The Religious Left

Educational Philosophy and Theory ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20 The religious left: How the left lost its argument and fell into a moral abyss Brad Evans & Julian Reid To cite this article: Brad Evans & Julian Reid (2022): The religious left: How the left lost its argument and fell into a moral abyss, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2021.2017886 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.2017886 Published online: 27 Jan 2022. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rept20 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.2017886 The religious left: How the left lost its argument and fell into a moral abyss Brad Evansa and Julian Reidb a University of Bath, Bath, UK; bUniversity of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY The essay addresses the rise of what we elect to call ‘the religious left’. Documenting the collapse between radicality and religiosity as identity politics embraces moral absolutism, the essay offers a critique of the culture wars and the ensuing flight from political confrontation. Attending in particular to the failures of the left, which we recognise as being a failure of the political imagination, so we turn a critical eye on claims of authenticity and the accelerated embrace of narratives of vulnerability and victimisation in a post-liberal world. The result is an inward-looking political imaginary, which is as suffocating as it is debilitating. Received 25 March 2021 Revised 11 October 2021 Accepted 20 November 2021 KEYWORDS Religious left; free speech; outrageous; Oscar Wilde; Frida Kahlo; Francis Bacon The university in crisis Growing up in the post-industrial wastelands of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain exposed the underclasses to the raw realities of power politics and structural violence. The pace of change introduced to every aspect of the social system was such that the term ‘revolution’ seemed both appropriate and denigrated in the very same moment (Stewart, 2013). Thatcher, following the example already set by Pinochet in Chile, found ideological solace in the works of Milton Friedman (e.g. 1962) and Friedrich Von Hayek (e.g. 1944) to set in place the first comprehensive neoliberal assault on the United Kingdom’s social State. She found a particular ally with this mission in Ronald Reagan who, in equal measure, used the economic stagnation of the previous decade to instigate wide-spread social reforms in the United States. Such change invariably demanded a market savvy authoritarianism. No coincidence that Thatcher voiced her support and admiration for dictatorships, most notably the Apartheid regime in South Africa, openly calling Nelson Mandela a ‘terrorist’, while overseeing the sales of arms to suppress popular uprisings around the world. The ‘Iron lady’ as some affectionately called her ruled with an ‘Iron Fist’. She also exposed most fully, in sometimes celebratory fashion, the fundamental deception writ-large that neoliberalism and democratic principles are mutually exclusive. Democracy in fact proved to be an unnecessary impediment or critical distraction to the real business of political rule. As is well documented, Thatcher’s Britain was shaped by the contours of an ideological war (Hall, 2021; Hall & Jacques, 1983). Education policy in particular was central to the domestic assault1. Neoliberal reforms marched hand in hand with a consolidation of power made possible by the onset of a ‘national curriculum’ that promoted an ethos of competition. This was complimented by widespread institutional reforms aimed at introducing market driven incentives CONTACT Brad Evans b.evans@bath.ac.uk © 2022 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia University of Bath, The Virgil Building, Manvers Street, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK 2 B. EVANS AND J. REID into education policy. Such reforms, it must be added, set the foundations for the crude league tabling of ‘performance indicators’ so endemic to neoliberal education policies that dominate the sector, especially the University, today. Growing up during this historical epoch taught us a lot, both of us being on the receiving ends of what Michel Foucault aptly termed the ‘capillary ends of power’. State school education, back then and perhaps still now, was shaped not by the question ‘what would you like to study?’ but ‘which trade are you fit for, plumber or joiner’? It is fair to say that we were both ‘late developers’ and largely self-taught at that. It is also fair to say that in these conditions the deceptions of particular regimes of truth are learned, especially the ways the ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ become smokescreens for political agendas which profoundly shape the conduct of subjects from the earliest stages of development. While subsequent governments brought a number of benefits to education policies—not least encouraging students from poor and difficult backgrounds to think that a university education was their right to demand2, there was no effective reversal of the neoliberal approach. It was in fact accelerated, all the while allowing narratives of ‘criticality’ to proliferate. The widely touted idea of ‘education for all’ developed alongside the intensification of performance measures which became all the more prominent as education was increasingly globalised. Opening up the education system to the world of opportunity proved to be less about empowering the masses to get an education than it was about ensuring global competitiveness and marketable standings for elite institutions, all the while fuelling a debt economy by encouraging the poor to defer payment for an increasingly privatised experience of education. Not in any way incidental, the government of Tony Blair was instrumental in effectively collapsing education with a war paradigm as it began linking the former with the causes of conflict in the global borderlands. This paved the way for the wider instrumentalization of education in the service of political and corporate needs as financial profit came to dominate university modes of governance, teaching, research, and the vocabulary used to describe students and their relationship to each other as well as the larger world. For Terry Eagleton (2015), this represented nothing short of the Slow Death of the University: According to the British state, all publicly funded academic research must now regard itself as part of the so-called knowledge economy, with a measurable impact on society. Such impact is rather easier to gauge for aeronautical engineers than ancient historians. Pharmacists are likely to do better at this game than phenomenologists. Subjects that do not attract lucrative research grants from private industry, or that are unlikely to pull in large numbers of students, are plunged into a state of chronic crisis. Academic merit is equated with how much money you can raise, while an educated student is redefined as an employable one. (para. 17) This has given rise, as Henry Giroux (2010) has maintained to a system of education, ‘tied largely to instrumental purposes and measurable paradigms’, resulting in ‘many institutions of higher education are now committed almost exclusively to economic growth, instrumental rationality and preparing students for the workforce. The question of what kind of education is needed for students to be informed and active citizens is rarely asked’ (paras. 12f.). This model for education sets aside the idea that the essential function of the university was to hold power to account by producing minds critically astute enough to have the courage to see and speak truth. As David Harvey insisted, ‘the academy is being subjected to neoliberal disciplinary apparatuses of various kinds [while] also becoming a place where neoliberal ideas are being spread’ (cited in Pender, 2007, p. 14). What this represented was a ‘future occupation’ in which generations have been forced to inherit modes of thinking which places little value on critical pedagogy, while paradoxically multiplying claims to criticality and insisting on what queer theorists call ‘subjectless critique’—critique which aims at no particular object and speaks for nobody in particular (Smith, 2010, p. 44). So, as the neoliberal idea of education was tied to the branding of thought; the critical would be a necessary branding suffix to entice the students and notably applied to all manner EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 3 of studies. Witnessed In the emergence of Critical Security Studies, Critical Theory, Critical International Relations, Critical Race Theory, Critical Media Studies, Critical Cultural Studies, the list of critical this and that continues to lengthen from year to year. Our concern here is not with ideas of criticality, which remain crucial to any analysis of power. It is however to bring to task those who still insist that ideas which have now been in circulation for over three decades and have become normalised still occupy marginal or radical positions within the academy. Indeed, what goes in the name of the critical today is not only a well-rehearsed performance (with the performative being the operative word), and often tediously predictable as a result. What counts as ‘progress’ is more the mask for a priestliness that would have Nietzsche barfing up his breakfast. Moreover, what marks these conditions is the hyper-acceleration of many previous liberal tropes (ironically, often done in the name of a certain institutional anti-liberalism), often linking historical demands for political justice to more petty contemporary advantages in terms of jobs and financial recompense, while flattening all accounts of victimisation, except for the plight of the white underclasses. And yet all this has been occurring when the gaps between the rich and poor have been increasing nationally and globally, and while we have become more aware of what Henry Giroux (2013) aptly termed the ‘War on Youth’. Not only were the minds of youths being taken as an object for power such that their destinies were being wagered exclusively on the successes/ failures of neoliberal strategies for a particular vision of an educated existence. As neoliberal strategies of ‘educational resilience’ replaced social security with a fundamental ontology of vulnerability, students were being herded onto a battlefield which promoted insecurity by design3. This signalled another chapter in the death of political imagination as another generation was denied the intellectual means for thinking beyond the necessity of exposure to risk and uncertainty, hence forced to concede that there is no alternative to our current anxiety laden conditions. The neoliberal assault on the university has been intellectually bankrupting. It has also embedded crisis and absorbed a comforting logic of criticality that affirms vulnerability into the operational fabric of its design. The university is not just in crisis. Crisis has become the rule. But there is another insidious problem now taking over university campuses today, which is also revealing of wider social dynamics and actually fully invested in the operations of power in this new post-liberal world. A new model army of digitally animated academic ‘activists’, spouting all too familiar liberal narratives of ontological vulnerability and victimisation, while also claiming to be anti-liberal in their politics, exemplify a sense of moral certitude which collapses the radical into the religious. Universities as such are being dragged into a new abyss where moral absolutism is prevailing and any claim to the idea that transgression demands the outrageous in thought is denied by the hyper-sensitive emotional policing invigilated by new moral and cultural censors. Hence, as argued elsewhere (see Evans, 2021), what we are witnessing today is the breaking apart of older political lines, leading to the creation of a new dialectic that’s increasingly entrenched and dogmatic. While those on the right bunker further down into their beliefs on the naturalness of Sovereignty and its accounts of civic enrichment, a new religious left has emerged that is equally as uncompromising and is leaving aside many of the radical changes of the late 1960s. Radicalism itself is now a dead enterprise, full of corpsed ideas, having succumb to the seductions of moral certainty, and which insists that all political demands and cultured outputs must fall back into the morass of identity politics. Just as there can be no art without some identity fix, what becomes of the political is the mere affirmation of positions already rehearsed and felt as true. With politics thus becoming confessional, the purpose of engaging the opposition in debate because you recognise the formidable nature of power is supplemented by a demand to simply be part of a self-flagellating wounded congregation. This is not simply about a recognition that leftists have lost their appetite for actual conflict. It ultimately points to a profound failure of political imagination when the left has become so caught up in an image of its own vulnerability, that it is unable to fight properly 4 B. EVANS AND J. REID for another world to come. A world that might truly be able to see beyond, instead of bedding further and further down in the Sovereign right to ban and the moral tyranny of emotions governing these times. And you call this progress? Like societies at large, universities have been notable battlegrounds in the fight over the very meaning of identity. In this regard, not only has the University been a formidable regime for power; to talk of the university has also been to see it as a site for resistance and full of transgressive potentiality. Let’s consider what went on in the late 1960s. While the Tet offensive in Vietnam supposedly led to a fit of self-scrutiny within the supposedly most advanced liberal democracy worldwide, which now had to face its own imperial excesses and neocolonial violence, the assassinations of Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King revealed what the same liberal democracy was willing to do to its own citizens when the situation demanded it. All the while, as a revolutionary fervour filled the air and the likes of Che Guevara became global pinups for increasingly image conscious radicals, once taken bonds that held together the foundational ideas of identity and social belonging started to be broken apart. This was the age of the emergent so-called ‘post-modern’ sensibility as across the world counter-cultural movements engaged in defiance of the old guard. It wasn’t that identities hadn’t existed before. It’s just that their very ontological and epistemological claims weren’t much questioned. Yet as the summer of love quickly gave way to widespread violence, from Paris to Mexico, so the very crisis of identity also opened up discussion on the crisis of democracy, the crisis of truth, the crisis of history, and the crisis of knowledge4. In some radical quarters, the revolutionary fire was truly ablaze, and its fires danced to a transgressive beat. This was the first coming of identity politics. Groups like the Black Panthers were unapologetic in their demands to be recognised and did it with style and aesthetic potency. The radicals who many found to be the most inspiring during this period were fierce, defiant and never apologised for the battles they engaged in. Of course, they were ‘victims of history’, as wonderfully explained by Angela Davis when interviewed in prison about her thoughts on violence (Bianco, 2015), but they seldom played the victim card. Theirs was a revolutionary becoming. Indeed, the Black Panthers were affirmative long before the domesticated notion of affirmative action became a term. In terms of identity, this period also inspired a number of important critiques, which driven by courageous voices both within and outside of the university setting, were radical and opened the doors for the proliferation of subjectivities that were to captivate political imaginations: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. With foundationalism set aside, it was now recognised that identities were constructs which couldn’t be divorced from power politics. There was nothing fixed or pure about any given identity. Identities are always made through processes of struggle and negotiation. Since power depended upon the construction of fixed notions of being, it was important to break away from crude essentialisms and them/us reductions of identity-based dialectics. No identity was perfect or beyond reproach. Indeed, whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, it was still always possible to become fascistic in one’s relationship to power. Privilege was something that worked in many different ways, cutting across various social markers of inclusion and exclusion. History was never linear or set by determinable teleologies. Indeed, what marked the birth of modern racism was the invocation of the logics of the ‘progressive’ versus the ‘regressive’. EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 5 Resistance was not about negation. It was an affirmative and creative process, which was always open to the future. Violence in this regard was not about differences. It was all about the attempts to force that which is different to become singular through a forced imposition in the order of truth. In order to challenge the violence of the universal, it was imperative that society challenged the imposition of moral absolutism. This would also include recognising the normalisation of oppression through the imposition of cultural standards, which worked through censorship and the sovereign right to ban. Every ‘ism’ was a cult. Period. Protestantism, Catholicism, Liberalism, Realism, Socialism, Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Racism, Patriarchalism, Feminism, Marxism, Butlerism, Zizekism, all cults. Nothing more. Nothing less. The critique of identity always demanded contextualisation, which connected the systematic with the subjective. Regardless of the history, nobody could claim a monopoly on victimhood. While fascism remained the main strategic adversary, it needed to be critiqued in all its forms. This included the forces of nihilism, the politics of shaming and the triumph of resentment. The purpose of critique was to engage while recognising your own shameful compromises with power. Nobody was exempt. And history was important in bringing about a viable critique of the present. The art of the political was distinctly about transgressing the normative standards imposed on a social order. As such, not only was culture always part of an ongoing war over the senses, but it was also precisely in the realm of culture where the savage beauty of transgression was most apparent. This was never about standardisation. It was about subverting the norm. Sadly, these gains and aspirations in critical thinking have now been completely lost by a religious left which has largely abandoned every single one of these propositions. This ironically brings us back to a notable Thatcherite. Despite our concerns with his politics, we can make some sense of this moment by turning to the political philosopher John Gray, who remains one of the most astute critics on the religiosity, violence and the demise of liberalism. During the lockdown, Gray made a particularly insightful intervention which saw to the heart of the political and religious crises defining our times. Taking direct aim at ‘woke militancy’, he pressed the all too theological implications. ‘The current convulsion’, Gray (2020) wrote, is ‘closely akin to the anarchical millenarians’ movements that raged across Europe in the late Middle Ages, whose vision of redemption from history was shared by America’s founders, and who carried it with them to the New World’ (para. 1). Noting in particular how this movement has now rejected liberal values of old, ‘they extend their power not by persuasion but by socially marginalising and economically ruining their critics. As in the show trials orchestrated by Stalin and Mao’s ‘struggle sessions’, woke activists demand public confession and repentance from their victims’. The upshot is the emergence of a new ‘tyranny of the righteous mob’ who ultimately have ‘no vision for the future’ except to catharsize the present: ‘cleansing themselves and others of sin is their goal. Amidst vast inequalities of power and wealth, the woke generation bask in the eternal sunshine of their spotless virtue’. And so, what remains once the imperfections of all come more into focus is a new saviour complex that shows its stigmata to the world. For Gray, the comparisons with medieval millenarians are clear: ‘While asserting their superior virtue, their signature practice was self-flagellation. Forgiveness—whether of themselves or others—was notably absent’. Unlike the millenarians of the past however, there is however one notable difference, Gray maintains, which concerns directly the questions of poverty, power and privilege. 6 B. EVANS AND J. REID ‘The woke movement’, he writes, ‘is mostly composed of the offspring of middle-class families schooled in institutions of higher learning. Like their medieval predecessors, woke activists believe themselves to be emancipated from established values. But, possibly uniquely in history, their antinomian rebellion emanates from an antinomian establishment’. Gray is certainly among the most formidable thinkers on the right today. Bearing comparison to Carl Schmitt, he equally doesn’t buy into the conceit that secularisation somehow meant the Death of God. On the contrary, liberalism, he argues, shows even more religiosity in its worldly practice than many other religions. While a naturalist whose ideas can easily be seen as apologetic to the grandeur of tradition, his pessimistic account of human nature and reason, including the delusions of the ‘progressive’ is a position even many conservatives would find difficult to swallow. Probably we agree more with him than many on ‘the religious left’. Showing an evident appreciation for his work, Simon Critchley (2014) brilliantly captures the thrust of Gray’s anti-humanist position: ‘To put it brutally, human beings are killer apes. We are simply animals—and rather nasty aggressive primates at that, what Gray calls Homo rapiens, rapacious hominids. Sadly, we are also killer apes with metaphysical longing, which explains the ceaseless quest to find some meaning to life that might be underwritten by an experience of the holy or the numinous’ (pp. 109f.). The real adversary for Gray, as Critchley notes, has always been liberal humanism. In his highly compelling book Black Mass (Gray, 2007), he continues his assault on liberalism as representing yet another chapter in the history of religion. Breaking apart the idea of history as some natural unfolding towards higher meaning and truth, and what is akin to the providential claims of earlier Christianity, Gray also notes how the ideas of neo-conservatives and liberal humanists are theologically closer than either might care to admit. This allows us to recognise how many of the concerns now pushed by the religious left today bear a striking similarity in mood and tone to the crusading edicts of the ‘moral majority’ in the United States during the mid 80 s. Majorities, as Gilles Deleuze once noted, have always been a dubious minority numerically speaking (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006). With history presented to us as a nightmare from which we must now awaken, as Gray explains, what liberalism demanded was an unquestionable faith in the logics of progress. Over time, this would be notably Americanised, and in turn more embracing of a sense of vulnerability too, as the inherent violence of the human condition became central. The violence of 9/11 would accelerate this truth and would be pivotal in enshrining the doctrine of resilience. Such progress in the face of vulnerability would however prove to be its very undoing. What’s at stake here then, we believe, points precisely to a crisis of political imagination, every bit as big as the one which beset the Left in the 1960s, and to which thinkers like Foucault and Deleuze responded to, by attempting to reinvigorate our understanding of the necessary violence of imagination and the force of images as weapons for the destruction of tedious regimes of power. The desire for a form of critique that leaps, that dances, that moves in directions and ways that escape and subvert the economy of power and do not merely pass down sentences remains as pressing as ever in this lockdown world of lives, thoughts and words.5 Instead, the radical demand today is being led by a highly educated, very middle class left which has become so fixated with victimhood (which in itself represents a hyper-aroused moral acceleration of the liberal will to rule), while profiting from the emotional currency that now trades in the solidarity of faux sentimentalities, and of what we could, borrowing from Georges Bataille, call ‘the affected share’. They have been the main advocates pushing us into the new religiosity of our times. Ironically, however, all this is occurring at the very moment when the proliferation of sites of victimisation (which has been taking place since the late 1960s) has effectively lost its political appeal, or at least has to come to terms with the exposure of its violently policed limits, which have been shown to be just as prejudicial and exclusionary as anything else. But that’s the point. When a system of political thinking no longer senses or feels that it has the self-confidence in the power of its ideas or willingness to recognise the radical singularity of others, what EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 7 invariably takes its place is a fall back upon moral platitudes and a barricaded indignation, which derives from the hurt felt at knowing that others don’t see the world as righteously as you. Equipped for and fully allegiant to the new technological order of things, the religious left now adopts logics once associated with the religious right in the United States. They have very little concern with politics (understood as practices of conflict and disagreement) than with presenting arguments with such moral conviction there is no requirement to even engage the opposition. But there’s not much to really worry about here if you’ve been in their firing line. According to these new digitalised puritans, everybody is now a ‘reactionary’. Leaving aside some of the vitriolic attacks in the past year towards Giorgio Agamben that also smacked of the worst kind of ageism (if anybody had the right to speak about the links between biopolitics, emergency powers and technology then surely it was he), Michel Foucault we are also told was nothing more than a Eurocentric racist, while Nietzsche simply a reactive messenger for the alt-right. Is there a more lazy and condescending term in politics today than ‘the reactionary’? Often invoked by privileged hyper-moralists who cast their righteous eye over every passing sentence, word, utterance or happenstance, demanding of their priestly attention like a virtual adaptation of the Catholic confession—one whose sin can only be atoned through self-flagellation, it’s as tedious and dull as all narratives concerning ‘the progressive’ have been since the advent of modernity. Then again, at least they can fall back upon the language of ‘white privilege’ to displace their own colonial guilt onto the backs of the poor and destitute, who they are so distant from. Might it not however be the case that the reason why Foucault is so perturbing for the morally certain today is that he problematised their image of history as unfolding itself so naturally, and saw also how the left is capable of as deep a fascism as the right? Might it not be that Nietzsche perturbs because he warns us precisely of deluded notions of progress and the dangers of hyper-moralism? Whereas Agamben perturbs for showing how power today cannot be simply explained through purely embodied ideas of ‘the white man’ but the pervasive nature of highly biopoliticised technologies, which themselves have become so important to those who wish to communicate their righteous indignation? As sobering as it seems, this demands a more honest reflection on the ways the left has lost its argument and self-confidence in its own transgressive potentiality, which in turn means acknowledging what the right is getting right in these politically fraught and morally reductive times. In our attempts to come to terms with the ways in which the left has effectively lost its argument, we might turn to works by Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, whose criticisms of the left centre precisely on the ways it has divorced itself from reality—especially when it comes to once cherished ideas of transgression and the resistance of the imposition of limits. What is real and what is imagined here cannot be separated from our concerns. Let’s think here about the question of free speech. Both those on the left and right of the debate actually believe that reality is on their side. The right point to the fact that their popular standing shows just how far the left has lost touch with the populace. Something we would agree with, though not for the reasons the right would draw upon when making its case. Whereas some on the left insist that not only has speech never been truly free (again agreeable, though not desirable), but the very idea of free speech is also ultimately an abstraction. As Zoe Williams of The Guardian wrote in response to the infamous Harpers letter warning precisely against the cancel culture of the times: ‘there is no such things as pure freedom of expression either: the expression of some views necessarily encroaches on the dignity and freedom of others. This is partly a failure of speech itself, which has the facility to raise impossible propositions—Eagleton’s unstoppable force meeting an immovable object—but not to resolve them. Mainly it’s a failure of humans. We should think carefully before lining up behind an abstract, on either side—absolutes have a tendency to dissolve on contact with reality’ (Malik et al., 2020). What Williams call the abstract, we call the future! And this is why we remain allegiant to the poetic and the need for what Felix Guattari called a new ‘aesthetic paradigm’. Counter to those who claim it is some mere 8 B. EVANS AND J. REID form of representation, as Tim Morton (2016) argued, art is thought from the future. It is not simply about the here and now. And it certainly doesn’t work by closing in upon itself. Denying freedom of expression is ultimately the denial of a future whose means and ends have been worked out in advance. That for us is the surest definition of a tyranny. But we know already that the current leftist puritans of reason have very little appetite for outrageous art and poetics. Burning the books How are we therefore to make sense of the left’s collapse into censorship today? If the post-modern failed at anything, then surely it was in its ability to impose a new order. What the religious left has fully embraced today is not the transgressive, but the ultimate Schmittian insistence: on the sovereign right to ban. As we look across our bookshelves, we see works by Hannah Arendt, Adolf Hitler, Mao, Jean Genet, Marinetti, Marquis de Sade, Giorgio Agamben, George Bataille, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Mahatma Gandhi, Yukio Mishima, Che Guevara, Andre Gide, Michel Houellebecq, Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Ayn Rand, Carl Schmitt, amongst others. Certainly, we don’t agree with much of what is written by these authors, but that’s not the point. Those who demand perfection might insist that what we have here is a list of racists, libertarians, sexual deviants, sensationalists, caste elitists, homophobes, Nazis, misogynists, criminals, urban terrorists, and notable tyrants from history. How many of these authors would be allowed to speak freely on a campus today is questionable, let alone get up to what they did. And that’s another tragedy facing us right now. Of course, there is a wider history to this, which on each occasion connects directly to a perceived crisis in the moral fabric of societies and ends up collapsing into puritanism. From the Bonfire of the Vanities to the ‘degenerate art’ of Nazi Germany, through to the culture wars of the neo-conservatives and on to puritan left today, when the argument fails religion prevails. This is not hyperbole. It is real and it is having dangerous consequences. Thankfully, you can spot a moralist a mile-off through their use of language. More often it’s all about a ‘bad argument’ or ‘bad taste’ or ‘bad manners’ and so on. As Foucault was right to point out, there is no such thing as good or bad, only dangerous. The invocation of the bad is no argument at all, it’s simply a moral position of theological certitude. But we mustn’t simply be content here with decrying the left as if the selective conservatism of the right is the path to be followed. The right remains dangerous. Murray is the quintessential example. Besides from suffering from what Henry Giroux (2014) calls the ‘violence of organised forgetting’ in his Empire denial, he is completely incapable of recognising his own privilege. But there’s nothing new at work here. Indeed, while Murray is quite happy to invoke the politics of identity when such matters suit, notably concerning the charges of anti-Semitism on the left (which no doubt remains a problem, though not for its anti-Zionism), what ultimately concerns is a fall back upon some foundational ground for truth, upon which natural selection is rekindled, order restored, and the naturalisation of hierarchy reset. Indeed, when that order is challenged that’s when ‘free speech’ is called upon in order to protect the system and revert back to some golden age of proven intellectualism. Whatever one achieves is simply personal endeavour, the system merely facilitates. A position so archaic, Oscar Wilde might still be heard laughing at it. This leaves us with two questions: who gets to speak truth to power? And who gets to represent in the name of a culture? Gayatri Spivak remains the brilliant point of entry to any discussion on the question of supressed language. With a critical fortitude to question whether the subaltern had the capacity to speak truth to power, she forced us to also consider the importance of subaltern knowledges and cultural productions as viable acts of resistance to colonial models. Spivak (1999) was also acutely aware of the problems associated with identity, noting how the subaltern remains ‘an unascertainable ethical singularity that is not ever a EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 9 sustainable condition’ (p. 175). This is why, for Spivak, there is always a need to be open to the impossibility of the future. ‘Most political movements fail in the long run’, Spivak writes, ‘because of this engagement [with the impossible]’. Thus, the very subaltern designation must refer to the heterogeneity of any given space in defiance of universal normative truths. Demanding then an impossible indeterminancy, the poignant words of Zygmunt Bauman (2004) ring true: ‘Identities float in the air, some of one’s own choice but others inflated and launched by those around, and one needs to be constantly alert to defend the first against the second’ (p. 13). Let’s link this back to the university where the battle lines in the fight over the politics of identity are increasingly being set. Spivak’s ideas, amongst others, were pivotal in leading the charge against the pernicious culture of essentialism and intellectual appropriation so common today in the social sciences, most notably Anthropology. Such criticisms rightly opened the doors to more considered reflections, which demanded a certain authenticity on behalf of those doing the professing. It is seen preferable, for example, to have a card-carrying indigenous scholar speaking about the plight of indigenous peoples rather than some privileged white man who grew up in privileged words made possible by settler colonialism. Such an aspiration for ‘authenticity’ however has not been applied across all fields of study. The most obvious examples here concern poverty and incarceration. Academia is full of sociologists, criminologists, economists, and others, who routinely talk on behalf of the poor and imprisoned without any sense of what it means to experience such conditions (except to visit and observe, like anthropologists still do, using fashionable concepts like ‘dwelling’ and ‘walking with’). Whether it is only right to have women speaking about feminist issues, Jewish persons speaking about the Holocaust, liberals speaking about denial, men speaking about male fragility, remains open to question and remains of course subject to many double standards. Let’s be clear here. A university which is home to professors from multiple ethnic, religious, gendered, class-based backgrounds is far more preferable than any old white man’s club whose welcome and wisdom was incomparable to working men’s clubs of old. But there is little to be gained if a university employs a black man, Indian woman, Islamist from Pakistan, indigenous Maya from San Juan Chamula, Irish Catholic, or someone from the most acute conditions of poverty in Russia if they all believe Nazism was a good thing or that socialism is the only game in town. Too often, especially in academia, the search for authenticity triumphs over the search for originality. That’s not to say original thinking doesn’t take place within some identitarian frame. It’s done to death. What it does suggest is how the means and ends of thought are limited to what identities permit. Hence, since beyond ‘the identity’ there is nothing to be said, everything needs to be drawn back into its reasoning. How often do you hear the question ‘what about gender’ in discussions about problems that are only tangentially relevant? The history of the study of politics is to demand more and more authenticity in the fields of study from the early years of nationalism and ideology, onto area studies and to the proliferation of multiple identity politics today. But this search is nothing more than an illusion. Nothing is authentic. Things are merely original or mimetic in their strategic design. A simple audit of politics departments across the world would suffice here. To invoke an old cliché, originality is not found within the walls of whatever box regardless of how authentic it looks. What’s required is to break open the image of thought that sets out in advance the parameters of thinking, the limits of its problems, and the binding ground such thinking is meant to fall back down upon when all is said and done. The maxim what is true needs to be authentic and what is authentic necessary true is a falsehood. During the late 1960s, there was a notable movement in philosophy when the very ‘essences’ of things were being broken apart. This gave rise to an entirely new body of knowledge now commonly termed the complexity sciences. Whilst this was initially positioned in opposition to identity politics, it has now been absorbed such that claims regarding the multiplicities of being permits more non-essential essentialisations to be cast. While the basis of identity politics today still promotes the idea that certain legislative action is essential on account of constructed biological essentialisations of the past, it is also now the case that 10 B. EVANS AND J. REID subjectivities are being subjected to the same move as they shift away from having clear political ideas to a pure emotionally framed state that is technologically determined. What we will identify as being ‘non-subjective subjectivities’ operate purely in the realm of affect, where the truth is manifest through a general economy of affective relations such that truth itself literally feels its way into existence. This brings us directly onto the question of cultural appropriation. The exploitation of culture for the purposes of commodification and colonial exploitation is a practice which needs to be challenged. But there is also a danger here that we again retreat back into forms of cultural purity and insist upon forms of authenticity which simply do not exist and merely work to police free expression by those who bestow authentic meaning. Is a movie made by Spike Lee about the racism experienced by black men living in the United States inevitably better than anything Quentin Tarantino could make on the subject? Not necessarily. Culture is not a competition and identity is no definitive kind of advantage. Or if it has become problematic in its delivery, it is precisely because of the competitive ethos, over money, over authenticity, over truth, which exposes the hypocrisy of those who otherwise insist that art is good for art’s sake. Art needs to exist for its own purpose, for it is only by having that freedom that it is able to transgress. And that’s what makes it truly political. The alternative is merely propaganda. So just as Katheryn Bigelow has every right to make a film about war even though she never served on the front lines (regardless of how tedious and predictable those films appear, which make them all the more useful in terms of wider social critique), the artist also has every right to engage with topics of their own free choosing. Imagine how poorer the cinematic landscape would be if Tarkovsky was told he couldn’t make a film about a space station because he wasn’t an astronaut? As the Cuban born artist Coco Fusco (2017) has explained: To make art about one’s presumed identity, or about any kind of history, is a choice, not a given. To make it well requires self-conscious knowledge and skill more so than lived experience—were that not the case, no artist could effectively represent historical subjects. For such knowledge to become the stuff of art requires much more than the awareness of the persistence of racism and consciousness of one’s personal or communal history. I am not trying to suggest that white artists never approach minority and non-European cultures insensitively—I have seen more cavalier usage of ethnic cultural references than I want to remember. Yet, I’ve also seen compelling works of art that incorporate a broad range of references intelligently. The problem is not whether an artist is white; it’s the discursive context that sanctions ignorance and romanticizes intuition as the starting point of creation, while denigrating sociological analysis as ill-suited to art, The assumption that a cultural milieu consisting of clearly demarcated cultural identities would diminish cultural appropriation is out of sync with the ways we produce and consume cross-culturally, with varying degrees of blindness to the labour conditions or tragic histories that shape it. Artists don’t have to be white for their cultural appropriations to be found offensive either—just ask Cubans outraged by the lionization of Che Guevara by every Third World movement on the planet. The crux of the matter is not what artists should or should not do but how everyone involved in producing, protecting, presenting and consuming culture thinks about what they behold and take ownership of. Attacking individual artists is misguided; it may provide emotional satisfaction to those who want a scapegoat, but it’s a symptom of the inability to engage in analyses of systemic racism and institutional practices. (paras. 3-5) So, to conclude, let’s just make one final return to Foucault and the reason why he is becoming so out of favour with the religious left today. It is no doubt very convenient for the puritans of the age to claim free speech is a liberal invention—after all it is liberalism they also wish to leave behind. We have already shown our admiration for Foucault and his work on parrhesia or what he termed ‘fearless speech’. Such speech, he maintained, as originally developed by the Greeks was integral to the courage to truth. Literally translated into ‘saying it all’, fearless speech demands the right to speak against those who would silence you—especially through the moralism of their reasoning. Without fearless speech society would descend into a conformism of the worst kind, where every utterance is in conformity to the sensibility of the times, EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 11 where the question of tolerance is so aggregable it nullifies the necessity for conflict as part of the creative process. A society then that is not open to fearless speech is a society that in the end says nothing at all. Foucault also noted how the sanctioning of language takes many different forms. There is still so much to be heard from the unsaid, the silences and the yet to be spoken. The current will to censor, by fiat or shame by the religious left is not then simply about responsibility or even to help repair the psychological effects of micro-aggressions. It is a battle against the future and what the fearless dare not speak on account of the non-violent violence it may bring. Such a world is just as terrifying as anything the right has dared to imagine. Taking aim at the image of thought, it seeks to ultimately kill off the fiction of a future life. As Kafka wrote in a letter on the necessity to bring a certain literary violence to emotion: ‘I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? …we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us’. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. On the changing nature of education policy in the UK, see Jones (2002). In respect to the impact of Tony Blair, see Smithers (2001). We take up our wider concern with the doctrine of resilience more substantively in Evans and Reid (2014). On the events of 1968, see especially Elbaum (2018), Williams (2018) and Debray (2017). 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