Can there be a radicalism that is not a moralism? Or, does the "left" have a future?

An acquaintance of mine, who until today I considered a friend, recently sent me videos of some journalistic intellectual denouncing a famous French philosopher, dead for some time now, for his supposed sins. The claim, which I admit is shocking if true, if only because many of us do admire great thinker from whom we can learn much, and we prefer our heroes, as Brando says in “Last Tango in Paris,” “over easy or sunny side up,” is that this man was guilty of some nasty behavior that only now has come to light. What strikes me about this is more than just the intellectual dishonesty of the moralism involved. My 'friend' thinks he is participating in some important discourse. I find that in fact this is a practice many people like to engage in. It's a game whose rule is this: find a famous intellectual, preferably on the left, and if not someone whom people on the left often like, like Heidegger, and rant about how this person was really a great sinner with guilty secrets that have now come to light. Ah, they think, so another pretender to a throne of theorizers is really naked. Now we can gloat and say, Ah ha! I see this person's guilty secret, they really are a sinner! Gotcha!

But what is the point of this game? There is no discussion about the thinker's ideas. They don't matter. The point is to do a morals check and remind everyone else out there that the thought police are everywhere. I think the real point, or at least function, of these ad hominem attacks is to try to destroy the life of the mind.

What this would best fit as social trend is a triumph of journalism over intellectual life, where the rise of a "thinking" that needs to do nothing more than exhibit people's dirty secrets in some kind of charivari, would go hand in hand with other trends afoot that have as one of their functions to weaken our university system (by commodifying it, making an education a good that you pay for and use as investment in getting a good job). It is supposed to be the job of those engaged in intellectual life to ask difficult questions, not just be ready with easy answers, which we may already know anyway. Part of the way this might happen is that a war of attrition would be conducted against any thinker that any young person for instance might admire. Subtly or not so subtly, people would be given to understand that today a right-thinking "left-liberal" politics does not need rigorous thinking or theorizing. After all, the appeal of these ad hominem attacks depends on no thinking, but only the instantaneous recognition of evil. The appeal to conscience is to what you know already, as everyone does. At the limit, nothing is to be thought about because only sinful lapses of taken for granted virtue are pointed out and noticed. A legal thinking can perhaps afford to think that way, as ours tends to (a counter-example to this is Judaism, where the moral laws traditionally were carefully studied; our system is largely one where character is judged but transgressions of law consequent upon its failures are the “names” of the faults then, subsequently, to explain and legitimate the judgment, identified). A political thinking cannot do this, because unlike governmentality, which merely iterates and enforces the order of things, politics seeks to change it.

Along with this goes a number of related trends. I take it that the fact that conservatives and neocons have complained about them as liberals generally have not gives people like me who still think we are men and women of the left to understand that left-liberalism as we know it is in some ways utterly bankrupt. Certainly, many people who are part of that tendency seem all too ready to fall for what is preached to them. Not only do we have identity politics, social justice warriors, safe zones, hermeneutical creativity wielded to identify "micro-aggressions" and wrench them out of mere latency, and intolerance for opinion masquerading as tolerance for every demographical category provided the people in it are presumed "oppressed" (Jews, for instance, need not apply), but what also goes with the syndrome is a Manichaean politics of the innocent good people who are presumptive victims of "oppression" by virtue of their identity and who are "oppressed" by whoever is "privileged" by virtue of theirs, so that in fact "politics" is reduced to war, and to a factionalism that expects people to line up as good soldiers for the fight of their faction to win and not lose against the bad guys on the other side.

Things like left-wing anti-semitism are among the results of this. It is important to see how certain errors in thinking (really, a failure to think) lead inevitably to this. One of the myths of the liberal left seems to be that there are these innocent "oppressed" people (who are apparently born that way, as are their "oppressors," who are guilty of being born with "privilege" and luck, a guilt they can never stop being reproached and punished for) who are basically victims of the violence of theft and other crimes. So that "left" becomes the party that accuses the "privileged oppressors" of crimes.

Then “people of color” are expected to dislike "white" people, women are expected, if they are good feminists, to dislike men, etc. And you get all the hypocritical excuses. I remember when “feminists” would protest vociferously that they don't hate men, it's just that... .Well, they did protest too much; the fact is, feminists in recent times have often hated men, and when they speak of "patriarchy," they mean either "too much maleness" or masculinity as such. Never mind that only in a theory can anyone really know what “masculine” or “feminine” mean or are, and promoting and enforcing a normative femininity or other gender ideology is a dubious claimant to be called “feminist,” since it would only grant another proprietary identity to patriarchy’s archy (rule, order, principle, beginning). France's Luce Irigaray wrote a book assassinating the character of most of Western philosophy: the bastards were projecting masculine ideals and prejudices, and the result was the tradition of philosophy as we know it, apart from feminist critical theory denouncing and critically analyzing it. Whether there can be a critical theory of forms of oppression that have favored some groups at the expense of others which does not entail or facilitate reverse oppressionist resentments is perhaps an interesting question. Of course, we know that patriarchal social forms have existed as "racial capitalism" has. The problem is that the critique of power, and of culture as mask of power (though it has never been only that, except when it isn't very well thought out, and so the forms that are most likely to be criticized do contain ambiguities from a contemporary point of view that judges without prejudices that tilt it into absurdities -- for instance, I can recall a feminist graduate student insisting in a seminar that Aeschylus’s Oresteia is not about ideas of justice and the rejection of vengeance, which it certainly is about, but is about (only, she thought) the oppression of women and its legitimation by a certain myth. (this is a not implausible claim, but why can't they both be true? They can, but not if the history of art is reduced to the sociology of power and unjust domination or oppression). Are Shakespeare's plays legitimating masks of English and European late Renaissance and early modern forms of domination? Surely, they cannot fail to be, though they are also in many ways critiques of what they may also be seen as promoting, and at any rate as describing and presenting as background and components of an ethics that it would not be easy for any thoughtfully judging person to merely denounce. Indeed, I think the same must even be true of the Bible itself, or any part of it, like any canonical text. Why should we suppose that intellectual history consists of monuments that are either wholly good or wholly evil? If they could be considered morally perfect, could there even be a subsequent history? Traditions themselves are sites of progress in which canonical texts are reinterpreted and novelties with respect to them invented.

I think the predominant moralism is conservative, and "conservatives" who reject it, and are so called because they oppose the left-liberal consensus, are right to. Even if they have nothing except earlier social forms to put in their place (that would be how they are conservatives, and also why they might be right about what they oppose and wrong only about they propose, which is likely to seem the case to those of who can imagine futural social forms that are in at least some ways better). The predominant moralism is conservative because it represents capitalism at its most conservatively and stupidly democratic. In the world of much of journalism and the new internet media, like Twitter, opinions easily stated and their seeming obviousness rule. Serious and rigorous thinking, which takes time, effort, and some training, is out.

As a result, there is quite a tendency for left-liberals who want to do the work of the anti-intellectual right for them, to denounce as "racist," "sexist," otherwise prejudiced, or guilty of some crime whatever they can find (the more, the better, and if possible, criticizing people who abused their power and in ways that are racist, sexist, or prejudiced against an officially oppressed and so protected minority group). I have seen this done again and again, and always the target, directly or indirectly, is the intellectual left. If these people win their battles, then the result will be to impoverish the world of intellectual creativity when it comes to any kind of social criticism that benefits from careful and rigorous inquiry rather than immediate and obvious denunciations of moral lapses. And I don't think it is possible to have it both ways.

The trend of resentment on the liberal left also loves to appeal to communitarian quasi-nationalisms and an innocence imputed to these communities. Thus, for example, there is the defense of the "indigenous." This means that people are defended as somehow specially holy and politically favored in this moralism because they are (a) victims of oppression, and (b) victims of theft. Colonialism itself is reduced in such thinking to a crime against the colonized subjects, the indigenous. The answer to the problems posed by colonialism and its aftermath then is simple: the colonists and their progeny should go home. The land belongs to us, because we inherited it good and proper from our ancestors, and you newcomers are just thieves. (Which is then an alibi for hatred of them). The application of this thinking to both racial difference and the Israel/Palestine conflict is obvious. But the point of this way of "thinking" is to simplify and its function is in fact to make political discussion and struggle, work, or action that could lead to solutions or better states of affairs impossible. That is their actual function, whatever the people engaged in this thinking intend.

And of course, if you think this way, there are good guys and bad guys and "politics" is the holy social justice war of the former against the latter. That this leads to things like anti-semitism is no accident, and is not a consequence that the left-liberals can avoid by trying to hedge their hatreds of supposed injustice with declarations that they are also against other forms of prejudice and hatred. This has never been very convincing, though the liberal left has quite often engaged in it. But these awful results of the simplistic political moralisms are best understood not as the kind of bad morals people who speak that way are obviously going to want to recognize, so much as a consequence of faulty and bad, albeit also dishonest, thinking. Bad thinking is failed thinking. Not thinking can have really bad results. Imagining a social problem or conflict as a war between the innocent good and the maliciously and disobediently bad is always a sign of failure to think. This is true even when there is malefaction or evil intent involved, whatever we understand that to mean; hatred and prejudice, for example. These only go so far in explaining things. Historical events that are regrettable are never quite fully explained merely by sin and morality.

But who wants that and what purpose does it serve? It serves the purpose of a governmentality that concerns itself with everyone's morals, like the old universal Christian church, and of a capitalism whose dominant class, the bourgeoisie, was always very concerned about the defining opposition of its morality: property vs. crime. While it is true that not all crime is crime against property and those who own it, it is nonetheless also the case that the model of property and theft (or dishonest gain, failure to work hard, and other things that obviously approximate to the same model) is dominant in thinking about morality in capitalist societies.

It is also worth keeping in mind that the good is never realized merely by morality. The difference between morality and ethics is that morality is always specified in a legal code that dictates what people must and may not do. What you may not do is a crime, and what you must do names a crime in the breach of observance. Ethics, however, is driven not by the desire for justice, which is what is owed, but the desire for happiness, which is perhaps an infinite object since it cannot be specified by this or that object or state of things or mind. This gives ethics an historical character than morals do not have, and it also is the reason why narratives, stories, are important. It is why there are stories of exemplary people whose deeds could not have been predicted and so legislated. It is why there can be something like an experimentation with forms of life, of self and world, which takes place above all in art. And that is why art is always latently political as well as ethical, though not always moral. “Should we burn Sade?” Simone de Beauvoir once rhetorically asked in an essay. Maybe one has to be truly scandalized by evil to want to study its artistic apparent manifestations or justifications. Otherwise, the immediacy and obviousness of moral judgment presents a puzzle: those who most vociferously denounce it are also convinced it is uninteresting, so that they seem to both care greatly about it and not at all. Every Platonism in art, which considers artworks as models to be emulated, and demands that artworks themselves be judged by moral standards and denied appearance in public space at all if they do not inspire justified emulation, faces this problem. Of course, morals must still exist and we must care about them, ignoring their demands at our peril. But while moral codes can develop or change, they are always in principle essentially static, and a society that has only them or in which they have too much sway over everyday life will be conservative. They would have too much sway if we were so worried about moral transgressions, our own or those of others, that we did not allow ourselves time to experiment with ways of modifying our form of life in order to be happier. This would be the world of Ecclesiastes, perhaps, a deeply conservative one, where all art and action are considered vanity and avoided for that reason. It could also be one of state terror, where everyone is on the lookout for, or fearful of, some great sin or evil emerging, suspicious of self and other lest that happen. It might be the world of Hobbes, the English monarchist political philosopher who proclaimed the coercive state necessary because people are evil and otherwise there would only be a "war of all against all."

If honest and good people set about to solve our social problems and managed to live blameless lives, we would still be able to imagine social changes that would make us happier or even freer, and to imagine criticisms of the way things are that reveal deficiencies in our collective and individual happiness that could be addressed fruitfully.

Could we ever move beyond regimes of law and morals? Is anarchy possible and desirable? I think what I take to be the Jewish messianic idea here is correct. The messianic age would not be one where no one is capable of any of the various great crimes that today are committed. It would be a world in which those crimes and the persons and worlds involved in them are remembered and studied. It would be a world where they are in principle still possible but very rare. The reason is almost no one would ever think it could make sense to commit such crimes. These memories would then recede to something resembling what might be called the childhood of the human race or species.

I would like to live in a world where the kinds of thing that happened in those camps set up by the Third Reich are no longer very possible. For this to be the case, how those things happened would need to be well enough understood. I don't think it would be enough to merely denounce those things as evils resulting from sins that can be opposed, denounced, and suppressed. And how would they be? Presumably with a big state apparatus ready to punish lots of people. Part of the problem here is that that kind of state is, as I see it, part of what made the Holocaust possible in the first place. And so too then is moralism as we know it, or much of what we know of it. This thought is not well enough understood, though Nietzsche seemed to grasp something of it. One reason moralists themselves cannot see this is that their thinking is organized around the moralist's recourse of categorical oppositions in which one term is privileged, and one thinks within the polarity, so that the war against immorality has opposed to it only the immorality it itself opposes. In this way, a paradigm fails to be thought, and as both cause and consequence of this, continues to be enforced. American liberals seem to think that there will be no more Holocausts once all prejudice has been stamped out, and the intolerance that goes with it, including all hatreds. Maybe so, but there is a short-cut here which, like all such short-cuts in thinking, does not so obviously lead to a world without administrative exclusions. Modern bureaucracy has them all over the place, including in the medical and therapeutic regimes and ideologies designed partly to enforce moralities and sanction, prohibit, and punish disobedience, deviance, dissonance, and maybe even disaffection and its dysphoria. A bit of reflection will reveal that this means that moral denunciations are woefully insufficient. And it is not the truth of what they turn on that is in question here. Of course, acts of violence are bad, and their absence relative to them is good. Is that moralists are always trying to establish, or remind us of? Maybe this also reveals a truth about moral injunctions: they are normally not argued for, but only iterated. The law might have a reason, but what one obeys in observing it is certainly not the demand to think rationally, but the injunction itself, obedience to which recognizes and confirms its commanding nature. Laws can be studied, and they must be obeyed; one usually cannot easily do both at once. Surely some of the arguments that take place really result from category mistakes. Religious fundamentalisms exist in a space that is similarly structured, with the difference that they are theories that argue for the obedient moral attitude by referencing its own character, and so their proponents are always acting a bit befuddled when people question what they say, replying to the effect of “Must I repeat it?” and perhaps, with the Sex Pistols, “We mean it, man!” (As if it scarcely matters what it is we mean or say and why we do so).

Let me add that a left-wing fascism is easy to imagine, and it is not something new either, since it was part of Stalinism and its variants, like Maoism and the Khmer Rouge regime in 1970s Cambodia. Left-wing fascists will say that they hate exploiters and oppressors, and people who are. They may also think that there are whole classes of such people who are born that way. So did Stalin and Hitler both and many of their followers. The problem here is that if people are born in social classes or categories that correspond to positions in a system of oppression, then they are not responsible for their actions that are explained thereby, while if they can be held responsible for what they do, then they cannot be destined to do those things by birth or demographical category. And moralizing left-liberals always want to have this both ways. Only in that way can you hate the bourgeoisie, or the Jews, or any other group that you would hate as instantiating the evil of oppression. Note that such a hatred is not the same as social criticism that involves describing social differences. Marxism was not hatred of the capitalist class, except in its basest and stupidest deviations, like certain aspects of Stalinism.

A more mature and credible left-wing position would recognize that there are injustices which are irreducible to crime. Crime is disobedience of a morally significant law, and so states, actual or virtual, are what oppose it. But now is racism, xenophobia, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, profit, or war itself, or even the state form itself, which can certainly be linked to historical and social injustices, are these things crimes exactly? If so, who is the criminal? Who can we punish for the crime(s) of capitalism? Is there some primal father who caused it? Who would that be, the devil himself? ("What's puzzling you is the nature of my game," as the Rolling Stones put it in their song of "sympathy" for "the devil"). This line of inquiry quickly yields the following conclusion: social criticism is not personal criticism, history is not reducible to morality and sin, and if it were, it would not exist. There would then only be a static model of society that people as individuals more or less conform to and obey, in terms of its dictates, laws, and norms. But then social change and thus politics would really be impossible. Though a kind of large-scale, even global, civil war might not be. I think that war exists and what it imposes, defends, and legitimates, through the often unwitting behaviors of many persons whose intentions, be they good or bad ones, are other than that, or at least seem to be, yet have that as their consequence. Much of the global "left" appears to be of this kind. But much of it also is of a very different kind, far more creative. The future of our societies may depend on the outcome of the competition between these two tendencies. What is troubling is how easy the more destructive tendency is, since it requires only moral judgment and obviousness, and how difficult the more creative tendency is, since it benefits from things like scholarly inquiry and serious art, and they are often more vulnerable. While there are forces afoot that seem aimed to destroy things like scholarly inquiry with its characteristic rigor, and dependence on rational thinking and the ability of those engaged in it to draw logical inferences and want to do so, at the same time there is at least a lot of art, and much interest in it, and I don't believe that even the destruction of the world's great universities, which certainly is now threatened, will or can mean the end of inquiry.