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Book Review: UNIVERSALITY AND IDENTITY POLITICS by Todd McGowan

Columbia Press, 2020

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.

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GOOD-GOD/BAD-GOD: THE JUDGE OFFERS HIS “LOVE”

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.

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GOD’S LOVE VERSUS HELL

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.

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CAPITALISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HELL

One of the many crucial points where religion and politics inextricably if not explicitly meet is in The Screwtape Letters (1942) by C.S. Lewis. Here, Screwtape, a senior devil giving instructions to a junior devil (his nephew, Wormwood) says the following:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that oneself is not another self. My good is my good, and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. “To be” means “to be in competition.” (Chapter 18)

C.S. Lewis did not write about politics very much, but it would be difficult not to see a connection between the philosophy of hell to the philosophy of capitalism, which, by its own admission, is all about competition.

Capitalists are not likely to put things quite so brutally as Screwtape does here—at least, not in public. What capitalism adds to this philosophy is a quaint, but ardently insisted upon frisson, which is that this competition will bring about the maximum possible good for the greatest number.

Screwtape would laugh out loud at that. One might divide capitalists into the naïve ones, who believe the frisson, and the cynical ones, who know it is rot but do not care. And I think that capitalism has mostly been cynical, rather than naïve.  As time goes by, the cynicism becomes more obvious, more brash, more contemptuous, and the naïve capitalist must turn cynic or drop the damnable capitalist ideology altogether.

Karl Marx himself, hardly a naïve individual, admitted clearly that capitalism had unleashed tremendous forces of production. But the tremendous wealth generated came at the even greater cost of human misery.

And it is one of the peculiar contradictions of capitalism that once you say a better way must be found, you are mocked for your naivete.  Apparently, anyone who opposes predatory cynicism is obliged to conceive of human beings as angels.  But capitalism, while mocking this alleged naivete, expounds a practice wherein apparently, the greatest good for the greatest number will be found by placing naked and untrammelled self-interest before all.  You may as well say that the best way to get where you want to go is to put a brick on the accelerator of your car and take your hands off the steering wheel.

Christianity is the long revolution against the zero-sum game that Screwtape proposes is built into the nature of reality.  The final triumph of Christ is the final defeat of this ideology in theory and practice.

So can Christianity still maintain its traditional doctrines about a hell of eternal torment?

I think not.  That is the Good News.  Hell is the first and last bastion of the zero-sum game.  Christians who still believe in hell as an eternity of torment or an eternity of annihilation are still clinging to the zero-sum game.  Nor can this game be defended by saying that within the traditional doctrines nobody is damned because of lack of room in heaven.  For as long as it is believed that the creation of humans must entail the risk of hell for each one of us (and that the risk was needed to make salvation meaningful) the inevitability of hell for some is built in, and therefore, so is the zero-sum game, the principle of hell.  Christ’s sacrifice becomes inadequate for salvation.  Instead, the agony of the damned becomes necessary to the bliss of the saved.  To believe in hell, therefore, is to take one’s orders from it, to be living under the same power that runs capital.

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REALISM HATS

A baseball cap or a cowboy hat are what you wear if you are nobody in particular.  You want to belong.  You’ll be as generic as possible to do that.  You are proud not to be different.

Those different people must be put down.

Hatlessness is okay, but eventually will grow suspect.  Even baldness has been turned into a hat.

That man over there in the slightly shabby clothes with over a million dollars in his bank account, he is not one of the elite.

Oh no.

He likes to go on about them.  The Elite.  Something about “Wine and cheese and Perrier water.”

He knows the script.  He helped to write it and forgot he was reading it ever afterward.

The hats are lining up.  They are taking sides.  All are “regular people” who need to “get on with their lives.”

Don’t ask them where they need to get on to.  This exceeds the event horizon.

They either have money or work faithfully for those who do.

It’s the money talking.  Even from people who don’t have any.

And beneath the money–for money is nothing at all, just like evil, but so very powerful–is the labour talking.

The groaning, back breaking, heart breaking, self-pity making labour.

The rat in the cage.

Oh proud rat.  You are not amongst the Elite, are you?  Of course not.  Good fellow.

The important thing is that you either wear livery or are the owner of it–the “brand.”

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Let’s go down a level or two.  Beneath the labour, even.  The Marxists go this far, much further than their enemies, but usually not far enough.

“In the sweat of thy face…”

Back to the Springtime of humanity.

Back to the origins of “things as they are,” back to the origins of “Reality,” now worshipped as a god, self-plucked from the void and much to be venerated by his followers, the “Realists.”

The baseball cap and the cowboy hat take council together.

(But the Lord shall hold them in derision.)

Back to the birth of the “necessary evil” without which there can be no good.

So we are told.

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The baseball cap and the cowboy hat take council together.  Their inanities are deadly and they know it.

But these are “good people” trying to “get by.”

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MARX, DAMNATION, AND THE BOGUS AUTHORITY OF CAPITALISM

This is from the first volume of Marx’s Kapital, Chapter 14:

The division of labour within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities, who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their reciprocal interests, just as in the animal kingdom the “war of all against all” more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species.  The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining “genius” of the individual capitalist.  It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory.

A more recent capitalist objection to conscious regulation of production is the usual harping on about the failures of the Soviet command economy, such harping revealing a studied lack of imagination: as if the only conceivable alternative to market-as-god must be the undemocratic bureaucracy-as-god.

But more importantly, translating Marx’s view of capitalist competition into religious terminology, one might say this competition is the capitalist form of idolatry.  The effect is not simply that this false god, competition, demands and gets his supposedly rightful place in the scheme of things, but that he demands the right to invade and conquer and transform into his own likeness all non-competitive relationships.  Competition does not demand to be a god among gods, but the god, before which there shall be no other.

This is one reason why I speak so often about hell.  Ultimately, beneath a belief in infernalism is a kind of spiritual competitiveness, a demand that the universe be functioning as a system of scarcity (economics often being defined in the capitalist mindset as “competition for scarce resources”) which necessitates, even justifies competition.  “If there is enough salvation to go around for everyone, if we all will get God’s undying love forever, how could that love be worth anything?” is the plaintive and unspoken cry of the infernalist.  While accusing universalists of presumption (as if trust in God’s love simply had to be presumption, for some reason) the infernalist reveals a pride which does not want any salvation so bountiful that everybody gets it.  Where is the distinction in that?  Where is the achievement?  While the infernalist may go on about her unworthiness to be saved, her redemption being the product of God’s grace alone, she secretly feels she really has accomplished something, if she ends up in eternal bliss while others end up in the fiery pit.

This soteriology is a zero-sum game which pretends to be something better.  For the infernalist is not usually so vulgar as to say that there are only so many seats in heaven and a certain number of individuals must therefor be damned no matter what happens.  Theoretically, according to many infernalists, everyone has the power to accept God’s grace and thereby be saved, and therefor there is no reason why not everyone will, in fact, be saved, other than that there will likely be those who reject the grace, entirely of their own free will, of course.

But the infernalist well suspects in his schema that there will not only be the damned, but likely quite a few of them.  Human “freedom,” as he conceives it, is not only necessary to make salvation worth anything (God does not want predetermined “robots” in heaven, is the claim) but also pretty much makes universal salvation impossible.  If we are not free to choose damnation, salvation is nothing.  And if we are truly free to choose damnation, it is pretty much inevitable in this schema that some shall.  In this outlook, therefor, God is relieved of any blame for having limited the number of the saved, while the infernalist gets the proud and secret satisfaction of rescuing heaven from meaninglessness: without the damnation of some, the salvation of any is worthless.  The demand of pride that zero sum philosophy prevail over the universe is satisfied, while the Creator is held blameless of any limits placed on his generosity.  The hypocrisy is blatant.

Competition in the economic or soteriological sphere creates a need for hell: economically, or eschatologically.  And it may well be the case that Christianity’s training of humanity to accept hell on an eschatological level made it easier to accept hell on the factory floor or in the office cubicle.

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TWO CHRISTIAN TEMPERAMENTS

There is one Christian temperament, which might be characterized as apocalyptic, and which demands that there be a point, a wall, into which the wicked must run sooner or later and be permanently defeated.  Broken, humiliated, spiritually crushed by the truth they hate, unrepentant sinners are either annihilated or sent to a place of unending punishment.

Then there is another Christian temperament that insists, “God shall be all in all,” and that all is quite literally ALL: this temperament does not wriggle out of ALL in a lawyerly way by saying the damned are not part of ALL, or preach that weaselly nonsense about how God loves the damned and that it is this very love which will torture them forever, since they reject it.  (Talk about passive/aggressive!) As Rob Bell puts it, Love Wins.  Who knows?–perhaps love wins even retroactively, such that evil will never have existed.  Could this be the (granted, quite unimaginable, quite absurd) answer to the problem of evil?  Perhaps.

I confess I am, unfortunately, of the former temperament much of the time.  I do not know whether the enneagram is reliable or useful, but I am probably a one (and if not that, almost certainly a nine).  So I often have the pharisaical and unchristian weakness to desire the unrighteous be crushed rather than that they repent and be forgiven.  Fortunately, I also have the critical strengths of enneagram one, and measuring Christianity rigorously against itself, I come to the conclusion that the ALL in ALL (universalist) conclusion is the Christian truth, even if my vengeful heart is not always in it.  (I have selfish motives for universalism, I admit, though they are not relevant to the truth.  In other words, if universalism is not true, how do I know if I am saved or damned?  Infernalism is wretchedly coy on this matter, to be sure.)  My beliefs, my deeper understanding, are better than the passions of my angry heart.

Let the infernalists not say we universalists are naïve.  This accusation seems to be the position of N.T. Wright in his chapter on hell in Surprised by Hope.  This is, on the whole, a very good book, by the way.  But his defense of infernalism is pablum.  Perhaps I will blog about this at a later date.

I was inspired to write this short post while outraged by some of the latest fascist shenanigans of Trump followers, and my apocalyptic side was triggered quite violently.  Let these murderers of the truth be sent screaming hysterical and naked into the fiery pit, says one side of me–but it shall not be forever—says the better part.  God shall have them all at his side, eventually, and eternally, whether I want it so or not.

How Christianity tears a believer apart!

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PROBLEMS WITH THE FREE WILL DEFENSE OF INFERNALISM (#1)

I’m not going to undertake here a thorough refutation of the free will defense of infernalism,  but just present a few thoughts.

The free will defense of infernalism states that in order for humans to truly love and be loved, we must have free will.  In order for us to be more than robots, we must have the ability to choose freely whether to love God.  And therefore, if we truly are free, some of us may well choose to reject God, and that must mean we get hell.  C.S. Lewis said, “some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot” (“The Shocking Alternative” from Mere Christianity).

But what is seldom pointed out is that if free will is so important to our value in the eyes of God and to our eternal fate, why does each of us have so little of it?  I do not argue that we have no free will, simply that our free will is only partial, incomplete.  I consider it a fairly obvious axiomatic truth that we have some power of choice, at least.  Others may disagree with me and say free will is entirely illusory, but if they are right, everything I or they say on the matter is moot anyway: I have no choice over what I am saying here, and you have no choice how or whether to respond to it.  There is no point worrying about the matter.  (However, if those who say we have no free will are right, we have no choice anyway whether we worry about these things or not, and so on.) 

That being said, how much free will do we have?  It seems each and every one of us has chosen sin to the point where we deserve perdition and can avoid it only by the grace of God.  It seems to be a standard theological claim that without the resurrection and grace of Christ, we’d all go to hell, and we’d all deserve it.

Funny how literally billions of people, all quite free, just happen to fail to make the right choice.  If you gave an exam to billions of students and every last one failed, you might come to the reasonable conclusion the exam was unfair.  (On the other hand, if we really do want to blame the billions of students instead, keep in mind the professor who wrote the exam up is the same one who tried to teach them in the first place.  We would have reason to question his competence.)  In fact, we are told not only that it is impossible for us to be sinless by our own efforts, but that it is the sin of pride to see it otherwise.

In other words, we are all inevitably damned by our own free will.

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  Indeed, I believe this quotation to be true.  And if we were able to count up all our various crimes we might each of us truly say, “I might have sinned even more, but I chose not to; I might have sinned much less, but I chose not to,” and so on.  I do not understand sin as sin in the most serious sense without the concept of free will.  One might err in a state of unfreedom, but one must have some freedom to truly sin.  But the record would seem to indicate that without exception we all freely choose to do what must make us deserving of damnation.  (Of course, if we take up the idea instead that we are born deserving damnation because of the sins of distant ancestors, so much for the idea of free will.  Clearly, we have no more freedom than robots after all, and the free will defense of hell falls.)

Either way, it seems this “free will” is a trap.  Nor is this changed by the fact that any given sin of ours on any given occasion could have been avoided.  It seems we all inevitably freely choose to sin from time to time (that is, if the sin is not inevitable on any given occasion, it will inevitably and frequently come nonetheless, and freely) and therefor become hell fodder.

The free will defense of hell tells us therefore that we need this free will in order to truly enter heaven, but that this same “free will” inevitably leads to us deserving the opposite.

Now, if we are in the midst of this paradox, that of inevitably freely choosing to sin, but we are told we still have enough free will to warrant our crimes serious enough to receive damnation, why might we not turn this on its head?  Why not say that we shall all inevitably freely choose to accept the love, grace, and forgiveness God offers us and thereby be saved?  C.S. Lewis and the infernalists object to this, but I don’t think they can do so without having to note that the same God who so cherishes our freedom in order to make meaningful eternal union with him possible, seems to have presented us in the meantime with a very strange sort of freedom indeed.  When we are offered the grace of salvation we must be free to reject it or that grace is naught, it seems, but the same free will so necessary to our salvation earlier bound us powerlessly to be damned.  We are forced to need salvation, but not forced to get it.

Let me put this another way.  If we can claim we were free when we inevitably damned ourselves, why can we not be predestined (all of us) to receive salvation and say we accepted that in freedom also?

I said earlier that we must have freedom to truly sin.  But is it not also the case that we must have as well unfreedom in order to sin?  That is, must we not also be tempted to sin?  And is not temptation, especially when we consider that it conflicts with our better impulses, a form of unfreedom?  Who, being free from temptation, would choose to be tempted?  Is the recovering alcoholic, torn between putting her life together and having another, potentially disastrous drink, more free that someone who just doesn’t want that drink at all?  To be tempted is to have a will or desires divided against themselves, and this does not sound like freedom to me. 

But this is where the story of Adam and Eve, quite frankly, screws us up.  The way it is so often read leads us to think their fall into sin actually makes sense.  They knew they should not eat the apple, but they were tempted, and fell.  We all have this experience.  But that is because we are free, but less than perfectly free.  Would not a perfectly free Adam and Eve not be tempted to begin with?  To understand their story, we would have to look at them through pre-lapsarian eyes, which is something we do not have (and hence, perhaps also a reason why Lewis could not imagine the creature he said he could not imagine).

In other words, sin, though real, does not make sense.  And that is why hell does not make sense either, because it cannot exist without sin.  (You may counter that if sin exists despite not making sense, hell might then exist anyway, but I would ask you on what basis.  The existence of sin is experiential.  On the other hand, many of us have suffered greatly, but I take it we have no direct evidence of the hell the infernalists are talking about.)

Alas, I feel as if there are further and more elusive developments to make on all this, but I must end here for now.  There is something about philosophy and theology that always seems to avoid complete closure.  This essay threatens to become a book.  Indeed, one reason I blogged little until recently was my fear I could say nothing without saying everything, and that doing so was impossible anyway.  But I then decided to accept the necessary lack of thoroughness needed to get anything done.  Better a series of imperfect blog posts than that handful of long and perfect articles that are never written.

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I’m Only Real

I’m only real
When I’m alone
I always cease to be
When giant faces loom about
To blink and
Silence me;

It is not fear
It is not dread
There’s simply nothing there
There is no bit
Of  “I am me”
I am not anywhere.

So look you sir
Now I’ll go pray
To get and keep a soul
To each his business
And desire
quiet I must be.

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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.