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LIBERATING THE LEFT FROM “WOKEISM”

A Review of Left is not Woke by Susan Neiman; Polity Press, 2023

So much of the “anti-woke” criticism that appears in our culture is actually a thin disguise for an attack on anything left, whether “woke” or not.  Susan Neiman, however, identifies herself immediately in Left is Not Woke as a leftist and a socialist, adding a much needed perspective to the discussion of “wokeism.”

Immediately, she states that this book is not “a call for bipartisanship, or a screed against cancel culture.  Nor will I speak of the liberal virtue of working to understand those who do not share your views, though I think it’s a virtue” (1).

Can woke be defined?  It begins with concern for marginalized persons, and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization.  The idea of intersectionality might have emphasized the ways in which all of us have more than one identity.  Instead, it led to focus on those parts of identities that are most marginalized, and multiplies them into a forest of trauma…. In the focus on inequalities of power, the concept of justice is often left by the wayside.

Woke demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories.  In the process it often concludes that all history is criminal.

What’s confusing about the woke movement is that it expresses traditional left-wing emotions: empathy for the marginalized, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs should be righted.  Those emotions, however, are derailed by a range of theoretical assumptions that ultimately undermine them.  (5-6)

Though one might be well advised to put the word “woke” into quotation marks, in acknowledgement of its frequent use as a simple term of abuse for anything left, liberal, or progressive, Neiman’s book, is about a tendency that has, in the author’s view, driven the left down various rabbit holes that deprive it of its traditional energy, justice, and insight.

What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.  All these ideas are connected.  (2)

These three points are central to this invigorating little book and constitute the sort of insight much of the current establishmentarian blather against “woke” has overlooked.  The five chapters of the book consist of introductory and concluding chapters, plus a chapter for each of the three central points.

Neiman might have paid more attention to the “considered to be leftist” angle.  Are the woke really a left that has lost its way, as Neiman seems to believe, or is woke really more the product of what might be called “liberal” thought?  I sometimes think of liberals as people who share the same values as conservatives more often than either knows, but who have too much of a heart to take them to their logical, brutal conclusions.  For example, both sides exalt ideas of property rights as practiced in capitalism, but the liberals are more sensitive to how these rights interfere with other rights and injure public prosperity.  The liberal, therefor, is more likely to favour unions for example, but would be appalled that anyone other than a capitalist might be competent to own and run a major enterprise.

But perhaps I quibble, because Neiman points out simply, “the woke themselves have been colonized by a row of ideologies that properly belong to the right” (127).

“Woke” started out as a positive term used by the woke to refer to their own way of looking at things, but now “woke” as a word is largely the pejorative offspring of the equally pejorative “politically correct.”  It seems the latter term is being retreaded or replaced by the former, having been worn out from its over thirty years of faithful service to the righteous cause of powerfully insinuating that anything left, liberal, or progressive is not only inherently pharisaical, but the only ideology in town allowed to speak, and one that only the bravest dare criticize.  In reality, of course, for over 30 years nothing has been more “politically correct” than not being “politically correct.”

Suffice it to say that in order to establish a ground for a more useful and accurate criticism of the woke, it is enough to signify what “left” means, and this I think Neiman does well.

The first chapter after the introduction is called “Universalism and Tribalism.” 

Let’s begin with the idea of universalism, which once defined the left; international solidarity was its watchword.  This was just what distinguished it from the right, which recognized no deep connections, and few real obligations, to anyone outside its own circle.  The left demanded that the circle encompass the globe.  That was what standing left meant. … What united was not blood but conviction—first and foremost the conviction that behind all the differences of time and space that separate us, human beings are deeply connected in a wealth of ways.  To say that histories and geographies affect us is trivial.  To say that they determine us is false.  (11)

Neiman sees universalism as having come under attack because of its being associated with a “fake universalism” involving “the attempt to impose certain cultures on others in the name of an abstract humanity that turns out to reflect just a dominant culture’s time, place, and interests.  That happens daily in the name of corporate globalism, which seeks to convince us that the key to human happiness is a vast universal mall” (23).  It is in this chapter that Neiman begins her defense of the Enlightenment, attacking the attitude that it can be dismissed as simply a bunch of hypocritical, periwigged white men.  The practice of getting back to universal values, and being unafraid of accusations of trying to dominate a given discourse thereby, is a breath of fresh air.  I am reminded of Todd McGowan’s Universality and Identity Politics and its even more detailed discussion of this issue.

Much of the third chapter, “Justice and Power,” is given over to an argument against the work of Michel Foucault.  In brief, Neiman asserts that the powers of the world have so often claimed noble intent in their actions, while actually being motivated by the baser elements of human nature, that “the line between power and justice is increasingly ignored” (78).  But while Foucault has often exposed the hypocrisy of power, he also sees it as “the driving force of everything” (63).  “Power” in Foucault’s understanding, according to Neiman, “even enfolds resistance, which reinforces power.  It’s power all the way down” (63).  She refers to a public debate between Foucault and Noam Chomsky from the 1970s, after which Chomsky stated that Foucault was “the most amoral man he ever met” (66). 

In this same context, evolutionary psychology also comes in for a critique because of its assumptions that human behavior must always be self-interested.  Neiman points out that evolutionary psychology did not start off as a product of the left.  Rather, initially the left objected to it.  But now, it “provides the default assumptions about human behavior accepted by most people regardless of political standpoint” (89).

“She did it because it was right” was once, by itself, an explanatory statement—though whether that was really the reason she did it was always open to question.  By the late twentieth century, such statements no longer counted as explanatory, but required deconstruction revealing some form of self-interest as the real driving force.  None of the thinkers who contributed to making this assumption seem natural has asked the historical question about their own premise: might that assumption itself be part of a conceptual framework constructed during the twentieth century?  The supposition that any genuine explanation of human behavior must penetrate high-flown, idealistic descriptions to reach the self-interested wheels that turn us is itself a piece of ideology whose history has yet to be written.  (89)

These thoughts give rise to what Neiman presents as an at least partial explanation for Donald Trump’s popularity:  unlike the rest of us, he is truly the sort of human being evolutionary psychology claims we all are.  His followers

admire his authenticity.  With apologies to Abraham Lincoln, he functions as a license to act according to the worst devils of our nature.  The baleful fascination he exerts over the many who loathe him is a result of his singularity: it’s perpetually astonishing to observe a human being who behaves so differently from the rest of us.  By taking the trouble to be a hypocrite, George W. Bush paid compliments to virtue.  No wonder even those who wanted him jailed for war crimes feel occasional nostalgia. (91)

Finally, the fourth chapter, “Progress and Doom” tells us at the outset, “there’s no deeper difference between left and right than the idea that progress is possible.” (92).  Here again, Foucault comes in for a drubbing.

So how did Michel Foucault become the godfather of the woke left?  His style was certainly radical, but his message was as reactionary as anything Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre ever wrote.  Indeed, Foucault’s vision was gloomier than theirs…. You think we make progress toward practices that are kinder, more liberating, more respectful of human dignity: all goals of the left?  Take a look at the history of an institution or two.  What looked like steps toward progress turn out to be more sinister forms of repression…. Once you’ve seen how every step forward becomes a more subtle and powerful step toward total subjection, you’re likely to conclude that progress is illusory.  How far Foucault believed this himself is an open question, but it’s certainly the view most have drawn from his work.  (93-94)

But how much is Foucault the godfather of the left?  Are the attitudes attributed to him really where the woke got them?  I suspect the source is broader, that Foucault is not a singular, original tributary, poisoning the entire river, but part of a larger watershed.

Are there not other reasons for wokeism than Foucault, evolutionary psychology, and poor understandings of the Enlightenment?  In other words, there may be reasons more historical and cultural than the more specifically intellectual sources Neiman is dealing with.  For example, the self-righteousness characteristic of the woke may be at least in part a result of being or siding with the underdog.  If some people are oppressed or marginalized, told constantly that they are not good enough because of their race or sexual orientation, for example, is it so surprising that some should end up aggrandizing themselves or putting on airs because of their sufferings?  Neiman wisely points out that while being oppressed should be nothing to be ashamed of, it is no virtue either.  But the manifold disappointment the left has faced since the sixties puts great pressures on people whether they are familiar with the work of Foucault or not.

There are many things philosophy is good for; one is uncovering the assumptions behind your most cherished views and expanding your sense of possibility.  “Be realistic” sounds like common sense, but hidden behind it is a metaphysics that underlies many a political position, a whole set of assumptions about what’s real and what’s not, what’s doable and what’s imaginable.  You can translate the advice to be realistic quite simply: lower your expectations.  When you take such advice, what assumptions are you making about reality?  (123)

Indeed.  “Realism” may well be the ideology of our time.  And it is time for the giant to be slain.  Perhaps the most insidious invasion of the left by its enemies is in the erosion of hope.  Hopelessness, though usually not explicit, is the real political correctitude of our times.  Bruno Bettelheim, though he may not have been by any means the most astute explicator of politics, and though his theories of autism have long since been rejected, may have been on to something when he saw a link between the philosophy of the concentration camps and the darker elements of seemingly apolitical human psychopathology in the motto, “you must never hope that anything can change.”

Left is not Woke is a book that is highly useful in revivifying leftist thought.  It gets down to what the assumptions are behind wokeism much better than its more conservative critics could do.  Neiman’s book is lucid, insightful, and very timely.

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UNIVERSALISM AND FREE WILL

They worry that if universalism is true, we have no free will–and that therefor life is meaningless.  But they are wrong.  In universalism, it is assured that each of us shall arrive at heaven; but perhaps how and when we get there is up to us.  In that is the story of each of us, our meaning.  One may watch a play knowing it is a comedy or a tragedy, and therefor knowing that certain important things about the end are inevitable.  Does that make the play meaningless?  Does it spoil it for us?  Indeed, perhaps the inevitability of a certain kind of ending is the very thing that gives the rest of the play its meaning.

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ON THE NECESSITY OF A GENERAL RESURRECTION OF THE WORLD

In these grim and dangerous times the forces of darkness conspire to make us despair and write ourselves off.

The problem with a conservative, or should we even say mainstream Christian eschatology, is that it implies that whereas resurrection is understood as overcoming death, as the person coming back from the dead with new life and new existence, thereby defeating death, there is no such equivalent for the world as such. (By “world” here I mean the world God made, and which has been transformed or built upon by us in history for better or worse.)  That is, the commonly held eschatological attitudes seem to imply not that the world will die and be resurrected, but that it will die permanently, and be replaced by a new world.  Though this new Earth may be immortal, the one it replaced will be dead forever.  But in that sense and problematically, death’s victory over the world will be sealed as permanent.  The individual my rise from the grave triumphant, but the world he or she had lived in will have been condemned forever.

Religion thus often exhorts us to be better people, to give over this sin or that one, to be more loving, or faithful, or truthful, or whatever.  It does not claim that moral perfection is possible this side of the grave, but does say improvement is possible, and commanded by God.  But at the same time, any real improvement in the politics of the world, its economic or social structures, is usually rejected by religion as either being in vain, or even outright blasphemous: an attempt to force the coming of God’s kingdom before God’s own good time.

But are our deeds, great and small, in the course of human history of any consequence in the long run, or are they not?  Do we have ultimately no place in the creation as actual creators, or as J.R.R. Tolkien might have put it, sub-creators?  Or must we as a species be stripped clean of all history and reformatted with entirely new programs, rendering the previous ones not only forgotten but vanished without a trace?

I am not talking about “salvation by works,” but the salvation of works.  Do our works, our lives, our history as a species, have meaning or not?  Nor can this question be escaped by asserting our works have nothing to do with our salvation.  Might not works be important in the eyes of God without saving anybody?

If there is not some form of continuity between the dead person or world on the one hand, and the resurrected person or world on the other, there is no resurrection.  Parents having another child after the first one dies is no victory over death, and no salvation of the dead child.  Nor will it undo their grief, no matter how much they may be rejuvenated or rejoice in their new offspring.  The idea of healing the deep family wound simply by replacing the beloved is obscene.

Likewise, there is something profoundly nihilistic in believing in resurrection of the individual, but not of the world.  Individuals do not exist as such, detached from the world, any more than we find healthy rosebushes floating about in outer space.  What makes the rose what it is, is in part its connection to its world via soil, light, water and air, all the surrounding insects and microorganism that are a part of its life.  Likewise, if we are, as St. Paul says, organs in Christ’s body, then it is true as Donne says that “no man is an island, entire of itself.”  For the full salvation of the individual, the salvation or redemption—not mere replacement–of the world is needed.

If there is no new Earth, a resurrected Earth that is, a reborn Earth, then what we have is fertile ground for frustrated and vengeful fantasies of annihilation.  The Christian eschatologist writes for himself permission to look upon the destruction of the world with glee, as if he will be standing aside with hands on hips, nodding in approval as an ancient enemy gets its comeuppance.  (Christian eschatology is far too often a way of allowing a sickening misanthropy hide out in the open.)  We give ourselves permission to shit on the creation, even to destroy it, because, after all, it is doomed to eternal nonexistence in any case.

It is deeply revolting and an offense to reason to assert that while charity to the poor is smiled upon by the Lord, the improvement of economic systems such that such charity is not so much needed is seen as some kind of impiety.

God’s creation was and is good.  And it is to be saved.  And if we as individuals are to be saved, what we have made in this world, however much may have to be cast into the flames either for destruction or purification, was not given into our power to make only for us to make it in vain.

But in effect, with this mainstream eschatology, it is implied that we are to be like transplanted rosebushes.  In so far as we thought we saw God in the world around us, even though we were also conscious of its terrible corruption, we were apparently deluded.

If history is to be wiped out, then it was always and already meaningless.  Everything we have ever done is of no significance.  But if that is so, why the relentless nagging of scripture and conscience to do this thing and not do that thing?

A priority of being over doing I can understand and tend to agree with.  But the annihilation of the deed is nihilism.

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AN ABYSS OF SEEMING OPPOSITES

One might describe the relationship of the human race to God, in Christianity, as deeply neurotic.  But indeed, how could it be otherwise?

Consider how God must be, in effect, an abyss of apparently opposite extremes.  On the one hand, there is the intolerance of evil, the demand for perfection, the insistence that all shall be as it should be, according to his divine and infallible will.  There is the anger at sin and injustice, and so on. No one, at least, no one who is unrepentant, will get away with anything.  As the guilt-ridden Claudius says,

In the corrupted currents of this world

Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice,

And oft ‘tis seen the wicked prize itself

Buys out the law.  But ‘tis not so above.

There is no shuffling; there the action lies

In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled,

Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,

To give in evidence.                                        (Hamlet 3:3:57-64)

On the other side of the equation there is the infinite forgiveness of even the worst and least excusable of human offenses, the implacable insistence on forgiveness and salvation, mercy to those whom even the most merciful of us could not forgive, even though every pain, every injustice, every indignity ever inflicted on any human being—from the most to the least deserving of them—is always and also suffering for the Almighty who is doing that forgiving.

It is a commonplace that we cannot comprehend God, but what I have just outlined above is one of the infinite ways in which this is so.  Therefor, faced with a God who is implacably against us and will never overlook the least of our sins, but at the same time a God who takes our side passionately against the retribution we have set ourselves up for, how can we possibly perceive this God accurately?  It is as if we stand in the middle of a road which recedes from us infinitely in both directions.  For he is the fierce advocate of flaming sword, but also the one who bleeds and who feels more for the bleeding and for those who blood them than any of us can imagine.

So, we cannot imagine him.  And that means, according to our individual situations and temperaments, we are inclined either to see him as a monster of rage and punishment, one who can never be even a little happy with us, let alone satisfied, or some simpering milquetoast who can do nothing but groan impotently on a cross and offer excuses for our every failure, making no demands on anyone at all.  The first version presents himself to us as a terror, and the second version is powerless.

God is too big for us to perceive him–except perhaps in rare moments of illumination—in any way other than one of these two distorted ways.  The contradiction is not in God, but our smallness.  Nor is the truth, I think, a simple matter of finding a “happy middle,” though from the point of view of daily life, that approach may be useful.  But I think the truth in this matter is somewhat beyond us.

One must be careful of trying too hard to make sense of God.

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ARISTOCRACY

When aristocracy as such became discredited, people still found in themselves a desire, acknowledged or not, to look down on somebody.  It is the old sin of pride.  Just because aristocracy is abolished or muted does not mean its proud and ancient desires disappear.  If they cannot achieve satisfaction in the old political structures, they shall find new ways.

And so, much of the 19th to 21st centuries’ opposition to “modernity,” however defined, may owe some of its existence to the old desire to feel superior. The aristocrat of the spirit looks down on the NOW in the name of the PAST.  He cannot, perhaps even in his own eyes, despise openly in the name of “blood,” or even class, and maintain credibility.  But he can cook up some theory—even one which may have considerable truth in it—wherein he stands by the past over and against the present.  Thus, he can despise all and sundry about him as the benighted commoners in effect, those who do not understand or appreciate the old ways.  This is a source of tremendous satisfaction.  The other type of snob, the one who despises the past in the name of the present, must be content to despise the dead.  It is much harder in this situation to pose as the brave knight living in enemy territory but soldiering on nonetheless.  To cast one’s attack broadly against “modernity” can be to gloat in one’s superiority in the face of an enemy whose power outstrips one’s own (while, in effect, living in no greater danger than anyone else); this is more gratifying to the ego than to gloat over a helpless corpse.

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C.S. LEWIS’S PHILOSOPHY OF HELL AND A NEW WORLD

C.S. Lewis never wrote about politics very much, but in the eighteenth letter of The Screwtape Letters he has his devil, Screwtape, say the following:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘ to be in competition’.  

This philosophy could be seen as what has always been the dominant politics of the world—or the sin of pride in its structural or corporate manifestation—whether the rulers were soldiers, priests, hereditary aristocrats, or business people.  Capitalism, with its “war of all against all,” its social Darwinism, is the locus of the Devil’s philosophy in the current age.

Many Christians simply accept Churchill’s dictum that history is “just one damned thing after another.”  Whatever he meant by that, they see it as an essentially meaningless and contemptible series of events and eagerly await the Christ to come back and wipe it all out, taking us to heaven.  They are disappointed in life, and want it to be punished.  And for what they imagine to be their admirable otherworldliness, they think they shall be rewarded with a new world that has no connection to and very little similarity to this one.

What is a resurrection?  It is a rebirth, a new person, but a person not entirely discontinuous with the old person.  It is the old person who has died but is transfigured and reborn.  Otherwise, there is no resurrection, but simply the death of one person followed by his or her replacement by another who is entirely someone else.

Thus it is, I believe, with the new Earth that is destined to be born.

The Christian’s approach to history should not be that of an unloving parent troubled by a chronically and seriously sick child, hopefully counting the days down to when that child shall die and the parent be presented with a healthy replacement.  The parent wants the child to be saved, not replaced, and this is what we should want for the world—not just for the individuals within it. 

Much of Christian eschatology, unfortunately, is simply a disguised desire for genocide, geocide, even.

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HELL IS POLITICAL

Many of the early Christians were very cheerful, very good, very fearless.  There was a real danger they might have no fear of death; and this would never do.  Christ came to defeat sin and death, and death is a much reduced master if he is not feared.  Fortunately, there was an answer: the Christians’ faith in the resurrection could not be easily shaken; but it could be more easily twisted.

Enter hell.  The solution was simple.  If people do not fear anything in this life because their deepest faith is in the life to come, make that life to come uncertain: not by denying its reality, but by making that reality potentially terrifying.  Tell them that they very well will live forever after they die, but that they must step very carefully in this life or end up in perpetual torment.

And so death, the retreating ancien regime, poisoned the wells for the advancing revolutionaries who were overthrowing him; he re-established his foothold on Earth in the very midst of a church that was to lead the revolution against him.  For now, Christians again lived in fear.  And their fear of the next world gave them all the vices and weaknesses people experience when their fears are only of this one.

The pagan world of the Middle East had believed in a dark and shadowy afterlife, a world of shades and shadows, of ghostly spirits who had forgotten their Earthly lives and wandered forever in gloom.  This miserable fate had been thought to await all but a few privileged ones favoured by the gods for whatever reason.  But now, after the victory of Christ, this shadowy underworld was superseded in its misery and terror by the Christian hell.

Thus it is that in wars and revolutions, the enemy puts up such resistance that one looks back longingly, like the Hebrews in the desert after leaving Pharoah, upon a time that was miserable, but less miserable than now.  Would it not have been better to make bricks without straw under a tyrant than be where we are now?   Would it not have been better to submit to death, its power and propaganda, to be “realistic” and bow to his “natural” reign, than rebel and find ourselves cast into the flames?

But not so fast.  For death never had power to make a hell, only the fear of it.  Death never cast us into the flames but only into the fear of them.  Death has enlisted us against ourselves in his war against us, and we need not commit this self-betrayal.  Nor need we believe that the rise of hell as a propaganda pinion of the Church was ever inevitable, or, even if inevitable, need we see it as anything other than a tremendous bluff, which itself is doomed inevitably to fall.

Hell is decidedly political.

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ON MERIT AND CAPITAL

We are often told to beware those who seek the easy way.  But I would add, beware those who accept only the hard way, for they have chosen to make the accumulation of merit the focus, even the whole point, of their lives.  Merit thrives on difficulty—indeed, cannot be produced without it.

And what is merit?  Let us not confuse it with virtue.  Virtue, or perhaps virtues in the plural, might be described as the powers to do or be good.  Analogously, a person might go for a walk to sustain or improve her powers of locomotion.  Of course, going for a walk can be, should be, of itself a good thing.  So, her walk has two purposes then.  But what if she views her walk as meritorious as well?  Merit comes in when she expects something from some unspecified or transcendent source for this action, as opposed to simply improved health or the pleasure of a Summer’s day.  She might not even expect to get this something.  She may be satisfied with, even prefer, that she simply deserve it.  A debt is owed her, and that debt takes no particular form, but is in fact pure debt.

Of course, if she is religious, she will likely be thinking of receiving God’s commendation.  But it is not necessary for her to be at all religious in order to have, even if not consciously, an almost religious devotion to her own merit.  Lacanian psychology, for example, speaks of the “Big Other,” an entity in the psyche for whom one is in effect performing, whom one wishes to impress.  This entity could be God, a parent, a historical figure, an influential person from one’s life, etc.

In critiquing merit, I do not intend to disparage the general idea of an exchange in favor of some more altruistic or unselfish motive for doing everything.  That is not the issue here.  What is at stake is this quasi-mystical bartering as the center of life: that is to say, a frame of mind which says I have the power of doing good, and will choose to exercise it to gain this ghostly merit: in other words, to put the beyond into my debt.

For merit is nothing of itself (again, it is not to be confused with virtue, or with good character, for example) but is rather, a kind of promissory note.

And in this sense, merit is much like money—is perhaps its foundation or prototype, or progenitor.  They have similar tendencies, especially when we look at money in capitalism.  Merit might be described as value in the spiritual realm, without being spirit, just as capital is value in the material realm without being material.

For in capitalism, one increases one’s capital for this reason: to invest and in turn increase one’s capital further, and to no known limit.  Capital, which can be used rationally to purchase use values, is used to increase itself, and to that end in itself, rather than to the purchase of more use values.  Use values are subordinated to exchange values in the most idiotic and indeed nihilistic philosophy humanity may yet have devised.

Likewise, with merit.  Those who seek merit do not desire to trade it for something else they supposedly really want.  They want the merit itself.

The pursuit of merit, which may actually be, or at least bear a strong connection to the sin of pride, is the spiritual foundation of the very material practice of capitalism.  (Why is pride a sin?  Perhaps because it seeks to put God in one’s debt, and therefor completely misunderstands the nature of God and humanity.)  Many generations before Adam Smith or his contemporaries, religious people of various sorts were pursuing merit.  The wiser amongst them would be alert to this tendency in themselves, this wandering from the path of virtue, in effect, and adjust themselves accordingly as far as possible.

But just as merit is a ghostly thing, a promissory note that can never keep its promise, so is capital.  Pride and capital know no natural bounds, and thus, as we see in environmental destruction, for example, destroy nature itself.

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ACCEPTANCE AND “REALISM”

A Buddhistic or Tollean acceptance of what is is worlds apart from “realism.”  “Realism”–an ideological word if ever there was one–is idolatry towards all negativity in what is.  Realism sneakily and in a cowardly manner (all the while swaggering about—it is impossible to use the word “realism” without at least a hint of swagger) conflates that which simply is with that which is not as we would like it.  To be “real,” something must be opposed to us, thwarting us, and the “realist” therefore is a tough guy who can “face” all this.  Realism is not the honest knowledge or acceptance of something negative, but the denial that anything that is not negative could be entirely real.  Realism is the worship of a dark god, the modern version of a now quaint and rather annoying Satanism.  The stupid vulgarity of pentagrams, animal-headed people, and bloody sacrifice is replaced with an equally vulgar and stupid salute to despair.  Realism is active, arrogant, worshipful failure, and hates or despises all who do not get on board.  The realist, like many who are intimidated and dominated by a bully, is humiliated by the very existence of those who are not, and is compelled to discount them as “naïve.”

One needs to learn how to say, “so it is” with neither swagger nor self-abasement.

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DAVID GRAEBER AND CAPITALIST HOPELESSNESS

Coming close to the end of David Graeber’s marvellous Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) I encountered the following:

How did we get here?  My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself.  In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.  At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world—in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win.  To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy.  Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy.  How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union?  One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and the rebuilding of the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around.  This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere.  Economically, the apparatus is just a drag on the system; all those guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and don’t really produce anything, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down—along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with.  Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons, lest speculation, predictably, go haywire.  Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, [Graeber seems to be referring to the 2008 financial meltdown here] we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged.  About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

But what has brought this situation about?  Let me assert that in the West at least, the two great systems of hope, as we may call them, have been Christianity and socialism—perhaps most specifically, Marxism.  Socialism has been betrayed by many of its so-called friends and alleged proponents in the form of party dictatorships, while being ruthlessly stamped out in hearts, minds, and the world by its enemy, capital.  Christianity has been co-opted by worldly power largely into two camps:  an ostensibly apolitical religion concerned solely with private faith and individual salvation on the one hand, and on the other hand a grotesque corruption of the Word of God into an aggressively and absurdly pro-capitalist, even fascist direction.  This perverse politics is not even a parody of Christianity, but an outright contradiction.  American Christian fundamentalism is as much a contradiction of Christianity as the Soviet Union was of Socialism (see Noam Chomsky, “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism”).

We are accustomed to looking at politics in terms of “Right” and “Left.”  This is useful.  (Of course, these useful labels are also routinely abused out of dishonesty or ignorance, as when the corporate media and those who use it as their only source of information refer to Democrats or liberals as “the Left”—cavalierly waiving socialism, communism, anarchism and anyone who actually is a leftist out of existence, or perhaps pretending that Hilary Clinton’s views are but a hairsbreadth to the right of Karl Marx’s).  However, we might also look at politics in terms of hope versus despair.

For it is only the Left, whether secular or religious, that has offered us any hope.  The Right is another matter.  Whereas the Left says that we can change things fundamentally, and for the better, such hopes tend to bring sneers of contempt to the faces of the Right, which proudly invokes “realism,” or perhaps “human nature,” or “the will of God” as in Luther’s conviction that the Almighty had given power and authority to the princes and so on.  On a theological level, the religious wing of the Left sees God as working not only in some otherworldly heaven, but has plans for this world, that may well include upheaval and revolution, but do not include writing the world off.

On the specifically religious plane, Left and Right are literally worlds apart.  The religious Left takes seriously the Biblical claim that “God so loved the world…” but the religious Right can’t wait to see him turn it into a fire pit.  Paradoxically, while the Right is therefor very otherworldly (in a most unhealthy sense) it preaches what is in fact a worldly gospel that absolutely loses sight of the poor and oppressed, handing over power and authority to the rich: the very people scripture most often castigates. 

Despair is a choice, and it is political.

For what “liberals,” the “woke” or “politically correct,” for all their faults–real, imagined or exaggerated–have in common is a belief that we can and therefor should improve things in major ways, that merely tinkering with the status quo is not enough.  The endless tirades since the late 80s or early 90s about “PC” and how everyone, apparently, is held in holy terror of its hysterical dictates mask what is in fact a deeper fear: that we can and therefor must change the world.

Hope can be frightening.

What really pains the Right is the possibility that that liberal/leftist realm is actually pointing out our real responsibilities, and our real powers, if we but use them.  And this call to action, if correct, alleviates us all from our excuses to do nothing.

That is the real terror: responsibility.

But in fact, the problem runs deeper, and is more interesting than that.  A politics of mere responsibility, though it would be an immense improvement over the slash and burn mentality of capital, has the same weakness as religion does when it loses its heart and degenerates into phariseeism.  “Thou shalt not,” in the long run, or “thou shalt” does not have the staying power in public or personal life that is needed for real change.  A genuine sense of ethical responsibility easily degenerates into a prim and censorious temperament, and lacks the power needed to overcome the darker elements of individuals or systems.

And what the Left and Right have often had in common is this phariseeism.

What is the answer?  Perhaps I should leave that discussion for a later post.