worth, one’s centre. By contrast, and exemplified in the novels of Charles Dickens, I argue that moral and economic worth or dignity must never be confused, that one’s moral value, or centre, is bound up with the good of the whole to which one contributes. I also argue that separating moral and economic value can liberate people from the various narratives of affliction that pervade our culture, because those narratives serve to cover up the various issues with self-esteem and mental illness that attend aggressive meritocracy. The ability to defer is indicative of a society where moral and economic worth are disambiguated – for deferring to others is acutely painful if their perspective is deemed representative of some sort of greater dignity than one’s own. Deference just means accepting another’s viewpoint as better placed than one’s own.
Chapter 4 is entitled ‘Honour’ and turns to love, sex and desire in the internet age. The point here is that obediently accepting another’s standing as an ‘end in itself’ and never a means to one’s own ends, in a loving relationship, means honouring that person as someone who is not ensnared in one’s own schemes or objectified. To honour someone is to hold dear to the boundary between yourself and another. Yet this boundary liberates people to love each other genuinely, not chase after others as vehicles for self-satisfaction.
The next three chapters shift gear to more societal concerns, beginning in Chapter 5, ‘Obligation’, with a critique of what might be grandly termed the epistemology of identity politics. Drawing particularly on the hermeneutical philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, I argue that the distinctive intellectual activities of the humanities (most fundamentally, interpretation) are structurally different to the natural sciences because of an inherent twofold structure of obligation. That is, to interpret something requires taking heed of a mutual obligation to subjectivity and objectivity. Natural science as classically understood adheres only to the obligation of objectivity. Yet, much of today’s discourse on the humanities breaks the binary in the other direction, claiming all is subjectivity. Moreover, older approaches to the humanities argued that these disciplines just reflected the way people actually live. In life, we perpetually seek objective truth in a way that is properly integrated with subjectivity. Basic human cognition serves both masters.
Chapter 6, ‘Respect’, I wrote with great hesitation, as it entailed going into some of the most vexatious territory of contemporary society: race. The thesis here is that most discourse around race-relations, particularly since 2020, has drawn on American racial discourse, despite the fact that that discourse is often ill-fitted to a UK context. The effect of unconscious bias training sessions, for example, is to try to leverage respect between different ethnicities artificially and often in a way disconnected from the lived realities in which particular ethnicities have forged a particular shared culture in Britain for decades. This is not a pluralist multiculturalism I have in mind, but something much harder to achieve – mutual participation in a culture that is shared. I contrast the mutual, organic respect that is won by sharing a culture with the forced, artificial respect associated with terms like ‘allyship’, which are themselves often used by people who haven’t lived within a shared culture themselves.
Chapter 7, ‘Responsibility’, discusses ecological concerns as expressed in the 1990s compared to the present day. Between the two periods, another broken binary has emerged – between cultural and social conservation and environmental conservation. This break is intensifying rapidly, with the current vogue for language of crisis and emergency pushing towards a near-permanent state-of-exception, radically disconnected from the past. But we need not go too far back in history to see how nature and culture were much more closely related than they are today.
The book then shifts gear again for the final three chapters, turning to even broader questions about language, the cosmos and, finally, authority. Chapter 8, ‘Discipline’, finds the epitome of the interrelation of obedience and freedom in poetics. Poetry is held to be writing freed from even the normal strictures of language and yet the requirements of the form are traditionally much stricter than prose. The fact that language today so easily slips into a bureaucratic and managerial turn of phrase (or anti-poetics) is symptomatic of our inability to use discipline in service of freedom.
Chapter 9, ‘Duty’, continues in a literary vein, bringing the six-volume autofiction work My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard into dialogue with the differing cosmologies of the premodern, modern and postmodern periods. This chapter presents the view that premodern cosmology had a sense of duty ‘hardwired’ into it, not least due to its inherently God-centred structure, which was not entirely forsaken in the modern era. Knausgaard’s work gives voice to premodern and modern impulses, stubbornly resisting the collapse into cosmic nihilism associated with postmodernity – particularly when he is in everyday situations of duty, such as caring for the young.
The book closes in Chapter 10 with a theme that surely sums up all those covered thus far: ‘Authority’. This broken binary is perhaps the most important in showing how obedience perpetuates freedom, the degree to which it is indistinguishable from it, and vice versa. What many consider obedience today is just blind subjection, which is why there is some truth behind contemporary unease about the term. Similarly, what many people consider authority today is just an exertion of power, which supervenes over assent, again helping to explain why it has become a debased term. This chapter seeks to show that genuine obedience always involves a measure of assent and the genuine expression of authority has no need for the exertion of the power. However difficult it is for us to envisage this now, the interrelation of obedience and authority once stemmed from self-evidence, from the unquestioned conviction that those in authority were mandated to their position. Today’s various ‘contractual’ forms of obedience effectively undermine authority and tend to get ensnared in individual desires, as indeed authority founded on just brute force undermines obedience and tends to unleash chaos.
The final scene of the book describes the notorious eviction of an illegal party on the Isle of Dogs in 1992. In the heat of the moment, the battle scene was indistinguishable from a dance, just as in today’s world the culture wars are a form of recreation and entertainment, particularly on social media. Each set of opponents in that battle considered themselves sworn enemies. I argue that they were actually on the same side, unwittingly, just as those who want to resist all authority often end up in a grimly restrained manner of living and those who celebrate subjection slip into anarchic and antinomian lifestyles. In the small hours of the night, for a few short moments, the effects of this broken binary came together on the dancefloor in a field in a mysterious enclave of east London. From that moment we can glimpse what healing such binaries will entail. That is, that obedience is freedom.
1 Allegiance
An area of common land in West Berkshire lies near an intersection between the industrial cities of the Midlands to the north and the ports on the English Channel to the south. The same spot is intersected lengthways too, connecting west and east on the old horse-drawn carriage route between London and Bath. The common land is a few square miles of woodland, heath and scrub. For centuries it would hardly merit much attention. Being common land it has no explicit purpose as such; it is simply ‘there’. But this land is also itself the site of an intersection of a different type. This land has a distinct history as a place on the intersection of war and peace.
This is documented from the time of the English Civil War. In 1643, Parliamentarian troops paused there to ready themselves for what was to be a decisive battle of that conflict. There are traces of much older earthworks still perceptible beneath the soil too. Long, linear banks of earth dated to the fifth century may have served
