Pushing Back Against the Anti-Politics that is Tearing Society Apart
I would like to comment on Giles Fraser's article published in 'Unherd,' How the Left gave up on freedom: Today's progressives snigger at Britain's history of liberty
Recognising the dangers of painting with broad brush strokes, it pains me to say that this article is sad but true. It saddens me that the very things I argue for, having spent a lifetime on the Left in politics - the balancing of freedom and authority, the need for law, justice, virtues and morality, for the balancing of the global and the local, collective and personal responsibility - are all being appropriated by activists and perverted to particular political ends. The problem with activism is that it never gets out of fight and opposition mode; it divides and destroys, but fails to unify and create. My work on 'rational freedom' has been all about establishing the intellectual, moral, social, and political conditions of a deeper freedom. It has been incredibly hard work trying to get a modern libertarian culture - and leftist politics - to take law, morality, authority, and virtues seriously, as something crucial to character and conduct. The dominant view has been to see such things as repressive of individual liberty. This is profoundly mistaken. Properly constituted, such things are dimensions of liberty. Improperly constituted, though, they are indeed repressive and hence rightly rejected. Now I see these very things being caricatured and perverted, and by the very intellectual forces I fought tooth and nail against in the 1990s, forces which defined themselves as 'post' marxist, who explicitly rejected the 'metaphysics of labour' and economic issues of class. These people are a plague on the Left, or maybe just signify the impossibility and implosion of the Left in politics. Their view seems a tacit recognition of the fact that the working class are not socialist, never were, and never will be - and so economics and class come to be supplanted by culture and language, monopolised by the bureaucrats of word and meaning. They constitute themselves as an authoritative command and control system, making truth and justice mere functions of an identity they are free to define and redefine, plunging the world into an endless linguistic engineering.
Putting aside the left-right wars of politics on this for a second - these characters undercut the position I have sought to stake out on 'rational freedom,' and in doing so make it easier for opponents to condemn values and ideals that I've worked hard to establish as dimensions of freedom as their very antithesis. Deep down, they are the authoritarian flip side of libertarianism, turning leftist politics into the very thing conservative critics say it is - collectivist, authoritarian, repressive, and utterly detached from people and realities. Both sides in this phoney war of left and right make values mere functions of power and identity - libertarians and authoritarians together, the one implies the other, and go together on the same side - the free market requires the strong state for its imposition and maintenance, a cultural and ethical relativism goes hand in hand with the blanket imposition of equality and diversity on each and all.
Once the basis for natural rights in natural law has been lost, then rights become merely conventional and political, a function and gift of constituted power and no more. It is apparent that once liberalism came to discard its metaphysical assumptions and became an overtly political doctrine, this collision on the twin reefs of libertarianism and authoritarianism became inevitable. The protagonists in that unwinnable war will see people like me as a complete irrelevance, each seeing me as guilty of the crimes of the other, neither seeing the symbiotic relation I establish between autonomy and authority. A plague on all of them, they are a menace to politics and society. But I still need to speak out just to make it clear, for posterity, that, at this juncture in history, not all members of the Left embarrassed themselves with a repressive moralism, authoritarian politics, and a distortion of history. We are not being presented with a serious politics and ethics here, but a demonology, a fake religion that takes religious themes and terms and inverts them, discarding - in truth, despising - mercy, forgiveness, redemption, and transcendence These people make the Right in politics look right in their critical response and pushback. That is certainly how it looks to 'ordinary' folk. Working in the local community, I take the pulse of 'the people' regularly. And they are not with 'the woke' at all. In the main, people are frightened of giving offence, being careful to add an apology to any comments they make. This is far from healthy. The fact-lite fatalism of the divisive identitarians has colonised media and academia and is now running rife throughout public life. It aims to control people and social life. Such a politics is thoroughly negative, undemocratic, and unfree.
From the Left – although openly drawing on other political traditions where they are right, sane, and true - I affirm other options. Rights are not the function of politics, the gift of the state. Something so easily conferred can just as easily be taken away - and usually is.The problem with the depressive and repressive identitarians is that they not only mistake the fruits for the roots, they consume those roots, dissipate them in subordinating them to political struggle.
Conservatives may quote Edmund Burke on this. Burke was spot on here:
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity,—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly
Burke argued against rationalism and abstraction in politics, the imposition of extraneous and a priori principles upon people and culture. I argue this very same principle as a critique of alien power in favour of a demand for internal ethico-social self-regulation.
I have consistently argued for the internalisation and socialisation of the law – both moral and positive - via the great socialist writers, developing Marx’s socialism as a social self-mediation, via Rousseau and Kant and the educative function of the law, and am now doing it via Dante Alighieri, who argues for the education of desire. That principle of internalisation and socialisation is intrinsic to my view on rational freedom.
I note in the comments on Fraser’s article a conservative employing Burke’s argument against the Left:
"2015 was about the time it became painfully obvious that large numbers of people were either unable or unwilling to control their lowest impulses, that they were righteously offended by the idea that they should have to in any way improve themselves or aspire to being good or civilised or decent. What did you expect would happen once that was made clear?"
I can ask the same question of the economic libertarians who have dominated politics and policy-making in recent decades. This decadence and degenerations needs to be traced to source in the systematic libertarian assault upon each, any, and every form of social and collective restraint - all condemned as "government" - freeing individuals to be able to choose the good as they see fit, plunging morality into a market place of rival goods and bads, with no way of telling the difference between them, and no need to, seeing as ethics has become no more that irreducible subjective preference and opinion. It was only a matter of time before truth went the same way. If I target ‘the Left’ in this piece, no one should make the mistake that I am glossing the culpability of the libertarian Right in this debacle.
Neither the contemporary right nor the contemporary left give a damn about educating desire, cultivating virtue, constructing character as an internal process - such things are rejected as impositions on individual liberty. As a result, both sides hold that individuals are free to think and act as they like. As anyone familiar with the virtue tradition will know, that means that individuals will tend to succumb to the immediacy of their desires and become enchained to empirical necessity. The principle is stated clearly not only in the older virtue tradition, but loud and clear in Rousseau and Kant. As much as I agree with Burke on this, I am concerned to correct the impression that only conservatives understand this, and that the Left are no more than a bunch of schizophrenic frauds swinging between libertarianism and authoritarianism. That bifurcation is inherent in a liberal ontology that falsely separates two things that belong together - individuality and sociality, and I shall keep repeating this until this most blind of ages sees it. And, of course, given that human beings are social beings, needing to live in social relation to one another, such libertarianism is an impossibility, with collective bonds and ties having to be re-established somehow. One sees here how, from libertarian premises, we end up with authoritarian imposition. For the reason that commonality has been improperly constituted, lacking appropriate communities of practice and modes of conduct.
For all the work I have done to buttress the politics and ethics of the Left with substantive foundations – exposing and rejecting the scarcely reasoned nihilisms of the ‘post’ modern, ‘post’ Marxist and frankly ex-marxist crowd, I received nothing but indifference, sometimes abuse. On rare occasions I have received understanding and support. The more insightful see that I am not rejecting the Left, I am trying to save it by reconnecting it with realities and with ‘ordinary’ people. This will always shock and surprise ideologues, but most people are not obsessed with destroying faith, family, community, tradition, and culture. They rather want to resolidify a diremptive society around such solidarities. Instead, the contemporary Left seek constantly to pour acid on existing bonds and ties, in their attempt to uproot power. That everything reduces to power in their world reveals the sophist character of their politics and ethics. In this, they are no different at all from that tradition, deriving from Thrasymachus, which sees truth and justice as the interests of the strongest. Far from offering a coherent alternative to Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all,’ they are part of it, seeking to triumph over rivals.
It's the end of the Left. The chasm separating these loud voices, tooled up with media and political power, and 'ordinary' people, is wide and growing wider. The ideologues, of course, are the last to see this. For the reason that they don’t want to see it. If you are convinced you are right, then you have no reason at all to listen to, let alone respect, alternative platforms. If you associate only with the shouters and spend most of your time shouting at your enemies, you can tend to think you are more numerous - and more correct - than you really are. And, of course, in such a world others are always ‘enemies,’ never fellow members of a public realm. How depressingly comical it is to see how many of them are backing Me-Gain Malarkey, the millionaire grifter and liar using royal titles to make money. The daily spectacle of very rich people whining to billionaires in the media about how oppressed they all are, using their power to silence people, accuse them of one ‘ism’ or some other unforgivable secular sin, forcing people into compliance or out of their jobs is wretched. It is a perversion. In doing this, they are appropriating the greatest ideals and values perverting them to their own ends.
In all of this nonsense, it is people like me who can't get a look in. I’ve been accused of racism and of white male privilege. Of course. Who hasn’t in an age when whiteness and maleness have been made the new original sins? I have been told to ‘shut the f*** up’ for correcting a blatant and easily corrected untruth, for trying to silence someone who was telling ‘his truth.’ ‘His truth!!’ When Donald Trump was busy inventing facts to fit his narrative, he was constantly fact checked and called a liar. When those pushing pet liberal causes do it – and do it for their own personal advancement – it is called ‘his truth’ and ‘her truth.’ Insofar as the terms ‘his’ and ‘her’ are meaningful anymore, and not rejected as exclusive and oppressive. This is garbage and it has to stop.
The depressing thing is that what counts as ‘the Left’ these days seems incapable of correcting itself. The contradictions are wide and growing. There is an outbreak of terminal cognitive dissonance going on. People turn instead to Douglas Murray, or to Jordan Peterson. As much as I enjoy the way they dissect ‘the Left’ on this, I have to say that they have an easy task pulling this drivel apart. I once saw how easily it is done, with Stephen Hicks simply using the words of the main intellectual protagonists themselves. The words only have to be stated to be revealed as drivel. To his eternal credit, Noam Chomsky has long called out the intellectual fraud involved, expressing his concern that it will rebound on the Left and undermine its key positions.
The hard job is to rescue the kernel of truth from the protest. There is injustice in the world and it does need uprooting. At the same time, the emancipatory project is one of creation as well as destruction. The destruction is the easy part, in that it is easy to know what you are against. The hard part is not only knowing what you are for, but building popular support, sustaining practices, and establishing institutions for its incarnation. You can't have freedom without law, morality, authority, and, I would argue, religion or a sense of the sacred and its worship. Instead of constructing the framework and infrastructure of the alternative society properly, we get mere ersatz, moralistic, and authoritarian versions, a grotesque parody of the real thing which invites the likes of Murray, Peterson, Brendan O'Neill, and many more to score huge hits against 'the Left,' making it appear all the time that the Right are right, taking us back to square one.
Very different things are being conflated in these controversies, with marxism being explicitly blamed. This is interesting. When I was involved in the thick of the intellectual wars of the 1990s, the "post" thinkers were explicit in repudiating Marx and marxism as totalitarian and repressive, containing a hidden God, declaring the age of grand narratives to be over. They also rejected socialism as ‘economistic,’ class as reductionist, suppressive of otherness and pluralism. It is pathetic to see the deleterious results of crowd bearing bitter fruit. Such a politics is rootless and therefore fruitless, and their sterile positions are being extended over the whole of society in the only way possible – totalitarian thought and mind control.
From a marxist position I argued against those characters in the 1990s. I was told by my research coordinator that they are ‘up a creek without a paddle.’ That was in the year 2000, when I was optimistic that the tide may be turning. Instead, we are at risk of being swept away in a tidal wave of depressive and repressive identitarianism. This is their revenge. My fear is that leftist politics will be damaged far more than politics and society. There will be a pushback and a backlash – there already is – and the Right will have large swathes of ‘ordinary’ folk with them.
In a recent interview, Paul Embery demanded that the Labour Party get rid of the ‘woke rubbish,’ arguing that such language is "out of touch" with the majority of people, especially among those voters Labour so desperately needs to regain the trust of. I very much doubt that those peddling ‘woke rubbish’ will listen, for the reason they are not interested in democracy and winning elections; their only interest in the views of ‘ordinary’ people is how much they stand in need of correction and manipulation. Embery knows this, arguing that "wokeness is about being very pretentious about social causes coupled with an intolerance towards anyone who might disagree.”
"People try to gain kudos by expressing a fashionable moral or political opinion and again, it's got a middle class graduate whiff about it.
"There's a real authoritarianism that has crept into the Left and I think it's now infecting large parts of the country including many of our public institutions and corporations.
"And because it's being driven by the Left, the Left gets associated with [it], and people in these working class communities don't like it.
"The party has to move away from some of this rubbish because it's damaging."
That said, the working class are not what marxists and socialists thought them to be. The working class were abandoned decades ago by the politicians and intellectuals of the Left. The Communist Lenin followed the Social Democrat Kautsky in justifying a vanguardism which held socialism to be the product of the intelligentsia and introduced into the working class "from the outside." Left to their own devices, the working class was capable only of an ‘economism,’ that is, of knowing only their material class interest. They needed to be educated extraneously in accordance with higher purpose. Already, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the working class had been reduced to being the passive, manipulable, malleable object of extraneous political engineering. And now we get the linguistic engineering by knowledgeable elites. Embery argues that "Starmer has a huge task on his hands simply because he's trying to manoeuvre a party into that position of articulating the principles of family, patriotism, community - a party that is instinctively uncomfortable with that stuff.”
Once we recognise that working class people are concerned with the solidarities of family, faith, tradition, community, and patriotism, that there is more to life than economics and material interest, then we can start to see that, politically, the working class is a blend of socialism and conservatism, in a way that the ideologues of either persuasion are utterly incapable of understanding. To the contemporary Left, family, faith, and patriotism are anathema, thinks to mock and destroy. That attitude strikes me much more as liberal and libertarian than Left, expressing the view of those who are materially comfortable and need little reliance upon and solidarity with others. The systematic attempts to uproot the building blocks of society and ethics will not go well and I am out of it.
Douglas Murray has a wide open goal in front of him, and just keeps on scoring. All I can say here is that this is NOT the socialism I espouse. But I may be fighting a lost cause on this and may be better simply abandoning the concern with political identity to present the principles positively
But what a desperately sad, divided, and dangerous world we live in when it is the most disagreeable people who get their way and impose 'their' truth upon others, using their positions of power to bully, silence, force apologies, and end careers. Language is being use to divide society, put people under pressure, render them vulnerable and pliable, make them apologetic. The sad truth is that apologies will never suffice. People are being targeted to be driven out, as a lesson to others to toe the line. In a world in which we are being plunged into unwinnable wars, the advice is to never apologise. And what a depressingly sad comment that is on a world that is stuffed fit to burst with material quantity but deficient in quality of character and conduct. Entitled, spoiled, parasitic people predating on the public realm – all sides, from top to bottom, are in on it now, filling their boots whilst something still exists.
I will apologise when I am wrong - which is often. I confess my sins every week, knowing there will be mercy and forgiveness within the eternal justice that enfolds us. This transcendent standard has been abandoned. In relativizing the absolute, the modern world has absolutized the relative, hence the inability to engage in dialogue with others and compromise, hence the tendency to demonize others who disagree, hence the tendency of all involved in the unwinnable political war to become disagreeable. I will not be bullied into apologizing for holding views that contradict the conventional unwisdom, not least when the loudest views of this anti-public are bigoted, prejudiced, and hate-filled to the core, driven by the need to win in the power games that are being played. I affirm the power of humility - and the truth and justice to which all are subject.
I hold no brief for Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson, or Brendan O'Neill or Darren Grimes or Jordan Peterson. I do find O'Neill pertinent, and Peterson insightful. But they don't represent my views. And when Peterson claims that the ‘postmodern Marxist left’ reduces the world to a Hobbesian battleground you can be certain that we are not talking about a genuine Marxism or left, merely people who have been absorbed into the endless struggle for power and resources (of all kinds, cultural as well as economic) rather than people who seek to transcend that struggle for a genuine egalitarianism. Hobbes is the authoritarian expression of the liberal ontology that falsely separates two integral aspects of human nature, individuality and sociality; Foucault is the libertarian expression: both are sent to extremes as a result of lacking a philosophical anthropology rooted in essential human nature. I affirm that anthropology, so did Marx, so did Plato and Aristotle, so did Aquinas and Dante. This is my metaphysical grounding for a rational freedom and happiness as flourishing.
But the inanities and insanities of the so-called Left are such that they need to be called out for what they are – a liberalism gone decadent and deviant, and a Marxism that has lost its substantive basis - and called out not least by voices who still identify as Left. I blend both sides in this struggle, but still call myself a socialist. I'll not allow the stupidities of the dominant voice to budge me from this self-identification. But it is time to speak and give a lead, if only to show that not all Left voices are embarrassing themselves or showing themselves to be howling totalitarians seeking to bully, coerce, intimidate, suppress, and silence all who think differently - which is most people. This crowd are giving very easy victories to the right in politics. Alternatives are available. But this spectacle of well-off, well-heeled, and well-connected people involved in an endless parade whining about how oppressed they all are has become vomitable, not least because there are very many people in real and desperate need out there, and who are being ignored, for the reason they are not part of the media-industrial complex and don't have the right views and identities – mediocrity as mediocracy. They appropriate and distort justice and deny it to the people who need it and, in the process, turn the Left on its head. Don't let the mob make you apologize, and don't let them force you into lying, betraying all that you know to be true, about the world and about yourself.