This was vividly displayed during the 'covid' years when Science was replaced by ' the science ' which we were all instructed to believe was the truth by the state. This has been succeeded by Ukraine and the devil incarnate Putin. Underlying these times has been 'woke'.
The 20% or so represented by the PMC or outer Party are completely disciplined.
Eric thought he was writing a novel not a blueprint for society.
"The science" in reality means "ideology". Not science as we used to know it.
The phrase was first used wrt climate change, at which point I clocked the above. As soon as I heard the Covidians use the phrase, it confirmed that what I was sure as hell was a scam was one.
So... the State aims to recreate a theocracy, but without a God. Without even the pretence of divine guidance.
Plus if you turbocharge the sheepfold analogy you could add that the 'purpose' of having a flock is to shear fleece as a tax and select meat for the theocrat's table. The sheep don't count. Their health is not a matter of benefit for the individual sheep, but a matter of maximising wool and meat.
The sheep of New Zealand’s decisive rejection of Jacinda “I am your sole source of truth” Ahearn gives hope that there is still a lot of fight left in us dumb animals when our traditional freedoms are removed “for the greater good”….which many of us would describe as modern day fascism.
Course, Ardern's government was re-elected in more or less of a landslide in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic and after two months of lockdowns. It wasn't until after the pandemic was effectively over and all restrictions had basically been lifted that that government, sans Ardern, who had resigned as PM, got turfed out.
Excellent stuff, as ever, but one quibble - at the end you talk about the soul, which is right, but there is another word that needs to be included.... "church". Sadly much church hierarchy (especially CofE) has forgotten the point you are making here. Still, in the end, all idols topple.
"You might think that; I couldn't possibly comment"...
Which is, of course, an example of how language can be used to go past the gate-keepers. I'm reminded of Wittgenstein's comment that' for theologians to insist upon the use of certain particular words and phrases does not make anything clearer, for practice gives the words their sense'. The language might be more or less 'policeable' but the human practice will always escape, and new language will form that escapes the centralised strictures.
I'm a Christian without a church. Methodist public school, C of E, prep school, utterly atheist parents but being soaked in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and during lockdown, reading the entire KJ bible, plus commentaries confirmed me as a believer. I am basically Anglican but cannot bring myself to join the C of E as I am damned if I know what they believe any more - if anything, and Welby is destroying it (emissary of Satan?😉)
What I did know on completing reading it, was that I had to read it again. At Proverbs currently. Love the language of the KJ version and should anyone be inspired to read this book, from which our core morals, ethics and legal system all derive, I recommend
Gabriel Josopivici - "The Book of God" (magnificent)
Northrop Frye - The Great Code
- Words with Power
Robert Alter & Frank Kermode - The Literary Guide to the Bible.
All fascinating. Part of me thinks I could/should have been a biblical scholar. Tho' one odd thing. They ALL seem to be male... weird.
ps. Jordan Peterson's lectures on Genesis and Exodus are a must. Exodus lectures even better than Genesis as he has around him various biblical scholars of note to discuss these books. Yup, all male. Plus one of them is Dennis Prager, a Jew, which really valuable as he gives the Jewish view of the Torah.
Thank you, as always. You have clarified something for me which has been troubling me for a while.
What you describe here is an almost perfect account of a monastic community and how it is meant to operate (cf The Rule of Benedict). There, there is no problem, providing the abbot or abbess has the qualities specified by Benedict (see chapter 2). And if they don’t the community can always choose a replacement or appeal to a higher authority for aid. And crucially of course all members join the community of their own free will, and can leave it at any time. None of those conditions really apply in our secular societies.
Until a couple of years ago I lived as a member of a community that followed the Rule of Benedict. Naively, I assumed I was still an autonomous individual, with agency. But “wrong think” and dissent from the leadership was really not encouraged or even tolerated. Aspects of the Rule, particularly the duty of obedience and not being disagreeable (as in, not agreeing with the leadership) were applied in a controlling and ultimately suffocating way. Until I read your article, I had not seen so clearly why I became so unhappy there, and eventually left, feeling a bit guilty and a bit of a failure. Not now, so much 😂
There was a reason why the Reformation happened, whether ultimately it was right or wrong. Having been brought up in a Baptist church, I nowadays see the virtue in a religious life which obsesses over the relationship between the free individual and the divine, though I understand also the drawbacks.
We are fallen. So yup, that can always happen - will always happen. The Fall is for me perhaps the part of the OT that sounds loudest; the fall was the result of us gaining consciousness. Understand that we are all fallen matters.
Spent a week on a retreat earlier this year at Buckfast Abbey on the edge of Dartmoor. Good to be amongst believers, and good to get have a regular cycle of daily worship. I think we need such as the Benedictines, praying for all of us on a constant basis.
Praying for us sinners? Who is telling us that we are sinners, that we are fallen? Isn't that part of the truth being given to us by external authorities?
Oh, blast. Forgot that some human are perfect and never hurt anyone else. My apologies. If you don't understand what the Fall means, you have fallen further than most.
I once attended a great talk by John Cleese, where he advised that the best way to deal with sarcasm was to agree with it. So applying that here, I'm really sorry you forgot about some of us being perfect, and accept your apologies dear Jeremy ☺️. Thanks for the good wishes and acknowledging my perfection!
Very much enjoy these big concepts, David. Girard's observation about Christ is surprising and compelling.
As you say, the ideas are abstract and I feel an urge to push back on a certain issue. I should preface what I'm about to say with pointing out that I abhor the nanny state and feel like our first mistake was allowing the government to make car seatbelts a legal requirement. That said, I think X should be banned, though I would prefer a movement developed of its own accord to quit all pernicious forms of social media. Thing is, they are designed to be addictive and among the chief mechanisms of addiction is outrage. X and FB and certain forms of social media journalism truly bring out the worst in people. Incidents and stories get in our heads and cause negative ruminations that actually find outlets in the real world, usually shouty and mean, but sometimes violent. TDS is a decent example of how social media can wire a person's mind to a hair trigger. So I don't see attacks on social media as a free speech issue, but as a reaction to a pernicious element causing anger, derangement, and division. It used to be understood that certain conversation were gauche and that it was best not to chatter with friends and family about politics and religion. Why? Because wars have erupted over these subjects, and we'd prefer to avoid conflict and promote social harmony. We need to find a way toward civil discourse and it is quite clear that--the medium being the message--the medium of social media (and the smart phone) is harmful. It amazes me that there isn't a mature, urgent conversation going on about this problem.
Never had one. They are having a severely detrimental effect on society, in that when in use, the user is no longer present. And as we see that applies to more and more people for more of the time. Over 20 years ago, I recall going into a pub in Bristol to see four young people at a table, all on their smartphones - none talking to each other.
They are the end of conversation, that's for sure - and conversation is our core relationship with others.
My daughter and several other fellow parents have signed an agreement not to let their children have smartphones until they are I think 16. Her eldest, a 10 year old, already has classmates with smart phones
Reading that article was disappointing because it's being framed as a disinformation issue, when it is in fact a matter of addiction and psychological abuse as well as a social problem. Those are the issues as I see them and I'm still not finding a mature conversation about it. Unfortunately, it's being framed in the worst way possible, as you suggest, David.
On the subject of seatbelts, it was so freaky how wearing covid masks was justified by so many by comparing them. It's almost as if the former had actually been made compulsory with this in view for the future. Really freaky stuff!
This is really helpful in comprehending the bizarreness of our times (as always!)- thanks David. And it seems linked with CJ Hopkins' latest post too, where he writes of the official realities given us from those who purport to "lead" us. Not sure what you think of CJ, David?
Christ was the "first political atheist" .. to distinguish between " the spiritual and political".
Not sure; my first thought was yes, the Christ did act like an atheist - because in His time rulers prescribed which god to believe in. I didn't last. The (later) Church found that idea very attractive - convert the king and multiply the flock accordingly.
I agree that "the State cannot save us", that "imagining that it is" is folly, and that "salvation is [by] oneself alone".
How can we achieve this personal salvation? One element - probably a necessary one - will be to make the citizen more self-reliant (that is, permit him to be so). Western institutions act against this; especially the economic ones developed since 1918. They create dependency, and produce a timorous citizen who fears criticism and craves the cold warmth of huddling within a group. Unless these economic structures change, we are surely lost.
I think our problem IS the curtailment of freedom of speech because it is then that the government can impose its own 'truth'. It is hardly something about which the "State has interested itself in....", sounds like the State is treating almost like a hobby. The State (and our new government) fears free speech because it can challenge and undermine what it determines as unquestionable facts ( truth), as in, for example, the 'covid pandemic', as with the carbon net zero agenda.
(Free) speech is the output of our thoughts, without really connecting what we utter to something designated 'truth'. We don't consciously think about truth, half truths, lies etc, unless we are dealing in facts, say, in the legal system. Free speech is off (the government) radar - they can't control where it will go - It asks awkward questions, it comes to conclusions the government hasn't planned for, which why it uses propaganda and indoctrination.
I'm not sure that it is a particular problem for a secularised society. Organised religion imposed truths and belief systems but people still spoke freely ( no shadow banning centuries ago, or YouTube platform strikes), and sometimes the free speech got people imprisoned or executed. But, people still exercised their freedom to speak, it comes from the 'soul'. The State doesn't care about 'soul'. Its responsibility is to itself, to preserve its dominance and to grow its influence. Free speech of itself cannot be tied to truth, ergo, that is the State's reason to control what is said.
“it must produce within the heart of the individual a form of self-reflection which leads to the proper understanding of what is deemed to be ‘true’.” Is this not pure 1984, without the squalor ( tho that may yet come)?
Very good. Very illuminating. Even someone who has no intention of paying for it (like myself) has to grant that it's worth paying for. Just compare it with Saturday's Telegraph at £4.50 a go.
I always enjoy your pieces riffing on Foucault, especially when you go into the corners and outside the usual sources. However, one of your ideas here seems to be that we shouldn't think of the current struggle as a free speech issue. I want to push back against this claim.
You say:
"But it is much more apt and productive to describe what is going on as the gradual crystallisation of a series of governmental techniques for the management or ‘modulation’ precisely of the ‘circulation of merits and faults’ with respect to speech itself...."
Aye, but it is not 'more apt and productive' to describe it in this way, rather this is a great description of *why* this is well-framed as a free speech issue. Likewise:
"This is what we face: not so much the suppression of free speech, but rather the production within us of the understanding, and hence the declaration, of what is held to be ‘true’, and only that."
But this again is precisely the definition of what is at stake in free speech. If it were not, there would be no sense in challenging people's freedom to speak whatever was on their minds and in their hearts. It is solely when there is an attempt to enforce a singular version of truth that free speech is placed under intolerable constraint. And this must, as you intimate here, always be a disaster, since the depth of truth simply cannot be flattened in this way without courting disaster. Yes, the situation is worse now in that the battle is less over the exclusions (as it arguably was, for instance, during the McCarthy witch hunts) and more about the enforcement of a single view of existence... but these are only ever two sides of the same coin.
When I started out in philosophy almost twenty years ago now, I swiftly converged upon freedom of belief as the key political and ethical issue of our time. If we are not free to believe whatever we wish, we are simply not free. This was being challenged at the time (it seemed to me) primarily through the assertion of a kind of maniacal version of scientific zealotry (what I came to refer to as 'positivism'; cf. my book 'The Mythology of Evolution'). Of course, I had in no way anticipated - quite unlike Foucault - that this was going to be deployed via the state apparatus to such destructive effect.
Yet nonetheless, I found in the constitution of the United States, where I now live (again... my third time living here) that the First Amendment was the keystone to any concept of freedom. The wording, although familiar enough, is worth repeating in full:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
In other words: freedom of belief, and thus also freedom of speech. The naming of 'religion' in this wording has unfortunately muddied the waters here by causing one branch of the secular society (a point you touch upon saliently here) to not see the contemporary relevance. This confusion over metaphysics and thus over religion is core to the crisis we're facing. I realised this quickly, but I also failed to appreciated the depths of the risks or the imminency of the dangers.
You suggest here that we should think about this in terms of the state apparatus to 'herd sheep', if you will, and that this is more productive than thinking about it as a free speech issue. My counter is that as a free speech issue, this topic commands enormous support (in the US and elsewhere) from people on the old left AND the old right, and thus works effectively as a standard that can be borne and rallied around. This is the merit of thinking about it as a free speech issue, and to me this outstrips the value of the additional ways of thinking about the problem (which are numerous, illuminating, but also very far from providing an oriflamme to rally around. All the additional critiques are worth putting into our backpacks, but they will not get us marching together.
Although my family has always been torn between the United Kingdom and the United States, ever since my wife and I married, during the recent Nonsense the decision to move back here was made far easier by the knowledge that this side of the Atlantic we have - at least on paper! - the protection of the First Amendment. In the United Kingdom, we have literally nothing like this to protect us. While I feel that the political battle needs to be joined everywhere, I also suggest that the First Amendment makes rallying disparate political travelling companions easier here. I do not feel I have abandoned my home nation. I feel that to win the fight for freedom of belief there, we must first secure it here.
Finally, I would like to note that I believe I was slightly mistaken in placing freedom of belief above freedom of speech in this one small way. A draconian state can tolerate free belief if no expression of it is permitted, for such as it is these dissident beliefs will wither and die without expression. As such, I might just as well have placed the battle line at free speech, as I will tend to do now, since this is the most basic act of free expression: to speak your mind, your heart, and to bare your soul.
Spot on David, tho' I would add that the "shepherd" aspect include the scapegoat, as the Bible so clearly describes. We need scapegoats, and when there isn't one, hell, let's scapegoat the Jews. Foucault and co. put me straight to sleep whenever I try more than a paragraph, so thank you for that summary of this part of his work.
My wife, many years ago at Warwick Uni., to a friend reading one of Derrida's works ...
"Do you understand him? "
"No. Nobody does" 😉😉
And of course, who can forget the terrifying Jacinda Ardern, hellspawn of Schwab, who made it clear that her government " "...will continue to be your single source of truth"".
This was vividly displayed during the 'covid' years when Science was replaced by ' the science ' which we were all instructed to believe was the truth by the state. This has been succeeded by Ukraine and the devil incarnate Putin. Underlying these times has been 'woke'.
The 20% or so represented by the PMC or outer Party are completely disciplined.
Eric thought he was writing a novel not a blueprint for society.
Demonic is good description.
"The science" in reality means "ideology". Not science as we used to know it.
The phrase was first used wrt climate change, at which point I clocked the above. As soon as I heard the Covidians use the phrase, it confirmed that what I was sure as hell was a scam was one.
A novel, or dramatised fact? Whatever, an uncanny prediction
So... the State aims to recreate a theocracy, but without a God. Without even the pretence of divine guidance.
Plus if you turbocharge the sheepfold analogy you could add that the 'purpose' of having a flock is to shear fleece as a tax and select meat for the theocrat's table. The sheep don't count. Their health is not a matter of benefit for the individual sheep, but a matter of maximising wool and meat.
Well..... quite!
The sheep of New Zealand’s decisive rejection of Jacinda “I am your sole source of truth” Ahearn gives hope that there is still a lot of fight left in us dumb animals when our traditional freedoms are removed “for the greater good”….which many of us would describe as modern day fascism.
Ardern's free as a bird though. And her style of government continues...
Course, Ardern's government was re-elected in more or less of a landslide in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic and after two months of lockdowns. It wasn't until after the pandemic was effectively over and all restrictions had basically been lifted that that government, sans Ardern, who had resigned as PM, got turfed out.
Excellent stuff, as ever, but one quibble - at the end you talk about the soul, which is right, but there is another word that needs to be included.... "church". Sadly much church hierarchy (especially CofE) has forgotten the point you are making here. Still, in the end, all idols topple.
Does anybody still have faith in the CofE hierarchy?
"You might think that; I couldn't possibly comment"...
Which is, of course, an example of how language can be used to go past the gate-keepers. I'm reminded of Wittgenstein's comment that' for theologians to insist upon the use of certain particular words and phrases does not make anything clearer, for practice gives the words their sense'. The language might be more or less 'policeable' but the human practice will always escape, and new language will form that escapes the centralised strictures.
I'm a Christian without a church. Methodist public school, C of E, prep school, utterly atheist parents but being soaked in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and during lockdown, reading the entire KJ bible, plus commentaries confirmed me as a believer. I am basically Anglican but cannot bring myself to join the C of E as I am damned if I know what they believe any more - if anything, and Welby is destroying it (emissary of Satan?😉)
What I did know on completing reading it, was that I had to read it again. At Proverbs currently. Love the language of the KJ version and should anyone be inspired to read this book, from which our core morals, ethics and legal system all derive, I recommend
Gabriel Josopivici - "The Book of God" (magnificent)
Northrop Frye - The Great Code
- Words with Power
Robert Alter & Frank Kermode - The Literary Guide to the Bible.
All fascinating. Part of me thinks I could/should have been a biblical scholar. Tho' one odd thing. They ALL seem to be male... weird.
ps. Jordan Peterson's lectures on Genesis and Exodus are a must. Exodus lectures even better than Genesis as he has around him various biblical scholars of note to discuss these books. Yup, all male. Plus one of them is Dennis Prager, a Jew, which really valuable as he gives the Jewish view of the Torah.
Thank you, as always. You have clarified something for me which has been troubling me for a while.
What you describe here is an almost perfect account of a monastic community and how it is meant to operate (cf The Rule of Benedict). There, there is no problem, providing the abbot or abbess has the qualities specified by Benedict (see chapter 2). And if they don’t the community can always choose a replacement or appeal to a higher authority for aid. And crucially of course all members join the community of their own free will, and can leave it at any time. None of those conditions really apply in our secular societies.
Until a couple of years ago I lived as a member of a community that followed the Rule of Benedict. Naively, I assumed I was still an autonomous individual, with agency. But “wrong think” and dissent from the leadership was really not encouraged or even tolerated. Aspects of the Rule, particularly the duty of obedience and not being disagreeable (as in, not agreeing with the leadership) were applied in a controlling and ultimately suffocating way. Until I read your article, I had not seen so clearly why I became so unhappy there, and eventually left, feeling a bit guilty and a bit of a failure. Not now, so much 😂
There was a reason why the Reformation happened, whether ultimately it was right or wrong. Having been brought up in a Baptist church, I nowadays see the virtue in a religious life which obsesses over the relationship between the free individual and the divine, though I understand also the drawbacks.
The problem is, just like “democracy”, a religious institution can be very easily corrupted, as Jesus not infrequently pointed out!
We are fallen. So yup, that can always happen - will always happen. The Fall is for me perhaps the part of the OT that sounds loudest; the fall was the result of us gaining consciousness. Understand that we are all fallen matters.
Spent a week on a retreat earlier this year at Buckfast Abbey on the edge of Dartmoor. Good to be amongst believers, and good to get have a regular cycle of daily worship. I think we need such as the Benedictines, praying for all of us on a constant basis.
Praying for us sinners? Who is telling us that we are sinners, that we are fallen? Isn't that part of the truth being given to us by external authorities?
Oh, blast. Forgot that some human are perfect and never hurt anyone else. My apologies. If you don't understand what the Fall means, you have fallen further than most.
Good luck with that, perfect being.
I once attended a great talk by John Cleese, where he advised that the best way to deal with sarcasm was to agree with it. So applying that here, I'm really sorry you forgot about some of us being perfect, and accept your apologies dear Jeremy ☺️. Thanks for the good wishes and acknowledging my perfection!
Very much enjoy these big concepts, David. Girard's observation about Christ is surprising and compelling.
As you say, the ideas are abstract and I feel an urge to push back on a certain issue. I should preface what I'm about to say with pointing out that I abhor the nanny state and feel like our first mistake was allowing the government to make car seatbelts a legal requirement. That said, I think X should be banned, though I would prefer a movement developed of its own accord to quit all pernicious forms of social media. Thing is, they are designed to be addictive and among the chief mechanisms of addiction is outrage. X and FB and certain forms of social media journalism truly bring out the worst in people. Incidents and stories get in our heads and cause negative ruminations that actually find outlets in the real world, usually shouty and mean, but sometimes violent. TDS is a decent example of how social media can wire a person's mind to a hair trigger. So I don't see attacks on social media as a free speech issue, but as a reaction to a pernicious element causing anger, derangement, and division. It used to be understood that certain conversation were gauche and that it was best not to chatter with friends and family about politics and religion. Why? Because wars have erupted over these subjects, and we'd prefer to avoid conflict and promote social harmony. We need to find a way toward civil discourse and it is quite clear that--the medium being the message--the medium of social media (and the smart phone) is harmful. It amazes me that there isn't a mature, urgent conversation going on about this problem.
I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment of this and had planned to write about it. The problem as I see it is not really X, but the smartphone. There are now people talking about finding ways to solve this problem: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/sep/10/australia-children-social-media-ban-age-limit-under-16-details
Never had one. They are having a severely detrimental effect on society, in that when in use, the user is no longer present. And as we see that applies to more and more people for more of the time. Over 20 years ago, I recall going into a pub in Bristol to see four young people at a table, all on their smartphones - none talking to each other.
They are the end of conversation, that's for sure - and conversation is our core relationship with others.
Couldn't agree more, Jeremy! Hear hear!
My daughter and several other fellow parents have signed an agreement not to let their children have smartphones until they are I think 16. Her eldest, a 10 year old, already has classmates with smart phones
Very common now, sadly. I've heard about such agreements and plan to also enter into one.
One child without a phone is possibly cruel. 3 or 4 without one is a select club 😊
Reading that article was disappointing because it's being framed as a disinformation issue, when it is in fact a matter of addiction and psychological abuse as well as a social problem. Those are the issues as I see them and I'm still not finding a mature conversation about it. Unfortunately, it's being framed in the worst way possible, as you suggest, David.
Well, that's good to hear! Thanks for passing along the article.
On the subject of seatbelts, it was so freaky how wearing covid masks was justified by so many by comparing them. It's almost as if the former had actually been made compulsory with this in view for the future. Really freaky stuff!
Girard's "Violence and the Sacred" well worth reading, and more readable than Foucault and co. He has a lot to say on the scapegoat.
This is really helpful in comprehending the bizarreness of our times (as always!)- thanks David. And it seems linked with CJ Hopkins' latest post too, where he writes of the official realities given us from those who purport to "lead" us. Not sure what you think of CJ, David?
https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/the-new-normal-right?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=298057&post_id=148614700&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=nnakm&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Christ was the "first political atheist" .. to distinguish between " the spiritual and political".
Not sure; my first thought was yes, the Christ did act like an atheist - because in His time rulers prescribed which god to believe in. I didn't last. The (later) Church found that idea very attractive - convert the king and multiply the flock accordingly.
I agree that "the State cannot save us", that "imagining that it is" is folly, and that "salvation is [by] oneself alone".
How can we achieve this personal salvation? One element - probably a necessary one - will be to make the citizen more self-reliant (that is, permit him to be so). Western institutions act against this; especially the economic ones developed since 1918. They create dependency, and produce a timorous citizen who fears criticism and craves the cold warmth of huddling within a group. Unless these economic structures change, we are surely lost.
My latest post will be about that lost topic - you’re absolutely right to raise it.
I think our problem IS the curtailment of freedom of speech because it is then that the government can impose its own 'truth'. It is hardly something about which the "State has interested itself in....", sounds like the State is treating almost like a hobby. The State (and our new government) fears free speech because it can challenge and undermine what it determines as unquestionable facts ( truth), as in, for example, the 'covid pandemic', as with the carbon net zero agenda.
(Free) speech is the output of our thoughts, without really connecting what we utter to something designated 'truth'. We don't consciously think about truth, half truths, lies etc, unless we are dealing in facts, say, in the legal system. Free speech is off (the government) radar - they can't control where it will go - It asks awkward questions, it comes to conclusions the government hasn't planned for, which why it uses propaganda and indoctrination.
I'm not sure that it is a particular problem for a secularised society. Organised religion imposed truths and belief systems but people still spoke freely ( no shadow banning centuries ago, or YouTube platform strikes), and sometimes the free speech got people imprisoned or executed. But, people still exercised their freedom to speak, it comes from the 'soul'. The State doesn't care about 'soul'. Its responsibility is to itself, to preserve its dominance and to grow its influence. Free speech of itself cannot be tied to truth, ergo, that is the State's reason to control what is said.
“it must produce within the heart of the individual a form of self-reflection which leads to the proper understanding of what is deemed to be ‘true’.” Is this not pure 1984, without the squalor ( tho that may yet come)?
It may very well yet come....
Very good. Very illuminating. Even someone who has no intention of paying for it (like myself) has to grant that it's worth paying for. Just compare it with Saturday's Telegraph at £4.50 a go.
I entirely agree that it is worth paying for!
So why not include a “buy me a coffee” option with each of excellent articles?
Dear David,
I always enjoy your pieces riffing on Foucault, especially when you go into the corners and outside the usual sources. However, one of your ideas here seems to be that we shouldn't think of the current struggle as a free speech issue. I want to push back against this claim.
You say:
"But it is much more apt and productive to describe what is going on as the gradual crystallisation of a series of governmental techniques for the management or ‘modulation’ precisely of the ‘circulation of merits and faults’ with respect to speech itself...."
Aye, but it is not 'more apt and productive' to describe it in this way, rather this is a great description of *why* this is well-framed as a free speech issue. Likewise:
"This is what we face: not so much the suppression of free speech, but rather the production within us of the understanding, and hence the declaration, of what is held to be ‘true’, and only that."
But this again is precisely the definition of what is at stake in free speech. If it were not, there would be no sense in challenging people's freedom to speak whatever was on their minds and in their hearts. It is solely when there is an attempt to enforce a singular version of truth that free speech is placed under intolerable constraint. And this must, as you intimate here, always be a disaster, since the depth of truth simply cannot be flattened in this way without courting disaster. Yes, the situation is worse now in that the battle is less over the exclusions (as it arguably was, for instance, during the McCarthy witch hunts) and more about the enforcement of a single view of existence... but these are only ever two sides of the same coin.
When I started out in philosophy almost twenty years ago now, I swiftly converged upon freedom of belief as the key political and ethical issue of our time. If we are not free to believe whatever we wish, we are simply not free. This was being challenged at the time (it seemed to me) primarily through the assertion of a kind of maniacal version of scientific zealotry (what I came to refer to as 'positivism'; cf. my book 'The Mythology of Evolution'). Of course, I had in no way anticipated - quite unlike Foucault - that this was going to be deployed via the state apparatus to such destructive effect.
Yet nonetheless, I found in the constitution of the United States, where I now live (again... my third time living here) that the First Amendment was the keystone to any concept of freedom. The wording, although familiar enough, is worth repeating in full:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
In other words: freedom of belief, and thus also freedom of speech. The naming of 'religion' in this wording has unfortunately muddied the waters here by causing one branch of the secular society (a point you touch upon saliently here) to not see the contemporary relevance. This confusion over metaphysics and thus over religion is core to the crisis we're facing. I realised this quickly, but I also failed to appreciated the depths of the risks or the imminency of the dangers.
You suggest here that we should think about this in terms of the state apparatus to 'herd sheep', if you will, and that this is more productive than thinking about it as a free speech issue. My counter is that as a free speech issue, this topic commands enormous support (in the US and elsewhere) from people on the old left AND the old right, and thus works effectively as a standard that can be borne and rallied around. This is the merit of thinking about it as a free speech issue, and to me this outstrips the value of the additional ways of thinking about the problem (which are numerous, illuminating, but also very far from providing an oriflamme to rally around. All the additional critiques are worth putting into our backpacks, but they will not get us marching together.
Although my family has always been torn between the United Kingdom and the United States, ever since my wife and I married, during the recent Nonsense the decision to move back here was made far easier by the knowledge that this side of the Atlantic we have - at least on paper! - the protection of the First Amendment. In the United Kingdom, we have literally nothing like this to protect us. While I feel that the political battle needs to be joined everywhere, I also suggest that the First Amendment makes rallying disparate political travelling companions easier here. I do not feel I have abandoned my home nation. I feel that to win the fight for freedom of belief there, we must first secure it here.
Finally, I would like to note that I believe I was slightly mistaken in placing freedom of belief above freedom of speech in this one small way. A draconian state can tolerate free belief if no expression of it is permitted, for such as it is these dissident beliefs will wither and die without expression. As such, I might just as well have placed the battle line at free speech, as I will tend to do now, since this is the most basic act of free expression: to speak your mind, your heart, and to bare your soul.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
Spot on David, tho' I would add that the "shepherd" aspect include the scapegoat, as the Bible so clearly describes. We need scapegoats, and when there isn't one, hell, let's scapegoat the Jews. Foucault and co. put me straight to sleep whenever I try more than a paragraph, so thank you for that summary of this part of his work.
My wife, many years ago at Warwick Uni., to a friend reading one of Derrida's works ...
"Do you understand him? "
"No. Nobody does" 😉😉
And of course, who can forget the terrifying Jacinda Ardern, hellspawn of Schwab, who made it clear that her government " "...will continue to be your single source of truth"".
Terrifying, in reality.