About four or five years ago Arran Gare wrote to me.
"Dear Peter Critchley
I have recently realized that we have very similar interests and concerns, and your work will save me from having to do it.
Best,
Arran Gare."
Praise from Arran Gare is praise indeed. Gare is an Australian philosopher who has done stellar work in work in environmental philosophy, philosophy of science and culture and in the metaphysics of process philosophy. I was swimming against the intellectual tides in the 1990s and I carried on swimming against the fashions. It's interesting to see how the marxist critique of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, bound up with the neoliberal turn in economics, got lost over the decades, to such an extent that we now have a Cultural Left that is, in large part, a corporate left, working seamlessly with the latest phase of capitalist development. I was present at its birth and rejected it completely. I read Foucault et al and was never impressed - at best long riffs on Weber's iron cage, and still as unable to see a way out as Weber was.
Some people are beginning to contemplate the troubling question as to why the vast majority of intellectuals / academics versed in Foucault are failing to critique how the contemporary responses to crises seem like an attempt to enact Foucault's nightmare of the biopolitical panopticon …
Because they’re unmitigated careerists, that's why, people whose material interests are bound up with 'the system' they feign ti criticise. They don’t want to unmask power as such, only power that lies in the hands of the people they dislike. They seek to advance their own power and the power of their ilk, whilst luxuriating in the fantasy that from the comfort of tenured positions of power they are brave unmaskers of power.
I should add that whilst I disliked poststructuralists, postmodernists, social constructivists and deconstructionists alike, fearing the slide into arbitrariness that was around the corner as a result of their efforts in destabilising and relativising standards of truth and justice, I would distinguish the likes of Foucault, Derrida, and other such thinkers from the manifest charlatans who followed in their footsteps. Such figures were critical, free-thinkers who have nothing in common with the woke scolds and cultural authoritarians who now presiding over a corrupted culture. That said … I did anticipate that a deconstruction of standards with respect to authority, truth (absolute or otherwise), morality, community, essences and other such bugbears of various 'post' thinkers would, in time, lead to their repressive reconstruction on entirely arbitrary 'grounds' of projection, power, and preference. I don't doubt for a second that Foucault, Derrida etc would be busy today pulling cultural authoritarianism apart – but, I would ask now as I asked then, by what standards and upon what grounds would their critique be based? Foucault, Derrida and the likes were indeed critical thinkers, but they cut the ground from underneath their own critiques, miring us on a rootless and fruitless terrain. Such thought created a void and a vacuum that was bound, in time, to be filled by fetishistic collectivities and surrogates. It came to pass. My problem with the likes of Foucault, going back to Nietzsche, is that they have nothing to satisfy the human need for belonging and meaning.
The same goes for Nancy's 'groundless grounds,' Rorty and ironic liberalism - proceeding 'as if' our most cherished values had foundations when we know that they do not. That position is unsustainable. Sooner or later, the effort involved in exercising an existential choice we know to be empty becomes onerous, all the more as our beliefs increasingly become unbelievable.
I was 'awkward' in the 1990s and I remain 'awkward.' The terrain is a moral and intellectual mess. And, here and there, there are academics, thinkers, and philosophers who have the intellect and insight to see what I'm about and the guts to say so.
Gare praised my "Of Gods and Gaia" book where I took the planetary engineers to task. In later works I critiqued the planetary managers and the planetary fetishisers, noting the strange alliance of technocrats and nature romantics. All such people work in abstraction from socially mediated forms, practices, and relations, speaking the language of 'Nature' through the reified voice of science or false religion. This Nature is an empty signifier.
It’s a long and slow process turning the world around, and people prefer the short-cuts. They look for buttons to push and levers to pull, but that’s not the right way in the end. I’m glad someone has had the nerve to tackle this old work of mine. At 900 pages it is rather intimidating. I did issue a shorter version, that cut out the (rather repetitive) critiques of the planetary engineers (they say the same thing, make the same case). And now I am reading this Michael Shellenberger with the same ‘God that failed’ / here’s the new god of eco-modernisation/technology/development story. I took both sides apart a decade ago. It will keep happening until environmentalism succeeds in generating a genuine ethics within public community, within a civic environmentalism, as against a scientism/naturalism.
In "Against posthumanism: posthumanism as the world vision of house slaves" Gare writes in terms that are very similar to the critiques I have made. An age that is sleep-working into the joyous and inhuman future, I would suggest that people wake up. But there are reasons why conformism will prevail - people really do imagine themselves to be free and liberatory when they are merely agents of cultural processes much greater than themselves, of which they are barely aware:
"House-slaves have a strong propensity to identify with those who have enslaved them and to despise inferior slaves – the ‘field-slaves’. What I am suggesting is that posthumanism, as a further development of deconstructive postmodernism, is the world vision of academics in the humanities who have become house-slaves and accepted their role. Such people were well described recently in an open letter by Petra Bueskens (2021) describing academics in Australia, although these are just an extreme case of academics in the humanities almost everywhere:
- Let me make a bold claim: the confluence of neoliberalism and postmodernism has produced a cadre of academics who lack imagination, passion, flair, originality or courage; they are all in lock-step with each other, more like a school of fish than a cohort of scholars. To my colleagues I say this: honestly, stop pretending you are victims of anything other than your own limbic hijack and petty careerism. Most of you are so busy checking metrics, expanding CV’s, meeting KPI’s, applying for grants, attending nauseatingly boring Zoom meetings, self-promoting, networking, virtue signalling and ensuring you support the corporate brand formerly known as the university that there is no time for thinking as an end in itself. The sociological imagination is a bespoke luxury that no longer exists in corporate academia. Keeping in line ideologically is now part of this dog and pony show. Pretending you are the vanguard of the latest civil rights movement is as dishonest as it is laughable. Many colleagues have contacted me privately to express their support; a handful of these feel they cannot support me publicly for fear of losing their jobs or being tainted. This too is evidence of the problem of “progressive illiberalism” sweeping the universities. If academics, for whom tenure was created precisely to protect their intellectual freedom, cannot speak for fearing of being exposed for wrongthink, then really what is the university today? It is a sham. The world-vision of such people is an expression of ressentiment as this was described by Friedrich Nietzsche, characterized by the denial of higher values by those incapable of realizing them. In The Genealogy of Morals (1956, p. 158) Nietzsche also noted that this manifest itself in the work of psychologists. As he characterized their work, and the people who produce such ideas:
-bWhat are these English psychologists really after? One finds them always, whether intentionally or not, engaged in the same task of pushing into the foreground the nasty part of the psyche, looking for the effective motive forces of human development in the very last place we would wish to have them found, e.g., in the inertia of habit, in forgetfulness, in the blind and fortuitous association of ideas: always in something that is purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular, and, moreover, profoundly stupid. What drives these psychologists forever in the same direction? A secret, malicious desire to belittle humanity, which they do not acknowledge even to themselves? A pessimistic distrust, the suspiciousness of the soured idealist? … Or is it, perhaps, a kind of stew-a little meanness, a little bitterness, a bit of anti-Christianity, a touch of prurience and desire for condiments? . . ."