Good-bye to statues, Good-bye to you
"Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children."
Jean Louis Mallet, “Considérations sur la nature de la Révolution de France, et sur les causes qui en prolongent la durée.”
For reasons I develop throughout my writings, the conditions for doing politics and ethics well do not exist, hence the dissolution of the public realm and social life into a war of all against all. However much liberals have sought to disguise this fracturing with the term ‘pluralism,’ the impossibilities of mediating the congeries of incommensurate values are becoming increasingly apparent, with police having to attempt to keep an order that government and politics can no longer supply.
Every time, the liberal left (and beyond) is involved in a paroxysm of rage and self-righteous indignation – which is often – spilling over into the destruction of public life and standards and destruction of itself – which is also often – we hear this phrase repeated by conservatives: the revolution devours its children. What is truly depressing is how predictable it all is, and having to admit how so very few people have learned anything about the self-destructive character of self-righteous anger in politics, the way political ideology hardens into a political practice that cannot but consume itself, given the lack of the self-limiting principle, as well as the failure to recognize the legitimacy of an external check that comes with conformity to transcendent standards and an acceptance of their means of incarnation and mediation through particular others. Instead, there is the crude, direct, and unmediated leap from universal principles – justice and equality - to practice, with all the processes of debate, deliberation, negotiation of consent, and law-making in public community that draw out the meanings and applications of transcendent standards missed out. Instead of a genuine politics there is a self-righteous assertion justifying the use of force against others, and this is something that cannot but consume itself. You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too. Once transcendent standards are reduced to political ideology, then there are no standards left, only an endless self-invention. That requires human beings to become as gods, a charge which they inevitably fail. Instead of endless self-invention of standards there is a self-destruction that consumes all.
The revolution will always eat its own children for so long as revolutionaries are grounded in nothing and bound by nothing other than a self-righteous self-assertion, appropriating transcendent standards of justice and reducing them to particular practice and incarnation in time and place – their practice and their preferred realisation. Once those standards are gone, they are gone, and justice is whatever the revolutionaries – or whichever section of them are the dominant power at any one time – say it is. Which is to say that that is not revolution at all, but is the same old rule of power. This is the purest sophism, the rule of might and the imposition of values by way of force, however much that force is rationalized by the assertion of values and principles. Justice is thus weaponized as a tool of political force.
The problem is not that the protagonists are revolutionary but that they are not revolutionary enough – they are playing the same game as the reactionaries they oppose, only circumventing current rules that constrain the game in order to impose new rules of their own. The defence will come back is that there have been attempts at change by reason and peaceful persuasion, and to no avail. The defence does not work. In a public community, others are not obliged to see and to accept the truth of the other’s position. The nature of freedom in politics is not merely the ability to express one’s view, but to recognize the legitimacy of contrary views and alternate platforms. You don’t have to accept those other views, and are free to argue with them. Still less are you compelled to submit to those views, make statements of public contrition. Instead, there is dialogue, a constant interaction in discursive space. That space has, of course, been under assault by those right-wing forces playing a zero-sum game, deliberately spreading rancour and anger, seeking to ‘score’ points and ‘own’ opponents in an attempt to short-circuit the whole truth-seeking process. They may well have succeeded, to the extent that they have bred an opposition in their own image. Those on the political right with the most to say about free speech and debate have played fast and loose with the fabric of public life, and have soured relations between people to such an extent that many now prefer monologue to dialogue. It’s not that they are against dialogue but that they can’t find enough willing and able to play the game. In arguing for partnership in public space, we have to ask: where are the partners.
So my criticisms of protesters don’t lose sight of the things and the people being protested. But dialogue is key. That constant deliberation proceeds in open space. The problem in the modern world is the colonisation of that space by the priorities of money and power, turning public community into a surrogate of private interests. Hence the obstacles to free deliberation. But that is no argument for bringing the whole edifice down. Instead it is a call to build legitimate public community under the rule of law as an ordinance of reason for the common good of all. To challenge and seek to overthrow political institutions which allow citizen interaction, discourse, and consent under the rule of law, is to invite the tyranny of those prepared to secure their ends by force. By definition, it is power that wins that game, not reason. However imperfect and corrupted institutions of governance and law are, there is greater chance of securing legitimate ends by their reformation, and precious little, if any, by their destruction, and not least when power devolves into the hands of those who act out of self-righteous anger and intolerance. The adherence to universal principles beyond subjective choice merely hardens their resolve to accept no compromise and brook no opposition. That uncompromising attitude can only ever be a blight in politics. In fact, it is the destruction of politics. It is the very antithesis of all for which I have ever argued with respect to transcendent standards of truth and justice. Such a ‘revolution’ takes those standards into its own hands and imposes them in a direct, totalising, and dictatorial way. The mediation by which individuals, as moral, political, knowledgeable agents come to apprehend truth and justice and assimilate these standards into practical life is obliterated. The dialectical eliciting and appreciation of truth and justice is missing and, with it, the core springs of action, negotiation, and consent. As a result, action which begins by affirming universal principles can proceed only by force, thereby subverting those principles by betraying them to the sophist alternative and the rule of the strongest.
The question boils down to a division between those who affirm the existence of transcendent standards, and those that do not and, presuming the existence of standards, between those who seek the realisation of those standards through a socio-institutional framework and moral infrastructure of ‘rational freedom’ and those who simply impose them through force. Either transcendent standards exist or they do not. The view I set out clearly and forthrightly in my work is that a substantive conception of the good based on transcendent standards of justice is the only basis for emancipatory commitments, human rights, and progressive politics. Without that grounding, there is no revolution in the sense of actualization of principle, merely a circulation of power divorced from principle and purpose. Those involved in that circulation may advance moral arguments, but they will do so for all the reasons Machiavelli gave, to give self-assertion in the interests of power a moral cover, giving the semblance of morality to others.
‘A prince should present the appearance of being a compassionate, trustworthy, kind, guileless, and pious ruler. Of course, actually possessing all these virtues is neither possible nor desirable. But so long as a prince appears to act virtuously, most men will believe in his virtue.’
Machiavelli, The Prince
In politics as in biology, there is evolutionary advantage in appearing to be moral and virtuous. But this is rationalization, and not true moral reason and virtue; and it is a rationalisation of power. The only check is the existence of rivals for power. Transcendent standards come to be reduced to rationalizations, serving as a moral self-validation that has no need to recognize, let alone accept, any check outside of itself. Transcendent standards cease to exist outside of practice as a common standard by which competing claims are can be evaluated and conflict adjudicated, a reality check binding upon each and all, to which all must learn to conform their will. Instead, they become whatever the dominant power says they are. Tolkien got this spot-on – as bad as the situation would be should the Ring fall in the hands of the evil lord Sauron, it would be far worse should it become the possession of the good Gandalf. Power corrupts the good, not least when it is used righteously. Those who arrogate to themselves the power of righteous action in the name of truth and justice destroy the good and themselves in the process. Such people would commit evil righteously, and brook no opposition.
It is this simple: either transcendent standards exist or they do not. Those arguing for truth and justice affirm the existence of those standards, whether they know they do so or not. That emancipatory commitment to truth and justice begs an ontology of the good. A lot of confusion here arises from the fact that the liberal/Left in politics openly repudiates the metaphysical grounding of truth and justice and openly argues for the political conventionalism and social constructivism of a praxis-based projection of truth and justice. That confusion can only be politically debilitating and worse, since it effectively means that an emancipatory politics is being prosecuted on the very terrain which prevents emancipation.
The political left requires transcendent standards to make good its emancipatory commitments. In advancing this argument I proceed from the modern separation of the realms of fact and value, with the former considered to constitute the rational realm of knowledge (science as the observational and experimental investigation of the physical world) and ethics as the non-rational realm of value judgements and irreducible subjective preference and opinion. The former is elevated over the latter, given that it yields true knowledge and the latter does not. That dualism and its asymmetrical ordering is politically debilitating, and for those advancing emancipatory causes far more than for those defending the status quo. The right in politics already have, in large part, the social order they want, their political activity amounting to a rearguard action to preserve that order against those advancing alternate causes and platforms. In having to advance principles and incite practices that bring about the transformation of the prevailing social order, the Left have a much more difficult task in politics. 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 an ‘uncomfortable’ realisation 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, and which sees politics as the assertion of power and no more. 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 truth and justice, progressives and liberals (radicals and revolutionaries, however you want to name them) are invoking transcendent standards, whether they realize it or not. My case is that they need to understand precisely this and understand that those standards are not a matter of personal choice or sectional demand and imposition. Those standards are not – as in the liberal reading - something that individuals are free to choose or reject at will – but are binding upon each and all and serve as a standard to which each must learn to conform his or her will. And those standards are not – as, too often, in the radical reading – something to be imposed on recalcitrant others as the monopolised possession of some. That recognition of a standard lying outside of each and all, to which each and all must adhere and conform will, is the part that many demanding justice may well baulk at. It’s our best, and only, protection against totalitarian imposition.
Either transcendent standards exist or they do not. If they do not, then we have to abandon all moral arguments concerning freedom, democracy, justice, and dignity as anything more than mere rationalisations in a power play between those seeking to advance their interests against others. Recognition of the existence of such transcendent standards is thus relevant to politics in rendering human rights, democratic freedoms, equality, and claims of justice both meaningful and capable of vindication. If such standards do not exist, then all that there is, is an endless power/resistance, and one chooses one’s sides according to personal preferences that no one else need take seriously. In his book Morality and Modernity (1991), Ross Poole states the moral predicament of modernity concisely:
The concept of morality is not, except in a highly abstract and non-specific sense, a universal; every society constructs its own form of morality. So my argument is not that the modern world destroys the ground for believing in certain universal moral principles and values; it is rather that it provides no good reason for believing in its own principles and values. Modernity has called into play a dominant conception of what it is to have reason to act; this conception has the consequence that the dictates of morality have little purchase on the motivations of those to whom they are addressed. Modernity has constructed a conception of knowledge which excludes the possibility of moral knowledge; morality becomes, not a matter of rational belief, but subjective opinion. In a world which is antithetical to faith and dogma, morality can only survive as a matter of personal faith or dogmatic conviction. In neither case can morality retain the authority it needs to play its role in social and individual life.
Poole 1991: Introduction
A world which is ‘antithetical to faith and dogma’ is a world in which humanity has taken morality into its own hands. The loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework is precisely what was behind Nietzsche’s declaration of ‘the death of God.’ The problem is that there is no singular ‘humanity,’ as with God, only a number of discrete individuals forming themselves into groups and identities. Instead of an authoritative moral truth, there are a number of plural truths with no objective standard available to adjudicate between their rival claims. A fractured humanity within an asymmetrical distribution of resources and relations of power leads to a fractured moral terrain and public life. In the absence of that overarching authoritative framework recognising transcendent standards morality exists only as a matter of personal faith or dogmatic conviction. As Poole states, in neither case can morality command the authoritative force it requires to play its role in social and individual life. Of course, issues of justice and equality in social life require the authoritative motivating and obligating power of morality. That power is not available. Modern society has effectively lost its internal moral capacity. The result is that when people require morality in order to assert their just claims in a public context, they have to leave the subjectivism and privacy of personal belief behind – the dominant form of morality in the modern world – and proceed by way of a dogmatic conviction that is inimical to dialogue, discourse, and public life. In effect, modern individuals are having to advance moral arguments in the absence of appropriate moral media:
‘Part of the moral problem of modernity is that there is no principled way in which disputes between them can be resolved. But this is merely symptomatic of a deeper problem. Modernity supplies no good reason to accept any of the disputing moral positions. Each morality provides an account of what individuals ought to do, but none of them provides a good reason for individuals to take them seriously. Given the conceptions of human agency and reason prevalent in the modern world, a rational individual will reject the claims of morality. As Bernard Mandeville suggested at the beginning of the eighteenth century, morality can only be a system of illusion, whose main justification is that it serves certain social purposes.’
Poole Morality and Modernity 1991: Introduction
In taking sides out of dogmatic conviction, though, we should understand that, in a world that has abandoned a belief in God as the creator of an objectively valuable world, all choices are arbitrary and empty. They are existential choices made to project meaning and value upon the world. In the overall scheme of things it is of precisely no significance which team with which coloured hats win. In the short-run, some may hog the deeper end of the trough for themselves, that’s all. In this bleak and miserable perspective, there is no point or purpose to the game of life, other than staying in the game and feeding one’s oafish face for as long as possible. All go the same way in the end, both weak and strong. Everyone in the graveyard votes the same.
It may seem to be liberatory to be fighting on the side of the resistance, but the ultimate emptiness and arbitrariness of the fight will sooner or later become apparent. ‘Where there is nothing,’ wrote Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation, ‘both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.’
For Weber, the prospects for the future were gloomy:
Now then, ladies and gentlemen, let us debate this matter once more ten years from now. Unfortunately, for a whole series of reasons, I fear that by then the period of reaction will have long since broken over us. It is very probable that little of what many of you, and (I candidly confess) I too, have wished and hoped for will be fulfilled; little – perhaps not exactly nothing, but what to us at least seems little. This will not crush me, but surely it is an inner burden to realize it. Then, I wish I could see what has become of those of you who now feel yourselves to be genuinely ‘principled’ politicians and who share in the intoxication signified by this revolution. It would be nice if matters turned out in such a way that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 102 should hold true:
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days.
But such is not the case. Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph exactly now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his rights. When this night shall have slowly receded, who of those for whom spring apparently has bloomed so luxuriously will be alive? And what will have become of all of you by then? Will you be bitter or baunistic?
Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation
Those questions are being put to us now. In answering those questions we should bear in mind that events were to bear the gloomy prognostications of Weber out. In coming to win the way it did, the revolution was lost. The revolutionaries that survived and succeeded did so by surrendering principle to its contradictory practice. As he draws his After Virtue to a close, Alasdair MacIntyre notes that ‘as Marxists move towards power they always tend to become Weberians.’ ‘When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy.’ MacIntyre goes on to proclaim Marxism to be ‘exhausted as a political tradition,’ making it clear that ‘this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.’ There follows the famous conclusion which proclaims that a new dark age of barbarism is upon us and we stand charged with creating local communities to preserve the virtues.
Without transcendent standards of truth and justice affirming a substantive ontology of the good, and without the ethico-institutional infrastructure enabling a life lived in accordance with those standards, then all choices made and actions taken will be arbitrary. There is nothing here but the endless circulation of power/resistance. This is a sophism in which truth and justice is merely the rule of the strongest and all values are merely conventional in those terms. That’s a ‘post-truth’ society that lives ‘after virtue,’ and is the very world that emancipatory commitments and causes are intended to transform and reform. The emancipatory cause will defeat itself on this morally empty terrain of power/resistance. You cannot reform a void. We may protest and resist and challenge power, but in the end there no real alternative other than submission to the rule of the strongest. In joining the resistance in this endless struggle, people advance moral arguments concerning freedom, equality, justice etc but, without an explicit and coherent basis in transcendent standards, they are merely rationalisations in a power play. Worse, they become mere tools in a struggle for power, weaponizing the very principles in order to resist power and impose truth as a new power. To the extent that progressive believe in the moral positions they advance, they need to make an explicit commitment to transcendent standards of justice. To the extent that they don’t, they remain within a sophist world of endless power/resistance, unable to ground their claims and embed their radicalism.
It is either transcendentalism or conventionalism/constructivism/pragmatism: there is no third alternative. I will go further and state clearly that the transcendent source and end of justice is God, and that refusal to accept that truth will have unpalatable consequences for those who believe in freedom, equality, justice, and democracy.
I have argued the case reasonably and philosophically for years. I am now done with using a lot of words to say what can be said clearly and concisely. I see a politics that is radical on ends and utterly reactionary in means. If we have learned anything from political history it is that when means and ends are incongruous, the means will subvert the ends sooner or later, and the sooner the closer that resistance comes to power.
The problem is that in the heat of political battle, radicals and revolutionaries lose sight of their need to conform practice to the necessary essence of the real world and instead become sycophants and servants of its particular appearances in time and place.
Emancipatory politics has long since dissolved into a multitude of groups and individuals promoting different causes, accompanied by all manner of internecine controversies and conflicts. Lacking a cohering principle by which particulars are ordered to a common standard, these controversies and conflicts are incapable of resolution. Without a balancing of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies there can only be further fracturing. Without possibility of internal ordering in the absence of a self-limiting principle, order can only be imposed by force in such a politics. Should resistance ever succeed in constituting power, then that power will enforce order without dialogue, deliberation, and consent.
This is one of many reasons why I take the constitution of legitimate public community, the rule of law, and politics as disagreement with a view towards negotiating agreement seriously. I have learned to distrust the politics of those advancing emancipatory causes. In advancing those self-same causes – and I would suggest I go far further in advocating a genuinely socialist economy – I emphasise the interpenetration of means and ends, seeing the means as ends in the process of realisation. Whilst statements couched in terms of truth and justice seem to give a clear indication of support for universal principles, the force and violence of the means betray them to a contrary practice and conclusion.
As I write this I am being assailed by ‘demands’ – they are no less – to take action, make public statements, join protests, sign petitions, make stands – frankly shout loudly in public - etc etc to make my ideological purity clear. It is purgation without redemption, salvation without the soul; it is an assertion of truth and justice by way of political imposition. This is a monologue, not a dialogue. It is not politics, but an anti-politics.
Ponder this argument that Marx made on the relation of politics and principles, and ask where he discerned the principles he argued ought to shape politics:
Nothing prevents us, therefore, from lining our criticism with a criticism of politics, from taking sides in politics, i.e. from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them. This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with the true campaign-slogans. Instead we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not.
Marx EW Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks 1975
Are these principles human self-inventions within the historical process or do they derive from transcendent standards? You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too – once those standards of truth and justice are gone, they are gone for good, and there is nothing but self-created human values to take their place. That sounds liberatory until one realizes that there is no one ‘humanity,’ just different individuals, groups, and classes within asymmetrical relations of power. Some humans have a far greater power to persuade and force others to acknowledge their view of reality as the true one. That recourse to power is precisely what the anti-politics of monologue is all about – people are indeed presented with the demand ‘here is truth, on your knees before it!’ In the absence of an overarching and authoritative moral architectonic, morality is either a private personal choice of no direct political significance or a dogmatic conviction that is inimical to public life.
What is this transcendent standard? In a more philosophical idiom, we could write, with Spinoza, of the ‘intellectual love of God’ (amor dei intellectualis), the highest blessedness to which human beings can aspire. Kant argues that there can be no conflict of politics, as a practical doctrine of right, with ethics, as a theoretical doctrine of right:
The rights of man must be held sacred, however great a sacrifice the ruling power may have to make. There can be no half measures here; it is no use devising hybrid solutions such as pragmatically conditioned right halfway between right and utility. For all politics must bend the knee before right, although politics may hope in return to arrive, however slowly, at a stage of lasting brilliance.
Kant, On the Disagreement Between Morals and Politics in Relation to Perpetual Peace, Reiss ed 1991:125
The key question is the appreciation and assimilation of truth and justice in politics, something that is mediated by way of the forms of legitimate public discourse and citizen interaction. Time and again I see that crucial step being ignored, often quite deliberately in being identified as an obstacle to pre-determined truths and ends. Of course, politics entails opposition and contrary views, politics is precisely about the yes/no, and requires judgement. Those who simply want a ‘yes’ in politics are not doing politics at all – they are dictating truth. They miss entirely the point that truth cannot just be passively given but must be actively willed, if it is to be absorbed, assimilated, and lived in the practical world. Politics is about dissensus, dispute, and deliberation, the dialectical appreciation of truth rather than its imposition. The fact that some, seemingly in possession much less of truth than a whole load of falsehood, continue to prevail in politics is not an argument to circumvent the political process – it is a demand that you start to do politics better, something which involves relating to people and engaging with people in a way that entails more than informing heads and demanding actions.
This is politics as monologue, not dialogue, which is to say no politics at all. It breeds resistance when it is not met with indifference. The recourse to force follows as a matter of course. This is an attempt to replace deliberation and consent with dictation, on the assumption that truth is already known, and in possession of one’s own side or cause. That is very much the issue to be tested by way of disagreement with a view to agreement. The end in view of politics is a consensual devotion to common ends. Without that, emancipatory causes will be mired in constant battles, unable to proceed against their negation. You have to win a constituency, solicit the agreement of people, and win adherents to the cause. These are the hard boards of politics, and are trodden by those who take politics seriously. People are crying out for a legitimate public community serving the common good, but too many have forgotten how to achieve and sustain such a thing. Those capacities have also been stripped away after decades of assault on public life. By deliberate social engineering, people have been educated to look to themselves as private individuals to secure their ends, rather than join together and seek redress in collective endeavour through the public realm. The destruction of the public realm – the corporatisation of public business – has been accompanied by a diminution in the public imagination. The result is that when we are confronted by issues which require genuinely public action, there is only anti-public action, an attack on the symbols and institutions of existing public power.
Those actions destroy without replacing and therefore confirm the fracturing of the ethical life in the public square. We now have an outbreak of the war of the statues. Who goes up and who goes down in these terms depends on the force of the mob. In terms of ethics, in the absence of common shared standards, there is merely a mutual indifference in private, which explodes into mutual contempt in the public sphere. The incommensurate values behind the paralysis of politics in the modern world now explodes in public places. In a world in which solipsism holds all the trump cards, there is no ground for a genuine public life. What symbols and icons are offered for public adoration depend on which group is powerful at any one time. As it always has been, you may say. But it begs the question of the right public order, a genuine public as something more than an assertion of power.
The problem with this kind of politics is that it makes it clear that if people can achieve their ends by force, supplanting the rule of law in legitimate public community – legitimate in being based on spaces for citizen interaction and consent – then they will. And they will insist on one and all going down on their knees in front of truth. Not truth in the transcendent sense, still less as the intellectual love of God, but truth as a political and cultural creation in time and place. Common standards of evaluation and adjudication are replaced by the demand that we submit to those who claim to have truth and justice on their side. That ‘side’ has appropriated transcendent standards to their cause, in time bending the ends to conform to the means. There follows the purging of people of the ‘wrong’ ideas. Purgation is fine, so long as it is a purgation as properly understood, with the penitents actively and consciously involved in the process as willing pilgrims on their way to a higher truth. The problem with the political purgers is that they reduce the active and participatory process of purgation to a mechanism in which pilgrims fall under the control of purgers grown intolerant and impatient in their purity. People are purged in accordance with pre-judged and pre-determined positions, there is no genuine participation, no negotiation, no creation of active consent and conscious agreement. Only force and punishment.
On more than a few times in ‘debate’ over the years now I have advanced reasonable arguments attempting to get people to clarify the grounds of the emancipatory positions they advance with respect to particular cases and causes. I have been met with the accusation that I speak out of ‘white male privilege.’ That attempt to silence contrary voices is a particularly insidious example of the various forms of relativism that stalk the modern moral terrain. It is insidious because it goes further than the ethical subjectivism which sees morality as a series of irreducible value judgements. It is an attempt to silence and suppress by way of delegitimising certain voices – white males in particular, but by extension white women and black men should they prove contrary and recalcitrant.
The argument that morality is simply a series of value judgements, lacking any common or objective standard by which we are able to determine where the balance of right and wrong lies in completing claims, discards the notion of moral truth and moral knowledge. On this terrain, a moral argument is easily, and frequently is, negated by the response that ‘that is just your opinion.’ Which is true, insofar as morality is considered to be no more than subjective preferences, likes, dislikes. The dominant conception in the modern world is that morality lacks objective content and is no more than irreducible subjective opinion incapable of yielding knowledge. That view comes with the corollary that one person’s judgement is as good as anyone else’s judgement, and that individuals are free to judge the good for themselves and have no need to submit their claims to any trans-subjective standard. No one has the right to tell another person what they ought to do.
That position appears liberatory, and is often felt as such. The fact that I love the music of Elvis Presley may tell a truth about me, but it has no bearing at all on what kind of music others may enjoy. That’s my truth, and others are entitled to their own truths. I have heard many people denigrate Elvis Presley over the years, but secure in my truth I need pay them no attention at all. In such a world there is no public right and wrong, only one’s own private truths. Likewise, if a person disapproves of something that others do, that may reveal something about the tastes and preferences of that person, but it has no bearing upon what others ought to do. Simply, no individual has the right to tell other individuals what to do.
This agnosticism on the good, placing morality squarely in the hands of individuals, appears liberatory. Individuals are free to choose the good as they see fit and pursue their ends without hindrance of external forces, whether in the shape of other individuals and their ideas of the good or of trans-subjective standards. I am free to listen to Elvis to my heart’s content and need pay no attention to those who routinely abuse him. That’s just their opinion, I can say, what do they know. They know nothing about nothing, I can tell myself, and carry on content with my own personal choices. The debilitating consequences of such an ethics become plain as soon as we attempt to muster the collective wit and will to address the crisis in the climate system. Environmentalists describe action to protect planetary boundaries as a ‘moral imperative.’ The problem is, on a moral terrain of subjective opinion, that statement merely means ‘I like climate action,’ ‘I dislike climate destruction,’ ‘I would like you to take action to protect the planet,’ ‘I dislike your environmentally destructive actions.’ In the absence of a moral referent, there can be no such thing as a moral imperative. We have lost that referent, and the fact that so few among our erstwhile progressives and reformers have yet to understand that loss and understand its practical implications constitutes a large part of our predicament. Such people are issuing imperatives that will not be acted upon, because they can, on this terrain, be silenced with the response ‘that’s only your opinion.’
As a result, there is a problem of moral and political paralysis at the heart of practical reason, something which ensures that the common action that needs to be taken to remedy various social and environmental ills does not get taken. In these conditions, individuals are perfectly entitled not to ‘contract in’ to any collective endeavour if he or she should feel it contradicts his or her personal interest, and are perfectly entitled to ‘contract out.’
The politically debilitating consequences of an ethics of subjective choice and preference are the source of growing frustration among those who see problems mounting and little effective action being taken. It is here that things get even more problematic. The solution is to recover the idea of a moral referent at the heart of an overarching and authoritative moral framework so as to give moral imperatives meaning, substance, and practical force. This, however, is rejected as an interference on personal liberty and as potentially repressive of otherness and difference.
The result is a clear confusion, an assertion of moral agnosticism at the personal level combined with moral demands for common action. This frequently manifests itself in outright contradictions that, if prosecuted by way of public action – either in ‘debate’ in public forums or in legislation and regulation - is frankly a totalitarian imposition of the preferences and choices of some upon recalcitrant others.
Many deny the existence of transcendent standards yielding moral claims that bind and obligate individuals on the one hand, whilst at the same time asserting ‘moral imperatives’ that all ought to respect. You can choose your own examples here, there are many, from climate action to racial justice. Those moral imperatives presume the existence of moral referents that do not exist on the modern moral terrain.
Given how easily people consumed by self-righteous indignation interpret refusal to submit to the diktat of the convinced and the dogmatic as evidence of incorrect ideology, I shall make it clear that my argument is not aimed against emancipatory causes, but the ways in which they are often advanced – and could only be advanced on a fractured moral terrain. Far from being against emancipatory principles, my argument is aimed to secure their moral and political bases so as to ensure they do not rebound against would-be emancipators and everyone else in their practice. To state the matter more plainly still, I want emancipation, not enslavement.
The paradox that is immanent in the liberal framework is now becoming apparent. The assertion of ethics as no more than subjective value judgements is based on a fundamental sociological illiteracy that was never going to be tenable in the long run. The contradictions of that view are becoming apparent in face of a range of social and environmental injustices demanding collective action. On the one hand, the notion denies the existence of moral standards that bind and obligate others, whilst on the other hand asserting the existence of one standard that indeed all should respect, namely that individuals ought not impose their views on others. Likewise, the liberal political order establishes a common framework that is neutral on an overarching and common good so as to allow individuals to choose the good as they see fit. That common framework is itself a view of the good, neutrality is just another word for liberalism. That neutrality may still be valuable, not least on account of checking the tendency of human beings from forcing their truths down each others’ throats, using principles as an excuse to abuse those of contrary views.
As MacIntyre argues:
Even although the neutrality is never real, it is an important fiction, and those of us who recognize its importance as well as its fictional character will agree with liberals in upholding a certain range of civil liberties.
MacIntyre, "Toleration and the Goods of Conflict," 144
I’m not knocking that neutrality in itself, not least for its value in holding the moralizing enthusiasms of human beings in check. But this brings me to my next point – in the end, the fiction of neutrality is not merely hypocritical, being a surreptitious smuggling in of the (liberal) good, it is nowhere strong enough to serve as a genuine good, and is too weak to resist the attempts of individuals to impose their collective goods on others by force.
I come back here to the several occasions on which I have been met in argument by the charge that I spoke out of ‘white male privilege.’ A charge such as that refuses engagement with the substantive arguments being made and, indeed, renders them redundant. They shift the issue from the proposition to the proposer. With that assertion we have moved beyond the view of individuals as having the right to speak truth and choose the good as they please – which is bad enough as a paralysing self-negation in the social sphere that keeps us mired in the status quo – to positive assertions of particular collective goods and truths and the systematic devaluation and delegitimation of alternative – deemed contrary by the righteous – platforms. And that is insidious, highlighting the very force that will consume any emancipatory politics from within. In other words, when we move from personal belief in the private sphere to dogmatic conviction in the public sphere, as human beings as social beings must, morality in politics takes a decidedly repressive turn.
On one occasion I responded by writing ‘there is only one person here speaking out of privilege.’ I was met with the vilest of abuse. So I have learned to say precious little in such debates, and not follow up when controversy starts, as it soon does. In other words, despairing of dialogue there is only a private silence and a public violence. That does not augur well for the building of public community. There is a short step from assaults on ‘things’ to assaults on people.
There is a need to think deeply as to how the modern world has reached this impasse. Many people value goods which are trans-subjective. The environment is the most obvious example in the contemporary world, but there are other examples, such as social and racial justice. People respect these goods and affirm certain principles in their respect, seeking to advance these goods as political causes. At the same time, though, many of the self-same people will deny the existence of objective, authoritative, and trans-subjective framework based on moral referents – and the communities of character and practice that enable virtuous action – which alone yields moral imperatives in the true sense, generating an ethic that inspires, obligates, and is acted upon. Instead, morality is claimed to be nothing more than a personal affair that is based upon subjective choice. On the one hand, there is an assertion of the value of collective and social goods, on the other, there is the assertion of personal preference. The failure to resolve this paradox at the heart of emancipatory politics will result in the failure to secure common ends by way of means that are consistent with their values and principles. Either there will be failure as a result of the inability to transcend morality as anything more than personal belief and subjective choice – there has been – or there will be a success through dogmatic assertion bought at the expense of the values and principles themselves – those values and principles will have become no more than counters and rationalizations in a power struggle, the excuse for some to impose their views on others, and not as the basis for securing consensual action to common ends, a genuine public community.
‘Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.’ That would appear eminently reasonable, leaving people free to decide on what is right for them and leaving others alone. Such an approach leads to a free and tolerant society. The benign nature of this principle has ensured common assent. The problem is that such a view is minimal, lacks social implication, and is parasitic on a moral capital developed in previous generations as well as economic stability in the present. Remove those conditions, and the limitations of that view soon become apparent. The values of individual liberty, personal preference, and toleration are not morally neutral, but presuppose a particular kind of society which inculcates a certain character via certain modes of conduct. The more morality becomes a matter of personal choice, the more those modes of character formation dwindle away, the more the common moral language and anchoring is lost – the less able society as a whole finds it possible to orient itself morally, the more coherence is lost, the more society fractures. The stresses and strains in face of social and environmental crises rent the flabby ethical fabric apart. A society in which individual liberty, personal preference, and toleration are upheld only to the extent that the individuals composing that society accept its good under the fiction of neutrality is hardly one that is safe, stable, and secure. Too much depends on the transitory preferences and tastes of particular individuals which, under the stresses and strains of mounting socio-economic and environmental crises that a subjectivist morality has proven incapable of addressing in the collective sense required for resolution, will fall quickly and easily into the embrace of surrogate communities and false collectivities.
Therein lies the totalitarian snare. Against this, my preference is for a more substantial moral framework in accordance with transcendent standards and underpinned by the rule of law in an authentic public community.
The accusation of ‘white male privilege’ sent in my direction is not something to be passed off as an anomaly, something that can be ignored as a minor aberration. It indicates a deep-seated mentality in a certain leftist politics, a mentality that will assuredly consume the emancipatory cause – and any public realm raised in its image – from within. That mentality is a bastardised subjectivism that goes beyond the idea that the good is a matter of personal preference to the imposition of a good upon others, without bothering to establish the moral framework and infrastructure in between and which alone gives moral imperatives their legitimacy and force. Instead, there is direct, unmediated force which says, ‘show me what race/sex/class you are, and I will tell you what you have done wrong.’ Those on the receiving end of that accusation will either submit to the power and demands of the accuser and express agreement, or will be the target of re-education or worse.
Everything in this world is turned upside down, precisely because the transition from private choice to public commitment is incapable of being mediated without a moral architectonic. Martin Luther King jr. was a great man not because he was black but because of his character and the way he affirmed transcendent standards of truth and justice in politics. His character was not a function of his race/sex/class but of his recognition, acquisition, and exercise of the moral and intellectual virtues. Martin Luther King jr. had things the right way round when he defined equality as the judging of people by the “content of their character,” and not by the colour of their skin.
‘Judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.’ (Martin Luther King jr.).
When it is skin colour and not character that matters, the world will remain forever divided between oppressors and the oppressed.
But I have the feeling I may be speaking a foreign language. Decades before Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), Lewis Mumford wrote on the extent to which the virtues have become almost a dead language:
‘If we are to create balanced human beings, capable of entering into world-wide co-operation with all other men of good will--and that is the supreme task of our generation, and the foundation of all its other potential achievements--we must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. And values do not come ready-made: they are achieved by a resolute attempt to square the facts of one's own experience with the historic patterns formed in the past by those who devoted their whole lives to achieving and expressing values. If we are to express the love in our own hearts, we must also understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to yellow fever. These historic manifestations of love are not recorded in the day's newspaper or the current radio program: they are hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds. Virtue is not a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime.’
Lewis Mumford, Values for Survival, 1946
If you want emancipation, then you will have to build the character and the practices that sustain a just social order. As MacIntyre writes:
‘When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community. And that regeneration enables such plain persons to put to the question the dominant modes of moral and social discourse and the institutions that find their expression in those modes. It was they who were the intended and, pleasingly often, the actual readers of After Virtue, able to recognize in its central theses articulations of thoughts that they themselves had already begun to formulate and expressions of feeling by which they themselves were already to some degree already moved.’
Mumford described the hippies of the late sixties as a ‘new barbarism’ arising in reaction to the organized barbarism of the modern Megamachine ruling over us. Is it too much to ask for a return to the traditions and communities of the virtues?
Some of the hypocrisy on display in recent days has been so breath-taking as to be pathological. I have been delivering some pretty vociferous criticism of those who have downplayed, and even denied, the threat of Covid-19, exchanging heated words with ‘libertarians’ against lockdown, going so far as to accuse them of having blood on their hands. This has been a huge issue of freedom and authority and individual responsibility. We had two weeks or more of Dominic Cummings being criticized daily – and rightly – for the way he broke lockdown instructions. But now we have mass protests breaking all recommendations and instructions, and people getting all excited in the process. The message goes out that principles, standards, and consistency count for zero, nothing, zilch on what conservatives gleefully call ‘the Left.’ It looks like lockdown is either on or off according to transitory political whims and preferences. The double standard here has to be more than the hypocrisy alleged by conservatives – x is a socialist but owns a big house, y is an environmentalist but once upon a time flew in a plane etc (that we are all compromised by living in the society we live in doesn’t change the case for its transformation) - it has to relate to the arbitrary moral grounding behind it all, the lack of a substantive good that is capable of binding on all individuals. We have had weeks of individuals being chastised for their irresponsible behaviour in the lockdown, with accusations that they were threatening the lives of the elderly and vulnerable – they were. All of this disappears when one’s favourite cause is to be advanced. We had the jokes at the expense of the libertarians marching in protest against lockdown and in favour of liberty. But now mass protests against racial injustice are fine. The double standards indicates the arbitrariness of moral preference at the bottom of it all, the lack of true moral substance. And it indicates the existence of a self-righteous superiority which holds that it is OK for some to transgress the boundaries but not others. This is a dangerous game to play, and for more reasons that it gives strength to conservative accusations of hypocrisy. The presumption is that only our kind of people are entitled to engage in protest, break the law, transgress the boundaries, because we are on the right side and affirm all the right values and principles. That attitude circumvents politics, the exchange and interaction, the deliberation over values and principles and their practical application. It’s a dangerous game because others can play it. It teaches that might is right and anything goes so long as one gets one’s way. Did you see the libertarian protesters armed to the teeth? If you take politics onto the streets do you really fancy your chances against the fascists? I don’t. And even if you win, I don’t want a public life based upon force rather reason, imposition rather than negotiation. There is nothing for politics, citizen interaction, and public deliberation to do – there is no dialogue and no dialectical appreciation and popular assimilation of truth.
The truth is pre-set, pre-determined, and pre-political, with politics reduced, at best, to an exercise in public re-education/indoctrination.
Establishing truth and justice this way is counter-productive, not only lacking the enduring quality that comes with democratic consent and content, but turning them into their opposites by use of contrary means.
As for the equation of whiteness with original sin, demanding contrition and reparation, this will rent an already divided social fabric so far asunder as to leave it in shreds. We have Covid-19 and its impact, we have economic depression for who knows how long to come, we have environmental crisis getting worse, so let’s throw yet more division into the mix. I refuse utterly the phenomenon of white liberal guilt which not only accepts, but volunteers claims that all white people are complicit, that is, racists, in the same way that all men are rapists. These claims are inflammatory and divisive. Most people are not racist (and not sexist) and most do support equality and justice. They may have different ways of supporting those ends, and some may be a whole lot slower than others. But impatience inflames debate and sends it to extremes, and short circuits the process in making demands that foster resistance. Identity politics has poisoned the Left and taken it away from the universal principles and standards that are its raison d’etre. Identity politics has little resonance beyond the comfortably off middle classes. The Left needs messages that have a greater appeal. Having an enthusiastic following among wealthy young people isn't an election winner. The left is becoming whiter and wealthier, not the right. The left has alienated almost everyone, especially the poorest. Trump just took advantage of that. Identity politics is divisive and destructive that establishes collective culpability and guilt, identifying people as sinners bearing responsibility for all crimes committed by some bearing the same identity. Notions of collective guilt are toxic, destructive, and self-destructive.
As for white middle class liberal guilt, just spare me. The prominent role of the middle class, particularly the upper-middle-class, the haute bourgeoise, bears scrutiny. It is this that goes some way in explaining the double-standards and sense of entitlement in what appears to be a hypocritical politics. “The ‘Great Awokening,’ the mass movement focused on eradicating racism in America and with a quasi-religious, almost hysterical feel to it, is dominated by the upper middle class.”
You have to be extremely wealthy, comfortable, and privileged to be able to engage in this kind of politics, egging people on from the safety of their own secure home and lifestyle.
I prefer R.H. Tawney and his concern to check any ideas by Henry Dubb, ‘ordinary’ folk. I prefer G.K. Chesterton, who wrote “Mere mobs!” repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. “So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists: they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons’ wars.”
I make no excuses, offer no apologies, and give no licence to those progressives who are inclined to turn a blind eye to violence, transgression, force, and imposition on account of it being for the right ends or an expression of anger and frustration. Or plainly prefer not to see it. I reserve my greatest contempt here not for the revolutionaries who, time and again, in haste and impatience, betray their principles to their opposite in practice, but for the ‘progressives,’ those ‘moderates’ and reformists who, whilst paying lip-service to the right principles to secure and retain office for themselves, have not acted on those principles, have not made the public realm work as it ought, and have been complicit in building up this dam of hatred which now threatens to engulf us all.
It is about time that progressives, reformists, and moderates started to live up to their billing and take the transformative action required to restore balance to the world. In politics, a slow driver can be even more of a menace than a speeding driver when it is time for precipitate action. Politicians have been stalling in front of entrenched power for far too long. Even now, at this late date, we have been told that the likes of Sanders and Corbyn are ‘scary lefties’ who will put voters off. If we keep practising the politics of complicity and mediocrity, the end is nigh. Donald Trump read the writing that has been on the wall in big block letters for decades. It’s a simple message concerning the need for change, and he misinterpreted it. But at least he read it and acted on it. Too many read it and ignore it in the hope it will go away. Gramsci described fascism as the vicious counter-revolution to the revolution that never came. Just make sure that the revolution is a revolution. In My Country Right or Left, George Orwell wrote this caution with respect to the Enlightenment and its moral and political promise that human beings could live by its own self-created values and principles:
“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.”
The death of George Floyd is a tragedy, and is something we have seen all too often in America in recent years. This problem of black people being killed at the hands of policemen pre-dates Trump, so it is wise to avoid taking Trump’s forceful assertion of law and order against protest as well as social breakdown as a declaration of a war in which we choose our sides according to political preference. That willingness to enlist in a social war has the potential to wipe us all out, with peaceful protests respectful of public order coming to degenerate into a lawless violence with the express intent of destroying a public community it condemns as irredeemably unjust. And that’s before we even come to the issue of those who exploit political conflict spilling outside of the conventional public sphere to engage in riot, vandalism, and robbery, threatening a breakdown in law and order that threatens to turn us all over to the predation of the immoral, the rapacious, and the violent. In short order, a justifiable anger incites a destructive cycle of violence that perpetuates itself by dragging in innocent people of all colours and political persuasions, feeding on the fear, hatred, and division it entrenches and exacerbates. This is an incredibly toxic mix that takes the fragility of public life for granted. Protest often succeeds on account of a forceful presentation of a just cause on the borders of legality. It is a tactic that should be used sparingly and not overused. When used relentlessly, it erodes the belief on the part of the public, and even the authorities themselves, that a just public order willing and able to respond to the demands of a just cause exists anymore. There is a naïve belief on the part of some that they can play the game of protest as an extra-legal transgression of boundaries that can shift those boundaries in the direction of justice. That has been done throughout history and has been instrumental in bringing change for the better. The naivety is a product of complacency, taking the security of foundations, in both ethics and public order, for granted. Those foundations are increasingly shaky and there has to be a question as to how long they can survive continuing and repeated shocks. The very public frame upon which demands for reform are levelled may thus crash.
For those who believe that the prevailing order has no redemptive possibilities that may be the point. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote this 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.”
Such people proceed by way of generalisation and caricature, pushing every issue to extremes to force a final confrontation and conflagration.
These issues are difficult and need to be carefully traced to source. Instead, there is the precipitate drawing of conclusions that fit facts and events to a pre-determined political narrative. Incidents are seen through a political filter, with contrary details schotomized as other details are interpreted by wat of exaggeration. The man who generalizes generally lies, stated Bertrand Russell. Whilst generalisation makes for poor argument, it can have immediate and direct impact in politics, inciting anger and stoking conflict, simplifying complicated issues in such a way as to make it easier to choose a side. But such an approach serves only to perpetuate a problem and nothing to resolve it.
The local-global fallacy is a common one in politics. This error is committed by those who draw large inferences from a discrete event or happening. There may well be problems of racial injustice in America – as there are in other countries – and these may be deep-seated and historical. Of the various ways in which that injustice may be addressed, the one least likely to succeed is to reinforce racial division and incite a race war by collective racial stereotyping, effectively weaponizing racial groups against each other. That is the very thing we have sought to end being applied with respect to black people. Now, with abandon, we have sweeping generalisations of guilt and culpability being applied to white people. Those white people who have been quick to accept this notion of white guilt, confess their collective sins, and ask for forgiveness may think that peace and reconciliation lies this way, but it does not. This is racist and reactionary and will rebound spectacularly on any just cause.
Those responsible for the institution of slavery, those involved in the slave trade, can be identified and the processes involved studied and analysed. This is why we study history, to understand and explain complicated issues. What is particularly insidious about this issue is the extrapolation from the immediate protagonists in the slave trade to all those who purportedly benefitted from the slave trade – effectively all people, including poor working class whites and, what is more, their descendants down the ages. Basically, everyone, in a collective guilt. It was instructive in this respect to hear a discussion as to which public monuments ought to be taken down. All the names from British history were mentioned, Nelson, Churchill, Drake, Cromwell, you name them. Britain is now being asked to throw its history in the dustbin.
The news is now dominated by the outrage of the day – several, these days - with the outraged paying little or no attention at all to the winnowing away of the structures and institutions of authority, including respect, commitment, and service, in pressing their demands. The presumption is that law and order are natural and emerge spontaneously through the good will and good intentions of people. That view is naïve and complacent. I’m afraid the bone-headed reactionary defenders who have thought they can carry on ignoring pleas for equality and justice have raised an opposition in their own image. This is not reformation, it is deformation. The public realm is in the hands of people playing the same game.
As ever, what starts out with good intentions, harnessing idealism with a determination to right an injustice, turns sour because of the lack of internal orienting and cohering principle allied to discipline, character, and substance. It is easy for such movements to get carried away in pressing their demands, for the reason that lack a limiting principle. The tendency to generalisation results in many people coming to be unfairly denounced, breeding resentment and reaction in itself. Priceless cultural resources come to be destroyed, on account of being ‘old,’ and hence complicit in the corrupt society to be destroyed; ‘traditional’ ethics and culture being traduced for being, well, traditional, regardless of any popular attachment. Contrary voices are delegitimised and overridden, silenced and suppressed if they do not concede defeat and silence and marginalize themselves. Any victories won this way will merely breed a resentment and opposition that will fester at the heart of an already social fabric for years. Instead of a peace through justice the best that will be achieved is a pacification imposed and maintained by force.
It should go without saying that I am not going to the barricades to defend the statues of slavers and racists, but that’s not the point. I have frequently criticized the likes of Baden-Powell, not merely on account of his nefarious activities, but in ripping off the idea of the scout movement from wilderness loving anarchists, people on the left who saw the inhuman conditions of the cities and sought to return young people to nature. It was a great idea and Baden-Powell appropriated it and put it into service for militarist and imperialist purposes, putting young people in uniform in the process. He militarized the idea of natural freedom and spontaneity. I made these points at length when Ian Hislop received great praise for his BBC TV show on Baden-Powell, arguing that the country needed these ideals of sacrifice, service, duty, and healthy living. It may well do, but not on these terms. There are better ways of doing these things than Baden-Powell’s way. I have also frequently pointed out that Gladstone’s maiden speech was in defence of slavery. I did so not to traduce Gladstone, but to attempt to get liberals to see that their idealisations with respect to values and principles tend to ignore contrary realities at the level of practice. Gladstone spent a career denouncing war and imperialism, but was as involved in these things as Prime Minister as much as his political rivals. He is known as a champion of justice, but in the 1870s the Miners’ leader Mason declared that the working people of Britain had gained much more from the Conservative government of Disraeli than it had from Gladstone’s Liberals. As for Churchill, if I were to start here I would never finish. I remember not just his racism – wanting Gandhi trampled under elephants in front of the Viceroy – but his aggressive class politics – wanting the miners on their knees eating grass. My grandfather was a miner. This is the kind of thing I remember. There are many more examples.
As a historian by background, interest, and training, I of course think it’s a good thing for people to take an interest in history. It’s just that attacking symbols and figures of the past on account of their not meeting the standards and values of some in the present is not history, the very opposite. There is no judgement here, no cool appraisal of the evidence, no balance, no setting of issues in context, only a political moralizing concerned to divide the world into sides. In politics, that approach undermines dialogue, identifying one’s own side as necessarily right and all other sides as irredeemably evil. In history, the effects are no less damaging. Without the balance in judgement that is history as a discipline, there is a danger of politicking and moralising not merely re-writing history – such is history – but doing so in a way that obliterates history, replacing it with the dominant politics of the here and now.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
I’m not massive on statues and monuments, although I do like to have a look round, the same way I look to look at art and architecture. I don’t insist that surrounding conform to my political and moral beliefs. I don’t much like to see the Duke of Wellington on his tower in Liverpool, but I took his photo all the same.
Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. After seeing it, a Vietnam War veteran wrote the following poem:
I didn't want a monument,
not even one as sober as that
vast black wall of broken lives.
I didn't want a postage stamp.
I didn't want a road beside the Delaware
River with a sign proclaiming:
"Vietnam Veterans Memorial Highway."
What I wanted was a simple recognition
of the limits of our power as a nation
to inflict our will on others.
What I wanted was an understanding
that the world is neither black-and-white
nor ours.
What I wanted
was an end to monuments.
‘Many believe that the best way to achieve that goal is through education. By studying the terrible events of twentieth-century genocide, we are vividly reminded of the power of the individual to make decisions that affect not only oneself and one’s neighbors but also the survival of the entire world. After seeing the destruction the atomic bomb wrought on Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II, Jacob Bronowski experienced “a moment that dwarfed his imagination.” He called it a “universal moment.” Amid the terrible ashes of the city, he wrote that all decisions about disarmament and other issues which weigh the fate of nations “should be made within the forbidding context of Nagasaki; only then could statesmen make realistic judgments of the problems which they handle on our behalf.”
My first degree is in history. I studied history long before I took up philosophy. History is a key subject in the way that it embeds us in realities and alternate possibilities. Any society that loses its critical and ethical purchase on the past is in peril. In generating people who know nothing but the present, such a society loses not only its past but also its future. In losing the awareness that life has been different from what it is today, we lose the sense that it could actually be different to today. The future becomes nothing more than the present enlarged, with people unable to see the potentials for alternate modes of living that are contained within present lines of development. The people of such a society bear remediable political and social evils easily, since they have nothing with which to critically compare the norms of prevailing society. Study history, it's an education in who we are, what we have been and what we could become, delivering both negative and positive lessons. At the same time, education is also about creating the happy habitus in which the virtues - as qualities for the living well together - can be known, learned, and exercised - linked to character-construction and appropriate modes of conduct. In other words, informing heads is important, but creates a flourishing society only in the context of forming characters so that people know the right thing to do, and do it for that reason. I'll adapt G.K. Chesterton here, who was spot on when he wrote: "you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it." Same with fact, evidence, information - character formation in the rightly ordered society is key. Knowledge and know-how give people the ability to act, they don't make people want to act - the motivational economy is developed in other ways. Without character formation and modes of conduct based on right relationships, our technics will continue to misfire and backfire.
The article cites mathematician Jacob Bronowski, a figure I greatly admire from my youth. A quote from Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man" is appropriate:
“It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.
I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people."
That does mean all people, and not just those with whom we agree.
If Liverpool cannot make a public commemoration of a four time Prime Minister, with sixty years of public service, born in Liverpool, on account of the sins of his father, then something has gone badly wrong in politics, ethics, and culture, and that is a threat to all of us. Gladstone was a great reformer, not burdened by his past, learning and reaching out to a new future for all. We can all become prisoners of the past.
I’m not massive on statues and monuments, although I do like to see them. I used to quote Bertrand Russell a lot, to the effect that most of the statues erected are of people with no discernible talent other than mass murder. I don’t much like any of these people. But at least I know who they are and can understand why others may value them. I’m not inclined to override people’s views. I don’t make a fetish of statues. They are up, so I will go and have a look at them, take their photo and express praise or disapproval to anyone who has the misfortune to be accompanying me on my rambles. But none of this is the point. My concern lies with culture, consent, negotiation, the awareness that you share social space with others who may be of a different persuasion – that’s the only basis for a society at peace with itself. The response back is that this is about public recognition for groups whose own legitimate claims have been wiped from history and culture. I see one illegitimacy and imposition in the process of being replaced by another, doing nothing but breed further resentment and division.
It is much easier to unleash the forces of febrile intolerance than it is to rein it in. Once you unleash a process like this, one that proceeds by way of negation and attack against visible targets, then there is no way of controlling its direction. Based on a mindset that opposes, negates, deconstructs, divides, and subverts, the process is endless and mires us in a cancel culture that advances only by denying once perfectly acceptable viewpoints, and which are still held by people, a legitimate platform. In the name of advancing the social position of some, others are silenced, suppressed, sent to the margins. This is value- and virtue-signalling removalism that does nothing to body forth those values and virtues and instead serves only to distract attention from a just cause and invites reaction and paralysis by the way it trivialises the growing pressure for real change. Capitalist corporations run entirely by white people are not the allies of racial justice, they don’t care one way or the other. They just throw dead cats on the table to distract from the much more important questions of substantive structural transformation. Unfortunately, people who have made a fetish of protest and demonstration are all too happy to remain at the surface level of events, paying lip service of their own. Their endless postings on Twitter and Facebook is a substitute politics. Low-level activity on social media does not build to substantial action, merely a lot of low-level, low impact activity that achieves nothing other than a restatement of views and beliefs already held. We are no longer addressing racial injustice – let alone any other kind of injustice - but engaging in pointless internecine culture wars. That conflict is rootless and hence fruitless.
In response to locals raising objections (with respect to the elderly folk and scouts defending Baden-Powell’s statue) I saw ridicule, contempt, and abuse, of elderly people of conservative views. I saw one elderly gentleman in scout uniform threatening to give anyone tampering with the statue a ‘bunch of fives.’ This would have been a reassuringly English image in another age, that determination to fight on against hopeless odds that would be quite comical were it not for the fact that it proved its worth in Churchill’s ‘we’ll fight them on the beaches’ speech. Churchill well knew the British had nothing to fight with; what he was doing was creating the fighting spirit and buying the time in which the technical capacity to fight effectively would be created. He gets daubed in graffiti and abuse for his trouble. Churchill was as divisive a figure then as he is now, the difference is that that age had enough of a shared common ground as to be able to sink its differences and muster the collective will to fight a common cause. It had a common identity. This has gone. Instead, there is the narcissism of petty differences.
Unfortunately, these issues are now becoming questions of power and strength, and opponents will have no compunction in delivering a bunch of fives back. And that’s my objection – victory here is going to the loudest voice and the strongest arm. To those who say that it always has, I say, maybe (not quite), but that approach has bred precisely the injustice, resentment, and discontent we see now, and will do so in the future – it is no settlement.
If you really want to challenge and defeat the politics of Gladstone and Churchill and such like, then engage in a real politics of transformation against the Gladstones and Churchills of today, if you want to take a political stand on slavery, then engage in the radical reformation of prevailing exploitative relations in the capitalist economy, and engage effectively, in the sense of winning people over to serious institutional and structural alternatives. These seems to be a complacent view that all economic problems have been resolved and that the only issue now is for groups to fight over the distribution of the spoils. I have long asked the question why, given the various transition movements underway, why so many are so active and enthusiastic with respect to protest and demonstration, and so inactive when it comes to practice and alternative socio-economic organisation. There is a disparity here. Alternatives exist in commons and collaborative economics and forms of governance and transitions, too few people are involved in them. There is a democratic deficit at the heart of protest. People in their bubbles have the impression that they are a lot more numerous than they are. Their constant assaults chip away at public order and do nothing to replace it. Our erstwhile revolutionaries may have missed it, but they just took one hell of a beating at the polls in December 2019. You can complain – rightly – about media bias and the campaign against Corbyn, but at the same time there is a need to work harder to take people with you. That’s if you are engaging in serious politics, instead of culture and lifestyle and virtue signalling – politics as fashion accessory. There is a radical disconnect. Election returns alone should tell people this. I know this simply by talking to the ‘ordinary’ folk as I work in the community. Such folk can be dismissed as ‘wrong’ and as standing in need of lectures. That didactic approach is not appreciated. Instead of building a genuine public, one which includes alternative platforms and discursive spaces, there is a tendency to dig trenches, take to them, and stay there.
The blunt fact is that this ‘revolution,’ like the climate ‘rebellion’ of recent months, leaves intact the institutional and structural basis of wealth and power. A politics of permanent protest excites its adherent by surface level attacks on the symbols and trappings of power but doesn’t come close to challenging let alone uprooting the structural bases of real power. It doesn’t touch the capital system, and isn’t remotely a step in that direction, whatever the fevered fantasies of those excited by the protests. Most interesting here are the complaints of those who do show some idea of the structural roots of racism (they have yet to get to the structural roots of inequality and injustice in general). They make government the principal agency responsible for challenging and changing those structural roots, with injustice becoming just another issue to divide on in the conventional political sphere. As one of capital’s second order mediations, government is tied in symbiotic relation to structural inequality and injustice and cannot serve as the agency of internal transformation in the way some demand. Some things can be done, a lot, even, as in Scandinavian countries, but the control of economic life by the transnational corporations won’t come close to being touched. In fact, these corporations will be in on it, embracing and paying lip service to racial justice, just as they pay lip service to environmental protection at the same time that they carry on eating up the planet.
There’s a lot of liberal Puritan self-flagellation going on, indicating that much of this – in white circles – is about superficial cultural measures rather than building grassroots opposition to class society. I note the feverish postings of people celebrating the desecration of public monuments, claiming that they mourn the absence of equality and not the destruction of statues. I know the people posting this kind of thing on Facebook memes very well, have known them for years, and know their lack of political substance. I know that every single time I have posted on Marx and socialism and any kind of class struggle and class politics which is serious about analysing the conditions of social equality, these self-same people claim socialism and capitalism are the same and they retreat back to variants of their green liberal reformism, which itself is a paradoxical mix of ‘non-political’ reformism from below with respect to small-scale transitions, without structural implication or direct challenges to power, and large-scale top down reformism from above with respect to ambitious and expensive government interventions. The approach is incoherent, implausible, and ineffective, its schizophrenic combination of libertarianism and authoritarianism expressing the false ontological dualism on which it is based. Liberal, in other words, good at holding a society of plural goods together when times are stable and good, mired in crises in divided, unequal, and unstable societies. The extent to which politically vacuous and sociologically illiterate statements such as the above – and there are many more (try planetary healing under lockdown, paying no attention to what a sustainable environmental lockdown commanding popular support might look like) - are praised to the hilt tell me that these people are not politically serious, and therein lies the problem. Legitimate public demands requiring redress are in the hands of people who lack the skills to build a genuine public community. That makes it easier for the opposition – whose insistence on checking and negating each and every demand for social equality and environmental justice lies behind these worsening crises – to block change, with popular support. And it tells me that they are politically dangerous, liable to support events that soon spiral out of their control. You don’t even need to predict this revolution eating itself, it already is. Where is the mass working class participation? Where are the agents possessing the structural capacity to act? Where are the material counter-organisations capable of constituting the alternative public order? Presuming that there is a serious intention to build a public order, rather than simply knock one down in the naïve belief that there is a natural order that will spontaneously arise in its place, a view which is curiously similar to the economic libertarians and monetarists who seek to remove the artificial constraints and institutions obstructing the normal functioning of the ‘free market,’ things like trade unions, laws, environmental protections, health and safety.
One figure whose statue is deemed acceptable was William Wilberforce. This, to me, sums up the entire historical illiteracy of this approach. We like to pretend that slavery was abolished because fine upstanding people suddenly discovered that they had a conscience and took a moral stand against it. It’s overlooked that the economics of the matter had changed. If you look, you can find Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations arguing that the institution of slavery is justifiable if it can be shown to be economically efficient. The fact is, by the time of the abolition of slavery supported by Wilberforce there was more money to be made by the exploitation of wage labour. The same Wilberforce who argued for the abolition of slavery is the same Wilberforce who voted for the banning of workers’ combinations in the Combination Act. It’s a complicated world and the last thing we need in politics is ignorant moralizing and self-righteous anger.
No white person alive today was responsible for the institution of slavery, and the argument that all white people are beneficiaries entails a divisive score settling that is guaranteed to tear societies apart. This raises the massively important issue of historic culpability. Today the University of Liverpool decided to rename student halls of residence named after Gladstone after student protests. This is so wrong in so many respects it is tempting to just give up rather than even start. One of the subjects I studied for my history degree in Liverpool was high politics. The figure of Gladstone loomed large. He entered parliament in 1832 and was still there in 1894. His political career lasted some 60 years and he was four times Prime Minister. The controversy is his connection to slavery. He was a scion of one of the largest slave-holding families in the world and his maiden speech was in defence of slavery. That makes Gladstone an open and shut case for some. For those who have pre-set positions and simply want to impose their views. Gladstone entered politics as a Conservative and ended as a Liberal, his views changed, he was a champion of moral and social causes, argued against war in an age of Empire. I’m less than convinced he was successful in this, and there’s a case for saying the working class got more from the Conservatives under Disraeli. But Gladstone was about reform and improvement and is part of British history. All of that is dismissed, wiped out, considered nothing, by people who not only know nothing of it, but don’t want to know. It just leaves me grateful for the education I received and the people who delivered it, and disheartened at the cowardice of those who capitulate so easily to the moralizing demands of people who have political axes to grind. That is a wretched precedent to set.
I’m speaking here on the value of history as a subject and discipline that teaches judgement, as well as on politics as dialogue. Morally, the decision is no less reprehensible. The idea of historical culpability involves a belief that the sins of the father be visited upon the son. We should maybe examine the questionable presupposition that the father is indeed sinful and therefore ought to be revenged. If you think slavery is simply immoral, then recall the defences in economic science as well as politics, given its centrality to the economy of the time, and then ponder the exploitative relations of the capitalist economy and determine how you propose to supplant them. I want clarity on the standards being applied here. I want this clarity since, in recent times, my essentialist position in philosophy, which affirms the existence of a human nature, and affirms that human beings are essentially something and something essentially as our best defence against totalitarian imposition, has been repudiated by those advocating a constructivist and cultural position. I can argue that slavery is bad and immoral in terms of the moral and ontological ultimacy and worth of human beings. That position is not available to those who argue for a cultural relativism that adheres to the standards of time and place. The slavery they decry now was once considered as natural and justifiable as, say, capitalist exploitation is today.
But the issue of historical culpability is one that contravenes what has been the understanding of our civilisation for a long time now that the sins of the father cannot be visited on the son. Gladstone was the scion of a slave holding family, he went on to be a public servant committed to advancing the public good. He is an example of the kind of change in behaviour and attitude that, surely, we should be working for. If we seek to learn from history, understand, and put a shift in in the public realm.
These are incredibly dangerous grounds to establish. Establishing responsibility and culpability is difficult enough on an individual basis, but to extend the condemnation of sinful behaviour from that level to a collective racial group responsibility and culpability plunges us into a treacherous terrain in which we will never be at peace. Disputes over which racial group is responsible for what will be never ending.
Once more, it is the absence of clear standards of debate and adjudication that is striking, making the cycles of claim and counter-claim that open up never ending. Also striking is the bogus religiosity of it all, this idea of a social fall that is without redemptive possibility. In a religious ethic, sin and salvation are connected by way of the opportunity of contrition. This is a godless age that prides itself of having freed itself of the ignorance and superstition of religion. Among the many reasons such free-thinking humanists reject religion are its allegedly judgmental and punitive character. What is striking, however, is the extent to which those involved in moralizing on political issues adopt a severely judgmental and punitive approach, one, indeed, that is without the redemptive possibilities of a truly religious ethic. Note how often many condemn a social and historical sin as ‘unforgiveable.’ In a religious ethic contrition is always possible. This politics is vengeful and vindictive, taking the judgment and punishment from the old religion, forgetting the mercy and forgiveness that release us all from cycles of reprisal and counter-reprisal.
Again, the lesson emphasizes the need to reinstate what is routinely dismissed as ‘traditional’ morality. Because the evidence is that people are rediscovering the need for such a morality but, lacking the training, the discipline, and the understanding, are applying it in a pick-and-mix way that is counter-productive. Sin, contrition, redemption, the cardinal virtues, character, duties alongside rights, the common good, the ordering of things to their true ends, all of these things have a role to play in the moral reconstruction of society. In the absence of the real thing we will suffer a plague of Weber’s renascent gods, false collectivities imposing ‘the good’ by way of a surrogate religiosity. The result will be a bad religion and a disastrous politics. And a society at constant war until it either rips itself apart or order is reinstated by authoritarian means.
We have been cautioned repeatedly against generalising and stereotyping with respect to groups and races, only now to see this very thing being done to white people in general and white Americans in particular. This is incredibly dangerous and utterly reactionary and liable to backfire spectacularly. That the self-same reasoning can be applied to all groups and races of people.
Generalisation proceeds from one Minneapolis policeman to all Minneapolis policemen to all American police to police in all western democracies. And so, on Sunday, we had a demonstration in London were people supporting Black Lives Matter – and they do – took the time to abuse the police men and women guarding Downing Street at length. I don’t see the police as enemies. I would like to see some respect for the police, and for all public servants. I don’t like the politicisation of the police. I don’t like the way the police are being called upon to mediate social conflict, hold the ring in a social war. I saw the assaults on journalists and camera men as well as protesters. We have to take the teeth out of this. I don’t like the politics of the streets, I don’t like this social war – it will prove destructive of the public realm and the public good. The problem is that it lacks limits and boundaries, it lacks mediation, and as a result it invites an extensionism that cannot but be destructive in politics. This is how disagreements turn nasty and vindictive and feed on themselves.
‘Police say they are being treated like ‘punchbags’, after two officers were attacked by a laughing gang who filmed the encounter and took selfies.
Every day, an average of 85 officers are being assaulted as they go about their duties, warned Police Federation chairman John Apter. It has become ‘almost like a hobby’ for offenders to film such attacks and put footage on social media, he added.
And Metropolitan Police Federation chairman Ken Marsh said: ‘We are not society’s punchbags. We have families we want to go home to at the end of every shift but the dangers are stark and seemingly escalating.’
An officer was pinned to the ground and kicked in Wednesday’s attack in Hackney, east London, after being flagged down to help someone who said they had been assaulted.
People began casually filming on their mobile phones and one man danced a jig in apparent delight after aiming a kick at the officer, whose colleague was pushed and shoved when she tried to intervene.’
I wrote precisely on this very issue a couple of years ago, noting the extent to which members of the public are not members of a public at all and, rather than intervene to assist those attempting to ensure public safety, join the assault on public life and treat it as entertainment. I speculated that, given the lack of active support and commitment on the people to actually put a shift in for public life themselves, the police, subject to impossible pressures in having to mediate a socially and morally fractured terrain, with withdraw from public service.
The protesters are made up of mostly good people with good values and good intentions; the police likewise. The same with respect to all the other identities being sent into battle. If you choose to hate an entire group of people based on the actions of certain individuals within thaThe Formula of Universal Lawt group, then you have a problem, and it’s called prejudice. There are structural problems beyond individual intentions and actions, and addressing these is not about labelling all people of one group or category or another as one thing or another, the very opposite – it is about liberating individuals from systemic biases that result in certain outcomes. Not enough people are prepared to think and act deeply and instead go for the easiest option, demonizing one side or another whilst demanding surface level actions that change nothing fundamentally. Basically, organize and act to change things properly and not tinker around the edges.
I no more accept that white people generally are responsible and culpable for certain actions and express a certain attitude or character than I do with respect to black people generally or any group of people generally. And I thoroughly reject the accusative tone of voice which declares people guilty in the act of being charged.
I come now to the violence. Those defending the protests argue that the violence that has occurred has been small and has been blown out of all proportion by reactionaries seeking to divert attention from the case for racial justice. This is complacent. The people on the receiving end of the violence don’t consider it a small thing, the people who have had their businesses smashed up and their stores looted, the people assaulted. These are law-abiding people who work and provide a service in local communities. No cause justifies people having their homes and livelihoods destroyed, and any society that goes down that road will be a howling wasteland in no time. Unless you think the looters will step into the vacuum and open up businesses of their own and put a shift in in the local community. I live in a community of small shops and businesses. I loved the local pet shop. I was a regular customer. It was robbed. The woman in charge had a young family and was badly shaken. She decided to close the shop rather than put her family at risk. Looters and robbers are a blight on a community. I can only think that those who think this an issue of little concern live in nice, respectable areas, are comfortably off, at a safe distance from social problems, and so can afford to have others suffer the deleterious social consequences of their high moral principles. It’s hypocrisy and entitlement. And it is complacent in the way that it takes public life and public order for granted. I work in the local community and I know the people who own and/or work in the local shops and businesses. The social ecology is every bit as fragile as the natural ecology and both are worthy of being valued and protected.
The dangers come with generalisation and extension with respect to condemnation, leading not to reconciliation but division and resentment. Incidents and events such as this encourage a tendency on the part of some to apply their pre-set political beliefs and draw false inferences, analogies, and conclusions in making illicit leaps from the particular to the general, in this instance claiming that there is no difference between one Minneapolis policeman and all Minneapolis policeman, all American policemen, and from there all policemen and policewomen. Police were abused and assaulted on the protests at the weekend. By rights, the crowds were illegal gatherings and people should have been arrested. The police adopted a light policing approach and were assaulted anyway. Now there are incidents being reported of individual policemen being assaulted in the street. This mentality entails an assault on public life, order, and law and, if this is representative of the liberal left public alternative, does not augur well for the future. We have just had an election in Britain in which Corbyn’s Labour were decimated. A large part of the reason for the defeat was the hostile and biased media coverage portraying Corbyn as a scary lefty. People don’t like it. Violence, disorder, and desecration of public places and monuments plus a threatening, demanding, dictatorial tone of language will confirm people in their electoral judgment that this crowd are not to be trusted with a sniff of power. Generalisation out of bigotry and prejudice and sheer hatred results in police officers in Britain being assaulted for the actions of one police officer in Minneapolis. That is lawlessness.
Also worth underscoring is the fact that these mass protests come at a time when we are dealing with the coronavirus, and are at the point of easing lockdown restrictions. This has been a huge issue, and one of political significance, with the liberal left, rightly in my view, insisting on lockdown and arguing that had the UK and US governments acted earlier then thousands of lives could have been saved. I agree strongly with this view and have said so openly and publicly, challenging those ‘libertarians’ on the right who disagree. The exchanges have sometimes been heated, and always unpleasant. These have been stressful times. People have been monitoring the behaviour of others (much more than they have the actions of their governments, I would suggest), complaining about the activities of locals having visitors, having garden parties, visiting local parks, sunbathing, going to the beaches in the sunny weather, and countless other things. There has been a huge controversy over the way government adviser Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown restrictions and the way the Prime Minister refused point blank to sack him. That was a rank hypocrisy which threatens to weaken the solid front on responsible public behaviour. If a government advisor can break the rules, then why can’t we?
And then, in response to events thousands of miles away, thousands of people congregate together in Trafalgar Square, London, and in many other places and proceed to march through the streets in protest. The most surreal part of this was watching the events on the TV news and hearing reporters tell us how the crowds are respecting the need for social distancing when, patently, they were not and could not. There was, in other words, a clear attempt to cover the clear contravention of coronavirus rules and recommendations on the part of protesters by words that turned the evidence of the senses on its head. Many reports gave up their contortions and admitted that whilst the protest is technically illegal, some issues matter more than public health. Quite. Except when the libertarians in the US said precisely the same thing with respect to their precious ‘liberty’ they were routinely abused and ridiculed. I criticized them myself on this site, and in the strongest terms. I not only stand by that criticism, I apply the principles behind it consistently to each and all ‘without fear or favour.’ Those mass gatherings should not have taken place, and for any number of reasons. The simplest reason is that of health and safety. Then there is the need for consistency of principle. For the same people who have, rightly, insisted on lockdown and on social distancing to now be seen backing mass protests utterly weakens their message whilst also gifting political opponents, who regularly charge the liberal left with being hypocrites, with the most public demonstration of the fact as could be imagined.
The interesting part for me is the citing of exception and exemption. This indicates a pick and mix approach to ethics, but one that contains a certain scale of values. I’m far from objecting to ordering public life in accordance with a scale of values. My argument is that this needs to be done explicitly and not surreptitiously, according to a framework and structure that is open and public and proceeds in accordance with common rules and standards that are beyond whim, preference, and interpretation. We have been told that everyone has to abide by the restrictions of lockdown, for the overall welfare of each and all, and dissenters have been criticised and castigated as people who don’t care for others and put profits before people and such like. Such people make ‘the economy’ their god and are happy to sacrifice the lives of others – and maybe even volunteer their own lives (as the personal choice they believe in above all) – to that higher end. I have criticized the view rigorously and relentlessly, an act which, in the eyes of libertarians, identifies me with the lockdown ‘authoritarians.’ I argue for authority and autonomy as two essential aspects of the authentic public community. But now I find that the people on the liberal left I would appear to be aligned with declaring, with breath-taking hypocrisy, that there are exceptions and exemptions to the rule after all – namely, if one Minneapolis police officer commits a reprehensible crime, then people are entitled to crowd together in public space and protest, public health be damned.
It is that exceptionalism and exemptionalism that is the most striking aspect of this issue for me. Its primary cause, of course, is the anger at yet another death of a black person at the hands of an American police officer, knowing that there have been many deaths, met with blatant apologetics along the lines of the police being involved in potentially dangerous situations and having to make split second decisions, with people armed or seemingly armed, or violent, or threatening violence. We know the incidents, they are well documented, some have been filmed. The apologetics added to the injustice must rankle. This time, the entire incident was filmed, there was no threat, no dangerous situation, no split second decisions. Hence the anger, an anger which is entirely justified. It is the extension from there that concerns me. Unfortunately, given the bone-headed reactionary response to injustice in the past, maybe this is what it was always going to take to break through the impasse. I just think it is incredibly important to avoid exceptions and exemptions establishing a new rule, building double-standards into the public fabric and hence laying the basis for further division, rancour, and retribution. You have to exercise extreme care with respect to what your words and actions may be embedding on issues of public concern like this. An important philosopher in defining the ‘rational freedom’ that is central to my argument is Immanuel Kant, the greatest absolutist in ethics in the modern thought. Some of the various forms in which he expressed the moral law may give some insight into the point I am seeking to make here:
The Formula of Universal Law
Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
The Formula of the Law of Nature
Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.
The Formula of the End in Itself
Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.
The Formula of Autonomy
So act that your will can regard itself at the same time as making universal law through its maxim.
The Formula of the Kingdom of Ends
So act as if you were through your maxims a law-making member of a kingdom of ends.
Review of the Formulae
A new version is given for the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends.
All maxims as proceeding from our own making of laws ought to harmonise with a possible kingdom of ends as a kingdom of nature.
The categorical imperative is expressed in three basic formulations. The first concerns its form, the second its content, the third linking these together:
(1) Act as if you were legislating for everyone.
(2) Act so as to treat human beings always as ends and never merely as a means.
(3) Act as if you were a member of a realm of ends.
The ethics of the categorical imperative has definite political implications in conceiving this republic of ends as an authentic public community of knowledgeable moral agents co-legislating and thereby co-determining their common life. Formulations (1) and (2) are connected together by formulation (3). Lose any of these maxims and formulations, and we lose the consistency of bedrock principle that grounds authentic public community. We remain within a Hobbesian conventionalism and sophism, effectively picking our sides in the endless – and pointless - cycle of power/resistance.
Kant’s essential idea is that individuals should act as a community of persons, each one making moral decisions together. This implies that each member treats all other members as moral beings, having regard to their desires, allowing them freedom of decision, and recognizing that each should and can decide as though legislating for all. Kantian ethics is a democratic ethics in affirming that every person is competent to make universally legislative decisions.
I insist on consistency for all of these reasons, as part of a commitment to creating an authentic public community of citizens as knowledgeable moral agents capable of living in accordance with laws they have given themselves, binding themselves equally under the principle of self-assumed obligation. The greatest threat to that public ethic has always been the individualist/libertarian view that the individual is free to contract in and contract out of any public agreement for reasons of self-interest. That is, the individual reserves the right to declare an exception or exemption on issues he or she considers to be of overriding personal concern.
In this instance, we have what may be called a sectional laissez-faire, a libertarianism of identity politics. The breakdown of lockdown rules and restrictions – so publicly insisted on by so many now justifying the contravention of principle – is justified by an assertion that there is, after all, a principle of overriding significance with respect to public health.
Is there? I return to the need for an overarching and authoritative moral framework based on a substantive conception of the good, so as to guard against the arbitrariness of particular claims and causes being elevated so as to occupy the central position, according to whim, prejudice, and power of the protagonists. People raised on freedom and morality as a matter of personal choice will baulk at the idea, as they may at the idea of religion. The problem is that events have shown that such people are themselves applying a religious ethic and moral framework, only badly and arbitrarily, in a piecemeal way, that cannot but backfire spectacularly. There is a need for judgment and for punishment and purgation, but such things bring a healing only if there is also time and space for the contrition that comes by way of personal moral effort, and most of all a place for mercy and forgiveness. It is noticeable how often people will describe a crime committed by others as ‘unforgiveable.’ This is a punitive religious moralism without the possibilities for redemption. That’s the morality that will enclose us in a hell of our own making. ‘And Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us.’ This is the hardest ethic to live by, my R.E. teacher told us at school. How can we ask God to forgive us of our sins if we refuse to forgive others? How can we forgive people of the evil that they do? Another way of asking the question is to ask how we can have a justice that achieves reconciliation without retribution. In confession and contrition we present ourselves to God, expecting mercy and forgiveness: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1: 9). We know that God will extend mercy and forgiveness to us in spite of our sins, so long as we repent of them. An age of prideful self-assertion and self-worship does neither repentance nor forgiveness.
The petition of the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t end with the request for forgiveness but continues, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Our forgiveness is therefore inextricably tied to our extending forgiveness to others. Whilst it is easy to beg forgiveness for ourselves, it is much less so to forgive others. But the two go together.
In the absence of an overarching and authoritative moral framework, the assertion of values of overriding significance cannot but be arbitrary, dependent not on a scale of values that is common, comprehensible, and shared, but reflects the preferences and concerns of particular individuals and groups. Any outstanding issues will be settled not in accordance with a scale of values that is known to and accepted by all, but by force. One area of life will be considered so important by some that they will elevate it to a position of overriding significance among human interests, a position which no single area is fit to occupy. This has been most noticeable in the modern world with respect to the centrality of ‘the economy’ in ordering the common affairs of humanity. Social life is thus driven by economic imperatives, not moral imperatives. But, in the absence of a coherent moral architectonic embedding public community, other preoccupations jockey for that pole position, with various interested parties fighting it out to occupy that central ground. In the absence of a clearly stated moral architectonic, people bringing moral arguments to bear in politics in response to events will be inclined to rush to judgements and conclusions which may well embed further injustice, generating not reconciliation, but further resentment and retribution. This is a continuation of the sophist politics of war. Some you win, some you lose – without principle, point, and purpose, all lose.
Is America the most racist society on Earth? Is the UK the most racist society on Earth? This is what we are being told. There is something incongruous in this accusation, in the sight of supposedly inherently and seemingly irredeemably racist societies permitting so vehement a condemnation of their racism. The accusation doesn’t ring true. A racist society would brook no criticism from those it discriminates against. Paradoxically, it is the very freedom of such societies which allows its internal critics to be so vocal in their criticism, with the result that the least racist societies in the world come to be portrayed as the most racist. By what standards? In the absence of objective standards enabling comparison, we have assertion based on prejudice.
White male privilege
Let me quote from an associate on FB here, a man, Jerry B. ‘The pussy hat marchers, the identity politics and the anti-gun protesters have little resonance beyond the middle classes. If Trump is going to be defeated, the Democrats need messages that appeal more widely. As Labour just discovered, having an enthusiastic following among wealthy young people isn't an election winner.’ He was met with this response: ‘Thanks for your input Mr White Man. No doubt your race and sex makes you more of an expert on this than Kamala Harris. Put your arrogant arse back down.’ Jerry B. responded: ‘I'm a Jew if you want to get racial. And well done for illustrating the left's problem. The left has become everything toxic that the right used to be. Racial abuse used to be what the right did.’ Another woman joined the assault: ‘Look! A man who puts the word sexist in quotation marks in such a sentence wants to mansplain to us about the left.’ And another woman. The basic claim is that a man being a man, and a white man to boot, has nothing to say about anything. And that is precisely why this pathetic excuse for a Left is going to oblivion. As Jerry concluded: ‘This isn't about my skin colour or yours, it's a discussion about how the left has destroyed itself using identity politics. I've not claimed to be an expert in blackness or pussy possession.’ ‘If people want to understand why the left can't win elections, they can just read this thread. "Waaah you're a white male!" isn't politics, it's just fascism at its most infantile.’
Let me unpack this accusation that white males speak out of ‘white male privilege’ and, evidently, having nothing to say. The implication is that a male can have no understanding of, and therefore no worthwhile opinion on, a female, likewise a white person with respect to a black person. In the new hierarchy of knowledge and understanding, the white male is at the bottom. This reasoning applies with respect to all identities.
I have been met with the accusation that I speak out of ‘white male privilege,’ too. That accusation is simply an attempt to silence. I wonder how many, like me, have silenced themselves on public forums as a result.
Who is anyone to understand anyone other than themselves?
The problem with this approach is that it is an irreducible game that, sooner rather than later, degenerates into abuse and counter-abuse on account of mutual incomprehensibility and miscommunication. There is no possibility of genuine dialogue, since monologue in the exchange of incommensurate values is built into the approach.
Follow the storm that has erupted over
‘The tale of JK Rowling, finally revealed as a modern-day witch guilty of wickedness over sex and gender, is one of those stories that captures just about everything bad about this issue and about public conversation conducted via, and shaped by, social media. Rowling’s crime was to tweet that biological sex is real and should not be subordinated to the subjective concept of gender.’
The only reason I have avoided abuse on the essentialist position I advocate in philosophy is that I tend not to advocate it over social media. This essentialism hunting is, however, a blight:
Rowling has been deemed a transgressor and publicly vilified for her views. As James Kirkup writes in The Spectator, the lesson of this degradation is ‘that the world must always be divided neatly into good people and bad people. Good people are entirely good and so is everything they do. Bad people are bad, and likewise everything associated with them.’
As I argue, this is a religion without the transcendent origin and end that tempers judgement, punishment, and purgation with love, mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. This is an unforgiving world which inflicts excommunication or worse on transgressors deemed irredeemably evil in their transgression.
Kirkup asks: “And how did JK Rowling go from good to bad? How did the creator of one of the world’s favourite childhood stories go from being beloved and benign to the someone who is routinely (and tellingly) described on Twitter as a 'c**t'?”
He answers:
‘Bad people don’t just do bad things. They have bad motives. It is impossible for someone to say something with which you disagree for decent, honest reasons. People who reach different conclusions to you are not well-meaning but mistaken. They are wrong and bad. End of.’
Kirkup comments:
‘I don’t know Rowling, but I suspect she would not object to being called progressive and liberal. She has given tens if not hundreds of millions of pounds to charities. She donated to Gordon Brown’s Labour party, was friendly with Barack Obama and used to work at Amnesty International (long before it embraced trans orthodoxy, I should note). She opposed Brexit. She is not, in short, someone who can be described as a social conservative. If Left and Right still mean anything, she’s on the Left.’
I wonder for how long, if this is what has become of the Left. I will have to stop saying things like this, I’ve been repeating this phrase for the last decade, but I did warn in the 1990s of the dangers of a Left which discards its universalist principles and assumptions for the subjectivism identity politics. I made the criticisms them and make them now in an attempt to induce those advancing emancipatory causes in the name of justice to secure their metaphysical foundations. If they are conventional, ‘made-up,’ mere social constructions and cultural creations, then fine: there’s nothing left of the Left, nothing of substance to talk about or aim for – only arbitrary assertions of power. It may work, but will only bring about the rule of those with the biggest voice and the strongest arms, the side with the most weapons. I thought that that was what we were trying to get away from.
The accusation that those refusing to accept some agenda or other are really regressive social conservatives will more than likely backfire spectacularly. In being abused in such a manner, people may well reject such a Left and, well, see the truth, balance, and sanity of social conservatism.
And this is why JK Rowling – clever, thoughtful, nuanced JK Rowling – presents such a threat to all those people who talk about 'terfs' and what should happen to women who say things they don’t like. Because if you’re going to shout about the views of JK Rowling and her wickedness, you’re going to have to come up with an explanation for that wickedness, and in so doing, to ask people to reach their own conclusions.
Nuance is a good word. Thanks to the hegemony of postmodern relativism, people have lost the art of nuance; they have lost the ability to discriminate or contextualise. Everything is either ironic or it is nothing.
There are two possible explanations, concludes Kirkup:
The first explanation is that a lot of people who have previously been firmly on the liberal-left side of politics have – secretly – been converted to social conservatism by right-wing ultras, on this one issue alone.
The other way to explain JK Rowling’s journey down that road to terfdom is that she is an intelligent women who has taken a careful look at the issue and decided for herself that there is nothing progressive or kind or liberal about a movement that encourages autistic children to be given untested drugs. That tells adolescents uncomfortable with their bodies that surgery brings happiness and the alternative is suicide. That tells lesbians they’re bigots if they won’t consider sex with women who have penises. That showers women (and really, it is just women) who question these things with violent and sexualised abuse.
I don’t know JK Rowling, but I know which of those two explanations I find more plausible.
Conservatives are having a field day at the moment. The dominant liberal/left voice has jumped the shark big time. There is nothing in Rowling’s position that indicates that she is no longer on the left in politics. I would suggest it is the other crowd that represents a liberalism gone decadent and which has taken the Left away from issues of class, exploitation, and political economy and into the mire of individualism and identity revolving around culture, lifestyle, sex and gender.
The world will very shortly be worrying about more important things than sex and gender, and all the celebration of otherness and difference in the world won’t save a single person from the collapse that is underway. I have no interest at all in entering into that storm, only to say – before I say goodbye – that the abuse people heap on others is reprehensible. And that the Maoist-style intolerance has naught to do with a genuine Left. It’s a fervour and a madness for tearing things down, erasing things, silencing those things which offer contrary perspectives we’ve seen before in history, from Reformation to Revolution, and it involves the same loud bullies committing violence righteously and brooking no opposition. The statue of Winston Churchill, Britain’s war leader, was daubed with graffiti – by people who either neither knew that it was D-Day, knew what that represented, nor cared. The statue of Abraham Lincoln was also daubed with graffiti. To those who know history, Lincoln was the man who fought a civil war for the abolition of slavery. To those assaulting his memory, he is a white man and therefore irredeemably evil. To be fair, female statues were not spared, either. In Leeds, the statue of Queen Victoria was defaced in a way which involved sexual humiliation, with the spraying of paint on her breasts and crotch.
Andrea Jenkyns, the Tory MP who represents Morley and Outwood, condemned the desecration of the statue, calling it "wanton vandalism and thuggery.” It is actually much worse than that, given that there is political intent and motivation – and bigotry, hatred, and intolerance – behind it. A public realm raised on this basis will not only be a thoroughly unpleasant affair, it will be impossible – it is the end of politics.
It strikes me as very strange to see statues being vandalised and pulled down on account of some crime on the part of that figure’s past or association with a time in history considered to involve crimes against humanity (has there been any other time?), whilst at the same time seeing murals being painted to glorify a repeat offender who breaks into a pregnant lady's home and holds a gun to their unborn baby... Are people free to paint over all those murals of him, expressing their truth?
This is the end of public life, something which spells a collective ruination embracing each and all.
This is a woke Taliban, an intolerant PC mob taking the opportunity to impose all manner of extremist ideas on government and the public, which all must concede on pain of being accused of being racist and damned. This is utterly regressive and will prove detrimental to leftist politics. If leftist politics stands for anything it stands for reason against force, justice against might, equality against inequality. Extra-political, extra-legal action on the part of a mob using force and violence is the very antithesis of leftist politics. The enthusiasm for defacing and smashing public monuments is more akin to the Taliban and ISIS and expresses not reason – still less a commitment to democratic deliberation – but a year zero mentality that sets out to disinfect the public sphere of every bad person, every bad act, and every bad idea there is, after a very public purging. Such actions are remarkably intolerant and have nothing to do with a progressive politics. The justification of these actions by way of the idea that there is a need for debate and education over history and historical figures is breathtaking in its audacity. Having studied history to degree level, and continued an interest in the subject, debate and education have very much been taking place. Britain’s role in the slave trade, the British Empire, the role of women, ethnic minorities etc etc etc have all been discussed and examined and highlighted. In fact for a decade or more now there has been nothing but such supposedly hidden and untaught history. I know all about Cromwell and Ireland, not least because every time Cromwell is ever mentioned, the massacres are also mentioned. I know all about Churchill’s racism, none of it has been hidden, all of it is known. To those who consider Churchill a racist I’d just say try the other bloke he led the nation against for size. The crucial point is that discussion and education proceeds by reason, and certainly does not involve a mob imposing its views by force. The figure of Mary Seecole has been named as a ‘forgotten’ black Briton to be commemorated. Again. She is not forgotten. Her name has been prominent for a quarter of a century or more now. And associated with myths about how Florence Nightingale refused to take her on. Not so. Seecole went to Crimea not to be a nurse but to do business. She was never a nurse. The facts behind the myth being peddled were found out in rational debate and education. Leave it to the mob, and untruths would be imposed as truth. But there it is, wiping away history in pursuit of political objectives merely replaces one set of myths by another, with all sides claiming that they have truth on their side. History is a complex subject, politicking and moralizing is easy. The imposition of political beliefs this way is undemocratic, philistine, and extremist and the very antithesis of progressive politics. It breeds an incredibly intolerant climate in which people become afraid to express their views as citizens. The imposition of truth in politics leaves people afraid to open their mouths lest they be accused of being ‘wrong.’ That view totally undercuts the notion of citizen agency as having a creative input in discovering and discerning truth, giving the lie that this is an emancipatory civil rights movement. Politics is all about dissent and disagreement, something which acknowledges the legitimacy of contrary voices and alternate platforms. This intolerant PC crusade on the part of those who already know the truth and want to ensure everyone else does, and submits to it, is nothing to do with dialogue and consent but a purge of anyone who dares to think differently. You can oppose this for many reasons. It betrays everything that the Left in politics has ever claimed to stand for – freedom, democracy, reason, truth, justice. More simply, though, it is just plain wrong, totalitarian, unjust, and undemocratic.
There is some hope here: Leeds volunteers holding Union Jack flag step in to clean Queen Victoria memorial
Volunteers hailing from different cultures took part, with Leeds residents joined by immigrants from Libya and Turkey, who volunteered to help clean the statue.
This is a point Matthew was eager to stress, at a time when the debate surrounding these monuments is proving divisive.
He continued: "None of us are right wing, we all accept that humanity - no matter race, creed, colour or sex - should have the same human rights across the world. We support Black Lives Matter."But a line has been crossed. British values are freedom, democracy and a right to free protest, not mindless violence and vandalism, that solves nothing.
"I'm proud to be from Leeds, my family have lived in the city for decades. My grandmother on my mum's side was an Indian who came from the partition, while on my dad's side they were German Jews, they came to this country as refugees in the 1880's. This city looked after them. If we looked back two generations and saw what our grandparents believed, we'd be absolutely disgusted. But we have to look at what they've given us, and everything we enjoy in the world is because of them - and that's why these monuments are here."
Those are hopeful sentiments and actions. Such folk have their work cut out to reconstitute public life.
I see the fracturing this expresses as an indication that a divided social and moral terrain can no longer sustain publicity – the common standards and shared language have gone, and cannot be put back together and maintained by collective and collectivising fictions. The surprise is that things have lasted this long.
The problem with this fervour for erasure is that it expresses an intolerant mindset that cannot but overspill into all areas. It is statues, art, and entertainment today – episodes of Fawlty Towers ridiculing racism for God’s sake! - but the real targets living flesh and blood people in today’s politics. Cultural revolutions are crusades against real people who possess the wrong identity and incorrect ideology.
The problem with playing ethics and culture as an irreducible game is that the monologue that lies at its core makes mutual incomprehension inevitable, not merely preventing effective communication across boundaries but inviting misinterpretation and misunderstanding that soon escalates into a Hobbesian war of all against all. Once we start down this route we soon become entangled in impossibility, having to explain ourselves and apologize for our failure to understand that which cannot be understood.
The game proceeds on the basis of two incompatible premises:
1) you have to understand - and accept - my view as a (fill in the blank);
2) you can never understand my view as a (fill in the blank) seeing as you are a (fill in the blank), but must accept it anyway.
This irreducible game can be played in all realms - race, sex and gender, for two - and engulfs those drawn into playing it in realms of incomprehensibility. It’s a world in which offense cannot but be given and taken, followed by heated, and abusive exchanges in which one and all tell the world how oppressed they are and how the other person is complicit in oppression and therefore an evil person. By merely mentioning J.K. Rowling above, without at the same time condemning her, I no doubt have caused outrage. This is the oddest phenomenon of all: this world that prides itself on having liberated individuals from the repressions and obligations of an objective and binding morality – what is called ‘traditional morality,’ basically religion – imposes the most repressive and judgemental of all moralities on individuals and, without a common and comprehensible moral framework to which we can all refer, obliges all to submit.
This is insidious and pernicious and turns people against one another in short order. It is a world that eats itself from within, a process which begins with an impossible premise. To start with the premise that because a person is some one thing, in terms of sex, gender, race or whatever, then a person who does not share this identity cannot understand them. And yet, even though understanding is impossible, one and all are obligated to accept the validity of the tale of oppression that accompanies such self-identification and self-expression, and society in general must accept the moral claims being levelled upon it. This is the surreptitious imposition of an overarching and authoritative framework upon society, only according to a scale of values determined by the loudest and most insistent voices, not transcendent standards of justice that are comprehensible to all and shared by all.
This is monologue, not dialogue. If we start with the premise that since a person is a woman or black or homosexual or anything, then a person who is otherwise cannot understand him or her, then any meaningful communication, exchange of views, and dialogue is impossible. The only thing to decide is whether or not the people who proceed in this manner are aware of the self-defeating nature of communication on such premises. They may well be engaged in monologue as the imposition of a pre-set position and pre-determined truth, thereby ending dialogue. The purpose of dialogue, then, is merely to set up those with contrary views for certain defeat, demanding a public self-abnegation, on pain of public humiliation.
If there is no possibility of understanding through exchange, then there is no point to engaging in dialogue. Dialogue with a view to truth-seeking is pointless, since the truth is already known. Public exchange here is concerned to force the other side into submission and compliance with the truth of an irreducibly incomprehensible value position. We are bullied and pressured into believing the tale of oppression and emancipation being told, with no standards of evaluation and adjudication. If we refuse, we identify ourselves as one of the oppressors.
The reasoning is inverted – show me what class/race/sex you are, and we will show you why you are wrong and tell you what you must do to meet standards of truth and justice known only to us. We are obliged to keep up with the ever-changing language of self-identification, even though it is futile since it the language is incomprehensible.
The rationale is not emancipation but imposition, monologue instead of dialogue. And it will end the public realm and engulf society in a war between incommensurate values incapable of resolution and reconciliation. Put simply, it is sophism. Without the possibility of and commitment to dialogue there is only force, power, and violence. Imposition takes the place of negotiation. Truth, after all, is non-negotiable. We are pressured into accepting a truth we can never fully understand. People who submit in the belief that this will bring peace and justice and secure an easy life for themselves are deluded. The demands originating in the arbitrary value positions of cultural self-identity will persist, demanding further compromise and submission, for the very reason that the process lacks a limiting principle. Instead of fulfilment and settlement, the process runs to infinity. The only peace that can result is not the lasting peace that comes with justice but a pacification that is achieved by way of imposition and submission. That’s fine, that’s what counts as victory in sophist politics. But spare me the moralizing and lecturing and the lessons in the vocabulary of emancipation.
The issue is of huge concern to me precisely because it addresses directly a number of things that are central to my work over the years – essentialism (still routinely, and very wrongly, equated with bad things); ‘rational freedom’ (as against libertarian freedom); the need for an overarching and authoritative moral framework; politics as dialogue and negotiation; ethics as based on a substantive conception of the good; transcendent standards of justice vs conventionalism, constructivism, and sophism.
The left in politics cannot succeed in realizing its emancipatory commitments by way of sophist politics. Certain groups can certainly press their claims and secure their interests by such means, but only by turning normative commitments in rationalizations of a power play. Any victory won is merely of transitory significance since the war continues. All that there is, is an endless power/resistance. Those who play zero-sum politics in dialogue are really engaging in monologue and invite the reaction, with only the pretence of mutual understanding and truth-seeking.
Such views undercut the intersubjectivity, interrelationism, and dialogue that lie at the heart of my work in rational freedom as a relational freedom. They contradict the communicative ethic that stands at the heart of any genuine, legitimate, free, and open public community.
It’s not just short-sighted and self-defeating for those with emancipatory commitments to play this irreducible game, it is genuinely sad. Throwing away the good thought and work and example of those who have sought to advance the cause of emancipation by way of justice and not force. Having cited Kant above, I could refer to Kant’s republic constitution and his idea of a rational community of co-legislators. I could refer to Rousseau’s commitment to citizens accepting the legitimate constraints of public community by way of the principle of self-assumed obligation. Many thinkers have done substantial work on what it takes to constitute an authentic public life, one that has dialogue at its heart, and people who neither know such thinkers nor want to know them just discard their work as pointless, having convinced themselves that they already know the truth and the only problem in politics is compelling others to submit, voluntarily or otherwise.
My work on ‘rational freedom’ stands in a line of long descent of a tradition of political philosophy which goes back to Plato and Aristotle and is concerned to establish the governance of human affairs on the grounds of reason as against coercion. That tradition defines political science as the examination of the conditions of the best regimen for human flourishing and politics as the realisation of those conditions. This is not a tradition to be thrown away, least of all for the reason that its key figures are ‘dead white men.’ The line of ‘rational freedom’ that can be traced from Plato and Aristotle to Habermas in the modern world remains vital, pertinent, and the most clear and intellectually coherent philosophy of emancipation in the world today. The concluding passage with which Goodwin and Taylor close The Politics of Utopia is worth quoting at length in this respect. Substitute ‘utopia’ for the transcendent standards of justice and normative philosophical anthropology at the heart of ‘rational freedom,’ and you have my view:
Underlying all forms of utopianism [the philosophical ‘ought-to-be’ which evaluates and criticizes the ‘is’] is the conviction that optimistic, imaginative thought and action are capable of bringing about a change towards not only a new social existence, but a better one. The sources of such optimism are, in the last analysis, difficult to define, and it may be that the only logical justification for optimism is that optimism seems to be a characteristic of the individual's psychology and (arguably) biology. [try a normative anthropology based on an essentialist conception of healthy human potentials and their creative realisation in a public life]. What would life be like if optimism [transcendent standards, normative commitments, and essences – let’s call it God for short] were eradicated from the individual's personality and his creative imagination? And what, furthermore, would be the consequences if optimism were eradicated from our attempts to comprehend and mould the society in which we live? In this book we have tried to show that a certain kind of optimism is a precondition for a worthwhile earthly existence. As long as man has the capacity to identify evil, then he is likely to feel the urge to transcend evil and seek goodness and beauty in his personal relationships, his artistic creations, his religious life and his social and political organization. [that affirms the three transcendentals in the context of a moral ecology of good and evil]. Historically, beginning in the civilization of the ancient Greeks, the study of politics first emerged as a rigorous method of assisting man in this quest for the good life. [the definition of political science in both Plato and Aristotle] Consciousness of the difference between existing reality and a non-existent, but potentially existent, future - a morally desirable future - was one of the most important ingredients of this quest. Unless we feel absolutely confident that we have now reached the limits of our capabilities and creativity, that we have advanced to perfection already, to dispense with utopianism would be to renounce a large part of what it is to be a political animal.
B Goodwin and K Taylor, The Politics of Utopia 1982: 254
This question is not about which side we are on when it comes to particular political platforms with respect to justice, least of all with respect to the past – it is about ethics and politics as a universal framework that permits alternate and rival platforms. So I shall make no apologies for ending with a defence of reason and freedom, of politics as dissensus, of disagreement as a process which encourages a search for agreement, of nuance and complexity, and of the worth and dignity of the public square.
Instructive here is Jurgen Habermas’ conception of the good society as a society of rational freedom constituted on the basis of a communicative ethic. The liberal view of the good society sees public life as a neutral system of freely developed conceptions of the good on the part of individuals. This involves a minimal state which upholds a negative conception of liberty, holding the ring between competing views and maintaining the civil peace. Habermas praises the ‘honourable history’ of these ideas, and argues for a retention of some elements of the liberal tradition. In particular, he argues for a degree of legal equality which will allow at the same time ‘the greatest possible measure of individualism, and this means space for individuals to shape their own lives.’ He does, however, note the cogency of the criticisms of individualistic conceptions which have been brought forward since Hegel:
Freedom, even personal freedom, freedom of choice in the last instance, can only be thought in internal connection with a network of interpersonal relationships, and this means in the context of the communicative structures of a community, which ensures that the freedom of some is not achieved at the cost of the freedom of others. Interestingly, abstract right is not sufficient for this purpose. One must make the effort to analyse the conditions of collective freedom, which remove the dangers of individual freedom, its potential for social-Darwinistic menace.
The individual cannot be free unless all are free, and all cannot be free unless all are free in community. It is this last proposition which one misses in the empiricist and individualist traditions.
Jürgen Habermas Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas 1992: 146
In his work, Habermas has analysed the conditions of this collective freedom in terms of the communicative community of rational citizens, thus defining the principle of rational freedom as a social freedom. Advancing the ideal of a community constituted by a domination-free communicative rationality, Habermas posits reasonable speech as the organising principle of socialised humanity that has learned to live well together.
The ‘ideal speech situation’ (Habermas 1984 I) is characterised by pure intersubjectivity, by which Habermas means the absence of barriers which serve to block processes of communication. The realisation of this communicative community presupposes the existence of symmetrical as against asymmetrical relations, removing also any constraints that are produced within the structure of communication itself. Habermas thus argues that ‘the structure of communication itself produces no constraints if and only if, for all possible participants, there is a symmetrical distribution of chances to choose and to apply speech acts’ (Habermas quoted in Thompson 1984:264). This assumption of symmetry establishes the general framework of the ideal speech situation. Symmetry in the distribution of chances means equality in the opportunity of all potential participants to take part in discussion. Whilst the speech situation is ideal and does not necessarily correspond with empirical conditions of speech acts, it nevertheless ‘belongs to the structure of possible speech that in the execution of speech acts (and actions) as counterfactually proceed as if the ideal speech situation . . were not merely fictive but real - precisely what we call presupposition’ (Habermas in Thompson 1984: 266).
When considered in terms of a feasible public community, the normative aspects of this ideal are radical and democratic. Habermas’ ideal communication community is the realisation of democracy conceived as a society governed by a discursive will formation on the part of its members. The notion of individuals as equally reasonable beings subverts relationships of subordination and superordination.
The possibility of a domination-free communication requires that the relationships constituting society themselves be domination-free, thereby ending the unequal distribution of power. Democracy is thus realized simultaneously with the abolition of domination and the equal distribution of power. In a domination-free communicative community, each person is considered a reasonable being capable of deciding questions of power and control in relation to the goods and people of society in the process of value discussions.
Through the notion of the ‘suppression of generalisable interests,’ Habermas is able to distinguish norms based on a rational consensus from those norms that merely stabilize relations of force (Habermas 1976:111). Every particular speech act invokes an ideal speech situation in which a rational consensus is achieved without the use or force or deception, in a context in which the opportunity and the means to participate in the communicative process are available to all:
It is the achievement of mutual understanding by a communication community of citizens, their own words, that brings about the binding consensus.
Habermas 1989: 82
The ideal speech situation is committed to the achieving of a consensus through the force of the better argument, in contradistinction to constraint and power. The ideal thus serves as a model by which to critically evaluate asymmetries of power and resources in existing society, demanding the reform and abolition of relations of domination and exploitation. The ideal communication community committed to dialogue, exchange, and communicative rationality thus contains a vision of an alternate social order. However distorted any particular act of communication may be, insofar as it advances a truth claim, in expectation of it being heard and understood, it always contains a transcendent moment which points in the direction of a free, open, and egalitarian society. The truth is neither predetermined nor already known, but comes to be known and appreciated by way of dialectical process.
Habermas’ ideal communication community establishes the basis of a rational society which is based upon symmetrical relationships between individuals not only as free and equal beings but as conscious and knowledgeable agents capable of apprehending and acting upon truth within and through intersubjective interaction and relation. This does not entail a rationalism that opposes an abstract, disinterested, and transcendent truth to sectional interests in the real world, demanding the submission of the latter to the former. For Habermas, truth and knowledge are ‘interested.’ There is a bridge and a mediation between transcendent standards of truth and the field of practical reason in politics and ethics. The realization of reason by way of dialectical unfolding is in the species interest:
'I believe that I can show that a species that depends for its survival on the structures of linguistic communication and cooperative, purposive-rational action must of necessity rely on reason.’
Habermas in Dews ed Autonomy and Solidarity 1986: 51 quoted in Eagleton 1991: 131/2
A genuinely social life that embodies solidarity and commonality is inconceivable without the moral and political knowledge obtained in practical communication. This is why the presence of dialogue is hugely important in building and sustaining community.
The participants in the communication community engage in discursive activity as equally reasonable beings performing equal speech acts. Through the ‘ideal speech situation,’ Habermas seeks to avoid a situation in which participants exercise power over each other in a context of asymmetrical relationships of subordination and superordination. The ‘ideal speech situation’ is thus a critical tool by which to evaluate social reality, informing egalitarian and emancipatory interventions. Within asymmetrical relationships, some hold power over others. Individuals within the hierarchical division of labour, and within the institutions which codify it, are unable to perform the same speech acts. It follows that Habermas’ ideal is possible only if society moves beyond the relations of dependency which are structured by asymmetrical relations of power.
Habermas’ notion of an ideal communication community based upon communicative rationality contains strong normative implications. In particular, the ideal involves a commitment to a social order which sustains a genuinely autonomous public sphere of debate and proceeds with the object of attaining an uncoerced rational agreement. For Habermas, this ideal is implicit in every act of communicative exchange.
Proceeding from Kant’s assumption that individuals are equally reasonable beings, Habermas develops the view that common affairs are to be governed by norms and values determined democratically and consensually by all in a rational, collective discussion. Individuals socialised as members of an ideal communication community acquire an identity that combines both universalising and particularising aspects. One the one hand, individuals learn to orient themselves and act autonomously within a universalistic framework; on the other hand, they learn to use this autonomy, which makes them equal to every other morally acting subject, to develop themselves in their subjectivity and singularity. In consequence, membership of this ideal communication community is constitutive of both the ‘I’ as universal and the ‘I’ as individual, thereby integrating individuality and sociality as two essential aspects of the same human nature. (Habermas 1973: 142ff; Habermas 1989: 97). Habermas thus gives us both autonomy and solidarity in a dialogic community of reasonable and reasoning beings.
In fine, communication, dialogue, citizen discourse and interaction not only ‘matter’ when it comes to identifying and establishing truth and goodness in politics, they are integral components of the good society; they are not merely the conditions of a freedom that combines autonomy and solidarity, but dimensions of that freedom. Lose these, and you have lost emancipatory substance.
Habermas establishes a communicative ethic which has the potential to buttress a deliberative democracy, realizing something like a Kantian republic of co-legislators. He develops formal and universal procedures for deliberation with a view to the rational resolution of disputes to bring about consensus. The problem with Habermas’ view, however, is that it upholds a very thin notion of solidarity, one which shares the figure of the abstract individual with liberalism, undermining notions of social flourishing in a public life that is greater than the communication community. MacIntyre’s resolution of the crisis of communication, achieving a rational reconciliation between conflicting positions, is based on a moral infrastructure of practices, narratives, traditions and virtues within moral and political community. I would argue, here, the need for an overarching moral and authoritative architectonic upholding transcendent standards based on a substantive good. MacIntyre’s view avoids the tricky, frankly intractable, philosophical issues that arise with respect to establishing the ontological status of that good, and instead focuses upon practice. This involves an emphasis on roles, virtues, character construction, narrativity, and living traditions, all of which holds that conflict is legitimate and can be resolved through rational means. Importantly, these means are grounded only in these traditions themselves, and not in any ahistorical or universal foundation. In this respect, he rejects the notion of a moral architectonic based on transcendent standards, instead offering a way of negotiating a way through the nexus of power/resistance. There are two views of politics here: one which holds that there is common ground, a shared language, and commonality that makes communication and agreement between conflicting positions possible, and another, zero-sum, view which sees all parties in political contest simply wanting to defeat the other sides. Largely implicit here is that there is a significant area of commonality shared between human beings and that this can be found within communities of practice that foster and sustain solidaristic structures and supports.
The fact that these events should be the cause of concern is understandable, but the fact they have taken many by surprise indicates the extent to which the members of this society are still unaware of the nature of their predicament and how deep and long standing are its social, moral, and historical origins.
Where once freedom and happiness we located in the public realm, with politics being conceived as the search for the human good, they are now located in the private realm as the subjective choices of individuals. This view turns the tradition of rational freedom on its head or, more accurately, establishes a hierarchy where once there was a continuum. There is no split between individuality and sociality in the rational tradition, since these things are recognized as two aspects of the same human nature.
Plato argued that the health and stability of a person is analogous to and dependent upon the health and stability of the political order. For this reason, the individual as a political being always participates rationally and responsibly in the processes of public life and decision. In like manner Aristotle established that the purpose of politics lay in the good life. The good for human beings as social beings, he argued, is a public good. Whilst there is nothing wrong with the private good sought by individuals, such a good alone is an incomplete good. Aristotle thus affirms the need of a strong and healthy public life if human beings, as social beings, are to actualize their healthy potentialities and thereby individuate themselves.
The character ideal of the human being, then, was very much that of a public identity, one embedded in a public life. In the eighteenth century, however, this identity was supplanted by a new character ideal, that of Homo economicus or economic man. Homo economicus was a private individual motivated by self-interest and suspicious of notions of public good. The presumption of such thinking is that if individuals are free to concentrate on their own private needs and act in pursuit of self-interest, the general satisfaction of needs would ensure and thereby deliver the public good. This idea entailed a moral revolution that elevated private interests over the public good, with the result that, as Max Weber argued, ultimate values retreated from public life into the private sphere of individuals:
the fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world’. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values, have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.
Weber Science as a Vocation in Gerth and Mills ed. 1961: 155
That passage states concisely the predicament of modern society. Whilst human beings as social beings require a public life in order to actualize and individuate themselves, the dominant conceptions of freedom and rationality of modern society are based upon an extension of instrumental rational knowledge that brings about the disenchantment of public life. With our precious cultural and religious values retreating into private life, the public square is left value free and without common identity and purpose.
The common ground has dissolved and, with it, the common language that makes mutuality and solidaristic exchange possible. Michael Sandel writes of the fundamental right of self-ownership at the heart of the libertarian conception of freedom: ‘my life, labor, and person belong to me and me alone. They are not at the disposal of the society as a whole.’ (Sandel Justice 2009: 104). There is little love in this world, beyond a self-love that itself is lacking in the nourishment that only connection with another or others in a public context can give. The idea of self-ownership, consistently applied, Sandel argues, has implications that only an ardent libertarian can love: ‘an unfettered market without a safety net for those who fall behind; a minimal state that rules out most measures to ease inequality and promote the common good.’
With his thoroughgoing critique of modern ethics and society, as set out in After Virtue, published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre has often been taken to be a conservative critic of liberalism. Indeed, in invoking the moral ideas and social practices of past societies, MacIntyre has drawn criticism from liberal commentators for offering reactionary solutions to the philosophical and cultural conflicts of modern times. The fact that those conflicts have not only not gone away since 1981, but have intensified and show signs of becoming entrenched, suggests that MacIntyre’s views need to be taken seriously, however one characterizes them politically.
Perhaps one reason why MacIntyre’s view could appear to be an embrace of conservatism pure and simple is the fact that he establishes the context for his writing of After Virtue as lying in his repudiation of his former Marxism. But MacIntyre’s views here are not of the ‘God that failed’ character, but specifically relate to his own thesis in the book, which sees Marxism as a species of a modern tradition in philosophy and politics that he considers to be exhausted. He openly states towards the end of the book that there is a radical individualism secreted within Marxism, which is the very source of modern conflicts and their intractability. That radical individualism is something that marxism shares with the dominant liberal tradition. In other words, MacIntyre’s view entails not merely the rejection of Marxism but of the modern tradition of ethics and politics, from which, he claims, Marxism originates and with which it shares key characteristics, particularly the commitment to an individualist notion of freedom.
MacIntyre’s repudiation of liberalism is absolute and uncompromising. In my PhD thesis, I criticised the protagonists in the liberal-communitarian debate – Walzer, Sandel - for the fact that they remained liberal and articulated key liberal principles. All except MacIntyre. The problem, I argued, was that instead of looking forwards, with his constant reference to family, nation, and tradition, MacIntyre looked backwards to past forms of solidarity. I therefore identified his work as a dead-end on account of offering past solutions to modern problems. In my research notes, I wrote this: ‘Marx, that is, offers a solution to the moral failures of modernity and does so without succumbing to the nostalgic paradigm so clearly exemplified by MacIntyre's After Virtue. Rather than resurrect a lost morality, Marx is able to extract the rational, emancipatory core of modernity and hence liberate those features of the present which point towards an alternative future. Marx's communism is a vision of the immanent society, morally as well as structurally.’
Whilst appreciating MacIntyre’s acute diagnosis of the intractability of modernity’s moral and political conflicts and their attendant crises, I shied away from his recommendations as to what it would take, morally and socially, for their resolution. My concern was to extract the rational and emancipatory content of MacIntyre’s critique from within the nostalgic frame of their presentation, thus avoiding any reactionary temptations to invoke the past in search of the future. Maclntyre's repudiation of modernity seemed so thoroughgoing as to leave him without any faith in any redemptive possibilities contained within the modern social and ethical fabric. I adhered to Marx’s immanent critique, taking the high road of modernity to an alternate future. For MacIntyre, in contrast, the only hope for the recovery of ethics lay in revitalising the residual forms of the past common life that continued to exist in the present. I considered this view to be both reactionary and futile on account of invoking the forms of a lost past. In contrast to this, I emphasised valuing present and emerging forms of sociality and solidarity immanent but repressed within prevailing social relations as containing the potential for the recovery of the ethical commons in new and vital forms. I therefore sought the moral resolution to current conflicts and crises in terms of a materialist immanence, looking not to the past but to those forms and lines of development in the present which point towards the restoration of solidarity and sociality in the future. I have since come to appreciate that such a position is quite compatible with MacIntyre’s own view. Where MacIntyre focuses on past forms of the common life, giving the impression of working within the nostalgic paradigm, we focus on emerging forms of solidarity and sociality in the present terrain, valuing them as potential forms of the future social order.
That said, the notion of immanence is problematic in light of MacIntyre’s critique of modernity:
Marxist socialism is at its core deeply optimistic. For however thoroughgoing its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it is committed to asserting that within the society constituted by those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better future are being accumulated. Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these resources for the future to be derived? It is not surprising that at this point Marxism tends to produce its own versions of the Ubermensch: Lukacs's ideal proletarian, Leninism's ideal revolutionary. When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy.
MacIntyre 1981 ch 18
MacIntyre’s absolute repudiation of modernity, then, seems to entail such an explicit repudiation of marxism as to render his work suspect to parts of the left academy. Starting with MacIntyre’s own 1984 postscript to the second edition of After Virtue, along with some of his essays, particularly ‘Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995,’ there has been a growing reevaluation of MacIntyre’s nuanced relationship to Marxism, one which places a greater stress on his critique of capitalism. As a result, MacIntyre emerges as much more of a leftist thinker and much less of a reactionary. Books such as Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974, edited by Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson have revealed a MacIntyre of the left, albeit one still rooted in what are considered conservative positions. In Virtue and Politics, Blackledge and Kevin Knight describe MacIntyre’s position as a ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism.’
The nuances of MacIntyre’s position, which are irreducible in the terms of contemporary political and ethical conflicts, makes MacIntyre singularly placed to give an angle on the strange and disorienting world that is in the process of emergence, a world in which familiar terms and institutions are losing their old meanings and no longer function as they once did. It’s an age in of a seemingly pervasive unreason and untruth, in which political communication, formerly the means by which agreement was sought through disagreement, has degenerated into a pathological lying and deceit, and public exchange is characterised by vicious personal attacks, public oafishness, and abusive behaviour. Politics originated with the ancient Greeks as the science concerned with identifying the best regime for the flourishing of human beings as social beings. The present age of unreason has not merely normalized the anti-social characteristics of modern society but, in politics, has elevated the separation of each from all to the status of high principle.
It is too easy, and dangerous, to project this condition upon Trump. Trump is not the architect of this political and ethical degeneration, but its manifestation and personification. The critics of Trump may well be right with respect to the specific charges they level against the President, but they are in danger of missing the much bigger picture that emerges once Trump is located within the modern trajectory leading inexorably to the ‘post truth,’ ‘after virtue’ world. Understood from this angle, Trump emerges as less a threat to the liberal order than a warning and alarm as to its internal failures. Instead of focusing so hard in defeating Trump, we should be focusing on his causes.
Whilst many repeat the lament that we live in a ‘post-truth’ society, their limited awareness of the nature and depth of the crisis within which we are mired is evident in the way that they equate ‘truth’ with ‘fact.’ This reflects the modern dualism of ‘fact’ and ‘value’ in which the former is considered to be real knowledge and the latter to be no knowledge at all. There is scientific truth and knowledge, but not moral truth and knowledge – morality is merely the non-rational realm of subjective value judgements. To grasp some sense of the depth of the crisis the modern world is in requires that we see this notion of a ‘post-truth’ society as a society that is both ‘post-fact’ and ‘post-value.’ This relates the idea to MacIntyre’s critique of ‘after virtue,’ indicating a society which has lost touch with both the intellectual virtues and moral virtues. There is no concern with truth-seeking and being good in such a society, it is a sophist world of power and its constant expansion.
There is a need to understand how we have come to the current impasse and identify what needs to be done to come out of it. In the closing passage of After Virtue, MacIntyre spoke as a ‘prophet’ who didn’t so much predict the new ‘dark age’ that is ‘already upon us,’ but warned us to prepare, survive, and establish the grounds of recovery by keeping alive the virtues in local communities of practice. MacIntyre’s work is important in that it enables us to recover a socially and politically viable notion of truth that is able to mediate the cultural and ethical divides of the age.
The present age of myriad converging crises is one of radical potential as well as danger, with individuals demonstrating a greater awareness of and openness to radical politics. We are living through a crisis with transformative potential, one whose resolution requires that we are prepared to rethink current society from its foundations upwards. The danger is that people will remain within the prevailing, and failing, modes of thought, action, and organisation, reproducing divisions in the attempt to solve the problems arising from them. It is in this context that MacIntyre’s critique of capitalism, can be recovered and placed alongside his more familiar conservative themes of family, tradition, nation, and even narrativity. The idea of MacIntyre as a reactionary nostalgically harking back to the lost past can be thoroughly rejected.
We are living in a society in which dialogue has been replaced by monologue as result of the dissolution of a common moral language capable of yielding shared norms and values through shared practices. Instead, what passes as public life is characterised by the endless exchange of incommensurate values, with conflict incapable of resolution. Modern society is thus characterised by the paradox of both the extension and breakdown of communication. Never have so many human beings been brought into such immediate contact with each other, and yet so separated from one another at the same time. We are suffering from a crisis in the moral and social ecology of communication. MacIntyre explains the origin of this crisis, arguing that
‘The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on – although they do – but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.’
For MacIntyre, this society of endless disagreement, increasingly exploding into anger, results from the loss of a coherent framework of moral reasoning, one in which values were not only known, explicit, and shared, but tied to roles and practices in a functioning social order. The thinkers of the Enlightenment and its aftermath sought to detach morality from its connections with religion and replace God with human reason, furnishing society with a rational and secular foundation for moral norms and values that was both universally applicable and universally acceptable. That grounding of ethics in universal reason - what Kant following Rousseau described as a common moral reason - offered the potential to guide society away from the intractable, and murderous, religious conflicts of the previous century and more. It was a noble vision and ideal, but its attempt at intersubjectivity has itself succumbed to the subjectivism of the age. Asserting the creative universe as ‘God enough,’ theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman argues for human beings taking morality into their own hands, little realising that that is precisely from the moderns have been doing since the Enlightenment. This is not a new demand but the oldest demand of modernity. We are living in the aftermath of its failure.
MacIntyre is alive to the way that moral concepts and principles and modes of argumentation have come to be detached from the contexts – involving roles and practices – in which they made sense, rationalized and intellectualized in being universalized, and redeployed in new contexts where they are no more at home than is a pendulum in a washing machine. Universal rules wrenched from the descriptive teleology which Aristotelian ethics grounds them in are entirely lacking in ultimate justification. Instead of a universal ethic, there is a fragmented moral terrain composed of the bits and pieces of competing and incompatible moral theories. Whether we refer to Kantian deontology, contractarianism, utilitarianism or consequentialism here, all moral theories which seek to do more and go further than subjective choice appear merely as minor cults that can make no moral claims on others. The revival of interest in virtue ethics is in large part an expression of a growing awareness of the failures of modern moral theories and their concern with identifying and analysing rules and principles, telling us which actions are morally right and how individuals ought to act. Such an intellectualized approach to ethics results in disagreements that are incapable of resolution, generating frustration with respect to their interminable character, and inviting anger when it comes to issues of pressing and profound social concern. Kantians, utilitarians, natural law ethicists, and contractarians disagree with each other, as well as have disagreements within their own terrain. The lack of resolution renders such an approach to moral theory socially and practically irrelevant.
Arguing that modern moral theory suffers from a preoccupation with the rational definition of rules and principles, MacIntyre recovers the forgotten truth that, historically, ethics has been in large part concerned with moral virtue and character. This observation makes it clear that the accent in ethics should be upon how human beings ought to be rather than upon what they ought to do. Much more than establishing rules and justifying actions, the ethical life is about what it is for an individual to become a good person. Ethics is about cultivating the virtues and developing the morally desirable character traits enabling healthy human flourishing. For Aristotle, the cultivation of virtue was intended ‘to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.’ A virtue is therefore a trait of character, manifested in habitual action, something that it is good for a person to have. The traits of character which should be fostered in human beings are as extensive as human social life itself: Benevolence; civility; compassion; conscientiousness; cooperativeness; courage; courteousness; dependability; fairness; friendliness; generosity; honesty; industriousness; justice; loyalty; moderation; reasonableness; self-confidence; self-control; self-discipline; self-reliance; tactfulness; thoughtfulness; tolerance. Instead of focusing on action-based rules, about which there will inevitably be disagreement without agreement, we should focus on the moral and intellectual virtues and the cultivation of morally desirable character traits. Instead of looking at how human beings should act, ethics should concern itself with the kind of person an individual ought to be and could become.
The countless attempts to formulate a coherent foundation for moral norms and deliberation flounder on the contemporary equation of morality with an irreducible subjective preference. In consequence, moral discussion manifests a confused and arbitrary quality which, when extended into politics, generates a mutual miscomprehension, frustration, and anger. Hence the tendency for debates to degenerate into abusive exchanges. The various parties to these debates in ethics and politics advance a motley array of reasons in support of their claims, none of which are compelling and persuasive for the very reason that the substance of these judgements, beyond personal preference, are uncertain and unclear. The protagonists in these debates thus seem to be talking past each other instead of coherently deliberating about the veracity and validity of particular moral claims. Incommensurate values thus render genuine dialogue impossible. MacIntyre thus seeks to identify the origins of the pervasive and profound moral malaise of the contemporary world, a world which mires its members in a permanent disagreement without hope of agreement. The fruitless character of contemporary debates are thus revealed to lie in their rootless origins in the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework buttressed by virtuous communities of practice and character. MacIntyre’s explanation for the fractious nature and bellicose tone of moral and political disagreements in contemporary society is compelling. The nearly forty years that have passed since the publication of After Virtue in 1981 have proven him right.
Arguments in the public terrain have the appearance of being a showdown over ultimate values, with the main protagonists advancing positions and attacking their rivals as though something fundamental was at stake: truth, freedom, justice, equality, civilization itself. The problem is that whilst all sides in the debate can often refer to the same terms, they understand them very differently, and instead of being able to appeal to ultimate grounds, the claims appear to be free floating, arbitrary and often inconsistent. Each side seeks to gain an advantage by flagging up the hypocrisy of the other side. The evidence of a pervasive and all-consuming hypocrisy, however, indicates that the problem lies deeper than the surface level of the moral terms being exchanged and in the fact that these terms have come to be detached from ultimate grounds. The character of so many moral and political debates in public is that of assertion and counter-assertion, which soon degenerates into abuse and counter-abuse as a result of incommensurability ramping up frustration and emotion and exploding into anger. The result is the descent of a genuine public life and dialogue into a generalized emotivist universe of irreducible preferences, with moral and political disagreement proceeding by way of monologue, manipulation, and imposition so that instead of dialogue and broad agreement, there is the triumph of one side and the defeat of another. This is a zero-sum world in which, instead of a public life based upon exchange as a mutual learning, oriented by connection to the ultimate values that embrace all, there is a scoring of points and winning of victories and owning of opponents. The shift of debates to social media has only served to inflate and intensify the situation, exacerbating already deep divisions whilst diminishing possibilities of their resolution.
We live in an age of ‘tumblr liberalism,’ claims Angela Nagle, and not a serious left, something that issues in a ‘left cannibalism.’ We can cite as an example here the furore caused by the publication of Rebecca Tuvel’s essay ‘In Defense of Transracialism,’ in the feminist philosophical journal Hypatia, which caused a huge backlash.
I fear of venturing further here, for reasons which shall become clear. This is an area in which you can provoke outrage not simply by saying the wrong thing but for failing to say the right thing. The pros and cons of Nagle’s book can be examined here: Books | Review | “Tumblr Liberalism” vs The Serious Authentic Left: On Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies ‘If the left is to have the same degree of success in translating online cultures into political movements, then it needs to understand both the online world and its own history. Kill All Normies helps with neither of those things, and is unlikely to win support beyond those already convinced of its central, conservative, thesis, writes Josh Davies.’
I dare say, that my own view can also be criticized for the same reason – it will be found unpersuasive by anyone not already persuaded by the central, conservative, thesis. That criticism, however, sums up precisely the crisis of communication and the irreducible game in which we are mired. I had precisely this same observation given in respect of my work on Istvan Meszaros – I was told it was unlikely to appeal to those who are not already Marxists. So here I am, combining thinkers right across the political spectrum, producing a blend of left-right thoughts, and being told that it is unlikely to be found persuasive. That leaves us being comprehensible only by adopted the very language and mode of argumentation that is being criticised.
Philosopher Kelly Oliver describes her involvement in the Rebecca Turvel affair, which she describes as ‘identity politics run amok.’ The way Oliver describes that affair in the above article expresses perfectly the inflation of emotivism that results in an age of pervasive social media. She argues that ‘outrage has become the new truth.’
Education in the Age of Outrage by Kelly Oliver. Oliver admits that the current political climate in academia confuses her. She describes her head spinning the more she reads about trigger warnings, safe spaces and petitions to retract scholarly articles:
On top of that confusion, I harbor a fear of expressing views that will offend other progressives, scholars and teachers who may also be fighting oppression. And I fear being subject to public shaming on social media, and receiving private hate mail (I still am, after my response in May to the controversy over Rebecca Tuvel’s article in the journal Hypatia).
In fine, Oliver describes herself as placed in an educational environment in which ‘outrage, censoring and public shaming has begun to replace critique, disagreement and debate.’ She proceeds to list the problematic effects of public shaming that are directly relevant to the issues identified in this essay – silencing people, blaming individuals instead of examining social context, fostering intolerance and divisiveness, creating a “with-us-or-against-us” ethos, and reducing identity politics to a version of “oppression Olympics.” ‘In cases where pain and suffering are equated with moral authority, calling out injustice can operate as a form of signaling virtue.’ The problem with all of these things is that they preclude the yes/no that defines politics and ethics – you can only say ‘yes’ in all of these areas. Instead of argument to discern the truth, there can only be agreement to a truth that is already known. The dissent of a contrary voice is met with outrage. A generation has been raised on outrage:
Let’s face it, outrage sells. That’s why social media and mainstream news outlets are invested in promoting it; they can both fuel and produce desires by tailoring their content to suit individual tastes. The red and blue newsfeeds and the “click bait” that proliferate on them produce profits, but they have also helped to make our time one of deep divisions and reactionary hatred, with a radicalization of both sides in a culture war that risks deepening into a civil war, with militarized armies of fascists and anti-fascists fighting in the streets.
That degeneration of politics and argument into a fighting, on the streets or elsewhere, is itself reactionary, whichever side you are on. The defence that emancipation has only ever been won in the past by fighting fails insofar as it is presented as a leftist argument, since all it proves, if true, is the truth of the power politics of might is right – principle has nothing to do with it, since it is power that does all the heavy lifting. Hence the betrayal of freedom, reason, and democracy in order to be politically effective, with respect to certain aims in the immediate run, is something that the left ought always be alert to. Because it involves a means which will inevitably supplant any emancipatory ends. In fact, it is reactionary:
In a culture that increasingly values raw emotions uncontaminated by scholarly analysis, the uncritical legitimation of feelings as the basis for moral authority becomes a form of political leveling. If unexamined outrage is the new truth, then we are moving dangerously close to a form of reactionary politics that closes down difficult discussions and prevents us from distinguishing between sexism or racism and critical discussions of them.
Such an approach is the betrayal of reason:
Privileging raw feelings over the cooked analysis of them not only fuels anti-intellectualism, but also conceals the socio-historical context that produces those feelings. In other words, feelings are never completely raw, but always already cooked. So, too, analysis is never completely devoid of emotion. Pathos and logos aren’t polar opposites. Yet to authorize outrage (whether on the left or the right) as foundational and beyond analysis is to deny the ways in which race, class, gender, politics, upbringing, culture and history shape our emotions. When outrage becomes an end in itself, it also becomes a form of fundamentalism and part of a dogma of purity that can be potentially aggressive, hostile and violent. When political activism becomes dogmatic and punishing, it uses the same techniques of exclusion and oppression that it rejects — only now in the name of liberation.
In the process, an emancipatory agenda turns into its opposite, inviting a repression that is all the more difficult to identify and oppose for reason of it being delivered in the name of emancipation. This inversion begins with the just end being cited in an apologetics with respect to the means employed along the way. It ends with the means supplanting the end:
Certainly, outrage has a place in the academy and in politics. But when emotional pain and suffering are taken as the foundation of moral authority and cannot be analyzed because they are viewed as absolute truths or obvious facts, the mission of higher education — to examine unquestioned assumptions about the world and the self — becomes a mission impossible.
Oliver’s points relate to academia and social media, but identifies an emotivist mentality that has spread all over public life with respect to politics and ethics:
Although social media can be effective for organizing, and for forming communities (on both the left and the right), it is also often fueled by emotional reaction rather than thoughtful response. Life is flattened to fit the screen, and cute cat videos play next to photographs of the latest atrocity. Social media works by leveling and ripping bits of life from their contexts as a form of entertainment or news — the more outrageous, the better. In academia, social media has become not just a way to disseminate research, or engage in debate, but also a way to close it down by shaming and cyberbullying. Outrage may be the first word in social transformation, but it shouldn’t be the last.
For MacIntyre, the barbarism of the new dark ages, like the old dark ages, is characterized as a loss of ‘civility and moral community.’
In ‘If this is Feminism,’ Kelly Oliver writes that ‘outrage has become the new truth.’ She writes of the new meaning that has now been given to the public/private split as a result of the backlash over the Tuvel article. She begins by noting the tendency of people to opt for a quiet life and maintain silence. I do precisely this on social media, for the reason I don’t need daily outrage and objection in my life:
The split between what people wrote to both Rebecca Tuvel and to me in private, and what they felt compelled to say in public is one indication that the explosion of personal insults and vicious attacks on social media is symptomatic of something much bigger than the actual issues discussed in Tuvel’s article. In private messages, some people commiserated, expressed support, and apologized for what was happening and for not going public with their support. As one academic wrote to me in a private message, “sorry I’m not saying this publicly (I have no interest in battling the mean girls on Facebook) but fwiw it’s totally obvious to me that you haven’t been committing acts of violence against marginalized scholars.” Later, this same scholar wrote, again in private, saying Tuvel’s article is “a tight piece of philosophy” that makes clear that the position that “transgender is totally legit, [and] transracial is not—can only be justified using convoluted essentialist metaphysics. I will write to her privately and tell her so.” Others went further and supported Tuvel in private while actually attacking her in public.
This is a self-censorship, a culture of suppression and silence and complicity submitting to the emotivism of outrage:
‘The feeding frenzy in response to Tuvel’s article couldn’t have happened without social media. The viciousness of the attacks was fueled by the mob mentality of Facebook. Dissenters, even those who just wanted a civil discussion of the issue, were shut down immediately or afraid to voice their opinions in public. Some who in private were sympathetic to Tuvel, felt compelled to join in the attacking mob. The thought police were in full force.’
Oliver identifies what is implied by identity politics as an irreducible game:
‘Part of the problem with the response to Tuvel’s article is that some seem to feel that they are the only ones who have the legitimate right to talk about certain topics. At best, this is identity politics run amok; at worst it is a turf war. Indeed, it leads to a kind of academic Selfie culture where all we can do is take pictures of ourselves and never consider the lives of others.’
You must understand and accept my truth; you can never, as a [fill blank on identity] understand my truth – but must accept it anyway.
Oliver now identifies outrage as the new truth:
‘We live in an era of outrage—let’s call it the Trump era. That’s how Trump got elected, by voicing outrage. His most ardent disciples uncritically and unthinkingly believe everything he says because it is expressed with anger and zest. Civility is suspected of being “political,” which has become a dirty word. It’s hard to argue with outrage, and that’s precisely the problem. Outrage has become the new truth. At one extreme, we have Trump and his supporters proudly embracing political incorrectness, and at the other, we have the political correctness police calling for censorship of a scholarly article written by someone working for social justice.’
The loss of ‘civility and moral community’ is identified by MacIntyre as the chief characteristic of the new barbarism:
Dissent and debate allow feminism—and scholarship more generally—to flourish and advance, while insults and censorship are the tools of those who would shut us down. In this battle, feminists embracing inclusivity are not the enemy. Far from it. The real enemy is our culture of displaced outrage and its symptoms, namely the thought police and the alternative facts machine. Let’s have critical debate and philosophical arguments instead of cyber-shaming and personal insults.
This culture is suffering from a crisis in the ecology of communication, something which impairs the ability of individuals to communicate reasonably with civility across the wider culture. Establishing the conditions resolving this crisis and enabling reasonable interchange and civility is the task before us.
A couple of months ago I had a rather pointless and unedifying exchange with someone on the question of Ray Charles’ negative, and incorrect, assessment of Elvis Presley. I’ll not rehearse that lengthy exchange, because it was indeed pointless. Pointless because it was evident that facts in respect of objective truth didn’t matter. Elvis is accused of being a cultural appropriator on account of ‘stealing’ ‘Hound Dog’ from a black female singer Willie Mae Thornton. In truth, the song was written by two Jewish white songwriters, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had to sue Johnny Otis and Thornton for their attempts to claim the song as theirs. Charles got this story mixed up with ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ which he says Elvis stole from Willie Mae Thornton. ‘Jailhouse Rock’ was written specifically for Elvis by Leiber and Stoller. The general point is that it is illegitimate for Elvis, as a white singer, to sing the blues. The very reason that Elvis was musically and culturally important, the very thing that made Elvis an integrator who opened the doors for a racially diverse and egalitarian society, the blending of black and white music, is now held against. The bitter irony – and basic stupidity – of it all is that those damning Elvis as a racist are the ones who are doing the most to reimpose the boundaries that entrench and extend racism. I also pointed out that Ray Charles, as Nat Cole before him, had huge success in recording country songs. In 1962, Charles released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. The album was a commercial success, yielding massive sales of 500,000 as well as four hit singles, and earned Charles greater mainstream notice as well as airplay on both R&B and country radio stations. It also earned Charles a Grammy award. Is that cultural appropriation? Is that evidence of a black artist helping himself to white music for reasons of personal aggrandisement? The whole issue is rot, and hypocritical rot – music is music. I actually gave a long and detailed and reasoned account that dismantled this accusation of cultural appropriation, and was met with the accusation that I, like Elvis and the bulk of his fans, was a racist and was ‘lynching’ Ray Charles for speaking ‘his truth.’ I only regret deleting the exchange now, because it would have been useful to have as evidence.
And with that notion of ‘his truth’ I saw that we were not involved in dialogue, merely an exchange of monologues. Which is precisely where the modern world of politics and morality is at, hence the cycles of assertion and counter-assertion which quickly degenerate into abuse and counter-abuse, then grunt and counter-grunt until, finally, sooner or later, there is silence. I ended it quickly, because once we are merely exchanging our own ‘truth’ then there is no possibility of exchange, no common standard commanding common assent against which to check the claims being advanced by various parties.
The problem with silence when it comes to public affairs, though, is this: issues of common concern do not go away, but instead become ever more pressing. If we can no longer dialogue our way through common affairs, then there is only force and violence.
Talking of Elvis, I am wondering how long it will be before his statues are targeted, on account of Elvis being a cultural appropriator and racist. The evidence here doesn’t matter, as it hasn’t mattered for many for too long now. The ‘shoeshine’ remark falsely attributed to Elvis back in the 1950s was resurrected in the 80s and 90s, and no matter how many times it has been rebutted continues to be repeated, simply because it fits the prejudices of those for whom Elvis, all evidence to the contrary, was a racist. By destroying the reputation of a man who was an integrator, such vehement anti-racists actually serve to embed racism even more deeply in the social and psychic fabric. They fetishize division.
In other words, we don't have a public life and have lost the common ground, and putting that back together is the task that lies before us.
A society of private individuals absorbed in their own interests carries on in a mutual indifference that lacks social purpose and direction but at least has the merit of not setting its members at each others’ throats. The gradual erosion of common bonds and orientation in face of collective forces is masked for a while, and we don’t notice the bonds of commonality and universality slipping away until, one day, in response to stress and crisis, the fractures are made manifest. In the attempt to recover public purpose around positive symbols commanding common assent, mutual indifference comes to be revealed as a mutual contempt which, if pushed, breaks out into a mutual hatred that threatens to engulf the whole of society. The depth of division and diremption in this society has been made plain by this war of statues and monuments, which has involved people trading insults and threats with respect to each others’ objects of admiration and adoration. The Beatles, Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria, Baden Powell and Alfred Fagon, Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher, Christopher Columbus and Francis Drake, whoever it may be that people once thought that at least a public out there, even maybe the public, would be capable of recognising. It turns out that these public icons are all just the dreams and fancies of private individuals, of no more significance than the Elvis tapestry that adorns the wall of my study. And the fantastical collective projection has just come crashing down. It’s a tide of sectionalism and subjectivism that now threatens to engulf even war leader Winston Churchill, at the time of D-Day, no less. We live in a society that has to protect the statue of the man who led Britain through its finest hour, and cannot even do that.
But this dissolution has been coming. As Max Weber argued, the fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and a 'disenchantment of the world’ in which our most sublime and ultimate values have retreated from public life into private life. We live in a society of mutual indifference with respect to each others’ objects of veneration and devotion, which explodes into a mutual contempt and hatred whenever that celebration attempts to go public.
In light of which, the last words of Lester Bangs’ famous obituary of Elvis Presley in 1977 could well serve not only as my last words, but the last words of a civilization whose members were so absorbed in their own particular concerns as to be incapable of making common cause with others in mustering the collective will and wit to confront the myriad forces threatening to overwhelm it:
‘If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others' objects of reverence.
I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies.
We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's.
But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.
So I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.’