Before the word “privilege” was recently coined as the prefix to words like “white,” “male,” or “able-bodied,” before the word “privilege” had any political connotation, there was already a whispering of the word “undeserved” as privilege’s prefix. There was already a simpering attached to “privilege,” such that whenever anyone claimed to have a privilege, he or she was bowing the head just a bit, acknowledging, even if not explicitly or consciously, a kind of shameful failure: one had received what one had not earned. One was therefor on the spot, to be watched closely: would the privilege be sufficiently appreciated? Would enough gratitude be shown? Would the gift be misused in any way?
Would the freely given gift be paid back?
Of course, “privilege,” by definition, is undeserved. As is a gift. If a so-called privilege is deserved or earned, it cannot be a privilege. But the context, style, and attitude with which the word has been so often expressed connoted (and still connotes) however subtly, a significant but unvoiced disapproval, disappointment at the recipient of said privilege. (I am still speaking here, of the word’s use in a non-political context).
When the word “privilege” is deployed, what would otherwise be the gifts of love are tainted with accusation, a lack of confidence in the receiver.
With this taint comes the ruination of gratitude. For “gratitude,” even though there is nothing wrong with the word, and at its basic level it connotes only positive things, is, by its popular usage, another of those simpering words. “We should be truly grateful” is so often delivered with a tone of “we don’t deserve this; it should not have been given to us. How worthy the giver therefor, and unworthy are we. Rejoice now, in your gift!” The message may even be, “I give you this from sheer love and/or generosity. But to whom much is given, much will be expected. And you have probably gotten more than you can live up to. I have bestowed failure upon you, and debt. And it is all your fault.”
Such is the way adults often teach children to be grateful, and provoke instead ingratitude. For how much of a gift or a privilege is that thing which is immediately a reminder of one’s unworthiness?
Now to the more recent, political meanings of “privilege.”
Privilege, in one sense, is quite real. Certain dominant groups have things in part or in whole because they were stolen from others. For example, white people in North America stole massive amounts of land from Indigenous people. A man in a corporation may get a promotion he is worthy of, but which a female colleague was more worthy of, and was passed over for sexist reasons.
But I often hear certain things described as “privileges” which are actually rights. For example, take the fact that people who are white will not be pulled over by the police simply because they are white. Things like this are sometimes referred to as “white privilege,” as if not being harassed by cops was some kind of gift one was not worthy of, as if a truly responsible white person would contrive somehow to be abused by the cops. Isn’t not being harassed by the police a right? The injustice in this example is not that white people are not going to be harassed on the basis of their race, but that people of colour are harassed on a racial basis. The issue is not white privilege, but white supremacy. If a white person takes the rhetoric of privilege to heart, he or she will feel guilty simply for not being victimized.
Does the rhetoric of privilege make any sense? I don’t think so. With this mentality, any good thing you have (such as your rights being respected) that somebody somewhere does not have becomes of itself a moral failure. No wonder, then, that some people are eager to claim the status of victim for themselves whether they are victims or not. No, if there is any guilt to be felt in the example of racially motivated police harassment, it is in the performance of the white supremacy, or the failure to oppose it. I suspect those who use the rhetoric of privilege would agree with this, but the rhetoric itself implies a subtle shift: it broadens the scope of accusation to include things which simply are not moral failures.
There are psychological machinations at work here, and rather than simply disapprove of this rhetoric of privilege, perhaps we need to understand where it comes from. A capitalist culture prioritizes property rights (first and foremost, of those with the most property) more than any other. Along with this comes the old work ethic of personal worthiness: I am wealthy because I earned it. You, on the other hand, deserve your poverty. A person who may be unmoved by protestations of human rights violations (such as police harassment) either denying they exist or being unconcerned enough to do anything about them, might have a bit of a fire set under his or her ass if, on the other hand, someone says, “you have something you haven’t earned.” The accusation of “white privilege” is very effective at this. The rhetoric of privilege has an emotional force to it. The person who does not feel responsible for the police harassment, or who may be unmoved by the statement, “it is your responsibility to help me defend my rights” may well be galled and/or morally intimidated by language which says, “you are a freeloader, one who reaps where he has not sown. You are, in the moral sphere, a thief, a bum.” Whether this person is then wracked by guilt and becomes an ally, or defiantly berates “woke culture,” he or she has at least been forced into some attempt at self-justification.
And the accusation of “Privilege” is a secular equivalent to some conceptions of original sin. You needn’t actually sin through your own choices to be guilty—neither a sin of omission, nor commission. You need only to belong to a privileged group, one which you may never have had any choice about belonging to. The problem with certain kinds of privilege is that one is born to them—given what the historical and cultural context is–and cannot give them away. The accuser is smug in the knowledge of pinning on you a crime you are surely guilty of but did not commit. One can decide not to engage in racism, one can decide to fight it, and one can be justly judged on the basis of whether one does or not. But one cannot give up “white privilege.”
Some measure of so-called “white fragility” (though I think not most of it) can be explained by this mind-fucking rhetoric: few things are more exasperating than an accusation that in one sense is irrefutable, but which points to an offense that is either not a real offense, or one that one could not help committing. How many preachers over the centuries, for example, have angrily furrowed their brows at their congregations and accused them in effect of not being pre-lapsarian? People have enough to feel genuinely guilty about without the volume being turned up on the survivor’s guilt, which is a psychological, not a moral category.
So you are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. Those who put you in this rhetorical bind are probably trying to replicate for you in a small way their own experiences as members of marginalized groups. Now, one may choose to commend this action as morally salutary or deplore it as small minded and dishonest. But let us at least see clearly how the mechanism works.
A focus on “privilege” in its political context takes righteous anger and undercuts it by resentment; the legitimate and righteous complaint made by a genuine victim is twisted into sounding like the whining of a failure. “You have stolen from me” becomes the voice of Envy as in Marlowe’s Faustus: “I am lean with watching others eat.”
In response, the victimizer (for example, white supremacy again) rubs his hands with glee: “Oh look! Resentment! Didn’t Nietzsche speak of this? For shame!” This development parallels on a cultural level what often happens on a political one: a violent and oppressive group fails to respond to peaceful demands for change; some of the oppressed eventually take up violence against the oppressor, and the latter in a fit of moral ecstasy decries the heavily provoked violence which is actually much smaller than the unprovoked violence of the oppressive group itself. Thus do the champions of the “anti-woke” make full use of the small-mindedness of privilege rhetoric to once again make the relatively innocent David look like the wicked Goliath. We have seen the term “politically correct” deployed for the last thirty years to make any attempt at equality and justice for the marginalized look like some kind of tyranny on the part of a terrifying liberalism that has had everything its own way. But nothing has been more politically correct than not being politically correct.
The reader will have concluded that I do not at all care for the rhetoric of “privilege.” It muddies the waters. It makes silly accusations while overlooking very clear and serious ones which the accusers must understand better than anyone. But I suspect much of the root of this rhetoric is the persistent and truculent attitudes of dominant and exploitative groups resisting change. So much injustice has not been properly addressed or resolved, or in many cases admitted. By and large the rhetoric of privilege is an angry attempt, made by thwarted and abused people, to get a little revenge against systems far too slow to stop their own much larger injustices.
“Knowledge of good and evil” in the book of Genesis may not mean realizing the truth that good and evil already exist. Knowledge of good and evil is not a “fall from innocence” in the sense that one had not heard of or even imagined evil but then comes to know of it. The knowledge of good and evil comes about in the context of a non-dualistic universe where there is only good, and it needs no evil to set it off, to be its foil. But to know good and evil is to fracture good into both, to create evil, unnecessarily.
The “knowledge” of good and evil here is not only an abstract knowledge, but more like “cleaving unto,” a knowledge in the erotic sense. One emerges in a fallen world where good seems to need evil (even in the imagination) to exist as good. This may well be the greatest evil of the situation. (See also Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a marvellous exploration of this idea of “necessary evil.”) One is leaving behind the knowledge (in both senses of that word) of an entirely good world, to a world where this pure good cannot be imagined, cannot be made workable, even as a theory. To the fallen world, the world where good and evil are known, a world of pure good seems an absurdity.
It is in this context then, that in order to save us from this situation, to restore us to a world without evil, Christianity offers the solution of belief in Christ. At this point the words of Francois Jullien become illuminating:
“Because it involves ipseity—selfness in itself—believe takes on a whole other meaning. ‘Believe in’ (pisteúein eis, πιστευειν είζ), John often writes. And, in fact, everything rides on the shift from ‘believing that’ [croire à] to ‘believing in’ [croire en]. What we believe when we believe that is from the start limited, constrained, objectivized (even when the belief is that God exists). But believing in—i.e., in a self, in an ipseity—is not undefined but infinite. When I say ‘I believe in you’ I have no limit in view. Moreover, believing that can be detailed and itemized: I can believe that X is and not that Y is, and thus make a selection. But belief in is by necessity whole; it calls for an absolute. When I say that I believe in you I no longer wonder “what” in you I believe in. To put things differently, believing that entails a necessary measure of credulity, even if I have good reason to believe, because I might just as easily not believe what I believe. I recognize its hypothetical character (e.g., belief that Santa Claus exists). Whereas belief in is not credulous but trusting. By the phrase ‘believe in yourself’—one that a parent might say to a child, or vice versa, or that one lover might tell another—I mean that I am counting on you, that I am expecting something of you, that I am placing my hopes in you, in you as yourself, in your ipseity, or that I am expecting everything of you. Thus belief in entails a self, an ipseity, on both sides. When I believe in someone I involve the entirety of myself. What I believe in in the person in whom I believe is what he himself reveals of himself, but also what he conceals within. Belief that might be open to convincing, but its truth will still rest on insufficient grounds; I would prefer knowledge that was certain. But the truth of belief in, precisely because it entails an as-in-oneself, will not be measured by a truth subject to proof; it is its own guarantee and can claim no other. You must believe in me, says Christ, and not believe what they say of me. But hasn’t the Church, with its dogma, been compelled to shift from belief in (ipseity) to belief that (identity)—and made the latter into the ‘faith’ that tempers its armor?”
(Francois Jullien, Resources of Christianity English edition, 2021, Polity Press, pp. 82-84)
In That All Shall be Saved (Yale UP, 2019) David Bentley Hart says,
“The truth is that all of these theological degeneracies follow from an incoherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian traditions: that is, the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the eternal torment of the damned.” (78)
It is one thing to argue that a just and loving God might annihilate or even torture forever some of his children. Infernalists and universalists clearly are on opposite sides of the fence here; the issue is usually argued on the basis of reason, scripture, or both.
But what does it mean spiritually or psychologically to believe in an infernalist God?
What does it mean politically?
I think that Christian infernalists are houses divided against themselves. As Hart asserts, probably many Christians only think they believe in hell.
But might it be that infernalism has hamstrung the church? Might it be that laying our arguments for infernalism aside, the infernalist position sets up a God who, even if he can be justified on logical or scriptural grounds simply cannot be loved? I believe so. The god infernalists love (or think they love) is not lovable. This cannot be stressed enough. It is all very well to take a hard line on divine sovereignty and say that since God is God there are no ethical constraints above him to which he must comply. But if what God does with this infinite right and power strikes us as abomination, how are we to love him? We cannot. We may proclaim that it is ourselves who are totally depraved in objecting to hell and to such a God, but whatever one makes of that argument we still cannot love the God of hellfire we claim to believe in.
If a Nobel Prize winning mathematician told you that 2+2=5 you might choose to believe he is right, even if you cannot see how. But you have disqualified yourself from ever doing mathematics again.
And if a cruel and monstrous god is supposed to be love itself, that makes it more difficult for us to truly love ourselves or each other. This is true in both the personal and political spheres.
So what is going on?
Why this insistence on the divine bogey, the horrific Nobodaddy?
Once one has swallowed the balderdash of infernalism, one can believe almost anything. If an omnipotent deity wants to save everyone, but cannot because his hands, supposedly, are tied by our free will, what other social, political, economic monstrosities can be rationalized and accepted? Feudalism, patriarchy, capitalism—one can do a song and dance and accept their necessity or even goodness if one can believe the holy, just, and loving creator of the universe will roast certain of his children over an open flame forever.
In effect, the church has corrupted itself by holding a form of moral idiocy close to its heart. It does not help that the idiocy of infernalism has been believed by many people who are by no means idiots. It seems that most thoroughly respected and even brilliant theologians have believed it. The idiocy has been believed by people with loving hearts and a true desire to know Christ.
It is also notable that it tends to be the more politically and socially conservative of the church who are most likely to believe in hell and to emphasize it. Could this situation be one of the reasons why Christianity and the Left have so often been at odds and even outright enemies? By this I mean not only that leftists object to infernalism, but that there is something in the beliefs and attitudes behind infernalism that are inimical to the entire leftist project.
(It seems to be a common phenomenon to find people who are theologically brilliant, but politically obtuse. Likewise, some of the most acute and perceptive political thinkers are blind or ignorant when it comes to matters of religion.)
Not that there has not always been a Christian Left, of course, but in his 2017 Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World (Penguin) Alec Ryrie asserts, “The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left” (7).
It is time for this Christian Left to arise. We must tell the world that infernalism is not fundamental to the faith.
Even if one makes the case that the secular left from the 19th century onwards owes its sense of justice to Christianity, this is no reason for religious triumphalism. What it means is that while the Church largely fumbled the ball by siding with the powerful, opposition to oppressive systems and ideologies like capitalism has been left largely to a secular Left, thereby deprived of the greater strength and spirit it might have had.
At numerous times and places the secular Left has had a stronger and more Christian ethic than the church. I am convinced the church’s frequent hostility to the secular left comes in part from an unacknowledged moral envy the church has sometimes had when it failed to help the poor the left was in solidarity with. Could it be the church’s ethic and spirit has been crippled by infernalism? Could it be that a more ethically sensible Left found itself unable to cleave to a religion that demanded eternal torture for some malefactors? I by no means advocate that Christianity should give up infernalism in order to gain more converts. One can only justify universalism in the name of truth: whether or not that gets you more or fewer converts is not relevant. But perhaps the secular Left has been more morally intelligent on numerous occasions.
One of the defenses of infernalism is that in order for human beings to be human, to be worth something as opposed to being simply robots, we must have free will. We cannot truly be with God unless we freely accept him. And if our will is truly free, then it must be possible for us to reject God. And the rejection of God must necessarily lead to damnation. Therefore, we are told, universalism must violate free will, since it states that all shall be saved and this seems impossible if everyone is free to reject God.
Let me deal with just one element of this whole argument here. According to the standard Christian view, we are all fit for hell to begin with. Our own sins, or original sin inherited from Adam and Eve or something of the sort, has made it just and fitting that we be damned.
No exceptions are acknowledged here. Simple justice, we are told, means that of all the billions of human beings existing or who ever existed they all deserve to be damned, and would be damned but for the mercy of Christ.
It seems peculiar that of the billions of humans who lived or ever will live, they all chose or will choose to sin badly enough to be damned. For surely, to deserve such a horrible fate one must have at least freely chosen the wickedness one is damned for.
Now this is a very strange free will indeed. Apparently, without exception, we have all freely chosen a path of sin bad enough to deserve hell. You would think that at least a handfull would have chosen to be sinless.
But one laughs at this of course. Sinless? Impossible. Even the greatest saints sin and sin seriously, as they are the first to admit.
So where is that famous free will then? How is it that when universalism wishes to storm the gates of hell and liberate all, we are told this violates free will; but when each and every one of us is born in a world where we are inevitably doomed to freely merit damnation one hears not a peep about how our free will is violated, and that therefor God cannot tolerate the situation to exist?
“Realism” is one of those intractably ideological words that have a tendency to speak the speaker rather than being spoken by him or her. People have a tendency to use this word with a lot of swagger, little realizing they are sitting on the ventriloquist’s knees, speaking his words, without even knowing he exists. This has happened so often that the swagger is actually built in now. You cannot say “be realistic” without swaggering any more than you can say “fuck off” politely.
In short, “realistic” and “realism” are ideological words.
One usually says, “be realistic” to people whose perceptions of a situation are seen as too optimistic. Very seldom is exaggerated pessimism told to “be realistic.” Why is this? Isn’t exaggerated fearfulness as far from reality as exaggerated hope? Somehow the word “realism” has become loaded with pessimism, with a belief that what is most real is somehow necessarily not how we would like it to be. In other words, the good can never be as “real” as the bad. A bad situation is very real, but a good one is somehow imaginary, ephemeral, wishful thinking. We are going beyond the statement that there is more bad than good in life, and towards a view that says the good can only ever be, in some vague sense, ghostly—unreal. Something like an inverted Platonism has crept into our language and thought.
Strictly speaking, “real” simply means that which is–good, bad, or indifferent. So linking this neutral word with connotations of a darker, more pessimistic (even cynical) sort implies a darker and cynical approach to the world generally: an approach that says that which is not the way we want it to be is somehow more “real” than things we like or love. All that is good or deeply desirable is looked upon in a patronizing manner. To be “realistic,” therefor, is to pretend to be neutral while promoting a very non-neutral view about the nature of reality.
From a Christian perspective (but not only from that perspective) “realism” is not pessimism, but defeatism, even collaboration with the darker angels of the world. (Simple pessimism is more honest, and even justifiable at times. It does not amount to a sneaky, cosmological/ideological move like “realism” does.) The news, after all, is good, according to the gospels. If there is anything that is less than real, it is evil, not good, despite the power and pervasiveness of the former. In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis, hardly a man to underestimate the power and extent of evil, likens heaven to a kind of hyper-reality where waterfalls are too loud for ordinary human ears, and the grass is too hard to walk on comfortably until one gets used to it. Those in hell (or maybe it was purgatory? I do not remember) when given a holiday in heaven, find the light hurts their eyes and themselves to be barely visible, like shadows or heat waves on the horizon.
Pilate was a “realist” when he murdered Jesus. “What is truth?” he asks. This might seem like a fine and thoughtful philosophical question, one which comes to mind only for sensitive and thoughtful souls, or tragic figures trying to understand their fate: the faithful servants of emperors “only trying to do their job” and trapped in unpalatable situations that “unrealistic” people do not understand. Some commentators have seen the Bible’s portrayal of Pilate here as antisemitic in its attempt to show Pilate in as positive a light as possible, thereby blaming the death of Christ as much as possible on the Jews. I do not know if this criticism of the Bible is true or not, but I do remember years ago seeing Pilate in this same light: that is, as a man trying to do the right thing, but somehow “tragically flawed”: less a sinner than his reputation paints him.
But now I see him, in his question about truth, as performing a standard politician’s gambit: when you are about to do a rotten and clearly unjustifiable thing, a thing you haven’t been forced to do either, play the role of the figure so exalted and wise that he sees reasons for his misdeeds that are beyond the comprehension of the vulgar and judgemental masses. “What is truth?” asks Pilate, as if he has an excuse for crucifying the truth because of his rectitude in admitting he is too scrupulous to pretend he knows it. The irony of Pilate’s “what is truth” is not that a sensitive and thoughtful man will now do a bad thing quite contrary to his noble intentions, but that the truth he is asking for is standing before him, about to be crucified by him, and he cannot or will not see him.
Maybe Pilate was putting truth on hold because he was a man of “reality.” There is a profound difference in having “reality” as the master referent, as opposed to “truth.” For reality is simply about what IS. Truth includes that, but is also about what OUGHT to be. In that sense, reality is only a subset of truth. Those who swagger and tell us to “get back to reality” are really trying to blind us to truth.
Perhaps the difference between a religious and a secular view is this: in the former, what OUGHT to be is as much a reality as what IS, however much painfully unmanifested in the realm of IS. For secularity, there is only what is.
Christopher Hitchens, a hater of religion, once said of Martin Luther King that he was not a Christian.
To which I reply, so much for Christopher Hitchens.
One can pretty much say anything about anything, if one is redefining words to suit one’s own interests, treating them as private property instead of public property. I can truly say that an apple is a potato if, by “apple,” I mean an irregularly shaped brown or reddish vegetable that grows in the ground.
And if one man like Hitchens can get away with this narcissistic nonsense through sheer bluff and swagger, what can not a whole class of people get away with generation after generation?
In effect, generations of anti-socialists have been telling us that an apple is a potato.
And it has not helped one bit that at the same time many potatoes have been calling themselves apples. In other words, just as many people violate the teachings of Christ in word and deed and call themselves Christians (Hitchens doing a variation on the theme by labelling a man who followed Christ as a non-Christian) many people have discredited socialism by falsely claiming to practice socialism when they were doing no such thing. In the one instance, Christ is slandered; in the other instance, it is socialism which is slandered. Most of us seem to understand, whether we are religious or not, that there is such a thing as genuine Christian practice; there are people we would call real Christians, and others we would call hypocrites. Socialism, however, is not granted the benefit of these kinds of distinctions: if some regime committing genocide, for example, calls itself or is called socialist, why then it must be socialist, and that is the end of the matter.
What, then, is socialism? Simply put, there are two basic principles running throughout socialist thought since its beginnings:
1) a socialist society is one where those who do the work own and control the means of production
2) a socialist society runs fundamentally on cooperation, not competition or domination. Brotherhood and sisterhood are the reigning context, not “the struggle of all against all.”
Whatever disagreements (and there are many) socialists have had amongst themselves, these are the two golden threads running through the history of socialist thought. A genuine critique of socialism, whatever else it does, must say that these goals are not desirable. For obvious reasons, this is very seldom done.
Much of the confusion in arguments over socialism is that they confound arguments over whether socialism is possible with arguments over whether socialism is desirable. If it can be made clear that socialism is what is broadly but accurately defined in the two points above, these two issues can be separated from each other and clarified; then an informed, intelligent discussion can take place. Likewise, two kinds of anti-socialist will be distinguished from each other, with the nature of both being made clearer.
The first kind of anti-socialist is simply ignorant of the meaning of the word we are discussing. He or she has been told that the depravities of Stalin or North Korea etc. are manifestations of socialism. It does not help that historically, many of those spreading these lies have called themselves socialists and have even believed their own propaganda. Naturally, the person who has been misinformed by all this will become an anti-socialist, and with good reason. (See, by the way, Noam Chomsky’s highly illuminating “the Soviet Union Versus Socialism” on why both the Soviet and capitalist empires falsely claimed the label of socialism for the U.S.S.R.).
The second kind of anti-socialist may or may not be ignorant of the true meaning of the word “socialism” but at heart, wittingly or not, hates the ideal outlined in the two points. She does not want it to be possible.
To know that “socialism” means the two-point socialism above and to insist doggedly on this fact is to found the whole debate about socialism not on the interpretation of history but in the realm of the desirable or normative. Let us establish what it is we should want before we look at how it has not been reached historically. The leftist who refuses the label “socialist” to the old Soviet Union refuses to be backed into a corner where he must either deceitfully justify the crimes of that regime or surrender the dream of socialism altogether. Why does Stalin get to decide what is and is not possible?
And of course, “socialism can only ever be a dream” is the next line of defense, usually presented in a tone of impatience and contempt. The allegation that socialism is not possible is one that must be taken seriously. However, this impatient reaction is not just a matter of a sensible person rejecting hopelessly utopian fantasies. The type one anti-socialist resists the two-point definition of socialism because she will have to admit she has been fooled by lying definitions. Nobody likes to admit they have been fooled, that sources they thought reliable turn out to be biased or ignorant. But it is worse for the type two anti-socialist: when the historical monstrosities he has been criticizing turn out not to be socialism, he has lost the rhetorical advantage of socialism being evil practically by definition.
Of course, the type two anti-socialist can and most assuredly will switch gears and claim it was the two-point socialist dream which caused the reality of what is falsely called socialism. But one can argue against this point far more honestly and effectively than if one decides to justify Pol Pot. (The point that the socialist dream is itself the cause of a nightmare, by the way, has a great many holes in it. It seems to be a convenient theory which its perpetrators seldom analyze in any historical context. People who advance this theory do not seem to have actually looked at revolutionary processes, what causes them, what makes them go well or badly.) Those who say “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” do not seem prepared to tell us straight up what kinds of intentions we should have.
Note therefor, that the type two anti-socialist needs to keep “socialism” in the two-point sense off the table. The idea or ideal of socialism, much as its enemies disparage it as a fairy tale, is quite dangerous to anti-socialism. When socialism steps in and claims its right to judge any government or movement calling itself socialist or claiming to move towards socialism, the terms of the debate are no longer the property of socialism’s enemies.
The fight over the word “socialism,” therefore is not simply about what the anti-socialist, in his ignorance, thinks the word means, but what he wants the word to mean, what he even needs the word to mean in order to defend his own ideology. Hitchens’ seems to have decided that Christianity is evil by definition. Ipso facto a good man like Martin Luther King cannot possibly be a Christian. We learn nothing about religion or King by this blarney. We do learn something about Christopher Hitchens.
Capitalism’s first line of defence is to make sure alternatives to it do not enter even the imagination, let alone the concrete political or economic sphere. As long as “socialism” is merely a word for some kind of monstrosity, two-point socialism can not be talked about. And what cannot even be talked about becomes even harder to imagine and nigh impossible to share. The socialist movement, on the other hand, needs “socialism” in its basic sense to mean the two-point variety, or there is no way we can even talk about what we want or how to get it. That kind of silence, of course, is what anti-socialism wants, and thinks it has a right to, so spoiled has it been by an unfair cultural struggle which confuses and silences any language with which the Left might express itself intelligibly.
I do not know whether to trust the enneagram, and I am no expert on it, but it is compelling. Perhaps it is simply a template we force things into, a mode of understanding human nature we try to prove correct by shaping all the evidence to fit into it. Christians do this with scripture all the time, for example, and scientists do it when the scientific method is not scrupulously followed.
However, sometimes the enneagram is intriguing. It might be used as a literary tool to help us analyze how a given novel works or does not work. While reading The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective by Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, and listening to Richard Rohr’s Youtube lectures on the subject, I found myself thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I think the enneagram can help explain what constitutes the particular power of this novel–one of my favourites.
I have no idea whether Fitzgerald consciously wrote with the enneagram in mind, or whether he had even heard of it. But it seems quite possible that he intuited something about the relationship between these three numbers that gave the book a profound and solid spiritual and psychological basis. It is my contention here that Gatsby, Nick, and Daisy, the three main characters of The Great Gatsby, form not only a love triangle, but specifically what might be thought of as an enneagram love triangle in the form of 3-6-9 respectively. Each character is a fascinating study of one of these three numbers and moves in this triangle towards false consolation or disintegration rather than moving in the opposite direction, towards true consolation, integration, or redemption. It must be noted that Rohr and Ebert point out, “The game of ‘who matches whom?’ can’t be carried over to the Enneagram. There are no ‘super partners’ who automatically make a good match” (228). So I am not asserting that any of these three characters should or should not have been friends or lovers. I am saying, however, that the relationships between these three characters (plus Tom, who is also significant enneagramatically) and what those relationships mean can be elucidated by the enneagram.
First, let us take a look at the enneagram diagram as taken from page 218 of Rohr and Ebert’s book. (I have added the names of the three characters.) Note that this version of the diagram includes arrows which indicate true and false consolations. To move in the direction of the arrow is to move towards false consolation, and true consolation is found in the opposite direction (more on this shortly).
Now for the characters and their corresponding numbers.
Enneagram Three: Jay Gatsby
Gatsby is the quintessential three. The fundamental need of the three is to succeed, and this is certainly true of Gatsby, in a specifically American/capitalist fashion. He is the poor boy who became rich in a very short time, and apparently on his own pluck or efforts, unlike the Buchanans (and to a lesser extent, Nick) who are born into prosperity. Of course, Gatsby has also used illegal and likely unethical methods.
Gatsby’s dream girl may be Daisy, but his dream, his needs and energy predate his meeting of her. For it needs to be remembered of course that the enneagram is not about personality “types” or characteristics, but about needs or energies. Nonetheless, it is characteristic of threes that they are efficient and good at getting what they aim at, and Gatsby is certainly that: until the end, of course.
It is also characteristic of the three to lose him or herself. Threes characteristically do not know who they are. It is rumoured in the book that Gatsby “killed a man once” (44) and I do recall one critic at least (I do not remember who) suggesting that man is Gatsby himself. Tom, stupid as he is in a number of ways, hits upon a truth he only dimly understands (if at all) when he calls Gatsby “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (130).
Gatsby springs from a “Platonic conception of himself” (98) as if he is not a specific person, but a disembodied, impersonal Platonic ideal. His connection to his parents is very weak, as if he is denying his own past (as he does in changing his name from “Gatz” to “Gatsby,” an act of self-erasure). His mansion is party central to countless people, yet none of them seem to know him. Even Nick, who knows and loves him best, is at a bit of a distance from him, perhaps more like an admiring sidekick than a close friend. But like a true three Gatsby needs to be liked. “He doesn’t want any trouble with anybody” (43) says a woman at one of his parties. Gatsby is the chameleon three who can be whatever he needs to be to get people to like him. When Nick and Gatsby first meet (significantly, Nick has been talking to Gatsby at one of the latter’s own parties without even knowing yet this is Gatsby) Gatsby smiles at Nick with an “irresistible prejudice” (48) in Nick’s favour. This does so much to win Nick over.
Various hints in the text show that Gatsby has been patterning himself off other people: mostly conventional heroes of American history, literature, or folklore, such as Ben Franklin, Tom Sawyer, Buffalo Bill, and Daniel Boone. In other words, Gatsby is not in touch with who he is. Nor is anyone else. Thus, the wild rumours about him, that he may have been a German spy in the war, and so on. There may be more than one reason why rumours constantly fly about who Gatsby is, but one reason is that nobody, not even Gatsby, knows.
Enneagram Six: Nick Carraway
Nick is definitely a six. As such, his fundamental need is for security. While Gatsby will take any risk, and usually succeed, Nick moves to West Egg to start trading in “securities.” Both men participate in the wild world of speculative finance of the 1920s, but Nick in a much more staid and conservative manner. “I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities” (4). Nick intends to make money according to the rules, literally by the book.
While Nick and Jordan are having dinner at Tom and Daisy’s (chapter one) Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s lover, keeps telephoning, creating tension between Tom and Daisy and weaving an unspoken air of scandal about the table. Nick says, “[t]o a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police” (16). This is the instinct of the six.
“When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever” (2). Responsibility, doing the right thing, making the trains run on time is Nick’s mindset. He is self-aware enough, however, to mildly satirize himself in how he phrases this, as when he refers to the “very solemn and obvious editorials” (4) he wrote at Yale.
The big reason Nick is so attracted to Gatsby is because Gatsby dares to dream big and acts accordingly. On the other hand, in describing his own relationship with Jordan, Nick says, “[h]er gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires” (58). For Nick, though he does not say so explicitly, and may not even be conscious of the fact, Gatsby is a hero because he succeeds where Nick has failed. Nick puts safety and mistrust first, and that is his undoing.
But the six’s obsession with law and order is not quite as straightforward as I have been implying. Rohr and Ebert say of immature sixes, “[t]he law, and everything connected with it, fascinates them. Many of them seek occupations where they deal with the law—whether by protecting it or breaking it. Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, detectives, inspectors, police, writers of whodunits, and criminals take part in one way or another in the SIX game” (134 my emphasis). Thus, we see Nick’s three nature is not simply a kind of moral conservatism. He is fascinated with and attracted to the criminal Gatsby, and is aware of the superiority of the East, as opposed to the Midwest with its “interminable inquisitions” (176). Tragically, it is back to the Midwest and its stifling security where Nick retreats by the end of the book.
Sixes, therefore, are obsessed with rules, not just keeping but also breaking them, and Gatsby does very much of the latter: crime, adultery, and getting rich without old money respectability. But however much Gatsby stands for everything Nick has an “unaffected scorn” (2) for, Nick is also there to help him on in his illicit endeavours. Though Nick turns down Gatsby’s offer of getting in on some probably illegal speculation, Nick does act as go-between for Gatsby and Daisy’s great first post-war meeting at Nick’s place.
And Nick is also present, disapproving but drinking everything in (including literal drinking, and quite a bit of it) that afternoon when Tom Buchanan compels him to meet his mistress and takes them both downtown to Tom and Myrtle’s love nest. It is shortly thereafter that Nick has his drunken and likely homosexual encounter with Chester McKee (see the end of chapter two, including some double entendre with the elevator boy). Nick, it seems, is breaking the rules himself.
Enneagram Nine: Daisy Buchanan
Daisy is a nine. The root need of the nine is to avoid things. The characteristic root sin is laziness. Nines tend to be unfocussed. At the same dinner party where Nick wanted to call the police, Jordan suggests they all plan something. “’All right,’ said Daisy. ‘What’ll we plan?’ She turned to [Nick] helplessly: ‘What do people plan?’” (11).
Nick eventually dismisses Daisy and Tom as “careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (179).
Many have agreed with Nick’s opinion of his cousin, and there is a great deal of truth in what he says. But it is not the whole story by a long shot. Daisy’s story is as tragic as Gatsby’s is in its own way. The evening of the same dinner party mentioned above, Daisy tries tentatively (nines have anything but an insistent presence) to draw attention to her troubles with Tom. Because of her evasive way of expressing herself, and because Nick simply is not perceptive of her needs, he misinterprets her as having “asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged” (17). Nick has gotten it exactly backwards. Daisy has in fact been expressing sarcasm towards Tom and everything (such as white supremacy) that he stands for. Nick also shows no sign of picking up on Daisy’s serious marital situation when she makes light of a bruised finger she blames Tom for. As the unassertive nine she can bring herself only to hint at Tom’s violence in the context of a joke. But Nick does not perceive the gravity of the situation.
What nines and threes have in common is a tendency to lose a sense of who they are. In the case of the three, this is performative: the self is lost amid the roles the three plays in order to be liked and to get along in the world. The loss of self in the nine, however, seems to have to do more with being overwhelmed by other people’s personalities or points of view. As in so many things in the enneagram, a person’s strength is also potentially his or her weakness. Nines are very good at seeing things from others’ eyes and are known to be peacemakers, but also tend to lose a sense of what their own position is. At a climactic scene one hot day in the Plaza Hotel, Daisy is torn between Gatsby and Tom until she becomes simply a “lost voice” (134) with no remaining power of her own.
“Precisely because NINES themselves often have no clear standpoint, they are capable of shifting to, and accepting, any standpoint whatsoever. . . . Many people report that in the presence of a NINE they come to rest in some inexplicable manner and can relax. . . . Their peaceful radiance is disarming” (187-88). Rohr and Ebert also say, “[i]n the presence of a NINE many people find it easy to come to rest themselves. In radical contrast to this, NINES often feel inwardly lashed by fears and restlessness, even when no one notices” (178). Therefor, Daisy’s being overpowered by others is symbolized by her voice, but on the other hand, it is that very voice which expresses the “peaceful radiance [which] is disarming.” Gatsby says famously that her voice “is full of money,” (120) and Nick agrees, but this is not simply a socio-political statement about how important money is in American culture or how it is thought to be able to buy anything. Money comes between the individual and the mystical dimension of life represented by the nine. In this way, what Daisy has to communicate is again thwarted, highjacked by something other than itself.
In chapter eight we get Nick’s interpretation of Gatsby’s version of why Daisy married Tom.
After the Armistice he tried frantically to get home, but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now—there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all. . . . And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.
That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. (150-51)
Then (as Nick relates Jordan’s tale to us) there is the tragedy of Gatsby’s letter, apparently arriving the day before Daisy is to marry Tom. Jordan finds Daisy drunk and inarticulate. Daisy does not explain what the letter is about, and it is dissolved in the bath. For all the beauty of her voice, Daisy is not able to communicate well—especially about her problems and needs.
Therefor, Daisy is not just a careless, irresponsible airhead. She has the difficulties characteristic of the nine.
Counterphobic Six: Tom
If Gatsby is Nick’s dream self, Tom is Nick’s dark shadow.
If most sixes deal with their fear by attempting to acquire some sort of security, the counterphobic six is prone to dealing with that fear more directly, by attacking the thing feared. Certainly, Tom is the most aggressive character in the book: he injures Daisy physically and seems to have her under control by the end of the novel, belts Myrtle in the nose, and uses Wilson to kill Gatsby. Not long after experiencing “the hot whips of panic” (125) when he realizes he might lose both Daisy and Myrtle, he goes on the offensive at the Plaza Hotel. It is from this point on that most of the violence begins. It is not that Tom is a genius at manipulating people and situations (or a genius at anything for that matter) but somehow all the bodies fall: Myrtle, George, Gatsby, such that only Tom is left with what he wants, and there is nothing for anybody else. Daisy does not get what she wants. Daisy, as we have seen, is not just the “careless” person who walks away from messes she creates. She is now trapped with an unfaithful, unloving man and has lost what may well have been the true love of her life.
Nick and Jordan are not objects of Tom’s wrath, but in the fallout from that fateful evening their relationship collapses. Neither character is a threat to Tom, and Nick may also be a special case: “[w]e were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own” (7). It is as if Tom senses Nick is a better version of himself. However, it is not Nick who wins in the end. The only winner is his dark shadow.
One of the characteristics of the six is loyalty. In Nick, this takes the form of his loyalty to Gatsby. Though this allegiance may be a manifestation of Nick’s false consolation (see below) it is also quite moving, and in some ways a positive thing. We should not forget that a man like Nick might well have resented Gatsby, seeing in the latter a reproach to the former’s own weaknesses. Instead, Nick is willingly generous. It is, of course, Nick’s shadow, Tom, who manifests open enmity with Gatsby. In Tom the loyalty of the counterphobic six takes the form of racism. “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things” (13).
True and False Consolations
For each of the numbers of the enneagram, there is a true consolation number, and a false consolation number. See again the diagram above. In times of stress or temptation, a number may go with the arrow, moving towards false consolation and disintegration, taking on the more negative characteristics of the number it is moving to. In the case of the 3-6-9 triangle this means a movement counter clockwise. What each number needs to do to become more fully integrated or “redeemed” (as Rohr and Ebert put it) is to go against the direction of the arrow.
Therefor, you might say Nick loses himself in going to Gatsby’s three: by the end of the book, Nick seems like he will never realize his own dreams; in fact, he probably will never even find out what they are because like a three he does not know who he is. He has broken up with Jordan, just as he broke up with a girl in the accounting department simply because her brother did not like him, just as he has or may have had something resembling an engagement with another woman out West. Nick goes half way with women, and might be gay or bisexual, without apparently realizing it.
Gatsby takes on the negative characteristics of the nine Daisy in that once his love is finally rejected he takes to his swimming pool (for the first time that summer) where he is shot dead on his air mattress by the ghostly George Wilson. We never see directly what must have happened there, but it is symbolically a very passive fate (reminiscent of Daisy and Jordan when we first see them on the “enormous couch . . . buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon” (8)) very much unlike Gatsby at his best. Nick tries to imagine Gatsby’s last moments:
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. (161)
This is a peculiar passage. Is this world Gatsby is awakening into too real or not real enough? Is he finding out his old Platonic dream world was only ever a dream, or was it more real than reality itself as it would be in Platonic philosophy? This ambiguous state Gatsby seems to be in is very much the nine’s situation. At no point is Gatsby, or indeed anyone, more like Daisy than Gatsby is here. It is in this state of passive vulnerability that he is murdered by the “fantastic figure” of George Wilson, whose gun is very real indeed.
In turn, Daisy moves to enneagram six in the form of Tom, driven by fear. Fear is the thing sixes are always struggling with.
So Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy each move counter clockwise on the triangle, each to his or her false consolation, and with disastrous results. What of Tom? He gets to keep Daisy, which for him is a clockwise move on the enneagram, and therefor one might think it would signify a true consolation. Again, the enneagrammatic idea of true and false consolation does not have to do with who should marry whom. If it did, it would mean sixes should marry nines, but nines should not marry sixes, which is clearly absurd. Tom, as a six, should move to nine, take on the nine’s better characteristics such as peacefulness. Since Tom is a restless, violent character, this makes sense. But Tom does not change, nor does he try to. He does not effect any changes; he simply manages to hang on to what he already had. Daisy tried to make a change and failed. Gatsby pursued his dream and failed, with disastrous results. Nick falls in love with Gatsby, in a sense, and while Nick’s failure is symbolized by his return to the Midwest, at least the dream of Gatsby stays alive. Tom, therefor, though he is the only winner of the four characters, is the most static. Each of the nine numbers of the enneagram is a limited way of perceiving and living life. Each way has its truth, but also its limitations. Tom does not even rattle the bars of his cage or suspect that he is in one. He has only brought the nine, Daisy, who represents his true consolation and an invitation to change, into the cage with him.
This brings us, finally, to Nick’s dream of West Egg.
In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares. (176)
Who is this woman? Well, it may actually be Gatsby. The four men carrying the stretcher suggest Nick, the chauffeur, butler, and gardener who carry the dead Gatsby to his house. Or the woman could be Daisy, who is frequently associated with the colour white. The jewels suggest her wealth, and the drunkenness her helplessness.
But there is one more candidate here. What is meant by “the wrong house?” Surely, when Gatsby’s body is taken from the pool to his house it is not the wrong house. “The wrong house” could suggest that Daisy is going to the wrong house–Tom’s–instead of Gatsby’s. So if the procession should be going to Gatsby’s house (the right house for Gatsby or Daisy) the most natural house to go to by mistake would be the one next door: Nick’s.
This would mean Gatsby or Daisy on the stretcher going to Nick’s house as “the wrong house.” Or is it, in the self-contradictory nature of dreams, the right house, if Nick is the one on the stretcher? Nick acts as his own carrier in this instance, or pallbearer in this funeral like procession, carrying his secret, gay self, not recognizing this self, but in denial about who is on the stretcher, and therefor thinking the house is “wrong.” The drunken, glamourous woman on the stretcher is the nine Nick needs to go to, but instead buries.
Another way of looking at it is this: if it is Gatsby’s house in the dream, as implied by the fact that four people actually did carry Gatsby to his house, then it can be “the wrong house” only for Nick.
SOURCES
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Scribner, 2004.
Rohr, Richard, and Andreas Ebert. The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective. Translated by Peter Heinegg, Crossroad, 2001.
There are conservatives who decry the Left by pointing to its so-called identity politics, and thereby give themselves a name for more tolerant and universalist values. Todd McGowan’s Universality and Identity Politics, while highly critical of identity politics in any form, will not give such conservatives much comfort or justification.
Although most ventures in identity politics that reject universality are conservative or reactionary, today we associate the term identity politics with leftist groups. This association of identity politics with the Left rather than the Right marks a significant conservative political victory, since the label instantly produces a misunderstanding of the nature of these political projects. (177-78)
Much of this book argues the point that when one looks deeper at left wing political stances, they are really appeals to universality, and that in so far as they drift into identity politics (or particularism, in other words) they engage in a mistake that betrays what the Left is really about.
Often, what people condemn as identity politics is really universalism in disguise. One of the key political battles involves distinguishing who is the real exponent of identity politics and who is engaging in a universalist struggle. The struggle between Left and Right is a struggle between the universal and the particular. This is how we should define Left and Right. But in order to see the contours of the struggle, we need to recognize that many of the projects labelled identity politics are often universal and that many calls for unity mask an underlying particularism. (178)
This is an excellent point. Isn’t patriotism usually a form of identity politics? Isn’t ‘MAGA’ identity politics in spades?
But how did the Left end up so often carrying the particularist football? a football which, as McGowan repeatedly asserts, does not rightly belong to its true self? We shall return to this issue, but first we must clarify what McGowan means by universality.
In an interesting move, both counter-intuitive and strangely liberating, McGowan does not found the idea of universality on the predictable idea of a ‘common humanity’ or something of the sort. The central idea is that universality is founded on what we all have in common: that we are all inevitably left out or alienated one way or another, even if not equally or in the same ways.
Universality cannot have a direct manifestation because it is constitutively absent and emerges in the form of a lack. (10)
Universal solidarity doesn’t leave anyone out because it takes those who don’t belong as its starting point. (68)
The shared absence of the universal rather than the shared possession of it bonds particulars together. (23)
Universality is the lack in every particular. (45)
Though I am not sure universality can be defined this simply, McGowan’s notion of universality is a powerful one. It may also help us all deal with the fact that while Left causes may be universalist, the temptations to particularism are within everybody.
Indeed, identity itself is seen as problematic in this book.
Identity is an obstacle to overcome rather than a foundation from which to base one’s politics. (18)
Must we, then, have no identity? For many, this will be a hard pill to swallow. But McGowan takes things a bit deeper here, presenting us with no simple banalities about us all being “the same under the skin” and so on, but instead positing a distinction between who one is, and what one is:
Rather than affirming my group identity, the universal reveals that I am not my identity, that there is a divide between who I am and what I am. It is this divide that makes political acts possible at all. When we lose sight of it and believe ourselves to be what we are, we may achieve some recognition, but we lose contact with the possibility of emancipation. (199)
I wouldn’t have minded if this book had gone further and discussed more the nature of personal being, if one may call it that, as opposed to identity (in other words, the who as opposed to the what). That being said, it is clear that one thing that comes under attack in this book is the conservative conception of self as the self-sufficient monad:
According to this position, individuals exist in a meaningful way outside the universality that constitutes them as individuals in the first place. Once one accepts this premise, the struggle is already over because universality will always appear as an impingement on the privilege of the individual. No argument about universality will ever ultimately prove convincing for those who see the isolated individual as the political starting point. The conservative victory occurs with the dominance of the image of two (or more) particular forces fighting it out for political supremacy. (33)
An insightful part of this critique of the conservative conception of the self is McGowan’s indictment of capitalism. ‘Capitalism,’ according to him, ‘engenders identity politics’ (24). In capitalism, the commodity form is capitalism’s structuring principle. ‘Individuals display their devotion to capitalism not by openly proclaiming it but by retreating into their isolated particularity’ (120).
Indeed, identity politics is not only practised by capitalism, it is essential to it. Capitalism inflicts upon the individual an empty isolation, an emptiness that craves to be filled with an identity. Without this kind of pacification, the working class would not accept the inequalities of the system. ‘The appeal to identity is capitalism’s secret sauce’ (147).
On the other hand, to come back to my earlier question, do we simply give up our identities?
… it is impossible to live without an identity. Even though identity is always ideological insofar as it obfuscates the self-division of the subject with an image of wholeness, it is nonetheless unavoidable. By emptying out identity through reducing subjects to a pure particularity, capitalism puts them in an untenable situation. This is why so many under capitalism seek an identity to give their subjectivity some content, and they often find it in religious, ethnic, or nationalist projects. (121)
Again, we have this quandary of the self. How does the who-I-am live with the necessity of the what-I-am, even though the latter seems to bind us to inevitable delusion of one sort or another? More exploration of this problem would have been good, though that might have made the book go a bit far afield and lose its focus.
But let us now return to the issue of how the Left came to end up in the realm of identity politics rather than its proper home of universality.
The suspicion about universality that the twentieth century produces creates a fertile ground for identity politics. That is, it derails the leftist emancipatory project from its proper course and shifts its struggle to the conservative terrain of identitarian battles. The dangers of twentieth-century totalitarianism were particular dangers. To theorize them as universal is to unwittingly turn the tide of history in their direction. (117-18)
McGowan argues that since World War Two the Left has joined the Right in condemning universality, rather than particularism, as the dominant problem. The Terror in the French Revolution, the depredations of Stalinism and Nazism, have been interpreted by many throughout the range of the political spectrum as the results of universalist practices, wherein the nightmare is caused by belief in values that apply to all, and which end up being forced on all.
But this interpretation of universality as the enemy is false, according to McGowan. Particularly interesting are his observations on Nazism here. Far from being rooted in some form of universality, where all are made to fit the same mold, Nazism practices at its root an intense particularism (such as racism and anti-Semitism). The universalist always wants converts and does not need enemies. The Nazi, on the other hand, is inconceivable without them. For the Nazi to be a Nazi, there must be those who are not, and can never be included in the Nazi ‘us.’
And this is also where Nazism and communism differ. Nazism’s nature is particularity. Communism is by its nature universalist. The Stalinist regime’s problem was false universality.
Stalin’s crimes were not crimes of the universal, nor were they just the crimes of one murderous leader. They were the result of an erroneous conception of universality, a belief that universal equality was an end to be fully realized through invention rather than a value discovered as the basis for the struggle for it. It is not universality but the Stalinist misconception of universality that led straight to the gulag. Stalin believed in his own particular capability to realize universality, but this belief in his own particularity would not have been so deadly had he not combined it with the dream that the revolution would permit everyone to belong. (107)
This situation, McGowan points out, is very different from the reigning interpretation of Stalinism, where the heart of the problem is seen as an insistence on universality to the point of erasing the particular.
Also:
When one conceives of universality as a realizable future that leaves no one out, it demands the erection of enemies that stand as obstacles to this realization. These enemies of the revolution are necessary to explain why we haven’t yet achieved universal equality. They will remain necessary as long as we fail to confront the impossibility—and undesirability—of a fully realized, all-inclusive universal. The fact that Stalin’s universality depends on enemies indicates that it is something less than genuine universality. Universality cannot have enemies and remain universality. (109)
I must admit that the discussion of the perversion of universality and communism under Stalin is illuminating, but not quite as illuminating or convincing as the discussion of Nazism. Does the conception of universality as realizable necessarily require the erection of enemies? I do not ask rhetorically.
Particularly good, however, is the discussion of how Nazism has been strangely de-politicized in our culture. This book points out that what Nazis hated about Jews and communists was their universalist tendencies, and that this fact is largely ignored. (This is in contradistinction to earlier, specifically Christian manifestations of anti-Semitism that faulted Jews for being too insular, too particularist.) McGowan also points out that the first people sent to the concentration camps (before death camps were established) were political enemies of the Nazis such as communists. ‘But communists do not figure in the most widely disseminated depictions of the Holocaust’ (94). Why? Because to highlight Nazi persecution of the political Left would show that Nazism was not an attack simply on Jews but on universalism. ‘Nazism saw communists as every bit as much the enemy as Jews. Both were political enemies, not just the victims of a universal evil’ (94). This goes against the dominant idea that it is universalism which is the problem, not the attack on it. One might also add that in the current regime of cultural capitalism it will not do to foreground the fact that the Left in Germany stood up against the Nazis earlier and with far greater determination than any other segment of the nation. (I have often noticed a strange double think in the mainstream literature about the Weimar Republic: liberals or conservatives in Germany who opposed the Nazis are rightly called heroic, while Left opponents of fascism, when they are noticed at all, are accused of ‘provoking’ the Nazis by their opposition.)
Though McGowan’s is definitely an idealistic work (as universality cannot help but be) there is a distinctly anti-utopian element in it. One wonders what McGowan would make of Christianity’s unabashedly utopian character in this context, for he does take a very positive stance towards Christianity as radically universalist (citing Paul in Galatians 3.28, for example).
This concern is to go afield of what the book discusses perhaps, but from my own Christian perspective I cannot help but note that the two great universalist systems, Christianity and communism, though they should be natural allies, are more often than not enemies. I would suggest that their union would be the particularist’s greatest nightmare, but a consummation devoutly to be wished. However, here we come up against McGowan’s anti-utopian stance again:
… the struggle does not aim at a universality to come….There can be no fully successful installation of the universal that doesn’t fundamentally betray universality. (75)
The universal is just another name for the impossibility of complete belonging. (79)
Statements like this are certainly compatible with some versions of socialism or communism, but not, in the long run, with Christianity. But this may not be a problem. From the standpoint of Christianity, and I would say from Judaism and Islam as well, the concept of faith means, among other things, that one need not give up an ounce of utopian hope: if perfection, in universality or anything else is not possible for humans, there is also the power of God in play, ‘whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine,’ says The Book of Common Prayer, quoting Ephesians. The religious need not make the mistake of Stalin.
Might I suggest that Christianity and communism are, as McGowan points out we all are, alienated: the latter from a transcendent realm of hope and power greater than human efforts, the former from a world it purports to save, usually claiming to be above politics, even when supporting the status quo.
CONCLUSION
This book, in short, is a knockout. It is a sound criticism of identity politics (whether presented as Left or Right) which gives no aid or comfort to the Right’s barrel-organing or childish catcalls about ‘special snowflakes’ and so on. This is a book that can be read profitably by liberals, conservatives, and leftists. It is a challenge to those who, wittingly or not, hold to particularist values.
Let me dare the following rant, at the risk of feeling ashamed of myself later. For religion has its religiously correct attitudes which reign us in, and in the name of avoiding sin we curb thoughts that may need to be aired, to be pondered, lest we miss something. People complain of “toxic positivity” in our culture, and sometimes rightly. Religion has its own versions of this, wherein some thought or feeling that steps outside the doctrinally correct is immediately stifled. The good Christian folds his hands prayerfully and smiles grimly inside, intoning, “think doctrinally correct thoughts, think doctrinally correct thoughts,” like those lamentable characters in that horrific story, “It’s a Good Life,” thrusting all rebelliousness from their minds lest their omniscient tyrant hear them. Must Christians hunch their shoulders through life in mortal dread whenever the traditional wisdoms are questioned? And for Christ’s sake anyway, what has he to fear from my thoughts or words? You may say WE have something to fear of our thoughts and words, very well. We also have something to fear of NOT saying them.
Thus:
You can’t tell people that if justice were done they would be tortured forever, and then in the next breath tell them you love them. Humans are not made this way. Here is what God, according to some Christians, is saying to us constantly: “you are a worthless sack of shit, and I love you.” No. This does not work as love. This is the manipulative, Good-God/Bad-God. And there is no sense saying we SHOULD be able to humbly accept the love of someone who thinks we deserve eternal torture, that we are being PROUD: the fact is, we don’t, and we can’t. How can you oblige someone to do the impossible? (even assuming the impossible should be done in this case even if it could). And obligeing us to accept in gratitude the gift along with the supposely graciously suspended judgement does not work. If we are wholly evil, and nothing but wholly evil (and we must be to deserve eternal damnation) there is nothing there to love. And there is no point saying, “God does not love us for something in ourselves, but because it is his nature to love.” This is blather. “Love” is not an intransitive verb. It has an object. And if this is not the case, we must say simply, “God loves,” but we cannot truly say “God loves us,” if indeed, there is nothing good there to be loved. For how can God love evil?
Nor must we say therefor that we seek to be loved through merit, because parents love their babies, and what merit has a baby performed? The baby is in some way good in their eyes, and we tend to agree with them.
No matter how evil we are, no matter how much we need the mercy, if there is not someone beneath the rust of spiritual ruin to receive that mercy, then who is it who is being loved? Perhaps God simply loves himself then? Then who are we?
There is no point exorting humans to be good and then saying they can’t do it, and judging them for inevitable failure. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory”; does not reason pipe up here and say that if not one has been righteous there is more going on than countless billions of people, all of whom just happen to be evil? Might there just be something systematic about this evil none of us could escape of our own efforts? Liberals have been mocked for being soft on criminals, saying they are in some way “victims of society.” But what kind of “society” is it, when every bloody citizen of it is a criminal? I think there is a wee bit of a structural problem here that nobody can escape. Sin is that structure.
What are we to say to God, then? “Love me according to my deserts?” God does not love according to deserts, does he? Was this not the mistake of the pharisees? Thinking they could buy or earn God’s love? Is it not free? And we don’t quite bloody know, each of us, exactly what our deserts are anyway. Certainly we cannot claim somehow to have earned eternal bliss. Nor can we claim, in truth, we SHOULD have.
Good-God/Bad-God is Blake’s Nobodaddy, hypocritically pretending to love freely while all the time reminding you of what a rotter you are. “Just think what I MIGHT have justly done to you,” he mutters under his breath.
Enough! Enough! All this nonsense, and maybe this meditation itself, is simply another attempt to keep justification hovering in the background as a dark and powerful shadow, even as we try to accept with trembling gratitude the Master’s love. “Oh Lord, please judge me positively for eschewing my worthiness…”! Yes, let us say we are too proud to accept unmerited love, then. But we are too filled with self-loathing also to accept that love. Ah, but the sages, say, that self-loathing is a form of pride. Perhaps it is: a form of pride we learned from those same sages teaching us humbly to loathe ourselves!
No, what is needed steps outside, beyond even what I am saying here. What is required is a miracle.
We are told that God loves all, but saves only some. How is this? Does it not take away from the faith in God’s love we might otherwise have? The way Christianity is usually preached, a Christian might say truly, “God loves me I know, but I am still afraid.”
So what is it that is more powerful than God’s love? “If God be for us, who can be against us?” asks Paul in Romans 8.31. What is the enemy that threatens us with real danger of eternal death despite the power of God’s love?
It is our own “free will,” apparently, which might reject God’s grace.
And how do we know if we have done that? Oh, the answers vary widely from those who say, “don’t worry, if you had done anything as drastic as that, you would know it” to those who say or imply that as long as we are living lives of sin, we have not accepted Christ, and are not saved. (And how little sin do you have to commit before you are no longer living a “life of sin”?)
Thus it is that the power of a conviction of God’s love can be set at naught.
Belief that some will go to eternal hell negates the power of God’s love, stops it from being a force in our lives, relegates it to a little corner in a dark room, shaking alternately with fear and feeble hope: “yes, God loves me, but…” is its plaintive cry.
We cannot believe in God’s love strongly if we cannot believe in our inevitable salvation. Hell hanging over our heads thwarts everything God has to give us.
