A surprising statement

In Cities of God, Graham Ward says that it’s not the theologian’s job to provide solutions to the difficulties of our situation but to ‘keep alive the vision of better things’ (266). This seems a little bit evasive to me. He also refrains from making suggestions in The Politics of discipleship, even though he recommends theocracy. That too strikes me as evasive, perhaps even irresponsible. If a theologian like Ward who is well read on our context won’t make suggestions why bother?

Ward discussion, final

Ch 6. The metaphysics of the body

222 ‘Only with a right understanding of embodiment in its many guises is effective political agency possible. The body as mere flesh is a radically depoliticized body, and a depoliticized body is a body waiting to be controlled, coerced, and manipulated by the political, economic, and cultural powers that play with it.’

  There is no such thing as just an object – all objects have meaning and we need to enquire as to what that meaning is. Thus all dualisms between physics and metaphysics, nature/culture, material/spiritual, should be rejected. 223 This is important because it is precisely this reduction that is happening to the material now, ironically as we are more concerned with the body (fitness, gyms, biopolitics, obesity, dieting).

231 Nowadays bodies are ‘fictions, cultural and social waifs, disposable because their identities are dispersed across networks of symbolic exchanges, enmeshed in the march of metaphors, lost in a forest of brand names and market manipulations.’ People have intimate conversations who have never met and don’t want to meet: ‘bodies are reduced to avatars.’

233 the metaphysics of the state is of a closed unity, a monad. Fascism is clear about this. Liberal-democracy operates with a Many emanating from the One.

236 ‘The body politics works out its ideology, its metaphysics of physical and political embodiment, through various state-informed practices acting through various state-related institutions – schools, hospitals, universities, religious bodies supportive of state policy, the army, the police force, the courts, and so forth. These apparatuses not only promote certain values and views of the bodies political and physical; they shape them through specific disciplines imbued with specific values (usually held to be moral values).’

245 In Plato and Aristotle it is the soul that is the analogy for the state, but for Paul we have the idea of the church as a body.  250 the church transcends its locality by intensifying it: sitting in church makes you closer to other members of the church elsewhere. Differences are not elided in the church but it works through these different functions.

252 the human body is ‘a cultural product.’ When one joins the church there is a ‘fundamental realignment that goes on’ which affects the person and the technologies they are involved in.

254 ‘What being a member of the body of Christ entails, in other words, is a political discipleship that does not readily translate into institutions or even modes of political activity in this world.’ We act in this world but the importance/meaning of our acts is related to Christ and so is often hidden. C.f. 289 based on Jn 18: J’s kingdom ‘does not map easily onto…terms related to governance as we know it.’

259 The church should do ‘transformative practices of hope’, such as detailed in the parable of sheep and goats.

Ch 7. The politics of election and of following

Ch 5 is about what an act is – eschatological. Ch 6 was eschatological understanding of the church. Ch 5 was also about the city as the place where the economic, social and political come together.

262 Ward claims there is a correlation between the physical human body and the body politic, and that political accounts have metaphysics that is either ‘good…or bad’ depending on whether it promotes human flourishing or not. Current metaphysics that underlie liberal democracies he sees as insufficient to prevent the dematerialization, depoliticization and dehumanization. Contrasting Hegel with Paul in their accounts of the body politic, he finds in favour of Paul, who is grounded in the resurrection. This has been in the aim of enabling discipleship, because ‘Discipleship empowers us to overcome the key issue: depoliticization.’ But this does not mean he will ‘inform you how Jesus wants you to vote.’ Scripture and tradition have been used to support everything from monarchy to communism to Republican democracy.

265 ‘but the hardships they [Muslims] have borne have made them political whereas the seductive comforts of bourgeois living have greatly softened the political edge of so many Christian believers in the West.’ So Christians have been more depoliticized than Jews and Muslims and Hindus; they have hundreds of years of Enlightenment ideals of private religion to mentally overcome to adjust to the new visibility of religion. But also ‘Capitalism encourages apolitical attitudes and depoliticization more generally.’ If you are satisfied and entertained, ‘there will be no political action’ because you cannot ‘see what more is needed.’ 268 fn6 ‘The rule is that the more one becomes satisfied with the goods of this world and therefore the more one becomes secularized, the more one becomes depoliticized. Repoliticization, then, means a reversal of the logic of this rule.’

271 love is politics. ‘Personal ethics cannot be divorced from social ethics, and both are implicated in actions that affect the community.’

276 discipleship is to be taught by Christ, through others, but ultimately ‘to be taught the true understanding of God by God himself through the Spirit.’ ‘The politics of Christian discipleship has one goal, con-formity with Christ.’ The rest (salvation, justice) are by-products.

278 following Christ is not imperfect repetition but ‘reperformance albeit in another key and on another instrument.’

279 as engaged in an extra institution (the church) we as shaped differently than our peers. This is ‘not simply an act of resistance but a testimony to an alternative understanding of what is true.’

280 prayer is the best discipline for learning to listen, the contemplation grounds our action. It is not a New Age practice concerned with self-development or enabling me to take advantage of what is at hand; rather it is allowing the self and everything connected to the self to be enfolded into God. ‘It is I and the Spirit within me who pray.’

291-2 ‘Insofar as the church continues this political work of Christ and his kingdom, then its politics too are concerned with unmasking the powers that operate in the world, revealing the levels of bondage under which people are living (even if in this bondage the world speaks loudly of freedom and equality).’

Contrast between Jesus and Pilate is that of exousia, authority, not dynamis, power.

 History of the term ‘theocracy’, unfavourable now but in Rev 21.22-26 the church has disappeared because it doesn’t need to mediate between god and people. So 297 ‘Theocracy is not only the social and political condition to which Christians aspire; it is inseparable from the covenant God made with creation.’ 298 this should make us equal with one another but submitted to god.

Questions

If the first half of Politics was persuasive and gripping, the second half was less so. Although containing close and creative readings of biblical texts, and engaging with critical theorists and theology, little of the ecclesiology was new. We could also ask whether metaphysics deserves the central place Ward assigns it. Not that it is unimportant, but would a focus on practices better achieve Ward’s aim of recommending postmaterialism to the church? Is it for lack of metaphysics that the church is affected by the various ideologies Ward describes so well? Here, Vincent Miller’s critique in Consuming Religion of much theology dealing with consumerism (including CG) is important. That said, Politics is still a compelling account of our current situation and example of Christian Kulturkritik that repays reading.

Ward discussion 5

Ch. 4 Theological Introduction

161 Postdemocracy, globalization, postmaterialism, the rise of religion and postmodernity are all related. They are Paul’s principalities and powers. Discernment between the fake and real is needed but ‘it is not the resistance to commodification that will help – for commodification is inevitable while capitalism still remains – but resistance to the reductions of materialism.’

 162 we need a more vital public sphere, one with more contestation, because it counters depoliticization, but grounded in a theological anthropology of the image of God rather than in liberal tolerance (he will argue for this later).

  163 the politics of discipleship begins with naming enemies (following Schmitt). 1) depoliticization in favour of entertainment; 2) dematerialization from ‘virtual realities that facilitate a certain cultural amnesia toward production costs.’ 3) commodification of all goods and values (including religious); 4) exclusive humanism/dogmatic secularism; 5) ‘the myth of the infinite freedom of hyperindividuals, liquid subjectivities that erode social and shared responsibilities in favour of a centrifugal atomism.’

Signs of hope: 1) deprivatization of religion (e.g. Vatican’s role in diplomacy, Council of Christians and Jews, Muslim Council of Great Britain); 2) postmaterialism in politics; 3) return of myth in the cultural imaginary. Religion should now be concerned with changing the cultural imaginary so that new institutions can be imagined and beliefs become believable. We need new myths.

165 politics and multinationals have their myths, often as ‘perversions’ of Christian myths. These must be uncovered and then the Christian myth be written and read back into contemporary culture (many who grew up in the more secularized world don’t have much theological knowledge).

Political theology begins with God’s sovereignty, and must start with eschatology.

The eschatological remainder (combining Metz and Agamben)

For Metz (and Ward after him), secularity is to be accepted because (especially in the incarnation) God gives the world its freedom. The trends around us are therefore the workings of divine providence, even if they are distorted by humans.

Ward modifies Metz’s eschatology in three ways. 170 1) Ward has more continuity between this age and the next: something of what will be is already present. 2) Ward sees Christ’s presence in any occurrence of joy, peace, justice, etc, in every Eucharist and act of faith, etc. 171 3) Ward sees God directing history in some way, through the Spirit, there is more going on than immanent processes.

175 Agamben: the ‘time of the now’ – the messianic transforms the secular form within. It relates all time back to the Messiah to give it new meaning. 176 in Homo Sacer he says that all modern sovereignty is based on the state of exception, i.e. modern sovereignty is ‘within and beyond’ the law. The state of exception shows the law as valuable but also mysterious because we are no longer sure what it is. 177 so the majority are irrelevant, only the sovereign matters. So how can there be any political alternatives or resistance to this? Agamben looks to Paul as someone who has a vision of a time without the law. But Agamben doesn’t relate this bit of Paul’s thinking to the rest of his thought – God, the church – but that is what is needed to produce an alternative politics.

179 ‘Agamben holds that any messianism drawing attention away from the fulfilment of the ‘now’ toward a future fulfilment is committed to endless deferment. But this is exactly where Christian eschatology differs from the Derridean messianic with messianism without the messiah; Christian eschatology places faith not only in what the messiah has done but also in what the messiah will do in bringing all thing into God.’ 

Ch. 5 The City and the struggle for its soul

For Paul service is a political act in the sense of building and maintaining a community, 183 announcing allegiances, and it is part of the Spirit’s work in the world. The Christian act is a participation in the Trinity, forming us in Christlikeness.

Agency

184 we are not self-sufficient but relational beings; this gives a different conception of freedom than in liberalism. A sense of surrender and sacrifice is part of the person, but he is not denying personhood as in some post-structuralist thought. 185 the Christian act shows something of the transcendent. 186 the Christian act is in some sense like Christ. God is beyond comprehension but has given us some markers in Christ as to what she is like. 187 God abides in us and we in God. 188 the church is not an isolated institution but a body that relates to other bodies, affects them and is affected by them.

188-9 the church is not reducible to ‘the particular and material location or the social and political meanings embedded in them. The ekklësia is a location of liminality, a correlation that lives always on the edge of both itself and what is other.’ E.g. Paul moving between churches and persuading them to support one another.

189 ‘This interrelationality within which the subject comes to an understanding or himself or herself cannot be separated from the practices in which this interrelationality takes place. For example, with respect to Christ being in me and I being in Christ, practices such as prayer, confession, praise, and participation in ecclesial liturgies constitute the economics within which this interrelatoinality is unfolded. But these practices are not limited to church attendance. In fact, these practices are executed most frequently outside the institutional framework of the church, spilling over and affecting all other social practices: the managing of a school, the nursing of the sick, the administering of the law, coking for the hungry, and pulling paints for ht thirsty…each practice embodies a process of subjectification. That is, the subject undergoes a certain formation or production of himself or herself in and through the practice.’

Action

190 Christian acts are in Christ, they are doxological, they are political because they have an allegiance (see O’Donovan The desire of the nations, p.47). Actions must be understood in their context – of the agent, the society, the history. 192-3 the Christian act is part of the divine action of desire for the world and it’s redemption, so we can never fully understand our acts, because they are a part of mystery.

The evaluation of the action

Evaluation is provisional until the eschaton reveals things fully, but if the evaluation participates in god somewhat then it will be consummated rather than overthrown at the end. 194 ‘the more we are subject to God’ the better we judge.

The object of the action

The ultimate object/objective of all thing is their submission to Christ. This is to do something just, beautiful, good and true in, with and beyond the object. This is priestly, liturgical and sacramental, because it shares in god’s unfolding grace.

The effect of the act

197 We must go beyond efficient causation only, so that the act can be seen as open to god, in both cause and effect. 198 We also cannot always tell what the effect of our action will be.

Dispositions and affections

There ‘appears’ to be a tension between Nyssa saying passionately desire God and saying strive for apatheia. The latter comes from Stoicism and can lead to dualism.

Following Aristotle’s distinction between praxis (doing, acting) and poiësis (making, creating) Ward claims that a Christian act is a praxis that participates in the divine poiësis.

The church

202 the church is not a thing or stuff, just as society isn’t. ‘The church is only what this body of Christians do.’ Ecclesiality would be a better word than ecclesiology. We never encounter the church as an institution, we only encounter this use of land, or that person, this artefact, etc. So church is complicated in several ways: 1) only God has the panopticon view of who is acting as Christ or not; 2) the church is excessive in its acts. 203 ‘The work of the church therefore exceeds the limitations of all current ideologies, powers, and dominions – the depoliticizations, the dematerializations, the dehumanizations, the commodifications, the atomisms, ghettos, gated communities, and cosmopolises produced by our current democracies, neoliberal economics, and spurious spiritualities. The church is not unaffected by them, but it works a work that cannot be reduced to them and therefore offers space for resistance to them.’ 3) it is vulnerable to mistakes and compromises, partly because it happens outside the power of the priests etc, even though they inform it. So the church always needs correction and repentance. 

The church’s values can only happen as the church engages with other socialities.

(critiquing Pete Ward’s Liquid Church 204 fn32: church as a network is not new but as it always was. ‘And therefore there is no need to develop new forms of church along the lines of consumerist flows. Such networks and flows must be rooted in the traditions of being church. There always remains the need for discipline, catechism, discernment, and belonging that is transgenerational and historical.’ The institutional church can establish and regulate the body of Christ and good theology is part of this.) 

the city and transcendence

It is the church’s task to transform the world from within.

207f Cities are places with aims, they are meant to express a version of the good life. Cities used to be gathered around the body of the king who represented the people, but no longer. Now there is no ‘face’, no single vision, no common labour of all citizens. Even the elected council is not in full control nor has an over-all view.

 There is a struggle for domination and control  – national government, local parties, corporations, universities. But there is also the struggle for the common good and happiness. The church is involved in the latter not the former.

 the church should work in the “no-go” areas, working alongside other agencies, all who fall through the cracks of the city. The city has three main problems now: homelessness, minimum-wage labour that is ‘slavery’, and ‘a new class of somnambulists’ who are only aware of and interested in their own entertainment rather than any civic responsibility.

Ward book discussion 4

Ch 3. Postsecularity. The new visibility of religion

‘The global resurgence of religion may well be a response to the crisis of the liberal state in the West as well as the crisis of the secular and modernizing state in the developing world.’ (Scott M. Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations).

 124 ‘Religion is viewed, then, by certain political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and cultural historians as epiphenomenal, as a response to something rather than a cause of anything.’ Worship and religious practice are always conceived of as substituting for a lack rather than being positive acts. Description slides into prescription.

The secularization thesis advocates ideological rather than procedural secularism; it wants to prohibit religious voices from political and legal debate rather than being open to them. The secularization thesis may be self-fulfilling (since atheism is higher in countries in which it is most forcefully propounded) but if atheism/secularism are dying away again, then it will have been an anomaly against centuries of piety.

Ward cites Habermas, Žižek, Vattimo, Derrida, and Taylor as announcing the postsecular, but this is not a return of religion in the same form. ‘What we are witnessing is not a return but a new religiousness that is hybrid, fluid, and commercialized.’ It has three forms.

1) Fundamentalism

135 ‘Fundamentalism is not in itself a new phenomenon. Among the pious there have always been groups who deemed their piety purer or more authentic – the Jewish Pharisees, the Islamic Wahhabites, and the Christian Donatists are all examples.’

2) Deprivatization of religion

This is religion leaving its assigned place in the private realm and entering the public sphere to debate.  the idea that religion has long been absent from politics and the public realm is ‘nonsense’. Ward quotes Talal Asad: ‘Given the entry of religion into political debates issuing in effective politics, and the passionate commitments these debates engender, it makes little sense to measure the social significance of religion in terms of such indices as church attendance.’ (141-2).

if there is to a be a universal civilization it will emerge from religious co-operation, not from nation states. States start wars, but religions transcend territory, and many religions have values in common and find secular ideals and ‘capitalist rapaciousness’ a common enemy.

3) Religion and culture

religion as marketed, commodified, as ‘special effect’. 148-9 ‘…religion does not live in and of itself anymore. It lives in commercial business, gothic and sci-fi fantasy, health clubs, theme bars, and architectural design and among happy-hour drinkers, tattooists, ecologists, and cyberpunks. Religion has become a special effect, inseparably bound to an entertainment value.’ 149 For example: ‘The Harry Potter series calls out for a detailed investigation as a social and cultural phenomenon, for this level of social and cultural success cannot be reduced to an existential angst concerning the breakdown of, and the nostalgic longing for, tradition. Seen more positively, it accords with a desire that subtends the cultural imaginary…’ This series and others like it cannot be reduced to neo-paganism, they contain elements of Gnosticism and Christianity also.

 So despite talk of the end of metaphysics, ‘contemporary living is shot through with metaphysical themes, desires, and dreams.’

 this new visibility of religion can give places, objects and people a ‘mystic charge. Those allured by this charge are not buying religion; they are not consuming the religious or being consumed by it. They are consuming the illusions or simulations of religion.’ But these illusions are used as a diversion from the insecurities and indeterminacies of postmodern living.

  This commodification of religion is political in two ways. 1) religious cultural ‘artefacts’ work as technologies, shaping social processes, our perceptions, our cosmologies and anthropologies. 2) religion treated like a consumer product allows for ‘zero degree dialectic’ (quoting Negri’s Time for Revolution), depoliticizes people to prefer leisure and entertainment to the endangering of democracy.

Conclusion

155 fn.87 for Ward, ‘post secular’ means ‘new modes of believing itself, new conditions for, and structures of, believing that allow objects of belief once thought obsolete to reappear.’

157 ‘Postmodernity’s religion was not about discipline, sacrifice, obedience, and the development of virtue. It was more relate to the spiritualizing of human subjectivity. It was an intensification of the privatization of religion and so in step with one of the main themes of modernity.’ 158 ‘…the more decisionist democracies are demanding new disciplines, new obediences, new belong-or-suffer-the-consequences forms of behavior.’

Questions

This is the final descriptive chapter and I would want to question whether he overplays the importance of religious ‘artefacts’. Note the slip between discussing the commodification of religion to religious ‘artefacts’: how many people engage with such artefacts? Perhaps many (apparently Amazon lists more books under religion/spirituality than any other topic), but I wonder whether Ward wants to play up the importance of religion for the public sphere and politics (which would increase his cultural capital).

  We could also question his criticisms of sociology and its methodological atheism, though I think he is onto something there.

  As for his threefold typology, why only list fundamentalism and not liberal Christianity or the ‘sophisticated realism’ (neologism!) of a Williams or Milbank? Such forms of religion are also deprivatized and commodified, though perhaps less so.

  Finally, though this is getting ahead a little, is the emphasis on metaphysics the antidote he hopes it will be?

Ward book discussion 3

Ch 2 Globalization. When the world is not enough.

‘There is the assumption that globalization is the continuation of the Christian civilizing project, and that whatever stands in the way is ‘oriental’ despotism, Muslim fundamentalism, etc. To this extent, globalization is counterpoised against the non-West in a mission of redemption and salvation.’ Eduardo Mandeita in Habermas’ Religion and Rationality.

Globalization= ‘a number of activities and processes related to historical developments in trading and capitalism that have been informed by neoliberal economics.’ (as opposed to Chinese or Japanese capitalism that some argue is less individualistic and more family network oriented.) But it is not only economics, it is also ‘ideologies of internationalism’, the ‘contraction of space and time’ and their impacts of society and politics. But it is inseparable from capitalism and the nation-states and liberal democracy that advocated it.

Globalism = ‘a worldview, a universal or global vision, intrinsic to certain ideologies (e.g., Marxism and Christianity), certain practices (e.g., missionizing and peacekeeping), or certain phenomena (e.g., the Internet and satellite television).’

‘The central argument of this chapter is that the historical development known as globalization is the product of a globalism issuing from Christian theology and its ecclesial history.’

Hayek (The Road to Serfdom), Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom) and Huntington all argue that capitalism is the only way to safeguard democratic freedom. But Ronald Inglehart has noted the shift in values that occurs as people cease having to worry about food and survival: from materialism to postmaterialism.

Postmaterialism is not anticonsumerism or asceticism. Postmaterialism is aware of labour costs etc but it is ‘fickle’, ‘a matter of consumer choice’, ‘subject to the rise and fall of economic prosperity’. We ‘actively desire to be ignorant’ about the labour conditions of who makes our clothes (for instance). Ward wants to root postmaterialism in a theology and metaphysics to make it more stable.

globalization and secularization are religious ideologies.

Christian and capitalist imperialism

Christianity encourages democracies to develop (Latin America in 70s and 80s, South Korea, Philippines; US and UK further back). Democracies favour neoliberal economics.

Christianity saw itself as the universalizing of Jewish salvation: God’s people were now open to Gentiles too. the pace of globalization increases as technology enables us to overcome territorial particularity. With Constantine ‘The imperial administrative and military networks provided Christianity with the technological means for expansion, the means for developing the universalist logic at the heart of its monotheistic credo.’ Our current globalization is based on the church’s maintaining of the infrastructures that the Roman empire left when it died. Charlemagne was crucial here.

 Then Christianity was channelled into colonization and universalized into ‘religion’. In the 1400s ‘religion’ meant the different monastic orders, but it came to mean any worship/practices. Partly this was to allow a peace between them (essential to the emergence of liberal democracy). This generated a new anthropology of a universal human condition; this in turn founded humanism from which came liberalism and rights theories. Capitalism developed in Europe in which Christianity was the main ideology, so Christianity’s habits and views (e.g. on freedom, contracts, truth) laid the groundwork for capitalism.

92 ‘The secular eschatology of early Enlightenment liberal humanism now informed the visions for a world market. By “secular eschatology” I mean that the transcendent role of divine providence yielded to the purely immanent teleology of history and economics but the absolutism of the utopianism remained the same…’

Ward uses two elements of Marx’s analysis of capitalism. 1) ‘the process of producing commodities…dematerializes the world’ and ‘establishes the social world as an allegory’, because people relate to one another as owners and representatives of commodities. We are living a fiction without realizing it. 94 Marx wants to let us see objects only in their use value (re-materializing the social world), but this is also an illusion, a secularized messianic eschatological task. It can never happen.

 2) commodities are idols or fetishes, part of a religious worldview that capitalism generates. Everything is subjected to the authority of money, which ‘disappears’ in that we don’t even think about it.

One of the roots of capitalism is desire, and it promises a version of freedom as ‘unfettered desire’, so that ‘the world is simply not enough.’ Capitalism, like Christianity, has no outside; both deal with the world but both are transcendental in ethos and ethics. For instance, brands/logos often float free of their specific products, so that, e.g., Nike means athletic perseverance and excellence rather than being a type of sporting footwear or clothing; or Disney means holidays, childhood, magic, Mickey Mouse, etc.

virtual immateriality

Capitalism, along with technology, is re-creating the world as a simulacrum, only better than the original; we have ‘real virtuality’. ‘We are deluded into believing that the world we have created in the West and participate in is real.’ But it depends on exploitation and waste. But the desires that want to believe in this fantasy are theological ones: we want heaven, we want to live like the Olympian gods, but we don’t want to wait.

Capitalism is about this unbounded freedom that doesn’t need to notice physical or cultural boundaries: we can drink Chilean wine, wearing Italian suits, on re-produced Shaker furniture made from Russian pine, etc. And we want everything instantly, which is partly why the internet is so popular. 102 the culmination of this is the desire ‘for total escape, full immersion…The logic of total escape culminates in death – death as oblivion.’ 103-4 This ‘culture of immateriality’ ties in with the ‘immaterial labour’ that Hardt and Negri describe in Multitude, based on social and working life modelled on networks. Immaterial labour is labour that produces information or texts, or affects the emotions (flight attendants or fast food workers who serve with a smile). And both fit perfectly with New Age spiritualities that are ‘hyperindividualist, self-interested, and vision oriented.’ (105). There is a ‘pursuit of the pure’, instantaneous and sublime.

Globalization as a cultural phenomenon relies on a ‘detraditionalized’ Christianity in six ways. 1) ‘a new vision of infinite freedom’, not relying on any person or locality. 2) ‘a belief in an eternal sustainability promising unlimited consumption.’ 3) globalization is seen as fated, inevitable.4) this force is dematerializing: note how money has been progressively dematerialized; this is assisted by the internet and the collapse of time and space. 5) ‘an all-encompassing worldview’, in which the whole world is connected and interdependent. 6) a moral vision that believes in the rejuvenation of the economy through work.

So globalization promotes a re-enchantment of the world, it undoes secularization, bringing religion back into the public sphere. Various people  (Stiglitz, John Gray, etc) have recognised that the universally integrated world is an illusion. Yet as a myth shaping beliefs and desires and actions it remains powerful, despite the counterfactual evidence of its benefits.

Complex ironies

Neoliberal economics is actually not very free, because it has been so closely allied with neoconservative, authoritarian, top-down government. In fact, countries seek to be nodes of power with influence over other satellite countries; if they refuse and seek to maintain their national sovereignty they are seen as ‘rogue states’ and threats to world peace (e.g. Iran, North Korea, former Iraq). Yet neoliberals are meant to be fearful of big government, but why the do we have the massive extension of security and surveillance? Or gated communities? ‘Certain freedoms are being bought at the expense of other freedoms.’

There is a ‘structural analogy’ between aggressive marketing by transnationals and aggressive democracy by countries such as the G8. Capitalism needs new markets and this leads states to colonize other states as markets, either directly (invasion) or indirectly (loans that force dependency). Crises, fear and insecurities can all be good for business.

‘Globalization is transforming democracy, undermining what makes democracy flourish – a vigorous civil society.’

 Questions

As with the previous chapter, Ward is mostly engaged in description rather than constructive work, so questions and comments that most immediately spring to mind are whether his various descriptions are accurate, whether he’s missing some important information, and so on.

Ward book discussion 2

Ch. 1 Democracy: Crisis and Transformation

Quote from Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form: ‘The domination of “capital” behind the scenes is still no form, though it can undermine an existing political form and make it an empty façade. Should it succeed, it will have “depoliticized” the state completely.” [reminded me of Deleuze and Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia saying that capitalism itself must be confronted rather than any state to which it is allied, since if a state is defeated, whatever replaces it will also become allied to capitalism]

 Hardt and Negri in Multitude think democracy is in crisis. But what is it? Ward proposes to look at actual societies now extant rather than at definitions. Democracy comes from the Greek for ‘rule of the people’ but this has been feared from Aristotle to Tocqueville as mob rule or ‘tyranny of the majority’. The people do not rule directly but through representatives (or the latter rule for them). Liberal democracies are liberal in that they are designed to prevent government impinging on people’s freedom unless they do that to others. ‘liberal democracy’ is a term always under negotiation.

Democratic polity is the form of government and political organization. Democratic culture or ethos is the ‘political values (freedom of the individual, equal opportunities, the right to property, human rights, tolerance, etc.) and practices (freedom of speech, open debates, equality before the law, even sanctioned resistance on critical matters, etc.)’. Polity and culture interact in complex ways and can challenge one another. For instance, culture challenges polity when police break up a peaceful protest; vice versa when smoking in public places is banned.

This relates to the public/private distinction, which stems from public and private law. Public law only arose with the emergence of the state (before that there were only private contracts). Liberalism demands the primacy of the private over the public.

The fundamental tension for liberal democracy is that between libertarianism and the egalitarianism of democracy, which demand a small or a large state respectively. Yet each needs the other: Bobbio in Liberalism and Democracy: ‘The procedures of democracy are necessary to safeguard the fundamental personal rights on which the liberal state is based; and…those rights must be safeguarded if democratic procedures are to operate.’

 Harold Laski Democracy in Crisis (1933). A crises because (1) all around Europe parliamentary democracies are unstable and seen as inappropriate for democratic societies; and (2) in representative democracy, it is the interests of those with economic power that dominate rather than the interests of all people (universal suffrage was not yet accepted).

Liberalism believes that truth will emerge through debate and so leads naturally to the formation of parliaments and thus parliamentary democracies. 48 but Laski warned that ‘Parties have to capture public opinion. But the elements of public opinion do not grow out of knowledge, and they are not the product of reason.’ (Democracy in crisis). 

 There was a move from liberal democracy to social democracy. This led to (a) larger state to engineer social justice; (b) larger bureaucracy to administer the former; (c) wider participation of electorate (which can lessen representation if citizens participate more directly, e.g. through referenda); (d) ‘more-authoritarian leadership by the party in power’. All except (c) are characteristic of totalitarian regimes, as Schmitt noted.

Trilateral commission: a group of allegedly private citizens (but ones that were in key positions in the government and of the Carter administration) set up to encourage Japan and Western Europe to work with the US in governing the world. The first report The Crisis of Democracy (1975) looked at problems of governing in democracy due to the ‘erosion of the liberal principle, and the advance of social democracy in the 1960s’ (50). Crozier and Huntington both question the ongoing viability of democracy and the desirability of its expansion.

 In the 60s and 70s increased education led to increased social expectation, which led to the ‘rise of micropolitics – movements for civil rights, blacks’ rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.’ But there was also a withdrawal by many from politics and the increasing consumerism fed into ‘privatized lifestyles.’ People didn’t trust macropolitics or its leaders, and it was more fun to use commodities than go to union meetings or political occasions. ‘Prosperity and privatization broke up what poverty and collectivity in the public place had welded together.’ (Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes).

Recall that the 70s saw a massive global recession, unemployment, massive price increases due to OPEC (and then the Iranian revolution). ‘The turn to identity politics and the lobbying for specialized issues broke up the support for left-wing resistance.’ There was a return to strong right-wing leadership, which with neoliberal economics, ‘put an end to state managed corporations.’ This economics worked with social changes to increase individualism.

 Democracy is always unstable because (1) it cannot properly define itself: ‘equality, freedom and the sovereignty of the people are unbounded and fracture along the lines of a thousand qualifications.’ (2) in contrast with a monarchy or a dictatorship in which there is a human body that represents the political body, democracy can have no such body, it has a vacuum where there used to be a theological justification for sovereignty. (This happened especially with the loss of the Kaisers and Romanovs, so there was a lot of work done on sovereignty by political theorists in the 20s). (3) so ‘secularization undermines the possibility for democracy because it disregards the theological foundations of sovereignty’ (57) 

People are less and less involved in mainline politics. The three main technologies (‘social institutions involving disciplines that encourage the skills for active citizenship’) for which are party membership, church and unions. The loss of trust noted in the 70s has only increased. People watch political campaigns on TV rather than actively involve themselves in them.

  Social capital is ‘the way family, friends, and networks of associates constitute an important asset politically, culturally, and even economically’ for overcoming poverty, vulnerability, and taking advantage of opportunities. But social capital is more substantial if based in institutions, whereas most new forms of social capital are not, and they are, further, more self-regarding (interest clubs etc). Social capital is needed for democracy to work, it is ‘public and social trust’, but it is declining and becoming privatized.

Four characteristics of the postdemocratic situation according to Colin Crouch

1) ‘the will of the people is not obtained but created by various means of persuasion’. But this may be a question of scale, since Laski was warning about it in the thirties. So ‘the question arises about the nature and interests of elected representation.’ The increasing role of the media, personality politics and the aestheticization of politics are reminiscent of dictatorships: the attempt to create and reinforce a political myth.

2) the political and social collapse into the economic. Business is used to supply what once were government functions: healthcare, education, etc. Democracy is a ‘drag on economic efficiency’; authoritarian governments can better promote neoliberal economics. The state becomes opaque, it must rule directly with no intermediate levels between it and citizens, and the ‘old system of checks and balances is no longer adequate for calling sovereign power into question.’

3) not just a ‘decline in political participation but active forms of depoliticization.’ Not that governments actively do that on purpose but that the individualism of neoliberalism favours consumers not citizens. People would rather be entertained than be political. Some question whether civil society exists at all any more; atomisation and depoliticization have reduced the possibilities for ‘critical mass politics’.

4) a crisis of representation: special interests and lobbies rather than the people are represented by politicians.

Conclusion

If we understand the history of the West as the struggle to be democratic, then we are not post democracy, but the postdemocratic thesis does show how ‘thin’ democracy now is. Crouch sees no alternative, Ward notes that ‘socialism, as it was conceived and practiced, failed.’ So we need ‘responsible capitalism’. We need a new metaphysics, a new story of what we and our purposes are. Green movements have already begun to do this by imagining the world as a gift to be stewarded (they are one of the few groups whose memberships have increased).

75 ‘But there is no doubt that the favored language of postmodernity…and the move toward soft understandings of the subject as agent and of power as diffuse are at best not going to be effective resistors to laissez-faire capitalism and at worst help foster a culture in which such capitalism can have its greatest impact.’

Questions

Does anyone dispute our situation as postdemocratic?

If we accept Ward’s analysis (which seems fair enough), how should we respond? Is democracy worth struggling for? Should we be attempting to bring about something completely different? Will ecological factors render all this irrelevant if global warming becomes catastrophic (would this induce constant states of exception in multiple countries worldwide?)

Book discussion: Ward’s Politics of Discipleship

This is the first in a series of posts discussing Graham Ward’s new book The Politics of Discipleship. Becoming postmaterial citizens. The table of contents is mostly like this:

Section 1: The World

1. Democracy: Crisis and Transformation
2. Globalization: When the World is Not Enough
3. Postsecularity? The New Visibility of Religion

Section 2: The Church

1. Theological Introduction
2. The City and the Struggle for Its Soul
3. The Metaphysics of the Body
4. The Politics of Election and of Following

The Introduction opens with the well known saying about Nazi Germany: ‘they came for the Communists but I wasn’t a Communist so I didn’t’ speak up’ etc. Ward wants Christians to act. ‘This study seeks to take a religious stand against the materialism engulfing the West.’ (23). Ward is writing so that the Abrahamic theologians might become better peacemakers.

It is again recognised that religion and mythologies and stories have power to cause violence or promote peace. The cultural changes happening are located in the ‘global city’. Ward will be dealing with Europe, North America and Australasia. The changes in democracy, globalization and postsecularity are happening alongside postmodernity and postmateriality. These need to be understood if we are to act cogently.

 Though the book is divided into two sections called ‘world’ and ‘church’, he is not opposing them in a simplistic manner. The church is within the world but should speak and act from beyond it and within it at the same time, both reflecting and critiquing its context. The church has never been one in a simple fashion but always contesting itself and its interpretations.

Politics is power that subjects, liberates or sustains the status quo. Power comes in four forms in our society: ‘social [time], economic [money], biological [energy], and cultural [status].’ ‘In advanced capitalist societies, all modes of power can be translated into economic power.’ But they don’t have to be.

Ward distinguishes between micro- and macropolitics. We mostly act in the former. Macropolitics is about power but dealing with governments, ‘dominant practices’ and value systems. Macropolitics requires a legitimate/d authority. Since 1989 there has been a shift away from ‘an active commitment to micropolitics to a more passive witness to macropolitics.’ (32).

Postmaterialist is not anti-material but not satisfied with only the material.

Chapter summaries and discussion will follow over the next couple of weeks. Feel free to join in!

Forthcoming book event

Sometime in the new year we’ll be reading and discussing Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship. Watch this space for more details.