I’ve long been fascinated by those ‘I believe’ collections of pieces from often-famous thinkers and writers. Sometimes I was informed, even pleased, by precis that captured my own predilections. Perhaps more often I was disappointed to find people I admired for one reason or another, had views irreconcilably different from my own. Finding myself with a free hour or two around the Easter weekend I thought I’d have a go at putting forward a selection of my own beliefs, values and predispositions.
I must begin by differentiating between people and the beliefs they hold. The former are owed a ‘provisional’ degree of respect, but the latter are fair game for no-holes-barred critique. In practice however, the tension between people and the beliefs they hold and act on can be difficult to manage. Caring can and should trump debunking on occasions. Caring is integral to living together.
I have arrived at a firmly-held conviction that we humans are but one species abiding on Planet Earth. There’s nothing special about us. There are no gods. All gods are human inventions. Religions remain socially significant institutions which can offer real comfort as well as opportunities to mobilise people for either good or ill. However, it would be far better in my opinion if we humans recognised the ‘arbitrariness’ of our presence and lot on Earth and faced up to the challenge this and our reflexivity offers; namely, to work out a way of living together in the company of other species.
We just happen to find ourselves introduced by birth to a life not of our choosing (‘thrown into it’, to paraphrase Heidegger). There is nothing superior about humans but we do possess reflexivity: that is, we can ponder out lot and that of other humans and species. We find ourselves in a situation never of our choosing but we can react. We can, as Archer put it, hold ‘internal conversations’ and exercise a degree of freedom to act, alone and in company. We are inevitably constrained by the time and place-bound structures and cultures into which we’ve been inserted, but we can be enabled by them too. In short, we have the potential to act freely and in combination. Only too often, however, the internal conversations we hold with ourselves are focused on negotiating with and/or circumventing our individual structural and cultural positionings.
Human systems of knowledge are fallible and should be subject to continuing questioning and critique. The emergence of the sciences, however, has led to a better understanding of the natural and social worlds we inhabit than was available previously. Science has proven better at this than prior myth- or religion-based systems. But science is ‘merely’ our best bet at this moment of time. It carries the potential to inform and fuel optimal ways of living together, but it cannot decide on them for us.
Neither individual morality nor ‘optimal ways of living together’ are handed to us from outside (via gods or prophets) or on a plate (via the likes of Plato’s philosopher kings). Utilising our individual-to-social reflexive potential is the only available route to either. As individuals we start from where we find ourselves, that is, with the structural and cultural conditions into which we are born and socialised. And we have at our disposal a mix of habits, customs and conventions as well as books, actual and virtual libraries, universities, the arts, digital platforms and so on.
I’m obliged to accept the self-evident truth that cultures as well as structures have varied by time and place. Notwithstanding this, I am a universalist not a relativist. In other words, I maintain that it is not only possible but imperative that we hold on to the notion in which the European Enlightenment was anchored, namely, that humans possess the potential to be rational, to achieve a consensus and to conduct affairs in such a way as to bring about a better, even a ‘good’, society. Undeniably the advocacy of the late eighteenth-century ‘unreconstructed’ European Enlightenment was ‘framed’ in terms of the prevailing structures and cultures of the time: it was white, masculine, bourgeois, colonialist, and so on. What is required now is what Habermas called a ‘reconstructed’ Enlightenment ethos, in other words an ethos that retains the commitment to reason but occasions a re-set. This demands subjecting our reflexive potential to continuing critique. No reconstructed Enlightenment ethos can rationalise subservience to ‘The West’ and its aspirations to retain and breathe new life into its hegemony (global economic and political dominance). Relativism has its appeal, but must be resisted. To sign up to relativism is to give up on our collective human potential to work rationally and collectively to care for each other.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century relativism has taken a strong hold across many Western societies. The result has been the emergence and consolidation of a hyper-individualised culture of instant judgement, post-truth, cancelling, in-group empathy and out-group hostility, culminating in the displacement of a politics of distribution and redistribution by one of politics of identity. This is a welcome gift to those with everything to gain from the structural/cultural status quo: to divide people by denying them universal human rationality is effectively to disempower them. To abandon the notion of a reconstructed Enlightenment project is to deny reason the power to construct a ‘utopian realist’ manifesto signalling better lives for most humans who inhabit planet Earth. To allow we humans a capacity to arrive at a reasoned consensus is to afford them/us hope.
This is not a ‘philosophical’ case for eschewing relativism (although recognising the fallibility of any ‘universal’ argument for ‘relativism’ is logically self-refuting, plus looking the other way has consequences).
There are parameters that are relevant for individual socio-political morality. If we humans really want what we typically say we want, a better life for ‘all’, and globally, then this has consequences. For me, I see an affinity between education, the kind of sociology I espouse and socialism. Knowledge should be distinguished from ideology, as it was in classical sociology (but is no longer). Ideology is a worldview that reflects the vested interests of a particular social grouping. The kind of fallible self-critical scientific project I define and commend stands in contrast to ideology. Education is, as Peters used to say, ‘intrinsically worthwhile’. Sociology is handmaiden and fuel for education. Sociology should be part and parcel of a person’s intellectual equipment since it exposes the ideologies of the powerful. It should feature in any core curriculum.
Sociology is necessarily oriented to Habermas’ ‘lifeworld rationalisation’ or ‘de-colonisation’. In other words, his seemingly utopian ‘ideal speech situation’, on which the promise of attaining a rational consensus on how we fashion human togetherness is premised, affords a logical impulse for many and various forms of deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy takes us well beyond any form of capitalist parliamentary democracy, which is ideology rather than knowledge-based. A knowledge-based deliberative democracy can only have traction in a post-capitalist or socialist society where the interests of all are addressed rather than those of a dominant group. This was the impetus behind early manifestos for communism.
We currently inhabit an era of rent-based capitalism, where the dominant group or class has a global base and deploys and promotes a ‘leave-it-to-the-markets-and-us’ neoliberal ideology to subdue and exploit the majority of humans worldwide. It is a post-industrial type of capitalism rooted in extracting rents from the ownership or control of land, property, services, goods, media, polities and digital platforms. Rentier capitalism has prevailed on political elites to ramp up central autocratic and oppressive control over lifeworlds and lives. It is the antithesis of deliberative democracy.
Since its emergence in the long sixteenth century capitalism has shown a remarkable capacity to recover from intermittent crises. Rentier capitalism is the latest in a long line of rejigged means of controlling most in the interests of the very few. It may nevertheless contain the seeds of its own dissolution, and it is now promoting racism against asylum seekers, migrants and UK citizens – most notably Muslims – from ethnic minorities. But it will only be succeeded by a socialist-cum-communist formation if enough of people are engaged and active in its demise and united behind a programme of transition and transformation. The obstacles to this happening are imposing and involve the ‘constraining’ interplay of structure, culture and agency.
I share the analysis and commitment to societal transformation of contemporary Marxists on what is typically characterised as the ‘far left’. I locate myself within this camp. As intimated, however, the route to a more rational socialist way of organising our lives together remains as unclear as it is daunting. And paradoxically single battles won in such domains as international aid, welfare or health gains, housing or job rights can make winning the war against the rentiers and their political allies less not more likely as the pain many people experience seems to reduce. Moreover when in the midst of harsh political austerity even modest socialist-like reforms are both popular and seemingly on the cards, as during Corbyn’s brief tenure at the head of the UK’s Labour Party, the threat is only too easily nullified. As things stand in the UK the left is introverted and factionalised and, as the self-destructiveness of Your Party has demonstrated, inward rather than outward looking.
My sense is that the optimum conditions for a significant mobilisation behind a ‘utopian realist’ agenda might yet be realised via an unpredictable ‘social trauma’ epitomised by a singular event or series of events. While the US-backed Israeli genocide presently being conducted against the Palestinians, plus their unprovoked bombing of Lebanon and Iran, might – and perhaps should – furnish such a trauma, it is in my view more likely that an event emergent from a political call for mass conscription or, more probably, one deriving from the cost-of-living crisis is more likely to prompt a mass revolt. But to stand any chance of being an effective catalyst for change such a mobilisation would have to be prepared and ready to counter police and armed forces deployed to neutralise or put them down by force.
I have wondered hither and thither in this blog under the rubric of ‘credo’. It is an attempt to synthesise and translate into plain language what I have analysed in more depth and detail elsewhere either in publications or in companion blogs. I am as ever open to challenge and to moving on. Such is the essence of education, sociology and socialism.