“Love God and do as thou wilt”?
I’ve been mulling over a post by Mil for about a week now, taking the time to do a bit of background reading and think of how to respond. Mil’s article refers to a survey which vigorously criticizes British parenting as betraying an “excessively individualist” ethos to the detriment of our children. To this is counterposed the query; “what would we do if our aim was a world based on love?” Mil suggests that from this question the political Right would recoil and the Left have nothing to fear.
Though the article is brief, Mil comes remarkably close to the attitude of legendary British Marxist E.P. Thompson. Thompson, in his essay Outside the Whale, discusses the concept of love in an attempt to mobilize it as an argument for socialism; love, he says, is the central affirmative of Western society. He opposes love to the tawdry attempt by the Right to query the motive and life-experience of every Leftist in an attempt to explain away and invalidate their views by ad hominem attacks.
In his essay, Thompson quotes David Marquand’s stinging rebuke of the Oxford intellectuals who joined hands with the communist movement: “You could yell and scream in the nursery – because you knew the nursery walls were built to last. You could even kick and scratch old Nanny – because you knew she would never desert you and would even forgive you in the end” (Manchester Guardian, August 18, 1958). Fifty years after writing, such a rebuke still strikes home.
Yet Thompson is deadly in his dissection of such sentiments, and for that reason I’d recommend this powerful essay to anyone.
However, the essay includes sentiments about love with which I am not inclined to agree, necessarily. In the end, “because ‘love’ must be thrust into the context of power, the moralist finds that he must become a revolutionary.” Perhaps this is what Mil was aiming at when he declared that the Left have nothing to be afraid of, should love become the aim of our world. I am, however, inclined to disagree both with the esteemed Professor and the esteemed blogger.
Even if we deliberately set out to conceive of love as being the ideological counterpart, the re-orientation of society, to the advent of proletarian dictatorship, I think the sentiment runs into trouble. Thompson proclaims that it is not the aim of socialism to abolish evil (or as Mil might have it, establish altruism) but “to end the condition of all previous history whereby the contest has always been rigged against the good.” Thompson’s order of events is, I believe mistaken.
The abolition of ‘evil’ (which Thompson quintessentially defines in his essay as the declension from disillusion to pointed quietism) is a precondition of socialist revolution. Whether one is a vanguardist or an anarchist, the unity of the working class, motivated by the praxis of a democratic-socialist ideology and the physical exigencies of capitalist exploitation, features high on the list of revolutionary prerequisites. The establishment of ‘altruism’ or ‘good’, that is, a will to sacrifice today for tomorrow, is an early purpose of activist socialism.
Thus commandeered, despite my re-ordering of Thompson, of course love has little fear for the Left, though no doubt we have to be specific as to whom that umbrella shelters. Probably not David Marquand at any rate.
If not so commandeered, love need not even be a political enterprise. Or, worse still, it may be a political enterprise deprived of the strategic awareness provided by Marxist historical materialist methods of analysis. Essentially, the ‘moralist’ may wish society to change but the ways in which he may wish to see society change need not challenge that root of all inequalities, the capitalist system. There are plenty of reformists of the Left, whose awareness is simply insufficient.
Yet are they too not motivated by this love?
I suppose my objections to the sentiments above could be expressed in concord with St. Augustine: love god and do as though wilt, so long as god is seen not as a doctrinnaire set of commands but as the flexible and revolutionary system of analysis bequeathed to us by Marx and Thompson himself. Or, put another, love is not always enough. Especially when it comes to correcting an excessively individualist ethos of parenting (where do the parents learn it?!) and save our children.
Dave, this is a beautiful piece of problematisation which I’m sure Mil will appreciate in the ‘loving’ spirit on which it is intended. I have not read the EP Thommpson essay to which you refer, so my brief response here needs to take that into account, as does my ever lengthening reading list.
Yes, you are quite right, I think, to insist that we cannot with integrity, and however nice it might be if we could, exclude the concept of love from the concept of power relations and the overall Marxian project to invert/equalise power relations in such a way that the removal of other inequities may (or may not, even though it has a much better chance) follow. In this respect, no, the Left should have no fear.
But that only takes us so far. To get a feel for whata truly ‘liberated’ love might be like, and therefore to build it into to the Marxian project in the same conceptual way we might build, say, ecological balance, my first reaction (as bloody ever, you will say) is to look to see whether there is a productive link between the Marxian project and the Habermasian project, which in simplistic terms I suggest is predicated on the success of the Marxian project (or something mighty close to it) and then seeks to answer the question: ‘well, what now people’.
Conceptions of a ‘radically liberal’ (to quote your own vert apt phraseology)public sphere, in which the old power relations are subjugated by a new democratic space where people get their ‘ideal speech’ thing going on, are, I suggest, replicable as concepts in the private sphere of love (and I’d be interested to look back at his evaluation of courtly love in this respect, since I have lost much of the detail from my head). After all, a key criticism of Habermas is his supposed enduring naivety in his methodological distinction between public and private – some of this is apparently well founded enough from within a capitalist paradigm, but falls apart when you step outside it, as I contend Habermas has sought to do.
Mil – the new Habermas. It has a ring to it.
I don’t think Mil has the critical apparatus to provide the answers but he definitely likes asking the questions. I do wonder where all this is leading us, though, as we seem to be stepping on some mighty important toes as we stumble towards a curious understanding of what is going on around us. I suppose in my case it’s a naive enlightenment of sorts.
I also suppose I believe in the naive as I believe in the capacity of children to ask the right questions because they do not as yet fear the answers. I experience this in my own children as they make me face up to my own inconsistencies. And I think I believe in the value of being naive not because it produces a better answer but rather because it consistently allows the right questions to be asked. It allows them to see the light of day, at the very least. Only then do we need the critical apparatus to kick in.
I can see I must read both the essay you mention and Habermas. I first came across Habermas about seven years ago when a classmate of mine on the Publishing Master I was studying at the time would absolutely swear by anything he’d said or written. I’ve always wondered why.
I’m not a very learned person and I don’t always remember who said what when I should. But I find both your and Paul’s blogs persistently inviting and I find I’m learning far more from them than I should ever have a right to expect. I guess I see this a bit like an intellectual version of the Marx brothers (no pun originally intended) – with me as the “peerlessly cheesy” Zeppo. You’re definitely Groucho, Dave. So what does that make you Paul?
Stepping on toes is the bones of academic undertaking – one has to challenge the big names, as they represent the most visible exponents of the things one disagrees with. I would rather approach it with the naivety you suggest than with the sneering, often condescending manner that professional academics can use, if they lack a sense of humour. That’s one of the things I like about English scholarship and dislike about French; it is more inclined to deliver and take a joke.
One of the things I have tried to do with the blogs of the three of us is knit them together: you and I disagree a lot, but you represent exactly the sort of person I have to convince with all this fancy-schmancy argumentation. So you keep me balanced. Paul has reading which I don’t have, yet, and so in turn I attempt to expand upon the glimpses he affords.
More of this will come out in the article I’m yet to write commenting on Sunny’s interview and your reply, and Sunder’s article on something similar.
In priority order:
a) I think I must be that well-proportioned older lady who is both somewhat shocked/non-plussed and really very attracted to/titillated by Groucho’s antics and clever, often slightly outrageoous use of words. As for Tom Miller, he doesn’t appear in every ‘film’ but when he does he’s the younger brother who has a great deal of affection for his three off-the-wall siblings and will join in as need be, but is ultimately a serious, good-hearted young man who stands aside from all the whackiness and focuses on the practicalities of building a future for himself and the girl he loves.
b) It’s interesting that your friend swears by Habermas, Mil, because Habermans is the marmite of contemporary philosophy – you love him or you hate him.
For some (including the constantly recurring Laclau and Mouffe, he is simply a naive throwback to the 18th century, someone who really has not kept up with the times and doesn’t understand things like discourse and embedded power.
For others, including me, he’s a genius because he is able simply (especially in his later work) to step inside an intellectual time machine and project his thinking forward to what might be, what has to be, if the ‘enlightenment’, in all its glorious naivety, is to be rescued (though this sets it in terms more revisionist than I think is really the case). The genius lies, I suggest, in being prepared to do that despite the barbs that he is simply being pulled towards a new ‘metaphysics’, but in linking it all back to his earlier ‘young man’ communicative action idealism, which is ‘radical’ in the literal sense of getting back to his roots. It also fits, I think (though I’m still working this out) alongside the ‘Marxian project’ perfectly comfortably.
The key problem with Habermas, though, is that he’s bloody hard to read. By accident last year I picked up a wonderful book by an Australian media lecturer (and clearly Habermas devotee) Luke Goode (Habermas and the Public Sphere) which I’d recommend to anyone as an interpretation/guide, even BEFORE looking at the original stuff and as a great appetiser. Goode clearly agrees with much of Habermas, but he doesn’t shy away from analysis of his tendency to ‘selective historicism’, especially around the role of women in the ‘public sphere’. The fact also that the book focuses on Habermas’ view on the ‘public sphere’ (for which we might also sikply say ‘political life’) is useful because it allows him to draw in the communicative action theory stuff as required but without getting bogged down by philosophy which is complicated in genesis but actually relatively condensable to the key practical idea that people mght actually want/need to communicate on equal terms with each other.
c) As for the French and philosophy jokes, you could argue that much of recent post-modern French philosophy is one big joke. It’s just not a very good one (I do not in fact agree totally, I don’t think, but my head jury is still out on it).