The Royal Martyr and the politics of love
As George Grant powerfully argued in his English-Speaking Justice, the dismal vision of Hobbesian and Lockean contractualism, in which justice "is conceived as the external convenience of contract" and "has nothing to do with the harmony of the inward life", was to empty of meaning the shared life of the commonweal:
Increasingly, the substance of the common good was expressed rationally only as contractual reason, to the exclusion of those loyalties which gave content to that good in more traditional societies.
Without "the denser loyalties of existence", in a public realm grown grey by the pale breath of Hobbes and Locke, we are left with the empty banality of the contract and the individual.
The Royal Martyr recalls us to those "denser loyalties", in which place and tradition, allegiance and vocation define the community of the realm. When, on the scaffold, Charles declared "I am the martyr of the people" he was giving voice to this understanding of the realm, of the commonweal. Allegiance and liberties are bound together richly, embodied in particular customs, institutions, persons. As Charles described it in 1642, "your Religion, your King, and the Laws of the Land".
The politics of love - a polity shaped by charity - is based upon such embodiment, rather than abstractions. It calls for allegiance to, communion with, and love for particular customs, institutions, persons, in which love of neighbour is embodied, with the responsibilities and duties of love not spectral abstractions but concrete practices.
The cult of the Royal Martyr is not, then, a form of eccentric historical re-enactment. It is a recognition that the politics of love, if it is to have meaning, is dependent on particular, embodied loves. In a passage from the Reflections which progressives since Paine have never seemed to comprehend, Burke captures the meaning of particular, embodied loves in the life of the polity when he addressed the indignities to which the Queen of France was subjected by the Revolutionary order:
But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that charity of honour ...
It is an example of what Milbank has described as the "very grace-given particularity" which Burke extols and defends. Of course, such "grace-give particularity" could and did exist within a political and social order which routinely failed to grasp and embody its fullest ramifications: that slave, peasant, and urban poor likewise had a "grace-given particularity" which should have called forth love and honour, and an ordering of justice, liberty, and economic goods which duly reflected such love and honour. It is here that we should heed Maurice Glasman's desire to "try to reconcile the revolutionary and Leveller John Lilburne with his contemporary Archbishop Laud in our defence of liberty and resistance to enclosures".
Commemorating the Royal Martyr is a means of resisting the age of "sophisters, economists, and calculators", of calling for a politics of particular, embodied love against the empty contractualism which dawned with his death. In a rather striking analysis, George Grant in 1974 pointed to signs of cultural desire for such particular, embodied love:
But is not the present retreat into the private realm not only a recognition of the impotence of the individual, but also a desire to leave the aridity of a realm where all relations are contractual, and to seek the comfort of the private where the supercontractual is possible? For example, the contemporary insistence on sexual life as the chief palliative of our existence is clearly more than a proper acceptance of sexuality after nineteenth century repressions. It is also a hunger and thirst for ecstatic relations which transcend the contractual. After all, mutual orgasmic intercourse cannot finally be brought under the rules of contract, because it takes one beyond the realm of bargains. Therefore human beings rely on its immediacy partially as a retreat from the arid world of public contractualism.
What alarms me about the strains of thought woven into this post — these ‘denser loyalties’, are all remarkably loyalties caught up in a hierarchy which functions as an aesthetically pleasing ontological apology for stratification by class, birth, and (ultimately too) race. It is where a pseudo-Christian theology can become an apology for ‘blood and soil’
ReplyDeleteAnd, behind that aesthetically pleasing facade, still lives violence and power. What your average Red Tory, or Blue Labourite, or devotee to the cult of Charles can seem never to forgive is the way modernity (and some forms of Protestantism) have stripped away the veneer to reveal that substrate.
It is testimony to the failure of the liberal political imagination that it cannot envisage what Grant meant by "denser loyalties" other than stratification by class, birth, and race. The loyalties expressed in and emerging from place, civitas, patria, shared history, and common allegiance are swept aside, leaving only class, birth and race or individualism. Perhaps if one was looking for an explanation for the exhaustion of contemporary liberalism, it is to be found here.
DeleteOf course, such critiques of post-liberal thinking are themselves caught up in a justification for a neo-liberal order and its injustices and violence. For Reason, the Market, and Individualism are themselves a veneer for greed, inequalities, and class division. Mindful that the social and cultural expressions of Reason, the Market, and Individualism wreak havoc amongst the most-deprived communities, the critics of post-liberalism are often apologists for an order characterised by profound injustices.
And having swept aside "denser loyalties", liberal political theology often itself becomes the handmaiden to vile ideologies of Left and Right, as the naked public realm is exposed and people seek for meaning beyond profit and autonomy. Thus the aesthetically ugly facade of Reason, Market, and Individualism breaks down before darker passions, whether fascist or communist.
Perhaps this is why the commemoration of the Royal Martyr - or, for example, recalling the martyrs of the Vendee - provokes such angst from opponents: they cannot forgive that commemorating such events is a reminder of the violence and injustice of the very system that their critique supports.
I am very open to a serious, meaningful discussion of post-liberal political theologies and their contrast with liberal political theologies. However, accusations of crypto-fascism are not a serious, meaningful discussion, not least when the effect is to give a theological defence of a political, economic, and cultural order marked by spiritual emptiness and profound injustices .