Spirit, Nature, Politics

Professor John Milbank argues we need a new spiritual politics to deal with the problems the globe is facing now and in the future.

By Professor John Milbank

John is Emeritus Professor at Nottingham Universities Department of Theology and Religious Studies. He is a prolific writer and speaker and founder of the Radical Orthodoxy movement amongst others. You can find him on twitter here.

We have today arrived at a point of global crisis which is perceived as a matter of politics, science and economics. But in reality it is a spiritual crisis. This does not mean that we should retire from the political to the cultural sphere, or retreat further into ourselves. Instead, it means that we need a new, spiritual politics. Or so I wish to argue.

One aspect of this crisis clearly concerns our relationship to the natural world. But we tend to think of this aspect as self-enclosed, rather than being inherently linked to the problem of political division that we are confronting at the same time, between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, populist or otherwise.

To the contrary, our modern idea of politics is inherently linked, ever since Hobbes and others, to a certain stance towards nature. We consider the natural world to be ‘over against’ us, as a threatening all-encompassing power that can also be tamed and exploited as an inexhaustible resource.

At the same time, we acknowledge that we ourselves, as embodied animals, belong to this world. Yet insofar as we know this, we also suppose that this belonging is largely negative: a source of our indigency, fearfulness and ignorance. Additionally, our shared animal nature is thought to entail a doubling of all these supposed natural tendencies by a factor of mutual human rivalry.

The only way out appears to be through artifice. An alien world is to be known through the joint application of reason and experiment. What goes for science, goes also for politics, now thought of as essentially a social technology.

To ensure both certainty and security, all political power is to derive from one source of monopolised violence. How this ‘sovereignty’ is to be constitutionally achieved and sustained can be conceived in variously more authoritarian, oligarchic or democratic ways. But from one perspective those differences are irrelevant. What matters is that we think of politics, political economy and public technology as a pragmatic control of meaningless nature, including the meaninglessness of our own bodies and instincts.

It is unsurprising that this outlook should have eventually generated what looks rather like a final, apocalyptic crisis. Nature is ravaged and our own bodies are increasingly diseased, distorted, bloated and abused.

In the face of ecological disaster, liberal democrats variously propose an evolution to a global Leviathan, a sovereign world government that will rule in the name of a qualified and more cautious scientific domination. They are increasingly opposed by authoritarian populists who remain attached to the nation state, or localised sovereignty, and tend to evade the seriousness of the collapse of the physical world itself. Populists also seem to favour a cultural or racist nationalism based upon the ultimacy of the friend/foe distinction. Their atavism is rightly deplored by liberals, and yet their fears of a an ever more extreme social engineering, in the face of natural crisis, exercised either by a single or still worse by rival global powers, appear not at all displaced.

In either case however, a modern duality of spirit and matter, of artifice and nature, has by no means been left behind; it has only mutated. Either our neglect of nature, that is seen as a self-sustaining whole to which we must instrumentally adapt, is deplored, or else the militant triumph of the human spirit in always particular idioms is newly celebrated, sometimes in religious guise.

The alternative to this is for Christianity, in alliance with other authentic faith traditions, to insist that it is this very duality that is the problem, and the politics based upon it.

Ironically, we abuse nature just because we do not see the primacy of spirit over nature in the deepest sense. The underlying impulses within nature herself are spiritual: creative powers mysteriously inclined to adopt certain consistent forms, as the basically Augustinian tradition of ‘French Spiritualism’ (from Biran to Blondel) has always taught. We are superficially related to these powers by our external ability to manipulate them, but we are more profoundly and immediately related to them by our own internal powers of feeling and imagination: an insight shared by the Spiritualists with the seemingly very different post-Puritan tradition of American Transcendentalism (inaugurated by Ralph Waldo Emerson).

For these traditions, the question posed to us by nature, of which we are part, is not mainly how she may be tamed and exploited, but how she may be fulfilled as beautiful, and therefore as also true and good, by human spirits in consociation with each other and with their surroundings. It is just the teleological goal of an ‘integral ecology’ which Pope Francis today demands.

Unless we repent, ‘turn around’ and pursue this goal, we are surely lost. For there is nothing accidental about the ecological mess that we find ourselves within. It derives directly from our mode of economics as appropriation of natural and human resources, exploitation of land as rent and of human bodies for profit. It derives equally from our mode of politics as methodical control without final purpose. And it derives perhaps most of all from our false assumption that a ‘science’ fossed only superficial description and regular manipulation, provides the deepest truth about nature.

The standard liberal democratic proposals merely to consolidate and tweak these theoretical- -cum-practical idioms of our culture can only solve the ecological problem as the cost of tyranny. Moreover, if a more tempered approach to our physical environment is adopted purely as an expedient, to be abandoned when economic profit or political control collapses, then further down the line of history it will only generate further environmental crisis.

This is the element of truth in the instinctive populist suspicion that successively terrorism, financial crisis, Covid pandemic and shortages of food and energy are exploited as emergencies in order for Leviathan to exercise yet further domination over a subordinated population.

One does not have to give any credence to conspiracy theories to allows this. For, from the outset, the modern notion of single sovereign power over against a mass of isolated individuals who only accidentally coagulate, was predicated on the notion of natural emergency which re-impinges in the face of the breakdown of cultural unity (as in the wake of the European Reformation). The threat of such has to be sustained, if sovereignty itself is to be sustained. And where sovereignty itself is threatened, then emergency may be artificially produced, or real emergency exaggerated.

But the hysterical half-grasp of this reality by populism is not the answer, any more than is its retreat to the sovereign nation-state which cannot handle a weakening of nature which knows no boundaries, nor the unrestricted flows of finance, capital and people which today thwart any attempt to realise social justice in one country. Nor can individual states respond adequately to the mutation of capitalism into a neo-feudalism that extracts profits from rents on drained lands, from ‘vectoral’ control of information and so of people, and from financial speculation rather than from production, which is now in that continuous crisis of profitability anticipated by Marx.

We have already seen why the materialism of liberals and of most of the Left cannot provide the answer either. Our entire natural-political crisis is rooted in the double denial of spirit to nature and of the ultimate spiritual rule of nature by human spirits, as opposed to her cruel oppression by the human understanding, uninformed by wisdom.

That means, politically, a return to a natural order, as Catholic Social Teaching has consistently taught.

All single sovereignty must be demolished. Instead, from the village to the planet, we need to return to the complex network of gift-exchanging communities and corporations, which naturally and traditionally pursue intrinsic good purpose and virtue, out of which a true and relatively more peaceful order can be distilled.

That requires dispersed democratic assent and various coordination by single individuals. But it also requires the rule of spirit rather than of the technicians of matter, as René Guenon once rightly declared. The wisest who most discern spiritual ends and can direct both nature and culture teleologically towards those ends have to be given a certain sort of crucial and privileged role. Their counsel must be proferred to the people and then the politically wise and virtuous, as genuine ‘representatives’, must instigate the working-through of such accepted counsel in a practice within which all can participate.

Without such a ‘clerisy’, as Coleridge termed it, and an integral directing of the secular towards the religious, what we get instead is the rule of the charlatans, the egoists and the profiteers, to the infinite distress of nature herself and the attempted exhaustion of her powers. That is impossible, but they can only be newly realised to human benefit if we recognise that they are both instigated and fulfilled in spiritual creativity, conviviality and contemplation.

Only a spiritual revolution will save us now. But that means also a real, social, economic and political transformation.