Riots, Individuals, Communities and Bullshit

Over at The New Statesman, we have some robust analysis dismissing the claims of the right that the recent riots were anything to do with family. Oh, actually, we don't. Instead we have lacklustre and predictable analysis just as tedious and meaningless as those people who drone on endlessly and without mercy about "broken Britain". Let's take a look and some choice cuts of prime grade bullshit from the article introducing the leading left thinkers (who, laughably, include Diane Abbott):

In his great book After Virtue, published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that the most striking feature of "contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements . . . There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture." Moral statements amounted to little more than statements of personal preference.

Now MacIntyre - a Catholic Thomist - strikes me as an odd choice for a left-wing magazine to be citing. After all, it is difficult to imagine the modern MacIntyre being classed as left-wing. Of course, the author of the article could argue that the Thomist turn in MacIntyre's work came after the book quoted above - and they'd be accurate. But let me pluck a copy of After Virtue from the bookshelf and turn to the pessimistic conclusion. MacIntyre writes "This time the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers: they have already been governing us for quite some time". So MacIntyre believes the barbarians have been in charge for quite some time and MacIntyre was writing in 1981... meaning that, in this country, the Tory administration was circa two years old (and you don't write a book like After Virtue in a hurry) whereas the Labour party - as well as a post-war consensus worshipping Labour-lite Tory party - had been in power for, well, quite some time. It would appear that MacIntyre was attacking the very sort of politicians that The New Statesman loves to praise.

Thirty years later, little has changed, as the aftermath of the English riots and responses to them show. Appalled and embarrassed by the marauding gangs and looters, David Cameron speaks of the "sickness" in our society, showing himself to be a classical conservative pessimist, a believer in original sin and in the futility of all utopian schemes to remake society.

I have to say that it is a bit of a stretch to call Cameron a believer in "original sin" (although, as a Catholic, the approvingly quoted Alasdair MacIntyre actually is) but there is nothing wrong with being a political pessimist and there is nothing wrong with believing the futility of "utopian schemes to remake society". You only have to look at France in the reign of terror or Stalinist Russia or the nightmare of the Cambodian Year Zero to see just how badly wrong such utopias and go - and how devastating they can be when they do go wrong. Whatever crass schemes Cameron embarks on and whatever damage he does to this country, it is pretty hard to imagine him doing anything as devastating as those utopians who have managed to gain control of certain societies in history.

He says nothing about the socio-economic forces that shape behaviour, or the corrosive effects of entrenched inequality (for the true conservative, there are always natural inequalities). Nothing about how three decades of neoliberalism have coarsened our society, debased our discourse and corrupted our public morality.

Y'know, I'm sick of left-wing people using the term "neoliberalism" in such a way. It is a bit like those tedious right-wingers who rail against political correctness or multiculturalism without ever really engaging with what those terms mean. Yeah, there's a critique of neoliberalism to be made, but it requires consistent, intelligent engagement with neoliberal thinkers in order to make it credible. And part of that will be acknowledging that we have never seen the free market in action - at least not in the period since 1981. What we have seen is varying degrees of the Mixed Economy.

Nothing about how the venality of those at the top of society affects those at the bottom.

Ah, venality. Let's ask those venal bastards like Tony Blair about the impact they have had on our society. We should probably acknowledge at some point that they are Labour politicians, though. Or is that a bit too inconvenient? Yeah, yeah, you might well argue that bankers are also examples of the venal. And they tend to be Tories... except for their willing less to enter into pacts with the Labour party during the latter's thirteen years in power.

As for the left in general, there has long been a reluctance to address what it means to live a good and fulfilled life in an age when religion, for most of us in the secular west, can no longer offer guidance and when family life has become dysfunctional for many. The solution to all problems, it is said, is more state intervention and greater redistributive taxation.

And that is precisely the solution we have heard trotted out time and time again in the aftermath of the riots. The biggest problem is that pretty much any situation, according to the left, requires more state intervention. If you comprehensively made the case that state intervention was the problem then I don't doubt that some people would respond - completely in earnest - with the idea that more state intervention is the solution. The fucking morons.

Long before the rise of Red Tories and Blue Labourites, Houellebecq articulated how globalisation had disenfranchised the urban poor and how lifestyle libertarianism had broken society. It is an insight understood by Phillip Blond, who, in 2009, in his essay "Rise of the Red Tories", wrote: "The current political consensus is left-liberal in culture and right-liberal in economics. And this is precisely the wrong place to be." One need not endorse Blond's religiously inspired social conservatism to acknowledge that many of the ties that used to bind us together - ties of familial, communal and civic obligation - have frayed.

MacIntyre probably would embrace Blond's conclusions, at least to some extent. But to say that the ties that bind us together have been "frayed" is to make a massive assumption across a broad, diverse and pluralistic society. But even if we accept that, then what is the alternative to the reality we now face? Forced state intervention to rebuild those ties? 'Cos that seems to be completely counter-productive and utterly naive.

Pleasure without happiness, freedom without responsibility: we are living through a profound cultural crisis. Does the left in Britain have anything original to say about family breakdown and our moral confusion? Can agreement be reached about what has gone wrong and what should be done about it?

Agreement seems unlikely - a tenuous consensus is probably the best we can hope for. But that would involve interested parties not adopting the casual and thoughtless positions that left and right demand. Just a cursory glance at the very titles of the articles in The New Statesman suggest that there is precious little original thinking going on there.

Overleaf, leading thinkers attempt to answer these questions and others as they, like the rest of us, move uncertainly through the burnt-out and blackened landscape of our cities, looking for a way forward.

Oh, please. I live in Leeds, and nothing happened. Across this country, millions of people live in cities and parts of cities where nothing happened. And that is just the people who live in cities; people who live in unaffected towns or the countryside are also probably rolling their eyes at the needless hyperbole that rounds off this article. An article that adds little to the debate on the riots.

But given my criticisms of the views of both left and right in the aftermath of these riots, it would probably be remiss of me not to offer my own opinions on those riots. I think some peope rioted because of poverty. And I think some people rioted because of the lack a father figure in their lives. And I think that some people rioted because (once again) the police gunned down someone. And I think people rioted because of peer pressure, because of uncontrolled rage, because of a desire to have new trainers for literally no cost whatsoever. The point is that disparate people with all kinds of different motives took part in those riots - when we attempt to ascribe a common cause, we are bound to get into trouble.

Which is part of the problem facing both those who claim that the riots were down to poverty etc and those who claim that it was down to a breakdown in some families. It seems to assume identikit people inhabit this country - people with the same motivations, across the board. Now I'm not trying to deny the existence of community - or, on a more micro-level family or on a more macro level society - but I am pointing out that we are a collection of communities of individuals. We respond to different things in different ways - hell, we even respond to the same things in different ways. To deny this is to deny our true nature as individuals, and to suppose that we can truly build a better future through such a denial is to embrace the sort of utopian politics that should be rejected based of, if nothing else, than the lessons of history.

On Dogma

Let’s begin by sketching an imagined, but I would say wholly realistic, debate between a Christian and an atheist. The atheist might reject Christianity on the grounds that it has been responsible for much bloodshed over the course of its history – and just the thought of the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the years of bloody conflict in Northern Ireland support this case. The Christian might respond that secular movements have also got a lot of blood on their hands – and it would be ludicrous to deny that something like Stalinism was not responsible for immense death and suffering.

Of course, either one of the participants in our imaginary debate could deny that their particular view is responsible for the slaughter. A Christian might point out that it is only a corruption of their faith that could allow for something like the Inquisition – after all, didn’t Jesus talk about the most important commandment being that you should love your neighbour? Likewise, a secular Marxist could point out that Stalinism is a gross distortion of Marxism. Now, I’d argue that both positions require highly selective readings of their sources. Just a cursory flick through the Old Testament will show you a God happy to smite as well as offering a vertiable myriad of regulations designed to control many aspects of life, often backed up by the threat of death. Likewise, Marx may not have intended to create Stalinism, but it is difficult to really see “the dictatorship of the proletariat” ending up as anything other than, well, a dictatorship.

There might be more merit in a secular libertarian like me pointing out that the Christian has, to some extent, created a straw man to fight – after all, not all secular beliefs are like Stalinism (libertarianism being a good example). But this is to miss the point the Christian might be trying to make – that slaughter is not unique to religion, and therefore the root cause of that sort of slaughter needs to be located somewhere other than in religion.

I’d be inclined to agree. The problem isn’t the belief in a god or the teachings of a secular thinker per se, but rather the way in which that belief manifests itself. The problem comes when a belief becomes a dogma, and those who follow that belief see their view as an unassailable truth that must be protected at all costs. It is a short leap from that position to the idea that anyone who does not share your beliefs is a problem, and either needs to be converted or silenced (with all the menacing implications that the latter concept has). And it is here that an atheist can be just as dangerous as a Christian, and there is far more common ground between the two views than might at first be expected.

This is why I can’t stomach someone like Richard Dawkins. Yeah, I agree with him that God does not exist. I see no reason to believe in a benign being in the sky watching over us than I do in a benign being living at the North Pole and having an impossibly busy night once a year. But I don’t care too much about what other people believe. As long as they don’t proselytise their faith, they can believe exactly what they want. Which is precisely where Dawkins fails for me – he wants to convince the God-botherers that their views are delusional*. I don’t care what beliefs they hold just so long as they bother God rather than me.

And the dangers of dogma is one of the key challenges facing any thinker genuinely interested in liberty, in part because sometimes the beliefs you hold will be changed by others into a dogma. There are many who believe whole-heartedly in liberal democracy – but when this becomes a dogma that the most powerful nation wishes to force on other countries through violence whether they like it or not, it becomes a concern.

It is the challenge of the liberally minded to always question the extent to which a view has become dogmatic, and whether other views – regardless of whether a liberal likes them or not – are being allowed to be heard. It is not religion that is the problem; it is a dogmatic religion that refuses to allow dissent that is the problem (or religious fundamentalism, to put it another way). The problem is dogma, and the solution is a commitment to critical thinking that challenges any “truth” that is blindly and unthinkingly held, especially if that “truth” is intolerant of the views and beliefs of others.

*A curious tactic to take, I’d argue, when you are trying to win over other people – always difficult to build up rapport with someone after you have attempted to destroy someone’s belief system and then called them mental for having those beliefs in the first place.

On The Frankfurt School

Over at the Orphans of Liberty, James Higham has a post up that is highly (to say the least) critical of the Frankfurt School. And as curious at it might seem to disagree with a frequent commenter here over a post on a website that I contribute to as well, I do have to take issue with his reading of the Frankfurt School. Partly because some of the contributors to the Frankfurt School have been key inspirations for my own views on politics*.

Before we get into the main body of what I want to say, let me first point out that it is possible to read most political philosophers in a number of different ways. Rousseau is for some a champion of democracy, for others an advocate and anticipator of totalitarianism. Machiavelli is for some an arch-cynic - the instigator of the realism in politics that can be traced straight to the likes of Tony Blair. For others, he is someone who is trying to put the concept of virtue back into politics. And so on and so on - the point here being that it is more than possible to read the collected works of the Frankfurt School in very different ways.

In part because the thinkers that make up the Frankfurt School are very disparate, and the school itself has been around for 90 years or so. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas agreeing on very much at all. Furthermore, the main incarnation of the Frankfurt School came when Max Horkheimer became the director of the institute in 1930 - two years after the "Manifesto of Cultural Marxism" that allegedly came from the Frankfurt School that initially inspired James's vitriol. To some extent, attacking the Frankfurt School is like attacking the Conservative Party - you are attacking a long history of disparate thinkers who often just plain disagreed with each other.

But enough with the scene-setting. Let's look at the Frankfurt School itself. First up, yes, the Institute/School was founded on a Marxist basis. However, many of the key thinkers involved had at best an idiosyncratic reading of Marxism. Indeed, I struggle to see Habermas's discursive (and largely impractical) Theory of Communicative Action as hardly Marxist at all, while Horkheimer himself ended up on the side of liberal capitalism. Furthermore, Marx's canon is not without its merits, even for a libertarian like me. While I can't stomach the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and can clearly see the damage that concept has done, the "withering away of the state" sounds a pretty admirable aim to me. As such, it is wrong to conflate all self-defined Marxists as one and the same, and the Frankfurt School alienated just as many traditional Marxists as it did conservatives. We're not talking about Stalinists here, or apologists for Stalinism such as the Webbs. We're talking about a very disparate group of thinkers with an often unique interpretation of Marxism.

So the relationship with Marxism was extremely fraught and often full-on critical - in particular, with the USSR, as Marcuse's seminal work Soviet Marxism shows. It is, however, true that the Frankfurt School was also very critical of the Western world. But let's take a look at why. Adorno, for example, was a cultural snob and often attacked mass-market entertainment. He saw it as making the people compliant and distracting them from real political issues. Personally, I think it is wrong to dismiss mass entertainment, but at the same time, when I watch the feverish coverage of The X Factor I can't help but think of The Culture Industry.

On a wider basis, though, it is important to think about the context in which the wider context in which the school produced its work - especially the thinkers who produced their work between 1930 and 1970; in other words, the era of the Frankfurt School that is perhaps most associated with Critical Theory. This was the Frankfurt School forced to flee Nazi Germany - and one of their number did not make it, leading to his suicide. And it was this Frankfurt School that was faced with the apparent descent of civilisation into either fascism or communism - either way, into totalitarianism. The diagnosis of some of their number that the USA was drifting into totalitarianism was not without its flaws, but this was the America of the 1950s, of McCarthyism, and the America that plunged itself into Vietnam and ended up at the Kent State Shootings. Just as liberals of our era argued against the Patriot Act and (in this country) ID cards, the likes of Herbert Marcuse argued against a US state that was often draconian in its attempts to control its own people.

This underpins the critique of the nuclear family. To my mind, it is not so much a wholesale rejection of the idea of a family so much as a rejection of the patrimony and conformism that traditional views of the family were often used to back-up. Remember the context again - a Western world struggling to come to terms with ideas such as equality between the genders and ethnicities, as well as a world where homosexuality was largely taboo. It would be a reactionary, as opposed to a liberal or a conservative, who would argue that greater equality in these areas is not a step forward for liberty - and it is in part these areas of life that that lead to Marcuse's permissive, if not promiscuous, views on sexuality.

But is Critical Theory against Western civilisation? Yes, but only so much as it is critical of any civilisation. And in the same way that it is about immanent critique - the critique of any system using its own terms. This is what Adorno's Negative Dialectics is about. Any status quo, be it a liberal democracy, a pseudo-Marxist state like the USSR or a theocracy, should be open to critique. And that is the point of Critical Theory - it is about much more than just the Frankfurt School. Don't believe me? Just take a look at the list of critical theorists ; it shows how disparate a bunch they truly are. In a sense, I would define myself as a Critical Theorist. Finally, criticising a society does not neccessarily mean the wholescale rejection of it. One of the aspirations that informs Marcuse's work is how to use technology in such a way as to meet the wants of the whole of society. Given we still live in a world where famine is a problem, this remains a good aspiration and alludes to pertinent questions about the use of technology.

So the Frankfurt School are not a homogenous bunch of thinkers at whose doors we can lay many of the problems of our modern society and culture. Indeed, even if I did believe the harsh reading of the Frankfurt School (which, of course, I don't), that doesn't then mean that they had the power and the influence to fundamentally affect the societies in which they live. Quite the opposite is true, really, if we look at the Frankfurt School. They alienated potential allies in the Western and Marxist worlds to such an extent that such alienation almost seemed to be a mission statement. While Marcuse had a flirtation with the New Left, he was never really part of that movement and was harshly critical of its violence (through groups such as the Red Army Faction). However, his association with the New Left has tainted his record in the eyes of many, meaning he has gone out of fashion just as the New Left went out of fashion. As for the others, even those such as Habermas who have become public intellectuals in their own countries have been scuppered why one crucial problem - there work tends to be obscruantist in the extreme. Adorno, for example, was given to writing obtuse aphorisms, making his work interesting only if you can decipher what the hell he was trying to say. It is hard to imagine the political class who have created so many problems in our society making their way through Negative Dialectics. Indeed, that's why the political "theorists" (if we can dignify these crass writers with such a title) who tend to have the most influence on the political class are those who present a Ladybird version of political theory - like Anthony Giddens and Phillip Blond.

So I don't think there is anything to be gained by dismissing the Frankfurt School. There work was not without its flaws, but they presented a bold critique of issues still having a devastating effect on modern life, such as the growth of faceless bureaucracies and of bland conformism. They also pointed to the need to critique society rather than blandly accepting what the ruling class tell you (surely the point of websites such as the Orphans of Liberty?) You can look elsewhere for the malaise that has done so much to damage our society; fighting the Frankfurt School is fighting relevant ideas that we could potentially use at the same time as letting the real enemies carry on undisturbed.

*Not the greatest influences, though. For that I would have to point to Arendt, Lyotard and Hayek.

Theroux, Westboro and Christianity

So, I got round to watching the new Louis Theroux documentary. The one about a family of (Christian funda)mentalists. Two thoughts strike me about it.

Firstly, I really don't like the way Theroux undertakes his investigations. There seems to be an inherent contradiction within them. When interacting with his targets (and make no mistake about it, they are targets) he seems to be determined not to provoke, or even judge, them (except in the voiceovers). Indeed, one of the most painful yet enlightening moments in his most recent documentary is when he is forced to reveal what he actually thinks of the homophonic shitheads he's dealing with in front of them. Yet the whole premise of his programme judges them. In this case, they are the most hated family in America. In the past, they've been Nazis. Or Weird Weekends. The whole point of his work is that he believes he is dealing with freaks who should be investigated - that's how he selects them. So, as far as I am concerned, he should either engage with them and challenge them properly on the areas he finds weird or freakish, or he should redefine his work as being a broad and open-minded investigation of counter-culture. Not the weird.

But it seems almost counter-intuitive to complain about Louis Theroux's journalistic flaws when he is dealing with an organisation as appalling as the Westboro Baptist Church. Yeah, Theroux could do more to improve his journalistic integrity. The Westboro Baptist Church could do more to be fucking human. They are odious, ignorant people. They hide behind an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible to justify their homophobia and rage against America. Their leader is a nasty, hate-filled misanthrope. They are, in short, repugnant Christian fundamentalists.

Of course, it is tempting for an atheist like me to condemn Christianity as a whole based on these malign Christians. But to do so would be wrong. Yes, it is true that this "church" can find its justifications in the Bible, but much of the Bible contradicts itself. Large swathes of the Old Testament contradict the Ten Commandments, such as "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and Jesus's own favourite, "Love Thy Neighbour". And the Bible is not unique in that regard; chunks of the Koran, for example, do not fit with the beliefs of moderate Muslims. And this phenomenon is not solely applicable to religion. Taking Marx at his word is blueprint for dictatorship and for Stalinism, whereas a more critical, moderate and intelligent engagement with Marxism can still find moments of value even if the theory as a whole is fatally and fundamentally flawed. The problem with the Westboro lot is not that they are Christian, but rather that they are dogmatic about it. They refuse to allow for any deviation from their flawed and self-justifying reading of the Bible. Just as those Muslims who strap bombs to their chests and go into battle refuse to engage critically with the Koran, and the Stalinists refuse to allow for any deviation from their dictatorial reading of Marxism.

Therefore, the documentary shows that the problem is not Christianity, but the religious myopia of those who unthinkingly treat Christianity as dogma. The mentalists in the Westboro church are no more representative of moderate Christians than the actions of Timothy McVeigh are of those who legitimately question the scope of the state. I'm no Christian - I believe the worship of the Invisible Sky Fairy is no more rational than a belief in Santa or the Force - but I do get that the extremists lackwits of Westboro have little to do with the much more benign beliefs of moderate Christians.