Enough Rainbow Flogging!

 

Just as the pandemic was getting started in 2020 I wrote a long essay about the contentious issue of whether biological sex was binary or existed as a spectrum. This was a response to a lot of noise around this subject that I’d been seeing on the fringes of what we now know as the gender, or trans wars. Part of that piece included an analysis of the meaning of spectrum as it appears in the rhetorical and sign strategies of LGBT activism. The rainbow - I argued - was the paradigmatic spectrum and the most readily identifiable symbol of LGBT discourse, whether as a flag carried by participants on a Pride march or used as a marker on products, literature or anything else. Describing biological sex as a spectrum was then a sort of territorial claim packaged with a cluster of associations which disrupted normative thinking around sexual dimorphism and the idea of the typical case, in a similar way that the expanding list of labels for sexuality and gender identity disrupt normative understanding of those categories.

I think an addendum to this analysis is in order on account of the way in which the use of the rainbow symbol has metastasised over the last three years. Very few people in the Anglophone world (as always it's worth noting that these phenomena reach their greatest intensity in those countries - at the vanguard of Decline) could fail to have noticed the massive expansion of the rainbow symbol beyond its common association with LGBT activism. We've come to a point where it's now hard to avoid encountering it in any number of incongruous locations. For example one might traverse a rainbow painted road crossing (displacing the traditional 'Zebra' black and white design) in Chiswick or Ealing. Are these places especially in need of ostentatious symbols of inclusivity?  Do they have a known lack of diversity or history of discrimination against LGBT identifying people? The intention is opaque. If you visit a hospital or other NHS facility you're positively rainbow bombed by murals, information leaflets, signage and the now ubiquitous - and slightly threatening - rainbow adjacent imperative BE KIND. In addition to these publically funded examples you're also likely to come across private businesses making a strong show of their 'allyship' or status as a Stonewall accredited LGBT employer, replete with bright and shiny rainbow graphics. So, why all the rainbow flogging?

In my analysis in 2020 I drew attention to the use within LGBT activist discourse of the concept of "spectrum" and of the rainbow as the paradigmatic spectrum. On the one hand the rainbow with its multiple colours highlights diversity and inclusivity. All are welcome under its umbrella, and - as the concept of spectrum indicates - the symbol is able to accommodate an infinite multitude of non-conforming and emergent identities. In addition to diversity and inclusion the rainbow also symbolises equity, that all members within the spectrum are equal and there is no place for normative categories of any kind. No-one has the right to claim normative supremacy against which the others are but lesser variations. Everyone is a winner, everyone should be celebrated. Taken as a whole the rainbow stakes a claim for a form of totality - albeit of a rather circular kind. It is a circle of mutual celebration and normative dissolution where the members are considered equal but without singular consequence. It is a flag under which you can be whoever you want to be, but all you will ever amount to is an equal in an otherwise free-floating and boundless community. The burning of a thousand minor stars is blinding.

There are I think at least two main highways through which the rainbow has come to symbolise this new totality. The first should be familiar. During the pandemic the child-like painted rainbow became the symbol not only of collective support for health workers, but of collective conformity with government restrictions. During my many long walks in 2020 I would see this rainbow in windows beyond which lived people terrified to leave their homes. I saw it marked in chalk on pavements next to spray painted signs to KEEP YOUR DISTANCE installed by local councils. I saw it in the gaudy lights of giant advertising boards in Piccadilly circus, on the sides of busses and in stations. The rainbow came to mark a boundary and a sign of allegiance. You were either compliant and clapped the good people of the NHS and the government trying to protect the vulnerable, or you were with the MAGA conspiracists, the death cultists, the anti-vax 5G proto-fascists. Quite a dichotomy set up there, but it was one fuelled by politicians for over two years, and that particular piece of divide and rule has only continued into the latest round of crises. And herein lies the crux of the matter.

 

The NHS is collapsing. In some respects we no longer have accessible public healthcare in the UK. Certainly many people, myself included, no longer bother trying to access it unless it's a question of life and death. Over 10% of the UK population is currently waiting for NHS treatment and the average waiting time for an ambulance is such that if you were to suffer a stroke, heart attack, or be involved in serious car accident you are most likely to die on the street. As I have written before, comprehensive public health was abandoned during the pandemic in favour of a war economy aimed at one eminently survivable disease. The damage caused has been vast and will only worsen, since not only have many NHS services never returned to pre-pandemic levels, we now have a population wracked by physical and metal ill health, the direct consequence of being confined to their homes and having their social existence decimated by wrongheaded and entirely short-sighted authoritarian policies. We  now also have rampant inflation, the combined result of disrupted supply chains (again due to the pandemic response) and the decision of European nations to shoot themselves in the foot by weaponising energy supplies in their now open conflict with Russia in Ukraine.

The second highway towards total-rainbow has been the mainstreaming of the gender wars at the same time gender activism has been making major inroads into State and third sector institutions. The main protagonists of the latter in the UK have been transgender organisations Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence, and the establishment LGBT+ organisation Stonewall, whose Diversity Champions Program and associated Workplace Equality Indices have come under scrutiny for among other things misrepresenting the UK Equality Act. There are however a whole host of advocacy/activist and associated gender-conventicles working across the economy, all using similar rhetoric and symbolism, including variations on the ubiquitous rainbow.

At a time of such self evident decline it's hardly surprising that the rainbow sticking plaster, with its infantile imperative BE KIND has conquered all before it. People have every reason to be angry; they are being taxed for services they cannot access and are freezing and starving to death in order to maintain American global hegemony. Western Governments have done little else over the past few years but sell out to big tech and big pharma, while at the same time annihilating the societal base upon which their populations may have been able to self organise and resist. We are angry, disenchanted and atomised. Our politicians have no answers to the grand problems facing post-industrial societies in climate collapse.

The rainbow provides a convenient image with built in semiotic slippage. Its ability both to totalise and to divide inside from outside make it invaluable - as it was during the pandemic - to rally people behind its nebulous cause, and stifle opposition. When after waiting weeks for a doctor's appointment you finally get to the overcrowded surgery only to find your appointment has been cancelled owing to staff shortages your understandable frustration is confronted by the sign fixed to the plastic screen (another retain from pandemic days) in front of the reception desk. It tells you 'We take a zero tolerance approach to any abuse of our staff". The words are ringed by a rainbow above which reads BE KIND. The reality being presented to you here is clear; you're either with the good guys, the cult of permanent celebration, that waits quietly masked up for treatment that'll never arrive, or you're the proto-fascist horde, the anti-vax thug, the deplorable superspreader event with bells on that deserves nothing from our entirely faultless and virtuous welfare system.

Pull back and apply the same logic to other situations where the rainbow appears like a warning. Whether you're an employee uncomfortable about being told to add your pronouns to your email signature, or a teacher unwilling to teach children about the existence of hundreds of gender identities, or just anyone going about your business only to be confronted by this new creed, this unspoken symbol of your compelled compliance, the rainbow makes clear you are either with us or against us. The rainbow has been radicalised and now represents a boundary permitting the distinction between insiders and outsiders. In a collapsing civilisation diversity, equity and inclusion becomes just another cudgel, another way to govern the ungovernable.

Interestingly, the emergence of the rainbow as a symbol of political kitsch coincides with its collapse as a symbol of unity in LGBT politics. The rise over the last two years of alternative activist frameworks which diverge from Stonewall's monopolistic approach is a sign that the reality of conflict between interests and the limits of facile liberal universalism are beginning to be felt. The Progress Pride flag is perhaps the strongest visual symbol of this conflict. It features the traditional horizontal bars of the rainbow flag but now it is bisected from the left by additional colours meant to represent  marginalized people of colour, trans people, and those living with HIV/AIDS. The point of the triangle cleaves into the rainbow at a 45^o angle as if it were trying to split it in two, the formal arrangement of which brings to mind El Lissitzky's Soviet era constructivist image 'Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge' 1919. In Lissitzky's picture, the Bolshevik red wedge is shown symbolically dividing the mass of the anti-revolutionary white army.

 

The progress pride flag, and all the many variations of it testify to a fundamental failure of the LGBT movement and of the liberal identarian dream more generally. If the rainbow flag, which by its own definition is the most inclusive flag imaginable, is not sufficient to hold the demands of your ever expanding list of constituents, then this might point to the insufficiency of personal identity and self-expression for founding a stable political community, or to escape conflicts over competing Rights claims.   

The modern "prosumer" (producer/consumer) of digital capitalism will not settle for being integrated anonymously into a abstract concept like the all-inclusive rainbow spectrum. Visibility, a latecomer to the activist arsenal works like an agent-provocateur setting all against all in the battle to be seen. This should not come as a surprise, since in an attention economy like ours, governed by the extreme narcissism of contemporary liberal individualism, being seen, being noticed, might be the difference between sink or swim; at least according to the market based value system that contaminates all Western culture. It is clear that self-actualisation is rarely achieved without standing on the shoulders of others.

By the same token, the attempt to mollify and capture a declining civilisation under the same empty totality will fail. What is described as the woke capture of the institutions is actually this attempt, which aims to mitigate the negative externalities of our digitally dysphoric and ever more fragmented world by bureaucratic means. But DEI policies and disciplinary procedures are no substitute for values nurtured within real historical communities and real-world practices. Ultimately the rainbow stands for everything and thus stands for nothing. LGBT activism has been thoroughly co-opted by corporate interests and subsumed into the prevailing culture of marketing and rat-race self promotion. While at the same time its colourful imagery has been generalised into a society-wide palliative and encomium to quiet compliance with the ruling orthodoxy of managed decline. The rainbow symbol's only function now is as a brightly coloured boundary running through everything. Vaccinated,/unvaccinated, Brexiteer/Remainer, Fascist/anti-fascist, inside/outside, with us/against us. These absolutes are a selection from a far longer list which now serve to divide the modern West into opposing and utterly implacable camps.

Moving Westwards - Fragment from The Archive

 

Moving Westwards

Ragged men drive women and children across the moor. Exodus from bombed out villages on East Dartmoor. Chagford crater. Makeshift camps reduced to shredded fabric. The hillside scorched. Hellfire and granite shards cut through people and things. Hum of drones with infrared give no respite at night. Beneath the stars at Scorhill circle I saw a tiny boy weep before a dead foal. His mother was left behind a week earlier. We set-up camp in a valley within the shadow of a great unnamed tor. Cold stone witness to this second age of exodus. Men with some experience of the land drew a crude map on the ground with twigs. We resolved to move westward as far from the roads as possible. A young man is sent ahead with a message for militiamen at Tavistock. He does not return. Three days later we discover the town laid waste, all supplies destroyed. Suicides mount. As dusk fell on the ninth day a strange congregation at the half derelict church of Sydenham Damerel gave us shelter in the nave. Some were foreigners, though none of colour. We, this shivering mass of non-persons and the wished-to-be-forgotten. The Muslim girls slept in the chapel. Obsidian stone forms compete with gothic revival and neo-paganism. Totems and sigils, some using human excretions adorn the walls. Frantic chanting on the morning of the tenth day. The girls are driven out of the chapel. Futility of purification leads to lingering distrust. Fug of incense and candle smoke amplifies the fear. Drone hum as counterpoint to choral plainsong. Most single men moved on during the night taking what they could from the outhouses. I stayed to assuage the wrath of the faithful. They expect libations. By the bank of the river Tamar I saw their women dance naked, raised up to a frenzy of jerking spitting flesh. Bodies scarred from revived penitentials. Rebounded superstitions, renewed extremity after the eschaton was permanently deferred.  Dead foal boy shrieking at the water's edge as if transformed into a coyote. At dusk one of the Muslim girls was found drowned in a foot of water. The remainder of us left at first light. The offer of an escort as far as the highway which cut the region from north to south was refused. We had scant sense of geography but even less trust in them. Two days to cross Bodmin then down into the South West as far as we could get by the end of the month. Ancient paths cross poisoned soil. Abandoned military emplacements stud the peaks. Freezing moorland water polluted with discarded munitions. The eldest woman among us passes out from thirst and exhaustion. We carry her to a ruined farm house. The domes and antennae of a listening station can be seen on the horizon. I know we cannot stay long.  On waking she curses her absent husband in a language I cannot understand. The food is nearly gone. She refuses her share, gesturing to the children who are not hers. Late in the evening she loses consciousness for the last time. I wake in the morning to the sound of spades cutting wet earth. A man who spoke her language lowered the body down. I could not understand him either. Tracking along the north coast a day away from Truro they caught up with us. There was no warning before the gunfire started. Most were cut down immediately. I saw the dead foal boy shaking, rooted to the spot before the bullet shattered his skull. White light panic. Screams like waves of static blot out the sound of the shots. My body carried away by them. I fall down to the beach. Wash up beneath the cliff face. Static resolves into oceanic rhythms. I wake upon the altar of a Devonian cathedral. Time is abandoned here. The world is gone. I am alone with the sea. 

 

Reframing the Present: Secularisation and the Rule of Law - 2022 Redux

            2022 Introduction

This is the last of the redux series where I'm republishing material from the defunct Spectre-Online website. This was a somewhat ambitious essay from autumn 2015 which attempts to argue a heterodox position on the influence of theology for modern jurisprudence and political categories more generally. As a piece of political-theology it's heavily influenced by my reading of Harold J Berman's two volume Law and Revolution, as well Giorgio Agamben's work on so-called economic -theology found in his Kingdom and the Glory.

There's a degree of naiveté shown here in my ignorance of the "dark side" of the process whereby the Medieval Catholic Church became a centralised transnational bureaucratic power, and how the birth of scholasticism was integral to that process. An excellent counterpart - or counterhistory even - can be found in R.I. Moore's The War on Heresy, which documents - from the ground up - the role that nascent Catholic legal science had in building the case for the Albigensian crusade.

Scholasticism gave a fixed and uncomprehendingly bureaucratic zeal to the clerics charged with prosecuting the war on heresy in the Languedoc and wider region of what is now South Western France. All too often the spectre of a "Manichean", or otherwise dualist Gnostic heresy was the convenient shorthand to gloss local disputes or reform activity which ran against the grain of the Church's attempt to centralise and systematise the faith. The invention of the heretic, with an almost standardised set of beliefs and posing an existential threat to the unity of the faith, emerged in the Paris schools of the twelfth century, coeval to the birth of scholastic rationality and the newly confident Church's drive to reform the secular world. Ranged alongside a French monarchy looking for excuses for expansion, the end result was a military campaign, unprecedented in its brutality, which historians now frequently refer to as genocide.

The second obvious naiveté in this text stems from it being written prior to the populist wave of 2016. While the displacement of the Church's claims to universality onto modern transnational institutions like the EU, IMF, World Bank, etc, is plain to see, my lament for the loss of a counterbalance to contest the Globalist (for that is what I'm talking about avant la lettre) pretentions of international finance proved to be premature. I read in those paragraphs a desire for a new movement, not a new Church, and certainly not what we got; a ragtag association of conspiracy theorists, 4Chan shit-posters, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. I'm being unkind, and the past seven years (only seven!) cannot be reduced to any one tectonic shift around worn-out political categories (least of all Left and Right). That's why the study of political-theology is so fruitful in destabilising our preconceived notions of how social and political life are put together. Now, the so-called Culture War really does look like the return of the wars of religion or the prelude to a crusade. As it was in the Middle Ages the battle lines are frequently being drawn between the rooted, parochial folk inhabiting the material world, and that assertive class of transnational administrator whose reified conception of how the world works depends for its stability on the ever present threat of the heretic.  

 

2015 text

"God is himself law; therefore law is dear to him" Sachsenspiegel (Saxon Law) of Eike von Repgau, Early 13th Century

 

Of all the grand narratives supposedly put to the sword during the era of post-modernity secularisation seems peculiarly resistant. While we are familiar with critiques of Western progress, cultural superiority and ethics, the narrative that would have us believe we in the West live in predominantly irreligious societies, and thus have passed through some process by the name of secularisation remains common wisdom. This idea is implicit in the way we see ourselves and how we frame our dealings with other cultures, and has become increasing acute in the post 9/11 world where the complexity of the global situation and the West's part in the multiplying fields of conflict are reduced to simple binary oppositions.  David Cameron provided a paradigm example of this kind of simplification in a recent speech on the ideology of Islamic State:

"It (ISIS) says religious doctrine trumps the rule of law and Caliphate trumps nation state and it justifies violence in asserting itself and achieving its aims. The question is: How do people arrive at this worldview?” (1)

One might critique this simplification by replacing the words religious doctrine with economic necessity or globalisation and Caliphate with American/Western hegemony. But this reversal - while having some truth to it - would gloss over what I think is the more important opposition Cameron sets up, which is the one between religious doctrine and the Rule of Law. Here the Prime Minister is drawing directly on a common assumption of secularisation, and from a particularly Protestant context, which draws a fundamental separation between human and divine law. This is one of the key assumptions of secularisation theory, that it involves purifying the legislative and governmental functions of the State from any kind of religious influence. That we in the UK live in such a state despite bishops sitting in the house of lords, an established church, and a sovereign who is also head of that church, is taken for granted. 

But what precisely secularisation consists in, and where and when did it occur, is still a vexed question, the answers to which very often fall back on the sort of grand narrative type of historiography that we are meant to have left behind. The answers may vary but inevitably they include many of the most recognisable events in Western historiography; the renaissance, the reformation, the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the French revolution, the industrial revolution, etc. Here we are confronted with a process supposedly ending in the present and yet seemingly without an origin. I would argue that this thing we call secularisation is a far more complex idea than it is generally taken to be and that an on-going critique of our assumptions regarding religion and the West is vital to understanding the current predicament we face in politics and culture. With such a vast topic a detailed treatment isn't feasible here. Instead it might be worth taking a historical perspective on the supposedly common sense opposition between religion and the Rule of Law.

 

A Note on the "New Atheists"

As is well known the question over religion's place in society and international affairs has been constantly raised over the last fifteen years or so, given impetus by 9/11 and the war on terror. There has been no more prominent voice during this period than the so called New Atheists with Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens being their most visible public figures. Their "debates" and public actions have more often than not focussed on opposing religion to their own brand of secular, empirical and scientific world view. As such they tend to spend most of their time debunking bible stories and criticising the irrational belief in higher beings rather than enquiring into the sociological and philosophical intersection between religion and modernity. They assume a break, so to speak, between the two and so their actions display an almost incredulous attitude towards those who haven't got the message yet.

This analytic/empirical attachment to the God question has skewed public discourse on religion to the detriment of other approaches which might yield a less partisan, less triumphantly antagonistic form of enquiry. One obvious source of that antagonism is the presupposed association of secularism with rational government and democracy, and thus their opponents with religious dogma, fanaticism and authoritarianism. Cameron's quote above fits squarely within this form of thought. To get beyond this antagonistic staging of debate around religion it is vital to turn away from the limited questioning around the existence of God and instead enquire into the history and operation of religion as a form of social ordering centred around the sacred. To do this broadens the enquiry to take account of the intersections between the history of philosophy, science, and most critically, the development and formation of Western legal and governmental systems. In doing this however, in particular to put the role of science into question, is a step too far for the New Atheists and their analytic empirical commitments.

To borrow a distinction from Ian Paisley, the activity of the New Atheists in public is in fact not to debate but to dispute religion. Their aim is to displace it from public discourse and to install their own version of secular empirical rationality as  "established". Thus they hope to remove the need to debate it in the future. In this sense it is broadly correct to describe the kind of militant atheism practiced by Dawkins et al as a kind of secular religion, construed as a form of totalised social ordering and fundamental set of principles beyond question.

 

Western legal rationality and the Canon Law: The Papal Revolution

To begin to  critique the accepted narrative on secularisation we need to go further back than the well known events listed above. Back further than the reformation and renaissance, back to the very heart of Medieval Europe. At the end of the eleventh century Europe experienced what some scholars have described as the first of the great revolutions; the so called Gregorian or Papal revolution. To summarise, it involved a declaration of independence by the Papacy from the control of Kings, lords and the Emperor within the multitude of Germanic proto states that made up the bulk of central and Western Europe at that time. But the infamous Dictatus papae of Pope Gregory VII was more than just a declaration of independence. Among its 27 statements it asserted for the first time the unity of the Church as a transnational body with the Pope as its supreme head; that the Pope may appoint or transfer bishops as he sees fit, and only he may depose them; and of particular importance was the statement that only the Pope can approve laws for the church. This was a new and powerful declaration of the dualism of secular (meaning temporal or earthly) and ecclesiastical powers and jurisdictions which came to be known as the Two Swords theory.

In the period after the disintegration of the Western Roman state and prior to the eleventh century these powers tended to be tied together in the concept of sacred Kingship where the ruler was not simply an enforcer of the peace but the spiritual head of the community; God's vicar entitled to dispose of ecclesiastics as he saw fit and intervene in church policy and governance within his respective territory. The freedom of the church from secular control and the declaration of the Pope's supremacy over spiritual matters began the process of eroding this notion of Kingship. The King was to be a layman whose role increasingly came to be seen as keeper of the peace and law-maker within the jurisdiction of temporal affairs only. However, as is well known, the Dictatus papae also made the radical claim that the Pope could himself depose Kings and Emperors, in accordance with the theory the ecclesiastical sword was ultimately superior to the temporal sword. This shouldn't obscure the fact however that the first tentative moves towards the separation of Church and State were made by the church itself, and it had to fight hard to assert this independence with the so-called Investiture controversy and the martyrdom of Thomas Becket being two significant flashpoints.

But the Church's declaration of political separation was only one part of the revolutionary changes that took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. More important for the emergence of the idea of the Rule of Law was the concurrent development and systemisation of the Canon law inspired by the newly rediscovered Roman Law books of Justinian. Scholars such as those at the recently founded law school at Bologna began examining the legal doctrines of the church in light of Justinian's texts which they took to be a complete and ideal legal system, a ratio scripta endowed with near biblical authority. To do this they employed the method of analysis and synthesis developed by Saint Anselm, Peter Abelard and others known to us as Scholasticism. Since they assumed that the edicts and responsa of the Roman Law were true and just they could in effect be treated as first principles. But since both the Roman Law, and the writings and Canons of the Church contained gaps and contradictions, a process of dialectical reasoning had to be employed to smooth out the different legal norms contained within; abstracting, classifying and synthesizing conflicts.

Legal historian Harold J Berman has argued that this movement represented not only the emergence of modern rationalised legal science but of the modern scientific method more generally. The glossators of Roman law and the Canon lawyers worked by formulating hypotheses that could serve as a basis for ordering phenomena (in this case legal phenomena) in the world of time that could yield probabilities and predictions rather than certitudes and necessities. Their approach moved dialectically by establishing general legal principles and then relating them back to particulars in predictions (2). Certainly this wasn't the sort of exact empirical science favoured by Dawkins but it did have an experimental side insofar as the developing system was tested in practice in the ecclesiastical courts and in the conflict between overlapping legal jurisdictions throughout Europe. The apogee of this work came in the mid twelfth century with Gratian's decretum, a collection of church Canons which formed the basis of Canon law until the 20th century. It is thus not an exaggeration to describe the Canon law that emerged from the Papal revolution as the first recognisably Modern legal system complete with a professional body of lawyers and a student body to study and develop it. But more than this it coincided with the independence of the church from secular control and its rise as a form of transnational state in its own right. This new state with its officials and sovereign (Pope) was to be a state based on law, a Rechtsstaat which in practice placed considerable limitation on the power of the Pope up to the point of theorising conditions where he should be deposed.  

As the legal system of the church developed so too did its legal practices, which in turn influenced the legal practices of the hitherto unsystematic and arbitrary forms prevalent in the Germanic kingdoms. Trial by compurgation (oath helping), ordeal or battle were rejected and superseded by the investigative or inquisitorial procedure which emphasised the establishment of the facts. To be sure the Catholic inquisition would later come to be associated with the worst of the Medieval church, but in the twelfth century these new procedures constituted a dramatic shift towards a more rational, logical and more distinctively modern jurisprudence where the direct intervention of God was ruled out. The Canonists and Glossators of the Roman law took up an agonistic relationship to the secular laws of the various Germanic and Frankish kingdoms, both supporting and challenging them, giving rise to many basic legal concepts we still carry with us today. Indeed the principles of reason and conscience were proclaimed by the ecclesiastical jurists as weapons against the formalism and magic of Germanic law (3). This relationship hinged upon the freedom of the Church and the fact that the boundaries between temporal and ecclesiastical power which inaugurated the Papal revolution were constantly being contested.

What we tend to think of as the religiosity of the Medieval Canon law and its conflict with secular state affairs was in fact always already a process of secularisation. The Glossators and Canonists endowed the Roman Corpus Juris, as it was known, with a sacred quality comparable to the Bible itself. They took it in effect as a total system developed over centuries that not only reflected the best that mankind's reason could produce, but also represented a common law of all peoples under God. This universalism and the Church's newly acquired mission to reform the secular world was a defining shift in the minds of Medieval people in comparison to previous centuries where the earthly realm was seen as little more but one of chaos and decay; a world sliding away into dust before the coming of The Kingdom of God which the Church was to patiently await. The period of the Papal revolution however saw a massive shift in Medieval European society. The invasions from the North, South and East of Europe finally came to an end, populations rose and thousands of new towns were founded along with increases in trade and artisanal production. Amid these changes the church declared its unity and independence and its mission to reform the secular world; a mission in which Law came to play a defining role. This shift in legal ideology might be summarised as the move from a chaotic irredeemable law of an irredeemable world to a systematic legal rationality that could aim to approximate divine justice itself and in doing so reform that world.

 

From the Two Swords to the global oikonomia

The above summary is obviously brief and simplifies considerably what was a complex and multi-facetted era in European history. It should however suffice to demonstrate that Cameron's assertion of the opposition between religion and the Rule of Law is wholly misplaced and in fact the Medieval church was instrumental in desacralizing Kingship and bringing to a closure the era of Germanic folk-law which reigned in Europe after the fall of the Roman state. We owe to the Papal revolution of the eleventh and twelve centuries and to the philosophers, theologians and jurists of that time the modern notion of a rational, logical, law governed world, one capable of embodying an ideal of Justice and ultimately the Rule of Law itself.

It should be noted that subsequently during the Reformation, and English and French revolutions it was the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts that was primarily attacked and only secondarily, over time, the content or procedure of the law itself. In England after Henry VIII broke from Rome the authority of the Pope was taken up by the monarch who not only maintained but even extended the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. It wasn't until the 19th century that the jurisdiction of church courts in England was thoroughly curtailed and the secular legal system took up what Michel Foucault has called its "pastoral power". In the modern era it is the secular powers that have assumed the task of judging and shaping the soul of Man.  It is only in the 20th century that the idea developed initially by the Canon lawyers, that the law should represent something universal for all peoples, something that embodies higher values beyond mere contingent political interest, has faded from view. More to the point the church's role in championing such a position and challenging the secular power to meet that obligation has almost entirely evaporated (although Pope Francis seems at times to hint at a revival of this tradition). It is Berman's thesis that this eclipse of universality constitutes the great crisis in law today. Without a common consciousness that the law should embody universal values about ends and purposes of society people lose respect for it and more often it becomes what Karl Marx and Max Weber believed it was; merely an instrument for the prevailing power.

I am more of the view that what has occurred over the last century or so is not the eclipse of universality but rather its displacement into a new field, namely economy. The IMF, World Bank, and other transnational financial institutions have issued their own Bull of unam sanctam and hold sway over the governments of nation states to a degree the Pope could never had imagined. For us unlike the peoples of Medieval Europe there is no Two Swords theory that would have the secular and spiritual authority vying for position, criticising and constraining each other's power. Nor does the universal law of the market admit of any other values aside from profit and competitive positioning. The nature and actuality of justice is no-longer contested as a political concern and is increasingly identified under neoliberal economisation with market outcomes. The American political philosopher Wendy Brown's recent analysis of the "revolution of neoliberalism" claims that under such conditions what disappears is precisely this capacity to limit, this platform for critique, and this source of radical democratic inspiration (4). Since the transnational apparatus for global finance holds both swords they can influence the laws and economies of sovereign states (need I mention Greece, Chile, South Korea) while judging the soul of human life according to the logic of homo economicus.

It is the radical thesis of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben that the paradigm for modern globalised economy was gestated in the Western church's theories of the divine economy and Providential government of creation (5). Just as the Medieval church came to see Law as a way of reforming the world and directing moral conduct towards a state mirroring that of the divine Kingdom, the modern era uses it - and governance more generally - as a way of reforming national economies and directing individual economic conduct towards market norms. The supposedly natural and immutable form of marketized world governance is however a Providence divested of its messianic fulfilment, and as such is a potentially eternal government of the world without the possibility of an eschaton.  

This dark thesis suggests a controversial way of looking at secularisation. According to this view secularisation is not a concept operating within historical processes but rather a "signature" which continually marks history, showing where the forms, modes and underlying metaphysical assumptions have shifted from the field of religion to those of politics and economics. While this is by no means uncontested ground we should perhaps be open to the possibility that our contemporary era is more marked by the ideas and signatures of theology than we are led to believe.

 

References.

1 - Cameron warns of 'quietly condoning' IS ideology (BBC News, 19 June 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33192306)

2 - Berman,Harold J - Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition ( Harvard University Press, 1983) - pg151

3 - Berman,Harold J - Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition ( Harvard University Press, 1983) pg251

4 - Brown,Wendy - Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone books, 2015)

5 - Agamben, Giorgio - The Kingdom and the Glory (Stanford University Press, 2011)