Negative Liberty, Liberal Faith Postulates and World Disorder

chapter 11 Negative Liberty, Liberal Faith Postulates and World Disorder

Timothy Fitzgerald

Introduction

The religion-secular binary is an ideological operator that arose in the first place as a key function of Liberal capitalist modernity. The invention and “othering” of something called “religion” has played an important part in the normalization of Liberal fictions as though they are “natural.” “Religion” was, in the first place, identified by enlightenment rationalists and empiricists with the dogmas and unelected hierarchies of Christian church-states and their hereditary rulers, but has gradually been expanded into a modern, generic, global category. It includes the “world religions” invented by orientalists, mis- sionaries, colonial administrators, and some sections of the indigenous (male) elites. It includes a vast number of ethnographic representations of oral cul- tures collected by anthropologists. There has also been the marketing of a host of competing “new religious movements” and “spiritualities.” But the term “religion” and “religious” is ubiquitous. In fact the category has become so crowded out that it is difficult to know what not to put in it. I suggest that Liberalism is not essentially different from what is typically thought of as a religion, in this case a system of faith postulates camouflaged as science and common sense. Liberal Individualism, representative democracy, national sovereignty and political economy have been widely assumed to be marks of western progress and superiority, of the modern over the traditional, of the secular over the religious. Liberals have attributed this success story, in part at least, to the progressive marginalization of “religion” and its dogmatic faith postulates from public life, and its replacement by the objective domains of secular reason. The problem with this narrative is that Liberalism is itself based on faith postulates that are not essentially different from what are typically classified as religious beliefs. The key doctrines of Liberalism are based on myths—about human nature, about ownership rights, about self-regulating markets, about progress and development, about nations and national identity, about religion and religions—that have taken on the appearance of universal, common sense

Negative Liberty, Liberal Faith Postulates 249 normality.1 Few of these Liberal abstractions have any empirically confirmable objectivity. They constitute imaginary goals and aspirations that appear in subjective consciousness as the limits of our ability to think. Furthermore, in Neoliberal doctrine these myths have become invested with an intensity of faith that today drives the world order. If the categories and principles of classical Liberalism are not essentially different from what typically get called “religious” beliefs, then Neoliberalism is a fundamentalist revival movement characterised by dogmatism and missionary zeal. That Liberalism, especially in its purist Neoliberal form, is not itself essentially different from a dogmatic religious faith undermines the very idea of the “secular” as the rea- sonable ground from which the “religious other” can be identified. This invention of modern generic religion and religions has functioned to transform a number of counter-intuitive Liberal (and Socialist) myths about human nature and liberty into the non-religious “secular” common sense normality of Eurocentric educated elites. Classical Liberalism, revived since the end of the Second World War as Neoliberalism, has come to dominate the assumptions and the policies of national governments, international institu- tions and a wider public. Many on-going debates and contestations among Liberal intellectuals about Liberalism’s key doctrines, especially “liberty” and its ideal implications for government, screen out the imperial power formations that have made possi- ble the Liberal institutionalised life and its privileges. The intellectual debates since Locke told his story about man in the state of nature (Locke 1690) while his eye was apparently on the “empty lands” of North America that seemed ripe for enclosure (Arneil 1992, Ince n.d.) have been conducted by largely male elites in colonial metropolitan centres whose class privileges have depended directly or indirectly on the global extraction of surplus value.The influential disquisitions of James Mill and his son J.S. Mill in the nineteenth century on the true nature of liberty went hand-in-glove with orientalist denigration and the colonial exploitation of India.2 It was in the context of the Protestant Christian European encounter with, and domination of, other peoples in

1 There is no space here to pursue the Marxist-Leninist versions of scientific secularism and mystification of “religion” and “faith.” I have pursued some of these issues in Religion and Politics in International Relations: the Modern Myth (Continuum 2011). 2 J.S.Mill’s On Liberty (1859) is considered a classic exposition of Liberalism. It is surely relevant that such disquisitions on the meaning of ‘liberty’ are in the context of colonial imposition and enforced extraction. Mill’s father James Mill’s History of India (1818), sales of which net- ted him a small fortune, exemplify Orientalist misrepresentations of Hindus and Muslims inhabiting a sub-continent that he never visited. Both he and his son had influential salaried positions in the East India Company.