Cassandra Voices

Tag: Jurgen Habermas

  • Distortions Of Language

     

    What tangled web we weave when our intention is to deceive?
    Sir Walter Scott

    The distortion of language lies at the heart of the greatest of threats to human civilisation. It now effects all aspects of the public and civic sphere, from court rooms to journalism to the expression of corporate-political elites. It is what allows atrocities to be sanctioned or airbrushed.

    The distortion of language fundamentally undermines the idea of shared and purposeful communication, whether interpersonal or societal. This is what Jurgen Habermas, in a different context, referred to as Communicative Action – a term borrowed from John Austin’s idea of ideal speech language – effectively purging it of ideology and taint. Distortion undermines the use of language in terms of truth-saying or truth-telling propositions.

    Theodor Adorno famously argued that after Auschwitz to write a poem was barbaric, implying that nothing could conjure up or express in human terms such atrocities. Nevertheless, various accounts by Primo Levi as a survivor in books such as If This Is A Man (1947)  and The Truce (1963) did poetically express the horror and show how human resilience endured. Language survived in a humanistic age to express the terms of the horror, but we are now in a more obviously trans-humanist age, and remnants of civilisation are not as obviously influential or vocal.

    The propaganda and euphemisms leading up to the Holocaust involved the use of language as a masking device to conceal different meanings and agendas.

    Although I am wary of structuralism, I do believe it is often necessary to deconstruct meaning. That occurs when an expression is being used to conceal an ulterior purpose, or to make a horror more palatable. The object of euphemisms, buzz words and jargons is often to distract, deflect and misdirect.

    Kenneth Branagh’s film Conspiracy (2011) effectively depicts the use by the Nazi High command at the Wannsee Conference chaired by Heydrich of the term evacuation, which of course really meant extermination.

    The phrase more typical of our age since Srebrenica has been ethnic cleansing, which is an opaque word for genocide, which at least has been used expressly in response to the actions of the Israelis, but even the utilisation of the appropriate word in a world of distorted coverage invokes fake well-financed indignation.

    In war or military matters historically, other euphemisms are collateral damage, friendly fire, or my favourite crew transfer question – meaning coffins for the dead bodies from the space shuttle.

    George Orwell.

    Orwell

    Any discussion of language in the context of war and politics leads inevitably to George Orwell.

    The term Doublespeak has been culled from Orwell’s 1984 (1949), although it was not used in the text where expressions like Doublethink and Newspeak perfectly express the nature of propaganda.

    In our time, political speech and writing are the defence of the indefensible… Thus, political language must consist of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness… the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Where there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms…

    Orwell elaborated on these themes earlier in his magisterial essay The Politics of the English Language (1946). He piquantly observed of political language that it ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ The essay chastises vagueness and prioritises clarity and simplicity over euphemisms.

    Thus, when defenceless villages are destroyed it is called pacification, and the plunder of property is called rectification of frontiers. One might think of other euphemisms in use today, such as affordable housing or even debt relief.

    Orwell’s essay is not confined to political language but includes all forms of distortion of language:

    The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

    Though he saw a terminal decline in the England of his time. He did suggest certain remedies well worth citing:

    1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speechwhich you are used to seeing in print. (Examples that Orwell gave included swan song, and hotbed. Such phrases are dying metaphors which a present speaker does not understand the context of, and the original meaning rendered meaningless because those who use them did not know their original meaning. The historical interpretation of the US Constitution by such as Scalia is like this.
    2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
    3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
    4. Never use the passivewhere you can use the active.
    5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargonword if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

    And the last canonical rule:

    1. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

    Linguistic Distortion

    Albert Camus is the great prose master both in terms of precision and sensuality. He can be quoted endlessly, but with respect to doublespeak there is this quotation from The Plague (1949) elaborating on Animal Farm (1950):

    There will come a time in human history when the man who says two plus two equals four will be sentenced to death.

    The criminally underrated Ernest Hemingway wrote a little known, but invaluable text called On Writing (1984), containing his observations about his craft, which curiously mirror that of Orwell.

    He advised writers to cut out the scrollwork of ornament. Stick to what is true and cut out the superfluous. Write about what you know. Like Orwell, he emphasises the active verb and the shortest word possible.

    With respect to the issue of immigration the word removal is now used without elaboration or explanation, notably at the recent Tory conference. The word disposal invokes similar considerations. Again, this involves a form of distortion and side-tracking of reality.

    A real problem occurs when bureaucratic language or legalese conceal infamy. People often buy into it for ease of mind, or owing to a blinkered or cognitively dissociated sense that nothing is happening – or that it suits their interests. This theme is beautifully expressed in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest (2023).

    In terms of the precise use of language to explain horror we have the Martin Niemoller parable during the rise of Nazism:

    First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

    Contrast the clarity and sincerity of that with this from Donald Rumsfeld:

    Reports that say that something has not happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we do not know we do not know.

    Rumsfeld comments are wrought with care and are lying to serve a purpose or engaging in deception to so do. That is the point St. Augustine condemned in his categorisations of lying as the truly venal lie.

    Other awful phrases now creeping into our world of sound bites and doublespeak include the new normal. This is effectively a plea to accept degradation and Chinese corporate capitalism, as well as to be controlled and shrivelled in an Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Compliance is another dangerous euphemism.

    We have, conversely, also become obsessed with hygiene and health and are preyed on in that respect. Stay safe. Oh, and take our drugs. The slightest cold sets people off into hysteria, leading to limited physical contact and an increasingly asexuality.

    This new form of social hygiene divides the world into the pure and the impure. Corporate and advertising interests are adept at this. Virtually any episode of the Madmen series set in the 1950s demonstrates that. In legal terms there is always a degree of tolerance of puff and blow to use the contract law term until the disparity between claim and exaggeration meets the reality of what is being done. Simply the best. Largest in the industry.

    Advertising and politics are now so co-mingled, and have been for some time in the interests of big business, that there is now little difference between winning an election and selling tinned beans. Make the product be the change.

    Sadly, such approaches have also crept into the criminal justice system. Thus we find slogans such as no excuse for abuse, while in sex abuses cases the phrase there is no smoke without fire is migrating into closing speeches.

    Political correctness is the ultimate destruction of language, providing an excuse for no platforming people and undermining freedom of expression.

    Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange.

    Simplicity has its Drawbacks

    But with all respect to Orwell and Hemingway simplicity has its drawbacks. Camus was never simple.

    Thus, in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange reveals a universe of gobbledygook, much in evidence in social media, reducing language to that of Alex the Droog. The compression of meaning into shorthand symbols or abbreviations is a return to the planet of the apes, creating simplistic misleading forms of communication such as the flawed Me Too movement.

    In my view we should reformulate the legendary text by Flaubert, The Dictionary of Received Ideas (1911-13) and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devils Dictionary (1911), filtered through the legendary dictionary of Dr Johnson in terms of providing more amplified definitions of some of the distortions of language in our age. The expression used to be followed by the real meaning.

    As in the definition of ‘Pension’ in Dr Johnsons’ dictionary: 

    In England it is understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.

    Or ‘Faith’ from The Devils Dictionary:

    Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

    Or Flaubert’s definition of sex as ‘Intimacy occurred.’

    I thus suggest a new dictionary of the real meanings of the doublespeak of our time, and indeed a reversion to old patterns of behaviour. This requires us to read books leading to an enhanced form of comprehension relying on clarity and simplicity.

    In this respect, self-reportage or sincerity can also be bullshit and ought to be treated with scepticism. Sincerely adopting your own euphemism can lead you to condone atrocities. It is precision and adherence to the facts that is crucial, certainly in political and civic discourse, which is not always easy.

    As Samuel Beckett, the master of succinctness once put it:

    Ever Tried. Ever Failed. Never Mind, Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.

     

    Feature Image: Tamás Mészáros

  • Emotional Regimes of the Pandemic

    This Mortal Coil

    The Covid pandemic brought a public health emergency, political and legal challenges, intense media coverage, social divisions, and intense debates among scientists. Yet, in public commentaries, attention fell almost exclusively on a single cause of suffering: the virus itself.

    This framing of the crisis contributed to an atmosphere of extreme danger, a sense that disease and death lurked around every street corner. Public messaging, media reports and daily statistics reinforced the idea of omnipresent risk. News cycles focused relentlessly on case numbers, hospitalizations and fatalities, making the threat feel immediate and inescapable.

    Five years on, we can collate how the pandemic sparked a surge of research across many fields: medicine, public health, economics, education, and sociology all responded. This burst of academic activity was not, however, spread evenly. Bibliometric studies show that, at first, research focused mainly on clinical medicine, immunology, biology, genetics, and pharmacology; the social sciences, psychiatry, and economics received less attention (Funada et al., 2023). Within the social sciences, early research looked at wellbeing, the plight of healthcare workers, vaccines, and inequalities. Emotions were also studied, but far less often, ranking only as the twenty-fourth most common keyword in published papers (Hamdan & Alsuqaih, 2024).

    Nevertheless, a closer look at emotion-related research reveals a problematic focus. Most of these studies examine mental health issues and depression, fatigue, sleep, fear, anxiety, coping strategies, resilience, and attitudes toward vaccines. They treat emotions as individual reactions to a threatening situation, mainly, the risk of illness or death. From this almost exclusive perspective, emotions are considered as disruptions to psychological balance, responses to a biological danger separate from society or culture. They are private experiences, signs of mental strain when facing mortality. Fear, grief, and anxiety are viewed as symptoms of danger and of risk, highlighting the personal impact of living through a threatening time.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Moving Beyond Reaction: Constructing the Emotional Field

    This framing of emotions overlooks a crucial point: emotions are not simply automatic, hard-wired biological responses to external situations or threats. Rather, they are often actively produced and shaped within particular moral, cultural, and political frameworks. How people come to fear, endure, or worry is continually influenced by the signals and expectations set by public discourse, media narratives, institutional practices and prevailing social norms.

    The news media do obviously more than report mere facts; they select, emphasize, and dramatize certain aspects of events, contributing and even constructing the emotional climate of crisis according to preconceived judgments. Hence, the emotional atmosphere of the pandemic, marked by vigilance, anxiety, and collective tension, was not just a consequence of the virus, but the result of ongoing processes that shaped how people understood and responded to the unfolding situation.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    ‘Be a hero, wear a mask’

    Several notable examples illustrate how governments and media employed rhetorical and psychological techniques to shape public emotions.

    In the UK, the slogan “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” became one of the most widely disseminated and emotionally charged messages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Designed to evoke both communal duty and existential fear, it mobilised public sentiment around the act of staying at home, not simply as a health measure, but as a moral obligation to shield others, particularly frontline healthcare workers. Ubiquitous across television, newspapers, and social media, the slogan fostered an emotional climate of collective responsibility and latent anxiety about overwhelming the national health system.

    Rhetorically, the slogan is striking: its simplicity, repetition, and rhythmic cadence render it both memorable and persuasive. It appeals simultaneously to national solidarity, civic duty, and the highest ethical imperative, saving lives, thus activating a complex affective mix of fear, guilt, and altruism.

    This emotional construct was neither accidental nor incidental. A report by the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, dated 22 March 2020 and titled “Options for Increasing Adherence to Social Distancing Measures” (SPI-B, 2020), explicitly recommended the use of emotionally charged messaging. It advised that “the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging,” and further emphasized the need to frame compliance as a duty to protect others. Public messaging was a deliberate instrument of affective governance.

    In France, the famous “Nous sommes en guerre”, “we are at war” slogan, pronounced by French President Emmanuel Macron recruited the French citizens for “general mobilisation” against an “enemy […] invisible and elusive”. This phrase, repeated six times during a single televised address, anchored the pandemic within a wartime imaginary, framing the virus as an invisible enemy and the French population as combatants in a national struggle (Lemarié, A., & Pietralunga, C. 2020).

    The affective environment in France was thus shaped around sacrifice and mobilisation. Staying at home became not merely a health directive, but an act of national resistance, evoking allusive memories of the World War II. This rhetorical strategy, deeply embedded in French republican traditions of unity and state authority, reactivated symbolic repertoires associated with past national emergencies.

    Perhaps the most disquieting illustration of planned disciplinary and emotional control during the Covid-19 crisis in Europe was to be found in a leaked strategy document from Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior. Widely referred to (ironically yet revealingly) as the “panic paper”, this internal memorandum, drafted in March 2020, exposes the deliberate mobilisation of fear and terror as legitimate political tools. The paper explicitly recommends heightening the population’s sense of threat to ensure compliance with lockdown measures, even proposing emotionally manipulative narratives targeted at children.

    The document’s authors do not hesitate to make emotionally manipulative claims, unanchored to any scientific or empirical evidence. One of the more disturbing passages reads: “Children will easily become infected, even with restrictions on leaving the house […] If they then infect their parents, and one of them dies in agony at home, they will feel guilty because, for example, they forgot to wash their hands after playing. It is the most terrible thing a child can ever experience.” (Bundespapier, 2020)

    Under the guise of public health strategy, the experts thus suggest that the state should conjure worst-case scenarios to shock citizens into obedience. This weaponisation of fear, particularly the psychological targeting of children, marks a disconcerting threshold where public communication slips into psychological coercion. It represents a calculated use of terror to engineer behaviour.

    Surprisingly enough, this narrative was not limited to governments or the media. Even prominent intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, one of the leading voices in the theory of deliberative democracy, perceived democracy as having ground to a halt. Under the threat to “the life and health of members of the species Homo sapiens across the globe,” Habermas declared in 2021, in strikingly dramatic terms, that humanity found itself in a truly existing Hobbesian state of nature, engaged in a metaphysical and biological war for the survival of the species. In such a situation, Habermas thought, the “legally mandated acts of solidarity” required by the authority of the state must override individual rights and liberties without exception (Habermas, 2021). In other words, the recourse to a temporary dictatorship is defended as a legitimate means of safeguarding democracy itself.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Reframing the emotional pandemic

    Such tactics reflect a biopolitical logic in which emotions are instrumentalised, manipulated, and weaponised in the name of security. As the American historian William Reddy’s notion of ‘emotional regimes’ reminds us, the state not only regulates action but prescribes feeling. What the “panic paper” reveals is an attempt to institutionalise anxiety and guilt as tools of governance, undermining democratic trust and ethical responsibility in the process.

    Insights from the history and anthropology of emotions, particularly the work of Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy, invite us to rethink this framing of emotions. Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’ (2006) highlights how emotions are shaped, valued, and regulated within particular social groups, each with their own norms and expressive codes. From this standpoint, emotions during the pandemic cannot be reduced to individual reactions but must be understood as patterned and normative, reflecting the affective economies of distinct communities: communities of fear, of denial, of moral indignation, or of solidarity.

    Similarly, Reddy’s theory of ‘emotives’ (2001) emphasises the performative and world-shaping nature of emotional expression. Emotions are not merely responses to a given reality; they participate in shaping that reality by enacting or challenging dominant scripts.

    Shaping the emotional landscape of the pandemic through these theoretical lenses allows us to move beyond the medical paradigm and to interrogate the normative, political, and cultural scripts that governed which emotions were considered legitimate, intelligible, or deviant. It also opens the way to analyse how emotions were mobilised to sustain or contest public policies, shape collective identities, and articulate forms of belonging or exclusion.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    How to do emotions with words

    Although traditional theories of public relations and propaganda from Bernays and Adorno to Ellul have long emphasized the central role of emotions in shaping public opinion, the American historian William Reddy offers a strikingly original lens through which to examine how speech, when instrumentalised, not only conveys but actively produces emotional states. The framework he developed in his book The Navigation of Feeling (2001) allows us to reconsider emotional expression not as a by-product of persuasion, but as a form of action in its own right.

    The expressions and formulae he calls “emotives” work at the same time as expressions and speech-acts that do not merely reflect a feeling but also act upon the feelings expressed.

    Let us consider one of the slogans widely used in the UK during Covid: “Can you look them in the eyes and tell them you’re helping by staying at home?” The formula obviously expresses sentiments of moral urgency, it purveys a sense of guilt, and it evokes a feeling of shared suffering. By mobilising emotional responses in its audience, the message not only seeks compliance but also helps produce an imagined community of responsibility, what Benedict Anderson might describe as a politically constructed sense of belonging forged through shared affect and narrative. “Not staying at home” not only becomes a morally shameful act, but it also transforms those who do not abide by the rules into antisocial or even dangerous outsiders.

    As such, the formula is not simply descriptive (“you are harming people”), nor purely persuasive (“please help us”), but it performs a moral-emotional judgment that invites internalisation: “You are failing us, your community, unless you feel what we want you to feel.” In this sense, that emotives express and reshape emotional experience by realigning the narrative sense of oneself and the expected moral position of the community.

    The same analysis applies to Macrons “war”. The expression declares a collective crisis state, it evokes gravity, calls out a clear and present danger and warns about an existential threat. Thus, it installs an emotional climate of wartime unity, emergency discipline, and patriotic mobilisation. Unlike the English moral community, French citizens are summoned in the guise of soldiers and patriots, enlisted in the defence of the state.

    The German example seems politically the most unsettling. The consultants emphasise horrific imagery (death by suffocation) in order to induce “primal fears” and uncontrollable panic. They instrumentalise guilt in children to heighten family responsibility by evoking a nightmarish parricide that results from disobeying.

    -Germany’s response corresponds in function (if not in scale) to Jacobin emotional regimes analysed by Reddy in the period of French Terror (September 1793–July 1794). Emotional authenticity is measured by conformity to the collective fear. In the context of post-Revolutionary France, not fearing enough becomes a sign of counter-revolutionary disloyalty. Similarly, in 2020 Germany, not appearing afraid (or questioning the panic narrative) could make one suspected of being reckless, not acting in solidarity, or worse, of being a right-wing-extremist-enemy of the state.

    To push things even further, Germany’s federal domestic intelligence service – the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – established, in 2021, a new ‘phenomenon area’ for verbal “delegitimisation of the state” as part of a broader affective disciplining.  Much like the East German state’s attention to emotional attitudes and moral tone (Brauer, 2011), pandemic-era Germany began to police not only what people did or said, but how they felt, or more precisely, which emotions they were publicly permitted to express. The result, in Reddy’s terms, was the emergence of a strict emotional regime, wherein fear, trust, and compliance became not just encouraged but expected, while scepticism, defiance, and even calm detachment were marked as dangerous deviations from normative feeling.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    The Touched and the Untouchable

    As Reddy shows, emotives do not exist in isolation but operate within broader emotional styles that can transform into hegemonic “emotional regimes”. These regimes then constitute the officially sanctioned or dominant norms governing which emotions are deemed appropriate or required. An emotional regime may be conceptualised as the emotional dimension of a culture’s ideological structure.

    This perspective helps explain how distinct emotional regimes were deliberately constructed within varying national and cultural settings. The aim was to cultivate specific emotional landscapes which, according to political figures, scientific experts and media outlets were perceived as the most effective means to encourage, persuade, or even compel populations towards the desired attitudes and behaviours. This was to be achieved, in large part, by aligning public sentiment with state goals and framing non-compliance as morally reprehensible.

    By dictating appropriate feelings such as patriotism, calm obedience, compliance, solidarity, anxiety or even panic, while discouraging dissent, critique, lack of fear or apathy, the Covid responses installed what Reddy calls a “strict” emotional regime. In strict regimes – as was the case in most Western democracies – authorities heavily dictate emotional responses (e.g. demanding constant displays of patriotic fear or fervour), whereas a “looser” regimes (like Sweden) allowed more individual emotional freedom.

    The construction of a strict emotional regime evidently leaves little room for individual “emotional navigation”. Emotional navigation, in Reddy’s theory, is the process through which individuals explore and reorient their feelings, often by attempting to name or express them using available emotional descriptions. Hence, within strict regimes, the mandated emotions and suppression of others are always at risk of creating a conflict with individuals’ authentic feelings. Pressure to conform reduces our autonomy to explore and articulate genuine emotional experiences.

    Reddy’s work suggests that strict regimes inevitably inflict “psychological pains”. This psychological pain arises from the discrepancy between one’s internal emotional state and the external expectation of how one should feel or express emotions. The deliberate heightening of threat and weaponisation of fear, as seen in the aforementioned pandemic policies, lead to significant emotional suffering.

    This approach mirrors what the German memo proposed (making individuals, even children, feel accountable for tragic outcomes) and what SPI-B had called “shame” by conflating compliance with virtue and non-compliance with deviance (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022).

    Indeed, psychologists reported a rise in what they dubbed “COVID-19 Anxiety Syndrome,” where individuals became obsessively fearful (avoiding public spaces, constant symptom-checking, etc.), effectively locked into a state of chronic anxiety (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022). Professor of psychology Marcantonio Spada, who studied this phenomenon, warned that by “deliberately inflat[ing] the threat and perceived fear of Covid-19 (in combination with lockdowns)”, the government made it likely “that a significant proportion of the population would develop psychopathological responses and end up locked into their fear or develop related forms of anxiety such as health anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behaviours” (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022).

    As a consequence, when people find an emotional regime oppressive or alienating, they seek “emotional refuges”, that is, social spaces or subcultures that permit the free expression of forbidden feelings. These refuges (such as the historic salons, Masonic lodges, cafés in Reddy’s research) let individuals “breathe” emotionally and share sentiments that the dominant discourse suppresses.

    In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, social media platforms played a crucial role as digital emotional refuges, allowing individuals to articulate forms of scepticism, frustration, irony, or grief that were often unwelcome or delegitimised in mainstream public discourse. Whether through Telegram groups, Facebook forums, YouTube comments, or encrypted chat channels, these online spaces became vital arenas not only for a delegitimized critique, but also for affective expression, especially for those who rejected the emotional scripts of fear, compliance, or trust in government authority.

    Here, alternative emotional narratives could circulate: defiance against confinement, sarcasm toward official slogans, or empathy with marginalised voices such as vaccine sceptics, small business owners, or distressed adolescents. It was these spaces that functioned as emotional counter-publics: informal communities where dissonant emotions could be shared, validated, and amplified outside the normative emotional regime that attempted to monopolise the emotional field.

    Yet even these emotional counter-publics did not remain untouched. As expressions of dissent or ambivalence became increasingly vilified and pathologised, many of these refuges were themselves subjected to forms of surveillance, content moderation, public denunciation and censorship. Social media platforms intensified their control of discourse through algorithmic filtering and deplatforming, while governments and media denounced certain emotional expressions, especially those critical of official policy, as irrational, dangerous, or politically subversive. In this way, the emotional regime extended its reach, constraining the very spaces where alternative affective orientations could emerge, intensifying emotional suffering and narrowing the horizon of legitimate emotional life.

    Bibliography

  • The Relevance of Jurisprudence to Law Part 3

    The remains of unquestionably the greatest intellect of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, are buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. I recently tossed a red rose on the site. I doubt whether Judge Gerard Hogan, to whom I have addressed previous articles in this series, or any other legal positivist, would do likewise.

    While positivists often engage, though disagree, with rights-based -thinkers such as Ronald Dworkin, most exhibit a level of incomprehension, and often outright hostility towards certain forms of Radical Jurisprudence. No doubt the often unclearly expressed ideas of late Marxism, structuralism and post structuralism often are a factor, but that is only a partial excuse.

    Noam Chomsky – himself a linguistic positivist – once made a comment to the same effect on these authors, exempting Michel Foucault. He had developed a rational understanding of Foucault, but none for example of Derrida, who many including myself regard as largely intellectually fraudulent. Indeed, many Cambridge University philosophers objected to the conferring of an honorary degree on him, although I believe there is an element of truth to his babbling on relative truth or foresight.

    This plan of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.

    Panopticon

    It is, nonetheless, easy to see why, as far as my harsh assessment of post-structuralism Foucault is exempted. Foucault makes very relevant contributions to Jurisprudence and the practice of law.

    First, the transplantation of Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon – the all-seeing surveillance prison such as Kilmainham in Dublin – is in Foucault’s view a depiction of modern society, where a uniform doctrine is enforced in schools, law courts and hospitals, leading to blind conformity.

    Foucault presaged the age of Surveillance Capitalism and 24-hour data surveillance in Ireland, achieved in camera in the Quirke Case through the representations of the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee. Thus, we have a global panopticon wherein the value of privacy and freedom is thrown to the wolves.

    Now our judges aside from Hogan, most recently in the Dwyer Case restricting the privacy right, ignore ECHR and EU law. This undermines an ideal of liberty, at least as old as J.S. Mill in modern times, and in fact going back to the Greeks. So, Foucault’s insight is not about postmodernism. It translates into the destruction of rights under Article 3 of the Irish Constitution and 8 and 5 of the Convention.

    The second of Foucault’s contribution is his book on madness in the age of reason. The fundamental tenet is that the Enlightenment / Age of Reason involved the necessity, intellectually and then institutionally, to confine the unreasoned – those who were called mad – into asylums. Well, who is mad and who is clinically insane?

    The recent US Democrat convention, with the rather wonderful Mr Walz speaking from the heart on middle-class US conservatism about banning books and depriving choice stands against that Twitter conversation between Musk and Trump.

    The problem of reason and madness is also clear earlier in Ken Kesey’s masterpieces ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1962). What happens when the lunatics have taken over the asylum and a dissident voice says no? What of when the man or woman of reason, the pursuer of nuance and grey, the boy who cries wolf, the creature of the Enlightenment is locked up by those who are in fact self-interestedly insane.

    Foucault was apparently not on the UCD Jurisprudence syllabus in the late 1970s. A short journey to the Arts block to encounter Richard Kearney’s expertise in Continental Philosophy would have been beneficial.

    Marx and Engels in the printing house of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. E. Capiro, 1895.

    The Crucial Figures

    The crucial figures of radical jurisprudence are not the structuralist, even Foucault, but the great Marxist theoreticians. For Marx law was a mirage, an ideology upholding the interests of the bourgeoisie, He considered it a mere superstructure determined by the economic base. Law, he observed, served the interests of the ruling class.

    Thus, in Marxist terms Hogan’s analysis of Kelsen is a form of intellectual masking or ideology justifying a form of state authoritarianism, which Marx would surely have interpreted precisely as the Populism of the petit bourgeoisie. No judicial deferral should be granted to the popular sovereignty of the mob.

    Marx though is not consistent about law. He argues that in the properly ordered Communist society there would be no need for laws, as we would spontaneously co-operate in our Communist Nirvana. But at times he concedes, inconsistently, that law is not always bad, and a close textual analysis of his views on property rights, and the freeing up of the alienation of estates to facilitate greater capital, shows that sometimes the superstructure can influence the base, and thus influence economic relations.

    So, what of Ireland controlled by a landlord class achieving nothing and facilitating careers going nowhere except to Microsoft and criminal banks, or the legal service class who act like vultures preying on the vulnerable on behalf of the powerful?

    The legal realist Oliver Wendell Holmes in his famous rebuke to unregulated free market economics in Lochner (1905) said the Fourth Amendment does not enact Mr Herbert Spencer’s social statics, and nor should the Irish Supreme Court enforce the interests of the commercial fat cats of Aran Square or elsewhere.

    Many Marxists, such as Lenin, saw the necessity for rules in a never-ending interregnum on the way to a Communist Utopia, which is never to be achieved. More pragmatically, the fundamental question for any judge which the Marxists pose is: whose interests do the rules serve?

    The Marxists influenced the critical legal studies movement, which to some extent educated me, adopting the radical indeterminacy thesis, an idea borrowed at one level from the legal realists. They argue that given the plasticity and malleability of rules, legal outcome can be very unpredictable and in fact subjective.

    There really is no such thing as a ‘plain fact’ or literal interpretation of almost any legal text. To avoid nihilism we should invoke moral principle as a corrective.

    Alienation

    The term alienation coined by Marx more generally to describe exploitation of workers serves as a warning as to how our government is destroying both the working and middle classes,

    Subsequent Marxist have been more approving of law. The legendary Antonio Gramsci, while imprisoned by Mussolini, adopted the phrase ‘hegemony’ to suggests as necessary a form of co-operation in law, politics and culture between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Now this coalition argument suggests law can be used as an instrument of social change. That depends on a desire to change for the good.

    One wonders whether the new, petite bourgeoisie-aligned Keir Starmer government in the U.K. should be a source of optimism or seen as a false dawn? More taxes on the wealthy, or further savage austerity for the poor?

    The Rule of Law is a central concept in jurisprudence, though hotly contested, and Marx aside, it has dominated the thinking of some of the main Marxists thinkers of recent vintage.

    In his codicil to Whigs and Hunters (1975), E.P. Thompson expressed a view on the Rule of Law as an unqualified good, which at times could check arbitrary authority. That of course assumes the Rule of Law exists in an ethical polity. It is not that evident in Ireland today as core principles are violated or improperly implemented.

    Thus, the independence of the judiciary is not obvious in Ireland, the use of in camera proceedings, akin to the promulgation of secret laws, is a cardinal violation of the notion that justice must be carried out in public. We also find an apparent tolerance of police corruption, the abandonment of substantive rather than formal equality, and indeed the abandonment of constitutional rights.

    Thompsons argument is premised on the idea that the judges are willing to enforce the rule of law, often with the effect of unsettling vested interests, as in the recent, painfully prolonged, Assange case. Irish judges are more likely to do the opposite.

    Jürgen Habermas

    Habermas

    Jürgen Habermas is, as ever, a crucial contemporary thinker, and, with all due respect to Gerard Hogan’s veneration of Kelsen, he is not just the world’s leading intellectual figure but the towering German intellect along with Thomas Mann and Kafka of the 20th century.

    Since Habermas abandoned the Frankfurt school, and thus post-structuralism, he has become, for over fifty years, one of the great proponents of the Rule of Law and legalism. He stresses the importance for judges not to subvert rights and parliamentary laws protecting civil liberties including the right to protest, viewing civil disobedience as central to revitalizing democracy.

    In contrast, the knee jerk reaction in Ireland and the UK has been to give more powers to the police to regulate dissent.

    Habermas’ other idea of communicative action, borrowed at one level incidentally from the arch positivist Austin, is the elaboration of the idea of ideal speech. His ideal for the vindication of speech rights is the eighteenth century salon. The ideas of communicative action in legal and judicial terms blends into the ideas audi alterum partem (‘listen to the other side’), and the obligation not to be either subjectively or objectively biased.

    Ideology, a term adopted by Marx, has been reinterpreted by Slavoj Žižek, drawing on another Marxist in Lacan, as ideological misidentification. In both instances, and applied to law, there is the sense that the bureaucratic class are engaged in false consciousness or deceptive ideas.

    Lon L. Fuller, who is not a Marxist but a natural lawyer, argued that once a legal system has not a tinsel of legality left, but enforces barbarism, it is no longer a legal system.

    To round the series off, a Marxist would fully understand the rage of Populism, but not necessarily approve of it. Of course pure Communist societies do not work, but nor does pure neo-liberalism. Indeed, Ireland is not working except for the landlord class.

    What does work legally ethically and morally is a social democratic Just Society advocated by the master John Rawls. What does work is Sweden, Denmark, Norway and much of northern Europe, where people are not in Marxist terms commodified and viewed as product, but in the moral Kantian sense things in themselves.

    John Rawls intellectually speaking would never have existed but for Karl Marx and a difficult thing for a legal positivist practitioner to realise is that Marx is in fact the greatest of all legal, political and economic philosophers. This is not to say he is entirely correct or a model to be followed in overall societal regulation, but a useful corrective to interpret laws and asses whose interest they serve and, if necessary, to bend rules to achieve socially just outcomes.

    Dworkin in fact argued that the South African judges during Apartheid should potentially have lied about the content of a racist law. I also agree or rather at the very least that they should have interpreted it to bring about socially just outcomes.

    Marxism at its best focuses on civil and in particular social and economic rights, and the judiciary responsibility to enforce them into the law and the Constitution, to the extent that this is consistent with the Rule of Law.

    Feature Image:Tomb of Karl Marx, East Highgate Cemetery, London.

     

  • Reform of Defamation Law in Ireland

    Irish Times journalist Naomi O’Leary wrote an article recently commenting on how journalists are curtailed in what they can write by the threat of defamation actions, which contributes to an omerta or code of silence, undermining free speech.

    This leads to self-censorship, dictated by fear of suit. But the Irish Times trust also appears to be compromised by association with vested interests, which dictate the blandishments and glorified stenography passing for journalism commonly encountered in its pages.

    In the aforementioned article, O’Leary cited emotive evidence of a landlord attempting to evict ‘an entire apartment block’, and a civil society group ‘highlighting privatisation in healthcare’ being silenced. She notes, fawningly, that Minister for Justice Simon Harris this week ‘laid out a planned defamation reform, saying it should not be perceived as a “rich man’s law”.’

    Does she seriously think that any reform of defamation laws has simply been designed to restrict the casino capitalism of the current level of awards in defamation cases?

    Indeed, in some instances a high level of damages is appropriate. For example, Lord Aldington was entitled to millions in damages for the outrageous slur that he had participated in sending the Cossacks back to Stalin. The unjustified staining of reputations with crimes against humanity requires vigorous restraints.

    Reforms

    Predictably, the draft guidelines for what lies in store do not look auspicious, as it appears designed to protect the powerful, who dominate legacy media.

    It should be noted that recently both Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tánaiste Micheál Martin suggested that Sinn Féin were using legal action and menacing solicitors’ letters to undermine free speech and robust questioning of political motives. There was obvious concern arising out of strict conditions for an RTÉ interview with Shane Ross, discussing his biography of Mary Lou McDonald.

    I have some empathy with Ross – whose views I generally find abhorrent – as when I went on RTÉ they stipulated certain matters, such as overt criticism of the Gardaí, were out of bounds.

    What Ross wrote about the Sinn Féin leader may not have been defamatory, but simply ideologically tainted.  After all, Ross has what might be regarded as extreme views on certain issues, as, arguably, do elements within Sinn Féin. The difference is that Ross is indulged by the establishment with publishing deals and a column in a Sunday paper. Go figure.

    If you want to be a journalist in Ireland it is generally advisable to espouse neo-liberal views.

    Leo-Liberal.

    Village’s ‘Putinistas’

    Moreover, remarks made by Leo Varadkar last year in an interview with the Sunday Times to the effect that those associated with the Leo the Leak story in Village Magazine were Russian sympathisers is a classic example of the degradation of contemporary political discourse, conveyed by media which offers an uncritical platform to those in power. It was, of course, clearly defamatory towards its editor Michael Smith, who has been vocal in his condemnation of Vladimir Putin.

    He might not expect a justified windfall, however, if the case comes before a Fine Gael-appointed judge, as opposed to a jury, as the defamation bill proposes.

    The renowned jurist Geoffrey Robertson QC has criticised gagging orders silencing critics, which serves the interests of the kleptocracy, including Russian oligarchs, in a recent book. but be we should be careful for what we wish for.

    A gagging orders might have been appropriate to counter Labour’s recent absurd slur against Rishi Sunak, which Keir Starmer doubled down on despite internal criticism from within his own party. All too often it has been the fake left, epitomised by Alastair Campbell, which has pandered to press hysteria in criminal justice in the UK.

    Blackmail

    I note the word ‘aggressive’ being used by Ms O’Leary in the context of pre-emptive threats, which is similar to the menace required to ground the criminal offence known as blackmail; the definition of which is menace backed by threats. Such tactics are something the government parties in Ireland and apparatchiks in the police and justice department know a considerable amount about.

    So, spurious defamation actions for ulterior motives may come close to the criminal charge of blackmail backed by threats, but only if these are spurious and untrue. But what if they are true? And where should the balance lie?

    It is almost universally agreed, including, apparently, by the incumbent Minister for Justice, Simon Harris that ‘Democracy cannot truly flourish without robust protection for the right of freedom of expression.’ In a certain respect, however, this Bill will in fact seriously curtail freedom of expression, a point that Naomi O’Leary strikingly ignores.

    Indeed, one wonders whether the whole article was conceived in cahoots with said Minister, who she has previously quoted approvingly over his role in the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, while ignoring that he once adopted a Pro-Life stance. The article is also presented with a flattering shot of the Minister emblazoned over it, depicting him as the champion of free speech.

    Online Disclosure

    Freedom of expression is the central hallmark of a democracy. Anthony Lewis, referring to the First Amendment of the US Constitution, said that free speech should be a search engine for the truth. The great legal scholar Ronald Dworkin argued that free speech is a condition of legitimate government and a counterweight to hysteria and unreason. Stephen Sedley, a great English judge, called it the lifeblood of a democracy. Freedom of speech also opens the government and indeed opposition to intense scrutiny. The prior restraint of gagging orders invites scepticism.

    So, bearing this in mind, let us explore the motivation of the current government for reforming the defamation laws.

    The proposed government Bill on Online Disclosure applies to all media, including Twitter, and potentially criminalises certain categories of ‘hate’ speech.

    It could amount to the most dramatic curtailment of free speech in the history of the state. Thus, if Naomi O’ Leary had the temerity to compare Leo Varadkar to a wart on the sole of one’s foot in jest she might be prosecuted, and appear before a Fine Gael appointed judge.

    The much-trumpeted new Whistleblowing Act ineffectively opposed, and badly amended, is also worth considering. It does not protect media breaking stories; nor does it adequately protect employees including journalist from reporting externally.

    A legal environment that favours legacy publishers that employ expert legal advice in advance of publication, as opposed to private individuals ranting on Twitter – often to very small audiences – also ignores the restraints imposed internally by an increasingly corporatized press, which acts as a stenographer to the powerful. This is a role which Naomi O’Leary herself seems proud to perform.

    The Irish Times is a trust, but dependent on its sponsors and connections; so it does not, and arguably cannot, provide genuinely truth-driven coverage that a true democracy requires. It is institutionally neutered and not just by prospective defamation actions.

    Defamation suits and pre-emptive injunctions chill free speech, and are frowned on by lawyers and responsible journalists. Such injunctions sought to shut down Watergate and Wikileaks. The judgment in the seminal US constitutional case the Pentagon Papers frowned on it. Politicians ought to be thick-skinned when it comes to obloquy and ridicule, it goes with the territory of assuming power.

    What we are dealing with is a far wider problem in contemporary political discourse. Jürgen Habermas – perhaps the leading public intellectual alive on the planet – developed the crucial idea of ideal speech or communicative action, which serves as an argument to the effect that speech should be proper and non-ideological in order to achieve optimum technical outcomes that are also morally purposeful.

    Sadly, most of what passes for debate in Dáil Eireann would be at the very opposite pole to the kind of Enlightenment salon discussions he imagines.

    Outer Limits of Free Speech

    The criminalisation or suing or gagging of speech – generally of those that most need protecting – is an awful feature of these woe-begotten times.

    Given the approving coverage that legacy media already provides to representatives of the parties representing large corporations in Ireland, the least we might expect is that debate on online fora continues remains robust, and, in general, conducted without fear of suit.

    Rarely, if ever, does the Irish Times land a blow against vested interests in Ireland, channelling instead a latent anger against distant caricatures over whom we have no control. Online fora at least offer an opportunity for citizen journalists to provide accounts that challenge dominant narratives in a way that legacy media does not.

    Naturally, speech has its outer limits. Hate speech that inspires violence against minority groups cannot be tolerated in a civilised society. Social media publishers have a responsibility to moderate content, but cannot be allowed to decide what constitutes ‘disinformation’, and censor according to the whims of bodies that may be subject to regulatory capture. Censorship is always dangerous.

    Surely, with respect to Fine Gael for example, one should be allowed to describe them as crypto-fascists, or indeed suggest that Mary-Lou McDonald is associated with terrorists as Mr. Ross seems to have done.

    Fintan O’Toole constantly warns against the dangers posed by Sinn Féin, but rarely does he offer a searing critic of the corporatocracy and dominant political parties. His sympathies seem to lie with a weary establishment, which ‘have no choice’ but to coalesces with the neoliberal parties.

    Untrammelled freedom of expression should only be accorded to those who say something of significance – those who have something to lose by speaking out.

    Robust Debate

    The solution, of course, is not litigation but robust debate in civil society; as one of the great defenders of speech the late great Christopher Hitchens put it: ‘If you disagree with me, do so and stand in line so I can kick your ass.’ Or words to that effect. Possibly slurred.

    A defamation action can ruin a person’s life. A casual disregard for the truth in Ireland and premptive publication fed by the police and its journalistic cohorts in the gutter press can have serious consequences. The Irish Independent and much of RTÉ deserve no special protection.

    Given the platform he is accorded, nor should the gaffe-prone Leo Varadkar be allowed to shelter behind loose laws that should be designed to protect real journalists. His big mouth was most recently in evidence with his crass sub–American Monica Lewinsky comment.

    Indeed, give the parlous state of media in Ireland, one shudders to think what nonsense will be published if we are to dispense with reasonably strict defamation laws, and jury trials.

    Nonetheless, I can agree with a certain amount of what Naomi O’Leary’s recent article argues. No doubt defamation awards should be curtailed and are out of kilter with other jurisdictions, but negating jury trials where liars are exposed would be a retrograde step, and the criminalisation of the nebulous concept of hate speech could be disastrous, rendering satire almost impossible.

    Freedom of expression has its limits. Indeed, one wonders about the responsibility of a publisher such as the Irish Times, which gives a platform to an ideologue like Michael McDowell, who attributes the world’s problems to Vladimir Putin as opposed to the neo-liberal shock brigade that he and his Irish Times acolytes belong to. They have provided cover for mass evictions, a declining quality of life and incipient far-right fascism.

  • The Importance of Public Debate

    At a recent debate organised by the English-Speaking Union (ESU) at its HQ, Dartmouth House in London, we considered whether the British government’s response to Covid placed too great a priority on security rather than liberty. Naturally I took the liberty side of the argument.

    I expressed the fear that such a public forum as the ESU had convened could represent an interregnum, or lull in the storm, but hope springs eternal.

    A central hallmark of a democracy is freedom of speech. In terms of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, Anthony Lewis argued free speech should act as a search engine for the truth. Ronald Dworkin argued that free speech is a condition for legitimate government, and a counterweight to hysteria and unreason. Stephen Sedley, an eminent English judge, called it the lifeblood of a democracy. Freedom of speech also opens government and private enterprise to intense scrutiny. Above all, it encourages diversity and tolerance.

    Christopher Hitchens.

    Right to Ridicule

    It is not for the faint of heart. Christopher Hitchens remarked that freedom to speak inoffensively is meaningless, while Dworkin insisted on a right to ridicule.

    The overarching argument for speech rights was expressed beautifully in extremis by Hitchens when he said, ‘if you disagree with me that is your prerogative, so stand in line while I, rhetorically, kick your ass.’

    Conflict is resolved best through argument with the truth sacrosanct, ideally via open-ended public debate.

    This should not merely be rhetoric, but include arguments of substance. And the ESU provides, or can provide, that forum. Perhaps uniquely so. Indeed, it was heartening to encounter a multi-generational debate that included insightful youthful interventions.

    In retrospect, Hitchens represents the tail end of a tradition beginning with his hero Thomas Paine, mediated through his other great hero George Orwell, and culminating in him through a rich tapestry of public intellectuals and journalists, who fundamentally believed the pen to be mightier than the sword: that speech and words matter.

    Alas today speech has degenerated in the popular press into public titillation and gossip. It is also noticeable that the great traditions of investigative journalism, evident during the golden era of the Washington Post under Katherine Graham and The Times under Harold Evans, is in serious decline. Today most investigative journalism is a sham. The intellectual culture of the press has been degraded beyond belief.

    Social media is now a form of speech-driven pornography, where legitimate and illegitimate expressions of speech are proving impossible to disentangle. Character assassination and casual defamation have become the order of the day. The Internet may be a force of liberation in some respects, but also permits public display of ever more bizarre and outlandish commentaries. Mark Zuckerberg has unleashed a Promethean conflagration that remains untamed.

    Today’s emphasis on brevity and soundbites in politics conceals how the truth often requires explanation, as it is often nuanced.

    Aneurin Bevan talking to a patient at Park Hospital, Manchester, the day the NHS came into being in 1948.

    Like paying a visit to Woolworths…

    Aneurin Bevan, as good an orator as Churchill, once remarked that listening to a speech from Labour leader Clement Atlee was like paying a visit to Woolworths: ‘everything was in its place, but nothing was above the value of sixpence.’ To be convincing speech should have the necessary brio to rouse an audience.

    From Jeremy Bentham’s Speech Acts, Jürgen Habermas, develops the crucial idea of Ideal Speech or Communicative Action. This is an idea that speech should be formal, and not tainted by an unthinking recourse to ideology. He also suggests that such dialogue in the tradition of the Enlightenment salon will provide technical outcomes that are also morally purposeful.

    In Communicative Action he wrote: ‘Speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals based on a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit worthy.’

    It succeeds:

    insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behaviour. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilise the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.

    Although not all speech should have to be taken seriously, it is important that a forum such as Dartmouth House is maintained for popular shibboleths to be dismantled in public debate.

    George Orwell.

    Doublespeak

    So, propaganda should not be taken seriously, nor modes of advertising, without close and detailed inspection. The opinions of many putative experts fall under the same category. Certainly, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

    The use of language – however cloaked in notional expertise – to undermine freedoms is a very worrying development. The employment by officialdom of complex legal discourse and manipulation of language may represent the onset of what George Orwell referred to as ‘doublespeak’. This can be exposed in civilised public debate in a neutral forum.

    A certain degree of puff and blow will always be found among business-people. Advertising lubricates the wheels of commerce, but when almost non-existent standards permit multinational corporate entities, including the pharmaceutical sector, to fabricate, falsify and frankly lie, thus precipitating financial and environmental collapse, this may represent a return to the dark ages.

    Sadly, mainstream political debate has disintegrated. Notably, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton engaged in a travesty of a public debate before the US Presidential election of 2016. It was more like a staged reality TV show. Its nearest equivalent was the format of a farcical game show, such as the Jerry Springer Show.

    Thus politics has become part of the entertainment industry. Despite his Classical education, Boris Johnson invokes Peppa Pig before business leaders.

    So, an unconditional respect for freedom of speech should be offset by an understanding that certain speech does not warrant protection. Nonsense is best resolved by forensic debate – cutting through crap in common parlance.

    Surveillance Capitalism

    The criminalisation of unpopular opinion is a worrying feature of our times, and it is ‘subversives’ such as Julian Assange – along with those who dared to hold a referendum in Catalonia – that are accused, prosecuted, and convicted of treason. It is these dissidents that need protection.

    Under the Facebook and Google dispensation people become products to be profiled and mined, a point made brilliantly in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

    Moreover, political correctness has also led to the intensification of extremism. I would argue that this includes attempts by the transgender lobby to ban esteemed academics from the airwaves or campuses. ‘No platforming’ undermines public debate, as do unsubstantiated complaints to academic authorities that lead to the removal of a radical professor.

    So, when in Georgetown University certain radical professors indicated they were far from unhappy at the death of the arch conservative Judge Scalia, their conservative colleagues sought their removal on the basis that the ‘snowflake’ generation of easily upset students would be offended at the disrespect.

    We must maintain a right to protest, engage in civil disobedience and crucially – in an increasingly controlled and technocratic age – the right to offer truth-bearing, fearless and independent criticism.

    KKK rally near Chicago in the 1920s.

    The Limits of Freedom of Expression

    Speech has its outer limits, where there is a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action. This tension is explored in Snyder v Phelps, where a fundamentalist Christian group demonstrated outside a gay serviceman’s funeral.

    Upholding speech rights, the Court concluded that:

    Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.

    Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

    Moreover, in Brandenburg v Ohio 359 U.S 44, the Court went so far as to protect even racial abuse at a Ku Klux Klan ‘rally’ held at a farm in Hamilton County.

    One film showed twelve hooded figures, some of whom carried firearms. They were gathered around a large wooden cross, which they burned. No one was present other than the participants and the newsmen who made the film. Most of the words uttered during the scene were incomprehensible when the film was projected, but scattered phrases could be understood that were derogatory of African-Americans and, in one instance of Jews.

    The Supreme Court concluded that this was speech protected under the First Amendment on the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation, except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

    In contrast, the ECHR will not protect either racist speech or Holocaust denial. And even the ESU may feel the Americans went too far.

    But the detailed US decisions show how far the US courts are prepared to travel to protect speech. It is an important point that it is the speech we most dislike and most disagree with that needs the most protection.

    Village stocks in Bramhall, England c. 1900.

    Enemies of the People

    Whistle-blower legislation protects those who want to expose official corruption and protects speech. However, as I have found, the spectre of criminal prosecution under Official Secret’s legislation is always a suspensive and possible threat. Anyone blowing the whistle must evaluate the risk of prosecution, including the almost inevitable consequence of job loss and ostracism.

    Henrik Ibsen’s Enemies of the People – perhaps uniquely in his oeuvre – was overtly political. The premise is simple: a prominent and well-connected local engineer whose brother is the town mayor is asked to conduct a survey of the waters of the town. The town in question has become famous as a spa resort attracting a great deal of tourism, but when he tests the waters, he finds that they are polluted and informs the town and indeed his brother.

    It is the reaction to this that is interesting. Rather than lauding him and complimenting him for his finely attuned sense of ethics and correct analysis, they turn on him with ever-increasing ferocity. A storm of hatred is unleashed.

    He will destroy the local economy. Their livelihoods will be affected. The industry of the town will be negated. He is shunned, ostracised, victimised. His family is torn apart, and he becomes an ‘Enemy of the People’. The mob descend in all their unfettered glory. Sound familiar?

    Thus, we must protect freedom of speech as it vitalises a democracy, but we must also recognise the rules of civic discourse.

    Yet I fear that a great tradition of oracy, public communication, rationalist discourse and generalist interest is in decline: usurped by the purveyors of false information, false speech acts and blandishments.

    If the English-Speaking Union can revitalise the young with a passion for genuine public communication, it will be performing a great service, training a new generation of professionals in the essential and transferable skills of advocacy, public communication and, above all, respect for the truth.

    Feature Image: Presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon for the 1960 election in the United States.

    The English-Speaking Union (ESU) is an international charity and membership organisation underpinned by Royal Charter working to give all young people – regardless of background – the speaking and listening skills and the cross-cultural understanding to enable them to thrive.  

    Our programmes are underpinned by over 100 years’ expertise in the field of debate and public speaking delivery, policy and research. 

    Founded in 1918 by the author and journalist Sir Evelyn Wrench, the ESU brings together and empowers people of all cultures and nationalities by building confidence and shaping communication skills, so that individuals can realise their full potential.  In our 36 branches in England and Wales and 54 international branches, the ESU carries out a variety of activities such as: competitions, debating, public speaking and student exchange programmes, teacher training, classroom outreach, research and scholarships. All of these encourage the effective use of the English language around the world.

    To find out more about our work, please go to: https://www.esu.org/ and so consider joining the ESU: https://www.esu.org/support-our-work/become-a-member/.  Please contact Matthew Christmas, Head of Engagement, if you would like to know more or to volunteer with us: matthew.christmas@esu.org.

    Dartmouth House, in the heart of Mayfair, is our International Headquarters and, as Covid recedes, we are delighted to be re-starting our regular public debates where we encourage civil discussion and informed debate where all ages can get involved. 

    The next Dartmouth House Debate is on Monday 09 May 2022 at 1830 hrs to debate the motion that “This House believes that cryptocurrency and NFTs are a hyped-up fad.” 

    We hope that will want to find out more and get involved with the ESU.

  • Public Intellectuals: Hannah Arendt

    A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.
    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966)

    It is, perhaps, notable that as a young student Hannah Arendt was the Nazi-sympathising philosopher Martin Hedeigger’s lover. His little Jewess trophy, perhaps redolent in his mind of Weimar Republic decadency. Surprisingly, she never really developed a hated for him, intellectually at least, despite his stunning failure in selling his soul to the Nazis.

    In contrast to Heidegger, the ultra-conservative German burgher Thomas Mann chose exile. His rather clunky prose is excused on that point alone, and, suitably, his best work arrived after decamping to Switzerland. This includes especially Doctor Faustus (1947) an oblique portrayal of an actor and academic visited by a Mephistophelian figure, who sells his soul to the Nazis – a Heideggerean type in fact.

    Arendt’s background, steeped in the great German philosophical tradition, but rejected as a Jewess – and even subjected to a period under Gestapo confinement – gave her an unparalleled vantage on the great evils of the twentieth century, and the perils of ideological conformity that corrupted even the most elevated intellects. A failure to exercise a moral conscience in performing actions is a recurring failure, even where we do not see the extremes of totalitarian rule.

    Arendt and Albert Camus

    Arendt is among the most important public intellectual of our age for a variety of reasons.

    First,  she witnessed at first hand the rise of antisemitism in Germany, before migrating to the Americas, along with others from a golden generation of great mitteleuropean thinkers – many of them also Jewish – such as Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin. She was young and resilient enough to avoid the despair that led many to suicide, or to expire prematurely like Louis Althusser, whose structuralist influence has had a less than positive influence.

    A migratory professor with lifestyle “issues” including a nicotine habit that has become increasingly unacceptable in America, Arendt’s cosmopolitan “Europeanness” was tolerated in her time. In a bygone age the Frankfurt School colonised American academia, and a person such as Vladimir Nabokov – a different beast altogether – could became a professor in Columbia. Imagine the uproar if his Lolita was published today?

    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards
    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards

    In some respects her Gallic twin – and the other indispensable public intellectual for our time – Albert Camus also disavowed extremism, strict ideological conformity and what may be described as scientism. Both firmly rejected a positivism identified with the nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte (d.1857), whose conclusions according to Camus ‘are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.’

    According to Camus, Comte conceived of a society whose:

    [S]cientists would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience ‘of action, of thought, and of feeling’ would be given to the high priest who reign over everything.[i]

    As today we hang on the pronouncement of anointed scientists who decide our intimate social lives, it would appear Comte’s vision has come to fruition. Thus, one of the latter-day hierarchy, Professor Niall Ferguson in an interview with The Times revealed his amazement at the power he wielded. After the British government followed Chinese policy in introducing a lockdown he observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’

    Likewise, Arendt equated Comte’s hope for ‘a united, regenerated humanity under the leadership – présidence – of France’[ii] with the idea of a ‘national mission’ used by English imperialists to justify global expansion during the late nineteenth century. Arendt also pointed to the danger of the positivists’ assumption – evident in totalitarian Soviet propaganda – ‘that the future is eventually scientifically predictable’.[iii]

    Eichmann in Jerusalem

    Eichmann on trial in 1961.

    Arendt’s fame rests especially on the proverbial shitstorm caused by her coverage of the former SS officer Alfred Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She coined the immortal phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe how under Nazism ambitious functionaries and bean counters – such as Eichmann – climbed career ladders without regard for the supreme brutality of their regime. This was not apparent to them in their day-to-day lives; so out of sight was out of mind. In any age, including this, we should be wary of a cost-benefit analysis of life where board room decisions decide the fate of human beings and the natural world.

    Indicatively, in Ireland between 1996 and 2012 the number of qualified accountants grew by a staggering eight-three percent to number 27,112.[iv] It is now clear that bean counters and bureaucrats dominate our lives. Although many may not seem like villanous characters, any buffoonery on display should not be a source of reassurance. As Arendt describes Eichmann:

    Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported.[v]

    Eichmann in Jerusalem highlights how an obsession with compliance and promotion blunts moral sensibility; and how a cognitive dissonance takes hold where slavish obedience leads to a failure to question one’s actions. This is the moral corrosion generated by a lack of consequentialist or moral thinking.

    The Human Condition

    I would argue that The Human Condition (1958) is central to understanding our age, in that it emphasizes the good life, and a need for Aristotelian measure and moderation in pursuit of eudaimonia. As the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics puts it: ‘Every art and every scientific inquiry, and similarly every action and purpose, may be said to aim at some good.’

    The Human Condition emphasizes a moral conscience that should ideally inform all our actions, especially politics. And she warns of a detachment from human realities that may occur once the “pensionopolis” of an entitled state class have no concern for trade or manufacturing:

    No activity that served only the purpose of making a living, of sustaining only the life process, was permitted to enter the political realm, and this at the grave risk of abandoning trade and manufacture to the industriousness of slaves and foreigners, so that Athens indeed became the “pensionopolis” with a “proletariat of consumers”[vi]

    It is insufficient to perform a deed in isolation; you have to understand what you are doing and for whom and why. Or at the least investigate and interrogate your motivations, while avoiding the pitfalls of perfectionism. As Voltaire put it: ‘the best is the enemy of the good’, a point seemingly lost on certain scientific authorities in their utopian pursuit of ZeroCovid.

    Arendt also warns against the scientism in our public discourse, or more crucially the triumph of a form of mathematical intelligence, which is often divorced from moral decision-making, with Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ after the launch of the atomic bomb an obvious statement of this pitfall.

    It is a point the philosopher Mary Midgley (above) has also made in response to a letter Albert Einstein wrote to the wife of a deceased physicist that ‘people like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’[vii]

    In response Midgley wrote:

    if reality was indeed something that only physicists could reach – if everybody else was wandering clueless through a hopeless maze of illusions – there would be a crucial difference between these scientists and the rest of us. We are being told that we are mere peasants, helpless “folk-psychologists”, and we may well hear this dictum as a simple insult “you are nothing.”[viii]

    Thus Arendt, along with Midgley, warns against placing too great a premium on mathematical intelligence – and those who may consider lesser mortals as mere nothings. Arguably, this can be seen in the all-too-ready acceptance of Professor Ferguson’s doomsday mathematical modelling for Covid-19 mortality last year, which proved to be wrong by a significant margin. According to Mark Landler and Stephen Castle in the New York Times, Ferguson’s interpretation was ‘treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’

    More widely, the contemporary veneration of science has spilled into worship of the ‘dismal science’ of economics, and the triumph of homo economicus. This represents a negation of critical human identity through a hyper-inflated economic reality of survival. That any critical intelligence endures, divorced from corporate ‘influencers’, is almost a minor miracle.

    The Human Condition also ably demonstrates that when the sphere of political engagement and the public sphere become redundant and private interests control democracy, then it has given way to something else

    Technocracy

    Arendt warns of the dangers of technocracy, pointing to the blunted moral conscience of an Eichmann, who reasoned that he was only putting people on trains, and did not have the intellectual curiosity to consider their destination and the likely outcome, or was casually indifferent. Arendt understood that he was more concerned with consorting with powerful people, and networking in a moral oblivion. One might add that being exclusively within one’s own silo bubble, or online echo chamber – as all too many are today – is recipe for serious trouble.

    Likewise, Jurgen Habermas has warned of the danger of technocratic solutions devoid of a moral compass, coining the phrase the public sphere.

    Juergen Habermas

    To offset growing consumerism Arendt advocates the Vita Activa of civic engagement. She remains even-handed, recognising that scientists should of course be listened to – providing crucial specialisation – but it should be understood that many lack a moral or philosophical education, and without ethical training ultimately hold no allegiance to the truth.

    In our time, all too often, political debates reach a point of paralysis in endless arguments over statistics; we are to quote Peter Greenaway ‘Drowning By Numbers’. Arendt’s analysis demonstrates how number can give rise to anti-humanism, perfectionism including an obsessions with tidiness, and other forms of anal retentiveness that inhibit our development as human beings.

    Science detached from philosophy is divorced from ethical considerations, and thus can be deployed for great evil. Therefore, ‘totalitarianism appears to be only the last stage in a process during which ‘science’ [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.’[ix]

    Banner of Stalin in Budapest.

    The Origins of Totalitarianism

    The Origins Of Totalitarianism (1951) is the seminal account of twentieth century totalitarianism – as distinct from the ‘mere’ fascism of figure such as Mussolini – of both the Nazis under Hitler and Communism under Stalin. It offers a series of reflections that should serve as a warning in our time – when we cannot be said to live under totalitarianism – but where, nonetheless, an unmistakable shift has occurred in the relationship between the state and the individual. Thus measures that no government would previously have contemplated – from lockdowns to curfews – have been normalised in many countries, and controls have even been tightened in Ireland at precisely the point when a declining number are dying from the disease. Coincidentally, ‘terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition.’[x]

    We cannot overlook the damage of enforced social isolation, as Arendt put it:

    What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the nontotalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of ever-growing masses of our century.[xi]

    Arendt also well understood the fictions that underpin our understanding of the world, and a tendency to embrace conspiratorial ideas in the absence of reasonable explanations:

    Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. Man, who has not been granted the gifts of undoing, who is always an unconsulted heir of other men’s deeds, and who is always burdened with a responsibility that appears to be the consequences of an unending chain of events rather than unconscious acts, demands an explanation and interpretation of the past in which the mysterious key to his future seems to be concealed. Legends were the spiritual foundation of every ancient city, empire, people, promising safe guidance through the limitless space of the future. Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.[xii]

    Thus, it is essential that in responding to the damage of contemporary social atomisation that we do not succumb to ideologies that sow further division.

    Arendt observed how allegiances break down when Populist mobs gain traction. Initially the targets are those of no influence or assets, but essentially anyone is guilty under the arbitrary laws of totalitarianism in power. Thus she recalls:

    It is obvious that the most elementary caution demands that one avoid all intimate contacts, if possible – not in order to prevent discovery of one’s secret thoughts, but rather to eliminate, in the almost certain sense of future trouble, all persons who might not only who might have an ordinary cheap interest in your denunciation but an irresistible need to bring about your ruin simply because they are in danger of their own lives.

    Sadly, this agitation seems reminiscent of the states of mind actually cultivated by government scientists, who have deployed ‘fear, shame and scapegoating to change minds is an ethically dubious practice that in some respects resembles the tactics used by totalitarian regimes such as China,’ according to Gary Sidley, a retired clinical psychologist. Nowadays, instead of being imprisoned, we contend with social shame and even loss of a job for heinous crimes such as meeting a friend for a pint or taking a hill walk.

    Radical Evil

    Arendt observes a failure ‘inherent in our entire philosophical tradition’ to conceive of a radical evil.[xiii] Such a blind spot she argues means, ‘Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’[xiv]

    Moreover, it is important to note in our present state of enforced isolation:

    [I]t has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical governments is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror, it certainly is its most fertile ground, it always is its result.[xv]

    So let us be wary of the strongman leaders who have emerged to ‘guide’ us to the promised land during a pandemic, which shows up the damage of their own making; and who now argue that solutions lie in asserting the very neoliberal values that brought us to this impasse in in the first place.

    Sadly Burkean and Habermasean moderation has been lost in an age of tribal nationalism. The handmaiden’s of the strongman leaders are in fact a grasping “pensionopolis” that are removed from the dramatically worsening poverty in countries such as Ireland caused by the pandemic.

    This sadly is the digital generation of what are, in effect, fabricated human identities – a kind of unreal Blade Runner replicant. Homo faber has given way to homo economicus, as the law and economics ideologues put it. Craftsmanship and intellectualism are despised, and the public space denuded of significance.

    Finally, and perhaps more optimistically, Arendt clearly distinguishes between loneliness, and solitude: ‘Solitude requires being alone, where loneliness only shows itself most sharply in company with others.’ Let us thus endeavour to accept solitude as a temporary gift and resist the loneliness which is fertile ground for the infliction of terror.

    [i] Albert Camus, The Rebel, Translated by Anthony Bower, Penguin, London, 2013, p.145

    [ii] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin, London, 1966, p.237

    [iii] Arendt, Ibid 1966, p.454

    [iv] Tony Farmar, The History of Irish Book Publishing, Stroud, The History Press, 2018, p.12

    [v] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking Press, New York, 1963, p.55

    [vi] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958, p.37

    [vii] Mary Midgley, Are You an Illusion, p.136

    [viii] Beard, Ibid, p.138

    [ix] Arendt, Ibid 1966, p.453

    [x] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.514

    [xi] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.627

    [xii] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.271

    [xiii] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.602

    [xiv] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.603

    [xv] Arendt, Ibid, 1966, p.623

  • Public Intellectual Series: Religion

    Say it to me if you have something to confess
    I was born on the wrong side of the tracks like Ginsberg and Kerouac
    Bob Dylan, Key West (2020)

    Notwithstanding my loathing for fundamentalisms of all strands, I have always preached from a gospel of love, or at least a form of reason that leads to moderation in the Public Intellectual Series.

    Ideas about religion and the existence of God based on reason, such as that articulated by Thomas Aquinas, must yield to the facts as these emerge. The ideas contained in natural philosophy – with its harmony of the spheres – available to a medieval monk has been superseded by the discoveries of the Enlightenment that brought the hitherto unknown field of science. Yet, this yielded quantum physics that permits a layer of uncertainty, wherein the nature of an object may shift depending on one’s perspective.

    The ‘uncertainty principle’ seems to have been anticipated by the Ancient Greeks, as Albert Camus explains in his essay ‘Helen’s Exile’ (1948):

    Greek thought always took refuge behind the conception of limits. It never carried anything to extremes, neither the sacred, nor reason, because it negated nothing, neither the sacred nor reason. It took everything into consideration, balancing shadow with light.

    This he contrasted with ‘Our Europe’ which:

    off in the pursuit of totality, is the child of disproportion. She negates beauty, as she negates whatever she does not glorify. And through all her diverse ways, she glorifies but one thing, which is the future rule of reason.

    We may find, therefore, an excess of reason breeding dogmatism that gives rise to unreason, or even scientism. Thus, the subtlety of the Greek mind, now reflected in the thinking of Jurgen Habermas, permits a space for religion in the public sphere, but certainly not the rule of religion, or a single moral vision.

    An awareness of the limitation of reason, or really any one individual’s capacity to reason in a divinely inspired way is not, however, to dismiss the true nature of objective facts in a given situation. As Karl Popper (‘On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance’ (1962)) points out:

    belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of justice, and of freedom, can hardly survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches that there are no objective facts; not merely in this particular case, but in any other case; and that the judge cannot have made a factual mistake because he can no more be wrong about the facts than he can be right.

    Therefore, dogmatism of all kinds – especially couched in religious terms –  should be excluded, but we must also accept facts insofar as we are capable of ascertaining these, using the intellectual tools inherent in science and history that have served public intellectuals through the ages.

    Extremism of Our Times

    Where divine revelation is treated by true believers as factual is truly dangerous. Thus moral philosopher Professor John Finnis assumes the existence of one God ‘the Almighty’ to be self-evident, leading to a fixed moral view that does not allow for diversity, or even mild eccentricity, within our private lives.

    In recent writings, Finnis illustrates a dominant extremism of our time. Marriage is for him exclusively between a man and a woman. Therefore, gay marriage is not a good. Furthermore, marriage involves sexual congress, which has as its aim the production of children. Not sex for the sake of having sex, but only for conception. Thus, Finnis considers homosexual congress and sex outside marriage as intrinsically shameful, immoral and harmful.

    Some argue that he derives such normative conclusions about homosexual relationships from factual premises of heterosexual physical contact. Moreover, in the civilised world, many of the practices Finnis sanctions are considered by homosexual and heterosexual couples both within and outside of marriage as part of normal sexual congress and behaviour.

    The issue highlights how sexuality has warped contemporary Christianity, negating more important issues around the real suffering of human beings in this world, a concern that Pope Francis is at least beginning to address. In his latest encyclical Fratelli Tutti (‘All Brothers, 2020) Francis condemns, ‘a concept of popular and national unity influenced by various ideologies … creating new forms of selfishness and a loss of the social sense under the guise of defending national interests.’

    Shaming Culture

    The advent of shaming culture as opposed to a justice culture, involves the demonisation of others and is a reversion to social primitivism, akin to burning witches at the stake, or René Girard’s idea of the reconciliatory victim or scapegoat. It is allied to a rise in Populist hysteria and religious mania.

    The leading contemporary Jewish philosopher in the U.K., Jonathan Sacks, in a balanced way seeks to exonerate religious belief from its critics. In God’s Name (2016) is a defence of religion in terms of the values it produces. Sacks rails against extremism, a theme he revisits in Morality (2020), where he outlines positive religious values, including a focus on dignity, associative levels of responsibility, community and a sense of public service and the common good.

    Jonathan Sacks

    Christian jihadism encompasses such forays as the invasion of South America by Spanish Conquistadors and the Crusades, leading to mass slaughter and the destruction of indigenous civilizations. In modern times the Blairite justification, couched in Christian terms, for the war on Iraq was also used to mask narrow self-interest in oil.

    Sacks equates altruistic evil with the thinking within the neoconservative group, wherein we are considered good and those outside our group are evil. This leads to the arrogant assumption that we are doing it for ‘their’ own good, killing multitudes will pave the way for democracy.

    Crusades, whether modern or ancient, are invariably cloaked in the garment of religious ideology, but are really about resources and the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. They also still permit mass murder. The connection between religion and unbridled capitalism has long been evident, and is, alas, woven into the fabric of institutionalised religion.

    All of these examples are truisms historically about the search of the Church and its believers or fellow travellers for gold and money – the Kingdom of Mammon, as opposed to the Kingdom of Heaven.

    Both Christopher Hitchens, and indeed Richard Dawkins, have written extensively about the new forms of religious extremes we are witnessing, with the finger of blame primarily being pointed at Islam. That religion of course provides graphic examples of brutal beheadings, mass executions, stoning to death for adultery, planes hitting the Twin Towers, as well as the murder of journalists.  All of this is unconscionable, but much of the rage can be traced to neo-imperialism in the Middle East, culminating in the invasion of Iraq. Christopher Hitchens’s greatest intellectual error was to support the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq.

    Power Vacuum

    So what is the root cause of Islamic extremism and Evangelical and Catholic extremism?

    Blame is rightly attached to the misguided and illegal wars in Iraq, and going all the way back to the 1920s, the creation of client regimes in the Middle East. The unintended consequences of the occupation of Iraq led to a power vacuum in Syria, which gave an opportunity to well organized religiously inspired militants.

    This, however, was the culmination of long-term trends within Islam, wherein successive generations had been radicalized by preachers who exploited a loss of identity in the face of Western consumerism, segregation and enduring poverty.

    In Marxist terms, religious fundamentalism can be traced to growing disparities of wealth and structural inequality, as well as a lack of opportunities to gain a rounded education, with all too great an emphasis on technical or scientific education for economic advancement, as opposed to a broad liberal education that inculcates critical thinking.

    Primarily, however, this extremism speaks of a need to belong to a cause, leading to belief in something ethereal, no matter how ludicrous. Belief in an afterlife defines people’s existences and justifies, as far as they are concerned, even self-immolation.

    But the secularist response in France especially – under the aggressive application of laïcité – to ban or regulate the wearing of the burka or nijab, upheld in the European Court of Human Rights in the SAS case, only appears to inflame the issue. This is really little more than a sideshow to a wider collapse in values.

    A Group of Women Wearing Burkas. Afghanistan women wait outside a USAID-supported health care clinic, Afghanistan, 2003.

    As the wheels come off the economic system as we know it, and where people are searching for words and expressions to convey their understanding of the withering of societal bonds, extremist Christianity has stepped into the void to provide solace.

    In the United States, at least, we are seeing an unholy synergy developing between Evangelical Christians and right-wing Catholicism. Far-right demagogues, led by Trump, have articulated a view that ‘our’ country is being overrun by immigrants and that the dominant ethnic group must ‘take back control’ from a phantom intellectual Marxism, liberal elites, or straight socialism – all emanating from the decadence of the mixed race cosmopolis.

    This a descent into the racist abyss, where those we disagree with are scapegoated and targeted. It is a product of a dangerous dualistic mode of thinking, which Sacks identifies with a need to define God in relation to the Satan residing in others. This is the demonisation of those we disagree with, which is also evident in social media vilification.

    Real Suffering

    The suffering expressed through religion is the genuine sigh of oppressed creatures. In Marxist terms, the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

    In a world of poverty, of diminishing resources and human degradation the appeal of an afterlife is obvious. What the Christian far-right in the United States and elsewhere offer is the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which involves a veneer of protection against the unbelievers. This leads to isolation of the righteous few in gated communities, segregating the chosen people from the disaster they have inflicted on others.

    The pandemic has led to the recrudescence of a millenarian ethos and sense of doom that is creating a society not dissimilar to that found in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, enforced against men and women alike.

    The philandering Donald Trump is merely a front man for larger interests, who control the puppet on the chain. He dances to the beat of the dark money of the Republican Party, appointing the Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was his parting gift.

    End of Days

    Another hallmark of the present distorted religious influence of the neoliberal world order is the denial of climate change, and the employment of post-truth reasoning – the denial of objective facts underpinning the rule of law as Karl Popper saw it – to justify this.

    The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his simple and illuminating Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, closes his account, with a reflection on how centuries of discoveries affect an understanding of ourselves. While generally positive, one stark passage stands out for its relevance to the challenge of addressing climate change.

    I believe our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilisation.

    Carlo Rovelli

    This exemplifies the difference between a man of science and objective facts, and those of a fundamentalist bent that place mankind atop the pyramid of Creation.

    More terrifying than where Ravelli places us in the grand scheme is the end of days preacher who cannot countenance that we may indeed be just an irrelevant blip on this Earth, but instead sees the Earth as something created for us to plunder and exploit.

    Cognisant of this threat, Noam Chomsky recently claimed that the Republican Party is the ‘most dangerous organization in world history’ He has deliberately corrected many interviewers who mistakenly stated that in fact he said it was the most dangerous organization in the world today.

    Chomsky also mentioned in a BBC Newsnight interview that there has to be connection between the denial of science, and active attempts to undermine it, with the belief of nearly 40% of the American public that the Second Coming will occur by 2050.

    Why would a deluded mind bother saving life and civilization, when it is prophesised that it will all be over soon? Christian End of Day’s logic, or lack thereof, is not so prevalent in agnostic Europe at present, but the breakdown of the social order through the austerity shock doctrine, and now the coup de grâce of the pandemic, leaves the continent exposed to those same forces, which may be articulated in an equally millenarian scientism that sees human beings as vectors of disease.

    Loss of Meaning

    In a 2004 essay Václav Havel foresaw much of what we now find in a piece called ‘What Communism Still Teaches Us,’ describing ‘supposed laws of the market and other invisible hands that direct our lives.’ There remains an abject lack of humanism in neoliberal politics and society, comparable in certain ways to Communist totalitarianism, not least in the brainwashing of the young through solipsistic social media.

    With the loss of religious forms, however, many living in modern technocratic societies experience a loss of meaning, and even a moral void. The social structure of religions fostered close relationships and inculcated a sense of community, as well as charity, the protection of human dignity and a commitment to public service. The Bible injuncts kindness towards strangers, and to do unto others as you would wish them to do to you, which also derives from Aristotelian philosophy.

    To rectify contemporary problem such as poverty and environmental degradation, undoubtedly we need to shift from a conception of ‘I’ to ‘we’ as Sacks argues.

    In The Godless Gospel, Julian Baggini also calls for a form of religion shorn of hatred for our age, where we develop personal and social goods through deeds not pious words. Through this we may realise our best intentions and develop empathy and compassion, a commitment to personal humility and an obligation and commitment to the truth. Above all we should try and do as little harm as possible he asserts.

    All of these are good values that Christianity may teach to those of a secular persuasion lacking in moral clarity.

    Thus from a secular perspective, Jürgen Habermas understood how religion engenders social integration, and is the basis for communicative action. As far back as 1978 he argued, from an agnostic perspective, for the necessity of religious ideas to humanise society. Those of faith must learn to communicate reasonably, which means the renunciation of violence and extremism. We must learn to talk and communicate our differences, agreeing on facts to ground the rule of law.

    Pope Francis

    Pope Francis’s experiences in the barrios of Buenos Aires appears to have shaped an empathy towards those afflicted with extreme poverty and subjected to degradation. He preaches tolerance, engagement and social and economic justice. This has largely been stripped of the condemnation of sexuality and sexual expression evident in his predecessor John Paul II.

    Let us hope the liberation theology that is intrinsic in Francis’s message is not tainted by the dark money of the Vatican, and he does not go the way of John Paul I, or ‘God’s Banker’ Roberto Calvi, found hanging from Blackfriars bridge in 1982, just outside the site of my Chambers.

    Christian socialism is a potentially vital force if it reflects the values of what Philip Pullman calls that great man Jesus, but not the values, as he equally presents, of that scoundrel Jesus Christ. This latter is a distortion of New Testament values, dedicated to the accumulation of capital, a lack of compassion and political manipulation.

    If inequality grows any further – amid ever-greater accumulations of wealth – then neoliberalism may well give way to neo-feudalism. Viewed in this regard it is easier to understand the potential for an alliance between church and capital in subjugating the masses. The Book of Genesis sanctions man’s dominion over the earth which has led to a scorched earth approach towards environmental regulations that will ultimately impoverish us all. For too long Christianity has married the exchange of goods with the exchange of gods.

    Scopes Trial

    In parts of American Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is accorded equal weight and validity as Creationism in schools. Children are taught that the world was created by God the Almighty in the space of seven days.

    It’s been a long time coming. In the Scopes Trial of 1925 – where a High School teacher was put on trial for teaching Darwinism – the legendary American attorney Darrow anticipated what happens when a society abandons reason altogether.

    Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? In addition, tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. Soon you may ban books and newspapers. Then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!

    In a period of declining belief in a broad liberal education, and where the art-repeneur has taken over from true artists, there is a desperation for something to cling on to, whether Creationism, neoliberalism or even scientism. We are living in an age of pervasive ignorance, which can be traced to our putative higher educational institutions, where students are taught to believe and comply. Or as Foucault would have it, punishment is becoming internalized through control vectors.

    Lost in all of this is the message of Christian socialists such as Pope Francis, Sacks, and even their ideological fellow-traveller Habermas. This is a form of Christian decency that reflects the needs of human beings battling for survival in an increasingly hostile environment, where adequate nutrition, shelter, health care, education, housing and even dignity are denied.

    Thus organised religions appear to be experiencing an existential battle between the neoliberals and Christian socialists. Exclusionary family values that are a hallmark of religious neoliberalism conceal a corporate existence and controlled sexuality. Its tenets are designed to diminish any radicalisation among the young.

    But let us hope a new-found empathy with the Wretched of the Earth can emerge, in Catholicism at least under Pope Francis, and perhaps other Protestant more tolerant faiths. This would reflect the moderation and human decency of public intellectuals in this series such as Jürgen Habermas, Albert Camus, George Orwell and Edmund Burke, all of whom in their own ways rejected the moral absolutes that lead to human degradation.

    No Time to be Making Enemies

    On his deathbeds the great Enlightenment intellectual Voltaire (1694-1778) was asked by a priest in attendance to renounce the devil. Voltaire considered this advice, but approaching the pearly gates he decided against doing so: ‘This is no time,’ he said, ‘to be making new enemies.’

    At this stage in our history it is important to be open to all belief systems, including Christianity in spite of its diabolical history. Christianity, and other religions, must confront a dark past, but can provide moral guidance in the face of a culturally dominant neoliberal cost-benefit analysis of life. Dogmatic secularist should concede that there are lessons to be drawn from religions. These may help generate a genuine brotherhood and sisterhood among human beings to confront the real evil in this world.

  • Public Intellectuals: Jürgen Habermas

    It came as a surprise when the editor of Cassandra Voices divulged recently that he had never read any works by Jürgen Habermas (1929 – ), who I regard as a strong contender to be the greatest living public intellectual. I put this down to limitations inherent in his generation, so I felt compelled to expand on the wisdom and complexity of this towering figure – among the last in the line of transcendent, rigorous intellectuals of the Old Left.

    It is perhaps a partial Germanic background that predisposes my appreciation of Habermas, and I frequently reference his work. Clearly not to everyone’s taste, a technical, and at times dense prose writer, he is not a model stylist. The salient points he makes are, however, of substance, lying as they do in an embrace of communality, anti-extremism and moderation.

    Habermas’s intellectual origins are in Critical Theory and he was, as we shall see, at one time an adherent of the Frankfurt School, and a committed Marxist (he remains Marxist in orientation, but his intellectual voyage has taken him a long way clear). Having definitively broken from the Frankfurt School, he became a firm defender of rationality and Enlightenment Values, the very antithesis of the Designer Marxism of the Sorbonne that spawned this Post-Truth zeitgeist that I have previously written about.

    In essence, Habermas recovers the substantive aspects of rationality, and puts forward a theory of practical reasoning and political deliberation. He regards reason as emancipatory and an antidote to dogmatism, compulsion, and domination. The substance of law is particularly important to him – indeed he has expressed regret that he did not study law – and much of his writings are legal in character.

    Part of the Habermas project is to elevate the space of public deliberation and the Rule of Law above Postmodern scepticism. Arguably, embracing legal philosophy compelled him to focus on the particular rather than the general – empiricism rather than Continental philosophy.

    Background

    As a member of the Flakhelfer generation who came of age during the final phase of Wold War II, Habermas was tremendously influenced by the horrors of the Holocaust, which he first encountered in cinematic reels after the war.

    In response, he venerates the Rule of Law as a counterweight to the horrors of Nazism. Moreover, though at times he is withering in his assessment of the post-war West Germany state (‘the FDR’), his criticism remained constructive and democratic in orientation, anticipating a Third Way between conservatism and doctrinaire Marxism, while bypassing the Critical Theory festering in academia.

    In his early writings Habermas was anxious to depart from influential intellectuals such as Carl Schmitt, tainted by association with Nazism. He opposed veneration of the state, emphasising instead the importance of civil society.

    In contrast to Marxists – many of whom dismissed this as a form of bourgeois fetishization – Habermas emphasised the value of legality. He does not, however, endorse law uncritically. Thus he was sceptical initially of the role of the German Constitutional Court, which developed fundamental rights in a largely progressive fashion. Habermas regarded such judge-led laws as paternalistic. As indicated, he emphasised the importance of civil society engaging in rational discourse rather than a scheme of state-driven rights recognition.

    Furthermore, Habermas sought to reconcile legitimacy with legality. He puts significant store in constitutionalism and a right to civil disobedience, reviving a liberal-socialist argument against the unbending Postmodernists. Habermas argues for a structural transformation and reinvention of the public sphere.

    In his early writings Habermas was also anxious to promote a positive conception of democracy, based on principles of legality and popular sovereignty. He identified an eclipse in the public sphere in the FDR during 1950s, and argued that in place of reasoning and decision-making propaganda and acclamation held sway.

    Natural Law

    Habermas has been deeply critical of an idea of politics as a technical affair, emphasising instead the importance of plebiscite or Direct Democracy. He is critical of a growing tendency to devolve power to technocrats and administrators, seeing the legislative branch of government as the real guardian of constitutionality. He argues that negative liberties could be reinvented only as positive guarantees of participation within a unified state society.

    In his earlier writings he was also sceptical of civil and political rights and these negative liberties. However, from 1961 we see a shift in his writing, as he became more positive about rights. In particular he is influenced by a series of Federal Constitutional Court decisions, including the Luth/Harlan case, which reinforced positive liberties and had a radiating effect on private law. He commends the court for applying rights in a horizontal fashion, against private parties and for recognising a positive obligation to protect speech.

    Nonetheless, throughout his intellectual life he has remained sceptical of court-imposed solutions, and, unlike the American philosopher Dworkin, judges themselves.

    It should be stressed that Habermas has been opposed to the Natural Law orientation of the Federal Constitutional Court, and has always sedulously opposed Natural Law. As he put it ‘Natural Law is devoid of any and every convincing philosophical justification,’[i] a point I endorse.

    Democratic Deficits

    Between 1961 and 1964 Habermas railed against democratic deficits in the FDR, a state which he believed had been handed over to technocrats. Inherent was a distrust of scientization and its fundamental incapacity to grapple with ethical questions, applying to the pursuit of the ‘good life’. He argued that the normative considerations essential to a democracy were being occluded.

    In a prescient remark, anticipating our present commodification of human life he writes:

    In modelling itself on the natural sciences, a science of politics risks treating the human being more as an object than a subject of historical processes.[ii]

    Habermas coined the term decisionist, meaning political decisions taken in a technical fashion unharnessed to ethical considerations. To counter this he emphasised the importance of reason, arguing against the scientization of politics and suggesting that unless technical knowledge was translated into practical knowledge political power would remain substantively irrational. The public sphere was the only place for that translation and that act of translation is the only way to make ‘a scientized society, a rational one.’[iii]

    Habermas thus argues that technocratic thought distorts the proper relationship between science and politics, and that citizens of the state need to be included in the translation between science and politics; in other words democracy needs to be inclusive and direct, as a technocratic consciousness excludes practical ethical questions from public deliberation.

    Habermas suggests that ruling elites in reducing practical questions about the good life to mere technical problems, undermined public, rational democratic discussion of values by the public. This had the effect of masking the value-laden character of government decisions, generally in the service of ascendant capitalism.

    Today’s fumbling bureaucrats and trickle-down-austerity-merchants are the semi-educated heirs of Habermas’s technocratic elite, devoted to growth-without-end, while ignoring externalities such as ecological and environmental meltdown.

    Alas his countrywoman Angela Merkel and her Eurocrat friends succeeded, by proxy, in destroying the social fabric and human structure of Ireland and Greece through adherence to a savage doctrine of austerity. The imposition of technical solutions (‘reducing the deficit’) negated the moral dimension of their actions, upholding a value-laden ideology that worked to the benefit of a shrinking economic elite who prospered after ‘weathering the storm’, at the expense of the preponderance of the population who were left on the scrapheap.

    Herbert Marcuse

    Habermas distinguished himself from his friend and former Frankfurt school colleague Marcuse in his attitude towards technology.

    First, unlike Marcuse, he saw technology as a permanent fixture of the human condition. Secondly, while Marcuse leaned towards the idea of a technological Utopia, wherein emancipatory machines would free workers from of work, Habermas emphasised the importance of the institutional framework of choice, decision and practical deliberation, seeing the permanence of technology without its liberating consequences. Thus, he steered a middle course between the technocratic right and the Marxist left:

    today better utilisation of an unrealised potential leads to an improvement of the economic industrial apparatus but no longer eo ipso to a transformation of the institutional framework with emancipatory consequences.[iv]

    He would surely despair at the mass surveillance of the internet, social media and automation, including a reconstitution of human identity through information technology. These are far from emancipatory consequences of technology. Automation and robotic capitalism will not award people more time to achieve leisure and growth.

    Communicative Action

    In 1968 Habermas introduces his key theory of Communicative Action, where he lays out his contention that the Left had incorrectly assumed that a change in the mode of production would automatically result in desirable changes in the relations of production. He argued that the technocratic approach of the Right and this Left utopianism converged in that each viewed politics as no longer requiring legitimation.

    In place of these, Habermas proposes a shift from a technocratic politics to concepts of work-interaction and communicative action:

    I suspect that the general relation of institutional framework (interaction) and subsystems of purposive rational action (work in the broad sense of instrumental and strategic action) is more suited than historic materialism to reconstructing the sociocultural phases of the history of mankind.[v]

    He further argues that:

    It becomes clear that two concepts of rationalisation must be distinguished. rationalisation at the level of the institutional framework can occur only in the medium of interaction itself, that is by removing restrictions on communication.[vi]

    Habermas also distinguished between technical reason and substantive or communicative reason, which he argued was vitally important: ‘The institutional organisation of society continues to be a problem of practice related to communication, not one of technology, no matter how scientifically guided.’[vii]

    Habermas argued thus for a domination-free communication, and that ideology systematically distorted communication. His argument is for universal pragmatics:

    By reconstructing the conditions of possible communication Habermas hoped to identify the elements necessarily presupposed in the successful exchange of speech acts and thereby to uncover the universal validity basis of speech.[viii]

    Habermas asserted that through language, speakers adopt a practical stance oriented toward ‘reaching understanding,’ which he regards as an ‘inherent telos’ of speech. When individuals address each other in this manner, they engage in what Habermas calls ‘communicative action,’ which he distinguishes from strategic forms of social action

    In communicative action:

    speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals on the basis of a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit-worthy. Whereas strategic action succeeds insofar as the actors achieve their individual goals, communicative action succeeds insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behavior. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilize the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.[ix]

    speech acts

    Over the course of a decade the theory of universal pragmatics culminated in a theory of justice as fairness of communication. In this Habermas was influenced by the English positivist John Austin and his idea of ideal speech, arguing with respect to speech acts that:

    In uttering a speech act, the speaker unavoidably raises validity claims which can only be redeemed in a discourse having the structure of an ideal speech situation. However, distorted the actual conditions of communication may be, every competent speaker possesses the means of the construction of a speech situation which would be free from domination and in which disputes concerning the truth of statements or the correctness of norms could be rationally resolved.[x]

    In his recent writings he has amplified on speech acts and identifies four ‘pragmatic presuppositions’ essential, he argues, to communicative rationality:

    • no one capable of making a relevant contribution has been excluded,
    • participants have equal voice,
    • they are internally free to speak their honest opinion without deception or self-deception, and
    • there are no sources of coercion built into the process and procedures of discourse.[xi]

    The essence of all of this is the idea of inclusive critical discussion, free of social and economic pressures, in which all involved treat each other as equals in a cooperative attempt to reach an understanding on matters of common concern.

    In this context Habermas harks back to the salons of the Enlightenment, and claimed that as mass societies emerged over the course of the 19th century, ideas became commodities, assimilated to the economics of mass media consumption.

    Habermas sought to revive this tradition of free-ranging thought in attempting to re-install public reason, and calls for a socio-institutionally feasible concept of public opinion-formation that is historically meaningful, and which normatively meets the requirements of the social-welfare state, and which is theoretically clear and empirically identifiable. He argues that this: ‘can be grounded only in the structural transformation of the public sphere itself and in the dimension of its development.’[xii]

    During this period, Habermas also evaluated the German Sociologist Max Weber seeing in his compatriot’s thought an iron cage of modernity, assigning law and morality to different spheres of rationality. Law required, Habermas argued, a rational justification in contrast to Weber’s positivism equating legality with legitimacy.

    Habermas asserted a need for the law to be justified not simply in technocratic terms, but also in terms of principle or practical moral justification. Law, he argued, was intimately linked to morality and politics and to the constitutional organisation of political power.

    Civil Disobedience

    Habermas was a man of his time, and like Albert Camus, engaged with its controversies. Thus from 1978-87 he turned to the question of civil disobedience in response to what was happening in Germany, especially in response to protests against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

    Habermas defended civil disobedience and endorsed John Rawls view that this was a morally grounded act, which must appeal to publicly recognised principles. He argued that state legitimacy was intimately connected to the normative quality of the state in arguing for a representative democracy that held a place for civil disobedience.

    Habermas saw civil disobedience of a peaceful nature as a revitalising force, and rejected the authoritarian legalism of Conservatives. Instead he placed faith in dissenting citizen, and saw the German state as a self-revitalising project animated by a noninstitutionalised mistrust of itself.

    At this time Habermas set his sights on Postmodernism. In fact, he called young conservatives antimodernists, old conservatives premodernisms and neo-conservatives postmodernist (such as the Green party who, in a quasi-Luddite way, argued against aspects of modernity) and rejected all three.

    Instead Habermas placed his faith in a concept of communicative rationality with reason centre stage. He would be in his element attacking the way in which post-modernist relativistic nonsense has been co-opted by the Alt-Right and the Neoconservatives.

    More recently, Habermas has emphasised the values of law, politics and the Rule of Law. In fact, he argues that democracy and the Rule of Law are co-original and presuppose each other. He argues for popular sovereignty in conjunction with human rights as the legitimacy of laws; prioritising popular sovereignty and a proceduralist theory as an alternative to ideology. He puts his trust in the productive forces of communication.

    Habermas argues that breaking up legislative power into institutionalised and noninstitutionalised spaces – the parliament and the plurality of public spheres – was the best way to achieve the democratic ideal of self-determination. He saw the noninstitutionalised distrust of the citizen, reflected in civil disobedience, as central to a democracy.

    He explained that the ideal speech situation created the necessary formal or procedural framework within which the public could deliberate and fill in the picture of a good society. Within such a framework participants could decide the concrete possibilities of social organisation they desired.

    His position is summarised thus:

    Habermas dubs his position an “epistemic proceduralism.” The position is proceduralist because collective reasonableness emerges from the operation of the democratic process; it is epistemic insofar as that process results in collective learning. The latter presupposes a fruitful interplay of three major discursive arenas: the dispersed communication of citizens in civil society; the “media-based mass communication” in the political public sphere; and the institutionalized discourse of lawmakers. When these arenas work well together, civil society and the public sphere generate a set of considered public opinions that then influence the deliberation of lawmakers.[xiii]

    In conclusion

    Habermas saw German constitutionalism as an unfinished project and sought to offer a Third Way of democratic discussion between formalistic positivism and moralistic natural law. He is critical of the foisting of human rights on us by judges –  and was critical of the Dworkinean prioritising of the judiciary – placing faith instead in in popular sovereignty.

    He argues, nonetheless, that a system of rights constitutes a minimum set of normative institutional conditions for any legitimate modern political order, but that further institutional mechanisms such as legislatures and other branches of government must operate as an open society of interpreters of the constitution.

    These are the important values espoused by Habermas:

    1: The rule of law and legalism.

    2: Speech and communication untainted by ideology.

    3: The voyage of social passage from post-modernist nonsense to Enlightenment values.

    Interestingly, both Habermas and Noam Chomsky are of a similar vintage, and are perhaps the residues, or remnants, of a tradition of learning and rigour, which is now largely marginalised and ignored. Though he is often difficult to read in a stilted Germanic style derived from Kant through Heidegger and even Thomas Mann, his ideas are of vital relevance. The great challenge is to impart these, and gain an audience.

    A dialogue between secular non-extremist humanism and Christian non-extreme humanism.

    The following is a codicil to a recent piece I wrote on Jurgen Habermas as part of the Public Intellectuals series.

    I list ten crucial lessons and interpretations from the man I regard as the leading public intellectual of our time who bridges schools of thought in a way similar to Edmund Burke, and with more rigour. Habermas was scorned by the agitprop leftists in Germany after he spoke out against a growing extremism as he read it.

    1. Habermas was correct to abandon postmodernism such as that identified by the Frankfurt School, and replace it with rationalist ideology whether Christian or secularist. We need to reunite through reason against the dark forces in the world.
    2. His crucial idea of communicative action and ideal speech invites us to talk in neutral conditions purged of ideology. This has led me to advocate for a world council composed of non-corporate, non-business, apolitical leaders apart from those who are properly rational, which includes Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. Independent think tanks. Let us talk and argue but not fall out and scream at each other any longer.
    3. Accept religion from an atheist perspective, all to their own. Spirtuality is not to be despised, and we need a communication about ethics and morality. A common ground.
    4. Avoid all extremism. It is counter-productive, whether leftist or rightist. That includes religious fundamentalists and atheist bashers of religion. An interdisciplinary dialogue between faith and reason, a reasoned faith, is needed to confront the problems of the world.
    5. Society should run using technocratic methods with ethical and moral components. Vorsprung durch technik, Germany works but has inflicted its model work practices to liquidate much of Europe. Merkel is not Helmut Schmidt.
    6. Embrace the intellectual tradition and raise our civilisation. Nuance is key.
    7. Democracy is enriched by dissidence, protest and a sense of community beyond parties. but not agitprop doomsday cults.
    8. In certain jurisdictions judicial and other elites cannot be trusted. Too many are now compromised. We need fresh ideas and perspectives.
    9. The United States is on the brink and should not be deferred to. The global challenge of silicon valley needs to be challenged, just as we should be challenging the encroachment of China.
    10. Continue to resist the intellectual and political legacies of both Nazism and Marxist-Leninism.

    [i] Jürgen Habermas: Natural Law and Revolution (1963), p. 113

    [ii] Matthew Specter: Habermas: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p.93

    [iii] Ibid, p. 97

    [iv] Habermas: Technik und Disenchant ales Ideologies (1968) p99.

    [v] Ibid, p.92.

    [vi] Ibid, p.98.

    [vii] Ibid, pp.78-79

    [viii] Specter, p.???

    [ix] Habermas: Stanford Internet Encyclopedia.

    [x] John B. Thompson and David Helds: Habermas: Critical Debates, M.I.T Press., Cambridge,  pp.8-9

    [xi] Habermas: Stanford Internet Encyclopedia. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/

    [xii] Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence), M.I.T. Press, 1989,  p.244.

    [xiii] Habermas: Stanford Internet Encyclopedia, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/