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THE scourge of Political Correctness has been with us now since the 1980s, a distinctively curious modern syndrome of angst marked by critical examination of language and custom. Something of this brouhaha has been with us over longer tracts of history if we care to survey cultural innovation and evolution across the centuries. However the present discomfiture visited upon the heads of our chattering classes, whereby seemingly innocuous linguistic chatter has recently become problematic and in many cases deemed reactionary, speaks to a novel juncture of intellectual frenzy and insecurity.
Our distinctive period of ferment has been variously labelled the late modern, the post-modern and the Anthropocene. Characterised in part by a waning optimism from the European Enlightenment and the giddy new world of neoliberal globalisation, our gilded benevolent post war progress has given way to precarity and anxiety as we attempt to grapple with the complexities of our new multi-spectrum information age.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) is arguably the first modern philosopher and progenitor to articulate the ‘post-modern’ conundrum. Nietzsche’s arresting idea of the ‘Death of God’ is the lynchpin to his unrelenting ‘anti-foundationalism’. As Terry Eagleton has persuasively reasoned, Nietzsche seems to have been the first ‘real deal’ atheist, as all the other atheists up to this point had surreptitiously smuggled in the old Judeo Christian metaphysics and teleology amidst their loud affirmations of the secular. God had now become Reason or Humanism or some other such spurious unfounded belief in progress.
Nietzsche is seen by many as the singular uncompromising figure who primed a metaphorical slow reaction colossus of a nuclear bomb under the rickety infrastructure of Western philosophy. Pushing atheist Enlightenment thought to its apotheosis, Nietzsche spelled out in theatrical bravura the cataclysmic implications of the way ahead. The masses could no longer recoil and refuse to understand the stupendous shift in our world view.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Nietzsche’s dethronement of the Almighty was also the shattering of Western philosophy and its epistemological and ontological foundations. He would spell out the radical new existential realities for the multitude up till this point largely oblivious to the anti-foundational revolution that had upended the cosmos. A terrifying paradigm shift and cultural shock, vertiginous and exhilarating, would have to be digested by the post-modern.
With the prime mover dethroned along with all the attendant metaphysical ballast, society’s loss of its elaborate meaning system in placating our existential fears and buttressing our sense of selves, our identity and our moralities, Nietzsche had foregrounded the nihilistic conundrum at the centre of modernity. Without recourse to transcendental authority and legitimacy, uncompromising contingency would issue in an intense anomic turbulence.
The realm of normalcy destroyed, regarded as oppressive and socially constructed. Scientific knowledge is now suspect, provisional and relativised. What was once taken as God given and natural is now arbitrary and suitable for deconstruction by suitably qualified post modern scholars well versed in the radical new indeterminism. All traditional ‘centrics’ of language and culture must be prised apart accordingly.
God is dead alongside the Enlightenment belief in Reason. Patriarchy is dead, the family is dead, heterosexuality is dead, the novel is dead, the symphony is dead, the author is dead. Political Correctness is the manifestation of this modern discomfiture played out in our daily lives, an incessant Nietzschean comedy of manners as we scramble to find an acceptable form of parlance stripped of any perceived historical provocations.
Our nomenclatures betray certain socially conservative proclivities and a Christian lineage which a majority of the populace had no alternative but to acquiesce to and defer to a level of fitting observance. This may now have given way to little more than functionality, devoid of the metaphysical fervour of the devoted. Yet as cultural conservatives, the new Political Correctness is seen as an idiotic and unnecessary intrusion into a shared domain of vocabulary considered innocuous.
Nietzsche’s politics defy easy pigeonholing. Clearly not of the left himself although certainly not a textbook conservative or libertarian either. How far his heroic and affirmative existentialism stands as a viable solution and corrective against the bleak nihilist terminus remains questionable, not least because of his hostility to the universal and to the masses at large. It is also doubtful whether Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists have charted a convincing path ahead to steer us beyond the anarchy of the wasteland.
References –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
Terry Eagleton – Culture and the Death of God (2014) – especially relevant is Chapter 5 :
The Death of God.
Also very useful is the related Terry Eagleton lecture uploaded to Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=ka-HG-WeW_U
ON the first Easter Sunday we were together my wife rushed into the garden to tell me that the Pope was just about to give his address ‘Urbi et Orbi’, to the city and the world. I was baffled at her enthusiasm. Our mutual lack of understanding was because she had been brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition and I in the Anglican. It has not stopped us living in peace and harmony for 46 years. Nor has it meant that our ideas have remained fossilised in the past. But it’s a difference that had people imprisoned, tortured or burned at the stake 500 years ago.
The Reformation*, when Henry VIII broke with Rome and established himself as the head of the Anglican church, is seen by some as one of the most significant events in English history. But at this distance a more realistic appraisal is that it merely exchanged one form of intolerance for another; an insistence that one set of beliefs was the one true way, for another.
For the next 150 years the insistence that they, and they alone, knew the truth about how to worship their God drove those who happened to be in power at the time to impose their beliefs on the populace. Burning at the stake was in vogue during the reign of ‘Bloody Mary’, as she was called in my history book, but not that of my wife. During the heyday of Puritanism in the mid 17th century dancing and Christmas celebrations were forbidden, a bit like Jehovah’s Witnesses refusal to celebrate today, or the Taliban’s ban on pigeon flying.
And then it stopped; not all at once, not everywhere in the world, not even everywhere in Europe, but slowly this thing we call ‘The Enlightenment’ came into being. It wasn’t a single thing, but included a range of ideas centred on, sovereignty of reason, empirical investigation and the evidence of the senses as the primary sources of knowledge. It advanced ideals such as individual liberty, constitutional government, separation of religion and state, and toleration, including religious toleration. The countries where these conditions still do not exist are too well known for me to need to enumerate all of them; three will suffice, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Although The Enlightenment has dethroned religion as the sole arbiter of truth and knowledge its ideals of individual liberty and of religious tolerance has ensured that those so inclined can hold and practice their beliefs without persecution by the state, and the state will act to ensure that they are able to do so. It is no coincidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury has said; ‘We have to speak freely, I’m much more towards the US end of the spectrum on freedom of speech than I am elsewhere towards the other end. I think we have to be open to hearing things we really dislike’.
Even if many of a religious persuasion do not, Welby is aware that his Anglican faith benefits from that ideal of tolerance which those of us who do not share his beliefs attempt to give meaning to. Tolerance of other peoples’ beliefs and their practice of them does not mean that they should be immune to critical analysis or criticism. I believe that any claims about the existence or non-existence of transcendental beings or deities have no meaning in the absence of any empirical test to determine their veracity. But it does not stop me defending the rights of Christians to express their views on God’s opinion on homosexuality, even though I think they are nonsense, or defending Asia Bibi against persecution in Pakistan.
In other words the freedom that the followers of Islam, including those who reside in Batley and are demanding that the teacher who did something they dislike should be sacked, have to practice their beliefs in this country rests firmly upon ideals of The Enlightenment. Insisting that we in the UK abandon those ideals and adopt their own stance of intolerance towards those whose views we disapprove of will not serve them well. Anyone for banning Halal slaughter?
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EDITOR'S FOOTNOTE:
* Dating the Reformation
Historians usually date the start of the Protestant Reformation to the 1517 publication of Martin Luther’s “95 Theses.” Its ending can be placed anywhere from the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, which allowed for the coexistence of Catholicism and Lutheranism in Germany, to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The key ideas of the Reformation—a call to purify the church and a belief that the Bible, not tradition, should be the sole source of spiritual authority—were not themselves novel. However, Luther and the other reformers became the first to skillfully use the power of the printing press to give their ideas a wide audience.
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