To consider how the human subject is for Don Cupitt an agent of political resistance, we will take an overview of Cupitt’s framing of subjectivity as historically situated and contingent, and his ethics as involving both ‘solar personal ethics, or “spirituality”… [and] “humanitarian” social ethics. … (Emptiness and Brightness, 2001, p.52-53). We will then consider the subject’s agency in the struggle for social change, before raising some questions for evaluating Cupitt’s thinking.
The self
Cupitt shares Karl Marx’s belief that the subject is historically formed and situated, twice citing A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844) in which the young
Marx says,
But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of men, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, … [but religion] is the fantastic realisation of the human essence, because the human essence has no true reality.
Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, p 175, Cupitt cites the italicised in The Revelation of Being, 1998, p.20 and Kingdom Come in Everyday Speech, 2000, p.133
For Cupitt, it is primarily language, the public world of culture and values, that both situates the subject in history and forms the inner sense of self.
We never actually get right outside language… out of the flux: …I can no more be lifted out of history than a wave can be lifted from the sea.
Radicals and the Future of the Church, 1989, p.42
If all our thinking is transacted in our language, then ‘the mind’ and all our supposed inner life of thought must be secondary internalization. … All this makes ‘the mind’ not a metaphysical entity with access to a higher world, but simply a contingent cultural construct. No more than that. Society is logically prior to solitude and not the reverse; and publicity prior to privacy. Solar Ethics, 1995, p.23
This ‘language’ is comprised not only of words, spoken or written that are internalised, but of cultural sign systems and values that are shared by what Cupitt calls a ‘“broadcast” self’ (Solar Ethics, 1995, p.39, p.13). The self is relational and performative, not a ‘spiritual-substance… just a collection of roles, faces and functions.’ (Radicals and the Future of the Church, 1989, p.19); ‘we receive and give off a continual stream of stories and messages through our dress, grooming, body-language, gait, manner, signature, speech, self-presentation, visible feeling responses and so on.’ (The Time Being, 1992, p.70)
Cupitt admits that, ‘The route by which we approached marxism (language, the external-relations view of the self, radical historicism) has also shown us that there is a great deal wrong with classical Marxism. … but we acknowledge the continuing influence of the marxist view of the self, society and history.’ (The New Christian Ethic, 1988, p167-169). Marx ‘s primary concern is with the material and the conditions that form consciousness, which Marx calls ‘the language of real life’. (A Critique of The German Ideology [c.1845-1846] 1932 in, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, [Part 1.A, pp.19-26]). For Cupitt, these historical or material conditions that informed Marx’s understanding of social class still have an influence, but through language and culture. Cupitt’s work aims primarily at liberation from the influence of the ruling ideas of religion and political order (the ‘ideological superstructure’ as is found in later Marxist thinkers (e.g., Althusser on interpolation, Gramsci on cultural hegemony, and in Foucault’s various genealogies of power).
A responsible moral agent
The subject is not merely a product of culture, but is a responsible agent: ‘We have to break with the long Western tradition of supposing that only a substantial self is a fully morally-responsible self’. (The New Christian Ethics, 1988, p.88) Our moral actions are a part of our value-laden performative communication.
Someone who asks, ‘Why should I be moral?’ is naively misunderstanding the human situation. He is like a person who asks, ‘Why should I use the common language?” Human beings are social. Rational thought is social, rational communication is social, and rational action is social too. A wholly personal and private morality is as useless a thing as a wholly personal and private communication-code.
[1978] Explorations in Theology 6, 1979, p.99
As a moral agent, the individual is not an isolated ‘lonely human being as being de trop, adrift in an ice-cold universe, bereft of value, and finding himself [sic] stuck with the sole responsibility for creating and projecting out values to live by’ as imagined by certain existentialist philosophy, rather, ‘Every human being is always already within a complete, fully-formed and value-laden human construction of the world.’ (Solar Ethics, 1995, p.51-52.) A given social order is also a social construct, which means we can be agents of change.
[A]ll ‘realities’, political, religious and other, are transient human constructs. When we have reached this point we can consider refusing to accommodate ourselves to presently-established ‘reality’. We hope and believe that things could be much better than this.
Creative Faith, 2015, p.55
Cupitt’s subjectivist solar ethics encourages individuals to take responsibility for their actions as they express themselves in words and deeds, and to become agents of change.
What does a solar religious life look like? First, it involves an attempt to find your own voice—that is, to find the lifestyle through which you can best and most fully express yourself. Second, you must attempt to appropriate your own life and assume full responsibility for it. Third, your personal living should be as affirmative and extravertive as you can make it: each of us should so act as to enhance and increase the overall value of life.
It is worth commenting here that all the greatest moral advances of the past seventy years have been of this type: feminism strives to raise the general social valuation of females; environmentalism strives to raise our valuation of our physical environment and of all the living things that populate it; anti-racism and the many movements descended from it strive to raise our valuation of racial groups other than our own; and finally, humanitarian ethics responds simply to human need, without regard to any calculation of the relative merits of individuals.
If we are still able to be hopeful about human beings and the human future, it is largely on the basis of what these four great movements have already done to make the human world a better place today than it was in earlier periods.
Impossible Loves, 2007, p.86-87
Humanitarian Agents of Resistance
The social ethic that Cupitt commends is humanitarian, understood to be from a secular realising of Jesus’ “kingdom” values, in a secularised Christianity (The Meaning of the West, 2008). But humanitarianism has become a global moral vocabulary of international agreements, such as the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Above Us Only Sky, 2008, p.vii, p.114), even though these values remain contested and not universally accepted.
Cupitt’s subjectivist solar ethics encourages individuals to take responsibility for their actions as they express themselves in words and deeds, and to become agents of change.
This social ethic evolves democratically, in contrast with ideological programmes like Marxist-Leninism. Cupitt’s solar ethics is an unsystematic ethics of ‘deviants and whistle-blowers’, who contribute to liberation from oppressive ideologies in politics and to the development of this evolving humanitarian ethic.
Systematic schemes for reducing the historically evolved variety and untidiness of our life cannot be implemented without more loss of values than gain, and serious curtailment of freedom. Space needs to be left for untidy people such as deviants and whistle-blowers. Many of us now prefer to be political sceptics, floating voters, people whose commitments are irregular, occasional and piecemeal. We interest ourselves in pressure-groups, minorities and issue-politics. Our politics is consciously unsystematic.
Cupitt, “Unsystematic Ethics and Politics”, in Shadow of Spirit, ed. Berry & Wernick, [pp.149-55], 1992, p. 154
Cupitt looks to the examples of those who have had a Christian formation and have become humanitarian agents of resistance: those Quakers and Evangelical Christians, who struggled ‘for the emancipation of slaves and of many other groups, such as workers, women, prisoners, the insane and children’; as well as Tolstoyans and Nelson Mandela. (Creative Faith, 2015, p.2, pp.5-6)
There are of course religious traditions that oppose humanitarian values. Cupitt notes that there is ‘an extremely sharp confrontation between a neo-conservative and ultra-puritan Islamism and ‘the West’, which it perceives as humanistic to the point of idolatry and as being rotten and ripe for destruction.’ (The Meaning of the West, 2008, p.120). In this case resistance involves non-violently bearing witness to humanitarian values, expressing humanitarian love even to the point of ‘martyrdom’.
[W]e should prefer to die for our humanitarian values, rather than betray them. So martyrdom returns, because we must be as serious about humanitarian values as we used to be about our old supernatural beliefs. … We should prefer to risk death by arguing non-violently for a full acceptance by Islam of democratic values, critical thinking, and humanitarian ethics.
Ethics in the Last Days of Humanity, 2016, pp.85, 86
In this case resistance involves non-violently bearing witness to humanitarian values, expressing humanitarian love even to the point of ‘martyrdom’.
Democracy and Politics
At the turn of the century, Cupitt had confidently believed that liberal democratic politics could best advance humanitarian values, holding to an ongoing and progressive vision of development.
[W]e live in an epoch when historical developments have progressively deconstructed the old disciplinary worldview. These developments include the world-wide triumph of liberal democratic politics and the decline of every sort of ideological politics, together with general acceptance of a strong doctrine of individual human rights. Nobody sees ‘beyond’ these ideas, and they bring us to the end of history — in the sense that democracy is itself an endless conversation, and a continuous process of adaptation to change that never evolves beyond itself. … Liberal democracy is kingdom-politics; it is end-of-the-world politics, and it is profoundly post-ecclesiastical.
Kingdom Come in Everyday Speech, 2000, p.55-56
This presents democracy as consensus building process, and Cupitt even commended the collaborative political philosophy of anarchism, in the sense of both being ‘without foundation’ (an-archē) and also being politically liberal-communitarian.
Because we are emotionally still monarchists in politics, realistic theists in religion, and foundationalists (Cartesians, usually) in philosophy, anarchy has a dirty name. It is a Yeatsian nightmare: “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” But in fact anarchy can turn out to be far more powerful and efficacious than absolute monarchy. …
The purely immanent interest each organism has in surviving, and that each human being or group has in communicating effectively, is now well known to be a highly effective discipline. …. When we grasp this we see that there is no reason to fear anarchy and radical immanence. Far from it, because the surviving absolute monarchies, theocratic societies, and other sorts of dictatorship are without exception in our experience backward, cruel, and corrupt. When did people’s desire for a “strong leader” ever do them any good? Doesn’t it now look as if a fully horizontalized world might be much more rational and peaceful, and much less self-destructive? Instead of trusting Authority, why not try trusting conversation, democracy, and bargaining?
Mysticism after Modernity, 1998, p.90-91
Instead of trusting Authority, why not try trusting conversation, democracy, and bargaining?
This confidence in a collaborative democratic process might have found expression in Cupitt’s method of drawing on popular idioms of everyday language for a democratic Lebensphilosophie (Meaning of it All in Everyday Speech, 1999; The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech, 1999; Kingdom Come in Everyday Speech, 2000). While everyday speech is neither uncritical nor univocal, this methodology only identifies current assumptions, rather than engages critically with the material conditions and capitalist worldview that give rise to such ideas, or the worries and fears and frustrations leave people alienated from the political process.
Later in life, Cupitt became more disillusioned. The ‘general acceptance’ of individual human rights remains elusive and there is a lack of ‘agreed rational criteria for a good society’:
One person’s progress may be another’s decline… [furthermore] we do not have and never will have moral and political standards that are fully independent of history and our own criticism. In which case the whole idea of progress breaks down’.
Theology’s Strange Return, 2010, p.43
Democracy is far from a polite ‘endless conversation’ in which people are ‘communicating effectively’ worldwide: it remains a battleground of competing material and economic interests, as well as religious and ideological politics. People are drawn to the popular ‘strong leader’ hoping for material improvement. Liberal democratic politics has also failed to stem environmental destruction, global inequality or resulting population movements in immigration. In spite of these, Cupitt still saw a need for humanitarian ethics and institutions.
[B]y far the best thing we have left to cling to as we face a very dark future is our tradition of humanitarian ethics originally associated in the Bible with the last and blessed Age to Come at the end of time, and now diffused very widely through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, through the United Nations and its various agencies concerned with refugees, health, food and the like; through the modern state’s active concern to promote the education, the health and the welfare of its subjects; and through the great international voluntary aid organizations. …Today, we are almost all of us humanitarians—because we darkly suspect that the human race has not got much time left.
Ethics in the Last Days of Humanity, 2016, p.18; p.20
Questions for Evaluation
Cupitt’s historically situated and culturally-formed ethical subject has moral agency, and an ability for social resistance as well as cooperation and consensus building. This a modification of the autonomous subject of liberal philosophy, who values liberty from social constraint, freedom for self expression. But liberal philosophy has gone hand in hand with capitalism, as liberalism was shaped by and has supported capitalism, perhaps more than capitalism as been held to account by the liberal critical tradition, or humanitarian ethics and institutions.
Cupitt is himself situated in a critical western intellectual tradition and his ethical subject prioritises reason over those emotions such as fear and vulnerability, desire and greed, which are exploited by capitalism and motivate people and politics. Recent Marxist writers have returned to Spinoza’s study of the affects motivating human striving (Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, including Deleuze, Guattari, and Negri) to analyse the influence of capitalism on our material conditions and consider how these construct our inner life and political behaviour.
One might wonder if Cupitt’s own material ‘situatedness’, living with university tenure among largely economically privileged students, shaped his thinking.
One might wonder if Cupitt’s own material ‘situatedness’, living with university tenure among largely economically privileged students, shaped his thinking. We cannot avoid being culturally situated, but this means that we need to attend to the experiences of marginalised people — those with long term sickness and disability, or who are displaced or have become refugees, people whose working life is spent in severely restricted and demanding conditions under surveillance. This points to the need for solidarity in his humanitarian ethic, requiring our attention to the accounts of those with different cultural, material and economic experiences. Cupitt became more aware himself of feminism, for example, learning from those around him.
What we do find from Cupitt is a valuable engagement with the post-modern self, presenting us with a model of ethical subjectivity that, if formed by secular humanitarian values, can bear witness to those values in the hope of achieving social change.