What is meant in the Genesis story about the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil?”
Let us take a look first at this passage, from Alain Badiou discussing Jacques Lacan in “The Other,” which is the first part of I Know There Are So Many of You (2019):
“We are making progress here on a very important point, which is that the question of the individual, from the point of view of otherness, is clearly a question of identity, except that this identity contains the Other within it. In other words, no identity can do without otherness. The very important lesson we learn from this is that it is always a fantasy, and sometimes a criminal one, to think that there can be identity without otherness. The thesis of the elimination of otherness may lead, and has historically led, to bloodshed, from the moment that, instead of understanding that since all desire is the desire of the Other, the Other is internal to my own desire, I instead assume the Other to be external, to be a border at which my desire is forever rejected, and so I attempt to destroy them.” (20-21)
(Elsewhere in this chapter, Badiou explains that “desire of the Other” seems to mean not simply “desire for the Other” but also “desire to be desired by the Other.”)
Let us make a bit of a leap here and assert that from observations such as this one, one might conclude that good and evil are complementary, that the one cannot exist without the other. Evil, therefor, in some fundamental sense is not so much evil as necessary. But another way of looking at things is that in theory, at least, evil could be eliminated, leaving only good.
Here is where the tree comes in. The eating of the fruit is called a “loss of innocence,” (a cringeworthy and patronizing phrase if ever there was one). “Loss of innocence” implies not simply a plunge into moral guilt (or a feeling of guilt) but a loss of ignorance. That is, the gaining of knowledge: in this case, one learns about good and evil that already existed, but it would have been best not to know the difference between them.
This would imply that paradise was not paradise, even before Adam and Eve ate the apple, but a kind of “fugitive and cloistered” paradise, a diminished existence which owes (perhaps shamefully) its bliss to the avoidance of certain realities.
But this is false from a Christian point of view, which does not see evil as an inherently necessary element in what would amount to a cosmic dualism. Even though it indeed seems the case that evil is necessary to good, and that we cannot even imagine (let alone make) a world where this is not so, we must keep in mind that the eating of the fruit, the “knowledge,” results in the eviction from paradise. The “knowledge” that evil is necessary is post-lapsarian, and therefor must be suspect. The fact is, we post-lapsarians cannot imagine how two people in perfection could fall. So we must see all tales of this unfallen world as tales of a foreign country whose language is so incomprehensible to us the story must be told in our own language, and therefor falsified. The “loss of innocence” is perhaps some acquisition of knowledge to the fallen world, but in absolute, that is, true terms, this loss of innocence is the gaining of ignorance. The “knowledge of good and evil” is a lie. It is a lie we cannot see beyond to the truth it obfuscates. We cannot even imagine this truth. We can know only that the “knowledge” is a lie.
I was in a Chapters bookstore not long ago and noticed a problem: no, I am not talking about the fact that what used to be a bookstore with a large number of gift items has now turned into a gift store with a large number of books.
I am talking about an interesting section of books called “Culture and community.” This was divided into four parts with the following labels: “Black Voices,” “Gender,” “LGBTQ+,” and “Indigenous.”
It is this sort of thing that makes conservatives bleat that liberals run everything. But this is like complaining women run the world because there is a preponderance of females leading the feminist movement.
No, the real problem is there is no section on class. And this, briefly, is the problem with much progressive politics.
The supposed liberal hegemony that conservatives complain about is nothing which in fact threatens them very much. What is truly thrust into the shadows, as if there is a quiet understanding amongst all good people that the neocons are right in saying Marx and everything connected to him is both outdated and hopelessly wrong, is a class-based understanding of our current situations.
I would not simplify history in the manner of a vulgar Marxism and reduce it to a mere playing out of property relations. But whereas there is little or no inherent power accruing to race, gender, sex, or sexual orientation, there is power inherent in the control or ownership of the means of production. In other words, such power as men have had over women, for example, has been based not so much on some inherent power in being a male, as that men have managed to have more property rights than women in many times and places.
It would be a mistake to get into a competition between a class-based analysis and these other types of analysis. In struggling with each other, advocates of all kinds for oppressed and marginalized people would only weaken each other and strengthen the oppressors. So my point is not to decrease the attention paid to current ways of understanding injustice. Rather, I would attach an understanding of class to these issues.
For is not class power central, perhaps even essential, in the oppression of various groups? Consider some of the following observations.
A key factor in the oppression of women, historically, has been in making it difficult or impossible for them to own property. Materially, they have been dependent on fathers and husbands. In societies where they can get the same jobs as men, they often get less pay. In other words, control of the means of production is restricted in their case.
Indigenous people in North America were opened to oppression largely by losing their land: that is, their means of production. In the late 19th century the buffalo of Western Canada were opened up to massive over hunting by white people, causing literal starvation amongst the indigenous people of that region.
A common incentive for sexual and gender nonconformists of all types to stay in the closet is fear of job loss or harassment on the job. Yet again, a threat to one’s means of production (keep in mind that employees do not own the means of production to begin with) is a key factor in maintaining injustice.
African people not only lost control of their means of production when removed from their land and forcibly exiled: they could not own property in North America and became literally the means of production for others in becoming slaves.
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.
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.
