Writing in SOF (No.42, September 2000), Dinah Livingstone diagnoses a “massive complacency” in Cupitt’s book which she sees as “ignoring the struggle for justice”.
The type of struggle Dinah recalls for us is that of indigenous peoples against the overwhelming dollar-power of Western global capitalism. Exercising this power, she argues, enables neo-liberal democracies to eliminate local cultures and their traditional economies, replacing them with a Western cultural hegemony governed by profit and greed.
Consequently, she is troubled by the association Cupitt makes between kingdom theology and the multinational companies which flourish in our liberal democracies. She also mistrusts his relish for postmodern rhetoric about “the end of history”.
Both, she implies, show Cupitt to be detached from the daily realities of human suffering among people throughout the world for whom the kingdom and its justice has not yet come. [am grateful to Dinah for raising this issue but, writing from the perspective of the pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty, | will develop three points which, despite her fears to the contrary, will suggest that both she and Cupitt are on the same side in the struggle to realise the ubiquity of justice as fairness.
First, concepts should be understood as tools rather than essences. Like Dinah, I doubt that the concept “the end of history” has much to offer the struggle to realise the ubiquity of justice as fairness. However, my Rortyan doubt about this is not a comprehensive doubt about the value of postmodern discourse but, rather, resembles the type of doubt a trainee bricklayer might have on being instructed to lay mortar on bricks with a wok. Good for cooking a stir-fry, a wok does not seem quite the right tool for a bricklayer.
Similarly, “the end of history” is a clever conceptual tool for analysing the consequences of the fact that, in Cupitt’s words, “[some of the] things that people used to believe would happen only at the end of the world have recently happened” (p.90). It is pretty useless, however, to those Latin American legislators whose job it is to decide what action to take when the weak turn violent because their legitimate complaints about the way the strong push them around go consistently unheard. For such legislators, a vocabulary of justice as fairness is a far better tool.
Such a tool can improve the conditions of the weak by empowering its users to seek fair ways of redistributing wealth and resources and fair ways of responding to the dissent of the governed. But this tool does not break in the hands of its users simply because they also use other linguistic tools unrelated to the important task of bringing justice to the weak. Equally, pace Livingstone, employing a postmodern vocabulary to discuss kingdom theology does not prevent an English theologian from using a vocabulary of justice as fairness to support that same important task.
As Livingstone says, “In the English radical tradition the struggle to de-supernaturalise God has gone hand in hand with the struggle for political liberation and justice”.
However, some contemporary followers of this tradition cannot hold the concerns of theology and the concerns of justice together. After de-supernaturalising God they do not see how anyone might grab hold of a single tool able to assist the aims of both concerns. They are simply happy that historical contingency has blessed them with both.
This leads to my second point. | accept Livingstone’s view that the unserviceability of metaphysical concepts (such as concepts of a supernatural God) does not make the struggle for justice pointless. However, the demise of metaphysics does not leave unaffected our understanding of how we justify this struggle. ; According to Rorty, the claim that philosophers can justify our political practices by appealing to “reason” or “truth” simply submits us to another version of supernatural authoritarianism. Instead of justifying why we should care about the suffering of people we are unlikely ever to meet by appealing to these philosophical concepts, “we should”, Rorty writes, “just thank our lucky stars that there are quite a lot of people nowadays who are pretty appalled by human beings suffering unnecessarily” (“Response to Simon Critchley” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, Routledge, 1996).
We should do this because after the demise of metaphysics it is easier to see that justification is always justification to a particular social audience - in this case the audience that is consistently appalled by human suffering: an audience that includes both Cupitt and Livingstone.
This audience finds the massive inequalities in wealth between the first and the third world intolerable. It hopes its children will do more than is currently being done to prevent the situation in which millions of people in the world go hungry while others have a surfeit. But developing the right metaphysical vocabulary will not be of much help to them.
Establishing the ubiquity of justice as fairness, Rorty argues, is not a matter of putting the right philosophical concepts in place but of putting the best bureaucratic procedures and technological resources to work - something which neoliberal Western capitalism just happens to have been relatively successful at in the last fifty years or so.
Consequently, we need to be extremely wary of sweeping criticisms of the capitalist system, for while it contains much to criticise and is in need of continual reform, it is the only effective system of social and economic polity by which any of us have any hope of ever realising the justice which Jesus suggested we seek.
Here we reach my third point. Livingstone, Cupitt and Rorty all hope to see what Livingstone calls “the enjoyment of the Earth’s rich bounty” shared by everyone. Estimates vary and standard of enjoyment are relative but roughly two fifths of the world’s six billion people currently have no such share. The question is how best to achieve their inclusion.
We have already suggested that after the death of God nothing other than our own efforts, our politics, our technologies and our bureaucratic institutions is going to achieve the ubiquity of justice. However, to suggest that “our” means “us human beings” is too imprecise. It may be uncomfortable, but we have to be honest to ourselves and admit that “our” refers to “us lucky, relatively technologically-advanced, bureaucratically-organised, democratically-governed citizens of wealth-creating Western market economies”. Although indigenous peoples throughout the world have wisdoms which have gone often prides itself on its philosophical ability to detect and deconstruct hidden aporias in the texts of novels or soap operas. It has helped to change minds for the better on identity issues, but as a tool for tackling the problems of the third world it is about as unhelpful as a scrubbing brush is for felling tress. Words like “capitalism” represent the sort of things from which cultural politics wants to get out from under. But with no practical alternatives to offer for lifting the very poor out of starvation, cultural politics’ antipathy to this Western tool risks writing off the people most in need of justice.
According to Rorty, “We can no longer use the term ‘capitalism’ to mean both ‘a market economy’ and ‘the source of all contemporary injustice’. We can no longer tolerate the ambiguity between capitalism as a way of financing industrial production and capitalism as the Great Bad Thing that accounts for most contemporary human misery” (Truth and Progress, CUP, 1998).
If Western intellectuals want to help the poor they should end this ambiguity by dropping the pejorative interpretation of “capitalism” and turning their energies to the banalities of “real politics”. Real politics offers “While capitalism contains much to criticise and is in %°!%0"s ‘© teal problems. It does p need of continual reform, it is the only effective not complain about the capitalist system as a whole but aims to system of social and economic polity by which any of = nsure that capitalism works as us have any hope of ever realising the justice which Jesus suggested we seek.” unappreciated by us Westerners, and although we should only feel deep shame at the murderous ways we have treated these people, no-one, I think, is seriously suggesting that their technologies and economies could match the global ability of the West to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and cure the sick. There are no better tools (at the moment) for creating the ubiquity of justice than those tools supplied by neo-liberal Western capitalism.
However well intended, Livingstone’s blanket criticism of these tools does little for those in need of justice. Willingness to help the weak, Rorty argues, has to be accompanied by the belief that we are able to help them. Whether we like it or not, this ability is largely Western and it is capitalist.
Thankfully, it is also liberal and humanitarian. Free markets do not solve all our problems but, Rorty writes, “Marxists were absolutely right about one thing: the soul of history is economic”.” He continues: “All the talk in the world about the need to abandon ‘technological rationality’ and... the need for...’non-Western ways of thinking’ is not going to bring more money to the Indian villages... Maybe technology and centralized planning will not work. But they are all we have got. We should not try to pull the blanket over our heads by saying that technology was a big mistake, and the planning, top-down initiatives, and ‘Western ways of thinking’ must be abandoned. That is just another, much less honest, way of saying... that the poor are unthinkable” ( Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin , 1999).
The shift among some Western intellectuals from what Rorty calls “real politics” - top-down piecemeal social reform based upon technological innovation and centralised planning - to what he calls “cultural politics” is partly responsible for making the very poor increasingly unthinkable. Cultural politics sees the relevant moral community as limited to a particular interest group. It much for the weak as it does for the strong. Real politics means discouraging the rich from setting up their own interest groups which no longer feel the need to consider the plight of the poor. It means implementing policies that do not reward excessive greed. It means encouraging national governments to implement policies that help standards of education and health-care in the third world draw closer to those in the first. It means supporting trade union campaigns for equal pay and working conditions for women and for international agreements on a minimum wage well above the United Nations’ official minimum survival rate of 60p per day.
It means doing the sort of thing that Dinah Livingstone did in her article - raising our sensitivity to the plight of people we might otherwise never have heard of and encouraging them in their struggle for justice. It means supporting Jubilee 2000 and, above all, it means campaigning for the creation of democratically accountable multinational institutions with the power to impose taxation policies on multinational companies to ensure that a fair proportion of their massive revenue is redistributed to support the aspirations of the weak.
None of these things are easy to achieve. Real politics works slowly, compromising between competing goods.
Livingstone is absolutely correct in thinking that postmodern theory is of little help here. Its popularity, Rorty suggests, owes much to the fact that it is easier to manipulate language than it is to manipulate relatively rich and self-satisfied people into doing more to help the poor. The fact that this is so means that a “three cheers, hurrah!” approach to the market economy is inappropriate. However, to give up on, neo-liberal Western capitalism is not the answer either, for with no practical alternative available we would also be giving up on the poor and their aspirations for justice.
Philip Knight gained a PhD. in theology at Durham University in 1997 and teaches RE in Kent.