Notes Towards A Dark Age Humanism

2 thinkers in particular have interested me of late. They are an unlikely pair, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they have not been put together before (inform me if anyone knows otherwise). These two are Niccolo Machiavelli and Stuart Hall.

Both serious political figures, although not “mainstream”, at least judging by the thinkers who I am used to seeing be referred to in contemporary political writings. Everybody of course knows who Machiavelli is, but usually via “The Prince”, not via the “Discourses on Livy”, which is the work I have been using. My tentative sense is that “The Prince” is the pop work, the “Discourses” the serious one. In fact, the preface to the Discourses, addressed to his friends (who are not princes), says it’s a shame princes are ruling, because princes are idiots. Stuart Hall was originally born in Jamaica in the 1930s, moved to the United Kingdom in the 1950s, and spent the rest of his academic career here. He was active in the New Left of the 1970s, and produced a large body of incisive political writings in the 1970s and 80s.

This will likely be a series of essays, and they will be rough. They aim to expand some of the current conversations around netocracy and global empires, cosmopolitanism, technofeudalism, dark renaissance.

Stuart Hall

Hall, as an insider-outsider to the British imperial order, born to a middle class brown-skinned family in the final years of colonial rule, was acutely sensitive to the nuances and disavowals of class, sex and race. He was able to see how the repressions of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois ideals wrote themselves across the British dominion. We’ll probably discuss this in more detail later.

Hall was active at the time when the “traditional left” broke down (Marxist orthodoxy, simple proletariat vs. bourgeois analysis) and the stakes for an expanded leftist struggle were on the table. This was a time of renewal and soul-searching, as the post-war social-democratic consensus broke down, Thatcher took power with her “authoritarian-populist” petit bourgeois ideals in the UK, and revelations about Stalinist Russia demolished any credible support for Soviet-style communism.

This is the period when the now familiar alliance between leftist politics, racial activism, LGBTQ+ activism (etc.) began to be formed.

Hall said yes, good — but also, let’s not be naive. The strand of thinking that has come to dominate, driving much wokeist activism, comes from the work of Laclau and Mouffe, particularly in Hegemony and Socialist strategy. Hegemony is a concept introduced by early 20th century Marxist Gramsci, and discusses the sphere of political struggle as being much beyond parliament and parties. Struggle also encompasses culture, the ideas and practices that structure and describe everyday life (spot the genesis of “culture wars”).

Hegemony is a concept Hall is also interested in. He agrees with the Gramscian vision that the stakes for a leftist struggle and emancipatory politics are much broader than putting a Labour party in power and unionising workers. It is a war of position, of cultural hegemony.

However, Hall thinks Laclau and Mouffe get lost. They overly subscribe to “discourse theory”, what we might now more colloquially call postmodern relativism. In their view, ideology, ideas and practices are flat, neutral, malleable. People think one way today; they could just as easily think another way tomorrow. The important thing for an expanded socialist struggle, then, is to seize culture and reeducate the masses into the oppressor-oppressed way of thinking. This binary is more expansive than classical notions of proletariat vs. bourgeoisie, encompassing race, sex, religion (etc.) and is thus, at least in theory, grounds for a broader socialist church.

Because discourse is flat, bad ideas and practices can be replaced with good ones. Good ones are those which identify and eradicate oppressor-oppressed discrepancies. Thereby a new, inclusive, socialist hegemony can be achieved and replace white, patriarchal capitalism.

“Not so fast. Don’t underestimate the power of tradition and the familiar” says Hall. The discourse theorists are too optimistic in their hope that everything can be reframed. Traditional discourses and practices, however contradictory and apparently oppressive to certain groups, have a certain enduring strength. In the very least, they appear to have worked out alright over time. Operative enough to produce the society that has endured to the present. Even if these traditions are largely invented, they form the fabric of everyday life, the imaginary landscape that governs fantasies and desires, and they are not easily dismantled.

(As an aside, here Hall is interestingly close to Roger Scruton. Scruton is interesting to read as a reflexive conservative. He rejects Marxist and Freudian “reductionism” (claiming society should be read exclusively in terms of sexual and economic relations), but he also does not outright deny the existence of these relations. He claims, explicitly, that his conservatism is interested in understanding and preserving the ways that people organise and make sense of their lives. Rather than a naive, divinely ordained or bourgeois enlightened conservative (we are god’s people, we are enlightened and rational), the value of what exists is precisely that it exists for itself and structures more-or-less functional relationships and societies. Hall, like Scruton, does not underestimate the enduring power of this surface of things. )

Hall is not a conservative. He wants to work towards a socialist society, structured around identifying and addressing real human needs, not the endless reproduction of capital. He does not romanticise the traditional discourses and practices, nor emphasize the inherent goodness of what already exists. But he does not underestimate them either.

The wokes, as the contemporary offspring of the hegemonic socialist strategists, are engaged in a bloody fight to the death for the discouse. They are not solely to blame for the culture war, but they are jingoistically engaged in its endless WW1-esque conflict.

If we just call out more and more oppression, people will eventually come round to our side, goes the woke logic. We can use our positions to cancel and flatten the oppressors and their discourses, with pronouns, with safe space policies, with nazi dogwhistling. Our expanded inclusive socialist world is bound to emerge eventually.

Meanwhile, their opponents increasingly seek baroque moral and religious alternatives. Orthodox Christianity is suddenly a cool youth subculture. Trad values are the new rebellion. The more insanely the wokes attempt to transform the imaginary landscape of everyday life, the more creatively and bizarrely the traditionalists resist. Right wing woke digs its trenches just as deep. Neither side sees that the other is the sublime object of its ideology. The extra-discursive realities of class and sex go unnoticed; the technofeudal lords laugh all the way to the bank and demographics collapse.

What we find in Hall’s writings are the seeds of an alternative leftist history. A left that didn’t underestimate the power of tradition and end up in a bloody zero-sum conflict against right wing populism which will always have an enduring reportoire to draw from. A left that didn’t see hamfistedly universalising the “oppressor-oppressed” dynamic as the road towards a more fair society. A left that didn’t become “woke”. Nonetheless, a left which DID expand to think about the psychosexual legacies of European colonialism, about race, sex and other forms of power alongside the classical Marxist struggle of the proletariat. A left which does think about a post-Western, universal subjectivity and a culture that is modern to its core.

Enough for now. Next post I’ll probably write about how Hall enables us to flip the script on the familiar culture war trope that woke is “cultural Marxism”. I’ll argue that in fact woke is better described as “cultural Thatcherism”, a yuppy radicalism that steals the creative energy from emancipatory political movements and turns them into a moral creed for trendy, depoliticised metropolitan individualists.

Machiavelli

So let’s get classical. Quite a change from our progressive Jamaican, Mr Hall. What a strange segue.

In many respects, Machiavelli is a iron-fisted conservative. He does not entertain any notions that society could be socialistically overturned and run in the interest of ordinary human needs. For the Mach, there will always be a ruling class and an executive. They will, and indeed must, rule firmly, enforcing harsh laws and boundaries. The stability and longevity of the state is the primary concern of those in power.

However, Machiavelli is also a radical. He is not a theocratic or patrician conservative, labouring under notions that the social order is divinely ordained by God, or some just state of affairs and harmonious natural relationships between rulers and ruled. He is also not a bourgeois conservative, attached to perverted notions of an imaginary equality between free individual citizens in a neutral market while exploitation continues underhand.

Unlike most conservatives, snobbishly disdainful of the muddy rabble, Machiavalli’s view is that, all things considered, the ruling class are more guilty of social disorder and tumult than the masses. He begins here with cold humanistic pessimism. Human beings are vicious, envious and ambitious. The ruling class are just as bad as the masses. But they also have the power, wealth and influence with which to exercise their vice and lust for power.

The only way to keep the power hungry ruling class in check is with a strong prince, who sets limits on their ambition, and a strong popular will, which resists when the elites go too far. Thus, for Machiavelli, the enduring strength of republican Rome was its inner dynamism, the fact that the kings and later consuls (princely executives), the senate (assembly of aristocrats) and the tribunes of the plebs (representatives of the masses) struggled politically against one another.

From time to time, the masses would close their shops, march out of the city, or refuse to sign the military draft for foreign wars. For Machiavelli, these acts of resistance were good and just. In today’s world, this looks like labour activism and strikes. It gives me other ideas too. For example, if 21st century wars scale up, with mass conscription of civilian soldiers, an interesting angle of resistance would be “blood for soil”. In other words, if the rulers want people to fight and die in wars, the people should in return demand secure places to live, free from the whims and vagaries of rentiers, private landlords, speculative property markets, and gentrification. Perhaps this is offensive to bourgeois notions that the primary responsibility of the state is to protect the private property of individuals. Good.

The point is that, for Machiavelli, the good state is not equal, nor are people totally free; but it is dynamic, and no one class is justified in dominating and exploiting the others. It is only when all three interests, prince, rulers and ruled, know this and actively struggle against one another that culture and politics flourish. Machiavelli has a nice little flywheel for us. It’s simplistic and it’s fun. When a prince becomes the supreme authority, he becomes a tyrant. This tends to continue until a coalition of the best, strongest and wisest citizens organise to depose the tyrant and rule oligarchically. This, however, over time, descends into an exploitative rule “for the few”, where the oligarchs become greedy and decadent, neglecting their duties to the masses. The masses then choose a challenger, a populist rebel against the oligarchy, who deposes the corrupt rulers. This popular rule quickly degrades into decadence and licentiousness, however, as there are no longer standards of behaviour and firm hands to enforce law and discipline. Popular rule is McDonalds rule. Eventually, then, a noble figure rises up to seize control and reinstate values and social order — and so the flywheel spins.

We can then investigate other alliances within this triad, and apply them to our modern condition. For example, the present can be understood as an uneasy tension between oligarchic and popular rule. It has been a long time since a strong “prince” was in power — in the UK, Thatcher was probably the last. Since then, there is a powerful cultural establishment of managers, consultnts, professionals, financiers, journalists, politicians and media folk who have ruled, promoting various versions of the bourgeois ideals of freedom and equality while life for the popular classes has gotten progressively shitter. A perfect example of oligarchic self-interest was the bailouts of the banks in 2008.

The masses rebelled, however. Brexit and Trump are precisely Machiavelli’s predicted populist uprisings against the corrupt ruling class. And importantly, for our purposes, from a Machiavellian perspective, these were good and just. They made the ruling class scared and uncomfortable. That’s exactly what needed to happen. The flywheel predicts princely uprisings due at some time soon. Dominic Cummings and Curtis Yarvin both want strong executives to burn the oligarchic bureacracies. Their readers are powerful technofeudal lords. The nice thing about the Machiavellian flywheel is that it provides a compass for the types of political interventions that are constructive and necessary, without needing to rely on absolute ideologies. It is dynamic. For example, right now, I am a member of the peasantry, and I don’t really care about whether in the next decade or two power falls into the hands of a strong prince (eg. a prime minister who really shakes things up) or stays in the hands of the Westminster political establishment. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. What I do care about are certain interests. I want lower rents and house prices. I want boundaries drawn around religious fundamentalism. I want arts funding for projects that aren’t woke. I want socialcare, healthcare and education out of the control of positivistic bureaucrats. I want social support for families and women getting back to work after pregnancy. Etc.

Dark Age Humanism

With these thinkers, “Dark Age Humanism” is the political signifier that interests me. It is a humanism, based both in a wide sense of the needs and struggles of people in the face of sex, race, class differences, and in an appreciation for the ambition and viciousness of people. It does not reach for transcendental Others and divine interventions. The stakes of life and politics are human, and humans are often ugly. It is, nonetheless, aspirationally universalist. It is a renaissance mentality, interested in dynamic, republican thinking and coordination beyond the interests of clan, ethnicity and fundamentalist religion.

It is also dark age, in the sense that our world is destabilising, we are unsure what will come next. We are confronting the ugly shadows of the enlightenment projects, which promised universal freedom and equality (blablabla) and failed, dramatically, to deliver.

See you next time.