A "Cultural Marxist" Critique of Logos Rising
/“This is the most important book of the twenty-first century. ”
Professor David Hawkes teaches English at Arizona State University. Click Here for full Bio.
This is the most important book of the twenty-first century. E. Michael Jones has thrown down an intellectual gauntlet that cannot honorably be ignored. He has written the definitive defense of logos, and for half a century anti-logocentrism has been the veritable shibboleth of the cultural left. Since the 1960s, rebellion against logos has inspired a whole new kind of politics: “identity politics,” the politics of the personal, a revolution within the psyche radical enough to compensate, some would say, for the conspicuous failure of external, political revolution. Logos Rising argues that the allegedly liberating politics of the Boomer generation represents nothing more than self-imposed mental slavery. Many intellectuals who consider themselves cultural leftists will be tempted simply to ignore this book and hope that it goes away. That would be a very bad mistake. The ideas it expresses will not disperse if ignored; they will gather and spread rapidly. The questions it asks must be answered, not dodged. Aufhebung comes only from negation. It is extremely important that the cultural left engage with this book.
“Many intellectuals who consider themselves cultural leftists will be tempted simply to ignore this book and hope that it goes away. That would be a very bad mistake. ”
There remains however one obvious obstacle to such engagement. It is not so much that Jones refuses to acknowledge the rhetorical conventions governing respectable intellectual discourse in the twenty-first century USA. He openly despises them, explicitly holds them in contempt, and ostentatiously demonstrates his disdain for them at every possible opportunity. Deeply aggrieved by his past treatment at the hands of academia’s regnant powers, he uses this book to settle old scores with a finality that is sometimes slightly scary. But this is not personal spite on his part. Almost alone among modern thinkers, whether religious or secular, Jones is aware of causal correspondences between the macrocosms of kosmos and polis on the one hand, and the microcosms of oikos and anima on the other. The personal is not merely political for him; it is theological. The neo-Platonic correspondences he discovers between the progressive self-revelation of Zeitgeist and the patterns of individual lives elevate his motives far above petty revenge.
“Deeply aggrieved by his past treatment at the hands of academia’s regnant powers, he uses this book to settle old scores with a finality that is sometimes slightly scary.”
Having accepted a tenure-track position at a nominally Catholic college at the height of the 1970s academic Kulturkampf, Jones innocently espoused his traditionalist moral opinions in public, and in print. Apparently to his surprise, he met no suave discussion but the instant, white-hot, wild fury of newly-awakened academic feminism. According to the detailed, intricate account Jones gives here, the department’s practitioners of identity politics conspired to have him fired just one year into his contract. As a dialectician who understands the constructive function of negation, Jones has been retaliating with unrelenting, passionate invective ever since. He does not so much disregard the rule-book of academic discursive propriety as tear it into tiny pieces, trample it into the mire and dance an Irish jig upon its grave. As a result, this book will not, by and large, be received by professional intellectuals with rational debate but with contemptuous, white-lipped silence.
“It is not so much that Jones refuses to acknowledge the rhetorical conventions governing respectable intellectual discourse in the twenty-first century USA. He openly despises them, explicitly holds them in contempt, and ostentatiously demonstrates his disdain for them at every possible opportunity.”
That is if it is received at all. The term samizdat is anachronistic and hyperbolic, but it is nevertheless true that, in the twenty-first century Western world, strenuous efforts are made to prevent people from reading certain texts altogether. We are faced with a cultural situation unprecedented since the British establishment’s attempt to suppress the early “punk rock” movement over forty years ago. Avant-garde work of clearly epochal significance is becoming impossible to access through mainstream channels. When it is not actually prohibited by law, institutional pressure or financial force, significant social and cultural costs are imposed on its consumption. Determined, concerted efforts are being made to restrict or prevent its circulation. As it was in 1976, this is a fascinating and important state of affairs in itself. Now as then, the breadth of the generation gap makes it easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is strange, but true, that this visibly monumental book currently lies so far beyond the academic Pale that it is effectively on Craggy Island.
“He does not so much disregard the rule-book of academic discursive propriety as tear it into tiny pieces, trample it into the mire and dance an Irish jig upon its grave. As a result, this book will not, by and large, be received by professional intellectuals with rational debate but with contemptuous, white-lipped silence. ”
And there, until recently, it might have remained, in windswept, parochial exile. Until the last decade, Jones’ ostracism from secular intellectual discourse must have seemed permanent. He was virtually unknown among mainstream academics, his opinions were mainly of local interest to a faction within the Roman Catholic Church, the religious faculty of Notre Dame University and the residents of South Bend, Indiana. Since then however, the explosion in the range, scope and power of social media has radically reduced the distance between the intellectual metropolis and the periphery. Much professional academic work in the humanities is now so over-specialized that it does not illuminate but obscures the overall condition of the social totality. Meanwhile, beyond the ivory tower, the wider implications of Jones’ apparently sectarian fulminations have suddenly been revealed to a global audience, and the mainstream establishment has been shocked into attempts at suppression so belated as to be risibly transparent.
Giambattista Vico
In truth, the genie is long gone from the bottle. Jones’ great intellectual hero is Giambattista Vico, who was famously frustrated in his attempt to win the chair of jurisprudence at the University of Naples. The setback turned out to be providential however, for it forced him to popularize his ideas by abandoning Latin, “the language of the academic world that would have none of him.” Jones has similarly abandoned the language of the academic world that would have none of him. Not just the language either. The frustration of Vico’s professional ambition unleashed in him a wholly new order of creativity. He re-introduced historicism into Western thought, which he rescued from Cartesian stasis, and he would rank as a precursor of Hegel, had he not favored infinite recurrence rather than narrative teleology. Vico believed that, having achieved an apogee of progress, civilization went through a ricorso, a degenerative counter-cycle, characterized by the simultaneous degeneration of polis and psyche. Such economists as Giovanni Arrighi have recently made similar arguments regarding the cyclical nature of finance capitalism. Such pessimism seems incompatible with Christian teleology, and Jones readily admits as much: “The ricorso is without a doubt the most problematic aspect of Vico’s philosophy of history. Its pessimism refutes the sense that Christ conferred on history a beginning, a middle, and an end and replaces it with the eternal cycles of paganism.”
The problem with that however is that, throughout this book, Jones drops heavy hints that the twenty-first century USA is now experiencing just such a ricorso. He reminds us that, when the mentality of Rome’s citizens degenerated into “‘riflessiva malizia,’ or self-aware malice, they end up being ruled by ‘dissolute and shameless madmen, like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian’ because the barbarism of reflection will tolerate no kind of leader other than one who mirrors their own disordered passions.” The allusion to our own day is hard to miss, and some readers will conclude that Jones sees history as a Viconian or Yeatsian cycle of recurrent, widening gyres. The alternative is that he believes that the rise of leaders whose personal depravity expresses the popular condition is a harbinger of Apocalypse.
But why in that case does Jones entitle his book Logos Rising? What it actually describes is logos becoming obscure, logos concealing itself from psyche and detaching itself from nous, logos fleeing and hiding its face among a crowd of stars. A logos absconditus, in fact. Jones traces in intricate detail the birth, growth, spread, reverses and resurgences of logos throughout history and philosophy, and he believes that its general trajectory is always upwards. Nevertheless, this book seems intended to call attention not so much to “logos rising” as to the currently absolute, tyrannical reign of anti-logos.
“.... it will surely not be long before the startling, incendiary ideas expressed in this book reach the ideological mainland. The questions raised here cannot be ignored or dismissed. ”
Despite that tyranny’s best efforts it will surely not be long before the startling, incendiary ideas expressed in this book reach the ideological mainland. The questions raised here cannot be ignored or dismissed. They are often unpleasant to consider, but they are the most important questions of our time, and Jones formulates them with a cogency and coherence drawn from his profound and—among public intellectuals—unrivalled knowledge of the Aristotelian, Thomistic and Hegelian philosophical traditions, which he has fused into a remarkable, original and coherent synthesis. Ironically and probably unconsciously assimilating much of the postmodernism he despises into his dogmatic, traditional Catholicism, Jones has concocted a heady brew from which abstinence is impossible. Shallow draughts will seriously intoxicate the brain. The only inoculation against misunderstanding is to drink deeply. Everyone should read this book. Many people should read it twice.
“Everyone should read this book. Many people should read it twice.”
Usury, Sodomy, and Idolatry in Postmodernity
As a fresh-faced, newly-minted Ph.D. I once found myself alone, in a corner, at a cocktail party, with the world-famous postmodernist philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard. In awe-struck panic and without the slightest preliminary, I broke the ice by asking him whether he believed in God. Turning to me with magnificent Gallic condescension he merely shrugged: “Bah, of course, like everybody.” My jaw must have dropped, for he leant in close. “Son, when you have an enemy,” he prodded me emphatically in the chest, “and for me, capital is the enemy,” a prod now emphasizing his every word, “it is best not to under-estimate him.” Silence ensued, and would likely still be ensuing, had the gracious hostess not observed my discomfiture and swooped to the rescue. At that time, Lyotard was possibly the most famous postmodernist in the world, he had practically invented the term “postmodernism,” and it was hard for me to imagine anyone less likely to say what he had just said. He was dead within two years, so the opportunity to ask him to expand never arose. But I pondered his meaning for many years, and eventually I reached a conclusion.
What I now think he meant was this. Logos is what makes it possible for us to have any recognizably human experience. In this sense, logos creates the world “for us” (as Kant would put it). Financial capital, the power that rules the postmodern world, is the dialectical antithesis of logos, because it both depends upon and inculcates the illusion that representation is non-referential. The autonomous reproduction of financial signs, once known as “usury,” removes the guarantor that appearances are meaningful. It assumes that money is a sign that breeds independently, without any reference to the external, natural world. Although this assumption is certainly manifested in what we call the “economy,” it is by no means limited to that “sphere” of life. On the contrary, the assumption that representation does not represent—that it is in fact not representation at all but reality—is the guiding belief that dominates every aspect of postmodern experience. Lyotard, I now think, was telling me that belief was Satanic and that logos is its only possible antidote. I think E. Michael Jones is telling us the same thing.
It is obvious that our age is dominated by usury, sodomy and idolatry. It is equally obvious that these are merely surface manifestations of a more general war on logos that permeates all postmodern culture. Exposing the operations of anti-logos is the most pressing task facing intellectuals today, and in Logos Rising Jones attacks it with ferocious energy, breathtaking range and Promethean ambition. Yet in my opinion he misses the most obvious explanation for the current hegemony of anti-logos, and in this review I will attempt to show how and why he does so. In my view, Western thought takes a tragic wrong turn when it identifies the enemies of logos with specific groups of people. Usury for example is often identified with “Jews,” sodomy with “homosexuals,” and idolatry with the “natives” of the colonized world—and with the Catholic Irish first and most of all. We must now consign such prejudices permanently to the past. We must proclaim the truth that all human beings are equally vulnerable to anti-logos. The critique of anti-logos should be aimed instead at abstract, conceptual forces that manifest themselves within the minds of all people.
Until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in fact, that is precisely how usury, sodomy and idolatry were regarded. The term “usury” has historically designated a vast range of economic sharp practice, including the mere intention to make illegitimate or excessive profit, and often including the payment as well as the taking of interest. It was once regarded as a well-nigh universal temptation. But as the monetarization of the modern European economy raised usury from the gutter to the Guildhall, a socially convenient fantasy developed to suggest that such practices were the preserve of pariah groups. A literalist interpretation of the Deuteronomic prohibition made it seem plausible that Jews permitted themselves to take interest from Christians. At the same time, legal prohibitions effectively coerced Europe’s Jews into money-lending, while simultaneously restricting that profession to them in theory, though certainly not in practice. As a result the terms “usury” and “Jew” remained virtually synonymous through the century of Trollope, Marx, Dostoevsky and Wilde. During the modern age, then, usury disguised its true nature by becoming associated with a particular group of people.
The vital point that Jones neglects is that usury, sodomy and idolatry develop, flourish and recede together, because they are different aspects of one, identical underlying tendency: the usurpation of performative power by systems of representation. Because he does not see that performative representation is the root cause of anti-logocentrism, he naturally tends to blame the symptoms. For example, the Platonic tradition regards the body as the sign of the soul. Until the modern age, the term “sodomy” designated any erotic focus on the body to the exclusion of the soul, regardless of the body’s gender or that of its observer. Sodomy could include any act of non-reproductive sexuality, or “concupiscence,” including masturbation. As with usury, it was not something practiced by a particularly nefarious group of enthusiasts, but a vice to which the postlapsarian psyche was inevitably prey. The idea that non-reproductive sexuality might be restricted to groups known as “homosexuals,” “gays” or “queers” is specific to modernity. Like usury, sodomy successfully concealed itself among a specific group of people during the modern era.
Sodomy and usury are both forms of idolatry, which is the dialectical antithesis of monotheism. The Decalogue announces idolatry as the sin from which all others flow. Incessant battle against idolatry is the literal topic of the Old Testament, and the figurative topic of the New Testament. Idolatry or shirk is Islam’s most heinous sin (closely followed by riba, or usury, and zina, or sodomy). Idolatry is the error committed by the prisoners in Plato’s cave. In the rhetorical form of “sophistry” it is philosophy’s main opponent and commodification’s main abettor: it manipulates rhetorical images to performative effect in return for money. Verbal idolatry regards words as things, not as signs, and employs them for the purposes of connotation rather than for denotation. Idolatry is equated with covetousness by Plato and Paul alike, and they both identify covetousness as the root of all evil. The recurrent hegemony of idolatry, and the iconoclasm always provoked in response, produced centuries-long internecine conflicts throughout Christendom from seventh-century Byzantium to seventeenth-century Massachusetts. In the process, however, the meaning of “idolatry” underwent a change. It ceased to designate a universal, ineradicable tendency of fallen humanity, and became instead a set of rituals performed by “idolaters,” who were predictably identified as the subjugated “natives” of the colonized world. Like usury and sodomy, idolatry passed the modern era successfully disguised among specific groups of people.
The Psyche
In each of these three cases, then, we see that what antiquity, the middle ages and early modernity regarded as abstract, universal psychological temptations were, by the European Enlightenment, firmly associated both legally and in the popular imagination with readily-defined, easily-visible, groups of people, who were then conveniently available to become the objects of the odium that these practices can provoke. Yet as Jones demonstrates in this book’s gripping early chapters, the lesson taught by both major forms of Western logocentrism—Hebrew monotheism and Hellenic rationalism—is that the conflict between truth and falsehood, like the homologous struggle between good and evil, is not something to be decided between warring groups of people, like a pitched battle or a football match. It can be decided only within the psyche. Only in the psyche does money reproduce; only in the psyche does an icon become an idol; only in the psyche is spiritual caritas transformed into carnal cupiditas. That is why we must identify the fundamental problem as performative representation in general, for it is obvious that representation can become performative—that signs can do things—only within the psyche.
In my opinion, then, the postmodern condition makes it clear that we must stop identifying sodomy with “sodomites,” usury with “usurers” and idolatry with “idolaters.” We should also stop identifying capital with such groups of people as “capitalists,” the “bourgeoisie” or “the 1%.” It is true that, between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, “labor-power” was incarnated in an empirically-identifiable social class: the “proletariat.” At the same time, the symbolic, alienated form of labor-power, or “capital,” was readily identifiable with another, well-defined group of people: the “bourgeoisie.” Each of these classes was instantly recognizable. They looked, behaved and thought completely differently from each other, but they displayed and experienced a striking degree of unanimity among themselves. The proletariat and the bourgeoisie were thus obviously, economically, ideologically and dialectically in a relationship of contradiction. Class struggle, either physical or intellectual, was the inevitable result, and the battle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat dominated European history for two centuries.
In postmodernity, however, the case is altered. Most people in Western societies receive income from both wage-labor and from some form of capital investment, if only a mortgage, retirement or savings account: they are objectively both bourgeois and proletarian. That does not alter the fact that labor-power and capital are in dialectical contradiction, for capital is the symbolic, objectified manifestation of labor-power. It is the reification of subjective human activity considered as a whole. It is the antithesis of human life itself. Today, however, the contradiction between objective capital and subjective labor-power is no longer expressed in terms of class. It remains a contradiction, but it is now internalized within the psyche. Just as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat looked, spoke and behaved completely differently, they also thought very differently. It follows that, to the degree that the contradictory economic positions occupied by the “proletarian” and the “bourgeois” coalesce within the same individual, the individual’s psyche will also fragment and divide. The consequences of this fragmented, disintegrated, incoherent subjectivity have been visible throughout Western society for many years, and Jones documents many of them with jarring intensity here.
The most obvious psychological trauma suffered by the postmodern West is false objectification. Throughout history, false objectification has often been characteristic of both slaves and proletarians: it is a mode of thought induced in people who have been commodified. It is manifested externally in a mode of behavior known to the Western tradition as “carnal,” “fleshly” or “materialist.” Usury, sodomy and idolatry are prominent forms taken by this mode of behavior in postmodernity, but they are certainly not unique to our age, still less to any specific class, race, religion or gender. They emanate ineluctably from the postlapsarian human psyche. Although made manifest in what we call different “spheres” of experience, they are united by their systematic reversal of the Western tradition’s constitutive ethical polarities. Usury, sodomy and idolatry collapse essence into appearance, nature into custom, substance into accident, and subject into object. They are reductive patterns of thought and behavior. They abolish logical oppositions, not by logic, but by the violent, irrational reduction of one side of a binary opposition to the other.
In the recent past, those who imagine they are fighting against usury, sodomy and idolatry have often engaged in violent, physical attacks on groups of people believed to practice them. Our comprehension of those phenomena has become distorted in consequence. We may hope that such violence, and the kind of emotion it produces, are now things of the past. Physical class warfare is unnecessary in any case, for the systems of symbols that rule over us can certainly be deconstructed within the mind. Take only the most obvious instance: the allegedly omnipotent, tyrannical symbol known as “money” or, more accurately, “financial value.” A moment’s thought will show that it has no material or physical existence. And yet it rules the world. What is the source of its power?
The rule of usury, sodomy and idolatry means that we live under the tyranny of the performative sign. The postmodern era is defined by the infantile belief—if “belief” is the right word for so entirely unreflective a supposition—that appearance is reality. Even educated adults now instinctively assume, as an ontological default position, that sense-perception gives unmediated access to the “real world.” As a result, appearance displaces essence throughout every aspect of experience. Identical ideological effects occur everywhere, despite increasingly futile attempts to divide life into such discrete categories as “economic,” “sexual,” “aesthetic,” “ethical” or “semiotic.” Precisely the same process occurs in each of these “fields,” because they are all constructed from the same raw material: representation. All human experience is constructed out of signs. When signs become indistinguishable from referents, they cease to be signs. They become agents. In a process parodied in Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, symbols start to act, to perform, and to abandon their referential function: “Die ich rief, die Geister, / Werd’ ich nun nicht los.” Abandoning reason to luxuriate in jouissance, signs lose their meaning. They forget their own conditions of possibility. They no longer refer to logos. The performative sign is, in fact, the dialectical antithesis of logos, and it rules postmodernity, as Jones likes to point out, with a rod of iron.
A New Map
E. Michael Jones is often described, and dismissed, as a “right-wing” thinker. Yet the idea that politics is a spectrum running from “left” to “right,” and thus susceptible to “radical” or “moderate” opinion, dates only from the French Revolution. It was initially invoked to describe the seating arrangements of the National Assembly, where the King Louis XVI’s most loyal supporters sat on his immediate right-hand side and his most dedicated opponents on his far left. During the modern epoch, the dialectically opposed forces of capital and labor-power temporarily coalesced into two groups of people, or social classes, known as the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.” For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, support for the economic interests of the proletariat was widely regarded as a “left-wing” position, while the interests of the bourgeoisie were generally advanced by parties of the “right-wing.”
But the notion that shades of political opinion can be expressed by means of a spatial metaphor grew less plausible as the third millennium approached. The rise of autonomously performative representation in economics, technology, linguistics, philosophy, sexuality, entertainment and throughout everyday life inevitably deconstructed the ancient binary opposition between phusis and nomos. To the extent that the eidola of sense-perception blocked the access of nous to logos, personal identity was no longer experienced as a natural condition, inherited at birth and sustained throughout life. Identity came rather to seem cultural, customary, something that one performed rather than something that one was, a matter of nomos rather than of phusis, to be defined by eidola rather than by logos. As this understanding of character took root in the popular mind, the concept of a political spectrum based on objective social class began to recede. In its place grew up an “identity politics,” which assumed that personal identity is artificially “constructed” by external, symbolic forces such as linguistic representation, visual signs and financial status.
Whatever is constructed can be deconstructed. As this began to dawn on the theorists of identity politics over the 1970s and ’80s, a previously undreamt-of but apparently wide-open route to power hove into view. Derided by conservatives today as “Social Justice Warriors,” the advocates of identity politics are also denounced as “cultural Marxists.” But no-one suggests that their “long march through the institutions” of cultural, social and academic influence was undertaken in the economic interests of the proletariat. Jones is hardly foolish enough to make that mistake. Instead he argues that first women, then African-Americans, then homosexuals, and now the transgender movement, have replaced the industrial proletariat as the vanguard promoted by revolutionary intellectuals. Having seen its economic theories refuted by history, the political left shifted its subversive energies onto the cultural sphere. In the area of civil society, claims Jones, the cultural left has achieved remarkable success: the integration of women into the workforce, the legalization of contraception and abortion, the introduction of homosexuality into mainstream society, the imposition of legal prohibition and social taboo on all forms of prejudice and discrimination, the destruction of canonical aesthetics, the redefinition of identity by custom rather than nature, the right to change race and gender—in a word, the multifarious collection of cultural developments collectively known as “postmodernism.”
But can we any longer call these “left-wing” phenomena? After all, the most potent system of performative representation today is financialized capital, previously known as “usury.” The practice of usury long predates the idea that politics is a spectrum, and usury’s predominance today is the best evidence of that idea’s obsolescence. For usury does not fit easily into the left-right model of political allegiance. Nor indeed do idolatry or sodomy. And yet usury, sodomy and idolatry are the definitive characteristics of postmodern culture. The simultaneous rise and reign of these three manifestations of anti-logos would not have seemed surprising in the past. They do not, historically speaking, merely accompany one another, associate or coincide. They are generally perceived to be one and the same phenomenon. Although such perceptions did not fit readily onto the last century’s mental map of politics, the twenty-first century provides ample empirical evidence of their veracity. Evidently, we need a new map.
Antonio Gramsci
It is admittedly true that, as Jones points out, identity politics and postmodernism can be traced to ideas originally formulated within the political left. It was the Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci who first distinguished between the “war of position” (a struggle for physical control of state institutions like parliament, police and the armed forces) and the “war of maneuver,” a battle for cultural influence in such institutions of “civil society” as the church, the media, the creative arts and the education system. When Gramsci developed these ideas in the 1920s, the most important ideological struggle was the Kulturkampf for the ideological allegiance of the proletariat being waged between the “left-wing” Communist Party and the “right-wing” Catholic Church. A century later, the political spectrum looks very different. Postmodern politics is best conceived as a struggle between those whose prime allegiance is to logos and those who believe in, practice and seek to establish the permanent hegemony of the performative sign.
Higher Education
After the Second World War, the Western world undertook a massive, unprecedented expansion in the system of higher education. Entire classes, genders, races and religions suddenly found themselves with unprecedented access to a vastly complex intellectual tradition previously accessible only to a tiny, privileged elite. Having for centuries been violently excluded from that tradition’s benefits, having indeed for centuries been violently oppressed by that tradition’s beneficiaries, subaltern populations reacted to the imposition upon them of canonical thought as the price of admission to post-imperial global culture with what was, in hindsight, a predictable lack of enthusiasm. Indeed the subaltern response frequently took the form of a radically hostile attack on logos in all its forms. Reason, logic, essence, substance, quality, virtue, spirit, soul, ideas, concepts, truth, even (or especially) God himself often came to seem oppressive when viewed from the perspective of excluded, marginal subjectivity. Within a remarkably short space of time, anti-logocentrism became the radical shibboleth of humanities departments throughout the Western world.
The obvious question is: so what? How could it possibly matter what a few hundred half-crazed professors of English Literature or Continental Philosophy or Art History mutter to their pimply acolytes over morning sherry? Nothing about the professional status, the public respect, the personal demeanor, the attention (or the remuneration) paid to professors of humanities in the late-twentieth century suggested the slightest degree of power or influence of any kind. Not even their students took them seriously. Who cared what they thought? Nobody cared, because it appeared that nobody needed to care. As professors of the humanities are just about the only people still to understand, however, appearances are necessarily deceptive. Appearances are deceptive by definition. Jones’ great advantage over his rival conservative commentators is that he knows this. He has not, like many, pretended to read Hegel; he has actually done so. He understands the workings of the dialectic, and as a result he has his opponents decisively upon the hip.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
For sense-perception, contrary to popular belief, is not co-terminus with reality. Indeed it is drastically different from and in demonstrable contradiction to reality. Thus, whenever it appears that humanities professors have absolutely no influence whatsoever, a philosopher versed in what Jones, following Hegel, calls the “cunning of logos,” would infer that, in reality, their influence is likely to have reached an unusually high point. Such a person would now be proven correct. The influence exerted by academic advocates of identity politics on a socially unprepared and ideologically defenseless student body was profound and immense. That influence was already obvious, to those who knew where to look for it, by the 1980s. Today, when the erstwhile students of those academics occupy positions of real, serious power in the guise of “Social Justice Warriors,” there is no need to look for their influence. It looks for you.
Conservative opponents of identity politics claim to believe that such broad influence has been achieved by a conscious, conspiratorial “cultural Marxism,” akin to the Machiavellian schemes plotted a century ago in Gramsci’s prison cell. Fifty years ago, such charges might have made some sense. In the UK the extraordinary influence exerted by Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958) inspired a generation of radicals such as Terry Eagleton and Stuart Hall to infiltrate elite academies, transforming them from within into hotbeds of political ferment, in a more successful deployment of the “entryist” tactics adopted during the same period by Trotskyite grouplets within labor unions and social democratic political parties. A decade later, politically active post-colonial scholars like Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said brought the cultural politics espoused by continental thinkers like Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva into the mainstream of the American academy. On both sides of the Atlantic, the militant students of such teachers fanned out rapidly throughout the liberal professions. By the end of the twentieth century, Gramsci’s “war of maneuver” within the cultural institutions of Anglo-American capitalism had effectively been won.
But who had won it? Obviously not the proletariat, whose institutional and ideological power had been decisively crushed over the same period. The significance of Gramsci for the Western left was that, by arguing for “the relative autonomy of the superstructure” and for the vital importance of the cultural “war of maneuver,” he made it possible to extend the vanguard function that Marxism ascribes to the proletariat to any “marginalized” social group. When the proletariat abdicated its revolutionary responsibility, therefore, its vanguard role could readily be passed on to women, racial minorities, or minorities constructed around sexual preference. After the Second World War, interpreters and translators of Gramsci like Cornell West and Joseph Buttigieg began to apply his originally Communist tactics to “marginal” or “subaltern” groups other than the proletariat, especially to racial and sexual minorities. For such commentators, Gramsci’s importance lay in the fact that he could be used to rationalize the politics of “the subaltern” for its own sake. “Marginality” became an end-in-itself. As Buttigieg puts it, “Gramsci was primarily concerned with the phenomenon of marginality,” and “Gramsci provides us with the most thorough study that has yet been formulated on the question of subalternity.”
Joseph Buttigieg
As Buttigieg knew very well, Gramsci’s Kulturkampf can be conducted by “marginal” cultures just as well as by the proletariat. It is at this point that Jones’ understanding of the connection between microcosm and macrocosm bears remarkable fruit, for it emerges that for many years he lived three doors down from Joseph Buttigieg in South Bend, Indiana. This should have given him the perfect chance to observe and report on Buttigieg’s philosophical and biological heir, the Democrat politician Pete Buttigieg, but unfortunately the prudent Buttigieg Sr. seems to have kept Jones at arm’s length from his ambitious son. In any case, it is fair to say that Pete Buttigieg could not be less interested in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Indeed, he is profoundly committed to consolidating the rule of financial capital. He is also committed to furthering the assimilation of homosexuality into mainstream Western culture. The question that Jones forces his reader to consider is whether there may be a connection between Buttigieg’s advocacy of usury and his advocacy of sodomy. That question in turns leads us to reflect on connections between usury and idolatry, which is repeatedly identified with “covetousness” in the Bible and throughout the monotheist, rationalist, logocentric Western tradition.
The nature of the connection between usury, sodomy and idolatry is the most significant issue of our age. I believe the connection is to be found in the idea that representation is not referential but performative: that signs do not refer to an external, pre-linguistic world but rather construct our experience of that world. The implication is that custom rather than reason rules our lives, that culture rather than nature is the foundation of our experience, and that we are therefore free to deconstruct and reconstruct both self and society at will. This is what previous eras called “license” as opposed to “liberty,” and ours is the most licentious society since decadent Rome, as Jones does not fail to note. I believe, however, that he falls into a trap laid for today’s advocates of logos when he continues to assign the blame for society’s ills to particular sections of society. I believe that he falls into that trap because he does not see clearly enough that the performative sign of postmodernity has achieved a degree of autonomous power and independent agency that leaves it in no need of any human assistance at all.
A desire to provoke can sometimes reveal a lust for martyrdom and, as the biographical sections of this book proclaim, a life lived in the cultural vanguard can be uncomfortable, if not dangerous. But an appropriate question to ask of Logos Rising is Kantian: what are its conditions of possibility? What are the circumstances that have brought it into being? Those are the real questions Jones raises here, and his logic demands that the reader formulate a response. Logical though it undoubtedly is, the substantive identity of usury, sodomy and idolatry is revealed with clarity only under certain, recurrent but passing historical circumstances. Those circumstances pertained, for example, in exilic Babylon, classical Athens, imperial Rome, quattrocento Florence, the Weimar Republic and, as Jones vociferously proclaims, they manifestly pertain in the twenty-first century Anglosphere. Their hegemony naturally produces dialectical reactions, and Logos Rising is a disarmingly frank, deeply learned, proudly provocative critique of postmodernity’s complicity, or rather identity, with usury, sodomy and idolatry. If the logic of its arguments is not distorted by misguided and futile attempts at censorship, it will inevitably call forth its own critique, and the resulting discussion will rapidly advance the process of human history. Whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
Jones is especially erudite on the pre-history of logos. He describes its original glimmerings and successive wrong turns in Babylon, Sumer, Egypt, India and Persia, before it emerged blinking into the light of pre-Socratic Ionia. He brilliantly reads the hermeneutic conflict between Moses and Pharaoh as revealing the contradictions between a representational, monotheistic culture and an iconic, polytheistic culture. He traces the birth of logos in Hesiod, Homer and Solon; he follows its growth through Augustine and Aquinas. He brilliantly illuminates the magical heritage of the English Enlightenment, uncovering the smoky traces of the alchemist’s kitchen that mar the respectable, bourgeois façade of Newtonian empiricism. He celebrates the resurgence of newly-historicized logos in Hegel, and he denounces its destruction at the hands of Nietzsche, who prepared the way for the fully-fledged postmodernist prophet Michel Foucault.
Jones is also fascinating, though not invariably persuasive, in his analysis of the geo-political crises that confront us in the twenty-first century. In his perspective, the cold war conflict between capitalism and communism has been superseded, since what he calls the annus mirabilis of 1979, by a global struggle between logocentric monotheism and materialist idolatry. This leads him, doubtless to the surprise of his conservative adherents, into a committed sympathy for the iconoclast Shi’ite revolutionaries of Iran in their struggle against the twin literalisms of Wahabbi Saudi Arabia and the fundamentalist USA. Jones frequently endorses, and expounds, the Iranian depiction of America as “the Great Satan.” He draws a telling analogy between the Shah’s aggressive Westernization campaign of the 1970s and the twenty-first century invasion of India by the allied forces of concupiscent sexuality and consumerist capitalism. He gives a revealing and compelling account of Foucault’s disillusion with the Iranian revolution as the befuddled philosophe began to understand the depth of Khomeini’s commitment to logos in all its forms.
It is during Jones’ discussion of Foucault, however, that the sophisticated system of neo-Platonic correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm most regrettably slides into something less impressive. How convincing is it to connect Foucault’s naïve enthusiasm for Khomeini’s violent revolution to his personal penchant for sexual sado-masochism? Jones makes a compelling and convincing case that the Marquis de Sade’s own proclivities were consciously cultivated in the service of social subversion, but the argument loses coherence when applied to the twentieth century. Nor is the ferocity of Jones’ attack on Foucault an isolated instance. The first hundred or so pages of Logos Rising is devoted to an unapologetically ferocious, often hilarious, but finally misdirected flyting of the little group of over-hyped but essentially harmless media stars who flourished a decade or so ago under the brand-name “the New Atheists.”
Mike Tyson vs. Woody Allen
Watching the likes of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens attempting to discuss metaphysics is, as Dr. Johnson remarked in another context, like watching a dog attempting to walk on its hind legs. It makes for an inelegant spectacle, but the natural, humane response is to pat the creature on the head, congratulate it for its prodigious attempt at what is, after all, an eminently worthy enterprise, and proceed unconcerned about one’s business. At worst one might take the dog’s owner aside and gently suggest that the animal’s talents might be better employed otherwise. There is no need to pound the wretched cur into smithereens, berating its good-faith, if over-bold, efforts as horrific, inexcusable presumption. A debate between Jones and Dawkins on this subject is simply a mismatch. It is like watching Mike Tyson fight Woody Allen. It is not a contest in any recognizable sense, and the merciless punishment inflicted by the stronger party is sometimes difficult to witness. Dawkins is no Marsyas, to be flayed by Jones’ Apollo. Hitchens is no Hector, whose lifeless corpse deserves dragging in triumph around the walls of Ilium. There is surely no cause to beat them so badly.
“A debate between Jones and Dawkins on this subject is simply a mismatch. It is like watching Mike Tyson fight Woody Allen. It is not a contest in any recognizable sense, and the merciless punishment inflicted by the stronger party is sometimes difficult to witness.”
And why, in any case, does Jones waste so much time, and so much aggressive energy, on such relative intellectual pygmies? He would no doubt vindicate his vehemence by claiming to be punching up rather than down, and in the sense that philosophers of the caliber of Noah Harari have been successfully promoted by an establishment eager to establish its ideological hegemony over the middle-brow he is surely correct. But does Harari really warrant thirty pages of a book such as this? More to the point, why does Jones choose to challenge someone like Christopher Hitchens on the topic of evolution rather than, say, Stephen Jay Gould? As I pointed out myself in the pages of The Nation, in a 2002 review of Gould’s magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Gould ultimately abandoned Darwinism altogether, on the grounds that the K-T event had decisively disproved the master’s gradualist unidirectionalism. He proposed in its stead a dialectical theory of evolution that, it seems to me, leaves plenty of room for an intelligent designer.
In Gould’s theory, then, we find a serious, rational, evidence-based theory of evolution that surely deserves at least the attention of any serious opponent of Darwinism. But Gould rates not a single mention in Logos Rising, although the risible expostulations of Hitchens are discussed at length. Nor is there any mention of William Paley, whose Natural Theology Darwin imagined he was refuting in On the Origin of Species, and with which it is difficult to see how any rational anti-Darwinism can dispense. More to the point, Jones does not even mention the K-T event itself, although the most committed Darwinists must now concede that evolutionary theory looks very different once it is taken into account. It seems churlish to criticize an eight-hundred-page volume for lack of inclusivity, and I cannot pretend to familiarity with all of Jones’ enormous oeuvre, so it is possible he discusses it elsewhere. Even so, however, it is hard entirely to escape the feeling that Jones has selected some of his opponents mainly for the relish he takes in demolishing them.
Such omissions would not even be worth mentioning, were it not for the fact that they seem to bespeak the central error in Jones’ reasoning. As I mentioned above, I believe that his basic mistake, which causes him to retain twentieth-century modes of critique that can easily look bigoted today, is his failure to recognize that the performative sign is the common factor that unites and defines the palpable effects of usury, sodomy and idolatry. As a result, he can sometimes neglect the connections between these factors and, as a further result, he continues to identify usury with “usurers,” sodomy with “sodomites” and idolatry with “idolaters.” Jones devotes hundreds of pages to the incipience of logos in India, Arabia, Egypt and Persia. He closely observes its emergence in Hesiod and Homer, he applauds its further development in Ionia. But he does not connect the emergence of logos with the simultaneous invention of coinage in Lydia, as thinkers like Sohn-Renthal, Seaford and Shell have done. Coinage relies on a distinction between abstract and material value, and therefore on a differentiation between sign and referent, whose relationship with the philosophical dialectic between logos and eidola is homologous. Jones appears to miss this connection. He makes no mention of mythical Lydian monarchs like Midas and Gyges, whose stories reflect an ancient ethics of financial representation, and therefore of representation in general.
In short, Jones does not treat Greek mythology with the gravity it demands. The same can be said about his approach to Greek comedy. He informs us that after Euripedes, “the Athenians had to turn to their philosophers as custodians of Greek thought,” and the only mention made of comedy is a brusque dismissal of Aristophanes as a “conservative” (173). We hear nothing of Aristophanes’ Clouds, where Strepsiades urges his son to learn rhetoric, so that he can avoid paying his debts. Nor do we learn of the Plutus, which shows money coming alive and achieving self-consciousness, when Plutus—money in personified form—is cured of his blindness, informed of his omnipotence, and thus enabled to reduce the gods of the Olympian pantheon to servitude. Plutus is immediately informed of his perverse power over prostitutes who “instantly turn their arses to him,” and also of his seductive impact on “male whores who care not for love, to them money means everything.” Not are these the only instances of Greek comedy’s association between usury, the verbal idolatry of rhetoric, and sodomy.
As I say, I am not familiar with all of Jones’s work. Here however, although he provides extensive analysis of tracts like the Republic, Jones neglects the connection that several Socratic dialogues draw between sophistical rhetoric and the commodification of knowledge. In tracts like The Sophist and the Protagoras, the performative verbal signs of rhetoric are fused with the performative financial signs of exchange-value, to the degree that their formal similarity over-rides the difference between the spheres in which it is made manifest. The same is also true of concupiscent sexuality, in which the physical sign of the soul is fetishized to such a point that its non-apparent referent is obscured. In short, Jones omits to explain how commodification is equated with the distortion of truth in the Socratic dialogues.
Jones writes consciously and deliberately from the perspective of traditional, doctrinaire Roman Catholicism. His undisguised sectarian allegiance presumably inhibits Jones from favorable consideration of Lutheran theology. However he generously admits and closely studies Luther’s fundamental influence on Hegel, another of his intellectual heroes. Hegel’s comprehension of the dialectic, as well as his theory of history, would have been quite impossible without Luther’s inspiration, and Jones obviously knows this well. Yet presumably his institutional affiliations will not allow him fully to acknowledge Luther’s quantum advance in the study of idolatry, and this in turn prevents him from appreciating the importance of Calvin who, astoundingly, does not rate even a single mention in this enormous volume. That silence is eloquent indeed. Calvin’s cataclysmic realization that the bread and wine of the Eucharist can be objectively efficacious and purely symbolic at the same time is the earliest theoretical acknowledgment of the performative sign’s newly practical power. You would not know it from this book, however, and that is a serious barrier in the way of its aspirations to transcendent truth.
The most compelling question raised by Logos Rising is also the most disturbing. Are the impressions we receive of figures like Harris and Buttigieg actually idols—artificial images, deliberately constructed for the purpose of replacing and distorting reality? In short, is there a pragmatic alliance, born of the ancient, profound anti-trinity of usury, sodomy and idolatry, which operates by attributing autonomous power to systems of icons and symbols? Many intellectuals today would regard such propositions as ontologically absurd, politically incorrect and, quite possibly, as metaphysically evil. The overwhelming majority of intellectuals in past ages, however, would have seen them as such obvious truisms as barely to require demonstration. This wonderful and frightening book attempts to adjudicate between the opinions of the present and the wisdom of the past. Much will depend on whose glove the referee raises.
“This wonderful and frightening book attempts to adjudicate between the opinions of the present and the wisdom of the past. Much will depend on whose glove the referee raises. ”
This article from the May 2020 Culture Wars Magazine has been reproduced here in its entirety. Please consider subscribing to the magazine to support our work.
