A Positive and Lasting Peace in the Presence of Justice
This extended essay was written in response to the recent words and deeds of the US President Donald Trump. I shall resist the temptation of denouncing Trump as a moral oaf. He may be. He isn't a professional politician. Part of me prefers his bluntness to the word-perfect super-slick barbarism of the professional politicians, who are well coached to say the right thing, whilst doing precisely the opposite in practice. It is not only Trump supporters who fall for flapdoodle. It is the failures of previous political generations that has brought us to this, and those who are hunkering for a return to 'moderation' under Biden are culpable. I am more interested in what this whole phenomenon says about the diremptive political terrain as such. The argument I shall present here is about more than Trump and his apologists/supporters. Of course, the specific focus is Trump, and what his pernicious brand of politics is all about. You have to try hard to avoid responding in kind, exchanging abuse for abuse. Those who join the chorus of ‘Trump is bad’ are actually playing his game, using ‘good’ and ‘bad’ on a moral terrain on which such terms are empty and devoid of content. It is politics as pantomine, where we become a crowd who do no more than cheer or jeer. If you abuse Trump and his supporters, you have actually joined the game in which people just swap - and reinforce - their prejudices.
Just take some time to watch this video of Jordan Klepper interviewing Trump supporters at a Trump rally. Jordan Klepper vs Trump supporters, The Daily Show
It is so very easy to make fun of the prejudices and stupidities of some Trump supporters. I have no idea how representative of Trump supporters these investigations are. I would expect the focus to be on the worst examples, the easiest to expose, mock, and parody. These things are themselves episodes of reassurance, where the clever people who believe all the right things take solace in the fact that they are demonstrably clever and right and the people who are trampling all over them are stupid and wrong. It may be so, but it’s not the point. The views of people, of all people, matter within a polity and are not to be overridden on account of being considered wrong. Society and politics works by a dialectic of disagreement and agreement in which the members of society reach an acceptable consensus. There is a ‘revolt against elites’ underway which, however wrong and misguided we may consider it, is real. Liberals have stood paralyzed and uncomprehending in front of this wave, at best thinking that exposing its contradictions and delusions would suffice to hold it in check. It is here that the soft underbelly of liberalism – the non-rational, non-cognitivist ethics of irreducible subjective opinion – has come to engulf liberal society. The central liberal figure of the discrete individual who is ‘free to choose’ contains the implication that ‘the real world’ presented to the senses is whatever the beholder would prefer to see, not what that reality actually is, which holds our beliefs to account within the parameters of factual and moral knowledge. Truth itself is a tricky notion. Many who cite truth as an objective check on subjective fantasy equate truth with fact. Even at its simplest, the notion is complicated, begging questions of the filters and criteria used in searching for, selecting, and interpreting facts. When we come to moral truth, the issue is even more complicated. The dominant position is that of a non-cognitivist ethics – there is no moral knowledge and moral truth, only irreducible subjective opinion. That, in the context of a radical separation between the realms of fact and value, has been the dominant position of the liberal order for a century or more. And these growing, and seemingly intractable conflicts between incommensurate values and irreconcileable views, makes it clear that the position is socially unsustainable. In liberal theory, there is an interplay of subjective preferences on a plural terrain whilst the neutral public sphere holds the ring and the law ensures non-harm. It is evident that this ‘conflict pluralism’ could work for a while, so long as there remained a broad agreement and consensus around values and institutions, something which derived from the capital of a previous age. Also important are conditions of broad equality in the context of a stable and growing economy. These parameters have been exploded. The common moral discourse has gone, the traditions of commonality have gone, the stable economy has gone – instead there is a congeries of individuals and groups pursuing distinct aims in the context of massive social division. Politics can no longer mediate such a terrain. It is not only Trump shouting, in other words. The shouting has been going on for a long time, for the reason that we have lost the common moral language, the consensual devotion to common ends, and the substantive standards of evaluation that makes communication and connection possible and meaningful.
The danger is that we continue to think this a problem of Trump, and continue to complacently assume that common standards with a substantive grounding exist. Nietzsche warned nearly one hundred and fifty years ago now that individuals in the modern world are advancing moral claims that are empty - the overarching and authoritative moral framework has dissolved. This is precisely what Nietzsche meant by 'the death of God.' He felt that this could be a liberation, involving a situation I read as the actual living of morality rather than rationalizing and codifying it. He feared that people would simply seek surrogates for God. The problem is not Trump and his supporters – these people are the writing on the wall, indicating the extent to which liberal society has lost connection with the metaphysical assumptions which are our common inheritance, giving us access to objective reality. Instead, society has plunged into a reality that is a subjective fantasy to be imagined and chosen ex nihilo. Whether this choice is undertaken by preference or prejudice matters not a jot, since we are in the realm of subjective choice, with truth and goodness being whatever the chooser chooses. Of course, the real world outside of such subjective choice exists, and the deleterious consequences of an accumulation of deluded choices will be felt by the society of freely choosing individuals, but as a collective force that is anonymous and impacts as a quasi-natural constraint that is beyond comprehension and control. The connection between choices, actions, and consequences will not necessarily be identified, bringing about a change of behaviour in a context of public learning. Individuals remain entitled to believe what they like, scotomizing the evidence according to preference/prejudice. It’s far from Trump supporters alone that do this. My worry is that all the failures of liberal ethics and politics – subjective preference, the freedom to choose, individualism etc – are being projected upon Trump and his supporters, rather than seeing Trumpism as a collective consequence of liberalism’s moral and sociological illiteracy.
To give just one of many examples on this video. One woman says that she doesn’t believe that Barack Obama was born in the US. She is asked what she would require as evidence to persuade her otherwise. The testimony of someone who was present at his birth, she replies. ‘Like his mother,’ the interviewer asks. No, the woman replies, because she’s biased. The same question is asked of Trump, what evidence does she have that he is American. He’s always lived in America, she replies. But what evidence does she have? ‘His parents’ she replies. ‘Why would they lie?’ she asks when she is queried on this. ‘I’m just using your own logic against you,’ the interview tells her. There’s no consistency, in other words, other than a dogged determination on the part of individuals to believe what the hell they like, regardless of evidence. It really is not only Trump supporters that do this, though. I recently had an exchange with people on the subject of an interview in which Ray Charles gave his view of Elvis Presley. Charles was not only negative in his assessment, but made arguments which were factually incorrect concerning the origins of songs, and judgements which were based on double standards (Charles had great success singing country songs, yet Elvis Presley and whites singing the blues are accused of cultural appropriation). I gave a detailed breakdown here, only to be abused for ‘lynching’ Ray Charles for speaking ‘his truth,’ something which placed me on the side of ‘the racists’ who make up the bulk of Elvis fans. I gave a response which made a distinction between truth as something that accords with an objective reality via an epistemological reality check and a subjective fantasy which is the product of choice and preference and perspective. I received a heap of abuse for my trouble, and was identified as a racist. The irony is that I am a big Ray Charles fan and, when I had the option of seeing Charles or Bob Dylan in concert, I chose Charles. Seeing as I am not a racist, but could so quickly be branded one indicates something very awry in the standards employed in ‘moral’ debates. If Ray Charles is entitled to ‘his truth,’ then so is everyone, racists included. To be able to identify something such as racism and denounce it as a ‘bad thing’ involves a tacit recognition of the existence of trans-subjective standards – this is the point I was underlined, and applied not only to Trump and his supporters but to each and all alike.
It’s not the stupidities and bigotries of the Trump supporters – or any other group for that matter - that is the important question here, but is the flagrant refusal of individuals of all kinds to accept any external check or constraint upon their beliefs. It is not difficult to show how wrong their views are. The difficulty is getting them to see they are wrong and to admit they are wrong. Evidence is dismissed as fake news. The serious point here is that Trump supporters are a microcosm of the expressivist or emotivist morality that pervades modern society. This combines an individualism in ethics on the one hand – the idea that each individual chooses the good as he or she sees fit – with a surrogate collectivism on the other – these gatherings of people who are like-minded in their delusions. The need for sociality and common purpose is satisfied by mass gatherings around authoritarian motifs, giving powerless people feeling under threat the feeling of power. Libertarianism and authoritarianism go together. The lack of a genuine principle of authority ordering actions to a true common end mean that human sociality and unity can only expressed in terms of force and illusion.
The point I am concerned to establish is that this is the anti-politics and anti-ethics of sophism, and it predates Trump. Basically, we are using terms and advancing principles as there were such things as truth and knowledge, including moral truth and knowledge, and that fact, reason, and logic make a difference. Too many are learning too slowly that the self-image of the liberal age is actually contrary to reality, and that an order which lives ‘after virtue,’ to use Alasdair MacIntyre’s solicitous phrase, is also ‘after truth.’ The good is what discrete individuals consider it to be. No matter how much high-minded liberals may seek to disguise that cacophony of competing gods by calling it 'pluralism,' even calling it a ‘conflict pluralism’ when forced to concede that the social terrain and public realm has fractured between contested positions. The moral terrain is fractured, there is no common moral language, only a clash of incommensurate values, meaning that power and force, via politics or other means, is the only way to prevail. Ethics and the temporal world of practice have parted company, with the result that those seeking to secure their moral ends have no option but to employ non-moral, and even immoral, means - having recourse to a politics that is devoid of moral significance.
I wrote at length and in depth at the roots of this predicament here.
The problem goes far deeper than Trump, and the excited abuse of Trump on the part of liberals upholding notions of truth and justice indicates the extent to which people are still not aware of the nature of the problem. In the modern world, politics and ethics have parted company, the world has been stripped of inherent value, the common good has been dissolved into subjective choice, and commonality is continually visited upon us as either ersatz community or external constraint (economic imperatives, crisis). The people who are most insistent on truth as a fact-checking are the ones with the most to learn here - without the tacit recognition of transcendent standards and a commitment to order society and the actions/choices of individuals in accordance with them, truth and justice will be no more than empty signifiers, an attempt to end debate and deliberation in the public realm by way of non-negotiable claims of certainty. Trump and his supporters are saying 'no,' affirming the primacy of politics and values against the false necessities of values presented in the guise of facts. That 'no' may well be wrong - I make it clear below that it is wrong - but standards of right and wrong beg an ontology of the good that a liberal philosophy shorn of its metaphysical assumptions cannot give.
Trump is merely a monstrous presentation of this reality, one that so manifestly contradicts the self-image of the age as to provoke horror and consternation on the part of its defenders. The ills for which Trump is being excoriated pre-date Trump. People have for far too long given their support to half-measures, or even quarter-measures out of the belief - half wishful thinking, half political cowardice - that such tinkering will be sufficient to ameliorate the worst aspects of the injustices scarring the social fabric. That is a palpable delusion, and Trump is the counter-revolution to the revolution that not only never came, but which 'moderates' time and again refuse to countenance. I’m interested here in the very many liberals and Democrats who think Bernie Sanders a ‘socialist’ and ‘too radical’ to offer an alternative to the voting public. Call that politics whatever you like, it is cowardice and it has and it will fall far short of the radical transformations required to remedy deep institutional and structural problems. That cowardice predates Trump.
I would suggest that one of the many things people dislike about Trump is his aggression. His blunt and brutal honesty in defence of the social order which generates such ills clearly upsets those who would prefer that defence to proceed by way of the usual rationalizations, in which professional politicians are well-versed. Trump says things that power would prefer to unsaid. He knows what power is, he knows how to get it, and he knows why he wants it. He’s not afraid to use it. In other words, he’s an aggressive player who cuts through the pretence of warm words that change nothing in power structures. The lip service paid to the right principles has been revealed to be feeble. Trump has run a coach and horses through the whole flabby terrain. That doesn’t make Trump right and it doesn’t make him a genius. He may well be wrong and may well be a moral oaf. But the fact that a man such as this could have succeeded to the extent that he has shows how weak and flabby the entire social and political terrain is. That terrain has been stripped of its reality check by way of truth and justice. This is an opportunity to do far more than oppose Donald Trump in an attempt to prevent his re-election, and instead uproot the entire sophist moral and political fabric so as to give the terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ ‘good’ and ‘bad’ a substantive meaning again.
John Milbank, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he is President of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy argues that: “the politics that we practice today is a politics without the soul. It is thereby a perverse politics, an anti-politics and even, in the end, an impossible politics. If we are to survive as recognizably human, we need to return to a politics of the soul, albeit in a new guise.”
John Milbank, The politics of the soul
Absent from the modern political landscape and its discourse is a shared and comprehensive understanding of the metaphysical ground of our being, underpinning our institutions and practices and sustaining a common moral language. As a society, we suffer from a cultural miscommunication which itself results from a disconnection from the soul and the failure to relate the ego to something greater than itself.
The argument I adumbrate here, (which I develop at length elsewhere), is based upon a comprehensive framework that seeks to place political order under the guidance of transcendent standards and the timeless values of justice, thereby reorienting behaviour by way of the cultivation of the moral and intellectual virtues within communities of character and practice.
Such ideas may seem implausible, potentially repressive of individual liberty, even, but properly understood they offer a way of explaining the current impasse which is making politics as the mediation of conflict increasingly impossible, intensifying the divisions of society, diminishing public life and discourse, and making people increasingly frustrated and angry in the process. To those defending liberal society and liberal ethics and politics against what they see as creeping authoritarianism, that authoritarianism is itself a response to the failures of a liberal order which has neutralized the public community in favour of a free subjective choice of the good. An aggregate of irreducible subjective preferences can never sum to the public good. Instead, we have a mutual self-cancellation which is preventing society from consciously and democratically managing its common affairs. Failure to secure common ends, powerlessness, frustration, and anger are the result. That is not a public community, that is trench warfare.
Comprehending how transcendent standards can be even defined, let alone how they impact on the practical affairs of human beings may be considered a puzzle. The solution is to bring the worlds of theoretical reason and practical reason into a new and dynamic relation via a character-forming culture and discipline fostered within appropriate modes of conduct.
The root cause of moral conflict in the modern world is the absence of a common ethical framework and language, meaning that individuals are free to choose the good as they see fit. The problem is not that modernity lacks moral theories but that it cannot offer recalcitrant individuals good reasons to accept them. The absence of a common framework, attached to roles and practices, means that morality lacks both persuasive and compelling force: it can neither inspire nor obligate individuals. The liberal view considers this to be freedom, leaving the individual free to look after his or her own interests. The problem is that it strips society of the ability to order its functioning in any common moral sense with respect to the long-range common good. Moreover, society comes to fracture around different, competing, and often contrary projects. The theory of conflict pluralism holds that a pragmatic balance is achieved through the interplay of different platforms and positions, with a reasonable and broadly acceptable consensus being reached by way of public dialogue and exchange. That seems to work when societies are broadly egalitarian and economies are stable and expanding. Those conditions increasingly do not apply, leaving groups carrying a social war into the political arena. The possibilities for a reasonable political compromise are diminished in these circumstances. The way forward is a metaphysical reconstruction that puts individuals back in touch with transcendent standards which are our common heritage, the foundation of our common moral reason.
I shall be writing on the apologists and supporters of an iniquitous status quo and its relations and practices, and, having made the necessary qualifications above, I’ll not mince words. I have had dealings with such people on climate change, and learned the limits of dialogue and debate in conditions of trench warfare. Instead of a commitment to truth-seeking in a condition of mutual learning – the liberal ideal by which a workable and acceptable truth emerges in the pluralism of values and competing positions in the moral and political marketplace – there is an aggressive defence of entrenched position and assaults on rival positions, without a common standard by which to ensure the consistency of terms employed. Most of all I learned how the absence of common standards and a shared language is debilitating in politics, enabling those defending the status quo to block arguments and movements for change. On climate change I stopped engaging a long time ago. I called these people ‘NONO’s’ on account of the way that they set out to negate, obscure, nullify, and obstruct in ‘debate.’ They are not interested in ‘debate,’ but in turning liberal principles against those who advance liberal causes. But in that, they are the mirror image of those who also refuse debate, on account of the possession of non-negotiable truths purportedly backed by 'the science.' The attempt to dictate truth to politics has bred a counter-reaction in its own image. The result is an impasse. In a quote attributed to Hegel, the biggest struggles in history are not between right and wrong, but between right and right. In this instance, this struggle is one between wrong and wrong. Or, more precisely, one side is right on the means and wrong on the ends, and the other side is right on the ends and wrong on the means. Fail to connect, communicate, and coordinate, and civilisation will fall.
In my work I have engaged in a sustained a critique of liberalism and the liberal ontology that separates two sides of essential human nature, individuality and sociality, so as to give us false antitheses of the discrete individual free to contract in and out of society on the one hand and a commonality and common good represented by government and law on the other hand. I have also criticized libertarianism and the libertarian conception of freedom. Here is a short presentation:
But these are very much philosophical concerns that over-intellectualize the issue. The libertarianism is merely a cover for some, an attempt to couch the basest of wants and desires in principled form. The same people who have the most to say about government as an infringement of individual liberty can now be heard defending the police and defending Trump’s call for the military to be used against civilians. They are apologists for police violence against people peacefully protesting police violence. I have no doubt they will be able to square it all with their blessed constitution – they somehow are always able to do that. That makes my point – whilst they claim adherence to transcendent principles, they bend those principles to fit their particular wants and desires. In other words, these people are not liberals or libertarians or conservatives, since this would be to dignify their position with a principled and reasoned philosophical commitment it lacks. Insofar as they recognize principles, they do so as rationalizations rather than reasoned positions, using them as tools and weapons to check and undermine opponents.
On peaceful protests, I'll make my position clear. Looting, desecration of public monuments, and attacks on police are reprehensible and should be stopped. There is a fetish of protest and demonstration taking the place of serious political commitment and organisation. That movement mobilized people against something; the challenge is to engage in constructive endeavour that is for something.
On NONO's, there is not only the one side not negotiating - all sides in this terrain are dictating their truths. Science is not politics, and the attempt to speak the climate truth in politics has been crude and clumsy, felt to be dictatorial, and bred resistance. Here, I fully see why my attempts to spread the climate message have met with indifference. There is a pig in the political poke being sold here, and people are leery of buying.
That said ...
On ‘debate,’ basically, don’t do it. These characters insist on ‘debate’ to provide them with a platform to negate, poison, and divide.
They deliberately incite anger and provoke division and then feed off the consequences. It is a strategy which quite deliberately aims at breaking up the unity that may be building around certain progressive causes. They know that unity is strength and power, and so they set out to pour acid on it. Once more, Dante’s Inferno is characterized by division and disconnection. This is the infernal anti-politics of Hell.
We are in the realm of what Dante characterized as a diabolic inversion and perversion, and the roots of that distortion run deep. Trump and his supporters are not the origins of that distortion, they merely make it so public that it can no longer be ignored. There is a brutal, naked, ugly honesty to Trump to the extent that he is revealing the social and political terrain to reduce to power, competition, and resources. That’s the image of the Hobbesian society, and those with a degree of comfort within prevailing society don’t like the truth to be made so clear and so undeniable. They would prefer a ‘moderate’ criticism that lets them and their political representatives tinker away on the surface.
The lesson to be learned here is that the substantive grounds of those advancing emancipatory causes are deficient, even non-existent, hence all involved are effectively charged with 'making up' their own truth. The political right have learned to take the weapons of the liberal left on cultural relativism and social construction and turn them against their authors. That they have done so to such destructive and negative effect is the most telling thing of all. It reveals that the emancipatory ends of the left are lacking the appropriate and effective means for their successful prosecution. The right are striking hard and effectively at the soft ethical underbelly of the left, feigning a belief in transcendent standards whilst practising an overt sophist politics based on nothing other than an aggressive defence of iniquities entrenched in the status quo. Until the left are able to ground emancipatory principles and causes in transcendent standards and buttress those commitments with supportive networks in communities of character and practice, then this sophist self-cancellation will continue, as will the iniquitous status quo it preserves.
In fine, these conservative apologists for the status quo are not principled conservatives, any more than they are principled classical liberals or libertarians or however else they choose to designate themselves. The political philosophy is a rationalization which dignifies a fundamentally undignified position. I am interested here in the way that such people intervene in politics to distort and divide, sterilising principles, negating truth, and generally debilitating the public realm, with the singular intention of entrenching and extending privilege. They have learned to take the language and values of progressive causes and to turn them against their realization and practice.
As I stated above, my concern here is not to call such people ‘bad’ but to make clear the extent to which, on a sophist terrain, terms such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are interchangeable according to positions and perspectives. In the absence of transcendent standards attached to distinct practices, people are basically choosing sides arbitrarily.
In a liberal order in which the good is the subjective choice and preference of individuals, my insistence on transcendent standards of justice has been taken to be conservative, even reactionary. I have been abused as ‘an elitist Catholic bigot’ and ‘fundamentalist Christian elitist’ for making the argument.
I make no secret of the religious roots of the argument I present. At the same time, I have been concerned to show why the political left requires transcendent standards to make good its emancipatory commitments. The idea that ethics is merely a series of value judgements, a non-rational realm of irreducible subjective preference and opinion, is politically debilitating, and for the left far more than for the right. The right already in large part have the social order they want, and are merely out to preserve it from those advancing alternate causes and platforms. The Left have a much more difficult task in politics, having to advance principles and incite practices that bring about the transformation of the prevailing social order. Marxist Terry Eagleton writes well on the contemporary demoralisation of the liberal order:
Politics was the technical business of public administration, whereas morality was a private affair. Politics belonged to the boardroom, and morality to the bedroom. This led to a lot of immoral boardrooms and politically oppressive bedrooms. Because politics had been redefined as purely calculative and pragmatic, it was now almost the opposite of the ethical…
The political left, however, cannot define the political in this purely technical way, since its brand of emancipatory politics inescapably involves questions of value. The problem for some traditional leftist thought was that the more you tried to firm up your political agenda, making it a scientific, materialist affair rather than an idle Utopian dream, the more you threatened to discredit the very values it aimed to realize. It seemed impossible to establish, say, the idea of justice on a scientific basis; so what exactly did you denounce capitalism, slavery or sexism in the name of? You cannot describe someone as oppressed unless you have some dim notion of what not being oppressed might look like, and why being oppressed is a bad idea in the first place. And this involves normative judgements, which then makes politics look uncomfortably like ethics.
Eagleton 2003 After Theory ch 6
That’s ‘uncomfortable’ for that part of the liberal left – which is still the dominant part – that sees ethics as no more than subjective choices and preferences, each individual choosing the good as he or she sees fit. Each individual has his or her own truth on this terrain. The problem with that position is that we lose the sense of moral truth and moral knowledge, lose the practices that body forth such truth and knowledge, and lose grounding that gives substance to emancipatory claims and principles. In calling for justice, people are invoking transcendent standards, whether they realize it or not. Here’s the rub – those standards are not a matter of personal choice, something that individuals are free to choose or reject at will – they are binding upon each and all and serve as a standard to which each must learn to conform his or her will. That’s the part that many demanding justice may well baulk at.
The extent to which liberal left causes and principles being appropriated and inverted is not a new problem is made clear by this passage from The May Day Manifesto of 1968:
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
The passage has all the hallmarks of Raymond Williams. The problem, in fine, goes far deeper than Trump. Trump and his politics have merely rendered explicit what is implicit in the sophist terrain in which the priorities of money and power prevail over people and their communities. ‘It is a strange paradox,’ write the authors of The May Day Manifesto, ‘which must be faced and understood.’ Unfortunately, too few proved willing and able to confront the paradox at source, let alone understand it and act on it. The radicals lost then, as they are losing now, and the reasons for that are many, not least the predilection to mask complicity by way of a ‘moderation’ that defaults to the status quo.
The point I am concerned to establish here is that if the left is serious about making its emancipatory commitments practically effective, then it needs to ground its principles substantively in an ontology of the good. Principles such as ‘justice,’ ‘equality,’ and ‘freedom,’ as well as commitments to truth, beg, and ought to receive, an ontology of the good, something more than social construction, cultural creation, and political convention. Otherwise we are merely involved in a power struggle, with no option but to submit to the greater power. We may think ourselves powerful enough to prevail, but short of that successful conclusion there is nothing but an endless resistance. That is the politics of a permanent protest that never ends, for the reason it is incapable of touching the institutional and structural roots of the injustices it fights, since it doesn’t get to the ethical and ontological roots of the institutional level. All we have is an endless circulation of power/resistance. In all of this it is significant that the left do still employ universal principles and slogans concerning justice, freedom, and equality that imply the existence of transcendent standards. When pushed for the grounds of these claims, adherents of these causes tend to argue that such principles are conventional, social constructions and political creations. The extent to which that position is weak and flabby has been demonstrated in stark terms by Trump.
I will therefore write on the theme of distortion, inversion, and negation in present politics, paying particular attention to the use of political ideals in order to negate their application and entrench their opposite in practice. I will also draw attention to the crude reductionism of the political language used, the systematic attempt to debase intellectual and moral language in order to enervate and incapacitate the public realm. Such hardball ‘anti-politics’ is designed to undermine collective purpose and endeavour in order to entrench and extend prevailing iniquities. The results are toxic and destructive, effectively denying a nation and the people in it the capacity to govern itself well.
Such people turn liberalism, egalitarianism, and democracy against their true meanings in order to defend their opposite in practice. Such people are toxic; they deliberately set out to poison and sterilize. But rather than join in the name-calling, it is more profitable to understand why such name-calling merely confirms the sophist politics we need to uproot. This name-calling is the game which the sophists want us to play, dissolving truth and justice and transcendent standards into a quagmire in which issues will be without resolution at the level of principle. In this world, it is power that decides where truth and justice lie, and all you will be able to do is resist. Resistance sounds liberatory, especially if we can throw a few quotes from Foucault in. The problem with such a view is not that it is radical, but that it isn’t radical enough – lacking substantive grounding for its emancipatory claims, it cannot embed and institutionalize power.
I made reference above to peerless poet philosopher Dante Alighieri. Dante would have understood the predicament we find ourselves in perfectly. Dante’s Inferno is a place of disconnection and demoralisation, a place where the damned are cut off from the transcendent source of hope, love, truth and belonging. Individuals are isolated and alone, victims of an infernal anti-politics that takes transcendent standards and distorts them in a diabolic inversion and perversion. That diabolic anti-politics separates those things that are properly joined together – human beings to each other in society, and that society to God’s plan of justice.
William Blake condemned Dante as an ‘atheist’ on account of his absorption in the all-too worldly affairs of politics. Such a view is too radical a split between flesh and spirit, the temporal and the spiritual. Dante adhered to an incarnate spirituality in which the quality of earthly existence mattered a great deal with respect to the soul. Dante was acutely aware of the extent to which a diabolical anti-politics contradicted a true politics as a creative and healthy human self-actualization. Dante understood well the extent to which the things of this world can come between people and tear the relations between them apart. That disconnection between individuals, and their false attachment to ‘things,’ is an infernal politics that brings about Hell on Earth. Dante took politics seriously for reasons of soulcare.
‘It is hard to believe,’ Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote of her husband Osip Mandelstam’s persecution and death, ‘that someone can be taken away from you and simply be destroyed.’ Osip Mandelstam’s assessment of the times was even starker: ‘The aim was to destroy not only people, but the intellect itself.’
My contention is that the loss of transcendent standards has destroyed principles and language and politics and as a result people’s health, happiness, life, and liberty.
In the famous stand-off between Plato and the sophist Thrasymachus, Thrasymachus stated bluntly that justice is the interests of the strongest. There is no substantive truth and justice in the sophist world, principles are merely rationalisations and counters in power games. Words, Thomas Hobbes wrote, are the counters of fools. Words are serviceable to the end of advancing interests and extending power, but do not contain any inherent principle or standard with which will and desire must be educated in order to accord.
That’s an ethics for those who think their money and power give them the right to determine truth and justice. Instead of conforming desire and will to a trans-subjective standard, such people bend such standards to their desire and will, and use money and power to that end. In this respect it is telling that Donald Trump is currently embroiled in a war of words with the US National Football League over whether players should be allowed to ‘take the knee’ during the American national anthem in protest against racism. In a tweet, Trump declared ‘We should be standing up straight and tall, ideally with a salute, or a hand on heart. There are other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag – NO KNEELING!’
The first thing I noticed in the churches when I visited the US was the absence of kneeling benches. As a Catholic, I take kneeling in prayer and contrition to be normal. Confession, too. No matter how great we may think we are – and friends and relatives will confirm I have a slight tendency to exaggerate my brilliance – we always fall short and need to remind ourselves of this by way of confessing our sins of omission as well as commission. To demand ‘NO KNEELING’ in capital letters and exclamation marks does not suggest the power of humility which is true Christian expression. One of the most beautiful explanations as to why Christians kneel in prayer is given by St. Thomas Aquinas in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians:
Humility makes a prayer worthy of being heard: “He hath had regard to the prayer of the humble: and he hath not despised their petition” (Ps. 101:18). And, “The prayer of him that humbleth himself shall pierce the clouds: and till it come nigh he will not be comforted.” (Ecclus. 35:21).
Therefore, he immediately starts his prayer in humility, saying: “For this cause,” that you fail not in the faith, “I bow my knees to the Father.”
This is a symbol of humility for two reasons. First, a man belittles himself, in a certain way, when he genuflects, and he subjects himself to the one he genuflects before. In such a way he recognizes his own weakness and insignificance. Secondly, physical strength is present in the knees; in bending them a man confesses openly to his lack of strength.
Thus external, physical symbols are shown to God for the purpose of renewing and spiritually training the inner soul. This is expressed in the prayer of Manasse: “I bend the knee of my heart.” “For every knee shall be bowed to me: and every tongue shall swear” (Is. 45:24).
These customs grow organically within the Church so long as we allow the fundamental principle to breathe freely: ‘At the Name of Jesus, every knee shall bend…’
Justice is all about allowing people to breathe freely, each and all people. The knee should be bent in a humility, not in power, to raise all, not to oppress some.
Those are not sentiments that make any sense in a sophist world where the individual is engaged in an endless competition with other individuals as rivals for scarce resources. That is a world in which power is preserved only by being constantly expanded. One accumulates or is accumulated. A Christian ethic teaches sacrifice and service to others and ends that lie outside of the self. The Social Darwinist menace that stalks sophism would identify such an ethic as a weakness on the part of its adherents, marking them out as targets for exploitation.
In these days of myriad and converging crises, we are hearing people use the word 'disaster' more and more. The word 'disaster' derives from the Latin 'dis-', meaning ‘away,’ ‘without,’ and ‘astro,’ meaning ‘star.’ Hence ‘disaster’ means to be ‘without a star.’ Dante ends every canto of the Comedy with a return to the sight of the stars. They denote the transcendent standards of justice which permeate the universe. The final verse of the Paradiso reveals the loving force behind all things, making the world go round:
'like a wheel in perfect balance turning,
I felt my will and my desire turned
by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.'
Paradiso 33: 142-146
Should we ever come to lose that Love, the origin and end of all hope, then we really would be heading for disaster. We are seeing what happens when love, in the forms of transcendent standards of justice enthusing, enfolding, and binding upon all, leaves the world. That is where we are now, a world that is replacing solidarity, mutual aid, care and compassion with egoism, instrumental relations, monetary ties, and physical force.
Dante forces us to face the question, how many of those acting in a self-interested way to the detriment of the common good, do so knowingly? He forces us to ask whether there are self-interested parties who are so committed to prevailing social and economic arrangements that so benefit them in the immediate and short-term that, whatever the social and ecological cost as a whole, they actively and knowingly deny the existence of injustices attendant upon them?
I would say the answer to this question is ‘yes,’ but would go further than personalities and personal will and choice to emphasize that such is the sophist world of competing social interests, groups and classes we live in. In such a world there are no transcendent standards, only personal preferences, interests, and claims held against others, and no grounds for service and sacrifice to anything greater than the ego.
All the same, Dante reserves the deepest places in Hell for those who do evil knowingly for reasons of personal advantage. Indeed, the deeper one descends into Dante’s Inferno, the smarter the sinners’ become. The weak and the incontinent can be found in the upper reaches of Hell, people who succumb to temptation and lack sufficient fortitude to resist pleasures of the flesh. Dante’s greatest scorn is reserved for the hardball doers of evil, those who knowingly abuse the gift of free will and sin wittingly, and who always refuse to accept responsibility for the deleterious consequences of their actions, blaming their victims instead. That’s the world we are in, a system in which free-riders have succeeded in institutionalising and embedding their power. They may be Dante’s damned in the afterlife, but in this life they damn us all to a social and ecological Hell, and do so with impunity. They call it ‘freedom.’ And they really don’t care.
In the eighth circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, we are confronted with the sin of fraud. The fraudulent are thieves who deprive other people of their rightful share of earthly goods. Fortuna, for Dante, is something we all have to deal with in life, how we cope with the things that befall us in everyday living. The fraudulent are those who use their intellect to cheat fortune and are therefore ministers of ill fortune to others. As we descend further into Hell, we meet the counsellors of fraud. These are the sowers of discord and the falsifiers of truth. These people are as familiar in the contemporary world as they were in Dante’s world. These are the people who deny truth and turn it into its opposite for their own gain. Their punishment is to suffer in the valley of the diseased for all the disease they have spread in society.
Yes! Falsifiers of truth! Rather than lament that we live in a ‘post-truth’ society, Dante doubled-down on truth and presented the case for transcendent standards of justice with a rigour and accuracy that could not be overlooked.
I have been watching the protests against the murder of George Floyd by police in the US. How predictable that those seeking to rationalize and preserve an iniquitous status quo should repeat ‘all lives matter’ in order to counter, check, and negate the claim that ‘black lives matter.’
We know that ‘all lives matter.’ And we know that these people know fine well that we know ‘all lives matter,’ given their tendency to abuse those seeking to secure justice for all people as ‘social justice warriors’ engaging in ‘virtue signalling.’ To them I say it is about time that they themselves started to practice the justice and the virtue implied in the claim that ‘all lives matter,’ and come and join those seeking to advance justice in the world, rather than engaging in an apologetics that practises the very opposite. It would be best not to hold our breath, though, because commitment and adherence to principle is not what a sophist anti-politics is about. All that they are doing with the slogan ‘all lives matter’ is countering, checking, and negating those who are seeking redress for those who suffering from a particular injustice.
(I have no doubt that the issue is far more complicated than an assertion of abstract principle, involving quality of relationships, modes of conduct, and the character-forming discipline of family, work, civic duty, commitment to place. The social and cultural conditions of these things, both in terms of personality and public community, connecting rights and duties, needs to be established and not skirted. The statement of abstract principle and avoidance of practical implications happens on all sides of this 'debate.' I have to leave that question here, since I want to retain my specific focus).
We can make short work of this statement ‘all lives matter’ considered merely as a trite statement of truth. The statement is a common right-wing refrain that crops up only when the Black Lives Matter movement threatens to make serious inroads into iniquitous power. When BLM dies down, those most vocal in asserting ‘all lives matter’ go back to abusing those engaging in a politics of the human betterment as ‘social justice warriors,’ sneering at their ‘virtue signalling.’ True, there is a lot of hypocrisy in the world, hence my point above debating the relative merits of Trump's brutal honesty and moderates' slick rationalizations. When it comes to advancing justice for all, the silence is deafening. The same with respect to the practice of the moderates. It’s as if they believe that we are already living in the perfectly just and egalitarian society ..
The statement ‘black lives matter’ does not entail a denial that ‘all lives matter,’ and yet that is the explicit – and utterly illicit - inference drawn by those who issue the counter statement. In part – but only in part – the issue here arises from the confusion of universals and particulars. Whilst all human life is worthy of respect, particular human beings have particular identities in determinate circumstances. There is no ‘all humankind’ at the social level, just particular individuals who are part of specific groups. ‘Mattering’ in this respect entails a reference to social identity. The problem is that human beings exist within often asymmetrical relations of power, with differentials in resources meaning that some groups are favoured over others, and some groups suffer from disadvantages and disproportionate risk. To achieve and ensure justice and equality in such conditions requires that we go beyond a statement of abstract principle – the universal ethic – but intervene to apply that ethic in concrete particulars. The problem here is that some groups – those who have embedded and institutionalized their advantage are attempting to give expression to the normative principle as a descriptive statement, arguing as though transcendent standards of justice have been actualized and that, therefore, attempts to secure change are illegitimate. They are guilty of conflating the normative and the descriptive in the attempt to establish what may be called false fixities, removing social arrangements from public challenge, controversy, and change. Those who do this are not merely ideologues and hypocrites, they are desolators and desecrators. Not only do they act to deny people their legitimate rights and ends as human beings, effectively denying their essential humanity, they take transcendent standards of justice and weaponize them as tools in the service of political ideology. Such people are despicable wretches who are guilty of a double desecration, debasing ethical standards and violating sacred truth.
The biggest irony is that it is the people who make the statement ‘all lives matter’ who tend to be the only ones who don’t agree with such universalism and egalitarianism. If you don’t believe me, then just monitor them over time, check their past political statements, and you will see little but a fear and loathing expressed towards others – intellectuals, elites, humanists, experts, socialists, communists, trade unionists, Hispanics, Muslims, Scandinavians, Germans, French, Chinese, feminists, secularists, Democrats (Dim-o-crats), libtards, Sanders, Pelosi, anyone with a brain cell and conscience basically.
But the rest of us understand fine well that all lives matter. We understand, too, that to say ‘black lives matter’ doesn’t imply that white lives don’t matter. It reveals something of the zero-sum mentality in operation here that the attempt to achieve justice for black people somehow implies threatens justice for white people. There is no antithesis here. Only those who break up the world and separate people from one another can see a gain for someone as a loss to another. But I will make this point here: On this notion of zero-sum, a point worth making about pushes for equality is that there tends to be an assumption of stability when it comes to social goods, with the promotion of the just cause of the oppressed, marginalized, and excluded being presented merely as an attempt to secure standards which others enjoy. That, of course, is what justice entails. The assumption that the goods of others are secure in their attainment, meaning that our only task is to equalize upwards, is, however, complacent. In a competitive, class divided, market society social relations are power relations. That observation doesn’t constitute a case against justice, of course, but it does indicate why pressing the case for justice cannot but involve class struggle in some form. And those who have obtained a certain position within the social order will feel threatened and will fight back. This may look like the defence of privilege, and it may well be. At the same time, such people see the truth that those asserting principle in the abstract don’t see, and that social goods and positions are not secure for all time and cannot be taken for granted and are always a matter of class struggle in a class society. In other words, if you want justice for all, and you want all on board in establishing this justice, you need to transcend class relations. Otherwise, politics will continue as a zero-sum game in which some will feel advances for others to be losses for them, and will resist.
But there is another problem. The social and institutional order is organized around whiteness as the default position. Here is where there is a disparity of treatment, the problem that stands in need of correction. The statement ‘all lives matter’ is merely code for saying white lives matter more than black lives, a disproportion that is already established in prevailing arrangements. In this context, the apparently egalitarian statement ‘All Lives Matter’ is concerned to preserve and consolidate that unequal arrangement. The statement that every life is valuable and worthy of respect is the transcendent principle, the standard of evaluation by which we judge and order society. When we see the disparities of treatment in society we see the violation of the principle and intervene to restore order. The universal statement, therefore, cannot but have particular application in determinate circumstances. Those who call a halt here are engaged in a plain apologetics in which abstract statement takes the place of practical application. You may as well tell people crying out for justice not to complain, you will get your reward in Heaven. It’s as crude as that.
It’s crude and it’s offensive in its repetition. Because it is hardball politics, no more, no less. The people who say ‘All Lives Matter’ don’t believe it. Black Lives Matter are in agreement with the universal, they just want black people to take their legitimate place in that ‘all.’ When they try to do so, they are countered with an implicit charge of racism, as if seeking a black privilege over white people. The statement is not intended to advance any principle, of course, merely to counter and diminish the struggle against oppression and discrimination.
If you dropped a bag of cement on your foot and broke your big toe, you would go to the hospital and complain about the pain in your big toe and ask for treatment. By that focus, you would mean no disrespect to your other toes, even less to your other extremities. Should the doctor tell you to stop making so much noise and that all body parts matter, you would probably consider him or her to have missed the point at issue and seek another opinion.
It is the plainest attempt to divert attention away from the problem. You may be at an event trying to raise awareness about a specific illness. Imagine the event being hijacked by people who start to shout that all illnesses matter. Who denies that? In acting upon the statement that 'all illnesses matter,' we cannot but get into the specifics of these illnesses in the particular. Much as my other body parts matter, my broken toe matters a great deal and is causing me pain, making it impossible for me to walk, work, and live. That is if we are serious about tackling problems. Acting on abstract principles can only take practical form in concrete particulars. To set the universal and the particular in antithetical relation is to use abstract statement as an alternative to its practical application. It effectively denies the principle by rendering it no more than an ideological support of the prevailing social order.
To state ‘all lives matter’ in response to ‘black lives matter’ is not merely offensive, nor even merely racist. As bad as both of these things are, the ideological use of transcendent principles is the ultimate abomination because in the end it reduces those standards to politics, dissolving the universal into the particulars and thereby denies all of us of the standards of justice we require for a truly human and fulfilled existence. In turning the transcendent toxic, all human relations come to be poisoned. Without transcendent standards we are plunged into a sophist world in which might is right. And, of course, that is precisely what these characters want – a world in which their privilege is secured by their power. Behind the statement ‘all lives matter’ lies the implication that the normative ideal stated in the abstract is also a descriptive reality. The view is that we already exist in a perfectly just and egalitarian society and hence that intervention and alteration is illegitimate. It is a plain attempt to delegitimate the campaign for justice and equality in an unjust and inegalitarian society. We should just be clear that there is something more going on here than committing an error of logic by conflating the normative and the descriptive. The people who do this don’t give a damn about logic. This is hardball politics and these people will use anything, from liberal principles to God, to secure their ends. They believe in nothing but getting what they want.
Martin Luther King jr. stated the point concisely when he said that an ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ The freedom of each is conditional upon and co-existent with the freedom of all. All lives can’t matter until black lives matter, the same with respect to all suffering from discrimination, disproportionate risk, and oppression.
But, of course, we know fine well that they don’t give a damn about ‘all lives’ at all, but are merely asserting an empty universal to deny its application in a concrete particular. The moral emptiness is evident in the extent to which they advance this claim to defend a social fabric utterly poisoned by inequality and injustice. The impact of Covid-19 has exposed the divisions of prevailing society clearly, showing the extent to which all lives do not matter equally at all. But the same people have been busy downplaying, even denying, the threat of the virus and demanding liberty against lockdown. I wouldn’t look for consistency at the level of principle, though – the only consistency here is the practice of privilege and power. Words and principles are merely serviceable tools, and we waste our energies intellectualizing this flagrant anti-politics.
I saw some young black guy on the Black Lives Matter protests who, when asked what it was that he wanted, replied:
‘Justice.
Simple right and wrong.’
That is, quite simply, it. Dante spelt it out in lights in the Heaven of Jupiter in the Paradiso:
DILIGITE JUSTITIAM QUIIUDICATIS TEKRAM
Love Justice Ye Who Judge the Earth
That demand for justice in conditions that deny justice imply the existence of a transcendent standard by which to evaluate, criticize, and order temporal arrangements. That is precisely why transcendent standards are required to buttress and further emancipatory claims.
Stated clearly, either there are transcendent standards of justice, which involve a substantive conception of the good, or there are not. If there are, then we are enjoined to conform our subjective will in accordance with trans-subjective standards beyond personal will, choice, and preference; if there aren’t, then an endless power/resistance in which we choose our sides according to our interests is all that there is. Either we accept the existence of transcendent standards, or we have to accept a sophist politics of permanent resistance/power, with ethics merely a rationalization of competing platforms in the endless power play. There is no third alternative to these positions. In other words, in engaging in resistance to power we may think we are advancing emancipatory claims and causes, but without a recognition of transcendent standards, attached to the modes of conduct and communities of practice devoted to their attainment, we are still playing a sophist power game. The cause we are advancing may prevail, it may not. That depends on power. The question as to why our cause ought to prevail, and why we are enjoined to persist until it does prevail, is a matter of principle.
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any stranger, President Trump posted Tuesday on Twitter that he had “done more for the black community than any president since Abraham Lincoln.”
I’d like to follow that claim up by making a comparison between Trump and Lincoln.
In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln called for a peace based on justice:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
These words express a commitment to achieve and cherish a lasting peace among ourselves and with the world. Justice is the only basis for an enduring peace. The pernicious brand of anti-politics practised by Trump and his supporters/apologists takes the principles these words affirm and reverse them:
With malice toward all; with charity for none, with firmness in the wrong, as the deified Randian ‘I’ gives us to see the right as we see fit, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to feed on the nation's wounds; to care for him who can care for himself, and for the weak not at all, to do all which may achieve and cherish a unjust, and a lasting pacification, for the continued benefit of ourselves alone, prevailing over all others, within and without the nation.
Heaven forfend that that could become Trump’s Second Inaugural Address. It certainly expresses his pernicious brand of anti-politics. Trump’s politics is a diabolic inversion that is designed to separate people and entrench and extend division. (Not that I think that Biden and Democrat mediocrity is an alternative, because I don't, it is part of the problem, with Trump as the reaction, albeit it one foot in the right-wing mythology of private business 'good' government 'bad.') But, to make a point I have made repeatedly, Trump is not the cause of the problem, he is the most public manifestation of it. The fact that Trump is not a slick political operator has served to make the sophism of contemporary politics more obvious. His predecessors and rivals are more slick and sophisticated in using the right words to make it appear as though they are respecting principles and values. Their practice reveals their hypocrisy. Until people are prepared to see that, they will keep fighting the wrong targets, attacking only surface manifestations instead of root causes.
The closing lines of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue are probably over-familiar now, having been quoted so often, but until the message sinks it, his words bear repetition:
if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different —St. Benedict.
MacIntyre 1981: ch 18
We are waiting for the forms of the common life that enable us to incarnate transcendent standards in our social practices. The problems predate Donald Trump. His crudity of action and expression have blown the reasonable cover of the barbarians. The problem is deeper than Trump. To state it simply, we have a choice to make between the affirmation of transcendent standards, and the modes of conduct and character that go with them, or conventionalism and sophism. Either transcendent standards exist or they do not. If they do not, we can resist in the name of emancipatory principles all we like, but sooner or later we will be forced to submit to power. Insofar as the present animus is resistance to Trump, without the means to make claims to substantive conceptions of justice good, we are just playing the same game. We may win, we may not – power decides that. Whichever side prevails, it is always power that prevails, never principle. Principle is merely a rationalization by which contending parties seek to persuade the world that their particular interest is the interest of all. That is not true principle but principle as an ideological project.
In reading great political texts we are inspired and elevated. The great texts don’t just deliver meaning and purpose, they give expression to our often inchoate longings and secret desires; they encourage us to aspire to be better and do better by giving us the hope that a better world is possible, and that the human betterment is something tangible and real, not an idle dream. In doing this, the great political texts expand the horizons of the possible and foster the moral imagination and courage people require to set course for a better world than the one that prevails at the moment. The hard facts of that prevailing reality tell us that we are beaten, and it is that defeated condition which those with a stake in the status quo seek to reinforce. They set out to diminish the public imagination and pour acid on the transcendent qualities of all principles that point us to a world beyond the present and inspire us to go in search of. Losing the future as anything more than the present enlarged, we end up disillusioned, demoralized, and demotivated in recognition of the pointlessness of embarking on what we are told is a destinationless journey. We are where we are, in a beaten state. Such a civilization is unsustainable in the long run, but those practising the politics of diabolic separation and inversion care for nothing beyond their immediate self-interest. Nothing exists beyond the immediacy of the ego, no others in society, no future, no God, no Heaven, nothing. This is a world in which solipsism holds all the trump cards, and any truth we hold is negated by the truth of another. There is little point in exchange. We swing between ice and fire, indifference and anger. At least anger implies some hope of redress, some possibility of breaking through to a common recognition.
The hard facts of prevailing society and its iniquitous arrangements indicate the extent to which a crude ‘realism’ is on the side of defenders of injustice, underlining the point that an emancipatory politics requires a transcendent principle that affirms a truer and greater reality than the conventional standards of time and place.
Reason often has told man he was defeated: why should the prisoner, the slave, the corrupted and the deformed and the ailing all go on with so few exceptions to their dismal end?
Mumford 1952: 30-31
Reduced to hard basics, ‘realism’ undermines hope at its source. Against this, great political texts nurture hope, deliver instruction, strengthen determination, and offer direction. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail affirms the principle of justice in conditions of injustice. He is able to do this precisely because he affirms the transcendent source of hope, the origin and end of all things, to which all must conform their will:
‘I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.
‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights.
That’s an explicit commitment to transcendent standards of justice as against the conventional view which sees rights as conferred by the state (and withdrawn just as easily). King makes another interesting point with respect to people who style themselves as ‘moderate.’
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
Openly racist people still exist. But many are covertly racist, adopting a ‘moderation’ along the lines King outlines above, concealing their prejudice behind an insistence on ‘order,’ claiming that the opportunities for redress of iniquity exist within present arrangements to effectively deny the legitimacy of any grievance being claimed. It’s long standing. ‘Black Lives Matter’ was formed not in response to Donald Trump, but to the shootings of black people by police under Barack Obama. As the campaign started, it was met with the response ‘all lives matter,’ and blatant apologetics with respect to police actions. This was and remains a contrived moderation, with a veneer so thin as to be scarcely credible.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
That view presumes that the ‘moderate’ proclaiming the universal principle ‘all lives matter’ actually believes in that universalism, and is seeing an order that embodies justice for each and all. They understand precisely that the realization of justice is a threat to a social order which advantages them, and hence enter into politics with the explicit purpose of constructing these dams that block the flow of social emancipation.
‘Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream."
‘Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment.
King continues to affirm the transcendent standards of justice driving the emancipatory cause. At the same time, he makes it abundantly clear that this transcendence is not an other-worldly irrelevance without political implication, quite the contrary:
‘In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.
The Bible affirms an incarnate spirituality, and the sharp distinction some uphold between the temporal and the spiritual is maintained quite consciously to disable and debilitate the politics of social justice. Such people repeat Jesus’ words ‘my kingdom is not of this world’ simply to preserve existing, and remediable, iniquities. In another example of diabolic inversion, they turn Jesus’ words against the spirit of his teaching. And behind this overt expression of anti-politics lies a definite political purpose. The same people who peddle this anti-political line can at the same time be found backing Trump to the hilt on account of his determination to fight against secularising liberal forces. They will quite openly criticise those who claim that politics and religion is a bad mix leading to bad politics and bad religion by stressing the importance of resisting attempts to secularize the public sphere and opposing those whom they consider to advance an anti-religious agenda. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of that issue – and I do have a problem with the notion of a neutral public sphere, neutrality is just another word for liberalism – that is politics, and evidence of a conscious and determined political platform that makes a nonsense of their repetition of ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’
What needs to be noted here is not merely the hypocrisy, but the cynicism and the way that it denies and destroys consistency at the level of language and principle. The only consistency is a determination that their will and their interests prevail over others. In their commitment to that cause of themselves and their own, they will use anything and anyone – God, Jesus, religion, and the Bible – to secure their ends. That’s the greed that will consume the world, just as it consumes the very standards it claims to uphold. It dissolves justice into itself, cannibalizes it. Instead of conforming the will and desire to trans-subjective standards of justice, justice is made a function of personal preference and interest. That defines sophism in a nutshell.
St. Thomas Aquinas defines law as ‘an ordinance of reason for the common good of a [complete] community, promulgated by the person or body responsible for looking after that community.’ (ST I-II q. 90 a. 4). The prevailing laws do not always meet that definition, but instead serve as surrogates for private interest. There is a standard which allows us to hold law to account. Against sophism, (and conventionalism, constructivism, and relativism), King affirms the transcendent standards of natural law:
‘One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.
When King distinguishes between laws which uplift the human personality and the laws which degrade the human personality he uses two words which are instructive with respect to political language and discourse. Great political texts and speeches seek to uplift the human personality, as against degrading it.
We come, then, to Trump and the political engagement he has fostered. The first thing that strikes you with the political language of Trump and his supporters is its blunt, reductive, divisive quality – simple words and dualisms, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as in ‘like’ and ‘dislike.’ The quite deliberate intent to degrade and devalue the currency of language is motivated by the concern to destroy standards of account and evaluation. Once there are no standards of truth and justice, then there is no accountability, and no possibility of criticism. Power is without rational constraint and put beyond public challenge and controversy. Trump’s press briefings are vehicles for debasing common standards, targeting language in the first instance. People who diligently fact-check Trump make plain the extent to which Trump reverses the truth. The problem may be much worse than this. The criticism that Trump inverts the truth at least implies the continued existence of standards of evaluation which make it possible to identify the truth. The problem goes much further than inversion to a downright perversion that destroys any notion of truth. When Trump openly makes the claim that ‘it’s a great day’ for George Floyd when he announces rising employment figures we are beyond inversion. These are claims so perverse that there is no way of countering them by reason and evidence. It’s a cacophony. Gibberish. The only parallel is with diabolic mockery of reason and sacred principle in Dante’s Inferno, discordant noise in the realm of the damned and the hopeless:
“Raphel mai amecche zabi almi,”
began to bellow that brute mouth, for which
no sweeter psalms would be appropriate.
Inf 31: 67-69
Nimrod the giant embodies moral and spiritual as well as physical disproportion, and his gibbering drivel reminds us that the healing and restorative qualities of communication and connection is eternally denied to the damned. In both intent and effect, the anti-politics of Trump degrades, first by degrading language and speech, and then degrading principle. It’s an anti-politics that works by reduction, gutting values and principles of the transcendent qualities that lead us beyond the present to a better future, severing connection by destroying the commonality of language. This is why Trump and his supporters/apologists do not actually debate, however much they make a big thing of the Left refusing to debate and banning free speech. They do not dialogue at all, in the sense of a mutual exchange. Instead, they encroach and attack, to provoke anger and cause division. In ‘debate’ they seek to ‘score’ points and ‘own’ opponents. There is no genuine truth seeking, no recognition of the legitimacy of alternative platforms – merely opponents to check and neutralize. It is ‘debate’ that proceeds by provocation and put-down to excite and hook supporters and keep opponents in a constant state of anger and protest. In criticising Trump relentlessly, you are actually playing his game and not your own. You can call Trump a moron, an idiot, a racist, and a fascist and such like, but by doing that you have confirmed his victory in removing political discourse to the furthest pole from truth and justice and reducing it to the level of abuse and counter-abuse. It’s a Dutch auction. Whatever abuse you hurl at Trump and his supporters, they can get a whole lost nastier. And as the exchange of oaths dissolves into an indistinguishable grunting, the very standards and principles by which to hold power to account and secure emancipation are lost. It’s a world reduced to naked power, the level at which sophists excel.
Trump doesn’t seek to elevate, he seeks to degrade. He follows the base prejudices and instincts of his supporters rather than seeks to give leadership. The same applies to his apologists at various levels of power and influence. Instead of leading his followers, Trump follows them, nurturing their resentments, exploiting their fears, and validating their prejudices. The mix of religion and politics is particularly toxic in this respect, because it introduces a theological dimension that is quite contrary to the spirit of politics. Politics is about disagreement and dissensus, allowing different voices to advance alternate platforms. Trump’s anti-politics demonizes contrary voices and turns political opponents into ‘enemies.’
And it is all based upon fear and hatred, feelings of powerlessness in face of a hostile world that people neither comprehend nor control. Hence the appeal of someone who makes a big thing of appearing to be in control. It’s an illusion, but one which builds upon the willingness of people in desperation seeing their world slip away to believe. When Trump boasts of his achievements and successes – all evidence to the contrary – his supporters feel vindicated.
Whatever transitory thrills this gives them for the moment, it’s a disaster for everyone else, just a confirmation of the moral and political debasement of sophism.
Which returns to my point that the problem goes further and deeper than Trump but lies in the fact that politics in the modern world is a sophism in which standards are considered conventional, mere social constructions and political creations. Politicians have continued to pay lip service to transcendent standards, and people have been happy with the appearance that our public servants are committed to adhering to truth and justice. It’s a show without substance. Trump has made the show explicit. It’s good that so many people are protesting, since it indicates that people are still committed to standards beyond power and ego, and think that public life should conform to those standards.
Trump is not responsible for the social divisions and injustices inciting protest. But he has exploited and intensified them, and is advancing a politics that is designed to entrench and extend them.
In his First Inaugural Address Lincoln proclaimed that ‘we are not enemies, but friends.’ The zero-sum politics that Trump practises divides the world into friends and enemies, winners and losers. In losing the public realm that unites each and all, we all lose. We lose the capacity to govern our common affairs in accordance with the standards of justice.
This brings me back to the fake universalism and transcendentalism of those who proclaim ‘all lives matter.’ The fact that this statement appears every time the Black Lives Matter movement starts to campaign so effectively as to raise the prospect of real change in society and its institutions. In his Birmingham Letter, Martin Luther King made a distinction between those who prefer a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace which is the presence of justice. The absence of tension in this respect would be a pacification of people within unjust relations. The statement ‘all lives matter’ is not a demand for a positive and enduring peace through justice for all people, but the statement of a valid principle in the abstract in order to prevent its realization in a particular instance. In other words, whilst the statement appears to entail a commitment to transcendent standards it is precisely the opposite – it is sophism reduced to cynicism, which has the effect of negating transcendent principle in practice by denying justice to those who require it. In fine, the statement ‘all lives matter’ is a cynical stratagem that seeks to undermine the efforts of those seeking justice and so bring about the very antithesis of what its adherents claim to support. To return to the passage from The May Day Manifesto with which I opened this piece, we are faced here with something alien and thwarting: an openly aggressive and cynical politics that takes universal standards and principles and inverts. I call it an anti-politics for the very reason that it contradicts the ancient conception of politics as the search for the best public life for human flourishing. Those practising this anti-politics express the universal ethic that ‘all lives matter’ not as a statement of principle on their part, committing to the positive and enduring peace which is the presence of justice for each and all, but to counter and check the attempts of some to achieve justice. This is a diabolic inversion of meaning and purpose in that it separates the each and all, spreads division, and feeds off the fear and hatred. It is openly cynical in affirming an egalitarianism in the abstract with the express intent of denying it in the real. The view that ‘all lives matter’ entails a commitment to the worth and dignity of all lives, something which sits very uneasily when coming from the mouths of virulent anti-socialists. The plain intention behind this statement is to use an egalitarian ethic to entrench and reinforce the inequality of prevailing social arrangements.
As I wrote above, the same people who so readily employ ‘all lives matter’ as a political counter to check demands for justice can also be found abusing what they call ‘social justice warriors.’ Their political concerns are so transparent as to be laughable. But, of course, they are not out to persuade or win philosophical debates, but to rationalize their bigotry and prejudice and check and counter the forces of emancipation.
The fact is that, whatever the principle of human equality states, we live in societies that are divided on any number of lines. People suffering from oppression are seeking redress, so as to make the principle ‘all lives matter’ a reality. When they do so they are checked by people
There is an idolatry of words as well as an idolatry of things. I am struck by how many of those who proclaim loudly that ‘all lives matter’ are big on how much they love Jesus and God, and how much they put Church before ‘government.’ (They are ‘libertarians’ in religion as they are in politics and economics, but more on this later). They pay lip service to the equality of all lives, and warn those who seek to practice what is preached that ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ No Jew of Jesus’ day would have failed to have understood that justice in this world to have been the concern of God – justice is the kingdom of God.
Erich Fromm writes well on this idolatry at the level of word and principle:
In view of the fact that the alienation of modern man is incompatible with monotheism, one might expect that ministers, priests and rabbis would form the spearhead of criticism of modern Capitalism. While it is true that from high Catholic quarters and from a number of less highly placed ministers and rabbis such criticism has been voiced, all churches belong essentially to the conservative forces in modern society and use religion to keep man going and satisfied with a profoundly irreligious system. The majority of them do not seem to recognize that this type of religion will eventually degenerate into overt idolatry, unless they begin to define and then to fight against modern idolatry, rather than to make pronouncements about God and thus to use His name in vain—in more than one sense.
Fromm 1976 ch 5
There is an idolatry of words. The extent to which people can go to Church and subscribe to words, beliefs, and ideas which they do not live up to in their practical lives and, what is more, seek to prevent others from living up to them, indicates the extent to which God can be killed by being made an idol, not an idol of stone but of words, phrases, dogma and doctrine empty of substance.
The impact of Covid-19 has exposed the inequalities at the heart of contemporary society. I shall leave aside the basic lack of empathy from certain sources with respect to the victims of coronavirus (I have covered this at length elsewhere). I shall simply note the Social Darwinist menace that stalks individualism/libertarianism in politics. Regrettably, it seems also to infect the religious domain, where for far too many the issue was one of individual liberty as against government mandate.
A true egalitarianism entails a commitment to transform existing institutions and social arrangements so as to overcome the disparities that affect the way that people live their lives. These disparities are apparent across the whole range of society, from health to education to crime and punishment.
What is truly cynical is to imply that those arguing that Black Lives Matter are in some way denying that All Lives Matter. This is cynical not merely because it is not true, but because the charge of hypocrisy is coming from people who have never fought for justice as something that applies to all. To them, as to all sophists, justice is the interests of the strongest. They are interested in themselves and their own, no other. It is cynical because it is to use the egalitarian principle that they themselves do not believe in – these are the people who equate taxation of the rich with theft, and denounce government for the common good as ‘socialist’ - against the egalitarian cause in its particular manifestations. It is cynical because the complacent presumption that ‘all lives matter’ – in the absence of any commitment on their part to achieve justice for anyone in any respect – is that we live in a society of perfect equality in which all are treated with equal respect and dignity now. This is more than errant nonsense, it is the deliberate misuse of transcendent standards and principles in order to deny their realisation in practice. In fact, it is to advance the plainly ideological claim that those standards and principles of justice and equality are in fact perfectly incarnated in the prevailing social order, thereby rendering it beyond legitimate political challenge and controversy with a view to its transformation. In conflating the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ in this way, presenting normative ideals as descriptions of reality, such people make it a billion times more difficult for people like me, trying to impress upon those fighting for emancipatory causes the need to ground their struggle in transcendent standards. These people turn the transcendent toxic. That is why the issue is more than one of cynicism and hypocrisy. Frankly, such people are guilty of diabolic inversion and perversion and ought to be damned to the lowest reaches of Hell, for the way that they knowingly damn so manner so needlessly to social hell in the here and now.
The statement ‘all lives matter’ is a classic instance of right-wing sophism at work, taking liberal principles and values and employing them as weapons against social justice instead of in favour of justice for all.
These, of course, are the people who are big on free speech and its supposed denial by the Left. This week I have seen journalists beaten, assaulted, abused, and shot-at. Where have our lovers of free-speech been? Supporting Trump’s call for the military to be used against the citizens. So much for the defence of individual liberty against ‘big government.’ And that really gives us a clue so huge it is amazing we even waste time trying unravel this hardball politics at the level of principle. This crowd basically don’t give a damn about principle. They use and abuse principle as they use and abuse language as they use and abuse people. They are exploiters, free-riders, and parasites who wish to be left alone in their privilege and power, free to enjoy their largesse, the rest of the world be damned. You couldn’t have seen a bigger threat to free speech and individual liberty than the events of last week, you couldn’t have seen a bigger government brutalizing its own people. Where were all those who have spent the past few weeks whining and crying about the infringement of liberty owing to government enforced lockdown? On the side of Trump’s authoritarian response, on the side of the police and demanding military intervention. Significantly, that was not the view of military leaders themselves. Insofar as these terms mean anything on this terrain, libertarianism goes hand in hand with authoritarianism, it always has and always will. They are two cheeks of the same backside, and plug ugly to look at.
The plain truth is that these people are not interested in individual liberty or equality or free speech or debate. They are not interested in God and Jesus and love. All of these words they use are empty. They are just tools to use to secure their interests and supply their wants. The smarter ones give us a lesson to learn, though, in the way that they take the values and principles espoused in emancipatory causes and use them as weapons against those fighting for justice and equality. They don't give a damn about these values and principles, they are merely concerned to use them as tools of oppression and domination. The way that they take transcendent ideals and employ them in order to defend and reinforce a reality which contradicts those ideals at every point is diabolical and should be called out as such. The extent to which very many of this same crowd can be found proclaiming their love of God in their churches at the same time as they effectively collapse the normative ideal of justice with an unjust reality indicates the extent to which we have entered the sophist world.
And that is my central point in all of this – the fact that such people have found it so easy to appropriate, invert, and distort the values and principles of liberalism – as critics claim – indicates how insecurely founded those values and principles have been. Hence I return to this, my main point. Either transcendent standards exist or they do not; there is no third alternative. A liberalism shorn of its metaphysical assumptions and commitments is defenceless against misappropriation and misuse. Once rights and freedoms become conventional, they are mere functions of power. You may be powerful enough to extend rights to some at certain times in certain places, but will always be vulnerable to reaction. That’s sophist politics as an endless power/resistance. You pick your sides and make your claims, but in that contest values and words are merely tools and counters and weapons. If you think they embody more than that – as I do, and as I know that, deep down, those committed to emancipation do – then you will have to make an explicit commitment to transcendent standards and remove them from the hands of the expropriators who are swallowing up the entire world in their greedy devotion to themselves alone.
And that is my final point here. In recent articles I have been concerned to criticize liberalism and libertarian conceptions of freedom. But in truth we shouldn’t actually dignify this collection of miscreants with a political philosophy. Just as they don’t believe in the liberal and egalitarian values they seek to turn against liberals and egalitarians, they don’t actually believe in any political philosophy of their own. They are not conservatives, communitarians, libertarians, nor classical liberals. The thing that strikes me most of all in having exchanged pleasantries with them is how utterly mediocre and predictable they are. They are the kind of people who are big on God, Church, and Ayn Rand. I have often wondered whether they know that Rand described religion as an affront to reason. I wonder if they even care. And that’s my point. When we have gone through all of the reasoning concerning transcendentalism vs conventionalism, these people really don’t care about anything other than getting their way. They're not actually that interesting intellectually or philosophically, just a seething and resentful mob of common-or-garden reactionaries, nurturing grievances and grudges against a world that insists on changing and letting more people have an equal share in the good things of life.
I really do try my best to avoid Trump and his apologists / supporters, for the reason that the problems are deeper and we are better off seeking redress there, and for the reason that abuse and counter-abuse/grunt and counter-grunt is precisely the Trump game that he wants us all to play. Instead of elevating and uplifting the public realm, this man and all he stands for seeks to degrade and debase, drag us all into the bog. I can only reiterate that he is an example of sophism in an age of reality TV politics, and he’s good at it.
This is entertainment, a TV reality politics as the new bread and circuses designed to put bums on seats and focus eyes on the spectacle, and to keep the masses distracted. We need to remember that the old bread and circuses was not just a ruling class tool of manipulation, but was something that the people did to themselves, voluntarily, by choice, becoming absorbed in their sensual pleasures and abandoning the difficulties and responsibilities of civic duty.
Politics has become a gladiatorial circus, a competition sport, with the different ‘teams’ fighting it out in the arena, and the crowds gathering round to watch. And while people are distracted by the noise and the spectacle, the plundering by the plutocracy continues from above. This is wealth confiscation under cover of the distraction of political games, and this will continue either until individuals constitute themselves as citizens of a public realm and reclaim their political, ethical, and physical commons or civilisation has been emptied out.
You can only beat this politics by reinstating the commitment to transcendent standards through the creation of communities of character and practice.
But I shall end on the spectacle of Trump at St. John’s Church last week. It requires a statement. It was the flagrant abuse of religion, and all religious people who have not spoken up in opposition, who, indeed, have defended Trump for political reasons condemn themselves by their complicity. Never again will we take lessons from these people on Jesus’ words that ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ These people are very worldly, and so much so that it leads one to suspect they have enclosed religion as they have enclosed all other commons with the very secular intent of taking the world to the market in order to be flogged.
Trump is dragging religion into a culture war. And a pox on all religious folk who not only allow him, but lend him enthusiastic support as he does, on account of the fear and hatred they have of political ‘enemies.’ That’s the problem with demonization. In demonizing others, you become a demon yourself.
On Monday night (June 1) an entirely peaceful protest outside the White House was broken up by a volley of tear gas and aggressive policing. That may be abominable enough, but the reasons behind it were even more diabolical. No doubt stung by criticisms over his complete lack of leadership, Trump wanted to be pictured in front of St John's Episcopal Church, just across the road from the White House, and pose as a ‘law and order’ president. The church has been at the epicenter of the unrest, with claims that protesters sought to burn it down. To achieve that photo-op, the peaceful protest had to be dispersed by troops and police.
We are now in the realm of explicit authoritarian rule, the combination of naked power, force, and fiction/fantasy. Trump stood outside of the Church, raised the Bible, upside down, in the air, and declared the USA to be the greatest country in the world.
You could still hear the sirens, tear gas was still in the air, soldiers were all over the streets. And there was Trump, using the Bible and religion for political ends. The local bishop declared his outrage at the use of tear gas and force just to get a photo opportunity.
Trump would later visit the Shrine to St John Paul II, also in Washington DC.
Trump's use of religion has outraged a number of clerics. The Episcopal Bishop of Washington, the Right Reverend Mariann Budde, declared:
"The president just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus."
In a tweet, James Martin, a Jesuit priest and consultant to the Vatican's communications department, wrote this:
"Let me be clear. This is revolting. The Bible is not a prop. A church is not a photo op. Religion is not a political tool. God is not your plaything."
I’m afraid that in a sophist world where there is no truth and falsehood, good and bad, only power and power struggles, then the Bible is as much a prop as anything, a Church has no intrinsic significance in itself, and religion is as much a political tool as anything else is. Nothing matters, nothing is inherently sacred. Marx warned of the sophist world to come: ‘all that is holy is profaned.’ There is nothing sacred; there are no principles and standards outside of power and its games. It is all a power play, and in the game we all become playthings of alien powers, God included. I shall not say the obvious – that Trump is abominable – and instead state a truth that people continue to miss, critics most of all: the conditions in which we do politics are abominable. Those outraged over Trump’s actions continue to express themselves in terms that presuppose the existence of transcendent standards of justice. I make the case for transcendent standards vs conventionalism continuously, and note that it generates precious little interest in political circles. That tells me that the protesters, the people with the most to say on rights, freedom, justice, and democracy, are complacent in taking the foundations of their standards and principles for granted. In presuming the truth of their positions they are in danger of missing the biggest truth of all here, the fact that in a sophist world, it is not principle that matters but power. They take the rightness of their principles for granted and are shocked and outraged when someone like Trump openly flouts them with a naked assertion of power. The truth is that Trump is making explicit the sophist nature of politics that is the norm in the modern world. Previous leaders mask this reality by paying lip service to principles, and people complacently believe that these principles are secure. They are not, and Trump’s actions have merely made it plain how insecure they are. The failure to explicitly ground politics in transcendent standards leads an emancipatory movement in an extremely vulnerable position, having to take on those asserting a power politics on their own terrain and at their own game. In that game, victory goes to the most powerful side. Principle has nothing to do with it. You may think you adhere to principle, but if that’s the game you play, you lose even if you win.
Rabbi Jack Moline, President of the Interfaith Alliance, said: "Seeing President Trump standing in front of St John's Episcopal Church while holding a Bible in response to calls for racial justice - right after using military force to clear peaceful protesters - is one of the most flagrant misuses of religion that I have ever seen."
Was Trump defending religion? Protesters had attempted to set the Church on fire. That is an abomination, and one which justifies prompt and decisive action. A society that is either unwilling or incapable of defending itself against assault cannot last. People who do this gift Trump every reason he needs to carry on down the road he is bent upon, and he took full advantage. My focus is on Trump because I have another point to make. But it is worth underlining that Trump's action here was a response to a shocking action that was by far the bigger crime, in intent if not in its effects. To suffer this injury without either condemnation or correction is to invite many others. The same goes for the desecration of public buildings and monuments generally. Just after 10 p.m. on Sunday, someone set a fire in the basement of the parish hall, which firefighters quickly extinguished, The Washington Post reports. The fire was contained to a nursery room, although there was smoke and water damage to other areas of the basement, according to the Rev. Rob Fisher, the church’s rector. That is an act of vandalism and desecration, and indicates how easily self-righteous anger can become destructive. And self-destructive. Conservative critics frequently repeat the line that the revolution devours itself. Here's how easily that happens. “We’re very happy to report that the rest of the church and parish house is untouched except for some exterior graffiti, which the city’s graffiti team has already covered up,” Fisher and the church’s wardens wrote in a June 1 email to parishioners. Fisher told Episcopal News Service that the nursery room is “completely destroyed,” but it could have been much worse. Nobody was hurt and none of the church’s “irreplaceable” historical items were damaged, he said in an interview. I wonder if Fisher is happy to have Trump as a defender?
Earlier in the day, over 1,000 protesters had marched peacefully through the area, demonstrating against the killings of African Americans by police, including George Floyd. The Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of Washington, joined parish leaders at the church to show support for the protesters. Would the protesters support the church in flames?
The issue isn't a simple black and white one.
"Donald Trump isn't religious, has no need of religion, and doesn't care about the devout, except insofar as they serve his political needs. The President failed to project any of the higher emotions or leadership desperately needed in every quarter of this nation during this dire moment," Allen wrote.
Maybe the establishment is regaining its senses, maybe it is seeing Trump threatening a backlash that will bring the whole system crashing down. In addition, more than 280 former generals, national security officials and diplomats signed a joint statement rebuking the president for getting the military involved in an assault on peaceful protesters.
One evangelical Trump supporter was asked whether he felt that Trump’s action conflicted with the Gospel of John, where Jesus said “my kingdom is not of this world”?
“Well,” Horbowy said, “that’s a philosophical question.”
The irony is that these self-same people normally and vehemently insist on the anti-political interpretation of Jesus' statement "my kingdom is not of this world." They insist on that view whenever there is the merest hint of government or collective action to remedy remediable social and environmental ills. They do it especially to prevent government programmes for social welfare and environmental protection that might cost money. Being so other-worldly, they like the rich to hang to their money in this world. I used to criticize such people as ‘libertarian’ or ‘conservative,’ but it really is redundant to dignify their views with a political philosophy or intellectual commitment or value position; they are basically plain and simple reactionaries who will do anything, say anything, and support anything that protects and consolidates a status quo which embeds their privilege and power. That bone-headed obstruction is driving people to anger and politics to self-destruction. And that’s pretty ungodly, I would say. You really need the diabolic parody, inversion, and perversion that Dante describes in the Inferno to come close.
I have no idea if Trump reads the Bible. I haven’t heard him quote it much (which is a relief), and I have seen little evidence of him acting on it. But if quoting texts from the Bible itself reveals nothing about the authenticity of one’s heart and commitment, this is even more the case with respect to holding up a Bible for public show. But I shall quote a few texts all the same, recognizing fully that this is also a political use of sacred scripture, and therefore itself diabolical. I do so merely to show that there is plenty in the Bible from which Trump and his supporters/apologists could learn, regrettably, it seems, even and especially his Christian loyalists.
Wealth and the gospel:
Mt 6:24 “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money."
James 5:1-6 Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. ...
Luke 12:33 Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys.
Luke 6:24 ' “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation."
Prov 23:4-5 Do not toil to acquire wealth; be discerning enough to desist. When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven.
Rev 3:17 "For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked."
LUST
Mt 5:28 " But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh. on a woman to lust after her hath committed. adultery with her already in his heart."
1 Cor 6:13 "...The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body."
Galatians 5: 16 "16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh."
GLUTTONY
Proverbs 23: 2 And put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite.
Proverbs 25: 16 "If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it."
Romans 13: 14 "But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires."
FALSE WITNESS
Proverbs 6: 16-19 There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.
John 1:24 Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him,
Rev 21: 8 But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.
Proverbs 21: 6 The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a fleeting vapor and a snare of death.
Proverbs 26: 18-19 Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, “I am only joking!”
There is plenty more where that came from. Trump, evidently, hasn’t got the first idea what is contained in the Bible. There is no reason why he should know, having never presented himself as a religious person, let alone religious leader at any time in his life. He is plainly using religion for political ends. I am more interested in the complicity of his Christian supporters in this misuse. My experience is that they understand the Bible to advocate a basically capitalist economy. That claim is highly contentious, begging in the first instance what is meant by capitalism. The Bible is full of precepts and recommendations concerning a sustainable and just economy, entailing a moral restraint and public regulation of economic affairs that is quite different from an untrammelled pursuit of self-interest on a ‘free’ market. But this is to over-intellectualize. There war between capitalism and socialism is a war between freedom and tyranny and God and atheism, those are the simple black and white terms upon which such people divide the world. Sheep and goats. Suffice to say, the picture could not have been more incongruous had Trump been pictured waving Das Kapital in the air instead of the Bible. I don’t think he knows what’s in either book. My point is that, in a sophist world, he doesn't need to know.
The paradox is that white evangelicals – and others – proclaim libertarianism against ‘government,’ which they condemn as ‘socialism’ and therefore totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and yet most decidedly embrace authoritarianism in order to secure their ends and interests. Far from being outraged by Trump’s words and deeds, they are excited and thrilled given that “they view politics as an arena where compromise is made with people unlike themselves in exchange for wins on issues that are central to their identity. They rely on church, not politics, as the arena for forming a virtuous sense of self.” (Joan Williams, The Misguided Push for an Equal Rights Amendment
Liberals and progressives condemn Trump and his supporters as stupid. That position is not stupid. It may be hypocritical, it may be cynical, it may make religious principle subservient to political ideology, but it is not stupid – it reflects hard-headed political calculation. It’s a nasty, zero-sum politics, totally divorced from ethics and, as such, contradicts the ancient intertwining of politics and ethics, in Aristotle, for instance, not to mention the Christian view. But it makes sense. The irony is that that lexical ordering of politics and ethics conforms completely to the modern disenchanting and rationalizing divorce of ethics from the world of politics, characterizing the very ‘dis-godding’ of the world driving modern secularisation. Such people are practical atheists. As indeed we all are, given the divorce of ethics from a disenchanted and objectively valueless world. The fact that ethics has fled this world means that Christians are incapable of acting on a Christian ethic in politics, and have no option but to be political beings in a political world. That's not a case of Christian hypocrisy, but a realistic appraisal of what it takes to be politically effective on a demoralized liberal terrain. I explain why this is so in The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality
The issue is noth therefore merely a case of Christian hypocrisy, but of the inability of anyone to practice what they preach in a terrain that has lost connection with the substantive good. To be politically effective, Christians cannot but be hypocrites on this demoralized terrain.
I am reading a certain Taylor Marshall, who argues that the Catholic Church has been systematically infiltrated by modernist and secular humanist ideology. He defends a traditional Catholicism. I trace and examine these themes my own way, and hopefully take a nuanced, dialogic, and dialectical approach that encourages people to think the issues through and work them out for themselves. Marshall has come to my attention for his defence of Trump and attack on Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. This strikes me as less a matter of theology than of politics. Biden and Pelosi are not only both Catholics but, in my understanding, both practising Catholics. They know the inside of a Church in a way that I suspect Trump does not. The interesting aspect is that Biden and Pelosi are attacked for failing to live up to Catholic teaching, favouring reproductive rights and, in general, subscribing to the secular, humanist, liberal agenda, as it is described.
Right, so when liberals and leftists are not atheists, to be condemned as godless agents of Satan, but believe in God and are regular Church goers, then they are practical atheists who are agents of Satan. The way to convict them is to have them undergo theological inquisition. Basically, anyone who doesn't subscribe to the 'traditional' morality which allowed the righteous to be cruel and vindictive to people they don't like - gays, women, weirdos, everyone but straight-laced and stiff-necked neurotics - should be excommunicated. That's me gone, then.
Marshall states in a video presentation:
‘During the riots in Washington DC, President Donald Trump went to St John's Episcopal Church and held up a Bible called for an to violence, looting, and racism. Meanwhile Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and a host of "Catholic" politicians are allowed parade in Catholic Masses without any criticism at all by Catholic bishops, cardinals or James Martin.’
These words are intended to solicit the right response from reactionaries. They succeeded:
‘All these fake Catholic politicians should be excommunicated.’
‘Most politicians are agnostics/atheists anyway. They just pretend to believe in God to attract religious voters.’ [This is priceless. When faced with politicians who are regular church goers, who can expose the falsity of Trump's claimed religiosity, a Trump supporter says all politicians fake a religious interest just to win votes. They all do a Donald, so we may as well stay with Donald. He may be false, but they all are, even and especially the ones who are not.]
‘They excommunicate themselves per canon law when they vote for intrinsic evil aka abortion! They must repent to return and sin no more!!!!’
‘Seeing Trump at a church with a bible seems to trigger the baby eaters.’
‘We need to see a surge in great, righteous excommunications.’
‘Executed, not excommunicated. We need an inquisition.’ [I'm not making this up, it is all on Taylor Marshall's YT page]
‘the Vatican is pure evil. It has all 10 requirements to be the Antichrist. No other person to date has all 10 requirements to be the Antichrist except the Vatican.’ [I've detected an anti-Catholic animus in certain religious quarters, little hints here and there that the Catholic Church is not Christian and the Pope is the Antichrist. I give it short shrift.]
‘Your own Pope needs to be excommunicated.’
‘evil people who guise themselves as Catholics should be excommunicated.’
‘Let’s pray and fast that God take these evil politicians and clergy out of power.’
‘Trump is not perfect but he’s not one of these hypocrites.’ [True, Trump is brutally honest in serving self-interest, and sacrificing one and all to the priorities of money and power. He may be utterly impious, but he is honest.]
‘James Martin's Catholicism is just like Nancy Pelosi's Catholicism, empty.’
‘We need a Pope like Trump.’
‘If we had a REAL Catholic pope, he would have defrocked Martin years ago. The Church needs to drain the swamp.’
‘James Martin defending LGBTQ Community just shows me that he himself is a gay priest. As simple as that, so sad for Our Church! This man has no dignity at all!!’
And so on at length, comments so ugly that you feel like having to shower to wash the stain of them away.
I think the test of authenticity is: do you hate gays, women, and weirdos?
No, I don't, so goodbye.
Basically, these people are reclaiming traditional ethics just to bash and abuse people. This is the reason why secularists, liberals, humanists, and atheists argue that the world would be a saner, happier, more decent place without religion. These are the attitudes that turn religion toxic. The right appropriated religion and the religious ethic to its politics, which makes it easier for it to set the argument up between the God-fearing and the godless, appropriating transcendent standards of justice to itself and pressing them in the service of political ideology. The liberal left were happy to let them have religion. But there has been a rediscovery of the centrality of religion and the psychic truth of religion by left thinkers in recent years. I have been part of this, and I anticipated from the first the accusation that people on the left are not ‘true’ Christians and not ‘true’ Catholics and are simply using religion to advance their political ends. Unlike the political right, of course. The first whiff of this accusation that comes my way, and I send it packing. It is as easy as this to spark religious conflict and war, reinforcing secularists in their beliefs that the world would be better off without religion. And the conflict has nought to do with religion, it is political to the core. In fact, it is the worst kind of politics, a politics that has been theologized and invested with a righteous certitude which allows no compromise and brooks no opposition. Spend much time in such company, and the case for reorienting politics around an authoritative framework based on a conception of the substantive good collapses to the ground. All the nasty, vicious, spiteful, bigoted, hate-filled, intolerant attitudes that have led human beings to burn and torture and maim each other throughout history are all still out there. Of course, my case rests upon the cultivation of the intellectual and moral virtues and won’t work without their acquisition and exercise. But there is a reason why we have a neutral political sphere which is agnostic on the good, leaving individuals alone to make their own choices. It’s a protective device which wisely considers common notions of the good to be potentially repressive – an excuse for some to abuse and oppress others. And in the end, that’s not enough.
The Washington Post hits back, claiming that Trump is a religious poser. That gives Biden an opportunity.
Trump is a religious poser, but the problem is the bifurcation of politics and ethics in the modern world means that Christians in the public square will struggle to find any politics that expresses an ethical position, that’s what diremption is about. A religious poser who will stand and fight against common enemies will do fine, as against those who pay lip service to values and principles, but legislate in precisely the opposite manner.
Trump is true/fake, Biden is true/fake, Pelosi, the Pope, you and I are true/fake – this is just a continuation of sophist politics, that’s all – you get to choose your own gods and devils and worship your own idols. And the plain truth is that in a sophist world it doesn’t actually matter who is fake and who is authentic, the only test is who is effective in advancing and securing preferred platforms.
That said, one comment was striking:‘People are more upset with Trump holding a Bible than they are at the vandals who burned a Church.’ I'm outraged at both.
Hypocrisy there is, then. The phenomenon is more than ironic, though, it is abominable. That they practice the very opposite of what a religious ethic teaches shouldn’t be surprising given the extent to which they hold the temporal and the spiritual so radically apart, consigning religion to the attic of the afterlife, with no practical implications with respect to the worldly affairs of politics. Of course, they don’t maintain such a rigid separation in practice, cautioning against ‘socialist’ programmes to bring Heaven on Earth given Jesus’ other-worldly ethic, whilst at the same time claiming the Bible advocates capitalism. (As I recall, Jesus Christ said take no thought for the morrow. He plainly thought the world was about to end and that we ought to follow him to the better world that was about to come. How to form any organized civilisation on that basis became a knotty problem for adherents as they started to create the Church.) Such people are not only practising an anti-politics, they are anti-Christian, to the extent that they use Christianity to justify and support the contrary in practice. They turn everything that Jesus said on its head, turning the Christian ethic into its opposite. The idea of capitalism as a new religion that honours wealth, hate, and division is bad enough, but foisting those false values on a Christian religion that honours the meek and love is truly diabolical in all senses of the word. It separates people from others, from themselves, and from the soul.
Trump’s actions were indeed a flagrant misuse of religion. The outrage should tell us that, deep down, people believe in transcendent standards in politics. The belief in justice, racial and social, testifies to that belief. People need to be clear in securing the foundations of their ethics and politics, rather than continuing to enter the sophist arena in which principles are secondary to power and power struggles.
Trump's status as the champion of evangelical and conservative voters may seem very peculiar given his use of divisive rhetoric, his three marriages, accusations of sexual assault by dozens of women, the hush-money paid to a pornographic film actress, and the record of false statements made during his presidency - more than 18,000 according to the Poynter Institute's Politifact website.
Trump does not belong to a particular congregation and only occasionally attends a religious service, and yet the religious right are vociferous in their support. The reason is obvious, the fear and hatred of the same social forces.
A number of religious leaders have expressed the hope that Trump's visit to the Shrine to St John Paul II in Washington DC may encourage him to reflect on the words that Pope John Paul II delivered to the United Nations in 1995:
"The answer to the fear which darkens human existence at the end of the 20th Century is the common effort to build the civilization of love."
I see nothing but fear and hatred in Trump’s base. It is very noticeable among those who proclaim their love of God most frequently and most loudly. I see no interest in building the civilization of love, the very opposite. The demonization of political opponents, whom they see everywhere, is most evident.
Trump’s message was not difficult to parse. In fact it was easy to see what Trump was doing, siding with his ‘us’ by whipping up fears of an encroaching – and demonized – ‘them.’ The messaging isn’t subtle and clever, and wouldn’t work if it were. His audience are a fearful and hateful bunch clinging on to the divisions and simplicities that comprise their worldview. Trump sees that these folk cleave to Christianity as a certain truth in an uncertain world, and sees that his enemies are their enemies. So he makes a public declaration of war on their behalf by saying that you and your Church are under attack from the forces of evil. I will give you my power and force and you will give me your symbols and together we resist and overcoming the forces arranged against. We are united in a common cause against a common enemy, and we will defeat that enemy with whatever force it takes.
Christianity be damned. This is politics pure and simple. Some of the most vociferous of Trump apologists/supporters repeatedly proclaim Jesus’ message that ‘my kingdom is not of this Earth.’ They assert this anti-politics in the specific contexts of commitments and causes devoted to social justice or other such ‘socialist’ politics. Their anti-politics, in other words, is motivated by a strongly political commitment to restraining government action for collective purposes. Plainly, those who are content with a prevailing social system, however iniquitous it may be, require little or nothing from politics by way of collective redress, other than it costs them little and lowers their taxes. And so they work to devalue and disarm politics as an agency of the common good. They affirm the transcendent standards of Christianity not out of spiritual commitment but to deny their practical relevance in the temporal realm. Their Christian anti-politics is a distinct politics of preservation with respect to the status quo. And it is the plainest hypocrisy. They openly argue against those who think religion and politics don’t mix by noting the anti-religious agendas of Democrats and ‘socialists’ aiming at election. For people proclaiming Jesus’ other-worldly message of non-politics, they are decidedly politically involved and interested people who have no compunction in using religion to serve and secure their own political interests. This unity with Trump has nothing to do with serving religious principle and everything to do with politics.
Politics is a legitimate activity. Those who delegitimate politics not only bear tyranny easily, they happily inflict it on others in the attempt to remove crucial questions of power, authority, control, and resources from public challenge, contestation, and change. They proclaim Jesus’ message of the other-worldly kingdom against those who would seek to build Heaven on Earth by way of collective endeavour, and yet openly engage in very worldly and interested political activity. Of course, they employ Jesus’ message not to persuade the left to disarm themselves politically. Since they believe the Left is atheist, it makes no sense to make an appeal to Jesus in order to persuade. It is all part of an attempt not only to delegitimate collective purpose in politics but to demonize those who pursue such a political agenda.
To drag Christianity and religion into the repulsive politics in the context of social and racial division in the US is an abomination. It is diabolical in the sense of separating people from one another and feeding on the divisions. It turns religion in general and Christianity in particular toxic. And something else it does is to make the argument of all those who argue the case for transcendent standards even more impossible. This entrenching of political divisions as religious divisions cuts the left off from the transcendent standards they need in order to ground their emancipatory commitments and causes and render their progressive politics effective. Instead, all are mired in a sophist power game in which victory goes to the strongest.
Protestors are mobilizing and marching under the slogan ‘Justice for George.’ That assertion of justice involves a claim that is much more than saying we have the force of numbers and therefore we should prevail – it is saying we have right on our side. That is an open statement declaring the existence of transcendent standards. The problem is that we have right and left divisions in politics that do not correlate with the ethical and intellectual divide. We have a political right which proclaims transcendent standards (with respect to religion and Christianity) only to practise the plainest sophist politics of money and power, and a political left which argues for conventionalism, constructivism, and relativism whilst acting for principles of justice and equality which rest on transcendent standards. When Trump employs Christianity to political ends and presses religious symbols in the service of political ideology – and Christians not only allow him but cheer him on – the effect is to reinforce that debilitating division between transcendentalism that will not practice what it preaches on the right and a conventionalism/constructivism that cannot practice what it preaches on the left.
But it is now plainly evident that these same Christians who repeat Jesus’ other-worldly message are guilty of flagrant hypocrisy – they are not only interested in politics, their religious commitments are clearly secondary to their political commitments, so much so that they are complicit in the rank exploitation of religion and its symbols to political ends on the part of a president who contradicts Christian principle at every turn.
It’s simple, it is politics. As McKay Coppins stated in The Atlantic: “Most white conservative Christians don’t want piety from this president; they want power. In Trump, they see a champion who will restore them to their rightful place at the center of American life, while using his terrible swift sword to punish their enemies.”
Note the subtext of this – the demonization of political opponents. Politics is about dissensus and disagreement. This theologization of politics renders such difference diabolical, identifying alternative platforms as contrary to God. This cannot but lead to bad religion and bad politics. And it cannot but reinforce the very debilitating divisions in relation to transcendent standards that are driving the crises of the contemporary world. It is a desparate situation.
The people at St. John’s and the rest of the Episcopal Church declared this for what it was. The Rev. Robert W. Fisher, the church rector, told The Washington Post: “We want St. John’s to be a space for grace, as a place where you can breathe. Being used as a prop, it really takes away from what we’re trying to do.”
That criticism is mild. Much more needs to be said. People of religious persuasion need to be on the guard against the political misuse of religion. Such a thing is bad in itself, and does immense harm, not least to religion itself. Trump is clearly attempting to drag the Church, religion and the Gospel into a ‘culture war’ that divides people and feeds on the fear and anger that the division provokes. It dissolves transcendent standards into the prevailing sophism of the current world. It’s a culture of diremption and division, in other words, one in which there are no common standards, only rival perspectives in which conflict is decided by power. The only unity possible in such a context is through surrogate communities. Liberals have sought to preserve unity through the neutral public realm preserving the civil peace. This is plainly untenable now, as division has intensified. Now we are seeing the open militarisation of public space, with police and army deployed in a way that is politically dangerous and antithetical to the Gospel message of peace. People of religious persuasion should resist this political appropriation at every turn.
Today’s Gospel reading, proclaimed at every Catholic Church across the world, concerns the relationship between the church and secular government. It is a text which the Christian right ought to know. I have heard them cite it repeatedly against ‘socialism’ (the use of government as an agency for common welfare and collective purpose):
Knowing their hypocrisy he said to them,
“Why are you testing me?
Bring me a denarius to look at.”
They brought one to him and he said to them,
“Whose image and inscription is this?”
They replied to him, “Caesar’s.”
So Jesus said to them,
“Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar
and to God what belongs to God.”
It is not quite correct that the church should not “take sides” in conflicts. True, the church is not and should not be political in the sense that is beholden to an ideology or political party. But the church absolutely is called to take sides: the side of peace, of the marginalized, of the powerless crying out. These are what and who belong to God.
These people are also hypocrites when it comes to free speech. The police are targetting and openly attacking journalists and camera crews. That includes journalists and camera crews from outside of the US, from Germany and Australia. What kind of country is this, that boasts of being the last beacon of liberty in world, and demonizes all those who disagree or whose very existence gives the lie to all such claims, and assaults those who seek to find the truth one way or another?
I can’t say I like demonstrations much. I’ve been on two demonstrations in my entire life, one of which had broad based political support in favour of keeping the coal pits open and at the heart of local communities. In truth, I’m a fairly conservative person and don’t like change much and trouble and turmoil not at all. But I am not a reactionary seeking to defend an iniquitous status quo against all change. That’s the problem here. Those who set out to oppose each, every, and any case for change will succeed in building a dam of hatred so great that when it bursts, as it must, it may well sweep us all away. Instead of conflating normative and descriptive statements to pretend that the perfect world already exists, state transcendent standards of justice as a radical ought-to-be and then seek to conform will, practice, laws, and institutions to it. Do that, and we will have that positive and lasting peace through the presence of justice for all for which Martin Luther King jr. argued.
I wrote this piece a few days ago, posted it, and withdrew it the same day. I’m happy neither with the tone nor the focus and may need to rewrite to temper the anger and achieve balance. Self-righteous anger is a blight in politics and society, and encourages people to transgress the boundaries of good manners and civility. As I comment at the conclusion of the piece, I am not much – if anything – of a protestor and have been on the sum total of two demonstrations on my life. I don’t care for this kind of politics and prefer a more constructive mode, for reasons given in this essay. I dissociate myself from the politics of the streets, from demonstration, riot, violence, the lot. I made my position on law, the democratic constitution of authority, and legitimate public community clear in a number of articles last year. I made a number of criticisms of Extinction Rebellion which many of my environmentalist friends would consider wrong and offensive. I thought long and hard about going out on a limb in this respect, and have continued to ponder the question. I believe the age suffers from a progressive weakening of the principle of authority, of the respect for law, of commitment to the public realm. There are reasons for this, not least the complicity of governing institutions in socio-economic practices which themselves undermine the common good and have turned the public realm into a surrogate for private interests. At the same time, we collude with the weakening of government, law, and public community at our peril.
Some notes I made for my article on transcendent standards and their inversion/dissolution
Society is steadily being abandoned to the mob, as institutions and authorities, charged with protecting law and order, whilst subservient to the imperatives and demands of the private economy, succumb to the morass of the endless yes/no. In the absence of mediation and adjudication in light of transcendent standards of justice commanding common assent, the police are increasingly being called upon to preserve a civil peace that is being torn apart by incommensurate values.
A couple of years ago I wrote a number of articles on the fundamentally lawless and immoral nature of the prevailing society. Those views were stated at extreme – in response to the extreme events to which I was subject – repeat attempts at mugging and robbery at home, and the complete lack of fear of the police on the part of the robbers.
I stand by those articles. There is an anarchy abroad which threatens to engulf us all. The police now seemingly have no option but to stand by and watch as cities are attacked and destroyed by mobs.
As for those mobs, they believe they have right on their side, and yet eschew the public realm to take affairs into their own hands and press their case by might. Self-righteous anger is a blight. Many of the causes may be the right ones. The problem is that all people taking extra-legal action think that there cause is right. The more people who resort to transgressing public boundaries to secure their aims, the less we will have a public community to appeal to, whether for our protection or to advance our positive ends. You may win the occasional victory in this game, but all that you have achieved is to have given a lesson in how the loudest voice most aggressively asserted prevails in politics. I am optimistic enough to hold that if a cause is right, then debate and dialogue bringing about agreement and consent by way of persuasion is possible. The problem in modern politics and society is that force, of various kinds –cultural as well as institutional, structural, and systemic – is prevailing over public deliberation and agreement. In this essay I have touched only on one aspect of this in the loss of transcendent standards by which to guide and orient behaviour. Those standards apply to each and all, not merely as a unit of account by which to check and evaluate our claims, but to unify each and all beyond particular claims in contention. This standard is being loss, with the result that society is fracturing into divisions around incommensurate values, leaving people shouting at, and over the heads of, each other, and getting angrier and angrier all the time. Such language and such exchange are not designed to persuade, they are designed to entrench and inflame pre-set positions.
The attacks on public monuments, places, and police are reprehensible and raise worries as to how far people would go if unchecked. This is ‘might is right’ politics at its crudest. Principles and values concerning racial justice are cited in defence. I have no doubt in the justice of the ends being asserted, but these ends will be subverted and inverted by the means in which they are being prosecuted. People will not live in chaos for long. There is a positive message to proclaim and win public assent to, but the violent nature of its prosecution which incite a backlash. Not only that, this aggressive attempt to win victories by force is precisely the anti-politics that lies behind our ills, further debasing public life and community. In the above article I criticize Donald Trump strongly for his debasement of language and politics. I criticized his use of the Bible and a Church for a photo-opportunity as reprehensible and so far away from Christianity as to merit the description diabolic. But the violent actions of some protestors on mass demonstrations indicate plainly why law and order needs to be secured. Trump’s attempt to assert this law and order may well have been cack-handed, but at least he made the attempt, in the attempt to nip the forces of anarchy in the bud. That Trump’s language and actions foster such anarchy I don’t doubt, and have said so repeatedly. But he is not alone in that and is not the architect of the loss of commonality and loss of civility confronting us today. Home Secretary Priti Patel condemned the ‘criminal minority’ engaged in thuggery and was met with abuse and outrage. To have not condemned the scenes we witnessed would have been to have licensed further instances.
Society is steadily being abandoned to the mob, as institutions and authorities, charged with protecting law and order, succumb to the morass of the endless yes/no. In the absence of mediation and adjudication in light of transcendent standards of justice commanding common assent, the police are increasingly being called upon to preserve a civil peace that is being torn apart by incommensurate values.
A couple of years ago I wrote a number of articles on the fundamentally lawless and immoral nature of the prevailing society. Those views were stated at extreme – in response to the extreme events to which I was subject – repeat attempts at mugging and robbery at home, and the complete lack of fear of the police on the part of the robbers.
I stand by those articles.
The police now seemingly have no option but to stand by and watch as cities are attacked and destroyed by mobs.
As for those mobs, they believe they have right on their side, and yet eschew the public realm to take affairs into their own hands and press their case by might. Self-righteous anger is a blight. You may think that you have justice on your side, but in advancing a cause in this way you are merely playing the same sophist power game, engaging in a trial of strength to test the relative power of the protagonists. This is not genuine politics, this is precisely the anti-politics that blights the world, politics not as a creative human self-actualization but as a competition sport, a zero-sum game of winners and losers. The self-defeating nature of this kind of politics for those with a just cause is this – even if you win, you lose, because you have succeeded as a result of force prevailing over discussion, persuasion, agreement, and consent. And without a consensual commitment to public ends, there can be no lasting peace, only a continuing war. Be warned, it is not only those with just causes who can play this game. Witness the libertarian protests against lockdown in the US, some very nasty strains involving people armed to the teeth. Weaken law, government, and public community at your peril. The police are being overburdened by being called upon to keep the peace in a society that is increasingly at war with itself.
Home Secretary Priti Patel has said "justice will follow" some of the violence seen during anti-racism protests across the UK at the weekend.
Ms Patel said the majority of demonstrators "were peaceful" and told them: "I hear you."
But she echoed Prime Minister Boris Johnson's comment that the protests had been "subverted by thuggery" after some demonstrators clashed with police.
It was a minority of protesters who misbehaved will come the response. In like manner, it is a minority of police who are the problem. To turn all police – all institutions – into the enemy to be overthrown will leave us defenceless to the predation of those who seek to obtain their ends by force. And it actually strengthens the case of Trump (and Johnson in the UK), because law and order matters. “We won’t be defunding our police,” Trump said at a roundtable with law enforcement officials at the White House on Monday. “There won’t be dismantling of our police. There’s not going to be any disbanding of our police.” He conceded that the nation had witnessed “some horrible things” at the hands of police officers, but suggested that “99%” of them are “great, great people” who have “done jobs that are record setting.”
Revolution is not destruction, as conservative critics claim, noting the predilection for chaos on the part of self-styled radicals. Such radicals are not radicals at all, their politics are rootless and hence fruitless. Of course, a revolution by this means eats itself, because it is motivated by nothing but the stratagems and aims of the alchemists of revolution, it recognizes nothing outside of its own force, conforms to no higher end or power. It is self-negating and self-consuming. Conservatives are right to call it out for that reason. But it’s not a true radicalism, because it is rooted in nothing but power.
In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes of the political fanatic:
“Chaos is his element. When the old order begins to crack, he wades in with all his might and recklessness to blow the whole hated present to high heaven. He glories in the sight of a world coming to a sudden end. To [expletive] with reforms! All that already exists is rubbish, and there is no sense in reforming rubbish.”
That is precisely what revolution isn’t. If it is rooted in nothing but self-assertive power, then it isn’t a genuine radicalism; if it is not engaged in constructive efforts to build the new social order, then it isn’t emancipatory. Unfortunately, far too much liberal leftist thought, politics, and action is mere negation, rejection, deconstruction, destructive of our metaphysical inheritance, destructive of social order and institutions. There is not enough focus at all on institution building. It is institutions that make society work. Without that constructive effort, you have nothing. The idea that resistance will somehow issue in the spontaneous emergence of a new world is fanciful, expressing the naïve belief that the natural reasonableness of existence will spring into life once the corrupt institutions repressing vital forces are destroyed. The oddest thing is that that belief in a benign natural order underneath artificial institutions and the corrupting influence is precisely the argument of the free market monetarists. Utterly naïve and deadly dangerous.
In My Country Right or Left, George Orwell writes regarding the Enlightenment, the 20th century, and radical change.
“For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool filled with barbed wire.”
My view is that of Rousseau, who argued that it is in 'the fundamental and universal law of the greatest good of all, and not in the private relationships of man to man, that one must seek the true principles of the just and the unjust'.
I affirm the democratic constitution of legitimate constitution.Mob rule is utterly abhorrent. Those who think this is the route to a progressive and emancipatory society are either deluded, and dangerously so, or are precisely what Priti Patel and Boris Johnson and, indeed, Donald Trump says they are. I completely dissociate myself from them.
The Home Secretary has said she "completely supports" calls for a new law to make it easier to prosecute people who damage war memorials, after condemning perpetrators as "hooligans" and "thugs". Some 200 Black Lives Matter protests took place across the country over the weekend, attended by more than 137,500 people, prompted by the killing in US police custody of George Floyd. Conservative MP Jonathan Gullis told Priti Patel his Stoke-on-Trent constituents had been "outraged" at the Cenotaph graffiti and attempts to burn the Union flag, asking the Cabinet minister if she would introduce a Desecration of War Memorials Bill.