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Peter Critchley

Conspirituality: a Modern Distemper

Updated: Jan 8, 2021


‘Conspirituality’ refers to the over-lap between New Age / wellness culture and conspiracy culture.


I would like to comment on issues raised by the events discussed in this article:


You know there is something rotten in western spirituality when the face of the attempted coup on Capitol Hill is a self-initiated shaman.


a) How predictable;

b) How depressing.


Let me preface these remarks with a brief comment on this hard right politics. I am far from seeking to divert attention by false arguments over equivalence, This crowd are so manifestly a bad lot I don't bother wasting words and breath on them. The fact that this can no longer be taken as read indicates some part of the malaise that is the bigger problem I want to address. I am observing, in hope that lessons will be learned. Sadly, but not surprisingly, I am seeing apologetics, denials and frankly open support - which has been a consistent theme. Is it too much to ask for leadership? Sanity? Or is this the politics were are mired in for good - ideologues accusing their critics of being ideologues? The systematic destruction of politics - "government" - has proceeded over the past four decades and has resulted in a diminution of the public imagination, fracturing genuine commonalities into this congeries of ersatz tribes. It's been deliberate, dissolving public purpose into the anarchy of the rich and the powerful. And with that dissolution comes these bastardized collectivities united by a lethal combination of fear and fantasy. I posted on this, objecting to a critic of this 'shaman' idiot as a believer in medieval nonsense. Neither ancient nor medieval, this seems very modern to me - lots and lots of goods without any good reason to take any of them seriously. The neutral legal-institutional framework can hold the ring and the conventional political sphere can mediate divisions for so long - but the cracks are showing. Frankly, yes, crazy people. And there is a lot of them. I will stick to my consistent line - rebuild public life, public community, reclaim government as the pooled sovereignty of the government, constitute public purpose, built the collective wit and will - and put critique and construction together. This Trump guy, I keep repeating, is not the architect of this malaise, he is a symptom of it. He saw the writing on the wall, and instead of taking it as a warning, took it as a licence, and exploited the divisions and hatreds rather than attempted to heal them. As to what it will take for that healing, that's the key question now. I'm looking for leadership among conservatives. Glad to say FB friends I have like Bob Inglis, former Republican senator, have been speaking up for years now. It's for the others. I was once disappointed. I am no longer. I'm afraid you learn to lower your expectations in some regards. I try to focus on those who affirm alternative, and better, possibilities. Those people are out there. Events like that can sap the energy and destroy hope. Or fire you up to assert an alternative political and social order. Rational Freedom vs anarchy every day of the week. This ain't freedom.


At which point, all that remains is for me to note, wearily, for the umpteenth time, the startled and shocked response of liberal commentators to all things Trump. The outrage, certainly, but most revealing of all is the surprise, asking with every event "how could such a thing happen here" and "who could have seen this coming"? These are obvious first questions which equally obvious answers. The fact that these questions continue to be asked, and continue to be unanswered, reveals liberalism to be capable of offering explanations for increasingly frequent ‘outrages,’ ‘shocks,’ and ‘surprises’ indicates that liberalism has become an ideology, a rationalisation of a failing political and social order, and that it is time to move on to a more critical view of the world.


Premised on a false ontology that separates the individual and the social, insisting on a plurality of goods, which might just as well as be bads given the denial of an objective common standard of moral evaluation, liberalism raises a neutral legal-institutional framework to hold the ring between competing views. It is called conflict pluralism and, within asymmetrical relations of power, the claim to even-handedness and impartiality is bogus. That demoralised and depoliticised framework is a conception of the good, liberalism’s own good of myriad self-choice, victory going to the strongest arm and loudest voice. The liberal self-image, presented in terms of equality of opportunity and liberty, is starkly contradicted by the reality and practice, and is now being ruthlessly exposed and rejected. Liberalism stands uncomprehending and powerless in face of its critics. Liberalism is fundamentally incapable of understanding or explaining the world, since it has no philosophical or moral framework that enables it to do so. The assumptions of the discrete individual and discrete events and happenings, a world of subjective choice, is complete nonsense and invites the creation of surrogate and ersatz communities in order to create some semblance of order, meaning, and belonging. As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, the bourgeois viewpoint is incapable of moving beyond the atomised, competitive, individualised society of the present, thinking it the end of history. With bourgeois relations, history has come to an end. In effect, liberalism has become a hide-bound conservatism, something that liberals conceal by continuing with outmoded emancipatory struggles against feudal powers that no longer exist (atheism vs religion is not only a sterile debate, it is utterly reactionary). The liberal emancipators give the impression that they are a plucky vanguard of the progressive extending the forces of enlightenment. The hard fact which liberals seem incapable of recognising is that liberalism is the dominant culture and has been for a century and more. Liberals don’t see that liberalism has triumphed, and that their protests in defence of liberal values and principles entail a critique of liberal institutions and practices. That’s why liberals are always so confused whenever anything happens, a crisis or a problem is a challenge to their end of history. Liberals are incapable of seeing that the problems and crises they protest are self-authored. My contention is that coming to own those problems in an attempt at their resolution means transcending liberalism and the social relations and modes of thought it is based on.


As I have argued in a number of posts, liberalism has become a conservativism concerned with the defence of a failing status quo, an ideology that is concerned with rationalising existing power relations even as it criticises the extent to which their effects contradict liberal values and principles. Like all power-serving ideologies, liberalism is more concerned with making excuses for power than with accurately explaining the world, let alone engaging in its practical-critical transformation. Conservatism and liberalism are converging as power gets more and more concentrated under the corporate form.


Into the Liberal Inferno (the rise of an illiberal liberalism)

This critique of liberalism has to be made, for the reason that liberalism stands in the way of addressing the problems and crises that are upon us. We are living through a crisis with transformative potential. The failure to resolve this crisis through positive transformative action will generate the increasing likelihood of revanchism and reaction, negative and destructive assaults on the status quo. The danger lies in joining with liberalism as a conservative ideology to defend that failing status quo against the monsters seeking to destroy it. I choose the word ‘monsters’ in recollection of Gramsci’s thought that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in the interregnum monsters arise. Cleaving to liberalism imposes the hopeless choice between a failing social order and monstrous reaction upon us. The more the system fails, the more monstrous will be the reaction. Liberalism is incapable of explaining and critiquing the fundamental, and increasingly glaring, faults of the system, because without the system liberalism is nothing. Liberalism is the system. Liberal values and principles are contradicted by central liberal institutions. And liberals are paralysed in refusal to make the choice. And that is why liberalism is defenceless against fascism. Fascism looks at expressions of capitalism in crisis and assigns them to some group - liberalism sees so much of it as inevitabilities that it is “utopian” to propose solutions to resolve the crisis. The resolution is socialism, but liberalism has fought tooth and nail to side-line it as extremist, utopian etc. In the absence of a genuine transformative commitment and understanding – a deliberate lack of self-knowledge – liberals will always create bogeymen to explain away the problems and crises immanent to a system which has benefitted them while impairing the life, liberty, and happiness of millions of others. The alternative is always extremism and authoritarianism. To those on the receiving end of liberalism and capitalism, that alternative is not a warning of the future but a description of the present.


Decades ago, Lewis Mumford warned of ‘the corruption of liberalism,’ how deficient in principles, philosophy, and morals liberalism is. There was no surprise, he argued, that fascism would run a coach and horses through the whole flabby bourgeois terrain. No roots, no principles, agnostic on the good, rootless and fruitless.


The politics and ethics of the modern world are a congeries of self-cancelling gods/devils, for reasons I have given in numerous posts and don’t care to ever have to spell out again. Yesterday I had the misfortune to read a hard-right climate/covid ‘sceptic’ abuse someone as an ‘ideologue’ who can’t see beyond the filters of his ideology and accept that the facts, science, and mathematics don’t support his view. The issue is not important. The ‘ideologue’ was asking for a more nuanced and contextual presentation of the facts, and this conservative voice of reason was determined to stick to a simple table of facts involving crude measures without context, explaining nothing and shutting down questions from critical voices with a blunt statement of facts and figures. I merely mention it because that is precisely an approach I have criticised from left-leaning environmentalists demanding climate action. My point is that science settles nothing, and when pressed into service as an authoritative voice in ethics and politics is a positive menace. It was put to me that a logic purporting to show the true nature and order of reality trumps the ideology of politics and ethics in the human social world. That separation of the logical and the ideological is crude and unsophisticated and is manifestly an attempt to compel a distinctive ethics and politics by way of a false certainty, nature reified through the voice of science. And the hard fact is, anyone and any side in politics can play that game, as I saw this representative of the hard-right do to someone merely questioning a table of figures. The logical voice may respond with a presentation of a table of facts and figures of their own. To which the other side will should ‘fake.’ The fact is that facts and figures do not decide questions of ethics and politics, merely inform them.


‘Universities need to make some plans to expand their budgets for the Humanities. It is no coincidence that the devaluation of the study of literature, writing, history, philosophy, etc coincides w the era of “alternative facts” & the storming of the Capitol by white terrorists.’

- Nedda Mehdizadeh


I agree but would generalize this point. 2020 was the year when everyone with a political axe to grind and a dog in the fight was reinventing history to suit their present purposes. I expressed my concern clearly on this in several posts last year. In those, I took aim against the contemporary left.



I also took the opportunity to separate myself from Extinction Rebellion and all those who make law-breaking a fetish and a tactic to pressurise public authority and government.



I remain committed to constituting a genuine public community and constituting a democratic authority which affirms transcendent standards of justice. Such actions are destructive rather than constructive. That may have lost me friends among environmentalists, but my warning has been born out. Protestors on the left presume that they and they alone monopolize extra-legal protest. They do not. Taking political struggles to the streets is a dangerous game, not least when you make a virtue of peaceful and non-violent protest. There are no rules to the game when politics plays out on the streets, so you shouldn’t be surprised when the other side, armed and dangerous, doesn’t play fair.

I repudiate one and all on this.

As for religion.


The self-discovery of the human personality came from Christianity and the sense of the person’s indestructibility. That discovery began with Dante, but in time overthrow the doctrine to which he was committed. Dante emphasised willing and choosing but sought a voluntary submission to true authority, so that perfect necessity would also be the perfect freedom. In time, the commitment to the autonomy of the human personality shed rational foundations and commitments so that the autonomous person, affirming that autonomy, was unwilling to acknowledge any superior order or authority, let alone the authority of the universal world order to which Dante submitted with a rational passion, in concordance with God’s plan of justice. The autonomous personality was born in a Judaeo-Christian matrix, but soon grew to shed its origins. That personality is manifested in all the tendencies of the modern age, the business spirit, the ethical subjectivism, the humanism, and the striving for physical and technological domination of the world. And I hold it in contempt. It is the ‘men as gods’ delusion and, as proposals are put forward for the dimming of the sun by way of geoengineering in order to check global heating, I vehemently reject it. I have just finished Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World. He writes eloquently on this:


From Christianity, whence it rose and which it ultimately defeated, this conception inherited unrest and immoderation. These qualities led it to discard the structure and limits of Dante's world, to which, however, it owed the power of its actuality.


Auerbach 2001: I76


With Petrarch and Boccaccio the historical world acquired a fully immanent autonomy, and this sense of the self-sufficiency of earthly life spread like a fructifying stream to the rest of Europe—seemingly quite estranged from its eschatological origin and yet secretly linked with it through man's irrevocable bond with his concrete historical fate.


Auerbach 2001: 178


That secret needs to be revealed and the dependence of a truly autonomous person on Christian notions of an inherently meaningful universe and indestructible soul stated clearly and rationally, as Dante did. Because the failure to do so leads only to an autonomy that degenerates in a destructive madness.


Here we see the less than benign face of the self-satisfied ethic of ‘I am spiritual but not religious.’ 'Spiritual but not religious' is a pick-and-mix approach to morality which expresses the individualist and narcissistic ethos of the prevailing culture. Religion involves being bound, a binding together. It is this supra-individual code and discipline that many are concerned to reject, leaving them free to believe what they like, and take what they like from the various goods on offer in the marketplace. Spirituality and religion are not alternatives; spirituality is the overall view and vision, religion its structure, form, and practice in everyday society. Spirituality without religion is flaccid, decadent, indulgent, any nice fantasy people want to believe. Religion is the hard yards that have to be walked on the path to spiritual insight.


I like what Simone Weil says here. In seeking to elevate vision beyond the prevailing standards of time and place, Weil emphasised the mystical dimension. Weil identified mysticism as the essence of religion and emphasized that each of the great civilisations in history were based upon a religion that possessed its own unique mystical inspiration. Weil was concerned to emphasise that the loss of mysticism spelled the loss of moral vitality to any civilisation.


I agree. But the same applies to religion. These events may serve as a wake-up to people pressing emancipatory causes – causes which I support in the name – to take law, morality, authority, government, civics, and public life seriously as not merely conditions of a free and democratic society, but components of it. And spectacles of shamans and such like on the extreme right only go to underline the need to take religion and the character-forming discipline of religious life and practice seriously. The world is reeling in a dangerous arbitrariness at the moment.


There was a time when I thought I had stated at extremes in this book, and thought to withdraw. The explosions of 2020 proved my warnings were accurate. If I am right, then there will be worse to come:



Deism was really about the eclipse of religion by science, and the overthrow of God by a Nature mediated by the scientific mind. In the process, the mystical vision of a transcendent reality beyond human construction and control was lost. In fact, it was expelled. Eyes became less visionary as hands became more practical. There was a turning away from the spiritual awareness of a supra-human reality towards a fixation upon transforming the environment in order to serve human interests and satisfying human wants and desires. The twin industrial and scientific revolutions of the eighteenth centuries and their political impact into the nineteenth century turned sights towards a rationalistic millennium constructed by purely human power over nature, oriented by purely human values.


Standing on the brink of ecological catastrophe, it easy to criticise the ambitions of the rationalized society as a dangerous fantasy, what Dante refers to as Ulysses’ ‘mad flight.’


I make an issue of it because this ‘shaman’ guy is full of superstitious thinking, ‘patternicity.’

It’s important for me to make the necessary distinctions here because, writing on Dante, a fourteenth century poet-philosopher, I could easily be tarred with the same irrational brush. I emphasise that from first to last, Dante’s ethical foundations are rational. Everything is measured and tempered. The article writes on this shaman protestor: ‘he literally believes this medieval nonsense.’ How ironic, I think, that morons who have risen from the subjectivist swamps of modern culture could be associated with the rational system of ethics that constituted the core of the medieval view of the scholastics. This guy knows squat about medieval ethics, which is also precisely the same as his critics’ knowledge. It really looks like a lost age to me. It isn’t, for the reasons I set out in the work I do. And I’ll be damned if that work gets condemned by associations with the fruitloops of modern subjectivist ethics and culture. This is one for the moderns to own, because these characters of the product of the modern age, however much they invoke the ancients and the medievals. Sorry Jules Evans, but no, this has nought to do with medieval ethics, and has nothing at all in common with ethics as a work of reason as the scholastics presented it. This is very much the face of modern politics and spirituality, the release from objective reality and moral-rational foundations as an invitation to believe in all the things one wants to believe in, and discard the hard ethical practices, disciplines, and rituals that come with conforming one's thoughts and actions to a common transcendent standard. The fact that we live in ‘godless and prophetless’ times, argued Max Weber, will only serve to make it even more likely that modern men and women, unable to bear the burden of existential choice in a meaningless universe, will create gods and prophets of their own, and even present themselves as such. It’s a wretched age, with technical possibilities for universal brotherhood dissolving into a universal hatred for want of an inner ethical unity.

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