Where are we, how did we get here and where to go from here?
Greg Moses, retired priest and academic of Cairns Diocese, unpacks the notion ‘change of epoch’, used by Pope Francis in Veritatis Gaudium, through the work of Italian philosopher, Augusto Del Noce.
In a recent document entitled Veritatis Gaudium (December 2017), Pope Francis has called for a “radical paradigm shift” in our way of doing the theological sciences, as necessitated by the “change of epoch” that we are presently undergoing (Veritatis Gaudium 3). Of course it might be more than our way of doing theology that requires such a shift. This paper endeavours to make a further small contribution towards the necessary prior work for understanding that “change of epoch”. [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]
This connects with a concern I have had for most of my academic life, but which received explicit expression in two papers which I took to conferences in Bangalore, in 2005 and in 2019. The Editor of The Swag was kind enough to publish a revised version of the 2019 paper in The Swag, Volume 27, No. 1, Autumn 2019, pp.34 – 37, entitled “Where are we, how did we get here and where to go from here?” This present paper firstly recalls the line of argument in the 2019 paper before adding a few further notes, mainly but not only by way of a few themes from the recently translated work of the Italian scholar Augusto Del Noce.
As I noted at the beginning of the 2019 paper, I was stimulated into asking these questions with new urgency in the course of a personal attempt to come to terms with the gay marriage debate in Australia in the latter half of 2017 and how the common sense of a whole nation has shifted or been shifted in the space of about ten years, on something so vital and central to human life and culture. Is this, and all the sexual orientation and gender identity stuff that goes with it and such like so called woke phenomena the consequence of some kind of Neo-Marxist plot, like a lot of people seem to think; or is it rather something coming out of the main line of Western Capitalist culture, just the latest stage of Late Capitalism in the West? Maybe the kind of thing that is only to be expected in the circumstances in some such form, at least looking back?
It could be both of course, but I came quickly to the conviction that it was certainly the latter, this at least as a working hypothesis worth exploring. The argument got quite complicated at a certain point, but the conclusion I came to at the end of it was that this way of thinking seemed to have a fair bit going for it and probably has the advantage over some contrary interpretations.
As I noted in the 2019 paper, if true, this would have some very interesting consequences. For example it would mean that the Greens, most of the Labor Party and other Centre Left parties like the Democratic Party in the US are without knowing it in some ways just expressions of the spirit of late Capitalism. Or, just as interesting, that so called Moderate Liberals and their inner city and leafy suburb Independent colleagues on both state and federal level and other people said to be economically conservative (i.e. Neo Liberal) but socially progressive, like the good people of Wentworth or Warringah, are just being consistent.
Fairly obviously this also makes sense of the fact that this kind of so called progressive rhetoric is strongest in those economies and those parts of society which are furthest down the late capitalist road, inner city and leafy suburb elites and such like, also in the developing world.
As I said, the argument got quite complicated. I concluded along the following lines: I am finding the logic of our present situation very complex and difficult. It probably is objectively so. By way of suggestion possibly something like the following might work. The true backlash is Trump, Brexit, populist parties, supposedly Far Right but also Far Left with some overlap on some issues. The main line multicultural identity politics is an extension of the culture and mores of the economic side of life into the rest of life, aided by the detraditionalisation and individualisation which has been on the road for centuries but also promoted by neoliberalism and intensified by the internet. The Centre Left and Left find this very useful politically, get into it with great gusto, for the sake of getting and keeping power, having given up on the main game in the neoliberal consensus.
Of course, lots of them truly believe it, perfectly natural, and on some things they may be right. This is just a causal analysis. The moderate wing of the Liberal Party and e.g. the good people of Wentworth and Warringah in Sydney meanwhile are just being consistent. Or something like this! The only thing I would speculatively add is that the backlash is infected by the new context. An example might be the fact of allegations of ‘fake news’ being made by both sides. Truth itself and the value attached to it, it seems, have also been ‘liquified’, one of the more subtle consequences, I think, of the lack of transcendence.
By way of summary and in order to bring this section to a close, back in 2019 I concluded this section with something which sounds crude and simplistic but might still be illuminating, along the following lines. Since the advent of commercial television if not a lot earlier, segments of our population young and old, but starting with young children as soon as they start watching television or nowadays get their first iPad or smart phone, have been churned out as individualistic consumers of goods and services. This has spread potentially to the whole population rich and poor and with massively increasing intensity as time and technology have gone on, but there has also been a massive progressive increase in the kinds of ‘goods and services’ apparently on offer, until these have come to include almost the whole of human life and even death and dying.
Thus the 2019 paper for a conference in Bangalore, republished in The Swag Autumn 2019, more or less. But, before going on to Augusto Del Noce, I would like to add a couple of extra paragraphs.
The current trend in advanced capitalism
While I haven’t gone into this a great deal myself: this individualistic consumerist spirit, the only Master Narrative left in advanced capitalist societies, melds only too well with what other people, e.g. Pope Francis, have called the ‘Technocratic Paradigm’ (Laudato Si, also his Dec. 2020 book, Let Us Dream).
This has been with us since the Agricultural Revolution when we ceased to be more or less creatively interacting parts of nature as in First Nations societies and started to become its master. It has usually been held within limits by other features of prevailing culture, but in late capitalist societies these limits have almost entirely disappeared. As Francis also remarks, not content with being masters of nature we want to be masters of humanity and of all aspects of human life as well. If it were possible we would like to decide our own conception and birth! The latest incarnation in contemporary politics might be the mantra of “Can-Do Capitalism”, which is supposed to save us from the environmental crises and climate change etc., in spite of this way of doing business being the very cause of the same!
And so, in Charles Taylor language, we seem to have gone from porous selves more or less comfortably embedded in country, community, the world of spirits and the numinous, all the way or almost all the way to just about totally buffered selves in and of ourselves almost totally dis-embedded. Or going back a lot further to the early days of modern philosophy: we are like Cartesian Egos playing around in the flesh with, it appears, no necessary connection to anything, including our own bodies, let alone country or community or transcendence.
The until recently neglected contributions of Augusto Del Noce
The first thing I have to say is that I came up with the above before even knowing about Augusto Del Noce, let alone reading his work. He seems to have come up with similar or better analysis forty or fifty years ago, with greater analytic sophistication and depth, solving some of the remaining academic problems along the way.
Augusto Del Noce (August 1910 – December 1989), was an Italian philosopher and political thinker, well known and important in Italy it seems, but not much outside. Francis X. Maier, The Most Important Thinker We Don’t Know (2018), gives us a taste of Del Noce’s contribution: At the height of Soviet power, Del Noce predicted with stunning accuracy the collapse of Marxism-Leninism. He foresaw the sexual revolution in its weirdest forms, including the transformation of the political left from advocate of the working classes to defender of sexual “freedom”. He explained the link between the fierce rejection of traditional morality in the 1960’s and the same decade’s ferocious moralising for radical change. And he described in great detail the fundamental totalitarian nature of the West’s emerging tech civilisation.
For this paper I would like to pick up on just two themes, namely where Marxism fits in, and understanding the new totalitarianism.
Marxism as a transition to a purer form of Capitalism
This is beautifully expressed in a few paragraphs in the last thing Del Noce wrote, in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, about a week before his death, in an essay entitled: Marxism Died in the East Because It Realised Itself in the West.
Marxism has fully realised itself, but disproving its premises and promises. It did not do so due to mistakes or to betrayal by its leaders, but by the nature of its necessity. It has not expressed the radical alternative between the thesis represented by capitalism and the antithesis represented by the proletariat, it has not been the creation of an entirely new humanity. Instead, historically, it represented the transition from one stage of the bourgeoisie to another, the ulterior and definitive stage.
Marxism has been the culture of the transition from the Christian-bourgeois society … to the bourgeois society in its pure state. We could even say that Marxism represented the “transition to the worst” in the sense that, through Marxism, bourgeois society has shed every residual moral and religious sense, unburdened itself of all “impurities” that still tied it to traditional society, thus presenting itself as full materialism and full secularism. The West has realised everything in Marxism, except its messianic hope. “Socialism” Veneziani writes, “has not inherited capitalist society, but has become included, entangled in capitalism itself; in many respects, it has been the intermediate stop on the journey from capitalism to neo-capitalism.
Therefore we can say … It is Capitalism that absorbs Communism, using it to erase religious sacredness and national sacredness, a goal it could not have reached in any other way.
So it is all a Marxist Plot after all, but Marxism denuded of its revolutionary potential and co-opted into the service of a pure bourgeois Capitalism, opening the way to a “perfectly bourgeois” society. There are activists hard at work making sure we all stay in line. But they are not the vanguard of the working class, they are vanguards of the bourgeoisie in its purified form.
The people of Wentworth and Warringah were just being consistent, as are the so-called moderate Liberals and their Independent counterparts, like I said above. It is important to understand this, and in our mutually critical dialogue to try not to be just the plaything of exactly the same historical forces.
Augusto Del Noce on the New Totalitarianism
This is the title of an article by Carlo Lancellotti, Del Noce’s English translator, and reflects a concern of Del Noce with various forms of totalitarianism for most of his scholarly life. The second paragraph gives a taste which resounds sixty years later (substitute or add in the allegation of various phobias and the almost universal generalised reference to ‘science’ to be found in contemporary “progressive” debate):
According to Del Noce, the telltale sign of totalitarianism, which he had observed firsthand as a young man in the 1930’s and 40’s, is the “negation of the universality of reason, so that any form of opposition to established power … supposedly does not express rational concerns but conceals interests of class (according to Communism) or race (according to Nazism).” In other words, totalitarian systems monopolise power by affirming that rationality itself is political. They claim that their ideological narrative coincides with rational discourse and thereby exclude a priori all forms of criticism.
In the 1960’s, Del Noce recognised a reappearance of this phenomenon in the tendency by the advocates of the sexual revolution to deny the rationality of their opponents by attributing their stances to moral or psychological conditions such as “repressed psychology”, “bigotry”, “hatred”, “prejudice”, “animus” etc. Del Noce observed that the politicisation of reason was now being conducted in the name of the human sciences that had gained new prestige since the end of the war: psychology, anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis. This latter, in vulgarised form, underpinned the program of sexual liberation, viewed as a “struggle against repression” and the “breaking of taboos”. Del Noce argued that this trend was just one manifestation of a broader and deeper phenomenon: a new nameless, “quiet” “totalitarianism.”. Whereas older totalitarianisms politicised reason on the basis of a philosophy of history (Communism) or a mythical racial narrative (Nazism), the new one does so through the ideological invocation of “science” in a very broad sense. The result is, nevertheless, a “subordination of culture to politics,” which to Del Noce is precisely the defining characteristic of totalitarian societies, and is also perfectly compatible with the preservation of the formalities of democracy.
It is not just culture which is subordinated to a certain species of politics, so is ethics, and even the search for truth, in the sense that any attempt at contestation is ruled out a priori, nowadays by deplatforming, a cancellation of the person and a million bully tweets, with the help of a correction apparatus a hundred times more effective than the Holy Inquisition ever was, even if not as bloody! (This bit of course is not Carlo Lancellotti.)
The only contrast left, it seems, is “progressive” versus “conservative”, these as defined within the ideology itself.
Carlo Lancellotti concludes the above paragraph with the comment “His argument is interesting and deserves to be elucidated”, which he does under three headings:
Scientistic Totalitarianism: which runs into similar problems as logical positivism. In so far as the statement that science exhausts the sphere of rationality is itself non-scientific it can only impose itself by banishing everything else, and which therefore relies on the mythology of science versus religion long past its use by date;
Absolutisation of Politics: the flip side of the politicisation of reason, every aspect of reality is interpreted and evaluated in terms of the new political narrative, law, education, medicine, the family;
A Totalitarianism of Disintegration, society undergoing a slow process of decomposition possibly from the early sixties, slowly consuming the reserves of meaning received from the past, until they run out; followed by a brief.
There is plenty just in this article, which is readily available online. I won’t go into Del Noce any further, however, the above being just by way of a taste. My project for the rest of the year is to read and study Del Noce in some depth, starting with The Crisis of Modernity. From the little I have seen mostly online, it might well be worth the while. It does seem to fit well with previous research and reading, adding considerable depth and sophistication on a number of points, and seems like it will deftly solve some of the remaining research problems.
At the very least, for anyone interested in where we are right now, how did we get here and where to go from here, as Carlo Lancellotti said, “His argument is interesting and deserves to be elucidated…”
Where to go from here?
There are some suggestions about this in the previous paper, which I then followed up in further work kindly published in various editions of The Swag but with versions collected for convenience on my personal website: https://www.gjmoses5.site
Australian Catholic Theological Association 2022 Conference is entitled The Radical Paradigm Shift of the Church in Australia and is billed as a response to the challenge put forward by Pope Francis referred to in the first paragraph above.
It is meant to be live, Covid permitting, in Melbourne, July 14th – 16th. And of course we await with more than interest on what the Spirit might have in store for us from the second session of our Plenary Council.
However, we resolve our theological and church transformation problems we still have to minister, to minister to people where they are with kindness and sensitivity, love and respect, to help them get to the next step in their journey whatever that may be.
But might I suggest, given the above analysis, in the midst of doing that we try not to jump overboard into the prevailing progressive rhetoric. Or at very least that we push the pause button on this for a while, until we have done some more of the hard work to understand where it is coming from, to discern the spirits at work, trying hard not to be just the plaything of the same historical forces, whatever they may be! For God’s sake and the sake of our culture, let’s try to find our own way. [/s2If]
