I was unfortunate enough to log in to my social media accounts just after American conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was murdered this week. This means that I now can’t unsee that image: a man bleeding to death on stage at an event to discuss ideas.
I don’t normally write about current events or politics. But I have had some thoughts brewing for a while, and now feels like the right time to share some of them.
What strikes me most about politics at the moment is the depth and complexity of the issues that are at stake. I don’t think it is as simple as “polarisation,” which is what I hear a lot of people talking about.
For me, there is a complex interaction unfolding, where political lines are hardening into polar opposites and disappearing at the same time.
One of the enduring images from Ancient Greece is the image of the Ouroboros, the snake eating its tail. It feels to me that traditional “left” and “right” politics are both eating their own tail. This creates a complex and confusing landscape of ideological commitments that are incredibly resistant to disagreement and discussion.
I think it is possible to build a civil society without homogenisation, harmonisation, and enforced agreement to moral values. In fact, over many thousands of years and in wildly different philosophies, this idea has been quite prominent.
Regular readers will know that I have three main influences on my philosophical work. These are
4th century Christian philosophical theology,
11th century Kashmir Shaivism, and
19th century Nietzschean materialism.
Today’s post is a little thought experiment in how each of these philosophical traditions might contribute to a different understanding of civil society. This would be a civil society that is not based on tolerance and agreement but on polarisation itself and the value of difference.
Christianity in the 4th Century CE
Contemporary western Christian belief, especially conservative American Christianity, stands at quite some distance from the foundations of the Christian faith. In my view, these foundations were laid in the 3rd and 4th centuries as new structures emerged to formalise Christian belief in a way that would support a new organisation: the church.
At this moment, Christian belief was framed around highly speculative ideas. This is exemplified by the Cappadocian Fathers, who merged eastern and western currents of theology to come up with interesting ways to solve the great mysteries of Christianity: the Trinity and the Incarnation. The result was that these were no longer mysteries, but ideas that could be understood with a precise formulation.
One of the features of this philosophical apparatus, which I have described elsewhere, is the idea that beings - whether gods or humans - exist in one another, that is, by virtue of their relationships.
This is easy enough to work with when you think only about people that are just like you. Or where you focus on relationships of trust and love. It is much harder to think this through when you consider people with whom you have a disagreement. Or people whom you despise. Or even hate.
This is where the early Christian philosophical theology has some teeth. It doesn’t say anything about these relationships needing to be nice ones of love and trust. If you took the metaphysics seriously, then the practical outcome becomes quite a striking challenge.
That is, even when we have deep disagreements, antipathy and all kinds of aversive and violent emotional and psychological reactions to a person, according to this metaphysics, we still owe our existence to them.
And this means that negating your enemies, harming them, seeking to remove or exclude them, is nothing short of nihilistic self-harm. The drive to homogenise, to require moral obedience from you polar opposite, your enemy, is profoundly anti-Christian.
And so we see the left wing of politics caught in a web of its own making. By taking the moral high ground, and insisting on conformity and homogenisation, its ends up in a grotesque celebration of intolerance and violence when an opponent gets murdered. The double irony is that not only has the supposedly progressive pro-tolerance faction become violently intolerant, it has done this standing against a debased and dogmatic form of contemporary “Christianity.”
Both sides could learn from real Christianity.
11th Century Kashmiri Tantrism
There are many features of the philosophical theology of medieval Kashmir that I think are deeply relevant to this question of polarisation and cohesion in contemporary politics.
But let’s just pick one. This is the Tantric idea of polarity itself. We seem to have this idea that when things get “polarised,” then relationships dissolve into animosity and violence. But Tantrism sees polarisation in exactly the opposite way.
Think of the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang, of binary but complementary opposites. You find this in Tantrism as well, in the idea of masculine and feminine energies that, when they combine, give rise to life itself.
The simplest example of this are the ‘god’ and ‘goddess’ of Tantra. Shiva is the preeminent male deity of Tantrism, and in Kashmiri Tantrism he becomes less a personal ‘god’ and more a metaphysical principle, the principle of Awareness.
Shakti is the preeminent female deity of Tantrism. She is harder to trace mythologically as a personal deity, but she seems to be loosely based on the mythology of Parvati and Kali. In any case, in Kashmiri Tantrism, she becomes a second metaphysical principle, the principle of Energy.
The whole universe arises from the relationship between these two principles. This is a relationship of mutually interpenetrating opposites.
I think we can get from this another interesting and helpful idea for today.
We often think about harmonious societies as societies that are homogenous in important ways. Most especially, we tend to think that societies need to have shared values or a common moral framework. Cultural norms become the bedrock of social cohesion.
Tantric metaphysics challenges this. It suggests that it is possible to use the energy that comes from intersecting opposites to create civil society. The key is to leave the opposites as opposites, and to work with them as energies to continually create, one new world after another forever.
19th Century Nietzschean Materialism
And, finally, Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy has a lot to offer this polarised world. Writing in the nineteenth century, he managed to predict the course of western societies in a way this is nothing short of genius.
In particular, he was able to predict that progressive politics would dissolve into moralistic idealism. He gives us the idea of politics based on resentment. This is, I think, deeply relevant to the Ouroboric story of both left and right in contemporary politics.
I’ll just mention, very briefly, one of his ideas here. And this is the idea that mainstream morality, what he calls customary morality, is not about right and wrong. It is about power.
The important thing in customary morality is not about where you draw your moral lines. It has nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the moral position itself. It has everything to do with who has the right to draw moral lines in the first place.
And this is an interesting way to diagnose the polarisation of contemporary politics and its devolution into violence.
I never agreed with Charlie Kirk’s moral positions. He stood for conservative American-Christian values. He was anti-trans and anti-homosexual, for example, something that I deeply disagree with.
But more importantly, his positions put him at odds with left wing identity politics. If you go to YouTube and watch his interactions with left wing ideologues, the thing that stands out most to me is the shock on his opponents’ faces. Shock that someone opposite to them believed that they had the right to redraw the moral boundaries.
What we are seeing in these videos is not a moral debate. It is a power struggle, it is about who has the right to draw the moral lines.
His opponents had nothing but contempt and resentment for him engaging in this power struggle. The most shocking thing for me in the wake of his tragic death is the celebration of murder and violence amongst his opponents.
Both Christianity and Tantrism, in my opinion, propose an abstract metaphysics that celebrates difference and opposition. Nietzsche despised metaphysics. But I think we see in his philosophy a practical way to bring these ideas to life and to order a society around them. And this practical mechanism, devised by the Ancient Greeks, is contest.
Nietzsche imagined a society that was founded not on grandiose moralising and the resentment that comes from moralistic power games. He imagined a society founded on a quest for excellence.
And excellence was discovered by contest. It went something like this:
Find the best opponents,
get them into a contest with each other,
adjudicate the outcome with an eye for excellence, and
go again.
I wonder if this kind of process might become possible again?
Neil
Thank you.
Thanks Neil - great ideas to ponder!