The ‘Vision Thing’
Bush 41 once called it ‘the “vision” thing’. By then it had decayed into compelling slogans. But vision in politics began as claims that things really, ultimately mattered. And we need that back.
Spirituality can be an attractive term to people when its connotation is emotion. That plugs into Romanticism as it has affected us from Byron until now.
Spirituality is also a revolting term for others, who associate it with moralism and religion. Often this has the same cause: religions are felt to be brakes on the authenticity of the individual expressing herself.
Romanticism has vied with rationalism since the eighteenth century. Rationalists may find ‘spirituality’ a distasteful word if to them it signals superstition and intellectual fudge; a house of cards stacked on a non-existent card table.
Materialists, meanwhile, vary in their views. Some are reductivists, and would boil down all spiritual, moral, emotional and behavioural matters to what they see as the most basic level of explanation for them: chemistry as it appears in biology and evolution. But there are other materialists for whom ideation is also a level of reality, and for whom the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and for them ‘the spiritual’ can be material in origin without ceasing to be real in its own proper terms.
And then, of course, there are the traditionally religious, for whom spirituality is not an alternative to religion but the aspect of our humanity for which religion has been given as support and spine. Liturgy (the prayer of the whole Church) is not an alternative to private prayer but a framework for it. Du’a is not an alternative to salat. Interiority is not a way of rejecting outward practice: it is the fulfilment and end of religion. Religious people often see their formal practice as a way to become more their true selves, and not less.
Unfortunately, that view is alien to many people with cultural power.
The ‘Anti’ Culture
It is a misfortune because politics is suffering from its anti-spirituality. The recourse to public emotion has not been enough for us. Human beings have not found a deep enough well in the ‘Diana effect’ at the end of the 1990s during which Foucault’s impression of ‘man as a confessing animal’ came true. It has not satisfied them as an alternative to the Cartesian person who is a rational being, or the Romantic character.
It is spiritual lack that radicalised people have sought to reify with ready-made and artificially-clear ideological personae — though typically, our society has written these young people up as having problems that are ‘psycho-sexual’ in nature. Studies of radical politics have referred to status dissonance, cognitive dissonance (and analogies to way in which conversions can seek to resolve it): anything, rather than call the whole of these parts, ‘the spiritual’.
Surely spiritual lack also lies behind the same thing in its wider and shallower form: identity politics. Jamie Bartlett’s The People vs Tech discussed the ‘re-tribalisation’ of people on whom social democracy, the nation-state and welfarism had caved in. Before civilisation could evolve into a civilisation of love; before nation-states could agree between themselves some model of global governance: the society of nations has retreated to the tribe hurried long by self-reinforcing algorithms, echoes, filters, and siloes.
The religious have often missed the point — and missed their opening — by describing all this as ‘a God-shaped hole’. To the believer the abyss in the self has that shape; to the person who feels her own lack it is not clear it has such a thing as shape at all. Religions have overshot the mark in their response to these developments ever since they were characterised ‘New Age Spirituality’; they have failed to think themselves into their audience’s frame of mind. Faith schools at the millennium sometimes supposed that they should become the new parishes for schoolkids who saw peers and gangs and not parents as ‘father and mother’. These kids are now thirty-something.
A proto-fascist populist group like the KKK sees itself as crusading. Terrorists imagine they are holy warriors. A Belgian Nazi saw himself as a Teutonic Knight. The Baader Meinhoff saw themselves as a vanguard. These are not simply psychological, sexual, social or educational contortions, or examples of temperamental grandiosity, to be isolated as parts and treated as exceptions. Whether thrown up by matter or thrown up like matter itself, in an act of creation, this is torment in spirit. It creates unholy alliances between conservative religious who are attracted to religious statements by radicals but turn a blind eye to their real desires and political radicals who speak for religions they do not live by as a kind of wish-fulfilment.
Philistine Politics
If politics cannot engage with matters which people feel to be real, or really feel as though it were something else, simply because reductivist materialists do not believe that people should have this sense, then politics will fail to engage with society as it is becoming; which is another way to say, politics will fail.
Nor — and what follows should be a source of great hope — is this something never noticed before. Solzhenitsyn spoke about it, and quoted Dostoyevsky writing about it. In a Tsarist Russia of empty compromise and failed promise, in the face of ethical dilemmas admitting no solution, Dostoyevsky wrote, ‘Beauty will save the world’.
Beauty is not prettiness, to be reduced, trivialised and traded as parts of human being now are. That is not beauty. That is sensation, pleasure of affection, and a commodity. Even our intimate lives were colonised by the market generations ago, but that is not beauty. Beauty will save the world because the recognition of the beauty is understanding that something beyond this world of spare parts has entered this world. ‘You must change your life,’ as Apollo’s torso seemed to say to Rilke. Beauty is not found by click and recommendation. In Christian theology, beauty is the holiness of a person.
These are the last things politics expects to face, which now it must face. Theology and beauty seem to have nothing to do with politics, but radicalisation is a feedback loop reminding us that they must. Previously there was the grandeur of civil architecture and public art on which to agree: now these are contested. And it is very long time since liberalism decoupled policy and decision-making from the true and the good; while the beautiful was forgotten altogether. So it sounds like nonsense to talk of beauty in politics.
Commitment
But this is what, specifically, the possibility of beauty in politics must mean.
1. The dignity of the person as an individual, not an adjunct to the group. That means workers’ rights and people before profit. It means that the validity of the old cannot be decided by their cost to society. It means the rights of the unborn, in short: a stricter and more consistent notion of human rights than liberals are comfortable with. It is the holiness of the person which can still provide the mark for beauty for a secular post-liberal world.
2. Freedom of religion and thought. Consistent egalitarian rights is a commitment basic to a vision of life as something through which an individual is transformed, so that it makes sense again to speak of society being transformed and of a connection between generations. Subordinating the old and unborn to the wishes of the present does not do that. The idea of transformation in the person and the persistence of the spiritual despite physical death is not something that has to be agreed, but if the transformation of society is to mean very much, it is a notion that must be preserved. So religions must be free. Consistent egalitarian rights (1) require freedom of speech (2), not the safe-space legislation which so many liberals-in-name are adopting.
3. An end to the fetish for neatness and tidiness. Perfection does not make beauty. It is alienating, and a mask. Perhaps that is why Oscar Wilde wrote in a diary that beauty was the only thing that does not excite desire: he had perfection in mind. Politics would not exist, and religion cannot go on as live tradition, when everything is neat and tidy. Life itself revolts against neatness and trying to make all things neat forces us to live lies. The rationalist and totalitarian approaches are the same, and our present dystopia of fear and litigation, risk-aversion and regulation, is teaching us that.
The honest man’s the noblest work of God (Pope and Burns)
To read Sean O’Callaghan’s James Connolly or Ed Hussain’s The Islamist is to learn that spirituality and idealism cannot long co-exist with the spirit of hatred. It is also to realise that liberal democracy is rejected, just as identitarianism, identity politics or radicalisation is embraced, because modern liberals will not, as the original liberals — Quaker, Baptist, and perhaps even Thomas Aquinas — did, acknowledge that the spiritual is real and necessary to humanity. Legality does not trump love. Failures of institutional religion, real or perceived, whether those of the Catholic Church, Windrush evangelicals, or Sufi-inspired parents, are really distractions from the fundamental societal lack and our insistent human need for purpose in beauty — which remains. Solzhenitsyn thought that artists could provide it but found that in the West the arts are another commodity. Therefore that beauty must come from the transparent goodness — or as we used to say, holiness — of people. It is not just that ‘what the world needs’ as Thomas Merton wrote, ‘is a spiritual revolution’; that revolution would exist in the three fundamental commitments above.
