Facts, Truths, and Inner Motives
Whisper it to those who think that truth is factual and logical and no more, but it is entirely possible that our minds have evolved more to manipulate reality, including others as well ourselves, rather than to apprehend the truth of that reality and conform ourselves to it. This disquieting suggestion also makes me think that the assumption of truth-seeking on the part of human beings possesses a theological origin that those who assume truth-seeking as the default human position perhaps do not realize. God made the world intelligible to intelligent beings, with the result that truth-seeking constitutes an integral part of a coming home to God on our part. The modern view of truth-seeking has discarded the theological origins of the idea and, with it, the idea of moral truth and moral knowledge. Truth and knowledge are considered to arise outside of the realm of (non-rational) value, and outside human practices and interests. This, I argue, has left modern truth-seekers detached from human realities and unable to deal practically with the complexities of human affairs. They are trying to educate and influence desire from the outside. That leaves them without an ethics and politics that has any critical purchase on reality and any popularity with the public.
There seems to be a clear clash between theological and evolutionary views on this question. A theological understanding sees the world as created by God to be intelligible to intelligent beings. This is very much the origins of the rational conception of the world and hence an invitation to truth-seeking on our part. In this conception, reason comes with its moral component firmly in place. The appeal is to the common moral reason of all human beings. It is on the basis of this theological assumption that we are inclined to believe that human beings, as rational, intelligent beings, are designed to seek, identify, and understand the truth about reality and are enjoined (and willing) to act in accordance with it. That assumption has survived the rejection of a belief in God and hence the discarding of its theological underpinnings. But the belief is suffering some increasingly damaging blows. That has left us having to confront an alternate view that, for all of its humanist credentials, is far less flattering to human beings. This is the view that human beings are not rational beings but rationalizing beings. An evolutionary view of human psychology holds that the human mind has evolved to be good at promoting human survival and nothing more; truth, far from trumping all things, is merely something that humans use to this end. In the Foreword to the first edition of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, Robert Trivers wrote that if deceit
is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of self-knowledge—the deception being practiced. Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.
The findings of cognitive science are increasingly telling us that human perceptions and memories are not just fallible, a view that is perfectly compatible with the view that humans recognize a fact-based truth, but are actually stories concocted by the brain to support and sustain our egos, justify our decisions, and condone our actions. These stories may actually deviate radically from reality and real events, but are not simply false or fictional for that reason: they conform to what we want to see and hear rather than the real world. There is a human truth to these stories, and they have a clear survival value.
Stravinsky is reported to have said, ‘I wonder if memory is true, and know that it cannot be, but one lives by memory nonetheless and not by truth.’ Such a view is something of an affront to the theologically based assumption of human beings as truth-seekers, as well as to the dignity of history, my beloved first degree. I remember the debates as to whether history is an art or a science, and the heavy emphasis on the emergence of history as a discipline as against mere story-telling. But Stravinsky’s view made me think of the way I tell stories and reminisce about past events myself. I have noticed that the details and, even more, the emphases change, even when I reply these tales in my own mind. Try this with family and friends, and I suspect that the various accounts offered by the various parties will vary widely. The events are the same but the accounts differ. You remember your memories as truths that happened, but the mind plays some creative tricks, adding some things, deleting others, modifying and embellishing still more.
The theistic philosopher Martin Buber argued that the "I and thou" relationship expressed the human relationship to God as the eternal thou, but that we were capable of imagining this divine "thou" to be our genes. Non-theistic philosophers will say that it is the other way around. Depending on whether your viewpoint is theistic or evolutionary (it can be both, of course), God or the genes are the reality to which our minds seek to bring us in accordance with; we are either engaged in a return to the divine source of life or a mere struggle for survival.
In the evolutionary biology view, there is no meaning to the game of life other than staying in the game. Does that view make most sense of the richness of human experience? I not only prefer the theistic view, I see it as a story far more inspiring and, therefore, far more plausible from an evolutionary perspective, than the scientific view which reduces to survival for no other reason than survival. Survival for what? Culture, creativity? To create ethics as we see fit? Maybe we already have done precisely this, and God is a spectral projection that, over time, forgetting origins, we take as origin.
The peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri expresses his belief in the peace that comes with the return to God as origin and end of all things:
And in His will there is our peace
It is to that sea all things move,
both what His will creates and that which nature makes.
Comedy, Paradiso III: 85-87
It is not true because Dante says it, of course. What is true is that Dante was the greatest story teller who ever existed. Dorothy Sayers states a truth here that so many miss in their concern with philosophical, theological, and literary questions:
"Neither the world, nor the theologians, nor even Charles Williams had told me the one great, obvious, glaring fact about Dante Alighieri of Florence — that he was simply the most incomparable storyteller who ever set pen to paper."
Sayers, Further Papers on Dante (New York, 1957), p. 2
We are all so clever now as to be able to identify the mechanics at work, pick the entire work apart by showing how it was constructed. I challenge the people who are so expert at identifying the materials, the mechanics, and the construction to do likewise – put their own set of tools and materials together and create a poetic work of similar weight. Sayers understood this point with respect to Dante’s technique:
“In a way I know how it’s done. I could take it to pieces and analyse the tricks. Just when you are getting tired, some ‘invention’ occurs – an alarming hold-up at the gates of the infernal city, a pathetic story by Franscesca or Ugolino, a pleasant aerial excursion on Geryon’s back, a grisly laugh over the quarrelling demons, a picturesque apparition of giants, a sudden dab of bright colour when Dis appears in the middle of the grey ice, a smattering of science when they pass the Centre … but merely naming the tricks doesn’t explain the achievement; it only makes on think one’s self clever.”
Sayers in Reynolds p20
There have been a lot of clever people in the world of literary criticism, deconstructing texts with such expertise as to render them lifeless. The ‘trick’ of great storytelling is to show but don’t tell. In revealing the tricks and techniques behind the show, literary criticism destroys the very thing it exists on the back of. That same thing applies to God and philosophy - philosophical reason doesn't just negate and deny God, it ultimately undercuts itself, and leaves us trying to survive in a meaningless, nihilistic world.
There is more to Dante than tricks and techniques; the interesting thing is not how The Comedy was constructed nor even the words with which it conveyed its message – it’s the message that moves in the end, and it’s the message that draws people back over the centuries.
That is the basis of truth-seeking that makes most sense to me, and it affirms a truth that is far richer and more rounded than that which reduces to fact and logic. It is also a more robust and more persuasive account of human life, as I shall argue shortly.
Which brings me to an article in The Times by Ed Conway.
Or facts aren’t respected in this age of unreason, as another article in The Times put it. I note here the equation of reason and knowledge with facts. When people complain that we live in post-truth times, they tend to mean post-fact. When I have confronted this view, I have made reference to Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, to make it clear that we have been living in post-value times since Nietzsche announced the "death of God." Of course, we are not post-value, since the modern world generates plenty of values. The problem is that in the absence of an objective moral standard, there is no way of deciding between these values. In the context of the fact and value split, many people do not think there is such a thing as moral truth and moral knowledge. For them, morality does not yield true knowledge but is merely a series of value judgments, irreducible subjective preference and choice. And therein lies the problem. Those who assert the dualism of fact and value presume that fact is the arbiter of truth and has priority over mere values. They are shocked and outraged when they find that this is not the case. Instead of learning that knowledge is more rounded and multi-layered than they had thought, they continue to insist on the priority of fact, and are thus at a loss when confronted by those with 'alternative facts' or no respect at all for facts. Yet not only does fact not compel this way, much that is presented as fact isn’t fact at all. The first lesson I was taught on my history course at university is that facts do not speak for themselves. We can get into selection, frames, and filters here, but my simple point is concerned to reinstate value, whether we refer to norms, beliefs, dreams, hopes - the things that inspire effort and action.
A mathematician friend, a professor and genius to boot, once told me in discussion that mathematics is based on ‘almost nothing,’ but on that basis you can build to infinity. That line really impressed me. You can find the whole exchange I had recorded in From Core to Infinity.
Wittgenstein stumped Bertrand Russell with his assertion that maths is ‘made up,’ by which he meant that there are no objective grounds. Russell, a philosopher who believed truth to be mathematically based, disliked the view intensely. He could never refute it, though, and he never found the grounds he sought. A decade after Russell’s defeat, Godel showed why he could never have found the certainty he was looking for. God and mathematics are similar that way. If you want proof of God, then demand it of mathematics too. If you find it, you will be hailed the greatest genius who has ever existed. Or God. We are standing with our feet planted firmly in mid-air. The intricacies of that question are not my concern here (and I am training my mind to cease wandering off on tangents, because it takes us away from the point, but most of all because it has become seriously draining on my time and energy. I leave such things as signposts for people to pursue in their own time. I may well return to this one, though).
The ‘almost nothing’ is the tiniest of threads upon which we walk; it may be narrow, but it is real and resilient and can take the weight of our hopes and expectations so long as we have faith and courage enough to put our best foot forward. Wittgenstein describes the religious man or woman as a "tightrope walker":
"It almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1948: 73).
People I meet are often surprised to hear that I am a historian by training. Most know me as a philosopher or, maybe, as a political theorist and sociologist, or as a writer in the field of literary ecology. They associate me with ideas and imagination. That’s the field I work in these days. But I cut my teeth on facts. I could grasp facts much better than anything. There was something about details, dates, names, events that I could identify easily, understand, and retain in the memory. When I struggled in all subjects other than languages at school, history came easily to me. I know facts and am trained in facts. And I know that facts are not enough. When it comes to the facts of history, I know that they are an amalgam of all things comprising human life. Somewhere in recent centuries, fact has come to be modelled on natural science. History is ‘proof’ that human beings ‘make up’ their facts as they ‘make up’ the world they live in. That’s what historical change is all about. It was once fact that kings ruled by divine right, it was fact that democratic movements challenged such a basis for government and made up alternate facts asserting different bases of political authority and legitimacy. History is all about human beings challenging, subverting, and overthrowing false fixities in laws and institutions, values and norms - making new facts to live by. No scientific fact is capable of resolving such cases, no one side can refute the other by citation of fact, nor by proof. The facts of historical change are of an altogether different order.
Natural science deals with facts and explanations pertaining to the physical universe. Once we move to questions of value, meaning, and significance, then science can inform, but it can neither pronounce nor legislate. My arguments are not against science but against the extension of science into other domains, at the expense of understanding and motivation. Michael Polanyi makes the point well:
The pursuits of biology, medicine, psychology and Unsocial sciences may rectify our everyday conceptions of plants and animals, and even of man and society; but we must set against any such modification its effect on the interest by which the study of the original subject matter had been prompted and justified. If the scientific virtues of exact observation and strict correlation of data are given absolute preference for the treatment of a subject matter which disintegrates when represented in such terms, the result will be irrelevant to the subject matter and probably of no interest at all.
- Michael Polanyi
If we seek to motivate people by recitation of the facts pertaining to an objectively valueless and meaningless nature (which is what modern disenchanting science reveals with respect to the universe) that is indifferent to human affairs (Einstein’s view in praise of Spinoza’s God), then don’t be surprised if people fail to respond: such a view cultivates indifference on the part of humans. (It should come as no surprise that human beings should be indifferent to a nature that is indifferent to them, the God of Spinoza/Einstein is entirely lacking in personal significance).
I have spent years trying to get people to see the need to join the worlds of fact and value together. I shall simply cite a couple of blog posts here, which are much shorter and easier to understand than my various books:
I refer people to the books for extensive treatment of the fact-value dualism of the modern world as a debilitating condition.
I shall keep my point here simple: scientific knowledge and technological know-how give us the ability to act, they do not make us want to act. Acting on capacity is always a matter of will, motivation, and belief on the part of human beings. Human beings needs compelling and cogent reasons to act, and these are always something more than explanations of physical reality and causality. Life is always a leap of faith. We live as co-creators in a ceaselessly creative universe, meaning that we always live forwards into uncertainty and mystery. We can never have complete knowledge of a world that is always incomplete. That view does not diminish the importance of reason, but seeks to enrich it and make it whole through recognition of the ethical, existential, and aesthetic components of human life. Of course, the more logic and evidence there is on your side, the less of a leap of faith you will have to make. Those of the least faith will require the most evidence and proof to stiffen their resolve, and the more of these things you have, the less likely is the probability of falling short, too far, or by the wayside. But making that leap is always going to be a matter of having the will to make it in the first place, and that is a matter of seeing the existential need to journey forwards into the unknown, and even the unknowable. It is a question of motivations. Jurgen Habermas is one of my favourite thinkers. I place him firmly in the tradition of ‘rational freedom,’ a tradition connected by the view, in the words of Spinoza, that 'the more man is governed by reason, the more he is free.' It’s a view that can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, except that the ancients would write of happiness or flourishing rather than freedom. In calling for constructive models of the future society, Habermas, arch-rationalist and proponent of the communicative ethic, underlines the importance of something that I consider key in allying social transformation with personal transformation: ‘I know that all learning depends on the formation of inner motives’ (Habermas 1981: 28). That’s the view I emphasize, and it entails the creation of the will that makes human beings want to act, something much more than the technical and instrumental ability to act.
My favourite philosopher is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I have always seen Rousseau as a kindred spirit. In 2001 I was advised by the great Kantian philosopher Gary Banham to specialize in Rousseau. Gary had read my work on Rousseau and enjoyed it very much. He told me that Rousseau is a much misunderstood, maligned, and neglected philosopher. He still is .I note that A.C. Grayling’s new book contains just five pages on Rousseau, this from a man who says that religion is bad because it has caused a lot of harm and pain in the world (unlike sex and everything else that makes life worth living, then) Suffice to say I consider Grayling a mediocrity, although, being fair, he may be the perfect exponent of philosophy in an age of much diminished expectations. Philosophy for non-philosophers who think the real truths are other-than-philosophical, then. I may be keeping the wrong company, but none of my philosophy friends have anything to say about Grayling; what he gets right is all very obvious, and his provocations are merely designed to make him appear clever and radical. I cut my philosophical teeth on Russell. I was once hugely impressed with the philosophical world he opened up. He got the major calls in politics right. I still admire him. But I don't read him much anymore. Maybe I absorbed his lessons. He is right on peace, cooperation, happiness, love, and his views on anarchism and socialism are interesting. But I find him limited philosophically. He is dry, which perhaps explains the somewhat shrill tone of his political pronouncements. His politics and ethics are not grounded in an appropriate philosophy. Logical atomism and empiricism really doesn't cut it. Russell's colleague A.N. Whitehead is much more interesting here. In Science and the Modern World he writes that whilst man may not live by bread alone, nor can he live by disinfectants. Grayling is no Russell. (And I’m sorry to have broken my new rule of not going off on tangents, because he isn’t actually worth putting down. But I’ve done it now, and actually feel better for having done it).
Rousseau was the greatest Platonist of the modern age, affirming transcendent truths against the Hobbesian conventionalism that splits and fractures the political and moral terrain in an endless assertion and counter-assertion. Hobbes knew well the truth that those who have followed in his sophist steps have yet to grasp: that neither scientific nor moral truth decides such struggles, but power. Modern liberals still seem to believe that they can shed the old metaphysical assumptions supporting the value, dignity, and equality of all individuals, and assert those things by way of a self-legislating conventionalism. It can’t be done, and the increasingly shrill calls to defend liberalism from the assaults of various nationalisms, populisms, and fundamentalisms will be ineffective. To avoid misunderstandings, my criticisms of liberalism do not justify an illiberalism that devalues individual liberty but seeks to enrich the moral and ontological ultimacy of the individual by recognition of the fact that human beings are social beings. In contract to liberalism, I affirm an ontology in which individuality and sociality are two sides of the same human nature. It is that proposition which goes missing in an individualist liberalism that has shed its metaphysical underpinnings to become an explicitly conventionalist doctrine (a non-transcendental sophism based on power and power relations).
Critics have argued that Rousseau’s notion of ‘the General Will’ is paradoxical or contradictory. They note that a will can only be particular, and cannot be general. Rousseau did not stumble across the concept, though, but had thought hard on certain Jansenist arguments and turned them to his own ends. His concept of the General Will expresses the notion that the truth cannot just be passively given by lawgivers, but must be actively willed, internalized, lived on the part of individuals. With this concept, Rousseau integrated the two most important wings of western philosophy, the idea that there is an objective truth and reality on the one hand, and the importance of subjective will and choice on the other. Rousseau’s importance here has yet to be fully recognized, and the radical Enlightenment he represented (as a figure both in and against the Enlightenment), is still occluded by the dominant liberal interpretation (free trade, free markets, free individuals, severed connections from politics and government, community, tradition .... nature). As the high public profile of the likes of Grayling testifies, it is the Enlightenment of Voltaire that prevails, not that of Rousseau. And that liberal Enlightenment is continuing to unravel on account of its own false ontology. I note how often many of its defenders, those who spend most of their time telling us what is wrong with the world and how modern civilization is a global heat machine implicated in the planetary unravelling, when pressed on this fall into a stock defence of liberal freedoms that is of a piece with defenders of capitalism. They know things are wrong, but just aren’t critical enough. They effectively join with the likes of Steven Pinker in claiming that capitalist modernity has made us healthier, wealthier and freer, and in greater numbers. Even if that claim is right as far as it goes (and Pinker has been criticized by many for cherry-picking his facts), my point is that capitalism/liberalism (can we distinguish bourgeois society from the capital form?) has now gone as far as it could go and is in process of imploding. It is time for a post-liberal order, not least because the roots of liberal society are in the process of being extinguished by the corporate form. In my recent criticisms of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now I noted the scant reference to Immanuel Kant, the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment, in that work. Reading Pinker you would scarce know that Kant wrote three great critiques. The uncritical, apologetic nature of those who situate themselves in the tradition of the Enlightenment is hardly worthy of the Enlightenment thinkers they claim to follow. There are certainly no Diderots among them, they have neither the guts nor the imagination, and seem to think taking post-shots against religion makes them radical. It doesn’t; it makes them irrelevant.
It’s along those lines that I would see to absorb the message Ben Conway delivers in the article Facts aren’t Sacred. Facts and logic alone won’t cut it when it comes to human life and historical change; they never have and never will, and those who continue to insist that they ought are merely side-lining themselves if they fail to provide a substantive ethic at the same time. Such an ethics cannot be the liberal one in which values are merely value judgments. It may bring them some comfort to think that they are right, and that the world on the way to perdition could have saved itself had it come to live by the light of their reason. But I see only pain and despair, and a defeat that is certain to come.
I’ve been on the inside of the environmental movement since the 1980s. This movement has sought to alert the world to the dangers of planetary unravelling. There have been victories along the way, and environmentalists have got the major calls right. I am very far from repudiating environmentalism here. If only the mainstream political parties had listened to what the environmentalists have been saying all along, we would not be facing an all hands on deck moment on the planet. I have done my best in the cause of raising the profile of environmental issues in politics. But I have noted certain blindspots. I have tried to make my own contribution. And I have been ignored in the main, and occasionally abused. I have noted a rigid adherence to scientific facts, and the pressing of science into service as politics and ethics. This has given some truth to the criticisms of deniers who claim environmentalism is not true science but is politics or ‘the new religion of climate alarmism.’ That's not true at all. The truth is much worse as far as I'm concerned - the use of science in place of politics and ethics. If only environmentalism had developed a truly political and ethical position. I have sought to pull ‘debate’ – the dialogue of the deaf – out of that terrain by ensuring that all things are accorded their true place and dignity. I have insisted on the need to bridge the gap between theoretical reason (our scientific knowledge of the external world, (the science on climate change, for instance), adding technological know-how as a product of science here) and practical reason (the field of ethics and politics, the realm of value, involving human meaning, choice, will, and motivation), adding economics and systems of provision and need satisfaction as a branch. Science is science, and ethics and politics are ethics and politics. The problems come when we conflate these things under the sway of just one of them, according it a place no single discipline ought to command, least of all the one concerned with statements of physical fact. These areas need to be distinguished to perform their legitimate services, and then related. I hear environmentalists constantly assert that physics doesn’t care what politics thinks, as though truth is simply a question of natural fact and nothing more. That is a debilitating error in practical human affairs that may well prove fatal. It certainly undermines the reach, purchase, and plausibility of environmentalism. Physics might not care what politics thinks, but human beings certainly do. Human beings are social beings and, as such, live in a public life comprising various beliefs, norms, meanings, hopes, and motivations. Physics might not care, but that says no more than that Nature is indifferent to human affairs. Which is not helpful. Nature might well be indifferent, but human beings are not. And the problem is compounded by the fact that modern disenchanting science tells us that indifferent Nature is objectively valueless and meaningless too. This is the science that a certain, dominant, strain of environmentalism is pressing into service as politics and ethics. There is no mystery at all as to why it has failed to inspire and motivate, and has failed to generate the collective actions required to stave off ecological catastrophe. The call to save a Nature that could care less either way is not the greatest of metaphysical motivators we have seen in history.
In saying this, I am not committing the reverse error of arguing for politics against physics. I don’t see Nature as objectively valueless and meaningless, either; I reject the purposeless materialism of the modern age, and I affirm an inherent purpose, value, meaning, and goodness. I would recommend Edward Feser’s book The Revenge of Aristotle here. Except that I wouldn’t describe the reinstatement of an essentialist metaphysics in terms of ‘revenge.’ Revenge may well come in the shape of ecological destruction. But the destruction of the natural ecology will have been long presaged and prepared by the destruction of the moral ecology. To avert ‘revenge,’ I would recommend the good old Aristotelian term ‘flourishing.’
I criticize liberalism to its very core in the ontological separation of individuality and sociality. Liberals are fighting back hard, noting all that is at risk at being lost in a rising tide of populism, nationalism, and fundamentalism. They don't see how atomism in a sophist world is inviting such 'ersatz' communities. I note how the likes of Grayling casually lumps Christianity and religion in with Communism and Fascism, making no fine distinctions at all, calling them all totalitarian. This is lazy and old hat, indicating a liberalism gone stale and decadent, incapable of learning and moving:
“the major religions and the major ideologies of fascism and communism are the same thing, namely, totalitarian ideologies--systems that seek to impose a monolithic outlook to which all must conform on pain of punishment including torture and death.”
I’ll leave that statement uncriticised. I have read the same thing many times before, in Russell, Popper, Berlin; it’s a stock liberal claim that shows little inclination to address the historical details. It works with respect to specific instances, but as generalisation is mere prejudice. I wonder if Grayling actually knows what Marx meant by ideology. For Marx, ideology was a critical concept, not a system of ideas. I very much doubt he’s curious to know. In his new book he criticizes Marx as a utopian, this despite the fact that Marx refused point blank to write kitchen recipes for the future, emphasizing the critique of present forms and relations and empowering existing agents to act within their particular social and historical conditions. To be fair, not enough marxists and socialists have understood that point either, with disastrous results for socialist practice.
I had thought totalitarianism to have become a somewhat discredited concept. It all depends on what we mean. The Judaeo-Christian affirmed the dignity of each person and the equality of all souls before God. Natural rights are based on natural law. Secular liberals make rights and liberties conventional, things conferred by state and law (and, as a corollary, things that can just as easily be withdrawn the same way). As for Communism, I have written extensively to show how Marx affirmed individuality and the freedom of individuals. He may, actually, have gone too far in that direction, as MacIntyre notes at the end of After Virtue. But the idea that Marx is a totalitarian is merely an expression on liberalism’s blinkered division between methodological individualism (freedom) and methodological collectivism (unfreedom). The point is important because I note the extent to which the Green movement is actually a left liberalism. It claims to be ‘neither left nor right’ and condemns socialism and capitalism as two sides of the same industrial coin. Industrialism is a vague concept. I find it easy to argue for a Green industrial revolution based on new energy infrastructures and technologies. It is the character of specific social relations that counts here. I note the massive demands that Greens enjoin on the governments of the world with respect to ambitious climate programmes. I note, also, the rejection of socialism as statist and authoritarian (as exemplified in the comments of UK Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley, who promotes the Green Party as the party of individual freedom). In other words, such Greens are attempting to enforce collectivist solutions requiring force of government and law on the basis of individualist liberal premises. It is incoherent and impossible and, in practice, will reduce to big government facilitating the process of capital accumulation within a continuing capitalist system.
Liberalism is an honourable tradition with substantial achievements to its name. I can make the same claim with respect to capitalism. To repeat: human beings are healthier and wealthier, better educated and longer lived, than ever before, and in greater numbers. Defenders of the system will attribute this to capitalism, and they will add liberalism and its record of rights, liberties, and tolerance to that list.
Which begs the question as to why so many are complaining so much. The likes of Patrick Deneen will tell you plainly that the problems of the modern world are self-authored. Liberalism is not the plucky outsider seeking to extend the sphere of human freedom against dominant feudal authorities; liberalism is the dominant culture and has been for a long while now. The problems that liberals are most vocal in protesting have the liberal ontology firmly at their core. It is time for liberals to take ownership and begin the transition to a post-liberal order. Liberalism is implicated in transforming the (often exclusive) citizen rights of the ancient and medieval world into individual liberties incarnated in the private ownership of property, tolerance and freedom of expression, equality of all under law, and the cult of the individual. There's good and bad in this record. But there is irony in the fact that the good things are now implicated in the ecological crisis of the age. In time, the associational and collective character of citizen rights has come to be dissolved into an individual self-assertion, so that liberties have become entitlements involving licence. It is this ontology and its expression in self-regarding actions that has served to detach us ever further from supraindividual sources of life, meaning and belonging: that is, from nature, the community of others, meaning, belonging, God. It is with bitter irony that I note that the very subjectivist freedoms which modern men and women value the most are precisely those which are implicated in the implosion of the moral, social, and natural ecology. The ambitious programmes of climate action being demanded cannot but entail substantial government intervention and real legislative and regulative force; and yet these demands are premised on individualist liberal principles which sees government as alien, something whose power is to be staked down.
The radicals of the era, swept along by the pressing demands of looming eco-catastrophe, are effectively espousing an anti-establishment politics whilst enjoining massive schemes of political action on untransformed limited governments. They have failed to note, too, that their rigid adherence to liberal principles serves to make their demands for sweeping change somewhat less than radical, however loud and visible they may be in their protest and campaigning. The danger is that in pressing science into service as ethics and politics, environmentalism will succeed not in effecting the ecological transformation of the political we need, only in equipping the governments they claim to reject with the knowledge, rationale, and justification they need to impose an environmental austerity on the people, one designed not to protect the planetary ecology but instead to preserve capitalist relations.
I have tried hard, but gently, to warn my green friends that the environmental movement was at risk of becoming the twenty-first century hygiene movement, cleaning up the infrastructure of the capital system and refuelling it with clean energy so as to enable another burst of expansion, which further encroaches on and transgresses planetary boundaries. The case for renewable energy is compelling. The issue for me, however, has always been the increasing demand for energy as a result of systemic imperatives. There is no energy gap. The USA in the past fifty years has used more energy than all the civilisations in history put together. (I have the source for that in one of my books. I am writing on hoof, so need to check back). The issue is less this or that energy source and mix but the imperatives of an exponentially expanding economy that makes such growing, and impossible, demands on energy systems. Cutting back energy use, by uprooting the accumulative dynamic, is the real game-changer here. At present, governments in hoc to capital are being asked by environmental campaigners to block the accumulative process. That will not happen. These governments are the political command centres of the capital system, securing a unity that the competition of capitals cannot secure, thus facilitating the process of private accumulation. A further point to be made is that no energy form has ever supplanted previous forms in history. Instead, there is addition. Clean and dirty energy will be added together to facilitate continued capitalist expansion. Unless the accumulative dynamic of the capital system is uprooted, then the covering of land and sea with power stations in beauty spots won’t make one iota of difference. I put this point to colleagues in the Green Party a decade ago, and was met with a deafening silence. I suspect they had thought I had become a climate denier, or was raising issues that would play into the hands of deniers. In truth, I was raising problems and incoherences that would not go away, and that would undermine the effectiveness of Green politics, to the detriment of environmentalism as politics. My big fear all along has been that for so long as the Green narrative on climate change remains liberal, then it will serve to equip governments in hoc to capital and its accumulative dynamic with the knowledge and rationale it needs to impose an environmental austerity on the people, not to ‘save the planet,’ but to preserve capitalist relations intact whilst pursuing the continued exploitation of nature and labour. For years I have argued for a class analysis of the problem, only to be met with politically vacuous assertions of being ‘beyond left and right.’ I have been told by eco-designer friends that ‘us and them’ thinking is an anachronism. It may well be. I took it as friendly advice to me to abandon talk of class, Marx, and socialism. In response, I offered the friendly observation that we live in an ‘us and them’ system, and that the ‘them’ have succeeded in embedding and institutionalising their power and will not be inclined to give it up in response to scientific fact, moral appeal, and democratic persuasion. So how, then, do we propose to put an end to the anachronistic exploitative and divisive system that is now presiding over planetary implosion? And how do we do that without taking sides? To refuse to take sides out of some purported independence is to effectively side with the dominant power. To criticise those taking sides against an exploitative and divisive system for being divisive is to underline the efforts and energies of those seeking change. Such reason exhibits the age old delusions of the ‘third way.’ Such people think that there is a workaround. If only there were. It would make life a whole lot easier, and enable us to avoid politics. On that delusion they will fail and the system they seek to change will remain in place until it falls, taking the rest of us down with it. The capital system is not a public domain amenable to scientific evidence, moral appeal, and democratic persuasion, but a regime of private accumulation. That lesson still hasn’t been learned by that part of the Green movement that remains liberal to the core, and on that failure to learn it will either fall, or merely succeed in seducing people into system-preservation rather than the system-change they claim to support. I read such people now protesting against ‘climate apartheid,’ which describes the way that the rich are preparing to insulate themselves from the worst aspects of climate change. Well what did the people refusing to acknowledge asymmetrical relations of class power in the first place expect to result? All lose when the system fails, we are told, and therefore it is only logical for all, the rich and powerful as much as the poor and powerless, to respond to science and ethic-based appeals to preserve the planet. That logic, unfortunately, is trumped by capital’s accumulative il/logic, and in the short run it pays more than enough for some to keep making the decisions which will ensure common ruination in the long run. The springs of action are missing. I am not rejecting the ends and ambitions of the environmental movement, I am asking that they actually practise the integral thinking they claim to espouse, see the multi-layered nature of the problem, and join their thinking and action up. This cannot be done on the basis of the series of separations which characterise liberal modernity. I want to see more of the holism and interconnection Greens are supposed to embody, and less of liberal abstraction and fragmentation. And the day I see the Green movement get to grips with the problematic of politics and collective action in a class-divided society, then I’ll start paying attention again. At present, too many are either engaged in actions firmly within the conventional political sphere, in anti-establishment protests that nevertheless enjoins ambitious climate schemes on big government, or in workarounds via technology, systems, and eco-design. We need to join these things up, synergize, scale up as well as down, and engage in the integral thought and action that takes us much further in the ecological transformation of the political. And at last bring masses of people in as citizens.
People are full of climate crisis, record breaking levels of everything, and outrage at the preparation of the rich to insulate themselves from the worst climate impacts for as long as they could. There are people who demand radical actions on the part of others, but when it comes to themselves are happy for the already constituted state and law to do the acting for them. Civil disobedience in pressing these demands can only go so far before the structural implications of radical action demands something more than protest. Civil disobedience is not the same thing as revolution, and falls far short of the material action and organisation needed to buttress system change. In the UK, Jonathan Bartley, co-leader of the Green Party, states that the Greens are the party of individual freedom as against the authoritarianism of the state and socialism. I don't see how this works out when it comes to the changes we need.
Bartley's view is perfectly legitimate. I just want people to be clear that that is very much a liberal position. That’s a fine position to take if you are a liberal. I simply point out the anomaly of Greens making radical demands with respect to the current system and calling upon the present, (unreconstructed) state to take comprehensive climate action and implement a massive programme (within an untransformed civil society and capital system).
Forgive my prickly comments. I want radical demands to be buttressed by radical mentalities and modalities; not just abstract aims and plans levelled on existing governments, but a commitment to institution-building and provision of moral and social infrastructures on the part of those making the demands. Judging by the constant waves of protests, there is a mass constituency of climate actors in the world, awaiting self-organisation and mobilisation. And there are people working along these lines.
I would strongly urge people to investigate the work of my friend Michel Bauwens. His recent report, co-authored with Alex Pazaitis, proposes a global (cosmo-local) infrastructure, which enables us to produce for human need, without destroying the life chances of other beings and the planet, with whom we are in fundamental partnership. The P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival addresses the infrastructural aspects of taking us from where we are to a Socially-Just Circular Society. I am full of praise for such work and give it my full support.
My criticisms are motivated by a concern to greatly diminish the muddle of a politics in which collectivist demands are being advanced on individualist liberal premises. I want to see more clarity and coherence. And that calls for more integral and holistic thinking. Collective problems cannot be resolved on liberal premises and the liberal figure of self-possessing, self-optimising individual. It’s time for collective action, not in any abstract top-down ‘totalitarian’ sense but in terms of a genuine commons constituted by individuals who see themselves as active citizens associating with, rather than separating from, others. In the liberal conception, individuals work on getting their life choices right since they view such personal changes as the key to solving social challenges, from gender equality to climate change. I am the last person to dismiss such choices. Indeed, in my most recent book, A Home and a Resting Place Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience, I emphasized the need for personal moral effort as a condition of real and enduring change, giving any social transformation its moral content.
My critical concern here is to overcome the liberal ontology which falsely separates the individual and the social, leaving us having to choose between two equally false positions, an individualist liberalism on the one hand and a collectivist ‘totalitarianism’ on the other. Grayling is right to criticize ‘totalitarianism.’ Of course he is! But the alternative to totalitarianism is not the equally abstract individualism he espouses - they are two sides of the same coin. There is a post-liberal view which puts individual and social together. What can work at the micro level with respect to personal changes can only scale up to the macro level through the provision of the right communities of practice and infrastructures. Change pursued through personal effort alone is doomed to fail at the level of society as a whole. In a liberal society in which each is entitled to choose the good as he or she sees fit, everyone is free not to choose the goods offered by others. In the moral marketplace of irreducible subjective preference, each person chooses their own goods and have the right to not join in the goods of others. We are regularly informed that taking action to preserve the health of the planet is a moral imperative. I most certainly agree with the need to ensure planetary health, but I am concerned to highlight the weaknesses of current environmental ethics. A moral imperative is binding on each and all only if there is a referent. With what Nietzsche described as “the death of God” there is no such referent. Nietzsche wasn’t just referring to the absence of God, but to the absence of any such moral entities upon which we may issue moral imperatives. He was writing of the emptiness of moral categories and terms in the absence of an authoritative and compelling moral framework. Nature is not such a framework, and neither is a conventionalist political society. The environmental movement constantly issues the demand that “we” take action to protect the planet and address the crisis in the climate system. The problem is that, politically, institutionally, and socially, there is at present no “we” to respond to these demands and to take necessary actions. So there is limited response and action, provoking laments on the greed, stupidity, and indifference of human beings. These laments are unwarranted. In the absence of appropriate and effective collective media by which to apprehend collective forces, we are reliant on a voluntary self-optimisation which is simply inadequate in face of concentrated power and vested interests. By remaining within liberal premises, the eco-radicals have themselves failed to develop the first principle of ecology, the law of "integrated systems," into a genuinely ecological politics. The concept of interactive cooperation, which is based on the way that nature functions, is the very antithesis of individualism, of separation, and of isolationist behaviour. In am therefore not repudiating environmentalism in my criticisms, merely trying to restore the larger ecological picture in an effort to move it beyond the characteristic separations of liberal modernity.
It is one thing just to use the earth: it is quite another thing to receive the blessing of the earth and to become at home in the law of this reception, in order to shepherd the mystery of being and to pay attention to the inviolability of the possible.
Martin Heidegger
One of those key separations of liberal modernity pertains to the dualism of fact and value. The problem is not merely the dualism, but the exaltation of the realm of fact as the realm of true knowledge and the concomitant denigration of values as mere value judgments incapable of yielding true knowledge. That is debilitating. It follows the ‘disenchantment of the world’ that Max Weber wrote about, the “death of God” signifying that the universe is objectively meaningless and valueless. Hence my critical comments on securing planetary health as a moral imperative. There can be no such moral imperatives in this disenchanted condition. It is not that modernity cannot generate moral theories, it can. The problem is that none of these moral theories can offer good and compelling reasons for those who choose not to accept them. Other options are always available and, in the absence of an objective moral standard enabling us to evaluate any choices made, there is no way of deciding between them.
So I have participated in the environmental movement and, from the inside, noted the extent to which it reproduces the alienating separations and dualisms of liberal modernity. I don’t propose to give a full breakdown on this, but focus on the extent to which my own interests and areas of expertise are marginalised. I have seen various areas of expertise valued within the environmental cause, and have been around long enough to know that there is a clear hierarchy. People from the natural sciences, technologists and eco-designers, and engineers are clearly valued above others. That may be a good thing if the questions we face were as simple as scientific explanation and technological implementation with respect to the physical universe. They are not. I have noted the one-sidedness and ineffectiveness of environmentalism as politics above, and it is in that spirit I have underlined the importance of the first principle of ecology, interactive cooperation and integrated systems.
I have been frequently asked to make a contribution to environmental debates. And having made a contribution, I have become used to being ignored or, occasionally, dismissed as irrelevant, an ‘idle intellectualizer’ or ‘posturing do-nothing’ or ‘moralizer.’ I’ve been told openly that politics is a waste of time, too. My response to that claim is that the solution to bad politics is not no politics but good politics, and it is in that sense that I write. Because there is no way around politics. Politics is the way in which human beings come together as social beings to determine the terms on which they are to be governed. To those who have told me of their intentions to create eco-communes based on permaculture I say, even if you succeed, the people you oppose will not leave you alone: they will either remove or colonize your communes, and draw them back into the system. History is a story of expropriation of the commons. You may not be interested in politics, but politics will always take an interest in you.
I may not be a scientist, engineer, technologist, or designer, but I do have areas of expertise. I am a trained historian and economist who went on to study ethics and philosophy. One of the subjects I studied was High Politics, which is the study of politics at decision-making level. I take it that environmentalism is serious about politics, winning people to particular platforms, influencing decision making, framing policies and such like. I know what makes for political effectiveness. And too much of environmentalism strikes me as a pressure group politics seeking to check existing centres of power or make demands upon them, rather than transform or constitute new centres of power and authority. It needs to be moving from the outside to the inside, transforming the conventional sphere as it goes (rather than being absorbed by it).
I’ll give you my lesson from history (insofar as history teaches lessons that people are capable of learning): all change is a combination of material interests, moral motives, and metaphysical mis/adventure. Human beings get things right, they get things wrong; they aim for one thing and achieve another, and in the attempt to clear up the mess produce something else entirely. If you think logic and evidence allied to technologies and systems can give you a workaround, then you will be side-lined for lack of the necessary springs of human action within the motivational economy.
This is not an either/or, but all these things together. The world is whole, all things are interconnected. The key is to order all things to their true ends, which is a matter of integration and orientation. And there is a key role for ideas, ethics, politics, and aesthetics in there.
Plato was a great philosopher, but he knew that reason did not rule alone. He put the true, the good, and the beautiful together for a reason. Values are as important as facts. And that brings me, finally, to Ed Conway’s article.
Conway begins by referring to a new study that indicates that human beings are swayed by deep-seated belief rather than hard evidence. There are people who will express disgust at such a notion. These same people are the ones who have been most vocal in condemning our descent into post-fact and post-truth times. Politics has never been about truth. The temper of politics is judicious rather than truthful, involving the full range of human attributes. And truth is more than fact. To declare humans being swayed by belief rather than evidence a bad thing is to commit oneself to the view that human beings ought to be swayed by evidence. That ‘ought to be’ is an ethical imperative, which underscores the insufficiency of fact. Indeed, it demonstrates the primacy of value over fact. Hence my view that to have split fact and value and rendered the former the only true basis of knowledge and the latter the sphere of mere value judgements is debilitating and self-defeating, and generates the seemingly intractable nature of the conflicts besetting modernity.
Conway challenges the flattering self-image which casts human beings as being irretrievably drawn towards the truth. Far from being the truth-seekers we style ourselves as, the anthropological evidence suggests that human beings are geared for tribal harmony and social cohesion. Whilst such an idea is an outrage to those who model truth on the knowledge yielded by natural science with respect to the physical universe, that makes a great deal of social, psychic, and moral sense. That is to say, it makes clear human sense. And it is that clear sense of the world as humanly objective (to use Gramsci's apposite phrase) I have been highlighting above. To miss that by opposing physics to politics is to invite human unresponsiveness: the indifference of Nature is met by an entirely understandable human response - indifference. I can agree that human beings need to conform themselves to reality, rather than change reality in an attempt to make it conform to human will. But that conforming itself involves human will and assent, meaning that knowledge is as affective as it is cognitive.
Conway cites a study from a few years ago which asked subjects to solve a maths puzzle comparing two sets of numbers. The subjects had little trouble solving the puzzle when the numbers were uncontroversial. However, when the numbers were set in the context of a politically charged experiment – ‘did gun control measures stop crime?’ – the speed at which the puzzles were solved depended on the extent to which the results confirmed the beliefs of the subjects.
Those who think truth trumps all things – including and especially what people think - and that reason is non-negotiable will lament the irrationality and stupidity of human beings. But their disdain is utterly misplaced, and betrays a haughty, and fallacious, anthropology on their part. Human beings are social beings with stakes and interests in society; human beings are involved in relations to others, which comes with a range of identities, loyalties, and commitments. Human beings are interested beings, not dispassionate calculating machines. In the words of Robert A. Heinlein, 'Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.' That is not in itself a good thing, I hasten to add, and much rationalizing involves defences of positions and practices that can most certainly be considered untruthful and detrimental to human and planetary health. But the issue is not resolved as easily as opposing some abstract, dry reason to rationalisation. The trick is to establish relations and structures which enable human beings to rationalize well.
Truth is not a matter of perceptions, the response will come. This may be true, but the character of any ‘truth-seeking’ undertaken on the part of human beings as situated, interested, meaning-craving tribal animals is in part a matter of how they see themselves, their lives and their world. The world of human beings is always humanly objective, and to assert that there is a world beyond human beings and human interests is merely to beg the question: so what? We need to learn the nature of reality in order to best be able to live in it. I very much agree. My view here is that science and religion are actually on the same side, not opposed: human beings are charged with the task of living in accordance with something greater than they are, whether this is Nature or God’s eternal plan of Justice. I agree, and certainly am concerned to steer human beings away from prideful self-assertion and will. You cannot, however, expect to inspire, motivate, and obligate human beings with the assertion of truths that are non- or extra-human. Hence the importance of God made incarnate in the world. ‘For God so loved the world he gave his only son ..’ This is the love that can never grow tired and never grow old, that can never cool into indifference.
Had this point on the unity of fact and value been grasped thoroughly from the first, then the movement to address climate change would not have stalled so easily and for so long in face of vested interests. For all the wealth of scientific knowledge and technological know-how, the environmental movement is akin to walking downstairs using the conscious mind only – stalling, stumbling, falling: we should have flown down those stairs. We lacked the motivational springs, the communities of character and practice, the ethics and the politics.
Conway comments that ‘few truths in life are as absolute as mathematical answers but it transpires that our relationship with them is determined as much by our politics as by our brainpower.’ If that is so, then those very many questions which entail answers that are much less than absolute will inevitably involve dispute, conflict, and disagreement. We have no shortage of these issues. Indeed, they seem to be growing in number, dissolving public life into a fractious terrain of endless assertion and counter-assertion. If we can’t even approach an absolute truth without discarding our interests, prejudices, hopes, and fears, then there seems to be little possibility of resolving contentious issues. In this context, the idea of leaving the endlessly contentious world of politics and society behind in favour of some pure logic, capable of being embodied in, and imposed upon all through, law, is not merely an evasion, but also a rationalization itself. It applies to a very narrow range of human issues, leaves most outside, and isn’t as clear cut as its proponents suggest.
Conway comes to climate change. There are other issues, such as vaccines. But climate change interests me. Those who have been involved in attempting to persuade people with respect to the facts of climate change know how difficult it can be change minds. One study refers to the backfire effect, which shows that demonstrating that something is incorrect to people doesn’t make them reject it but believe it all the more.
Many take it as read that people are truth-seekers, that truths are ‘self-evident,’ and that, therefore, people would respond to statements of fact. I have no idea why so many people had come to take the self-image of humanity for the reality. Studying history disabused me of that happy notion. There is a naivety concerning post-truth/post-fact lamentations that is born of ignorance of history and a naïve belief in Enlightenment models of information (which Enlightenment thinkers themselves did not and would not have entertained.) Conway identifies the assumption that if people believe something dodgy, it is simply because they have been consuming dodgy news or listening to dodgy politicians. Exposed to facts, by which is meant truth, people would see sense, sooner or later. But this is wrong. With the expropriation and commodification of mind and body, it will take far more than this to bring humans back to their senses.
The modern world, built on the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, has emphasized progress through the informing of empty heads on the part of educators. The fallacies of this passive and elitist project was first noted by Marx, who insisted that the educator must also be educated: if circumstances shape human beings, then these circumstances at the same time are shaped by creative human agency. There is an interaction here between subject and object which the process of information of objective truths misses. Over-impressed by the scientific and technical power to manipulate matter – and people – the moderns forgot Socrates’ ancient wisdom in emphasising the formation of character. It is in this manner that Gandhi spoke disparagingly of those who dreamed of systems so perfect that no-one would need to be good. The most perfect system in the world will never compensate for deficiencies in character, and can never alone supply the will and motivation to inspire people to put such systems in place.
What if we were wrong? asks Conway. By which he means most precisely that those who thought facts to trump all things were and are most definitely wrong. One Nation, Two Realities is a recent book by Morgan Marietta and David C Barker, two American academics whose research is focused on America. The lessons, however, are of wider general significance. The findings of the book reveal that one person’s ‘facts’ about global warming can be very different from another person’s. That may strike those involved in climate science and the dissemination of its research as just plain wrong. The facts are the facts here, and there simply cannot be alternative facts. But I have had these disputes myself, and soon reached an impasse in which facts from scientific sources were produced which contradicted the facts I had obtained from scientific sources. I rely on the statements of seemingly every major and minor scientific body on the planet, so I felt on solid ground. But to no avail. Conway writes: ‘Which of these ‘duelling facts’ you subscribe to has far less to do with education, class, ethnic background, or even where you get your news than with deeper-seated values and identities.’ I myself drew the conclusion by hard experience that facts alone will not resolve these issues. Years ago I was told that since values are contentious, I was wasting my time with ethics, and that it is values that separate human beings. Truth is truth, and facts are unanswerable, right? Wrong. The divisions we are talking about go deeper than facts and values, and neither alone nor both together suffice to resolve these issues.
‘The tribes are hardly uniform, plenty of people believe the science behind climate change and also believe in homeopathy – the Prince of Wales for one. But the book’s overarching message is that one person’s fact is another’s fake news and no amount of education or fact-checking can change that.’
What may be troubling to some is blindingly obvious to others. That’s the lesson I have long sought to bring, reunifying the realms of fact and value and setting both within an authoritative framework buttressed by communities of character and practice. I can’t write on these here, but would simply refer to my work elsewhere. I will simply say that human beings are not simply governed by facts and reasons, nor even by calculations of their own best interests, either as individuals, groups, or societies. On account of various beliefs, norms, even prejudices, human beings will assert positions that will strike rationalists as downright irrational. People act out of more than rational calculation of interests, and truth is always much more rounded and multi-layered that its most vocal adherents understand.
A recent YouGov poll found that about 70 percent of Remainers believe the warnings and about 70 percent of Leavers steadfastly do not. We huddle in our ideological corners and, for all the fact-checks about GATT Article XXIV or the shortcomings of gravity models, no one is budging.
That’s the same for climate change, says Conway. I’m not at all sure he is right in saying that, mind, and there is evidence that the constant dissemination of the findings of climate science and the facts on climate change have created a degree of public acceptance. But I would point out that that has involved an awful lot of struggle and campaigning for an awful lot of time, with the physical evidence of climate change becoming so increasingly visible as to be incontrovertible. In other words, it’s not much of a victory. And a passive public acceptance is not the same thing as an active public consensus demanding, and increasingly inclined to engage in, radical action.
Conway acknowledges that his view will strike many as outrageous, and I am constantly aware that my own criticism of environmentalism could be construed as aiding denialism in some way. I seek to strengthen environmentalism by equipping it with a moral and political infrastructure that is capable of inspiring and facilitating collective action.
Conway is doing something slightly different, but does amount to an argument against using science and fact as overriding authorities in politics and ethics:
Anthropogenic global warming is a fact, surely? Well, technically, no. Even its strongest advocates would concede that it is better described as a probability. A very high probability, but sub-100 per cent nonetheless. We live in a world not of self-evident truths but of probabilities. Had we remembered this in past decades, we might have avoided today’s divisions.
That, I say, is a very good lesson. Too many have presumed that, armed with science, the politics would be a pushover. They have failed to respect the dignity of politics and of citizens. Politics may well have become detached from realities, but that is a call to do politics better, not reject it. It is a challenge to the critics to engage politically, win citizens to alternate platforms, build a consensus for change. Instead, there has been a reliance on science and fact that is redolent of nothing more than an environmental philosopher king dictating and legislating to politics and people.
We have lost the memory because we have lost the unity of fact and value, and today’s divisions on climate change are merely one of a species of widespread conflict endemic to the modern condition.
Politically, this has been a costly error to have made. It effectively leaves environmentalism strong in the field of science and technology, but weak in the field in which change actually comes, the field of practical reason (ethics, politics, economics). I don’t doubt in the least that existing institutions, structures, and systems are outmoded and that there is a need for new mentalities and modalities. I have argued this very thing for two decades. But I have argued these things as politics, ethics, and economics, something involving not merely new institutions and systems, but human will, consent, participation, and support. That involves something far more sophisticated than an external ordering, which leaves citizens cold. It takes more than facts to motivate human beings, and something more than facts are involved in the principle of self-assumed obligation. People are sceptical and have learned that things presented as facts often turn out to be projections of power interests and expressions of power plays:
But humans prefer clarity to uncertainty so our policy-makers, economists, and journalists hubristically cast probabilities as facts. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction; the financial system was crash-proof; diesel cars polluted less. All were probabilistic judgments presented as facts; all were catastrophically wrong.
Politicians have not been alone in doing this. Conway refers to the reproductibility crisis in social science: many famous experiments in previous decades could not be reproduced by other scientists, so a host of phenomena long considered to be scientific ‘fact’ have turned out to be, well, little better than fiction. Including, ironically, the ‘backfire effect.’
Life and human beings cannot be modelled on natural science. The methods of natural science do the easy bit in counting and measuring the physical bits. Human self-knowledge is far more intricate, complicated, and sophisticated. The presence and involvement of human beings makes the easy incredibly difficult. Any movement that cuts itself off from that, or asserts the superiority of facts yielded by natural science over human facts shot through with will, consciousness, norms, and agency is destined only to be right for the little distance it actually goes; and it will never actually go very far. The facts I studied as a historian were facts which derived from all aspects of human life. The world was changed by many things, and since human beings were the change agents it always involved beliefs, ought-to-be’s, passionately held ideals, metaphysics and morals. I learned a good lesson the first day of my history A level. Brother Victor picked up the big, thick course book on nineteenth century European history and told us never to make the mistake that the facts recorded in this book were the only facts possible. We will meet incredible characters like Napoleon and Garibaldi, examine some incredible movements for change and revolution, great statesmen like Cavour and Bismarck. But we should be wary of falling for the illusion that everything written down in print here is the only way these events could have happened. We will analyse history not as something made and fixed, but as something in the process of being made, getting inside the motives, the ideas, the alternate possibilities that were missed or suppressed, the lines of development underlying the decisions taken by the principal agents, working out whether they could have done otherwise. In other words, we learned the radical indeterminacy of history. I learned from history that nothing ever proceeds so smoothly and that change is the product of a number of often contradictory pulls and factors. I learned to be sceptical of grand designs and plans, clean rational solutions of would-be universal reformers, rationalists in politics who proved all too often to be rationalizers in politics. Those who are so keen to assert that logic and fact trump everything in politics and that reason is non-negotiable are good at ordering the physical world in the abstract, and may become a positive menace in overriding citizens in practice. Those who have thought that human beings could be inspired and the world changed for the better by disinfectants have merely prepared the psychic and social ground for entry into the purposeless materialism of the monetary mechanarchy of the Megamachine.
The corruption of facts cannot explain today’s rift in beliefs. That we have just endured the biggest real earnings squeeze since Napoleonic times probably has something to do with it, too. But rising wages alone will not save enlightenment thinking and renew the power of reason. Since fact-checking won’t work and censorship only widens the divides, perhaps the best solution is humility. Let’s spend a bit less time hectoring and a bit more time listening. Let’s recall that many of our strongly held beliefs are mostly just that – beliefs rather than facts.
Or, better still, let us put fact and value back together and engage in a proper work of reason, one with the ethical and emotional component in place, the common moral reason that unites each and all. Let us all remember that facts alone are not enough, and are often not even facts.
Conway ends by saying that when something is a probability, then let’s try to express it that way instead of as a dead cert. I take that to be a call to be leery of certainty, and leery of a politics which employs logic and evidence in order to legislate over the heads of citizens. I make that argument not to undermine environmentalism, but to urge it finally comes to take politics and ethics seriously, rather than seeing the field of practical reason as merely secondary to and dependent on scientific knowledge.
It’s a call for humility, which is the profoundest wisdom. Socrates was the wisest of all, not because he knew, but because he said he didn’t know: only this that I know, that I know nothing. That was not a rationalization of ignorance, a scepticism designed to keep existing power relations unchecked, unchallenged, and unchanged. It was a caution against false certainty and against the pretensions of knowledge propping up power and authority. Most of all, it was an invitation into investigating any matter further and coming to find out the truth of the matter. It was an invitation into truth-seeking. Whether such truth-seeking can be justified in terms of its evolutionary advantage is an interesting question to explore. There may be a split between the individual and the species on this, with individuals sacrificing their lives for greater good that accrues to the species. That is a view that offends the central liberal principle of the moral and ontological ultimacy of the individual. In this specific case it led directly to Socrates’ death. If human bodies are mere survival machines, then Socrates stands as an example of a failed being. Sentenced to death, Socrates was offered the chance of exile. Instead he chose to remain and die, and for reasons that science cannot explain: for a moral principle that conferred no advantage on his physical self, only a mortal disadvantage. Any advantages that such behaviour possesses could only accrue to the species as a whole, not to the person. In high moral terms, Socrates’ example was one of sacrifice and service to others. It is the same as Jesus’ example. Jesus, King of the Jews, was stripped down to a powerless state and mocked and murdered. We are talking here about the power of humility. Maybe we are merely telling stories, rationalizing our experiences to justify our existence and confer a meaning, dignity, and purpose on our actions. The problem with that view is that it doesn’t satisfy. Even if we put this in the most minimalist and meagre of terms of failing to flatter the self-image and self-importance of human beings, who like to feel they value truth and, with it, justice, it doesn’t satisfy. Human beings, being the meaning-seeking creatures they are, thirst for more than facts, and need to know that their actions are more valuable than merely conferring an evolutionary advantage that boosts chances for survival. Survival for what? Settling the question of what truth is also involves answering the question as to why truth matters. A couple of years ago scientists were marching in the USA to affirm ‘the value of science.’ In the context of the fact-value dualism, with facts equated with truth and knowledge and values relegated to mere value judgments, that motto meant that the realm of reason was having to be defended and justified by the realm of non-reason. That doesn’t work and cannot work. The realms of fact and value belong together, each with their own legitimacy and dignity fully recognized. There is such a thing as moral truth and moral knowledge, just as there is scientific truth and knowledge. But that requires making the world whole again.
In the end, a controversy such as this makes clear the extent to which human beings are pursuing a whole truth, a truth that is more than facts, in a world that is more than physical cause and effect; we are pursuing a moral and, indeed, spiritual truth that involves a self-knowledge as a return to the source and end of life. That’s why I cited the beautiful lines from Dante’s Comedy: ‘in His will is our peace.’ In evolutionary terms, the image of human beings as truth-seekers is a mere rationalization, a mask we were for survival. In theological terms, this rationalization is part of a story concerning the meaning and end of life, a story with a happy ending, hence the title of Dante’s ‘sacred poem.’ But in being a ‘divine comedy’ it is also a profoundly human comedy. If we are talking evolutionary advantage, then this story ‘works,’ in a way that the revelation of the brute facts of humans as rationalizers doesn’t, merely demoralizes. In fine, the commitment to truth-seeking is yet another good idea that struggles to survive when stripped of its theological underpinnings. Unless you think the dispassionate revelation and acceptance of the hard facts of cold, indifferent Nature suffice to inspire human effort.