The Secular Left Stuck In A Pose of Ritual Hesitation - What Happens When You Reject Moral Absolutism

I am going to go on quoting Terry Eagleton's Gifford Lecture and commenting on it because he hits a lot of nails directly on their heads.  Continuing on with commentary. Beginning with a sentence I should have probably included in yesterday's post.

The price of freedom is potentially tragic conflict as well as a certain vulnerability in the face of a robustly absolutist or illiberal or foundationalist enemy.

Freedom that isn't limited will be a guarantee of tragic conflict, often following am even more tragic stasis in a system of violent oppression on the basis of those free to exploit people in a weaker state, as so much of human history consists of.

Monarchs, emperors, dictators, slave holders, factory bosses, owners of tenant plantations and farms, company store towns, etc. enjoyed the kind of freedom that Noble Prize economics preaches, especially as even the likes of Friedrich Hyack's Darwinian evolutionary depravity evolved, itself, into the Koch brother's favorite model invented by James M. Buchanan, Darwinian framing, itself dissolving into the ironically titled "Public-choice" in the universal acid that materialism inevitably is.   The imagined absolutist foes, as imagined by Margaret Atwood or at least her fantasy in the hands of cable TV or the anti-Islamic fanatics, in turn, would be overtaken by that same force until things became so intolerable that there would be a violent overthrowing of the system, with or without any intellectual framing.  What followed, whether Stalinist oppression, mafia  or French enlightenment style rule of terror or, as in the rare example of George Washington (slave holder though he was) the only plausible candidate to wield dictatorial power not feeling right about being crowned king in some Hamiltonian wet dream, might only be a stage in a rerun.

But I'll continue with what Eagelton said because it's more important to understand our condition, where we are.

For another thing capitalism  is not just, is just not the kind of life form that demands too much from its citizens by way of belief.  As long as they roll out of bed, pay their taxes, refrain from assaulting police officers, they can believe more or less what they want.  It's not belief that keeps the system taking over, as it's belief that keeps the Lutheran Church  or Flat Earth Society taking over.  The system, once again, is thus bound to look particularly feeble and fragile when confronted with a stoutly absolutist foe.  Post-modernism in particular commits the grave error, I think, of regarding all passionate conviction as ipso-facto dogmatic.  It's skeptical not just of this or that faith but, in a sense, faith as such.  It tries to get by on as little of the stuff as it decently can like a recovering cocain addict.  For this brand of thought all certainty is latently authoritarian. This is, one reason  why the post-modern young insert the word "like" into their speech every couple of seconds to avoid the impression of their being certain about something.  And thus, in their own view, distastefully authoritarian.  It's a kind of ritual hesitation and so a sort of authenticity in an age when you can't be sure of anything where it seems overweening to imagine or convey that you can by not putting the word "like" between the other words.  Yet I think there's more to the general situation than that because I think the deepest irony is that liberal secularism of the kind I've been describing actually helps to breed fundamentalism.

I have mentioned the part that going on lefty blogs in the past twenty years and reading the unfiltered thoughts of self-identified lefties has played in my disillusion with the secular left and I can say another of the major milestones in that was.   I wish I could resurrect the discussion in which one of my fellow LGBTs castigated the entire category of morality and morals as oppressive when the basis of her making that statement was her histrionic anger at supposed, imaginary really, oppression of atheists, itself, cluelessly, moral complaint.   I seem to recall pointing out that without morality and morals that the rights of LGBT people could not be demanded because all anyone would need to do to reject such a demand is to say, "I don't want to".  When you reject the absolute moral standard of equality as a moral command, that's all that's left.  Atheists of that ilk have no leg to stand on in demanding any civil right on the very basis of their materialist, scientistic framing because those destroy the entire category of morals. 

The situation Eagleton lays out does play an enormous role in the self-generated, self-imposed impotence of the left after about 1965 as the college-based "left," schooled in the very ways of thinking that Eagelton cites, started taking over from groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, perhaps freedom-summer had that ironic effect.   The domination of that college-based left in the anti-war movement definitely suffered from the often self-defeating enthusiasms of such young people as well as the attention-seeking and, pathetically enough, "power struggles" among the powerless based on ideological assertions of who, by virtue of one ideological position or other,  was the most lefty in the room, a room which would never do anything, not anymore than the blog commenting communities that so many of those people now people.   It is one of the limitations of depending on leadership of the young, it's bound to get caught up in the inherent immaturity of the young.   The "youth culture" hegemony that my generation inflicted on the world proves that immaturity can be extended into senectitude.

Compared to the religion-based activism of the Civil Rights movement, which produced the incredible feat of at least forcing a pause in the American apartheid system, the achievements of the secular left are certainly at least unimpressive and I say they have been counterproductive.   Given what I said about the idiocy of my generation's great contribution to this, "youth culture" it's only fair to point out that it wasn't only the young who contributed to that idiocy. The part they played in "breeding fundamentalism" was not only in fragmenting the left (as any student of American Marxist parties could have predicted was inevitable) but more so in providing the Republican-fascist right with examples of ballot-box poison and laughing stock "liberalism" (the "liberal" Phil Donohue seldom presented liberals as anything but flaky).  Likely most damaging of all,  they also unleashed the corporate media to lie with impunity, handing the fascists unlimited ability to propagandize the country through a fundamentalist reading of their idea of secular holy writ, the First Amendment.