The “biopolitical” illusion

“…the “biopolitical” illusion… splits humans up into a wild, natural component on the one hand, and an artificial “cultural” component on the other. In the one direction this can lead to fantasies about how we are naturally violent or egotistic (Hobbes) or else, to the contrary, naturally innocent (Rousseau). In the other direction this can lead to an over-technologised society, disparaging of ecological limits. Instead, we need to hold onto the truth that we are a “cultural animal” – an animal whose nature it is to survive through the invention of cultures which are very diverse, though not wholly diverse from each other.” (John Milbank)

This is, it seems to me, a very important idea, and one which is part of a well-formed Christian doctrine of creation. Human beings are naturally social. What this means is that the natural/socially constructed dichotomy, with its common implication that what is “natural” is morally important in some sense, but what is socially constructed is morally irrelevant — this is in fact a false dichotomy. It is too simple a way of thinking. We are created social and to respond to the natural order in social forms. Social constructions are, and should be, social developments of what is natural. That doesn’t mean they are necessarily good developments, but it also means we can’t write them off.

What does this mean for the way we think about gender?

John Milbank on Gender

Here is a fascinating comment from John Milbank about gender. It’s part of an article about Same Sex Marriage, which is well worth a read.

“In the realm of public discourse, assertion of sexual difference has become practically unspeakable, despite the fact that it is implicitly assumed and indeed spoken of by most ordinary non-intellectual people in the course of everyday life. Moreover, there are crucial negative testimonies to its persistence. It would seem that when it is denied that a woman’s body or biology has any psychic correlate, that then her purely physical difference gets vastly over-accentuated and exploited. Thus children are increasingly differentiated by gender to a ludicrous degree in terms, for example, of every item intended for little girls being coloured pink and the ever-younger adoption of sexualised clothes and make-up by adolescent and pre-pubescent girls. Indeed, it has been plausibly argued that the “young girl” is now at once the prime commodity and the prime consumer of late capitalism. Is it an accident that the according of only “human” rights to women coincides with a new phase in their degradation?

Equally, the increased crisis of the masculine psyche suggests that we cannot just remove by fiat the greater propensity of men towards danger, risk, physicality, objectivity, transcendence and the need to be in charge. Faced with the prospect of being out-competed by women possessed of more personal skills, plus a stronger draw of physical focus (something both natural and today artificially enhanced) in the ever-expanding service sector, working and lower-middle class men are tending to retreat to the margins. This suggests that we need to learn how to channel male aptitudes to social advantage, rather than dogmatically to deny their instance, in the face of all the evidence. Therefore, the issue of sexual difference and complementarity needs to be readdressed – however properly ineffable this topic may be. For it would seem clear that part of what has made marriage work, and indeed made it an exceptionally strong bond for millennia, is the asymmetry of perspectives and roles. Now much of the latter is rightly contested in the name of equality, but if it cannot be in certain subtle ways constantly and diversely reinvented, then divorce is likely to be ever more on the rise.”

Marks misses

I recently became aware (perhaps you have been for a long time) of philosopher Joel Marks’ “conversion” to amorality, which he wrote about two years ago in Philosophy Now. It is an interesting turnaround: from atheistic moralist to proponent of amorality, conceding that “the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality.” Dostoevsky too, actually.

But at the end of the day it is not amusing, nor stimulating, but rather sad and scary. Marks concludes Part I with these words:

I conclude that morality is largely superfluous in daily life, so its removal – once the initial shock had subsided – would at worst make no difference in the world. (I happen to believe – or just hope? – that its removal would make the world a better place, that is, more to our individual and collective liking. That would constitute an argument for amorality that has more going for it than simply conceptual housekeeping. But the thesis – call it ‘The Joy of Amorality’ – is an empirical one, so I would rely on more than just philosophy to defend it.) A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.

To my mind, this terrifyingly pathetic argument against child-molesting (what the rest of us call bulls**t) shows precisely how wrong this position is, about atheism as well as about morality.

Plato’s explanation for Christendom

The title of this post is silly; but I found a comment of Plato’s in the Republic thought-provoking in relation to Christian political thought. After explaining to Glaucon the nature of the Good (or at least pointing in its direction), the relation human beings have to it, and how they can rise up to see it, by means of the analogies of the sun, the divided line, and the cave, Socrates moves to outlining the importance of these thoughts for politics. Rulers will only rule well when they do so reluctantly, as those torn away from something better:

There lies the point. You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after their own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State. (Republic, 518)

The key to good government, says Socrates (Plato), is for rulers to not think too highly of their office, because they know something better besides it. This, I believe, is something Christian political thought is uniquely able to do: to radically relativise the honour and benefit attached to political authority in the light of something much better that a ruler may have as gift, along with everyone else, or not at all.

Some reflections on voluntarism and technology

My wife and I are shortly due to have a baby, and this experience has brought home to me the remarkable way our society treats its unborn children. For one woman, or couple, a fetus can be something astonishingly precious, to be protected and defended at almost all costs, while for another, it is something unfortunate, that can legitimately be “terminated”.* Many have pointed to a sense of deep incongruity here.

The thing is, though, there is in fact a logic that holds these two perspectives together: it is the logic that what matters is the woman’s choice. (You’ve heard the arguments about “a woman’s right to choose”.) The woman’s choice is what determines how the fetus is to be treated, whether as a precious person, or as something much less than that. The name of this approach to thinking about the world and moral choices is “voluntarism”. It is the view that the will (Lat: voluntas) determines reality.

Of course, as soon as you say it out loud, the limits of this view appear. No one is happy for voluntarism to apply universally. No one would agree that it was okay for someone to treat them as a disposable object just because that person chose to see them in that way. Rather, we constantly bump up against a reality beyond our will, impinging upon us and demanding our attention and respect.

Yet in certain ways, such as in regards to the treatment of fetal life, voluntarism exercises remarkable sway in our society. We believe people ought to have the right to their choice being able to determine, in some ways, how things are.

One of the things that allows the fiction of voluntarism to have some power is technology. For it is technology that enables us to transcend our natural limits, to shape the natural world in previously unimagined ways. So we can choose to treat a fetus as either a person or not, without ever having to look it in the eye; and we can marginalise natural reproductive methods and allow children to be born apart from the personal presence of a father; and we can modify the genetic code of plants in order to improve their productivity.

The limits of this technological voluntarism are, however, pressing in on us at many points. The reality of limited natural resources and the spectre of a dramatically changing global climate are a reminder that we cannot simply make of the natural world what we will. We are being reminded that there is a world that is simply there, apart from what we imagine it to be.

The question is not, though, whether technology is bad or good. The natural order is in fact manipulable (to an extent), and the solution is not just to go back to treating it as if it isn’t. The question is about what kinds of manipulations are legitimate and what kinds are not. Voluntarism answers this question radically by exalting choice. But the fact that no one would be happy to be a consistent voluntarist — you and I simply are something precious and that cannot be pretended away — should make us pause: reality, at one level or another, demands respect. We cannot without grave guilt simply make of it what we will.

Finally, I just want to point out that these issues lie behind the current debate in Australia about same-sex marriage. When all the nonsense is seen through, the heart of this debate, it seems to me, is the question of whether marriage is something, i.e. a natural structure of the world we find ourselves in, or whether we can choose for marriage to be something different. Those who believe the idea of same-sex marriage is a mistake (and I am one of them) do so because we believe that male-female marriage is a basic structure of this world that ought to be acknowledged and respected. It’s not the only way someone can live, nor is it the only admirable form of life. But it is an untruth to call a same-sex relationship a marriage.

Those who reject this argument do not actually reject it entirely. The very desire to grant the name marriage to same-sex relationships suggests a recognition that a marriage is a something that is good. What is denied is simply that this something can only exist where there is a male and a female. It is worth noting, in conclusion, that technology has made this position much more believable. Because technology has (sort of) hidden the rather obvious fact that the bearing of children requires a male and a female. The possibility of children is, typically, one of the things that has been fundamental to the concept of marriage. Now, however, technology has made it possible for children to be “begotten” apart from an actual relationship between a man and a woman.

Well, sort of. Let’s not exaggerate technology’s effects. There is still (at least at this stage) a man and woman involved in any pregnancy. Technology can manipulate biological reality, but only to some extent. In other ways we keep continually bumping up against a world that is there apart from us and before us—and in some aspects of life we’re realising that almost too late (or perhaps, too late). Technology has made the fiction of voluntarism seem believable; but a fiction it still is. Life has a natural order to it that we ought to recognise and respect (even though that is a complex thing to do). We are not doing anyone any favours if we abandon the task of seeing things for what they really are.

*Not all abortions are like this, of course; and I realise this is often an appallingly difficult experience for many people. I simply want to comment on the way “society” tends to think.

The Living One

“When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades.” (Revelation 1:17–18)

Easter and Malouf

Meredith has very helpfully alerted me to this article reflecting on Malouf’s essay at Easter time. Check it out.

A grammatical argument for the existence of God

German moral philosopher Robert Spaemann, whose work I am reading this year, believes in God. Interestingly, he does so partly because he believes in grammar. He makes this argument for the existence of God based on the future perfect tense:

The future perfect tense (e.g. “next wednesday, I will have been writing this blog post today”) implies the idea that the present is always true, in some sense. “If we are here today, then tomorrow we will have been here”. Moreover, that will still be true even in the distant future, when all traces of memory and effect have disappeared, and even the earth has vanished. Even then, this moment will still have been. But, argues Spaemann, this only makes sense if there is some absolute consciousness in which everything that happens is taken up; and this, as Aquinas would have concluded, everyone calls God. The fact that what has happened will always have happened requires that there be God. The idea of truth presupposes God. (“Rationality and Faith in God”, Communio 32, 2005, pp.635–36)

Hmmm.

John Milbank’s Stanton Lectures

ABC online is posting the text of John Milbank’s Stanton lectures. Thanks Scott Stephens! I am keen to follow these for the next few weeks, so if anyone wants to read them and interact with me here over them, that would be great.

In the first lecture, Milbank sets out his agenda to recommend Christian theology’s continued embrace of “perennial philosophy”, that is, the Western tradition anchored in Plato and Aristotle and consolidated “Christianly” in Aquinas. Because first,  argues Milbank, “the Christian tradition has for long centuries proved the marriage between Greek Socratic reason and Biblical faith. It trusts both its ways and its ends”; and second, “the Christianizing of Greek philosophy has ensured a mutual permeation which ensures a certain sort of organic harmony between the interiority of belief and the exteriority of cognitive articulation”. Milbank suggests that “we still live within a Franciscan Middle Ages, and this can be shown to be as true of our politics as it is of our philosophy. The question is whether an alternative, Dominican Middle Ages can yet be revived in order to shape, in the twenty-first century, an alternative modernity.”

The lecture is also, happily, not too difficult (although if anyone wants to help with the explanation of Duns Scotus that would be great), and at times quite funny, for example: “It is of course notoriously true that, with the exception of the likes of Wilfred Sellars, Richard Rorty and Bernard Williams, analytic philosophers are proud of their total ignorance of the history of ideas, or the history of anything else save things like playing cards and voting practices.”

Update: Lecture 2

Image and idol

I found this analysis of images and idolatry, in W. P. Brown’s book Seeing the Psalms, very interesting:

While images, as metaphors, carry a revelatory power that stirs the imagination and enlarges the senses, they are also delimiting in their hermeneutical scope. A metaphor qua metaphor is limited in its transference of meaning. When metaphors, for example, become literalized to the point that they exclude other metaphors for the same subject or target domain, particularly in the case of God, they function as idols. Such has been said of the exclusive use of masculine imagery for God. Put theologically, if any metaphor, no matter how profound, becomes absolutized, as though it were itself considered ultimate, idolatry becomes the norm. Metaphors, particularly those that are theologically oriented, have their own defined scope and shelf life within reading communities. Literarily, an image can become an idol when its connotative force is mistaken for its denotative scope, when the target and source domains are collapsed into one. Theologically, idolatry arises when the deity’s power is immanently lodged within the material strictures of the image or source domain, and transcendence, consequently, is eviscerated. Yet to eschew the power of metaphor in theological discourse for fear that idolatry is the unavoidable result would, in effect, sever any connection between God and the world of human perception. The outcome would be an impoverishment of theological discourse. (Seeing the Psalms, Louisville 2002, 10)

I think this is helpful. But I also wonder whether this take on metaphor takes adequate account of the incarnation. Does the incarnation establish as definitive certain modes of speech to the exclusion of others? Doesn’t the incarnation at least modify our understanding of God’s transcendence, and his “connection” with the world, not in the sense of limiting it, but in regards to our knowledge of how it is expressed?