The Revolution that is Eating Itself
I will begin with this scathing review of Douglas Murray's "The War on the West" by Patrick Deneen.
The Anti-Woke Girondist's Lament by Patrick Deneen
Deneen’s article is also a brilliant assault on so-called conservatives "who are actually better characterized as classical liberals." This is an old theme of mine. As a socialist, I have repeatedly argued that the contemporary Left is not socialist, but a cultural Left that has supplanted the Social Left, replacing the working class, particularly the white working class, with ‘margins and minorities.’ Issues of broad concern to most people have been replaced by issues of particular concern to some people. Deneen argues the same with respect to those who are considered conservatives but who are in fact classical liberals or neoliberals. I don’t know why the point is so difficult to grasp. Conservative grandees like William Rees-Mogg openly describe themselves as classical liberals, believers in free markets, low taxes, deregulation, and limited government. That’s liberalism, folks, the old Manchester Free Trade liberalism that was the scourge of conservatism in the past. It’s no friend of socialism in the present, either.
The contempory world is not being pulled apart by a war between conservatives and socialists at all. We are embroiled in a war between different wings of neoliberalism. With regard to socialism, a Cultural Left has supplanted the Social Left, with the working class ejected from the movement it created. Charming. The story of the working class is one of continuous dispossession, even with regard to its own political forms.
Patrick Deneen is a conservative, I would describe myself as a socialist, but from different perspectives we have seen the same thing, that economic deregulation and cultural de-regulation are twin reefs and that the economic neoliberals of the Right and the cultural neoliberals of the Left are two wings of the same self-consuming monster rather than genuine political rivals. The contemporary political fight between Right and Left is really a war within a neoliberal landscape. That being the case, we should avoid picking sides in this unwinnable war.
I’ve been saying this for so long that I have abandoned hope for certain audiences. Sadly, ‘progressives’ don’t want to know. They are too busy riding the new wave of capitalist development, thinking that embracing the new acceptable face of capitalism amounts to system change. It doesn’t. They think they are being radical when they are merely exchanging the old for the new. The capital system periodically goes through these internal transitions. Experience alone should tell them that something isn’t right. They just carry on misdiagnosing the problem. ‘Progressive’ isn’t necessarily Left and most often isn’t.
I come now to a quote beloved of conservatives.
"Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children."
This is a quote by Jacques Mallet du Pan from his 1793 essay Considérations sur la nature de la Révolution de France, et sur les causes qui en prolongent la durée. The quote is frequently used by conservatives against socialists and Leftists. But we should note straight away its context of the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution was not a socialist revolution, it was a bourgeois revolution, it was a revolution about the rights of man. It is interesting to compare Marx’s critique of these rights as an atomistic conception appropriate to bourgeois market society with Edmund Burke’s critique of this same atomism as appropriate to a mechanical way of thinking. The economic system as a machine and the state as a machine ran entirely contrary to conservative – and it would seem also Marx’s socialist – notions of organic growth. Once we understand the claim that the revolution always eats itself from this perspective, we can begin to appreciate it as a problem within liberalism, not socialism.
Liberalism has a long and honourable tradition but, on close examination, much of its honour stems from a pre-liberal tradition. The rights of man go back to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, with rights being natural rights rooted in natural law. This leads to liberalism as a comprehensive doctrine, affirming standards that are not merely self-created and conferred by the state. Once liberalism discarded its metaphysical supports (the transcendent standards of truth and justice which pre-date liberalism, particularly the divine transcendent) to became a wholly political doctrine, it was bound to curve in on itself, for the reason that it had lost its objective, authoritative standard. Once there is no objective good to measure up to, then man does indeed become his or her or its own measure. Instead of the one overarching good, there are as many goods as there are human beings. And once each person becomes his or her or its own god, there is no longer any real politics, merely a battleground of warring gods. This is the kind of polytheism that cannot but theologize and destroy politics. Whilst politics is dissensus and disagreement, there can be no compromise on divine truths. War commences and the political field closes in on itself.
Conservatives cite the quote about the revolution devouring itself often against socialists and socialism. But the revolution that is eating the contemporary world is the same one about which the quote was written, the liberal revolution of individual rights and atomistic politics, leading to society as a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism. This is the revolution in which individuals ditched transcendent standards of truth, justice, and goodness to take morality into their own hands. That development is liberatory in the first instance. The problem is that free individuals soon start to collide with one another, with their self-chosen goods cancelling one another out.
At the heart of this process is the abandonment of God for Reason. It’s an optimistic move, a noble one, even. It affirms that human beings are capable of governing themselves through the reason that is innate and common to all. That this claim for universal human rationality is central to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, with man created in likeness to God, should tell us not to be too hasty here. Replacing the likeness to God to being as gods is a step too far, charging flawed and fallible creatures with living up to an impossible ideal. The burden is too onerous to bear.
In Spiked, Patrick West argues that "if they were around today, the likes of Foucault and Derrida would be fighting woke orthodoxies." They most probably would, in the same way that Danton fought Robespierre and the Russian Revolutionaries fought amongst themselves. Many people who were classed as postmodernists refused the label, Derrida for one. The article argues that Foucault and Derrida would have rejected the certainties and orthodoxies of the new cultural Left. “Like Foucault, Derrida was opposed to certitudes. Both rejected Marxism as a political enterprise. Neither believed in reason, agency or the individual. So such talk of ‘neo-Marxism’ or ‘cultural Marxism’ is tosh. Foucault and Derrida were free thinkers beyond categorisation.” This may well be true, and certainly we are in the presence of modes of thinking that have nought to do with marxism and notions of reality, foundations, and reason. But, and it’s a big but, the implosion of these ever-shifting, arbitrary modes of thought always involved a certain totalising re-regulation. The sweeping denunciation of a totalising reason was as totalising as anything produced by the most extreme rationalists. Plus, it was noted at the time – I for one certainly noted it – that the leftist political commitments that postmodernist thinkers retained were entirely arbitrary and, in being arbitrary, implied actions which were coercive of people and reality. The fetish of difference, uncertainty, instability, and malleability was always socially and politically unsustainable, with the result that attempts to re-impose order were predictable.
West argues that Derrida’s project of ‘deconstruction’ – to explore and excavate the meaning of words and the context they are presented in – was not undertaken to dismantle or destroy the Western canon, as many believe, but to better understand it. This rings true, but overlooks the fact that precious few people are subtle and supple enough in their thinking to take the point. I once read a philosopher demolishing Derrida’s view of Plato, bemoaning how much of Plato he had got wrong or bent out of shape to fit his own concerns. As a lover of Plato and loather of Derrida, I remember cheering as each blow hit its target. Then the thought occurred to me that in my own work I rarely write a straight by-the-book presentation of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx etc., but inhabit their thoughts in order to better express my own. I like to be engaged in dialogue. I can remember my Director of Studies discussing the reports that I submitted asking, ‘are you sure this is what Marx said? Or is this you saying that this is what Marx ought to have said?’ I was always concerned to draw out other possibilities in various thinkers, other roads that should and possibly could have been taken with a little ‘tweeking.’
The idea of Derrida as destroying the thinkers and thoughts he wrote on makes little sense. That’s the kind of thing that only third-rate minds with a political agenda to promote do. ‘I love very much everything that I deconstruct,’ Derrida declared in 1979. ‘Plato’s signature is not yet finished… nor is Nietzsche’s, nor is St Augustine’s.’ It is worth rereading the texts of such thinkers, he argued, because when you reread, words, thoughts, and books read differently each time. I learned something similar reading Heidegger. Heidegger had been very much the Catholic in his younger days, arguing that ‘Catholic ground is the only true ground.’ This claim caught my attention, given that Heidegger is commonly known as an anti-metaphysician, so I read on. Heidegger said something very interesting on St Thomas Aquinas, which struck me as an overlooked truth. We remember thinkers like Aquinas for their finished body of work, which are canonised, systematised, and passed down in history as an orthodoxy to follow. But what we rarely consider is the active, creative philosophising that went into the making of that body of work. Heidegger sought to keep that spirit of philosophising alive as against freezing thought. Heidegger stated that reason is the stiff-necked adversary of thought, a view which has opened up to accusations that he is anti-rational, offering invitations into irrationalism. This is the full quote:
“Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.” (Martin Heidegger).
As someone who argues for ‘rational freedom,’ this claim seemed to strike at the basis of all that I hold to be true. But when studied closely – as we are surely called to do as philosophers – the point became clear, an ossification of thoughts by way of rationalisation is the very antithesis of thinking, the active and creative process by which human beings come to truth and understanding, rather than accepting dogma and reproducing orthodoxy. Rather than being the enemy of philosophy, Heidegger thus appears to be an advocate of philosophising in line of descent from Socrates.
But thinkers like Heidegger and Derrida possess a rare quality. They can live without stable commitments and orthodoxies and certainties. Not everyone can. Understood properly, Marx’s thought is dialectical, possessing a fluidity and movement that is in tune with the ceaseless creativity of the universe. In the hands of marxists, that thought is frozen as a political orthodoxy to be imposed on pain of excommunication, exile, and death. ‘I am not a marxist,’ Marx declared as an elderly man. He had caught a glimpse of what was to come.
I can understand Marx’s frustration and I can accept that Derrida and other such thinkers would be horrified at the thought that their work could be considered to have inspired certain insanities in the contemporary world. I think they do bear a certain responsibility for all that. Marx took the promise of the Judaeo-Christian tradition with respect to rationality, equality, sociality and appropriated it to humanity itself, a humanity which circled round its own sun rather than the illusory sun of God and religion.
The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
Marx Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right : Introduction EW 1975 p.245
For Marx, in line with the secularising impulse of the Enlightenment, ‘man’ is to ‘revolve around himself’ and ‘move around himself as his own true sun.’ There, in a nuthshell, is the issue – are human beings capable of such a revolution. Without God, as an entitity drawing human beings into communion with something greater than they are, ‘man’ dissolves quickly into a congeries of very different individuals, with commonality being lost as each becomes his or her or its ‘own true sun.’ Kant and Hegel thought unity could be retained by way of a universalising reason, Marx by way of ‘socialised man’ reappropriating creative labour and organising it as a social power. It’s a noble vision, one that I argued for for a couple of decades, and which I continue to affirm with one fairly drastic modification – the noble claims can only be redeemed if God is re-instated. Without God, humanity curves in on itself. We have learned that there is no homogeneous, unified humanity revolving around the one sun of reason, there are as many gods as there are human beings, the many suns cancelling themselves out as they collide.
With the “death of God” came the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework and the loss of objective standards capable of evaluating between competing claims. Each free individual became his or her or its own God, each brooking no opposition from others. How could they allow disagreement and dialogue and accept compromise? Truth is non-negotiable. The result is a polytheism of values, an endless and unwinnable war fought between ‘men as gods.’ That’s the revolution that is devouring itself. People seem to admire Douglas Murray for the strong stand he is taking against the insanities and inanities of the cultural Left. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel. How difficult is it to take down people who can’t define what a woman is? The same with the race haters and race baiters. These people are cranks. They appear powerful because, being neurotics, they are never off social media, never away from activism, always politicking, dividing, provoking. And they have managed to find their way into institutions and corporations, from where they issue their orders and abuse their critics. Murray is to be commended for taking it on. He hits his targets well. But, frankly, people like Robin DiAngelo are such cretins that it would be impossible to miss. I hope he does take this crowd out. He would be doing the Social Left, the left that has the interests of working people at heart, a huge favour. I also hope that ‘ordinary’ people stand their ground and tell these idiot academics to go and stuff themselves with green apples before someone does it for them.
When it comes to the grounds for the counter-revolution, though, the likes of Douglas Murray are clueless. If you listen to the counter-revolutionaries often enough you notice a common thread. They have all noticed that ‘woke’ contains certain clear religious themes and elements, so much so that they will criticise woke as a ‘new religion.’ This is shallow in the extreme. This Cultural Left is not a new religion at all, it is a bad religion, an inversion and perversion of genuine religion. This is what happens when politics supplants religion, when human beings overthrow the transcendent divine to become gods legislating the good for themselves. In denouncing what they call ‘woke’ as a ‘new religion,’ these counter-revolutionaries reproduce the anti-religious impulse of the liberal humanism that gave birth to this Cultural Left. The denunciation of ‘woke’ as a ‘new religion’ is based on the presumption that religion is contrary to reason and free thinking, the right of human beings to legislate the good society by light of their own reason. That assertion of a self-legislating reason is precisely the origin of the revolution that is now devouring the world.
Douglas Murray is now seeking merely to halt the revolution he and his ilk inspired in the first place, now that he sees it coming to topple the idols he favours. I see exactly the same thing at work with the likes of the historian David Starkey who, in one interview, traces every ridiculous ‘woke’ idea back to Rousseau. This is wrong, and profoundly so. Everything that Starkey spoke of can be traced back to the classical liberal tradition he favours, particularly Hobbes and Locke. The idea of a self-defining identity and self-created reality is there in Locke’s idea of a tabula rasa. Indeed, modern identity politics can be described as a merging of the Lockean blank sheet and Social Darwinism, only levelled on the group rather than the individual. That Starkey may be somewhat confused is indicated that at several points he likens Marx’s reduction of all things to power to Hobbes’ war of all against all. Quite. Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx all noticed the diremptive and destructive qualities of Hobbes’ emphasis on the constant expansion of power. There is the problem in a nutshell, a problem that Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx sought to check. They were unsuccessful and the reasons for that lack of success are all important. You cannot create the political peace on the basis of a self-legislating reason and a self-creating labour, there always has to be a power outside of these forces, motivating, orienting, and obligating the merely human. The people who criticise ‘woke’ as a ‘new religion’ are denouncing it basically as a religion, against which we need to assert reason. In fine, they re-assert the very humanism that initiated the descent into self-cancellation in the first place.
Neoliberalism won and is now consuming society, politics, and culture, and we are living in the maelstrom. I’ll not be taking sides. I would rather Murray and his likes win against the Cultural Left, but it won’t constitute a victory, merely a holding operation before the next onslaught. We are all free to choose our own goods and be our own gods after all.
It is not the least achievement of the ‘iron cage’ society within which we are confined that it embroils us in endless debilitating dispute over illusory oppositions arising between unreal friends and enemies. These antitheses can only be unravelled by being traced back to an estranged, alienated system which must continue to generate false contradictions so as to better hide its true ones from us.
Douglas Murray is scathing of the ‘woke Left’ and marxism, but the thing that conservatives like Murray don’t see that it is they who are the architects of this revolution that is eating itself. It is easy for conservatives to call for a fightback against the ‘woke Left.’ They may well win people to their support, too. So insane is some of the stuff spewing out of the academies that I find myself cheering the counter-attack too. But it won’t do the trick. This is a case of the people who lit the fire now trying to put the part of it that threatens to consume them out. The fires will continue to blaze elsewhere. My fear is that people, stressed to breaking point by the culture wars, will flock to conservatives who are really classical liberals in order to check the nominalist madness. We have a Conservative leadership election underway, and all the candidates are promising a fightback against ‘socialism,’ by which they mean massive Lockdown expenditure and state intrusion into personal life, the commitment to net zero and other Green taxes and regulations, and ‘woke.’ Put like that, I feel like voting Conservative myself. But it would be merely a new wave of neoliberalism, unleashing who knows what.
I’m old enough to remember Margaret Thatcher. I disliked her politics intensely and spent the 80s fighting back. But I could see why she won – she called the Left’s bluff. She knew that too few of the Left had the nerve to really push beyond the exhausted reformist tradition, so she gave us the Second Coming of Political Economy – ‘there is no alternative.’ I thought her economic miracle a complete disaster that deindustrialised the economy, created mass unemployment and sent the UK into deficit on manufacturing account for the first time in history (never to return to surplus). But she won by calling the bluff of an empty reformist Left and I see the so-called Left of today as similarly empty. Whoever is the first to call its bluff may well garner huge political support.
But it won’t be a victory, because these conservatives are neoliberals, the architects of the very crises we are mired in in the first place; they are the neoliberals who began the revolution by asserting the right of the rich and the powerful, the monied and the propertied, to choose the good as they see fit. And they inspired others to do likewise. Milton Friedman’s ‘Free to Choose’ was the Bible of the monetarists. The argument was soon extended from the economic market to society and culture, ethics and politics. That’s the revolution that is now eating the world up.
That principle that individuals are ‘free to choose’ in the economic marketplace spills quite naturally and inevitably over into culture, turning ethics into a moral marketplace, where people can choose the good as they see fit. They are now choosing the truth the same way. I have no idea why people are surprised. It’s in the DNA of modernity, as Nietzsche argued.
Contemporary Leftism isn’t Left at all, it is the cultural wing of economic neoliberalism. Economic de-regulation and cultural de-regulation proceed hand-in-hand, transgressing social and natural boundaries, spreading chaos and confusion, uprooting reality, and paving the way for a totalitarian re-regulation fashioned in the preferred image of the cultural creators. We don’t actually have a Right vs Left in politics, merely economic neoliberals and cultural neoliberalism emptying out the public realm, the economy, and community, each choosing the good as they see fit. It’s a self-cancellation.
I have argued this from the Left, but have been drowned out. The Left, Greens, progressives etc. look away. And I am sure I know why – God and religion. There is a definite move to supplant God and religion with reason, science, and humanity. I have news for the people who think that way – you have arrived, your brave new world is here. The problems of the world are self-authored and you need to take ownership of them.
There are conservatives out there who are getting it. I don’t know whether they will prove influential enough to turn the tide here. I do know that they have a far better grasp of the problem than those still wedded to liberalism.
We might well be destined to be consumed by a revolution that knows no boundaries. A common ruin is possible (Marx in the Communist Manifesto speculated on the common ruin of all the classes). I’m just seeing no hope on the Leftist side in politics. I don’t get the sense that anyone of Leftist or progressive persuasion even sees the problem. They just think that their side is better for having science rather than God on its side, and think that with a bit more effort and activism will prevail. That’s always a sure sign that we are in the presence of empty signifiers.
In 2017 I was invited to the book launch for Jonathan Clatworthy's excellent “Why Progressives need God.” The argument went down like a led balloon with progressives. I think that genuine conservatives will get it long before progressives will.
The only thing I would add here is that the problem is not that “the revolution devours its children” so much as the children devour their revolution.
My work on St Thomas Aquinas a decade ago charts the descent and the self-implosion inherent in liberalism and shows the way back. The book has been consistently in the Top 5% on Academia and currently ranks in the Top 2% There is hope. There is always hope when you cleave to the transcendent divine.
Patrick Deneen