For to comprehend reality means to comprehend what things really are, and this in turn means rejecting their mere factuality. (Herbert Marcuse)[i]

 

Some things seem utterly unproblematic. We think and speak in the first person, and this means that we presuppose a separation and indeed a gap between inner and outer worlds. That such a gap exists seems obvious. We can be substance dualists of the folk psychological kind or the carefully-reasoned Cartesian variety, proponents of panpsychism, or deflationary or reductionist physicalists. It makes little difference. We all take ourselves to be independent subjects, carrying out our private lives among external objects, beings, and a public, cultural sphere through which we must each make our own way, and we identify ourselves with the first-person perspective so unselfconsciously that an enduring personal subject reappears even when we think we are calling its reality into question. One hears people ask, “Do I have a self?” and others may answer, “No, you don’t have a self,” but the exchange presupposes an “I” which possesses or does not possess something called a self, and this in itself would have to be the self.

There is no self-conscious experience without such a structure; even introspection relies on a distinction between the percipient subject and the object to be perceived. The fact that this is inescapable, though, does not mean that it is correct. As Kant argued, we can perceive only appearances, so we can never know what we are in ourselves. The reality of human life could be quite different from the way we experience it, and the first-person stance could very well be a misleading one. But put that aside for the moment; the crucial point is that our reliance on this self-evident separation has constrained our thinking and action at a time when we have no choice but to act. It has political consequences, and far-reaching ones at that.

Every idea is a limitation, a constraint on thinking. Picturing humans as discrete, self-governing beings imagines the social world as a kind of Newtonian void, an empty space in which entities orbit and collide. The void itself is without qualities, and under this presupposition we would not want it any other way. Its vacuity is the necessary precondition for the exercise of Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty, the space which allows me to swing my arm without hitting you on the nose. Without it, we think, we could not be free.

The neoliberalism of Ferdinand Hayek and Milton Friedman has never delivered either the freedom or the widespread prosperity it promised, but its premises are so firmly grounded in this vision that it seems unquestionable. What may be less obvious is the extent to which progressive politics is also grounded in that imaginary. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had seen a wide range of social experiments and mass movements, and in the trente glorieuses that followed the Second World War a roughly egalitarian welfare state seemed almost inevitable. Since the oil shocks of the 1970s, though, social possibilities have steadily narrowed. Left-wing politics now seeks mostly to advance the rights of independent actors and the neutrality of “the playing field” where they pursue their individual projects, and it has little affirmative content beyond a generic commitment to human rights and the abolition of restraints and differential treatment. There have been genuine victories along those lines; the briefest glance at the odious treatment of race and ethnicity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is enough to refute those who think that humanity never makes any progress. Those victories go only so deep, however.

The extraordinary reversal of attitudes towards homosexuality is a good example. It has been argued that gay marriage triumphed in the United States because it was promoted not just by LGBTQ communities but by those who wanted to shrink government and put as many people as possible into families which could then be compelled to support their sick, disabled, and elderly members.[ii] It was a real victory nonetheless, for it allowed millions of often-stigmatized individuals to live like everybody else. Yet it was a shallow victory, too, because it changed nothing about the structure or workings of the world to which those individuals were now granted admission.

The same shrinking of the political can be seen in American feminism, where ideas such as pay for housework and the socialization of child rearing gave way to self-care and “leaning in.” Writers and activists had once argued that the oppression of women was essential to the reproduction of capital, providing domestic services and emotional support to a mostly male workforce at no cost to those who benefited from their labor. Today, though, the aim seems to be little more than full participation in the very economic system that those earlier feminists had challenged. The services and support are, if anything, more desperately needed than they were fifty years ago, but instead of fighting for a more humane and equitable world we make do with microwave meals and antidepressants.

All politics today, in the first world at least, gravitates towards the individual and to securing individual rights and a sense of self-ownership. The Trumpian project is authoritarian only towards migrants, the poor, and sexual minorities; for everyone else it is libertarian. The same dismantling of public life, though, is apparent in contemporary progressivism and identity politics. We are urged to honor and respect the lived experience of others; what they have been through, we are told, is theirs alone, and when a person speaks from that perspective her authority is unimpeachable. This advice ignores the fact that “lived experience” is so bound up with subjective interpretations that it can claim no objective value. Worse yet, it leads us towards a mutual estrangement. You cannot know me as I do, and I cannot doubt my own story without betraying myself. We end up locked inside our private narratives, and the armoring of a fragile and threatened self-image makes each interaction into a minefield.

For both right and left everything is personal, and every difference is a potential threat to what we take to be our true being. Those threats loom largest when they involve markers of social status such as race, ethnicity, and religion, which in the absence of any other social grounding get incorporated into our own self-image. This converts political and social oppression into individualized personal affronts, where any misstep is interpreted as microaggression and a subjective experience of victimhood is taken as objective proof of unconscious or even non-existent but still culpable prejudice.[iii] Much political will is therefore expended on securing “safe spaces,” where the social has been configured, again on the Newtonian model, to eliminate the risk of any kind of disturbing experience.[iv]

This comes at the cost of fraternity. We long to join hands with others, to live in a world of love and friendship. Because we imagine ourselves as sovereign consciousnesses, though, every real difference threatens to unmake us; our hopes can be realized only as long as the fiction of unanimity can be maintained. Sooner or later the fiction fails, and we are left with the deferential relationship of allyship, where we acknowledge that others are always ultimately strangers. We can come together only to secure a space for each individual to pursue her own unchallengeable projects and desires.

Movements that set themselves against the larger systems of capitalist modernity still exist, but these have been pushed to the fringes to the extent that they are truly radical and have purchase in the mainstream of politics only to the extent that their aims are watered down. Public life has thus been reduced to the adding up of individual choices, through elections and the market. We can clear away obstacles and smooth the surface of the playing field, we can guarantee a basic income for all or impose punitive taxation to ensure that some do not get a better shot at the goal than others, but we cannot change the game and we cannot propose or even imagine a different order of things; that would only set us on the road to serfdom. This was Hayek’s fear, of course, yet in essential ways most mainstream progressive politics proceeds as if he had been right. We have never had so much physical power over our lives and the life of our world, but we have rarely been so reluctant to reshape or change any of its fundamentals. All we can imagine is the same world with more various and virtuous people in it.

We should not be surprised. If one starts from an individualist model of the human subject one can hardly end up anywhere else. Mrs. Thatcher was only making its implications explicit when she said that there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families, and once we grant individuals a fundamental right to assert themselves as they please we cannot imagine them to be free under any affirmative ordering of their relations. Every social order seems at best an unpleasant necessity and at worst a crime against humanity.

We have somehow allowed the sphere of human agency to contract almost to non-existence, and this happened very quickly. At the end of the 1936 film Things to Come, scripted by H. G. Wells and directed with great visual flair by William Cameron Menzies, Raymond Massey, having just seen off the first travelers to the moon (propelled there by a giant “space gun”), tells a secondary character, and of course the movie audience, too, that they have a choice: “All the universe or nothingness? Which shall it be?”[v] Three years later, on a less cosmic note, Lewis Mumford and Willard Van Dyke’s The City showed world’s fair visitors urban ugliness, the horrors of the slums, and the comic annoyance of traffic jams, leading them to the garden city utopias of Greenbelt, Maryland, and Radburn, New Jersey, while the narrator told them, “It’s here! The new city, ready to serve a better age, you and your children! The choice is yours!”[vi] Just fifty years later, though, the slogan of the World Social Forums was, “Another world is possible,” trying to get people to see a role for collective human vision and agency that the filmmakers of the nineteen thirties had taken for granted.

Such an impoverishment of the political imagination could not have happened at a more dangerous time. Capitalist production has pulled out threads at random from the reciprocal interconnections of human and natural worlds, leading us towards mass extinctions, uncontrollable global heating, the exhaustion of resources as vital as sand, water, and fertile soil, and to intractable and worsening inequality. We will be lucky indeed if these lead to nothing more serious than a long decline in living standards and a slow rise in warfare and social strife. Yet we have no vision of anything that could replace the rapacious logic of the modern world. Our governments make grand but ultimately fraudulent pronouncements at international conferences and concoct carbon pricing and offset schemes which end up as cash cows for the unprincipled. Outside the conference halls we hold rallies for climate justice and climate action, which those in power ignore, we agitate for an end to fossil fuels, a goal which nobody in power even considers, we lobby for subsidies for electric cars, or we throw paint on works of art. Cooler heads tell us that we simply need to return to Enlightenment values or cultivate a respect for the planet. On all sides we get little but moral exhortations, performative politics, and symbolic action. Business carries on, species continue to die out, and the temperature keeps rising.

Dangers like these have not always led to social paralysis. When the global climate cooled after the so-called Medieval Warm Period “Western Europeans doubled down on their preexisting ways of living, whereas Native North Americans devised whole new economic, social, and political structures to fit the changing climate.”[vii] We seem fated to repeat that doubling down, though, for we cannot bring ourselves to devise any economic, social, and political structures other than the ones that are already doing us in. The triumphs of our progressive politics have gone beyond rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, to be sure, but a social revolution that would let steerage passengers into the first-class dining saloon would be just as pointless. What we need to do, and cannot, is storm the bridge and turn the ship around.

Any number of explanations have been offered for this powerlessness: the politically-useful threat of social revolution collapsed along with the Soviet Union, de-industrialization eroded the power of the working class, precarity bred timorousness, right-wing populists turned the resulting insecurities against migrants and others who purportedly receive aid denied to hard-working citizens, the press “manufactured consent,” and the public sphere was emptied of real content thanks to the proliferation of spectacles, the intoxication of mass media, and the dopamine hits of cellphone apps. All of these likely had parts to play. They would not have been so effective, though, if they were not aided by something deeper and harder to grasp: our uncritical acceptance of a shape of experience in which nothing but the self has any real value.

The devil’s prettiest trick was persuading humanity that he didn’t exist, said Baudelaire, and the best ideological move of the neoliberal order was persuading humanity that it was not an ordering of things at all. There is no such animal, though. Every social order is an affirmative one, elaborated out of presuppositions about human agency and the proper shape of a human community. We pride ourselves in thinking that we have freed ourselves from such presuppositions, but this is nothing but self-deception. We fail to see that the separation of self and world is a presupposition like any other, not a fact but just one among many foundational ideas out of which communities can structure personal lives and social relations. Our world and the selves that populate it are no less grounded in ideological partiality than are those in any other society. All we have done is replace overt ideologies with implicit ones which are harder to observe or critique.[viii]

The institutions of modernity are able to dispense with propaganda and theoretical justification. Instead of affirmative claims they rely on an absence, a blindness, a failure to consider that there might be anything behind the structures of self-consciousness. This is a trap. We think we know what freedom is and how it is to be protected and fostered, but we fail to notice that the underlying assumptions behind liberalism and capitalism, which were supposed to effectuate those ends, have instead constrained the scope of the thinkable. We have counted on self-evident presuppositions, and this has deprived us of both the public world of collective action and any vantage point from which we could imagine any other way of life.

***

It would be easy to cite recent neurological research, critical or autopoietic cognitive science, and social psychology to challenge the idea that we are isolated individuals whose essential being lies within, apart from everything and everyone else. Not all of this is actually recent; so much support for this critique had been developed in the last century that a Danish science writer, Tor Nørretranders, had summarized it in a 1991 book that reached bestseller status in Europe.[ix] But few people live their lives by science, or by popular science books, either. Religion is far more important.

This may seem less like a promising line of inquiry and more like a pursuit of folly. Where Christianity dominates, and often elsewhere, the investigation of religion is the analysis of doctrine, and those overt teachings can look like so many examples of poetic fantasy, wish fulfillment, or simple delusion, serving as substitutes for the hard work of a rational life, as palliatives for those injured by age, chance, or the cruelty of others, as justifications for social control, or as instruments of xenophobic fanaticism.

Christianity, though, is a very odd religion as religions go. Many Asian and indigenous traditions are critical of doctrine and overt explanations of reality; instead, their more thoughtful proponents would likely agree with Wittgenstein when he wrote, “The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.”[x] They try to relieve us of the need to explain things, dispelling the sense that we stand apart from anything that demands explanation. They are, or at least can be, critiques of the everyday and the self-evidence of the first-person perspective.[xi]

Such religions cannot be dismissed as pathological or explained away as products of neediness, fear, or an inadequate grasp of scientific fact. They have genuine value, most of all in the universes they conjure up and in which their devotees can live or aspire to live. We may grant that nothing said in the name of any religion is factually true, but what counts are not their pseudo-scientific or historical claims, not the names and descriptions of beings, be they divine, diabolical, or foolishly wise, and not even the stories of the gods’ adventures and squabbles, but the shapes of life and human agency evoked through image, sound, metaphor, and myth, and the ways in which these trace the weaving together of self and world. If we hope to put our ideas and assumptions into perspective it would be foolish to overlook them.

 

To be continued.

 

Notes:

[i]           Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. ix.

[ii]           See, e.g., Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2017).

[iii]          To take an example from a current news story: “A lawyer representing the A.C.L.U., Ken Margolis, said during a legal proceeding last year that it was irrelevant whether Ms. Oh bore no racist ill will. All that mattered, he said, was that her Black colleagues were offended and injured.” (“The A.C.L.U. Said a Worker Used Racist Tropes and Fired Her. But Did She?” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/us/politics/aclu-employee-fired-race-bias.html) Identical logic has led to the prosecution of writers and others in India whose words are claimed to have injured the feelings of right-wing Hindus.

[iv]          The right mocks this mercilessly, but its own project is the conversion of complex and diverse communities into safe spaces for White Americans, true Magyars, or cultural Christians.

[v]           https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtm63UM3Nu4

[vi]          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGL1jZ4Zxv8.

[vii]         DuVal, Kathleen, “A 600-Year-Old Blueprint for Weathering Climate Change,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/04/little-ice-age-native-north-america-climate-change/677944/

[viii]         As Wittgenstein said of the natural sciences, “the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.” Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. Ogden, 6.372.

[ix]          The English translation is Nørretranders, Tor. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. (London & New York: Penguin, 1999).

[x]           Tractatus, 6.521

[xi]          It has been persuasively argued that defining certain ideas and practices as “religion” is a projection of essentially European and Christian paradigms onto non-Christian communities. For the purposes of this essay, however, I am using the term loosely, and do not think it necessary to get into this issue.