22.09.2010

Disorientated establishment promotes Popemania

Mike Macnair examines the results of Ratzinger's visit

Press coverage of last week’s papal ‘state visit’ has been characterised by what can only be called ‘popemania’ in the Tory press. Large numbers of column inches have been given over to the visit. The success of the events has been enthusiastically hyped. Objectors and protestors have been marginalised, and with them discussion of the international Catholic Church child abuse cover-up has been relegated to - as it were - a footnote. And the columnists have poured out an aggressive anti-secularism. To round the story off, David Cameron praised the Pope’s visit and ideas as providing support for his own ‘Big Society’ campaign of privatisation and cuts.^[1]

Eddie Ford’s article on the visit in last week’s issue of this paper and its headline emphasised the dangers of anti-Catholicism as a form of British nationalism, as well as the Pope’s rightwing politics. This balance of emphasis turns out to have been inappropriate. Not comrade Ford’s fault: the line of his article drew on a prior discussion in the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee. We in the PCC did not anticipate that the papal visit would bring forth a coordinated Tory-media campaign for Christianising (or even Catholicising) British politics. Perhaps we should have done: John Paul II’s 1982 visit was a pastoral visit, ie unofficial; making this visit a state visit signalled that the British state was going to support it.

In his address to the great and the bad in Westminster Hall on September 17, Benedict XVI argued for the necessity of Christianity to society and for the right of Christians in public positions not to have to apply the secular (anti-discrimination) laws. In support he invoked torture advocate Thomas More (1478-1535), notoriously executed in 1535 for refusing to swear the oath of allegiance to King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England.^[2] But his larger argument was that ethics requires religious foundations, since “if the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident”.^[3]

Benedict argues that ethics depend on religious commitment. Some of his supporters argue - following his own earlier suggestions - that the enlightenment led to the holocaust, and ‘sixties’ sexual liberation to clerical child abuse. The boot is exactly on the other foot. Commitment to ‘revealed religion’ involves a deformation of ethical judgment which is at the root of the child abuse cover-up. And Nazism grew out of the anti-semitic parties and movements which the papacy actively promoted and funded in late 19th-early 20th century Europe.

Benedict argues that Britain is characterised by an “aggressive secularism”. But the boot is on the other foot here too: in this state visit the Conservative Party is seeking to emulate the US Republicans in enlisting clericalism as part of an aggressive offensive against secular education and secular welfare.

Ethics

Like all really dangerous arguments, Benedict’s argument on ethics is founded on a half-truth. The half-truth is this. Academic liberalism has developed ‘anti-foundationalist’ arguments in relation to both epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) and ethics. To simplify grossly, the basic claim these involve is that there are no underlying objective grounds of belief - whether in propositions of fact, or in ethical propositions (“thou shalt not kill” and so on). Rather, factual beliefs (which we can set for the moment on one side) and ethical beliefs are both grounded on the consensus of the society of which we are members.

The philosophical arguments for these views can be set wholly on one side. The political argument is that ‘foundationalist’ approaches which claim that there is an objectively discoverable moral truth lead to civil war (as people inherently disagree about these questions) and/or to totalitarianism (as people who claim absolute expertise enforce their ideas of what is good for us on everyone else). It is easier for us to agree on democratic decision-making procedures and on liberal limits to government (or free markets!) which will allow individuals to pursue their own idea of what’s good.

Benedict identifies a real problem with ethical anti-foundationalism. This is that there isn’t a social consensus on ethical issues, or even on democratic decision-making procedures: islamists, protestant “dominion theology” advocates, and various sorts of far rightists reject the claims of democracy. (Communists also reject the claims of what the liberals call democracy, ie rule-of-law constitutionalism, but from another angle: that of fighting for a real democracy.) Moreover, anti-foundationalism implies that there is no reason why we should ever be able to form a consensus on these questions.

The reality is that liberalism has been imposed on large parts of the world by main force. The execution of Thomas More was (part of) an early stage of what is still going on in the form of the “war on terror”. Liberal ethicists thus actually need to claim that liberal values are sufficiently objectively morally justified that it is justifiable to impose them on those who reject liberalism, by force if necessary. A rigorous ethical anti-foundationalism thus collapses into the clash of wills argued to be the basis of politics by the (incidentally, Catholic) Nazi Crown Jurist, Carl Schmitt.^[4] “The fragility of the process becomes all too evident”.

If there is an objective foundation to ethics, what is it? David Hume (1711-1776), who modern anti-foundationalists treat as an early proponent of the idea, argued that it could not be human nature, because that would be to reason from ‘is’ statements (eg ‘mammals look after their offspring; humans are mammals’) to an ‘ought’ statement (eg ‘humans ought to look after their children’).^[5] What is left behind as a ground for ‘ought’ statements - ethical claims - is either social convention, or revealed religion (‘God has told us that humans ought to look after their children’). Hume’s argument is, in fact, misleading; but this point will be better dealt with later.

The Catholic neo-Thomist school of natural law argues that certain very basic values and procedures of reasoning are ‘self-evident’: for example, that it would be obviously irrational to argue that knowledge of the truth is a bad thing, because such an argument would prove that it is pointless to make the argument. This example is a valid argument. But most of the other ‘self-evident’ basic moral values proposed by this school turn out not to be ‘self-evident’ in this logical sense, but to rest on revealed religion in the form of Catholic doctrine.^[6]

Revealed religion

Suppose for the moment and purely for the sake of argument that the foundation of ethics is that we ought to live according to the will of a supernatural being, a god (or of the gods). How are we to know the will of god?

It is necessary to distinguish revealed and non-revealed religions. Non-revealed religions, like classical paganism, Hinduism, and Taoism, grew up historically out of local religious custom and practice. To the extent that they make ethical claims, these claims also grow up out of local custom and practice, perhaps as elaborated by religious scholars, or by philosophers or Confucian sages.

Revealed religions, like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Sikhism, are characterised by dependence on the teachings of a prophet, scribe, or whatever, to tell us what the will of God is (or, for Buddhists, the right way for humans to become one with the universe). In revealed religion, the revelation is thus the ‘objective’ foundation of ethics.

Suppose, again for the sake of argument, that the world we live in was, in fact, created by an omnipotent and benevolent god - as is claimed by at least Judaism and its Christian and Muslim offshoots.^[7] It follows logically that the character of the material world which god created, and not only the revelation to the prophet, is also evidence of god’s will in relation to human conduct.

In reality, of course, the character of the material world and the biological nature of the human species necessarily enter into ethical arguments. It is for this reason that, as I said above, Hume’s argument for the separation of factual and moral arguments is misleading. If humans, like some plants and fungi, reproduced asexually, a large body of sexual morality would disappear. If, like tigers, individuals were required to defend a large territory, interacting closely only for sex and between mothers and immature young, ethics would have a very different character. More immediately, if, in medieval England, you came across someone having a fit, it would be ethically justified to call an exorcist who would have them beaten with rods to drive out the demon by which they were possessed. Today this response would plainly be ethically unjustified.^[8]

So far in this part of the argument I have supposed for the sake of argument that the foundation of ethics is the will of a benevolent creator-god. But in fact this supposition is unnecessary. Hume’s and subsequent anti-foundationalist arguments rest on the idea that we cannot logically infer values and ethics from facts about human nature. So we are forced back to convention or self-evidence. But this sort of argument is wrong. We not only can, but invariably must, infer values and ethics from facts about human nature. The link through the will of god is simply unnecessary.

If anything, the matter is the reverse. The uselessness of ethical anti-foundationalism rests, in the last analysis, on the methodological individualism of bourgeois philosophy, economics, and so on. Ethics is both required, and made possible, by the social and communicative character of the human species. The ethical therefore appears among hunter-gatherers, long before revealed religion. It expresses the limits of the human individual; and therefore naturally appears in non-revealed religion as an aspect of the sacred.^[9]

The ethics of revealed religion are therefore only to a limited extent original: Jewish and Zoroastrian sacred legal and ethical ideas are largely derived from common earlier near eastern legal and ethical ideas, while Christian ethics are heavily derived from Jewish and pagan Roman legal and ethical ideas.^[10] Ethics contributes to producing religion, not the other way round.

Nonetheless, the question inevitably posed to revealed religion is this. Which is the better evidence of god’s will - the evidence of revelation, or the evidence of creation (of the material world)? It makes no difference if, like Catholics, you are not believers in the literal truth of the revealed text, but in the authority of the continuity of its interpretation by the Church. The Church’s interpretation still stands potentially in conflict with the evidence of creation.

A revealed religion is bound to prefer the evidence of revelation - until force majeure prevents it. Thus, for example, the early Christian polemicists, Lactantius (245-325) and Augustine of Hippo (354-430), argued that biblical revelation was proved to be superior to ancient natural philosophy among other reasons because the natural philosophers had created the ridiculous idea that the world was round and there might be people living at the antipodes. Obviously, Lactantius says, they would fall off. So the biblical evidence for a flat world is to be preferred.^[11]

The problem is an immediate present problem because the Catholic Church argues that abortion and homosexuality are contrary to god’s will. This is the immediate context of Benedict’s complaints about church and state and “aggressive secularism” in England. But in both cases the evidence of creation is contrary.

In general between 15-20% of all pregnancies end with spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) or stillbirth. Under famine conditions, however, these figures rise: in the famines caused by the Chinese Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, spontaneous abortions rose by 30-50%.^[12] These are acts of ‘nature’ rather than of human will. But assuming that a creator-god made us, he made us such that starvation leads the pregnant woman, quite irrespective of her will, to spontaneously abort the embryo or fetus. If the embryo is a separate life from the moment of conception, human biological nature nonetheless sacrifices this life to preserve the life of the mother.

Homosexuality is a linked issue. The theoretical basis of Catholic condemnation of homosexuality is that the purpose of sexual relations is reproduction; therefore, non-reproductive sex violates god’s purpose; hence both homosexual behaviour and contraception are condemned. But the anthropological evidence that forms of homosexual behaviour are present in human societies of most types and times is now backed by a massive evidence of ‘homosexual’ and non-reproductive sexual behaviour in the animal kingdom.^[13]

Revealed religion must prefer the evidence of revelation about the will of god - or, more usually, the evidence of the expert interpreters of revelation, the priests, rabbis, imams, etc - to the evidence of the material world about the will of any creator-god. That is, it must treat clerics as better witnesses and more valuable people than lay people. Thus medieval Catholic canon law ruled that a bishop can only be convicted on the evidence of 72 eyewitnesses. Some Sunni Muslim scholars of the same period ruled that Allah forgives up to 70 sins committed by a scholar but not one committed by a layman.^[14]

These formal rules are mostly gone, though the Islamic courts, where they have power, as in the Iranian regime and the Afghan puppet regime, still apply medieval sharia rules which prefer clerics’ evidence to laymens’ and men’s evidence to women’s.^[15]

But basing ethics on revelation, as opposed to basing it on the evidence of human biological nature, still necessarily implies that the evidence of a priest is preferable to that of a layman - and that the value of a priest’s life and career is more important than the lives of the priest’s lay charges. The catholic child abuse cover-up thus grew naturally and logically out of the claim that the foundation of ethics is in revealed religion.

Big-lie history

The suggestions that ‘sixties’ sexual liberation led to clerical child abuse, and that the enlightenment led to the holocaust, are remarkably big lies, of the same character as “Leon Trotsky was a fascist, and I know it for a fact; first I said it, then I read it in the Hitler-Stalin Pact.”

Clerical abuse is the simpler story. The reality is that cases of clerical abuse are found in the judicial records back into the Middle Ages, before there was even a homosexual subculture - let alone ‘sixties sexual liberation’. How can ‘sixties sexual liberation’ explain cases of clerical abuse in 14th century Venice or 16th century England?^[16] What is new is not the abuse. It is the fact that in the early 21st century world of mass media, the internet, rolling news, and so on, the cover-up stopped working.

It is true in a certain very limited sense that ‘modernity’, ie the scientific revolution of the 17th century and industrial capitalism, produced the holocaust. The reason is that the human capability to do something like the holocaust is largely a product of ‘modernity’. Industrial technology and industrial bureaucratic management permits industrial-scale murder. The result is, of course, not only the holocaust, but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more generally the 60 million dead of World War II, and so on.

When, however, we address the peculiar motivations of the holocaust, the matter looks very different. Nazi ideology was a curious blend of two distinct ideologies. One element was 19th century German romantic nationalism - the images of the primeval forest and Tacitus’ Germania, of the restored Reich, Aryanism, and so on. The ‘weird science’ Atlantis beliefs of some of the Nazi core, and the ‘Nordic paganism’ of another overlapping group, were variants on this. The other element was anti-semitism.

The role of anti-semitism was, in fact, far more critical to the Nazi project than the romantic nationalism. The reason was that it allowed the Nazis to present themselves as a peculiar sort of anti-capitalist (National Socialist German Workers Party) by imagining the evils of capitalism as the product of Jewish finance-capitalist parasitism. They could even make an amalgam between Jewish capitalism and Jewish socialism and Bolshevism by way of the role of Jews in the socialist and communist parties. It is this criticality of anti-semitism to the Nazis’ efforts to mobilise mass support which - at the end of the day - drove the holocaust.

If we ask, however, where this anti-semitic ideology came from, the answer is perfectly clear. David Kertzer has documented in depth the reasons why the late 19th century papacy attributed the fall of the papal state in the unification of Italy to the emancipation of the Jews, and the papacy’s ideological and financial promotion of anti-semitic parties across Europe, including in Germany. The ideological representation of the Jew as the finance-capitalist parasite on the healthy body of the market economy was the work of this ‘Catholic social teaching’ before Hitler and his cothinkers made it their own.^[17]

Nor was this sort of aspiration to purify the body of the state by getting rid of Jews a novelty in Catholic thought. The first and second crusades were accompanied by pogroms, and the fall of Jerusalem to the crusaders by a massacre of Jews as well as of Muslims. The Spanish state, the leading Catholic counter-reformation state in the 16th century and down to the 1640s, forcibly converted Jews and Muslims - and then drove them out anyway under the slogan of limpieza de sangre, ‘purity of blood’.^[18] They could go, because there weren’t either effectively controlled borders or competing powers determined to keep them out (as happened to Germany’s Jews), so that the result was mainly bad for the Spanish economy. But if there had been controlled borders and the Reyes Catolicos and their successors had disposed of 20th century technology, there would surely have been a 16th or 17th century holocaust in Spain.

Here the ‘ethical foundations’ given by revelation and its clerical interpreters, the ideas of the Jews as murderers of god and of Muslims as followers of a demon, turn out to be the opposite of ethical. ‘Catholic social teaching’ is not yet Nazism. But it was one of the critical foundations of Nazi ideology, and the one which was foundational to the holocaust.

Papalist Toryism

Why should the government and the Tory press go out of their way to promote the papal visit and Benedict XVI’s attack on secularism and liberalism?

Part of the answer was given by Eddie Ford’s article last week. Once upon a time the Tory Party could be called the ‘church party’ (as opposed to the Whig and later Liberal ‘chapel party’) or the Church of England could be called ‘the Tory Party at prayer’. No longer. The Church of England is not just dying on its feet; it is also deeply ideologically divided, both between Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals, and between conservatives and liberals on women priests and on lesbian or gay priests.

A deeper answer is the decline of neoliberalism in face of the crisis of 2008-09. ‘Neoliberalism’ is commonly used by the left to mean the turn in the policy of the core capitalist states away from the social-democratic consensus of the 1950s-60s and towards financialisation and ‘globalisation’.

This turn has been unaffected by the crisis: public spending on bailing out banks is acceptable, public spending on welfare, etc, remains unacceptable and has become more so. More, not less, attacks on wages, working conditions and trade union organisation are coming. Contrary to a widespread belief on the reformist left, these are not matters of superficial neoliberal ideological commitments, ‘errors’, or even the simple pursuit of the interests of the class elite in taking more from the rest of us. They are the necessities of the long-term decline of the US-led world order.

But neo-liberalism also means a political ideology which has been associated with the turn since the 1970s. This ideology claims that free markets, deregulation, free trade and capitalist globalisation are not only the great engines of material progress, but also the great engine of human freedom. It incorporated under its banner not only traditional liberal ideas of freedom of the press, and so on, but also revised neoliberal versions of 1970s feminism, anti-racism and claims for the liberation of lesbians, gay men and other sexual minorities.

This political ideology was struck a serious blow with the 1997 ‘east Asian crisis’, leading to the Social Forum movement and ‘another world is possible’. It would have been struck another blow by the dot.com crash of 2001, but for the effects of this crisis being overshadowed by 9/11 and the beginning of the ‘war on terror’, which became, in a sense, a neoliberal crusade. The 2008-09 crisis, whose effects are by no means yet over, is another and this time a savage blow.

The capitalist class is a small minority. It cannot rule simply in its own name. It therefore needs political ideologies which will rally behind it a sufficient section of the lower orders.

Social Democracy has been abandoned, and there can be no return to it unless the working class seriously threatens to take political power away from the capitalist class on an international scale. Now neoliberalism as a political ideology has become broken-backed. What is to be the new ideology?

In the US the ‘Tea Party’ movement represents a deepening turn of the base of the Republican Party towards dolchstosstheorie (stab in the back theory), nostalgia for the glory days of the American past, racism and Christian (in this case mainly Protestant) irrationalism. In Europe we have just seen the advance of the far-right ‘Swedish Democrats’, while Belgium remains without a government thanks to the strength of the rightwing Flemish-nationalist NVA, and in France Sarkozy seeks votes through expelling Roma. These are only a few of the symptoms of a general turn away from neoliberalism as a political ideology and towards forms of irrationalist politics.

Cameron’s and the Tory press’s welcome to the papal visit and its irrationalist message, of an increased role for religion in politics, are a British form of the same phenomenon. They are not merely about the hope that the churches will take up the tasks of social solidarity that the state is about to dump. They are also about a means of constructing a new Conservatism, well to the right of Thatcher, with a new irrationalist political ideology. They will not be the last step in this direction.

The political skies are darkening - gradually, but still perceptibly. The workers’ movement desperately needs to begin to break with ‘business as usual’ routine and to take steps to rebuild its own strength at the base, its own means of social solidarity independent of the state and of the churches, and its own means of communication independent of the capitalist media. Without steps in this direction, in the long run much worse will come of Cameron’s embrace of Benedict than simply public spending cuts.

Notes

Note an unusually long article in The Sun September 20, www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3143973/PM-David-Cameron-praises-Popes-moving-visit.html
Torture advocate: More in The Debellacyon of Salem & Bizance (1533), arguing generally in support of the ecclesiastical procedure for the prosecution of heretics, since without such methods ‘heretics would swarm the streets’.
thepapalvisit.org.uk/The-Visit-Live/Speeches/Speeches-17-September/Pope-Benedict-s-address-to-Politicians-Diplomats-Academics-and-Business-Leaders
The concept of the political ([1932]; trans. G. Schwab, Chicago 1996).
A treatise of human nature, ed. P.H. Nidditch, Oxford 1978, Book III, Part 1, § 1, 469-70.
Eg J Finnis, Natural law and natural rights, Oxford 1980, Chs 3-5; critique, NC Bamforth & DAJ Richards, Patriarchal religion, sexuality and gender, Cambridge 2008.
Some Gnostic heresies of Christianity and of Zoroastrianism supposed that the material world was created by a malevolent god, and that the destiny of humans is to escape the clutches of this god by ascending to the realm of pure spirit. But ideas of this sort have limited ideological purchase.
(1348) YB 22 Edw III Lib. Ass. pl. 56 is an example in which this was accepted to be a defence to charges of battery. Convenient list of modern cases at whatstheharm.net/exorcisms.html
C Knight, Blood relations, New Haven, CT, 1995.
Jewish and ancient near eastern: R Westbrook ed. A history of ancient near eastern law, Leiden 2003. In the Christian case the Jewish derivation (from the bible) is explicit, the Roman derivation obvious on most pages of the medieval Corpus iuris canonici and the ‘cases of conscience’ handbooks for confessors, eg Angelus de Clavasio, Summa Angelica de Casibus Conscientiae (Caen, 1517)
Lactantius Divine Institutes Book iii ch 24; Augustine City of God Book xvi ch. 9.
Yong Cai and Feng Wang, ‘Misfortune before Birth: Intrauterine Mortality in China 1955-1987’, abstract paa2003.princeton.edu/abstractViewer.asp?submissionId=62094
B Bagemihl, Biological exuberance New York 1999.
Bishop: Gratian, Decretum 2 q 4 cc 2, 3; Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (2004), 336.
The Anglican church has never been able to agree on a general reform of medieval canon law, so it remains the law of the Anglican church except as displaced by measures introduced under parliamentary authority. An Anglican church which had freedom of religion by the removal of the shackles of subordination to the British state would thus be a weirdly anachronistic institution. In reality, of course, it would merely break up into fragments.
G Ruggiero, The boundaries of eros Oxford 1989; A Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England London 1982.
DI Kertzer Unholy war: the Vatican’s role in the rise of modern anti-semitism London 2003 (and cf. my review, Weekly Worker July 22 2004).
Crusades: RI Moore, The formation of a persecuting society (Oxford 1987); Spanish limpieza de sangre: extensive literature, but a convenient discussion by S Poole, ‘The politics of limpieza de sangre’ (1999) 55 The Americas 359-389 at pp360-371.