The postmodern left: part two

“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.