What the fuck, John Milbank?
Jackie Ashley (This fight really matters, May 19) reveals the bizarre bankruptcy of the current British left. By every traditional radical criterion New Labour has failed: it has presided over a large increase in economic inequality and an entrenchment of poverty, while it has actively promoted the destruction of civil rights, authoritarian interference in education and medicine, and an excessively punitive approach to crime. But never mind all that, says Jackie Ashley and her ilk: on what crucially matters – the extending of supposed biosexual freedom and the licensing of Faustian excesses of science – it is on the side of “progress”.
Yet it is arguably just this construal of left versus right which is most novel and questionable. Is it really so obvious that permitting children to be born without fathers is progressive, or even liberal and feminist? Behind the media facade, more subtle debates over these sorts of issue do not necessarily follow obvious political or religious versus secular divides. The reality is that, after the sell-out to extreme capitalism, the left seeks ideological alibis in the shape of hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites.
An older left had more sense of the qualified goods of these things and the way they can work to allow a greater economic equality and the democratisation of excellence. Now many of us are beginning to realise that old socialists should talk with traditionalist Tories. In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a “traditionalist socialism” or a “red Toryism”. After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.
John Milbank, Letter to The Guardian, Thursday 22nd May 2008
Ah, “the family”. The family…John, you’re not making this trying-not-to-call-Milbank-a-fascist thing very easy, you know…
I’m told Milbank’s a big admirer of Badiou; and indeed that line about “the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism” is a kind of echo of Badiou’s scornful denunciations of our contemporary “liberal pluralism”. Except that – and this is kind of important – Badiou doesn’t as far as I know assert that cultural liberalism is responsible – via a sort of general slackening of moral standards – for the depredations of capitalism. He just observes that capitalism is perfectly comfortable with whatever “personal freedoms” don’t interfere with its ongoing NEAR-TOTAL MASTERY OF THE KNOWN UNIVERSE, and therefore that the contemporary focus on such freedoms (excluding any and all expressions of them that in any way inconvenience the pursuit of profit) is kind of skipping gaily around the elephant in the room.
Milbank seems to think that a bit more deference towards elites, a bit more heteronormativity, a bit more prescriptiveness about what women can decide to do with the contents of their wombs, would act as a bulwark against the wild licentiousness of neo-liberalism. But as Zizek has recently been pointing out, capitalism works perfectly well – indeed, it might even work “better”, by its own lights – without the trappings of “social democracy” and “personal freedom”. “Cultural liberalism” may be politically impotent, and deeply complicit in the system of exploitation it nominally opposes, but it’s ultimately a dispensable instrument.
“Red Toryism” is the attempt to console those who have seen their societies ripped apart by neo-liberal dogma with a return to traditional moral co-ordinates, for which they themselves must (naturally) take responsibility. It may even feel, for those who rightly mourn and resent the social consequences of the past thirty years of what Badiou calls “the restoration”, like a kind of empowerment: “zero tolerance”, traditional values, the resuscitation of a social agenda of respect and responsibility. But it’s a con, and the next four (at least) years of (practically inevitable) Tory government will demonstrate just what manner of con it is.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:02 am
“Red Tory” is a great term of oppobrium; my first opportunity to use it was discussing Rorty a decade ago, and I still want to say it often. But I think I mean something different than you; I mean precisely “the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism”, i.e. people who sell a line of “moderate” liberalization as a bulwark against the strident masses. I initially had in mind intellectuals who, like Rorty, made a show of being “social-democrats” while going on and on about the evils of Resentment and other thoughts and sentiments typically associated with righting actual social injustice — but aren’t blogs full of Disraelis in favor of extending franchises, but not too much?
As for the franchises of Biosexual Freedom and Faustian Excesses of Science, I think the question for the real “traditional socialist” is market penetration. I have nothing (beyond usual ceteris paribus conditions) against single mothers tying up their dates, or people (perhaps not only kids) learning about chemistry by making stuff blow up, but some conceptions of “liberality” in these matters view modern science and sophisticated sex as things which are on the universal level only suffered. So although Milbank generally seems to be operating the same con as Alasdair MacIntyre, I think bringing economic stratification back into the equation doesn’t completely nullify his sentiments.