Nothing Lasts Forever
The Case for Something Against Nothing
Notre Dame
“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
- Victor Hugo
“Everything is burning”
Everything is burning, nothing will remain.
Nothing?
That seems a remarkably unspiritual comment to make on a Cathedral. As all people of faith know, all things of the physical world are transitory. I have been reading the debates over Notre Dame, noticing the extent to which human beings really are almost totally absorbed in the material world. It's as if they either don't know that a Cathedral is the physical casing of Faith or, more likely, don't care.
My all time favourite book is Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, which we know in the English speaking world as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I re-read it last Christmas. I've always had a soft spot for the hunchback, although I do have always to point out that he is but one character in a book teeming with many memorable characters.
I have no time and even less energy to waste on those who would establish false oppositions between cathedrals/art/culture and nature and have taken the opportunity on social media to unfriend those many who have seized on the fire at the cathedral to indulge in anti-religious bigotry or merely express a certain cack-handed callousness in pressing their point about the destruction of the planetary ecology. I need no lessons at all on this destruction, and am in the mood to deliver a few to those environmentalism is utterly deficient in understanding the springs of human action in ethics and politics. I also have to point out that the idea that climate change is not being covered is risible. Never a day passes without climate change being mentioned. If it isn't at the top of political priorities, then there is a failure here to understand the nature of politics.
Many people here have been well-meaning enough, although their brief expressions of regret and concern with respect to the cathedral have been so brief as to leave me doubting their sincerity. The worst have been downright abusive, as they have used the occasion to peddle their selective histories in support of their prejudices.
It has become all too apparent to me that too many among the most vocal here could care less about anything but their own pet concerns. I have taken the opportunity to have a clear out on social media. Such people have clearly learned nothing from me over the years, and I have no interest in being a passive audience for those concerned only with peddling their opinions. I didn't go silently and directed some choice words based on sound reasoning in their direction. I hope I have left them with something to think about, presuming that they are, of course, capable of thought. I am sure that they will simply think I am a reactionary idiot and bigot. I don't think I am, and I do engage in a lot of self-criticism and self-reflection. I try to piece many the different strands making for an integral life together in an attempt to overcome the separation and parcelling out of experience that characterizes the modern world. My concern is to bring knowledge and know-how into the motivational economy of human beings in an attempt to actually turn the world around. If you can understand what Dante means by being "turned" at the end of The Comedy here then you will start to grasp what I am continually getting at. Worldchanging involves much more than informing heads, it involves forming characters within a community architectonics..
I have a profound interest in the cathedrals, not only for their religious connotations, but for the lessons they deliver with respect to what it takes to build and sustain a viable civilization. In Being at One I argued that a successful environmentalism requires those qualities best exemplified in religion and religious practice. Environmentalists write of building 'cathedral projects,' by which they mean projects to which individuals commit in the knowledge that they will not see their completion. I agree with this, only to emphasize that such commitment cannot but be profoundly ethical in being based on faith. An environmentalism which identifies truth and knowledge with science and fact cannot supply such faith. A science which reveals the world to be objectively valueless and meaningless cannot supply such faith. A purposeless materialism cannot supply such faith. The Faith which built the Cathedral of Notre Dame and sustained civilization over the course of centuries has lessons to teach here, if the brave soldiers of modern scientific positivism are open to being taught.
There is another aspect of this that is worth highlighting. The great cathedrals may well have been an integral part of the ideological apparatuses of the feudal order, but they embody a purpose that is independent of those past determinations. They are expressions of collective endeavour and art as well as of common belief and practice; they are the result of social practices and the norms and values that sustain them. Such a notion is very different from the modern idea that anything of any worth and achievement is merely the product of the subjectivity of self-contained, isolated and discrete individuals. In that respect, what we may call 'cathedral projects' are expressions of the art and culture of any society organised around common purpose and endeavour – exhibiting means and ends joined together in unison. This is not the condition of the modern world. 'Formerly’, Einstein argued, 'one had perfect aims but imperfect means. Today we have perfect means and tremendous possibilities but confused goals.' This is a debilitating condition since, if we do not agree on common ends, then we will not agree on means either. Those who think we can avoid contentious and seemingly irresolvable debates on ends by supplying means or solutions we can all agree on are well-meaning but guilty of wishful thinking.
I once gave a little talk in the libraries of St Helens on Notre Dame de Paris. The brief I was handed here was to introduce a famous book to members of the great public to stimulate an interest in reading. It was all part of an endeavour to encourage people into the libraries to develop a passion for good books. The presentation was nothing complicated, nothing by way of literary criticism, which, in my view, would have served to have driven people out of the libraries in droves. I merely offered a few brief words. From that talk:
If there is one word that sums up the book, then that word is ‘fate’. Hugo claimed that the story was suggested to him by the Greek word "ANANKH" which he discovered carved deeply in Gothic characters in one of the towers of the cathedral.
And from the book:
"These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply".
In chapter IV it is revealed that the word means "Fate".
That the inscription had been removed as he was writing the book symbolised Hugo’s fear that the Gothic splendour represented by Notre Dame was in danger of being lost as a result of the contemporary trend for tearing down old buildings.
Hugo’s book was understood by many as a plea for the preservation of the architectural heritage of Paris. Renovation work began in 1845, Notre Dame re-emerging as what it had been in Hugo’s novel – as one of the great monuments.
"Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which the author of this book here consecrates to it, there remains to-day nothing whatever of the mysterious word engraved within the gloomy tower of Notre-Dame,--nothing of the destiny which it so sadly summed up. The man who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of man many centuries ago; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth. It is upon this word that this book is founded."
All materials things pass. Hence I make an issue of those who express sadness by saying that 'nothing' will remain of the Cathedral. For men and women of Faith, everything of importance will remain long after all things of the Earth have passed, our lives included. I have discerned an almost complete ignorance of the theological significance of the Cathedral in the lives of the faithful here. That makes it clear that much more than a physical structure has been lost here, something much more real and substantial. And that was lost a long time ago. Let me elaborate.
For Hugo's “fate” read “finite.” Like all temporal things, the Cathedral is finite. We express sorrow over any destruction and damage that may come its way, but people of Faith will not see its passing, or the passing of any temporal thing, as the end of the world. The Cathedral is finite, but the Faith that inspired its creation and sustained it over centuries is not. I'm intrigued by the reactions to the fire, by the sadness of its damaging, the threat of its passing, and by the analogies some have drawn between the destruction of the Cathedral with the destruction of nature. Those who have mocked the damage and destruction of the Cathedral, pointing to apparent indifference of people when it comes to the destruction of the planetary ecology, are missing a key point. In fact, they are missing a few key points. In the first place, the supposed indifference of people in face of environmental destruction is not indifference at all but powerlessness. People are at a loss to know what to do. The problem of the modern world is one of atomized, isolated individuals in face of abstract collective forces. It has been the job of environmentalism to build appropriate and effective means and mechanisms of collective action, enabling individuals to respond effectively to calls to address environmental problems. That this has not been done is a failure of the environmental movement, a huge failure too on the part of a supposedly political movement seeking to bring about change on the planet. Instead, too many environmentalists have continued to issue calls for action to individuals, only to indulge in flagrant misanthropy in citing human greed, stupidity, and apathy as causes of environmental destruction. That's not the problem. The problem is the failure to inspire, motivate, and obligate sufficient numbers in common cause, providing effective material counter-organisations enabling significant collective action. I shall leave that problem aside for another time.
Here's a question for those environmentalists complaining about the coverage that the fire at Notre Dame has received. The spirit which led to the building of Notre Dame and sustained the social practices around it and its culture will endure. Can the same be said of anything grounded in nature? All temporal things must pass. I ask this question in light of a disenchanting science which conceives the universe to be objectively valueless and meaningless, without end or purpose. What kind of ethic can we derive from such a scientific understanding of the world? Many environmentalists call for the creation of "Cathedral projects," by which they mean projects in which individuals commit themselves to actions whose completion will come long after their own lifetimes. I support this, but am concerned to point out that such "projects" receive their motivational and inspirational point and purpose only through the provision of a transcendent ethic. It doesn't work when grounded only in finite nature. Because all things pass here - art, culture and nature - all worldly things are finite. You live, you die. This is not news. I am struck by all those who take their stand on science expressing so much shock and anguish in face of the passing, and prospective passing, of things on this planet. It is as if, having believed that the machine gods of modern civilization really had given us immortality in a secular eternity, they have now come to realize that they have in reality merely shortened life-spans and existence. We are witnessing the collapse of a false and bogus religion, and the howls and laments are deafening. Of course, there is cause for protest at the premature ending of so much life, but there is more going on here. The 'death of life' is a biological fact of life. We can lament it coming sooner than later, and have every right to protest and grieve over it coming much sooner than it ought. But come it will, to all things. Expressions of sorrow here are residues of a lost faith. I say we need to call that faith back. There is only the one eternal thing. All else will crumble to dust. All the creations of humanity will pass away, too, just as all mountains will fall and all rivers run dry. One day, the Sun will fade and die, and the Earth will die with it, too. That's just fact, and the empire of fact is a tyranny that could care less about human concern in this respect. To whom or what, then, are so many crying so loudly?
Notre Dame has been with us as a sacred space for so long that we have fallen for the illusion that the Cathedral, built to the glory of God, was somehow not bound by time like all other things of this Earth. To have witnessed the fire which threatened to bring about its destruction has been shocking in its reminder of the transitory nature of all finite things, ourselves included. Sacred spaces and holy places incite us deep within our being and lead us to activate some dormant sense of wonderment. We come to think that a thing of sacred beauty may last forever, even though, like all human creations, like all human creators, it will pass in time. Such things seem eternal to use, but they are not, they channel eternity and lead us in its direction. They are all the more beautiful for that.
The fire at Notre Dame Cathedral is the occasion to restate some deep, long-forgotten, truths:
"Christ’s death on the cross is indeed something that we are all called to face as Catholics—that because of our sins he died for us and that we mourn his death deeply are basic facts of our faith. Watching the great spire fall into the flames one cannot help but reflect on Christ’s death, and be reminded that indeed nothing of this world is truly permanent. Despite the towering mass of permanent stones having stood for over 850 years, this monument to the Faith appeared to us this week to be just as fragile a creation as any human being. It reminded us that we, too, must eventually die."
"As we look forward to the reconstruction of Notre Dame, we ought to also reflect on this: the path of faith is not without pain. To be united with the Lord, we all must die in order to be glorified and made anew. Our path of redemption can be symbolized by this great fire; it is only through suffering that we are raised to new life.
So, too, in the Church as a whole, which is suffering a similar conflagration. Our struggles today can also be seen in the flames: the consuming fire of sexual abuse and corruption that threatens to reduce the Church of Christ to ashes. But we must always have hope in the promise that Christ gave to Peter, namely, that the gates of hell will not prevail. Like the cathedral, the Church is made of many parts, and although some of those parts—like the great oaken members—were consumed by flames, the church as a whole still stands, ready for new growth to replace the old."
I would extend that call for reconstruction to all things of value in this world of art, culture, and, indeed, nature. I don't set things of value against each other but establish them on a continuum. If you genuinely have concern in one area, then you will have it in another. Love knows no boundaries and establishes no cutting off point. I am sceptical of the motives of those who have being so adamant in establishing their own concerns as the all-important ones, to the exclusion of others. I see such people as violating their own purported environmentalism, violating the first principle of environmentalism, the interdependence of all things.
But I am concerned to establish some ancient wisdom here, against moderns who have come to think themselves as immortals and their works as eternal.
We must remember always that:
"Sic transit gloria mundi"
This is a Latin phrase that means "Thus passes the glory of the world."
"Worldly things are fleeting."
"O quam cito transit gloria mundi"
("How quickly the glory of the world passes away")
(Thomas à Kempis).
That applies to nature and all natural things as it applies to all human creations.
Yet that 'glory' seems to matter to us. We carry on building. In ruin of hope, we continue to hope all things. For we are transcendent beings made in the image of God. Forget that, we invest those hopes elsewhere, in transitory things, and suffer from an existential anguish as we bear witness to their destruction and passing.
I am reading people who are arguing that with climate change, civilisation and all the things that make for a civilised existence will come to an end. That's very true. And … I'm all in favour of civilization and the things that make for a civilized existence. I'm less than sure that the primitivist anti-civ wing of environmentalism will agree with me here. They see civilization as destructive and the human species as doomed. And they hold religion in contempt. They are people entirely without hope. And they are a bane on environmentalism.
Let's start from this: all worldly things will pass. With respect to the disenchanting science that has replaced religion in the modern world, we are talking of the inevitability of extinction in an objectively valueless and meaningless universe. That is just hard fact, and there can be no sorrow or lamentation here. We are certainly right to protest an unnatural and premature ending of all things. But all finite things end. That is no cause for surprise or shock. Whether that ending comes sooner or later, it comes nevertheless. So I am most intrigued by the lamentation of so many here. Is the natural end to things anything more or less of an ending than an unnatural, human-forced one? It's the end either way you care to look at it. Indifference is built into these “prophetless and godless times,” to use Weber's words. This modern world is one that proceeds “without regard to persons,” Weber continues. And without regard to the planet and the other beings and bodies in the more-than-human world. So why the expectation that we can and ought to make a difference? Why the lack of indifference on the part of those who science-based environmentalism implies that very thing? Such reactions only make sense in terms of a continued belief in a transcendent source, end-point, and hope. That's my view and my motivation; that's where the commitment beyond the facts of time and place comes from and is sustained from. Without that you have nothing but an impotent lament. People do seem to think their cries will be heard by something or someone somewhere, some entity that cares. Sooner or later, all the things of this Earth will pass, and a nature conceived as objectively valueless and meaningless could care less. I ask again: to whom or what do you cry? Because cold, indifferent nature couldn't give a damn.
My outlines from the talk on "Notre Dame de Paris" (I improvised around them, so this is a bit spartan (for me)).
It may be worthwhile to point out that the spire that has collapsed at the Cathedral was not actually quite a restoration from the 19th century but more of an innovation. That makes the point that the Cathedral has been rebuilt and revamped more than a few times in its eight hundred year history. The book Notre Dame de Paris was inspired by the word “fate.” Who knows what the fate of the building will be now. If you can take destiny into your own hands, then it ceases to be destiny. Then again, if you can do that, then it was never destiny in the first place. Your will is forever up against fate, and you can never no what can be challenged and changed before the act of challenge and attempted change.
Any rebuilding that will take place will become a part of the constant re-making of Notre Dame over the centuries. There may well be a 21st century rebuilding, superseding the developments of the 19th century, as well as those of the 13th century. New materials may well combine with the old structure. It's possible and, in the absence of old materials, will be necessary. I'm as interested in the underlying spirit as I am in the physical architecture, though. The former is eternal and enduring, but can be lost from view with the emphasis on physical structures and appearances, as well as on the self-serving ego that sees the external world as mere 'things' to appropriate, use, enjoy, discard. The individuals of the contemporary world seem all too happy to see themselves as tourists in time and place, mere consumers in the private realm. This is the ego as a prison.
With respect to the rebuilding of Notre Dame as a technical challenge that our modern architects will relish tackling, I cannot but recall St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas is clear that knowledge is not a virtue in the truest sense, since it is lacking in appetitive content. To be a virtue, knowledge would have to make one positively desire to grasp the true and the good. But it doesn’t. Hence the constant bewilderment of the moderns as to why so much knowledge has yet to deliver on its promises. It won’t and it can’t. Not on its own. As Aquinas comments, “Having knowledge does not make one want to consider the truth; it just makes one able to do so." (QDVC 7c). Along with the ability to act well, we need, most of all, the will and disposition to act well. Aquinas describes the intellect as "following the will." The underlying disposition "more truly has the nature of a virtue inasmuch as it gives a person not just the ability or the knowledge to act rightly, but also the will to do so" (QDVC 7c). That will is something that comes from within; it is something we are born with but also something we nurture through cultivation, habit, and practice. The application comes via a social context or habitus which activates and canalises our innate moral capacity, forming the right character that responds to calls for action without need of proof.
This article in the National Catholic Reporter raises some pertinent questions:
Notre Dame, long a symbol of Catholicism in Europe, becomes a picture of its collapse
"Those who engineered and cheered the destruction of clerical power and the influence of the church had little to put in its place. Libertarian capitalism exploited workers and consumers and destroyed the environment. The power of the media was used to create celebrities, sensationalize news and sell commodities. Democracy has given way to narrow-minded nationalism.
Pope Francis is a lone voice in Europe for the common good, respect for the stranger and values more important than the almighty dollar, but there is no institutional strength supporting his message. The church is a shell of what it once was.
I would be cautious of reactionary lamentations here. Events such as this too easily become the occasions for the venting of pet concerns and prejudices on the part of all kinds of people. (Of course, I am doing it myself here, but in a not unreasonable way, I would suggest). I wonder how many of those who are saying that Catholicism has been dying and in retreat long before the fire at the Cathedral are actually active in the Church and know much of Catholic activity, theology and spirituality. Maybe they do. I don't know. I see decline, but I don't see anything like collapse. These things ebb and flow over time. I do see religion in general under threat in the modern western world, but I also see that as part of a withdrawal from all collective commitments and communitarian activities. Hence my concern to relate the religious ethic to environmentalism here and to socialism elsewhere. The green and socialist ideals and principles I affirm can only be sustained, in my view, by a transcendent ethic. My religious faith is independent of these political commitments, of course, and I am far from claiming that Jesus Christ is an eco-socialist or an anything in politics. That's not the relation I establish. Transcendent standards exist outside of political loyalties and commitments but serve to inform, orient, and evaluate them all the same.
I am told that French Catholicism is alive and well, as demonstrated by the young people's prayer with respect to the fire. I know for a fact that the Catholic world is far from moribund. In fact, I have a hunch that the Church, which has survived the Fall of Rome, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Capitalism and Communism, will survive modernity itself. It is based on something eternal, something modernist secular heresies are divorced from. They will pass.
Watch, if you can, the Palm Sunday mass at Notre-Dame de Paris, on YouTube
Having said all of that, I will still say that something essential has been missing in the world for a long time now. I am thinking of Alisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue here, and the loss of the social practices that sustain the moral categories we use. These can always be recovered. But we are talking about a project of recovery and renewal in this respect, but not of reaction.
'The fire tears at all of our hearts and makes us wonder: Will Paris rebuild? One would suppose so. Life will endure. And so will the faith, which does not need our buildings, as much as they enhance it. We will continue to write our stories, in glass and in stone, perhaps, but also in how we live our lives with others and for others. This cannot burn away.'
I feel that something profound is taking place here, with so many people awakening to the fact that they love Notre Dame not merely as a physical structure but for the meaning that the Cathedral symbolizes and embodies. There is an outpouring of love in this week of loss, grace, healing and redemption. The destruction is bad, but so much was saved and so much more has been recovered. The Cathedral will be rebuilt, it will not be lost.
As to what form renewal will take, we can speculate.
Here is some reason why I most emphatically do not draw art, culture, religion, humanity, God, nature, other beings and bodies in the more-than-human world in antithetical relation:
Jane Goodall very much expresses my view on this, making the point that I am doing more than reaffirm the Catholic Faith here. There is a deeper question at stake here with respect to God as the source and end-point of all things.
“As I wrote in my book Reason for Hope, the cathedral played an important part during a very difficult time in my personal life, and the experience I had there, when I visited in 1977, marked an epiphany in my thinking about my place on Planet Earth and the meaning of my life.”
In Reason for Hope, Jane Goodall wrote this:
“Many years ago, in the spring of 1974, I visited the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. I had wanted to go inside this glorious cathedral ever since reading Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Little did I know just how important that visit would be.
There were not many people around, and it was quiet and still inside. I gazed in silent awe at the great Rose Window, glowing in the morning sun. All at once the cathedral was filled with a huge volume of sound: an organ playing magnificently for a wedding taking place in a distant corner. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I had always loved the opening theme; but in the cathedral, filling the entire vastness, it seemed to enter and possess my whole self. It was as though the music itself was alive.
That moment, a suddenly captured moment of eternity, was perhaps the closest I have ever come to experiencing ecstasy, the ecstasy of the mystic. How could I believe it was the chance gyrations of bits of primeval dust that had led up to that moment in time—the cathedral soaring to the sky; the collective inspiration and faith of those who caused it to be built; the advent of Bach himself; the brain, his brain, that translated truth into music; and the mind that could, as mine did then, comprehend the whole inexorable progression of evolution? Since I cannot believe that this was the result of chance, I have to admit anti-chance. And so I must believe in a guiding power in the universe—in other words, I must believe in God.”
Her views here chime very much with those of another influential environmentalist, the author of Small is Beautiful E.F. Schumacher.
These views are mine also, as I make clear here and elsewhere:
All human constructions, everything contained in culture, all cities and their contents, all art and architecture, are made and remade continuously over time, and are endlessly rebuilt in the midst of damage and destruction. The mourning of loss is accompanied by idealism and activism with respect to renewal and rebuilding, and these things will ever be inextricably linked for so long as civilization carries on. It's what human beings do, and is an essential part of what being human is about. Loss is as much a meaningful part of the human story as is culture and creation. Civilization is a story of constant building and rebuilding and the confidence that sustains both. What interests me here in some of the reactions to the fire at the Cathedral is the evident loss of confidence in civilization on the part of those who lament the destruction of nature most of all. “Rebuild this,” they demand, alongside photographs of ecological devastation. What interests me most about this is that they must know fine well that such destruction cannot be be rebuilt, for the very reason they were not built by humans in the first place. Why issue demands that cannot be met? To shock people into protecting nature? If that is the case, then it is based on the mistaken view that nature is being destroyed through human indifference. That's so far from identifying the real causes of planetary unravelling that I feel like crying in despair myself. I read things like this and I cannot help but draw the conclusion that a certain strand of environmentalism is anti-civilization and irredeemably misanthropic, taking some perverted pleasure in advancing a hopeless and ineffectual environmentalism for certain defeat, merely to hurry up the defeat that is sure to come.
I have kept lines of communication open with such people for a long time now. They plainly think I am deluded, part of the destructive, parasitic civilization which is inflicting environmental damage on an unprecedented scale. My argument back is that this is the challenge we have been presented with. I am taking that challenge head on. In my view, they are avoiding it. They dream of eco-communities based on permaculture. They tell me that politics is hopeless and that I am wasting my time. I tell them back that if they are not interested in politics, politics will always be interested in them. If they ever succeed in building their local communities of resilience – which I do indeed support – those with money and power and resources will not leave them alone in their splendid isolation: they will take them over, destroy them or make them work for 'the system.' The commons have been expropriated before, of course. I want people to scale up to the problem, not retreat before it.
I'm afraid, though, my views were rewarded with utterly contemptuous responses, dismissive at best, downright abusive at worst. I try hard to keep a variety of views and platforms together to foster a process of mutual learning. But some people are well beyond being reached.
I have had to move them on. A shame, really, because at times we had exchanged on things of common interest and concern.
It has been a sad time, but things are far from hopeless.
From Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris:
“So you're giving up? That's it? Okay, okay. We'll leave you alone, Quasimodo. We just thought, maybe you're made up of something much stronger.”
No, not giving up, we are made of stronger stuff, aren't we?
The spirit of Quasimodo lives on, the book, the cathedral, the spirit on which all things draw – these things are eternal:
“For love is like a tree; it grows of itself; it send its roots deep into our being, and often continues to grow green over a heart in ruins.”
Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris
The coming of the book will put an end to the cathedral, said Hugo in Notre Dame de Paris. I'm really not sure of that at all. His book brought the cathedral back to life. It can be done again. I'm just always interested in restoration as a restorying.
The good news is; God, hope, and humanity are not the walls in which these things are encased but the things inside. They endure beyond destruction in time and place.
“Spira, spera.
(breathe, hope)” (Hugo, "Notre Dame de Paris")
Those who have mocked the damage and destruction at Notre Dame – or more neutrally, have all too briefly expressed regret in an opening line before proceeding to advance their pet cause – all those who have been concerned to lament the apparent indifference of humanity when it comes to the destruction of the planetary ecology, are actually missing something essential here. Those indulging their anti-religious bigotry to abuse don't worry me here. They have nothing of interest to say here. It's the others who worry me, the people whose concerns I share. I am very far from being indifferent to the planetary unravelling, having sacrificed health and wealth to the cause. But I go deep here, in a way that those lamenting human nature do not. The 'indifference' the world suffers is something cultivated by a certain ethos or way of life, one which sees ethics as no more than irreducible subjective choice or opinion, mere value judgements. This is a world in which individuals choose their own gods/devils, with there being no objective standard by which to differentiate between those choices. An ethical naturalism cuts no ice here and, in fact, is very much of a piece with it. In the words of the song, “and the grass won't pay no mind.”
There are two concepts of God in the Hebrew Bible, Elohim and Hashem. The first concept is the God of physical Creation, the God of scientific explanation and philosophical reason. It is Spinoza's God, to which Einstein expressed adherence. On 24 April 1929, Einstein cabled Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein in German: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." (Isaacson, Walter (2008). Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 388-389). I am very concerned with the fate and doings of humankind. Ethics can never be indifferent in the sense of Spinoza's God – the values, norms, principles, and ideals we live by make a difference. The second concept is the personal God, the God of Love, the God of personal relationships. In putting both concepts together to form the one God we join the worlds of fact and value.
Dante expresses it well when he writes:
...as a wheel turns smoothly, free from jars, my will and my desire were turned by love, The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
― Dante, Commedia, Paradiso
From Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris:
"Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”
I write a lot on "rational freedom." But I am actually a very unreasonable person to the extent that I argue that there is a world beyond logic and evidence, an anarchic surplus that is core, something that evades enclosure by reason. I subscribe to the view of St Thomas Aquinas who affirms reason as far as reason will go, and then makes way for faith. The quote ‘love takes up where knowledge leaves off’ which people often cite as Aquinas derives from the Summa Theologica, IIa IIae, q.27, a.4, ad.1.
The Latin reads, "Et ideo ubi desinit cognitio, scilicet in ipsa re quae per aliam cognoscitur, ibi statim dilectio incipere potest."
In English, "And therefore...love can begin at once where knowledge ends, namely in the thing itself which is known through another thing."
This argument is an answer to the objection that since we cannot love what we do not know, we cannot really love God, since we cannot know God in this life. Thomas responds that we can love more than we know, since the order of love and the order of knowledge do not necessarily correspond. A child, for instance, may love his or her mother more when young than when an adult, the love grows colder as the knowledge becomes greater. God can be loved in this life through the Church, and the sacraments, virtuous life, etc., any greater knowledge of God can only come after. This is a love that is beyond knowledge. In the Commentary on 1 Corinthians, Thomas identifies love with friendship and unity, things which transcend knowledge. To know someone or something is not the same as loving them; love, therefore, transcends the limitations of knowledge and takes us into another dimension.
You can see clearly now the meaning of my point with respect to environmentalism as a series of “cathedral projects.” Such projects are inspired, motivated and sustained not by knowledge alone but by love. You will have to do your own research here, but I do know that George Monbiot is one environmentalist who has been prepared to argue that we act out of love on the environment and should not be shy in saying so. He has also sought to steer environmentalism away from religion, denouncing religion as irrational. He has said a lot of things has George, not all of which are consistent and coherent.
I repeat:
The spirit which led to the building of Notre Dame and sustained the social practices around it and its culture will endure. I hear environmentalists call for the creation of "Cathedral projects," individuals committing themselves to actions whose completion will come long after the lives of those individuals. I support this. But such "projects" require a transcendent ethic. Because all things pass in this realm: art, culture and nature, all things are finite. Not just cathedrals. Why do you lament? To who? To what? To each other?
On Quasimodo:
“Besides, to be fair to him, his viciousness was perhaps not innate. From his earliest steps among men he had felt, then seen himself the object of jeers, condemnation, rejection. Human speech for him always meant mockery and curses. As he grew older he had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught it. He had acquired the general viciousness. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded.”
“He therefore turned to mankind only with regret. His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquillity and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him – he resembled them too closely for that. It was rather the rest of mankind that they jeered at. The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and kept watch over him. He would sometimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lover surprised during a serenade.”
(Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris).
Notre Dame de Paris is my favourite book. It's not a happy book. I re-read it at Christmas and found it a troubling book, quite depressive. But it's a beautiful book nonetheless. I was saddened reading it, and I was deeply sad when the end came. But not indifferent; I was quite moved in fact. It's a very human book. I don't expect people to be any better than they are.
So I am joining with those who are crying for Quasimodo, the poor misunderstood hunchback who lost his love in the Cathedral, and who has now lost his tower. I believe the vault in which he crawled away to die in hopeless sorrow is still intact.
From Notre Dame de Paris:
"..in better company, they found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a garment which had once been white, and around her neck was to be seen a string of adrezarach beads with a little silk bag ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that the executioner had probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust.”
Dust to dust ...
or is there something more that you yearn for?
"Our heart is burning. Our heart is on fire... I would never have thought I would one day be crying non-stop for a monument... yet it’s a fact. I am as devastated as probably Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Victor Hugo and the juggler of Notre-Dame... and every stone of our beautiful Lady of Paris !!!
I just want to scream and cry to the moon. Deep sorrow!”
- Poetico Mundo
I share that sorrow but await the response that affirms the more enduring qualities of Notre Dame. The spirit underlying all this great human endeavour is eternal, and it will endure, inspiring us to rebuild and, in the process, renew. The world has lost touch with something essential for a long while now. It will be recovered and renewed. The question, of course, is how and why. I have no interest in tourist traps, I don't give a damn how many million a year visit just to tick it off their bucket list. That's hollow, a self-absorption and hedonism that underscores a loss much greater than physical structures. I've even less interest in some statist-reactionary-neoliberal project under the auspices of Macron.
"All that is solid melts into air, indeed. Notre Dame survived the English, the Jacobins, Napoleon, the 1871 Communards & Vichy..but not neoliberalism."
(Afshin Rattansi)
If we return to God, let's make sure it is God we return to and not yet another of the false idols of the modern world, the surrogates for true religion and community which divide humanity against itself and have them at war with each other. I see pitched ideological battles ahead between all those who have a dog in the fight. I am on no side in this contest. It's a contest over nothing. "Where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights." (Max Weber). To the victor the spoils. I take my stand on "something," not some wilful human projection in compensation for the "nothing" of an objectively valueless and meaningless world. A self-legislating reason is self-contradictory and undercuts itself. It is its own self-validation, grounded on nothing but itself.
I've lost patience with those 'friends' who have used the occasion to indulge their anti-religious bigotry. They are 'friends' no more and, in truth, never were. I retain many atheist friends who see the whole theism vs atheism thing as pointless and tiresome. They affirm the insurgency of life, and that's fine by me. I recognize that I am the one making the extraordinary claims here. They may well be right and I may well be wrong. I just have a hunch I can't get rid of, though …
I've no interest in settling scores and scoring points or any of the various ways in which human beings take the opportunity to be mean and nasty and petty and cruel to one another, religious or non-religious. Bigotry comes in many forms and I loathe it. Such people listen to nothing I say in any case, so I have no reason to subject myself to their noise and nonsense. I have moved them on. I know this much - ethically and politically they are clueless and hopeless, and a wealth of scientific knowledge and technological know-how can never compensate for deficiencies in the field of practical reason. I would impress upon them the need to understand E.F. Schumacher's demand for "metaphysical reconstruction" as a condition of an effective environmentalism. He says it in his seminal Small is Beautiful, and he repeats that view even more clearly in Guide for the Perplexed. Schumacher was no fool. Environmentalists love his views on economics and appropriate technology, but they ignore in the main his call for 'metaphysical reconstruction,' even though he made this the most important thing of all. To be fair, they do do work on changing worldviews, but this affirmation of holism is not quite the same thing as Schumacher. I'll leave that there. But I'd like to see a culture and an ethics that is capable of building and sustaining an 850-year civilisation, motivating individuals in common cause, drawing individuals out of their self-choosing, self-maximising egos, expanding being outwards in relation to the world and others. I'd like to see a culture in which our technics no longer misfire and rebound.
I did like the comment of marxist theoretician Alex Callinicos on this.
"You can say, correctly, that the mediaeval cathedrals were a crucial part of the ideological apparatuses of European feudalism. But they were also the works of collective art, the result of the anonymous labours of many skilled artisans, very different from the Romantic ideal of art as the expression of the individual subjectivity of a solitary genius. I've long thought that in this respect they anticipate what art would be like in a communist society. But, less pretentiously, one could just say that Notre Dame is old and beautiful and part of what makes Paris Paris. It's one of the things that makes Paris so different from London, the survival of a mediaeval centre."
I will openly declare that I am a communist. I support commons transitions and long for the day when the Earth will be restored as a common treasury for all humans to enjoy as well as the other beings and bodies in the more-than-human world. I just believe that some such thing is possible only when bounded by the Greatest Love of all, which is the God that enfolds, nourishes, moves and carries one and all equally.
"It is only a building," I have read some people say. “Get a grip!” Such profundity. And this from educated people to boot. That indicates how little they know, and how much the modern world has lost in understanding. It is no wonder people struggle to make common cause and take a common stand on issues of more than instrumental or utilitarian or sectional concern. Notre Dame is not merely a building but the living stones which house the sacred, a sacred space within which the people of God have prayed throughout the centuries, beseeching their Lord and His Holy Mother for succour and salvation. It is not the physical structures but the lived space in between that is important. Too many who equate the real with the tangible and the physical are clueless on this. Such people will never and can never build a civilization. At the moment they are proving totally incapable of saving one.
I like the words of John Updike, who explained that his goal in life was “to work quietly, even shyly, as did the medieval carvers who so carefully sculpted the underside of choir stalls.” I did this myself for years with the writing, before I was advised to go onto the Internet to promote my new tutoring business in 2011. It had to be done, and the next thing is that my writing exploded all over the electronic universe. I'd prefer to be writing quietly again.
I'm recalling the thousands of anonymous people who built and rebuilt the cathedral over the years, as they did the other cathedrals and churches, together, by hand in loving relation to the physical, joined in common endeavour, devoting their entire being to a common end. Such a notion is alien to our culture, and it shows. Hence the inability to make common cause in issues of common concern. The environmental crisis that is upon us, despite advanced warning, is evidence enough of this. The Cathedral of Notre Dame is born of a time when it was the very highest purpose to create a building or a work of art in order to give glory to God. Today's world is one of prideful and wilful projection and self-worship – we create for purposes of self-glorification. We worship ourselves through false idols. Notre Dame embodies the time, the talent, and the devotion of thousands of anonymous artisans and artists and builders, and craftsmen, all lost in time, but whose handiwork stretches across time — each committed to creating something so beautiful and enduring, in the service of a purpose far greater than one's own self-aggrandisement and acclaim. Those who say 'it is just a building' express precisely what the modern age has lost, and make clear the real reason for lack of response when it comes to taking a common stand on issues of common concern.
I have quoted Alex Callinicos above, making a comment with which I agree. He describes the common endeavour that went to the building of Notre Dame as being how he envisages art/architecture in a communist society. I think he has hit the nail smack on the head here. I am reminded, too, of socialist William Morris and his work on the arts and crafts. Culture and civilization is common endeavour, and the communists and socialists, people concerned with collective goods and actions, get it. I openly declare myself a communist, hoping that people will take the trouble to understand what I mean by that. My understanding may not fit the labels that others seek to apply. It's just that I add this spiritual dimension beyond the tangible things of this world. I can't do otherwise. I've looked at it over and again, subjected myself to a deep questioning, and I continue to draw the same conclusions. I can do no other.
I was bitterly upset by the implication that people, such as I, who are heartbroken over the damage to Notre Dame, are somehow indifferent to the destruction of the planetary ecology. I loathe this kind of reasoning, not least because not only is it not true, it misses the point by a very wide mark indeed. I point to a growing spiritual malaise and collapse in the world. I relate it back to the disenchantment of the world (Weber), the “death of God”/collapse of an overarching and authoritative moral framework (Nietzsche), and to the way that as a result ethics dissolves into no more than subjective choice/value judgements. The spiritual loss I point to as predating this physical destruction is, in my view, bound up with the inability of individuals in the modern world to forge a common will and join in common endeavour in politics (in this instance, climate action). This is where the deficiencies lie. It's this loss we are charged with overcoming. I believe that the lack of response environmentalists bemoan on climate change is to be attributed less to indifference on the part of greedy and stupid/ignorant people than to the absence of effective collective mechanisms and media enabling individuals to take effective action, encouraging them into taking such action in the first place. So this constant false opposition of art/culture/civilisation and nature seriously irritates me and, at this sad time, has had me despairing. It's not just wrong, it tells me that those concerned most with environmental crisis still have little idea how to constitute themselves as an effective movement for change. The presumption seems to be that someone else - "government" - will do it all for them. That's not politics; that's a pressure group with an inflated sense of its own importance, and an inordinate degree of entitlement.
But I have not succumbed to despair. I'm far too angry for that. There is sadness, of course. But I have been angered by the extent of the stupidity that has been on display on this. I can dismiss bigotry easily, and have done. It's the incomprehension on the part of people whose views I share that has really been annoying. And upsetting. Not because I am saddened over Notre Dame, but because I see plainly why the causes I support in politics are failing and will continue to fail.
Here are some responses I wish to analyze further in order to expose their fallacies.
"It's only a building." "Nobody died." “X/Y/Z/everything (delete as appropriate) is more important.” "Don't get emotional." And much, much worse. It's perfectly possible that I may be in the wrong place with the wrong people, of course. Their views are an object lesson on how to be totally ineffective morally and politically. Talk about something missing. This is how not to do politics. I have tried long and hard over the years to knit things, and people, together, but to no avail with such folk. Clearly it is either me who is completely clueless, in which case I am better clearing off and doing something completely different. Or others are. There is a place for pressure group tactics, but such tactics are incompatible with a movement that claims to be aiming for system-change rather than climate change. At some point, climate protesters and campaigners have to scale up their actions to constitute a genuine politics. I would suggest that that time was an awful long time ago. At the moment, environmentalists seem locked in the politics of permanent protests, their rebellion merely rehearsing the defeats that are surely to come in the absence of an effective politics, political organisation and strategy.
I'll give you my hunch as to what the future holds on this - and I'll emphasize that it is no more than a hunch. I feel that change is not only coming from many directions but converging. I believe that many people are coming to discard what Lewis Mumford aptly described as a "purposeless materialism" and are recovering the sense that we live in an objectively as well as subjectively purposive, meaningful, valuable and participatory universe. Many are still hooked on the false philosophy of materialism, of course, but many are kicking the addiction in search of something more genuinely fulfilling. That doesn't necessarily entail the kind of faith embodied in Notre Dame cathedral, but it does imply a truth and goodness that is more disclosure than imposure, or is some creative fusion of the two, with human beings as active co-creators in the ceaselessly creative, and meaningful, universe. A world that is more than wilful human self-projection, then.
Here is a beautiful and inspiring article on the work of Andrew Tallon, a pioneering architectural historian and father of four, who died on November 16, 2018, from brain cancer, at the age of 49.
"A cathedral calls us to consider time beyond the boundaries of one life, enclosing us in a grand view of what humanity can do that humans cannot. Andrew Tallon will not reappear among the living, but the work he put into recording stone and wood as it was built by countless hands over time may restore that creation—and embed the man into the place he venerated."
"It is both a tragedy as well as an appeal to genuinely get back to work.We are not the guardians of a museum. We need to be builders. Perhaps this tragedy is now calling on our builder spirit."
See, also, the article in La Croix International on this.
Here is the point I have been concerned to make, so long as it is understood that the civilization building I am talking about is much broader than a particular religious faith. My concern is not with reaction and apologetics, and I do see how people of anti-modernist persuasions could easily hijack this concern in an attempt to advance their own agenda.
The kind of people who could rebuild Notre Dame are also the kind of people who could rebuild our civilization
The greatest treasure is not the Cathedral itself, but the Faith that built it — it is the Faith that makes the Cathedral, and that causes us to wonder, and worship God.
I agree, but will exercise caution here and point out that a return to Faith does not imply a rolling back of many rights and liberties which have made modernity an emancipation for so many.
I suspect that one very strong reason why so many are sceptical of religion and leery of talk about God is that they fear a reactionary political intent to deprive them of those rights and liberties that have improved the quality of their lives.
That said, I am concerned to emphasize that those rights and liberties are rooted in a tradition much older and much more enduring than conventionalism; they are not creations and entitlements conferred by the state, and just as quickly and easily withdrawn by the same entity. Much that we praise liberalism for has a much older origin. Natural rights are based on a natural law which originates in and is ordered and oriented by God. In the past century, liberalism has shed its metaphysical assumptions and theological underpinnings to become an explicitly conventional political doctrine. Human beings are in control of their own destiny, writing the laws and the rules for themselves. That sounds liberatory until one asks by which standards this law- and rule-making proceeds. Conventionalism holds that they are mere human creations, conferred via existing political institutions, with no standards of evaluation outside of them to hold them to account. Within asymmetrical power relations, it is the voice of the strongest and the most powerful that will prevail over that of others when it comes to the law- and rule-making. Have human beings ever lived within other, more egalitarian, kinds of relations? Will they ever? I am committed to that more egalitarian order beyond relations of superordination and subordination, but that commitment is not arbitrary and is based on my reading and understanding of natural law. And that natural law is based on God. Those things that are equal to the one thing are equal to each other. Remove that transcendent ethic and all that we have is a mere conventionalism in which power decides and imposes according to its will. The standard we appeal to to protest the iniquity of this lies outside of political institutions. It is a transcendent standard that opposes conventionalism.
I agree, then, with the arguments advanced in this article:
"As the spire cracked and buckled, millions of us felt civilization trembling. But trembling at what? At the loss of God? At the sudden recognition that, for all our progressive confidence, deep down everyone knows that Western civilization lacks the philosophical and religious principles that once made such a structure possible in the first place?We tremble because we know that the world has been drawing down a Christian inheritance for centuries, drawing down the cultural wealth of the Faith into rampant prodigal decadence."
The capital system has been living off the moral and cultural resources of Christian civilization for its entire existence, dissipating the stock whilst being unable to replenish it. Capital is an economic force that is parasitic on resources that lie outside of it. It has even succeeded in turning the light cloak of faith into an 'iron cage,' as the closing argument of Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism holds. It petrifies all that it touches. There, not Communism, is the origins of the godless materialism of the modern age, the replacement of true religion centred on God with the idolatry of the things of the human hand.
“Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.”
(Hillaire Belloc)
I am interested in much more than Europe and its future. In my work I have been very interested in putting character formation and social formation together to create the personal and institutional capabilities encouraging and enabling civilization building. This is to develop an integral moral environmentalism. This article concludes with lines that make the point effectively:
"What should make us tremble is that to truly rebuild Notre Dame will require becoming the kind of people who built her in the first place."
It's not an either/or, but there has been far too great a reliance on informing passive minds in seeking to advance causes in the modern world, and far too little concern with forming the right characters in the first place. Engage in character formation, and you will no longer have to issue the commands and dictats ordering people to "rebuild this!" They will volunteer their actions and build whatever needs to be built, for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do, and people will know it from within. That's the character that has been lost in an age of individualism and instrumentalism, where tasks are only undertaken in return for the promise of a reward.
I shared this article on social media, and was picked up on it by a friend who pointed out, rightly, that there is a danger of being drawn into the apologetics of a religious establishment which is itself bound up with very definite political agendas. He quite rightly pointed out that there is a reason why so many drifted away from or explicitly rejected the Faith in the first place. I welcomed those
words as invitation to me to qualify my remarks.
My comments come with a very big BUT!
This grotesque fiscal indulgence is NOT what I mean by rebuilding; it is its very antithesis. I take religious ideals seriously, not as apologetics for rich and powerful folk, but as the voice of those who thirst for righteousness. These ideals are aspirations for something more, something better, than present iniquities, the sigh of the oppressed creature and so much more than that.
I am reading a lot of comment along the lines of Aditya Chakrabortty in this article. I agree with much of what is being said here - how could I not as a communist? But I am a communist committed to the achievement of an egalitarian order, not a liberal fighting a guerilla war against the rich and powerful whilst merely tinkering around within a fundamentally unchanged system. Handouts from France’s super-rich make them look pious, and .... I have no interest whatsoever in moralistic bashing of the rich. It makes liberals look radical when they most certainly are not.
There's a clear political difference here, and I want to know how many of those quick to use radical language in harrying the rich here are committed to the egalitarian politics such criticisms imply. I have a feeling many of them are basically liberals seeking no fundamental change in the prevailing system, restricting their vision to the taxation of the rich to finance government spending on their favoured social programmes. The old reformism, in other words, that has delivered bloated bureaucracies, unrepresentative elites, failing economies, and legitimation crises. That crashed in the 1980s, and the Left has had long enough since to shed its attachment to elitist technocratic liberalism. I'm simply demanding of those who employ radical language engage in a suitably radical critique and develop the politics to match.
What I do want to know is how many making these radical criticisms would join with me in defining capital as the wealth of labour in alien form, proceeding from there to demand the practical restitution of this power to the social body, and undertaking reorganisation as a social power. Have we got what it takes to build and sustain an alternate economy beyond exploitative relations? This takes us far beyond the Catholic apologetics of which I have been accused, and makes clear the qualities I am attempting to revalue and transfigure for the project of radical transformation. That requires the fundamental transformation of capitalist socialist relations, putting an end to the existence of this class of billionaires with the power of decision over vast financial and social resources.
To put the point simply, the problem is not which good causes billionaires should donate their money to, but the fact that there are billionaires with such command of resources and power of decision in the first place. That is a problem of our social system: the iniquity is built into its foundations through specific social relations. The perverse choices currently being made with respect to what is deemed valuable - within, it needs to be pointed out, an austerian straightjacket that has been imposed in the aftermath of an economic crash caused by the anarchy of the rich and powerful, an anarchy sanctioned by the political classes, left and right - needs to be located within the prevailing social relations. To feel smug and superior, it is enough to expose the hypocrisy of the rich; they don't really care, but we do. I'm not interested, because this changes nothing, just makes the politically ineffective feel better mired in their failure. We need to go much further and dig deeper into the structural roots of such extreme wealth and change them at source. Charges of hypocrisy won't work when it comes to actually changing things. The super rich see themselves as wealth creators. You can show facts and figures that prove otherwise. But what is your end-game? Tax and spend through interventionist government, leaving the parameters of social alienation unchanged?
I see capital as a social form that is parasitic on the two sources of wealth: labour and nature. I'm much less interested in controversies over the distribution of wealth than I am in the reshaping of production relations so that division and inequality is no longer generated at extremes. I support Rousseau's vision of a society in which no one is rich enough to buy another and none are so poor as to have to sell themselves. That entails recovering a healthy growth from within the clutches of capital's cancerous accumulative imperatives, so that we longer have to demand that governments and the rich do our bidding and act and spend on the social purposes we value. With practical restitution and reorganisation restructuring power and resources, we become self-determining beings in a self-governing socialist society, capable of acting on the issues that concern us. As Catholics do on their Cathedrals ... Don't ask others to do what you want, ask yourself as to why you and like-minded others can't do it, not in the numbers required to be effective.
To institute a society devoted to the common good we need to reclaim the common ground, and that means uprooting the capital system, putting back together all that capital rents asunder. Separation is the key figure of capitalist modernity, denoting the separation of human beings from their various steering media, means of social existence and forms of governance, human beings from each other, humanity from the sources of life, love, belonging, meaning and sustenance (God and Nature). I hope that all of those making these radical criticisms concerning the money raised for the Cathedral are prepared to join together in an effective politics of social restitution along these lines. There's enough people making these points for them to make a difference, should they have the political wit to concentrate force.
There's no point asking billionaires to spend their money on the things you and I value if you are serious about doing something much more than levelling accusations of hypocrisy. There's no point telling them. They disagree. They don't value the things we do and they will not act on our behalf. The same with respect to governments, which function not as they ought as agents of the universal interest but as capital's political command centre. When I read radical criticisms like this - and I have read many in light of Notre Dame - I want critics to scale their politics up at the level of organisation and strategy. I want an explicit commitment to the creation and maintenance of a viable and functioning alternative economic system to make good the wealth of radical criticisms I have been reading along these lines. Something more than demands for stringest tax regimes instituted by government. There's a line in the last Leonard Cohen song that strikes a chord here: "I struggled with some demons, they were middle class and tame." I note the mismarriage of radical criticisms and tame politics.
To be is to build. I want to see a rebuilding that houses the human ontology, including the spiritual dimension, something that achieves interdependence with the other beings and bodies of the more-than-human world, too. Capital is a false god, the self-expansion of its values coming at the expense of use values; it detaches us from the sources of identity, belonging, and meaning.
My call is for more than a physical restoration, for an enduring restoration that proceeds from the Spirit that pours through the hearts of men, women and children. When I say that, I mean precisely that. I do NOT mean a physical restoration that proceeds through the the idolatry of an iniquitous and exploitative economic system. The large fortunes possessed by some at a time when the politics of austerity is cutting into the bone is indeed an abomination. But it has deep-seated causes and will not be resolved by the same old liberal tinkering. Liberalism is exhausted. It has succeeded in becoming the dominant political and ethical paradigm. The problems we face in the world will not be resolved by liberalism, they have been caused by them. We live in a liberal world. It's about time liberals owned their problems rather than blame others for it, with themselves in the guise of emancipators riding to the rescue from the outside. The endless protests and demonstrations in favour of rights gives the impression of a mass movement preparing to storm the citadels of power. This is an illusion. We live in a fundamentally liberal order. Liberals are on the inside and governing over us and have been for some time. Too many who style themselves 'left' can't see this, and are pressing their radical demands through the tamest of politics. Patrick Deneen argues that liberalism has failed. I think this is overly strong, although I agree with his critique of the libertarianisms of right and left as instrumental in the moral, social and ecological unravelling of the world. The truth is that liberalism has shed the theological and metaphysical assumptions which were its strongest point and embraced an explicit conventionalism. And in the long run this is untenable. We are living within a collapsing paradigm. Unfortunately, many people who espouse emancipatory causes make the mistake of identifying them with liberalism, leaping to its defence in its demise, rather than seeking to advance them by transcending failing liberal institutions. Liberalism hasn't so much failed as succeeded, and it's time to deepen and enrich values of autonomy with the provision of an appropriate ethical and institutional infrastructure.
We have been living within this hypocrisy for a long time now.
We have learned that the capital system – which is something much more than the mere institutions of capitalism – is not a public domain, amenable to legal regulation, moral persuasion, and democratic control, but is a regime of private accumulation and totalizing alien control which imposes inexorable economic imperatives upon the public realm. “Accumulate! Accumulate!, that is Moses and all the prophets,” Marx wrote. Accumulation is the new Law, the new religion. I rather still like the old religion and see no reason to change.
Since it's Maundy Thursday today (18 April 2019), it's worth looking at what this means. The word "Maundy" is derived from the Latin word mandatum, or "mandate." This word is used in the Latin text for John 13:34:
"Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos."
In English:
"A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you."
The only commandment that the capital system recognizes is that of accumulation. That is the sine qua non of the capital system, a system-wide non-negotiable. Moral laws have been replaced by economic imperatives. John Maynard Keynes wrote:
“Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers."
Keynes, J.M., ‘A Short View of Russia’ in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932).
R.H. Tawney, who was a Christian Socialist and not a Marxist, writes on this passage:
'It [capitalism] is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations. The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Posterity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression, as from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley - who himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III.’
R. H. Tawney Religion and the Rise of Capitalism 1926 ch 5
The lesson is plain: if you want your religious ideals, then you are going to have to recover the light cloak of faith from within Max Weber's "steel-hard cage" of capitalist economic determinism:
"The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment'. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism - whether finally, who knows? - has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanised petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.’"
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 1985 181/2
And to those who are busy issuing edicts and commands as to what should and shouldn't be built, I'll say this:
If something should be done by somebody, and if you claim to know what that 'something' is, then remember that YOU are that somebody and that it is your responsibility to make common cause with other somebodies instead of telling everybody else what it is you want them to do. In the absence of an authoritative ethical and political framework capable of commanding support and eliciting responses – and that's the very thing you need to build - you have no authority to issue commands of this nature to people. You have no authority over them, and simply saying that you cannot ignore the science is merely an attempt to bully in the absence of such authority. It is politically illegitimate. So if you know what needs doing, then go ahead and DO IT! And in the process start to develop the means for effective collective action, organisational, political, psychological and ethical. Because without them all that you have is an impotent moralism, abstract appeals with no practical purchase, and demands without the power and authority to enforce them.
Don't ask others to do any of this for you, least of all those with other interests: because they won't. The rich and powerful have other priorities, and government is bound up with facilitating the process of accumulation. There are layers of dependency within the capital economy, and if you don't understand what that means with respect to structured patterns of behaviour, then you understand nothing. No government is going to dismantle the growth infrastructure and no party aiming at office is going to make that commitment either: capital is a regime of private accumulation, not a public domain amenable to scientific, moral, and democratic persuasion. And a public dependent upon 'jobs, growth, and investment' will be sceptical of demands for fundamental transformation through governmental fiat. To institute the degrowth economy you will need to have developed a politics and to have mobilized sufficient support to be able to undertake governmental action in the first place; success will only come in the context of widespread social transformation. Whatever it is that you value and wish to be treated as a cathedral to house the sacred, psyche, love and life, remember that capital is a system that is organised around the pursuit of exchange value, and is utterly divorced from the realm of use value – in other words it is systematically deaf to your demands. You have no alternative but to constitute yourself as a public and, in the words of Kropotkin, to "act for yourselves" - in unison, practising mutual aid. Like that common endeavour in cathedral building I spoke about.
Messages like "rebuild this [whatever we are losing in nature, whatever social institution or public good you favour]" are just the lamentations of the hopeless. At best, they expose hypocrisy and highlight iniquity, but they change nothing. YOU have to build the political will, the inner motives, and the character that enables YOU and like minded others to take the action that is needed.
Bear in mind this:
"The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints."
Will and Ariel Durant, The Complete Story of Civilization.
And that observation brings me to this
“When I tell politicians to act now the most common answer is that they can't do anything drastic because that would be too unpopular among the voters. And they are right of course since most people are not even aware why those changes are required. That is why I keep telling you to unite behind the science...
“Our house is falling apart. The future as well as what we have achieved in the past is literally in your hands now. But it's still not too late to act. It will take a far reaching vision. It will take courage. It will take fierce determination to act now to lay the foundations where we may not know all the details about how to shape the ceiling. In other words it will take cathedral thinking. I ask you to please wake up and make the changes required possible.”
- Greta Thunberg
I have criticised much of this thinking elsewhere (and I shall append a lengthy critical comment below*). It is politically and institutionally illiterate and places a degree of faith in governmental initiative that is inadvisable given the embededdness of government in the capital system. It is arrogant, demanding changes and issuing commands, presuming the existence of unanswerable truths. Statements like this pay no attention at all to the legitimate creative agency of citizens. They hold alternate voices and platforms - the very stuff of politics - in complete contempt, and demand governmental action that proceeds over against the democratic will of the citizen body. They are a self-appointed enlightened elite and the citizens are too corrupt, too greedy, too stupid to be consulted. And the people are apathetic, too: note yet another wake-up call. Note the presumption that we are right and you all have to accept this and do as we say. “But it's not us saying this,” comes the apology, “it's the science that is telling us.” Same thing. It is the use of science as an authority dictating to and overriding politics.
Some environmentalists have been calling for cathedral projects for years. I very much agree with the idea of cathedral thinking. But cathedral projects require a cathedral ethos - a commitment and devotion to common ends and, more, to a transcendent source and hope. Such things are beyond the scope of an individual life in the here and now, and yet provide an ethic that serves to inspire individuals to act in the here and now. Greta tells us to unite behind the science. There is more to cathedral thinking than facts and it takes more than descriptions of the 'is' to unite people in common cause. Science cannot do the job of ethics and politics, and so long as environmentalists keep advancing the cause of environmentalism in terms of science dictating to politics it will continue to fail. It is fact and value together we need, and recognition of and adherence to something much greater than we are - the Love that enfolds, nurtures, sustains and redeems us all. That is what the Cathedrals were about. Split fact from value, exalt the former as the preserve of all genuine knowledge and truth, and relegate the latter to merely the realm of value judgements, and you are politically and psychologically disabled, cut off from the motivational economy that operates within the field of practical reason (ethics and politics). The wealth of knowledge and know-how at your command doesn't matter since you remain deficient in the very things that inspire and obligate human beings in collective action, the things which create the will to change and foster responsiveness to calls for action.
Such thinking is incoherent. If ethics is merely the sphere of value judgements, a realm of irreducible subjective opinion, then it ceases to be a work of reason. Science alone, the world of fact, is considered to be rational. A couple of years ago we witnessed scientists having to march in support of the "value of science." There is a paradox here? With the split between fact and value, with the latter dismissed as mere value judgement, the rational has to be supported by a non-rational sphere. Unite behind the science, yes, but also behind the ethics. Separate those things and there is no possibility of unity, only division, incapacity and collapse. Think long and think deeply on what Nietzsche meant by the "death of God." That death pertained to the collapse of an authoritative moral framework in the modern world. Nietzsche was making the point that in such a world there is no ethic for human beings to unite behind. And science won't do the job in its place. You are charged with having to piece the common ground back together in order to make a (last?) stand in the last great cause - the biggest challenge that humanity has ever faced. It's no time for tinkering around.
*I have to issue some critical remarks here with respect to David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg. I regret doing this, because I know they are inspiring people and educating people and I know that they are fighting for a cause that is right and just, a cause I fight for and support too. But I dislike this approach to environmentalism for reasons I shall give. We have to stop pressing science into service as ethics and politics, and we have to stop using science as an authority to dictate to politics, governments and citizens. Attenborough/Greta is telling governments, institutions like the EU and UN, and the rest of us to do a lot of things. I agree with much that is being said here concerning the environmental crisis; I disagree profoundly with the way they say it. It's an anti-politics and I am deeply suspicious of the dictatorial character and totalitarian implications of such a thing. I am leery of a scientific reason that puts politics on ice. Environmentalists are not the only ones who can play that game. The rich and powerful can do the same in asserting their own priorities as all important. Take economic growth, that slippery euphemism for the accumulative imperative that is currently eating up the planet. Every government must facilitate the process of private accumulation as a condition of its own power, resources, and legitimacy. We protest this, rightly, as a denial of the democratic voice and will. But that voice and will can be denied by many other platforms and special interests.
With respect to the environment crisis that is upon us, I am in agreement with those sounding the alarm and calling for action. I have said many of these things myself over the years. I have said these things long before Attenborough, and have criticized his silence in making his naturalist programmes for the BBC. Not only have I said what Attenborough and Greta are saying now decades ago, I have said a whole lot more besides. I have yet to see such people address the socio-economic drivers of this crisis. Frankly, for all of the plaudits that are coming their way, I see the same old evasion that has brought us to this.
In all of this, I have been careful not to tell governments to do my bidding. I'm just one citizen among many. And I have been careful not to tell citizens to 'wake-up,' something which accuses them of being asleep (or just plain stupid and selfish). In a politics worthy of the name, you engage with citizens and respect their creative input; you respect the agency of citizens, you persuade them, you seek to mobilize people, and in the process you build a constituency that confers a legitimacy upon your political platform. It's called politics. If you lack politics in this sense, then all your ambitions to change the world, even save it, will come to nothing. In which case, you are deluded. Circumstances will force rescue upon us, and we won't all survive. Against this, I am committed to building a genuine public life, an Eco-Republic that commands widespread support and loyalty on the part of the citizen body.
I suspect an inherent scepticism in certain environmental circles with respect to 'the masses.'
In fact, I have been accused myself of being dumb and distracted on account of the interest I take in football. A lot of sport and pop music, apparently, correlates with stupidity. This accusation has been made too often for it not to indicate a certain dominant attitude among certain liberal left/environmental circles. It is also highly convenient to blame others for the failures of one's own politics. People are not stupid; they know when they are being patronised and lectured and switch off. That's not passivity and indifference; it's an active rejection of those who hold them in contempt.
I hear frequent condemnations of the greed, stupidity, and passivity of the people. That anthropological pessimism suffices to explain the constant appeal to governments to act on 'the science.' Such appeals betray a complete lack of faith in the people. The supposed indifference of the masses to environmentalism appears to be mutual.
I am not denying science on the climate crisis, the very opposite. The science is so clear as to be not even worth discussing. I am challenging the use of science as an unanswerable authority in place of politics and ethics, the privileging of the voice of scientists over against that of citizens, dictating to politics and law. That is a denial of the principle of self-assumed obligation upon which the legitimacy of law rests. Individuals are bound only by laws which they have had a hand in making. I have consistently opposed the idea of philosopher kings and lawgivers who legislate on the assumption that the people are too corrupt to give the law to themselves. (You can read my doctoral work on this, where I repudiate the “theoretico-elitist” model in favour of the democratisation of power, politics, and philosophy. See the references under the “Books” tab). That view is a travesty of Plato, whose Republic has a clear educative as well as legislative purpose. I would nevertheless go further and argue for the democratisation of Plato's Republic, so that we get not the philosopher-ruler but the rule of philosophy through common human reason. I think view is more true to Plato's purpose, recognizing the extent to which he differentiated this reason through different levels and gradations of society. I adhere to the principle that human beings are obligated only by those laws they have had a hand in making. That principle has been subverted in many ways in the modern world, by the dominant forces within the economic world for one. The citizen voice and the agency of citizens is devalued and overlooked far too often as it is. I have no interest in replacing one elite with another, even one with which I agree. I don't believe in the authoritarian use of knowledge to rule the people. The truth cannot just be given, it has to be willed. This was Rousseau's great insight with his concept of 'the general will,' reconciling the two great wings of western political philosophy, objective truth and reality/knowledge and subjective will/popular consent and legitimacy.
Here's another article along these. Note the heading.
“It’s okay if you refuse to listen to me… but you cannot ignore the scientists, or the science."
Which amounts to saying that there is a problem and we need to address it. Which is helpful.
Because climate change hasn't been covered at all in recent decades and people are completely unaware of its existence.
Right? How about this: climate change has been covered, and the failure to address it is nothing to do with lack of publicity and everything to do with institutional failure and system failure. And, since that is so, there's a need not to issue commands and diktats to existing institutions, which is futile, but to build alternate institutions in the context of widespread social transformation.
Put this way, we need to scale climate rebellion up from being civil disobedience bringing pressure to bear on governments to a full-blown organisation and mobilisation of the masses, constituting itself as an authentic autonomous movement of citizens capable of reconstituting the public. I offer this against the age old delusion of science as politics. The claim to knowledge has ever been the way that some have arrogated power to themselves and kept it to themselves. This is science being used politically by some to dictate non-negotiable and incontrovertible truths to politics, undercutting the voice of citizens. I oppose this as an anti-politics which denies citizen agency and the democratic will of the people. This view privileges some voices over those of others.
I have been accused of turning on environmentalism here. This is mistaken, and profoundly so, betraying such how oblivious certain environmentalists are to the issues I am seeking to address. My position on this has been consistent over decades of environmental campaigning. I draw a distinction between theoretical reason - our knowledge of the external world, the facts - and practical reason - the field of politics and ethics, values, the world of will and motives. The challenge before us is to bridge the two. Scientific knowledge and technological know-how give us the ability to act, but not the will.
I profoundly disagree with dictating to the people, denying their agency as citizens, and undermining the basic principle of self-assumed obligation. Not only is this wrong, it is politically ineffective. And even if it were politically effective, I would still oppose it on account of it being wrong.
Environmentalists are currently seeing how religion can mobilize people and motivate actions on their part. Instead of learning a lesson here with respect to motivation and nurturing the springs of action, they seek take a piggy-back ride on such mobilization to demand that said people they do the same for their own particular causes. That is moral bullying and blackmail and I despise it. It is also evidence of a parasitism and free-riding which does not augur well for any future environmental society. It is beholden upon YOU to build the inner motives and character in like manner so as to generate a similar responsiveness on the part of people; if you can inspire people to the same extent and in the same numbers, then you will cease to be an impotent marginalised minority having to issue demands in this way. Get the politics and the motivational economy right, and people will flock to you in droves and volunteer their actions. I don't believe in environmental philosopher-kings and dictatorships. YOU act on climate change, like people have acted on Notre Dame - don't expect to hijack the good will and character of others. And, in like manner, don't attempt to hijack governments and institutions in order to proceed over the heads of citizens. There has been far too much of private interests embedding themselves in the public realm, hence the inability to secure the long term common good of all. This has utterly turned people off politics and is fostering a populist backlash that could lead anywhere.
If you don't build the inner motives and don't cultivate the mass support and consent of citizens, then don't be surprised if you remain politically insignificant and marginalised; and don't presume that because you are scientifically informed that your voice counts more than that of 'ordinary' citizens. That's not what politics is about; indeed, it is a denial of politics. I get the distinct impression that certain strands of environmentalism is profoundly misanthropic, exhibiting a deep loathing of humanity. There is an unmistakable pessimism among some people as to the nature of human beings. There is a hopeless and ineffectual anti-politics at work here, one that is born of a meagre view of human beings. There IS a lead which is inspiring and mobilizing actions on the part of citizens, and this may spread out in time. And I spare those Greens who are active in their communities and local politics from these criticisms, for they are building the motives and character required for long term change. More than an external pressure on governments, I wish to see the creation and maintenance of permanent material organisations capable of constituting a genuine citizen public or Eco-Republic, so that instead of telling government what to do, the people form themselves as a new system of governance and give the law to themselves. That's my consistent position.
Too ambitious? Too long term at a time when we have been denied a long term? We are engaged in civilization change and civilization building, aren't we? Or are we merely pressing demands upon the very systems and institutions that are implicated deeply in the looming climate catastrophe?
This is cheap and lazy. If people defend it by saying it is effective in inspiring people into climate activism, I become even more critical. This appeal that we – someone, who, exactly? – respond to the climate crisis the same way we have to the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral is revealing. It is revealing in terms of how certain strands of environmentalism thinks in terms of government and political institutions, and it is revealing in terms of how detached from human realities this thinking is. Because part of the problem here has been the falling away of collective concern surrounding the Faith over the years. Cathedrals attract more tourists these days than pilgrims. Progressives read this in optimistic terms as a drifting away from the superstitions of religion, but that is a profound misreading. Instead, we live in an increasingly individualistic culture in which individuals do as they want. When the religious ethic was strong, and the collective spirit too, we could denounce this as a sin. No longer. In a liberal age, individuals can do as they please. There has been a scrimping and saving on budgets as it has become increasingly difficult to look after the Cathedral at Notre Dame. That cutting corners may well be implicated in the fire here. The same economic libertarianism that is heating up the planet may well be responsible for the fire at the Cathedral. The problem, again, is the absence of a ‘we’ to take the collective action required. Which brings me to the second aspect. This appeal goes over the heads of the people and goes straight to the rich, the powerful, the decision makers, the remote institutions – the principal agencies of the capital system as a global heating machine are being asked to save the planet. This is not just political naivety – not to mention an elitism that betrays a complete contempt for the agency of the people – it is the politics of stupidity and futility. It works only to grab another few headlines for the climate cause, keep the momentum for change going. At some point, though, it will rebound on itself for want of an effective politics channelling efforts into an end-game.
This kind of approach is not fostering the eco-citizenship we need, merely encouraging the exploitation of words and deeds for effect. It's shallow, in other words, and sets a bad example in politics. It's not the politics the world needs, but a continuation of 'showbiz.' I want more depth. I'd like those who have expressed critical views with respect to Notre Dame this week to come and walk the walk. I've argued the case for emancipation as the restitution of social power to the social body these past three decades. I definitely count as a radical. I will also stand by my comments on spiritual regeneration. I put the two together very easily. They are not antithetical. For reasons I spell out in this post, the two are joined - there is a reason why - blessed are those who thirst for righteousness.
As for David Attenborough's "Climate Change the Facts", its main value is that a popular television figure told the truth. Or part of it. Not the whole truth. And the human race will be damned for what was left out.
It is in light of this that I was so disappointed by Attenborough's Climate Change The Facts. It wasn't so much what Attenborough said that was disappointing – although the starting dates he used to detail rising carbon emissions did not go back far enough and somewhat minimize the scale of the problem facing us – as what he didn't say. There was no critical analysis of the structural and systemic causes of climate crises, no institutional analysis, no reference to specific social forms and relations, no mention of economic growth as an expression of the central dynamic of accumulation within the capital system.
There was none of this, begging the question as to how serious people really are about addressing climate change. The impression is given that all we need to do is relay the facts on climate change and governments will legislate and act. Such breathtaking naivety would be comical were its consequences not so lethal. Even more disappointing was the wild praise for Attenborough amongst environmentalists. Why? He did nothing more than offer a synopsis of the current state of scientific play on climate change. The facts of climate change are not news. There seems to be an understanding that the only thing that has been standing in the way of climate action has been a lack of information and knowledge on the part of the great public. This is a delusion. It is the socio-economic drivers of the crisis in the climate system that need to be analyzed, explained, challenged, and uprooted. On this there was and is a complete silence.
In politics, I look for an end game and a strategy connecting here to there. I see nothing of this in this approach to environmental politics. Could Attenborough have said any of this? Who are the real deniers here? How real do we want it? Are we really prepared to address the socio-economic drivers of the crisis in the climate system? Or are we just writing our obituaries, lamenting the greed and stupidity of humanity in general? I like a precise institutional and structural analysis set within a critique of political economy. Without that you have nothing but a wealth of facts and vague demands issued in the wrong areas to the wrong people and wrong (unreformed) institutions - there is no effective politics and no end-game. The deniers of climate change express an important truth – climate action is a threat to the prevailing economic system. And I suspect that many environmentalists know this too, and shy away from articulating it lest it put people off. I have been openly told that references to socialism and revolution are off-putting and make it easier for the authorities to marginalize environmental concerns. They try to avoid environmentalism being portrayed as economically harmful, lest it put people off. That leaves me baffled as to how people who are effectively calling for system change, and who, increasingly, are explicitly arguing for such radical change, intend to effect such a thing.
This comment from Damian McIlroy is so true: "The force behind the climate breakdown is fundamentally the same exploitative system that creates the pits of social and economic inequality across the globe. The rule of capital accumulation. That said while this program omitted a huge opportunity, we cannot expect anything else from the BBC. But I would say it was a start, most starts are small and always imperfect. Minutes later on the same channel protesters all over London are determined to invoke a response that's more tangible. It must become increasingly obvious that the only way to deal with crisis capitalism as the author of climate breakdown is to move towards more social and more involved forms of organising society and production. Climate breakdown and Crisis Capitalism rather than making organised labour obsolete, actually pushes the eco-labour movement to return to its old bailywick: the ultimate struggle over the means of production to save the planet and all our futures."
I look for the agency of social transformation and the structural capacity to act. I am reading this by Suzanne Jeffery in the ISJ:
Also ...
Why protesters should be wary of ‘12 years to climate breakdown’ rhetoric "Climate change is not so much an emergency as a festering injustice. Your ancestors did not end slavery by declaring an emergency and dreaming up artificial boundaries on “tolerable” slave numbers. They called it out for what it was: a spectacularly profitable industry, the basis of much prosperity at the time, founded on a fundamental injustice. It’s time to do the same on climate change."
I'm encouraged that many greens and environmentalists do understand my criticism here. As John Barry wrote me: “Peter Critchley well put ... playtime is over ... time to put down the pen ... and to protesting ... dig where we stand... stand for what we stand on...” I'm a Digger.
The call for system change rather than climate change is in the air. People like George Monbiot are openly calling for an end to capitalism. I am seeing those who are sceptical point out that Communism in Eastern Europe was at least as environmentally destructive as western capitalism, and that the problem is not simply a matter of abolishing capitalism. I try to explain to them that what prevailed in Eastern Europe was neither socialism nor communism but a state capitalism. I make a distinction between capitalism and its institutions, which are fairly easy to expropriate, abolish and/or socialize/nationalize, and the capital system, which refers to capital rule and the logic and dynamic of accumulation, which is much less easy to uproot. A failure to make the fine distinctions here runs the risk of instituting a socialism that is no more than the top-down bureaucratic generalisation of capitalist accumulation, hence the character of past Communism). Whatever else that is, it is NOT socialism. So I offer these lengthy pieces from last year (I have many others going back to the 1990s), in order to make the necessary distinctions clear. I don't want to be reading from greens that capitalism and socialism are two sides of the same industrial coin. They can be, but that is not necessarily the case. Can we please get into the structural dynamics, institutional infrastructure and logic of the capital system, as something much more entrenched and pervasive than "capitalism." There is more to this question than changing the title deeds on property. I spell it out at length in these works from last year. (I am now on the Humanities Commons, nice place to be).
The distinction is central to the work of an old mentor of mine, Istvan Meszaros. I bitterly regret not taking up the opportunity to go and stay with him at Sussex University back in the 1990s.
Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx 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. All I'm saying is ... change is in there air, so make sure that you know what you are doing, if you are going to do it, and do it right, lest you bring about the opposite and confirm all of Weber's criticisms and the criticisms of all the modern Weberian anti-socialists Dare to declare capitalism dead – before it takes us all down with it | George Monbiot And beware the men as gods delusion, the oldest and most dangerous one in the book. I need to temper this one, but I'll stand by the central thrust - you cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it to, it will implode and/or backfire against your ideals.
I'm all in favour of system change. But it is beholden on those doing the changing to know what it is they are changing and to what. Wishful thinking is a blight in politics and can leave us mired in an economic wasteland that helps no one and hinders all but the bureaucrats who take over. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does politics. And gaps tend to fill quickly with bureaucracy. It's difficult to sum it up in a few lines, and even in terms of the big works above there are positions not easy to reconcile. But, no, for me the old equation of socialism as top down state control a la Stalinism is a state capitalism, the state acting as a surrogate community for want of a genuine commons. There is a need work on a viable economics. It's all about overcoming the tyranny and violence of abstraction - the abstract forces that determine the lives of individuals externally as alien power. Whatever institutions and systems and social practices are required for a genuine grounding in experience. Abstract definitions here are merely question begging - mediation, mediation, mediation - the three "m's"
Much of this text is a thoroughgoing critique of the naturalism and scientism underpinning certain dominant strains of environmentalism, exposing both as bourgeois forms, one of the bourgeois ascendancy, the other of its decadence (the back to nature lament in opposition to moving forward to a socialism beyond capitalist relations). "Nature," "God," "Reason," "Man" etc are all mere abstractions apart from specific social relations. We can argue until the cows come home on the ontological status of all these things - it is inevitably uncertain and beyond evidence and proof. It is the character of the specific mediations between persons and things that matters. Those who oppose "nature" and "humanity" or who constantly remind us that "human beings are natural beings" are really saying a truth so trite as to be worthless. The question is really under what relations has human civilisation come to be abstracted from and ever further removed from the biological and ecological matrix. That's what I get into. I specifically target an environmentalism that singularly fails to do that, fails to take ethics and politics seriously, embraces a quasi-scientific naturalism in their place, or indulges in either scientism or a vague nature mysticism, and, worse, conflates capitalism and socialism within a sociologically illiterate conception of industrialism. Uncritical perspectives which merely leave us confined within prevailing relations. Such folk talk big on rebellion but, in truth, they leave us mired within the very system we are charged with transforming. No institutional and structural analysis, no connections with people, no mobilisation of the masses (who tend to be dismissed as greedy and stupid), no effective politics connected to an institutional, organisational, and structural capacity to act. I could go on. But won't. It's a waste of time here. There's movement underway. And I've written more than enough. I need to save it for elsewhere. It's this kind of drivel that I directly challenge and explicitly repudiate in these works. It is surprising how many who think themselves environmental radicals succumb to it. Such people are not remotely radical, they lead us down a cul-de-sac. Such thinking is the plainest reaction, and socially and politically naive, and I loathe it. There are too many simplifications and stupidities painted with broad brush strokes for me to waste breath on. There are certainly problems with Marx and the spiritual dimension, and I address them in volume three. But this kind of thing is big on repudiating everything about civilization, leaving us with nowhere to go but backwards. It won't happen, it can't happen; it is not desirable and people won't choose it in any case. That's the simple view. I could argue it in more complex terms - the problem is not chronological, it is structural. Those who take issue can read my Meszaros piece on this. I no longer waste more than a few minutes with it. Oh yes, Russell Means, I know him - libertarian and virulently anti-socialist. This is dead end thinking that leaves us firmly within a capital system that such folk are big on decrying, but pitifully short of being able to challenge and change. I hold such thinking in contempt. It is liberalism gone decadent, the bourgeois mind at the end of its tether, shedding tears at the present but preventing actions which deliver alternate futures. To them, the alternatives are not present capitalism and future socialism, for they see these things as the same, but the failing present and the return to an idealised past that is beyond recall.
I'm interested in this real Reformation, the Reformation long promised but which we never had, through diversion into a prideful self-worship born of an anxiety in service to a remote external God, rather than the God of love and nourishment. I'm also interested in this renewed interest, and increasing openness. It's something of a tightrope to walk, trying to avoid pressing questions of faith as exclusive claims that will, once again, turn people away. It matters a great deal how this is done, lest we simply restate the things that caused people to turn away in the first place. I combine a lot of strands that are not easily stated in concise form. But I'd link it up with calls for a new reformation in economics. I see Marx as doing some such thing, as when he refers to Adam Smith as the Martin Luther of political economy. What I like about this - if we can do it - is that different people with different areas of knowledge, understanding and expertise may well converge and complement one another, to mutual advance, enfolded by the Greater Love that carries us, as a dear friend puts it. I know there is real division in the world, and interests will collide, but I would hope to achieve and sustain a unity of people with good will in the times to come.
It really is a multidimensional problem and will require solutions or, a better word still, transformations that integrate all forms of knowledge, experience and understanding. That encompasses the relation between politics and faith as well as questions of both fact and value. It has us looking at the question as to where and why science and relation became falsely divided.
It's been a challenging week this week, the fire at Notre Dame raising all kinds of questions about just what it is we value, why, and how we value it. I wrote a post a few years ago which made reference to the origins of the word "worth" in the Anglo-Saxon"woethership". I relate environmental notions of inherent value or worth to this question of the sacred, what things do we worship. It does mean challenging the disenchantment of the world and the idea that the world is objectively valueless and meaningless. I try to knit the various strands together around a consistent principle - there is a God, an anarchic excess or ethical stream that evades capture and enclosure by reason. We can't disenchant the world and expect people to be motivated and responsive when it comes to the defence of something objectively valueless and meaningless. If truth and goodness is just a human projection and creation, then we have lost the sense of worth. That's the way I come at this. Same with the notion of power. I write a lot on the reclaiming of power. I'll stand by that as far as it goes. The issue is less the way that billionaires choose to spend their money than the existence of social relations that generate the super-rich. Decisions over what is valuable has to be made another way, and that means challenging relations that devalue the things of true worth. I do like Marx's notion of restituting social power from alien social forms to the social body, but with this strong qualification: God and religion are not about power in that sense of the word, not about the power of coercion over recalcitrant others or the power of transformation of nature through tools and technology: it's about the power of humility through service and sacrifice. If we invert the true relation here, we end up with a men as gods delusion which will collapse in on itself, issuing not in a universal brotherhood but a universal self-hatred that will engulf us all. We are created in the image of God, but are not identical - our technics do not make us gods. We thought we could rule as such but are now facing undoing as masters of nowhere, disinherited in a world of our own creation. There are too many words here again, but there are so many sides and dimensions to the questions we face. It's a huge civilisational challenge and should be addressed as such. Many are addressing this from different angles. We need convergence.
It really is a wicked problem. In the long run, all lose, rich and powerful as well as the poor and powerless, when the system fails. But in the short run, it pays some to make decisions which yield them an advantage. In prevailing social relations, this is the dominant form of rationality, and it generates a collective and self-destructive irrationality. The system is designed to fail in the long run. It's just that, as Hegel wrote, human beings live in the 'here and now.' And that is where they act.
I very much agree with the notion of the Radical Reformation. When it comes to the wellspring of vitality, I am looking forward to finishing my Gerrard Winstanley book. I shall be critical of an eschatology that reduces to political ideals, arguing for a transcendent dimension (along the lines of the conclusion to the Bradstock book you recommended). But Winstanley is fruitful when it comes to the God of nourishment as against this external remote God that had humans neurotically proving their worth. That led to a prideful self-worship within an idolatrous new order of economic and technical power. I like to look back and see undeveloped and underdeveloped trails of thought which retain great transformative potential. I like the areas you look at here, the Reformation still to come.
The resources are there, begging the question of who gets to make the choices and what social relations are needed so that society at large is able to invest these resources in what is truly valuable. I like cathedrals, I'll admit, they are expressions of the faith that carries the human spirit. But I'd like to see a physical infrastructure that houses the sacred, the psyche, and builds a home for all humankind - and other beings and bodies - at last. I like that you are looking at Catholic teaching on this. There are plenty of good ideas in that direction. I like this: "Goods that are Truly Good and Services that Truly Serve: Reflections on Caritas in Veritate." You don't have to be a Catholic to appreciate the points made here. I like that some folk look beyond the labels and are prepared to apply good ideas to the problems that beset us. There are good ideas here: https://www.stthomas.edu/.../2011.../GoodpasterPCJPPaper.pdf
There has been controversy over Notre Dame, with too many making irrelevant arguments that "it is just a building" and that "nobody died." The cathedral of Notre Dame is not just a building, people need to ask what it means, what it symbolizes. To be is to build: we need to build in order to express and expand our being. It expresses something of us, something of that “something” which nourishes the core of our very being. As flesh and blood human beings. But what is the flesh, too. This human civilisation is just flesh and stone: it corrupts, it decays, it crumbles and dies. And then it is gone. Nature too. If you want the eternal you have to transcend that world. If we are just going to pander to the physical side of things, then we are all just flesh, as buildings are just stone.
I shall make a general observation here at the end of a long week of dealing with comments on Notre Dame. There have been far too many irrelevant arguments that "it is just a building" and that "nobody died." This is just plain uncomprehending rot that misses so many points that it has me questioning just how deep the radicalism is of those who have made the arguments. The cathedral of Notre Dame is not just a building, people need to ask what it means, what it symbolizes. To be is to build: we need to build in order to express and expand our being. It expresses something of us, something of that “something” which nourishes the core of our very being. It is that "something" that interests me in all of this. We are talking about more than the ownership of and power of decision over resources - as important a question as that is in respect of social relations and arrangements. If we are just going to pander to the physical side of things, then we are all just flesh, as buildings are just stone. As flesh and blood human beings. We are but flesh, ourselves, as transitory as our creations. This human civilisation is just flesh and stone: it corrupts, it decays, it crumbles and dies. And then it is gone. Nature too. So where does value lie? If you want the eternal you have to transcend this world of flesh and stone. So I have been exchanging angry words with people who engage in "What-aboutism?" This attempt to diminish the importance of one thing by reference to another is one of the most preeminent fallacies of the age, and there was plenty of it on social media this week. I don't mind radicals demanding resources be used for social use, and I don't mind radicals emphasising the things that are valuable in this world - ecosystems, health services, education and so on. In fact, I very much agree with them. But rather than telling governments subject to the systemic constraints of the capital system what to do, instead of lamenting that billionaires do not value the same things we value, I have sought to up the ante and see power and resources under the control of a dominant minority as our own power in alien form, to be restituted to the social body.
I've seen too many arguments this week along the line that human beings are more important than cathedrals/architecture/culture/arts/heritage. Actually, all those things are integral aspects of what it is to be human. To value Notre Dame is to value human beings: there is NO separation here. It is impossible to divorce human beings from their cultural identities, histories, faiths, and stories without damaging their humanity deeply. To be uncaring about something because it is “just a building” is to be uncaring about human beings. And people who don't get that don't get anything. They are engaging in a form of reasoning that can be applied to any issue of concern to some. This simply opens up a Dutch-auction in which anyone can, in the abstract, outbid others in their profession of virtue, for the very reason that there is a vast range of irreducibly different kinds of value in the world we live in. If some are concerned with “A,” then people of all kinds of persuasions can respond with the objection: “what about “B,” “C,” “D,” “E,” “F” … anything at all. I utterly reject that kind of “what-aboutism?” Not least because those most vocal in raising the objection all too often talk the talk rather than walk the walk. If you think that x, y, or z is something that ought to be of practical concern, then YOU put your time and money where your mouth is. Comparisons are not only invidious, they are also too often covers for a passive radicalism. If you can cite any number of “cathedrals” that stand in need of rebuilding by somebody, remember that you are that somebody and be prepared to put a shift in. Don't denigrate the efforts of others by stating that something else is of greater concern or importance. By what scale? To whom? Let's note here how easily a sliding scale of values involves pretty much all things but the one chosen thing that trumps all others falls off the list of priorities. Human beings can handle a number of values at once and don't have to make these kinds of stark choices. It is appropriate to respond in love and concern to every problem concerning the things humans value as and when they occur, not to dismiss their importance by reference to some other problem considered of overriding concern. Take that reasoning to its logical conclusion, there could only ever be one thing that humans should be concerned about. Try to establish what that one thing is, and you'll see the impossibility of such value monism. Unless that notion refers to the God that encompasses all things of this world and much more besides. Within this world, such a value monism fails for want of ontological certainty with respect to the supreme value. “Nobody died,” say some. Is the life of human beings, then, the one valuable thing? What of the planetary ecology? Other beings and bodies? No insects on earth, no human life. And so on. Rebuilding Notre Dame doesn't preclude activity in other areas. The issue of resources is an issue of prevailing social relations and the power and control that some have over the ends to which these resources are put.
Valuing the cathedral of Notre Dame is inextricably bound up with valuing human beings and the various ways in which human beings express their needs and their humanity. Notre Dame was built and maintained all these centuries by human beings, who saw it as an expression of their identity. The cathedral embodies the love, labour, and longing of the generations: human beings who created beauty in worship of beauty, the great transcendental that lights the path to the two other transcendentals: truth and goodness. Do people today believe in such things? I do. Those generations built something for themselves and brought meaning to their world. They created something beautiful for themselves and passed it on for future generations. I have heard environmentalists call for the creation of “cathedral projects” to preserve the health of the planet. Such projects are more than physical: they speak to the spiritual dimension of life, something that impels human beings to create something beautiful that outlives them. That very many people fail to understand what is truly valuable about Notre Dame suggests that the age is bereft of the spirit and ethos required to build something that endures over the centuries. The real loss is the loss of a genuine sense of the eternal. We have sought eternity – and immortality – through machines. Tolkien referred to the “infernal combustion engine” – men as gods in command of infernal instruments manipulating matter and coercing human beings on or about the earth's surface. In the end – and the end comes to all flesh and stone - it's not enough to sustain a meaningful existence. It lacks a true sense of value as inherent worth.
“Paris!” Marc Chagall wrote in his autobiography, “No word sounded sweeter to me!” Arriving in the city for the first time in 1910, the Belorussian-born artist was deeply affected by the French capital and settled in the country permanently in 1948. He captured many views of Paris, including Notre Dame, throughout his career in his signature fantastical style, incorporating mythical monsters and mystical figures in colourful swirls of paint.
Paintings by Marc Chagall
Paris's Medieval muse: ten of the most famous works of art inspired by Notre Dame
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/…/in-pictures-art-inspired-…
From the Washington Post
'You can forgive Americans for their sense of shock at seeing an iconic structure far older than their own nation suddenly enveloped in smoke and flame. “Especially to citizens of the New World, the old one can look like it was chiseled in stone at the dawn of time,” The Post’s Griff Witte wrote. “Its cathedrals, castles, palaces and opera houses form a sturdy and permanent-seeming backdrop in a world increasingly dominated by ephemera.”
But the far-right obsession with Notre Dame as an eternal lodestone of “Western” civilization is a distortion of history. Its very “Westernness” is a fuzzy construct: Historian Juan Cole noted that the French Gothic tradition is deeply influenced not only by Greek pagan thought, but by the influence of Islamic architecture likely encountered in Moorish Spain. Cole gestures to the migration of artistic styles from the other side of the Mediterranean: “Some art historians have argued for the pointed arch as a Muslim development of a Sasanian Iranian form, which was then taken over into the Gothic cathedral.”
Whatever the case, for the French, the cathedral brims with national meaning that transcends its religious origins. And for academics, there’s little immutable about a structure that has gone through myriad transformations since its construction. “Through the centuries, it’s been updated, amended, degraded and defiled,” Witte wrote about Notre Dame. “The spire that crashed so spectacularly on Monday was only added relatively recently, just a century and a half ago, following a period of profound neglect.”
The skylines of myriad world cities boast the spires and bell towers of renovated structures once laid low by disaster or war. “The towering cathedrals that dot Europe’s landscape are mostly monuments to resilience, testaments to what you could build after fire claimed what had been built before,” medievalist Matthew Gabriele wrote. “The radiant stained glass and soaring vaults that we see today were often direct responses to tragedy and disaster.”
Perhaps for that reason, leading officials on the continent don’t share the same apocalyptic view as the West’s far right. “It’s not the end of the world,” European Council President Donald Tusk told reporters.'
The Notre Dame fire ignites the West’s far right
by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post
There is a universalism to Notre Dame
There is a universalism to Notre Dame Cathedral most don’t realize:
“Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The tragedy of the burning of the 800-year-old Notre Dame is a loss for global culture. Regular readers know that I grew up partially in France, and I love Paris with a passion. I remember visiting Notre Dame with my parents as a child. Perhaps there is a faded Kodak photograph somewhere. I had a fellowship at the Sorbonne in 2013 and lived near Notre Dame, which I used to visit occasionally, since it is one of my favorite buildings.
It is a great shame, however, that the loss is being commemorated in some quarters in a nativist way. This is, they say, about France, or Catholicism, or “Western civilization.” Of course it is about all those things, and what happened to this magnificent edifice is like a kick in the gut for us Francophiles. My heart goes out to all my French friends at this cultural catastrophe.
But the significance of Notre Dame is universal, not racial (!). For this reason, it is particularly regrettable to see an ugly hate speech meme circulate blaming the fire on French Jews or French Muslims. This vile anti-Semitism and abject Islamophobia is devoid of any hint of truth of course.
Notre Dame is a Gothic cathedral, and the French Gothic tradition of architecture was deeply influenced by Christian Neoplatonism. In particular, the thought of Plato, Plotinus and Iamblichus– pagan thinkers of antiquity and late antiquity– was worked into Christianity by figures such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late 400s-early 500s AD).
And this thinker in turn was depended on by Abbot Suger (d. 1151), a major patron of the then new style of Gothic architecture. He wrote in his “On the Consecration of the Church of Saint-Denis,” that, as the Gale Group’s article says, “‘we made good progress—and, in the likeness of things divine, there was established to the joy of the whole earth, Mount Zion.’ In other words, the church was built as an image of heaven.”
Platonism holds that ideal forms are real, and this world is a pale reflection of them. The Gothic cathedral also was light and airy, with rose windows, reflecting Platonic light mysticism.
Not only did the Gothic cathedral receive substantial inspiration from Greek pagan thought, but some elements used in its architecture likely had Muslim, medieval origins via the influence of travelers or of Muslim Spain (Andalus). Some art historians have argued for the pointed arch as a Muslim development of a Sasanian Iranian form, which was then taken over into the Gothic cathedral.”
https://www.juancole.com/…/universalism-muslim-goddess.html…
The French communist daily L’Humanité expresses the thoughts of many, with or without a religion:
"The terrible fire nearly destroyed the masterpiece of the spirit and of history that is Notre-Dame. After an immense wave of emotion, its reconstruction is the business of everyone, of those who believe in heaven, as much as those who do not believe in it."
https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/…/notre-dame-rebuil…/…