The following text, which was originally published in the German online magazine Rubikon[1] in April 2017, will introduce the series “Thoughts about Social Division” that I plan in the Lawyer’s Fees Substack. The series will mostly contain contributions by guest authors, both established writers and newbies. The topic itself invites the idea, so to speak, of “bringing people together” that I, a hippie at heart, have always been partial to.
Without further ado, let me proudly present this text from one of my favourite German-speaking philosophers, Matthias Burchardt. The reason I chose to open the series with a text that is more than 5 years old – almost historical from today’s viewpoint – is that Burchardt’s premonitions about attacks on social cohesion have not only appeared to have come true in the most devastating way, but have become even more radicalized than anyone at that point may have been able to imagine. Or have they not? Let me know in the comments.
Attacks on Social Cohesion
by Matthias Burchardt
The "identity illusions" fomented by both the left and the right destroy what constitutes society. At first glance, there seems to be worlds between the völkisch concept of the Identitarian Right and the appreciation of diversity in left-wing identity politics. Yet there are worrying similarities: Both identity models exploit legitimate needs of people to undermine democratic society. French fashionable philosophers here (un)voluntarily act as abettors of the global power elites and gender programmes also contribute to the division of society. Under the illusion of freedom, bonds are destroyed and isolated people are left defenceless at the mercy of control and exploitation.
Justice grows out of communities of solidarity
Justice is an essential ethical demand that we place on a political community. In a modern democracy, this claim applies equally to the legislative, the judicial and the executive powers. But beyond the written law and its manifestation in the organs and processes of the state, a political community also thrives on people's deeper need for just conditions and on their ability and willingness not only to assert egoistic self-interest but also to pursue the welfare of others and the common good. It is an interest-led assumption of the elites that only the moderating and chastening power of a state brings the motive of justice into play, without which individuals would find themselves in a war of all against all, because people are stupid and evil in their essence. (Cf. Rainer Mausfeld: Die Angst der Machtteliten vor dem Volk.)
The state as disciplinarian?
This state-philosophical assumption is in the tradition of Hobbes, who in his work Leviathan narrates the founding of the state as a socialisation of egoistic lone warriors under the beneficent repression of an all-powerful government. As plausible as this transition from a savage state of nature, where “Man is Man's wolf”, to a peaceful, civilised time sounds, the basic assumptions are problematic: Man is an egoist by nature and social relations implicitly or explicitly always have the character of war, since everyone is exclusively out for their own advantage. State community would thus be a necessary form of coercion that reconciles the solitary egoists. This approach, however, fails to recognise the anthropological insight that man is not only an individual, but always a social being, that he always originates from communities and exists in them. This means that the question of just conditions for all is not first raised by state constitutions, but that these constitutions respond to the pre-existing elementary need for justice of social communities. Moreover, if elites or institutions presume to use their power only for their own interests and not according to the common good, people's deeper sense of justice can lead to political indignation and build up corresponding pressure on those in power. Hannah Arendt points out in her essay on “Power and Violence” that it is not the violation of egoisms that produces political engagement, but the violation of the sense of justice of both those affected and those not affected. For good reason, the motto of the French Revolution “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” therefore links freedom and equality with the moment of fraternity, i.e., a pre-political commonality from which compassion, justice and solidarity follow. If democracy consisted only of the free and the equal, a majority with equal interests could rule mercilessly at the expense of a minority. It is the moment of fraternity that inscribes in the individual a sense of justice and in democratic processes a commitment to the common good and the protection of the minority. Without the return to elementary fraternity and the mandate of justice, the democratic state degenerates into a cold majority machine where the satisfaction of a majority is passed off as justice at the expense of the minority. The current political situation bears moments of this political decay: a group of people defamed as “modernisation losers” without prospects and without a voice of their own draws attention to itself at least on the way to the ballot box and, to the dismay and surprise of the propagandistically lulled majority (cf.: Rainer Mausfeld, Warum schweigen die Lämmer?), flushes figures with unclear agendas into parliaments and the highest government offices.
Desolidarisation and the hour of the Pied Piper
What is fatal in this context is that the public discourse does not take this as an opportunity to seriously ask about the needs of these groups and the causal social distortions, but in a perfidious twist, the act of voting in the voting booth serves to present the concerns and needs of these people as illegitimate and they themselves as undesirable figures in the political sphere, precisely because they are, for example, AfD voters, and thereby apparently disqualifying themselves. This problem of justice, which stems from a blind spot of the democratic parties, is precisely the breeding ground for populist offers from the right, which, through targeted linguistic provocations, profit from the fact that burning socio-political questions are tabooed in the political sphere or given a propagandistic spin. In addition to the concrete precarious living conditions, the “losers of modernization” are above all doomed by their need for economic security, social safety, regional and cultural roots: the postmodern open society demands the uprooted and creative self-entrepreneur, who enjoys the non-commitment of being unattached and nomadises flexibly between locations. Or he works via the internet - thanks to intercultural competence - multilingually in multinational project teams, bound together by the globally harmonised workflow in the universal grammar of neoliberal project management. His political commitment is channelled intellectually and symbolically, and in his consumer behaviour, he knows how to combine hedonism with political correctness. The loser of modernisation, on the other hand, smokes, eats meat, speaks in a politically incorrect manner and does not understand why, after many years of austerity policies, the decay of public infrastructure, the withering away of the welfare state and the lack of solidarity, banks, of all things, have to be saved, or wars waged, and why suddenly there is a “welcome culture” and billions are to be spent on the integration of refugees.
The Terror of Identity
The ideological concept of the “people” (Volk), as used by the so-called Identitarian movement, is politically and theoretically problematic in several respects. The problem lies not so much in the typifying use of the concept, as it is also applied - quite humorously - to ethnic origins: Rhinelanders, Swabians, Bavarians and others are often ascribed clichés that can then serve as the starting point for conversations and are ultimately confirmed or refuted by the respective person.
Philosophically speaking, this is a hermeneutic process, i.e. an understanding that starts from a deliberately fuzzy pre-understanding and looks forward to deepening and differentiating. The assertion of a völkisch identity, such as an essence of the German, is problematic especially when it is associated with pejoratives towards other nations and their representatives. The idea of an unchanging and unambiguous national character at work in all citizens ignores the historicity and diversity of political communities. Nations did not fall from the sky, but are a historical consequence of warlike conflicts or political founding acts, which always have something accidental about them.
It may be that cultural commonalities, religious convictions or a shared language form a link, but it does not have to. Those who claim a national identity homogenise the diverse and the dissimilar. I would like to call this the terror of identity, the egalitarianism through the destruction or elimination of what is different. What is criminal about German National Socialism in this respect is not so much the reference to the Volk as a community, but rather the ideological charging of this pre-political sphere with concepts of national character and racial doctrine in the sense of a terror of identity.
While the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany postulates the People as sovereign and subject: “All state power emanates from the people”, the National Socialists had it exactly the other way round: The People are the object, project and product of the violent shaping by a power clique in an authoritarian state apparatus: the Holocaust, eugenics, euthanasia, expulsion, ostracism, censorship, book burnings, propaganda, synchronisation of science, media and culture were biopolitical and socio-technological instruments for the production of homogeneity through the eradication of multiplicity.
The definitional sovereignty of what constituted this identity did not lie with the people, but in the hands of the ideologues. Identity, in the sense of uniformity, was not sought out in the existing political community, but mercilessly constructed on the basis of interests. This poses another problem: The obtaining of legitimacy by claiming to be a mouthpiece for the will of the people. Populists raise themselves with pithy words to be the advocates of the excluded and then speak as augurs supposedly “in the name of the people”. Unlike judges, however, they do not do this from a democratically controlled and legitimised official role, but in an encroaching appropriation that is no longer interested in a multi-voiced democratic negotiation process.
One then immunises oneself against criticism by insinuating that democratic opponents are “traitors to the people”. In this way, however, the völkisch concept proves to be a forcibly homogenised identity, a means of power of the few against the many.
Identity politics and the terror of difference
Another strategy for breaking the power of the many is the terror of difference. Divide et impera! Divide - or better: divide! - and rule! Since the power of the many arises from their fraternity and can lead to consensual action, the power elites would have little to oppose this. That is why they sow discord and foment conflict among the subjugated, so that they do not connect to jointly assert their democratic claims. Secret services, foundations and think tanks systematically rely on the power of active corrosion. In the geostrategic interest, for example, regional conflicts between ethnic and religious groups are forced to bring about a “regime change” in recalcitrant states, so that access to raw materials and the establishment of military bases becomes possible. Military interventions can even be sold to the domestic public as “humanitarian wars”. It is not uncommon for such interventions to leave behind “failed states” instead of the promised democracies, failed states in which, despite established institutions, no community can come into being that can support these structures and fill them with meaning. A variant of soft terror is the fragmentation of societies into groups managed by identity politics. This is perfidious in that the divisive will to power can hide behind scientificity and moralism, and thus exploit people's need for justice in the same way that nationalist ideology exploits the sense of community. Under the strategic vocabulary of "diversity" or "heterogeneity", divisive rhetoric and separation are cultivated in the socio-cultural sphere. A dissecting gaze is thus implanted in the mostly well-meaning actors, and a linguistic corset is imposed on them, to which they must submit on the one hand, but which on the other hand gives them the opportunity to subjugate others themselves. The programmatic background of this practice of power was provided in particular by some French philosophers of post-structuralism. In the name of “discourse theory” and “deconstruction”, these philosophers not only worked through (and in a sense disposed of) the history of philosophy, but also dismantled any preconditions for left-wing resistance politics and a humanist counter-design to the existing. Models of truth, enlightenment, justice, reason, emancipation, critique, ethics, human rights and even the ability of human beings as persons or communities to be authors of political change are radically denied. For Michel Foucault, for example, these are not incontrovertible concepts, but merely accidental expressions of anonymous discourses of power that control man, without being controlled by him. As helpful as these analyses may be in identifying the hidden interests behind well-sounding conceptual facades, the core theses are devastating: There is no truth. There is no reason. There is no subject. There is no human being. There is no enlightenment. There is no dialectic. There is no history that we can change for the better. We are all mere puppets played by the invisible hand of discourse. As abstruse as these theses may sound to outsiders, for the generation of scientists currently occupying the chairs of the humanities and social sciences, they have irrefutable validity - despite the claim that there is no truth. The extent to which the broad and deep impact of these programmes is also a consequence of interested scientific propaganda by secret services and corporations would have to be investigated separately. All in all, the ground has been prepared for the triumph of neoliberalism. In “The Ghost of Populism”, Bernd Stegeman puts it in a nutshell: “The left is obviously sitting in a dungeon that postmodern thinking has built for them.”
Whether or not the deconstruction of left-wing thinking actually took place as planned, as the French sociologist Didier Eribon described in his book D'une révolution conservatrice, Stegemann’s exaggeration sums up the dimension of the problem: “In the 1980s, left-wing neoconservatives used investor money to organise conferences, give seminars and instigate media debates with the aim of blurring the line between right and left. It was a concerted campaign. They wanted to abolish everything on which leftist thinking is based: the concept of class, social determination, the exploitation of labour power, etc. They also wanted to abolish the concept of the socially excluded. Today we see that for the most part they were successful.”
Genderism
In the following, the soft terror of difference will be exemplified by the gender programme. The starting point is a quite accurate statement, namely that gender in social space cannot be explained by biological determinants alone. There are socially formulated and historically changeable gender roles that can be - even if not exclusively - an expression of power. In the sense of the terror of identity outlined above, they can have a repressive effect on the individual. Pre-gender feminism formulated from this a programme of emancipation that rejected social attributions and prescriptions and thus gave women back the sovereignty to interpret and shape their femininity. Genderism, however, radicalises this approach in the haze of postmodernism by viewing gender completely as a product of social constructions. It thus leaves the realm of theory, i.e., of knowledge of what is the case, and becomes a socio-political programme that, for example, declares the findings of biology and other sciences invalid when it comes to gender issues. At the same time, an integration of the approaches, i.e., the reality and sociality of gender, could be achieved relatively quickly if one spoke of social interpretation based on natural foundations. This denial of a gendered existence that can be interpreted but not created has far-reaching consequences.
1. If gender no longer has a point of reference in people's being, but is only “socially produced”, it can be shaped and pluralised at will. The relevant genders of genderism number in the thousands and are ultimately only limited by the number of people on earth.
2. The transfer of gender into the virtual world of social signs leads to an alienation from the bodily reality of one's own gender, which is not only biologically determined, but also a way in which we encounter the other and ourselves.
3. The biological duality of man and woman, which even in the animal kingdom knows intermediate forms and homosexual relationships, always carries a relational quality, anthropologically speaking. As an individual person, I am referred to the erotic other on the one hand and to the generational community on the other. The “fraternity” of Enlightenment plays metaphorically with the kinship of the people of a generation, who all owe their existence not to a social construction but to the real sexual intercourse of their parents. Through genderism, in the name of a supposed freedom, social bonds are shattered, and people are deprived of the support against the grip of power and exploitation.
Stegemann, yet again:
"The left, too, is still falling for the circular argument of postmodern freedom: Capital is working on the liquefaction of all relations for an unhindered access to markets and resource, and at the same time globalisation is emerging as a project of boundless capital. Now a theory from the humanities comes along and describes globalisation not as an economic project, but as a welcome deconstruction of all ties - such as identity, nation, gender or ethnicity - and thus lends the deregulation of capital the higher consecrations of a global freedom movement."
On the one hand, the strengthening moment of a human kinship is erased, on the other hand, countless micro-conflicts are created in return as substitute theatres for the achievement of “justice”. For example, what is the political significance of the fact that, according to an Australian study, lesbian women earn 13 percent more than heterosexual women?[2] Instead of registering, comparing and, if necessary, correcting the percentages of income of the gender types, what should really be on the agenda is the devastating consequences of neoliberalism globally and locally, and how unjustly power and wealth are concentrated on a small percentage of the world's population.
However, the more the powerful few entangle the many in micro-conflicts and play them off against each other, control their articulation through language politics and create "differences" between the subjugated in every conceivable way, the more the solidarity and justice motif of the common disappears. Genderism causes a lasting irritation of the political community in thinking, acting, and speaking. The relational and strengthening power of gendered existence is poisoned by uncertainty and mistrust, the bond to the common is dissolved and people are isolated into disoriented gender particles.
What conclusions can be drawn from these considerations? Political dangers lurk on both sides of the axis of identity and difference. The democratic polity and its citizens thrive on the productive dialectic between community and individual, identity and difference. The Frankfurt political scientist Andreas Nölke has identified a “gap of representation” in the German party system in his analysis “Basic Lines of a Left-Popular Position” and sees the “necessity of a left-popular grouping”. Bernd Stegemann, who has been quoted several times, wants to fill this blind spot of the left by recovering the class concept. In whatever form: there should be an urgent search for a defensible form of the old familiar fraternity motif as the horizon and condition of justice, so that neither the terror of identity nor that of difference cements the rule of the few over the many.
We do not need a struggle of a thousand particular interests against each other. We need a debate about the top and the bottom in society, about rich and poor and the rule of the few over the many, which urgently needs to be disposed of on the rubbish heap of history.
Cover photo: Bryan Ferry and mysterious beauty in the “Avalon” music video, 1982
[1] Translated and reproduced with kind permission by the author. https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/angriffe-auf-den-gesellschaftlichen-zusammenhalt
[2] https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/the-gay-pay-gap-men-earn-less-but-women-earn-more-20150227-13qmxk.html