Beyond Partisanship I

Diagnosis of a Left-Brained Excess

And even if, in this manifestation, our life frequently turns out to be rubbish, it is still life and not simply the extraction of a square root. As for me, I quite naturally want to live in order to satisfy my whole capacity for living and not solely to satisfy my capacity for reasoning, which is only one-twentieth of my entire capacity for living.

Dostoyevsky, ‘Notes from Underground’

THE FOLLOWING THOUGHTS have been milling about my mind for quite some months now, prompted by a prolonged and intimate confrontation with the reality of political disagreement. This is a hopelessly ambitious set of pieces to be writing given the broadness of scope and severity of issues in question: its themes include discourse, disagreement, morality, community, and way of life, as each are relevant to our current, pained social state. Many people and events have given me reason to write, but it was ultimately the recent passing of the redoubtable Alasdair MacIntyre that prompted an escape from my procrastination. As for so many, my first reading of After Virtue was a revelation. It was a piece of obviously brilliant contemporary philosophy that made tangible contributions to the way its readers thought about and lived in the world. Lux aeterna.

Given I have quite a bit to say, this will be divided into at least six pieces, having written three long essays which I’ll split in two. The first will be mainly observational and diagnostic, identifying the issues that have arisen in political and cultural discourse and tracing something of their genealogy. The second will be a more extensive reflection on such issues and an argument for my general thesis. The third will be most audacious of all, venturing what I take to be some of the concrete changes necessary in the attitudes of human beings and institutions in order to, as innocently as it can be put, make the world a better place.

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There is a notable, if rather crude, narrative that has coalesced on the intellectual right in recent decades concerning the alleged decline of Western culture and civil society. There is much in its content with which to take serious issue, but an undeniable gleam of truth obtains in its general form. The story runs a little like this. Following the conclusion of the Second World War and the happy defeat of fascism, various intellectuals (primarily Franco-Germanic) sought to sift through the rubble of appalling tragedy, make sense of what could have allowed an ideology as barbaric and inhuman as Nazism to take hold in what was arguably the most sophisticated culture in the world at the time, and—most urgently of all—initiate the vital steps to prevent such disasters from ever occurring again. To speak generally, the two most significant offices of such intellectual milieux were Frankfurt and Paris, home to what have been termed ‘critical theory’ and ‘postmodernism’ respectively. In the former (which converged originally before World War Two), the Frankfurt School was led by the likes of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Emile Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Jurgen Habermas, and was characterised by the application of hermeneutics and sociological analysis to philosophy. In perhaps his most famous work, Negative Dialectics, Adorno delivered a proclamation that captured the zeitgeist in those post-War decades:

A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.¹

The invocation of Kant’s categorical imperative is important: for Adorno, Auschwitz marked a fundamental shift in not merely the history of philosophy but humanity: the great Enlightenment project venturing the self-sufficiency of reason to govern our species crashed to a conclusion in those death camps, and our orientation must now be changed: Kant’s rational categorical imperative is to be replaced by a distinctively historical one.

This attitude is also reflected by those falling under the broad designator of ‘postmodernism’. Generally speaking, this indicates a transition beyond the ‘Modernist’ ventures of Soviet communism and Nazi fascism, each failed attempts to chart a course toward secular utopia through distinct ‘metanarratives’ convinced of their right to totalitarian control. In kindred spirit to the Frankfurt School, French scholars such as Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean Baudrillard provided further (if more obscure, given the nature of French philosophical prose…) elaborations on this strange sense of arriving after humanity’s self-important projects seem to have crashed and burned. If before the twentieth century we were assured that ‘God is dead’,² not even a century later Foucault intones that man is dead:³ an immensely jarring proclamation for a civilisation reared on and until now extremely confident in the individual autonomy promised by the Enlightenment. Similarly to the Frankfurt School, postmodernists advocated the embeddedness of all things in history and language, replacing the centrality of the self present in Kantian idealism and Husserlian phenomenology with a flux of becoming that incessantly undermined all claims to essence, presence, or fixity.

Various names from both schools either took posts in or at the very least frequented major American universities, leaving what is now a tangible imprint on their ethe and cultures. Indeed, the theories of these two schools have in large part become the very air breathed by American humanities. Rejections of essentialism and ‘totalising’ metaphysics, an awareness of reader bias when approaching a text, and a keen cognisance of the sociohistorical conditions which produce or permit a given work of art or philosophy are all staples of such faculties, and it is hard to imagine anyone receiving a particularly strong grade should they argue directly against them. They also serve as the underpinnings for a host of presently popular movements on the intellectual left, from feminism to queer theory to postcolonialism. It is perhaps these which have proven, in spite of their relative academic smallness, to dispense the greatest influence on culture outside the guild, animating in some way or another arguably the majority of all current political debates. And this, according to conservatives, is where our salient present troubles arise.

There are problems with the standard conservative telling of this tale. First and most persistent is that these figures are read lazily or not at all by their outspoken right-wing critics. The most common charge is that postmodernists like Foucault and Derrida (the two most frequently demonised) are ‘relativists’, suggesting that neither believe in the existence of truth beyond mere opinion, explored either in terms of power or language respectively. This is obviously false, and quite a silly thing to say. If a thinker like Foucault believed that any old opinion could pass as the truth, he would have no grounds on which to assume the rigorously anti-fascist position he did, nor even say or write anything edifying at all, let alone argue his ideas against other intellectuals and institutions. Derrida, for his part, is simply offering a set of considerations about how we access truth, the pervasive and elusive role of language in so doing, and the typical postures and biases that often animate our desires for illusory ideals of semantic stability and presence. This is not, despite the impression given by all the pearl-clutching, an attack on truth itself. To again speak generally, the pair are instead making a shared observation that has passed relatively uncontroversially—because it is patently correct—into the minds of generations of subsequent philosophers: that language, reason, freedom, thought, religion, and every other domain of life are both conditioned and historical. In the latter’s famous phrase, il n’y a pas de hors-texte. Nothing is pristine and untouched, nothing is beamed purely from heaven above, nothing is without a history. Everything is influenced by everything else, nothing is at the centre, and nothing stands still. Crudely distilled, but quite profound when observed without prejudice. In fact, we might even dare to see in it some reminiscence of the wisdom of certain venerable religious traditions. But more on that anon.

In the meantime, we can return to what is actually a virtue in the conservative account. What it does get right, I believe, is that the ‘historicisation’ of truth by such schools has resulted in some genuine issues now apparent in culture. Take academia as a first and important example. Especially in humanities faculties, a particular approach to texts, historical events, and works of art has risen to near total predominance. In English literature, what can best be described (following Paul Ricoeur) as a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ has crept to prevalence, becoming all but the template for the average undergraduate essay. The work of English students has in large part become absorbed in what is an all but political undertaking, essentially approaching literature with the kind of agenda that might well feel at home in the offices of a government ‘prejudice taskforce’. It is hard to imagine a Shakespeare class reading The Tempest or The Merchant of Venice without duly scanning the text for colonial or antisemitic overtones, just as it is nigh-impossible to behold the Western canon at large without denouncing its narrowness in diversity, calling for the ‘decentering’ of straight white male authors, or the like. Students are exhorted to—again, following Ricoeur—suspect something malicious of the writer, to analyse what prejudices or privileges may undergird their worldview or creation, which strata of power may prop up their place in the syllabus, and even go out of their way to object to or boycott some readings on account of their being ‘problematic’. In this way the reader has (ironically, given the Foucauldian influence), become little more than a textual police, scouring the work to assess which vocabulary is no longer fit for purpose, which ideas require editing on account of offensiveness by the measure of contemporary standards, and so on. Ever more frequently, to suggest that one might simply read with a view to revelry in the genius of the artist and the splendour of the work, forgiving or at least bracketing some unsavoury views or features, is to court an intolerable naivete. In an academic culture founded on hostility and critique, a ‘hermeneutics of love’⁴ is far too niche, and far from vogue.

What I wish to categorically reiterate is that the impetus behind such critiques is valuable and necessary. Another issue with the conservative reading is that it is deliberately ignorant in its unwillingness to engage the considered reasons that originally gave rise to this hermeneutic. Such is reflected in present White House policy, with its motions to blindly roll back DEI initiatives without any substantial reflection on their purpose and intention, citing them as unjust and unequal whilst ignoring the fact that injustice and inequality are precisely what such schemes were implemented to address. But two things can be true at once. Yes, all of this can be expedient, timely, and even effective to redress persistent and undeniable social imbalances. But yes as well: such an approach, however well-intentioned, can be overemphasised to the effect of stifling and distorting the substance of human relationships—to one another, to our institutions, to our art—to such an degree as to allow biting moral-political judgment to replace basic hospitality and charity.

It would be an error to think that what has occurred here is historically unique. It takes up a question that often crops up at times of crisis, when the majority of people believe that society is awry and become increasingly opinionated on the need to fix it: must everything be moral? As an example of how we previously repsonded, think of the long nineteenth century: a period which at once boasted the antitheses of Wilde and Tennyson, Swinburne and Zola, Pater and Ruskin. Each (and many more besides) professed wildly divergent views about the role of morality in art, clashing fiercely over whether or not art should be used to reinforce a particular way of living, ennoble the character of the audience, or simply revel in the richness of its own bohemian brilliance: l’art pour l’art. The agon here was between two excesses: decadent aestheticism on the one hand and draconian moralism on the other. The venerable Harold Bloom situates himself on the Wildean wing, writing the following in opposition to Antonio Gramsci’s critique of the canon:

…if the governing class, in the days of my youth, freed one to be a priest of the aesthetic, it doubtless had its own interest in such a priesthood. Yet to grant this is to grant very little. The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension.⁵

We should also keep in mind Wilde’s own apothegms:

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
[…]
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
[…]
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.⁶

Neither Bloom nor Wilde are naive. Bloom does not pretend that material conditions have not permitted him the privilege of a lifetime buried in beautiful literature, and Wilde, of course, drew no small benefit from his birth. But if—as I fear is currently the case—we can only approach their advocations for the ‘elitist’ and ‘useless’ nature of art with a vehement critique of their privilege and defence of the status quo, then we shall have missed something rather important. This is the heart of the problem, I think: a total occupation of life by political activism.

Whilst beauty and goodness both share the podium of classical transcendentals, goodness doubtless speaks with the more brazen tongue. Beauty is known to whisper, even at times keep its alluring silence. Goodness proclaims from the parapet, bellows upon the soap box. Bring the two into direct competition, and it is hard to see how beauty could make a case for itself. This is just its nature: in the face of Tennyson’s booming injunctions of Victorian morality, how can Wilde be anything but a lax lotus-eater? This is a debate between one party that insists on its reasoning with overwhelming force and urgency, and another that gaily jettisons justification altogether. How could it be understood by the moralist that Wilde, in his devotions at the shrine of sacred uselessness, may actually be defending something utterly invaluable; something that cannot be captured in moral or political exhortations, something that may even oustrip them in importance?

Because moralising approaches always insist on their own terms, they tend to speak over and soon smother their alternatives. So when the only directive available to us is the application of a postcolonial, queer, feminist, Marxist, etc. critique to our art and lives, we are forced to ask: why not?⁷ Why would we ever protest against the total implementation of these ideas? Do we not care about the issues they seek to address? Do we not think them urgent problems? And under a barrage of such questions, we feel our conviction slink away into hazy indecision. Are not all objections subtly or even overtly racist? Homophobic? Sexist? Elitist? And we are lost for words in reply, because the domineering proclamations of the moral cannot be met on mutual ground by the elusive susurrations of the aesthetic. These are different languages altogether, and wholly unequal in volume. Whenever morality comes to dominate beauty in history, it is as though waking from a pleasant dream. As we scrub our eyes of sleep and acclimatise to the ever louder shouts reverberating about the annals of cultural discourse, it becomes ever more difficult to recall quite what we objected to in the first place. Any form of protest can now only be a shameful mark of privilege, out of touch with the struggle of the vulnerable—surely…? As moral discourse compounds in intensity and anger, the space for a non-moral voice is gradually squeezed into oblivion. All things are moralised, and the failure to moralise anything is openly immoral. Yes, we do care about these issues, and they are urgent, we respond to those sharp lines of inquiry. But what was it we were trying to preserve…? What was it we sensed and loved in that heady dream, even now in the lingering taste of lotus upon the tongue? No, it was no activism. But it was good—for its own sake….

This debate over morality in art is a microcosm of what can—and presently does—play out across culture at large. Our age has succumbed to a voracious moralism leaving little untouched. A former professor of mine put it best, confiding that the humanities have suffered from such a great obsession with the ‘horizontal’ dynamics of power relation, material condition, and social justice that they have all but occluded from view the ‘vertical’ transcendentals that actually inveigle human beings to create and consume art—and, I might add, lead fulfilling and meaningful lives—in the first place. What is lost in all this is a childlike sense of genuine wonder, admiration, and adoration for the most beautiful and loveable aspects of life: all are coldly replaced with cynical reflections on subtle systematic injustices and hidden complicities, the malevolence lying behind every dissimulation of apparent innocence.

Nowhere is the hegemony of this hermeneutic elucidated more clearly than in contemporary public discourse. One of the questions that animated certain postmodernists and critical theorists was whether rhetoric and speech, whether by conjuring dangerous imagery or even simply participating in a ‘discourse of essences’, could constitute a kind of ‘violence’—a still pertinent question at present, with our frequent, vitriolic debates over hate speech.⁸ This particular postmodern motif has permitted the subtle but sure encroachment of a suspicion toward discourse itself.

This was, perhaps, inevitable. The exhortations of those intellectuals to submerge every walk of life in the matrix of conditioned history were of such vigor as to give no quarter: even the realm of rational debate itself was to be subjected to scrutiny. However lofty and noble the pursuit of truth may have been when orchestrated before the sun-kissed colonnades of Academy, hosted by the powdered salonnières inviting wigged philosophes, or echoing off the umber wainscot chamber of the Cambridge Union, questions are now ineluctably raised not about the content of the debate, but the RSVPs. How many women and slaves were permitted a seat at Plato’s table? Who but bourgeois gentility could grace the gilded salons of aristocratic France? And, to cite a more recent question in the United Kingdom, how much likelier are white than black students to have reason to dust off a dinner jacket for Cantabridgian debate? Questions of class, wealth, prejudice, privilege, identity, and opportunity have risen to a startling zenith first in academic faculties and now in popular culture. Again—no bad thing in itself, at all. But its excess has dire consequences, especially when so great as to not only complement but replace the original pursuit of truth.

The politicisation of all reason, knowledge, and debate has led to the gradual exchange of such things for political action. Especially over the past two decades, the progressive wing of Western politics has become increasingly accustomed to the policing of debate as an alternative to debate itself. Universities are often left-wing, but only recently has that become cause for a more active extirpation of opposing views. Treatment of progressive topics gradually became less a matter of presenting a rousing case for the betterment of society than dictating to students and faculty certain obligatory opinions on pain of redundancy or ostracisation. Deplatforming and cancelling came to replace the need for an articulate and robust defence of one’s views. Universities have increasingly become places not where controversial opinions are encouraged to be shared, defended, and criticised, but most scrupulously policed and quashed. No doubt, it is a little silly to see talking heads like Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens complain to millions about how they are prevented from sharing their views. But this should not detract from the real truth that certain fairly tame conservative ideas became entirely radioactive on campuses, and that certain very contestable liberal ideas were paraded as unassailable fact. In the same vein, debate also gradually transitioned away from an at least ideal universality toward the particular marshalling of speech according to parameters of identity. It is now commonplace to see the invalidation of opinions on account of the speaker’s status: ‘no uterus, no opinion’ is a famous example. Again, this all shares a continuity with the attitude introduced by the aforementioned schools. If debates of the past have been typified by an unjust predominance of a particular subset of people at the exclusion of others (and they surely have), the progressive response has been to turn the same mechanism of exclusion on those privileged, and thereby amplify previously marginalised voices. That is: if we now see that debates have been defined by access afforded unfairly to a certain group, the resolution is thought to be found not through a continued debate but alteration of those conditions of access.

If only it were that easy. The trouble with this—no matter how well intentioned—is that to seek victory in debate through power rather than reason is a profoundly risky strategy. It is, after all, contingent upon having the power necessary to do so in the first place. In the case of the United States, that power can turn on a dime, and when your opponents gain the authority previously used to debar and stifle them, there is little to prevent the same tactic being turned on you. And this is how the story has played out in the past decades. The moralising liberal muscle continued to tighten its restrictions upon open discourse, the conservative resentment grew in tandem, until both reached a fever pitch. Hence the strangest of intersections I might ever have reason to remark upon in this dispatch: Donald Trump and the Dao.

Pars dua forthcoming….

1. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 365.

2. Freidrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §108; §125.

3. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 422.

4. See Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (New York: Routledge, 2001).

5. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books 23.

6. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 3-4.

7. Incidentally, these were the four ‘critical lenses’ I was obliged to apply to my chosen texts during my Pre-U English course, on pain of failing my exams.

8. See a concise and much-needed reproval of this overzealous use of the word ‘violence’ in Iddo Landau, ‘Violence and Postmodernism: A Conceptual Analysis’, Reason Papers 32, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 67-73.