Paper for Harmony 2019 from The Rev'd Dr Gregory James Moses

Title: How we got to where we are, where exactly are we, and where to go from here: from harmony to disharmony, and back again?

Abstract: This is a continuation of the 2005 Bangalore conference paper published in God-Talk: Contemporary Trends and Trials (2006), pp. 53 - 77. As in that paper I begin with a reflection on Australian Aboriginal culture, almost the ultimate in integration and harmony of cosmic, ethical and religious orders. I expand on this because it is also one of the places where the paper will end.

This is followed by a brief recapitulation of the previous 2005-6 research refocused on the present theme.

The central new part of the paper is on, Where exactly are we, right now? This strives to bring the previous reflections up to date with help from various Belgian and other European scholars (notably Lieven Boeve, Herman De Dijn, Zigmund Bauman and Slavoj Zizek), and some Australian scholars (Stan Grant, Bernard Keane). Initial analysis is to try to understand what is going on recently as a further fragmentation of culture caused by an intensification of trends already underway in the capitalism of the late 20th century, trends such as detraditionalisation, pluralisation, individualisation, and especially consumerisation and marketisation, the new master narrative(s) and now the only one(s) left. Neoliberal economics comes in as both an expression of some of these long term trends and a reinforcement thereof. The dominance of neoliberal economics and the ideology it engenders, expressed differently on different sides of mainline politics, advances also the liquification of values, lifestyle choices and the multiplication of identity markers already underway in what has been interpreted as 'liquid modernity'. This is then all made massively more intense by the very recent impact of the Internet.

This prepares the way for Bernard Keane's thesis that the mess we are in right now may be explained in terms of the peaking in the last few years of three waves, neoliberalism, the hollowing out of democratic politics and the massively disruptive arrival of the Internet. A lot of what we now experience is by way of backlash, taking different forms on left and right. But even the forms taken by identity politics on both sides are things made possible by the long term trends.

I then conclude with some more reflections on Where to go from here?, how to get back to a new, creative artistic rather than organic way of doing harmony, relying on process relational commitments but now emphatically including a receiving of the Gift of traditional cultures relevant to our context.

Bio-Data:

Gregory James Moses is a philosopher and Catholic priest previously associated with the Brisbane College of Theology, the Sydney College of Divinity, and the Diocese of Cairns in north east Australia. Before retirement he was a Visiting Scholar at the School of Theology, Griffith University, and Auxiliary Faculty at the Australian Catholic University, and has had brief stints at the Institute of Philosophy (HIW) Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) and at Loyola University New Orleans. The Rev'd Dr Moses holds a Licentiate and Doctorate at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is a member of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and Australian Catholic Theological Association and was a founding member of the International Process Network and the Australian Association for Process Thought. His areas of ongoing research include Australian Aboriginal Culture and Spirituality as well as an interest in Process philosophy and theology and a continuing philosophical and historical interest in the Construction of Modernity and how to comport ourselves in the situation it has gotten us into, whatever that may be exactly.

Introduction

Let me begin once more with a story told to me about Australian Aboriginal artwork in traditional mode. I am told that in its traditional setting Australian Aboriginal artwork functions symbolically on at least three levels. The painting will have a geographical functioning, mapping the lay of the land, waterholes, where food is to be found etc., a guide for survival for the people claimed by that bit of country. On another level it will have a sociological, individual and communal narrative identity functioning: this is my country, this is our country, where I am conceived in it determines my totem and my place in the community vis a vis other people. On yet another level it will have what we would call a �religious� functioning, tapping into the Dreaming and events in the Dreaming about Rainbow Serpent or whatever which produced the lay of the land and determined the sociological and the individual and communal narrative identity constructive functioning of the land. Not that the levels are separate: they are inextricably interwoven, one story, one pattern, it is we who make the separation.

In terms of the theme of our conference, for all its historical fragility, this in its structural features seems to represent almost the ultimate in integration and harmony of cosmic, ethical and religious orders. There is a harmony and integration of content, and of people into their total social and natural and religious environment. This is matched by a harmony and integration of form: the artwork maps the stories maps the song lines maps the dancing and ceremonies is expressed in the way people live their lives in country, with each other, and in respect of the Law and the Dreaming.

This is obviously a long way from where we are right now, wherever that may be.

How We Got To Where We Are Part 1: Blumenberg, Dupr�, Radical Orthodoxy and Gauchet

This is by way of a brief recapitulation of the previous 2005-6 research on the construction of modernity, refocused on the present theme. For scholarly purposes, the papers need to be read together, with one as an extension of the other.

(If you have read the previous article, please feel free to scroll down to more recent research, starting But where exactly are we).

(A) Hans Blumenberg¹

With the German philosopher and historian, Hans Blumenberg already, the origins of modernity get pushed back beyond the Renascence, beyond the period 1500-1700 with its three science producing paradigms. According to Blumenberg, the modern self-understanding - modern science, modern philosophy, modern art, individualism and so forth - is a particular, and in the circumstances �legitimate� historical and cultural response to the all determining emphasis in theory and in practice, upon the theme of the omnipotence of God in the nominalistic thinking of the late Middle Ages. It was this theme, consistently pushed through, that finally destroyed the credibility of the ancient and high medieval cosmic order. The actual, finite world becomes totally contingent, no longer the embodiment of the full range and variety of what is possible with human beings as microcosm in the centre and the whole suffused by the divine. Ethics becomes contingent, dependent entirely on the divine will, as does, eventually, both salvation and damnation and indeed the whole of theology. Modern �self-assertion�, science, art, individualism etc. emerges as a response, and a legitimate response to a human situation deeply determined by this emphasis, by way, it seems, of the ultimate working out of a �solution� developed by Christian Fathers, esp. Augustine, to the problem of Gnostic dualism (though no one seems to bother much with this detail). The threshold is crossed sometime in the early Renascence, with the unusual but still orthodox Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) on one side of this threshold and on the other side the unorthodox Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548-1600) who has already left it behind.

Louis Dupr� �s Passage to Modernity is meant in part to be a sometimes critical response to Blumenberg, while learning from his work Also, he adds a lot of detail and a particular emphasis which to my mind turns out to be rather crucial to understanding the present situation of both theology and religion, namely that the very conception of the positivistic supernatural and the split between natural and supernatural, with concomitant splits between faith/revelation and reason, nature and grace and such are all late medieval constructions. This gives a positive and not just a negative problem setting role to moves in late medieval Christian theology.

(B) Louis Dupr� ²

For Dupr� , Modernity seems to have had its origins, more than anywhere else, in a �fateful separation� towards the end of the middle ages between the supernatural and the natural, with the latter itself dividing up into the knowing and acting, meaning-constituting autonomous human subject on the one hand and the totally objectified, de-sacralized natural world on the other.

The story starts already with Aquinas. For Aquinas however, �nature�, at best, is a �remainder concept�, a purely theoretical entity, in the way of a counter-to-fact speculation which never ever existed, what would have been if God had not called us, from the beginning, to intimacy with God-self. The word �nature� in the natural desire for the vision of God on the other hand is as in Augustine, human nature as it really is, in its full existential reality, human nature in the concrete, the only nature there is. Aquinas also makes what looks to be a fairly clear distinction between philosophy and theology, recognizing the autonomy and integrity of each. However, in Aquinas himself, philosophy, including human science, is taken up into the very heart of theology, for the sake of the achievement of its goal, namely the salvation of human beings, the same as preaching. But this does help to sow the seeds for a more serious split.

The story continues with Duns Scotus, with his theology of the Incarnation, including his invention of a notion of human nature neutral between being taken up by a divine person or a human person called to grace, a kind of natural nature to which something then gets added.

But it really gets going with post Ockhamist nominalism with its theological voluntarism and its overpowering emphasis on the omnipotence of God � as in Blumenberg, but with a twist. Moves in theology get to be positively, not just negatively, related to the emergence of modernity. Having put so much emphasis on the omnipotence of God, a distinction is then made by the theologians between God�s absolute power and what God has in fact willed. We finish up with two kinds of laws, both imposed by the arbitrary will of God. In natural science, this leaves us with a nature of divinely imposed laws irresistible except by the power of God and knowable to some extent by human reason, which, among theologians in the sixteenth century, eventually turns into a doctrine of pure nature. The supernatural, grace, revelation etc. is now read as an addition to and, where it seems necessary, an intervention into or suspension of this purely natural realm. The notion of a purely natural realm of course has to be presumed in order for the positivistic interventionist supernatural even to make sense � which is what makes them a true binary. Whatever about this, the relation between God and creation is now reduced to no more than a contingent, increasingly external relationship of efficient causality and the human being ceases to be a kind of microcosm at the heart of the real and now becomes its human, increasingly objectifying interpreter and actor. Finally this gets combined with Renascence human self-assertion, albeit in a more complicated fashion than in Blumenberg, for an explosive mixture which eventually gives rise to modernity, in spite of various late medieval and renascence attempts to keep it all together.

So what�s the solution? Dupr� points us in the direction of two strategies which seem at first sight to be somewhat opposed but which Dupr� himself manages to combine together.

On the one hand we can accept and maintain the division, recognizing and affirming the legitimate autonomy modernity has gained for the three components of culture, but trying to bring the ingredients into a better balance with each other. On the other hand, and maybe for the sake of restoring the balance, we can strive to develop a comprehensive vision (351: �a comprehensive synthesis�) which restores transcendence and overcomes the split, but in a modern way following the example of Cusanus, Telesio, Bruno and later Spinoza (PM 352), also Erasmus and the Baroque philosophers such as Pascal and Malebranche (M&C 58-59) and lately some major thinkers of recent times from Hegel to Whitehead (PM 253!, the last page). We need �to revise the accepted idea of transcendence in a way that transformed the concept of power hierarchically transmitted from beyond into a source of power within the universe whereby God�s presence permeated all parts at once� (PM 352), working towards the recognition of a more fundamental givenness that includes the creative subject itself with its central, meaning giving role (M&C 56-57) while also recognizing that the physical cosmos contains more meaning than a reduction to pure objectivity reveals.

C) Radical Orthodoxy³

Radical Orthodoxy seems to be consistent with and possibly to have absorbed the Blumenberg and Dupr� diagnosis of our current predicament and its causes in late medieval times, but with rather more emphasis on the role played by Duns Scotus rather than Aquinas who now gets to be almost completely exonerated. This is partly as a result of Aquinas being given a more Augustinian-Bonaventurean neo-Platonic interpretation than is usual in 20^th century Thomist scholarship.⁴

In response the Radical Orthodoxy people seem to be going for yet a third strategy, similar to the second but both more aggressive or bold and self-confident and more conservative. It seems to be an exercise in the hermeneutics of recovery or of critical retrieval of the patristic and medieval vision, including the neo-platonic and Augustinian themes of knowledge as divine illumination, beyond �the modern bastard dualisms of faith and reason, grace and nature�, and the Christianized platonic notion of participation which refuses any reserve to created territory while allowing finite things their own integrity. (RO 2-3) It is however a critical retrieval to the extent of admitting that we do have to rethink the tradition, �to �re-envision� a Christianity which never sufficiently valued the mediating participatory sphere which alone can lead us to God�, to correct some of its late medieval �otherworldly piety upholding a centralized tyrannising politics�, this itself being the result of late medieval theological deviation. (RO, pp. 2-3), to recover the historic roots of the celebration of exactly what the moderns value in a participatory philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it can acknowledge that the pre-modern tradition never took this celebration far enough. (RO 4). Beyond this, having recovered the vision in this critical fashion it then seeks �to deploy this recovered vision systematically to criticize modern society, culture, politics, art, science and philosophy with an unprecedented boldness.� (RO 2)

Their scholarly time is thus deployed in two directions, towards a critical recovery

of the past in the tradition of the great Christian critics of the Enlightenment, and towards a critical boldly and explicitly theological overcoming of the inadequacy of secular rationality in the present. However, in spite of the orthodoxy or even because of it, they have no time either for either Protestant Biblicism or post-tridentine Catholic positivist authoritarianism: �both Protestant Biblicism and post-tridentine Catholic positivist authoritarianism are seen as aberrant results of theological distortions already dominant before the early modern period.� (RO 2).

Thus Radical Orthodoxy, equally inadequately. The important thing for us to acknowledge is that they are already operating in a post Blumenberg post Dupr� space, where I argue process theology and indeed the rest of theology also has to go. Whether it is also post Gauchet is another question.

(D) Coming to terms with Marcel Gauchet⁵

Gauchet finds the potential for the separation already in the rise of monotheism within Judaism, as filtered through the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation esp. in its Chalcedonian form, the potential being realized in the West (rather than Eastern Christendom) because of certain contingent political factors at the dawn of the Middle Ages in the West. The time table for the actual ending of religion in its full social and political life sustaining form however is much the same, the game over in the advanced countries in Europe already by around 1700, with the end game being played out from the High Middle Ages on.

The full story starts with so-called primitive religion, which for Gauchet is religion at its most complete, full dispossession with nothing to worry about, all determined from the Dreamtime, another time, beyond us, which constructs our lives and which we ourselves cannot affect seeing that it is past.

Monotheism already tends to amalgamate all spiritual forces and the totality of the sacred into a personal being separate from the world, turning the world into an object firstly of the divine gaze and after that of other intelligent beings both in thought and in action. But this was not enough by itself, is reconcilable with hierarchical thinking and capable of going other places than where it went, eventually, in the West.

The event of Christ and the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation especially in its Chalcedonian form firstly cut off certain escape routes. The fact that the Word was made flesh in a person at the bottom of the ladder rather than at the top, a kind of inverted messiah, radically calls into question hierarchical thinking, the top of the political pile as the mediator of the deity notion. [Here is a Son of Man who must suffer, a Logos/Sophia Incarnate, Word Made Flesh at the bottom of the hierarchy, a fatherless male from a backward country village. There are all sorts of attempts, starting perhaps already with Paul, to restore the hierarchy, but the seed has been planted, it can�t work eventually, it is already too late.]

The fact that not only is the world God�s creation but that in addition God has become one flesh with it, also cuts off the option of complete escape from the world into the beyond: henceforth the Christian will always be caught in an irresolvable tension between this world and the beyond, with a need somehow to stand in both.

On the other hand, Christ is one person in two natures without mingling or confusion, each kept in its integrity: thus Chalcedon. Eventually the two natures will give rise to the two realms, the two orders, each with its own integrity. (See below.)

The Church, meanwhile, puts itself forward as a mediator of the divine, doing its best to control personal interpretation and to determine what people believe even in their heart of hearts, but what it is mediating is personal, inner conscientious faith in the one and only mediator in a religion in which unlike in Islam interpretation is of the essence and has been from the beginning. The Word made Flesh in Islam is the Koran itself, whereas in Christianity it is a concrete person and a concrete life, and the gospels and epistles are already so many different interpretations and even then a later selection of the currently available interpretations. We have been into interpretations since, in spite of manic, sometimes bloody attempts to control it, which attempts in Gauchet�s view are in the way of a less important witness to this more important fact. It is particularly important at the moment in so far as it means we have at least the intrinsic potential to adapt so as to survive, with makes Christianity, so to speak, potentially but so far only potentially the religion of the end of religions.

But getting back to the main story: finally there were certain contingent features of the western political landscape which brought the full potential to fruition only in the West, cutting off the more or less comfortable compromise achieved in Eastern Christendom. After the fall of the Western Empire and at the time of the eventual emergence from the so-called Dark Ages there was a large political gap to be filled. The Church, the Spiritual Power, moved into the gap, tried, effectively, to take over and dominate the political realm, cutting off any easy accommodation between the two realms. This caused a reaction, with the political powers, first the emperors, eventually the monarchs of emerging nation-states, claiming their own unmediated sacral legitimacy, with full legitimacy in their own sphere eventually with an all-encompassing integrity of its own. Democracy as we know it was an eventual child of this monarchical governance, once the legitimation from the sacral outside dropped away: the democratic reversal was inherent in the premises of the absolute State. And so Christianity became the religion which eventually made possible the ending of religion: we are all thus children of Christianity, laiics no less than clerics, states no less than church, atheists and agnostics no less than remaining believers.

On the other hand, as Charles Taylor notes in his Forward to the English edition, and as Gauchet himself makes clear, while religion in Gauchet�s sense goes, the problems it was intent on solving still remain. Religion as a species of all-embracing culture pre-empted all those difficult questions about who we are and where we fit in and what is the meaning of things. With the end of this culture, these questions now cannot be avoided and each individual is faced with them. The need for a spirituality thus still remains, indeed is much greater if anything, with the culture no longer providing one ready made. But whereas spirituality was once a byproduct of religion it is now the other way around, with religion now remaining very much as a personal option and in the service of spirituality, in the service of people finding their way in a world now constituted outside religion itself.

This indeed is our challenge: but how to respond to it?

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But Where Exactly Are We Right Now, and How Did We Get To This Strange Place, Part 2:

I was stimulated into asking these further questions in the course of a personal attempt to come to terms with the gay marriage debate in Australia in the latter half of 2017 and how the common sense of a whole nation has shifted or been shifted in the space of about ten years, on something so vital and central to human life and culture. Is this, and all the gender identity stuff that goes with it, the consequence of some kind of Neo-Marxist plot, or is it rather something coming out of the main line of a particular kind of Western culture? It could be both of course, but I came quickly to the conviction that it was certainly the latter.

This came in the context of a research project inspired by Louis Dupre and a lot of others on the construction of Modernity, which more or less concluded with a paper given in Bangalore in 2005 and published in 2006, summarised above. I moved from academia into parish on the Atherton Tablelands in my father's home country in 2006, retired to a gentle place (Nowra on the Shoalhaven River, a hundred miles south of Sydney, my mother's country) in mid 2017 and into a new possibility as a kind of freelance academic. What has been going on in my mostly hard working pastoral absence?

Under inspiration of some Belgian scholars such as the theologian Lieven Boeve and the philosopher Herman De Dijn (esp. Vloeibare Waarden, Kalmthout Pelckmans, 2014) and then Zigmund Bauman (Liquid Modernity, Polity, 2000) accessed initially via Herman De Dijn but then read for himself, and some Australian scholars (esp. Hugh Mackay), I came quickly to connect our present experience with what seems to be the latest stage of late capitalism in the West. By this I mean, following my scholars, the progressive marketisation and consumerisation and individualisation of everything including, it seems, gender and relationships and 'getting married', and the end of any vision for society and civilisation beyond the individual attainment of 'happiness' for anyone who can afford it, and other such ingredients of what some people call 'liquid modernity' (Bauman). From birth people are told they can be what they want and do what they like, even make up their own value systems, put themselves together entirely as they want to with everything up for grabs, including it seems even whether they are boys or girls or something in between. This is one reason why there has been a doubling of depression among our young people since around 2011, the first generation to fully grow up in the new age, as well as an increasing rate of suicide in the general population, it is just too much. All this is then made much stronger by the technology, especially smart phones. People still need recognition, but now from their social media tribe, their Facebook group or whatever, and when they don't get it their life goes down the toilet.

According to Boeve and the others as well, marketisation, which of course is not unique to Europe, "has its place within the more all-embracing globalisation movement that is in turn connected to the so-called postmodern and post ideological climate. In an insidious manner, the logic of economics has taken the place of the 'master narratives' or the ideologies that have tended to inspire modern Europe up to the present...". (Lieven Boeve, "The Identity of a Catholic University in Post-Christian European Societies: Four Models", Louvain Studies 31 (2006), p. 239). Boeve also talks about detraditionalisation and pluralisation, with individualisation as following in the train of detraditionalisation, though not a necessary consequence thereof, being one form taken by detraditionalisation rather than the same as it. (See Lieven Boeve, Theologie in Dialogue (Pelckman, Kalmthout, 2014), esp. pp. 53-56). The hope is that we can find a respected and enriching place in the midst of the plurality, in dialogue with the rest of the plurality striving even to be something of a leaven and a light in accordance with our Christian calling. The trouble is that the various constituents of the plurality itself get to be construed if we are not careful inside an overarching individualistic consumerist logic, like spiritualities for some time, now also the plurality of cultures; and that our efforts and very existence get constrained, like every other particularity, by certain linguistic and legal potentially totalitarian ideological derivatives of this new master narrative.

If something like this diagnosis has some merit, then what the left wing of Labor and the Greens in Australia and much of the Democratic Party in the US for example and other old Centre Left parties have done, without realising it, has been to buy comprehensively into the spirit of late capitalism. This would mean in the Australian context, the proper home for this kind of stuff is the so called moderate Liberal now ex prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, what is left of his section of the Liberal Party, his investment banker friends and Qantas executives! Rather than Bill Shorten leader of the Labor Party or Richard Di Natale of the Greens. It has after all nothing to do with the betterment of the working class or the alleviation of poverty or anything whatsoever to do with the environment.

This is consistent with the fact of Labor and other Centre-Left parties across the Western world buying into market fundamentalism/economic rationalism, the so-called Neo-Liberal Consensus that came to us in Australia with Hawke and Keating. And even the Greens, who we find buying so readily into 'market based' solutions to global warming. This latter is happening in the aftermath of the GFC and now at a time when it is clear that market capitalism can no long deliver increasing wages or reasonable energy or property prices. Though lately the Greens seem to be showing a bit of gumption, on breaking up the banks and on the Trans Pacific Partnership for example, combining in Parliament sometimes with the Katter Australia Party and Pauline Hanson, with both major parties on the other side!

It also fits with the fact that, as my Leuven professor friends Jan Van der Veken and Herman De Dijn have noted to me, everything changed in Belgium when the Liberals (by this stage well and truly neo-liberal) took over. The Socialist parties went along with it all, striving to be thought 'progressive', but it was the Liberals who initiated it. And of course it was David Cameron who quite proudly introduced gay marriage into Britain. There is also the fact that a billionaire like George Soros, the very epitome of the triumph of the financial economy over the real economy, who made a lot of his money in speculation on the currency market, (itself no doubt the cause of a lot of misery), can also be one of the chief financiers of so called progressive movements all over the world. (Cf. Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times, Verso, London, 2011, pp. 291-292).

Finally, in the Australian context it even makes a little bit of sense of a recent by-election in the federal electorate of Wentworth in Sydney, as to how the majority of voters in Wentworth were said to be 'economically conservative and socially progressive'. We should start thinking of this togetherness as something perfectly natural rather than something surprising or paradoxical.

We old style Labor people, meanwhile, have been left stranded on the Left, like Jeremy Corbyn on economic matters, rather than Labor and the Greens moving further to the Left and leaving us stranded on the Right!

I came up with this supposed 'likely story' fairly quickly and then found some critique but also lots of confirmation in all kinds of places. The latter came notably in the work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who provides confirmation and some deepening almost in passing on the way to doing other things. To take just one quotation as a taste, on the two aspects of liberalism:

"Traditionally, each basic form of liberalism necessarily appears as the opposite of the other: liberal multiculturalist advocates of tolerance as a rule resist economic liberalism and try to protect the vulnerable from unencumbered market forces while market liberals as a rule advocate conservative family values and so on. We thus get the double paradox of the traditionalist Rightist supporting the market economy while ferociously rejecting the culture and mores that economy engenders, and his counterpart, the multiculturalist Leftist, resisting the market (though less and less so, it is true...) while enthusiastically enforcing the ideology it engenders." (Living in the End Times, Verso, London, 2011, p. 37).

He then goes on to explain how this threatens to manifest if left unchecked as a species of cultural totalitarianism, almost "the ultimate totalitarian nightmare" (pp. 38-39), as the new way of being human gets to be compulsory, telling us not just who and what we can and can't be and do but what we can and can't think, let alone say.

While the manifestation of this present phase has been mostly in the last twenty years or so, more or less depending on the country in question, its roots go back further. From one of our Australian commentators Stan Grant:

The British prime minister Margaret Thatcher captured the essence of neoliberalism, when she said, 'economics are the method, the object is to change the soul.'

Bourke's 'little platoons' - traditional communities, identities, time-honoured customs, crafts and trades that set our moral and social horizons - were swept aside.

British philosopher John Gray says this 'permanent revolution' had the 'effect of destroying conservatism as a viable political project'.

Gray has argued [in his book Enlightenment's Wake] that neoliberalism imperilled liberal civilisation itself and 'the inevitable failure of this utopia spawns illiberal political movements'. (From ABC Website, accessed 9/9/2018, "Which idea of conservatism will Prime Minister Scott Morrison embrace?, by Matter of Fact host Stan Grant).

Whether what has happened in the way of a changing of the soul is anything Margaret Thatcher had in mind at the time is another question.

Eventually it, whatever it is, probably, indeed almost certainly, has roots in the construction of modernity itself, perhaps the last step for the moment of the increasing fragmentation intrinsic to the modern project as described in previous scholarship. To cite Louis Dupre:

The unity of the integrated culture on which Western metaphysics once rested became fragmented into isolated spheres: nature, the meaning-giving mind, the inscrutable God. The transcendent component gradually withdrew from culture.... The fragmentation, it ought be noted, has not halted at the ultimate principles. Once the human subject became solely responsible for the constitution of meaning and value, tradition lost its former authority. Every group, if not each individual, eventually felt free to advance a cultural synthesis of its own, ransacking the tradition for spare parts... (From Metaphysics and Culture (Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, 1994) pp. 43-44).

Discussion

Of course, this is not the only 'likely story' doing the rounds. Another story thought by some to be more likely is that, while contemporary 'identity politics' initially on the Left but then with a vengeance also from the Right (Trump, Brexit, populist parties all over the place) may be causally related to the dominance globally and in particular societies of neoliberal economics, it is related by way of reaction or backlash, rather than some kind extension thereof. Identity politics has much more ancient roots in something inherently human, in the drive for Recognition, as treated for example in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It is just that the purely economic identity projected by neoliberalism has proven to be inadequate to satisfy this particular basic human need, particularly though not only for people who are being left behind or who think they are not doing as well as they could or should be or are not being treated fairly in the present system. The economic and identity-based drivers are in fact independent of each other, even if they can sometimes seamlessly fuse.

For this story see, for example, Bernard Keane, The Mess We're In: How Our Politics Went To Hell And Dragged Us With It (Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, Sydney, 2018) pp. 99-110, esp. pp. 104-106.). He is trying to understand the mess we are experiencing in the last three or four years. He does this in terms of the peaking in the same timeframe of three waves, neoliberalism, the hollowing-out of democratic politics, and the more recent but just as massively disruptive arrival of the Internet. His recommendation for a way forward is to try to follow the example of John Maynard Keynes in the 1930's, to save capitalism from itself, and thereby preserve the benefits it has yielded while limiting its tendency to greater exploitation, to do what is necessary to renew our confidence. This includes such themes as radical transparency, a significantly more progressive tax system, a bill of rights, more power for unions, more independent institutions...

Another rather more cynical logically possible story is that identity politics gives the Centre Left and the Left, Labor and the Greens in Australia or most of the Democratic Party in the US, something still to do in order to get or keep power, after they have conceded, thrown up the white flag, surrendered, sometimes even lead the way, in respect of the main game, in the Neo-Liberal Consensus! This, in effect, gives them a way to reestablish their own identity, having given up on what they used to be for. The only trouble being that the Right can also play their own version of this identity game and sometimes play it just as effectively.

A further just as cynical possibility espoused by some people is that neoliberalism itself is a "Big Con". For example, Richard Denniss, "Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next", in Quarterly Essays 70, 2018, pp.1-79. From p. 1: "Neoliberalism, the catch-all term for all things small government, has been the ideal cloak behind which to conceal enormous shifts in Australia's wealth and culture. It has provided powerful people with the perfect language in which to dress up their self-interest as the natural interest." Also p. 60: "... it is clear from the outset that neoliberalism was a political project rather than an economic one. In essence, it allowed powerful groups in society to dress up their personal preferences as national goals.". His suggestions for change are rather similar to Keane's: a charter of rights, a National Interest Commission replacing the Productivity Commission, a federal corruption watchdog, education in democracy, a sovereign wealth fund... (The Big Con language is on p. 18, the heading: "The Big Con - Neoliberalism As Economics".)

I think the bottom line might be that the forces at work are bigger and deeper than neoliberalism. While neoliberalism might make matters better for some, worse for others, neoliberalism is itself a manifestation and product of the forces at work rather than being by itself the source of all our woes, or benefits. The dominance of neoliberal economics advances the detraditionalisation and individualisation already underway, which is made more intense by the Internet, thereby contributing to the liquification of values and the liquification and multiplication of potential markers of identity that we see nowadays. With marketisation the only remaining master narrative left there is nothing to stop this. The contention would be: it is not so much the identity projected by neoliberal economics but the culture and mores, the way of doing business that people get used to in the economic substance of their lives, which gradually spreads to the rest of life. Certainly the search for identity is ancient and inherent to human life, and some of what goes on presently may be by way of backlash. What has changed, what is new, is the form this search takes and also its potential content, which has also changed the nature of the identity power game, helping to explain its present rather confusing features.

I am finding the logic of our present situation very complex and difficult. It probably is objectively so. By way of suggestion possibly something like the following might work. The true backlash is Trump, Brexit, populist parties, supposedly Far Right but also Far Left with some overlap on some issues. The main line multicultural identity politics is an extension of the culture and mores of the economic side of life into the rest of life, aided by the detraditionalisation and individualisation also promoted by neoliberalism. The Centre Left and Left find this very useful politically, get into it with great gusto, for the sake of getting and keeping power. Of course lots of them truly believe it, perfectly natural, and on some things they may be right, this is just a causal analysis. The moderate wing of the Liberal Party and e.g. the good people of Wentworth in Sydney meanwhile are just being consistent. Or something like this! The only thing I would speculatively add is that the backlash is infected by the new context. An example might be the fact of allegations of 'fake news' being made by both sides. Truth itself and the value attached to it, it seems, have also been 'liquified', one of the more subtle consequences, I think, of the lack of transcendence.

By way of summary and in order to bring this section to a close, I will conclude with something crude and simplistic. Since the advent of commercial television if not a lot earlier, segments of our population young and old, but starting with young children as soon as they start watching television or nowadays get their first iPad or smart phone, have been churned out as individualistic consumers of goods and services. This has spread potentially to the whole population rich and poor and with massively increasing intensity as time and technology have gone on, but there has also been a massive progressive increase in the kinds of 'goods and services' apparently on offer, until these have come to include almost the whole of human life and even life itself.

Where to go from here: some more reflections

Whether or not any of this is right, I think the main function of faith commitments and other more or less comprehensive allegiances including philosophies is to stop people being just the plaything of external forces, one's peer network, the latest marketing campaign, the shifting spirit of the times. This also should be the goal of Catholic education, the function of the Dialogue School and such, not so much to convert as to see that every student at least goes out not just a plaything of external forces whatever they are but with a more or less coherent mind and heart and spirit of their own. This I think is also the vocation of a philosopher in a university setting and in society at large, to try to get people to think deeply for themselves beyond the taken for granted, and not just to be products of the governing culture and civilisation.

Not that we shouldn't truly listen to and dialogue also with the times in order to discern what the Spirit is saying to the churches there as well. The second thing faith and other comprehensive allegiances do is give us a place from which to do this dialogue. We Christians in particular might remember the lesson from the French atheist Marcel Gauchet about modernity originating as a split within Christendom between clerics and laiics and that we are all thus children of Christianity, states no less than church, atheists and agnostics no less than remaining believers. (See Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, Princeton University Press, Princeton N.J., 1997). Also that according to our own Christian belief the intense liberating Divine Love made manifest in Christ includes the whole of humanity and indeed the whole of creation, that Jesus is the Lord of all not just of believers and that the Spirit who gives life to all things and makes them holy moves absolutely where and how it wills. This is one of the lessons to be learned from the sexual abuse crisis. It may be some considerable time and take a lot of learning and change in structure and culture before we can be light and salt and leaven. We should not, however, allow ourselves to be walked over: more than our own survival is at stake. What is going on in our society and culture is not all God's work. The humanity being produced is considerably impoverished, disconnected from nature and almost entirely without transcendence.

I am still strongly into Catholic social teaching, which I used to teach, and attracted to its latest form, the 'integral ecology' of Pope Francis. For a long time now I have also been into process relational philosophy and theology as a kind of default integrating worldview. I still find this helpful. Among other things, they have truly received Laudate Si much better than most Catholics. It is however not enough by itself. It doesn't quite get the heart and spirit fired up or enable the necessary interconnections in concrete reality.

What I as an Australian am finding very helpful lately is to take really seriously the Aboriginal Gift (Eugene Stockton) in all its variety and locality, to join our 230 years of Anglo-Irish and multicultural human settlement to the 60,000 years of human settlement before that. I think we need to do this not just as individuals but as believing and worshipping Australian church, as local communities and as a nation. Though it is important how we appropriate it: not to appropriate it as a consumer product, let alone as an extension of our colonising stealing their soul and spirit having stolen their countries. It needs to be received as a gift, to the extent to which it is being given, which I among others have found quite amazing and generous, with the appropriate acknowledgements and protocols, with a reversal of perspective putting the giver in the box seat. Though maybe it will be mediated for most of us initially by people of our own who have been given and have received the gift (like Eugene Stockton or Frank Fletcher, or for someone coming from the Atherton Tablelands the Augustinian Rod Cameron). We need to take it into our heart, our liturgy and our lives, not just as something peripheral. Finally, we need to do this not as an alternative to doing justice, but as an intrinsic part of that, as one of the ways in which we express respect, beyond just some 'acknowledgement of country'.

We can try to do this much at least, to work towards at least a semblance of harmony, while we await and perhaps try to shape what is going to happen next in the economic substance of our lives and what might be the superstructural consequences of that.

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