In face of a movement which takes some of your own themes, reduces and relativizes them by way of arbitrary, self-chosen standards, and reveals their absurdity in taking them to extremes, I feel the need to clarify and qualify my views. This is a parlous enterprise given that I have written well over twenty million words, with further words rising confusion rather than clarification. So I shall be brief and to the point. Rather than present my view and then present the contemporary ‘woke’ view, I shall take this issue by issue.
1. Religion, belief, ideology.
I have these past ten years and more been concerned to establish the cogency of a God-based religious view of the world. I argue for evidence and logic as far as they will go, but am interested in the world that is beyond the reach of such reason. The world of faith and belief is indeed dangerous ground, for the reason that it is based upon a conviction that is outside of tangible fact and proof. I see no option but to act in faith. I emphasise truth. I also argue that the act of truth-seeking is an act of faith, an act motivated by a belief that the universe is intelligible to intelligent beings. That is not an anti-rational or irrational position. Those areas of life which are outside of or beyond reason are not necessarily irrational, but may be arational or non-rational. I make space for those areas of human living which evade evidence and logic. My position is to seek evidence and proof where evidence and proof are possible and desirable. That reality check is required to keep people sane and sensible, grounding them against ideological flights of fancy and fantasy. It is when people take flight in those ways that their words and deeds may go to extremes, doing violence to people and to reality. Critics argue that such is the inevitable consequence of religion and belief. They are wrong. The Judaeo-Christian tradition generally – and the Catholic tradition to which I belong – reserves an exalted place for reason. That tradition holds that God made the world and its laws and processes intelligible and rational to the intelligent and rational beings that human beings are. Religion is not an invitation into an unreason that is contrary to fact and logic, but the very opposite, an invitation to use one’s innate and universal reason with its moral component in place. It is worth pointing out that in the past, the argument for faith alone was the heresy of fideism. The problem in the contemporary world is not religion but a bad and bogus form of religion, a secular religion in which certain human beings, the new elect, have become their own gods, asserting their own truth and goodness out of ideological conviction and commitment, and seeking to impose their arbitrary standards upon all others in a false universality. That is not a genuine universality but a rigid, sterile uniformity based on a one-sided ideological recreation of reality.
2. Original Sin, moralism, and judgmentalism.
This second point relates to the above in belonging to the category of bad and bogus religion. Many critics are describing ‘woke’ – and green climate change activism – as a ‘new religion.’ The criticism is shallow and seriously underestimates the depth of the problem. We are not being confronted by one religion among many, or one god among many, a polytheism that describes the pluralism of the modern condition, but by a particularly repressive and intolerant religion whose god is a peculiarly jealous and wrathful god. We are looking at a secular religion, a new puritanism, as divisive and hate- and fear-filled as past puritanism. The gods here are the created values of human beings who have become their own gods, setting their own standards and insisting upon universal compliance. In a genuine pluralism or polytheism, people would be allowed to live in accordance with their own values. What we are seeing here is the ultimate untenability of a moral pluralism without objective standards of evaluation. The human social world requires a cohering and organising moral principle to make sense of a world that is greater than individual choice. Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ has dissolved that standard into myriad viewpoints, none of which is capable of offering good enough reasons to persuade and obligate. The result is a fragmentation that places an impossible burden of existential choice on each and all. Rather than bear that burden, people will seek and find meaning in a cause, in a movement, in an ideology, none of which is necessarily grounded in reality. Indeed, a central premise of modern existentialism is that since we live in an objectively valueless and meaningless universe then individuals have no option but to create their own meaning and goodness if they find it too burdensome to live without such things. The evidence is that human beings are meaning-seeking spiritual beings and cannot live on a destinationless voyage. Deny that spiritual quality and human beings will recreate it in other, not necessarily benign, forms.
We are now in the grip of a bad and bogus religion that extracts certain features from religion – sin, suffering, pain, sacrifice, judgement – and renders them partial. God is not here, only ‘man’ or, rather, particular men and women, the new sinless elect that is big on the sins of others. This is religion without mercy, forgiveness, and redemption, which is to say no religion at all. Religion, certainly Christianity (the religion I know most about), is about redemption. A secular religion created by ‘men as gods’ is about resentment and vengeance and is entirely without redemptive possibilities. This is not merely the inversion of religion, it is the perversion of religion. This perversion is implicit in the initial inversion of human beings and God. The bitter irony is that those who have been the most vocal in denouncing religion on account of its repressive moralism and judgmentalism reveal themselves to be the most repressive of all in these terms. What is worse, they practise a judgmental relativism which is the very inversion of both science and religion, being detached from Nature, God, and reality.
3. Justification by faith
This is a very interesting question for me. From the 1990s I developed a praxis-based philosophy which emphasised the creative agency of the human subject, underlining the view of human beings as knowledgeable agents who, in some way, created their own reality. In this view, the world is not an external objective datum to be observed and contemplated passively at a distance removed from it, but is something that human agents are a part of, as conscious co-creators. That’s the praxis philosophy I developed in relation to Hegel and Marx. I emphasised that Marx did not write theories of the world, since such a view would imply the external observation and contemplation of a reality that was in some way apart from the human subjects. Instead, I argued that Marx, in line of descent from Kant, developed critiques. This is a challenging view, for the reason that it entails a new view of science, one that overcomes the separation of subject and object.
Whilst I would still argue along those lines, I would now insist on the equality and unity of contemplation and action to underline the existence of an objective reality that is independent of human choice, projection, and self-creation.
The dangers of a praxis-based truth and meaning have become apparent as a result of the turn to ideology, language, and discourse in recent times.
In line with Vico and Hegel, I argued that the condition of knowing something is to have made it. But Vico added a crucial rider which later philosophers in that line of descent were apt to miss. The realm of nature, as God’s creation, was outside of that realm of self-creation and self-knowledge. Hegel is an interesting case. To me, he reads as an attempt to enclose God’s realm of spirituality in a universalising human reason. Marx does likewise with respect to labour. Such views thus invert God and humanity and seek to enclose the anarchic excess and surplus that is God, the core of being that resists the enclosure of reason, in a human-made social construct. That leads us directly to endless culture wars fought between myriad human gods,
As for justification by faith, it works like a magic circle. If you buy into the circle, you accept and understand and are one of the chosen; if you continue to question and ask for reasons, then you are told that you don’t understand the position you are criticising and may be excluded, persecuted, and damned with justification. Understanding is therefore a condition of acceptance, obedience, and practice, practice having the express purpose of making real the utterly unbelievable and unprovable. As in religion, critics might say. Not quite. Religion does indeed come with extensive ritual and practice, in recognition of the anthropological fact that human beings are social and solidaristic beings who seek not merely meaning but a shared meaning. To critics who persist in saying that such a thing is ‘dangerous’ and potentially harmful, we can only ask what among everything that makes human life interesting, meaningful, and worth living isn’t? The crucial test concerns how these ineliminable aspects of a truly human life are to be mediated.
The current ideological wave of justification by faith is not healthy and has removed all the orienting checks that accompany religion properly called. (A religion which itself has frequently become unhinged in history, justifying all manner of crimes against reason, humanity, and God in the process). You can see how this works in the fruitless ‘debates’ with ideologues. You will note immediately how the language is loaded with snares and traps, with meanings either being vague or constantly changing. The standards of evaluation are either obscure or non-existent or, in many instances, not merely ‘made up’ but simplistic and moralistic (as in ‘x is good, y is bad’). So crude is the reasoning that we need to seek an explanation as to why it generates so much discussion. It is not the quality of the ideas that causes lengthy discussion but the immense controversy that the endlessly repressive and divisive pressurising generates. The actual ideas are shallow and superficial and quite easily checked and countered (take the demands for exact statistical representation in all areas as one example, something that is quite easily checked as soon as we get into specific areas – sex and gender with respect to certain jobs, representation of people of colour in various situations, the reasons why which are based on things other than sex and race). What is not easily countered and checked is the controversy that such views incite and the divisions that such views open. Accusations of some kind of phobia or ism invite the immediate attention of the mob, leading people to cease questioning and criticising in search of peace. The views spread not by quality of argument but by a combination of bullying and cowardice.
4. Language
Which begs the question of what can be done. I would answer simply that you should cleave to the Socratic method and always ask people for meaning, especially when they employ language that isn’t clear. I would also say stay clear of abstracts and express yourself clearly, but recognise that this is a tricky issue. I can remember a rather pompous woman picking me up on the use of the term ‘praxis.’ ‘When I write my book on the poor,’ she rather snottily told me, ‘I will use language that the poor can understand.’ I told her that I was one of the poor and that we all use language like that where we come from. I was lying, slightly, but was concerned to draw attention to the old tradition of reading and self-education in the working class socialism that forms my background. This woman, I discovered, was an upper middle class Church of England vicar or something, who had precisely zero connection to the poor she felt so sure were incapable of understanding long words like ‘praxis.’
But point taken. Be careful of jargon. I have to confess to having used a lot of long words in my philosophical work. This came with the terrain seeing as I specialised in German philosophy, particularly Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Habermas. But the terms I used did have meaning. At the same time I was concerned to contest the linguistic turn and inflation of discourse in the various ‘post’ schools of thought that started to spring up in the 1980s and after. I bought the books on postmodernism and was decidedly unimpressed by their lack of content and meaning. It struck me as a form of academic masturbation. I hoped it may be a passing fad but saw the potential for such anti-realism to align with the ICT revolution and sweep through society via media and culture. It did. In the 1990s I denounced the grandiloquent phrases concealing poverty of thought, but I now see that this is a generous view. There is indeed thought behind it, pernicious, toxic, and divisive. Check abstraction, ask for substantive reference and meaning, and be one your guard against empty signifiers and texts without referents.
5. Essentialism.
Essentialism is a key aspect of my philosophical work. It also perhaps the most controversial aspect. There is nothing that the liveliest minds of the modern age have sought to pursue more than essences, the idea that there are substantively real things and entities with real natures that can be identified and potentials to be actualised. Such essences constitute a direct threat to those who see the world – and people – as malleable, plastic, and manipulable. Essences constitute a reality that is outside of projection and self-creation, inviting a co-creation and partnership and cooperation. The anti-essentialists advance an explicitly anti-realist (anti-)metaphysics, which is to say a bad metaphysics on account of its sublimated, disguised, denied nature. Such people hunt essentialism wherever it may be found, tracking essences down to drive a stake through their heart. It is the death of reality, purpose, and potential ushering us into an age of nominalist madness.
My work is premised on an explicitly essentialist metaphysics. My position is one of a moderate but critical realism. Simply, the idea is that any thing or entity is essentially something and something essentially, something that is identifiable, intelligible, and knowable. The view is fundamentally realist, affirming the existence of substances and a substantive reality. These substances contain natures, attributes, potentials, and lines of development. In the caricature of the critics of essentialism, essences imply timeless and fixed notions that confine people according to imputed identities. Such views are the product of a philosophical amateurism and ignorance that conflate the particular and the universal. Unable or unwilling to make the proper distinctions with respect to particular incarnation in specific time, place, and social relations, they throw out the baby with the bathwater. Of course there is a danger of false fixities by way of naturalising what needs to be historicised and socialised. We now have the bitter irony of witnessing the man-hating feminism that began in the seventies being trumped by a trans ideology since it is no longer possible to define what a woman is essentially.
But, of course, we can define what a woman is. This whole area is overrun with the shallow and the stupid, the demonstrably false. And it is internally incoherent. This is apparent in the question of race. Here, the people who take fluidity and plasticity to extremes with respect to sex and gender turn into the very worst kind of essentialists they normally denounce when it comes to race. With constant accusations of racism and cultural appropriation, there is a strong assertion of racial identity and segregation, imposing fixed identities and demarcating hard boundaries that can never be transgressed. It seems that in certain selected – privileged – cases, the world is not so fluid, anti-realist, and self-created after all.
Incoherent, unintelligent, restrictive, and repressive.
There are better ways of conceiving cultural and social creation, as a co-creation that proceeds in accordance with essences as an organic growth and healthy unfolding of potential. That’s my view. And it is the very antithesis of a ‘woke’ movement which asserts complete fluidity and self-creation on the one hand, and fixed identity on the other. Racial essentialism is essentialism in the caricatured image of its critics, critics who now stand silent in favour of its most demonised image. We shouldn’t be surprised. Not only is this entire movement intellectually shallow, it is internally incoherent and politically and morally arbitrary, making up its standards as it goes along, imposing them on others by way of coercion.
6. Rational Freedom.
My work is organised under the heading of ‘Rational Freedom.’ I now qualify that idea of freedom by reference to the ancient good of happiness, by which is meant flourishing in accordance with one’s healthy potentials. The basic idea is that the freedom and happiness of each is coexistent with and conditional upon the freedom and happiness of all. I argue this as the ‘radical ought-to-be’ of philosophy, as premised on the common moral reason. I openly refer to the ‘rational utopia’ of philosophy, bringing this ‘ought-to-be’ to bear as a critical standard by which to evaluate the ‘is’ of contemporary society.
Stated so concisely, the idea would appear to be a close relation to the ‘woke’ idea of intersectionality. Where rational freedom affirms the unity of each and all, the idea of intersectionality holds out the prospect of a future state in which all differences are resolved and all identities united in common cause. It is a variant of the old philosophical ideal of perfect peace. To those who denounce it as utopian, I would say it is to be found in Christ’s eternal promise to men and women on Earth, in Dante, in Grotius and Pufendorf, in Kant, in Bertrand Russell. In my PhD, I wrote fairly generally of ‘the philosophical ideal.’ In time, I came to sharpen this idea in terms of transcendent standards of truth and justice. These transcendent standards exist outside of time and place and serve as a critical standard of evaluation. At the same time, these standards are only incarnated by specific practices, forms, and relations in the particular contexts of time and place. There is a crucial distinction and mediation here that is lost in what is called ‘woke.’ And it is that loss that ensures that an ideal which ought to be located in the real as a process of creative unfolding and becoming comes to be detached from its means of realisation, to become something impossibly and dangerously utopian. Hence we get intersectionalist claims of perfect peace and unity that are based on ideological assertion rather than moral, social, and practical content. This leads to ideologues seeking to impose peace and unity, coercing reality and people into conformity with an impossible ideal. Here, the loss of a realist and essentialist metaphysics turns the ideal into something pernicious, divisive, and destructive.
7. Transcendent Standards
This follows from the previous point. Either transcendent standards of truth and justice exist, or they do not. If they do not then you have no option but to submit to the endless and pointless cycle of power / resistance, choosing your sides with the oppressors or the oppressed, whilst knowing that all ultimately are serving a pointless power. ‘Where there is nothing,’ wrote Max Weber, ‘both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.’ And that emptiness applies also to the various identities with which the new revolutionaries have replaced the proletariat.
Ultimately, the entire problem reduces to the supplanting of God by humanity, followed by the supplanting of humanity by particular, chosen, groups of human beings.
This has ever been the strategy – and fatal reductive flaw - of Gnostic ideologies like those which dominate culture, politics, and society today. Gnostics abandon transcendent standards and truths in favour of their own self-created values/gods, which in turn express immanentized dream fantasies. By way of a process of reification and wilful projection, these self-created gods come to be asserted and imposed as authoritative and objective truths and realities. These standards are thoroughly arbitrary and reducible to power. It is no wonder that all those who argue in this way reduce everything in the world to power – power is their prime motivation, their only ethic and standard, the only god they recognise and serve.
From this follows the concern to change reality to conform to the dream world. There are many problems with this view:
1) There remains a reality and a truth about that reality which is independent of self-creation, fluidity, plasticity, and endless re-creation centred on the will to power:
2) The reality of others who assert their right to create and live by their own gods and truths;
3) The swallowing of reality and people into the endless cycle of power / resistance.
We have been living through the secret revolution, the one that is hidden in plain view. The irony is that we are beset daily by permanent revolutionaries who have yet to realize that the revolution has happened and that the tumults, causes, and controversies that have engulfed us are the aftermath, not the preparation. People don’t realize the depth of the change that has taken place because all of the familiar buildings remain standing, including the terms and language which motivated their construction and the social infrastructure which supported them, but they are empty, both buildings and values, they are devoid of content and practice. People see the familiar and repeat the familiar terms, and presume that things are as they were, and that the prevasive feeling of crisis means that the revolution is to come. They are looking for red flags and barricades in the streets, little realising that the revolution has run right through the institutional, cultural, and social fabric. The constraints coercing complicity are already with us, in the constant policing of thought and deed, the constant correction of ‘deviant’ behaviour, the deadening of social and intellectual life, the lack of serious understanding and genuine debate, the suppression of alternate platforms, the demonisation of those who disagree. In public life and social life, people accept this, because they have no option but to accept it if they wish to be left in peace. But this isn’t peace at all, it is submission. The old is dead. The most remarkable thing about the outbreak of protest and insurgency in 2021 was not the institutional cowardice in response but the lack of confidence on the part of the authorities. Called upon to defend themselves and their societies and traditions, the leaders of these institutions caved in. There is no mystery to this institutional cowardice, which easily extends into complicity. We have lived through a neo-liberal revolution which positively denigrated the public realm. The consequence has been a diminution, too, of the public imagination, both on the part of society’s leaders and of the people. Politics, media, culture, education are all dead, with people mistaking their zombie existence with life. The spirit has departed, the purpose has gone. The leaders of these institutions couldn’t defend themselves against assault for the reason they no longer believe in their purpose, they no longer have confidence in their reasons to be. Much of what is put out by contemporary media is an affront to intelligent people, but it continues on account of such people being increasingly thin on the ground.
We are in the foothills of such a moral, cultural, and political catastrophe that it is unwise to wait for the crisis to blow over. This crisis is deep, far deeper than any climate crisis, which is merely the physical manifestation of something far deeper than climate activists, cleaving to ‘the science’ are capable of understanding. I should know. I have several times made the point to these campaigners that climate change isn’t the problem, it is the physical expression of a problem that lies in a faulty moral economy. On several occasions now I have had my comments deleted and have been unfriended and blocked. Hence the comments with which I opened this piece with – people suppress the contrary views of others in order to suppress their own doubts. The problem is that you cannot suppress reality. Such people think themselves to be telling the truth; the truth is that they are telling us of their deeply held beliefs. The problem is that they don’t quite realize that this is what they are doing. Instead, they think they are giving us ‘the science.’ This is a potential lethal mindset. Adherents of the great religions know that they are entering the realm of faith and belief; adherents of political causes suffused with religiosity believe themselves to be speaking and acting on the basis of fact, science, and logic. They are not. Instead, they conflate knowledge and certainty in such a way as to constitute a threat to politics as dissensus, disagreement, and dialogue.
In fine, whilst my views over the years may seem to share many common points with contemporary activism and ideology, they are diametrically opposed. I have felt the need to clarify and qualify in this essay precisely because the superficial similarity may induce many, in an age of superficial thinking, to class my work on ‘rational freedom’ with those who eschew reason and reality in favour of a series of incoherent nominalisms and nihilism. To put it bluntly, such people take things I have a long standing interest in – value, virtue, praxis, essentialism, God, religion, political peace, the unity of each and all, freedom – and pervert them at extremes.
Will the future belong to rational freedom and happiness? Only if we are lucky, and have the good sense to learn the discernment required to make fine distinctions.
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