Where Exactly Are We Right Now, How Did We Get To This Place, and Where To Go From Here?
Gregory James Moses, Diocese of Cairns
I was stimulated into asking these questions firstly 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. I moved from academia Kensington and Banyo 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?
And then of course there is Trump, Brexit, populist movements on right and left all over the place, no longer business as usual, the very ground of modernity and the so-called 'modernisation' process seeming to shift under our feet. How to fit this in with the other, which I had come to interpret as more like a continuation of modernity into a more extreme form? But first to deal with the former. I will come back to the latter in the course of the Discussion below.
Under inspiration of some Belgian scholars such as the theologian Lieven Boeve and my one time supervisor the philosopher Herman De Dijn and then the Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, Polity, 2000) accessed initially via Herman 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 seems very like Bauman and DeDijn's 'liquid modernity'. 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 (cf. Hugh Mackay) 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. If in so called primitive societies everything is decided, now we seem to have gone to the opposite extreme. People still need recognition, but now from their social media tribe, their Facebook group or whatever it is our culture is up to, 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, an "open narrative" 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, in danger of taking over the whole of culture, 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 will 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 Global Financial Crisis and now at a time when it is clear that market capitalism can no long deliver increasing wages or reasonable energy or property prices. Lately, however, 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 neoliberal) 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.
Old style Labor people like myself, meanwhile, have been left stranded on the old 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. As one of our Australian commentators Stan Grant put it:
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, to justify their continuing existence, having given up on what they used to stand for. The only trouble being that the Right can also play their own version of this identity game, often cultural identity but not forgetting the identity of groups feeling left out, 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 national 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 and for people who don't have anything else, there is nothing to stop this, which is why they all seem to think the same way and move almost in step with each other. 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 and becomes a kind of new 'common sense'. 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 tentative 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. To put it in Dupre language: if the human subject has become the sole determinant of meaning and value, then what is left is a competition between human subjects.
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.
Where to go from here: some 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, or as Dr. Fr. Thomas C. Mathew, Vice Chancellor, Christ (Deemed to be a University), put it in his inaugural address for Harmony 2019 Conference in Bangalore, "a harmonious, melodious, philosophy of life". 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, in Boeve's preference "an open narrative", 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 learnt 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 in Australia 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 from country 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, and will work on this in the year to come. 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, and as if the possibility of living a harmonious life in the country which claims us partly depended on it. Though it is important how we receive 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. This needs to be received as a gift which has been and is being given, to the extent to which it is being given, which I among others have found 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 in north east Australia the Augustinian Rod Cameron). We need to take it into our heart, our liturgy and our lives, not just as something peripheral, exactly like John Paul II said in Alice Springs. 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 a semblance of harmony in our person and communal lives, 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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