Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

The postmodern left: part two

By Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler - posted Thursday, 29 March 2007


Today’s Labor is haunted by the spectre of Marx, which it thinks to exorcise by redefining the left as a politics for all seasons, disinherited from the ideas of Marx and Engels, from the idea and the ideal of democracy to come and from a social-revolutionary history on the side of liberty, equality and fraternity.

In its abject compliance with a politics of never-ending policy polling and ceaseless popularity ratings, today’s ALP continues to allow conservatism to turn the democratic values and traditions of the labour movement into an electoral liability for Labor, under the threat of a single charge - “Marxist!

Nothing causes the postmodern left to recoil in such horror as to be reminded that the left has got something inexorably to do with Marx, whose name conservatives have perversely succeeded in making synonymous with the sort of violent, undemocratic power exemplified by Stalinism … and the pigs in Animal Farm.

Advertisement

With “Marx” having been made so unpopular, present-day Labor pins its electoral hopes on other candidates (both real, as it were, and discursive). Yet in its make-over as the party for all seasons, while it remembered to banish Marx it forgot to ban Brian Burke.

This may be far from Labor’s first act of forgetfulness (the retreat from Marx stretches back, indeed, to the beginning), but by now the memory loss is almost total. In its simulated politics of conversation and consensus - never to be confused with a politics of conflict and contempt - today’s ALP plays the game of posing as an alternative to conservatism through the cynical appointment of voter-friendly celebrity candidates dressed up as just the sort of compromised “lefties” an electorate might be persuaded to buy.

So, with Marx gone, what sources of revolutionary tradition, what well-spring of democratic values, what heir to the Enlightenment project of critical thought and freedom should the left turn to for political guidance in Australia today? Playing “snap” with the conservatives, Clive Hamilton - Executive Director of the reputedly left-leaning Australia Institute in Canberra - proposes an answer to this question in a recent essay for Eureka Street (December 26, 2006):

... despite the suspicion of many progressives, the churches could be the answer. […] The churches remain the repository of the deeper understanding of life that once motivated some elements of the Left. There has always been a tradition in the Left to focus on alienation, the sense of the loss of self. And we can use this idea to understand the way in which modern consumer society deprives people of the opportunity to pursue a more truthful, a more authentic life.

There are many people in the churches who still cleave to that stream of progressive thought. Although I have no connection with it, it seems to me that this is particularly true in the Catholic Church.

What the Left desperately needs is a new approach to morality. The error of post-modernism, which grew out of the broad academic Left and now dominates Western society, is that it has no metaphysical foundation for a moral critique. Without a metaphysics that is common to humanity, any moral stance must be relative and therefore be contestable and lacking in conviction. (Hamilton, “Churches”)

Advertisement

Let’s be perfectly clear about the political path Hamilton seeks to take us back down in this passage, in the name of the left: at the end of it lies the church as the ultimate authority on the meaning of life. This points him against not only everything in Marx and the entire left history of the labour movement (a movement inspired by the idea and the ideal of democracy to come, despite its history of failures and betrayals), but also the politics and philosophy of the Enlightenment.

The superstitious idea that we should all put our faith in religious decrees is profoundly anti-modern and therefore undemocratic, having nothing whatsoever to do with the left.

Marx’s views on the church are well known and we don’t need to repeat them here. But before Marx, writing in 1784, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant insisted that knowledge and understanding, as opposed to superstition, must be sought “without guidance from another”.

Sapere Aude!” he wrote famously: dare to know - “that is the motto of enlightenment” (What is Enlightenment?). So what Marx inherited was a deeply sceptical attitude to superstition, including the superstitious idea that there could be any such thing as an ultimate authority, like the church.

Before Marx, in other words, the Enlightenment was already on the side of secular freedom, at the expense of church power. By imploring the left to give itself over to the moral guidance of the church today, therefore, Hamilton is calling on it to renounce not only Marx but also the ideas, values and cultural heritage of the Enlightenment - a very big call indeed.

Instead of answering the Enlightenment challenge to go on daring to know, Hamilton timidly betrays that inheritance by calling for a return to certitude in the form of a “metaphysical foundation” residing with the church (as a real-historical institution or an abstract, a-historical idea). He is entitled to do so, we acknowledge, but not in the name of democracy or the left.

For what could be more lockstep with the conservative attack on “postmodernism”, by Auty, Windschuttle and others (see "Postmodern left: part one" - On Line Opinion), than to proclaim that postmodernism now “dominates Western society” and to blame this on the “academic Left”?

How utterly conservative, then, to charge postmodernism with having “no metaphysical foundation for a moral critique”, without considering it (as might be expected from someone on the left) as daring to hold open the very concepts of metaphysics, foundations, morality and critical thought and practice to perpetual questioning, in the spirit of democracy, the Enlightenment and Marx.

How absurdly postmodern, too, that this stock-standard attack on postmodernism should turn out to reify the virtual at the cost (it would seem) of any regard for the actual. Our reference here is to the example Hamilton gives of the sort of moral issue the left ought to be confronting, under the guiding star of the Catholic Church - the sexualisation of children in popular culture.

Citing one of his institute’s publications on the subject, Corporate Paedophilia, which exposes this pernicious evil of “modern consumer society”, Hamilton seems to have lost all touch with the real world in his rush to vilify the world of representations.

What’s he doing getting all worked up about the virtual pedophilia of consumer marketing when there has been no shortage of actual pedophilia going on in the church, which he chooses to represent as a “repository of the deeper understanding of life” but which could just as easily be called a repository of the sexual abuse of minors by men and women of the cloth?

Is it laughable, or just plain offensive, that this is the organisation he wants the left to turn to for moral guidance?

Of course, a rock is still a rock if it’s called a stone. The Catholic Church is still the Catholic Church, whether it is called a repository of truth … or a repository of sexual abuse. Words, signs, representations, semiotic systems, texts: none of these things matters. All that matters is the metaphysical foundation of meaning invested in the authority of religious institutions or the ideas that underwrite them.

Obviously, then, it’s possible to mount a critique of the church only by submitting critical thought to the higher authority of church law, which enshrines a “metaphysics that is common to humanity” - and not by means of some abstract, non-journalistic, smart-arse idea like “there is nothing outside of the text” (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology). Only by submitting to the authority of the church could it be possible to speak out against a global event as scandalous as the church’s cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by priests and other clergy in its employ.

Only those who don’t share postmodernism’s “lack of conviction” would want to point out the lengths to which this anti-modern institution has been prepared to go in silencing dissent and the cries for justice by its victims and their supporters.

We think Hamilton should come clean at his next confession and admit that he’s been trying to pull a fast one for quite some time now, by pretending to be left. But in this he’s not alone. While Hamilton may not be officially aligned with the ALP, his call for what amounts to a negation of the spirit of democracy associated with Marx is all too typical of a left that dares not speak its name - a left that isn’t even “centrist”, but conservative. The left that is right.

This left doesn’t want us to go on daring to know; it wants us to go to church.

Marxism, Derrida reminds us, and by “Marxism” he means the promise of democracy, of democracy to come, is “heir to a spirit of the Enlightenment which must not be renounced” (Specters of Marx). Through its cowardly renunciation of that spirit, the postmodern left puts the future at risk of returning to the past.

In the event of that happening, what would be left to say?

Read part one here.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

21 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Authors

Niall Lucy is a professor in the humanities at Curtin University. He hosts weekly music/culture show The Comfort Zone on 720 ABC Perth, Wednesdays @ 1.30pm. His latest book is Pomo Oz: Fear and Loathing Downunder (Fremantle Press). He co-edited Vagabond Holes: David McComb and The Triffids.

Steve Mickler is Head of Media and Information at Curtin University. His latest book, with Niall Lucy, is The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press (UWA Press, 2006).

Other articles by these Authors

All articles by Niall Lucy
All articles by Steve Mickler
Related Links
A travesty of logic - On Line Opinion
Postmodern left: part one - On Line Opinion
Right wing columnists - anti-democratic? - On Line Opinion

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Article Tools
Comment 21 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy