When I first turned up on social media, around November 2013 I think, a scientist posted a video on my page, an interview in which Richard Feynman spoke disparagingly of the idea of a ‘social science.’ The sarcastic references made it clear that natural scientists think natural science real science, and properly tough, and the humanities and social sciences as soft subjects for those who can’t hack it. I ignored the sleight. I mentioned back that I have a cousin who is a professor of biology, steeped in 'hard science,' and that I have another cousin who is a doctor of medicine. I don't play the sixth form game of arts versus sciences anymore, but argue for an integral approach. Simply, the difference is that the natural sciences and the social sciences have different methods for different subjects: the natural sciences analyse the easy stuff – different coloured and shaped things – and the humanities and social sciences deal with the complicated stuff – human beings.
I’m being deliberately provocative for a reason. Those wedded to natural science, knowledge of the physical world, and empirical fact are suddenly feeling uneasy in an age of cultural war. They have nothing to say beyond general and irrelevant denunciations of belief and ideology. What do they mean by 'ideology'? A general system of ideas? Politically motivated beliefs? Values? What about Marx's critical definition of ideology as a set of ideas that conceal and rationalize asymmetrical power relations? If ideology merely refers to ideas, beliefs, and values beyond empirical fact then we are no further on in understanding - that explains nothing. People who think this way really are innocents at the mercy of the world we live in. It's a political world - human beings are immersed in value-laden culture, not some value-free, amoral nature. To oppose one to the other gets us nowhere. Worse, it puts us at the mercy of those who shape and manipulate interpretations at a distance from reality.
People of a science persuasion/obsession have just discovered Nietzsche and his view that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations.’ Sadness is expressed at the view that there may be no truth after all. Those who are aware of Nietzsche loved the way that he discarded God and dissolved religion. They were happy to see morality reduced to being no more than a series of value judgements, incapable of true knowledge. For them, that implied that natural science held the monopoly of truth and knowledge. They didn't notice that Nietzsche’s critique was acidic in its effects on science as well as morality. They are noticing now:
"Science, along with morality and religion, is to be understood, not in terms of objective truth and falsity, but in terms of the aspirations, projects, hopes and fears of its proponents. The scientific picture of the world is an expression of a particular kind of will to power, and to seek objective guarantees of its veracity is a timid evasion."
Nietzsche demands an answer. 'Science' is not an answer. I never cared for his view, but it is not easily answered. The failure to address the loss of the overarching and authoritative moral framework – Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ – has plunged us into the ‘culture wars’ fought between irreducible positions and perspectives, truths as well as values. Assertion of 'nature' and 'reality' through the voice of science is not an answer.
I begin by noting the irony that it is the humanities, which those who think science the be-all and end-all snootily told us to be an irrelevant waste of time, not true knowledge, unfalsifiable, soft, and incoherent, which are claimed to be methodically destroying the civilisation, with science being powerless to mount a defence. How can something so ephemeral be so important and something so central be so impotent?
Maybe ‘woke’ will be a blessing in the disguise, waking those still committed to truth from their dogmatic slumbers. Help has been needed here for a long time. My view has sometimes been construed as anti-science and anti-technology – it is the very opposite, in being concerned with securing the conditions and the point of truth-seeking – both moral and scientific.
The ‘culture war’ may seem like fake wrestling, but it would be a grave error to either dismiss or ignore it. It’s not an error or a passing fad that will go away. The ‘conflict pluralism’ celebrated at the core of liberal democracy in the modern world is Max Weber’s polytheism of irreducible subjective opinion, an unwinnable ideological war waged by incompatible gods. This is the very implosion that follows the dissolution of the overarching and authoritative moral framework. This way lies subjectivism, relativism, nihilism, and solipsism. The only surprise is that it has taken this long for the war to explode. That war is without resolution in its own terms.
It really is like shadow boxing, being forced to take different sides of unreality, exchanging the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave with one another until self-cancellation or implosion is reached. If one can maintain a position of detachment from the outside, not caring one way or the other, it can make for mildly amusing entertainment. The fact that these issues matter and have practical consequences on the whole of society, including your own relations, makes such a position untenable. We can try to walk through the madness of contemporary society in the manner of an anthropologist, like Dante and Virgil visiting the Inferno, but the truth is that we are none of us aliens to this society – we are members of it and hence its condition must affect and concern us all.
The irreducible values of the protagonists in the culture wars have no meaning, value, and substance outside of those wars – and the entire predicament of the unwinnable game is that they have none within it either. The force and fury of the contest and conflict is an attempt to make the unbelievable believable, prove the unproven and unprovable by 'practice.' Truth and justice here are mere functions of power and identity. In the absence of transcendent standards there is only a standpoint epistemology or ontology. In raising these points, I was challenged by the question 'by whose standards?' That is a dangerous question on account of its implications of irreducibility - push further in this direction and you will find that there are as many standards as there are identities, groups, and, ultimately, human beings. Solipsism lies at the end of that road, with private claims against society trumping public claims. The loss of reality ensures that any claims to objectivity in an intersubjectivism comes to dissolve in a subjectivism. It is noticeable that the intellectual roots of the current malaise lie in the explicit philosophical anti-realism of the various 'post' modes of thought in the 1980s and 1990s. Some are concerned to establish a connection with marxism or 'neo-marxism' or postmarxist. To the extent that Marx's realism is repudiated, they are not marxist at all. My work in the 1990s was concerned precisely to establish this distinction. What seems to have happened is that the anti-realist, discursive, cultural turn in the 1990s has retained, quite arbitrarily, the normative and political commitments and values of the left, but entirely without substantive grounds. The position is incoherent in theory and positively dangerous in practice - it is an invitation to the manipulation of symbols as the key to manipulating people and reality as endlessly plastic.
But the explosion of these culture wars is surely a sign that the fight to preserve values against the forces of relativism, sophism, and nihilism is over and that we have already been taken over by anti-Western forces. I frame in this provocative way not because I believe it but in reference to claims that reason is a ‘white male construct.’ If this is all that reason is, then so much the better for white males and so much the worse for those who make reason a function of power and identity. Once this mode of endless manipulation comes to infiltrate society’s institutions, then there is no way of winning the war from within – no-one is ever in charge, since there is no longer a coherent and cohering narrative. People are expressing their laments and protests here, but this whole situation is merely the social and public expression of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ – the loss of comprehensive moral and intellectual standards. To be fair to Nietzsche, his life affirming view argued against filling any metaphysical void that wasn't present in the first place. He cautioned against human beings replacing God and religion with an idolatrous humanism and surrogate collectivities. He would have seen the various sides in the culture wars as attempts to replace God with projections and rationalisations of knowledge/power, not true knowledge but a bogus, substitute religion, intolerant, divisive, and repressive.
I was involved in an exchange on social media in which the argument for transcendent standards of truth and justice was rejected for being ‘post-racist’ on account of being unable to ‘fathom the fact that a CRT is necessary for deconstructing the inner violence of our so called (western) "reason", and trying for once be in accordance with the principles we as a society hold: equity, justice, and dignity.’ There followed a classic statement of deconstructive-critical logic: ‘Education was always racialized: it promoted a clear picture of white supremacy with a biased take on history and "human" values, ignoring the historic specificity of them and how they were formed on the basis of colonization and genocide. The inner contradictions of western society must be exposed in order to move towards a better education and a true global standard of living.’
There are so many sweeping statements, generalisations, and assertions in there that it is best to leave them at that, recognising the tendency to simplify given the constraints of social media commentary. But the reduction of everything to ‘historic specificity’ and race gives the game away. There is a crude antithesis at the heart of this kind of thinking that is wholly false: there is no contradiction between transcendent standards and ‘historic specificity,’ and to force a choice between the two leaves us having to choose between an ahistorical ideological universalism concealing asymmetrical power relations on the one hand and a relativism that reduces to power on the other. These critiques can sound sophisticated and academic but they are anything but, they are crude and simplistic; and whilst they sound radical – particularly in the force and fury of expression in public – they are thoroughly retrograde, dissolving reason into tribalism.
I have had a number of exchanges in recent years on this subject, and have now withdrawn, having received the height of abuse along with haughty lectures. I don’t know which is worse. It is fairly comical being schooled by semi-educated children who, in their university course, substitute imbibing and regurgitating worldviews for critical thinking. I am left wondering what academics are actually doing, if such people are typical of what the universities are producing. Critical thinking was built into my university courses. We were told, the more critical we were, the more we tested ideas and arguments, the higher the grades we would receive. On social media, I have felt myself to be in the presence of an unthinking, bullying, heretic burning cult. Being critical, I could not but be that heretic.
The thinking is riddled with incoherence and any number of inconsistencies, but that doesn’t seem to trouble its adherents. Because we are not really dealing with a body of thought at all, only a worldview with its eyes fixed firmly on power, subverting the power of some so that others may appropriate and monopolize it for themselves. This body of thought is not ‘theory’ at all, but a movement, a worldview, in which ideas are a function of practice and validated and made true by practice. Its origins here do indeed lie in the way that Marx resolved the distinction between contemplation and action into a revolutionary critical praxis. I maintain that Marx’s philosophical realism – expressed in his materialist dialectics – retained certain standards of truth and justice. But I would also argue that their historicist presentation relative to time and place invites the degeneration that is now taking place. It is a reduction to sophism, with truth and justice being rendered mere functions of power. ‘Theory’ is a movement based on a worldview. It’s a power grab pure and simple, which justifies itself by pointing out that others in history have bagged power for themselves and their kind. Such people take the simplest statement of the obvious to be the height of historical wisdom. The thinking is crude and simplistic and, translated into culture and politics, cannot but be divisive and destructive.
It is utterly incoherent and self-contradictory.
Take this claim that critics are 'deconstructing the inner violence of our so called (western) "reason", and trying for once be in accordance with the principles we as a society hold: equity, justice ...' (I could multiply such examples, the claims are invariably the same, indicating that we are in the presence of a worldview/ideological standpoint - once you know the rule book, you know exactly what such people are going to argue. They never surprise you with their views, indicating just how uncritical, conformist, and 'religious' they really are).
How desperate to see that the dead-end of deconstruction now starting to seep into society and politics. I engaged with this mode of thought a quarter of a century ago and exposed its nullity in an attempt to warn radicals and leftists away. Deconstructionism is utterly acidic. Yet so many are now falling for it hook, line, and sinker. It seems to offer a sophisticated way to contest power culturally, now that people have abandoned the hard work of contesting it in the realm of socio-economic reality. In the way that it reduces society to the hyperreality of symbols and their manipulation, this linguistic, discursive, and deconstructive turn mirrors the economics of neoliberalism. It is gibberish and gobbleygook, entirely without academic substance and integrity. But it seems to have colonised entire university departments. I saw it happening in the 1990s into the 2000s and fought against it then. Put terms like ‘hegemony’ and ‘discourse’ in your paper, change ‘universal’ into ‘differential,’ claim to be challenging power and domination, and you will get the grades and get published. It is idea laundering. And it is miseducation. The phrase ‘garbage in, garbage out’ has never been more apposite. A very uncritical mode of thinking is being cultivated.
It is a simple matter to expose the contradictions of this kind of thinking.
The assertion that critical theory is necessary in order to deconstruct the inner systemic and institutional violence of our ‘so called (western) "reason"’ so as to ‘be in accordance with the principles we as a society hold: equity, justice, and dignity’ begs an awful lot of questions that deconstructive-critical thinking is unable to answer.
What is the foundation of these principles of equity, justice, and dignity? We need to know, given that my attempt to establish grounds back in the 1990s was met with the assertion that none exist and that there are "no necessary relation," only relations that are culturally constructed. Why, was my question to the likes of Laclau and Mouffe? Why construct these relations rather than those if there are "no necessary" grounds outside of discourse; why this politics rather than that? There were no answers then and there are none now - the position is incoherent. And dangerous. Because once standards are made arbitrary, we are in the hands of people claiming the power to make truth and reality anything they say it is. That is the end of the Left in politics. In its apparent moment of triumph, the Left is eclipsed by its sophist enemy.
[I made some observations on my past engagement in with postmodernism and postructuralism. I cut my academic teeth on these modes of thought back in the 1990s, and I stand by my views then: Redeeming Empty Promises
If there are no transcendent standards – rejected as ‘so-called western reason’ – then what, exactly, are the standards supporting these principles? Are they mere self-creations of time and place? Of essentialised identity? How, exactly, are claims of social construction and racial essentialism compatible? Does coherence even matter once we have deconstructed/dissolved reason? Who, then, is this ‘we as a society’ creating these principles? And why does this ‘we’ create these principles in particular, rather than others? By what criteria? Discard ‘reason’ as merely a social and historical construct of time and place – ‘western’ – then all that is left is another equally arbitrary construct. We therefore plunge into a war of competing constructs, with there being no rational way of deciding between them – objective standards have been abandoned in the reduction to power. This opens up the world to the anarchy of the rich and powerful, about as far away from Leftist values and politics as could be imagined.
In passing, though, if ‘western’ thought and society is to be dismissed in this way, I would ask – which other time and place has advanced freedom, equality, rationality, and justice more than the West? You have the whole of history to choose from – identify if you can the times and places that embody freedom, reason, and democracy more than the West. Let us have an even playing field when it comes to comparing and contrasting societies, not the weaponising of principles as impossibly high and ahistorical ideal standards. Fantastical recreations of the past in order to portray a story of a Fall from innocence is a cheap radicalism that leads nowhere, merely traps us in a false narrative and denies us a future. Put simply, the deconstructive critics have conflated two entirely different, but related, things – transcendent standards and their historical incarnation – setting them against one another instead of setting them in relation, advancing their own particular worldviews as truth and justice.
The idea that we as a society should live in accordance with certain principles implies the existence of transcendent standards independent of time and place and their incarnation in socio-historical practices and relations, the very thing that is denigrated and dismissed as 'western reason.' That conflates reason, a standard, with its incarnation in time and place. Other incarnations are possible. But, the question can be asked again, why has the West proven to be so rational? And remember, too, that the origins of this Western reason were not so western at all - ancient Greece.
If this demand doesn't imply such transcendent standards, then the principles 'we as a society hold' cease to be principles at all; they are merely conventions and constructions based on nothing more than the loudest voice and strongest arm prevailing at any transitory moment. They are unpersuasive and can offer no good reasons to command assent in their favour. Other assertions are just as plausible, and hence just as implausible. There is no 'we' according to this conception, merely attempts by particular groups to assert their particular view as the general view. It is merely a power struggle, then, and nothing new and nothing radical at all.
This kind of thinking is riddled with so many holes it is laughable. There is no 'western' reason, truth, or justice - those are the standards which transcend society and which society is to live in accordance with - and which have been incarnated in the West more than any other place in history. The question remains - where else the combination of liberty, free speech, science and technology, material expansion? Where else would you prefer to live?
Those are the ‘critical’ standards that hold the ‘western’ and all other times and places to account. Without that standard there is no point to any 'accordance.' The 'principles we as a society hold' are merely relative to that society – self-made standards attempting to establish their own grounds. It cannot be done, not by reason (western or any other kind) – only by the force of some in the absence of the genuine public of a ‘we.’ The issue is one of transcendentalism vs conventionalism. Either there are transcendent standards or there are not. If there are not, all that there is and all that there ever can be is power/resistance - an endless cycle of submission to power or assertion to power, relative to 'society.' That is the end of the left in that it entails the end of universal human values in an unwinnable game of irreducible game. Dress it up in all the fancy names of deconstruction you like, but it is a reduction to the sophism of Thrasymachus: 'justice is the interests of the strongest.' That won't necessarily be you - to whom and what will you then appeal when on the receiving end of an injustice? who or what will care if there are no grounds?
Thirty years ago I saw the beginnings of the degeneration of the left as a result of this kind of pernicious thinking. I sought to re-assert transcendent standards of truth and justice in order to secure the normative and emancipatory claims and commitments of the left against decadence and degeneration. It seems like that battle was lost. How sad to witness the degeneration of the left, opening up the gates to a universal division and hatred.
I love the reference to exposing inner contradictions in pursuit of the global/universal. It sounds an awful lot like those westerners Hegel and Marx. Ill-digested, misunderstood, and monstrous in regurgitation. Such views will turn Hegel and Marx into the totalitarian monsters that liberal critics have always said they were.
This kind of thinking is a perverted religion, without mercy and forgiveness, coercing public contrition/apology but without the prospect of redemption. Its influence is baneful. It will dissipate many good radical energies into divisive, destructive, and sterile channels.
The most important thing at the moment is to cleave to attempts to reclaim the commons. Twenty years ago now, when I was working in academic research, I saw the dead-end this kind of thinking represented. I was told by my Director of Studies, a professor with a long publishing career, that such people are 'up a creek without a paddle.' That was in 2000. Now they have come out of academia and entered culture and society, and the effects are every bit as baneful as I had anticipated back then. Many are inclined to think this thinking 'critical' and 'radical' - it is not, it is thoroughly reactionary. And divisive. It leads us straight into unwinnable wars fought around irreducible and incommensurate values - with victory going to the strongest voice. That's just naked power. People describe “woke” as a "new religion." It is much, much worse than that: it is a perversion of religion, full of arbitrary judgement and punishment, coercing repentance from non-believers, and not allowing genuine contrition on the part of individual sinners. Its leaders are self-appointed sheriffs of the moral landscape, constantly altering language to make people uncertain and dependent, replacing the free moral agency of the many with the moralistic authority of the few. It is a ‘political’ religion that is divorced from the sense of transcendence that raises us above absorption in earthly power; it is entirely without mercy and forgiveness. It misappropriates the idea of original sin, and applies it to very particular identities (whiteness, maleness, straightness), whilst exempting other identities entirely. It offers no redemptive possibilities to the former, except on terms of complete obeisance and self-immolation, and licence and irresponsibility to the latter. As irreligious as he was, Marx at least recognised religion as "the heart of the heartless world." The identitarians have no heart, no soul: instead they mirror the heartlessness and soullessness of a world reduced to power. It will be a nasty and disagreeable world to live in should they prevail with their constant linguistic engineering – they will control the language and the meanings, with 'standards' changing accordingly, knowable - and manipulable - only by the initiates. It will be a world of endless war. In relativizing the absolute (God), the modern sophists have absolutized their relativist viewpoints and now demand total adherence to their gods. Such a world is entirely without compromise, entirely without compassion. It damns us all to taking part in an unwinnable war of rival ‘gods.’ Driven by claims of emancipation, it ends in universal hatred.
It is not surprising that this kind of thinking and activism causes unhappiness. It is practically designed to do so. For all of the attempts to frame things in a fancy, grandiloquent language, it is a fake intellectualism. It doesn’t offer theory – views to be tested against the facts of the real world – but advances a movement that seeks to change the world. And it is advanced by people who want to condemn history, accuse people, and punish our society. Some may say that they should be ignored, but that is impossible. These people are not going to go away. They are aggressive and seek to force compliance and submission. The noise they make is too severe and the claims they make too obnoxious to go unopposed. You either give in or you resist. There is no avoidance of this aggression.
Many are still perplexed as to why anyone gives these people any attention. Their demands are so absurd, extreme, and obnoxious that, just two decades or more ago, they would have been totally ignored. ‘I suspect it has to do with the state our our own education system,’ someone comments. Twenty or more years ago these views were running like a virus throughout academia. That’s when I was staking out my view of ‘rational freedom’ as an alternative. I knew then that I was swimming against the tide academically. I also knew these ideas to be a cul-de-sac. But they succeeded in capturing academia, and now here they are all over culture and society. A culture of fakes has been long in preparation. What is encouraging about all this is the evidence that ‘ordinary’ people don’t support it one jot. It seems that intellectuals and academics have been a hopeless let-down in this struggle. Now that these ideas are in the public domain, it will be for people to expose them as fake, divisive and destructive.
But there are grounds for concern. Having captured the major institutions of dissemination and education and communication, it may be easy to bully people into compliance and silence. Further, once a society is in a position where it has to fight for its cultural heart, then that culture is probably decadent and dying already.
It has been coming. There is a short step from the view that individuals are entitled to choose the good as he or she sees fit to the idea that they can choose their own truth in like manner. Perhaps the absurdity of that view, and the maintenance of a touching faith in science, has slowed down the degeneration. But people have been content for so long now with the dissolution of ethics into no more than a series of value judgements. Why not science, knowledge, and truth?
We are living in a time when emotional lies are framed as structural truths while mention of, or empirical insight into, the structural truths are forbidden. Functional centres cannot hold in such cultural conditions.
That this is coming as such a surprise and a shock to so many begs the question as to where they have been. We are over a century and a half on from Arnold’s Dover Beach. Then there is Yeats’ famous poem:
The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The claims made with regard to historical specificity and the need to go beyond any empty universalism and ‘reason’ that may serve to cover iniquitous power relations is not wrong. What is striking is the extent to which this simplest truth in the critical tool box is being so aggressively advanced to drown out the nuances in thought that are all important. This critical examination of existing and historical relations is merely the beginning of analysis, not the end and not the be-all and end-all. Too many are happy with the easy stuff, because it allows them to politicize and weaponize the ‘principles.’ It is pure reduction to and absorption in power, a sure sign that the supposedly radical has degenerated into sophism at its worst.
Being absolute wretches in the past is not the monopoly of any nation or group. It is more or less every nation and every groups history. Those who think otherwise are a positive menace, in that they are blind to the evil that all humans – themselves especially – may do. None of this criticism of the history of ‘the West’ means that it is wise to discard liberal values for a ‘leftist’ authoritarianism. Name one country and one civilisation outside of the West that is not only fairer, but offers the same material comfort and freedom?
That question, I will guarantee, will silence the critics. It invites them into indulging a romanticism of the past and of the other which is easily unpacked against the facts.
Etymologically, diversity is linked to division. Without a cohering and unifying principle, diversity tends to division. Diversity is Orwellian newspeak for enforced homogeneity and uniformity, a melting pot into which genuine human diversity (a product of organic cultural evolution and differentiation) will, over time, dissolve, diminish and gradually disappear. It is a deceit.
It is self-righteous bullying on the part of self-appointed arbiters of the moral landscape. It can’t be attributed to the left or any other organised movement. Some people have discovered that you can mercilessly bully another person if you’re perceived to have right on your side. Old warnings here - lessons learned the hard way - have been forgotten. It seems the struggle is ongoing, with every generation having to make its own moral effort and learn anew.
Loss here comes as a result of bullying and appeasement, the waging of war on the part of some and the search for peace on the part of others. Non-radicals tend merely to concede ground in the search of peace. All they ever achieve by that is to slow the ‘progress.’ The frog comes to be boiled slowly. There is no peace this way.
Cultures are not homogeneous; they vary in time and place. As in nature, these variations in cultural mores (norms and values) will result in selection. Only those that fit with reality in being in accordance with transcendent standards will survive. Those cultures that sustain lies will die out. We may well be seeing a dying out. The irony is that those those involved in this struggle as protagonists seem not to see that it is themselves who are dying out. They think they are on the right side of history and are winning.
Who is the 'we' in these wars? Which side are you on? Either side or none? I have no intentions of joining either those defending past and present forms of iniquity in the name of reason, culture, and tradition or the post-structuralist thought police. There is no 'winning' of anything in these unwinnable wars. I affirm standards outside of this game.