The Existential Self-Hatred that Consumes the World
Or, The Egoism that Eats God and Feeds Gods
The main focus of this essay is the need to recover values, virtues, and visions grounded in an ontology of the good which gives us a sense of the transcendent, ensuring that human beings expand their being outwards rather than curve in on themselves, consuming the world by way of unwinnable wars fought by rival gods and goods. In light of this I would like to begin by quoting from and elaborating upon this article:
“Iris Murdoch was an atheist and a Platonist moral philosopher who taught at Oxford from 1948-1963 before retiring to spend the rest of her life writing racy novels.”
Gee, no wonder I always liked her. The book of hers that most influenced my view was The Sovereignty of the Good. In that book, Murdoch states: ‘it is always a significant question to ask of any philosopher: what is he afraid of?’ (Murdoch The Sovereignty of Good 1985: 72).
Murdoch struck a chord with me as a fellow swimmer against the tide: “Murdoch’s philosophical work cut deeply against the grain of popular academic philosophy and argued with great clarity for a preservation of the transcendent in moral life.” Metaphysics, transcendent standards, universalism, essentialism were out, with even morality and the common good considered repressive of difference and otherness. I swam in the other direction. My Director of Studies, despite having a different view in many respects, offered encouragement, assuring me that the dominant intellectual fashions will one day be up-a-creek-without-a-paddle. They now threaten to take the rest of us with them with their nominalist extremism and inflation, what fellow Mancunian philosopher Norman Geras describes as 'discourses in extremity' (Geras 1990)..
I like what Kathleen Cavender-McCoy writes in this article:
“Iris Murdoch ultimately unveils the certainty that moral theology, like moral philosophy, cannot survive without unrelenting realism, metaphysics, a keen sense of the transcendent, and a practical method for growing in love.” (Kathleen Cavender-McCoy).
Murdoch’s metaphysics frames a moral philosophy which locates morality firmly in reality. Her realism takes into account the truth of the human person as well as the reality of the Good. In her essay entitled “Metaphysics and Ethics,” Murdoch makes the unfashionable argument for the innateness of the Good—that “good” is not simply a description attached by humans to objects or actions, but that it has objective reality.
“Metaphysics, Murdoch argues, is what grounds moral philosophy in the reality of the Good. In analytic philosophy, which maintains a strong hold in academia, there is no stable idea of the good. By questioning the essential nature of goodness, modern philosophy rejects the relationship between metaphysics and realism. The search for an essential structure of the good is, in this view, pure delusion.
This perspective has found its way into some approaches to moral theology. Metaphysics is at times scorned as an oppressive structure which tries to control human experiences in a top-down way. It is accused of essentializing things that are mere constructs and is on this account thrown out by some theological thinkers. While these problems are possibilities for a metaphysics gone wrong, Murdoch insists we must not reject metaphysics in an attempt to evade possible corruptions of it: without metaphysics, she argues, ethics loses its connection to reality.”
Unselfing Through Loving Attention
Iris Murdoch believes that moral realism grounded in metaphysics necessitates mysticism, of all things. And an unselfing that is attained through a loving attention: “an attention to God which is a form of love. With it goes the idea of grace, of a supernatural assistance to human endeavour which overcomes empirical limitations of personality.” (Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings On Philosophy And Literature (NY: Penguin, 1998), 344). I love the title of this book, Existentialists and Mystics. Murdoch argued for a practical mysticism in moral life. A moral realism grounded in metaphysics necessitates mysticism.
I’ve always liked Simone Weil in this regard: Weil was a philosopher, activist, and mystic. Of these, it is Weil's emphasis on mysticism that strikes me as the most important aspect of her legacy. Her political and social commitments stem not merely from her religious commitment, but from her insistence that religion be oriented towards the mystical. Shorn of its mystical element, Weil argues, religion becomes a mere idolatry, as hard and inert as all the other counterfeit collectivisms and communities that plague the world. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” Weil wrote. I like Murdoch’s emphasis on a practical mysticism which is characterised by a loving attention. Which begs the question as to what it is to be a ‘mystic.’ By mystic, Mark Van Steenwyk refers to ‘those people who see the world with spiritual eyes and, therefore, see things for what they truly are.’
‘Mysticism collapses the distance between a person and God, between people, and between a person and the rest of creation. At its best, mysticism points toward a life free from abstraction, where you simply see what is.’
Mark Van Steenwyk, The Unkingdom of God: Embracing the Subversive Power of Repentance 85
Simone Weil saw clearly the need for mystical illumination, inspiration, and experience. Hence her emphasis on spiritual renewal as a condition of physical renewal. We need to be careful of truth in practical politics, truth is explosive and you have to be careful not to blow yourself, or the world, up:
‘There is a danger in walking the path of the prophet apart from that of the mystic. If we attempt to transform the world around us without a renewed imagination, we are likely to repeat the cycle of injustice in fresh ways. There is a danger in walking the path of the mystic apart from that of the prophet as well: that we will move inward without attending to the injustices around us.’
Mark Van Steenwyk, The Unkingdom of God: Embracing the Subversive Power of Repentance
The reason this is true is precisely on account of the sacred core which Simone Weil identified as existing in each and all:
“At the bottom of the heart of every human being…there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.”
The world has lost its sense of mystery and of the mystical experience: ‘By banishing [mystical experiences] from our children, we destroy them within ourselves at the same moment.’ (Dorothee Solle). Without wonder, we come to imprison ourselves in a world of our own making, and experience existential crisis as no more than that world’s unmaking. But there is hope in that infinitesimally small but ineliminable sacred core within each and all that Weil identified. As Solle writes, ‘When we start digging up the buried mysticism of childhood, the feeling of oneness and of being overcome arises anew. Memory clings to little, insignificant details.’
The driving force of my philosophical work has been to challenge and overcome the tyranny and violence of abstraction and the way that power and knowledge come to be alienated beyond human dimensions and proportions. I like to collapse the distance between people and things. My poor long-suffering, infinitely patient, and very wise Director of Studies once tried to pin me down, precisely, on my views, only to smile at the way I reasoned ‘like a true existentialist.’ I wasn’t sure what he meant. To me, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, and Kierkegaard are great existentialists. For St Thomas, essence is passive and inert until brought into existence through deed and act.
But we know that God is dead, since Nietzsche told us it was so and that it was ever thus. In light of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God,’ Murdoch sought to uncover a secular grace that would enable the moral agent to profit from a loving and prayerful attention. Like prayer, this practical method for unselfing involves an object of attention, an idea of unity, and an idea of transcendence. These things – a contemplative practice – are key to retaining one’s grip on reality:
“The argument for looking outward at Christ and not inward at Reason is that self is such a dazzling object that if one looks there one may see nothing else. But as I say, so long as the gaze is directed upon the ideal the exact formulation will be a matter of history and tactics in a sense which is not rigidly determined by religious dogma, and understanding of the ideal will be partial in any case. Where virtue is concerned we often apprehend more than we clearly understand and grow by looking.
Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty Of Good (NY: Routledge, 2001), 30.
“Here, Murdoch delineates exactly what the danger is in centering oneself as an object of one's attention. The danger is that we will be dazzled by ourselves. So enamoured can we become with our own image that any other object fails to hold our attention. We grow larger in our own field of vision until we become our own ultimate reality. If the goal is growth in the moral life, we cannot succeed without an ideal upon which to gaze, whether this be the Good or Beauty or God." I refer to transcendent standards of truth and justice, but could add easily add love to that pair, or just refer to the three great transcendentals in their unity of the true, the good, and the beautiful (and go further to claim them all as qualities of God). Here, I would underscore the wisdom of Socrates in making beauty the supreme political category, for the way that it lights the path to truth and goodness and invites the heart to follow. Beauty seems to be the last bastion of evangelisation in contemporary culture, one thing other than and beyond the self and the body that individuals are worshipping any more. In The Symposium Plato wrote of the divine beauty which is beheld by the eye. That’s a very different notion from the subjectivist assertion of the beauty that is in the eye of the beholder. Beyond the idea of morality as irreducible subjective opinion/value judgement, there is such a thing as moral knowledge and truth. If freedom is the appreciation of necessity, then the nature of that appreciation is crucial in bringing together the two great wings of western philosophy – subjectivity and objectivity.
Murdoch rejects the concept of the discrete, rational, disembodied, choosing subject in favour of an embedded, relational, situated subject.
We are not isolated, free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons.
Murdoch 1983:49
For Murdoch, the rational concept of the subject is the source of the problem of modernist moral philosophy and is quite unable to grasp the complexity of the moral life. Murdoch's emphasis on the personal in moral actions and her attack on the impartiality which characterises the dominant moral tradition transcends the classic dualisms of subject/object, personal/impersonal of modern morality (Murdoch SG 1985:359).
By replacing the egoistic conception of the Good with a conception that is grounded in reality, we are able to gain moral clarity and see both ourselves and others in light of the transcendent Good.
“The task of attending to reality is not a mere changing of the subject, but is a radical reorientation of the self, a reorientation which opens one up towards the freedom to see others as they really are, the freedom to see the Good and be changed by it.
Self-deception can keep the ego insulated from reality , encouraging us into a fantasy world. This fantasy, as “the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called ‘will’ or ‘willing’ belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.” (Driver, Julia. “Love and Unselfing in Iris Murdoch” in Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 87 (July 2020): 174).
In the end, for Murdoch, the moral life comes down to love. “Love,” Murdoch writes, “is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love . . . is the discovery of reality.” (Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty Of Good (NY: Routledge, 2001), 30.
Conclusions
The key points for contemplation we obtain from reading Murdoch are
the importance of metaphysics: metaphysical reconstruction is key, as E.F. Schumacher told us;
an understanding that morality and moral philosophy require a grounding in an unrelenting realism (with an understanding of the real informed by the metaphysics above);
a sense of the transcendent;
our attention must be focused on the Good rather than individual efforts of will, and that a moral philosophy not grounded in the practice of mysticism is not grounded in reality;#
the importance of a practical mysticism in moral life;
growth in the moral life through contemplation of the transcendent as a growth in our rootedness in reality and a mutual growing in love.
Worth reading on this is Roger Trigg, Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics (2015). Trigg studied under analytic philosopher A.J. Ayer. Without metaphysics, reality is soon lost from view, through an absorption in tools, concepts, and other such things in the nominalist cartography.
R. Trigg, Beyond Matter. Why Science Needs Metaphysics, 2015 – Review of a clear and cogent book written for a non-specialist audience, and an antidote to the wretched (anti-)metaphysics plaguing the contemporary world.
In 2018 I wrote a three volume study on Karl Marx, commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. The first volume, Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx, presented those things which I felt were still critical and pertinent in Marx’s legacy, which is a lot. The book gained some traction and received much favourable comment. Esteemed scholars such as John Bellamy Foster read it and published the Appendix in Monthly Review online. The book was also described as ‘significant’ and ‘meticulous’ in The Socialist Review. The second volume, Ethics, Essence and Immanence: Marx's Normative Essentialism, addressed the moral and metaphysical underpinnings of Marx’s emancipatory political commitments. In this volume, as ever, I am swimming against the nominalist and anti-realist tide of the (post)modern age, cleaving to an essentialist metaphysics that is very much out of fashion. I show at length that essentialism is our best defence against tyranny and totalitarianism, the likely end of the nominalist madness that infests the age. That volume also suggested to me that post-modernism is not so much the problem – to be resolved by a return to and reassertion of modernism – but an expression of the ultimate groundlessness of a modernity which affirms human self-authorship founded upon a self-legislating reason. It can’t be done, and postmodernists have merely exposed the delusion. In that sense, postmodernism is merely modernism without the self-deception and hypocrisy. From here there are only two courses to take, a Nietzschean affirmation of nihilism as a joyful science or a recovery of transcendence as well as immanence.
Jean Luc-Nancy writes of ‘groundless grounds’ in the (post)modern world. It has become increasingly apparent that the many things which the moderns have sought to supplant God with are simply incapable of doing the job. Reason, Nature, Culture, Humanity, Science, Technology, still less the Nation, the Self, the Body, the favourite sports team and pop star, have all proven incapable of filling the metaphysical void opened by the ‘death of God.’ This, I argued in volume three of my Marx studies, is by far and away the greatest flaw and weakness in Marx’s emancipatory project. I think that Marx came closer than most to a resolution of the gaps that open up in the absence of God, seeing all the above entities as mere empty abstractions when considered independently of social forms, relations, and practices. Marx would extend the same criticism to God. I argue that Marx came incredibly close to a resolution when he identified self-alienation as prior. I noted how Marx diagnosed alienation in its social, economic, political, and intellectual forms, as an estrangement from nature, from others and society, and from self but, significantly, failed to locate its primary source in the human self-alienation from God. This caused him to miss the significance of personal moral effort alongside social and collective effort. In volume three, therefore, A Home and a Resting Place, I argued that visions of the universal brotherhood of man would take the form of a universal hatred, given the lack of transcendence. Without transcendent standards of truth, justice, and love, human beings cannot but curve in on themselves, dividing against one another. Without God, none of the other abstractions with which humans have sought to order their existence – Reason, Nature, Humanity, Culture, Science, and Technology – can survive long without internal implosion. Without the transcendence that comes with God, collective entities reduce to their component elements, curving inwards until only there is the Self and the Body. The Self and the Body are the only tangible things left for individuals to worship, surviving the revelation that all other things are merely empty signifiers. According to evolutionary biology, human beings are not so much rational beings as rationalizing beings, deceiving others (and ultimately themselves) in order to gain an advantage.
Truth, I argue, is a theological concept which depends on the notion of human beings as truth seekers. Unless human beings were motivated to seek truth in the first place, then truth is passive and inert, existing only as a rationalization of drives, interests, and desires. Without God and the peace and unity attendant upon God, the world is a battleground of contending individuals and tribes. I argue that the (post)modern world is a curious mix of the Lockean tabula rasa, or blank sheet, and Social Darwinism levelled upon the group (and not just the individual). The result is the war of all upon all, each seeking to expand their power and accumulate lest they be accumulated. In the process of this war, the connections between human beings become almost entirely instrumentalized, invading even the primary loyalties and proximal relations of human beings.
In relativizing the Absolute – God – human beings have come to absolutize the relative. By ‘taking morality into their own hands,’ human beings have become their own personal gods. And with god-like truth there can be neither negotiation nor compromise, only endless contestation. Whilst Weber was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche and his notion of ‘the death of God,’ he never quite saw the end of religion. Instead, Weber predicted an age of warring gods, renascent gods taking the form of impersonal powers, ‘polytheism.’ In this, I argue, Weber is not at all far from Marx, who wrote of human beings becoming ‘the playthings of alien powers’ (On the Jewish Question). Of course, for Marx, these powers were human powers in alien form – state, capital, commodities, money, bureaucracy – to be restituted to the social body from which they originated.
For a long time I held that this was the resolution to the ills of the modern world – socialism as a thoroughly humanized, socialized, and democratized society. I will still argue for this very thing, as far as it goes, whilst noting that it doesn’t go far enough and needs to be placed on a more secure basis than human self-creation. The problem with self-created values is this: when each becomes his or her own god, choosing the good – and the true – as he or she sees fit, no-one needs to accept and live by the values of another. The result is that society becomes a sphere of universal antagonism and contention, a universal self-cancellation. There has to be a transcendent ordering and orienting principle to draw choosing individuals in the existential universe into the contemplation of something greater than the ego and its own. To those who argue for some form of relationalism, I ask: in relation to what? My PhD thesis argued for the transfiguration of a ‘rational freedom’ incarnated in abstract and alienated forms of law, state, and institutions into a relational freedom. This, I argued, was Marx’s definition of socialism as a social self-mediation. Now, however, I caution against Marx’s heady notion of the abolition of philosophy (and God) and of the incorporation of the philosophical ideal into pure immanence, for the reason that you can’t have your transcendent cake and eat it too: once it is gone, it is gone, leaving only explicitly self-created values, none of which those not party to the creation need accept. The world fractures into a cacophony of egoistic individuals and tribes asserting themselves against all others.
My works here:
Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx (2018) 618 211, 678
Ethics, Essence and Immanence: Marx's Normative Essentialism (2018) 460 160,478
A Home and a Resting Place Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience (2018) 484 171,487
In my argument, therefore, I turn the critical and emancipatory claims and commitments of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and modern atheistic humanists against them to expose the core flaw at the heart of the heady idea of human self-creation, self-authorship, and self-legislation. In the absence of a transcendent source of life, purpose, meaning, and end, the ‘self’ in these notions fractures and dissolves, losing the universality and the sociality until only the assertive god-like ego remains. That way lies a universal hatred in which standards of truth and justice are reoriented upon a disagreeable, deceptive, and competitive political cartography. Instead of an overarching and authoritative moral framework – and the socio-ethical infrastructure of practices, right relations, and virtues that goes with it - authority becomes an arbitrary function of power and resources. People break the law with impunity, asserting that the true and unimpeachable moral standards they adhere to – standards lacking in any authoritative and universal significance beyond such self-assertion – offer reason enough. Those self-same people then proceed to reconstitute authority and insist on obedience and conformity on the part of others. This is not a genuine unity at all, merely a totalitarianism based on arbitrary standards and anonymous gods. Instead of unity, there is uniformity; instead of diversity, there is division.
I call the contemporary world the '(post)modern world' in recognition of the truth that modernity and postmodernity are not antithetical but express the same world with differing degrees of self-awareness. Whereas modernists cleave to the old goal of a freedom attained through the reason of science, technology, universalism etc, postmodernists reject such grounds as false projections of objectivity and rationalisations of power. The human world without God reduces to power, with social relations being no more than power relations. The Left, which once contested such a view, has now succumbed to it, turning every site of human action and interaction into a battleground, uprooting solidarity, and turning human beings against one another in an increasingly denuded public sphere. When all that there is protest and claims drawn against society and the public, society and public life cease to exist. This (post)modern world has been subject to a transvaluation of values, but instead of the joyous affirmation of life envisaged by Nietzsche the result has been a devaluation of life, human beings, and solidary human connections.
Many of those who take their stance on science and nature see their worldview as anti-metaphysical; in truth, they have supplanted a prevailing metaphysics with a rank bad metaphysics. They also see themselves as irreligious; in truth, many have succumbed to a false and perverted religion, one which emphasises the sins of others and not their own whilst demanding public contrition from those others without the prospect of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. Many who cleave to reason are quick to condemn this as a religious revival, the kind of thing to which a society which has yet to extirpate religion is prone to. That is my reading of Nietzsche, who cautioned against humanism as just another idolatry replacing religion. That was once my view. I now hold that the religious sensibility – the cosmic longing for meaning and belonging – is ineradicable and that attempts to extirpate it are implicated in precisely the kind of religious revanchism the world is suffering from now. Reason answers those questions amenable to reason, but has nothing other than perverted things to say when extended to all those areas of human life – the most passionate and most meaningful aspects – left over after reason has finished saying what it can say.
The western world has shifted from a theistic culture to one that is militantly anti-religious and anti-supernatural. This involves not merely the rejection of God and religion but of transcendent standards of truth and justice. My response to this is to assert, bluntly, that either transcendent standards exist or they do not; if they do not, then all that there is is an endless power/resistance, and all that one can do is choose a side in the struggle for and against power. There is no end to it, no meaning and no purpose, other than staying in the fight for as long as one can. This situation describes an unwinnable war between incommensurate values; there is no winner in such a war, only losers, which is all of us as a result of the loss of universality, sociality, common ground and the common good.
I have written at length on some of the most salient characteristics of the emerging society. I have noted in particular the assertions of an abstract and empty ‘humanity’ in general to the neglect and denial of social forms, asymmetrical power relations, and class dynamics. I have noted, too, the grounding of such claims in ‘Nature,’ whether this is the Nature revealed by science and progressive planetary managers and engineers or by the regressive romanticism of planetary fetishizers and worshippers. I see both wings as two cheeks of the same backside taking us to the arse-end of nowhere as a result of dissolving transcendent standards into a nature that cares nothing of human concerns beyond imperatives of survival and reproduction.
Climate Rebellion and System Change: Rebellion or Revolution? (2019) 706 264, 821
In these works I note also the connection of this abstract humanitarianism and naturalism to a ‘global’ unity and imperative. Abstraction is the fertile ground of totalitarian control: the commonality and universality that human beings require as social beings are denied at the level of human social relations and thus come to be projected outwards and upwards. Such a global identity is abstract in the sense of having no critical or practical relation to the social forms, relations, and practices mediating the human relation to nature. It is a false universalism, the kind of which has characterised human societies throughout history, turning reason and freedom into a general unreason and unfreedom.
This ‘humanitarian’ politics and ethics, premised on naturalism, has established itself as the new “Pantheism,” but with the universal God being supplanted by the particular, but no less absolute, choosing individual. Such a militantly humanist and anti-theist culture easily falls prey to the delusions of ‘men as gods’ – and women as goddesses.
Instead of transcendent standards, there is an assertion of human power to control and manipulate, to create and recreate reality at will.
Of Gods and Gaia: Men as Gods Gambling with Gaia (2012) 954 342,097
Against this, I affirm the existence of transcendent standards of truth and justice.
Being and Place: The Dialectics of Catastrophe and Hope: Restoration and Restorying (2019) 415 145,730
The Ecology of Good (2020) 435 162,890
Rational Freedom, Transcendent Standards, and the Quest for the Good Life (2020) 261 pages, 77,500 words
FOR TRANSCENDENT STANDARDS AND A SUBSTANTIVE ETHIC OF THE GOOD (2020) 313 126,748
And I argue for the need to recover the transcendent source and end of life as condition of recovering from the great sundering of the modern world, bringing that world back to its senses, and fostering the sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose that human beings require for a fulfilled and flourishing existence.
It is from this understanding that it becomes clear that the Nietzschean transvaluation of values necessarily implodes in on itself to become a devaluation of life and meaning through the rejection of - and open contempt for — the transcendent source and end of life and meaning. The problem is not merely the rejection of the sacred in favour of the profane, but the appropriation of the sacred by the profane. The result is that the power relations and struggles of the human world come to take on a murderous theological significance as a battle between the forces of good and evil – the sanctified and the demonized, the righteous whose goodness licences them to do as they please and the damned who are of no account. In such a world, standards of truth and justice are transfigured and reoriented in accordance with a political geography that is beyond good and evil, with authority shorn of substantive, verifiable grounds to be formed in the image of the dominant power group and its interests.
To discern a standard and construct an authoritative moral framework on its basis is to be involved in a project that transcends the immediacy of material and natural relations. It’s a big ask. Mention God and you will be immediately asked for evidence and proof. There is no compelling evidence and proof as far as I can find, but then if there were, we would have no need of faith. Make the same demands of other things that make life worthwhile, and the best you will find are suggestions and intimations requiring contemplation and interpretation. I can remember Alasdair MacIntyre writing somewhere that every moral proposition, if you try to trace it to source, lacks proof. Mathematics is similar in being based on almost nothing. People who understand this will still recognize that you have to start somewhere and build on something. My question to such people is why here and not there? Such choices as people make never seem to be arbitrary, implying that there is something substantive somewhere. Reject transcendence at your peril. Without transcendence, human beings will likely become submerged in the immanence of a primal squalor and natural indifference.
I have, therefore, this past decade been concerned with the systematic destruction of transcendence on the part of a modern ideology that cleaves to the self-sufficiency of a particular humanism and naturalism. Nietzsche, of course, revealed the human complicity in the ‘death of God,’ and as a result begged the question. In killing God, human beings must come to realize that God never existed, and that they must always have been living in accordance with their own self-created values. The universalism and transcendence of God, then, may well have been a false projection, but it possessed a reality too, one that human beings could live in accordance with. Illusion it may have been, if critics are right, but if so it has all the qualities of a necessary illusion. And something so necessary, I would argue, cannot actually be illusory, only real. Remove it at your peril. Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman writes of ‘reinventing the sacred’ (2007), as though the sacred is a technical or engineering task of endless creation and recreation. Nietzsche wrote well on the enveloping aura and mystery that the sacred requires: make the sacred a matter of human creation and recreation, and the aura and mystery is stripped away to leave only very contentious and contestable claims. In killing God, human beings have killed the qualities of the sacred. In his final song, You Want it Darker, Leonard Cohen states the truth: ‘we kill the flame.’ That flame cannot be rekindled by technology of the human kind. There is an exhaustion that comes with constantly having to create and recreate values and invent and reinvent the sacred. Human beings are not, after all, gods able to dwell in a paradise of their own making. The need to keep riding the complicated and often contradictory dynamics of the natural and supernatural, whilst still paying homage to a mysterious incarnate spirituality, leads to madness and burnout.
In exposing the emptiness of modern moral theories, Nietzsche excoriated those who used moral terms deriving from a Judaeo-Christian heritage whilst discarding the God which alone gave those terms meaning. Hegel and Kant had attempted to refound spirituality and religious ethics on the basis of a universal and universalising reason. It was a bold and ambitious project, but it had taken too much upon a fallible humanity. The claims made for an inter-subjective reason cracked and subjectivity became the norm – the world fractured into a congeries of little gods choosing truth and goodness existentially. Emboldened by its new found scientific, technological, and economic powers, modern humanity forgot its origins and became blind to the fact that the terms of its moral life were drawn upon its Judaeo-Christian inheritance. The modern world has been drawing upon the moral capital of a past age whilst doing nothing to replenish the stock. We see the same phenomenon, too, in public life, with aggressive, egoistic, self-assertive individuals ratcheting up private claims on the public realm, forever taking without ever contributing. This is a form of cannibalism – in taking morality into themselves, human beings are complicit in the death of morality; in constantly drawing on public life without putting a stint in themselves, individuals are complicit in the death of public life. When subjectivism holds all the trump cards, solipsism lies just around the corner. Nietzsche called it nihilism and affirmed its joyous possibilities. I suspect that had he been living today, the pessimism he often expressed with respect to an idolatrous humanity might well have been more pronounced. In The Drama of Atheist Humanism (1944), Henri de Lubac describes Nietzsche as the canary in the coal mine. Weber heeded his warnings, and gloomily characterised the future to come as ‘the polar night of icy darkness.’
Weber himself is an interesting character in his own right, describing himself as ‘unmusical religiously,’ yet expressing a pessimism - which contrasts markedly with Nietzsche’s joy – with respect to a humanity living in ‘godless and prophetless times.’ Weber is often taken to be anti-religious on account of his ‘unmusical’ declaration (eg Wuthnow 1987), but this is superficial. No one could write at length on the sociology of religion as Weber did without being concerned with and interested in religion and its significance in human life. If one reads the rest of the sentence in which Weber describes himself as ‘unmusical religiously,’ it is clear that Weber is not anti-religious at all and that he did possess a religious concern, and maybe even a religious sensibility. His wife, Marianne Weber, writes that Weber ‘always preserved a profound reverence for the Gospel and genuine Christian religiosity’ (1988: 337). That has always been my reading of Weber, even if he expresses pessimism as to the power of religion to overcome modern diremption (he felt war to have proven itself a greater unifier of human beings in the modern world than religion, something which, to me, says more about the modern world than it does about religion). I write on this, and on Weber and religion here:
The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality: Morality and Modernity (2020) 701 248,302
The result of this collective moral amnesia in the (post)modern world is a vehement rejection of transcendent standards of truth and justice in favour of reductively naturalist and irreducibly nominalist ideologies which, at first glance, seem positive – nature as benign, benevolent even, self-created human identities and values as liberatory – but which quickly become regressive and reactionary. I can in this short piece do no more than signpost and outline, hence I encourage people to check out any and every one of the works of mine I cite. Summed up in one paragraph, the situation appears as a sorry, self-contradictory, self-cancelling mess, involving the myopia of a surrogate human religion mediated by way of a naturalism reified by science, romanticism, decadence, and indolence. I unpack that miserable melange of self-importance, self-abnegation, and self-flagellation in the works cited in this piece. The main point to grasp in this short piece, though, is the profound human need to fill the metaphysical void that plagues the (post)modern world with something more substantive that the surrogates that that is all the meagre imagination of the choosing subject bereft of mystery and transcendence is capable of. My works convey the skepticism I have of the various humanisms and naturalisms that stalk the contemporary world, which can be summed up as a profound scepticism of each, any, and all forms of worship which extinguish the transcendent and thereby reduce normativity and spirituality to the facts of scientific materialism, to a nature that speaks through the reified voice of science, and to ‘men as gods’ experimentation in planetary and social engineering. The world deprived of its supernatural principle is akin a rose that has neither fragrance nor thorn. Beyond the world of existential choice and crisis, there is an ecology of good and evil. Such was the world before the dis-godding of disenchantment, and that world still exists, whether human beings recognize it or not. They need to. Because when the transvaluation of values is realized as the devaluation of the objective good, then reduction and degradation follow. A humanism that curves in on itself, so that the Self replaces God as the prime object of worship, always degenerates into the self-immolation of violence.
Here is Georges Bernanos writing of Hitler and Stalin:
The one exploits the mystique of race, the other the mystique of class, for the same purpose: the rational exploitation of human labour and human genius in the service of purely human values. An immense reform, with incalculable implications, when one reflects that up to now the better part of human endeavour has been devoted to the discovery, defence and celebration, not of human but of spiritual values. Millions of men have killed one another on account of metaphysical ideas to which the minds and hearts of millions have been dedicated. A fraction of the heroism expended for the conquest of eternal life would have been sufficient to found a hundred empires. Admittedly, there are many who are not yet familiar with the new point of view. But once it begins to establish itself it will spread like wildfire. One has only to remember how enormously the religious instinct has been weakened by the successes, modest and, above all, incomplete though they have been, of experimental science. And yet there was something about the purely utilitarian materialism of the 19th century which was repulsive to any noble soul. But our reformers have linked it with the ideas of sacrifice, grandeur and heroism, so that the peoples are now able to turn away from God without anguish and almost without knowing it, in a state of exaltation like that of the saints and martyrs. There is nothing to warn them that this experiment ends in a condition of universal hatred.
Georges Bernanos Les grands cimetières sous la lune 1938 (The Great Cemeteries under the Moon. Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2018).
This is where we are at with identity politics, forever dividing the world into the sanctified and the demonized, the pure and the polluted, the innocent and the implicated, the deified and the damned.
In The Price of Leadership, Middleton Murry writes:
It can be no cause for astonishment to the Christian mind that, in an economic order of which the characteristic is that the physical energy at the disposal of society has been multiplied a thousandfold in the last hundred and fifty years, the natural man by his natural actions should be preparing to bring moral degradation and universal catastrophe upon himself. ... It is not enough to admit that the history of postwar Europe has plainly shown that the working-class has no intention and no power to dictate, and that what happens when it is foolish enough to say that it intends to do so is that it is dictated to by a satanic nationalism. It is imperative to realise why this happens and why it must happen. It happens and must happen because, by no conceivable operation of the ordinary self of mankind, or any class of mankind, can the 'classless society' imagined by Marxist Socialism be brought into being. Such a society will be brought into being by Christian love - 'that seeketh not its own' - or not at all.
Murry 1939
Whilst I think Marx’s case for socialism can respond to such charges, I do think that Murry’s case – resting on a humility, a power tempered by love – is infinitely sager and saner than the dream of ‘men as gods’ (still less 'rebel angels'). For the reason that it was God’s boundless love for humanity and the Earth, made incarnate in Jesus Christ, that revealed the impossible and destructive boundlessness of man’s No. In so doing, incarnation exposed the core flaw of an atheistic humanism that is constituted by individuals claiming the right to choose the true and the good as they see fit, and refusing to be obligated by anyone or anything other than the choosing self as its own god – and refusing to accept the damaging and destructive consequences of what Dante calls their ‘inordinate affections’ (and to recognize the source of our disappointment with them).
The vehemence of the “No” that human beings assert against God, transcendent standards, and supra-individual authority exposes the rage of a violent egoism that is often hidden behind the libertarian, even joyous, assertion of a self-sufficient humanism. As Hans Urs von Balthasar argues, this liberatory project was inaugurated only recently:
In the religion of the Enlightenment, the truly enlightened person himself is the truth (untruth is its temporary obscurity); in the religion of Jesus Christ, he alone is the truth that exposes the sin and falsehood of man and atones for them on the cross. The two models of religious universality are incompatible: Jesus’ absolute claim – “No one knows the Father except the Son” – cannot be subordinated to an “intrinsically good” human nature that of itself (despite obscurities, despite Kant’s “radical evil”) knows the truth and can come to possess it.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Adrienne von Speyr, My Early Years 1995: 2
Instead of a genuine universalism, such thinking yields only the uniformity of totalitarianism, a totalism that is not genuinely transcendent but abstract, constructed at a distance from and towering above human beings in their proximal relations, primary loyalties and solidarities, and intermediary sites and societies. This falsely transcendent universalism of all ‘humanity’ –in abstraction from actual flesh-and-blood human beings – presents state, law, and institutional force as the new saviours taking the place of Christ. Behind this abstract universalism is not morality but power, and not the real but the nominalist: it is not love that is the motive power of this universalism but the endlessly creating and recreating force of those who impose the unity of all upon the world as a uniformity. This is not irreligious at all, but a new idolatrous humanism, turning to repress, persecute, even murder all the non-believing enemies of ‘Humanity in general,’ unleashing the kind of barbarism and bloodlust typical of human beings in the grip of a religious revivalism an revanchism. This is the return of the repressed with a vengeance.
Without transcendence, there is no way of evading this self-destruction. If God doesn’t exist, then human beings and human beings alone have morality in their own hands, to do with as they please. Since this self-pleasing tends to take place within asymmetrical relations of power, the effects of this humanism tend to be uneven, and even baneful. That may incite the demand for a more egalitarian relation between human beings, but that demand by definition articulates a transcendent standard. The only rival to the religion of ‘humanity in general’ is the inhumanism of naturalism and its god ‘Nature.’ That ‘god’ is utterly indifferent to human concerns. People who want nothing more to do with God have a choice to make between a self-destructive humanism and an indifferent inhumanism. In exposing the inherently fatal flaws of a solipsistic humanism on the one hand and a regressive naturalism on the other – both of them reductive and destructive - it is hoped that people stripped of their false gods will come again to find hope and meaning in the one true God.
How can this God be known? As transcendent, this God is non-existent, it is futile to offer evidence and proof. Take that route and the only reasonable end is atheism. There is much more to religion than an omnipotent God. Beyond endless debates concerning proof and evidence are the attributes of true divinity – the power of humility and the non-violent heart. Buckley writes of religion as possessing the principles and experiences within itself to disclose the existence of God, pointing to
the cogency in the phenomenology of religious experience, the witness of the personal histories of holiness and religious commitment, the sense of claim by the absolute already present in the demands of truth or goodness or beauty, the intuitive sense of the givenness of God, an awareness of the infinite horizon opening up before inquiry and longing, an awakening jolted into a more perceptive consciousness by limit-experiences, the long history of religious institutions and practice, or the life and meaning of Jesus of Nazareth.
To look outside of these things in order to establish that there is a ‘friend behind the phenomena’ is to be involved in a fruitless search for foundations. Buckley’s point is that this search is utterly futile, involving religion in the limitations of philosophical reason, noting the extent to which philosophy undercuts its own foundations. Those who, from a rationalist perspective, accuse religion of lacking in grounds need to understand that critical reason is a double-edged sword, and applies to all such grounds. Religion has its grounds within itself, and it is ‘ultimately counterproductive to look outside of the religion to another discipline or science or art. Inference cannot substitute for experience, and the most compelling witness to a personal God must itself be personal. To attempt something else either as foundation or as substitute, as did the Newtonian Settlement, is to move into a progress of internal contradiction of which the ultimate resolution is atheism.’ (Buckley 1988: 99). The implication of Buckley’s view is this, a moral language that is shorn of the religious experience it presupposes not only loses the only foundation it can have, God, but also any foundation – such foundations do not exist. ‘The origin of atheism in the intellectual culture of the West lies thus with the self-alienation of religion itself.’ (Buckley 1987: 363).
A self-legislating reason cannot be its own foundation. The protagonists of the myriad wars of the (post)modern world are mistaking the fruits of freedom for the foundation of freedom, eating that foundation up in their forgetfulness. Against the humanist assertions that human beings can live by their own self-created standards – which are not standards at all - Buckley’s words indicate that human beings are only able to free themselves from their violent ways by embracing the non-violent heart of the transcendent God. Lose that transcendence and we once more return to the polytheism of rival human gods, becoming mired in an endless and unwinnable war in which all lose.
As for the image that heads this piece: Freedom for the pike is death to the minnow. And when the minnows have gone, the pikes eat themselves and then die of starvation.