For the so-called Old Testament, the non-god Yahweh and the ‘non-being’ of the poor are closely connected. Indeed, it is the first historical document to forge such a relationship. In a revolutionary reversal, true power springs from powerlessness. As St Paul writes in Corinthians: ‘God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong… even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.’ The whole of Judaeo-Christian thought is cast in this ironic, paradoxical, up-ending mould. The wretched of the earth are known to the Old Testament as the anawim, those whose desperate plight embodies the failure of the political order. The only valid image of the future is the failure of the present. The anawim, who are the favoured children of Yahweh, have no stake in the current set-up, and so are an image of the future in their very destitution. The dispossessed are a living sign of the truth that the only enduring power is one anchored in an acknowledgement of failure. Any power which fails to recognize this fact will be enfeebled in a different sense, fearfully defending itself against the victims of its own arrogance. Here, as often, paranoia has much to recommend it. The exercise of power is child’s play compared to the confession of weakness. Power can destroy whole cities, but there is nothing very remarkable in that. Destroying whole cities is a relatively simple business.
The authors of the New Testament see Jesus as a type of the anawim. He is dangerous because he has no stake in the present set-up. Those who speak up for justice will be done away with by the state. Society will wreak its terrible vengeance on the vulnerable. The only good God is a dead one – a failed political criminal in an obscure corner of the earth. There can be no success which does not keep faith with failure. It is this faith which has since been used to justify imperialist adventures, the repression of women, the disembowelling of unbelievers, the reviling of Jews, the abuse of children and the murder of abortionists. As a form of organized violence, it has become the badge of the rich, powerful and patriotic. It is the nauseating cant of US Evangelists, the joyous cries of bomb-happy militarists washed in the blood of the Lamb, and the suburban respectability of fraudsters and wife-beaters. It is glazed, bland, beaming and tambourine-banging. It wants nothing to do with failure, and shoos the anawim off the streets. It is the logo of the military-industrial complex, the cross which props up the American Eagle, the holy water sprinkled on human exploitation.
At the same time, much atheism today is just inverted religion. Atheists tend to advance a version of religion which nobody in their right mind would subscribe to, and then righteously reject it. They accept the sort of crude stereotypes of it that would no doubt horrify them in any other field of scholarly inquiry. They are rather like those for whom feminism means penis-envy, or socialism labour camps. A card-carrying atheist like Richard Dawkins is in this respect the mere mirror-image of Ian Paisley. Both see Yahweh as (in William Blake’s word) Nobodaddy, which in the Old Testament itself is a Satanic image of God. It is the image of God of those who want an authoritarian superego or Celestial Manufacturer to worship or revolt against.
This God is also a wizard entrepreneur, having economized on his materials by manufacturing the universe entirely out of nothing. Like a temperamental rock star, he fusses over minor matters of diet, and like an irascible dictator demands constant placating and cajoling. He is a cross between a Mafia boss and a prima donna, with nothing to be said in his favour other than that he is, when all is said and done, God. It is just that the atheist rejects this image while the Evangelical accepts it. Otherwise, they are pretty much at one. The real challenge is to construct a version of religion which is actually worth rejecting. And this has to start from countering your opponent’s best case, not her worst.
This is as true of Islam as it is of Judaeo-Christianity. Islam first emerged as a radical critique of the injustice and inequality of an aggressively commercialist Mecca, in which the old, egalitarian tribal values of caring for the weaker members of the community were giving way to the profit motive. The word Quaran, which means ‘recital’, indicates the illiterate status of most of Muhammad’s early followers. The very title of the Muslim scriptures suggests poverty and deprivation. Islam, which means ‘surrender’, suggests a total self-dedication to the Allah whose gospel is one of mercy, equality, compassion and a championship of the poor. The Muslim body itself had to be re-educated in such postures as prostration out of the arrogance and self-sufficiency which were growing apace in Mecca society. Muslims must fast throughout Ramadan, as Christians do throughout Lent, to remind themselves of the privations of the poor. Non-violence, community and social justice lie at the heart of Islamic faith, which is notably averse to theological speculation. As with Christianity, the distinction between sacred and profane, the sublime and the mundane, is dismantled. No clerical class in the Christian sense is permitted, to emphasize the equality of all believers. It is this admirable creed which has become in our own time the doctrine of oil-rich autocrats and the stoners of women, fascist-minded mullahs and murderous bigots.
The Book of Isaiah is strong stuff for these post-revolutionary days. It is only left in hotel rooms because nobody bothers to read it. If those who deposit it there had any idea what it contained, they would be well advised to treat it like pornography and burn it on the spot. As far as revolution goes, the human species divides between those who see the world as containing pockets of misery in an ocean of increasing well-being, and those who see it as containing pockets of well-being in an ocean of increasing misery. It also divides between those who agree with Schopenhauer that it would probably have been better for a great many people in history if they had never been born, and those who regard this as lurid leftist hyperbole. This, in the end, is perhaps the only political division which really counts. It is far more fundamental than that between Jews and Muslims, Christians and atheists, men and women or liberals and communitarians. It is the kind of conflict in which it takes a strenuous act of imagination for each party to understand how the other can believe what it does. This is not always the case with disagreement. You can disagree that broccoli is delicious or that Dorking is the most vibrant town in Europe while being able to imagine quite easily what it would be like to agree.
Radicals do not reject the ocean-of-well-being theory because they reject the reality of progress. Only conservatives and postmodernists do that. In certain postmodern quarters, the word ‘progress’ is greeted with the withering scorn usually reserved for those who believe that the face of Elvis Presley keeps mysteriously showing up on chocolate chip cookies. Those who are sceptical of progress, however, do not generally turn up their noses at dental anaesthetics or signal their exasperation when clean water gushes from the tap. What we might call Big Bang conservatives tend to believe that everything has being going to the dogs since a golden age, whereas for Steady State conservatives even the golden age wasn’t all it is cracked up to be. For them, the snake was always-already curled ominously in the garden. It is logically dubious whether one can backslide all the time, but some conservatives appear undeterred by this difficulty. Some of them seem to maintain that all historical periods are equally corrupt, and that the past was superior to the present. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land can be read as holding both beliefs simultaneously.
Postmodernists reject the idea of progress because they are distracted by grand narratives. They assume that a belief in progress must entail that history as a whole has been steadily on the up from the outset, a view which they naturally dismiss as a delusion. If they were less taken with grand narratives they might follow their own lights, take a more pragmatic attitude to progress, and arrive at the correct but boring conclusion that human history has improved in some respects while deteriorating in others. Marxism tries to make this tattered cliche sound less banal by pointing out, more imaginatively, that the progress and the deterioration are closely linked aspects of the same narrative. The conditions which make for emancipation also make for domination.
This is known as dialectical thought. Modern history has
been an enlightened tale of material welfare, liberal values, civil rights, democratic politics and social justice, and an atrocious nightmare. These two fables are by no means unrelated. The condition of the poor is intolerable partly because the resources to alleviate it exist in abundance. Starvation is appalling partly because it is unnecessary. Social change is necessary because of the lamentable state of the planet, but also possible because of material advances. Postmodernists, however, who pride themselves on their pluralism, prefer to consider the question of progress more one-sidedly.
In one sense, the need for revolution is plain realism. No enlightened, moderately intelligent observer could survey the state of the planet and conclude that it could be put to rights without a thorough-going transformation. To this extent, it is the hard-nosed pragmatists who are the dewy-eyed dreamers, not the wild-haired leftists. They are really just sentimentalists of the status quo. To speak of thorough-going transformation, however, is to say nothing about what form that change might take. Revolutions are characterized by how deep-seated they are, not how swift, bloody or sudden. Some processes of piecemeal reform have involved more violence than some armed insurrections. The revolutions which produced us took several centuries to complete. They were made not in the name of a Utopian future, but because of the deficiencies of the present.
As Walter Benjamin remarked, it is memories of enslaved ancestors, not dreams of liberated grandchildren, which drive men and women to revolt. This, in short, is the radical version of the well-known query: What has posterity ever done for us? Nobody in their senses would suffer the disruptions of radical change in the name of some intriguing theoretical experiment.
As with the fall of apartheid or the toppling of Communism, such changes are made only when they need to be. It is when a feasible alternative to the present regime is unlikely to be more dire than the regime itself that people may arrive at the eminently rational decision not to carry on as they are doing.
Like the spotty, overweight and paralytically shy, radicals would rather not be the way they are. They regard themselves as holding awkward, mildly freakish opinions forced upon them by the current condition of the species, and yearn secretly to be normal. Or rather, they look forward to a future in which they would no longer be saddled with such inconvenient beliefs, since they would have been been realized in practice. They would then be free to join the rest of the human race. It is not pleasant to be continually out of line. It is also paradoxical that those who believe in the sociality of human existence should be forced on this very account to live against the grain. To the cheerleaders for Life, it seems unwarrantably ascetic. They do not see that the asceticism, if that is what it is, is in the name of a more abundant life for everyone. Radicals are simply those who recognize, in Yeats’s words, that ‘Nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.’ It is not their fault that this is so. They would rather that it was not.
Let us look once again at the idea of a materialist morality, this time as illustrated by Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lear begins the play by exemplifying the megalomania of absolute sovereignty, which imagines that it is omnipotent partly because it has no body. In casting off so cruelly the fruits of his body, his daughter Cordelia, he discloses the fantasy of disembodiment which lies at the heart of the most grossly material of powers. Lear believes at this point that he is everything; but since an identity which is everything has nothing to measure itself against, it is merely a void. Similarly, a nation which becomes global in its sovereignty will soon have very little idea of who it is, if indeed it ever knew. It has eliminated the otherness which is essential for self-knowledge.
In the course of the drama, Lear will learn that it is preferable to be a modestly determinate ‘something’ than a vacuously global ‘all’. This is not because others tell him so, being for the most part too craven or crafty to respond to his tormented question, ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ It is because he is forced up against the brute recalcitrance of Nature, which reminds him pitilessly of what all absolute power is likely to forget, namely that he has a body. Nature terrorizes him into finally embracing his own finitude. And this includes his creaturely compassion for others. It therefore redeems him from delusion, if not from destruction.
The play opens with a celebrated bandying of nothings:
LEAR:… what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.
CORDELIA: Nothing, my lord.
LEAR: Nothing!
CORDELIA: Nothing.
LEAR: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.
(Act 1, scene 1)
Despite Lear’s irascible finger-wagging, something does finally come of nothing, or almost nothing. Only when this paranoid monarch accepts that he stinks of mortality will he be en route to redemption. It is then that his lying courtiers will be discredited:
To say ‘ay’ and ‘no’ to everything that I said! ‘Ay’ and ‘no’ too was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they are not men of their words. They told me I was everything; ‘tis a lie – I am not ague-proof.
(Act 4, scene 6)
The storm has thrown Lear’s creatureliness into exposure, deflating his hubristic fantasies. He has discovered his flesh for the first time, and along with it his frailty and finitude. Gloucester will do the same when he is blinded, forced to ‘smell his way to Dover’. He must learn, as he says, to ‘see feelingly’ – to allow his reason to move within the constraints of the sensitive, suffering body. When we are out of our body, we are out of our mind.
Lear’s new-found sensuous materialism takes the form of a political solidarity with the poor:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
(Act 3, scene 4)
If power had a body, it would be forced to abdicate. It is because it is fleshless that it fails to feel the misery it inflicts. What blunts its senses is a surplus of material property. If it has no body of its own, it nevertheless has a kind of surrogate flesh, a thick, fat-like swaddling of material possessions, which insulate it against compassion:
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that does not see
Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly;
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.
(Act 4, scene 1)
If our sympathy for others were not so sensuously depleted, we would be moved by their deprivation to share with them the very goods which prevent us from feeling their wretchedness. The problem could thus become the solution. The renewal of the body and a radical redistribution of wealth are closely linked. To perceive accurately, we must feel; and to feel we need to free the body from the anaesthesia which too much property imposes on it. The rich are insulated from fellow feeling by an excess of property, whereas what impoverishes the bodies of the poor is too little of it. For the rich to repair their own sensory deprivation would be for them to feel for the privations of others. And the result of this would be a radical social change, not just a change of heart. In Shakespeare’s imagination, communism and corporeality are closely allied.
The trouble with the rich is that property binds you to the present and thereby cocoons you from death. The rich need to live more provisionally, and the poor more securely. The ideal combination would be to live with a sufficiency of goods but to be prepared to give them up. This is n
otably hard to achieve; but such sacrifice is in fact what everyone is forced to in the end, in the form of death. Being prepared to let it go right now makes death less terrible when it comes along. If we have grown used to living with lack, refusing to stuff our desire with idols and fetishes, we have rehearsed for death in life, and so have made it seem less fearful. Self-giving in life is a rehearsal for the final self-abandonment of death. It is this that the rich find hard to do. The problem is that as long as the rich exist, the poor cannot live abundantly, and as long as the poor exist, the rich cannot live provisionally. They will need constantly to watch their backs.
Property deprives you of a genuine future. It ensures that the future will be simply an endless repetition of the present. The future for the well-heeled will be just like the present, only more so. One’s deepest hope is that nothing momentous will ever happen. When asked what they fear most, the rich can reply in the words of a former British prime minister: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ It is fear, rather than hatred, which lies at the root of most human mischief, not least at the root of hatred. The rich need more discontinuity in their lives, while the poor need more stability. The rich have no future because they have too much present, whereas the poor have no future because they have too little present. Neither can thus recount a satisfactory narrative of themselves.
The West, and in particular the United States, has not, by and large, learnt the lesson of Lear. The USA is a nation which tends to find failure shameful, mortifying or even downright sinful. What distinguishes its culture is its buoyancy, its robust exuberance, its doggone refusal to cave in, cop out or say ‘can’t’. It is a nation of eager yea-sayers and zealous can-doers, in contrast with that bunch of professional grousers, scoffers and long-suffering stoics known as the British. No group of people uses the word ‘dream’ so often, except for psychoanalysts. American culture is deeply hostile to the idea of limit, and therefore to human biology. Postmodernism is obsessed by the body and terrified of biology.
After Theory Page 18