Redeeming Empty Promises
I have been reading Jeffrey Hart, Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education 2001an. The title amused me. It is easy to get drawn into the unwinnable wars being waged by the permanently engaged and enraged. Much that is being said and done is such a distortion of truth and reality that it simply demands a response, thus drawing us into the endless cycle of assertion and counter-assertion. Once you are in that cycle, there is no way out. There are no standards of truth and falsehood, only a world in which each is entitled to invent the world according to their prejudices. It is lamentable, but it is sensible to retain a certain calm, even amused, distance from the madness in order to preserve one’s sanity. The best thing to do with the permanently outraged as they inflict their crisis of the day upon the world is to keep smiling. In a world that is being overrun with angry talking heads pouring over every inconsequential word spoken by some semi-educated nincompoop or other, all that you can do avoid being drawn in.
Flash a light, make a noise, create a controversy, divide a public into warring sides, and feed off the anger and outrage that expands by way of assertion and counter-assertion. The public realm is being reduced to this. Constantly pitch a product, provoke a reaction, solicit, incite, and enflame. It’s a certain strategy to build a ‘career’ on when you have next to nothing or next to nothing, only ambition and will to power. The strategy has been applied in the world of entertainment for years. Think of any number of ‘singers,’ TV stars, ‘celebrities.’ Just get people talking about you and keep them talking and, in time, you will be famous, an industry, and no one will remember why. It is possible to rise to fame and fortune without trace by this strategy. Just get people talking about you and keep them talking. In politics, such a thing is positively dangerous and destructive given its pervasive social effects, the way that falsehood spreads out to poison relations between people.
There are people looking at this world of permanent rebellion as a state sponsored anarchy. When the authorities are less than keen on suppressing law breaking, crime, and protest, then we have to wonder whether the conspiracy theorists are right and the authorities are champions of reset, engendering an organised chaos to build a support for the reimposition of order. I think the explanation is much simpler – the authorities are weak and passive on account of their complicity in bringing this debacle about. These culture wars come on the back of decades of aggressive top-down neoliberal politics, and the deliberate attempt to relocate happiness and freedom from the public realm and associational space to the private realm of discrete individuals choosing and pursuing their own particular goods in the market. This was the strategy of the economic libertarians, and the result has been destroyed communities and social inequality. Now we have the fractious cultural wing, and the authorities lack the sense of commonality and publicity – the forms of common identity – to rein them in. Having promoted private choice for so long, the authorities’ appeals to common standards are unpersuasive – not least because those standards seem not to exist. Appeals to God, Queen and country don’t work when God has been supplanted by the ego as its own god and the country is deemed to be historically and systematically racist. As for the Queen, God save her from manipulators and dividers with their agendas of personal aggrandizement. The most striking – and revealing thing – about this degeneration is seeing how many who identify as leftist so easily fall in behind manipulative, exploitative strategies that are so blatant as to be hardly worth wasting words on. There has been a shift from socio-economic and class realities into culture and language and the manipulation of symbols, and there are many who have followed, thinking the detachment from reality to be radical. It’s the opposite. If people can’t tell that they are being had, then there is nothing that can be said or done, other than calling them out as members of a would-be overclass of mass manipulators. The war is over and this really is a catastrophe we are living through. In the words of Red Sector A by the immortal Rush, ‘All that we can do is just survive.’ And smile. And keep the virtues alive should society come out the other end, for the time when people are prepared to acquire them and live by them. It’s possible. The social instinct is an essential human quality, and life without genuine connection and communication is unliveable. People will return from division. At the moment, though, it is cheats, liars, dividers, and free-riders who are in the ascendant, and to call them out is to play their game, giving them the opposition that enables them to whine and complain about oppression and being victims. It’s impossible to beat this crowd on their own terrain. Once culture is detached from reality, then you have lost the grounds by which to check falsehood and fantasy. So it is best to leave the malicious malarkey alone, keep smiling, and watch as the poison spreads and turns against itself.
There is a phrase going around at the moment, ‘educated but ignorant.’ Having heard these people, engaged with them (receiving the height of abuse), and seen how consistent they are in peddling their favoured tropes, all fact and reason to the contrary, I have to say that the situation is much worse than that. It is always possible to educate and enlighten the ignorant by way of knowledge and information. The problem we have here is that such people draw on the wealth of knowledge and information available at surface level, and interpret it all through a distorting filter – they are ‘miseducated and therefore prejudiced and bigoted.’
Most of all, though, they are not Left. They are not the Left I have identified with my entire Left. That could simply mean that I myself am not Left. Which would come as a surprise, seeing as I have argued for socialism consistently, sought industrial democracy, argued for the restructuring of power in favour of labour against capital, commune democracy, and the rights of ‘ordinary’ people to govern their own affairs. And more besides. I’ve been an eco-socialist for as long as I can remember, too. It could just mean that such a Left is dead and buried, that capitalism has triumphed and ideas of a socialist alternative are just the pipe-dream of people on the losing side of history. It’s possible. In which case the contemporary Left is a response to the end of the Left. The Left of the past upheld a direct connection between reason and reality, believing that they were on the side of history. History seems to have moved elsewhere and, instead of moving with it, the new Left have abandoned reason and reality. And ‘ordinary’ people too. Marxists have always been disappointed by the working class. The working class have never behaved as the professors and politicians of socialism have thought they ought to behave. The theory of ‘false consciousness’ was always the ready-made excuse serving to mask the fact that practice was never quite in conformity with theory. Now we have unconscious bias. It’s bobbins, all of it, betraying a thoroughly anti-democratic distrust of the agency of ‘ordinary’ people. It turns Marx on his head. But maybe, if class politics and socialism are not as Marx saw them, Marx had to be turned on his head. If that is true, then the proper course of action is not to try to breathe life into a corpse by a culture and politics divorced from reason and reality, but to ditch the whole lot.
Given the all-pervading, all-consuming ‘culture wars’ raging in media and politics, it is worthwhile considering that the dominant voice of the contemporary Left is not leftist at all. It seems leftist, certainly. It claims to be against the political Right. It repeats vehement rejections of capitalism – whilst taking corporate money – and the various institutions it identifies with capitalism – racism, patriarchy, and whatever other oppression is on offer. I have myself argued for the link between climate crisis and the capital system. I have also argued for an institutional and systemic analysis, seeing the crisis-tendencies and contradictory dynamics of the capital system in a holistic way. Hence I take an interest in claims of institutional and systemic ‘isms’ of any description. Because the cack-handed and generalised way in which these critiques are being employed totally undercuts the legitimacy of such analysis (and, as a result, damages the cogency of my own approach – I have always been careful to address character formation, the virtues, and personal moral effort and responsibility alongside institutional and systemic analysis).
Having written at length on Marx and socialism, conservatives and liberals would have no trouble at all in identifying me as leftist. Writing on workers’ control, industrial democracy, commune republicanism, and ‘the proletariat,’ I may well be living in a political fantasy land of the past. I do more than this, though, and have always blended the case for socialism with an older tradition in ethics, politics, and philosophy, going back to Plato and Aristotle and taking in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I affirm the twin poles of Athens and Jerusalem, then, reason and faith. Remove one pole and the other will fall. Hence my view of ‘rational freedom’ premises the case for socialism on transcendent standards of truth and justice. That’s not how Marx argued the case. My view is that to make his normative commitments good, Marx requires a substantive ontology of the good. Marx writes this into history, rendering it arbitrary. What Marx is trying to do is mediate the perceived gap between transcendent standards and social reality. Marx is seeking the realisation of philosophical ideals of freedom and unity by way of social practice. He understands that these ideals exist only in determinate social relations. He is right on this. Where he is wrong is in his historicism. You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too: once it is gone it is gone for good, and all that it left are arbitrary, constructed standards. And that is where the contemporary Left are. It has dispensed with any standards other than the ones that are constructed. Why we should construct this set of standards rather than another, choose one against another, we cannot tell, given the absence of foundations. That leaves us adrift in a sophist world of power. Whatever else that world is, it isn’t Left – the grounds for one’s particular normative commitments – democracy, freedom, equality – don’t exist, these are merely personal preferences of no more validity than the preferences of others.
I shall take a twin-track approach to the question, the first negative, the second positive. I shall examine the tendencies to separation and extreme individuation at work in contemporary culture first before moving on to identify the yearning for commonality it is possible to discern in current discontents. That yearning is being misdirected and is therefore misfiring, taking a surrogate form that, in being so divisive, serves only to deny commonality. This is apparent in the way that the strong assertion of rights as claims against society and the public realm is accompanied by the assertion of identity, which can be interpreted as a claim to be part of a community. The question is whether identity in those terms really is a community and a movement. Douglas Murray is disparaging, demanding to know, as a gay man, where this ‘gay community’ is. All that there is is a number of dominant voices claiming to speak for all people who share that identity. People with an agenda, then. Such is politics – minorities claiming the support of majorities, particular claims being advanced as being in the general interest. The same applies to the other communities whose existence is being asserted. It is a false and ideological claim, as revealed by the vitriol and hatred poured out against those who share the identity but reject the ideology. The racist terms of ‘coconut’ and ‘uncle Tom’ have been hurled against people of colour who dare to call out the tendentious nonsense peddled by certain anti-racist groups. There are countless examples in all areas of the culture wars. The abuse hurled against J.K. Rowling utterly betrays any longing for connection and belonging at work in identity politics. Divisive and downright nasty. Nevertheless, at the less toxic end, it is still possible to detect behind this surrogacy a real yearning for meaning and belonging, a search for the reality of a communal experience that is denied in modern society. Rather than simply oppose identity politics, it is more profitable to try to transfigure and redeem its healing potentials. That is nothing less than difficult. I shall address this aspect in the second part.
To take the first aspect first. We need to guard against radical demolition crews. Such things are parasitic on the public realm it purports to oppose, making claims against it on the presumption that it will continue to exist and function as a public realm. That continuation can no longer be taken for granted. That leaves us with activists engaged in a permanent revolution rather than forming themselves as a citizen body capable of constituting a viable public in their own right. The results will be wholly destructive.
Young persons have always been a source of controversial ideas and ill thought out rejections of the status quo and ‘the establishment,’ taking it for granted that said establishment – like their parents – will always be around to rein their destruction and disorder in, or bail them out when they go too far. In time, they lose that degree of autonomy once allowed them to indulge their rebellion, and instead grow into a mature freedom which proceeds by way of responsibility through relations to others. The problem today is that we live in what Benjamin Barber called a culture of ‘infantilism,’ one governed by image and sound-bite at a distance from reality. (Barber Consumed 2007), an ethos that ‘generates a set of habits, preferences, and attitudes that encourage and legitimate childishness.’ Barber notes the connection with capitalism, arguing that infantilism ‘serves capitalist consumerism directly by nurturing a culture of impetuous consumption necessary to selling puerile goods in a developed world that has few genuine needs’ (2007: 81). ‘Infantilization aims at inducing puerility in adults,’ he writes, giving a clear indication of the extent to which this infantilism would, in short time, come to consume the political and cultural opposition to capitalism, capitalism creating an opposition that is shaped in its own self-aggrandizing image. Instead of a citizen democracy committed to building and sustaining a public community, we come to be confronted by a consumer democracy. There are three archetypal dualisms which capture the ethos of infantilism, argues Barber: easy over hard, simple over complex, fast over slow. Such infantilism defines the libertarian freedom which dominates the age – a conception which identifies freedom with individual private choice of the good, in subordination to the immediacy of sensuous desire. Barber proceeds to make the case for what I have, in my own work, designated as ‘rational freedom.’ He distinguishes between the ‘anarchic spirit of liberation’ expressed by children and ‘adult autonomy.’ ‘The absence of such anarchic liberty need not be … adult servitude or what the philosophers call heteronomy (being morally ruled by others), but can be moral autonomy—the use of freedom to choose the purposeful and the good. This is the kind of disciplined liberty Kant and Rousseau associate with free moral willing. Unlike childish license, adult moral autonomy is neither anarchic nor authoritarian but both purposive and common… It was this foundation that Rousseau suggested created the conditions for democratic self-rule.’ (Barber 2007). It’s called growing up.
Instead of a habitus in which the virtues can be known, acquired, and exercised, we have a media and education system that is a new free space at a distance from reality and responsibility, a space which nurtures childish autonomy and anarchy, a space in which irresponsible ideas can be propagated, disseminated, and reproduced, a new margin at a remove from the world, inhabited by perpetual adolescents engaged in permanent revolution against capitalism, the patriarchy and whatever else is the monster of the month. The irony is that it is the resources generated by capitalism that pays for it all and sustains it all.
The authorities are not merely unwilling to resist, they are incapable, having been rendered spineless and powerless by their own culpability in the privatisation of life. The economic libertarians have raised a generation in their image, individuals for whom particular, private, goods – their own - trump the collective good. An emasculated and overwhelmed police force has given up the ghost. Authority has been neutralised, thus rendering ‘ordinary’ people prey to any number of technocratic parasite groups and free riders. That’s the conspiracy theory. Ask who has the power and the money to deliver on these high ambitions of emancipation and salvation.
There are many auditioning for the role. It is a world in which activists outnumber citizens to a factor of a thousand, constantly making claims and drawing cheques on the public realm whilst doing precisely nothing to constitute and sustain publicity themselves. And they drown each other out in the noise. All that is left is power and resources and their capture, organisation, and deployment. As ever. As for the groups themselves, they cancel themselves out. There was a phrase I used to hear on the building sites, ‘white noise.’ If we were drilling or bulldozing and performing several other noisy activities at the same time, the sound would blur and become indistinct. This was ‘white noise,’ something so loud and monotone it would become impossible to pick distinct sounds out, even calls from work colleagues to stop making a racket. What is left of the public realm is in this situation now. Dear Greta can call ‘emergency’ all she likes, but when so many are claiming victimhood status and shouting for immediate redress amidst outrage and offense, she won’t be heard. Just join the queue and shout louder from the back.
As an introvert and contemplative by nature, I’m interested to know what happens to people like me ‘in a world that won’t stop talking.’ In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain writes of ‘colossal waste of talent, energy, and happiness’ which results from the domination of the extrovert voice. (2012). The problem isn’t that the world is endlessly talking, it is that it is shouting, diverse groups without a common language shouting past one another, in the most abusive terms. It is a betrayal of the unifying social potential of language. Maybe I have spent too much time reading over the years, but it is apparent to me that in saying so much so loudly so continuously, the present culture is saying precious little of any real substance and worth.
A quarter of a century ago I sought to buttress radical politics by firming up the transcendent standards its normative commitments implied, as against conventionalism and constructivism. Arguing for ‘rational freedom,’ I warned of the dangers of seeing the world as endlessly fluid, malleable, and manipulable. In such a world standards would become arbitrary, inviting the imposition of projections and fantasies by way of force. I noted the paradox that many who argued this way did so whilst embracing normative commitments that a) were leftist and b) required the very foundations they were determined to kick away. Many were not leftist, or only vaguely so. Many were explicitly anti-socialist and anti-marxist, however much they sought to cover their tracks with the prefix ‘post.’ Does it matter? Only if you think the values advanced by the Left historically matter. Conservatives will write the entire world off as deluded and dangerous, repeating the old trope that the revolution always eats its own children. My response to that charge is that it very probably is true in this instance, except that the revolution here is the neoliberal revolution that sought to privatise the common good, and is now being ‘consumed’ by its own children in the culture wars. Libertarians of the right and libertarians of the left now stand opposed to one another, destroying what is left of the common ground as they fight it out between them. And neither side are what they seem – the right are not conservatives, but free marketeers who disdain every conservative value with respect to common identity; the left are not socialists, but ethical and cultural relativists who seek to destroy every form of collective identity and good that stands in the way of their self-created and constructed gods.
And it matters, too, for sheer academic integrity and accuracy. I worked hard to distinguish the Left and its commitment to reason, democracy, solidarity, and freedom from these cultural libertarians. I identified their destructive, nihilistic potentials from the first. Unable to ground any normative claims they retained, their politics as culture would plunge us into a world of arbitrary standards, with the result that power would come to prevail over principle. Critics are now locating the culture wars in Marxism and Gramsci and Critical Theory. Although this contains an element of truth, it is far too simple. Certainly, Western Marxism did distance itself from the working class in its turn to culture from socio-economic reality. In truth, it has been known since Kautsky and Lenin that the working class was not as it was portrayed in Marxist theory. Hence the Kautsky-Lenin thesis that socialism is something introduced into the working class ‘from the outside’ by intellectuals. That is a complete inversion of Marx’s thesis, for whom the socialist consciousness is generated from within the social position of the working class and its struggles within exploitative relations. Left to their own devices, argued Kautsky-Lenin, the working class can achieve only a ‘trade union consciousness,’ an economism that confines it within the capitalist terrain. That thesis completely denies the possession of epistemological and structural capacity on the part of the working class to see through and break through capitalist relations. And, maybe, the working class can see very clearly its social and economic interests and prefers to remain within the confines of capitalism and the degree of materialist affluence it generates, rather than embrace the vagaries of a socialist future. More of the same is not much of a utopia after all. The working class have been losing faith in the revolution for a long time, if they ever had any in the first place. A generation or two on, and it became clear that the vanguardism that Lenin proposed to bridge the gap doesn’t work either. The working class remained defiantly unrevolutionary. Enter Gramsci and, later, the Frankfurt School, who argued for the importance of culture in preparing the ground for a change; social transformation would come by way of a change of consciousness. Stated thus, there is little that is controversial here, merely a recognition of the need to cultivate the moral and intellectual virtues and form character within modes of conduct. It’s an old truth. Gramsci was brought up in a strict Catholic country. He knew the Catholic social ethic, he knew Aquinas, and he knew the importance placed on education and enculturation in that tradition and sought to bring it over to socialism. He was right in his observations here. Where he was wrong is in appropriating the virtue tradition and pressing it into service for narrow political ends. What is controversial is the cynical, calculating, and manipulative approach to culture and ethics, seeking to engineer the revolution by the manipulation of morals and motives.
The emphasis on cultivating the virtues and training people in the right habits is a pretty conservative theme, I would argue, and the right one. It is an entirely valid idea when defined as the ancient idea of paideia, the raising of citizen members willing and able to undertake the responsibilities of living in the polis community. The greater the socialisation and internalisation of norms and values on the part of citizens, the less the need for external imposition and engineering to attain political ends. Tocqueville emphasised the need to cultivate ‘habits of the heart.’ The problem comes when the language of virtue ethics is translated into the language of class politics – something is lost and perverted when virtue, conduct, and character are instrumentalised, politicized, and weaponised.
That manipulative approach is also anti-democratic, seeing people as mere clay to be moulded in accordance with pre-determined standards. Gramsci retained a close connection with the working class, as with his involvement with the Factory Councils movement. The Frankfurt School lost that connection. Culture and class politics parted company. In this respect, cultural Marxism was born of political defeat and an inveterate class pessimism; it is the final acceptance that the working class were not, are not, and can never be the revolutionary class subject who are willing and able to deliver socialism. When ‘false consciousness’ persists for so long, it clearly expresses a genuine consciousness, one that departs from revolutionary theory. Sophisticated theories were elaborated as to why the working class was irredeemably brain washed into remaining compliantly servile cogs in the capitalist machine. Actual members of the working class would simply say that, after a century or more of being impoverished, a decent standard of living, consumer durables and the odd foreign holiday was worth far more than the vague promises of the socialist future, particularly when set against the real repressions of the Communist present.
The point I want to establish here, though, is that, whatever the parting of company between class and culture in the work of the Frankfurt theorists, that work retained foundations in reason and universality that still identified it as leftist, even socialist, in a way that is qualitatively different from the various ‘post’ marxisms and modernisms that exploded in the 1990s. It is the latter who are the real culprits here, and I fought tooth and nail against them in the 1990s, exposing their ruinous theories and baneful influence in that decade.
I wish to revisit that work from the 1990s, selecting some passages to comment on, before coming back to the present. I have selected at random, because the work I published here is over 1200 pages long and I don’t have time to read through. I am certain that other passages better state my criticisms of a world conceived as endlessly fluid and malleable – and people as endlessly manipulable.
Quotes from
I pick up on the repeated assertion that ‘there is no necessary relation’ between class and political/ideological position. That assertion delivers us to a world of pure ideological self-creation apart from socio-economic reality. It is a world without foundations.
‘To be blunt, the claim that relations can have no significance other than what human beings fashion politically and discursively is equivalent to writing a blank cheque for the bureaucrats of knowledge and politics. To explain, if relations do not exist independently of discourse and if there are no necessary relations which connect the political and the intellectual with the social and the structural, then the world is full of open possibilities, political packages which politicians which can endlessly present and re-present at will.
I noted the linguistic turn over against reality and the inflation of discourse which follows:
‘A total nihilism, unqualified chaos of factors and types - discourses, yes, but also other things of an inexhaustible, ineffable diversity - presumably follows. One may hope, however, to be spared this last deconstructive step. No matter what theoretical form it might take, it would be, in practical, political terms, pointless.’
Such ‘indeterminacy .. yields the unfounded - arbitrary - choice of more or less whatever politics you want’ (Geras 1990:115).
Whilst such thinking may seem harmless enough in the academy, conferring a pseudo-intellectual sophistication in the ability to produce convoluted sentences based on Saussurean semiotics and Lacanian gibberish – whilst at the same time arguing for democracy and denouncing Marxism for its privileging of the class subject – it has practical consequences when it starts to pervade culture and politics. The arbitrary choice of whatever political package the new self-created, self-authorizing political subjects want entails also indoctrination, imposition, and coercion. There is no other way for such arbitrary positions to be advanced.
Something I was concerned to identify in these developments was a) inconsistencies in their leftist credentials, to the extent that normative claims were being advanced at the same time that the foundations supporting them were being ‘deconstructed’; and b) the explicitly anti-marxist and anti-socialist character – there was an outright rejection of socio-economic issues associated with class in favour of culture and plural identity. Sound familiar? It should. Here are the origins of the present culture wars. I warned:
‘the upshot would be a disastrously eclectic, opportunistic politics, which simply drew into its project whatever social groups seamed currently most amenable to it.’
This rather understates the problem. Being an indurated socialist, I could still only countenance the existence of human collectivities as being in some way ‘social’ and ‘real,’ rather than constructed fantasies, even though that is precisely where arbitrariness with respect to reality leads.
This ‘post’ modern/Marxist mode of thought didn’t resolve the problems it claimed to identify – economism – merely inverted them to give us the same determinism in new form:
‘Like all reactions it has gone from one extreme to the other, reproducing the same problem in inverted form. Where once economics determined all, now ideology and politics are all determining.’
For ‘ideology’ here read discourse, language, self-created identity detached from socio-economic reality and any other kind of ‘essential’ reality for that matter.
This constant assertion of there being no necessary relation has become the occasion for asserting that politics and ideology truly determine all that there is. The material world, it appears, does not exist until it is defined into existence; it is clay in the hands of the politicians and the intellectuals
With the explicit repudiation of essentialism, human nature was declared non-existent in terms of potentials to be actualised, merely plastic, pliable stuff, clay to be moulded or self-moulded. In such a world, you could be whatever you want to be, or shaped to be whatever other self-appointed authorities thought you ought to be:
One may characterise the position as Nietzschean, to the extent that there is no given order to the world, only ineffable chaos, and no meaning to the world other than what human beings, arbitrarily, determine to construct.
I subjected the linguistic turn to detailed critical analysis, and found it empty and arbitrary, with distinctly authoritarian implications:
Language does not reflect reality but shapes it conceptually. No opinion can be given here as to what precisely is being shaped conceptually. Reality lacks any causal or structural significance in itself independently of the signifying activity of human beings. Reality is thus an unknown before human beings constitute it through their discursive activity.
We thus plummet into a world divorced from objective reality, truth, and standards in:
this scepticism as regards reality and its causal processes and hierarchies leads to absurdity. The impression given - indeed the only position that is logical on the premises asserted – is that discursive activity creates reality ex nihilo. For reality is not some unknown x before being signified into existence. Rather, human beings signify the world through being able to comprehend the distinctions that exist in reality.
Issues of ontology and epistemology may interest philosophers and intellectual charlatans alike, but scarcely reasoned nihilisms here become debilitating and positively dangerous when entering the public realm via culture.
I use the word ‘charlatan’ here in acknowledgement of Noam Chomsky, a man of the Left who is steeped in linguistics. He openly identifies Lacan as a charlatan, condemning all those who use ‘fancy words’ that mean nothing when they are ‘decoded.’ If they ever come to be decoded. Chomsky asks that such theorists present the substance of their thought clearly so as to make it comprehensible and criticisable. It never happens. I read the work of Sokal and Bricmont, natural scientists who are of the Left in politics. When asked why he wrote the book Intellectual Impostures, Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science (1998), he declared that he failed to see what the work of Irrigaray, Lacan et al offered to working people in their struggle against oppression, only that their obfuscation and denigration of standards of truth would aid the oppressor. Back in 1999, Raymond Tallis asked ‘Sokal and Bricmont: Is This the Beginning of the End of the Dark Ages in the Humanities?’ (Tallis, Raymond.PN Review; Manchester Vol. 25, Iss. 6, (Jul 1, 1999): 35.) Sadly not. Worse was to come. I was told in 1999 that this ‘post’ whatever crowd were ‘up a creek without a paddle.’ Knowing that this mode of thought leads nowhere made me complacent, so I stopped reading it and criticising it. Frankly, 1200 pages in 1997 is 1100 pages ought to have been enough. Unfortunately, it strengthened its grip in the academy, rendered the humanities inhuman with its incomprehensible jargon, and then, through appallingly miseducated and outrageously overcharged students, it spilled into culture and society. Tallis writes: ‘For many years, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva et al got away with murder, confident that their readers would have only the slightest acquaintance with the areas of knowledge they expropriated to prop up their ideas and their reputation for scholarship, indeed for omniscience.’ (https://search.proquest.com/openview/e94a3a91e4d5ce67fb31a40bb4835e83/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1817849
Sokal and Bricmont obliterated their stupidities. But not only is this wretched mode of thought still standing, it is on the front foot, deconstructing and dissolving everything that stands in its way. Such thinking is acidic, first poisoning and then destroying all it infects. It was the political implications that concerned me, bringing about a world of arbitrary standards and values in the control of self-appointed authorities:
The claim that relations can have no significance other than what human beings fashion politically and discursively is equivalent to writing a blank cheque for the bureaucrats of knowledge and politics. To explain, if relations do not exist independently of discourse and if there are no necessary relations which connect the political and the intellectual with the social and the structural, then the world is full of open possibilities, political packages which politicians which can endlessly present and re-present at will.
And bureaucrats of the soul, I would now add, in recognition of the extent to which this mode of thought constitutes not merely a new religion but an inverted and perverted one. It is full of original sin – whiteness, maleness, straightness – and the need to atone or be damned to eternal fire, or constant haranguing by monomaniacal whiny brats, which is much worse. God is not here. Completely absence is the sense of the transcendent, completely lacking is genuine contrition, mercy, and forgiveness. It is an unforgiving world, full of punishment, vengeance, and damnation. The dead giveaway here is the very public mode of shame, begging forgiveness for the past sins of general others, entire nations and civilisations deemed racist and genocidal. Shame is the most difficult, most humiliating, most personal feeling, an act that is performed in private. That these people do it in public, and, significantly, express it on behalf of others, deemed guilty in their absence, gives the entire game away – this is not shame at all, this is pride, spectacle, and show, exhibiting others in order to signal one’s own virtue and one’s own superiority. We, taking the collective guilt of others on our shoulders, are so much better people than those who don’t. This is abominable, cynical, and thoroughly cynical.
I look for standards and parameters when it comes to truth claims:
'What is it that constrains our discursive constructions?' asks Eagleton; (1991:205). What is it in social relations and material reality that makes some discourses more socially and politically relevant than others? What is it that makes the working class tend to socialism in their politics and the ruling class defend the ideological perspectives of the capital system? On Hirst and Hindess' premises it cannot be reality given that this reality is simply the product of discursive activity. This being the case, 'it might appear that we are free, in some voluntarist fantasy, to weave any network of relations which strikes our fancy' (Eagleton 1991:205).
And there they are today, weaving invisible threads away to produce one big nothing, like platting fog to obfuscate and give the impression of depth where there is nothing but paucity of thought. All that there is is ‘a critique of philosophical realism, with no logical defence against its reduction to absurd conclusions.’ A quarter of a century on from these criticisms, we have the absurdity running rife through culture and politics.
What concerns me is the extent to which this mode of thinking undermines the Left in politics. That was my concern back in the 1990s:
If language is not the passive reflection of a given reality but is active in constituting that reality, then the Marxist position is untenable.
This is important to note given the extent to which conservative critics are identifying these current cultural warriors as socialist and leftist. They are not, and the extent to which they are identified as leftist only serves to underline the degeneration and dissolution of the Left. Their mode of thought totally undercuts the realism, rationalism, and universalism which is central to leftist values and political commitments. They are no more leftist than ‘social justice warriors’ and ‘virtue signallers’ are truly representative of the values of justice and virtue. Justice and virtue will survive being instrumentalised and weaponised in the service of political agendas. I’m not sure the Left will.
And here we come to the origins of such thinking: the liberalism and bourgeois modes of thought that the Left was supposed to uproot. The liberal ontology is characterised by the separation of the individual and the social, and is premised on the pre-social discrete individual who contracts into the society of others in order to defend and advance self-interest, contracting out whenever that interest isn’t served. That leads to a whole series of dualisms and separations. I thus noted the connection with the linguistic and cultural turn:
In effect, they opt for the autonomy of theory and politics, an autonomy which characterises bourgeois thought. So called 'objective' interests, then, are made the product of political and ideological discourse.
There are serious problems at the level of ethics and politics with respect to this autonomy of discourse and culture:
But, given the denial of necessary relations, it becomes hard to identify what politics is about or, from a slightly different angle, it frees politics from having to relate to socio-economic conditions. And it is this latter quality that is most attractive to those who wish to escape the revolutionary political implications of asserting that social reality is essentially something and something essentially, that class location leads to a certain kind of politics. This plays into the hands of politicians selling any old package.
I come to the authoritarian and manipulative potentials of post-modernism and post-marxism (basically, intellectual anti-socialism and anti-marxism, born of the time when Marxist academics discovered that they were paid members of the academy first and Marxist not at all):
The basic paradox at the heart of post-marxism is quite apparent here. Rejecting Marxism for its epistemological and political authoritarianism, post-marxism nevertheless adopts a particularly assertive and arrogant relationship to social agents. Indeed it treats social agents as a passive piece of clay to be moulded any way whatsoever according to the predilections of the hegemonisers. Thus, in relation to the working class and socialism, it seems perfectly elitist and authoritarian to argue that, for instance, once the workers are hegemonised, coopted into a wider political movement, their previous identities, already unrecognised, are now completely submerged within the hegemonic process. Whatever human beings were before being hegemonised bears absolutely no relation to what they have become by being hegemonised.
Basically, this refers to the endless moulding and manipulation of human beings as pieces of clay in the hands of self-appointed potters, the Guardian-manipulators who hold all standards and their determination and interpretation in their hands.
Laclau and Mouffe argue that 'hegemony supposes the construction of the very identity of [the] social agents [being hegemonised] (1985:58). Which begs the question of such what is being constructed. It doesn't exist before being hegemonised. Laclau and Mouffe's position commits them to having to argue that the social agents being hegemonised do not exist at all independently of the process of hegemonisation which constructs them, which is an argument as circular as the rationalist fallacy condemned by Hindess and Hirst. Or they must argue that these social agents actually do exist prior to the process of being hegemonised, which implies that their hegemony constructing the identity of these social agents is quite contrary to their initial social identity, in which case one needs to know why these agents should acquiesce as they are coopted into the hegemonic project.
Spend any length of time in this company and you will go mad, or give in and join them. This verbiage seems designed to destroy the standards of rational thought. I remember that I was glad to be able to leave this world behind and move on to serious, substantive, and properly critical thought. This stuff rotted the mind. It was all part of my PhD programme. I was told that I had to earn my spurs by criticising key literature in the field. It made me almost regret deciding to enter research. I spent a long time examining this stuff. I felt it to be a waste of time. From the moment I read it I thought it fake, lacking quality, packed with meaningless verbiage. As I read I kept thinking to myself: I left decent money and decent prospects on the building site to read this dreck? And it is dreck. I identified it as dreck from the first. I could see why people who favour the natural sciences would come to hold the social sciences and humanities in contempt. I felt disgusted with myself for even taking time to read and reason in this area; this mode of non-thought is the destruction of reason. I thought these people an abomination then and everything that has happened since has confirmed that view. When it leaves the academy and enters the culture it becomes destructive of society and its institutions and relations.
Laclau and Mouffe, then, are very keen in condemning Marxism for its authoritarianism. And yet their own work is an explicit justification of an hegemonic project that is committed to the construction of the identity of social agents, thus denying those agents their own social identity independent of the hegemonic project and their own capacity to define their own identity. The dangers of this hegemonic project ought to be clear. Whoever leads the hegemonic project claims the right to determine the identities of social agents, moulding them and manipulating them according to principles of political rationality.
This is an interesting passage for the way it points to the dual character of ‘post’ modern modes of thought. In one aspect it is libertarian, emphasising in a most narcissistic way the right of agents to create their own identities; in another it is authoritarian, insisting that those self-created identities be accepted by society at large, on pain of persecution for heresy.
The question of essentialism is one that is particularly interesting to me, having argued for the cogency of an essentialist metaphysics in a number of works over the years.
Simply put, essentialism holds that a thing is essentially something and something essentially, possessing healthy potentials that contain lines of development that are to be actualised for that thing to become what it is. It’s a mode of thought that goes back to Aristotle, and I argue that it runs throughout Marx. In a line, when Marx criticises the capital system as a dehumanisation, he is able to do so only because he has a standard of the human good in mind. That means that he has some idea of what the truly human society is, a realised society of realised individuals. Marx may be right or wrong here – I say he is right – but the important point is that such thinking is based on a standard of account and evaluation whose existence ‘post’ modes of cultural theory deny. That that vision of the ideal polity is present in Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Habermas. Remove the standard, and the vision of the truly human society can no longer be sustained. These ‘post’ modernist thinkers remove the standard. I was always interested in the criticism from ‘post’ thinkers that there was a ‘hidden God’ in the work of Rousseau, Marx et al. There is, in the sense of containing certain metaphysical assumptions. I have since come to the conclusion that the yearning for universality, community, and rationality is really an echo of the old search for reunion with God. Marx et al thought they could supplant God with Humanity and Reason. They were wrong:
Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York, Vintage, 1973)
Foucault himself lacks a philosophical anthropology and eschews the normative with respect to human nature. Without an ontology yielding a substantive notion of the good, we lose the possibility of an overarching and authoritative moral framework by which to order, guide, and orient society. In this metaphysical void, bereft of transcendent standards, justice becomes merely conventional, the result of a sophist power-play in time and place. Hence all the competing voices which get louder and louder the more the game goes nowhere. As Roger Scruton writes:
‘Foucault's approach reduces culture to a power-game, and scholarship to a kind of refereeing in the endless "struggle" between oppressed and oppressing groups. The shift of emphasis from the content of an utterance to the power that speaks through it leads to a new kind of scholarship, which bypasses entirely questions of truth and rationality, and can even reject those questions as themselves ideological.’
Scruton, Roger. 2012. The great swindle: From pickled sharks to compositions in silence, fake ideas and fake emotions have elbowed out truth and beauty Aeon
It’s a swindle, for sure. And now, in large parts of the Academy, even this anaemic version of scholarship has been lost. Putting the point bluntly, students are being taught what to think, not how to think. False emotions and false claims to truth have supplanted the true, the good, and the beautiful. We will raise a generation of cretins this way. But it is too easy to blame ‘woke.’ The problem lies further back. Let’s be clear: the attempts to reconstitute universality based on a self-legislation reason failed and curved in on itself as subjectivism, narcissism, and solipsism. Lose God and the transcendent, and humanity follows in due course. Such thinkers are not leftist and are not presenting us with a new religion – they are expressing a frustrated yearning for meaning and belonging and peddling surrogates in the absence of the substance of true socialism and true religion. The trick is to reclaim the yearning from out of the teeth of the fakeness and surrogacy.
With regards to the critique of essentialism, these thinkers are inept, relentless and repetitively targeting a caricature of essentialism as dealing with timeless and fixed entities, a view that makes a nonsense of Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx and myriad other essentialists. I could happily carry on abusing the ignoramuses of this new left that isn’t left and new religion that isn’t true religion, but need to move on. So I shall resort to the time-honoured device of the lazy and time-pressed, and quote: ‘Anti-essentialism is largely the product of philosophical amateurism and ignorance.’ (Eagleton After Theory 2003 ch 5). Indeed. Except that it isn’t ignorance, it is flat out bigotry allied to stupidity, the product of the kind of people who learned the word ‘objectification’ from Hegel and nothing else.
But I shall be lenient – I am the liberal one, after all – and accept that it may just be ‘amateurism and ignorance.’ Either way, it is now spewing forth from academia and pouring into culture, politics, media, and society. And the remarkable thing is that it is the stupid, uneducated, and unenlightened ‘ordinary’ folk who spot its fakeness immediately and reject it, and don’t spend 1200 pages doing so. The Red Walls are falling all over the UK, the working class are off.
And that brings us to where we are today, a world in which activists continuously mug the public realm, advance rights as private claims against others, and ratchet up particular claims against the public realm. Such endless activism does nothing to constitute public community. Instead, it saps the energy of the public realm, exhausts its resources. The public realm is treated as a parental bank for the permanent children to keep drawing cheques on, with nothing being put back in. Sooner or later there will be nothing left in the account. Such activists far outnumber citizens who turn up and put a public shift in. Instead there is this war of attrition between activists and public officials, with all eyes focused on public resources and their redistribution. Victory goes to the loudest voice and strongest arm.
It may seem left, particularly with respect to the demands for equality or, more so, equity. But note how ‘equality and diversity’ are employed aggressively to silence and suppress those many diverse others who may disagree, or simply not agree in their persistence in cleaving to ‘their’ truth and goodness. Given the way that election results consistently go against left of centre parties, those diverse others seem to be most people. We are not talking mass movements and parties commanding popular support here but vanguards, ‘tiny majorities’ out to bully and coerce the public in its favour. This is not democracy at work, the expression of the public voice, but engineering. People may be inclined to concede in order to find peace. That’s a mistake. In the disagreeable world these people bring about, victory goes only to those who make themselves so disagreeable as to force people to give in. The lesson is: stand firm, don’t budge, and never apologise. Throw such people a bone and they will keep coming back until they have made a carcass of you and consumed every bone.
What we are witnessing is not a genuine Left politics, but a Left politics in its defeat leaving us mired in a liberalism in its decadent phase. Liberalism is an honourable tradition, but is fundamentally flawed in being based on a false ontology. Liberalism separates two essential aspects of the same human nature, individuality and sociality, proceeding from the figure of the discrete, pre-social individual who contracts in and out of society according to the protection and promotion of self-interest. Such an individual is congenitally sceptical, even hostile, towards all forms of collective endeavour, shared moral language, common identity, and common good. What saved liberalism in the past was its metaphysical assumptions. In the early stages there was a recognition that natural rights are founded in natural law. Liberalism then was what Rawls called a comprehensive doctrine, founded in notions of human nature, sociality, and rationality as well as a belief in God. I’m generalising wildly here, of course, in an attempt to avoid writing a book. This is not the view of Hobbes, for instance, who discarded such metaphysics and focused narrowly on the desire for pleasure and aversion to pain, individual drives which unchecked would bring about the ‘war of all against all.’ Hobbes thus argued for the imposition of order by way of the coercive state, the warring parties agreeable to disagree in order to preserve the civic peace. Hobbes’ Leviathan was therefore a statement of political order as resting on convention. In time, liberalism came to discard the comprehensive frame for the conventional, with rights being seen as something conferred by the state. Without the metaphysical assumptions, however, an inversion takes place in which the fruits come to be mistaken for the foundations and political order comes to rest with its feet planted arbitrarily in the air. Proceeding from the fruits, without replenishing the roots, the tree withers and dies. This is precisely what is happening today. Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ is now supplanting coercive political order, with liberalism’s bifurcated character between individuality and sociality exploding as an untenable libertarianism and authoritarianism. Libertarianism and authoritarianism are twins born of the same liberal ontology and denote a liberalism that has gone to extremes in having discarded its metaphysical grounding. Remove the basis of rights as natural rights grounded in natural law, and they become purely conventional, no more than pure creations and constructions, functions of power. Simplifying, (at risk of committing an offence against logic through the fallacy of presenting just two simple options as the only ones), either transcendent standards of truth and justice exist or they don’t, and if they don’t then there is no option but to submit to power. There may be infinite varieties of options within either acceptance or submission, but there are the positions which divide the moral landscape. ‘Where there is power there is resistance,’ argued Foucault. That statement seems radical, and those resisting power certainly identify themselves as radical. But such thinking isn’t radical at all, it is a cul-de-sac that submerges us in a Hobbesian world of endless struggle. That is a sophist world in which, as Thrasymachus put it, ‘justice is the interests of the strongest.’ Without transcendent standards all that there can be is an endless cycle of power/resistance. Whilst one may choose one’s sides within this struggle, it is hard to know on what basis. In this world, principle is merely a mask for power and interests.
This is not, actually, a new phenomenon, just a perennial peril of the human condition that will never go away:
‘A prince should present the appearance of being a compassionate, trustworthy, kind, guileless, and pious ruler. Of course, actually possessing all these virtues is neither possible nor desirable. But so long as a prince appears to act virtuously, most men will believe in his virtue.’
Machiavelli, The Prince
There are plenty of little princes and princesses around today who fit that bill. And, unfortunately, there are an awful lot of men and women who are more than willing to believe them and indulge them as they mug the public realm with their gushing virtue. We don’t need Machiavelli to tell us that there is political advantage in appearing to be virtuous. We don’t need biologists to tell us that there is evolutionary advantage in appearing to be virtuous. Nasty people appearing to be nice have appeal and get their way. If that’s the struggle that people who see themselves as Left want to engage in, then they should be told that they are beaten as soon as they reduce politics and principle to such a game. Those on the side of resistance are merely seeking power themselves; win or lose, power reconstitutes itself accordingly, leaving the world crying out for justice as before.
Identity politics based upon endless plastic and pliable ‘stuff’ draws us into an irreducible, unwinnable, and pointless war of fluid and malleable identities. That game proceeds thus:
You must hear, understand, and therefore accept my truth, which is unanswerable and unarguable, an authoritarian imposition that, when challenged on reason and evidence, becomes
You can never understand my truth, but still must accept it anyway on unimpeachable authority, on pain of condemnation of being an heretical ‘ist’ or ‘ic’ of some description.
This is irreducible subjective preference on steroids, a narcissism and decadence that leads to a virulently anti-social combination of solipsism and authoritarianism.
It’s all about overthrowing the old standards and bringing down existing institutions. As to what the new standards and new institutions will be, heaven knows, something as arbitrary as passing personal whims, wishes, and, no doubt, crusades. Because the people who do this are much more motivated by what they are against – which seems to be everything – than in clarifying and working for what they are for. We know them more by the slogans and demands than by their constructive works. ‘Smash the system,’ ‘smash the patriarchy,’ basically ‘smash’ everything and everyone we don’t like. And what and who these people don’t like constitute an awfully large chunk of reality, for the simple reason that we are dealing with the projection of self-hatred upon the world. That pretty much identifies the core of this activist minority who have taken over the Left. They are completely severed from the mass of ‘ordinary’ people and flout the fact, as proof of their superior intelligence and advanced thinking. This new Left view of society is one of resentment and hatred. Everything in the past is bad, every tradition is implicated in some ‘ism’ of some description, and everyone who doesn’t agree is on the part of oppression. Instead of the hard task of institution-building, one which is based on the participation and consent of ‘ordinary’ folk, there is a constant war of attrition against existing institutions, rendering them weak and putting them on the defensive by way of impossible demands and apologies. These institutions, it is asserted, are repressive and stand in the way of liberation and therefore must be destroyed. There is no understanding that it is institutions that make society work and keep society together, and no commitment to building viable alternative institutions. What there are are the anarchistic fantasies (an embarrassment to genuine anarchists) of people who are activists first and serious community, public or otherwise, builders not at all. You see the same pattern and the same themes repeated in all of these groups, in the concern to overthrow the economy, the police, the state, the patriarchy. The more cogent among them claim to want to reorder society and its institutions – something I have consistently argued myself – but it is evident that they are not serious. They are excited only by the opposition, confrontation, and destruction. Such people will never ever establish law and order, simply destroy and then consume themselves. Their views are the plainest romanticism, involving notions of a free society of pure unmediated spontaneity once all the bad institutions are destroyed. Once more, the only parallel I can draw here is not with the Left, not the social and political Left that took society- and institution-building seriously, but with libertarianism and neo-liberalism, the Hayekian view that there is a natural order whose workings have been distorted by artificial human institutions and laws – health and safety legislation, trade unions, environmental protection etc. Remove all the bad institutions that interfere with the workings of the market – the natural exchange of human agents – and the harmony of the natural order will emerge. Of course, the economic liberals were never so stupid as to leave their natural order unprotected against predation and so proposed a system of law and authority protecting property rights. This cultural libertarianism of the left is more naïve and romantic in its belief in an unmediated spontaneity and, as such, is really liberalism in decadent form. What always happens in these situations is that authority comes to be reimposed in authoritarian form in order to deal with the ensuing chaos.
What can I say, as someone who has been on the left in politics since youth? When the left seems congenitally incapable of learning from experience, it seems reasonable to draw the conclusion that what you see – and have seen umpteen times in history – is what you get: this is the Left. In which case there is nothing for it but to move on. That’s not the whole story, of course. There are countless examples, from the Viennese socialism that was suppressed by Hitler, to social democracy in the west, to Guild socialism and so on which indicates a pragmatic bent attuned with ordinary folk. That tradition was defeated by the neoliberal reaction of the late 1970s and now we are seeing the political and cultural aftermath, an opposition that is raised in the image of the thing it opposes. Social Democracy itself morphed into a technocratic neo-liberalism in response to its political defeat, hitched a ride to globalisation and liberalisation (which in truth was a corporatisation), and in the process cut itself off from its working-class heartlands, thereby opening the door to two diametrically opposed reactions – right wing populism and cultural libertarianism. What’s left of the Left is irrevocably split between that divide. The working class, who have always been socially conservative, will go conservative, and the ‘progressives,’ who have always been about themselves, will take liberalism to the libertarian extreme.
A word of warning to the romantic who think libertarianism is the way to liberty – it isn’t, it leads to the opposite. Michael Lind analysed the 195 countries in the world today, and found not one to be libertarian. For the reason that libertarian, for all that it works in fantasy, never works in practice:
If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn't at least one country have tried it? Wouldn't there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?
Michael Lind, (June 4, 2013.). "The Question Libertarians Just Can't Answer." Salon.
Actually, libertarianism has been tried, and found always ends in chaos. It’s not an option for a complex society of any scale. But let’s, for the sake of argument, go along with this libertarian idea that the past is bad and all current institutions emerging from it are repressive and stand in the way of liberty. Take a look at the people who argue this; listen to the way they conduct themselves and express themselves; see how they relate to others; note the abusive manner, the hatred, the foul-language, the destruction of property, the violence inflicted on others – if that is what liberation amounts to, then ask whether you want this for yourself, your family, your friends, your society. These are the liberated, people yelling about repression, liberation, and politics. When everything is politicised, then every relation and every exchange between people becomes a matter of argument and disagreement. Do these people seem happy in themselves? Does it look like they are in a good place? Do they sound as though they are flourishing in relation to the world? Do they sound as though they have the answers, are living right, have got it all together? Talk about hard questions. This is not what happiness and groundedness looks and sounds like. The problem is that there are people out there, less strident, more conventional, liberal-leaning, who will passively submit to this warped view of reality and start to buy into the notion that the past is all bad and institutions are all repressive, and cultural libertarianism is really liberating. How can they not resist when they are being inundated with it on a daily basis via a public hygiene movement, through mainstream media, the edutainment industry (the bombardment of film and TV), by academia, by the school system, big tech, the corporations, the lot.
And it is ridiculous. Entertainment is no longer entertainment, it is edutainment; education is no education, it is a miseducation. TV and film have agendas, history is being rewritten to fit a narrative. People have spotted it, so I shan’t waste time and words on it. It’s so blatant as to be impossible not to spot.
Virtue signalling is not true virtue, merely pride and arrogant in asserting political positions over against others. This is people, in a world that made a virtue of trampling down moral standards and leaving individuals free to choose the good as they see fit, making a point that they are good and that their good is the true good, better than everyone else’s. It is people letting others know how good they are, and demanding recognition of their goodness. But it is more. It is some people putting other people down, claiming they are better than others, policing others, picking others up on their language and behaviour, demanding repentance and compliance, but offering no redemption, merely eternal damnation. That’s what cancelling is, sending people to social Hell without hope of redemption. This is some people cancelling others for the slightest thing they did or said many years earlier, posing as being perfect in themselves by flagging up the imperfections of others. This is what happens in a post-religious society. The language and functions of religion return in bastardized and perverted form, used to repress rather than redeem. But at least the truth is out. There can never be a post-religious society. Turf religion out through the front door, and it will return through an open window round the back. Or it will be smuggled through the back door by people who understand, in incoherent form, that there can never be a society beyond good and bad. It’s cartoon and caricature, of course. Such people use and abuse moral terms to make themselves look better than others and look better than they really are. The effects of this abuse of religion are utterly pernicious. If there is no redemption then there is no value in contrition – the perverts of the fake religion demand repentance, only to send those confessing their sins straight to Hell. Hence people are now issuing the advice to never apologize. In the religious idiom that means never confess, never learn from mistakes, never change your behaviour. And don’t expect mercy and forgiveness, for there will be none forthcoming, only the damnation of cancellation. It is utterly destructive of empathy in human relations, a destruction of ethical relations. It is just people hating on others to make themselves look better than they are.
It is, of course, best to ignore such people and carry on. They want to draw people into the war of attrition, they are out to incite reaction and pull numbers into the swamp. They thrive on the attention. Once in those cycles, there is no way out. All that is achieved is that the audience for this nonsense is expanded. What can’t be ignored is the way that this tiny minority are infiltrating society and its culture and institutions, leading to the domination of ‘tiny majorities.’ What this shows is how undemocratic society has always been, with most folk easily sidelined and with no option but to go along with the new narratives.
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. The problem is that most people don’t have social and cultural power, and so are vulnerable to these ‘tiny majorities’ twisting and distorting reality and fighting it out over who gets to control who.
If you forget that most people are OK, and it is easy to get angry and end up playing the game. There is reason enough. This is the culmination of a rather skewed, unfathomable way of non-thinking on the part of people who are grounded in nothing, represent nothing and no-one, other than their own estranged, disembodied, discombobulated, liberalised minds. It’s also striking how many of them, in being so anti-establishment and anti-status quo, end up as professors in the universities. It’s balderdash, complete rot, and it will ensure the destruction of leftist politics. Sanity will return, and it will turn against the left.
First they came for our pronouns, then for schools and universities, then our history … More fool anyone who keels over. Because these people really are morons peddling nonsense of the highest order, anti-intellectual claptrap. They have nothing. That is what many who feel intimidated may not understand – these people have absolutely no substance. Give way to them and their influence will be ruinous.
The most infuriating thing is that the world is being told how to think and how to behave by people who made a virtue of ditching morality and authority as inherently repressive, people who don’t know anything and can’t comprehend anything other than the most literal view of what their prejudices tell them is at the end of their noses.
Whilst what is happening could be described as an extreme individualism, this doesn’t quite capture its character, given that it does advance, most aggressively, a collective or supra-individual form in the sense of identity.
In Rational Freedom, Transcendent Standards, and the Quest for the Good Life (2020) I describe this phenomenon as the merging of a liberal Lockean blank sheet individualism with a Darwinian collectivism (at group level, rather than species level) to produce a toxic and anti-social combination of libertarianism and authoritarianism. Instead of a genuine mediation of the individual and the socio-relational to unify the two aspects of human nature, the social dimension that is missing in liberalism comes to be supplied by an exclusive group identity to produce a sectional fracturing so deep and wide as to be beyond the endless verbiage of ‘intersectionality.’ Let’s break society apart and then claim that we have the means to put it all back together. This is a social and political cretinism born of the narcissism of lesser differences.
The result is not so much a post-modernism as a hyper-modernism in which the self-creating activities constitutive of a transgressive capitalist modernity come to be extended and intensified in the form of a full-blown social and cultural constructivism. Identities come to be conceived not as the realisation of healthy innate potentialities, as in the essentialist conception, but as self-constructions which inflate to infinity without endpoint. Seen in this light, contemporary obsession with identity can be explained by the fact that this is the ultimate space in which the individual self-realisation implicit in the original Lockean project can take place. When bounded by social reality and human nature, that self-realisation is a fantasy, and a destructive one to boot, in that it entails a drive to infinity in the context of finite resources.
The technological power of human beings to reconstruct and manipulate the natural world in order to satisfy human desires always contained the inherent potential to turn inwards and become a project concerned with transforming and constructing human nature. Turned externally against nature, that power is destructive; turned internally with respect to the human, it is similarly destructive. We are looking at a world of men and women as gods giving birth to themselves, cannibalising the natural. In Rational Freedom, Transcendent Standards, and the Quest for the Good Life, I argue for an ontology of the good to make possible substantive moral claims, establishing a unit of account to bring the world of endless invention and reinvention to heel. I may be outnumbered on this. It doesn’t make me wrong.
In Being at One (2016) I argue that ‘Lenin and Stalin expressed an extreme Lockean faith in blank sheet possibilities in their belief that the “new man” could be created just by education, propaganda and force. Such a view makes individuals mere clay in the hands of cultural and political manipulators, coming to be shaped in accordance with ends which are external to them.’ Whilst the idea that human beings are ‘wired for culture’ (Pagel 2012) seems liberatory, it is the opposite, encouraging a view of the future as a radically undetermined cultural product, unbounded by any constraints by way of nature within and nature without. It is transgressive of boundaries in the way that capitalism is transgressive. If you think that capitalism is humanity’s greatest success story, liberating the masses from economic penury, linking up the world, freeing people from being tied to land and status – the facts and figures prove it – then that is fine and dandy. But it isn’t Leftist. And it isn’t sane and balanced. The notion of culture as an endlessly creative capacity conjures up visions of a boundless future shooting so far beyond nature and human nature that they simply cease to exist. This overweening hubris blinds us to our flawed and imperfect nature and, indeed, seeks to deny and eliminate that nature. We have the freedom to become our own self-creations. As to what we shall be, or ought to be, there is nothing but whim backed by power, resources, and opportunity. Such thinking rejects essentialism as a repressive curtailment of otherness and difference. This view is mistaken, tragically so. Far from being repressive, the idea of an innate or essential nature is humanity’s best defence against all kinds of external manipulation, whatever its motivations. Without a residue of human quality that is beyond cultural control, (as Lionel Trilling put it), we would be infinitely corruptible beings, clay forever in the hands of self-appointing, self-validating political and cultural elites. An essentialist anthropology guards against possibilities for extraneous authorities, accountable to no-one but themselves, to manage and manipulate human beings in some top-down political and cultural tyranny. Some of the greatest crimes against humanity have occurred as a result of rulers who have thought that they were using power for the human betterment. The conception of an essential human nature that is our own possession, our own responsibility, is our best check against such arbitrary power. The same point applies to a tyranny that is self-imposed in the form of manipulating and creating our own identities in order to meet some ideal standard divorced from essential potentiality.
In my thesis Marx and Rational Freedom (2001), I was concerned to identify the potential for a predatory Social Darwinist surrogate sociality within Lockean blank sheet liberalism, something that in time would emerge as an anti-social sociality. Identity politics emerges in this light as an extension of the Lockean tabula rasa in connection with a Darwinism that reduces our species identity to a series of group identities. The result is a contradictory notion of a sectional and fractional libertarianism. The only sense in which this can be considered leftist is in the radical individualism which MacIntyre, in the conclusion to After Virtue, sees ‘secreted’ within Marx’s view of socialism, allied to the atheist assertion of human self-creation. Both those views, I would argue, stem from a liberalism and secular enlightenment that has discarded metaphysical assumptions rooted in God. We are looking at the latest attempt to fill the metaphysical void that opens up in the absence of God. There have been many attempts to supplant God – Culture is one of the first, along with Nature, Reason, Humanity, Science, Technology. They all drop the baton.
What we are witnessing is liberalism in the process of implosion having shed its metaphysical, indeed theistic, underpinnings. It is capital that has become the new God, capitalism the new religion. (Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism as the Religion of Modernity). That’s the inversion of true standards from where the fakery and foolery originates.
In the work from 1997 I write on ‘the coincidence of the capitalist offensive and the rise of a post-marxism or poststructuralism devaluing the working class and workers struggles.’ I thus note that ‘postmarxism and postmodernism, far from being variants of left wing thought, are actually ideological representations of the latest, “flexible” phase of capitalist accumulation (Harvey 1990:173/9), the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Jameson 1985).
The ‘leftist’ politics being advanced in these culture wars is not a genuine left at all, but fits the contours of narcissism, consumerism, and infantilism of late capitalism like a glove. This really is the cultural logic of late capitalism, as the Marxists Harvey and Jameson argued back in the 1980s and 1990s. The domination of postmodern modes of thought has been such that many have forgotten – if they were ever taught – the Marxist critique of political economy, so they mistake radical postures and aggressive anti-capitalist rhetoric for leftism. It is shallow. The comparison is with capitalism.
The narcissism, the taste for ‘difference’ and transgression, the rejection of collective modes, the extreme individualism, all of it is capitalist to the core. As Eagleton writes:
‘Old-style puritanical capitalism forbade us to enjoy ourselves, since once we had acquired a taste for the stuff we would probably never see the inside of the workplace again. Sigmund Freud held that if it were not for what he called the reality principle, we would simply lie around the place all day in various mildly scandalous states of jouissance. A more canny, consumerist kind of capitalism, however, persuades us to indulge our senses and gratify ourselves as shamelessly as possible.’
Eagleton After Theory 2004: Ch 1
Eagleton identifies the common ground shared by ‘anti-essentialists’ and advocates of capitalism in that both make a virtue of being transgressive of nature, human nature and nature nature:
‘Anti-essentialists are therefore wary of the idea of nature, just as the apologists of capitalism are. Capitalism wants men and women to be infinitely pliable and adaptable. As a system, it has a Faustian horror of fixed boundaries, of anything which offers an obstacle to the infinite accumulation of capital. If it is a thoroughly materialist system in one sense, it is a virulently anti-material one in another. Materiality is what gets in its way. It is the inert, recalcitrant stuff which puts up resistance to its grandiose schemes. Everything solid must be dissolved into air.’
Eagleton 2004: Ch 5
That’s spot on. The comparison becomes evident whenever one finds supposedly leftist parties, seemingly radical in condemning capitalist free trade for its deleterious social and ecological effects, vehemently defending free movement of people. There is a horror of boundaries and borders of all kinds, with economic libertarians demanding free trade and cultural libertarians demanding free movement of people. Those who do argue for boundaries and borders are considered to be in restraint of trade, repressive of otherness, racist and anti-people to boot. The whole terrain is schizophrenic. I cannot resist quoting Peter Hitchens here:
‘Globalisation is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become – is visibly becoming – a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic and concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.’ (Peter Hitchens).
If you don’t like Hitchens then you have an awful lot of hard questions to answer rather than avoid.
So which is it? If climate action requires restraint of free markets and free trade in respect of planetary boundaries, how does it not also imply the recognition of social and national boundaries? Likewise identity. How can environmentalists condemn the violation of nature in the one respect whilst, in cultural aspects, denying that human nature exists? If individuals are allowed to choose their own identity, since there is no human nature, why are capitalists not similarly free to transgress nature’s boundaries and impose a monetary value upon a valueless world? The entire area is full of holes and contradictions, and the war between libertarians of right and left merely ensure that we will end up living in a howling wasteland.
I ask these questions as a socialist who believes that there is such a thing as objective reality and such a thing as human nature:
‘Once this unnatural economic system known as capitalism was up and running, however, it was socialism which came in time to seem contrary to human nature.’ (Eagleton 2003 ch 5).
And when there is no human nature, what then? Without a conception of nature and human nature, is it even possible to talk about anything beyond what some are able to impose on others and what others are willing to accept in pursuit of a peaceful existence?
There is a need to bear all this in mind when we come across people, ostensibly leftist, who query whether human nature even exists. If there is no human nature, on what terms does the conflict between capitalism and socialism come to be conducted? If there is no such thing as human nature, then there may well be no such thing as nature, for the same reason – everything is plastic and malleable, subject to wilful projection and imposure. This is capitalist to the core:
No way of life in history has been more in love with transgression and transformation, more enamoured of the hybrid and pluralistic, than capitalism. In its ruthlessly instrumental logic, it has no time for the idea of nature - for that whose whole existence consists simply in fulfilling and unfolding itself, purely for its own sake and without any thought of a goal. This is one reason why this social order has a boorish horror of art, which can be seen as the very image of such gloriously pointless fulfilment. It is also one reason why aesthetics has played such a surprisingly important moral and political role in the modern age. (Eagleton 2003 ch 5).
Again, the references to transgression, the hybrid, and the pluralistic as against the idea of nature suggests a parallel between this new leftism and capitalism, revealing such leftism to be not left at all, merely the cultural wing of libertarianism or neoliberalism.
Having written extensively on Marx and having campaigned for climate action, I could be classed as being – or as having been – on the Left in politics. I do, however, thoroughly reject the stultifying grip that identity politics has on leftist politics, and see the hierarchy of grievance and victimhood that is the staple of identity politics as baneful. I reject also the cultural bullies who use media to engage in linguistic engineering, with a view to coercing changes in thought, action, and behaviour, having people forever learning and re-learning a constantly changing vocabulary, destabilising and undermining communication, making people nervous of their own speech, watching their words, withdrawing into themselves. It is emotional bullying and blackmail in an attempt to guilt people into compliance and obeisance. This poisons human relations. The unifying potential of language comes to be used to divide people, so much so that people withdraw and communication breaks down. It is inhuman and anti-social.
Some are mystified as to why the authorities have not been more aggressive in fighting back. The reason is simple – they are complicit in the deterioration of the public realm and know it. They lack the authority to impose common standards for the very reason that they have spent the past decades running down the public realm and public imagination, using public policy to engineer a shift from citizen democracy to that great misnomer ‘consumer democracy.’ The libertarians of the right have been the dominant force in this, using government aggressively to undermine collective centres of popular power and resistance in order to atomize the public into discrete individuals, who are ‘free to choose’ the good with their own money, but who are nevertheless powerless before economic forces. It’s called ‘neoliberalism,’ but it is basically classical liberalism in an age of supra-individual force. In marketizing and monetizing public goods, the libertarians of the right have been complicit in corporatizing public business. The result has been massive economic inequality, economic instability, debt, crisis, the unravelling of communities and social solidarities and the despoliation of the planetary ecology.
To the question as to why the authorities have been so weak and pusillanimous in face of rebellion and aggression, the answer is simple: they lack the authority. This is what happens when government comes to be colonised by people who are ideologically predisposed against the use of government for positive and common ends: the governed have lost the art of governing. Those in positions of authority don’t believe in government, and it shows.
In ‘opposition’ we have a libertarianism of the Left, the ethical and cultural relativists who, likewise, undermine collective and universal forms in favour of particular identities, and particular conceptions of those identities, pushing private and personal agendas at the expense of the social, damning all those who stand in the way. But this libertarianism of the Right and libertarianism of the Left is neither conservatism nor socialism, merely a liberalism that has imploded within the vacuum at its heart, gone decadent, and gone to extremes, taking politics, culture, and society with it. And people, too. It is destructive and it is divisive, it poisons the essential means of human exchange, communication, and interchange, making people enemies of one another over differences with respect to entirely arbitrary standards.
It presents itself as a form of leftism, and critics are happy to identify it as leftism, so stupid, inane, and vicious are its viewpoints that it offers the prospect of easy victory. But it is really an extension of the radical individualism that lies at the heart of liberalism. Liberals, of course, are entitled to argue that a liberalism without reason and the virtues of self-control and personal responsibility is not a liberalism at all. I would agree. I would also add the need for God and metaphysical underpinnings, too. One by one, all of these internal stabilisers have been discarded to leave only the assertion that individuals are free to choose the good as they see fit. Inevitably, individuals brought up on that licentious notion are now asserting their right to choose the truth as they see fit also. This possibility has been lurking under the radar for a while. In an argument in which I picked someone up on a blatant factual error I was accused of speaking out of ‘white male privilege,’ repressing someone for speaking ‘his truth.’ I responded to the effect that truth is truth, something determined in accordance with an objective standard outside of subjective preference and perception, against which truth-claims can be checked. Here in this clash between objective reality and subjective truth, too many are cleaving to their own truth without compromise. When discourse becomes merely assertion and counter-assertion with respect to ‘his’ or ‘her’ or ‘it’s’ truth, then communication becomes pointless. The error I pointed out was so obvious and so easily checked that it was hardly worth the effort. What was interesting, though, was the height of abuse I received in response. And they accusation that I was oppressing and silencing someone. We are dealing with belief systems. Frankly, we are in the realm of bogus religion. In relativizing the absolute by dissolving God into a polytheistic war of competing subjective values, the modern world has absolutized the relative. Each person choosing his and her own good and own truth has become a god who will brook no opposition from others and entertain no compromise with others. It’s a fight to the death. That does not augur well for the future of society and its relations. This is subjectivism extended in the form of a narcissism so epic as to become solipsism. This is a mindset that cannot but be destructive of collective ideals and collective institutions. If this is a Left, then it is a Left in implosion.
It seems abundantly clear that far from being a new form of leftist politics, we are in the presence of the cultural wing of libertarianism, the cultural counterpart of the economic neoliberals. A militant and dogmatic wing at that. A lot of it does claim to be anti-capitalist. How it proposes to dismantle capitalism without the massed ranks of the working class remains a mystery. At the ballot box, parties espousing such views continue to be obliterated. It has the quality of revolutionary vanguards at play in Toytown. But what is very interesting – and telling - is the extent to which this ‘woke’ politics has corporate influence and even backing. Campaign groups raise millions, advertisements tick all the right boxes. I don’t watch TV anymore, I don’t have a licence. I wouldn’t pay the BBC in washers. I have been told that the only interesting thing about TV now is the game of spotting the straight white male in the commercial breaks (and programme presenters). Left wing? Anti-capitalist? You have to be joking! You don’t even need to look closely to find the extreme individualism and self-interest driving these agendas. As for the capital system, it doesn’t give a damn about identity, so long as it facilitates the process of accumulation:
Know thy enemy:
he does not care what colour you are
provided you work for him
and yet you do!
he does not care how much you earn
provided you earn more for him
and yet you do!
he does not care who lives in the room at the top
provided he owns the building
and yet you strive!
he will let you write against him
provided you do not act against him
and yet you write!
he sings the praises of humanity
but knows machines cost more than men.
Bargain with him, he laughs, and beats you at it;
challenge him, and he kills.
Sooner than lose the things he owns
he will destroy the world.
SMASH CAPITAL NOW!
But as you hasten to be free
And build your commonwealth
Do not forget the enemy
Who lies within yourself.
Christopher Logue, Know Thy Enemy
That line about the enemy that lies within is key, going beyond questions of institutional, structural, and systemic bias – which is real enough – to personal responsibility. In a now forgotten religious idiom that would refer to original sin and the need for contrition before redemption. It’s all been forgotten. All we have now are men as gods following the example of rebel angels and seeking all power for themselves. You will not build the free commonwealth this way. In fact, you will do well to hold on to whatever public community you already have.
This cultural libertarianism aggressively advances personal interest and comfort over above the health and functioning of society. For all of the vehement claims in defence of difference and otherness, such libertarianism values the self-esteem and self-worth of the individual over against solidarity with different others in community life. Indeed, it turns with hostility against all those who disagree, or who merely refuse to agree. It denigrates all those things which the practice of solidarity requires, common language, common meaning, common norms and values, common beliefs. In short, such thinking is parasitic on the commons, a form of free-riding, taking what it can from common forms whilst contributing nothing in return. And another ‘common’ it despises is common sense. This cultural libertarianism tramples all over the forms of the common life without compunction. It makes its loathing of marriage, family, faith, tradition, community, culture, and customs clear and explicit, elevating it to the point of principle. They sneer at patriotism and view morality, law, authority, government as oppressive institutions that constitute a barrier to their own self-realisation. In fighting against power, they are destructive, inviting the reimposition of order and control in the most repressive and authoritarian of forms.
‘There is no such thing as society.’ There is no such thing as family, neighbourhood, community, association, trade union, nation … That methodological individualism is a classic statement of liberalism. Whilst identity politics isn’t quite this, since it does entail a collective identity, it does affirm very particular identities in a way that is inimical to the one communal identity. Identitarianism rejects the common good as repressive of otherness and difference. Identitarians make a fetish of otherness and difference and romanticize life lived on the margins. They think it subversive. As one who lives on the margins I can identity such thinking as a decadence and an indulgence that leads society into a cul-de-sac. Such thinking makes a virtue of the atomisation a central aspect of life in a capitalist market society. Far from being a coherent and cogent response to the extreme individualism and corrosion of social solidarity engineered by neoliberalism, left libertarianism is the cultural counterpart of that process, indeed its extension, repackaging its aggressive individualism and celebrating it. The collective ideals and aspirations of traditional leftist politics – and conservative for that matter – have been supplanted by a divisive, neurotic, moralistic, and heavily policed identitarianism.
It is well worth recognising here that part of the appeal of identity politics lies in the fact that it contains a kernel of truth. Here I come to the second aspect. Cultural libertarianism – libertarianism of the left, ‘woke,’ identitarianism, however you name it – is not quite atomistic and individualistic, given that in affirming an identity it affirms that individuals are members of a supra-individual body. I refer above to Douglas Murray who, as a gay man, rejects this idea of a ‘gay community.’ The same point applies with respect to all the other communities to which identitarians can tend to refer to. They claim to speak for all members of the group when really speaking only for themselves. But the fact that they do actually refer to community is significant. This allows us to see identity politics as in one part continuous with capitalist individualism but in another part seeking to reconstitute the sociality that capitalism has destroyed. The same with respect to religion. This new leftist politics is frequently described as a new religion. This is wrong: it is actually a bogus and inverted religion attempting to fill the gap left by religion, but without the transcendence, humility, mercy, forgiveness, and redemption that comes with God. Instead, human beings are their own gods, which brings not humility, only arrogance and power and a harsh, unforgiving mentality towards heretics, who are legion.
Marx’s view that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ offers us a clue here:
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
If Marx dismissed religion as an ‘illusory happiness,’ he did so as part of a demand for ‘real happiness.’ On what grounds can Marx argue that there is such a thing as ‘reality’? Note well that Marx embraces realism in some form here, otherwise his critique of illusion would make no sense. The idea that the only reality is one that is plastic and self-constructed is entirely at odds with Marx’s notion. Marx’s demand for ‘real happiness’ would be rejected by the new libertarian left as prescriptive.
Note also that Marx identified religion as an expression of and protest against real suffering. In so doing, Marx recognized that religion embodies a psychic truth with respect to heartless and soulless conditions that generate the need to seek solace in illusions. For Marx, if religion was an illusion it was also a necessary illusion, the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.’ (A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right). Marx thus saw religion as filling a psychic and social void, meeting the need for meaning and belonging in however false and unreal a sense. He thus argued for the transformation of a heartless and soulless world that generated a void in human lives. Marx comes close to true understanding here. Human beings are driven by a cosmic longing for being, meaning, truth, and belonging. That quest is central to the religious tradition, ending with peace and rest in reunion with God, the source and end of all things. ‘In His will is our peace,’ as Dante wrote. Marx’s notion of alienation comes close to grasping the fact that human self-estrangement is, in the first instance, estrangement from God. He must see this, and he rejects it completely. In a burst of post-enlightenment critique, he turns the relation between human beings and God on its head and came to see a human estrangement from their own powers, demanding their restitution in the free commonwealth. Here is where Marx, in seeking to abolish capital as alienated social power, missed what Logue described as the enemy within, one’s own fallen nature in estrangement from God. This is the fatal conceit and flaw.
Marx was nevertheless onto something valid when he pointed to the void and the need that human beings feel to fill it. He saw it as a social and psychic void; it is both these things within a metaphysical void opened up by the absence of God. The expression of and protest against ‘real suffering’ in this context is a search on the part of spiritual and social beings for meaning and belonging. Marx in this passage had understood the void that religion filled and the need that religion satisfied. He felt the need to be real but its satisfaction to be illusory. Marx, following Feuerbach, saw religion as itself an alienation, with God being an alien human quality in being a projection of all the best human qualities upwards. This view inverted the religious view in which human beings, made in the image of God, possess a likeness to God, and are endowed with the gifts of reason and free-will that are to be used as part of the personal moral effort to overcome self-estrangement from God. Human beings recognise the enemy within in their own sinful nature, show contrition, seek mercy and forgiveness, and are redeemed. That is the only way.
Marx sought the abolition of God as he sought the abolition of the state and capital, that is, as a positive abolition that drew all the alienated power back into a self-conscious and free humanity. But there is a fatal conceit here : human beings are made in the image of God, but are not identical to God. To conflate the two is to envisage human beings as gods. In relativizing the absolute, such a project absolutizes the relative, so that society becomes a polytheistic war of rival – self-created - gods, entities who are entitled to speak and serve their own truth, demand obeisance without compromise.
A generation after Marx, Nietzsche declared the ‘death of God.’ That death was easily enough pronounced. Much less easy was to live without God. The unmoored theological assumptions once attendant upon God came to be re-attached to human creations of various kinds. War, politics, and culture were all invested with theological significance. When religion goes into decline, then something else comes along to fill the void. With the death of God, all manner of other entities turn up and claim the baton – culture, reason, nature, humanity, science, technology, Elvis, Eric Clapton or whoever, (there has never been a shortage of goddesses) - all take it in turns to drop the baton.
Looking at the question this way allows us to look beyond the surface level of identity politics to identify the psychic and social drives behind the expression of and protest against suffering. In light of the death of God and the decline of religion, identity politics emerges as an attempt on the part of human beings to reconstitute meaning and community in an objectively meaningless and socially fractured world. They won’t succeed this way, only spread further division and hatred. But the dismissive criticism that identity politics is a new religion provides a clue that critics outraged by inanity and insanity – are inclined to miss. The death of God and the concomitant loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework has left human beings adrift and alone, suffering under the weight of a psychic strain that is impossible to bear. Identity politics is thus an inchoate response to real existential suffering in a soulless and heartless world without God.
Identity politics is the very antithesis of religion – I know most about the Judaeo-Christian tradition – in a number of key respects. It makes no universal appeal and instead breaks humanity up in terms of particular group identities, it conceives reality as socially constructed, reduces social relations to power, and renders truth and justice to being of power. Specifically, it identifies society in terms of a division between oppressors and oppressed, with human beings being on one side or the other of that divide. It conceives politics as struggle conducted by way of consciousness raising and activism.
This view eschews the existence of transcendent standards of truth and justice, replaces humility with power, and rejects the idea of a reality that is greater than human choice, struggle, and praxis. At the same time there is a degree of overlap between identity politics and religion. Whilst identitarians may be bigger on the sin of others rather than their own, there is at least a recognition of the sinfulness of human beings. Their inclination to see sin everywhere, albeit in almost exclusively in the past and in dominant institutions, indicates an awareness of the reality of evil and pervasiveness of sin. Badly handled – and without a proper religious tempering such terms cannot but be badly handled – this interest in sin and evil risks backfiring. This is where the idea of truth and reality as a social construction is particularly dangerous. If Hell is a human invention then, like all human inventions, it can turn badly upon its inventors.
The same point, with the same clauses and qualifications, apply to the confessing of sin. Calling out the sins of others and demanding repentance is not genuine contrition, merely religion as power play. This follows inevitably from within the idea that society is no more than a series of power struggles, with truth and principle being no more than functions of power. A genuine religion conceives contrition as something internal and intimate with respect to the individual sinner, not as an external demand made on individuals as part of a power struggle; the former path leads to redemption and salvation, the latter to defeat and subordination. A confession of sin that is public, general, and coerced is not genuine contrition, merely an expression of pride. Worse, it is part of a process in which some bully confession on the part of others whilst signalling to society how good and virtuous they are, and how irredeemably reprobate others are. It therefore offers an example of a society that overtly abandons religion but, finding it impossible to do without religion after all, smuggles it back in in a political form. The challenge is to go beyond exposing the deficiencies, distortions, and hypocrisies and better understand the call to repentance and the redemption that comes by way of repentance. Again, rather than reject ‘social justice warriors’ as divisive hypocrites, the challenge is to consider more carefully the nature of justice. In one aspect, justice is a transcendent standard that exists independently of time and place, serving to judge, orient, and inspire institutions and practices; in another aspect, justice is the social virtue par excellence. The misuse and misapplication of justice as a tool and weapon in power struggles shouldn’t be allowed to take attention away from justice as a social virtue, something transcendent and no more. Here, I follow Plato’s insight into the character of justice as the social virtue par excellence, enabling us to order society according to notions of the good life. My view is that that idea of a political movement re-establishing justice as a social virtue is valuable. When done properly, it puts the responsibility for our lives back in our hands as moral and social beings. Done improperly, it allows opponents – who are often apologists of institutions that engender and entrench social injustice – to dismiss social justice as such. The problem is not social justice, but the weaponising of justice in a power struggle, a tool used by some to beat others. Again, this follows the division of society into oppressors and oppressed, forcing a taking of sides. Justice is on all sides and favours reconciliation over revenge and retribution.
The controversy over identity politics thus offers a way of recovering the true sense of reality, authority, justice, and repentance, as against perverted forms. The resort to religious terms and language shows a lack and a need in a post-religious society. It shows the existence of a gap to be filled. Identity politics cannot fill that gap. No politics which is merely human creation, power, and construction can fill that gap. Pressing religious terms into service in an attempt to fill that gap through politics will result only in perversion. Seeing reality as a social construction, identity politics replaces God with the idea of human beings as gods in themselves, authors of their own existence. In such a world, there are as many gods – and competing notions of ‘the good’ – as there are human beings. Such a view offers no basis for unity, peace, and dignity. Identity politics takes a very partial approach to sin. Instead of recognising the universality of sin, it offers a list of particular sins. It is vocal and insistent with respect to certain behaviours and practices, and particularly with respect to the identity of the persons committing them. It falls silent with respect to other sins and sinners. Without universality and impartiality, however, there can be no true justice. Instead, justice is instrumentalised and politicised as part of the power play of social groups, something which in turn generates new injustices.
With respect to repentance and redemption, identity politics bullies and coerces confession (apology), only to say that such a thing is not enough. Without mercy and forgiveness there is only submission and compliance, or eternal damnation to social Hell via cancellation. Such an approach results in division rather than reconciliation. Reconciliation always involved the moral engagement, effort, and commitment of all sides, not one side possessing initiative over the other.
It would be a profound error to see current social divisions as the product of identity politics. Such a view is complacent, permitting a blind eye to be turned to the divisions, injustices, and oppressions that have caused such an upsurge in protest. Real suffering has been generated and real needs thwarted within a society that is improperly ordered, hence the cries for redress. That these cries are taking mistaken, misguided, and ultimately self-defeating form means that the challenge before us is not to resist and suppress them but to ensure proper guidance, in the hope that those protesting injustice will accept such guidance.
In this respect, we can see identity politics as the symptom of older injustices and divisions, its misguided practice and mistaken premises exacerbating and intensifying these injustices and divisions, often inverting them and adding some more.
Beyond the question of causes and responsibility is the more positive question of lighting the path that leads society out of its impasse.
Love justice ye who would rule the Earth. The way out is the holy trinity of Love, Truth, and Justice – and clarity as to their nature and grounds.
It is easy to criticise the righteous zeal and intolerance of the ‘woke.’ That quality is also most evident in environmentalism. We can condemn the hypocrisy of militant secular atheists employing the language of ecological sin in the name of science, hunting down ‘carbon criminals’ in their myriad disguises (all of us, it seems, miserable sinners as we are on account of our reprobate nature (like religious folk never knew)). The demand for conformity and contrition, the obsession with hunting down heretics, and so on gives it the character of a religion. It’s a bad religion, mind, one that is without a sense of transcendence, without mercy and forgiveness, offering no hope of redemption.
Rather than dismiss and oppose identity politics as completely wrong, it is best to see it as an attempt to fill a number of voids that have opened up as a result of ‘the death of God’ – psychic, social, spiritual, metaphysical. Identity politics cannot fill those gaps, but the immense efforts involved in the attempt indicates that very many feel that a real need is being served. There is a need, then, to go beyond the obvious flaws and identify what it is driving the cry and protest. Rather than reject ‘wokism’ as a new religion, I’m more interested in it as an inverted and perverted religion. It expresses a profound need for meaning and belonging but, since it lacks God, it turns that need in another, divisive and repressive, direction. But at least, in that aspect, it does flag up something that is missing. To dismiss it as mere religiosity and then move on would be a huge mistake, for the reason that it leaves the intrinsic heartlessness and soullessness of the world unaddressed, inviting future forms of surrogacy. We risk the return of the repressed in monstrous form so long as this void goes unfilled.
Whilst condemning religion as an illusion, Marx pointed it up as an expression of a real need and yearning on the part of human beings. His view was that whilst religious people were investing their faith and hopes in something nonsensical, they were also expressing the intrinsic human need for fullness and fulfilment in a world that denied those things. The suffering that resulted from such denial was real, and Marx sought to remove its causes by way of social transformation, creating a life so rich and happy in the wealth of human connection as not to require illusion and consolation. That’s the Marx I have supported since my thesis of 2001 (Marx and Rational Freedom) to my work on the bicentennial of Marx’s birth in 2018 (Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx). I see none of this in current left politics, for the reason that what is left of the Left has abandoned the working class as an unrevolutionary disappointment.
That idea of religion as being the expression of and protest against real suffering is worthy and insightful, and a much more productive line of enquiry when it comes to getting an angle on the explosion of identity politics. Rather than dismiss identity politics as the cause of self-interested narcissists who are spoiled, entitled infants inflating trivial concerns to cosmic importance, moralists and emotional bullies seeking to get their own way, throwing all manner of tantrums in the public sphere … (OK, I know I did some such thing above, for the very reason that that is actually a substantial part of the truth, and needs to be recognized as such for the damage it inflicts on society and culture) .. it is more profitable to identify the void that such politics is seeking to fill. The extent to which identitarians are conscious of filling this void can be doubted. Their language and their manner is that of the bully, showing precious little sympathy and empathy with respect to others. In fact, there is a pronounced tendency to demonize others with respect to all manner of grievous sins, as clear a case of essentialism as a timeless and fixed condition as any (whiteness, maleness, straightness, American, British, you name it). And I will certainly not weaken my view in the least that the various theories pouring out of this area – cultural race theory for one – is an environmental hazard, offering an easy career path for grifters, manipulators, and mediocrities in culture, politics, and the academy. But criticising identity politics as the hypocritical mask of those seeking wealth and power is easy and obvious and leads us nowhere. If it is garbage, then what needs to be explained is why there is so large and so ready an audience for such garbage. When people seize on arguments that are demonstrably false, then we need to understand what lack it is that those arguments are meeting. I have read commentators expressing outrage at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ statement that being ‘morally right’ is more important than being ‘factually right.’ Rather than join the outrage and condemnation, entrenching positions, it is more worthwhile to try to see the point she is driving it. A point that I have been concerned to make over the years is that facts in themselves are powerless, lack appetitive force, and explain little. I have argued that facts need to be existentially meaningful if they are to be acted upon. I learned this lesson when I studied history. The very first class introduced Ranke and his statement that ‘the facts speak for themselves.’ They do not. AOC’s formulation is clumsy and, in the form it takes, not one I would support. But she is trying to get people to identify something important. What is interesting is how many conservative critics subject AOC to heavy abuse for this statement. When Greta Thunberg also states – she claims - nothing but climate facts, regardless of politics, there is also outrage and complaint. Plainly, there is a role for values in all of this somewhere – the facts alone won’t cut it. In the incident I recounted above, I picked someone up on a factual error – frankly, it was a lie based on prejudice - and received the height of abuse for my efforts. Facts matter. But there is such a thing as psychic and moral truth as well as scientific truth, and it is usually this that animates discussion and controversy. The problem of the modern world is that it has been raised on the fact-value dualism. Facts and values need to be brought back into relation. AOC plainly understands that morality has been side-lined in favour of factual statements. But the solution is a balance between the two, not the pernicious and false notion that one trumps the other.
Having been on the receiving end of abuse – and vicious abuse at that – from identitarians, I am not averse to eviscerating identity politics as the self-serving ressentiment of the permanently oppressed and outraged out to tear society down. There is some relief in getting that off one’s chest. But such ill-tempered (well deserved) venting of spleen merely perpetuates the unwinnable war. Where did the outrage come from? What is the source of need? Where does resolution lie? The answers to those questions may well lie buried in the psyches of all the protagonists in this war. If there is a real need and a real suffering behind it all, it makes sense to identify and address it, and avoid the temptation to enter the battlefield.
In conclusion, then, having spent 80% of this essay being critical of left libertarianism/identity politics/wokism, it is imperative to look beyond the noise and the nonsense and seek the roots of this wretched phenomenon in an effort to chart a path out. Once we do this, then it soon becomes apparent that what is driving identitarian angst is a past – and present - suffering on the part of individuals who want to belong and take their place in a common life, but who have found spaces for the expression of that social need lacking. Yes, we can dismiss it as victimhood and dismiss those claiming it as cry-babies. But it won’t stop the crying. Because, as Marx acknowledged with respect to religious illusion, it is rooted in something real.
Earlier, I condemned the identitarians as narcissists who trample all over collective institutions and the forms of the common life, setting their face against the family, faith, community, the nation etc. The response back would point to the extent to which all these forms of the common life are broken and deficient. Where is this ideal family? In societies that have been fractured and atomised under the forces of free market capitalism, families have been broken. Where is the faith, in an era brought up on the death of God? The overarching and authoritative moral framework has dissolved into a subjectivist moral realm. Where is the nation in an era of globalised economic and institutional relations? The public realm has been colonised and captured by corporate power. The means of public community and authority have been outsourced. Where is public community when society and the political sphere have become theatres of war between rival gods/goods? Social relations, communities, and institutions are broken and do not function as they ought; power is remote, having been alienated beyond proximal relations; the spaces to actualise the need for meaning and belonging do not exist. So to blame identitarians for trampling over the forms of the common life spectacularly misidentifies the cause of the malaise and, in so doing, ensures that it will continue – the forms of the common life barely exist, hence the search for meaning and belonging, however misguided the forms it may take. Our social relations and institutions are themselves sources of division rather than unity, and with the divisiveness of identitarianism we reap the whirlwind. There is a desperate need to push well beyond the noise and division to identify the conditions of unity and then seek to work together for their recovery and restoration. Behind the antagonism and the nonsense lies the expression of the human longing for meaning and belonging, and it is this that we can see identitarians and their communities as attempting to address, whether they know it or not. I don’t doubt for one second that such communities are as illusory and as surrogate as Douglas Murray’s dismissive comments indicate. But that criticism is superficial. To dismiss identity politics in this way is tantamount to dismissing religion as an illusion and no more. That’s easy. Rather than do that, Marx looked to see what suffering religion expressed, what need it met, and what void it filled. That, I would suggest, is the only way out of what may well degenerate into an impasse that will ensure the ruination of the public realm. To argue for the suppression and silencing of identitarians would resolve precisely nothing, merely leave questions of social alienation and dislocation unaddressed. If identitarians can be criticised for asserting their particular communities over collective institutions and forms of the common life, then the truth is that those institutions and forms are not working as they ought and haven’t been for a long time now: they need to be fixed rather than fetishized and defended against the barbarian identitarian hordes. Identity politics is not the cause of this debacle but a reaction to it. I have given extensive reasons above as to why I think it a flawed response that reproduces much that has brought this tragedy in social and public life about. But it is a reaction to a cause that needs to be identified properly and uprooted at source. There is a need to look deeper and identify the source of dislocation and disconnection in order to offer a positive alternative to the ersatz and surrogate forms of meaning and belonging – that means nothing less than the restoration of the health of the common life.
And that means being truly ‘woke,’ waking people up to true community. It is significant in this regard that Marx made the critique of religion foundational to the loss of illusion with respect to social reality. I think Marx made a misstep here in identifying God, in the manner of the state and capital, as an alienated power for human beings to reclaim. Waking up here means coming to see, as Marx didn’t see, alienation in origin as self-estrangement from God. And that means taking full cognizance of the enemy lurking within. With that in place, Marx is full of insight in the way he encourages us not to dismiss religion, old and new, true and fake, as an illusion but as expressing certain truths being denied and repressed in the current age. The challenge is to look beyond the surface rhetoric, to avoid the temptations to respond to provocations and stupidities in kind, and go directly to social dis-at-ease and disconnection that has issued from the metaphysical void that has opened up with the ‘death of God.’ That Nietzsche made that pronouncement back in the 1880s indicates the extent to which we are grappling with a long and deep-seated problem, something that lies in the very DNA of modernity. It also indicates that, contrary to the claims of secular humanists, that the problem is not God and religion but their absence. Human beings are social beings, not discrete individuals. The pain and anguish here stems from separation and antagonism. The real secret of identity politics lies in the expression of the deep cosmic longing on the part of human beings to identify themselves with something greater than their egos, something which expands being outwards and invests life with meaning and significance. It is a religious craving seeking a home in post-religious times. Whilst the old forms of meaning and belonging are rejected, the succession of new forms has failed to fill the void, with the result that the suffering continues. With doubts as to whether there is such a thing as human nature and, even if there is, what that nature entails, the grounds for unity seem as far away as ever. But this question will always come back to nature in one form or another, a reality that is something more than self-creation and social construction. There has to be clear recognition of the things that bind us together before meaning and belonging will be possible. All that there is at present is a rejection of objective reality, absolute truth, human nature, God, and reason. Without a common, authoritative standard there can only be continued fragmentation and division, leaving individuals seeking to reconstitute meaning and belonging via self-created communities and constructed identities, plunging them into an endless, unwinnable, and pointless power game, seeking triumph over others as rivals.
I try not to use the word ‘woke,’ for the reason that the issue goes far deeper, and goes much further back than critics seem to understand. But it’s the term that is being used and is commonly understood, so I use it. There’s more going on, though. Pointing the finger at Gramsci and Critical Theory is easy. The impression is given by such critics is that if such cultural Marxists had never existed then the world would be fine. That view is complacent and wrong. We need to go back further to the loss of the overarching and authoritative moral framework. I always valued Marxism and critical theory as an attempt to reconstitute that framework on the basis of a self-legislating human reason and self-creating labour. I think that the attempt was noble and honourable but doomed to failure. Reason cannot be its own grounds. Hence the attempt implodes on itself, which is what happened. The real architects of ‘woke’ are the intellectuals who followed in the ruined edifice of modernist reason, the ‘post’ modernist, post structuralist crowd. These were in many respects explicitly anti-marxist and anti-socialist. Establishing the genealogy, however, is not quite the issue. To resolve the problem it is necessary to dig deeper and see beyond the empty promises of modernism, rationalism, and Marxism to address its limited premises in the loss of objective reality, truth, and morality. Lose God everything else slides and falls in due course.
In fine, whilst checking and rejecting the error and divisiveness of identity politics is important, by itself it achieves little or nothing, merely has us taking part as combatants in the unwinnable game of irreducible power claims. That this game predates identity politics by more than a century should tell us that the problem lies elsewhere. We can argue back and forth with identitarians but it will resolve nothing, merely perpetuate the game. In Politics as a Vocation, Max Weber warned that ‘where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.’ In the unwinnable game of will-to-power and subjectivist assertion, it doesn’t matter which side wins. The challenge before us is to overcome this condition of ‘nothingness’ and relocate the ‘something’ that grounded the forms of true meaning and belonging. In other words, identity politics isn’t the enemy and an enormous mistake is made when we think it is. The appeal of identity politics lies in its promises of redress, emancipation from oppression, freedom, and belonging. In certain key aspects we can see progressive and libertarian movements as trying, desperately, to heal the wounds that have been opened up in the absence of God. We can dismiss these movements as new and false religions, but that simply begs the deeper question: why do so many, in the midst of material abundance, have need of any kind of gods, created or otherwise? Critics who dismiss the religious character of these movements and campaigns are not looking closely enough. They seem to equate religion with illusion, and therefore dismiss the cries and complaints are mere delusional psychological states born of pampering and entitlement. But there is much more than this going on. There is a lack of connection, meaning, and community in the world, and the members of these groups are sounding the alarm. Rather than simply dismiss their hypocrisy and intolerance, it is more profitable to dig deeper down and bring to the surface what it is they are fighting for, what need it is that they are expressing, and what metaphysical void they are trying to fill.
It is easy to expose the hypocrisy at work, easy to be contemptuous. Much less easy, and much more worthwhile, is to seek to redeem those promises by way of a better practice, thereby reinvigorating and properly orienting the undying human quest for meaning and belonging. The men and women of the modern world retain that cosmic longing; it is an inextinguishable part of being human. What they have lost is the metaphysical means and understanding. That is the void the moderns have been seeking to fill. Rather than dismiss the forms which have been proposed to fill the void, the challenge is to recover and revalue the quest, show the world what it is really struggling for, beneath its overt forms. The criticism that identity politics, environmentalism et al are really a ‘new religion’ betrays a dismissive contempt that explains how we have ended up in this mess. To such people, religion is merely an illusion to be dismissed. It isn’t. Religion embodies psychic truths and spiritual needs in the search for connection and community. This has been lost and people are adrift. This being so, the real criticism of identitarianism, environmentalism et al is not that they are new religions, but that they are false religions, attempts to reclaim the religious spirit and intent without an understanding of its content, language, and practice. And it is here that my critical comments earlier need to be restated. There is a harsh and unforgiving tone to identity politics. Such is the nature of politics that swallow up the whole of life. Politics is about dissensus and disagreement. The problem is that when politics comes to be invested with a theological edge, the result is to split the protagonists between the sheep and the goats, deifying those who are on our side, demonizing those on the other side. Such a politics is unforgiving, treating its opponents as heretics who are to be shown no mercy. Christianity is clear that to expect redemption it is first of all necessary to name sin for what it is and call it out. And express contrition, personally. It is noticeable that identitarians are very big on calling out the – many – sins of others, but not their own. Contrition stands at the heart of the Christian process of redemption, a heart-rending humbling and humiliation. Contrast this with public naming and shaming in identity politics, advancing notions of collective guilt that stretch back into history. This is not contrition. In fact, this is an example of pride and spectacle, publicly exhibiting the sins of others, and joining in merely to demarcate oneself from those who refuse to join in. There is no grace here, no mercy, and no genuine contrition. There is no personal moment of humility, only pride. It is a power play entirely lacking in humility. Identitarians demand, in the shrillest of terms, that sinners repent of their sins; but such repentance promises no redemption at the end, no wiping away of all tears, only further demands as people are beaten into submission and trampled underfoot. And it is this that reveals the whole phenomenon not to be a religion at all, but a politics being pressed aggressively into the religious void, bringing about the worst of both worlds. It seeks not redemption and reconciliation but complete triumph over its rivals. It is seeking to win the unwinnable game by any means necessary, resulting in a bad politics and a bad religion that turns people against one another and leaves us as far away as ever from the true community we seek. And it leaves us all still suffering. In criticising religion, Marx recognized its concern with recovery heart and soul in heartless and soulless conditions. I see precious little of this recognition in identity politics. To the contrary, I see the dividing of people and communities and a rhetoric of mutual opposition and antagonism that feeds on itself to such an extent as to threaten to drown the world in a universal hatred. In which case, identity politics is not a genuine search for belonging and community, merely an expression of their lack in the modern world, pushed to their divisive and destructive extremes by a relentless and merciless retribution.
There is a lack of meaning and belonging in the world, and identity politics is an attempt to fill the gap. I believe solutions being offered to be ersatz, divisive, and a dead-end, exposing the promises that they make to be empty. But the longing for meaning and belonging is healthy and needy, and their promises hopeful and inspiring when put back in touch with reality. It is for us to supply the substantive content and moral motive power for the redemption of those promises.