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 Capitalismand 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. Thompsonexpressed 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.
In a quiet room, two men smoke hashish and discuss the inevitability of the Apocalypse. All the signs are apparent: unusual weather conditions, social unrest, unendurable suffering caused by poverty and war. Searching for a loophole, they weave theories of increasing complexity, involving Messiahs, the reversing of the Old Laws, and the triumph of the Feminine spirit. After a few more puffs, however, the older man’s ability to speak fails to keep pace with the increasing abstraction of his thoughts. He falls into a reverie, or perhaps merely sleep. Only he can tell which. The other man stays awake, watching his ideas play out in all their baroque intricacy and intensity, until he, too, is overcome by tiredness. The solution to the Apocalypse will have to wait for another day.
Welcome to eighteenth century Poland, as imagined in Olga Tokarczuk’s recently translated novel The Books of Jacob. A work of historical fiction, it straddles genres. On one hand, the book is the fruit of painstaking historical research, with Tokarczuk claiming to have worked seven years on the text. On the other, the novel’s ability to engage relies on the way it imaginatively enters its historical personages lives, and weaves compelling characters, relationships, and plots from the gaps in the historical record. The reader is told this in one clause of the book’s stylishly verbose title:
The Books of Jacob
Or
A Fantastic Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects.
Told by the Dead, Supplemented by the Author, Drawing from a Range of Books, and Aided by Imagination, the Which Being the Greatest Natural Gift of Any Person.
That the Wise Might Have It for a Record, That My Compatriots Reflect, Laypersons Gain Some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment.
The novel was originally published in 2014, and has been considered Tokarczuk’s masterpiece. In 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, and in November 2021, an English translation by Jennifer Croft was published by Fitzcarraldo. Croft had previously translated another of Tokarczuk’s books, Flights, for which they shared the winning of the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.
Olga Tokarczuk in 2019.
Summary
The book follows the emergence, peregrinations and eventual dissolution of a religious sect built around a charismatic leader by the name of Jacob Frank. The sect was composed mainly of Jews, mostly Polish in nationality, who broke from the mainstream Jewish community. They believed earnestly that the end was nigh, and Jacob Frank was the Messiah. Frank’s teachings consisted of homely expositions of esoteric Kabbalist theories, involving such things as a Trinity of four parts, and the notion that God created the world without being aware he was doing it.
Frank led his followers into new territory not just in the world of ideas, but also in respect of their place in European society. As Jews in Poland, they were barred from owning property, taking noble titles, and were perpetually subjected to suspicion and animosity, especially in times of social unrest caused by wars and famines. Frank convinced his followers that it was necessary for them to be baptised as Catholics. A barrowload of theological argumentation was provided to justify this move, and the group maintained many aspects of their culture even after their conversion, including unique clothing, refusal to eat pork, and a preference for marrying within the group. The cynical question can’t be dismissed: to what extent was the sect’s religion a front for a social movement?
Jewish wedding with klezmer band in a shtetl in Russia, painting by Isaak Asknaziy, 1893.
Musings on Contemporary Applications
Many commentators on this novel have noted that it speaks directly to our time, but few have been more specific in saying how. Marcel Theroux’s excellent review for The Guardian, for example, ends without developing the tantalising suggestion that the book, “which is so demanding and yet has so much to say about the issues that rack our times, will be a landmark in the life of any reader with the appetite to tackle it.” In the rest of this article, I would like to step away from the act of reviewing this book, and instead reflect on parallels with our current time.
I propose three areas of comparison.
The Nation State in Peril
Popular Apocalyptic Sentiment
Cults of Personality
Administrative division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1789.
The Nation State in Peril
The Poland depicted in this novel is not the Poland of today, either in its geographical delineations nor, in many aspects, its culture. But the idea of such a nation stretches back to the eighteenth century.
In general those claiming to represent any nation like for its subjects to be obedient, to document themselves clearly for the State’s convenience, and to stay in one place. For these reasons perhaps the Irish state has long struggled to accommodate the Irish Travelling Community.
This novel could be read as a meditation on the relationship between the nation and that which is ‘foreign’. After all, Jacob Frank’s last name is not a ‘real’ last name at all, but was a generic title applied to foreigners. Thus, Jacob Frank could be translated to ‘Jacob the Foreigner’. The group exists in a strange tension with Poland. Jacob doesn’t speak Polish, but still amasses a following in the country through his physical bearing, his charisma, and the compelling nature of his ideas in translation. Emerging from the Jewish community, and with theological ties to schools of thought widespread in the Middle East, the sect is both native and foreign at the same time. It comes from without, but gathers momentum because it speaks to a dissatisfaction within Polish society.
Over the course of the book, the group ‘settles’ into a mode of being comfortable for the state. They stop being nomadic, they get baptised into the dominant religion, and they change their Jewish names to Catholic Polish ones. Jacob Frank tells his followers, “Everyone who seeks salvation must do three things: change his place of residence, change his name, and change his deeds.”(p. 229). Rather than solidifying the order of the nation state, as this action appears to do on the surface, it actually undermines the concept of nation by highlighting the fluidity of such markers of identity as one’s name, place of residence, religion etc.
By definition, arising from the establishment of settled agriculture, a nation is opposed to nomadic forms of human culture. Nation states also tend to dislike groups with distinct languages or scripts. To be considered a good citizen, you should have one name, spelled one way, using no funny symbols, and you should never dare to change this.
The granting of land to the Frankists was not just to the sect’s interest, but was also greatly in that of the State’s. If the group held land, they would stop travelling around the country riling people up and gathering more converts. Moreover, it would be easier to keep an eye on them.
As a member of a dominant religion, you conformed publicly with the society at large. You had your job, your Polish name, and attended church. But in your own home, and in your smaller communal meetings, you discussed your true spiritual beliefs and worshipped in your own way.
The freedom to practice one’s religion privately, without persecution or suppression by the state, is one which was hard won over the large few centuries. But in Jacob’s time, it was a primary issue, connected to what it means to live as an individual on a day to day basis.
Reading the novel, I found my mind turning to the tension between private and public existence in our time. It seems to me that the division between public and private that may have existed in the eighteenth century is slowly being eroded in our own times. After all, surveillance is no longer something that happens in the street, but has now intruded into every facet of private life. Citizens keep voice-commanded devices in their bedrooms, their kitchens. We each carry around devices with camera that face both outwards to the world, and back at our faces, with microphones that record the words we speak. Our phones, without which modern life is difficult to manage (how will you get a job, stay in contact with friends, pay for your visits to the cafe?), have become an instrument of power that destroys the fragile barrier between public and private life. Without this barrier, will the possibility of quietly practicing non-dominant ways of life (religion, community, culture) be permitted for long?
In Catholic Poland of the eighteenth century, the Church and the state were intertwined. In Neoliberal Ireland of the twenty first century, the state is intwined with the interest of corporations.
But the corporations have an edge. It is to companies like Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Google and Amazon that the vast majority of surveillance capitalism belongs, not the state. Google knows where I go on a day to day basis, what I buy, what music I listen to and what blogs I read, much more intimately than the state does. What does it mean for a non-elected body to have such power in a nation? Is it comparable to the power the Church had over the kingdoms of Medieval Europe? If Google ordered it, would Ireland join a Crusade?
Viktor Vasnetsov (1848-1926), the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Popular Apocalyptic Sentiment
It was reasonable for Europeans to feel apocalyptic two hundred years ago. There was terrible wealth disparity, with peasants and kings living side by side, social unrest, culminating in the French Revolution and a succession of natural disasters, like the Lisbon earthquake.
It is fair to say that there is similar apocalyptic sentiment around today. Although the average standard of living is higher now than the average eighteenth century Polish peasant, the extent of wealth inequality has become absurd. In a globalised society sweat shop workers produce iPhones for the satisfaction of wealthy consumers who fantasise about building mansions on Mars, while the planet shudders under the weight of our cumulative impact.
Natural disasters will always happen, but it is interesting to note our increasingly panicked reactions. Words like hellish and apocalyptic are bandied about when we see forests burn, amidst an increasingly sense that we are to blame. If we contrast this with an event like the Lisbon Earthquake, the reaction it evoked for many was to question the Divine plan. How could God allow such awful things to happen to Europeans?
The Frankists believed that in the end times, the Messiah would come, and when this happened, all the old laws would be reversed and thrown away. It was this logic that allowed Frank’s followers to change their Jewish names, ignore all the rules for living laid out in the Talmud, and experiment with bizarre new (or, perhaps, archaic) modes of sexual behaviour.What changes in our culture will we see when a large enough percentage of the population truly accepts the possibility of apocalypse?
North Korean poster featuring Kim Il-Sung.
Cults of Personality
Jacob is not the most intelligent character in this book. At the same time, he often downplayed his intelligence, calling himself a ‘simpleton’. The intellectual backbone of the Frankists were a group of older characters, deeply versed in Jewish scripture and Kabbalah. In their nightly discussions, they would provide the raw material to Jacob, who would then draw from this wisdom in his actions and speeches to the rest of the followers.
What Jacob had was charisma, above all else. He was like a magnet, drawing people to him through an invisible force. Without Jacob, the group had no coherent identity: a group of Jews who had forsaken their birth names, the teachings of the Talmud, and their homelands. The teachings of the group, too, had no unity apart from Jacob. It was, in effect, a cult of personality.
There is an interesting passage near the end of the novel. In this scene, the stories of Jacob’s life are being recorded. Being old, and the revered head of a movement, the stories have become increasingly mythic in nature. But what strikes one observer is that the story of the Frankists as a group, and the story of Jacob’s individual life are intertwined.
…the Lord tells his tales, and he and Jakubowski write them down, until out of these stories Jacob’s life starts to emerge – a life that is simultaneously the life of this ‘us’. (p. 86)
Normally, we think of individualism and group-based living as being diametrically opposed. But here, they’re interdependent. But what does it mean for an individual to represent a group?
People are always more persuasive than ideas. And it’s interesting how a charismatic personality can stimulate interest in esoteric ideas among people who would never have dreamed of engaging with such ideas otherwise. Just look at how many young men are now reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Carl Jung, and Dostoyevsky because of the viral popularity of Jordan Peterson. Or how many hipsters are reading Hegel because they like Zizek.
This is not to be critical of reading Jung or Hegel, or to mock people for reading outside their comfort zone, but it is notable that they mostly read Jung in the context of Jordan Peterson, or Hegel in reference to Slavoj Zizek. And these personalised forays into philosophy or psychology come with ideological baggage.
A Peterson fan is likely to read Jung to find proof of the mystical solidity of the division between the Masculine and Feminine spirit, or the impenetrable irrefutability of biological determinism. A fan of Zizek will read Hegel, and, in all likelihood, understand very little, but will at least be more impressed and willing to listen to Zizek the next time they hear him speak, because clearly he understands things they do not…
All this reference to authority has something medieval about it. In the Middle Ages, it was enough to say that Aquinas wrote something to take it for granted that it was true. There was a finite list of ‘authorities’ that you could quote with impunity. And it was considered appropriate to defer to such authorities than try to prove the truth of something by original argumentation.
The scientific method broke with this, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. No, it said, we can’t take any ‘obvious’, ‘common sense’ truth for granted. We can’t hold anything true on the grounds of ‘authority’, because we no longer trust these powerful institutions like the Church and the State to tell us what is true and what isn’t. Let’s give power to the people!
A philosopher like Habermas would argue that this striving for objectivity, atomised and isolated from the rest of human knowledge, is fruitless. Truth arises as part of a conversation.
In our own times, with information so freely available, but also requiring some conscious effort to sort the chaff from the grain, there has been an explosion of cults of personality. With its ability to present the human face in motion and voice in high definition, the internet, more so than even the radio (which had such a devastating role in boosting dictators in the twentieth century), allows for the easy transmission of charismatic personalities.
You could argue that this is the bookish side of the larger celebrity culture, but it’s worth paying attention to this phenomenon when you consider the extent to which popular discourse is driven by these popular thinkers, such as:
Jordan Peterson
Slavoj Zizek
Sam Harris
Ben Shapiro
Christopher Hitchens
Note: Having a cult of personality isn’t necessarily a damning judgment on the individual in question. It just seems to be the way the internet works at present.
Note 2: Isn’t it interesting that all these people are male?
Many of these popular thinkers are not true intellectuals. They often speak in vague statements. They contradict themselves etc. But this may be part of the charm. In The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk describes the effect Jacob has on crowds:
…he makes quite the ruckus, with his strange gestures and the odd things that come out of his mouth. He speaks so enigmatically that it’s hard to figure out what he means. That’s why people stay together for a long time after he leaves, trying to interpret for themselves and one another the words of this Frank, this foreigner. What did he say? In some sense, each can only understand it all as best as he can, in his own way. (pp. 639-638)
This doesn’t sound dissimilar from the comments section on a Jordan Peterson lecture.
These figures mostly appeal on the level of personality. Their fans don’t care if they are not the most intellectually sophisticated thinker in the academy. They’re engaged more on the level of watching somebody they like and admire, such as a friend, grapple with issues that they feel effect them. And of course, this being a cult of personality, they identify with these figures. Ben Shapiro is a knight, a hero, valiantly slaying the libs for ‘our’ sake. These figures gain support and popularity by virtue of being ‘on our side’. Even if they don’t identify with the group, they can win support by scoring argumentative points against one of the group’s enemies. Thus, Jordan Peterson was admired by many neofascists, despite his denouncement of that viewpoint, because he criticised the culture of ‘wokeness’ on so many occasions.
Perhaps these popular figures are tapping into the archetype of the prophet? A figure who speaks enigmatically but urgently, calling for us to change our ways before it’s too late. In a neoliberal system that seems impervious to innovation unless it is in order to exploit the planet and human beings more brutally; it’s thus understandable that there’s a thirst for a powerful voice of urgency among young people. This is what the movie Don’t Look Up primarily conveys: a sense of powerlessness, of not being heard when the apocalypse is so painstakingly obvious.
Lay It to Rest, Lad
In a room bothered by the noise of traffic, two men quietly smoke hashish. They speak of the imminent apocalypse. All the signs are there: natural disasters, odd weather conditions, vast wealth inequality, the strong preying on the weak. They weave intricate theories, drawing from the half-baked ideas of internet grifters. The sun sets, but the light of the screens stay on. Sleep will not come soon.
For Christmas two years ago, my mother bought me a copy of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People (2018). I tried to read it, I really did, but gave up after twenty pages. Looking back now, I can’t remember exactly what it was that turned me off it. I recall saying something along the lines of not liking the dialogue and the way the characters were realised.
Looking back, I think I disliked the social pressure exerted on me to read and admire Sally Rooney. You see, as a student in Trinity College Dublin, the figure of Sally Rooney loomed large.
Access to campus was restricted while a TV adaptation of her book was filmed. Her novels lined the windows of nearby book shops. Rave reviews appeared everywhere you looked online. She was the voice of the Irish millennial.
All of this, rather than encouraging me to embrace her work, raised my hackles and ensured that I would find fault in anything I read by her.
After laying Normal People aside, my girlfriend read it. After finishing it, she expressed the opinion that it was a good read, but nothing special in literary terms. Then she read reviews of it in well-respected publications, and began to experience a cognitive dissonance so severe I worried about her mental health.
“What is it I’m not seeing? Why is everybody praising it so highly? Am I not seeing something here?” she beseeched.
I tried to comfort her. “It’s the world that’s gone mad.” I said, “Your judgement was correct.”
“But everyone is saying it’s great!”
“It’s all just marketing! The whole industry is a sham!”.
Alas, my words offered scant comfort. It wasn’t until she saw some negative reviews in major magazines that she felt consoled.
‘A lot of press attention surrounded the publication,’ says a novelist character in Rooney’s new novel, ‘mostly positive at first, and then some negative pieces reacting to the fawning positivity of the initial coverage.’
For my girlfriend and me, the negativity was a justification. Maybe our generation’s aesthetic sense hadn’t atrophied after all. There was still hope.
“Why do you need other people to say something is bad before you can trust in your own judgement?” I asked.
“Let’s stop talking about this.” she replied.
After my girlfriend’s near loss of sanity, I resolved to maintain a safe distance from Sally Rooney. The best minds I knew assured me that Sally Rooney’s popularity was a product of marketing, and that her writing was nothing special.
A New Assignment
My life went on peacefully, untroubled by the exorcised spirit of Rooney, until two years later an editor challenged me to review Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021).
“I’m afraid to say I’m not a big fan of Sally Rooney”, I said.
“All the better!” he replied, “She will get enough positive reviews as it is. Write what you really think!”
I left the office elated at first, but then an inner contrarian bristled. That’s right, I’m a contrarian even among other contrarians. If asked to criticise a mainstream work, I’m inclined to defend it.
Buying the book in Chapters, I felt immensely self-conscious at the bestsellers shelf. I scanned the shop before taking the blue paperback from the number one slot.
“If anyone I respect asks why I’m buying it”, I thought, “I’ll tell them I’m writing a review.”
Returning home, I sat down on the couch with the novel and a pen and notebook on hand. Upon reading the first page, I found an adjective that felt awkward, and I noted this down. On the next, I found a sentence I didn’t like, and then a character description that annoyed me. I noted these down too. Then I realised I wasn’t reading at all.
I laid aside the notebook and returned to the beginning. Time passed. A few times, I wanted to reach for the notebook, but resisted the impulse, accepting the text for what it was. Slowly, my ego disengaged, and I started to focus on the scenes, the characters, and the structure of the story. The afternoon slipped away.
On the second afternoon, I became even more deeply engaged. I found some of the ideas expressed by characters exciting. I laughed at parts, enjoying the romantic dynamic between different characters. When I wasn’t reading the book, I looked forward to when I would be again.
The pace of the novel appeared to slow in the final third however. By the end, I had lost some of the enthusiasm sparked earlier. I still enjoyed it, but believe it doesn’t amount to a substantive whole.
Summary
The novel primarily follows two Irish women in their late twenties/early thirties. Eileen works for a low-paying literary magazine, and is terribly jealous of her friend Alice, who is a successful novelist.
Alice lives in a beautiful house by the sea, has money and time to spare, yet never goes out of her way to visit Eileen. The novel alternates between chapters following Eillen or Alice individually, and chapters composed of email exchanges between the two friends.
The alternating structure is used very artfully. In the narrative sections, the narrator is extremely remote and impersonal: ‘He was wearing a black zip-up, with the zip pulled right up, and occasionally he tucked his chin under the raised collar, evidently cold.’ (p.216)
This is a very roundabout way of telling us a character is cold, but it maintains the sense of the narrator’s detachment. This technique is characteristic of Beautiful World, Where Are You. In the narrative sections, we watch the characters keenly, with an interested gaze, but we’re barred from access to their minds; nor does the narrator offer insights into the characters. Thus, for example:
The waitress from behind the bar had come out to mop down the empty tables with a cloth. The woman named Alice watched her for a few seconds and then looked at the man again. (p. 6)
Or,
When Felix saw Alice approaching, he stood up, greeted her, touched her waist, and asked what she would like to drink.” (p. 214)
There’s a clinical coldness to the narrator, but while fulfilling the role of a dispassionate eye, the descriptions of actions remain vague. It lacks, therefore, a truly realist attention to detail.
The rationale for this style seems to receive its most explicit justification around the midpoint, where the narrator says:
Their conversation seemed to have had some effect on them both, but it was impossible to decipher the nature of the effect, its meaning, how it felt to them at that moment, whether it was something shared between them or something about which they felt differently. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves, and these were questions without fixed answers, and the work of making meaning was still going on.(p. 126)
I am bound to ask: if a realist novel doesn’t offer readers insights into their lives then what is its purpose? Are the experiences of Dublin millennials really so profound that they can’t be explained in words?
The coldness in the narrative chapters emphasises the emotional warmth of the email correspondence between Eileen and Alice. The end of chapter five, for example, shows us an Alice aloof and withdrawn in conversation; whereas the next chapter opens with a forthright Alice telling Eileen: ‘Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way.’
The emails allow floodgates to open kept firmly closed through the narrative chapters. In there, Alice and Eileen share their worries, hopes, and undergraduate analyses of our current predicament.
This is my favourite part of the book by far. Why? Because the opinions expressed by the characters show conspicuous self-awareness on Rooney’s part of her place in contemporary culture, and the role her novels play.
The contemporary novel is irrelevant (pp. 94 – 95); the cult of the author is philosophically groundless and dangerous but is maintained by marketing hacks (p. 55); the oppressor/victim complex in online discourse is more theological than political (p. 74); beauty died in 1976 (p. 75). These are ideas we can agree on, and I am glad to hear them voiced in a mainstream novel.
Ruthless Self-Examination
Beautiful World, Where Are You doesn’t need to be critiqued. It does that for you. At one point, the millenial novelist Alice laments her public image:
I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe she is me.(p. 55)
The ruthless self-examination offers Rooney salvation from her cultural sins. No longer do we need to critique her. She is doing it for us.
Now, you could view this cynically in two ways. First, consider Theodor Adorno’s idea that the culture industry actually feeds off its own critics.
Thus Punk came along and rails against Popular music, and then became the new Popular music. In a postmodern turn, the more you look into the myth of Punk, the more produced and insincere it seems.
The Sex Pistols were a punk-look-alike band, a few handpicked chaps that fitted the image of a Punk band, not a real group of rag-tag lads from the street as in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments. Nirvana is a similar case. We’re sick of hair metal, let’s make music rock again, and then you’re on the front cover of Rolling Stone. The more you rebel against the industry, the more you’re playing into the angry rocker cliche. There’s no way out.
Top of the Food Chain
So, Sally Rooney’s novel can complain about how banal contemporary novels are, how useless and privileged its author is for spending her life writing such things, and through that self-critique, she secures her position at the top of the millennial novelist hierarchy.
Slavoj Žižek has discussed at length the role played by guilt and self-deprecation in our current discourse, evident in its most extreme form on Twitter.
If we are guilty of all the ills in the world, then we become, paradoxically, important. It all centres around us. Thus, Alice writes of going to a Dublin shop and thinking:
of all the rest of the human population – most of whom live in what you and I would consider abject poverty – who have never seen or entered such a shop. And thus, this is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle, for people like us! (p. 17)
She is highlighting her sense of guilt, and therefore her virtue, but it also reveals an arrogance. We are at the very top; we must be generous; we must be humble; we must be self-deprecating. Why? Because we are important.
Žižek refers to a marketing ploy used by Starbucks to sell their coffee The chain acknowledges it is more expensive than competitors, but every 10 cent goes to starving children in a far off country.
Therefore, to assuage your guilt about commodifying the planet to the detriment of the developing world, simply buy this particular commodity.
Likewise, if you feel defeated by the state of the contemporary novel, read a contemporary novel that complains about this too. It may be banal, but at least it will be ‘relatable’, and can we ask for anything more?
This is really the key issue. Rooney can articulate what is wrong with the contemporary novel, but can’t seem to write any differently for all that self-critique. The same dross is dished out, but now it’s served with a side of cringing humility.
The aperitif of self-criticism may eliminate the lingering dull flavours, but I’d rather have eaten some good food in the first place.
Possibly Insidious…
I was pleasantly surprised by the self-awareness exhibited in this novel, especially evident in the emails sent between Eileen and Alice, articulating how I feel about the contemporary novel and the cult of Rooney in a way better than I could myself.
These critiques are, however, ultimately unsatisfying, because they undermine rather than justify the narrative sections.
They don’t spur Rooney on to write superior work, or even anything different. Instead, they simply undermine the banality of the narrative in a possibly insidious way.
Why insidious? Because the critique of the mainstream fitting seamlessly into the mainstream really illustrates the failure of the critique to have any effect on the status quo. It becomes a pose, emotional venting that doesn’t amount to anything; failing to point to anywhere better, or just different.
Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You was published by Faber & Faber (London) on September 7th.
Lately there seems to be something very right-wing about being on the ‘Left’. I’m not really sure what the ‘Left’ actually stands for anymore. Until the 1990’s it was the place where you would find a broad array of Marxists, Trotskyites, Labour Party members, Socialists, and even Shinners. All partook of an identity easily distinguished from the ‘Right’, where there was a corresponding mix of Thatcherites, Reaganites, ‘trickle-down’ economists, and extreme libertarians.
Oh boy! Things were easy then. Even if you didn’t sympathize with the Left, agreement with the near-ubiquitous Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) made you one by proxy. The Left was a vast political and psychological landscape, and it was almost impossible to reach another political standpoint without crossing its borders.
In essence, the Left was once defined by its distinction from the Right; the big Other of Nuclear Power, the Corporation and ‘profits before people’. It was real, accessible, unavoidable, and an essential alternative to the establishment; a crucial political counterbalance to the dominant side of politics. It was, ostensibly, about ‘ordinary-people’, higher taxes for the rich and social investment.
For a long time the Left held the intellectual high ground. Existentialists, artists, poets; Kafka, Camus, Beckett, Joyce, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and many more, were all on-side, raging in their own way ‘against the machine’; against religion, blind conformity, and the inhumanity of a comfortably-numb establishment.
You just had to grab a copy of Kafka’s The Castle, slip into a pair of Birkenstock’s, order a latte, or smoke on a clove cigarette, to declare yourself a Leftie. Today those same cafes are populated with ‘techies’, hurriedly devouring avocado toast, perusing the Economist, fiddling with a ‘fit-bit’, and asking Siri if Tesla shares are on the rise.
So where have they all gone, those Beatniks and the latter-day Chés? Today, distinguishing ideological differences between ruling and opposition parties in most Western democracies requires superhuman vision, or no vision at all. Existentialist dialogue about literature or philosophy is rarely found in mainstream media, instead relegated to academia, or that strange cabal, referred to disparagingly as ‘intellectuals’.
What we are left with is an exaggerated respect for the titans of big business, the market, and venerate unlimited economic growth.
RTÉ Science & Technology Correspondent Will Goodbody gets a rare insight into the functions of Apple’s European Headquarters in Cork https://t.co/DYL0oHVqYT
Perhaps the Left simply grew old and frail? The fruit of the early labours brought sufficient liberty and licence to sire a more politically effete ‘snowflake generation’. Perhaps their offspring have simply ‘sold out’, or been wooed into the corporate fold, via a co-dependence on social media and semi-legal sedatives?
Yet today in Ireland our government is not simply failing to tax corporations progressively, but actively trying to return tax revenues to its corporate ‘benefactors.’
Allegiance of the national media to the Government’s ongoing legal battle to return tax revenue to Apple has been crucial. Thus, in one article published on the RTE News website in September 2019 entitled ‘The Apple tax case: All you need to know,’ RTE’s Business editor Will Goodbody concludes his analysis with the following summation:
But wouldn’t we like to get our hands on the cash?
That would seem like a great idea on the face of it, and one advocated by quite a few politicians.
At a time when we are facing significant economic uncertainty with Brexit, a global economic downturn, trade wars and more, €14.3bn would go a long way towards resolving many problems.
However, that would only be a short term gain and may only go to reinforce claims that Ireland is a tax haven – something the Government strongly denies.
In the long-run the argument made by other politicians and experts is that Ireland would be far better off if it and Apple won their appeals.
This would protect Ireland’s reputation and send a strong message out to the international investment community that Ireland is a safe place to invest, they claim.
Of course, there is much change afoot in the international corporate tax environment anyway, particularly through the OECD. Within the country too, the Government has taken steps to clamp down on corporation tax loopholes.
So while a €14.3bn windfall might seem very attractive, for a small open economy like ours that is so dependent on inward investment and a reputation for doing clean business, it actually could prove massively damaging.
The stakes are very high for all concerned and the next hand will be played on Tuesday morning in Luxembourg.
Note that the argument for accepting the tax arises from “quite a few politicians”, whilst the case to return the tax is made “by other politicians and experts”. Apple must be permitted to avoid paying taxes, otherwise they might take their sugar elsewhere. At least that’s the “expert” view.
Goodbody’s supposedly impartial analysis is really “all you need to know”.
Notably, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic whilst in opposition Green Party leader Eamon Ryan repeatedly stated he hoped the government would drop its legal challenge to the E.U. judgment, and accept the unpaid tax (2). Yet whilst negotiating the Programme for Government this enormous issue, slipped down the Green agenda.
It’s reached the stage where we should not be asking where are the Left, but rather where have our collective morals disappeared altogether with regard to a company paying its dues.
Revealingly, in 1968 the rate of corporation tax in the U.S. stood at 52.8%. Since then it has dropped steadily to the present rate of 21%. Socialism is an expensive business which requires taxation revenue.
In Late 1970’s Britain in particular, the excess of socialism were becoming obvious, with the three day working week, refuse on the streets, and the stranglehold of government by the Unions. In circumstance where initiative was stifled Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan championed the old doctrine of unregulated markets.
What Langwallner’s critique hints at is that when the unions became strong, workers in many industries became lazier and devoid of initiative. There is also the U.S. Republican assumption that socialism has the same effect upon the poor. The welfare or unionised notion of paying people to work less, or not at all, may indeed be the ‘terrible’ underbelly of socialism, but this notion needs to be unpacked, with impartiality.
When the poor are given sugar in the context of a political philosophy that values sugar (or material wealth), as the measure of success, it is not unreasonable to expect that teeth will rot and guts bulge. This is, however, true of the poor and of the not-so-poor. The problem with sugar is that it dampens hunger for more demanding or nutritional alternatives.
What do people generally do with the essential supports from a socialist system, once the absolute essentials are paid for? If there is something remaining, do they buy; beer, smokes, take-aways, or books to read? Some might choose the latter, but let’s face it, they are hardly in a majority.
The ‘poor’, are encouraged to become more ‘educated’ and ‘literate’. Yet, all too often, getting homework done, or having academic interests is only really possible as one ascends through the class structure of Western society. Education is impeded at an early stage by classrooms that are overcrowded. Literacy or literature has little social currency, if you don’t believe me ask a poet.
The poor live within a society that values wealth above most other qualities. The education system hardly teaches children to become autonomous individuals, insisting on conformity to a particular curriculum. Children are primarily educated to become ‘workers’ or ‘professionals.’
The poor respond to their marginalization through recourse to booze, smokes, sugar, football, or pot. Or someone can vent frustrations or social impotence upon those vulnerable who are closer to home.
James Joyce described this process in Dubliners in the stories of ‘Counterparts,’ where the ‘hero’ Farrington is lauded in a pub after work, for a witty retort to his hectoring superior’s question: ‘Do you take me for an utter fool?’ His response ‘I don’t think, sir, that that’s a fair question to ask me’.
He has his drinking buddies in stitches, but ends the day realising the joke may have cost him his job, which shines an unforgiving light on his failings. Returning home:
He cursed everything he had done for himself in the office, pawned his watch, and he had not even got drunk.” At home his son becomes the scapegoat: Farrington severely beats him with a stick, for failing to keep the fire alight.
Joyce subtly illustrates the inferiority and anger we inflict on others because of our own socially reinforced notions of success; and what it means to be a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’. Human psychology changes very little.
A Deeper Analysis
What of the assertion that the socialist transaction cannot avoid reminding both beneficiaries and benefactors, of who the ‘winners’ and the ‘losers’ really are? Now we are upon the fringes of a different kind of question. This is not to doubt the requirement for social supports, but to interrogate more deeply the psychology of the participants, the ideological context, and the material nature of the transaction itself.
We have been playing different versions of the same capitalist game since the advent of civilization, in amassing personal wealth. Yet, the irony is that human-mortality resolutely confirms ownership as a delusion. Every ‘thing’ we think we own, is in fact, merely borrowed for a time. The plastic bags within which we carry home our groceries, may well be around for longer than ourselves.
Science, technology, government and mass production have freed us from a necessity to hoard, but it continues in different forms, as we make it our life’s work. Perhaps we are simply stupid or perhaps instead we have been conditioned to fear instead of trust? Wealth provides security and assuages certain fears. Indeed, if we could only trust our politicians to deliver on their promises, we might be less inclined to hoard, and even happily pay our taxes.
In the decline of the Left, Democracy succumbs to a capitalism that sustains corporations, the market and a state bureaucracy. Arguably Democracy has foundered, and an evolution, or a new kind of ‘social experiment’ is long overdue. Impending environmental collapse means the window for change is fading fast.
In the present version of ‘the game’, there are plenty of ‘losers’. Social welfare is the essential mechanism whereby those ‘losers’ are protected from falling too far from the field. The game is indeed an expensive one. As such, Socialism is a kind of charity that is derived from the taxes of those who are not losing badly, or (in theory at least) from the taxes of those who are not losing at all.
Yet, what becomes of Socialism when it is trapped within the wealth-game and dependent on the charity of the winners? What is the nature of the relationship between giver and receiver? The latter ought to be grateful, whilst the former cannot escape feeling self-righteous, magnanimous, or even ‘Christian’. Much of this ‘sentiment’ is superficial, but what if we dig a little deeper?
What if the recipient of socialist charity feels resentment towards his benefactor? Or what if his outlook is merely ambiguous, or he could not care less about a state that has generously endowed him with entitlements like a home, a medical card and welfare payments? If he lacks gratitude, he is apparently not fulfilling his part of the transaction. But if he experiences gratitude, he is demoralized.
What if the poor are not as thoughtful as some presume? Perhaps they see the relative wealth of the State, and resent that they are dining on crumbs, however hearty? We in the middle classes expect recipients of our social charity to be grateful, at least to the extent that they refrain from breaking into our homes and disturbing the islands in our kitchens.
But what if the poor man is an angry man, and not a grateful demoralized slave? What if he is uncertain as to why he is angry? What if he defines his material wealth, his status, through the same relativist lens as his benefactor? He has clearly ventured outside the contract; he is not playing by the rules. He may even become a criminal.
Mainstream media displays an obsession with ‘obvious’ criminals. Yet the hidden criminality of tax avoidance is immune from daily scrutiny or moral indignation.
But what if our ‘obvious criminal’ is merely demonstrating his anger by pissing on the street, or through petty crime, littering, graffiti or larceny? What if his addiction or self-destruction is a symptom of losing the game? What if much criminality is instead, the sublimation of something deeper? The criminal participates in a different game, where he doesn’t depend on charity and has an equal if not a significantly improved chance of becoming a winner?
We are want to believe that they are indeed grateful for our socialist charity, and immune to the material-relativism that has generated the very excesses that makes such largesse possible. Within this narrative criminals are simply ‘bad-eggs’ requiring incarceratation, re-education, rehabilitation, punishment or perhaps simply entertainment with a little bit of sugar.
Alain de Botton described a ‘Status Anxiety’ where the relatively poor are just as unhappy as the relatively rich. How unhappiness manifests in either ‘class’ is different of course: rich and poor display peculiar versions of the same dis-ease. Neither are immune from feeling like a ‘loser’, and indeed, becoming a ‘winner’ is often far less rewarding, than assumed.
It is only when we have the courage to reject the wealth-game that permits and demands us to be charitable, that ‘we’ begin to reject both cause and effect. At best however, we wallow in the intellectual mire, of continually trying to change the rules; to make society more inclusive, accessible and accommodating for all the players. We never tire of trying to preserve the game and construct what Slavoj Zizek describes as ‘Capitalism with a human face.’
Counter Argument
The counter argument is often that without wealth, charity becomes impossible. Perhaps we are all now ‘trickle-down’ economists.
There is, however, in this modern era, a reasonable reply, requiring a modicum of thought. It states with philosophical confidence, that without wealth, charity itself becomes largely unnecessary. This ‘radical’ assertion is based on a progressive assessment of our social progress, of our technology, our science, our medicine and our ability to provide for honest human needs.
There is today, more than enough for everyone, but only when we begin to define ‘enough’ outside of the context of relativism. Yet it’s a truth that has yet to find a political home, and be lived up to by ‘we the people’. We should not despair, however, the Scandinavian nations, at least, seem to have secured a few lifeboats and embarked on a voyage of political discovery.
On a practical level, the question then arises: how might we elect politicians who will lead by the contrary example of rejecting the wealth-game, instead of the usual perfunctory review of the rule-book?
I believe we must listen to the hidden articulations of our ‘obvious’ criminals, sanction the un-obvious criminals, and honestly reject our material superfluity.
If we should ever embark upon a different game, politicians will have to tell us what many do not wish to hear. That too much money is not good for us. They will have to insist that the game itself is the cause of our dis-eases.
It is simply inhuman to live in a society that does not hold socialist values; and yet we cannot avoid Oscar Wilde’s astute observation in The Soul of Man Under Socialismthat: ‘charity degrades and demoralizes. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.’
We must move our political philosophy beyond the Victorian ideal of a charitable socialism, into a realm of thinking that renders charity itself unnecessary. To do so we must consider human beings as being far more than consumers. We must recognise that the poor don’t require a decent and philosophically grounded education, we all do.
To think philosophically or even intelligently, we must re-evaluate our collective love of sugar. We must dispense with excessive material possession, status anxiety, eternal youth, and fast fashion. The measures of success and the benchmarks for respect within a shared society must be turned on their fat ugly heads.
Such a society would be one where each human being is recognised as being born with something successful already contained within. It need not be consumed or purchased or attained, it is already hard-wired, and needs only to be introduced to the world by the midwife of old Philosophy. If the Left is to become viable again, it must stand as an antagonism to the irrational consumptive ideals that have come to define the individual, society and state. In order to do so, the Left must own a pure philosophy, and lead by example.
The Extinction of the Left
It is interesting to note that many, if not most of the big Corporate entities we might consider to be on the Right, emerged from ostensibly Leftie origins.
Steve Jobs, ‘Leftie’ origins.
Steve Jobs who founded Apple, was an orphan of mixed race parentage. The start-up began in a garage with a few pals, followed by a rise to fame and fortune with a ‘vision’ to bring an ‘alternative’ to the market, a computer for ordinary people. Likewise all the main players from Starbucks coffee, Facebook, Google etc., began their lives with the lefty dream-tropes, of grass-roots change.
In Ireland, we had something of the same transformation of U2 the band, into U2 the industry. We see this evolution in erstwhile Lefty publications like the Guardian, who begin on the Left, and then drift inexorably right-ward, becoming increasingly dependent upon the market, or the ‘clickbait’ of social media.
Arguably the same process has ultimately transformed RTE. It’s income from mandatory TV licences was supposed to insulate it from market forces. Yet it is now caught in a bind between dependent on licence fees and the market revenues it derives from advertisements. The present salaries of its top presenters are as publicised as they are ignored. Early on, the transformation was objected to by one of its most accomplished and renowned directors, Bob Quinn, who resigned as an RTE producer in 1969, objecting to the increasing influence of market imperatives.
Today, stuck between the pay-masters of Government and the Market; ideas uncomfortable to either, are rarely countenanced. RTE’s financial dependence define its intellectual boundaries. What has evolved, might be described as something of a national ‘metronome’, ticking hypnotically between two defined limits; a fidelity to the ruling regime (whomever they may be) and a strict conformity to market ideology. Until RTE is liberated from itself, (and we from it), Ireland’s intellectual paralysis seems likely to remain.
Too often, the Left is contaminated by the same wealth that it seeks on behalf of the proletariat. Thus as Lefties become rich, we evolve slightly different values. The process of the son growing up and murdering his father, is as old as Greek mythology. A cynic might even suggest that the purpose of the Left is simply to nurse the children of the Right, until they are mature enough to leave the den and hunt for themselves.
The Meek shall Inherit the Earth
It appears that you have to be poor to be on the Left. The further one moves from poverty into the middle classes, the more of a material ‘success’ one makes of oneself, the more difficult it becomes to declare oneself a Lefty. As most society get wealthier the Leftist demand for ‘more money’ for the relatively poor is increasingly difficult to sustain. Terms like ‘looney left’ are increasingly grounded in empirical truths.
During the Lefty campaign against water charges in 2014, then Tánaiste and leader of the Labour Party Joan Burton answered a questions in the Dáil with words that may have led to the demise of her career:
“All the protesters I have seen seem to have extremely expensive phones, tablets and video cameras.” [They]… “put Hollywood in the ha’penny place.
It serves to remind us that only ‘genuine,’ ‘deserving’ poor should lay claim to being on the Left. The brutal irony is that the statement was made by the leader of the Labour Party, then in receipt of a salary in the region of €200k per annum, which just goes to confirm the absurdity of Irish politics.
Yet we cannot insist that all Lefties are equally bereft of integrity. Socialist TDs Joe Higgins and Clare Daly, were jailed for protesting against bin charges in 2003. Higgins subsisted on half his salary, donating the remainder to his party. TD’s under the banner of ‘People before Profit’ can claim a similar ideological legitimacy.
Perhaps there is some cut off point at the lower middle class, where the legitimacy of being a Lefty starts to break down? Lefties (real ones) apparently don’t drive Range Rovers, or have islands in their kitchens, and they don’t live in the leafy burbs.
Yet I, along with many family members and a few friends who are relatively wealthy, consider ourselves ‘legitimate’ Lefties. The real test arrives when we are called upon to give some of it back, to pay more taxes, or take pay cuts. I like to think that we would gladly rise to the occasion. However, I am yet to experience a political regime that is willing to lead by example, and until then, my own superfluous wealth is safe from them, and perhaps safe from a more honest version of myself.
Protective Rationalization
The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvellous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins.
“The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by the discovery. It was miraculous.
“It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue, slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honour, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
In many respects a new market space has opened up where Lefties can now outsource our morality, in order to reconcile private wealth with the realities of global, ecological and home-grown privations.
In pursuit of this ‘protective rationalization’ the easiest thing may simply be to deny everything, from climate change to the Holocaust. To blame the poor for poverty and the addict for his addiction – de-legitimizing the left by pointing to their expensive phones.
Having lived in California for many years and been educated there, I wonder at how I reconciled my own life; going to college, driving a pick-up, living in a comfortable apartment in Sacramento, and attending University. How was I able to reconcile my hard-earned comforts with the privations I witnessed while walking through the Mission District? There one encounters a kind of ‘zombie apocalypse’ – an army of homeless, social outcasts, mentally ill, war-veterans, alcoholics, drug addicts, down and outs, panhandling to get by, engaging in petty crime, sleeping on the streets, and being a veritable ‘nuisance’ to all and sundry.
At the time, I bought into a particular narrative that may have held an element of truth back in the naughties. I had emigrated to America with nothing, I had some help from a girlfriend. I lived with her until I could get on my own two feet; obtained a student visa to make myself legitimate; attended college; found a job and secured a credit card.
Encountering the homeless, I too saw them as ‘bums’ and ‘wasters’:too fucked up on drugs; or too lazy to take advantage of the opportunities that California had afforded me. They may not have had expensive phones but they had the same ‘opportunities’ as I enjoyed.
Since then I have grown up, and become a little wiser in respect of what ‘causes’ another human being to sleep on the streets. Yet, what I now know remains alien to many Americans who cling to the belief that their nation is a ‘frontier’ society, where fortune and success await anyone willing to get out of bed early in the morning and get to work.
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
I imagine that when Henry David Thoreau began his life experiment on Walden Pond, his ideas conformed with those of a contemporary Republican in the U.S., Indeed, his assertion that ‘government is best which governs least’ remains a Republican or Right-wing ideal, in respect of taxes and social investment.
If, however, that assertion is amended slightly to: ‘government is best which has to govern least’, we may gain a clearer understanding of what Thoreau stood for. There is an obligation upon government to govern, and there is an equal obligation upon individuals members of society to avoid needing an excess of governance.
Society requires a government to keep us safe from criminals; to protect borders from invasion, (armed as opposed to invasions of the hungry or displaced); to treat its water and sewage; to tend to the sick and to educate children.
Government on all these levels is essential. Yet there is a vital counterbalance to the need for government. This arises from the autonomy of the individual, his freedom to determine his own destiny. If we convince ourselves that the bum has chosen his destiny and that his choice is his ‘right’, his ‘freedom’; we find it easier to exclude the horror of his existence from the relative comforts of our own lives.
But it isn’t easy to convince oneself that another human being deserves a squalid life, simply because of a ‘choice’ he has made as an expression of his liberty. Yet this is an approach that seems to work for a lot of people.
So what can we do? We can’t simply raise enough in taxation to provide every homeless person in the Western world with a slice of middle class living.
Perhaps we can stay on track, with the Republican notion of ‘opportunities’, so that the poor have less of an ‘excuse’ to be poor? Wherever that argument lead us, it cannot escape the hard reality that fellow human beings should not be allowed to sleep, live and die on the streets. Nor can it escape the reality that the existence of winners gives rise to losers. Clean, hygienic shelters/homes, access to adequate nutrition, to mental health services, to education; all are eminently realisable in a state that can send aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf.
A rejection of personal material wealth raises a different type of intellectual ‘poverty’ and affords us a different type of environmental solution. In respect of the environment, and our own personal ‘enlightenment’, it might well be the only approach that will permit the global human enterprise to continue.
Love thy Neighbour?
So the Lefty question remains: Is it wrong for me to live out a life of comfort, whilst many within my society and billions outside of it, live in squalor or at least as ‘losers’ beyond the prevailing notions of success? I fear the answer is yes. But at what distance does my relative abundance, my moral indignation, my personal wealth, become relatively immoral? Perhaps I owe more of an obligation to my immediate neighbour, if indeed I am aware that he or she is hungry or suffering or is abusing his dependents. But what if he lives two doors down, or a block away, just across the border, or on another continent?
Sadly, as we become wealthier, we become less overtly Lefty. We subtly change our morals to accommodate our ‘success’ in the world. As the process evolves we become overburdened by our possessions, our connections with corporations, or our smartphones. The weight often grows to the extent that we feel a need to outsource those same morals, to a ‘safer’ place than Leftist activism.
We achieve this through comedy, through the arts, or perhaps through supporting the Green Party. Art allows us to feel the pain of the poor without getting our hands dirty. Comedy provides us with a safety valve to laugh at the pointless nature of our own materialism, our insatiable desire for more of the same.
The Green Party are of course not the enemy. Yet the notion that we can ameliorate the collapse of global ecology, through a new type of ‘Green consumption’, through recycling, or by driving an electric car is a palpable manifestation of our capacity for delusions that are at once essential and ineffectual.
The Growth Illusion
The poverty that is chiefly described in the West, is rarely the real poverty that sleeps on the streets and numbs itself with heroin. It is instead, the self-absorbed horror show of ‘relative poverty’; doctors, teachers, nurses, state employees, train drivers, taxi men, all of us feeling that relative to others, we don’t earn enough and don’t possess enough.
The desires of the ‘many’ are the voices that politicians listen to. Putting more money in the pockets of ‘ordinary people’ or ‘the squeezed middle’, is the mantra of almost all political parties. It is the basic economic imperative of the state. It grounds what Richard Douthwaite and others have referred to as the ‘The Growth iIlussion.’ Growth maintains the irony that a cure for our social and environmental ills, can only arise from more of the same cancer.
In Walden Pond, Thoreau made an honest evaluation of our real needs by his little experiment in the woods. He added the corollary of an extended list of things that are honestly beautiful, and of value. Unsurprisingly most of these things cost nothing at all.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load.
The Left is Dead, Long Live the Left
We have murdered the Left by failing to recognize that we ourselves, our individualism and materialism, remain the absolute source of our social ills, and petty dissatisfactions.
The revolution cannot begin until we reject materialism in ourselves, the devil at home as opposed to elsewhere. We must become proud to be materially poorer than our neighbours, so that we might be richer; in spirit, in mind, in temporal freedoms, in Nature and in soul. What a truly paradoxical concept! The only thing such an idea has going for it, is the fact that today more than ever before, this is as realizable as it appears impossible.
Plato in his idealised Republic insisted that the political elite of his ideal state, its ‘Guardians’ should not be paid, and should treat gold as if it caused a disease. They would be trained to recognize that their gold lay in their souls and cultivated minds.
James Joyce described his art in A Portrait of Artist of a Young Man as follows: ‘I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience, and to forge in the smithy of my soul the un-created conscience of my race.’ That aspiration should become the banner of an honest version of the Left.
When Ireland or indeed any wealthy country begins to see politicians rejecting their current salaries in favour of a minimum wage, once more copies of Ulysses instead of Argos or Ikea catalogues adorn coffee tables; when we we begin cultivating our gardens, baking bread, and leading by example; only then will the Left be a living honest thing. Then a revolution will have begun; not out the streets at the behest of social media, but rather within, the ‘smithy of the soul.’
Perhaps there is something in the phrase that; ‘there is good in everyone’. Alas, I have my doubts. But it is this ‘good’ that demands practical and honest expression from the top down. It is then that the environment will have a hope, and the plutocrats will have something to fear. Then and only then will the cause and need for socialist charity begin to end. Governments will need to govern less. The Left will be ‘woke’, and the tired old game will have been irrevocably changed.
No picture of the modern world is complete without a Marxist analysis. The fundamental point – even for anyone who is not a fellow traveller – is that a materialist analysis of capitalism’s inherent instability is essentially correct, and now more relevant than ever.
The problem has always been around how a post-capitalist society emerges without savage bloodletting and numbing totalitarianism. The bearded figure scribbling away in the British Museum would no doubt have been horrified by the barbarous regimes – from Lenin to Kim Jong-Il – that have laid claim to his legacy.
Slavoj Žižek is perhaps the best known representative and synthesiser of contemporary Marxist theory. Anyone who has viewed his films The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2009) or The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2012) can only marvel at how this middle-aged, slovenly Slovenian Marxist is taken so seriously. Despite the spittle that pours involuntarily out of his mouth as he expostulates, it seems his ideas are judged on merit; albeit a somewhat comedic appearance has probably made him seem less of a ‘danger’ – especially when set against a straight-backed sparring partner such as Jordan Peterson – and ‘Ted-Talkily’ acceptable.
Žižek is a complex political thinker, noted for his observations on ideology. Yet his writing is dense, often impenetrable, and even, at times, frankly nonsensical. Sadly, the content can be obscure, and the ideas often wildly over-stated, though recent books have seen him curb this tendency, leading to greater traction. With age he has mellowed, or at least he has become far more coherent in his critique of the late capitalism disaster movie unfolding before our eyes.
His thought processes are, nevertheless, eminently contestable. Former Irish President Mary McAleese – who lectured me – always despised recklessness, as do I, but in a different sense. It is intellectual recklessness I hold in low regard. Žižek is full of it, at least in terms of his wilder statements calling for insurrection.
Žižek argues that the widespread belief that our world is post-ideological is an ‘arch-ideological’ fantasy. Today, he asserts, ideology entails what people impute to others, whether left or right.
This demonization of others, and the exclusion of outsiders, is indeed very much to the fore in his recent writings, and in our end of day’s capitalist order. Tribalism, nationalism and the targeting of non-nationals and immigrants is an endemic feature of our time.
For a subject to adhere to an ideology he argues, he must have been presented with it, and accepted it as true and right – such that anyone sensible should believe in it. In a seminal text, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) Žižek claims that ideology has not disappeared, but has come into its own, and because of its success, it has been dismissed as non-existent. Or should it be that ideology has been internalised?
Ideological Disidentification
Žižek also puts forward the idea of ‘ideological cynicism.’ Ideology today is not as it was for the proletariat for ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it.’ He disagrees that for ideology to be effective it has to effectively brainwash people, as Marx contended in his famous religion being the opium of the people assessment; rather Žižek contends that a successful ideology always permits a critical distance towards that ideology – this he terms ‘ideological disidentification’; saying: ‘I know well that (for example) Bob Hawke / Bill Clinton / the Party / the market do not always act justly, but I still act as though I did not know that this is the case.’
Or perhaps it should be said that behaviour has been modified or controlled, and widespread passivity makes it is irrelevant what we do in a spectator democracy. In effect, we are irrelevant to changing any of this, as the supporters of Bernie Sanders are finding out.
Žižek points to a ‘big O other’, who legitimates control through ‘God’ or ‘the Party’. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, (1989) he argues that such important or rallying political terms are ‘master signifiers,’ even though they are ‘signifiers without a signified’, i.e. words which do not refer to any clear and distinct concept or demonstrable object. Thus, they induce control and a false sense of belonging, but are meaningless.
This claim of Žižek’s is related to two other ideas:
That subjects are always divided between their conscious and unconscious beliefs towards political authority;
That subjects do not know what their beliefs are that leaves them open to domination and control.
Jouissance
Žižek further contends, following the critical theorist Louis Althusser, that ideology is embedded in our everyday lives. In particular, he uses the term jouissance to describe transgressive pleasure that we derive from the master signifiers, such as ‘nation’ or ‘people,’ through cultural products as sports, music, alcohol, drugs, festivals, or films.
Another central idea in Žižek’s initial political philosophy is that any regime only secure a sense of collective identity if their governing ideologies afford subjects an understanding of how these relate to what exceeds, supplements or challenges its identity. Or, in layman’s terms, bread and circuses is the glue that binds identities – ‘Football’s Coming Home’ to quote Baddiel and Skinner.
Žižek adopts the term ‘ideological fantasy’ for the deepest framework of belief that structures how political subjects, and/or a political community, come to terms with what exceeds its norms and boundaries. He identifies Law with the Freudian ego ideal.
But Žižek argues that, in order to be effective, a regime’s explicit Laws must also harbour and conceal a darker underside – a set of more or less unspoken rules which, far from simply repressing jouissance, implicate subjects in a guilty enjoyment in repression itself, which Žižek likens to the ‘pleasure in pain’ associated with the experience of Kant’s sublime.
Žižek’s final position about the sublime objects of political regimes’ ideologies is that these belief-inspiring objects represent the many ways in which the subject misrecognises its own active capacity to challenge existing laws, and to found new laws altogether.
He repeatedly argues that the most uncanny or abysmal aspect of the world today is the subject’s own active subjectivity – explaining his repeated citation of the Eastern saying ‘Thou Art That’. It is, finally, the singularity of the subject’s own active agency that leads to subjects’ recourse to fantasies concerning the sublime objects of their regime’s ideologies.
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight
Žižek’s technical term for the process whereby we recognise how the sublime objects of political regimes’ ideologies are, like Marx’s commodities, fetishised objects – concealing from subjects their own political agency – is ‘traversing of the fantasy.’
Traversing the fantasy, for Žižek, is the political subject’s deepest form of self-recognition, and the basis for his own radical political position, or defence of the possibility of such positions.
Žižek also references Alain Badiou, who argues for an elevation or an insurrection. Žižek also seeks a form of Jacobin army, the intellectual irresponsibility of which needs to be emphasised. Even if these ideas are metaphorical the extremism provides ample ammunition to right-wing critics, who argue he condones or even approves of terrorist methods.
Sadly, in more recent times, the Marxist left has been self-sabotaging, and the cause of its own downfall. They have also had their good arguments stolen and mangled by the right.
Yet it seems that radical Marxists are at last growing up and that the post-modernist wing is grappling with its self-contradicting, and implicit approval, of a valueless universe.
In his recent book Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (2016) Žižek distils many of the abstruse elements of his ideas into manageable and helpful commentaries that have a broader base of appeal. The ethical political order, notwithstanding Habermasean attempts at a reconstituted normalization, have collapsed, he argues.
Freedom of choice is an illusion in a world of disinformation, plummeting educational standards, short-terms contracts, imposed services and privatization. Any alleged freedom we have arrives in a narrow spectrum of choices, subtly imposed upon us through social influencers and technological nudges controlling choices. Or as John Gray put it in The Soul of The Marionette (2015) ‘we are forced to live as if we are free.’
Žižek and others have demonstrated the sinister developments within late capitalism. Including how a rent for profit model means most of us on low salaries serve undeserving sponsors, leading many into the informal market or the black market by violence or the violence of regulation – as David Graeber explores in his epochal work Debt: the First 5000 Years (2015).
Other disturbing trends are in evidence, Roberto Saviona in Zero, Zero, Zero (2015) through a sustained analysis of drug cartels, shows how the corporate model of Mafiosi loyalty has been exported into law firms. The lines between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism are thus blurred to a point of near non-existence.
The ‘woke’ left cannot escape blame for failing to identify the socio-economic issues that really count in peoples lives. Pseudo-feminism plays a class game, marginalizing lower class men as harassers and even demonizing migrants. Indulgence of victimhood has created the abuse excuse.
The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon
Žižek is quite critical of the great post-colonial Marxist Frantz Fanon and his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth (1961). But Fanon was surely right in identifying a colonial order wherein, ‘the people’s property and the people’s sovereignty are to be stripped from them.’ The Untermensch were obliged to pay the debts of the occupying powers, which is now the international model of austerity.
Žižek argues that our society of depoliticized and compliant sheep invite disaster. He references the film Blade Runner (1980), which is a useful cultural trope as the older replicants – baby boomers – now need to let go of their accumulated wealth and power. Generation X are at least conscious of false memory syndrome or implanted hopes, and some have the wherewithal to do something about it and no longer settle for being victims. So despite the victim excuse, Fanon and Žižek have much in common in their analysis.
The reality is that the analysis of Fanon is now in place across the world. The elite or the corporatocracy are a gang, and what amounts to a mafia is running the planet like a colony.
So the slovenly Slovenian has hit the zeitgeist, and now interacts with more common sense than was evident in his wilder pronouncements of the past. But unfortunately it appears as if the lunatics have already taken over the asylum, and to an increasingly docile audience what he is saying will appear mad, a point that his appearance would appear to affirm.
Or at the very least his ideas will be packaged by Facebook, so he plays a bit part in the drift or acceleration into the abyss that we must resist.
