The Church of Everything

Slavoj Zizek, the Marxist philosopher and critic of, well, just about everything, is fond of pointing out the oppression of today's society, but I personally feel it's a point that is often missed. Surely today's society is less oppressive than, say, Soviet Russia? Or totalitarian European states that existed prior to the English Civil War?

A western society like the United Kingdom can be represented as much as anything by the outcome of the Hegelian dialectic, the equation put forward by the German philosopher Johan Fichte that reads thesis + antithesis = synthesis. One of the most common misunderstandings about the theory of evolution is the belief that there is a difference between transitional species and the species we see around us today, this arrogant worldview that we are in some way the finished product of a previous equation. This is simply incorrect: the process is still ongoing with no end in sight, and it is equally important to remember that the synthesis of the Hegelian dialectic is always a thesis and an antithesis in a successive equation; indeed, to do otherwise is dangerous (as it among other things leads to apathy). To write the Hegelian dialectic out in full would require a blackboard the length and width of the universe itself, so for the sake of limitation we must start with a synthesis and work backwards. This is easy with Britain, as it is so obviously a halfway house between authoritarianism and anarchism, a great example of a Western libertarian society because the vestigal organs are still alive in Buckingham Palace. We enjoy many freedoms and support sensible limitations: we can dress how we like (to a point), we can speak our minds (to a point), we can have sex with whatever we want (to a point), we can marry whom we please (to a point). But again human arrogance arises: 21st century liberal democracy is right, everything that led to it is wrong.

It is easy to look back and criticise from a position of hindsight. We see Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany as the ultimate dystopias, and criticisms of them that are too late to be relevant are held up as anti-establishment thought (see V For Vendetta). In my previous posts I have mentioned how apathy posits a political problem today, but there is a philosophical assault by the liberal democracy championed by the likes of Francis Fukyama: the oppression of tolerance. It was his criticism of tolerance that first drew me to Zizek, as tolerance has always struck me as an unpleasant word, and indeed it is also an unpleasant concept.

Since I am unashamedly ripping Slavoj off here, I will use his example: a classic, authoritarian father might say to you, "You are going to visit your grandmother today, whether you like it or not." The postmodern, liberal democratic father you might find today is far more likely to say, "You don't have to visit your grandmother, only go if you want to." The obligation to go is still there, but you have to like it, too. On a larger scale, whereas in the past homosexuality was illegal, now it is "tolerated," along with criticism of it. Yes, you can go out and say queering doesn't make the world work, but you will be frowned upon. We are no longer kept in place by armed police, but by society's expectation and the inner pain it can inflict.

Is this a good thing? Well, it means that the target has moved from the homosexual to the homophobe, which is a positive. But the enforcing of it is extremely dishonest. And it is only through conditioning that we even see this as positive. The late, great pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty noted that as a teacher he was no different from the progandists that were employed in Nazi Germany. He conditioned his students so that they were no longer bigots because he believed, as do I, that it was right to do so, just as a Nazi teacher would have conditioned his students to be bigots because he believed it was right to do so. Who has the moral advantage? It lies only in the balance of the synthesis.

I once ridiculed Ann Coulter for her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. In fact, she had an excellent point, whether she knew it or not. However preferable a secular democracy seems to us compared with a fascist theocracy, the enforcement of the former at the expense of what had gone before is as ironic as it is unjustifed. It's worth noting that there was never an explicit rule in Soviet Russia about criticising the communist society, but if you did you would undoubtedly disappear. Now? There is no criticism of the liberal democracy. Why? Because we no longer pander to utopias. Why? Because the 20th century seems to have borne out Antonin Artaud's belief that, since suffering is vital to human existence, utopias must always become dystopias. The truth is that nothing has changed as much as we'd like to think it has. We are still on leashes, they're just invisible now. And we are all still very, very partial to indoctrination.