How the Sophist Politics of the Contemporary ‘Left’ Liberates the Rich and Powerful
I shall begin by commenting on the recent article How Race Politics Liberated the Elites.
I use the phrase the ‘New Left’ here for want of another. I would describe this new class as the ‘New New Left’ to make it clear that we are dealing with a Left that is so ‘new’ as to cease to be Left at all. It lacks the point and purpose and grounds that give substance to its emancipatory claims. In fine, in dissolving principles of universal significance and losing the capacity for reconciliation and unity around shared commitments, this political movement has ceased to be Left and has, instead, become an extreme and decadent version of the very order it seeks to critique and overthrow. In taking the fruits for the roots, it succeeds only in dissolving its own grounds and will wither and die in short order – rootless and fruitless.
It is this rootless morality as power that I target here as 'sophism,' much as Rousseau used the phrase. Of course, the term 'sophism' needs to be properly delineated and defined. I shall qualify the term at the end, and return to a more nuanced treatment in a later article*
In this article in Unheard (December 14 2020), Matthew B. Crawford argues that when society is taken to be inherently oppressive, the notion of a common good disappears.
If I may, I have been warning of precisely this for longer than I care to remember. With the concept of ‘rational freedom,’ I have sought to re-affirm transcendent standards of truth and justice in order to buttress the normative claims and emancipatory commitments of the Left in politics. Without those standards, all things reduce to a conventionalism and sophism in an inherently political, irredeemably competitive, world. The Left makes the error of discarding the roots through an obsessive preoccupation with the fruits. Rights are natural rights and are founded in natural law. Remove that natural law, and rights become merely conventional, a function of power, conferred politically and withdrawn by the same means just as easily. In discarding the foundations, the fruits sooner or later reduce to being no more than a function of power. This is a fair-weather ethic that looks good when one’s side is winning, but is always subject to reversal in an endless power struggle. If struggle is all about power, then there can be no common good. The transcendent standards sustaining the notion of a substantive good have been lost, replaced by endless contention and irresolvable division. The mistake lies in coming to take the fruits for the roots and, instead of securing them for all equally on the basis of a substantive ethic, detaching them from their foundations in order to push them to extremes, provoking further division and feeding off it instead of attaining a reconciliation in unity. At this extreme, the power struggle has become the end in itself, having discarded the end-point which delivers fulfilment. Instead of an equality that serves each and all, this prosecution of rights divorced from their foundations is pursued as an assertion of difference, separation, and the assertion of the superiority of some over others. This development has been coming, once the Left started to make a fetish of difference and otherness and life on the margins. (No one who has ever lived life on the margins has ever made this mistake).
This tacit recognition from the Left that its struggles have no point other than the extension of power also indicates the defeat of the Left, the recognition that there is no substantive good, only an endless, and pointless, cycle of power/resistance. The only decision to make with respect to this cycle is to decide which side to commit to, the meaning of that decision being no more than an ultimately empty existential choice.
It is at this point that the constant refrain from conservative commentators that the left eats itself becomes valid. Except that the point is of much broader significance. This cannibalisation of ethics and politics lies at the heart of the DNA of liberal and capitalist modernity itself, which overthrows the notion of an objectively valuable, meaningful, and purposeful world in favour of a self-legislated reason and a self-created good. Drawn into the sophist power struggles of this world, the Left in politics reduces to being merely a species of this self-assertive humanism.
My thesis on Marx and Rational Freedom identified a normative ideal at the heart of socialism which implied a substantive and transcendent ethic, as against relativism and conventionalism. In other words, I argued that the Left in politics advances normative and emancipatory positions which presume the very transcendent standards which the Left in its dominant forms have denied. The Left’s explicit philosophy and its implicit commitments thus stand in contradictory relation. I have sought to define a ‘rational freedom’ in order to secure the basis of these commitments and prevent them becoming absorbed in an endless cycle of power/resistance. Such was and remains my thesis. I may be wrong and the Left may be able to advance its emancipatory commitments without an explicitly normative theory. I continue to doubt that very much, and Crawford’s article confirms my suspicions.
Crawford argues that in losing the common good, the contemporary new Left serves to emancipate not the oppressed and the exploited, but the ruling class. I’m glad to say I pointed this out immediately in the wake of the protests, riots, and rebellions of 2020. I wrote my observations up in a number of articles, which I present below.
These texts are based on the consistent critique of the modern sophist age I have sustained over the years. Once the idea of an objectively valuable, good, meaningful universe is lost, then any meaning and value the world has becomes a matter of existential choice, either on the part of the discrete individual or, in an attempt to recover a sense of collective identity and belonging, on the part of the group. This is the reduction of ethics to power relations, with the most dominant voice prevailing over all others.
In the article, Crawford describes a ruling clan as ‘ultra-rich and totally amoral,’ characterised by ‘aristocratic license.’ Again, rather than repeat myself, I shall refer to another text of mine, which covers precisely this theme:
The rich and licentious clan that Crawford identifies occupies the most rarefied level of globe-trotting oligarchs. These are not Crawford’s target in this article. Their immoralism may be nasty and vicious, but at least it is honest. He compares this clan with no pretensions to morality to the moral ecology inhabited by the broader gentility, which he identifies with the salaried decision-makers and ideas-managers who service the global arrangement from various departments of the ideological apparatus. These characters work in NGOs, the governing bodies of the EU, corporate journalism, HR departments, the celebrity-industrial complex, the universities, Big Tech, and such like. ‘They, too, enjoy a kind of freedom, but it is decidedly not that of the high-spirited criminals depicted in Succession. So far from living “beyond good and evil”, this broader class of cosmopolitans asserts its freedom through its moralism, precisely. In particular, they have broken free of the claims of allegiance made upon them by the particular communities they emerge from.’
This is the techno-bureaucratic class of planetary managers in a nutshell. There is currently an issue around the way in which leftist political parties have liberated themselves from the loyalties and solidarities of the people they once represented and still claim to represent. The abandonment of the working class by the politicians and intellectuals of the Left has been instrumental in the rise of populism. The issue is, however, of much broader significance. I am particularly interested in this notion of a moralism as distinct from a genuine ethics. The point here is comparable to the religiosity this same class expresses, insisting on adherence to its worldview, having all the trappings of religion but without its redemptive, healing, and transcendent qualities. In denying a substantive ethics and religion centred on God, this class seek to subject people and society to a harshly regulative religiosity that brooks no opposition.
This is the subject of a number of essays I have recently issued on Academia.
Crawford is contemptuous of the contemporary Left and, frankly, so was I in the articles I wrote throughout 2020. Crawford criticizes the ‘relentless moralism of contemporary life’ and describes the spectacle of power operating with bald-faced corruption as far more ‘refreshing’ than the ‘self-righteous b/s.’ He is spot-on, and the angry tone which characterise my articles came as a result of seeing a Left that has explicitly repudiated an ethics grounded in substantive and transcendent notions of the good, identifying morality as repressive and oppressive, coming to engage in a moralism that was bullying, threatening, coercive, repressive, and authoritarian to the marrow. Such moralism expresses every bad quality that leftist critics have been concerned to equate morality with. The sophists and the relativists thus prove themselves not only to be absolutists, but absolutists of the worst kind, resting their ethical claims not on a genuine ethic that is independent of politics and power but on power – their power, their arbitrary and subjective view of the way the world ought to be.
I feel entitled to quote from Crawford’s article extensively here, having written extensively on precisely the issues he raises for a long time now. So I shall mix my own arguments with Crawford’s critical comments.
Crawford notes how this dissolution of the substantive and common good in particularism within asymmetrical power relations operates (and operates to the detriment of the universalism of the Left, I would add):
The idea of a common good has given way to a partition of citizens along the lines of a moral hierarchy – one that just happens to mirror their material fortunes (as in Calvinism). Instead of feeling bound up in a shared fate with one’s countrymen, one develops an alternate solidarity that is placeless. The relatability across national borders that the gentlefolk feel in one another’s company — the gracious ease and trust, the shared points of reference in high-prestige opinion — has something to do with their uniformly high standing in the moral hierarchy that divides citizen from citizen within their own nations. The decision-making class has discovered that it enjoys the mandate of heaven, and with this comes certain permissions; certain exemptions from democratic scruple.
Crawford describes the division of the citizen body and the dissolution of the public into an asymmetrically structured pattern. I have written on the loss of a sense of belonging and meaning and socially rooted sources of identity in The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality: Morality and Modernity
That book is a substantial piece of work, at over seven hundred pages, and I would strongly recommend that anyone who is concerned to get to the origins of the moral and social malaise afflicting the contemporary world should read it and ponder it at length. In this book, I examine the rise of the capital system as a systematic disembedding that separated individuals from the political, ethical, historical, and physical commons, all sources of identity other than monetary relations. That leads human beings, as social beings, seeking to reconstitute the warm and affective ties, loyalties, and bonds that have been lost, leading them into the embrace of surrogate and ersatz communities, entities which have the form of unity but not the content. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels described the abstraction of the modern state as an ‘illusory community,’ claiming to embody and represent the general interest of all whilst in truth being a surrogate of particular interests. Crawford is identifying something similar as happening on a global scale, in the context of a globalisation of relations as a displacement that has brought about the end of place. In The Coming Ecological Revolution (2011), I associated this displacement with the moral and social dis-at-ease that characterises modern society.
That view led me in time to argue for a recovery of being in place, a moral and social sense of place supporting a genuine belonging.
Crawford makes an important point when noting the existence of a moral hierarchy among this class that claims to be autonomous of place, society, and material interest, a hierarchy that ‘just happens to mirror their material fortunes.’ Precisely. This is the crass materialism that underlies their supposed spiritualism and idealism (to borrow Marx’s critique of Hegel’s state bureaucracy as the disinterested universal class). The members of this ‘decision-making class,’ whom I designate as the techno-bureaucratic class of planetary managers (who claim to be independent of material interests but who, in effect, function within the capital system and serve capital), nurture an alternate solidarity and community that is placeless and rootless, detached from the shared ties and loyalties of fellow countrymen.
It is worth emphasising the extent to which this ‘classless’ class, which is at pains to deny its existence as a class and deny any possession of a material interest, are the most cohesive and class conscious group of people on the planet, having no trouble at all in identifying and associating with fellow members across the nations. Crawford refers to the ‘relatability across national borders that the gentlefolk feel in one another’s company — the gracious ease and trust, the shared points of reference in high-prestige opinion — has something to do with their uniformly high standing in the moral hierarchy that divides citizen from citizen within their own nations.’ Precisely. Hence my reference to the way that the Brexit vote in the UK exposed not merely class divisions, but the existence of an overclass or would be overclass that is used to getting its way, and has been uncomprehending and outraged that an underclass could have been allowed to stand in the way of its plans and machinations. This creates a very awkward political situation. Its claim to act in the general interest of all becomes untenable when a sizeable proportion of that all are refusing to buy those claims.
Crawford makes another interesting point here: ‘The decision-making class has discovered that it enjoys the mandate of heaven, and with this comes certain permissions; certain exemptions from democratic scruple.’ This techno-bureaucratic class has seceded from society in order to govern, order, and regulate it more effectively from the Empyrean heights it occupies, safe from the clamour of democratic will and contention. That mandate of heaven is the appropriation of the redemptive myth from the contending parties of capital and labour and its investment in the bureaucrats of power, knowledge, and politics.
Crawford explains how this high-minded and unanswerable moralism operates:
‘The permission structure is built around grievance politics. Very simply: if the nation is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, I owe it nothing. More than that, conscience demands that I repudiate it.’ He goes on to show how Hannah Arendt spelled out this logic of high-minded withdrawal from the claims of community in her response to the protest movements of the 1960s. Conscience ‘trembles for the individual self and its integrity,’ appealing over the head of the community to a higher morality. I, too, appeal to a transcendent ethic, but do so to check relativism, subjectivism, and sophism. With regard to this moralism, however, this higher morality ‘is discerned in a highly subjective, personal way.’ This is the subjectivism of the modern world writ large as a new moral absolutism, one without substantive grounds and common standards of evaluation – one that is entirely a function of power and material interest. It is a view which denies people a legitimate voice in ethics and politics. As Crawford argues, the heroic pose struck by Thoreau in Civil Disobedience is the model for this kind of moralistic anti-politics of conscience, in which the good man is presented as superior to the good citizen.
In The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch spelled out in greater detail the role that claims of racial and sexual oppression play in securing release from allegiance to the nation — not just for those who identify as its victims, but for those with the moral sensitivity to see victimisation where it may not be apparent, and who make this capacity a touchstone of their identity. It becomes a token of moral elevation by which we recognise one another, and distinguish ourselves from the broader run of citizens. Both Lasch and Arendt argue that black Americans serve a crucial function for the white bourgeoisie. As the emblem and proof of America’s illegitimacy, they anchor a politics of repudiation in which the idea of a common good has little purchase.
I have done the hard work on this, out of concern for a) establishing first principles and firm foundations and b) ensuring the Left doesn’t dissolve itself into the irreducible power struggles and unwinnable games of the modern sophist world. Without realizing it, the Left becomes the very world its normative and emancipatory claims are designed to counter and transform.
I have no doubt the forceful way I expressed my views here identified me as a reactionary among progressive friends, no doubt guilty of some ‘ism’ or ‘phobia.’ In which case I am in good company, because if society is inherently ‘ist’ and ‘phobic’ (add favoured prefix) then I’m a populist along with everyone else in revolt against the most loathsome of creatures, the bureaucrats of knowledge, power, and politics. At least the religious ethic to which I subscribe acknowledges the fallen condition of human beings, holding out possibilities for redemption. In this new religion, however, there is no redemption, just an ever-intensifying sin which finally consumes the entire world. My argument is that my progressive friends lack the substantive grounds to make good their emancipatory commitments (commitments which I support), and that pressing rights as fruits without foundations will serve to divide the world further rather than unite it. The result will be a permanent fight over divisions in an endless – and meaningless – cycle of power/resistance. The Foucaultian ‘left’ thus succumb to Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all,’ sacrificing right to might and principle to power.
Crawford shows that for the contemporary Left, society is inherently corrupt and hence irredeemable. He points out that the labour movement once had an alternative order to offer in place of the liberal and capitalist social order, one that drew on the socialist tradition. This alternative included African-Americans, but as workers, not as African-Americans. The achievements of this movement seem to have been written out of history in favour of identity politics, but it is clear that the pressures that organised labour brought to bear on business and the state helped to secure a long period of shared prosperity, which was deliberately broken up at the end of the seventies. Examining the fiscal policies in 18 countries, a new study from the London School of Economics now shows that fifty years of tax cuts for the rich didn’t trickle down. The paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, found that such measures over the last 50 years only really benefited the individuals who were directly affected, and did little to promote jobs or growth.
What did trickle down is the individualism, the greed, and the immorality of the rich and powerful, breaking up ties and solidarities, and dissolving the universalism of the Left. This systematic politics of class redistribution upwards from labour to capital was accompanied by globalisation, liberalisation, and the digitalization of the economy and of culture. The Left fractured along the lines of society. The result was a linguistic and psychological turn away from the social and the economic, a turn to the individual away from class. Crawford identifies the new prominence of the term ‘repressed’ in the 1960s as significant in marking a shift into a new terrain of psychologised politics. The intellectuals of the Left, exemplified by the Frankfurst School, despairing of the working class as a revolutionary subject, abandoned class notions of an emancipation rooted in socio-economic issues and instead sought to examine cultural and psychological reasons for repression. The object of critique by this the ‘new Left’ ceased to be capitalism and instead became ‘society, conceived in terms of the Freudian superego, with its insistence on standards of behaviour that are binding on all. Crawford comments that both Arendt and Lasch identified this attack on shared standards as the decisive inflection point in our turn away from a politics of the common good. Society is taken to be inherently oppressive, and discredited in the name of liberation.
Whilst the idea can be found in a selective reading of Freud, it remains the case that for Freud, reconciling oneself to the conflict between self and society and entering into the world of shared meaning and exchange, indeed identifying with it, is the process by which one becomes an adult. ‘The world does not love you simply for being you, as your mommy does. One holds oneself accountable to prevailing norms, or else remains trapped in infantile narcissism.’ The implication of Crawford’s criticism is that, in seceding from society and common commitments in favour of a culturalism and psychologism, the Left has succumbed to infantile narcissism. This is something I pointed to in my critique of environmentalism published in Monthly Review in 2018
Here, I can only note in passing the bitter irony of the situation. Over the years I have frequently cited Benjamin Barber’s argument in Consumed that a consumer democracy and ethic of infantilism is replacing a citizen democracy based on reason and publicity. Little did anyone realize that it would be the Left that succumbed to this infantilism.
How did the left come to this? The emancipatory commitments and normative principles and values of the Left are universal and require transcendent standards and substantive foundations. These are the concealed ethics, the hidden God, that self-made man thinks he can dispense with. In creating a world – and a value – of their own, these modern men and women become as gods, choosing the good as they see fit. But as Weber, following Nietzsche warned, this plunges society into a war of rival gods, none of which is able to prevail over the other in rational and moral terms – only through the assertion of power. In secularising the religious ethic, the Left blew its own foundations sky-high, consuming its values and principles, and threatening to consume the world with it. In a modern world based upon a self-legislating reason and prideful self-creation, it isn’t only the Left that is in danger of eating itself.
In the articles I wrote on this year of protest and rebellion, cited above, I pay attention to the fracturing of civility and publicity. Crawford finds the antecedents of this in the riots of the 1960’s.
The Left’s posture of liberationism provided an interpretive frame in which the deadly riots and wider explosion of urban crime in the 1960s was to be understood as political rather than criminal. This interpretation played a key role in the wider inversion: it is “society” that is revealed to be criminal. The utility of urban rioting for the new Left lay in the fact that it was thought to carry an insight into the illegitimacy of even our most minimum standards of behaviour. The moral authority of the black person, as victim, gave the bourgeoisie permission to withdraw its allegiance from the social order, just as black people were gaining fuller admittance to it.
By identifying moral authority not with a genuine and substantive ethic but with a category of person and identity, the reason and excuse for withdrawal from common standards and society is given to those with the power, interest, and inclination so to do. At that point, the dissolution of society and politics into the anarchy of the rich and powerful becomes not only possible but likely. That, leftist critics may argue, merely reveals the truth of an exploitative class society that is concealed and rationalized by notions of the state as serving the general interest and morality as articulating the common good. But in having revealed this truth in this manner, the common moral standard, the commitment to shared ends, and possibilities for reconciliation which give the Left its support and orientation come to be lost. In other words, the whole point of critiquing injustice and inequality has been lost, jettisoned in favour of a naked power struggle. Power is as power does and offers its own argument by triumphing over all rivals. There is nothing at all leftist about such an ethic, which is the purest sophism. By exposing even the minimum standards of behaviour to be merely the ideological cover of an inherently unjust and illegitimate society, the very notion of transcendent, substantive, and common standards is jettisoned, leaving no other way than power struggles to determine what is just and legitimate. This is precisely why, Crawford argues, the new identitarian Left, in seeking to liberate oppressed minorities has succeeded only in liberating the rich and powerful to pursue the licentious society it has sought all along.
Crawford asks us to consider the images that had so impressed the nation in the 1950s and which lead to the passage of civil rights legislation: marchers demanding equal treatment, and being willing to go to jail as a demonstration of this allegiance to the rule of law, impartially applied. The civil rights movement was a practical critique of the injustice of double standards, seeking not to destroy those standards but to hold them to their promise of equality and justice for all. The attack on these common standards was undertaken in pursuit of their realisation, not their destruction. But in a stunning reversal achieved by the new Left working in concert with the Black Power movement, Lasch points out, “the idea of a single standard was itself attacked as the crowning example of ‘institutional racism’.” Such single standards – transcendent, substantive, common, embracing all equally - were held to be repressive rather than liberatory, having no other purpose than to keep black people and other marginal groups in their place. ‘This shift was fundamental,’ Crawford comments, ‘for shared standards are what make for a democratic social order, as against the ancien régime of special privileges and exemptions.’
This is a monumental own goal, committing the new Left to a course of action that is destined to be self-defeating, betraying the universalist principles and goals of the Left to the very individualism of the liberal capitalist order the Left once sought to supplant:
‘For the new Left, then, it was not capitalism but the democratic social order altogether that was the source of oppression — not just of black people, or of workers, but of us, the college bourgeoisie. The civil rights movement of black Americans became the template for subsequent claims by women, gays and transgender persons, each based on a further discovery of moral failing buried deep in the heart of America. Hence a further license, indeed mandate, granted to individual conscience, as against the claims of the nation.’
Within the asymmetrical power relations constituting capitalist society, it is the most powerful individuals, the ones who can command the most resources of all kinds, whose consciences prevail over all others. This is the moral and ontological ultimacy of not merely the individual, but the most powerful individuals over the least powerful. This is the critical claim I make against those who argue for a humanism over against a God-centred ethics, holding that human beings take morality into their own hands. There is no ‘humanity’ in this sense, only discrete individuals within asymmetrical power relations. In taking this route, the Left betrays its normative and emancipatory commitments to sophism. The claims of the powerful individual trump the claims of each, any, and every supra-individual entity. Humanists applaud this ethic and consider it liberatory when the target is religion. I have consistently sought to induce those who celebrate this as a liberation to understand that that same acidic logic applies also to the collectivist claims of their own favoured politics or ethics, whether this is socialism or environmentalism. When the mandate, even the license, is granted to freely choosing individuals, then the claims of each, any, and every collective entity are rendered illegitimate and rejected as repressive and oppressive. That is the case that the libertarians of the right, doing the job of the rich and powerful, make against socialism and climate action. Not to put too fine a point on it, Crawford is making clear the extent to which the Left betrayed its own grounds and standards to the prevailing sophism of modern society and thereby give the rich and powerful precisely the license they have ever sought to secede from society, either to govern and order in its own interest at a safe distance from the demos, or to employ others to do it for them.
Crawford explains how this secession is morally justified and how the various themes coalesce in the notion of a new technocratic decision-making class raised above society. He writes:
‘The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained, African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening the social order, strangely enough.’
I pursue these notions at length in the essays Good-bye to Statues, Good-bye to You. And good-bye to the common good; For Civil Life, Publicity, and Reason; A Positive and Lasting Peace in the Presence of Justice; The Society of Idiots.
(I have gathered these together and issued them as a single text on Academia
But it is Crawford’s next line that is the clincher, in the context of this entire discussion of a socially rootless, geographically placeless, classless class of planetary managers, bureaucrats, and engineers:
‘For it is now an order governed by the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. Somehow these free agents, ostensibly guided by individual conscience, have coalesced into something resembling a tribe, one that is greatly angered by rejection of its moral expertise.’
There is no morality in the sense of an ethical system grounded in substantive notions. We are indeed ‘beyond good and evil.’ We only need to note here how often the members of this ‘classless’ class eschew notions of moral systems, just as easily as they eschew particular political views, embracing an amoralism and an apoliticism easily, claiming a disinterestedness and a neutral expertise. When it comes to ethics, members of this class will refer not to explicit ethical systems, which they invariably denounce as repressive and oppressive or divisive and incapable of commanding common assent. Instead, they will refer to natural selection, sociability and reasonableness, enlightened self-interest, and other such notions, all of which reduce conveniently enough to individual conscience. Such people may sound left and liberatory but they are anything but. They are relativists and sophists to the core, liberating individuals from social, ethical and other constraints, little realizing that it is precisely this disembedding and licentiousness that is implicated in the twin social and planetary unravelling.
In the context of this discussion of the techno-bureaucratic class of (would-be) planetary managers, Crawford’s concluding passages are key in unravelling the mysteries of an environmentalism that presents itself as saving the planet but which may well become complicit in its final ecological unravelling:
‘The notion of expertise is important. There appears to be a circle of mutual support between political correctness, technocratic administration, and the bloated educational machinery. Because smartness (as indicated by educational credentials) confers title to rule in a technocratic regime, the ruling class adopts a distinctly cognitivist view: virtue does not consist of anything you do or don’t do, it consists of having the correct opinions.’
In my own work on political and moral ecology I have sought to advance democracy through character construction, social formation, and the creation of the habitus in which the virtues can be known, learned, acquired, and exercised. As Being at One makes clear, I have sought to bring this understanding to environmentalism. It is clear that I have been working in the alien territory of would-be universal technocrats, bureaucrats, planners, and engineers. In one book and article after another I have emphasised the need to bridge the gap between theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world, the realm of fact, science) and practical reason (politics and ethics, the realm of value, the motivational economy of human beings). For years I have wondered whether those environmentalists I have addressed were guilty of indifference or incomprehension. I have come to denounce the blight of scientism within the environmental movement in more explicit terms in recent years. Crawford is right – the members (and would-be members and supporters) of the techno-bureaucratic managerial class adopts a distinctly cognitivist view. Only science and fact yields true knowledge; ethics is the realm of value judgement, irreducible subjective opinion and preference, to be informed and ordered by the former. The work on ethics I have undertaken is deemed an irrelevance. And ethics and politics are indeed an irrelevance to those seeking to appropriate and extend their power of control and decision-making by way of their claims to neutral expertise.
Crawford concludes by putting the point in a nutshell:
‘This is attractive, as one may then exempt oneself from the high-minded policies one inflicts upon everyone else. For example, the state schools are turned into laboratories of grievance-based social engineering, with generally disastrous effects, but you send your own children to expensive private schools. You can de-legitimise the police out of a professed concern for black people, and the explosion of murder will be confined to black parts of the city you never see, and journalists are not interested in. In this way, you can be magnanimous while avoiding the moral pollution and that comes from noticing reality.
With this clerisy’s systemic lack of “skin in the game”, the idea of a common good becomes a weak abstraction. Maintaining one’s own purity of opinion, on the other hand, has real psychic consequence, as it is the basis for one’s feeling of belonging — not to the community one happens to reside in, but to the tribe of the elect.
If the ideal of a de-moralised public sphere was a signature aspiration of liberal secularism, it seems we have entered a post-secular age. Populism happened because it became widely noticed that we have transitioned from a liberal society to something that more closely resembles a corrupt theocracy.’
The good thing is that the poor, ignored, unenlightened, uneducated, stupid masses have not only seen through the mask of neutrality, disinterestedness, and enlightenment, but have determined to refuse its combination of bribery and bullying and reject its claim to rule. It is incredibly difficult to continue to argue that one rules for the good of all people when a sizeable chunk of that population are denouncing those claims as bogus.
It took me a while to draw the conclusion, but in establishing the problem in terms of ‘rational freedom,’ identifying a moral ideal at the heart of Marx’s socialism, I was led in the right direction. It is twenty years exactly since I submitted my PhD thesis on Marx and Rational Freedom. In that thesis I identified the existence of a transcendent philosophical ideal at work in Marx’s critique, which Marx and those that followed him thought he had discarded. Dispensing with that ideal means that emancipatory and normative commitments not only can no longer be sustained, but may even turn repressive around power.
I was right. Twenty years on I feel like telling the world ‘I told you so’ and moving on to doing something more productive with my life. I don’t intend to spend any more time trying to get through to people determined to stick to the modern liberal age as it splits into decadence and extremes.
As I write this, I am confronted by this statement from a member of The Green Party: ‘I don’t discriminate. All religion is equally idiotic.’
I don’t think this person understands what the word ‘idiot’ means. I don’t think such people, fighting old wars of the Enlightenment, see how deep the problems of the modern world actually are. An unravelling planetary ecology is not the most important existential crisis at all, merely the most obvious physical manifestation of an existential crisis that goes deep into moral, social, and psychological constitution of modernity. I am most concerned to expose the idiocy at work in the contemporary world. We are witnessing the emergence of secular movements in religious form, giving their members all the answers and the meanings they seek, giving them a structure through which to see the world. This gives people meaning in a meaningless world, a cause to fight for, and a salvation to sacrifice their lives – and the life, liberty, prosperity, and happiness of others – to. Socialism was as a class struggle fought over wealth and its distribution. The socio-economic realm of class has, however, been replaced by power and a new liberatory struggle which, instead of redistributing wealth, looks to redistribute power. The world is thus seen, in true sophist character, as a struggle for power between identity groups. And this involves people looking for – and finding - offense everywhere. This is the very antithesis of Marx and socialism; in fact, it is the realization of Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all.’ The end of that war is the all-powerful authoritarian state, the only way of imposing an order that society’s aggressive little egos are singularly incapable of supplying for themselves. This is the complete inversion of Marx’s vision of socialism. The leftists who continue to cite Marx in aggressively promoting this politics have no idea of the bitter irony.
Too many who think themselves progressive, radical even, are wedded to a liberalism that is increasingly stale, decadent, and reactionary, cleaving to a reality that is failing in the evident belief that these failures are caused by accidental or extraneous factors. It’s the fact that people can’t diagnosis the things that ail them that ensures these problems will get worse, and will be exploited by those moving in less than progressive directions.
As Max Weber pointed out, it doesn’t matter which side wins – where there is no substantive good, all have lost their rights. I cover this in the essay An Easter Prayer.
I wrote this in April 2018, seeing clearly the explosion and intensification of divisions to come. That self-cancelling animus of contemporary society hasn’t remotely gone away.
The moderns still don’t understand the extent to which they are just shadow boxing, swapping fictions, ignorant arms bereft of the good, clashing endlessly in the dark.
In pressing rights to the nth degree, the moderns have mistaken the fruits for the roots, pushing them so hard as to remove them ever further from their source, destroying foundations and leaving us all fruitless in a freedom as a mutual cancellation.
*In using the word ‘sophism’ here I am referring to the denial of objective, absolute, and/or transcendent standards of truth and justice. There is, of course, another way of approaching this issue, on which casts sophist thinkers in more positive light in terms of attempting to tease out the truth through dialectic and dialogue. This is actually consonant with my own view in holding that the truth cannot just be authoritatively and passively given but must be democratically and actively willed, thus reconciling objectivity and subjectivity. There is a strong case for arguing that sophism addresses the complexities of mediating objectivity and subjectivity, bridging the gap between theoretical reason – objective truth – and practical reason – the subjective appreciation of truth. I have written on precisely this with respect to rhetoric and dialectic.
I shall write further on this at a later date. In arguing for transcendent standards against relativism, conventionalism, and constructivism, I nevertheless make it clear that these standards are only ever incarnated in time and place and mediated via practice. In the phrase ‘freedom is the appreciation of necessity,’ appreciation refers to that mediation. That is the missing mediation in the statements and demands of those who think they can simply state truths to politics (and people). Such brute rationalism is destined to fail, as the ancient sophists well understood. So long as we reinstate transcendent standards of truth and justice (with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle), the dialectical means of the sophists are not merely valuable, but indispensable.
