Theologian Graham Ward's new book Christ and Culture is out today. I went to hear Graham deliver a paper at the departmental postgraduate seminar this afternoon, entitled Religion and the decline of democracy. It was pretty much what I've come to expect from G.W., but his work seems to be starting to come to terms with the need for a theory of action, although he has still not managed to produce one. Christ and Culture is moving towards it, but I fear that G.W. may be falling into the same trap as Adorno did: being excellent at the cultural critique, but being unable to relate it to what political action should amount from critique.
An extremely brief synopsis of today's paper: There is a new public face of religion, and religiosity is on the rise, although not in organised forms. From Bush's religious language, through the French headscarf ban, to the prominence of religious and quasi-religious names for bars, products, and experiences, there is underway a remythologisation of Western culture. Culture is turning to the religion of special effect, from The Lords of the Rings, through Star Wars, to the da Vinci Code. But there is a crisis of identity in democracy, and democracy, through German and Italian fascism, has already shown itself highly volatile and liable to end in despotism and dictatorship. We are at risk of falling into a zero-degree dialectic, unwilling and unable to engage in meaningful political debate, exacerbated and encouraged by the erosion of public space and the dissolution of categories of public and private into one. Democracy must find a way to repoliticise itself, or the explosive mix of public religion and totalitarianism may ignite.
Anyone reading this who is unfamiliar with Ward's work should not take my rushed and cack-handed synopsis to be a fair representation. Go to the source. Again, although Ward is starting to deal directly with the problems of the polity of the West, his proposed solutions are much more vague. How exactly is democracy to repoliticise itself? And how is it to overcome the problem of plurality and heterogeneity in the context of a democratic social contract which must, by definition, be homogenous? It was particularly unclear where Ward sees the role of religion in this polity. I was interested by Colin Crouch's ideas about postdemocracy, but his categories do not necessarily hold. They are thought provoking all the same. Postdemocracy is characterised by:
- Will of people is not obtained, but created
- Political sphere is dominated by economic questions, and indirectly, business interests
- There is mass depoliticisation through universalised atomism/individualism
- Crisis of representation; minority interests do not receive due consideration
- Outsourcing of traditionally state-responsible tasks to private companies [only further alienating the political system from the people]
- Growth [therefore] in opacity of government, rather than accessibility or transparency
Anyway, there's a few thoughts. It was somewhat fitting, though, that I came in from that seminar all about the totalitarian tendencies of democracy, to witness an eighty-two-year-old heckler being forceably ejected from the Labour conference, and every sign of a police/government cover-up in the case of the de Menezes shooting. The signs of the times, indeed, Professor...