As you are likely aware, there has recently been a global acceleration in the campaigns against ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’, as evidenced by three stories that it would no doubt be conspiracy-theoretical to link together too closely: the arrest of Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov and associated threats against Elon Musk, the banning of X in Brazil, and the proposed clampdown in the U.K. on ‘legal but harmful’ speech. It seems as though something is afoot: not so much a change in the weather as a sudden picking up of the wind, as though heralding an onrushing storm.
This makes it an apposite time for a brief post on the political theology of the anti-disinformation movement. This, I hope, will allow readers to see past what to my mind is the rather unhelpful way in which the subject is generally framed – i.e., as a ‘free speech’ issue. As I hope to make clear, casting the struggle in free speech terms as such is really to speak in relation to symptoms rather than causes. The problem at root is not that there are people who are seeking to suppress freedom of speech (though there are such people); the problem rather is the underlying desire to manage what I will call – following Foucault – the ‘circulation of merits and faults’ in society, and how this relates in particular to speech-acts. Put more straightforwardly, the issue is not exactly that freedom of speech is being restricted, but rather that a global effort is underway to decide what is true, and to produce a consciousness of that ‘truth’ within each and every individual, at any given moment, so that their speech indeed can do nothing but declare it.
This, as we shall see, will take us to a difficult but important subject: Jesus Christ, and his description by René Girard as the ‘first political atheist’. The secularisation of society has largely taken the figure of Jesus out of the public consciousness; my aim here is in part to show that this has been a great tragedy in terms of the loss to our understanding of politics in the round (leaving matters of spirituality and theology entirely to one side).
Let us begin all of this, then, with Foucault. As regular readers will recall, in his 1977-78 lecture series, Foucault made plain that the state was only an ‘episode’ in the trajectory of government. This, to recap, was because government itself was a practice untrammelled by borders or indeed physical barriers of any kind; the task of governing was a project embarked upon precisely because, with the advent of modernity and the Scientific Revolution, it became possible to imagine the world itself as a domain which it was possible to act upon so as to improve it. This in the first instance became the project of the state. But implicit in that project was the notion the state was merely a kind of staging post to world government (what is nowadays called ‘global governance’) properly so-called.
However, there is of course also a retrospective element to this statement as well: if the state is only an ‘episode’ in government, then this naturally implies that there were previous episodes in government before the modern state existed. And Foucault’s focus here was on the medieval pastorate, which he describes in part as a system for managing “the circulation of merits and faults” in society – a totalising effort to do nothing less than “govern men’s souls”. This system, as Foucault argues, derived its structure and approach from the semiotics of the sheepfold: humanity was conceived as a flock of sheep, and the pastorate’s job was understood as being to minister to that flock – caring for each individual within it with “kindness”, and minutely monitoring the “economy” of sin within it – so as to lead it to salvation.
Foucault uses the word “economy” advisedly; as he further elaborates, this is because the job of the pastor was in part “distributive” – it involved making decisions indeed about nothing less than the distribution of salvation itself:
The necessity of saving the whole entails, if necessary, accepting the sacrifice of a sheep that could compromise the whole. The sheep that is a cause of scandal, or whose corruption is in danger of corrupting the whole flock, must be abandoned, possibly excluded, chased away, and so forth.
And, to extend the use of an economic metaphor, this would involve keeping ‘accounts’ of each individual within the flock, partly so as to carefully monitor that ‘distribution’ of salvation within it and where necessary eject corrupt sheep, and partly so as to be able to determine, in the final analysis, on the fearful day, ‘everything good and evil’ that every individual in the flock has done.
This, Foucault goes on, gives rise to a particular approach to the subject of government, exercised not as we understand it in the secular sense, but in respect of matters of the spiritual. It made the medieval pastorate a quintessentially managerial exercise, defined not by rules, law or principle, but by a carefully calibrated and continual exercise of individuated manipulation, observation and perfection, in light of a certain vision of what salvation is thought to mean.
Foucault, accordingly, highlights for us two qualities of this exercise of the government of souls. First, he says, it cannot be simply a matter of fire-and-forget: the pastor does not simply teach the flock how to be good and leave it at that, but rather engages in a “direction of daily conduct”. Hence:
It is not just a matter of teaching by general principles, but rather by a daily modulation, and this teaching must also pass through an observation, a supervision, a direction exercised at every moment and with the least discontinuity possible over the sheep’s whole, total conduct. The perfection, merit, or quality of daily life must not be just the result of a general teaching or even of an example. The pastor must really take charge of and observe daily life in order to form a never-ending knowledge of the behaviour and conduct of the members of the flock he supervises.
And, second, it follows, the pastor does not merely teach, but also sets up a relationship with the flock of permanent spiritual direction, which does not just intervene at particular moments of celebration or crisis (a death, a birth, a marriage and so on), but all the time, in every circumstance, “with regard to everything and for the whole of one’s life”. And this naturally makes every individual in the flock totally dependent on the pastor for spiritual direction at every turn: the exercise is not designed to achieve autonomy, but rather the opposite – it will “fix more firmly the relationship of subordination” between the flock and the pastor, by making every member of the former constantly examine his or her conscience in order to always be in a position to inform the pastor “what one has done, what one is, what one has experienced, the temptations to which one has been subject, and the bad thoughts that inhabit one’s mind”.
The result of all of this, Foucault tells us, in one of his sweeping rhetorical flourishes:
Is a form of power that, taking the problem of salvation in its general set of themes, inserts into this global, general relationship an entire economy and technique of the circulation, transfer, and reversal of merits and faults… [which] establishes a kind of exhaustive, total and permanent relationship of individual obedience.
With the advent of modernity, of course, and the crisis of the medieval episteme brought about by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and so on, the pastorate itself went into decline. But Foucault insists that its conceptual system for the government of souls did not disappear – far from it. In fact, released from its theological trappings, it grew far stronger and more pervasive than it had ever been before until it was truly (to use Foucault’s own word) “demonic”.
That is, although the pastorate itself deteriorated and lost the position of power and status it once had, the structures of thought which it had developed did not. That “form of power” which had “the problem of salvation” as its theme, and which inserted “an entire economy and technique of the circulation, transfer and reversal of merits and faults” into the “global, general relationship” continued to exist, and continued to insist on “exhaustive, total and permanent individual obedience”. It was just that, through the process of secularisation, the way that form of power was exercised (very gradually, of course) became itself secularised – and was seeded within the thought-structure of the modern state as it emerged from the medieval period’s philosophical wreckage.
Put in crude terms, then, as the project of the modern state became the act of governing, it began to take on for itself something akin to the role of pastor. Its duty became to achieve a kind of secular salvation; its interest became the “economy” of “merits and faults”; its insistence became “exhaustive, total and permanent individual obedience”. And its approach began slowly but surely to incorporate the pre-existing managerial framework for the government of souls which had been developed within the medieval pastorate. It thus came eventually to rest on precisely the same techniques – which, one will recall, consisted of continual, daily “modulation”, informed by “a never-ending knowledge of the behaviour and conduct of the members of the flock”, combined with a relationship of permanent and total dependence of the individual on the state-as-pastor, operationalised through the requirement for individuals to continually examine their consciences in light of the existence of constant individuated supervision.
The story of modernity and Enlightenment is then here cast not as a replacement of faith by reason but as a gradual transference or transposition of the cognitive and metaphorical mechanisms for the pastoral government of souls from the realm of the spiritual to that of the temporal. The consequence of this was a creeping and totalising managerialisation of the relationship between the state and society, conceived precisely on the semiotics of the shepherd and flock – what Foucault called “the politics of the sheepfold” – and a consequent insistence on the complete subservience of the individual, made accountable always and everywhere to the state (whether directly or indirectly) in order that the salvation of the flock be secured.
It is to be conceded that Foucault was a highly schematic thinker and that these ideas were presented as musings derived from extended periods submerged in the archives of the Collège de France rather than carefully presented evidence. But it is abundantly evident that he was onto something, even if only at the level of abstract generalisation: secularisation appears increasingly to mean the replacement of church by state in quite literal terms, with the state presenting itself as the means for realising a kind of temporal salvation, and the structure of government taking the form of a mechanism precisely for the management of the “circulation of merits and faults” in society. When Foucault speaks of a “form of power” which “tak[es] the problem of salvation in its general set of themes” and “establishes a kind of exhaustive, total and permanent relationship of individual obedience” achieved through “a never-ending knowledge of the behaviour and conduct of the members of the flock”, we all instinctively recognise what he is referring to as the form of power which we now find ourselves subject to.
We are, in other words, governed more and more in the name not of achieving mere material improvement in our living conditions, let alone securing the conditions of individual autonomy, but in the name of improving our moral sensibilities – indeed, in the interests of our spiritual advancement. That this is done atheistically, as it were, or from a position of agnosticism or denial with respect to actual spiritual matters, is by-the-by. What is important is the structuring of the relationship between state and society, and between state and individual, which follows from it.
Seen in this way, the campaigns against disinformation and hate speech take on an entirely different complexion than that of a brute, authoritarian suppression of free expression. No doubt that is present to a certain degree. But it is much more apt and productive to describe what is going on as the gradual crystallisation of a series of governmental techniques for the management or “modulation” precisely of the “circulation of merits and faults” with respect to speech itself: the means on the one hand by which “permanent spiritual direction” by the state over the individual is secured, and on the other hand by which “exhaustive, total, and permanent” individual obedience is realised. The state takes responsibility for leading the flock to salvation – and for providing an ‘account’ for every individual within it. And this means that the individual, in turn, is required to abnegate his or her self, or will, to the benevolent guidance of government – to know, indeed, “that any will of one’s own is a bad will”, as Foucault put it, and to “always desire that someone command”.
It follows that the individual, in this picture, is not supposed to express him- or herself freely. He is supposed to speak ‘the truth’, in the sense that truth is something that is ‘produced’ within him – it is something that is taught. It follows that the state must therefore be constructed as the possessor of truth, and the individual as the one to whom the truth is taught – the passive recipient of knowledge of what is true or false. The state is that which knows best, because it is the state which is in possession of the expertise and wherewithal to have a proper hold on what is true. And thus we see the state “acting on the consciousness of people” so as, precisely, to extract from them “the truth” in what they speak.
This, it bears noting, is qualitatively different from the relationship between the individual and the pastor, which involved a genuine confession by the individual of the good and bad things that he had thought or done. In the relationship between individual and state there no such disclosure – except perhaps the forcible disclosure of ‘data’ – and the process of the production of truth is much more direct. The state tells the population what is true, and the population declares that truth accordingly. Underlying this, it goes without saying, is the soul itself – understood, again, atheistically – and a concern that what is being thought within it is also, so to speak, ‘true’.
It also, of course, follows that – as will be recalled – part of the state’s role is, like the shepherd, to abandon or chase away any sheep that might corrupt the flock. Ideally the shepherd will bring even the most recalcitrant of sheep back into the fold: taking responsibility for the whole, he will go to great lengths to ensure that every head is accounted for, to go in search of strays, and to look after those which are sick. This will also include a strong element of discipline, too, by which the flock is rendered docile and compliant enough to be properly managed. But there also comes a point at which that responsibility must be exercised more surgically, so as indeed to excise irredeemably corrupting influences – perhaps with the aim some day of rehabilitation, but perhaps to permanent exile and exclusion in the interests of the good of the whole.
What we see here, in Foucault’s account, is then a form of political theology that lays a great emphasis on the relationship between the individual and the structure of power – which, indeed, understands political power as being something which in modernity is exercised precisely on the individual so as to extract from him or her a particular “truth”. This has a dual aspect: on the one hand, the state must know everything about the individual in the sense of the relevant data, but – perhaps even more importantly – it must produce within the heart of the individual a form of self-reflection which leads to the proper understanding of what is deemed to be “true”. And this, naturally, puts speech at the heart of the project of the state in modernity, as the primary locus of control.
All of this has obviously taken centuries to play out, but we are now seeing the process bearing fruit as secularisation has truly set in. The idea that a more secular world will be one which will be more rational and free is thus revealed to be hopelessly naïve: the truth of the matter is rather that it will be characterised by a more complete and thoroughgoing rejection of both reason and freedom than ever previously existed, centred around the phenomenon of speech. What will be important will not be what is True but rather the speaking of what is ‘true’ according to what has been pre-determined. And what will allow us to get to that ‘truth’ is not reason, but patterns of thought induced within us under the managerial purview of the shepherd-state, so as to ensure that ‘truth’ is what we declare (or that what we declare is always ‘true’). This is what we face: not so much the suppression of free speech, but rather the production within us of the understanding, and hence the declaration, of what is held to be ‘true’, and only that.
Secular moderns (this includes all readers, atheists, agnostics and believers alike) must reckon with all of this. We have not even begun to do so. But in closing it may be worth considering the thought of René Girard, and his mysterious declaration that Jesus Christ was the “first political atheist”, as a part of that necessary reckoning.
Girard was an even more schematic thinker than Foucault and came at matters much more obliquely, but what he seems to have meant with this comment was that Christ was the first figure in human history to make plain the distinction between matters of the spiritual and political. Whereas before Christ there was no meaningful difference between the religious sphere and what we would think of as government – the two were entirely fused, as they indeed remain throughout much of the non-Christian world – his appearance ushered into human consciousness the notion that salvation of the soul was not within the power of worldly authority to secure: it was a matter for the divine alone. With Christ came the message, therefore, of “political atheism” – perhaps the most important concept to grasp within all of political life, which is that the state cannot save us. That is not its function, and the more we delude ourselves into imagining that it is, the worse our predicament will grow.
That is a genuinely atheistic message as much as it is a Christian one, and believers and non-believers alike would do well to consider it. For the atheist, salvation, so to speak, is a matter for oneself alone. For the believer, it is a matter for one’s relationship with God. Our problem is that we have allowed ourselves to construct a political-theological edifice wherein the state takes on the responsibility for our souls, albeit typically cast in the language of ‘progress’. That is why our problem is not whether we have freedom of speech as such, but rather that speech itself, and its connection to thought and truth, has become a subject about which the state has interested itself in the first place. How a secularised society resolves that problem will be one of the central conundrums of our age. That resolution, it follows from what I have surveyed here, may have to occur within the soul itself rather than within the formal structure of law, politics and government.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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“to produce a consciousness of that truth”—–One man’s “misinformation” is another man’s ultimate truth. But what government mean by calling things “misinformation” is that it is truth that is not government approved. There can be no room for personal opinion, and only one opinion is to be allowed or people are in danger of committing “hate crimes” or other such nonsense. ——So essentially what “to produce a consciousness of that truth” actually amounts to is BRAINWASHING.
Or, for a less intellectual analysis on a cheery Saturday morning you can listen to Tom Paxton;
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+thought+went+free&rlz=1CAHELE_enGB1053&oq=the+thought+went+free&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRhA0gEINDgyN2owajeoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:e776dbd6,vid:T8eHTtSlPg0,st:0
When I click on your link I get a very brief glimpse of the Google page to which it links, then my Google home page replaces it. Almost as if someone doesn’t want me to look at it (which seems believable, given the suject of this article!). Anyone having the same experience, or have I got a glitch of some kind?
Exactly so. So search for Tom Paxton The thought Went Free.
Every Opposing View Will Be Crushed
Foucault may have been right about mediaeval pastors’ concept of controlling the soul, but it was seldom true in practice because even good pastors were humans with foibles (and came from among the people), and bad ones took the money and drank or womanised whilst the people sorted themselves out. Popes and Cardinals were as removed from oi polloi as today’s elites.
But if for the sake of argument we accept Foucault’s characteristic (and destructive) reduction of everything to “power,” then one of the worst things about state totalitarianism is its self-evident cack-handedness in deciding the truth it imposes. Christianity (contra the secular myths) took hold because it had a morality that worked for individuals and society , a spiritually egalitarian theology that offered the poor and outcast eternal rewards – and (from my Christian viewpoint) a personal connection with the divine that satisfied the soul.
What we have now is like late Soviet Communism – everyone is forced to parrot it, but hardly anyone actually believes it. And that minority decreases as the health-gospel produces sicker people, the unlimited cheap energy policies freeze people to death, the LGBTQ+ factions fight each other and damage children, and so on. And most significantly, the whole project belongs to an increasingly marginalised Western world, as more and more of us recognise.
So, like other tyrannies, it may well enslave entire nations, but will fail because the slaves know they are slaves, and eventually subvert the system.
Their idea of total control will fail because in their utopia of total control mankind would cease to exist.
This is in line with Lenin’s idea that once communism is implemented perfectly, the state will “wither away”. This is true but only in the diabolical sense that in order to implement communism perfectly the entire population would have to be executed first; in that state of course the state would indeed wither away as there would be nobody left.
I’m always a bit baffled how these otherwise obscure French “intellectuals”, like Foucault managed to acquire such influence – does anybody read these guys? The same with Marx: a good economist at best but as a philosopher?
Nevertheless I believe it was Jung who posited the idea that the opposite of love is not hate, but power. I can see how this is true: the state has an insatiable desire to acquire more and more power, not just over what people can and cannot do but increasingly over what people are allowed to think. In this sense the state seems to be permanently unhappy with mankind; ideally they would like to reduce them to some animal-machine hybrid that it can have total control over. It is highly annoying for the state that, at least at the moment, people’s thoughts cannot yet be controlled like computer program.
In contrast there is not a single example, even a hint in the Gospel, as far as I can see, where Jesus tried to save or heal someone against their will. He offers freedom at all times. In this sense power is indeed the polar opposite of love.
28 Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
It is hard to imagine anyone of the current powers that be uttering any such words.
Especially if it increased the risk of them being unemployed; money talks. After all, what would happen if various Government Departments had less work to do?
I heard Jung said that after meeting Dick Cheney. Seems about right. It’s well to remember that the state is comprised of people, and while we allow, through laziness or selfishness, for damaged and inadequate twats to reach high office, we’ll all suffer the consequences.
If you want utter confusion and real misinformation listen to the philosophers and the sophists. Out of their contempt for reality we have all the isms that have destroyed our world. Once opposed ‘Science’ has now joined in so we have ‘Scientism’. Metaphyics+fraud parading as truth.
Hi David. I think it still is a freewill free speech issue. The problem is with how such is understood . Freewill is about a form of freedom from other wills which allows an element of responsibility, hence free-will. Muddling this with free choice is a mistake.In the bible it is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which marks this freewill either way . The problem with the state is that it has no totem against which freedom from it’s will or ‘truth’ is judged, in fact such is not even within it’s purview; hence by definition which ever way it develops it will become totalitarian. For the state making society better means bringing more stuff into line with it’s truth, when the proper development of all men is quite different. That is a greater actualization of individual responsibility. Mens lives are not a state fragment they are their own hopes and dreams.
Sorry but I think that is vastly over thought.
The purpose of politics is power, leading to wealth and comfort for the wielders of it. And glory and fame.
Dissent among the proles threatens that comfort, and needs to be suppressed. As violently as necessary.
Simples.
Twas ever thus, made easier by technology and pacifying people with material prosperity
That’s exactly it.
Succinct and to the point Jack.
Agreed, follow the money.
You may control your own speech in the manner described by Psalmist 39, but if your speech is controlled by others, it cannot be free.
In the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth describes two sorts of shepherd. The true shepherd ‘lays down his life for the sheep’. The hireling shepherd flees when the wolf attacks. Can the state-as-pastor retain legitimacy as true shepherd when its ‘religious’ – the police and social services – turn a blind eye to the grooming gangs; or when they eventually prosecute a token handful? Or when they diligently arrest some rioters but run away from others?
Unlike in Foucault, no sheep is ejected from the Israelite flock. The metaphor of ‘shepherd’, which has survived to our time in ‘pastor’, came originally from eastern and southern Palestine. Passing into Hebrew poetry, it was constantly used by the three great prophets, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah for both the ecclesiastical and civil rulers of the people. Not only healing the weak, but the pastor also guarded the strong. However, in the Christian churches it was only gradually that the functions of pastor and laity separated to make the pastor the sort of officer of the medieval church.
Moreover, the organisational arrangement of the early Christian churches was provisional until ‘the Lord should come again’. With the Roman destruction of the Temple, the immediate return of the Messiah to a temporal reign in Judea became a distant hope and with the churches ceasing to circulate around Jerusalem this hope began to take the form of a new spiritual empire as wide as the Roman Empire itself. In this there grew up the concept of the new Ecclesia Dei whose limits were the world, an exact counterpart, though on a larger scale, of the old Ecclesia Dei whose limits had been Palestine.
The true shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth declares in the Gospels, goes in search of the lost one. Foucault’s state-as-shepherd is more like the Judean Sanhedrin whom Jesus accused of making up rules that ostensibly made the people moral but in practice only burdened them without improving them. Ejecting the unredeemable sheep is more GDR than ancient Judea. More goat, as in scapegoat, than sheep. The animals that were to be separated, according to Jesus’s parable, were the sheep from the goats.
The Apostle Paul urged his Roman and Greek converts to obey the governing authorities. However, Paul included one easily overlooked caveat. The legitimacy of the authorities lay in that they were a terror to those with bad conduct. But what if they are not a terror? Are shoplifters frightened of the police or the courts? Are illegal immigrants in terror of the Home Office or Border ‘Force’?
Girard was not quite on the money, as they say. When Jesus of Nazareth declared that what was Caesar’s should be given to Caesar and what was God’s should be given to God, he wasn’t exactly making a distinction between government and religion.
If the coin in question that Jesus was talking about in this instance had to be given to the emperor, where was he? He wasn’t in the Temple, where this discussion took place, and if he came there, he would only come as far as the court of the Gentiles. The coin would have to be taken out of the Temple to the place where the emperor was. This is a demand for the separation of the profane from the holy.
In the ancient Roman world, a person could have two religions. There was the religion recognised by the state. Then there were the religions that any person could worship in private.
But the transition from the churches being subordinate and their adherents being merely tolerated at best, even though the early churches were an intrinsic part of Roman civil society organised as all the other free associations that honeycombed the Roman world, to a position of dominance as the religion of the state with its clergy now high officers in the imperial government badly affected the church’s internal organisation which had been democratic and its relationship with the masses. Heresy was now a political crime.
This change in the church’s fortunes combined with the increasing instability of the later Empire due to both internal and external factors caused an intensification of the sentiment of order (or ‘safety’ as it would be termed today). The conception of civil order under the Imperial regime was very different to that of modern times. The tendency in modern societies is to have the greatest amount of freedom that is compatible with order. The tendency in the Empire was to have the greatest amount of order that was compatible with freedom.
(TBC)
It was true, as Girard stated, that in the Empire civil order was thought of as almost divine. The head of state seemed to have by virtue of his elevation some attributes of divinity. This dignity was the same as given by the Apostolical Constitutions to clergy who could celebrate the Eucharist, separating them from those who did not possess it.
When in the later Roman Empire and its successor kingdoms the ecclesiastical organisation was the only remaining stable institution, those who preserved the tradition of imperial rule, by mere fact of their status, seemed to stand on a platform inaccessible to ordinary men.
Update this to the secular polities of the 21st century. The nation-state, like the first century Palestine Messiah-ship, is to be surpassed by world rule. The government minister becomes by virtue of his or her position a pastor, a self-declared servant (Labour’s government a ‘government of service’): a church ‘minister’ means ‘servant’. But at the same time, as the only and self-declared restorer of order (as the later Roman emperors declared themselves to be) to the ‘broken’ institutions, the minister is elevated above the masses, separated as the priest from his or her flock.
In a secular polity the head of state, even if a monarch, has no divine attributes. But instead, the secular state existing solely in its activities carried out as by an incorporeal hand acquires divinity as a necessary legitimisation. The Almighty God-State before whose omnipresence, invisible as Jehovah and just as terrible, goes not the Cross of Christ but the rainbow banner under which absolute diversity becomes absolute uniformity. The ‘servants’ ensure that the will of this deity ‘clothes’ every person, just as the biblical description has the spirit of God ‘clothing itself with Gideon’, the Israelite hero.
But in earlier times there was a grander faith. For the kingdom of God was a kingdom of priests. Not only the ‘four-and-twenty elders’ before the throne, but the innumerable souls of the sanctified upon whom ‘the second death had no power’; each of whom were ‘kings and priests unto God’. Only in that sense was priesthood in the church predicable of Christian men and women. For the shadow had passed: Reality had come: the One High Priest of Christianity was Christ.
(Obtaining a copy of Edwin Hatch’s The Organisation of the Early Christian Churches (Longmans, Green & Co, 1895) from which extracts have been respectfully taken, is of use to those interested).
The direction we are going in means that soon everything we say or do will be either compulsory or forbidden. The space between the two getting narrower every day
“(what is nowadays called ‘global governance’) properly so-called”
Or New World Order!
From the comments, it looks a fascinating article. Could a kind person summarise it for those of us with limited attention span
A couple of AI summaries, but I feel they miss the essence:
CHATGPT:
The core issue is not just about whether we have freedom of speech, but that speech—its link to thought and truth—has become a focus of state interest. In a secular society, resolving this problem will be a major challenge of our time. The solution, however, may lie more in personal, internal reflection rather than in changes to laws, politics, or government structures.
GOOGLE GEMINI:
This text argues that the real issue is not whether we have freedom of speech, but rather the fact that the state has taken an interest in speech itself and its relationship to thought and truth. This is a new development in a secularized society, and how it is resolved will be a key challenge. The resolution may need to be found within individuals’ own souls rather than in legal, political, or governmental structures.
I hope that helps!
makes sense now, thank you very much
I don’t think it is true at al in regard to our relationship to the state. Most people are distrustful of the state but at the same time they are insecure about their own knowledge and wisdom, many believe that science and mathematics are beyond their ken, and in Britain the people are particularly timid hence mass compliance. It isn’t out of trust of the state but fear of it that people go along in my experience. The cowardliness in this country isn’t the same everywhere else. They got addicted to the high life and they worry that it will stop. It will stop because when you worship the materium you lose not only the spiritual realm but also all the gifts of the materium.
Government as God. Socialists (who think the bigger government is, the better) are, in my experience, always atheists. Even if they profess religion, scratch the surface and you find an apostate. One of the main themes of the Bible – Old and New Testament – is free will. That is inconsistent with pervasive, domineering government.
An interesting discussion and commenters above have said all and more than I could even begin to think!! However, I question the benevolence of any modern government and particularly ours in the UK (see ‘the benevolent guidance of government’) – rather, I seriously think if it might be outright evil!
They certainly haven’t got “the man on the Clapham omnibus“ interest at heart.
It was Foucault who argued that the site of social control was the body. We suffered blatant social control mechanisms during the Covid era by the imposition of vaccines and masks. How right he was! That was pretty successfully executed by government diktats.
Also the surveillance of bodies he identified is in full force these days. His work on the inbuilt system of control known as the panopticon was prescient. Fear of being seen to do something wrong has morphed into fear of saying something wrong in public nowadays. The public square of X for example is where you can be punished these days not unlike like the stocks in the past.
We are headed for the outcome of the growth of efficiency of the language system, in AI, and everyone can talk to everyone at little cost but no authority. The outcome is self-referentiality, which, like automation, is max efficiency, and it is also the loss of the meaning which was only represented by the growth that conformity subsumes.
Self-referentiality poses a problem for those in charge because of the loss of authority.
All they can do is to alter the nature of the conformity to a dictatorship, but it is a distinction without a difference.
Talking about language, am I alone in feeling some articles are excessively long – labouring the point until the point is lost
Probably, but people start substacks and then have to keep going !