Väärinymmärretty Paradoksi
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[Kielimafia editoi 24.2, klo: 03 ja risat]
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John Milbank is an Anglican theologian whose ideas, distinguished by a profound skepticism of secular reason, have given shape to Radical Orthodox theology and provided the underpinnings of the Red Tory and Blue Labour movements in British politics. His most recent book, The Monstrosity of Christ, is a collaboration with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, edited by Creston Davis and published in 2009 by MIT Press. He is also a contributor to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a series of critical engagements with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, recently published by Harvard University Press.
I
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Voiko vannoutunutta ateistia [kuten Slavoj Zizek] pitää uskottavana teologisen ymmärryksen ja viisauden ajattelijana? Vastaus: kyllä ja ei. Joka tapauksessa Zizek edustaa Milbankille huomattavaa parannusta verrattuna Dennet-Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris-tason uusateisteihin, joiden tietämys ymmärryksestä nyt puhumattakaan on sekä teologisen problematiikan että kristinuskon historian suhteen heikkoa ja yksipuolista.
Haastattelijan kahteen ensimmäiseen kysymykseen antamissa Milbankin vastauksissa kiteytyy nihilistin/nihilismin ambivalenssi ja umpikuja. Milbank soveltaa Dostojevskin Riivaajien ehkä kiehtovimman henkilöhahmon Aleksei Kirillovin problematiikkaa Zizekin yritykseen tulkita politiikkaa ja etiikkaa [typistetyn ja hegeliläisen] kristinuskon kontekstissa.
Milbankin mielestä Zizekin yritys ratkoa [tai paeta, mikä tahtoo implikoida, ettei ateisti koskaan pääse lopullisesti pakoon nihilismiään] Kirillovin logiikan umpikujaa kristillisen narratiivin puitteissa on oikean suuntainen, mutta ateistina Zizek ei voi päätyä mihinkään positiiviseen ratkaisuun vaan jää keikkumaan jonnekin rationaalisen leuhkimisen [self-vaunting] ja olemattomuuden väliin.
The atheistic logos will always lack either being or reason, without which there is no philosophy, no exercise of the love of wisdom.
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Milbankin radikaali-ortodoksinen politiikka on jakautunut kahteen päälinjaan, joista toinen [suurelta osin Milbankin itsensä ideoima] on ns. Blue Socialism/Labour [sininen on perinteisesti konservatiivinen väri-symboli Englannissa] ja toinen Red Tory/ism, jonka brittiläinen [alunperin liike juontuu Kanadasta] innovaattori on ollut Milbankin oppilas Phillip Blond - Englannin nykykonservatiivien [eli pääministeri David Cameronin] poliittisten linjausten aatteellinen takapiru[!]
Milbankin 1998 Catherine Pickstockin ja Graham Wardin kanssa julkaisun manifestin myötä perustettuun radikaali-ortodoksiseen liikkeeseen pohjaava aatteellinen innovaatio: Blue-Socialism on ollut jatkuvasti linjaansa täsmentävässä vaiheessa; sillähän ei ole varsinaisia poliittisia edeltäjiä kuten Red Toryism'illa, ellei latinalaista vapautuksen teologiaa sitten sellaisena pidetä [Milbank tosin kritisoi tuon liikkeen huonoa organisoitumista kansan ja hallinnon välillä; ks. seuraava päre].
Myös Phillip Blond [toistan: Milbankin entinen oppilas] on [myös tämä käy ilmi tulevasta sitaatti-päreestäni] radikaali-ortodoksisen liikkeen vaikutuksen alainen, joskin livennyt siitä enemmän oikealle kuin Milbankin 'joukot'. Blonden konservatiiviset eettis-teologiset lähtökohdat juontuvat kuitenkin samoista lähtökohdista kuin Blue Socialism'inkin.
Selvää silti lienee, että Milbank todellakin on poliittisesti vasemmistolainen, vaikka perinteinen vasemmisto-oikeisto.jako ei enää pädekään. Pikemminkin on puhuttava kommunitarismin ja liberalismin vastakkainasettelusta, kunhan ensin tajutaan, että perinteinen vasemmisto-liberalismi on langennut perinteisen markkina-liberalismin pauloihin, mikä kytkös on tiedostettava ja torjuttava.
Blonden poliittinen näkemys on ehkä jo [edellä mainitun] poliittisen perinteensä pohjalta hieman tarkemmin määritelty. Tiivistän sen wikipedian tiedoilla.
More recently, Phillip Blond, director of British think tank ResPublica, has gained traction with his so-called Red Tory thesis which criticizes what he refers to as the welfare state and the market state. He has been mentioned as a major influence on the thinking of David Cameron and other Tories in the wake of the 2008 credit crisis. He advocates a civic state as the ideal, where the common good of society is valued and solutions emerge from local communities Blond's Red Toryism has been embraced by traditionalist conservatives in the United States, such as journalists Rod Dreher and David Brooks, economist John Medaille, and the editors of the web log Front Porch Republic. Blond's ideas also parallel the socioeconomic tradition of distributism, as is evidenced by Blond's appearance at a distributist conference at Oxford University in 2009 sponsored by the G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture - [ks. wikiversio, jossa saat esim nimi-linkit aktivoitumaan].
Red Toryism ja Blue Socialism yrittävät löytää ikäänkuin yhteistä säveltä uudelta, konservatiivisemmalta arvopohjalta ponnistaen, jolloin perinteinen jako: jyrkkä vasemmisto-libertaristinen oikeisto ei enää päde vaan vastakkain-asettelu kulminoituu kommuntarismi-liberalismi-ideologioiden synnyttämiin erimielisyyksiin ja tulkintaeroihin poliittisessa arvoetiikassa.
Milbank toteaa 2009 eräässä suuria linjoja vetävässä puheessaan [jonka päretän tämän jälkeen] seuraavasti:
Thus, some within Radical Orthodoxy may follow Phillip Blond in his espousal of a new British form of "Red Toryism." Others, currently the majority, will follow my own brand of "Blue Socialism"—socialism with a Burkean tinge, now common to many of the more reflective on the left, including some within the center-left (anti–New Labour) British Labour party "Compass Group."
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Though the majority within the movement [Radical Orthodoxy] support John Milbank's "Blue Socialism" in politics, others have aligned with the traditionalist-conservative "Red Tory" movement in the UK (and Canada). Though the difference between the two isn't clear [wiki].
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Radikaali-ortodoksian paradoksi-kristilliseen paradigmaan [1) Jumala on yksi olemus kolmessa persoonassa, 2) Jeesuksessa jumalallinen ja inhimillinen luonto ilmenevät sekoittamatta ja erottamatta] perustuva makro-linjaus on ainakin Milbankin kautta saanut vahvasti vaikutteita Charles Taylorin kommunitaristis-tyyppisistä näkemyksistä suhteessa länsimaisen ihmisen sekulaarin identiteetin muodostumiseen [tyhjenemiseen arvosisällöistään] ja siihen, mitä tulee moraaliin ja vasemmistolais-kristillis-konservatiiviseen agendaan arvojen ja oikeudenmukaisuuden perustoista.
Liike korostaa nimenomaan paradoksaalista lähtökohtaansa [metafyysista käytännöllis-poliittisen paradigmana], joka pyrkii yhdistämään aiemmin toistensa kanssa vastakkaisia ja vieraina pidettyjä aatteellisia näkemyksiä/käsityksiä, kunhan ensin tehdään selväksi, miten ne todella [poliittis-juridisen jargonin läpi tulkittuna] toimivat valtiokeskeisessä markkina-liberalismissa ja mitä niillä tarkoitetaan uudessa paradoksi-politiikan ja radikaali-ortodoksian kontekstissa.
Blue Socialism ja suurelta osin myös Red Toryism suuntautuvat enemmän kohti katolisuutta eli vanhan kirkon ekklesiologisia perinteitä, konservatiivis-kommunitaristis-liberaaleja hyveitä ja
G. K. Chestertonin katolisuuteen kytkeytyvää distributismia asettumalla liberalistis-voluntaristista nominalismia, protestantismin sisällyksetöntä vapauskäsitystä ja valtiokeskeistä markkina-liberalismia vastaan [valtion merkitys markkina-libralismin takuumiehenä on tullut entistä selvemmäksi viimeisimmän laman jälkiselvittetyissä].
Tuskinpa Phillip Blondella David Cameronin poliittis-aatteellisena idea-sampona kuitenkaan on edes halua lähentyä niin kommunitaristis-vasemmistolaista kantaa kapitalismiin kuin, mitä Milbank edustaa, joskin jo nyt on selvää, että uudenlaisemmat tuulet ovat alkaneet puhaltaa, koska [ironista ja paradoksaalista tämäkin] Blonden lähtökohdat eivät ole Labour-Blairin opettajan Tony Giddensin teknokraattisen konsensuksen rakenteistumisessa [vrt. Habermas], jonka nimissä otettiin [tarkoituksena sopeuttaa työväenpuolue yhteiskunnalliseen muutokseen, jotta puolueen suosio kasvaisi] ratkaiseva askel markkina-liberalismin suuntaan vaan arvoeettisesti jossain aivan muualla eli kristillisen kirkon narratiivissa, joka kytkeytyy erottamattomattomasti ja elimellisesti Jeesus Nasaretilaisen elämään ja 'ruumiiseen' [sekä konkreettisesti että metaforisesti].
Yhteen virkkeeseen tiivistäen sanoisin, että radikaali-ortodoksinen paradoksin politiikka vastustaa ennen muuta modernisaation/sekularismin suuntaa vailla olevaa ja jo senkin vuoksi markkinavoimien ohjailemaa ultra-liberalismia, josta seuraa, joka vaatii ja joka ylläpitää arvotyhjiötä toimiakseen mahdollisimman tehokkaasti.
Mutta juuri arvojen pirstoutuminen, muodollistuminen sekä juridinen menetelmällistyminen: - tästä seuraten tyhjeneminen sisällöistään ja siten praktisesta, positiivisesti ohjaavasta eli ihmisten elämää intergroivasta voimastaan, on kapitalistisen valtio-liberalismin ihmisiin 'injektoima synnin tila' - 'lohikäärme', jota vastaan Milbank aatetovereineen taistelee kuin Pyhä Yrjänä ikään.
Minulle Milbankin paradoksin politiikkaa kehittelevä Blue Socialism on toistaiseksi paitsi teoreettisesti innovatiivisin myös praktisesti houkuttelevin/kiehtovin vaihtoehto vanhalle dogmaattiselle kommunismille, joka ei kyennyt päivittymään [olkoonkin, että Marxin lisäarvoteoria pätee ikuisesti] ja tuomittiin näin ollen toistamaan itseään kuin Sisyfos, joka työntää vuoren harjanteelle kiveä, jonka tietää jo etukäteen väistämättä vierivän sieltä alas [näin on käynyt Zizekille ja vanhoille kommunisteille].
Blairiläisyys, jonka etenkin Paavo Lipponen lanseerasi SDP:n linjaksi, ei ole sitä sosialismia, jota Milbank haluaa. Siten hän on ymmärtääkseni olennaisesti vasemmistolaisempi kuin esimerkiksi Suomen [oikeisto-]demarit.
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Kaiken kaikkiaan Milbankin kristillis-poliittiset näkemykset ovat vähintäinkin mielenkiintoisia, ja vaikuttavat ajoittain sekä metafyysisesti että pragmaattisesti järkevämmiltä kuin Zizekin leninistis-stalinistinen avant gardismi, jonka suurimpana puutteena voi pitää outoa tai jopa absurdia katkosta teorian ja käytännön välillä - [tämä on kaikkien marxistien perimmäinen heikkous lukuunottamatta Toni Negriä, jonka deleuzelaisessa moninaisuudessa (multitude) katkos/ero käsitteenä menettää tyystin merkityksensä sulautuessaan jatkuvaan muutokseen: vallankumous on siis ehkä jo tapahtunut [ikäänkuin salaa]!?].
Huolimatta nerokkaasta ideologia-kritiikistään Zizekin poliittisesta filosofiasta ei näytä löytyvän ei-väkivaltaista tietä [päinvastoin - vallankaappaus on ilmeisesti ain(o)a edellytys vallan saamiselle] kohti kommunismia [tai mitä Zizek sitten lopulta kommunismilla tarkoittaakin], joten emme myöskään tämän vuoksi voi odottaa itse 'lopputuloksen' olevan erityisen 'rauhallinen' [ei ainakaan ilman keskusjohdon terroria kuten NL:ssa].
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En kuitenkaan malta olla Zizekin yhteydessä mainitsematta Jacques Rancierea, jota Zizek näköjään arvostaa, mikä on jälleen osoitus siitä, ettei militantti ateistimme ole [ainakaan totaalisti] Ljubljanan asunnossaan kranaatteja vallankaappausiskuun rakenteleva uusjakobiini [vaikka sitä hänen kommenttinsa antavat joskus jopa aiheen epäillä].
Rancierella on merkityksellistä sanottavaa demokratian olemuksesta [ei ehkä niinkään yksittäisistä keinoista] erimielisyytenä. Demokratia ei ole Ranciere'lle päämäärä vaan aina lähtökohta. Demokratia ei ole instituutio, järjestynyt yhteiskunta [jota valvoo poliisi] eikä edes konsensus vaan erimielisyyden manifestia esim. mielenosoituksena, jota ei ole masinoitu ammattiliitoista käsin ja joka ei kysy parlamentaarista lupaa. Silti Rancieren poliittisesssa ajattelussa ei ole kyse ohjelmallisesta anarkismista.
'Olen kierrättänyt syksyn 2010 vastarinnan ja kapinan tapahtumia [Ranskassa]
Rancieren ajattelun kautta, koska, kuten Zizek sanoo, yhtenä harvoista ajattelutavoista se käsitteellistää johdonmukaisesti kysymyksen kuinka jatkamme vastustamista'. [Ari Hirvonen, Tiede ja edistys 4/2010 - Jacques Ranciere teemanro.]
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Selventävä teksti tähän kirjoittajan tietojen puutteellisuudenkin vuoksi liikaa yleistävään koosteeseen tulee heti seuraavassa päreessä Milbankin [ainakin minulle] erittäin merkittävän puheen/tekstin muodossa, jossa hän tekee perustavia aatteellisia linjanvetoja paradoksin politiikkaansa radikaali-ortodoksian lähtökohdista.
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Orthodox Paradox: An Interview with John Milbank [Wednesday, March 17th, 2010]
NS: You write of Slavoj Žižek, “In an important sense, he bears a theological witness.” How can a self-described atheist bear a theological witness?
JM: In Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils, one character, Kirillov, speaks of both the necessity to believe in God as the reality of infinite goodness and the impossibility of doing so. His resolution of this dilemma is deliberate, meaningless suicide on the grounds that, in an atheistic world, he himself is now God, as possessor of a sovereign will, and that suicide is the highest demonstration of this will. Žižek tries to escape this dilemma in another way—by pointing to the figure of Christ, whom tradition has taken to be the incarnation of God in a single human life. Although, for Žižek, God is only present in incarnate guise and otherwise does not exist at all, he still insists that outside this Christian legacy we would not have had the sense of an absolute demand, exceeding all human law and custom. Indeed, the notion of incarnation sustains for Žižek the idea that this absolute demand, which orients our humanity, is more than human, even though it comes, he says, from “nowhere.”
NS: Against Žižek, you insist on the necessity of theism. What do you think are the prospects for a philosophical encounter with theology that doesn’t assent to a transcendent deity?
JM: I think that, in the end, the prospects are non-existent. Dostoevsky saw further than Žižek, because he dramatized the alternative existential stances in the face of nihilism, even a Christological nihilism. Kirillov tries self-assertion, but logically concludes that the only irrefutable act of “divine” self-assertion is self-slaughter. Stavorogin, in the same novel, adopts instead a malicious indifference, which he deploys seductively to derange the lives of others. But in the end, this leads to a suicide of mere despair. Žižek’s Christ is merely a clown, the excreted everyman, the dross of the world. “The Good” is here reduced to the instance of that which exceeds reality, which finds no home. This places love beneath being, even if in a sense it is beyond being for Žižek, as the impossibility of realized desire. But at the end of The Devils, Dostoevsky suggests through the mouth of the dying Verkhovensky that love exceeds being in the sense that the real is orientated by the Good. Here, loving faith alone closes the circle of the ontological argument. The highest, which would include existence, must indeed exist. Without this idea of a perfect happiness for all of reality, which the most extreme misery cannot perturb, Dostoevsky contends that human beings lose their defining orientation. The final episodes of the novel try to depict scenes of disclosing recognition and forgiveness between people, which show how we can authentically participate in this infinite perfection and thereby transfigure the world.
Atheistic philosophy still finds itself caught in a theoretical version of the nihilistic aporia depicted by the 19th-century Russian novelist. Either, like Kirillov, it can assert human reason or freedom against the power of the void—but then this seems like self-vaunting wishful thinking; or else, like Stavrogin, it can deny the final reality of any human suppositions against the background of an indifferent nature. But in that case, the reality of reason itself is threatened. The atheistic logos will always lack either being or reason, without which there is no philosophy, no exercise of the love of wisdom.
NS: Now you have a forthcoming book, again with Creston Davis and Žižek, on Saint Paul, who has been a popular subject for Continental philosophy in recent years. Do you think it is legitimate for secular theorists to take Paul as a model for political action?
JM: Certainly, in the sense that Paul provoked the first Western enlightenment, the first ideas for a universal humanity, not just for an elite. He also suggested that the norms of human life lie in excess of any customary law-code. It is to their credit that secular thinkers are seeing that Paul erected the paradigm for all later revolutionary gestures. At the same time, they sometimes underplay his paradoxicality and the way in which he was also a conservative figure, who did not mean to overturn the truth of Jewish election by God, nor of Jewish law, but rather to appeal to its deeper foundation. There is some danger of a Marcionite reading of Paul, denying the God of the Old Testament, as in the renderings of Ernst Bloch and Alain Badiou, for example. Paul, by contrast, appeals at once to tradition and yet to the hidden basis of tradition, which allows one respectfully to exceed it. To be fair, both Žižek and Agamben allow for this far more. But then, they are also gnostic in their suggestions that Paul is caught between the aspiration to escape the somewhat sinister domain of law, on the one hand, and the impossibility of doing so, on the other. Yet because of his belief in the possibility of mediation, Paul did not just make radical gestures; nor did he, like Marx, propose the necessity of the present order’s destruction. Instead, he systematically established a new sort of international community within and alongside—and yet beyond—the state. This community was at once democratic and hierarchical, at once radically new and cosmopolitan, and yet archaic, because it returned to the pre-legal basis of a gift-exchanging order.
NS: Why do you think this renewed interest in Paul is happening now?
JM: It coincides with a new sense of tragic futility. If I were an atheist, I think I might ultimately condemn this interest as betokening despair. Yet Paul himself was eminently practical. It is, ironically, his mode of praxis that the atheists cannot grasp or embrace, because it is based on the possibility of imagining faith and trust in infinite goodness on earth. Paul does not ascribe to a dialectic of law and desire, nor to one of death and life. Rather, he believes, by insisting on the resurrection, that life is infinite and deathless. His politics of resurrection are the only possible politics of unrestricted hope in the coming of harmonious coexistence through the incarnation of love and justice.
NS: Do you see your participation in this dialogue as evangelization? What do you hope to accomplish?
JM: Yes. Victory.
NS: Adam Kotsko, in Žižek and Theology, argues that Christians have something to learn from the likes of Žižek. Do you think that the conversation could go both ways?
JM: Of course there are things to learn from Žižek—he reminds us that the logic of the God-Man is more universally human than the logic of God alone. In this way, he, as an atheist, refuses the lazy relativism of so much contemporary Christian theology, which betrays the Incarnation by seeing the God-Man as just a kind of optional add-on to the idea of God. This add-on might, for them, equally well be the Torah or the Koran. But to think this is also to betray the specificity of the Western legacy. Žižek is a crucial corrective here. However, the posturing of someone like Kotsko can only produce a wry smile in someone of my generation. This is exactly the sort of pusillanimous theology of some in the 1960s that we have long sought to escape from. Why? Because it is bad faith. If you are going to be an atheist and nihilist, then be one. Only second-raters repeat secular nostrums in a pious guise. Such theology can never possibly make any difference, by definition. It’s a kind of sad, grey, seasonal echo of last year’s genuine black. All real Christian theology, by contrast, emerges from the Church, which alone mediates the presence of the God-Man, who is the presupposition of all Christian thinking. Kotsko fears that the Church is an institution, but of course it isn’t—or isn’t primarily—as Graham Ward has well pointed out. It’s rather the continued event of the ingestion of the body of Christ. This fact provides a critical self-correction, well in excess of any outsider criticism of all the Church’s shortcomings and abuses, which I would hope to be among the first to recognize and denounce.
NS: You’ve noted theology’s shift toward secularization, through its adoption of the methods of the secular social sciences. How does one undertake genuine theology in a secular age?
JM: I’m critical of theology deploying social science when this means taking over theological or atheist positions uncritically and in disguise. Theology in a secular age has to give an account of the secular and of why secularization has occurred. This should include recognizing how Christianity secularizes (in a good sense) by desacralizing politics, law, and nature to some degree—but without total disenchantment. At the same time, I think we need an account of why secularity (in a bad sense) has left the West with realms autonomously indifferent to the sacred. Persons, land, and money without reference to God become, as Karl Polanyi pointed out, either idols or else mere instruments to be exploited—or both at once. Charles Taylor, I think, has part of the answer for why this happened; the West became over-disciplinary and the ethical displaced the religious. Another part of the answer is the way in which bad theology paradoxically invented a “pure nature,” so that a rather simplistic notion of God as something supernatural and intervening could all the better stand out. Defending mediation, by contrast, is once again crucial here.
NS: Do you think an atheist has any business in a theology department?
JM: I recommend departments of mixed theology and religious studies in secular universities, and the appointment of able people of all religious creeds and none. But, of course, if one respects knowledges linked to traditions, then adherence to those traditions can sometimes be relevant to making appointments. It’s a matter of tact, not of scandal.
NS: Increasingly, people are coming to describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Do you think, however, that there is value—perhaps even potential for political movements—in the growing detachment of people’s religious lives from traditional authorities, and in this newfound autonomy?
JM: It is good that people can no longer so easily be coerced into faith; faith itself has to welcome that, for faith-based reasons. In a way, we have returned to the situation of the first few Christian centuries. At the same time, though, autonomy and freedom from tradition can never be real. One has to come to terms with one’s own legacy, and children have to be taught something. The idea that they might be offered only “choice” is of course crazy. Before we choose, we are inducted into an habitual way of life.
NS: Another aspect of modern liberalism—and liberal religion—that you’ve been critical of is so-called sexual liberation. Why do you call this, which many people consider an advance of liberty, fascism?
JM: In one sense, the freeing of sex from the law has always been implied by Christianity; the 1960s’ “liberation” remains an event within Christian history. At the same time, what one saw here was a kind of democratization and commercialization of “bohemian” morals, which had themselves earlier been newly legitimated and normalized for an elite, as Phillip Blond has pointed out. The problem here is that self-pleasure can become either explicitly or tacitly a goal in itself. When the romantics earlier spoke of the importance of marriage being “free,” that seems to me nearer the mark, as a goal. Human fulfillment lies more in the direction of faithful love and inserting oneself in the continuity of generations. Marriage and the family, for all their corruption and misuse, are at base democratic institutions. Fascism for me comes into the picture because I think (following Adorno, amongst others) that the gradual separation of sex from procreation is regarded naively if we do not realize that this is what the state wants. Covertly, it wants to secure “Malthusian” control over reproduction and to deal with the individual directly, rather than through the mediation of couples. Much of liberal feminism is actually, in practice, on the side of economic and political neoliberalism. It is too rarely noticed that sexual permissiveness has today become a kind of opiate that covertly reconciles people to the loss of other freedoms—both in relation to the state and to the workplace.
NS: Does this mean that the progress of feminism, as well as of sexual minorities, should be rolled back?
JM: What we need is not a return to former legal coercion and social ostracism in the sexual field, but a change in ethos, which will promote both relational fidelity and the encouragement of human creativity and participation in the workplace and in civil life. As part of this, I think it is important both to support gay civil partnerships and yet to oppose the idea of “gay marriage.” Many more gay people in Europe approve of this combination than do in the US.
NS: And finally: capital. What does the current economic crisis mean to you, theologically? How far do you think an atheist thinker like Žižek can go toward a meaningful analysis of it?
JM: Not very far, because he tends to combine refusism with Stalinist nostalgia. The current crisis is not final, but reminds us of what happens when one wrenches the meaning of things apart from things themselves, which is a consequence both of over-abstraction and of individualism running riot. I think we need a new sense of the sacredness of land, people, and even money as real goods, though not things to be worshiped in themselves. We also need to realize that humans are gift-exchangers seeking mutual recognition before they are self-seekers. Not only are more ethical market procedures viable, but they would also permit a freer market, run more by trust and tacit understanding. It is actually the neoliberal market that needs the titanic, interventionist state.
NS: What do you think the prospects are for a theologically-informed political movement in today’s secular world?
JM: Red Toryism is an old current in Canadian politics, which has now been transplanted and revived in Britain by my former pupil Phillip Blond. Through him and others, including the Blue Labourites headed by Maurice Glasman, a “politics of paradox” is emerging and is making some headway in the UK. (In the UK, as in Europe, “red” denotes left-wing and “blue” denotes conservative. Hence ‘red Tory’ indicates the paradox of a Toryism blended with a non-statist associationism and distributism—with ‘socialism’ in a certain sense—and “blue Labour” indicates the paradox of a non-statist Socialism with a Tory tinge.) Basically, what we have here is an attempt to work out in practice a Communitarian politics, but one which fully includes the economic dimension. A Communitarian versus Libertarian polarity is starting to disturn the dominance of the Left-versus-Right polarity at the heart of British politics. The new thinking concentrates around Phillip’s think-tank ResPublica, and—make no mistake about it—this is something big. Already, both major parties have adopted aspects of Phillip’s ideas for an “ownership state,” which would involve more decentralized professional control of the public realm—but with non-profit, social purposes in view. To complement this new mode of state, the new “paradoxical” position also advocates a “moral market,” in which contract must itself have a social purpose, and businesses will often be partnerships of owners, workers, and consumers. This is influenced by Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, who helped draft Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI’s recent social encyclical. One can link this also to a blending of elements in Polanyi and Marx. The argument is that an even freer market (more so than the neoliberals want) is also a moral market (as they don’t even pretend to conceive). Yet many arguments about the exact role of government in all this are yet to be played out. In any case, it has turned out that the only thing that can break with both Thatcherism and Blairism is a new fusion, and yet recreation, of both Old Labour and Old Toryism.
NS: Of what exactly, in terms of politics, does this “paradox” consist?
JM: It is threefold. First: in the UK today, as in the US, we see that a “liberated” market has in fact augmented the role of the state—in saving and upholding big banks, in remedial welfare, in policing individualist anarchy. Moral trust is required by the market, but neoliberalism never theorized the firm as involving such trust and has failed to avoid substituting for it mere incentives and surveillance. Second: it’s a cliche that the right has won economically and the left culturally. But this is actually the victory of one force—liberalism. To this we oppose an associationist communitarianism, which combines left egalitarianism with conservatism about cultural and ethical values. It is pro-high culture and pro-excellence in education, but wants these things to be democratically available. Ethically, it is pro-family but by no means wishes to reverse the gains of female equality and the tolerance of homosexuality—the point is rather that stable marriage is the best way for most people. It is also critical of the technologization of medicine and the increasingly calculative approach to the lives of the old; it takes for granted that all decent people are opposed to voluntary euthanasia. The third paradox is that an egalitarian democracy actually requires a hierarchy both of values and of persons of excellence. Otherwise, money and sophistry co-conspire to destroy it, as they have in recent years. Democracy can only be sustained when there is a parallel, non-democratic concern with paideia—the formation of good character—which links talent to virtue and both to positions of appropriate social influence. Without the extra-democratic inculcation of character, democracy cannot enter into the debate about the good, which is the only legitimate and non-corrupt debate that can be held.
NS: What are the sources of this character? Are they necessarily Christian ones?
JM: Red Tories and Blue Labourites reject both the deontology of the right and the utilitarianism of the left in favor of the view that state, society, and economy must all see their role as the building up of individual and relational flourishing—of honor and virtue. The mediating role of religious bodies in all this clearly must be crucial. We hope that many Muslims and Jews, as well as Christians, will embrace a return to the politics of the Good, rooted both in the Bible and in classical antiquity. It is this legacy, re-thought and democratized (in keeping with biblical impulses), which alone can now save Europe, America, and the world.
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http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/03/17/orthodox-paradox-an-interview-with-john-milbank/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Milbank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_(philosopher)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Possessed_(novel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Blond
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Pickstock
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Ward_(theologian)
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributismi
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kommunitarismi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ranci%C3%A8re
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11672
http://crestondavis.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/pauls-new-moment-a-new-book-by-john-milbank-slavoj-zizek-and-creston-davis/
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17605
http://blog.lege.net/content/PatriotsQuestion9_11__professors.html
http://myarmywifelife.com/archives/1231
