This passage and what came after it in Terry Eagleton's Gifford Lecture, posted yesterday, struck me as touching on some of the most dangerous and difficult to address trends leading to the current resurgence of fascism and its relationship to modernity. So I thought I'd type it out and comment on why I think it's important.
The world, one might say, is currently is currently divided between those who believe far too much and those who believe far too little. I like to think I stand in the middle, somewhere. Late capitalist cultures are not given to an excess of belief for at least two reasons. One thing liberal democracies don't so much hold beliefs as believe that people should be allowed to hold beliefs. They display a certain creative indifference towards what their citizens actually believe as long as they're allowed to get on with believing it and as long as they don't entertain or act upon beliefs which will prevent other people from believing whatever they believe. Such social orders, then, are agonistic by their very nature, um . . . sorry, agnostic. They're also agonistic, I misread the word. They're also agonistic but I'll say agnostic for the moment. And this agnosticism, however intellectual or laudably admirable, letting people get on with what they believe is politically perilous. Because the fact in this situation is that peoples' beliefs are bound to collide with each other to the point where any fundamental consensus necessary for political power becomes well neigh unachievable. Another reason why that consensus becomes very difficult to achieve in late capitalist societies - though this is another story - is so-called "multiculturalism." If the dominant power will be interpreted in different ways by different communities that poses a problem for deep-seated political consensus. Anyway, it's a characteristic of modernity, certainly late modernity, that consensus is increasingly hard to come by in a way that would, no doubt, have struck many an ancient or medieval thinker as exceedingly strange. Almost everyone agrees that roasting babies over fires is not the most civilized way to behave but we can't agree why we agree on that and we probably never will.
The pretense of scientism I mentioned earlier, especially in the period when psychology took it on itself to convince people that they couldn't trust their own thinking because the phenomenon of mental illness exists, and, especially, the need of materialistic-scientistic atheism to discredit morality as having the possibility of determining absolute moral truths has led to political absurdities that make liberal democracy (as opposed to the democracy of traditional American liberalism) unsustainable. It is proving unsustainable, in the age of Trump and other neo-fascist, neo-Nazis, because of the legalistic principles that replace moral principles. In the United States, it is conventionalized in the mistaken idea that because the Constitution says something, because "the founders" said something, it is the sought end of things. That stupidity enshrined in the oaths that various officials take to merely "defend and protect the Constitution" short circuits the only reason that any Constitution should be considered as having any legitimacy, that those serve egalitarian democracy and the requirements of universally held moral obligations to respect the rights of all. Those aren't, by the way, the legitimate end which all of those must serve to be legitimate, that end is embodied in the principle that you are to do unto others as you would have done unto you, that you are to love one another, that you are to provide for those in need, including the alien among you, that you should forgive (if for no other reason than that you might then rightfully ask forgiveness) and that you should know those truths and those truths will make you free.
Eagelton's extreme example of the general consensus that you shouldn't roast babies but that we'll never agree on why that is is both extremely optimistic that there is any kind of consensus on that or and spot on in identifying why, even that, what should be the hardest of hard hard truths, is vulnerable to the methods of materialistic, scientistic modernism, which, I will say, I have come to believe is primarily a vehicle for the service of those who can exercising their will on those without power. The goal of science, from the start, was to channel nature to enhance the power of those who wield it, politically that is bound to serve those who already have the power. Egalitarian democracy has to find its origin and energy in something else and that is only going to come from God who endows all of us with rights and moral obligations.
It's demonstrably true that there isn't general consensus against the murder of babies, the history of the 20th century that Eagelton derides "Ditchens" for holding is a saga of increasing moral excellence has had innumerable babies and children and other innocent people murdered, the Nazis, under various Marxist governments, all of them proclaiming their scientific nature, did pretty much what Eagelton says a consensus in opposing. And the whole while, those acts had their apologists among liberal democracies and certainly intellectual establishments. Often such things were accepted as a mere cost of war or a cost of "progress" and, in fact, the murders of children - though by some cleaner, "humane" means - is a mainstay of the scienctific consideration of what is called in many if not most universities in the English Speaking Peoples, "ethics". In fact, its explicit discussion was a mainstay of utilitarianism and its existence was certainly accepted by many of the brightest lights of the enlightenment, either directly or by proxy in their support of racial inequality and the conquests and destruction of people deemed inferior to the Europeans who were anything but civilized in their actions. The scientific and sociological and philosophical literature is full of such breaches of that consensus.
Politically, in the United States in the post-war period, the tender regard of secularist elucidations of the civil liberties establishment - at the behest of lawyers payed to promote such stuff - of post-war Nazis freedoms to be able to promote a repeat performance of the Nazi genocides was and remains a mainstay consensus of the modern, secular, enlightened intelligentsia that "Ditchens," or at least such intellectuals as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker put their most warmly held faith in.
That even as the ashes of the crematoria were cooling and even before the scholarly understanding of what had happened was barely getting underway, those holding fastest to the legalistic principles that the Founders replaced real morality with in the Constitution, piously invoked and recited the formulas that we had to take the chance of the Nazis doing what they had already succeeded in doing, what Marxists were still and are still doing, killing people, including babies, is all the confirmation anyone of any reasoning ability and any moral sense would need to say the agnosticism that pose is based in is not only problematic but dangerously and criminally immoral.
The "principle" that we must take a chance on Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. on not being able to repeat what they did because science, the slicing and dicing of intellectuals can't come up with a solid consensus in why what they did is wrong, a consensus that, unusually in even scientific discourse, especially that pretending to treat human societies and populations, is demanded to be on the level of a mathematical proof before we take it as an absolute truth is in the running as the stupidest idea produced in the entire history of human thought. I can't think of another idea as stupid that is regularly spouted by anyone today. And, as we're still in the backwash of the new atheism, it's not for want of competition for the ultimate stupid idea but it's an odds on favorite. I have a feeling we're going to be seeing just what a good bet that was.
I immediately think if Trump and Stephen Miller, who would ask: "Well, whose babies are we roasting?" Dawkins would be subtler, but he's upheld the distinction, too.
ReplyDeleteI honestly think, as cynical as it sounds, that consensus is a matter of power, not uniformity of reason or even thought. If consensus seems increasingly hard to come by, it's because the past always looks homogenous, and the present always seems to be tearing the past into chaotic shreds.