April 24, 2020 - 10:47am
This week I released a podcast with Conservative MP Bim Afolami, one of the BBC’s MPs to watch in late 2019. He is a black politician and trustee of the Oxford Union, and our conversation ranged across free speech, identity politics and the polarisation of public life. We explored the idea, which I first came across via Michael Wear, that the withdrawal of stable, lifelong forms of belonging, identity and meaning, primarily religion, has left politics bearing too much emotional weight. Afolami said:
Although, as Afolami admits, this is a hard trend to evidence — we are definitely in the realm of correlation rather than causation — it does chime with wider thinking. Scholars including Jonathan Haidt have suggested that part of the reason political polarisation has deepened is that it has become riven with “sacred values”, or indeed that these sacred values are playing a more central role in our politics. I was intrigued by one statement in particular in a 2016 lecture:
Haidt believes that today’s Left and Right hold different things sacred: Anti-discrimination and the victim in the case of the Left, and freedom, or order, on the libertarian or authoritarian Right. Capital and labour, important though both are, don’t amount to a framework for meaning in the same way that anti-discrimination or freedom does.
Haidt is something of a sacred value sceptic. In a separate academic paper, he said that he was building “upon Berlin’s idea [that] the elevation or sacralization of a moral principle or symbol is a major cause of evil”, warning that a clash of sacred values in politics can easily become heightened because compromising on the sacred is by nature, profane.
I’m not quite so sceptical (I think the more important issue is what we hold sacred, than whether we have sacred values at all). But it is hard to disagree with Bim that the across the western world our “political questions have become less technocratic, more values based.” The sacred has found its way into politics.
Elizabeth Oldfield is the former head of Theos. Her writing has appeared in the FT, Prospect and The Times. Her Twitter handle is @esoldfield
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SubscribeI agree with the premise of this,During the Brexit debate over the three or so years I think that ‘we’ did see in various forms some of the ideas that influenced people ,including me, were less political, but had a more ‘sacred’ sense of value and meaning to them, particularly on the Leave side (which I am) there was a hearkening back, or longing for, maybe something that never quite existed but was for all that more precious,and sad, the idea of the UK, of England, as sovereign, as a ‘Sceptred Isle’, more importantly I think its what lies behind these longings and desires, and it is partly the loss of the ‘religious’ of the transcendent, of faith, community, belief, of something larger and more hopeful and generous to live for, rather than just MORE of everything, or bigger, or faster, or with the labour party more recently, more rights and no articulation of what it comes with- Responsibilities.
By the way I do consider myself a rational person as well!
There may be something in this but, let’s face it, most rational people left religion behind at least 100 years ago and this political fanaticism is only very recent. I would agree that, to some extent, capital and labour no longer frame the main debate, although Piketty and others surely disprove this to some extent.
I think there’s an element of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory here. As he points out, the progressive left has evolved a movement that does not build on or ‘integrate’ the advances made in previous stages of societal evolution and improvement. Instead, it disavows everything that came before and seeks its own Year Zero.
The problem is that these people comprise more or less all of academia, most of the media, and most government departments. In doing so, they form an immovable layer of nonsense that lies between ordinary people who do useful jobs and the politicians those ordinary people tend to elect. The politicians then find it almost impossible to act in the interests of ordinary, useful people because this substantial layer of useless but extremely self-regarding people prevents them from doing so.
It’s a massive problem that will probably destroy western civilisation.
Western civilisation began to stagnate as soon as it abandoned its shared Christian heritage, and has since fallen into a state of moral confusion and relativism with increased suicide, divorce and anxiety. A society without shared values is hardly a society at all.
It is incredibly arrogant to say that “most rational people left religion behind”, particularly since there has been a massive upsurge in religious belief, particularly Christianity, outside of Europe and North America.
There may well be an upsurge in religious belief, but that doesn’t mean that the statement “most rational people left religion behind” is wrong.
So are people outside of Europe less rational?
I used to think the only thing modern society valued was shallow freedom, but the overwhelming support for a police-state in response to COVID-19 has demonstrated that modern society doesn’t even value that. People today will accept pretty much anything so long as they have enough food, shelter and instant unlimited access to entertainment, as well as enough depressants to drown-out the deep sense of dissatisfaction and meaninglessness at the end of the day.