Myth and Solidarity in the Modern World

Beyond Religious and Political Division

Timothy Stacey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351167826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

In the context of the rise of reactionary politics across the globe, this book seeks new ways of developing solidarity across religious, political and economic differences. Drawing on an increasingly influential Christian theological movement, postliberalism, it claims that the dominance of liberal, secular rationality has blinded people to the fundamental role of transcendence and myth in developing solidarity. The result is either atrophy, or a retrenching in divisive myths of faith, race, nation or economic status.

Liberalism is now a dominant force across the globe. But its resonance in the Anglo-Saxon West, from which it originates and has been most fully realized, is relatively underexplored. The book thus follows two simultaneous lines of enquiry. Firstly, a genealogical study of social scientific and policy iterations of the relationship between belief and solidarity in the Anglo-Saxon West, placing postliberal theory into dialogue with the sociology and anthropology of religion, politics and economics. Secondly, it draws from original ethnographic research with groups in London, UK, that seek to develop solidarity in the face of deep-seated difference.

By bringing a new way of framing these contentious debates about contemporary society, this research offers tools for more productive conversations around religious and political topics, in particular concluding with a clear policy proposal. It is, therefore, a useful resource for both academics of theology and religious studies, political philosophy, sociology and anthropology; and for politicians, policy makers and practitioners hoping to develop solidarity in the modern world.

1
Postliberalism

Revalorising a lost world

Postliberalism, I have been saying, is about rediscovering a collective search for solidarity rooted in shared beliefs and practices, and revalorising this search to the centre of politics and economics. According to postliberals, liberal social theory assumes that ordinary people are incapable of achieving such solidarity without descending into violence. Thus for liberal social theory, belief-independent rationality is the only possible basis of politics and economics. And since the only belief-independent aspects undeniably common to all people are security and wealth, so improvements in security and wealth become the only means of legitimising political and economic decisions. Postliberalism questions both of these premises. First, it stresses that people are naturally generous and creative, and as such can overlook differences to collectively explore solidarity rooted in shared beliefs and practices. Second, and fundamentally, it stresses that solidarity cannot be rooted in belief-independent rationality alone, since this is to ignore what motivates people to live in solidarity with one another.

It is worth noting here that others (MacIntyre 1981/2007), including myself at other times (Stacey 2017b) have defined postliberalism as about rediscovering a collective search for the good life. I have come to find this designation unhelpful, since it tends to lead to abstract discussions about what the good life consists of, which ultimately anyway turns out to be one lived in solidarity with others. Moreover, focusing on the good life has at times (see in particular Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012) led to a belief-independent and individual-centred construction of what the good life consists of, only after which can we turn to discuss how to ensure that all have the right to partake in this good life. This line of enquiry, I suggest, risks reproducing the same fault postliberals attribute to liberal social theory generally, namely that the good life must be rationally constructed by a university-educated elite, and subsequently bestowed upon grateful subjects. Instead, by focusing on a collective search for solidarity rooted in shared beliefs and practices, I seek to stress the rationally elusive and, because of this, fundamentally inclusive and political nature of this search. Solidarity denotes a state in which people are bound together in the mutual desire to uphold one another’s dignity without expecting something immediately in return. It is the cultivation of this mutual desire that I am interested in rediscovering and valorising to the centre of political and economic decision-making; without such a desire, any discussion of what the good life consists of remains purely abstract.

Of course, if the undermining of a collective search for solidarity rooted in shared beliefs and practices were a problem in liberal social theory alone, this would remain an ivory tower debate, and this book would be unnecessary. Yet the key point is that liberalism has risen to a status of hegemony. This means that liberal social theory has been the dominant paradigm shaping the thinking of university-educated politicians, policy makers and practitioners in the North Atlantic West for at least the last two centuries. For postliberals, the result is that whether or not you have read liberal social theory, if you are living in the Anglo-Saxon West, and indeed increasingly elsewhere where the latter’s ideologies and practices have spread, you have probably imbibed liberal ideas: primarily, the idea that a collective search for solidarity rooted in shared beliefs and practices is paradoxical and dangerous in a context of radical diversity of belief and practice. The problem here is that we simply cannot develop solidarity without shared beliefs and practices, thus to relinquish to liberal pessimism is to relinquish to living parallel lives, divided across boundaries of faith, race, nation or economic status, each of us making individual or group-based claims to various and conflicting rights that a detached state is ever harder pressed to accommodate.

This point becomes particularly clear in the context of the postliberal analysis of the rise of the state and capitalism. For postliberals, pessimism regarding the possibility of a collective search for solidarity is the key to understanding liberal theories of the state and capitalism. If people are incapable of this search, then a strong state, a ‘visible hand’ is required to enforce order through policy, law and policing, upholding each individual’s right to her own private beliefs and practices, which are themselves only permissible insofar as they do not infringe on any other individual’s beliefs and practices. Belief-independent rationality is upheld by an enlightened few on behalf of an increasingly disconnected, belief-oriented populace. Running in parallel to this visible hand is a complementary ‘invisible hand’ of the market that curates solidarity, defined merely as improvements in security and wealth spread as widely as possible, out of the otherwise self-interested behaviour of multifarious disconnected individuals.

Put simply, any theory is liberal that takes as its starting point the impossibility of a collective search for solidarity rooted in shared beliefs and practices. Thus rather than ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’, statist and capitalist, it is better to speak of ‘left liberalism’ and ‘right liberalism’. By stressing this ‘unity of liberalism’, postliberals are able to show that reactions against both the state and capitalism are ultimately reactions against the mistrust liberalism places in people. From this perspective, postliberal political theory is vital in understanding the contemporary political context both in the Anglo-Saxon West, and in settings where the latter’s ideologies and practices have and continue to spread. It cuts across a left-right divide in politics, helping us to understand reactions against the state as varied as neoliberalism, community development and populism, and reactions against capitalism as varied as social democracy and the neo-anarchism of movements like Occupy. Each of these movements, in its own way, at least claims to challenge the dominance of the state or the market to return power and dignity to ordinary people.

The key problem with postliberalism, I will suggest, is that in order to make these claims, it returns to pre-liberal Christian theology. In so doing, it prioritises Christian beliefs and practices at the expense of other religious and nonreligious positions. Postliberals, I will suggest, as much as the liberal theorists they criticise, reify a religious/secular, mythic/rational binary that forecloses creative possibilities for developing new ideas of solidarity amongst people of all religions and none. Even if we accept that a pre-liberal Christian society came closer to realising a collective search for solidarity, the emergence of diversity within the Christian faith, of nonreligion and secularity, and the mass immigration of people of other religions requires a reimagining of how to collectively search for solidarity today. Once the mould has been lifted from the clay, it cannot be replaced without cutting off the new archipelagos that emerge. What is required instead is a creative exploration of how to develop a sense of solidarity that speaks to people of all religions and none. Postliberals themselves recognise the fundamental importance of developing new ideas to fit the current context. But they have not, heretofore, managed to systematically seek out possibilities for such ideas.

Instead, in their recognition that Christianity will not resonate with everybody, postliberals make creative leaps from their predominantly Christian critiques of liberalism to entirely secular policy recommendations that can supposedly appeal to anybody on the basis of their rational content. The problem here is that, as postliberals recognise, rationality alone is not enough, since shared beliefs and practices are at the heart of a collective search for solidarity (Milbank and Pabst 2016: 195). Drawing on, or else developing shared beliefs and practices will thus be fundamental to implementing policies that resonate with people. Neither the state, in the form of policy, law and policing, nor the market in the form of incentives, can entirely convince people to act in the name of solidarity. Only shared ideas that people firmly hold faith with can do this. Thus to leap from a once shared Christianity, now largely gone, to policies adhered to on the basis of rational argument, is to undermine postliberalism itself (see Stacey forthcoming 2018).

In order to explore these points, I begin by briefly introducing the theoretical origins of postliberalism in theology. I then introduce postliberal political theory, in particular distinguishing the latter from liberal political theory. It is here that the theoretical picture becomes more complicated. The shorthand I have been using to describe postliberalism as the attempt to revive a collective search for solidarity rooted in shared beliefs and practices will be set aside. Instead, I will speak of the call to revive solidarity rooted in a particular idea of transcendence with strong implications for practice. I suggest that postliberal political theory may seem antithetical to liberalism, since its raison d’être is to revalorise a notion of transcendence that liberal political theory is constructed with the deliberate aim of replacing. Yet I also stress that liberal ideals, particularly that of plurality, are themselves rooted in particular ideas of transcendence, and thus suggest that a post-liberal political theory may be considered a means of cultivating ideas of solidarity rooted in liberality, or plurality, without liberalism. In this sense, postliberalism may be conceived as a project of saving liberalism from itself. To make this distinction clear, it is again worth noting that when I refer to liberalism, I intend the political theory and not the notion of plurality.

I then explore the implications of a postliberal politics for understandings of the role of the state and capitalism. Each of these three explorations then becomes the basis for the next three chapters, the empirical core of this book, on religion, the state and capitalism respectively.

Origins

Although its roots can be traced into much earlier theological writings, postliberal theology first emerged through the work of Hans Willhelm Frei, George Lindbeck and Stanley Hauerwas at Yale Divinity School in the early 1980s. These scholars critiqued the colonising of theology by a liberal ideology rooted in the Enlightenment, which insisted on the possibility of a belief-independent rationality based on logic and empirical evidence, and the relegation of anything that could not be so evidenced to a matter of individual preference (Hunsinger 2003: 51; Michener 2013: 2). With the spread of this ideology into theology, the latter had largely fallen into two camps: what Hunsinger, in his definitive history, characterises as the evangelical and the liberal – although proponents of each might beg to differ at this characterisation (Hunsinger 2003: 44). The broad use of the term evangelical intends those that take a literalist approach to theology, often justifying ‘faith commitments and propositions using the methods and suppositions of the rational and empirical’ (Michener 2013: 2). The term liberal intends those that seek to identify a universal religious experience grounded in psychological or sociological processes, of which Christianity is just one manifestation. From this perspective, scripture is to be read metaphorically. Against both of these positions, postliberal theologians cast Christianity as an internally coherent narrative or set of narratives that cannot be interpreted but only undermined by methods grounded in different ontologies. The Christian narrative is unique, and the interpretation of this narrative must be situated in terms of the needs and struggles of a particular community as it evolves through time, providing a basis for holding one another to account and undertaking shared action (Hauerwas 1984).

Given its focus on internally coherent narrative and community-based interpretation, much of postliberal thought is aimed at changing either theological thinking generally, or else particular churches (Hauerwas 1984). But a few thinkers within the postliberal school, most notably Charles Taylor, Alisdair MacIntyre and John Milbank, aim to speak beyond theology and the church to society as a whole. These authors critique the dominance of supposedly belief-independent rational discourses of empiricism and individualism in secular societies, and press instead for a revalorisation of narrative generally, and of a Christian narrative in particular, which is seen as key to social solidarity.

In the writings of Taylor, MacIntyre and Milbank, postliberal thinking thus takes an explicitly political turn. Liberalism is regarded not as merely undermining Christianity, but as undermining human nature. These thinkers cast a collective search for solidarity rooted in shared beliefs and practices as the highest end of humanity. And they suggest that an unfounded pessimism as to the possibility of such solidarity is foundational to the rise of pretensions to a belief-independent rationality, which becomes the sole basis of politics.

In the following section, I offer a reading of postliberal political theory in contradistinction to liberal political theory. This primarily revolves around ontology and transcendence, and as such forms the basis of my exploration of postliberalism in relation to the sociology and anthropology of religion in chapter 2. In distinguishing postliberal and liberal political theories, I will simultaneously demonstrate the importance of the postliberal analysis in diagnosing the shortcomings of liberal political theory, and the shortcomings of postliberal solutions themselves. By pointing to these latter shortcomings in particular, I demonstrate the importance of this book. The following subsections then trace this argument into statism and capitalism. Although other political thinkers have adopted the term ‘postliberal’ (see Turnbull forthcoming 2018), Taylor, MacIntyre and Milbank become the primary focus of this chapter because their work has proved the most influential, both amongst academics and in the world of politics, policy and professional practice.

Postliberalism and transcendence

The story begins with the European Wars of Religion. Up until this time, both politics and ethics were, supposedly, conceived of as a collective search for solidarity rooted in shared beliefs and practices, where solidarity was imagined as a space of love and peace beyond human endeavour that could be approached but not achieved. But in the face of ongoing violence during the European Wars of Religion, a new pessimism as to the possibility of a collective search for solidarity emerges (Michea 2009: 14; Milbank and Pabst 2016: 100; Taylor 2007: 159).

Michea (2009: 15) explains the point very simply:

[A]ccording to the dominant interpretation of the time… the two main causes of the madness of war were, on the one hand, the desire for Glory on the part of the great, and, on the other, the pretensions of people to know the Truth about Goodness (the cause of all civil wars), so that they could set themselves up as competent to judge the salvation of others.

The search for a unitary idea of solidarity is merely a smokescreen for the search for glory or power, or else a deluded pretension to know the truth about goodness. It thus became popular to think that not only is there no unitary idea of solidarity that is verifiable in terms of a belief-independent rationality, but even if there were, people would not be capable of agreeing on this idea without descending into violence. In this situation, any attempt to develop a collective search for solidarity can only ever be subjective and violent, involving one individual or community imposing its views on another. Instead, all that can be hoped for is the relative safety and prosperity required for each individual to pursue her own security and wealth.

As a result, Michea laments, ‘Western modernity thus appears as the first civilization in history that has undertaken to make self-preservation the first (or even the only) concern of the rational individual’ (Michea 2009: 14). For the first time, the very possibility of a collective search for solidarity is called into question. As a result, the focus shifts from solidarity to order. Thinkers at the time sought

a firm underpinning for an agreed public order. [This philosophy] was born in the midst of bitter and violent inter-confessional strife. One of the most important things it was meant to offer was a basis for rational agreement on the foundations of political life, beyond and in spite of confessional differences.

(Taylor 2007: 127)

Thus the early development of a belief-independent rationality is an inherently political project, constructed in order to replace ideas of solidarity rooted in mere beliefs. Others have simply called this idea ‘secularism’. I avoid doing so for three reasons: first, secularism is less precise than the notion of legitimising politics on the basis of a belief-independent rationality. Second, I am identifying the roots of secularism. Only by addressing liberalism, I suggest, can we seek to uncover the problems with secularism. Third, and because of this, focusing on secularism can result in a tendency to think that the political consequences of secularism can be addressed by merely reawakening to the continued presence of religion in the public sphere – what has been called postsecularism – without ever addressing the belief-independent rationality that forms the core of liberalism. This latter point in particular will be further developed in chapter 2.

This epochal shift from rooting politics in unitary ideas of solidarity to rooting politics in self-preservation and order has two consequences, the first ontological, the second political. Here, I seek to explicate the ontological consequence by differentiating between the postliberal understanding of politics as a collective search for solidarity rooted in shared beliefs and practices and liberal political theory’s treatment of politics as a means of managing the divergent pursuits of multifarious individuals. This paves the way for the next section, which explains how this latter approach tends to undermine the very principles it is developed to promote, namely, by empowering bureaucratic elites at the expense of ordinary people.

Optimism versus pessimism concerning human nature

The most obvi...