In the gravitational field of the state (an election reflection)
We know that power always destroys values and meaning.
-Jacques Ellul
A hat tip to Charlie Collier for putting me onto Michael Hanby.
Michael Hanby says we are living through “a metaphysical catastrophe.” (Some might say a spiritual catastrophe, but maybe it’s the same thing.) This applies to culture and politics across the modern spectrum. It applies to Republicans and Democrats (and their cognates in other countries). This applies to “left” and “right.” This applies to Christians of every political stripe — including (Hanby points out) conservatives and integralists as well as (Illich pointed out) progressives and liberationists. I won’t even include as “Christians” the muscular “evangelical” nationalism that is such a radical departure from the teachings of Christ as to be a kind of anti-Christianity (another excrescence of this metaphysical catastrophe). This catastrophe — invisible to modern eyes — creates a vacuum which can only be filled by power, and the most acknowledged default institutional form of power is the state — the power over which, ostensibly, no other power can prevail . . . or even be permitted.
This is a confusion, I think — me being influenced here by recent readings of Hanby — between power in which authority can be validly identified and power more generally, which I’ll try to explain momentarily.
Speaking very superficially on these accounts, metaphysics (what there is and what it’s like) is a branch of philosophical inquiry, alongside epistemology (the ways we “know”), ethics (“right-and-wrong” questions), logic (intellectual non-contradiction, coherence, and consistency), and phenomenology (philosophical inquiry about “first person” states of perception/consciousness). The sub-paragraphs, so to speak, of metaphysics are ontology (existence, Being, the real), identity (what makes a thing the thing it is), change (the transition from potential to actual, e.g.), inside/outside (or intrinsic/extrinsic) properties of phenomena, space-time, what’s possible, what’s necessary, various kinds of causes, various unified polarities , consciousness and mind, and so on.
When one asks a question like, “What is the meaning of life?” or “Who and what am I?” or “How shall we know what is right and wrong?” there can be no answer that does not at least imply a set of metaphysical assumptions. This is why I’ll contend that even for those modern/postmodern philosophers and intellectuals who claim to have escaped or set aside metaphysics, merely by “calling metaphysics into question,” metaphysics remains inescapable. The problem here is that unacknowledged metaphysics operate as forms of power sans authority and in a very covert way that forecloses challenges to these forms . . . because we can’t see them. We’re the birds who take the air for granted.
One cannot even use language without metaphysical assumptions. Doesn’t mean we understand that we have metaphysical assumptions, and there’s the rub. What Hanby suggests is that the modern state, alongside media and the market, has redefined human nature — a metaphysical construct.
Metaphysical assumptions underwrite our boundaries, our mechanisms of control, and especially they ways in which we police ourselves. Cultural policing is, in its essence, metaphysical policing. It always assumes something about ontology, identity, change, intrinsic v. extrinsic qualities, space-time, what’s possible, what’s necessary, various kinds of causes, various unified polarities, and consciousness and mind. Cultural policing is self-policing inasmuch as we absorb these assumptions not just uncritically, but unknowingly; and this absorption is constantly reproduced by the unthinking validations of culture, or nowadays interweb subcultural silos. We all come to agree with our own crowd, and this is just the way it is.
When cultures enter into periods of crisis — like they are now and have been for some time — variant metaphysical assumptions emerge within cultural subsets; but the state, as the locus of political power, cannot function effectively with contradictory metaphysical assumptions, and moreover the state cannot change as quickly as modern/”postmodern” culture.
The problem of the state is that, while it remains “sovereign” in the legal (and military) sense, new forms of cultural policing appear with such frequency, and gain such velocity, that the state — a massive ship with a small rudder — cannot adequately and appropriately apprehend and respond to these changes. Two examples of this are the international power of rentier capital — which emerged from within the state then came to control it — and digital technological innovations, specifically “social media,” which has come to mediate consciousness itself.
Rentier capital exercises formal power through control of the state from beyond formal accountability (as a de facto, not de jure, sovereign).
Social media, on the other hand, has created a form of surveillance-power in which all surveil and police all at one level, facilitated by the hidden hand of the media itself. In the latter case, there is power without accountability at the level of the “users,” and the consolidation of the power of the media’s owners, as well as the formal determinations of the media — which are the unintended consequences of media on cultural practices and epistemology.
Which is not to say that the state, rentier capital, and Big Tech haven’t contingently partnered. The state has enthusiastically embraced pantopticon technology; and Silicon Valley has been just as enthusiastic in offering its cooperation. The state is a huge market, after all; and Big Tech is just as aware as the rest of us of the advantages conferred by partnering with the institution which still enjoys a monopoly on legal offensive violence. The state-financial nexus has been in overdrive ever since the Reagan administration — the shorthand is “neoliberalism.”
One of the problems — per Hanby — is that the late modern state, unlike its feudal polity predecessors has collapsed authority into pure power, power unmodified. Big Tech and rentier capital may hold the cultural, epistemological, and economic levers, but they are unlike the medieval Pope who crowned the medieval sovereign in recognition — however perverse in political execution — that the authority of the sovereign was conferred from some higher source.
Nowadays, we think “authority” is synonymous with power — a metaphysical error resulting from our ignorance of metaphysics. The state within whose boundaries I live not only recognizes no higher authority (like God), it can’t even claim the Aristotelian practical authority, e.g., Abby Wambach is an authority on soccer. Our political leaders are a mix of slick technocratic manipulators, carnival barkers, corporate shills, and loudmouthed loons. They have no special competence at leadership (which is not reducible to management), in which they are outdone by the average 20-year-old infantry squad leader. We’re the country that put George W. Bush into office, then elected Trump, another intellectual ape who managed to make Bush fil look good.
Authority is intrinsic. Power is extrinsic. As MacIntyre points out in his many book-length meditations on philosophy, without this intrinsic authority (which we no longer even know), we are left with plain power, self-perpetuating and consequentialist, whose institutional expression is through bureaucratic management.
The meaning of potestas [power] was destined to change dramatically when its relation to auctoritas [authority] was unthought and forgotten. Power that does not derive from a sacred origin and acknowledges no transcendent source outside itself diminishes to an indeterminate force, the brute strength to realize arbitrary possibilities. Milbank and Jones are correct in maintaining that the advent of the modern concept of sovereignty reduces authority to indeterminate power. This reduction takes place in metaphysical and theological discourse as well as political. The meaning of authority undergoes a radical inversion and becomes merely one of the forms of power, inevitably oppressive rather than liberating. “Authoritarian” and “totalitarian,” which in their original meanings designate opposites, have become synonymous for us. (Hanby)
The state now has power without authority. One might say that the American polity is constitutional, with the Constitution itself conferring a higher authority. It seems to me that St. Paul has a better account of the state, technology, and markets than we do: a spiritual panoply of archons — principalities and powers — that serve the Prince of a fallen world. Or as Illich so pithily put it, to worship power is to worship the devil.
David C. Schindler, one of Hanby’s Catholic interlocutors, adds to Hanby’s metaphysical diagnosis, about power sans authority. The liberal state is founded upon a perverse account of “freedom” in which power’s relation to potency, or possibility, has been reversed. Where once human beings, rooted in a non-objectified reality of which they were a part, contemplated a reality-based potency, or possibility, prior to the employment of power, liberalism has put power before potency — a reversal that only the metaphysics we have lost could have apprehended, and a kind of abolition of any form of precautionary principle. “Anything is possible” becomes “anything is permissible” becomes “anything is desirable.” Potency, unmoored from reality, or we can call it “nature” if you insist, leaves power ungoverned. That power has led us into a ever more machinic dystopia.
There’s a connection between the objectification of nature and the sterilization of “choice” exercised on a soulless computer menu.
The prospects — I hate bringing such pessimism into the discussion at this stage — for the recovery of metaphysical awareness and coherence, as MacIntyre showed, are pretty doubtful . . . especially in the political sphere. Liberalism is suiciding, and yet the liberal state limps on, its default metaphysics summarized in “Don’t just sit there, do something.” Onward, onward . . . into the land where contemplation has been abolished. “Don’t just do something, sit there” is now a revolutionary act.
The Jewish command to keep the Sabbath, which many Christians seem to have forgotten, is to take one holy day each week for pure contemplation. Sabbath means don’t just do something, sit there.
Hanby makes a crucially important point, I think, when he says that John Locke is liberalism’s figurehead, but that the American polity was not founded on Locke. It was founded on Bacon’s New Atlantis, on the “conquest of nature.” We all know what happened to the last Atlantis; and the seas are now literally rising.
If liberalism fails — and it is failing — in the United States in particular, where our hyper-instrumentalist grasp of metaphysical questions is arguably the shallowest of all cultures, the only responses we can muster to the collapse of liberalism is a kind of instrumental nihilism. Riots by anarcho-punks on the left and cosplaying gunmen on the right; and a state that further consolidates its power (without authority) through the progressive strengthening of executive powers, mass surveillance, and technocratic dependency/control. No, there aren’t microchips in the vaccines. Yes, thousands of people have already voluntarily received microchip implants. They’ll make their way further in when we’re convinced they’re essential safety devices in the bodies of our children.
We can’t see past technology, and we can see no more deeply than the state. Metaphysically, this corresponds to Being losing its status as prior to analytical deconstruction. Descartes, Bacon, Hume, Locke . . . I’m sure everything they saw made sense then; but now we’ve devolved into Trump v. Biden as emblematic of the New Atlantis . . . into the interweb “woke mob” of all policing all — meta-technique — an absolutism internalized by all, countered by the anti-woke hysteria that likewise enters the gladiatorial political arena, where — if politics fails — many fantasize about an armed extra-judicial reset.
Everyone disagrees except on one point: this is an emergency, and only the power of the state can correct it. You’re with us, or you’re with the enemy.
Nothing is left but the law, and yet it seems not to work. What are we to do?
Anything except stop and reflect. It’s a tempo task, a war; and we’re running out of time.
The American polity is a pure legal creature, with only a perfunctory reference to an “endowing Creator” from which the legal fiction of “rights” descends. There’s the metaphysical assumption, posted like a sign at the gate, which ceases to function once we are inside the property. In fact, once inside the American legal state, metaphysical questions have been excluded from consideration by the metaphysical master signifier of “rights,” originally constructed as a set of “no’s” — of “the-state-shall-not’s.”
This was originally understood as a compromise necessary for the pluralism required to get on with the business of business; but the unintended consequence for a people indoctrinated to believe that the state is both sovereign and marginally accountable (through elections) has been an habituation of thought by Americans in which we can no longer imagine anything beyond the political. We have lost the capacity to think in metaphysical terms. We have set aside the big questions as irrelevant — or even dangerous — to the only questions that truly matter, political “issues.” This is the gravitational field of the state on our collective epistemology, and it has rendered us incapable of seeing any deeper than questions of law and policy.
In attending in every final instance only to the law and the state, and in the habituation of our thinking to attend only to the law and state, we come to believe that thee is nothing which exists beyond law and the state. Policy has become ontologically prior to existence.
I’ve written about this with regard to the interminable debate about abortion, which has centered all discussion and debate around law and the state, and in doing so has foreclosed a full-bodied (metaphysical) account. Pro-life and pro-choice are legal positions in which one side has foreclosed the ability to acknowledge that the unborn are human (which they’ve conflated with being a citizen, someone entitled to “rights”) and foreclosed the other side from acknowledging any of the socially-determined circumstances that drive women to abort. The result is two narrow and absolutist positions, each dishonest or incompletely honest in its own way, because (1) they have incommensurable metaphysical assumptions (which remain unseen and unacknowledged, and (2) the competing narratives have each been captured within the gravitational field of the state and law — a black hole of political tactics that sucks in our capacity for honest and sober reflection.
The metaphysical “catastrophe” is, in some part, our own inability to perceive our own metaphysical assumptions, which we’ve absorbed uncritically from a society ever more totalizingly determined by our dependency on things like social media. Not just by the “content” of social media, but by the very manner in which we are compelled to use it. Money-dependency has determined our consciousness and our metaphysical assumptions ever since the first enclosures that began the enforcement of money-dependency. Social media is another form of enclosure, but this one accomplished more like the fisherman than the thug. We were presented with very attractive baits, and we went after them like bass fattening up for the winter.
I remember years back now, when a friend told me that Facebook was the most revolutionary tool in history for the antiwar movement (in which we were active at the time). I can only look back on that now with a sad smile.
The public discussion of the failure of liberalism (post-liberalism), one in which I have a strong interest, is not immune. The “postliberals” with the most influence are, in fact, those who have most effectively manipulated (and have been manipulated by) social media, “where brands are built and careers as a ‘public intellectual’ are made and broken and where the ‘success’ of one’s arguments — what we now mean by profundity and truth — is measured by ‘impact’: by the size of one’s following and one’s dexterity in saturating and manipulating the market.” (Hanby)
This is the paradox of successful enclosure. I’m writing this on a weblog “platform” and disseminating it through email and Facebook. It’s akin to trying to grow food on abandoned parking lots. It can be done, but it takes a lot of extra work and a good deal of bricoleur improvisation. (By the way, if the size of one’s following and one’s market dexterity are the metrics of success, then I’m an abject failure, in which I take a perverse measure of satisfaction along with a heaping helping of freedom. Not worrying about being “effective” is quite liberating.)
Self-expression, self-absorption, self-trivialization. The social media cycle. The social atom that was once a person embraces his or her own trivialization and dissection. I insist that the person is ontologically prior to DNA, biology, and evolution, but I piss, alas, into the wind. The modern liberal order has imposed the opposite and the result is a corresponding phenomenology. The late Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about people paying for “personality makeovers” as prerequisite for seeking certain jobs.
The last illusory vestige of any actual say over out own lives is politics. I know quite a few people who base their evaluations of other people, before anything else, solely on political convictions. That’s the gravitational field of the state.
The gravitational primacy of the state (understood as politics) is visible among Christians, who choose their “denomination” — with little attention to theology, christology, soteriology, or philosophy — based on how well this or that church and this or that pastor comports with their political convictions. This is the exact opposite of what St. Paul taught — that political power (law) is only legitimate to the degree it conforms to justice, understood in a messianic sense. Where God and theology was once seen as prior to and above the state and politics, we now live in an epoch wherein the state is prior to God. This is how we got the nationalist church. This is why — as Stanley Hauerwas continually points out — those who sacrifice themselves (or kill others) for the state are celebrated as heroes, and those who sacrifice themselves for faith are considered fanatics.
The postliberal, integralist/conservative trend which constitutes part of the postliberal discussion is itself captured by a kind of Constantinian state-gravitational field, inasmuch as it appears to aim at some kind of American national renewal (I’m sure there are analogs among integralists in other countries, too). This tendency is metaphysically and theologically confused (we won’t divert into nature-grace duality, because I’m not qualified to do the dive), and is by being itself, metaphysically caught in the gravitational net of of the state, by default, both liberal and modern.
First of all, the very word “integrate,” meaning the integration of the ecclesial and political orders, makes the modern metaphysical assumption that “religion” and “politics” are the valid poles of some existing duality. History has shown that when this duality appears, its very appearance always actualizes into greater power for politics. The integralists in particular begin with what I think is a true claim — that the church, with all its faults and historical perversions, is at its core (that core being the Holy Spirit) the truth. But this is a truth that can only be apprehended apart from, beyond, and above the concerns of politics. Grace is not conceivable in the language of politics and the state, and any attempt to do so will impoverish our grasp of what grace is.
Contemplation — the only way to grasp grace — is experiencing its own extinction event, its metaphysical erasure by the political instrumental-ization of thought, which finds its highest form in politics. Something to think about as we do yet another election in the US, where we are asked to choose between scoundrels and buffoons, where media and social media will keep us all in a tizzy about the catastrophic consequences of not defeating some enemy, which distracts us from seeing that they are the enemy . . . of sober reflection, of potency prior to power.
I’ve gone on for some time, but as this “goes to press,” so to speak, we in the US are about to have another election — the 2022 midterms. My mailbox fills up each day with people asking for money, and that — thank God! — will soon pass. Email is a demonic phenomenon — a doggie door into your life through which all manner of pestiferous beats may enter. (And smartphones are electronic leashes!)
Whatever happens in this election — and shit will happen — the panic mavens across the political spectrum will surely go to work on our psyches. The sky is falling. The world has come to an end. You enemies are becoming more powerful. This is, after all, how the mavens get more clicks . . . and how the rest of us can be kept on a low boil of anxiety bordering on paranoia here in the gravitational field of the state.
Me . . . I’ll vote. It’s going to be in the forties, sunny, with a moderate wind coming out of the east-northeast. Right after I mark my ballots, I’m going to accept that I’ve done what I can do (ain’t much), head down to Allen Lake where the sandhill cranes nest and the ospreys hunt, and my ass is going fishing. I can pray for my enemies while I’m there.