Looking for the Heart of the Heartless World
"Identity politics, unlike Christianity, is not the heart of a heartless world. Far from it. Christianity calls out sin and demands repentance; but it has grace and forgiveness at its heart. The shrill voice of identity politics screams for repentance, yet it presumes that no actual act of repentance will ever be sufficient. It offers neither grace nor forgiveness. That is because total victory, not reconciliation, is the real name of the game. Even Marx recognized in Christianity the heart of the heartless world. I am inclined to think, as the rhetoric of identity is ratcheted up, that identitarianism represents not the heart of our heartless world so much as that same world’s unforgiving heartlessness pushed to its ruthless and destructive practical conclusion."
I've been writing similar things to the views set out in this article for some years now. In truth, I am harder on identity politics than Trueman is, who proves the worth of his Christianity in seeking the source of disquiet rather than become entrenched in the controversies. For all that, he still draws the hard conclusion that I draw. Sadly, leftist politics, in its dominant form, seems no longer to be presenting a coherent response to the injustices of the contemporary world, merely reproducing them in new forms.
This was inevitable without God.
You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too - once objective standards of truth and justice are gone, then they are gone, leaving only conventions and constructions established by power relations and struggles. Marx argued that philosophy would come to be abolished by being realized. It is a heady notion to which I once subscribed. In time I came to realize that Marx’s view was naive, childish, and arrogant. Lovers of wisdom and knowledge are no doubt driven by the motivation to realize the greatest ideals of philosophy. This is what motivated Marx, putting an end to notions of a heavenly realm of Platonic forms by bring them down to Earth. He was no doubt influenced here by the impact of the revolutions in ideas and politics and society following the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Such developments gave us the will and capacity to build Heaven on Earth. It is surely the point of all those ideals in philosophy that they should come to be realized. I would agree that human beings should come to live in accordance with reason, with its moral component firmly in place. But Marx, and those he inspired, had something much more ambitious in mind. His realization/abolition of philosophy brought the ideal down to Earth and placed it firmly in the minds and hands of self-creating human agents. And therein lies the problem. Once transcendent standards independent of time and place are reduced to time and place, then no matter how much we call this human freedom as self-determination, it involves a collapse to convention and power relations. Marx succumbed to the dominant vice of the modern age – activism above all things, to the exclusion of all things. Pre-modern ages were wiser in seeking to balance the contemplative and active lives, holding theoretical and practical reason in harmony.
That balance has been gone. We live in a world of activists. Such people draw on the knowledge of others, but they invariably reduce it to a power play or agenda. It seems clear that I am a contemplative. I have been described as an ‘idle intellectualiser,’ a ‘posturing do-nothing,’ and a ‘mere ponderer,’ (and much, much worse). I don’t know what term to use to describe the activists who have hurled abuse in my direction. You can call them ‘woke’ or ‘social justice warriors’ or cultural libertarians. All I know is that they are out there and are thoroughly abusive of all who do not accept their fundamentally correct views on all things. They are out there in force, telling one and all how much they love humanity and justice and how caring and compassionate they all are. Dare deviate, and they fling the vilest abuse at you. One day, such people may come and reflect on the time when they had the dominant cultural voice, and used it so abusively against so many. If they do this, they may come to see how the radical moment was not just missed, it was thrown over the cliff, so cheaply and so stupidly, just to flatter personal egos. They may come to reflect on why, in supposedly fighting injustice and oppression, they failed so consistently to gather the support of ‘ordinary’ folk on the receiving end of injustice and oppression. There's no mystery - 'ordinary' folk, being ordinary, don't remotely trust them. And, being ordinary, neither do I.
I've seen and heard the warriors in action. I wouldn't trust them with an ounce of power and take their claims to be on the side of justice with a large dose of scepticism. I’m not alone in this. Most people find their claims to be fighting injustice and oppression betrayed by the strident tone in which their liberatory messages are delivered. I can’t say I’ve been cancelled. Anticipating the worst from these people, I’ve pretty much cancelled myself on social media. For the mildest of observations – correcting a factual error here, offering an alternate view on the pursuit of knowledge there, reclaiming history (my first degree) from those telling lies to fit an agenda – I have received the height of abuse – the usual accusations of various ‘isms,’ of speaking out of ‘white male privilege,’ and told to ‘shut the f$£& up.” So I did. On social media. Noting the utterly barbarous character of the persons holding sway. I carry on elsewhere, maintaining standards and determined not to give an inch against the new barbarians. They are rootless and hence fruitless and will go nowhere. They can destroy, but not create. In the short run, the challenge is to counter their destruction; in the long, hold firm and see them off.
I hear many describe this activist politics as a "new religion." That is a mistake. It is inverted religion, coercing repentance in order to inflict defeat; it is entirely without mercy and forgiveness. This is what happens when religion is kicked out through the front door - it gets smuggled back in in diabolic forms, separating people, inciting anger and hatred, and feeding off the controversy. Divide and conquer. The conquest is characterised by self-appointed authorities seeking to reimpose a particular, and harsh and punitive, morality on all who refuse to fall in line.
It is fake to its rotten core. This article by Carl Trueman is generous, finding it more profitable to seek the cause for anguish and suffering, as did Marx when identifying Christianity as the soul and heart of a soulless and heartless world. There is indeed a longing for meaning and belonging at the heart of the modern world, and this new wave of activism can be seen as in some part an expression of that. I’m more inclined to see it as an ersatz, illusory form of meaning and belonging, going only to prove that the things that bind us can also put us in a bind, imprisoning and suppressing the self in an identitarian straightjacket rather than liberating it.
I've been on the receiving end of abuse too many times, now, to be inclined to see identitarians as anything more than a bunch of hate-filled, bigoted, intolerant zealots sowing division, spreading hatred, and feeding off the anger. Once they start to appropriate the language and modus operandi of religion, society should really start to worry. Here, we move into a terrain of irredeemable original sin, heresy, persecution, and punishment.
The odd thing is, in my local community, meeting people of all kinds, there is no rancor or hatred. But when I enter the realm of culture and media I suddenly feel like Dante and Virgil in the Inferno – aliens in an inverted, perverted landscape. Which is appropriate, seeing as they were straight white males. It seems that in an era of inverted religion, straightness, whiteness, and maleness is an original sin times three, and totally beyond redemption. But only in the fake, ersatz communities that the ‘woke’ are building. I hate using that term, it seems so clichéd. It also honours people who, frankly, are neurotic. Activism is a neurotic act, a desperate attempt to impose meaning and establish control on the part of people who possess neither.
Of course, it isn't considered that way among normal folk. Like Ricky Gervais says, ‘what these people want, they just want attention, they don’t care what it is. It’s like these people who go on any march just to smash windows, they don’t care about the cause. [they sure as hell don’t care about virtue, which is a personal moral and intellectual quality, not a public agenda]. There’s that five per cent that brings [everything down]. All good ideas are eventually infiltrated and ruined by a minority, the trolls of the political world. But most people are alright. If an alien looked at Twitter, we are not going there, it’s £^(%!*$ mental. But if any aliens are watching it’s not like that. Don’t think that the real world is like the maniacs, the five percent crazies, extremists, fighting over the minutiae of £^(%!*$ nothing. It’s not like that. Most people are nice and getting on with their lives.’
Most people are alright. Just go out and meet them. It is the permanently engaged and outraged who dominate culture and media who are the problem. But it shows what happens when humans decide they are so clever as to be able to dispense with God. Mad and murderous, they rip each other to shreds. Universal hatred lies down this road. I’m certainly not going to be offering myself as an audience or a target for this crowd.
Trueman’s article is well worth reading, very measured. Rather than dismiss identity politics, it looks beyond the anger and division to see the yearning for meaning and belonging that drives it. From this angle, the problem is not identity politics but the separation and meaninglessness it protests. But real meaning and belonging requires truth, justice, and community, not their ersatz and surrogate forms.
It is for us to redeem the empty promises of identitarianism by supplying substance and content.
My views in a post from last year are similar to the ones in this article, if lengthier and much more critical of identity politics
I should revisit that post of mine and add some extra material concerning the connections between capitalism and a transgressive libertarianism (both economic and cultural, right and left). I quoted Terry Eagleton in that post, and so shall quote from another of his works here, Reason, Faith, and Revolution.
‘The advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit in them, whatever some of its apologists might piously aver.
Eagleton 2010: 39
In the blog post, I cite Marx’s argument that religion is the heart and soul of a heartless and soulless world. That world is the capitalist world. How sad it is to see contemporary libertarians of the Left mirror that heartlessness and soullessness – and mirror the naked power politics at the heart of the capitalist world. The left and right here have one thing in common – they are utterly godless, embracing the indifference and amoralism of power. Capitalism’s apologists do indeed pretend that capitalism and Christianity go hand in hand. I judge by deeds rather than words, and these deeds speak volumes. In A Short View of Russia written in 1925, John Maynard Keynes wrote that ‘modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’ Marx was a little more nuanced, arguing not that capitalism had put an end to religion but that it had constituted itself as a new religion. (I write at length on this in The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality: Morality and Modernity (2020)
See, also, Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.
That’s the truth of it, and it is a perverted religion governed by a merciless, punitive god, Capital, which daily demands human sacrifice at the altar of profit. And now we seem to have a Left that has gone down the same route, as merciless, divisive, and inhuman in the realm of culture as capitalism is in the realm of economics.
God and Christianity still have some value as apologetics, at least for those who worship at the altar of Capital, but like to cover their idolatry of things by an idolatry of words. In a society of ‘packaged fulfilment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and consumerist economics,’ God serves an ideological rather than a religious purpose, as ‘ideological legitimation, spiritual nostalgia, or a means of private extrication from a valueless world.’ As examples, Eagleton offers Islamic and Christian fundamentalism and New Ageism, ‘which is just the sort of caricature of the spiritual one would expect a materialistic civilisation to produce. Precisely. ‘I’m spiritual but not religious’ is a pick-and-mix bespoke morality for an age of narcissists.
The important thing to note, in relation to my post of last year, is that Marx’s description of religion as ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature,’ ‘the heart of a heartless world,’ ‘the soul of soulless conditions’ are ‘not for Marx purely pejorative.’ (Eagleton 2010). On the contrary, Marx is identifying religion as an expression of real suffering and real need. The question is how that suffering is to be alleviated and that need to be satisfied. For Marx, religion offered an ‘illusory happiness’ rather than a real happiness. He thus sought to transform a heartless and soulless society that generated resort to illusion as consolation. It is in this respect that Trueman approaches identity politics. But he notes the difference – whereas there is transcendence, mercy, forgiveness, and redemption in Christianity, there is none in identity politics.
For Eagleton, Christianity’s sigh, soul, and heart ‘signpost a problem to which they themselves are not the solution.’ Trueman judges identity politics in like manner.
Eagleton shares Marx’s objection to religion when it rationalizes or conceals the causes of the oppression, heartlessness, and soullessness of the existing world. But that is a criticism that applies to ideology in general rather than religion in particular. Religion can function this way, as can any system of beliefs and ideas (Marxism, for instance). But that is not true religion (and not true Marxism, for that matter, which is built on a critical method).
Christianity ‘takes the full measure of human depravity and perversity. It recognises that human beings are, in the words of St Paul, ‘foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.’ If the conditions of the world are, as Marx says, ‘oppressive, heartless, soulless,’ then it is flesh and blood human beings that bring about and reproduce those conditions. Christianity recognizes, in a way that Marx didn’t, that human beings are flawed creatures, prone to sin. Christianity offers possibilities for contrition and redemption. What is most striking about modern humanist philosophies and movements in this regard is their unforgiving nature. The amoralism and indifference mirrors a view of a power-infused reality; power is as power does, and to the victor the spoils. The loser has no one to cry to. All the sighs in the world are to no avail when all that there is and ever can be is a heartless and soulless world. Remove God and all that there is is a Nature which is totally indifferent to human affairs.
Trueman’s article struck me as pertinent and insightful, for the very reason it steps out of the various protagonists in the prevailing culture wars in the attempt to see what that war is about, if anything. That approach allows us to establish the conditions of the common peace.
This all made me think of my own work, having moved from Marx to a theistic view in recent years. Whichever way I looked at the questions I was asking myself, none of them could be answered without God. Of course, philosophers will tell me to change my questions, or see that such questions are non-questions. The problem is, though, that they don’t go away. The mind raises questions that reason cannot answer. Philosophically, it is wise to be sceptical of the answers we supply to those questions; we should be open to other answers and eschew certainty. If we could be certain we would have no need of faith.
I made a very reasoned argument concerning the complementarity of philosophy and religion and was on the receiving end of no end of abuse for my trouble. One person – who describes himself as ‘extremely clever’ (clearly never having absorbed Socrates’ lesson) - told me that I was a “pretentious little fraud” and that he was unfriending me immediately. Before he went, I had the satisfaction of telling him that I have done many difficult things in my life, and that philosophy at PhD level wasn’t one of them. I exaggerated slightly to annoy my philosophical critics (Kant was brain-breakingly difficult). I feel entitled. Philosophically, I was much better qualified at a higher level, and much better read, than my critics. The odd thing that struck me about them was how unphilosophical they were, how crude and dogmatic. In fact, what really struck me about them is how much they shared the same traits as religious fundamentalists. But there it is. I shall have to learn to live without their friendship. I think I shall manage. The ‘ordinary’ folk I meet on my rounds in the neighbourhood seem to have retained the sense they were born with, which puts them a rung or three above the ‘extremely clever’ people who inhabit social media.
The interesting thing about all of this is that it clear that it is not just religion that serves as opiate, or even as God. For some it is Nature, others science and technology, or ‘Humanity’ and ‘Reason’ and ‘Culture.’ There has been no shortage of candidates to fill the metaphysical void that has opened up in the absence of God. And they have all succeeded so well that we have identity politics in search of meaning and belonging and proposing their own forms of ‘illusory happiness.’ Eagleton himself noticed this in Reason, Faith, and Revolution, arguing that ‘it is culture, not religion, which is … the heart of a heartless world’ (Eagleton 2010: 159). And here we are, a decade on, in the middle of the Culture Wars. The fact that there are wars should tell us something – there is no unity and belonging this way. The overarching and authoritative moral force once offered by God has fragmented and the different human groups are all seizing on bits and pieces of it and assailing others with it in the attempt to reconstitute the whole. It can’t be done. As I wrote earlier, you cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too. Once that single, compelling, transcendent standard has gone, all that remains are competing views, no one of which can compel and command obedience and respect from the others.
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