Pacification : Putting Politics on Ice as the Earth Heats Up
This was an argument put forward by a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion:
“Try imagining a world that's not set to wreck itself by pointless battles for control as it falls apart, just for a few minutes ... dare to dream!”
Let’s take it as obvious that, as the world ‘falls apart,’ ‘we’ should 'act' to prevent catastrophe. ‘We’ should all get together and 'act' for the common good. And time, of course, is always short. There is, of course, no ‘we,’ and the failure to constitute a collectively that has the will and the wit to act for the common good lies at the source of modern failures. So a statement like this merely has resort to the only collectivity in town, and that is government. Government should act, and all political debates should end. Pretty much every key point in the critique of modern diremption and its social and moral causes that I have developed over the years is ignored. Over the years, every attempt to reinstitute the ordering of society in accordance with a view of the good has been resisted as totalitarian. Liberal philosophers have developed a concept of ‘totalitarian democracy’ to portray socialists and Marxists as ‘enemies’ of the ‘Open Society.’ My own critique demonstrates that the atomism of civil society as a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism generates the centralisation of the political state as a counterpart, the one abstract figure (the self-possessing individual) accompanying the other (the surrogate commonality and universality of the state). A careful critique of liberal society has been developed to this effect over the years. Liberalism cannot generate the common good and does not believe in the Highest Good, something by which society and individuals are to be ordered. Such a notion has been ruled out as an infringement on individual liberty. Of course, the tradition I belong to properly orders society in accordance with this Highest Good, including proximal communities, the cultivation of the intellectual and moral virtues, the character-forming discipline of modes of conduct, subsidiarity, the interimbrication of institutions, all entailing a degree of active participation on the part of individuals. This is how we recover authoritative framework of the good in society. Having denied some such thing as totalitarian for decades, moderns now that they have lost the capacity to act on what they consider to be the ultimate good – the planetary ecology. Sorry, folks, but the “death of God” that you have celebrated throughout the age implies the death of all overarching conceptions of the good. You are indeed free to choose the good as individuals. And individuals are free not to choose whatever it is that you think is the good, no matter how much you back your argument by unanswerable science. Science is not politics and is not ethics. Of course, if the planetary ecology unravels, civilization unravels with it. But there is no moral imperative to act, because there is no referent. That’s the bit that I have tried, and obviously failed, to get through to people who think themselves radical, but are most clearly not. To be radical is to go to the root of things. I go to the root.
I come return throughout to that statement from an XR spokesperson. The statement introduced a link to Extinction Rebellion entitled “Our Demands.”
The demands are presaged by this statement:
“Extinction Rebellion is an international apolitical network using non-violent direct action to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency.”
In a nutshell – what you and I and everyone who seeks to address the way humans mediate their relation to each other in society and to nature call politics is dismissed as “pointless.” The very thing that lies at the heart of the converging social and ecological crises is dismissed as “pointless.” In fact, every single damned word I have ever written is “pointless.” Not just the politics, ethics, and philosophy, but the literature, aesthetics, poetry. The latter are not merely pointless but, as I have been told umpteen times, a “distraction.” Insofar as there are just ten years to act and force governments to make unprecedented changes in economy and society, then indeed everything is a distraction.
Aristotle defines citizenship in terms of a character in which individuals are capable of leading and being led in turn. Giving leadership presupposes people willing to be led. Aristotle, of course, has a ‘thick’ notion of the political, one that seeks to check the tendency of libertarian notions of freedom to degenerate into licence. His view is not liberal and has been criticized as such. Under liberalism, individuals are self-possessing beings who are entitled to join and exit any common endeavour in accordance with self-interest. Such an ethos has the tendency to fracture into atomism, with unity having to be imposed through an abstract legal-institutional apparatus.
And here is yet another instance of this imposition of universality and commonality in abstraction from the conditions of its genuine composition.
This denial of a political intent behind the apolitical pretence is utterly deceitful. This is not a solution to the political problem but an evasion of it; it presumes the very thing that has to be worked for with real politics – how to mediate difference and reconcile discordant elements in a common unity that all can accept. In the context of my own work, this presumes the very thing that I have sought to develop over the years as the social, moral, and institutional conditions of ‘the good.’ This entails nothing less than the recovery of the ethical, political, and physical commons. I have made the argument many times over the years. The problem is that far too few activists and radicals are actually activists and radicals. Their activism has focused firmly on pressing demands through existing institutions rather than transforming them whilst creating alternate institutions that command widespread support and incite mass participation.
So let’s just wish the problem away, let’s ignore the facts of division and the way that these structure human action; let’s all get together as one, just imagine all the people with no interests, no concerns, no states, religions, possessions, nothing to die for, argue over, nothing. Let’s just wish the nasty world of politics away. And let’s presume that “government” will actually be the ethical agency of the universal interest, the very thing that the great philosophers have argued that government ought to be, knowing critically that that is what it is not. You know, the very thing that Plato, Aristotle, Hegel with his Sittlichkeit, Rousseau with his Social Contract, Kant with his ‘political peace,’ Marx with his communism – I mean how very dare he be wasting time with “pointless” arguments over power and exploitation – Rawls, Sandel, everyone who has ever spent time and spilled ink writing on: the ideal of the common good in politics. We’ll get it just like that, as easy as Lennon’s “Imagine.” That’ll work.
That’s precisely the denigration and devaluation of the political that will either send us into a totalitarian environmental austerity or the catastrophic end of civilisation because too few had the backbone to go the hard yards in politics. Probably both, as the one colludes in the expropriators having one last drink at the well before it runs dry.
It is with regret that I make these comments, since they put me at odds with people I count as friends. But in being part of the movement seeking effective climate action I have always sought to bring an understanding with respect to politics, ethics, culture, critique, and communication that, I felt, would strengthen the climate commitment. Instead, the strong scientistic temper of the movement has prevailed, leading it to a deficiency in politics which, in compensation, generates a tendency to authoritarianism.
The ‘apolitical’ argument that all sides should forget their differences with respect to where we are, how we got here, and where we ought to go is based on an utterly false analogy with the Second World War. The problem is not external but internal. Whereas the enemy in the Second World War was easy to see, define, and fight, the enemy with respect to climate change are the internal mechanisms of our own societies and economies and the structured patterns of behaviour and psychologies bound up with them. The problem of climate change is self-authored, which makes it imperative to examine the social forms and relations that are complicit in the crisis in the climate system. You cannot put this question off the table and think that the problem is being effectively addressed. Unless the gambit is that an authoritarian state will do precisely this. That is a piece of political naivety that flies in the face of political experience and history. More likely, any such state will use authoritarian powers to impose an environmental austerity to preserve existing power relations intact. On that basis, we will get one last mad gamble on the planet, no doubt involving geo-engineering and nuclear as well as renewables. Nearly ten years ago I wrote Of Gods and Gaia as a critique of ‘men as gods gambling with Gaia.’ It was hard-hitting in respect of the people I called ‘planetary engineers.’ I should, in retrospect, have analysed the ‘planetary managers,’ too. I emphasized the lack of a genuine ethics and politics among these would-be planetary totalitarians. In fact, I drew attention to the explicit denigration of ethics and politics in their arguments for environmental pacification. Looking back, that work was prescient. I held fire in the hope that the next ten years would produce a breakthrough in environmental politics and ethics. Instead, we get the same scientism and the same emphasis on technocratic expertise. Instead of a genuine cultivation of the ecological virtues in communities of practice, there has been a heavy emphasis on training the cadre for the environmental Megamachine.
I repeatedly challenge the scientism that pervades the environmental movement and the way that the emphasis on statements of scientific fact with respect to the physical universe devalues other forms of knowing and being. Ray Monk refers to Wittgenstein’s ‘forgotten lesson’ here, referring to the tendency to think that science explains everything and extends into domains of value, meaning, and significance, or merely discards them as nonsense.
As Monk argues, Wittgenstein's philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times. That scientism dominates the environmental movement, to its detriment. The status of science is so high that few are prepared to challenge not merely its dominance, but its extension into non-scientific areas or the way those other areas are devalued and dismissed. Monk notes that Wittgenstein’s thought has made very little impression on the intellectual life of this century. Wittgenstein was himself aware of the extent to which his style of thinking was at opposed to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand.” The dominant style which Wittgenstein opposed was “scientism,” the view that every question, insofar as it is intelligible and meaningful, has a scientific solution. If it didn’t, then the question is a non-question and therefore has no solution. ‘It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face,’ Monk writes. He continues: ‘There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music-all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better.’ This is true, but the point goes further to the realm of politics and ethics, language and law, too. Further, the attempt to conceive economics as a science has also been misguided.
This mode of thought works to detriment of practical reasoning, will, and motivation. The sooner that environmentalists stop leading with the facts, and usually just remaining with the facts, and engage the other human faculties and domains, the sooner we will succeed in cultivating a responsiveness to truth in terms of will and motivation, organising into an effective political movement. The devaluation, even denigration, of politics is here debilitating. There is a view that the world of ethics and politics is of limited value when it comes to effecting change because it is the realm of the endless yes/no. This is a superficial view that fails to address the social and moral reasons for the impasse here. I address this in terms of the dissolution of the overarching and authoritative moral framework in the modern world. The effects of the loss of a common moral language by which society is able to steer and orient existence becomes apparent with respect to the failure of humanity to find the nous to make a common stand on climate crisis. That’s not a reason for rejecting ethics and politics as a realm of paralysis and self-cancellation but for recovering the ethical and political commons. I address this question at length throughout my work. Those who reject this as too difficult and too long-term a project given the need for action now argue that an approach based on fact and logic is more effective. You can only say ‘yes’ to statements of fact and logic, whereas you can say ‘no’ to arguments advanced in the realm of ethics and politics. That, it is argued, makes statements of fact and logic stronger than statements of politics and ethics. The flaw of that view is based on mistaking the realm of politics and ethics as the realm of science and philosophy. These are two very distinct domains. The challenge, as Plato well knew, lay in bringing these domains into relation so that the truth of the former could be translated into and apprehended by the latter. Statements of fact and logic are unanswerable in the sense described above if one is addressing scientists and philosophers. The world comprises citizens, individuals with stakes and social interests. When they say ‘no,’ they are not simply denying fact and logic, they are contesting the political and social implications. This applies whether or not we are speaking of politicians, businessmen and women, citizens, trade unionists, consumers etc. Statements of fact and logic inform behaviour but do not decide it. The attempt to evade the endless yes/no of politics and ethics by way of science and philosophy therefore fails. We are, for reasons Plato gave us, faced with the challenge of discerning truth through dialectic. You can state a position on fact and logic to the world of politics and ethics and receive a ‘no’ instead of a ‘yes’ in response. Take Donald Trump on Paris. All you can do then is restate fact and logic. And receive another ‘no,’ and again and again, until it is apparent that, one way or another you have to engage properly in dialectic to help people discern the truth, act on it, and live it. That means looking at the social and affective dimensions. Plato was a philosopher who knew that reason does not rule alone. He therefore put the true, the good, and the beautiful together. In governing our existence in accordance with reality, we need all our faculties in order to conform ourselves to and thereby confirm Ultimate Reality.
I, therefore, argue for an integral approach to environmentalism in order to ensure that truth is communicated ethically and effectively, cultivating a responsiveness in terms of will and motivation. That entails embracing the affective and social dimensions of truth and its reception.
We are living in a crisis with transformative potential. The twin socio-ecological crisis confronting civilisation has its origins in the contradictory dynamics of the capital system, particularly the way in which its accumulative dynamic is breaching social and ecological limits. Capital has reached its absolute limit. The resulting crisis cannot just be reformed away but can be resolved only by transformations with respect to core fundamentals of the system. Instead of this, this new wave of environmental action is being steered away from radical transformations and into unreconstituted government action in league with existing commercial forces. There are marginal – and marginalized – voices openly stating that Extinction Rebellion is a Corporate Led "Environmentalist" movement which is organized with the specific intent of sidelining, bypassing, and isolating the Left and muting radical critics of the capital system. The truth is a more nuanced than that, but that is the effect of the XR approach. Their openly stated aim is to bypass politics in general and refuse engagement with critics from right and left. That is the basis of the claim that XR is ‘apolitical.’ This claim is actually an extension of the old Green claim to be ‘neither left nor right.’ The Greens would claim not to be exponents of typically evasive ‘middle way’ (non)politics by claiming to be ‘in front.’ This was always a deceit. Politics takes place in the here and now, and any position presented, however ‘apolitical,’ comes with political implications.
To claim that Extinction Rebellion (XR) is corporate led is a big claim, given the way in which so many have been mobilized in the cause of climate action. But that turns cause and effect round to read effect as cause. In a nutshell:
“New Power” – “The ability to harness the connected crowd to get what you want.”– Jeremy Heimans, Co-Founder Purpose/AVAAZ, B Team expert.
Note how controlled the message is. The claims and demands are focused and targeted. There is a hymn sheet.
Extinction Rebellion (XR) was officially launched on October 31, 2018. They have come a long way in one year. The wave of environmental protest that has followed could be taken as proof of XR’s effectiveness in pressing the need of climate action. There is no doubting the effectiveness in mobilizing numbers in protest. But where is the self-sustaining material counter-organizations capable of constituting the alternative public? Nowhere. System change is not the point. This is about creating and leveraging mass pressure on government and no more than that. It is a glorified lobby group. And it is the ‘green’ corporations that stand to benefit from government action, expenditure, investment, and contracts.
On November 2, 2018, a few days after the launch of XR, a video documenting the training session held by XR co-founder Roger Hallam was uploaded to the Extinction Rebellion You Tube account. You may go to this account.
George Monbiot, ‘we need to create the biggest movement there has ever been.’ Check it. It’s not a movement. The emphasis is on numbers. Those recruited are not autonomous agents capable of setting and controlling the agenda, the agenda is in place. People are recruited as a passive mass to confer legitimacy on an agenda that is already set.
Thunberg is there, of course: ‘Use Natural Climate Solutions to Protect Nature.’ That would be what were once called ‘Natural Capital Solutions,’ then. Scroll down and you find the significantly titled ‘Reframing conflict.’ How to avoid conflict with money and power by rebranding and remarketing radicalism so that everyone can join in. Then there is “Mother and Child Protest.” Cynical and manipulative to the core, all the right emotional buttons pressed for an agenda that is pre-set and has zero democratic input and involvement. A passive mass on the march, to be marched off the stage just as quickly when the deals are done and the contracts signed.
Power remains as alien as ever. The YouTube video documents the training session held by XR co-founder Roger Hallam: “This was filmed at the Extinction Rebellion Local Coordinator training in Bristol. Roger Hallam explains some the key dynamics of building a mass movement from the level of personal resilience to creating system change.”
There’s the claim to be driving ‘system change’ again. If this was openly a case for green corporate capitalism it would be challenged and checked in the same way all previous cases for ‘greening’ capitalism have been. The capital system itself is the problem, and no matter how much you democratize, reform, and green it, that central accumulative dynamic encroaching over and commodifying every commons in existence is the driver of socio-economic crisis and collapse. The contradictory dynamics of the system are open and public, rendering capital vulnerable to public challenge and radical change. For “saving nature,” read “saving capitalism.” For “system change,” read “system preservation.”
I am reading the post “Extinction Rebellion Training, or How to Control Radical resistance from the ‘Obstructive Left.’” By Cory Morningstar published at Wrong Kind of Green. (May 6, 2019).
The road to Hell on earth is paved, and brightly lit, by corporate complicity.
This article examines the XR mass organizing model for the mobilization of a global ‘mass.’ And it is a ‘mass’ that is being mobilized and incited, not an active citizenry acting on its own initiative, developing its own power and resources. It is all about generating numbers to mobilize behind pre-existing, pre-determined positions.
From the official launch on October 31, 2018 in the UK to December 6, 2018, XR grew to over 130 groups, across 22 countries. By January 29, 2019, XR groups spanned across 50 countries. On April 27, 2019 XR reported they were nearing 400 branches globally. The global expansion is being led by Margaret Klein Salamon, founder of The Climate Mobilization, who launched the Extinction Rebellion US Twitter account on October 31, 2018 – the same day as the launch of Extinction Rebellion in the UK. I have been FB ‘friends’ with Margaret for a few years now and am a member of The Climate Mobilization. The Extinction Rebellion demands are a mirror image of The Climate Mobilization’s emergency strategy. I have been a critical supporter of The Climate Mobilization, gently pointing out that the analogy to the World War II mobilization is flawed – the enemy we face is not external, it is internal – we are fighting our own alien power encased in fetish systems of politics, power, and production. I had rather naively thought my criticisms would be heard by someone somewhere, and that in time the error in perspective would be corrected. Not so. There is a clear agenda and critical voices, however friendly and constructive, are simply ignored. You are being had; you are being played. You are handing your autonomy over to strategists, to agents of money and power.
“Tell the Truth” is the slogan. Fine. Truth-seeking is the political and philosophical tradition I work in. I don’t need to be told to tell the truth. We need to be very cautious of all who claim to know and tell ‘the truth.’ It always tends to be somewhat less than the full truth.
This photograph is revealing with respect to the truth being told. It reveals who claims possession of ‘the truth,’ and who the passive recipients of this ‘truth’ are. It also reveals that truth is decidedly not a contested concept, and that those who do contest it are to be bypassed. That is significant. Truth cannot just be passively given as an object, it has to be subjectively willed. That is precisely how the dialectic operates in Plato, as a bridge between object and subject. There is no bridge in this top-down “truth telling,” no dialectical process, no active agency on the part of people. This is ‘the truth’ as totalitarian imposition.
Notice not merely that the arrow bypasses the middle group, but that it only goes the one way, down, from top to bottom. This asserts a descending mode of knowledge and power, from elite to mass. This is a clear statement of elite theory over against democratic theory. Completely extinguished is the ascending theme of knowledge and power, the idea that human beings are knowledgeable change-agents. The notion of a dialectical interaction in which top and bottom are drawn into dynamic relation, each informing and educating the other, is extinguished.
Training the XR Local Coordinators
Hallam draws a chart with three circles in the training session. The small circle on the top is the knowledge aristocracy claiming possession of ‘the truth.’ This is the Extinction Rebellion hierarchy, the environmental vanguard, the elite: the people who want ‘action’ from government. Hallam proceeds to the middle circle. This circle is larger but contains the difficult people who are politically active and knowledgeable. Every totalitarian regime in history has identified ‘the intellectuals’ as potential threats to authority and power. The members of this group are targeted for either recruitment or “re-education.” These are the people who not only know a thing or two, they are critical and more than capable of challenging the claims to power of the knowledge aristocracy. Hallam wastes no time in identifying this middle circle as the contentious one, the circle containing the people who ask awkward questions. This middle circle contains the truth-seekers, and that’s the last thing those seeking to mobilize a passive mass behind the slogan “tell the truth” want. This circle contains the people considered “mostly obstructive” and “political.” One might be inclined to think that it is the hardball right-wing climate deniers who are being targeted here. This group have been so successful in obstructing climate action that the concern to bypass them is understandable. But still not quite justifiable. Any failure to advance the cause of climate action indicates a failure to do politics effectively. That failure lies in the dominant scientism of the climate movement and its consistent trademark evasion of political questions of class, power, and social relations. And this brings us to the significant designation of this middle circle of the politically knowledgeable and interested as containing the “hard left.” It is precisely those people who are concerned with system change who are to be bypassed, isolated, marginalized. There is a refusal to engage, even, since the “truth tellers” at the top know fine well that the truth-seekers in the middle will easily expose their claims to be ideological. Instead of an engagement which exposes the ruse to public controversy, the middle group is bypassed, on the assumption that the rest of society will continue to ignore them too. The strategy, then, is for the top circle to bypass the middle circle and take its truth directly to the bottom circle. This bottom circle is where the numbers are. This circle contains the passive mass of non-political citizens. This is XR’s target audience, and they openly say so. These are “the people who’re sh****ng themselves and want something to be done but aren’t highly political.” Something should be done, and the people in the top circle are putting themselves forward as the people to do, or licence others to do it.
This section is worth quoting at length on the the breakdown of people into three groups:
“Groups of political engagement in people:
People who want to get things done – highly political people – people who’re sh****ng themselves and want something to be done but aren’t highly political.
The first group go to the second, when they need to go to the third.
Gotta tell them it’s not perfect.
They’re not interested in political effectiveness, they’re interested in things being perfect and good. This is not a personal judgment, but it won’t help.
This is how you mobilize lots of people.
Don’t have a Q & A. This allows the extreme people who want it to be one way to bring everyone else down. 80% are normal people 20% political absolutists. There to appropriate your energy.
Have a general meeting. Us ine participatory design.
Most successful socialist movement in the world is – Mondragon experiment in Spain – central concept is balance. Not socialism or anything. Trying to practically create a better world. There are too many separate concepts and issues to focus only on one.”
I have frequently extolled the virtues of Mondragon. I advocate Mondragon as a whole practical ethical package, embodying and articulating an ethic that is much more than what ‘works.’ Mondragon was formed by a Catholic priest. It was motivated by a genuine social ethic and respected people as co-agents. It has naught to do with such calculating cynical strategies as this. The kind of people who would inspire and sustain the likes of Mondragon are people who are in the “difficult” middle group of the 20%, people with a political and ethical commitment. Hallam has portrayed all such people as extremists and sectarians. The people he cites are tiny minorities. Yes, they exist. Yes, they confuse, divide, and drain energy. Hallam has put everyone retaining a political and ethical commitment and concern in the “not normal” and “difficult” circle. That is not an oversight. He openly states that the top group should look to recruit those in the middle group who “get it,” and then bypass the rest. In other words, whilst he criticizes people in the middle group for seeking to do things the “one way,” he is himself establishing the XR way of the top group as the “one way.”
As a warning against left-wing sectarian politics, this may read well. But the sectarians simply can’t be the target. This is a caricature designed to portray all people who are politically aware as purists, absolutists, and sectarians; this is a caricature designed to portray all who ask awkward questions as divisive. This is the consensual drive driven from the top to marginalize and silence all dissent. This is the de-politicizing drive in the design of cooperative and collaborative strategies. The sectarians are so small in number and so fissiparous as not to require sidelining – they have successfully sidelined themselves throughout history. The target is most certainly others. People like me. I’ll take no lectures on the Mondragon co-operatives and utterly reject the ideological attempt to distinguish Mondragon from socialism. I have praised Mondragon highly in the context of making a case for workers’ control and cooperative production.
“The Mondragon co-ops in the Basque region of Spain offer a practical, working, enduring example of how the spirit of community and solidarity can insulate co-ops from the vicissitudes of the capitalist market as well as the political splits to which socialist movements are all too prone. The Mondragon co-ops have their origins in the technical schools founded by the Catholic priest Father Arizmendiarrieta…”
Peter Critchley, Workers of all lands unite - and build the cooperative commonwealth
As both Catholic and Socialist you can put me in the middle circle of the awkward squad, the politically aware and literate who can spot an ideological project at a thousand paces. The argument presented above is a flagrant attempt at appropriation for ideological purposes. If cooperative production in the manner of Mondragon is your intention, then do as the Mondragon cooperators did and do. And embrace the Catholic ethic and Socialist politics that goes with it.
With socio-ecological crisis, the giant monster is being shown in public for what it is. But people are not necessarily seeing the monster for what it is. They are feeling the effects of the monster, and feeling fear and danger. But that’s the problem with giants. In times of danger, people can panic and seek protection from the very monster who is creating the danger.
People seeing and feeling and changing through environmental praxis is key. At the heart of it is alien power and its social restitution. "The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything" [Albert Einstein] Dante disliked neutrality. He had those who refused to take sides march uphill for all eternity behind the white flag of surrender. I dislike "apolitical" politics and claims to be "beyond politics." It is so patently an attempt on the part of "truth-tellers" to bypass public controversy, challenge, and disagreement (to bypass truth-seekers, awkward people like Bookchin, people who have the annoying capacity to be right) in order to access and manipulate a passive mass (people to be told). I see people as knowledgeable agents capable of learning by an experiential, experimental knowledge. Dialectic, the teasing out of truth. There's a fight for the heart and soul of politics underway, for its real meaning as creative self-actualization.
The problem with that giant monster of alienation is the fetishism that comes with it. The friend and the enemy are often less than obvious. Take this from (probably) Raymond Williams in 1968 against what had become of the Labour Party in office: "we are faced with something alien and thwarting: a manipulative politics, often openly aggressive and cynical, which has taken our meanings and changed them, taken our causes and used them; which seems our creation, yet now stands against us, as the agent of the priorities of money and power." (May Day Manifesto 1968).
Beware "non-political" politics and the depoliticizing drive which, in being designed to side-line, isolate, and bypass "politics," diverts, converts, and perverts a radicalism concerned with system-change into system preservation. I'm trying to find a Ken Loach interview in The Guardian, last week I think, where he noted the way the working class voice has been marginalised in politics and culture. To see through and breakthrough fetish systems of power, production and politics requires a praxis based on epistemological and structural capacity - creative knowledgeable agency. That's if system change means system change, of course.Such views are at a contrary pole to those presented by Roger Hallam and XR:
Hallam:
“I’m just going to finish on something that’s a bit of a taboo subject, okay? But it’s another major issue you’re going to find when you organize, which is difficult, political people.
Okay, so I’m going to do a little chart here.
You usually find, like most of us people in this room, that are really political, but we’re really practical because we want to get some things done. Okay?
And then below us, in inverted commas, there’s another group of people that are really political and don’t want to get things done, because they’re so political. (lots of laughter). I will separate those people out in a minute.
And then below that, this is like a thousand times bigger, they really want to do something well there actually not political, you see what I mean.These people really want to get things done. Then they go down here and try to involve these people, and these people basically grind it to death.”
Hallam proceeds to lecture on the dangers posed by the “extreme hard left” views, “extreme intersectionalism” (“we need to be all perfect and that sort of stuff”), “extreme” desires for diversity, “extreme veganism”, etc. Hallam deliberately states these political positions at extremes in order to label them as “difficult” by definition. In delegitimizing “political” standpoints, it becomes legitimate to bypass them. The reasoning is crude and simplistic, drawing a basic distinction between “political” people who argue and “not political” people who “really want to get things done.” The political people are considered obstructive with their awkward questions and arguments. But dialogue, disagreement, and dissensus is politics. This is a call to end politics. The failing with the environmental movement all along is that it has failed to take politics seriously. It has always done politics in scientistic mode, seeing truth and knowledge as things constituted in the realm of science to be relayed downwards into politics, government, and society. Of course that approach has failed to incite the public and inspire effort and movement. Because it lacks the motivational springs of action. Politics is very much the field of practical reason. Politics (and ethics) is the key to getting people moving and getting things done. Instead of finally coming to appreciate that point and shift theoretical reason into practical reason, this approach compounds the initial error and freezes it in explicitly authoritarian mode.
Hallam’s presentation uses all the manipulative tricks in the handbook of sharp practices. He examples are all set to extremes in order to mislead. Who believes in an “extreme” anything? By “extreme left,” the audience is left in no doubt that “the Left” as such is extreme. Hallam makes comic asides with reference to socialism and anarchism in order to solicit laughter. He builds a sense of ridicule in the audience. His approach is to reassure the audience that whilst they suspect that the “extreme left” may be right in their arguments, they are really extremist and impractical fantasists who will never “get things done.” Hallam recognizes that “often they’re right.” As he must. People are not so stupid as not to know that the people in the middle group are actually pretty clued up politically. They say awkward things like “it’s capitalism,” which deep down they all know to be true. It’s awkward truths like that, which involve challenges against deeply embedded power, that discomforts people, puts them off politics. Politics is a dangerous business. You need nous and nerve for politics. A lot of people lack the nerve to back their nous up. It’s much more reassuring to miss this whole contentious area out and pleasing to be told that you are “really” getting things done in being so submissive to the truth-tellers at the top and non-confrontational with the power-holders behind the political veil.
“And often” the people in the middle group “are right,” says Hallam. The strategy is clear. Those in the top look to recruit from that middle group, then bypass those who remain critical and “difficult.” Anyone seriously interested in the system change needed to address the socio-ecological crisis would actually seek to empower and expand the middle group so as to educate, activate, politicize, and organize the “non-political” masses in the bottom group. That is precisely the last thing XR are concerned to do. On the contrary, the aim is to recruit those in the middle group who can be persuaded, on grounds of “pragmatism,” into becoming complicit with the system, whilst bypassing, delegitimising, and silencing those who remain “difficult” and critical in refusing to conform.
The reference to Mondragon really sticks in my craw. It betrays precisely no understanding of what Mondragon is and what motivations lay behind it and drove it from the first. Mondragon is a social commitment based upon a transcendent ethic. It is an integral part of the Catholic social ethic and is eminently practical in being transcendent. This crowd haven’t the first idea what I am talking about here. They are modernists to the core, ethically empty and soulless. As EF Schumacher, an eminently practical man, wrote:
‘What I’m struggling to do is to help recapture something our ancestors had. If we can just regain the consciousness the West had before the Cartesian Revolution, which I call the Second Fall of Man, then we’ll be getting somewhere.’
Schumacher was a Catholic and integrated the Catholic ethic into his practical economics:
‘In the Christian tradition, as in all genuine traditions of mankind, the truth has been stated in religious terms, a language which has become well-nigh incomprehensible to the majority of modern men. The language can be revised, and there are contemporary writers who have done so, while leaving the truth inviolate. Out of the whole Christian tradition, there is perhaps no body of teaching which is more relevant and appropriate to the modern predicament than the marvellously subtle and realistic doctrines of the Four Cardinal Virtues - prudentia, justitia, fortitudo, and temperantia.’
The extent to which this language has become “well-nigh incomprehensible” to the moderns is made clear in Hallam’s reasoning. In XR pragmatism, the ethics described by Schumacher above are not a practical motivating, driving, and orienting force but a positive detriment standing in the way of pragmatic action:
“Look, all the most effective movements have a central concept and that concept is balance. Balance the pragmatic need and the ethical imperative to change society versus the need to be eternally ethical.”
And “balance” means precisely what in institutional and systemic terms? Sorry to ask awkward questions. (As a Catholic, I take prudence and transcendent standards for granted, I don't need lessons on that kind of balance). But “the most effective movements” are driven from the inside by a genuine politics and ethics, not an external strategy by what Marx called “would-be universal reformers” and “alchemists of revolution.” Hallam makes the crudest of distinctions here between “purists” and “pragmatists,” labelling all concerned with politics and ethics impractical. This is how he caricatures the middle group of the politically aware:
“They’re [the 20%) not actually interested in political effectiveness. They’re interested in a political approach that makes them feel good.”
People who are interested in politics are self-centred and self-indulgent. This is politically motivated caricature designed to lead the passive masses away from those with a genuine politics into supporting those seeking to put politics and people on ice. The origin of the word “politics” is the Greek polites, meaning those interested in public affairs. XR makes the plainly ideological claim, “We are working to build a movement that is participatory, decentralised, and inclusive.” That is precisely the opposite of what it is doing. It’s strategy is rigidly top-down, centralized, and disempowering. Instead of politicizing and activating the citizen agency, citizens are treated as a passive mass to be mobilized and demobilized at the behest of the knowledge aristocracy:
“The name of the game is to bypass these people, or at least recruit the little bit of them that get it … and go down here. And that’s how we’ve managed to mobilize thousands of people in three months. By having a public meeting. And if the public meeting is constructed around participative principles, you won’t have the SWP [Socialist Workers Party] guy standing up at the end. Everyone’s feeling good and he does a rant about how it has to be socialist, otherwise it’s rubbish. Which brings everybody down. It happens over and over again.
All socialists are SWP? Hallam’s pitch works here because people do know – and are put off by – those sectarian socialist parties which use every crisis and campaign as an opportunity to deliver a sermon and a commercial. So people laugh. But they are being invited to laugh at all socialists. Hence the presentation of XR as “apolitical” and “non-political.” That means non-socialist as in anti-socialist for the simple reason that environmental crisis is a crisis of capitalism, but to say so is most certainly socialist and political. Politics is out and with it socialism. Not the extremes, but all points.
And how we do that, we don’t have a Q & A. Q&A’s encourage nerdy people and absolutists, (laughter), we all know this, right?
Hallam solicits laughter. Bear in mind that these are words being delivered by someone demanding ambitious and expensive large-scale government programmes in order to avert climate catastrophe. These are the people who repeat “follow the science” like a mantra, the people who have, via science, turned ‘Nature’ into a bigger absolute than ever God was. With God, human beings are partners in Creation. With Nature as absolute, human beings are subservient to cold, indifferent force. I like to point out awkward, difficult truths. I’m not someone you would want to have around asking questions:
"I mean you can have a Q&A if you’re super confident and you’re in a group of people that are generally like, in the real world, but if you have a public meeting 80% of the people will be normal people, who are basically interested in the issue, and 20% of the people will be political absolutists. And they will be there to appropriate your energy.”
The sleight of hand here is to proceed from those who most certainly do obstruct and drain energy in promoting or defending a viewpoint to those who are engaged in the perfectly “normal” politics of dialogue, disagreement, argument. Here is the bitter irony in this “apolitical” politics. The problem in recent decades has been one of hardball climate change deniers defending the capital system against government intervention. Those deniers are right wing libertarians seeking to protect and advance the global anarchy of the rich and powerful against what they perceive to be 'socialism.’ Climate action involves government and is therefore socialist. That’s how the reasoning goes. So they have blocked and negated each, any, and every climate agreement. Engagement with such people is futile and has served only to waste time and drain energy. But here is the bitter irony in an environmental strategy which, in bypassing a right wing anti-socialist libertarian politics is also explicitly anti-socialist in bypassing “difficult,” “obstructive,” “extreme left” politics. The result is to steer environmentalism away from the critique of political economy and away from the socio-economic drivers of climate change, back into the embrace of the corporate capitalist forces responsible for ecological degradation and disaster. That’s what happens when you don’t take politics seriously and lack a genuine, effective politics. That’s the problem with clever people who think complex problems are solved by strategies – they are basically as stupid as mud.
We are plainly in the presence of an ideological project which serves to conceal and preserve existing asymmetries in power and resources intact. System preservation is the result.
Hallam: “This is how you mobilize lots of people.” The key strategy of Extinction Rebellion is not to bypass the hardball climate deniers. They are small in number and lack credibility. The reality of climate change is crystal clear and those who deny it are utterly unpersuasive. It is the awkward squad of radicals who, now that climate action is in the offing, need to be sidelined on account of their revelation of the socio-economic causes of climate change. The case for system change is clear. The purpose of an “apolitical” strategy is isolate such radical voices and to establish a narrative that delivers change within the system. This is an organized and orchestrated campaign that serves to preserve existing power relations. A stark distinction is drawn between the purist, the absolutist, and the impractical on the one hand and the normal and the pragmatic on the other. The mass mobilization and imagery presents a false sense of democratic participation and inclusion. There is open contempt for the masses. People are not treated as knowledgeable, moral agents with a creative autonomy of their own. They are to be told the truth and mobilized behind it. There is no creative input from the people as active, informed citizens learning from their experimental, experiential praxis. There is also a mocking, sneering tone adopted towards those who, first and foremost, have engaged in politics out of a commitment to social justice and planetary health. Those who have engaged in the hard critical analysis to implicate the capital system in the destruction of the social and ecological conditions of civilized life on our finite planet are now framed as political “purists” and “absolutists.” This from a movement which purports to “Tell the Truth.” Now, at precisely the hour when capital’s Day of Reckoning has come, here is a movement which caricatures, labels, and side-lines those who have known the truth from the first. These are the people whose “pragmatism” is based on the belief that the systemic drivers of the capital system can be reformed away or regulated to avert environmental destruction. That belief is a delusion. The evasive approach taken to capitalism is accompanied by sneering abuse of socialism. Hallam frames the politically interested and motivated people in the middle circle as not “normal”, soliciting confirmation from the audience with sentences ending with “yeah?” and “okay?” Having created a group mind consensus, people agree. Who, after all, would want to disagree and thereby identify themselves as “difficult,” “obstructive,” “extreme,” “absolutist,” “purist,” and “not normal?” This approach builds a culture of conformity and cowardice. Hallam delivers his sneers and people laugh. There is safety in numbers, and in obedience. There is no questioning of Hallam, no challenge to his assertions, nor to his deliberate framing of those who are “not normal” and non-conformists as “obstructive.” This is not truth-telling, this is an openly cynical and manipulative top-down social engineering. In the age old conflict between elite theory and democratic theory, this approach is explicitly elitist, upholding a division between an active knowledgeable elite and a passive “non-political” mass.
Note the gratuitous abuse of socialism. Although Extinction Rebellion claims to be “apolitical” and studiously avoids a critique of political economy, Hallam takes the opportunity to abuse socialism and socialists. He cites the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain as an example of successful economic practice, insisting on “balance” as the central concept, “not socialism or anything.” Not socialism or what, precisely? “Balance” as such explains nothing. As a socialist I have made “balance” central to my analysis. I can develop the idea through and from Plato. It is central to the work of Lewis Mumford. I have serious objections to people who take meaningful concepts and terms and hollow them out in order to be pressed into ideological service.
Go through the assertions made in this training for XR Local Coordinators:
“They’re [the middle group] not interested in political effectiveness, they’re interested in things being perfect and good. This is not a personal judgment, but it won’t help.”
“Don’t have a Q & A. This allows the extreme people who want it to be one way to bring everyone else down.”
People who have analytical clarity and a precise understanding of social, structural, and institutional questions will indeed see things a certain way. But let us address this objection to “extreme people” “who want it to be one way.” What else does “tell the truth” mean? The objection here that that the top-down environmental manipulators and managers have their own “one way” and will brook no opposition or contrary view.
The masses who constitute the bottom group are to be herded like sheep.
“80% are normal people [and] 20% political absolutists. There to appropriate your energy.”
“It’s not about climate change information, it’s about the emotional way that we say it – needs to create that emotional response, personal reactions are incredibly powerful.”
Cynical to the rotten manipulative core. People have spent decades trying to emphasize the importance of emotional intelligence, and ethics, from Viktor Frankl to Martha Nussbaum, very many more. This has been central to my own work, pointing out the need to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical reason. These characters have finally learned the lesson as to what is missing, but instead of developing a truly affective and social dimension through engagement in the motivational economy of human beings, they still target people as objects to be managed and manipulated from the outside. Psychology is employed not to spark and facilitate the inner motives, but to manipulate people. This is not true emotional expression but the exploitation of emotions. For the knowledge aristocracy of Extinction Rebellion, the enemy is not the corporate colonization of the commons and not the expansionary capital system eating up the planet, but radical critics of capital.
Pacifism is not a virtue
Peace is not a virtue in itself. Peace in conditions of injustice is complicity in that injustice. Peace without justice is oppression. Peace in an unjust society is surrender in the class war to resist domination and exploitation. This is the politics of pacification. Neither is the preaching of non-violence without violence. The preaching of non-violence in ways which disrupt is itself a form of moral, social, emotional, and linguistic violence.
“In certain situations, preaching nonviolence can be a kind of violence. Also, it is the kind of terminology that dovetails beautifully with the ‘human rights’ discourse in which, from an exalted position of faux neutrality, politics, morality, and justice can be airbrushed out of the picture, all parties can be declared human rights offenders, and the status quo can be maintained.”
— Arundhati Roy, How to Think About Empire
That reference to “faux neutrality” is perfect in exposing the duplicity that lies behind claims to be “apolitical.” All the contentious questions of social life are excised from view and thereby removed from public controversy. We need to bear in mind here Marx’s critical conception of ideology. Ideology isn’t merely a set of ideas for Marx, but a view of the world that serves to conceal and preserve existing power relations. Power is best preserved by being concealed. This “apolitical” view does precisely that and thereby reveals itself to be highly political. These characters know fine well that the politically and intellectually clued up people in the middle group will spot their obvious ruse very quickly and so have launched a strategy which misses that group out. It is, actually, so pathetic in what it reveals about the lack of political spine among the self-styled rebels as to be laughable. This is an attempt to avoid the tough old world of politics. The idea that people will remain politically quiescent as the bills come in for climate action is fanciful to say the least. What these Toytown rebels and bog-standard Machiavellians will succeed in doing is betraying environmentalism into the hands of the corporations. The opportunity is here and now for social transformation, and these idiots are diverting it into sterile channels. The capital system is in global crisis and vulnerable to radical assault. This is a concerted attempt to pacify the working class in servitude to the state and capital, thwarting the potentials that exist for radicalization in the direction of social transformation. Instead of radicalizing people as citizens with a view to constituting the new social order, equipping and guiding people in transformative practice, the masses are considered passive and inert. This is not rebellion, this is business; this is not non-politics, this is politics. And now I have lost patience. This is such an obvious case of corporate engineering that it doesn’t require wading through a wealth of details. I have better work to be doing, being a “purist” and “absolutist” and all that. There’s a judgement to be made here. I send all rogue traders packing.
I am reading indolent commentators compare Greta Thunberg to an Old Testament prophet. I doubt many of them read the New Testament, let alone the Old. The people who respond to a message so blatantly true as to be trite are those who, in face of problems that have mounted by the decade, have lacked the wit and the guts to trace them to source and root them out. To them, I say that these problems are self-authored and, to resolve them, requires recognition of a self-alienation that exists in the very fabric of the social and institutional order. You cannot be apolitical in face of that basic structural fact. You cannot attempt solutions which keep the pillars of the corrupt edifice standing. This is the liberal order in denial, fighting against itself with the only tools at its disposal, the very modes that have brought us to crisis. I say this as someone who was told in no uncertain terms that ‘left wing anti-capitalism is the new climate denialism.’ Those who argue for a genuine radicalism that proceeds to the internal relations of society, seeking to identify and uproot the problem at source, are castigated as climate deniers. That move to apoliticism is ideological to the core, to the extent that it covers the asymmetries in power and resources that lie at the very heart of current society and which drive the converging crises in the social and natural environment.
I shall say it loud and plain, the status quo won’t save the planet, nor will some yearning for a pre-modern Golden Age that never existed. I note how the age has lost its lofty ideals and now only speaks of ‘survival.’ This is utterly debilitating. You cannot portray life and people in the bleakest, most miserable of terms, devalue the ideals of politics, ethics, and art as pointless distractions, and then think people will respond to the appeal of survival. Survival for what? A life that swings between excess and austerity doesn’t seem to be worth living in any case. The bleak bogus existentialism born of disenchanting science has so dispirited existence that the best motivating ideal environmentalists can come up with is ‘survival.’ Even worse than that, given the endless lamentation I read for the pure, pristine Nature “we” have destroyed, many of these environmentalists don’t even believe in that, and are absorbed in the reactionary cul-de-sac of visions of a Nature that never could be again even if it ever was.
Marx called this straight with respect to the “bourgeois viewpoint” and its inability to see beyond the antithesis of fragmentation of prevailing market capitalist society and the supposed fullness of the pre-modern natural society: ‘It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end. (Marx Grundrisse 1973). The choice is redundant, there is no future in either realm: survival lies neither in the status quo nor returning to the past. The problem is structural, not chronological. But arguments over structures is ruled out as “pointless.”
Romanticism always tends to decadence. The end is near for this order, and so we have the last gamble, the attempt to get the very things that liberal institutions are incapable of generating – commonality, universality, the Highest Good. Instead, the usual abstraction, backed by authoritarianism and coercion.
Even to argue against control or for non-possessive and non-exploitative relations is a political battle. Anyone who falls for this denial of political intent is sleepwalking into totalitarian tyranny.
The Citizen Assemblies would appear democratic. They involve people, after all. Or representative selections from the people. In all such assemblies, though, it is well known, it is the most confident and the most articulate whose views prevails, those who by background and education are used to speaking and being heard. We have a representative system now. It has been corrupted by money, XR spokespersons say. If that is the case, the challenge before us is to reclaim the political from the encroachment and capture of monied interests. Instead of that, we get typical evasion. In fact, a truce is called. “Battles over control” are declared “pointless.” Where the problem precisely is the enclosure, expropriation, and exploitation of the commons, “control” of resources is the problem. The main socio-economic drivers of ecological degradation and destruction lie here. Rather than target and uproot these, a truce is drawn, preserving existing power relations intact. This is significant.
As for these Citizen Assemblies, once the orders to politics have been delivered by science, there is nothing to debate and discuss, certainly not with respect to ends. These have been set outside the political arena. The only thing to discuss here is the appropriate means to these ends. The more ambitious the plans, of course, the more powerful the means to be applied. What we have here is the semblance of democratic participation and choice. People remember Limits to Growth published by The Club of Rome, pointing out how the dire warnings of that book were unheeded. What doesn’t get mentioned is the series of books which the Club of Rome issued after Limits. These books set out the solution to the environmental problems set out in Limits. The first three books in the series were entitled Mankind at the Turning Point (1975), Reshaping the International Order (1976), and Goals for Mankind (1977). These books sought to address the politics of addressing environmental crisis. Except that what was offered was not a politics at all but an anti-politics of the most anti-democratic, elitist, authoritarian stripe. Such a politics was deemed necessary to avert environmental disaster. There was no faith in people, hence no point rallying people to environmentalism as a democratic cause. (I’ll stand with the view I set out on the failures of scientism as politics as a result of a democratic pessimism in Of Gods and Gaia from page 610 onwards, I can’t put it better than I did there). The ‘rational freedom’ I espouse is based on a common moral and intellectual reason. The rational solution sought by technocratic elites is one that is determined by scientific analysis of the problems faced by the world. The solution that these books came up with was for all the nations of the world to hand over the forms of governance and the keys to the global economy to an elite panel of unelected, immovable, unrepresentative experts. Whilst the members of this panel made all the key decisions, the democratic energies of the people would be absorbed in talk-shops which gave the semblance of popular participation. The institutions of democratic representation would therefore be stripped of all real power and turned into debating societies, occupying citizens’ time and energy. The real power of decision and control was to be monopolised by corporate-bureaucratic committees removed from public check, scrutiny, challenge, and accountability. The world of the endless yes/no was thus handed over to the people to idle away their time in whilst all the difficult problems of politics and economics would be resolved rationally by a panel of philosopher-kings. The old question of ‘who guards the Guardians?’ was ignored. Further, you cannot check power if you have none yourself. As Polybius knew, only power can arrest power. The people are stripped of power. When it comes to the question of who appoints the Guardians, just ask yourself who has the money and power to make such appointments. And ask yourself why people of money and power would make such appointments. Anyone who thinks that such authoritarianism is a way out of environmental crisis is not merely a political naif but most certainly a useful idiot, the kind of people who respond uncritically when stampeded by a politics set in emergency mode. The environmental dictatorship of the officials in the service of the continuation of the capitalist Megamachine is thus erected with the active consent of people with the best of intentions and ideals. Should anyone be thinking I am exaggerating here, I would simply say find and read these books for yourself, going beyond the statement of the crisis to identify the specific proposals for dealing with it.
I argue this not because I am against climate action, but because I am for it. People may lament the failure of politicians and people to heed the warnings of environmentalists back in the 1970s. There is a real for that failure, though. The lack of response came at least in part as a rejection of scientism and elitism, the deficiencies of environmentalism as politics, and the utterly erroneous understanding of the nature of forms of governance and economic relations. After a century or so of socialists battling the capitalists over the ownership and control of the means of production, it takes some rarefied stupidity to believe that the keys of the economy were just going to be handed over to a panel of experts to be run for the global good. The lesson is simple, if you do politics badly, out of disrespect and disdain of politics and people, then you will fail.
And what will these Citizen Assemblies have to discuss? Note the language underneath “Our Demands.” Each demand begins with “Government must.” That word “must” is used repeatedly in this environmental politics. There is no distance from there to the imperative that “people must.” If you have the power to command government, you have the power to command people. The environmental movement is full of imperatives with respect to what individuals should and shouldn’t do. I have argued repeatedly that the problem of the modern world lies in the loss of an authoritative moral framework. Nietzsche drew attention to this most dramatically when he declared “the death of God.” In truth, many thinkers had recognized the problem and its attendant diremption before him, not least one of my favourite philosophers Hegel, but also Comte. When environmentalists repeat that there is a “moral imperative” to act on climate, they fail to appreciate how a modern liberal age, in which morality is merely a series of subjective value judgements, has lost its referent, whether we wish to refer to “God,” “Nature,” or “Society.” That loss of the Highest Good and the ordering of society to the Highest Good has always been the problem, or a symptom of the problem of loss of control with respect to the political, ethical, and physical commons. The result is that, morally, there is no imperative to act that has any purchase or binding significance on individuals. This is a point I have tried to make many times, only to be dismissed as illiberal. The problem with liberalism now stares those who, after all, do actually believe in an overarching good – with liberalism, individuals are entirely free not join or to exit any join endeavour for the common good. With liberalism, there is no overarching good or moral framework. Instead, there is a neutral sphere which allows individuals to choose the good as they see fit. Of course, critics such as myself, MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Deneen, etc point out that neutrality is merely another name for liberalism, given that this agnosticism correlates perfectly with liberal values and institutions. But this is where we get the counterpart of liberalism’s figure of the abstract individual – the atomism of a society in which each chooses their own good – and that is the abstract commonality and university imposed by the state. The good which liberal society requires in order to sustain its existence, but cannot generate from within, has to be imposed from without by authoritarian means. Instead of a genuine authoritative moral framework, we get a coercive imposition of ‘the good,’ the very abstract good that liberals forever criticise people like me of wanting to impose on individuals. They rule it out consistently when others present the case for ordering society to the Highest Good – only to impose it anyway, on the basis of untransformed social relations, that is, their own social order. Anyone who is inclined to contest this loss of an ethical framework, as well as loss of control over physical commons and resources, including one’s own labour, is dismissed as engaging in “pointless battles.”
The form by which social labour is supplied matters a great deal. To note the extent to which conventional politics has been colonised by the forces of monied power, only to seek to recreate the political elsewhere, is utterly evasive. If there is a problem of a corrupting power anywhere in society, it needs to be challenged, contested, subverted, and uprooted. Whatever community or forum you may be able to establish elsewhere, that central corruption in society will both constrain from the outside and pervade into the inside.
I have written on MacIntyre’s local communities of virtuous practice as a place to withdraw to as wider society becomes ever more corrupted by money and power. The likes of Rod Dreher are arguing that the corruption is so pervasive that people of virtue have no option but to take the Benedict Option (based on the argument in the last passage of MacIntyre’s After Virtue in 1981). Dreher is a conservative. Before him, Lewis Mumford also argued for abstention, withdrawal, and conversion in face of the Megamachine. His argument was also based on the experience of monasticism. You can find a similar idea among ecologists, such as Bahro with his eco-communes. My argument back in each case is consistent – if there is a corruption in wider society, then it will sooner or later come to infect the local communities of virtuous/ecological practice, preventing their growth. There is a need for these communities to scale upwards and outwards, uproot the source of corruption, and constitute themselves as an extensive public life.
I agree with peace. But peace is not surrender. Peace without justice is surrender. In iniquitous conditions, it is a continuation of war. This is not radicalism; this is a de-radicalization that channels legitimate and sincere demands for change into sterile forms that preserve existing power relations intact.
A liberal philosopher I very much admire is John Stuart Mill. He argued that ‘the price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.’ (On Liberty, 1859). I have read Mill well and absorbed his lessons. There are reasons why the modern age has become sceptical of notions of ‘the good,’ even more of notions of the Highest Good. As Mill wrote, ‘we have now recognized the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion.’ With views deviating from so many on this question, I am highly appreciative of Mill’s liberalism. That is why, in the critique of liberalism that I have developed over the years, I have always emphasised that my position is post-liberal, not illiberal. There is a very big difference. In my work on Marx I emphasized that Marx is also post-liberal in this sense, and post-capitalist too. The quality and viability of future socialist society depends on preserving, enriching, and developing the achievements of liberal capitalist modernity. Marx thus didn’t repudiate what he called political emancipation, but identified its immanent potentialities for human emancipation in general, turning a formal freedom into a substantive freedom. That means open recognition of liberal freedoms with respect to individual rights, expression, alternate platforms. Any ‘musts’ that are issued here with respect to imperatives arising from a notion of the good come with certain conditions. As Habermas writes, “we know just how important bourgeois freedoms are. For when things go wrong it is those on the Left who become the first victims” (Habermas Autonomy and Solidarity 1992: 50).
That said, the critique of liberalism and the demands for a post-liberal social order stand. Liberals have celebrated the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework as a liberation, not least on account of the association of such a framework with God and the religious ethic in the past. But with that loss also comes the inability of society to order and orient its existence towards true ends within the Highest Good. Science alone cannot cultivate responsiveness with respect to motivation and will. And so society is brought to the brink of social and ecological implosion, and yet cannot muster the collective wit and will to do anything about it. I repeat myself endlessly on this, on account of the lesson being ignored: the solution to bad politics is not no politics, it is good politics. And a condition of good politics is the rooting out of the source of corruption in the first place. Depoliticization merely confirms the current malaise. The Earth is being pacified!
For all of the talk of rebellion, I see surrender to the status quo and a recourse to abstract institutions surrogate gods. It is telling that, in comparison, the arguments of current Catholic philosophers possess a depth, insight, pertinence, even defiance in face of a status quo going to oblivion that marks them out as truly radical. In comparison, too many rebels are conformists. I am not.
This is spot on. Hence my argument in favour of postliberalism remains critical of liberalism, drawing attention to the fact that much that is presented as liberalism actually draws on an older, God-centred, ethical tradition. Shorn of its metaphysical underpinnings, liberalism becomes purely conventional and political. Natural rights are grounded in natural law. Remove that grounding, and rights are merely conferred by the political sphere, and just as easily can be withdrawn by the same sphere.
“What many don’t understand is the extent to which secular liberalism has fed off Christian teachings and virtues. The Enlightenment secularised Christian teachings about the sanctity of life and the dignity of the individual human person. But it could not come up with a stable grounding for those teachings in reason alone. For a long time, the West has been coasting on the residue of its Christian faith. But without basing our morality in transcendent values, how will we recognise threats to our humanity in the future (from, say, genetic manipulation), much less resist them?”
I would just bear in mind Mill’s defence of liberty, paying particular reference to the closing passage of the “Holy Warriors” article, which notes the tendency to religious wars over the good in the past. We don’t need that kind of thing. But it was that fine Christian gentleman and scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam who pointed out that such disputes over religion took the faithful as far away from the Prince of Peace as one could get. Erasmus has been called “Prince of the Humanists.” He was, too. Which makes the point that Christian humanism has a long and proud tradition (Thomas More, Rabelais, I would also include Montaigne).
I would just like to know where, when people such as I and many others decades before me, pointed out the fundamental social, economic, and ecological contradictions of the prevailing order, these people now asking for silence with respect to “battles for control,” (issues like power, authority, resources, social relations which are central to politics) and conformity with respect to an unaltered status quo were. Dreher’s article above refers to Christians as now a ‘creative minority’ in modern secular society. This retreat of religion is celebrated as a liberation by those who take their stand on the individual’s right to choose the good as he or she sees fit. They are now finding that such a conception of liberation is a delusion, with the collective consequences of subjective choice and action now being visited on society as an incomprehensible and, without appropriate and effective collective mechanisms, unalterable force. The voluntarism of liberal society thus faces its nemesis in the form of the involuntary necessity of climate catastrophe. In politics, too, I have always been in the minority, as a socialist, eco-socialist, and green. I didn’t bother joining the Labour Party, not at the time it was happily expelling its working class activists as extremists. I shall not list the political battles fought along the way. They were lost in the main, for want of either popular support or structural and organisational capacity. Such is politics. What I would never countenance is the use of an authoritarian state to impose the very things that have failed to win support and consent.
So to ‘rebels’ who adopt an ‘apolitical’ position, elide the fundamental questions of politics, and mandate the authoritarian state to implement its demands, I would say this: if human civilization has to make in just ten years the big changes it has had the opportunity to do, but singularly failed to do, in hundreds of years, then accept that your machine gods have failed, have the nerve and, even more, the contrition, to face the music, make your peace, and get on your knees and beg mercy and forgiveness from the God you abandoned in the first place. The Earth you despoiled may abandon you, even you who worship Nature as a Goddess, but God never would. To those who discarded God in the belief that, through science, technology, and industry humans could go it alone and build Heaven on Earth, your god is now coming in, in the form of a harsh physical necessity that doesn’t give a damn about your cries and concerns. But, having discarded the personal God for Einstein’s god of a physical universe that doesn’t care, you should have known that. To whom do you now cry? Your disenchanting science told us that the universe is objectively valueless and meaningless, that truth, goodness, and purpose are merely human choices and projections. The emptiness of this self-authored universe is now apparent. Your existential crisis was written into the evolutionary design all along – in physical terms, extinction is on the cards for all things. There is no rebellion against physical fact. I shall tell you back straight what you have told me straight: physics doesn’t care about your politics and ethics, your concerns and cries. God does. To God, there is no extinction, only eternal life.
“Bidden or unbidden, God is present.”
Carl Gustav Jung discovered this phrase among the Latin writings of Erasmus. Jung popularized the phrase, having it inscribed over the doorway of his house, and upon his tomb.