Disinformation, Hate Speech, and the Government of Souls

Getting to the bottom of the freedom of speech crisis

The strangest form of power, the form of power that is most typical of the West, and that will also have the greatest and most durable fortune, was not born in the steppe or in the towns. This form of power so typical of the West, and unique, I think, in the entire history of civilisations, was born, or at least took its model from…politics seen as a matter of the sheep-fold.

-Michel Foucault

As you are likely aware, there has recently been a global acceleration in the campaigns against ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’, as evidenced by three stories that it would no doubt be conspiracy-theoretical to link together too closely: the arrest of Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov and associated threats against Elon Musk, the banning of X in Brazil, and the proposed clampdown in the UK on ‘legal but harmful’ speech. It seems as though something is afoot: not so much a change in the weather as a sudden picking up of the wind, as though heralding an onrushing storm.

This makes it an apposite time for a brief post on the political theology of the anti-disinformation movement. This, I hope, will allow readers to see past what to my mind is the rather unhelpful way in which the subject is generally framed - i.e., as a ‘free speech’ issue. As I hope to make clear, casting the struggle in free speech terms as such is really to speak in relation to symptoms rather than causes. The problem at root is not that there are people who are seeking to suppress freedom of speech (though there are such people); the problem rather is the underlying desire to manage what I will call - following Foucault - the ‘circulation of merits and faults’ in society, and how this relates in particular to speech-acts. Put more straightforwardly, the issue is not exactly that freedom of speech is being restricted, but rather that a global effort is underway to decide what is true, and to produce a consciousness of that ‘truth’ within each and every individual, at any given moment, so that their speech indeed can do nothing but declare it.

This, as we shall see, will take us to a difficult but important subject: Jesus Christ, and his description by René Girard as the ‘first political atheist’. The secularisation of society has largely taken the figure of Jesus out of the public consciousness; my aim here is in part to show that this has been a great tragedy in terms of the loss to our understanding of politics in the round (leaving matters of spirituality and theology entirely to one side).

Let us begin all of this, then, with Foucault. As regular readers will recall, in his 1977-78 lecture series, Foucault made plain that the State was only an ‘episode’ in the trajectory of government. This, to recap, was because government itself was a practice untrammelled by borders or indeed physical barriers of any kind; the task of governing was a project embarked upon precisely because, with the advent of modernity and the Scientific Revolution, it became possible to imagine the world itself as a domain which it was possible to act upon so as to improve it. This in the first instance became the project of the State. But implicit in that project was the notion the State was merely a kind of staging post to world government (what is nowadays called ‘global governance’) properly so-called.

However, there is of course also a retrospective element to this statement as well: if the State is only an ‘episode’ in government, then this naturally implies that there were previous episodes in government before the modern State existed. And Foucault’s focus here was on the medieval pastorate, which he describes in part as a system for managing ‘the circulation of merits and faults’ in society - a totalising effort to do nothing less than ‘govern men’s souls’. This system, as Foucault argues, derived its structure and approach from the semiotics of the sheepfold: humanity was conceived as a flock of sheep, and the pastorate’s job was understood as being to minister to that flock - caring for each individual within it with ‘kindness’, and minutely monitoring the ‘economy’ of sin within it - so as to lead it to salvation.

Foucault uses the word ‘economy’ advisedly; as he further elaborates, this is because the job of the pastor was in part ‘distributive’ - it involved making decisions indeed about nothing less than the distribution of salvation itself:

[T]he necessity of saving the whole entails, if necessary, accepting the sacrifice of a sheep that could compromise the whole. The sheep that is a cause of scandal, or whose corruption is in danger of corrupting the whole flock, must be abandoned, possibly excluded, chased away, and so forth.

And, to extend the use of an economic metaphor, this would involve keeping ‘accounts’ of each individual within the flock, partly so as to carefully monitor that ‘distribution’ of salvation within it and where necessary eject corrupt sheep, and partly so as to be able to determine, in the final analysis, on the fearful day, ‘everything good and evil’ that every individual in the flock has done.

This, Foucault goes on, gives rise to a particular approach to the subject of government, exercised not as we understand it in the secular sense, but in respect of matters of the spiritual. It made the medieval pastorate a quintessentially managerial exercise, defined not by rules, law, or principle, but by a carefully calibrated and continual exercise of individuated manipulation, observation, and perfection, in light of a certain vision of what salvation is thought to mean.

Foucault, accordingly, highlights for us two qualities of this exercise of the government of souls. First, he says, it cannot be simply a matter of fire-and-forget: the pastor does not simply teach the flock how to be good and leave it at that, but rather engages in a ‘direction of daily conduct’. Hence:

It is not just a matter of teaching by general principles, but rather by a daily modulation, and this teaching must also pass through an observation, a supervision, a direction exercised at every moment and with the least discontinuity possible over the sheep’s whole, total conduct. The perfection, merit, or quality of daily life must not be just the result of a general teaching or even of an example. The pastor must really take charge of and observe daily life in order to form a never-ending knowledge of the behavior and conduct of the members of the flock he supervises.

And, second, it follows, the pastor does not merely teach, but also sets up a relationship with the flock of permanent spiritual direction, which does not just intervene at particular moments of celebration or crisis (a death, a birth, a marriage, and so on), but all the time, in every circumstance, ‘with regard to everything and for the whole of one’s life’. And this naturally makes every individual in the flock totally dependent on the pastor for spiritual direction at every turn: the exercise is not designed to achieve autonomy, but rather the opposite - it will ‘fix more firmly the relationship of subordination’ between the flock and the pastor, by making every member of the former constantly examine his or her conscience in order to always be in a position to inform the pastor ‘what one has done, what one is, what one has experienced, the temptations to which one has been subject, and the bad thoughts that inhabit one’s mind’.

The result of all of this, Foucault tells us, in one of his sweeping rhetorical flourishes:

[Is] a form of power that, taking the problem of salvation in its general set of themes, inserts into this global, general relationship an entire economy and technique of the circulation, transfer, and reversal of merits and faults… [which] establishes a kind of exhaustive, total, and permanent relationship of individual obedience.

With the advent of modernity, of course, and the crisis of the medieval episteme brought about by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and so on, the pastorate itself went into decline. But Foucault insists that its conceptual system for the government of souls did not disappear - far from it. In fact, released from its theological trappings, it grew far stronger and more pervasive than it had ever been before until it was truly (to use Foucault’s own word) ‘demonic’.

That is, although the pastorate itself deteriorated and lost the position of power and status it once had, the structures of thought which it had developed did not. That ‘form of power’ which had ‘the problem of salvation’ as its theme, and which inserted ‘an entire economy and technique of the circulation, transfer and reversal of merits and faults’ into the ‘global, general relationship’ continued to exist, and continued to insist on ‘exhaustive, total, and permanent individual obedience’. It was just that, through the process of secularisation, the way that form of power was exercised (very gradually, of course) became itself secularised - and was seeded within the thought-structure of the modern State as it emerged from the medieval period’s philosophical wreckage.

Put in crude terms, then, as the project of the modern State became the act of governing, it began to take on for itself something akin to the role of pastor. Its duty became to achieve a kind of secular salvation; its interest became the ‘economy’ of ‘merits and faults’; its insistence became ‘exhaustive, total and permanent individual obedience’. And its approach began slowly but surely to incorporate the pre-existing managerial framework for the government of souls which had been developed within the medieval pastorate. It thus came eventually to rest on precisely the same techniques - which, one will recall, consisted of continual, daily ‘modulation’, informed by ‘a never-ending knowledge of the behaviour and conduct of the members of the flock’, combined with a relationship of permanent and total dependence of the individual on the State-as-pastor, operationalised through the requirement for individuals to continually examine their consciences in light of the existence of constant individuated supervision.

The story of modernity and Enlightenment is then here cast not as a replacement of faith by reason but as a gradual transference or transposition of the cognitive and metaphorical mechanisms for the pastoral government of souls from the realm of the spiritual to that of the temporal. The consequence of this was a creeping and totalising managerialisation of the relationship between the State and society, conceived precisely on the semiotics of the shepherd and flock - what Foucault called ‘the politics of the sheepfold’ - and a consequent insistence on the complete subservience of the individual, made accountable always and everywhere to the State (whether directly or indirectly) in order that the salvation of the flock be secured.

It is to be conceded that Foucault was a highly schematic thinker and that these ideas were presented as musings derived from extended periods submerged in the archives of the Collège de France rather than carefully presented evidence. But it is abundantly evident that he was onto something, even if only at the level of abstract generalisation: secularisation appears increasingly to mean the replacement of church by State in quite literal terms, with the State presenting itself as the means for realising a kind of temporal salvation, and the structure of government taking the form of a mechanism precisely for the management of the ‘circulation of merits and faults’ in society. When Foucault speaks of a ‘form of power’ which ‘tak[es] the problem of salvation in its general set of themes’ and ‘establishes a kind of exhaustive, total, and permanent relationship of individual obedience’ achieved through ‘a never-ending knowledge of the behaviour and conduct of the members of the flock’, we all instinctively recognise what he is referring to as the form of power which we now find ourselves subject to.

We are, in other words, governed, more and more, in the name not of achieving mere material improvement in our living conditions, let alone securing the conditions of individual autonomy, but in the name of improving our moral sensibilities - indeed, in the interests of our spiritual advancement. That this is done atheistically, as it were, or from a position of agnosticism or denial with respect to actual spiritual matters, is by-the-by. What is important is the structuring of the relationship between State and society, and between State and individual, which follows from it.

Seen in this way, the campaigns against disinformation and hate speech take on an entirely different complexion than that of a brute, authoritarian suppression of free expression. No doubt that is present to a certain degree. 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: the means on the one hand by which ‘permanent spiritual direction’ by the State over the individual is secured, and on the other hand by which ‘exhaustive, total, and permanent’ individual obedience is realised. The State takes responsibility for leading the flock to salvation - and for providing an ‘account’ for every individual within it. And this means that the individual, in turn, is required to abnegate his or her self, or will, to the benevolent guidance of government - to know, indeed, ‘that any will of one’s own is a bad will’, as Foucault put it, and to ‘always desire that someone command’.

It follows that the individual, in this picture, is not supposed to express him- or herself freely. He is supposed to speak ‘the truth’, in the sense that truth is something that is ‘produced’ within him - it is something that is taught. It follows that the State must therefore be constructed as the possessor of truth, and the individual as the one to whom the truth is taught - the passive recipient of knowledge of what is true or false. The State is that which knows best, because it is the State which is in possession of the expertise and wherewithal to have a proper hold on what is true. And thus we see the State ‘acting on the consciousness of people’ so as, precisely, to extract from them ‘the truth’ in what they speak.

This, it bears noting, is qualitatively different from the relationship between the individual and the pastor, which involved a genuine confession by the individual of the good and bad things that he had thought, or done. In the relationship between individual and State there no such disclosure - except perhaps the forcible disclosure of ‘data’ - and the process of the production of truth is much more direct. The State tells the population what is true, and the population declares that truth accordingly. Underlying this, it goes without saying, is the soul itself - understood, again, atheistically - and a concern that what is being thought within it is also, so to speak, ‘true’.

It also, of course, follows that - as will be recalled - part of the State’s role is, like the shepherd, to abandon or chase away any sheep that might corrupt the flock. Ideally the shepherd will bring even the most recalcitrant of sheep back into the fold: taking responsibility for the whole, he will go to great lengths to ensure that every head is accounted for, to go in search of strays, and to look after those which are sick. This will also include a strong element of discipline, too, by which the flock is rendered docile and compliant enough to be properly managed. But there also comes a point at which that responsibility must be exercised more surgically, so as indeed to excise irredeemably corrupting influences - perhaps with the aim some day of rehabilitation, but perhaps to permanent exile and exclusion in the interests of the good of the whole.

What we see here, in Foucault’s account, is then a form of political theology that lays a great emphasis on the relationship between the individual and the structure of power - which, indeed, understands political power as being something which in modernity is exercised precisely on the individual so as to extract from him or her a particular ‘truth’. This has a dual aspect: on the one hand, the State must know everything about the individual in the sense of the relevant data, but - perhaps even more importantly - 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’. And this, naturally, puts speech at the heart of the project of the State in modernity, as the primary locus of control.

All of this has obviously taken centuries to play out, but we are now seeing the process bearing fruit as secularisation has truly set in. The idea that a more secular world will be one which will be more rational and free is thus revealed to be hopelessly naive: the truth of the matter is rather that it will be characterised by a more complete and thoroughgoing rejection of both reason and freedom than ever previously existed, centred around the phenomenon of speech. What will be important will not be what is True but rather the speaking of what is ‘true’ according to what has been pre-determined. And what will allow us to get to that ‘truth’ is not reason, but patterns of thought induced within us under the managerial purview of the shepherd-State, so as to ensure that ‘truth’ is what we declare (or that what we declare is always ‘true’). 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.

Secular moderns (this includes all readers, atheists, agnostics and believers alike) must reckon with all of this. We have not even begun to do so. But in closing it may be worth considering the thought of René Girard, and his mysterious declaration that Jesus Christ was the ‘first political atheist’, as a part of that necessary reckoning.

Girard was an even more schematic thinker than Foucault and came at matters much more obliquely, but what he seems to have meant with this comment was that Christ was the first figure in human history to make plain the distinction between matters of the spiritual and political. Whereas before Christ there was no meaningful difference between the religious sphere and what we would think of as government - the two were entirely fused, as they indeed remain throughout much of the non-Christian world - his appearance ushered into human consciousness the notion that salvation of the soul was not within the power of worldly authority to secure: it was a matter for the divine alone. With Christ came the message, therefore, of ‘political atheism’ - perhaps the most important concept to grasp within all of political life, which is that the State cannot save us. That is not its function, and the more we delude ourselves into imagining that it is, the worse our predicament will grow.

That is a genuinely atheistic message as much as it is a Christian one, and believers and non-believers alike would do well to consider it. For the atheist, salvation, so to speak, is a matter for oneself alone. For the believer, it is a matter for one’s relationship with God. Our problem is that we have allowed ourselves to construct a political-theological edifice wherein the State takes on the responsibility for our souls, albeit typically cast in the language of ‘progress’. That is why our problem is not whether we have freedom of speech as such, but rather that speech itself, and its connection to thought and truth, has become a subject about which the State has interested itself in the first place. How a secularised society resolves that problem will be one of the central conundrums of our age. That resolution, it follows from what I have surveyed here, may have to occur within the soul itself rather than within the formal structure of law, politics, and government.