C—O >E>- Poet, author, activist and SoF member DINAH LIVINGSTONE contributes this scathing critique of what she sees as Don Cupitt’s ‘shameful’ endorsement of global capitalism as the ‘end of history’ and the arrival of ‘the Kingdom’ a mess of postmodernism On January 21 2000, the indigenous peoples of Ecuador and their supporters rose up against the proposed dollarisation of the economy and took over the Parliament building in the capital, Quito, to install a “poncho utopia” trying to create justice in their country.
These indigenous peoples see this as a new phase ina five-hundred year old historical struggle, which is by no means over.
This uprising was rapidly defeated by big business and US pressure, but as Antonio Vargas, one indigenous Kingdom Come's style is happy clappy - of the urbane Cambridge kind, rather than mid-West tele-evangelist. The book's keynotes are individualism and privatisation, its salient characteristic is massive complacency. leader, puts it: “Our road is long, it does not come to an end in one day, and this was an advance along the road”, or as another leader, Blanca Chancoso, says: “This uprising is like giving birth. It has just begun but when the guagua (baby in Quechua) is born they will see how strong it is”. Throughout the Third World, the idea that we have already reached the “end of history” is either meaningless or, if true, a disaster.
This article is not a review of Don Cupitt’s latest book, Kingdom Come in Everyday Speech, which has already received extensive coverage in SOF magazine. But given that the central message of the Sermon on the Mount is “Seek first the kingdom and its justice, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matthew 6:33), it is extraordinary that in Cupitt’s Kingdom Come the word justice barely figures at all.
Kingdom Come’s style is happy clappy - of the urbane Cambridge kind, rather than mid-West tele-evangelist.
The book’s keynotes are individualism and privatisation, its salient characteristic is massive complacency. Cupitt’s theme is a “morality of lifestyle, ‘pride’ and free self- SOF 42 / July 2000 expression” (p.16), because “personal faith is privatised” (p.47). According to him, “the world-wide triumph of liberal democratic politics” brings us “to the end of history”. “The democratic process is an historical achievement that has no ‘beyond’... fully-developed liberal democracy is already post-historical. Liberal democracy is kingdom politics... The whole globe is becoming democratised: it is becoming a theatre and a market that never shuts” (pp55-6).
The proclamation of the Kingdom, declares Cupitt, was a “self-fulfilling prophecy” and “there has already occurred a rather extensive ‘realisation’ of Christian eschatology” (p.90).
There are “a whole series of structural resemblances between... the world of our postmodernity and the traditional ideal world-atthe-end-of-the-world that religion has called the kingdom of God” (p.89). Cupitt says rather tetchily (p.92) that if anyone makes objections to this, “either they rest upon a misunderstanding or I have already replied to them” (p.92). He regards himself as unassailable and has become a priest of the Neoliberal New World Order, endorsing it with far more elegance and grace than a mid-West tele-evangelist can command.
In Kingdom Come Cupitt is excited by the Human Genome Project as “some indication of what people might opt for when they have a free choice in the matter” (p.86). For the Human Genome Project, many samples of Ecuadorian indigenous blood were stolen (apparently by members of US Pentecostal sects) to put on sale in US Genome Boutiques and on the internet. As the indigenous leader Ricardo Ulcuango says, “We knew about the stealing of sacred animals and plants like ayahuasca but it had not yet reached the point of actually carrying off our brothers’ and sisters’ blood”.
In his earlier book, After God, Cupitt gave a fascinating, indeed thrilling, account of how “through its system of supernatural beliefs a society represents to itself the ways that its language builds its world”. Here he was echoing Blake, who says that all religions are Throughout the Third World, the idea that we have already reached the “end of history” is either meaningless or, if true, a disaster. creations of the poetic genius. On the other hand, Blake constantly denounces the way in which religion has been used as a system to “enslave the vulgar”.
In the English radical tradition the struggle to desupernaturalise God has gone hand in hand with the struggle for political liberation and justice. For example, Gerrard Winstanley’s purpose in speaking of “the Great Creator Reason”, rather than God the Father, is not only theological but political: to justify the poor Diggers’ political action in digging up St George’s Hill to feed themselves. Blake fulminates against injustice in many of his poems. In Holy Thursday he denounces “babes Clue-sniffing teenagers living in a Nicaraguan shanty town, 1991 is reduced to misery” and in Jerusalem he attacks the beautiful City’s chief enemies: “Is this thy soft Family-Love, Thy cruel patriarchal pride, Planting thy Family alone, Destroying all the world beside?” Cupitt is a distinguished heir of half this English radical tradition: its struggle to de-supernaturalise God.
But by ignoring the struggle for justice, he squanders the other half of his birthright for a mess of postmodernism.
For Cupitt, religion is “an experiment in selfhood”, pursuing “our own personal growth by exploring and flipping among several different forms of selfhood and views of life”. Concentrating on these spiritual exercises, to the exclusion of any struggle for justice and political liberation, aligns Cupitt with the triumph of global capitalism, whose ideal philosophical companion is postmodernism, because it is simply unconcerned with the reality of suffering and injustice in the world. As Cupitt puts it in Kingdom Come, “In postmodernity we are no longer worried, because we do not believe in progress any more” (p.93).
SOF 42 / July 2000 He asserts that “the whole cosmological or grand narrative side of religion has totally collapsed”, but it is not true that because there is no supernatural God in heaven the struggle for justice on Earth has become pointless. Bringing God down to Earth to “reside in the human breast” is not Kingdom Come (though it helps). Kingdom Come means first justice - on Earth because we have no other world. Even if we never fully succeed in creating a reign of justice and peace in the world, the point is not to give up trying. This is a grand narrative, which the death of God has not destroyed but reinforced.
Cupitt assumes that postmodernism has brought about the end of idolatry. But Mammon is an idol which demands countless human sacrifices every day, far more than any of the old religions. He says: “It is very curious that God and Mammon should have changed places ethically. Mammon is internationalist. He wants people to be healthy and welleducated. He wants peace and stability, progress and universal prosperity.” He praises the multinational companies: “Tt is conventional to criticise the multinationals for being mobile, rootless, anonymous, and interested only in profit, but I’m pointing out that it is precisely these features that make them morally superior to our old locally based national and religious identities.” When we look at the enormous suffering and damage caused by global capitalism, these remarks are fatuous.
Mammon does not care at all whether people are healthy and well educated, except when it suits it. Mammon is massively involved in wars and the arms trade, rather than peace. In the last twenty years the gap between rich and poor has widened enormously, in England and all over the world.
Mammon creates haves and have-nots, rather than universal prosperity. Cupitt’s remark about multinationals that “being mobile and global, they cannot afford to operate by generating and excluding an ‘other’”, is the opposite of what actually happens to millions who are poor and excluded.
In his communiqué of July 1998 (posted on the internet), Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatistas, whose uprising on New Year's Day 1994 was against NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, says: “Certainly neo-liberalism has created a formidable enemy force in large-scale financial capital, an enemy force that can dictate wars, crashes, dictatorships, so-called ‘democracies’, lives and above all deaths in every corner of the world.
Nevertheless, this process of total globalisation (economic, political and cultural) does not mean the inclusion of different societies, incorporating their particularities. On the contrary, it implies the imposition of one single way of thinking: that of financial capital. In this war of conquest everything and all of us are subjected to the criterion of the market - anything that opposes it or presents an obstacle will be eliminated.” “It is very postmodern”, says Cupitt, “suddenly to realise that we no longer actually need roots, identity, stability or provenance. We can do without all those things. Me, I don’t want them anymore.” Firstly, it is somewhat comic that a retired Cambridge don, with many unmistakeable characteristics of a retired Cambridge don, rooted in English philosophy and that pleasant way of life, should regard himself as having no identity. Maybe he thinks his is a kind of norm or default identity, just as the neo-liberal global market's “single way of thinking, that of financial capital”, regards itself as the triumphant norm. lg SOF 42 / Duy 2000 Perhaps that is unfair to Cupitt, but speaking in praise of “the end of the other”, he gives a telling list of “much the same syllabus” schoolchildren are studying all around the world: “English, mathematics, science, and technology”.
English first on the list speaks volumes.
But as Marcos says, “This process of total globalisation does not mean the inclusion of different societies, incorporating their particularities”. He does not celebrate “the end of the other” but speaks about people being eliminated. The Zapatista slogan Por un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos (for a world where there is room for many worlds) means the opposite of the end of the other. It means their inclusion in the enjoyment of Earth’s rich bounty.
On the Earth we share, there is room for many “worlds” or cultures, many homes, many poetries. This means treating the “other” with respect and, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude”, which he calls “the great spring of the activity of our mind”. The respect and the pleasure depend on both our likeness and our differences. Capitalism lacks this respect and has turned Mammon into an idol, to which all life on Earth, whether plant, animal or human, is sacrificed if they stand in its way.
The Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal has a beautiful poem about some contraband parrots, which had been captured for export to the United States to learn to speak English there. The parrots are rescued, and “When the cages were let open they all shot out like an arrow shower straight for their mountains.” Cardenal goes on to say: “The Revolution did the same for us, I think. It freed us from the cages where they trapped us to talk English.” It comes as no surprise that the US President Ronald Reagan (whom Cupitt in Kingdom Come bizarrely includes in a chapter on “postmodern saints”) was determined at all costs to exterminate that Revolution.
One of the last Aztec poems written when the Spaniards conquered Mexico in 1521 concludes: “Weep, my friends, and know that by these deeds we have forever lost our heritage.” Today the violence of the capitalist global market against the “other” is more powerful than the “proudest arms of Spain”. The violence is real, not “non-real”. This is the “end of the other” which Don Cupitt celebrates as postmodernist lightness of being. His endorsement of the current hegemony is as cavalier as that of the conquistadors.
The Aztec for poetry is in x6chitl in cuicatl: “flower and song”. “They came to make our flowers wither, so that only their flower might live”, was how the Maya prophet Chilam Balam de Chumayel described the “end of the other” perpetrated on his continent by the conquistadors - as in Blake’s Jerusalem, quoted earlier: “Planting thy Family alone Destroying all the world beside.” _ This “end of the other” is still being perpetrated today by the hegemonic Neo-liberal New World Order, not just in Latin America but globally. It is shameful that Cupitt should endorse this murderous ideology. The word “anthology” means a collection of flowers. The poetry of earth’s glory is that it has so many different flowers and so many different songs.