Reorientation: come together and unseparate
I am writing this piece about the need for moral reconstruction in our society in the UK. The impulse to write it derives from deep shock. This has been caused by the genocide in Palestine but the shock is not the genocide, though it is shocking but I knew this was going to happen well over ten years ago. It has been happening in one form or another since the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948. The shock is to do with my response to the UK governing class’ participation in the genocide. This group of people knew exactly what was going to take place. They know it is genocide – the attempt to eradicate a people. They know it is to do with the theft of Palestinian land. I have never in my life confronted feelings like those that have been provoked by the actions of the UK ruling elites in the perpetration of this genocide. I have believed all things, all actions were eventually understandable and capable of being forgiven. I have faced in myself an inability to forgive. This is like hatred. I have never felt this before.
However I have come to see that these feelings of hatred and inability to forgive are an inadequate response to the shock. They are as I understand it a defence against feelings of outrage and horror. They are a way of displacing these feelings. Also and at the same time, I saw that, over this Spring and Summer, since the end of intensive military action following the US/Israeli attack on Iran on the 28th February 2026 that the balance of power in the world has shifted and the decline of the US-led ‘Western’ Empire has taken a significant step towards its downfall.
I understand, maybe in the light of this turn of events, this block on feeling is pretentious and unproductive since, anyway I am not really in a position to forgive nor not to forgive. Moreover the UK political elites who have never deserved anything but execration are in an extremely weak position. Their moral collapse will be followed soon by their reputational and operational collapse. This is why I believe that the regime in this country set up in 1688 needs complete dismantling. I believe its orientation and the orientation of our society needs a complete transformation. Our society and whatever state carries through and works in the interests of it, must distance itself from the US/Israeli alliance and turn its aspirational attention towards the massive, beautiful and diverse continent off which our island is situated. We must begin to repair our relationships with the people of Europe, Russia, West Asia and Central and East Asia. This is a profound cultural, philosophical, economic shift towards autonomy but also towards interdependence on societies and people with whom we share our bioregion and the wider continental reach that lies to our east. This means breaking the dominance of the City of London over our society, disentangling ourselves from, and suppressing the activities of, the financial corporations that from 1688 have drained the resources of our society and our country.
This cannot happen without a multilevel transformation of our lives. Ethics precedes politics and lays its basis. We need to build our lives from the bottom up by constructing a new moral basis for our society. We do this primarily by sharing our feelings and developing our feelings together. Key to this is an engagement with our deep intuitions about the society we want to live in. On this basis political structures and the policies they advocate and the demands they formulate can be fruitfully constructed.
This piece of writing makes observations about the structure of elemental matter, of the universe and creation. It goes on to describe the connection between these observations and how we make and re-make our social structures. It lays the basis for fundamental moral reconstruction and describes the processes of interaction of which this consists.
So I am writing this to understand more clearly how our society can recover from the situation of moral degradation that has reached a low point with the UK state’s perpetration of the genocide in Palestine. This nadir has been demonstrated by the judicial and police actions undertaken by the UK state to enforce genocide denial. It means that our public life, the government, the media, the academic institutions and the cultural establishment have been complicit in lying and deep hypocrisy in relation to human rights and equality. The UK state has, while the population of the country has suffered growing poverty and a decline in the quality and extent of public services, decided to spend increased amounts of social resources on armament and preparation for war. It has fostered racism against migrants as a way of dividing opposition to the policies it has put into effect. It has persisted in its obedience and compliance with the US. The situation could not be a lot worse. However, I am convinced that the overwhelming majority of the people who live in the UK do not want the future implicit in the policies and institutions that currently hold sway here.
People here lack any sense of a future for their children and grandchildren. The institutionalised lying has got deeper and deeper and more widespread and is corrupting the life of the country. Personal responsibility is buried in institutional bias. It is fruitless to expect the corrupted institutions that make up our state and civil society to be responsive to attempts to hold them to account and made to abide by the values to which they pretend. Our moral life, our shared sense of what is right and just, needs to be constructed from the bottom up by people in their localities and communities coming to grips with the profound moral and material issues that face us.
The problem is that to a large degree we are creatures of the institutions that oppress us. The system to a large extent lives inside us. Its outlooks and beliefs are habitual. How can we start to climb out of the hole that to a large extent we have dug for ourselves? That which we have been persuaded is rational and in our self interest is a dependence on a system that reduces all values to that of material commodity, and increased dependence. Where can we look to renew our society.? Of course the answer must be: towards each other.
The system of beliefs and values that are needed have to be worked out by people. I believe another way of putting this is that we have to construct an ideology. In this situation no ready-made set of beliefs will do. However I am not suggesting starting from scratch. I believe that the traditions of society-making in the socialist movements that have invigorated life here and which have largely been a result of working people’s organisations are vital but there are also other self-help, charity-oriented and campaigning organisations that are vital for re-orientation. All around us there are ideas, intuitions, experiences and values that stand and live, despite the institutional system that has dominated our history. However what I am warning against are bodies of belief that offer a complete solution on all issues. Most of these systems that are ready-made involve routinised solutions that have been easy for the ruling institutional interests to discount and incorporate. People who are genuinely committed to renewal and who have a strong sense of justice and equality will not be believed unless the values they offer and embody have been collectively developed through participation and dialogue. If whatever ideology a popular movement develops does not ground itself in the reality of people’s mortality and experience of love, birth and death people will shrug it off.
The ideology that I am proposing can be made and constructed by interchange between people on the basis of listening to the other and radical equality. This is what can hold us together. Without these deep roots the set of ideas and values cannot be combinatory. It cannot offer the ‘holding together’ that is necessary to see through social change. It cannot link the particularities of people’s daily life with the larger institutional reconstruction that is necessary.
This is why I start my thinking about ideology with the issue of the nature of the cosmos, the structure of matter. We have to go deeper than the usual politics of our society permits. People in their deep consideration of their lives, their time on earth, work with ideas of god, fate, destiny in their attempts to find guidance and find their bearings, in order to explain the primary causes of the development of the reality that we experience. We need a deep conversation.
We must start from the bottom up. We are already making the society in which we live, even if we are oppressed within it. We make it everyday, in our homes and streets, at places of work, care and education, together in all our interactions we give each other our society. For it to change, we must change. Not just what we believe but what we do. But it is no good simply leaving the responsibility to the individual. We must change ourselves together.
I have used the word ideology cautiously. I can find no other word to cover the meaning I intend: a set of beliefs and values. I confess that I have communist tendencies. Due to early experience of social struggles I became a member of the Communist Party. Already I had read extensively in philosophy, literature and significantly had encountered Karl Marx’s work. Marxism, for example, could be considered to be an ideology and it interested me that when Marx heard that there were people calling themselves Marxists he avowed that he wasn’t one of them. However I was deeply and joyfully involved in the Party. At a local level I was an organiser and at a national level I was on the editorial staff of Marxism Today. I identified strongly with this movement. However by the late 1970s with the victory of the Thatcher government in the elections of 1979 I started to question this set of beliefs and started trying to work out, through writing, talking and thinking, why it was that I felt this project was not going to have the outcomes that I hoped for. I come from a working class background. I got educated. I worked as a theatre director and writer, writing and directing plays in the socialist theatre movement of the 1970, working in repertory companies and drama schools, directing companies, directing training courses, working internationally, evolving my own path, able to take time out to do a Masters in Ecological Economics, always struggling to bring my work into alignment with my social and political beliefs, always reading extensively in social ideas. So my outlook is formed by an amalgam of ideas from different places and is strongly shaped by artistic practice.
My starting point here is in the tradition of thought and practice that flowed from the work of Democritus, Anaximander and other pre-socratic philosophers. Their influence is strongly communicated through Lucretius’ ‘The Nature of Things’. The core idea is that of atomism, that the world is made up of irreducible elemental particles. What does the way we think about the fundamental elements of matter, or creation, have to do with ethics and what does ethics have to do with making a politics of radical equality? It is Lucretius that suggests a connection between our understanding of the ‘physical’ universe and our relationship to social structures. He reiterates in the ‘Nature of Things’ that those that believe that the world was created by God for the benefit of humanity will be more likely to submit to authoritarian rule. I am looking at the work of these thinkers from the point of view of quantum physics and relativity.
Making or remaking and ideology is fundamental to moral reconstruction. We have to look back at how the world was made, at the origins of our species life on earth, the history of a particular local habitation and seek a connection between mentality and its bio-regional determinants. To a large extent we already know what is right and what is true but our knowledge and habits of mind have been corrupted and controlled by the section of the population that rule through the state (the government, the monarchic court, civil service, media, academy, police and justice system and the official church). In fact as we identify the origins of the state in the West in the development of the Greek empire centred on Athens, we can see how it institutionalised, incorporated and diminished the values and beliefs of the preceding civilisations, along with, in this instance, the work of the pre-socratic philosophers. Just as the modern corporate state struggles to control knowledge in every aspect of its activity but also, for example, through the regulation of the algorithms used in the social media. The issue of the state is central. It is this complex set of institutions that need to be transformed. If we do so without being clear about where its substantial limits are and how it came into being we easily become absorbed in its miasmic structures which offer the appearance of access to power. We have to be outside it and be able to think and imagine beyond or before it to remake it. This ‘outside ground’ is ethics. It is in this ethical space that we can find our self.
The way we understand the structure of matter and how it is formed has a determining impact on our view of our self, who we are and of what we are made. What is offered by Newtonian physics is a version of relational space where gravity and attraction/repulsion, the ordering of objects or particles in space, is determined by size or mass. The vision of Newtonian space is as if there were in a kind of contained space like a box in which particles or bodies interact . What relativity (summarised in his theory of special relativity in 1905 and general relativity in 1915) proposed was that events in space did not happen along a consistent and unified timeline. There was no such thing as simultaneity. Events occurred in space-time. The idea of space-time that was adduced by Einstein from his understanding of the electro-magnetic field (developed decades earlier by Faraday and given mathematical grounding by Maxwell) was that it was curved. This idea was developed by quantum physics into the idea of matter being determined by a gravitational field. This field is made of events that appear like interactions between particles or waves. It is like a matrix where particles exchange basic elements (for example electrons) and may only exist in interaction with other elements. Particle disappear as if they were a part of wave formations only to appear again in a different part of space-time. This offers an image of interaction quite different from the Newtonian model.
The view that describes reality as consisting of interactive events in a multidimensional curved and undulating time-space is similar to the perception of action in theatre space. Having worked with theatre I was familiar with the idea that the world was made of sequences of events, sometimes complexly and distantly related. In dramatic art language we call this ‘action’ (the dramatic action) and through this action, time is condensed and extended. To a large extent the elision (or condensing) of time takes place due to the imaginative space created between the actors and the spectators. The dramatic action is only present when it is viewed, when the spectators lend it their ‘belief’. The time portrayed in the story is bent and curved to occupy the time-space in the imaginative interaction between the spectators and the actors during the performance of a play. My understanding of relativity and of theatre happened simultaneously. Theatre is relational. The moment of the convergence of these forms of consciousness happened when I was 18 and I read The Tempest by Shakespeare with a kind of revelatory intensity. I will refrain from describing my thoughts about this in detail but in the middle of the play Prospero conjures up a performance to celebrate the union between his daughter Miranda and Ferdinand, who has been shipwrecked onto Prospero’s island through another piece of Prospero’s magic, (a peculiarly theatrical magic which manifests a storm at sea). After the play within the play, at the point where Prospero realises that he has not yet successfully resolved all his problems and there is still a plot to undermine his power, he dismisses the performance of his play and, conjuring a vision of theatre as reality and reality as theatre, he tells Miranda and Ferdinand:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And – like the baseless fabric of this vision –
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Other experiences of theatre practice also deepened my sense of what ‘action’ might be.
These perceptions of action, or the series of moments (or spaces in between moments) of which a dramatic movement consists, is not dissimilar to Jean Luc Godard’s often quoted remark that film is truth 24 frames a second. This relates to celluloid film. I make no comment about digital media and its relationship to truth. Except that digital media disguise much more successfully the finite character of the units that make up their continuity. What I want to underline is that it is the discontinuities (the space between), the incompleteness of the representation of an event in the dramatic space that activate and is activated by the spectators ‘view’ of (or participation in) it. It is this sense of the finite character of the quanta and the limits to the reducibility of particles of matter that lie at the basis of atomism. This can be illustrated by considering a pendulum and asking ourselves whether there are an infinity of positions of the pendulum as it swings. Quantum physics asserts that there are a series of finite positions. This asserts that the world is measurable and is the legacy of a science that goes back to Archimedes’ ‘The Sand Reckoner’ and beyond. The idea of the finite irreducible nature of matter hold that there is a limit that makes the universe knowable, even if much of it remains unknown. This is an active idea of knowledge that is dynamic, that is based on the interaction between the knower and the known. Just as there is a limit to velocity in that there is nothing faster than the speed of light so also that is a constant (Planck’s constant) that describes the limit to the smallest quanta of energy/mass. Light also, of which our natural eyes can only see a limited range, is discontinuous and is structured by photons, parcels of light.
These understandings affirm human beings are an integral part of nature, unseparated from it. We are the nature we observe. Because of course human beings, like any form of life, are also composed of these elemental particles. This recognition lays the basis for the further recognition that human beings are a species of life like any other form of life and that human beings are no more or less special than any life phenomenon. We are in interaction and interdependence with the material processes that surround us and pass through us. What we see and sense are manifestations of multiple underlying interactions which are uncertain in their character and subject to probability. What meets our eye is itself formed by interactions between what our eyes are formed by and connected to in our consciousness and the field of energy of which we are a part. As Carlo Rovelli puts it in the title of his book about the development of quantum physics, ‘reality is not what it seems’. This echoes what Motokiyo Zeami, playwright and founding genius of the Japanese Noh Theatre said in his treatise on acting, ‘the truth and what it looks like are not the same thing’.
The idea of atomism, that the universe is made up of irreducible particles, was first recorded (but clearly not first thought and conceived of) in the work of Democritus. Democritus tells us that ‘truth lies in the depths’ and that deep in matter, the substance of the universe, there are elemental particles that he called atoms. What is remarkable about the work of discovery that has been accomplished in the time since Einstein alongside many other scientists rediscovered and transformed our ideas about atoms is that it has affirmed the relational nature of the interaction of these particles at the deepest and most elemental level.
The conception that the world consists of relational manifestations of events could help us understand how radical equality and intersubjective interaction might lead us towards a deeper understanding of our society-making capacity. The idea that knowledge itself is a series of events accords with our experience of active knowing through which we can realise how we know as individuals but at the same time we know together.
We might be able to see how play, as in the play of light on a landscape or the play of a child’s imagination in its transformation of the world around it, can be a formative model of how we make our world if we can free ourselves of the separations which have been instituted by, and into, the ruling order, the mentalities that have been ordered into the institutions that rule us permeating the minds of both the rulers and the ruled. We are not separate from nature and the material processes that surround us and this tells us that our transformations of the world will in turn transform us.
Is the structure of matter in its ‘relationality’, indeterminacy and granularity (see Carlo Rovelli: Reality is Not What it Seems) that is described for us by quantum physics telling us something about ourselves that we really need to know? We are here for an instant. Are we here simply to survive or rather to interact, to free the potential that is within us? Through interaction? Rather than through dominance. What I am pursuing here is the thinking that tells us that human beings are not separate from nature and that mind is not separate from the body. These two apprehensions are linked. We can become conscious of the ways in which quantum physics and relativity extend and transform a view of the universe that we may have normalised from the physics of Newton. Newton’s cosmology is common sense and based on observation of the activity of a world that is contained and ordered according to our sensual perception in most instances. It is mechanically efficient but is holistically limited. It is unsurprising that this great scientist was contemporaneous with the English Revolution of 1688. From 1696, he worked as the Warden of the Mint and oversaw the Great Recoinage and measures against counterfeiting related to the setting up of the modern state borrowing and financial system that was facilitated by the Bank of England set up in 1694.
The separation of humanity from nature, of mind from matter, developed as patriarchy became the dominant structure in our species life during the neolithic revolution. The sense that we can be the objective god-like observer of natural processes and that this is assumption of control and domination of ourselves and natural forces are historical developments. Understanding patriarchy can help us undo the institutional obstacles presented by the ancient and modern state. These obstacles are not simply made of force and violence but of secrecy and duplicity. They are inherent in its structure.
In the recent period, faced by the genocidal behaviour of the UK state and the Western imperialist alliance of which it has been the progenitor and is still an key ally, I wanted to work out what ethics were. This led me to re-read Spinoza’s Ethics. There is an anecdotal connection between relativity and Spinoza. When Einstein was asked if he believed in god he said that if he did it would be Spinoza’s god. And there is a direct connection between Lucretius and Democritus and Spinoza’s work in his formulation of how humanity is not separate from nature and neither is mind separate from the body.
Early in his life Spinoza (1632-1677) had already been isolated from the community in which he lived, the exiled Jewish community in Amsterdam whose roots lay in the community in Spain from where it was ousted in the 1490s. This community were outsiders and Spinoza was excommunicated from this community for his heretical beliefs in his early 20s. It was a kind of voluntary and forced isolation. The Ethics was not published in his lifetime. It would have been considered to be highly unorthodox by Christians and Jews. It seems to me significant that he kept a copy of the Quran on his book shelves. His work is that of an outsider.
In the Ethics, Spinoza dispensed with the trinitarian Christian conception of god and asserted that god was one and god was what was real. He stated that the essence of god was existence and therefore god could have no cause. He equated God with substance and made clear that god and nature, the material world around us and of which we are a part was god. He strongly resisted the idea that god had purpose and intention and that god had human qualities. This meant that, for him, humanity was not separate from nature. He was critical in the same way that Lucretius was of attribution of the elevation of humanity as the special beneficiary of god’s benevolence. This meant that for Spinoza consciousness or mind was an aspect of the body and the body was the aspect of the mind and they were indivisible. He conducted a radical critique of Descartes especially in his analysis of the separation between mind and body. Rene Descartes’ work had been published decades earlier (his Discourse on Method was published in the Netherlands in 1637) but had had a profound impact. He asserts the nature of rationality not as a response to external pressure or affects but as an inner focus on the ‘whole’. This explains why the work starts with his description of god.
He is doing this to promote a holistic meditative inner stance. Ideas that arise from external affects he calls inadequate. They are the result of passions and are therefore passive. Ideas that derive from contemplation of the ‘whole’ are adequate, and are actions and therefore active and rational. The articulation of integrity is at the core of this creative philosophy. In order to make his views coherent or maybe to disguise the very profound recognitions that he made he wrote the Ethics in the form of a mathematics dissertation modelled on Euclid’s Geometry. But also Euclid’s work offers him a framework and a way of proceeding from first principles. Euclid starts off from a the definition of what might be described as the irreducible elements of geometry: the definitions of a point and of a line.
The Ethics directs people’s attention to what a good life involves and begins by establishing the nature of reality and substance furthermore effectively saying that that reality is god and by contemplating reality/god we can create adequate full ideas and undertake action on that basis, on the basis of of a holistic view and with integrity, free of fear. By contemplating god the idea is active because the view of the whole of substance, nature and existence. Responding to desire for fame, riches or sensual satisfaction the human being is subject to passion and is therefore passive and the conception of the idea in these instances is inadequate. In the unfinished work, The Improvement of the Understanding which precedes his composition of the Ethics he tells the reader about a transformative moment in his life. Here is an excerpt from the this work where you can get a sense of what this process involved:
All these evils seem to have arisen from the fact, that happiness or unhappiness is made wholly dependent on the quality of the object which we love. When a thing is not loved, no quarrels will arise concerning it–no sadness will be felt if it perishes–no envy if it is possessed by another–no fear, no hatred, in short no disturbances of the mind. All these arise from the love of what is perishable, such as the objects already mentioned.
But love towards a thing eternal and infinite feeds the mind wholly with joy, and is itself unmingled with any sadness, wherefore it is greatly to be desired and sought for with all our strength. Yet it was not at random that I used the words, “If I could go to the root of the matter,” for, though what I have urged was perfectly clear to my mind, I could not forthwith lay aside all love of riches, sensual enjoyment, and fame.
It is understanding that we should be looking for. But the nature of the space in which this understanding can be developed may not yet simply exist, ready to be inhabited. In looking around for the makings of this space I have already mentioned Paulo Freire’s work and the creative space of theatre but I also have to imagine the space that Spinoza created for himself as he undertook his exploration of ethics. He proposes a quality of interiority and integrity, of conceiving the mind in the depth of the body, and the body in its phenomenal form by a mind with which it is coexistent.
However he proposes towards the end of the work that ‘The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal'( Spinoza’s Ethics V, P23). Anthropological, historical and sociological insights can be derived from this perspective. It connects to the incomprehension of non-existence, of non-being. Spinoza describes a mode of thinking that is ‘from the point of view of eternity’ (sub species aeternitatis). It is here that the constitutive connective thinking that Spinoza describes as intuitive takes place. It strikes me, as I describe this, that the ‘point of view’ here is similar to that adopted at certain moments by the characters in Chekhov’s plays when they voice the deeply impossible curiosity of what people in ages to come – sometimes they talk about hundreds of years but the suggestion is of an inestimable length of time – will think about these characters’ lives, their values, their intimacies, hopes and desires. It is as if this hypothesis constitutes a kind of ultimate group of spectators. As we watch Chekhov’s plays now and sometimes laugh at the pretentions of precisely these kinds of projections we are being invited to imagine this distant view of our own lives. This is a form of historicisation, of being in history while making it.
From a political point of view this contemplation – how would it be if in a thousand years time people could look at what we are going through now, what would they see? – is powerful. It may be a more powerful and active idea of theory than seeing it as an attempt to understand past dogma based on the expectation of some kind of certainty. It is primary, raw thinking as distinct from interpretative thinking or thinking about other peoples’ ideas. In fact, the word contemplation is the latin translation of the Greek ‘theory’. It will surprise no-one that the roots of this word are the same as for ‘theatre’. The common concept is the act of seeing. Of course we know from the earlier citation from Motokiyo Zeami that the seeing here is possibly by a light that itself we cannot see. The theatre in an ancient definition in the Chinese Book of Changes is where the invisible is made visible.
When we reduce human life and knowledge to mechanics we submit to the dominance of relationships between things which Marx describes as being what replaces (or occludes) relationships between people in the core process of rule in the capitalist mode of production (Karl Marx Capital Volume 1 Chapter 1 On the Fetishism of the Commodity p.165 in Penguin Classics 1990 Capital A Critique of Political Economy ). I believe the work of ethical exploration is an integral part of moral reconstruction. I am considering how the development of an ideology of renewal must address the devastation of moral values that we have encountered. The knowledge that energises social change must come from people actively seeking it. It must happen through dialogue. But it may be deeper than what this is normally thought of as politics. I am proposing that it consists of deep listening to our selves and to others. To a large extent this process consists of unlearning and unknowing in order to clarify the depths from which our beliefs and values might come. Looking around for a model of this relationship of knowing we should look no further than the intersubjectivity which is vital to the infant human being in relation to the parent (see the work of Sarah Hrdy Mothers and Others )
I believe we have to create the spaces necessary for this listening dialogue. There are similarities between the space of theatre and the space of transformative learning described by Paulo Freire in the work he developed in the literacy campaigns he undertook. I am looking for a pedagogy, a way of learning and knowing, a particular structure of group work that can produce the movements we require but the can only be defined or refined by this work. The work of Iranian thinker, activist and writer, Ali Shariati is helpful in this respect.
In this recent period I have been inspired by the response of the people of Iran and their government to the attacks made on them by ‘the West’ and this has made me pay attention to Shi’a islam. The Palestinians response to their devastating situation has had a similar impact. I have watched with a certain amount of wonder at the way the Palestinians have held themselves together. In the case of Iran I have extended my admiration through reading the Iranian thinker and writer Ali Shariati whose work seems to me to have made such a significant contribution to the development of the Islamic Republic.
Ali Shariati set out to renew the fundamentals of Shi’a islam and does so while exploring the components of ideology. He proposed that the Iranian people undertake a profound journey of building through intuitive knowledge this basis for social revolutionary change. He knew it must be made by people and he described the elements from which this construction can be made. A good summary of what he was working for is Islamology, School of Thought and Action. Reading his work made me aware of how ideology did not arise automatically but could be made by dialogue and sharing. Also, because Shari’ati spent a considerable part of his life in France and studied the work of Sartre, Fanon (with whom he had a correspondence and the title of whose book DAMNÉS DE LA TERRE was used by Rohullah Khomeini as a rallying cry during the 1979 revolution.), Habermas, Foucault, Marcuse along with less well known sociologists, Gurvitch and Massignon, he combined critical social theory and his understanding of Shi’a Islam in a deliberate project to create an revolutionary ideology. He criticised the economism and determinism in Marx’s work. His public lectures in 1971 in a public space in Teheran asserted a rediscovery of the revolutionary ethical power of Shi’ism. He articulated this ideology as at once a return to self and a rediscovery of deep rootedness in history and culture. He emphasised how the process of arriving at the truth was a personal and profound journey. He also described analytically the components of what he called a ‘school of thought’. He was victimised and imprisoned by the Pahlavi regime and died in 1977.
In Shari’ati’s School of Thought and Action he outlines what he considers to be an ideology. This broad and coherent set of beliefs and values is held within a school of thought so that there is a coherence between what somebody might think about the nature of matter, the best way of life, what constitutes the human being and other domains of knowledge and thought.. Somebody who is apart of a ‘school of thought’ is not just a functional cog in the society of which they might be a part but has a guiding principle idea of the aim or goal to which the society is headed. He compares this to a carpenter who is not just somebody that cuts wood but who has an idea of what they are making. He draws a distinction between knowledge and learning similar to Paulo Freire’s distinction between ‘active’ knowledge (interactive) and ‘banking’ knowledge (collecting items of information) see Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is the coherent, co-ordinated quality of the world view that is the key to its vitality.
He describes the components of an ideological school of thought as being based on a world view. This is the idea of what constitutes existence and reality. It is on this basis that the conceptions of what a human being is and what a human being should be is formed. On this infrastructure of a world view he describes three other components.
First a philosophical anthropology which is a further extension of the nature of the human being. This is not a compartmentalised knowledge which has scientific validity but is an intuitive idea derived from thinking, philosophy and ideology. I think the result of this is what Gramsci refers to as species being which he describes as being the basis of the philosophy of action. It encompasses the feeling we have about the development of our species and what has structured our lives.
Second there is a historical component and of course this merges with the philosophical anthropology and the third component which is sociology.
The sociology component is to do with ideals, what is the ideal society and how do we attain it. Obviously this has to rhyme with the feeling for the human being and what the human being is and what we ought to be.
Shariati talks about the interactions that give rise to schools of thought starting in cafés rather than the academies. These former are the spaces where people can come together and ‘unseparate’. This evolution of schools of thought or ideologies in ‘thinking and talking’ spaces outside the institutions of the state is based on his idea that when academies start to pick up on new trends of thought effectively categorising them and defeating the living fibre of their connectivity.
As we come again to look at spaces (cafes, universities, political meetings) I am reminded that as the word theory came to be translated into Latin as ‘contemplatio’ it gained an association with the space of the temple, a sacred space, a space of worship. How much was this imposition of boundaries an incorporation and a restriction? The illusion of derived from secularisation is a means of domination and control. I call it an illusion because I believe that the process rests on a concealment of that which is sacred even more labrythine than the secrecy of the sacred spaces it pretends to transcend. The meaning of the word secularisation is the act placing something sacred in a non-sacred space. This either conceals and possibly makes more potent the sacred character of the object or bestows sacredness on the space into which it has been placed. So secularisation can be understood as a kind of total sacralisation of all aspects of institutional life. What is at issue here is the border between the sacred and the non-sacred and which social group controls this. It is the location of the processes of secrecy on which patriarchal hierarchical power rests.
In summoning and engaging with the work of Ali Shariati I am clarifying the more general policy ‘turn’ I described earlier about turning the focus of our future political and social relations towards the east across the Eurasian continent. This is what I am calling a re-orientation. It is multilevel and based on bio regional and therefore ecological determinations.
But when Ali Shariati and other Iranian thinkers look back and take inspiration from the extraordinary history of the people of the region who are included in the Iranian state they see unique aspects of literary, musical, poetic and spiritual culture. It retold the story of Ali Hussein and the battle of Kerbala. It advance the respect and admiration due to the daughter of Mohammed, Fatima. This reclaiming process was an extremely core part of the revolution of 1979; it was the assertion of a civilisational dimension. This ‘reclaiming’ is similar to when the System Reform Institute in China engaged with the issues of industrial and social development in the period after Mao’s death (1976) and continuing into the 1980s. The System Reform Institute, alongside others involved in the Great Reform Debate reached back to the work of economists from the period 2000 years before in order to make arguments against the imposition of a ‘big bang’ liberalisation, that would have liberalised prices and introduced markets in a way uncontrolled by the state and by society. see Isabella Weber’s How China Escaped the Shock Doctrine; the Market Reform Debate. In one of the most profound and significant social and political processes of modern times the Chinese avoided economic ‘shock therapy’. To do so they too took succour, strength and wisdom from what was regionally specific and rooted in Chinese history and culture.
But how does this insight into the joining of past and present wisdom play out here in the United Kingdom or Great Britain? Is imperialism and ‘maritimism’ the only legacy of this island. Was it oak trees and sheep and then coal that ‘made’ the society which developed in Britain. What ideological components have arisen. What aspects of our culture are antecedent to the empiricism and utilitarianism that have stamped our culture with its mechanical tendency. This question of history has been explored by a group of perceptive historians: Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Raphael Samuels along with the History Workshop Movement which he founded. There is too much to say about the arrival of the various peoples who migrated from the east after the decline of the Roman Empire, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the impact of the Viking occupation of the northern part of England, the imposition of the new order and the formation of a homogenous aristocratic elite by the Norman invasion of 1066 that founded the class system, the break with Rome in the 16th Century and developed the theocracy that was instituted by the monarchic court, the impact of the English Revolution where many of the rebellious egalitarian current of contemporary Britain find their source, the relationship between the industrial north and the financial South East, how migration from Britain’s colonies was ‘utilised’ and its other impacts, the extraordinary diversity of London.
Last year (2025) when an indication was given that a new party was to be formed, 800,000 people expressed support and interest. There is no sure way of knowing what the influences on this major portion of the population were. The anti-austerity movement initiated in 2010, the popular movement that threw Jeremy Corbyn into the leadership of the Labour Party, the massive movement of protest against the Palestinian genocide may all have been factors. Here in North London a group of young people decided that they needed to take the initiative in response to this movement. Indeed they were a part of it. They called for the setting up of a local branch of Your Party. Their first meeting was invested with the energy of discovery and brilliant recognitions. They recognised the need to produce leaders rather than follow the already existing ones. They were four young people, typically diverse Londoners, who were all members of a book club. Ali Shariati would have been thrilled. The story of what became known as the Islington Proto-Branch of Your Party needs to be told and heard. For a moment the potential of this space seemed to be massive. The invention of ideology, the moral reconstruction, the reorientation could flow from this kind of initiative.
The other exceptional and deep movement that has recently occurred on our island (and elsewhere) was the Fridays for Future and its follow on, Extinction Rebellion. These called for the elite institutions to tell the truth about global warming and take action for future generations. This movement fed into the pro-Palestinian movement that escalated in 2021 and again in 2023. The issue of denial and truth strongly link these issues in the vivid experience of a generation. The world is waiting for the next surge of defiance and rebellion.
What are the significant specific features of a revolutionary reorientation and moral reconstruction from the bottom up here in the birthplace of industrial capitalism? A process of social renewal without increased resource consumption would need to take place. So far human history has seen revolutionary movements undertaken in circumstances where the productive forces were undeveloped where industrial capitalist development hadn’t fully taken place. This meant that socialisation of production and distribution needed to happen simultaneously with industrialisation. No advanced industrial country has undertaken the socialisation, democratisation and resource re-distribution integral to social justice and radical equality. So it is a unique project to extend human creativity whilst not expanding the use of irreplaceable environmental resources. One other thought is that Britain has a tradition of unilateralism, the reformation of the 16th century is an example of this. The people here can take radical and profound decisions. It may be an aspect of living on an island. Why shouldn’t the society that gave birth to industrial capitalism, be the first to show a completely new path towards solving this massive human problem of how we relate to the world around us, the environment, the living earth.
Also, and finally there is something in the ambience of Britain, this weird broken up, shared island that exudes a special form of love. Although Shakespeare’s social view may have been compliant to the ruling order (I’m not sure it was but there is evidence that as a landowner he participated in the enclosure of common land; his work shows magic adherence to the preordained order as well a raw anarchic energy of rebellion) he also reminds us of a kind of love of nature, the world and of human beings. It is a unique quality of our culture that the most renowned poet, who combined and composed our strange composite language, made theatre. The Beatles tapped into this with their song All you need is love. Love is all you need. There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. You don’t need to read Spinoza to get the message.