Category: rhetoric

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LIBERATING THE LEFT FROM “WOKEISM”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ARISTOCRACY

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

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

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ACCEPTANCE AND “REALISM”

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

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

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ON “REALISM”

In the prologue to The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism became the Religion of Modernity, Eugene McCarraher says,

Words such as “paradise” or “love” or “communion” are certainly absent from our political vernacular, exluded on account of their “utopian” connotations or their lack of steely-eyed “realism.”  Although this is a book about the past, I have always kept before me its larger contemporary religious, philosophical, and political implications.  The book should make these clear enough; I will only say here that one of my broader intentions is to challenge the canons of “realism,” especially as defined in the “science” of economics.  As the master science of desire in advanced capitalist nations, economics and its acolytes define the parameters of our moral and political imaginations, patrolling the boundaries of possibility and censoring any more generous conception of human affairs.

“Realism” is a deeply ideological word, and in a very negative sense.  “Realism,” in other words, says more and other than what it pretends to say.

“Realism” pretends that it refers simply to “that which simply is, or that which is possible.”  But we all know, given the countless times we have heard the word used and in its usual contexts, that what is or what is possible as designated by “realism” always has to do with what we wish were not real, that which thwarts our desires, or that which simply can’t live up to them.

“Realism” is invariably linked to some reality (present or possible) that cannot be what we wish of it.  “Realism” has to do with telling us we cannot get what we want, and that we may as well accept this fact.

What are we saying if we tell someone to “be realistic”?  We are almost certainly not telling him or her to see that the situation is or will become much better than he or she imagines.  Almost certainly we are trying to say that things are worse than this person has imagined, or will be worse than our addressee hopes.

So what am I saying?  Simply this: that “realism” is a subtle, powerful, and very commonly used ideological battleaxe deployed not only to diminish hope in a given context—indeed, in the name of honesty, one might well be justified in doing this sometimes—but to assault hope in principle.  The sinister and dishonest ideology of “realism” is that it equates reality with thwarted needs or desires; it subtly curses the positive, the good things in life, with the label of unreality: if something is good, even if it is undeniably extant (and “realism” is always very reluctant to see the good, literally blinds itself in its presence) that good is somehow not real.

In effect, we have what might be described as a kind of dystopic Platonism.  Only the negative, the regrettable, is entirely real in this rhetoric.

And what could be more useful to a society that wants to destroy hope at every turn?  What could be more useful to a society that wants millionaires and billionaires to be in charge and desires that no one will ever question this self-evidently absurd and unjust situation?

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ON THE RHETORIC OF “PRIVILEGE”

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.

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AGAINST “REALISM”

“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.

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CAPITALIST ECONOMIC TERMINOLOGY AND RHETORIC

How do we discuss economics in our society?  Consider this from Michael Harrington’s Socialism: Past and Future (1989):

“But those Keynesian concepts and statistics are value-laden.  “Gross National Product” is, after all, truly a gross measure and certainly a very capitalist one.  It assumes that any activity that yields a profit – be it the production of carcinogenic cigarettes or automobile engines that contribute to acid rain – is to be given a positive weight.  If the GNP goes up, no matter what its composition, it is thought that the society is advancing.  But that advance could well be a stride toward catastrophe, for example, toward a greenhouse effect that will threaten life itself.” (p. 217 Arcade Publishing 2011 edition)

This quotation here is evidence of how biased the culture is in favour of capitalism, how ignorant (to be generous) are those allegations from the Right that we are too socialist, when even the language of economics is geared away from socialism towards the values of capitalism.  Popular culture and corporate media do not discuss economics except in the terms that are useful to capitalism and imply that capitalist economics and economics in general are one and the same thing.  Unless we see this and step out of the capitalist frame of reference, our discussions of economics will always be biased in favour of the wealthy and powerful, viewing the world through their eyes while assuming our approach is ideologically neutral.

In addition, the rhetoric of capitalism constantly portrays it as the wild and risk-taking swashbuckler of economic systems, the very opposite of life under Stalin, where “the basic decisions with regard to work, production, and consumption were made by a centralized bureaucracy” (226).  Harrington continues:

“If, a believable joke reported, a Soviet pin factory was assigned a quota of so many tons of pins, it would turn out one monstrously large and unusable pin; and if it were told to produce a certain number of pins, it would achieve the numerical goal with a myriad of pins so thin that they were also useless.” (227)

It is easy enough to see the absurdity of such a practice.  But is it indeed any more absurd than the GNP fetish Harrington in effect describes?  We see here the Soviet and capitalist versions of what are essentially bureaucratic and robotic mentalities.  Truly, Noam Chomsky’s frequent condemnation of both camps, with their managerial arrogance, is not misplaced.