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The Morality of Knowledge and the Disappearance of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Francis Barker
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It is with a certain circumspection that a Marxist enters the kind of debate represented by the articles of Denys Turner, Brian Wicker and Terry Eagleton on the problems of morality, Marxism and Christianity. This is not because he any longer fears that guilt by association which was once so characteristic a feature of (Stalinist) ultra-leftism by which anyone who even passed the time of day with a ‘petit-bourgeois idealist’ was automatically suspect and probably a class traitor, but rather because, in entering such a discussion, the Marxist simultaneously acknowledges that there is a discussion to be had—something real is at stake—and also his relative inadequacy to participate in it. This sounds like conceding defeat immediately but is intended to echo Terry Eagleton’s schematic but accurate map of the Marxist tradition—on the one hand a neo-Hegelian idealism stemming from the work of Lukács, fully equipped with a humanist ideology, and on the other the structural-scientific work of Althusser, programmatically anti-humanist—and thus to indicate right from the start that the English Marxist at least is bound to be caught wrongfooted. He is bound to look back and see that a Christian-Marxist dialogue was easier all round under the old socialist humanist regimé, but equally the Marxist is newly aware of the inadequacies of that theoretical past, the errors which led to irrationality in theory and defeat in practice and the correction of which are, for him, the primary theoretical concern. Marxism is now establishing for itself a new rigour the central thrust of which is towards the purging of eclecticism from itself and the preclusion of united fronts with other discourses at the level of theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 57 , Issue 676 , September 1976 , pp. 403 - 414
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Denys Turner, ‘Morality is Marxism’, New Blackfriars, February and March 1973; ‘Can a Christian be a Marxist?’, New Blackfriars, June 1975; Brian Wicker, ‘Marxists and Christians: Questions for Denys Turner’, New Blackfriars, October 1975; Terry Eagleton, ‘Marxists and Christians: Answers for Brian Wicker’, ibid. Also relevant is Alan Wall's ‘Slant and the Language of Revolution’, New Blackfriars, November 1975.

2 More properly ‘a hierarchy of sciences’.

3 Turner himself makes a related point in his dialectical analysis of the relationship between methodological coherence and objective knowledge, and of the fact that Marxist science could only come into being under capitalism (ibid., pp. 123–4).

4 ibid., p. 125.

5 An example of the ‘clash of discourses’ is provided by a schematic comparison of the structural characteristics of scientific and religious languages. When science says x, y, z, because or therefore c it reveals itself as a discourse which is sequential, syntagmatic. ‘Because’ or ‘therefore’ signify the real simultaneous discovery and achievement of something new and are quite different in function from the same words when they appear in a sentence from religious discourse such as Denys Turner's ‘To my mind, everything in [his] ontology demands of the Christian that he rejects the reactionary behaviour of his official church; it is not in spite of, but because of his ontology that he is so required … For the Christian, therefore, the question is, what is the beginning of this criticism of religion?' (ibid., pp. 247–8). Religious language is paradigmatic, constructed of a ‘vertical’ paradigm of which the prototype would be somethig like ‘I believe in God’. In it words like ‘because’ and ‘therefore’ do not structure a diachronic development as in scientific discourse, but merely serve to conjugate, to ‘spatialise’ the optative paradigm. Religious language, like all ideological discourse, is thus strictly speaking tautological; it never utters anything that is not in the paradigm right from the start.

6 Article cit., esp. pp. 513–5.

7 See Body as Language, 1970, pp. 67–8. Cited by Wall, p. 514.

8 Leading, for example, to this sort of fatalism, the other side of Turner's ‘critical utopianism’. ‘I believe … that capitalism is so developing that either the world will blow itself to smithereens, or else it will just lie down and die, or else will become, by the logic of its own historical development, socialist’ (ibid., p. 253).

9 The crudity of this little scenario stems in part from the paucity of such conversations themselves. If God is beyond history he is also beyond cognition where literally anything can ‘exist’ and within the curved space of tautology endlessly discussed without result. The position of belief in existence beyond scientific cognition is, of course, in logic, impregnable.

10 On the question of torture. For anyone who has actually studied revolutionary situations the question as it is put here is quite literally abstract. History rarely, never, puts such questions in this pure, philosophical form. A revolutionary situation is a complexly overdetermined historical conjuncture in which ideology plays not the least important part. It is not within science that men become ‘aware’ of the real contradictions and fight them out but, as Marx says, within ideology. All liberation movements generate and/or appropriate their own ideology which is not the same thing as Marxist science. Over a broad span of our history the revolutionary ideology may be broadly designated ‘socialist ideology’ and it contains many slogans of a purely ideological kind. Let us take a general abstract slogan like ‘For freedom from oppression’. This could be uttered by just about anybody, Tory, Anarchist, Fascist. In any given situation science could reveal the class character of such a slogan and indicate whether, in that context, it is to be supported or not. (The same applies to a more ‘realistic’ slogan such as ‘Nationalise the banks’.) The slogan is nonetheless ideological and historically local (indexed in this example by its ‘universal’ form) for in a fully Communist society ‘freedom’ will disappear at the same time as the lack of it, and it would then be meaningless, in the most fundamental sense of the word, to demand it. In revolutionary situations it will be the revolutionary ideology that provides the answers to ‘moral’ questions, consisting partly of the transference and re‐activation of previous historical ideology (it would be impossible to have a revolution in this country without elements of Christianity unwittingly providing some of the stuff of the revolutionary ideology), and partly of a series of negations of the ideology and practice of the class enemy. If, for example, the oppressor (who is materially and historically constrained to be less than scrupulous about these things) tortures then it is likely that the slogan ‘Down with torture’ and its equivalent prohibition in revolutionary practice will have a quite practical and immediate relevance. I saw a poster recently that referred to Zimbabwe, advancing the slogan ‘No more hangings’. This was not a ‘moral’ poster.