been able to develop a purity, a humility, and a nobility that seems well-nigh impossible for anyone with stakes in society. And social existence is all about stakes. If there were no stakes, there would be no substance to society, no positions and interests to preserve and advance. So maybe I shouldn’t expect people to live up to my impossible theories, merely grasp the qualities I describe in their experience of life as they come to touch them. They may be transcendent qualities, but not so transcendent as to leave us untouched by them in our everyday lives. They are not merely human projections, self-created values, and are beyond the minimal egoistic self. They are qualities of the love that seeketh not its own.

These are bold claims to make, quite foolhardy and delusional, really. If fact and logic is all there is to life, then reconcile yourself to the truth that we are shaved chimpanzees clinging to a barren rock that came from nowhere and is going nowhere for no reason, other than an oblivion for which there will be no memory or record. Build a civilization on that, if you can. It surprises me not one whit that the age of disenchanting, disillusioning rationality should stand on the brink of civilizational collapse and ecological catastrophe, and its liveliest minds are preoccupied in a futile search for clever strategies in order to muster sufficient will for a collective last stand.

But that is another sweeping statement, in light of which you may suspend judgment.

Modern life has lived, and is dying, in a condition of suspended judgment. There are many who find the notion of transcendent standards a ridiculous superstition. A disenchanting science has made existentialists of us all by revealing the world to be objectively valueless and meaningless. The question as to where value lies is thereby answered firmly in the corner of the valuer as against the valued. There is nothing real in such a world beyond subjective choice and preference, at least not in any meaningful sense. And the love that seeketh not its own is a mere fancy made up by the religious mind for comfort. There was a time when existentialism was a meaningful philosophy, and that time was when people believed in God. We are smarter than that now, and smarter than Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Kierkegaard and such life. I am essentialist in philosophy, so long as we understand that in the Aristotelian terms of a potentiality that is unfolded historically and socially in time and place. For St Thomas Aquinas, an essence is a potentiality that becomes existent through act; we thus pass from passive being to active being. In that sense, Aquinas was both essentialist and existentialist. The modern prejudice is to assert existence over essence; we are nothing except that which our deeds have made us. It has been the time of Sartre:

“For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

It sounds liberatory, as a life of deliberate choice and action on the part of the individual. People don't like to be told what to do, least of all with respect to 'the good.' But if there is no essence as inherent potentiality, if there is no objective goodness in the world, then these choices and actions cannot but be empty. Sartre’s argument lacks reason, substance, referent, essence, potentiality, standard. How do we know such a thing to be love, or genius, or beauty or anything if we lack an objective or evaluative standard independent of the deed? To be described as a deed of love implies a standard of love existing outside of the deed. That is a transcendent standard. Likewise a conception of art by which to judge something to be a work of art. We know when love comes around by some innate grasp of love, not by defining every passing fancy as love. How is it that we know love when we come to see it? I come back to the question I posed earlier: where does value lie, in the valuer or in the valued? On what do we base our conviction that a thing or a person is valuable? The moderns repeat the phrase that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ That’s a claim that beauty is purely subjective, a matter of created human values. That phrase, however, is an inversion and distortion of the view that Plato presented in The Symposeum. Here, Plato refers to the divine beauty which is beheld by the eye:

‘The contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold.’

‘But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life—thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.

Plato The Symposium

I return, then, to spectacle, seeing, looking at, consideration, and contemplation. It leads to communion, virtue, and God.

I seem to have been hard to please at most points in my life. Coming from a self-contained and pretty wholesome world, at least in my imaginings, society and its practices could never measure up. And this applies to both elites (of all kinds) and masses. My greater disappointment tends to be with those who make the larger claims to knowledge. They are the ones who raise expectations, overreach themselves, and fall far shorter than the ideal they project, and which simple souls such will tend to believe in and hold them to. The higher the ambition or projection, the greater the fall. And the disappointment. The masses don’t demand or promise nearly as much, and so tend to disappoint for the very opposite reason. The world is not as it ought to be, so it strikes me that people should be as dissatisfied as I am and seeking to change things. The people who try to change things disappointment, the people who don’t also disappoint. I spend a lot of time trying to prevent disappointment turning against idealism to congeal as cynicism. I’ve managed it. Even now, I cannot quite see how much of my disappointment with society, whether we refer to its elites or masses, stems from my own maladjustment to society or from the fact that society is itself plainly ill-adjusted to anything by way of the True, the Good, the Beautiful. The idea that society should be so adjusted could itself be considered a remarkably elitist or aristocratic notion, divorced from practical realities which show the ‘ordinary’ people to be far better off than they had ever been under any society ordered to the three transcendentals. I don’t share the aristocratic disdain for the age of the masses. I criticize capitalist modernity for its failures, not its successes. The problem is that it is impossible to divorce the two, capitalism is a whole package. This becomes clear when we see the efforts to reform it from within. The changes which political elites promise to deliver a ‘democratic,’ ‘responsible,’ or ‘ethical’ capitalism may impress people as ‘moderate’ but always struck me as the most obvious evasion and timidity. The people demand change, the politicians understand the need for change, and a change is delivered in such a form that nothing changes, and politicians are satisfied and people are reconciled, and the cynics say ‘we told you so’ and play The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’ grumbling that the new boss is the same as the old boss. People know it, politicians know it. And it will carry on until people stop asking demands of alien government and politics and instead reclaim government and politics through the organisation of their own social power.

My disappointment with the elites of politics, culture, and society may well be an expression of my own maladjustment, to the extent that I am estranged from the normal functioning of the society around me, and so don’t share in its evident success stories. When I want ‘change,’ I tend to want it all changed, because from my side of things precious little actually functions as it ought. But it is precisely because I live in such estrangement that I see the world in sharp relief, and plenty that people accept or merely complain about I see as requiring substantive alteration. Whilst I admit my maladjustment, I nevertheless hold that there is something so profoundly wrong with our whole society that any elites it produces are bound to be deficient in some way. Occasionally, after years of making my points, I would distrust this conclusion I had drawn almost from the very beginning of my interest in politics. In fact, this conclusion was the beginning of my political life. The sense that the world was ill-ordered and the wrong people in control was the cause of my radicalization. I have always known that I was so ill-adjusted that even the left-of-centre alternatives on offer in conventional politics seemed utterly complicit with the very society that needed to be transformed from the base upwards. I knew I was an outsider. I drifted further out to the left but still refused to fit in. I’m not much of a joiner; I’m not very clubbable. I flirted on the fringes of this politics, but found the various left groups to be even more inveterately elitist than the parties which dominated conventional politics. I actually told them it was like being present in a student tutorial, with ‘debate’ being obviously directed to certain key, unchallengeable, positions. Immediately I saw the setup, those who were in charge and educating, those who were servants doing the active recruitment. I never joined any of these groups. They would run society as they run their parties, a theoretico-elitist vanguard ordering the masses to think and act as they ought.

I have no doubt that I have been seeking to remedy my deficiency, indeed almost complete lack, of social adaptability by imagining some ideal world in which I could feel at home. The central themes of ‘rational freedom’ all pertain to community, cooperation, and solidaristic ties, the very things lacking in my life. I nevertheless maintain, too, that there is a deficiency in these very things in society at large. I will admit to having very selective social antennae, and will hone in one any evidence that confirms my suspicions and obsessions. In research, it is called focus. From people crying out in a lost and fragmented society to libraries full of academic research, the idea that we are ‘bowling alone’ (Robert Puttnam) in ‘divided societies’ (Ralph Miliband) is not mine alone. To my credit, I have not only resisted the compensation offered by ersatz, surrogate communities in all their forms, I have developed an extensive and penetrating critique of such communities, showing how atomism below is the breeding ground for false abstract collectivities above and without. I refuse them. My researches and writings have confirmed the views I developed as a callow youth that there is indeed something seriously amiss not merely with the elites running society but with the would-be elites seeking to run society. But in deepening the research, I came to realize that the problem is not so much the elites but a society in which people and communities are so divided from their commons as to generate elitism. It is, of course, a class problem. So if this talk of ‘elites’ strikes others as vague, it strikes me the same way too and I would welcome those who could render things more precise in class terms. But there are elites wherever you look in all modern societies. That’s inevitable in a world that has been instrumentalized, bureaucratized, and rationalized. By ‘elites’ I mean all those who enjoy a privileged or superior status in the various fields that make up society. It’s in putting that way that the lines between a dysfunctional society and my own maladjustment become blurred. Surely, not all superior status is elitist. If you are ill, you would want to see something who has a good chance of detecting what the problem may be and judging what the best treatment may be. We call them doctors, the people who have the best credentials to do the job at hand.

But even after the common-sensical acceptance of expertise, my point remains. The abstraction and rationalization of power and instrumentalization of human relations and actions has created a society of such scale, quantity, and complexity that it is beyond the control and comprehension of ‘ordinary’ people, leaving us dependent upon specialists without spirit. You find them everywhere, in the governing class and in the boardrooms, in the committees and in business groups, at one end of the spectrum to the intellectuals and academics of the liberal left and left (by which I mean not intellectuals and academics, but those who intellectualize and academicize politics and so remove knowledge away from a knowledgeable citizen agency). These are the people whom Marx denounced as ‘would-be universal reformers,’ ‘alchemists of revolution,’ and ‘workers’ dictators.’ I went very strongly on Marx’s rejection of the theoretico-elitist model in my thesis, and I still see a supposedly emancipatory politics afflicted by the same predilection for ‘correct ideology’ from above and ‘from without.’ The references are to Lenin’s vanguardism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain once picked up my first book The Proletarian Public. Among the praise for the depth of detail and perspective, the reviewer said: ‘he does an effective demolition job on Lenin and the Bolsheviks.’ I did, too. I despise vanguardism in all its forms, whether the chosen people, the elect, the party. That’s not a rejection of expertise in relation to specific function or purpose, but of elitism in matters where creative and collective citizen agency apply.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about all the elitists is that I see them as the form I could myself take in seeking to become socially and practically effective. That may go some way towards explaining the visceral reaction they provoke in me. In arguing for truth and transcendent standards, I am quite aware of the totalitarian temptation in politics. It is a small step from thinking one knows the truth to thinking that your job is to ensure that everyone knows it too. And accepts it. I have therefore consistently argued for the bridge between the truth-telling and its reception, and have argued for the generation and assimilation of knowledge as a two-way dialectical process, bottom up via experiential and experimental praxis and top-down as considered formulation. I share a certain deficiency with the elitists who approach society and people armed with unarguable truth, a thin bookish rationalism, an emotional poverty, a superior tone, a meanness of temperament, a presumption of knowing better, and an impatience in dialogue. To my credit, I very much argue that knowledge needs always to be in touch with the human roots that feed politics and never ever use any error, ignorance, and misguided cries on the part of the people as grounds to denounce the popular voice. The task is to understand the popular cry and proceed from there, with the people, not above them. I have made this point repeatedly to those practising elitists seeking reform and change, only to meet an incredulous, uncomprehending reaction. From that I can only conclude that they are entirely unaware of their remoteness from people. There is no mystery to me as to why such a politics fails to move people and fails to garner anything like the support which, given the wealth of knowledge and expertise on its side, not to mention the rightness of cause and the seriousness of the problem, it ought. They are doing politics wrong and at the heart of the error is the abstraction of knowledge from people and their social practices.

I am more convinced than I ever was that when would-be reformers rise in society they are more changed by this society than they change it, gaining in a certain power but losing that which is much more valuable. By becoming part of the system to be changed, they discover the intransigence of social institutions and structures. The system is immune to elitist change, it can only be changed by democratic participation. It is possible to lose the senses we were born with. In fact, capitalism entails a systematic alienation of the senses from people. A radical transformation concerns precisely what is required to bring people and society back to their senses. When you are so ill-adjusted and have largely failed to be socialized, you retain more of the senses you were born with. There’s nothing new in the world, only a lot of things we have forgotten. I haven’t forgotten the things I was born knowing. Adrift in society, I had to hold on to that knowledge as my bedrock. The fact that others lose that knowledge and become so distanced from the truths it contains as to fail to recognize it in others as anything but oddness and madness serves only to cut me even further adrift. These were among the vague impulses and concerns which led me to gravitate towards various left groups in politics, this search for meaning, community, and change. And it they were also the reasons I kept my distance and refused to join whenever I was asked. I didn’t volunteer and I could never be persuaded. Always, I had strong instinctive presentiments of this kind with respect to an educative politics. To this day, I look at people addressing people in classes, all whiteboards, pens, and presentations, and recoil.

I can’t pause for precision in detail and analysis here. These are general observations and expressions. My specific purpose is shed light on life seen through autistic eyes. I have gravitated towards those thinkers, ancient, modern, and all points in between and beyond, who strike me as having given expression to, and even diagnosed, the fundamental maladies which afflict human society and suggested specific remedies. I say ‘human society’ in some timeless sense here, rather than ‘the contemporary age,’ because the afflictions seem endemic to human nature, however much they are manifested in time and place. That’s why I have investigated Plato and Aristotle with a keen eye. The dysfunctional and ill-adapted have ever been in conflict with a dysfunctional society ill-adapted to ‘reality.’ The philosopher is ever dealing with the clash between different realities. The consistent theme in the philosophies I read is a concern with the excessive assertion of subjective choice and preference in the projection of meaning and value upon an objectively meaningless and valueless world. The clash is as old as Plato challenging the sophists. The critique of the view that the good is based on existential choice and subjective projection, leading to the enslavement of the empirical self to immediate sensual reality, lies at the heart of my case for ‘rational freedom.’ In my work within the ‘rational’ tradition I have sought to show how purely human projection, self-creation, and the self-seeking self are transcended. Bringing human beings back to their senses entails taking them beyond the sensual and sense experience, thereby transcending the enslavement of the ego to empirical necessity. It is a religious view of the view. I present it most explicitly, however, as a secular rational view in my writing on Rousseau and Kant. But the reference to Rousseau is instructive. Rousseau, of course, made his name and his entry into philosophy through his prize winning essay A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences (1750), which indicted modern civilisation has had and will continue to have a debilitating effect people and society. That view was challenged at the time and has been challenged ever since. The likes of Stewart Brand and Stephen Pinker and others of their ilk will supply a wealth of figures to prove that human beings are not only healthier and wealthier than they have ever been, but more peaceful, less violent, more moral in their personal behaviour. It still strikes me that Rousseau was right. But I may be as psychologically maladjusted as Rousseau was, demanding the socially impossible from my position of exile. Rousseau argued from a position of being both in and against the Enlightenment; he was neither a reactionary nor a progressive. He was hailed a genius by David Hume and Immanuel Kant, who must have the strongest claims to have been the greatest, or most significant, of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. But he was without support and popularity. He still is. Call me sensitive, but I tend to notice how badly abused Rousseau is by apologists for modernity. I notice, because the claims made against Rousseau also apply to me. Take this from James Lovelock: ‘Renewable energy is something that comes from Gaia whereas fossil fuel and nuclear energy are man-made and therefore dirty. This is wholly untrue and a myth that goes back at least to Rousseau.’ (Lovelock ch 4 2009). I have learned to judge the depth of any thinker or argument by the approach taken to Rousseau. The second rate minds opt for the obvious line that Rousseau was a ‘back to nature’ philosopher. He plainly wasn’t, as is evident to anyone who has ever read him. Rousseau’s comments on agriculture and metallurgy go back to Genesis and were concerned to check the simplistic assertion of uni-linear progress. That seems a rather sober and sensible view as we stand on the brink of civilizational collapse. But Rousseau is routinely ridiculed. This from Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline:

Arthur Herman traces the origin of romanticism and its decay narrative to one man and one event—Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution of 1789. Rousseau embraced an imaginary primitivism and declared, "Everything degenerates in the hands of men." His vision of a return to innocence and freedom seemed to be at hand with the overthrow of the French monarchy. The intelligentsia of Europe thrilled to the coming of a new dawn in 1789, and then watched it turn into blood and terror by 1793. With that trauma, the romantic stance became one of despair and defiance, and it has remained so ever since. (Brand ch 7 2009).

Which makes it clear that if either Herman or Brand have even bothered to read Rousseau, they either haven’t understood him or have deliberately misunderstood him. Rousseau did not embrace an imaginary primitivism to argue a return to natural innocence, the very opposite in fact. But this notion of degeneration through human self-creation does raise an important issue. In my PhD researches I used Rousseau as a bridge between Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Hegel, and Marx. My real focus was Marx as a radical reconfiguration of the idea of ‘rational freedom.’ I much diminished Plato, and even Aristotle was rather skirted. Basically, I was attempting to identify and extract a philosophical ideal and norm from the rational tradition and show how Marx embedded it in social praxis. Kantian philosopher Gary Banham read my work, was impressed by what I had written on Rousseau, and advised me to specialize on him as a much maligned, misunderstood, and neglected figure. I felt somewhat vindicated in my treatment of Rousseau (and the whole tradition by extension) when a few years later philosopher David Lay Williams published Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (2007). In this book, Williams demonstrates how Rousseau affirmed transcendent norms and values against the conventionalism which has dominated the world since Hobbes. This conventionalism holds that human beings are the creators of their own standards and values – the sophist view that Plato challenged.

Those who split the issue into a division between an artificial and inauthentic society on the one hand and a natural and authentic society on the other are guilty of a crude separation that obscures the true nature of the problem and its solution. Rousseau is interesting on this question, arguing the need to move not backwards to nature but forwards to a legitimate social freedom in the civil state. At the same time he affirms ethics as ‘the sublime science of simple souls.’ It is that innate knowledge and goodness, the truths engraved on the human heart, as Rousseau puts it, that are expressed also by George Orwell in The Italian Soldier Shook My Hand:

And he was born knowing what I had learned

Out of books and slowly.

These are words which intriguing to explore in light of my own development. I was born knowing what I came to confirm very quickly in books. I came not to Plato and others not for learning but for vindication, confirming me on my course, however lonely. The view that Rousseau or I are arguing for the wisdom of the simple, unlearned, and unsophisticated ‘natural man’ over against the educated and civilized elites is crude caricature. That said, I do indeed think that the educated and sophisticated have much more to learn from ‘ordinary’ people than they know. I affirm the knowledgeable agency and experiential praxis of people in everyday life, enabling ‘ordinary’ people to see through and break through the constraints of prevailing institutions and relations. And I hold this as a necessary corrective to those reformers who, in seeking change through ‘the system,’ find themselves all too easily changed by it. That’s not a matter of hypocrisy or ‘selling out,’ but recognition of the inertia and intransigence of institutions and structures. A social system can be reformed to work better, but not to work differently.

The last thing I would argue is that the simple, unsophisticated, and unlearned person could find their way to freedom and happiness when left alone, unaided and unguided. That view of the ‘natural man’ choosing his own good in a natural order is precisely the eighteenth century fiction of individualism which underpins the modern malaise. That’s precisely the point at issue with respect to subjective choice and the notion that the good is merely a matter of self-created human values. The key question pertains to the kind of guidance and aid that human beings as social beings require. The naturalists of the free market answer the question by eliminating all artificial forms to leave the individual free to choose the good as he or she sees fit. That is always my response to those of radical and leftist persuasion who argue against my ‘rational’ view as prescriptive, moralistic, and potentially repressive of difference and otherness. That is precisely the same objection that free market monetarists argue with respect to laws and institutions as artificial accretions blocking the proper functioning of the natural order. My ‘rational’ view of freedom affirms a positive conception of liberty, a development conception of democracy, and an expansive conception of happiness. The liberal view maintains a sharp institutional separation between the state and society, claiming that the tradition I represent is inimical to individual liberty. Aristotle, for instance, is claimed to have made the individual the property of the state and its overarching conception of the good. That view only holds on individualist liberal premises. There was no ‘state’ in the modern sense in ancient Greece. The polis denotes the constitution of the whole community, including practices and culture as well as codes and constitutions. ‘The state,’ if that is how we choose to put it, is the supreme community of all smaller communities. Each community is concerned with serving its particular ends, with the supreme community coordinating all activity and channelling it towards the universal good. The liberal view is congenitally incapable of understanding that conception and so misconceives it as inimical to individual freedom. The charge can be turned against liberalism. Liberalism’s individual freedom and reason/choice generates a collective unfreedom and unreason that impinges upon the individual in the form of external constraint. It is plain, then, that one of the principal reasons why liberal democracy and market capitalism seem a much less bad system than any other system we may propose is precisely because individuals within the competitive relations of an atomised society distrust and fear one another so much as rivals for scarce resources to be able to countenance any alternate system. The prevailing system is premised upon a scarcity of material resources and proceeds to generate a moral and psychological in terms of the public imagination. We live in Hobbes’ world, a society characterized by the war of all against all. Instead of politics in the true sense of creative self-actualization in a public life that unites each and all, we have a mutual insurance pact, what Aristotle in the Politics called a military alliance. Instead of polis we have police, instead of mutual growth we have protection.

“Set a thief to catch a thief,” as the old proverb goes. That proverb originates, not coincidentally I would suggest, in the mid-seventeenth century, in a play published in 1665, just after Hobbes’ Leviathan. (That said, it is described as an “old saying,” although it is still significant that its first appearance is 1665, "Oxford Dictionary of Quotations," Fifth Edition, edited by Elizabeth Knowles (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2001, p. 310; Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs). The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs goes back further to the classical Greek writer Callimachus, who wrote an epigram containing the remark "being a thief myself I recognized the tracks of a thief.” Thieves have ever been among us. But it should come as no surprise that in a society raised on “the robbery of the soil” and “the robbery of the worker”, as Marx put it with customary disconcerting clarity in Capital I, that we no longer just live among thieves, we have become thieves. And since we are thieves and not citizens, it makes more sense to establish a protective conception of politics rather than a developmental one; instead of each helping all others to advance individuality within communality, each is reduced to policing and checking the behaviour of all others. This protective conception is very the antithesis of the rational conception of freedom I develop in my work. The upshot is that the illegitimacy of any alternate conception and system is taken as axiomatic by all those who affirm the ontological ultimacy of the pre-social self-seeking individual. That progress is premised upon that axiom explains not merely the degeneration into decadence, but the inability of liberals to resolve their existential crisis.

In his preface to Maurice Magnus' Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, D. H. Lawrence states: “I think most middle class, most so-called educated people are inferior to the peasant.” He proceeds to elaborate:

It seems to me the so-called culture, education, the so-called leaders and leading classes today, are only parasites - like a great nourishing bush of parasitic consciousness nourishing on top of the tree of life, and sapping it. The consciousness of today doesn't rise from the roots. It is just parasitic in the veins of life. And the middle and upper classes are just parasitic upon the body of life which still remains in the lower classes...

Lawrence is doing far more than crudely pitching masses against elites; he is calling for true leadership:

I don't believe the lower classes can ever make life whole again, till they do become humble, like the old peasants, and yield themselves to real leaders. But not to great negators like Lloyd George or Lenin or Briand.

This kind of remark made Lawrence very suspect in the eyes of liberals, and caused accusations of ‘fascism’ to be levelled against him. But such accusations betray an inability to see through anything but dualistic eyes. Anything beyond the self-choosing individual is bound to appear an illegitimate collective constraint to those who make that fictional individual axiomatic. Rather than meet the challenge to liberal orthodoxy it is easy to restate that orthodoxy. Lawrence is addressing the problem at a much deeper level. Recall here Aristotle’s definition of a citizen as one who willing and capable of ruling and being ruled in turn. Compare that notion with Lawrence's view of democracy:

Democracy: a recognition of souls, all down the open road, and a great soul seen in its greatness, as it travels on foot among the rest, down the common way of living. A glad recognition of souls, and a gladder worship of great and greater souls, because they are the only riches.

D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature.

True democracy is not merely an aggregate of individuals, a mere counting of heads, but expresses the capacity of the individuals composing the demos to associate together to determine the terms on which they are to be governed/govern themselves, prescribing laws and limits to bind appetite, demonstrating the ability to lead themselves by the nous instead of allowing others to lead them by the nose. If that sounds utopian, it is the answer to Plato’s question as to whether democracy can supply a self-limiting principle, demoting the capacity of the demos to govern themselves. For democracy to work, there is a need for our greater souls to prevail over our self-seeking selves.

The problem, of course, lies in identifying and adhering to a common and valid standard of evaluation. The quotes I have given from Rousseau, Orwell, and Lawrence suggest that the standard is to be found in the uncorrupted, unsophisticated simplicity and humility of the common folk, on the proviso that the people should come one day to be simple and humble once more. At the same time, there is no doubt that society’s leaders ought to be humbled, too, because their sophist politics set no authoritative standard of any kind. The most important task of social criticism is not merely to expose the parasitism and pleonexia of the leading classes of modern society, but to locate its roots in a society that has departed from standards other than the ones set in the power plays of dominant relations. It is easy enough to satirize political and cultural leaders, and such satire is popular because people can see the corruption; they live with its effects every day. Satire leaves the problem unaddressed and unresolved. Without effective action, a decadence sets in which, unchecked over time, becomes a politically debilitating and collectively ruinous cynicism. To come back to our senses, in order to transcend them, and make democracy a reality through the restoration of simplicity and humility, there is a need to temper problems of scale, quantity, and complexity down to human dimensions and proportions.

The conception of progress in the minds of the leaders as educators of ‘the people,’ whether expressed consciously or not, is that their view of what is right and true should prevail and their view of the right way of living should become the norm for all people and that, consequently, all should be educated into conforming to that way of life. Paradoxically, individualist premises sustain an educative politics that is conformist to the core, with the end in view being that all individuals should resemble the leaders as educators. ‘The elites.’ That conception of progress is about as far away from what is right and true as it is possible to get. This view of progress has delivered society into the hands of a new aristocracy of knowledge/power. In each of their particular identities they are all examples of that particularly reprehensible creature, the bureaucrat of knowledge/power, organisation men and women, functionaries of the Megamachine. You meet them and their servants and minions in every corner of society, the bureaucrats who order people and the accountants who count the money, officials, technicians, scientists, engineers, industrial relations experts and human resource managers, organisers, managers, planners, controllers, directors, trainers, experts, instructors, mentors, teachers of all kinds, professionals, intellectuals, journalists, correspondents, all of them specialists with spirit. All of them educators standing in need of a good education from the people! Again, I shall admit an autobiographical prejudice here stemming from my never less than difficult relation with education. I had bad experiences at school. In addition to the struggles to actually learn the same way at the same pace as others, I had basic problems socialising. I coped. But I was out of step, and it was noticeable. I could never thrive in a society raised on the educative model. The key question, of course, relates to what, precisely, education is, by what criteria, and, importantly, by whose criteria? Judging a person to be truly and successfully educated strikes me, from my position of social awkwardness, as demand that individuals be truly and successfully socialized and adapted. By what and whose criteria?

On the outside, I felt and deep down knew the sociological blindness to the nature, meaning, and content of education. And it seems inevitable that my experience of struggle in the educational system should involve me in rekindling some long outdated, but once vital, ideas in past socialist hopes. One of these quaint old ideas is that the purpose of extending educational opportunity is not to ensure equality of opportunity, as if everyone could ever be equal in competition and as if competition is life’s norm; nor even to ensure a social egalitarianism. Both views suffer from treating education as a means to and end. I saw education as an end in itself, pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Capitalism is a loathsome system on account not merely of its economic iniquity but also the intellectual and cultural abominations it inflicts on the lives of working people too. I took great delight of disappearing up the scaffolding on building sites to have a read of my history books. I remember reading Christopher Hill’s From Reformation to Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was over from where I was sitting.

Another idea I rekindled was the idea that knowledge, true knowledge, also had social roots with a practical purpose. This is an incredibly important point to grasp. Whilst much that I argue appears odd in the present day, there is a real sense in which I have returned to the early days of socialism, when it was possible to believe that knowledge and philosophy were logically, inexorably, and unswervingly socialist, given that socialism is, in general terms, the reasonable arrangement of common human affairs. I have often felt alone in staking out my view of ‘rational freedom’ as socialist, as based on drawing the philosophical ideal into an encounter with the practical world. My extensive reading and the conclusions I drew from it led directly to the view that the ‘rational’ ideal implies socialism in practice.

If I am something of a throwback to the early days of socialism here, I am not alone. A couple of years after I completed my thesis on Marx and Rational Freedom, Terry Eagleton published After Theory (2004), a book that advances the case for socialism as the realization of themes central to the ‘rational’ conception I set out in my PhD. Eagleton goes big on Aristotle, as I did. He writes of human beings coming to realize their natures at its best in and through relation to others in society.

And that means that you realize your nature at its best - since if the other's self-fulfilment is the medium through which you flourish yourself, you are not at liberty to be violent, dominative or self-seeking.

Eagleton 2003 ch 6

That, in a nutshell, was the rational conception I had set out, proceeding from Aristotle to affirm the unity of the freedom of each and all. I defined this ‘rational’ view of freedom against the libertarian individualist conception in which subjective choice trumped common goods. Each can realize their individuality truly and fully in community with others; it is that interactive quality that is missing in competitive individualist conceptions. Eagleton draws the conclusion that had motivated my thesis a decade earlier:

The political equivalent of this situation, as we have seen, is known as socialism. When Aristotle's ethics of flourishing are set in a more interactive context, one comes up with something like the political ethics of Marx. The socialist society is one in which each attains his or her freedom and autonomy in and through the self-realization of others. Socialism is just whatever set of institutions it would take for it to happen.

Eagleton 2004

In Socialism (Paul, Miller, Paul ed 1989), Loren Lomasky writes on ‘socialism as classical political philosophy.’ He writes:

A small puzzle: the terms 'capitalism' and 'socialism' initially present themselves as contraries, the one affirming what the other rejects. However, once removed from the dictionary, they function otherwise. The theory of capitalism is very much contained within the science of economics. The positive theory of capitalistic institutions, but also its normative superstruc­ture, rest most easily within the language and methodology of the economist. What distinguishes the free market? It is efficient; allocation of factors of production are optimized; individuals maximize their utility; and so on. These are the terms with which justifications of capitalistic production typically begin - begin, and often end.

Socialism is different. Its legitimation is overwhelmingly sought within a discourse proper to politics. Proper socialistic organization of the means of production will, one is told, banish exploitation and thereby transcend class conflict. Socialist society is fundamentally more democratic than whatever bourgeois society holds forth because it is a more egalitarian order. (And the contemporary identification of the bourgeoisie, whatever its origins, has become an act of political classification.) These entirely familiar locutions can hardly be misidentified: they advance political arguments. It is erroneous to view capitalism and socialism as theories in conflict. That cannot be so, because they occupy substantially different domains. The puzzle is why that should have come to be the case.

Lomasky in Paul, Miller, Paul 1989

I argued for socialism as the realization of ancient political philosophy on a modern terrain prepared by Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. The conflict between capitalism and socialism was one between a system imposing an economic determinism upon society and a social organisation that reaffirmed the primacy of the political in the sense of human self-determination.

My view on ‘rational freedom’ may strike people as odd in the contemporary age. In conversation, my director of studies Jules Townshend said ‘there’s no one doing similar work at the moment, at least I can’t think of anybody.’ He paused and thought, and then said ‘no, nobody.’ But there is a definite sense that my work returns to a state of socialist innocence, the early days when it was considered that philosophy, reason, and knowledge implied socialism as the rational arrangement and ordering of human affairs.

It is in this sense that education could be considered to make socialists who would, in turn, proceed to make socialism. Here is a consciousness raising with practical intent. The errors and inadequacies of all social arrangements and ideas that failed to conform to reason would be plain to the truly educated mind. Or so I thought. Until I pondered the lessons of Marx’s conception of ideology as a set of ideas that is right about the wrong system, a theoretical expression of an inversion at the heart of society’s core fundamentals. To uproot that inversion would require practical critique and not merely theoretical critique. In the 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philos­ophy of Right' Marx writes that:

'Philosophy finds its material weapons in the Proletariat, just as the Proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in philosophy.'

That statement exudes visceral political energy and power. If Plato could never quite manage to bridge the gulf between contemplation and action, Marx storms across the divide, with whatever consequences (I don't believe you can have your transcendental cake and eat it too). We have become so accustomed to Marx’s arguments that their audacious nature for the time tends to be unobserved. Marx was explicitly seeking to make philosophy worldly in order to make the world philosophical. That may strike us as odd or naïve now; it struck people at the time as revolutionary. That merging of philosophy and politics in revolutionary-critical praxis struck a deep chord in the early socialist and labour movement. Socialists, activists, and trade unions were not merely the agents of the working class fighting exploitation, but embodiments of a philosophical enlightenment being taken into the heart of social transformation.

So in my researches I have been pretty much rekindling the old philosophical flame that fired the early socialists, before Social (parliamentary) Democracy and (State) Communism sold reason out to modern capitalist rationalization, confusing friends and enemies of socialism alike ever since.

I don’t think I’m as alone on this as many would be inclined to think. The connection between socialism and philosophy was once more clear. Jonathan Ree, for instance, writes at length on this in Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain, 1900-1940, (Oxford University Press, 1984). Then there is Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, (Cambridge University Press, 1980.) The first book I ever wrote was entitled The Proletarian Public (1996).

Philosophy for me represents the supreme rational discipline, aspiring to encompass all other disciplines, ordering them and their specialisms according to an overarching architectonic. Philosophy and socialism meet in this architectonic conception. Socialism is a social arrangement and ordering in which all sectional interests come to be organised so as to form a rational and harmonious whole. In time, I deepened this affinity between socialism and philosophy with the religious ethic which place God at the centre as the ordering and orienting principle. That I should have taken this step is also not as odd as those who think socialism and religion implacable enemies think.

I am currently finishing a book on the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri. Dante refers to ‘diverse ranks’ coming to render ‘sweet harmony among these wheels’ (Par 6: 124—26), that is, through their integration with heavenly unity:

Diverse voices make sweet music,

So diverse ranks in our life render sweet harmony among these wheels.

Par 6: 124-126

That is the meeting of philosophy and socialism I have been writing of, with the addition of God as the transcendent ethic and hope which moves and orients all things. The Christian Socialist R.H. Tawney identifies precisely the rational arrangement of common human affairs which defines socialism to me, so long as we understand reason here as containing a moral component:

The famous lines in which Piccarda explains to Dante the order of Paradise are a description of a complex and multiform society which is united by overmastering devotion to a common end. By that end all stations are assigned and all activities are valued. The parts derive their quality from their place in the system, and are so permeated by the unity which they express that they themselves are glad to be forgotten, as the ribs of an arch carry the eye from the floor from which they spring to the vault in which they meet and interlace.

Such a combination of unity and diversity is possible only to a society which subordinates its activities to the principle of purpose. For what that principle offers is not merely a standard for determining the relations of different classes and groups of producers, but a scale of moral values. Above all, it assigns to economic activity itself its proper place as the ser­vant, not the master, of society. The burden of our civiliza­tion is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the pro­cesses of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired.

R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society 1982 ch 11

These views on the rational and ethical society born of the merging of philosophy, religion, and socialism are light years away from a modern rationalization presided over by the bureaucrats of knowledge/power. These characters, who treat the whole of society as a training ground, have been forged in the sterile world of monopoly capitalism and centralised government. In comparison with their counterparts in past ages, they are less greedy for money and power, more ‘rational’ in their parasitism and domination. They pursue money and power, of course. But for good reasons. Here are the origins of a cold, callous, clinical governing class which rules according to rational calculation. We can expect nothing more than such self-validating unarguable authority as sheer power in a world which recognises no moral standards beyond self-created, self-chosen human values.

Which is not quite to deny that the intellectual and technical accomplishments of the age have, in the main, to the human betterment. It is merely to say that progress in quantity can be bought at the expense of quality, thereby undermining the very moral-anthropological purpose of anything that merits the designation ‘progress.’ In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx criticizes the capitalists who “want only 'useful things' to be produced”: “they forget that the production of too many useful things produces too many useless people.” (Marx EW EPM 1975). The price exacted for progress is far too high if it makes individuals much less in terms of their essential humanity, and by that I mean a rounded humanity. The De La Salle sixth form I attended seeks to ‘educate the whole person.’ The endless accumulation of material quantity delivers a progress that can be measured. What can be missed is the qualitative dimension. A progress that feeds quantity and starves quality exacts too high a price to pay, a price which, in the denial of spiritual realities, which could well prove impossible to pay in the end. For any society, the loss of the precious cultural resources, moral capital, and spiritual wisdom bequeathed by the past represents a forfeiture that spells ruination, since these values are as essential to society as roots and constant watering are to a plant.

To return to my consistent point, the governing of society in accordance with the self-created, self-chosen values on the part of the self-seeking individual is an inheritance of the naturalism of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. People mistakenly think that the problem lies with the individualism of the nineteenth century, but that is a mistake. In many respects, from Hegel and the Romantic reaction to Marx, Tocqueville, and Comte, onwards to Durkheim, the nineteenth century represented both a conservative and socialist attempt to resolve the problems of individualism bequeathed by the eighteenth century. The rational values of the natural rational man of the Enlightenment is the source of the malaise. The naturalism of eighteenth century materialism severed the individual from others, from community, from tradition, and from God. This severance gave birth to the pure unencumbered individual and a society that sought to live by purely human values. That naturalism maintains the fiction of the individual as a pre-social being who enters society only to defend and advance self-interest, defecting whenever these self-seeking concerns are frustrated. The society created in that image is composed of individuals who live only in the present and care neither for the past nor the future. Such an ethos denies God in affirming material reality over against spiritual reality.

With the assertion of the self-sufficiency of the self-seeking individual, community, common good, tradition, God and Nature are denied. This view of ‘rational man’ is the very antithesis of the view of humanity expressed in the conception of ‘rational freedom.’ In Les grands cimetieres sous la lune, Georges Bernanos described "the rational exploitation of human labour and human genius in the service of purely human values” as “an immense reform, with incalculable implications, when one reflects that up to now the better part of human endeavour has been devoted to the discovery, defence and celebration, not of human but of spiritual values.” Intoxicated by scientific advance, technological innovation, and industrial expansion, human beings have thought themselves powerful enough to be able to “grow up” and take morality and material life into their own hands. Humanity has sought to live by its own values, discarding spiritual values and realities insofar as these are considered supra-human. Human beings have gone it alone, and that is precisely where they have ended up, alone in a world of their own making, children of their deeds and orphans of their power: the masters of nowhere. The new point of view “spread like wildfire,” noted Bernanos. The material benefits have been huge. The figures show it. The damage inflicted on the natural environment records the impact of economic expansionism, too. Bernanos comments that “there was something about the purely utilitarian materialism of the 19th century which was repulsive to any noble soul.”

“But our reformers have linked it with the ideas of sacrifice, grandeur and heroism, so that the peoples are now able to turn away from God without anguish and almost without knowing it, in a state of exaltation like that of the saints and martyrs. There is nothing to warn them that this experiment ends in a condition of universal hatred."

The question we continually ask with respect to progress is the same question we may ask with respect to the descent into barbarism: Are we there yet? The twentieth century came close to wiping civilization out on at least two occasions. That’s a modest claim with respect to the two world wars. We can’t keep on making it through by the skins of our teeth. It is a sobering thought to consider that Bernanos’ prediction that ‘the rational exploitation of human labour and human genius in the service of purely human values’ will end ‘in a condition of universal hatred’ is still in the process of being fulfilled. And may yet be fulfilled. For whilst talk of catastrophe and the collapse of civilization is in the air, preparing everyone psychologically for the end that is sure to come unless ‘we act,’ precious few raising the alarm actually show much sign of grasping the moral malaise at the heart of the environmental crisis. That being the case, there is every reason to fear that the world wars and everything since, the genocide and wars, the arms races, the military budgets and armaments trade are all involved in fulfilling Bernanos’ prophecy of a world submerged in universal hatred. In this way, self-seeking individuals living in accordance with purely human subjective values bring about the end via a self-fulfilling prophecy, a society of mutual self-cancellation degenerating into mutual contempt, then indifference, and then finally mutual self-annihilation. The twentieth century has been the overture.

And here I can unravel the apparent paradox of how I can write of Marx so favourably when arguing for a social transformation designed to lead us out of the capital system and into socialism, for environmental action to address climate change, and against a consensual “non-politics” of an environmental reformism that leads us straight back into an untransformed socio-economic system driving ecological collapse, whilst enfolding all of the above within the greatest collaboration of all: partnership with God as the Greatest Love of all.

This is the part that seriously worries me about class politics and environmental politics. Unless this politics cleaves to the ‘rational’ core I establish as bedrock, the hatred and fear feed on themselves to drive human beings as far away from reason as is possible. The only way of preventing the fulfilment of the prophecy of universal destruction is for people to take time to examine more the socio-economic and moral origins of and antidotes to the expressions of hatred and fear, and respond in much less ‘activist’ and incendiary fashion to the events inciting this hate and fear. To my eminently rational mind, hatred and fear are evidence of a class and environmentalist politics that may have the right ends but are missing their appropriate targets, giving loud public demonstration to their ineffectual nature, inciting further hatred and fear. Panic is the last thing we need in this context. To keep missing the target is to ensure not merely that causes go uncorrected and cures go unadministered, but that hatred and fear grow and eventually come to merge to deliver the perfect combination for the human self-fulfilment of Bernanos’ bleak prophecy.