On Rights Activism & Its Reactionary Nature

'Rights' are a fiction in a state of nature. If a 'right' appears on the scene, it should really be interpreted as a demand for something that someone has not got. It is a creation of the social. An appeal to some moral high ground on the basis of 'rights' is generally a rallying call for those who have not got something that others have (freedom, decent healthcare or whatever) to get together and force those with more power to concede to their demands. So far, so good.

But, at a certain point in history, people who see that others have not got something that they have and, for whatever psychological reason, think that these others should have what they have, will become 'rights activists'. They will try to grab yet higher moral ground for 'rights' as an abstract concept not apparently directly related to their own interest. This, of course, masks the interest they come to have in activism as an identity and as a racket for getting funds, ultimately from the wider population as taxpayers and consumers, redirected into their own pockets. This secondary development of rights ideology is dubious intellectually. A struggle for power cloaked in the language of rights (a healthy business psychologically and politically) becomes displaced by a more disturbing infantilisation of others using that same language. This secondary form of activism denies the opportunity for those without rights, through struggle in their own interest, to learn self-reliance and pride in their own liberatory achievements.

The final decadent phase of rights activism is when the activists have completely displaced the 'have-nots', denying them the right to engage in struggle at all, claiming that the 'have-nots' are not educated or resourced enough to represent themselves and so must be represented absolutely by NGOs or international organisations. 'Have-nots' become no more than passive subjects of well-meaning charity. The agenda is conservative. Much of human history has involved dynamic acts of resistance by the 'have-nots', often violent and self-interested - the myth of Spartacus tends to hide the fact that his probable intention was not to liberate all slaves but to liberate his community of slaves and enslave the enslavers. This politics of struggle became troublesome when a later theoretical equality based on the next world was organised by socialists and anarchists into an ideology of struggle and equality in this world. This had two major elements.

The first and most important element was the pragmatic emergence of effective resistance organisations amongst the politically and economically weak on their own account just before and in the wake of trade and industrialisation - in dissident churches, in pirates and autonomists as described by Hakim Bey, in trades unions and co-operatives and in political parties embedded in a community of relative have-nots and designed not to help people into the fairy-land of heaven but to build Jerusalem on earth.

The second element was a troubled and sympathetic bourgeoisie, increasingly added to by the sons and daughters of 'have-nots' who could hybridise the culture of the middle classes and the struggle for power within the community into political leaderships of transformative power. By the early twentieth century we had roughly five major types of well-organised liberatory struggle competing to transform the condition of the masses alongside the actual winner of that struggle, the free consumer market - i) the organised labour movement with its political party links, ii) the hybridised worker-intellectual party of European social democracy, iii) communism where a cadre of intellectuals act as bridge to our post-modern Leftism, iv) anarcho-syndicalism which subordinated the intellectual to the worker (at least in principle) and v) anti-imperialist liberatory movements which further hybridised what was going on in Europe.

The first type is now decadent - a hollowed out shell with only attenuated tribal community links run by cadres of professional politicians who have shifted from the politics of community to that of identity, from economic redistribution to cultural politics. The second type is taking much the same trajectory but placing its trust in bureaucratic and corporate top-down relations with the masses that mimic that of communism. Communism is almost defunct. Anarchism is now merely a ludic form of performance art for deracinated urban types. And the anti-imperialist movements have nearly all degenerated into statist rule from above, little empires in themselves, or murky and increasingly nasty traditionalisms. In short, the liberatory Left has virtually collapsed to the point where the best it can do now is emote in useless demonstrations, vigils and petitions or raise money and undertake volunteer work to save increasingly non-human idealistic visions such as that of the environment or those of grand abstract projects for poverty alleviation that do far less in a year than a wealthy capitalist can do in a day through a philanthropic foundation. Indeed, if anything, it is the super-rich that seem to be saving the world and not Leftists or the Progressive State.

The organised mass of the population is no longer organised because it no longer needs to be organised in the so-called free world and is not permitted to be organised outside it. Most people are broadly free in the free world with the only daily threat to them (as opposed to the manufactured ones that are convenient for the 'deep state') being the incompetence or malice of the very State that their ancestors had sought to capture in order to create Jerusalem. This leaves the other second element without a purpose - a huge minority of educated (to graduate level) middle class people who are virtually unemployable in the productive sector (or only in its more 'creative' services side) and who are desperate for meaning in their lives. It is this class that has decided for the last thirty years or so to take up the 'white man's burden' and fight for the rights of others - and all very conveniently for the conservative forces that still have all the rights that matter such as access to power and resources. So long as liberal bourgeois intellectuals are running around speaking for the 'voiceless', and so long as any meaningful struggle by the 'voiceless' can immediately be labelled as terrorism once it crosses all those boundaries that were crossed in the past to build the modern world, then the 'voiceless' can be neutered and contained as threats. By speaking for such people, the post-modern intellectual has given those masses no opportunity to speak for themselves or to learn by doing - through struggle.

But what if we stopped demanding specific 'rights' and simply asked to be respected as equal persons who are subject to no one. If we did this, the struggle for 'rights' ends when we have organised ourselves. We do not need activists and we do not need experts. We can return cynically and appropriately to rights as cover for our interests as persons and learn to understand that other persons have equal rights insofar as they are persons and not identity fictions. We do not then need liberators because we liberate ourselves. Those who appear beyond the hope of liberty grow, as we did two hundred or so years ago, into their own liberators from within in a struggle that gives a community dignity and respect. Better this than being infantilised by a bunch of outside neurotics wanting to express themselves narcissistically through their ownership of others' claims and aspirations.

Let us give a very contemporary example of the villainous call and response effects of liberal rights activism in the world. The aggressive drive for liberal rights has made the rights activists and their young middle class heroes and heroines in the field feel good but what has it actually achieved. It has put obscurantist, authoritarian and traditionalist regimes on their guard and allowed them to present universal values as imperialist and colonialist. The drive to impose such values by force fifteen years ago self-evidently strengthened traditionalism and resulted in its winning over of indigenous masses or a good proportion of them to conservative values. In many parts of the Middle East, dynastic rulers are now actually more progressive than the general population. Compare thissituation with the liberatory Marxist discourse in the Middle East of the 1970s or even the secularist discourse of Arab nationalism with the dominant discourse nearly fifty years later. These are the same people in the same culture but they have gone backwards in time as a defensive move against incursions that undermined local core values and identity. Self respect came to demand obscurantism over decency. Now the anti-imperialist struggle is directed as bloody terrorism against those same liberal intellectuals who most promoted those apparently universal values. In short, it is the blundering of liberals that has created the current terrorist threat.

Another example comes from Russia and is not so different from the provocations of Charlie Hebdo. Femen did not act to persuade through rational argument but purported to represent freedom without the consent or understanding of those desperate to be sexually free. They performed filthy mannered 'artistic' events that gave good local cultural cause for repression to the Right. By all means say that you think religion is oppressive or nonsene (I do all the time) but do not be so narcissistic as to go into a church, a sacred place to others, and behave in an offensive manner - it is like a drunk insulting a man's portly partner in a pub and calling her obese. It would just be bad manners and the drunk is lucky if the man whose partner they insult is the sort of man who will quietly get up and leave - the likelihood of the drunk being punched on the nose is equally high and the drunk should take responsibility for his behaviour. In Russia itself, the lives of gay people are now infintely more unpleasant and potential liberatory progress has been reversed because of the narcissism of a bunch of 'artists' and 'intellectuals'. Im this case, I stand with the ordinary gay guy in Novosibirsk and the ordinary Muslim in Homs against the egoism of the abstract thinker. So, "non, je ne suis Charlie parceque Charlie est un utter prat."

What we have in these cases is an anomic bourgeois liberal intellectual class that has no functional role in our society other than one based on 'performing' in order to be noticed like a court jester or ducking and diving to find ways to pay for their lifestyle by becoming a circus seal before the media and the sources of funds. It may be a narcissistic artistic performance with allegedly political ends or it may be the performance of the institutional network that gets funds because it really does no more than entertain or meet the agenda of our own type of fanatic or it may be the NGO that has turned itself into a mini-enterprise seeking funds from states and philanthropists to ensure its activists can live the lifestyle it craves. Whatever it is all must 'feel' that they are 'doing the right thing' (even though their blunderings are often doing the wrong thing and worsening the total situation). Occupy is the sad epitome of this mentality. I find it heartening that, though naive in this matter, Russell Brand is at least trying to think through what is going on on his own account - if only more did.

These people are, quite literally, decadent - neither courageous enough to enjoy the fruits of their class status nor honourable enough to donate their skills effectively to help the masses self-organise and transform society on their own terms in a political act of will. They are deracinated third rate minds who mistake their own abstract concepts and theory for considered evidence-based thought and who evade the reality of their situation - as parasites on a surprisingly effective and well run free consumer society that could be better. If we could break free of these bourgeois liberals, all of us, we certainly would not then need them to rule in our interest. We would become persons.

A Note on the Heretical & the Political

In the last posting, I referred in passing to Versluis' The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism (2008) and we should dwell a little on its insights.

By taking the most extreme form of the heretical (from a post-Nicaean standpoint), that point where sexuality and spirituality commingle, he highlights what it is that, in practice, caused the authorities to engage in murder and torture, to destroy people whose role in society was otherwise relatively marginal.

Of course, there were moments when perhaps heresy might actually have overturned established order but these are very rare - in the confusion leading up to the Council of Nicaea perhaps, in the seizure of tracts of Southern France during the period of the Cathars, in the marginal lands where competing Christianities, Judaism and Islam fought for dominance.

But, for most of history right up until the fundamentalist onslaught on different sexualities across the world today, the amount of effort placed by authority in extirpating heretics is analogous only to that of homeland security loons in dealing with 'terrorists' and political dissidents and communist purgation.

When a real threat appeared, as in the case of Cathars, the Church had no compunction in turning genocidal. From whence does this appalling fear of what hurts no other derive?

Of course, there may be psycho-sexual motives behind all this. After all, many conventional religious were rutting away like mad despite their claims to celibacy. But there are also cultural and sociological reasons that are worth considering as having parallels even today.

Buddhism and left hand path Hinduism did construct a form of accomodation between sexuality and 'spirituality' but usually only on very exploitative terms towards minors. I have covered this in a review of Faure's Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality elsewhere. The West proved much more rigid.

First, the dissidents actively rejected Church bureaucracy and hierarchy. In so doing, they implicitly (though there is no real evidence of any explicit intention) rejected the alliance between Church and the magisterium.

The threat of dissent was political - secular authority might well do to conventional catholicism what the Catholic Church had done to paganism viz. stuff it to cut a deal. Any rival operations had to be cut out of the game as ruthlessly as Al Capone wanted Bugs Moran dealt with.

Since condemnation of pagan sexuality was central to the Church's claim that only it could restore order in the febrile atmosphere in and following the third century AD, then any bunch of dissidents who had an alternative plan involving the maintenance of order through expression of that same suppressed sexuality could be a material threat to its institutional power.

Second, they embraced the 'natural' (meaning what men do naturally and the wildness of territory beyond the reach of the bureaucracy of the day). This too had political implications. The christian, like the communist and the late-imperial victorian, model was totalitarian and this ultimately meant it must be about sex.

It was no accident that the members of a Gnostic sect were referred to as being 'brigands' (though they stole from no-one) and that the vicious polemicist Clement of Alexandria declined to give further details of the beliefs of Carpocrates lest he 'oufit a pirate ship'.

They were literally 'outlaws' ... or 'terrorists' perhaps. But since they were not a threat to property (the main concern of secular authority), what was the brigandage and piracy directed at?

Why, self-evidently, a threat that would 'thieve' ideological control from the aggressive elite group, the spiritual New Labour-like coup d'esprit of the Catholic intellectual leadership based on a class of priests and bishops who did not care for another round of martydoms.

Like Bolsheviks in 1918, the struggle was won and the wanderings and exiles must now cease. They had gambled at the table and won and were not going to risk their winnings again.

Third, the dissidents accepted the spiritual equality of women, not just as able to attain 'gnosis' through the intermediation of priests but as direct and equal communicants with the divine.

Note that this is not the rivalling of some mythic patriarchy with some countervailing matriarchy as some more dim-witted modern feminists have asserted but a far more profound sense of anti-authoritian 'gnosis'. It was not act an act of feminism but of personism or of autonomism within a community of the like-minded.

The essence of the rebellion against the Church was individualist and so egalitarian in a wholly different way from the slave-religion of the Catholic Church which treated all souls as equal under its leadership, much like the Party in the Soviet Union.

Political and spritual universalisms always contain the seeds of totalitarian social terror as we see today in the universalism of a degenerate liberal enlightenment.

Finally, the heretics' antinomianism, not libertinism but that sense that a 'gnosis' had created an internal moral authority that was higher than any law or regulation dictated from above by Church or State - or indeed community, presented a bridge over which the Church could march its ideological troops into the secular castle and demand action and thereby assert its ability to 'cut deals'.

After all, the alliance between Church and magisterium was always contingent on delivery of order at low cost through ideology (as the Lutheran revolt was to show in its relation to peasant revolts). The communism, terrorism and heresy of the Munster Anabaptists was a 'gift from heaven' in that respect.

The ideological brigandage was of no intrinsic concern to property (since most of these mystics most of the time were rarely communistic in the expropriatory sense) and European aristocratic society was often perfectly happy with strong women in positions of influence and power ...

... no, the secret to the murder and torture which, if the secular authorities did not do themselves then they permitted to be done on their territory despite public order risks, came down to the shared interest of both Church and property in holding down the individual and ensuring that he or she remained unthreatening and submissive.

It was the antinomianism that did for the the heretics of the past much as it does for today's heretics. The relationship between sexual mysticism and mainstream culture is thus highly political and parallels the relationship between radical political dissent, radical sexual freedom and the State today.

The modern political dissenter rejects the self-serving structures of liberal constitutionalism, operates outside the institutional structures of the elite and is egalitarian across gender and class but none of this is important when set against his or her growing 'antinomian' tendency - against the possibility that the State no longer has 'legitimacy', the right to make and enforce laws. And resentment of bad laws is growing ...

It is the crisis of our time now that anyone can be a sexual mystic without a knock on the door at five in the morning from a Dominican friar - but that economic failure, uncertainty, unending apparently inexplicable and murderous small wars and loss of identity are creating a potent brew in which the political dissident is always going to be one sentence from being classed a 'terrorist' ...

... and always at the edge of things is the system's longing for some all-encompassing ideology that will set boundaries. In the West, it is a manipulative NGO-led universalism that is now required to clean up the mess left by globalisation and it is this ideology that is discovering sexuality as a problem and not an opportunity.