Peter Critchley on the Problems with Horizontalization and Immanentization
Discussion
Peter Critchley:
" the modern age has horizontalized the vertical. That may sound liberatory, the problem is that this declaration of human independence results in the creation of as many standards as there are human beings, each their own god choosing their own good, upon which there can be no compromise. Truth will go the same way. For a century or more, people have accepted the reduction of ethics to the status of irreducible subjective opinion, mere value judgements. Too late they see the threat to science and truth for the same reason. There is no shared objective reality, no facts, only interpretations - it's all power, perspectives, and projections. You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too; once it is gone, it is gone, and all that remains is a conventionalism and constructivism. (I'm simplifying for brevity).
In The Ecology of Good I write:
“Where once we sought this transcendence in terms of God and Heaven, we now seek to create Heaven on Earth through men who, through technological power, have become as gods. We have horizontalized the vertical. Where once we pointed upwards to Heaven for transcendence, now we seek perfection on Earth, seeing our technological capacities as a perfection of means capable of delivering such an ideal. The fatal mistake is to have failed to see that the eternal perfection we are seeking as an endless project undertaken on a planet of finite resources.”
In addition to the physical dangers there is the moral and psychological damage, drawing down the transcendent into the realm of immanence. In Being at One, I argue that the modern world is characterised by the technological appropriation of the vertical conception of God as transcendent entity and its horizontalisation on the material plane. Imperfect, flawed, and erring human beings thus see themselves as perfect and unerring gods in possession of the knowledge and power to realize the Infinite within a world of finite resources.
You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too: once it is gone, it is gone, leaving nothing left but self-created values/gods, none of which offer other god-like creators good enough reasons to persuade, motivate, and obligate. That leads to a world of mutual indifference and self-cancellation. Kingsnorth refers to the war that has been declared ‘on all aspects of “the Indo-European, Islamic, Hebraic impulse-control system,” whose genuine faults had become associated with all and any impulse-control, hierarchy, order or structure.’ As Lewis Mumford argued back in the 1940s, freedom has come to be identified with liberation from constraint and inhibition: all those moral and rational restraints which were designed to control impulses and guide behaviour beyond immediacy were upended and discarded. This cannot but invite adults into an infantilism. In Values for Survival, Mumford notes that the virtues had become an ancient language that the moderns no longer understood. The result has been a soft attitude breeding soft habits. The identification of freedom with instant gratification leads people into bad habits and behaviours which are inimical to their health and happiness and ultimately their freedom. Instilling the culture of discipline that produces strength and health is much the greater challenge but is the right thing to do. People who seek to normalize the non-standards of a personal relativism is described by Kingsnorth as a ‘corrupted cultural Levelling,’ producing a culture of inversion, in which rebellion against all and any forms was seen as the only inherent good. This was to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Social norms have always had a hard side, but usually they existed for a good reason. The trick is to mitigate the harshness without incentivising and rewarding harmful behaviours. Giving in to instant gratification makes people weak, unhappy, and unfree enchaining them to immediacy.
Kingsnorth refers to the ‘desert’ ‘created by late 20th-century American capitalism, which had decimated communities and households, stripped the meaning from the lives of young generations and replaced it with shopping.’ We can be more precise than ‘late 20th-century’ here and refer to economic neo-liberalism. We should also refer to its cultural counterpart, identified with the Cultural Left, which is also stripping meaning from lives and communities, working as a universal acid.
Robert Bly believed that the fundamental problems of our time were more than political and economic, they were mythic: ‘They manifested at the level of deep story, on which all cultures are built. The modern West, without knowing it, had taken an axe to the root of its own mythic structures.’
Bly describes the “generalised ingratitude” that people immersed in the culture of inversion show towards their cultural inheritance:
“Our society has been damaged not only by acquisitive capitalism, but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors. Many siblings are convinced that they have received nothing of value from anyone. The older truth is that every man and woman is indebted to all other persons, living or dead, and is indebted as well to animals, plants and the gods.”
I am reminded of Dostoyevsky, who said that the Devil would never give thanks.
Bly went on to argue that Western culture was now doing to itself what it had long done to others: colonisation. The methods that Western colonial administrators had used to destroy and supplant other cultures were now being turned against us — rewriting history, replacing language, upending cultural norms, banning or demonising religions, dismantling elder systems and undermining cultural norms and traditions. My first degree is in history. I learned that history is a matter of change and continuity. And I learned the difference between change as an organic process in which broad masses of people participate, ‘own,’ and change as something forced and engineered, something the few do to the many. There is no defence of fixed traditions and no freezing of norms in this analysis, no assertion of false fixities in defence of asymmetrical power relations. Instead, there is an awareness of how precious cultural and historical resources are, and how traditions are enabling rather than constraining. The past, present, and future lie on a continuum, each flow into and through the other. The human species is a familial species, affirming the pact between past, present, and future generations. All this is lost when organic change is supplanted by the inorganic, the deliberately engineered and manufactured. ‘Language has always changed,’ comes the rebuttal. Yes, but how?
In our perpetual sibling society — sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, godless — we have forgotten how to behave like adults, or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud.
“The inner dome of heaven has fallen,” wrote Bly. “To say we have no centre that we love is the same thing as saying that we have colonised ourselves. What we need to study, then, is how a colonised culture heals itself.”
The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment, of limits and longing. We are, in short, going to have to grow up. This is long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work.
I have never shied from declaring that the principal task of the age is one of metaphysical reconstruction. The liveliest minds of the age think that science had put an end to metaphysics. They are wrong. We are living in an age of bad, false, wretched metaphysics.
Simply put, either there are transcendent standards of truth or justice or there are not. If there are not, then we are mired in an endless power/resistance, with no rational way of arbitrating between competing claims, only power. We choose our sides according to preference, interest, and ideology. But there are no rational grounds for that choice. It is a return to Thrasymachus’ 'justice is the interest of the strongest.' That power/resistance is merely a Hobbesian/Foucaultian world that leads nowhere, merely a self-cancellation. I don't care if people take their stand on science or religion here, or on both, as I do. What matters is that we continue to affirm the idea of truth and not conflate it with social construction and mediation (which does of course take place, any 'transcendent' truth is only known through its unfolding in reality, and that reality is always in some way social and constructed. I see it as a sub-creation. Mediation must take place. Transcendent standards are only ever known, experientially, in time and place. I don't have a term for what it is I am describing; it is something between and beyond disclosure and imposition/projection, recognizing the role of human agency within the ceaselessly creative universe. The issue is one of transcendentalism vs conventionalism. Either there are transcendent standards or there are not. If there are not, all that there is and all that there ever can be is power/resistance - an endless cycle of submission to power or assertion to power, relative to 'society.' That is the end of the left in that it entails the end of universal human values in an unwinnable game of irreducible game. Dress it up in all the fancy names of deconstruction you like, but it is a reduction to the sophism of Thrasymachus: 'justice is the interests of the strongest.' That won't necessarily be you - to whom and what will you then appeal when on the receiving end of an injustice? Who or what will care if there are no grounds?"
2.
"In fine, there is a need to constitute communities of practice and character in order to cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues, something which presupposes the existence of a substantive conception of the good that can be known and which serves to order practical affairs and social arrangements. Here, the notion of the good as being a matter of personal subjective choice clashes directly with the tradition of cultivating the intellectual and the moral virtues. In shedding the overarching authoritative moral framework, we have lost also the moral infrastructure as the happy habitus for identifying, cultivating, and practising the moral and intellectual virtues. In these conditions, democracy is led more by the nose than by the nous, being an aggregate of unordered and uneducated subjective choices. Cue laments from those seeking collective purpose in politics that ‘not enough people know enough.’ The brute, blunt rationalism which those seeking to advance collective causes in politics is a demonstration of impotence and failure, arising from the bifurcations adumbrated above. The loss of moral referents (Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’), the loss of an overarching authoritative framework, and the loss of the habitus and infrastructure for cultivating virtues and values results in a systematic social and moral incapacity vis collective purpose and the common good."