Habituation vs Homelessness
This essay was provoked by contemplating Martin Buber’s analysis of the way that 'epochs of habitation' gradually weaken and give way 'epochs of homelessness':
In the former, man lives in the world as in a house, as in a home. In the latter, man lives in the world as in an open field and at times he does not even have four pegs with which to set up a tent.1
The modern age is one of the most severe epochs of homelessness in history, arguably the most severe. People in the modern age are living in a metaphysical void without the aid of a meaningful, believable religion. Religion in the West survives in the institutional sense but is dying in the existential sense. A disenchanting science which reveals the universe to be objectively valueless, meaningless, and purposeless, and human beings to be insignificant, has opened the doors to an epoch of cosmic homelessness. Buber writes:
“When a culture ceases to be centered in the living and continually renewed relational process … the cosmic home which was constructed around its altar, the spiritually apprehended cosmos collapses [and] it hardens into the It world.”2
Buber declares this decline and loss to be “the sickness of our age.”
Which is to say that the problems we face are deep-seated and are not to be resolved by winning victories in the ‘culture war’ (which ever side you may be on). The problems are not new, however much they may now be exploding across politics and media. For ‘woke’ now read ‘postmodernism’ in the 1990s, and see the same futile attempt to restate reason and reality on modernist (enlightenment, scientistic) lines. That rationalism cannot be the solution to problems it has generated. Postmodernism is modernism without the innocence and hypocrisy – and without the totalising claims to be God through science and technology.
I’m also interested in Buber’s warning that the spiritually understood cosmos collapses and hardens into the ‘It world,’ the world of objectification, in which each sees human others as objects of mere instrumental significance, what Max Weber called ‘mechanised petrification.’ A disenchanting science leaves an insignificant humanity alone in front of an indifferent nature. A science which speaks with the voice of that nature cannot but come to locate human beings in an externalised It-world, whose cold and uncaring character comes to be reproduced in human relations.
At which point it is also worth pointing out that these thoughts were provoked by yet more lamentation from scientists and climate campaigners who insist that we ‘follow the science’ to the effect that no one listens and no one cares. Such people think themselves to be anti-metaphysical, replacing metaphysics with science. They are wrong, they have replaced metaphysics done well with a rank bad metaphysics (in the same way that science makes for a bad politics and ethics). To be blunt, ‘the science’ is the reified voice of an indifferent nature that doesn’t care. Nature isn’t moral, it just ‘is.’ And the ‘is’ without emotion lacks motivation and motion. (I explain in depth in other places, and urge readers to make the connections and draw the conclusions).3
Buber’s distinction between epochs of habituation and epochs of homelessness makes a great deal of sense of my own work as a quest for meaning, belonging, and community in an age of separation and loss. The idea of an epoch of habituation sums up perfectly my concern to ground, enrich, and develop the unity of ‘Being and Place.’
A sense of home and belonging in the context of a greater meaning is a crucial condition of human flourishing. Without these things human beings suffer from a displacement and disorientation that breeds a sense of futility. The evidence is that we are currently living through an 'epoch of homelessness.' Homelessness is not necessarily a bad thing, but may be a shedding of illusions in furtherance of the call to live in truth. To cling to empty meaning and community is also inimical to human flourishing, since it involves acquiescence in surrogates that leave human beings far short of their healthy potentials. Homelessness is a call to build a true home, one that is in tune with inner and outer realities. The continued frustration of that creative spirit, however, ensures that homelessness generates a self-confirming hopelessness. It is arguable that this expresses the condition of a modern scientistic age that has revealed a reality that is utterly indifferent to human desire. To live in truth is the demand of both Jesus and science, but the truth and reality envisaged by both seem radically different:
Well, what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe, the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be – and the non-necessity of it.
Thomas Hardy
It is worth making a comment on this reference to ‘the non-necessity of it all.’
I take that to be a lamentation of modern science’s revelation that there is no inherent purpose in the natural world, nothing to conform to, beyond mere survival, and no end to be working towards. This is a lamentation in light of a disenchanting science. But there is another way of viewing this non-necessity, one that is more life-affirming.
From a theological standpoint, it is heretical to think of our meaningful presence in the world as necessary. There was no need for God to bring about His own Creation – God created out of love rather than necessity. God could have gone on perfectly well without human beings, troublesome creatures blessed with free will and a capacity for disobedience they have exercised from the first. The upshot of this is that life is a matter of grace and gift rather than necessity. From a theological point of view, human life is gratuitous rather than necessary.
I have read autistic people described as ‘evolution’s casualties,’ somewhat out of kilter with nature. I bear this in mind whenever I read planetary fetishizers wax lyrical about a beautiful, benign that really doesn’t give a damn one way or the other. Species reproduce via its members, whose health and happiness is sacrificed in service of the cause, a process which carries on until inevitable extinction. Biologists will tell us that there is no point to the game of life other than staying in the game long enough to reproduce, either by genes or memes, and that death and extinction are inevitable, with no greater meaning attendant upon an afterlife. Bear this is mind when we are urged to ‘save the planet,’ ‘Mother nature is all we have and she needs us.’ ‘Mother nature’ could care less. I used to wax lyrical about a benevolent nature myself, but came to see this as a bogus metaphysics in which a cold, indifferent, impersonal ‘Nature’ supplanted God, the God of Love and personal relations. The scientism which dominates the age is the reified ‘voice’ of that Nature, spreading an inhumanism throughout culture and society. The people who assert that ‘nature’ is all we have are innocents. In fact, they are worse, they are naifs who, when called upon to recreate a home from within an empty shell, have regressed. They have refused the challenge and seek instead to return to a home that has long since gone. In the beginning was nature, the supreme moral problem from first to last.
Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power. Without society, we would be storm-tossed on the barbarous sea that is nature. Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature. Human beings are not nature's favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force. Nature has a master agenda we can only dimly know.4
Civilised life was born in fear and flight. It might well be a state of illusion, but this involves a necessarily illusion that serves to conceal from humanity the sheer pointlessness of its existence when considered in purely natural terms. There are environmentalists who celebrate human insignificance in face of nature. This self-immolation reveals the extent to which naturalism is an inhumanism. Take this quote from Russell Means, shared widely across social media as somehow inspirational: ‘if all the human beings were taken away, life on Earth would flourish. That is how insignificant we are.’ In fairness, the full quote is concerned to underline the importance of ‘green things’ and other creatures, ‘our relatives who crawl and swim.’ But the key word is ‘insignificance,’ because this is an explicit devaluation of humanity. With that word, human beings are removed from the relational conception. Everything, it seems, is a legitimate agent within an exalted nature other than human beings. Statements like this are riddled with contradictions and paradoxes. It is fair to assume that Means’ words are addressed not to creatures who, for all that they can ‘crawl and swim’, cannot read. That high capacity for reason on the part of human beings indicates a significance somewhat greater than quotes such as this indicate. The substantive point made by naturalist statements such as this reduce to a bald statement that human beings are natural beings and that nature is the ultimate, inescapable power. For human ‘insignificance’ read the meaninglessness of life. There is a cowardice to such views, in that they simply refuse to address the central moral problem of human existence by asserting natural necessity. ‘Civilized man conceals from himself the extent of his subordination to nature,’ writes Paglia. Human beings labour long and hard to build a civilised existence, but all is ruin when nature shrugs. Naturalists demand that we live in truth, but the truth about a pointless, purposeless nature is unliveable. Death, like disaster, descends upon good and bad alike. ‘Civilized life requires a state of illusion. The idea of the ultimate benevolence of nature and God is the most potent of man's survival mechanisms. Without it, culture would revert to fear and despair.’5 We live in an age which is in the process of discarding God, leaving us dependent upon nature and nature alone. Many among the planetary fetishisers may cleave to a belief in the ultimate benevolence of nature, but this belief is even more vulnerable to falsification than the belief in God, for the reason that it is more directly dependent upon science as a check against physical reality. Once God goes, humanity and the belief in a benevolent nature soon follow. The disenchanting science of the modern age unleashed an orgy of metaphysical carnage that in the end comes to destroy every last shred of evidence which may be offered in support of an ultimately benevolent nature.
It is in this context that the view of autistic people as being ‘evolution’s casualties’ may be appreciated. You could just as easily write ‘nature’s casualties’ here. Or casualties of a cultural as well as natural evolution, casualties of a society that normalises, rewards, and reproduces certain character traits to the neglect of others. But there is another way of looking at this, departing from the casualty conception inherent in the impairment model of autism to identify a power and creativity of autism vis a recalcitrant nature. The people who have hacked a civilisation out of nature are those so ill-adapted to its contours as to seek a better alternative. An autistic person such as myself will not be so ready to accept indolent images of a beautiful, benign nature, having had to be so creative in finding and developing ‘alternative’ pathways in living. It is hard to celebrate nature when that nature has wired you up to be at cross-purposes with the imperatives of daily living. Camille Paglia is similarly provocative in expressing her views on feminism:
We must ask whether the equivalence of male and female in Far Eastern symbolism was as culturally efficacious as the hierarchization of male over female has been in the west. Which system has ultimately benefited women more? Western science and industry have freed women from drudgery and danger. Machines do housework. The pill neutralizes fertility. Giving birth is no longer fatal. And the Apollonian line of western rationality has produced the modern aggressive woman who can think like a man and write obnoxious books. The tension and antagonism in western metaphysics developed human higher cortical powers to great heights. Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential. The Apollonian has taken us to the stars.6
A cold, care-less, hopeless nature should be distorted. Those who ‘follow’ nature, as they ‘follow the science,’ shed illusion to live in the unliveable truth of a bleak, pointless reality. A humanity that follows this path of disenchantment will find itself alone without a home:
When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.7
That leaves us facing the challenges of re-enchantment.
Human beings have traditionally turned to the ties, bonds, and solidarities of religion, family, and place-based communities for a sense of meaning and belonging. The value of their existence was thus bound up closely with faith, family, and fatherland. I could just as easily have written nation here, to underline the value of patriotism, but the three f’s trip off the tongue so well, and allow me to make another point. That such words are now considered to have inherently extreme right connotations indicates that something has gone awry. The uprooting and severing of connection attendant upon capitalist expropriation has become normalised as it has gone global, swallowing up a leftist politics that once prided itself on social solidarities and loyalties. It is difficult to find more fundamental reasons for living than the loyalties arising out of these ties of family, faith, kinship, and proximal community. People have fought to protect these very things since time immemorial. Part of the great appeal of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings lies in the way that the protagonists put everything on the line and throw their whole heart and soul into the struggle. Everything they hold dear is at stake, the people and places they love, everything they hold to be true and know to be right. They long to preserve these things and are prepared to sacrifice themselves for their protection. The message affirms the hobbit-like existence in which the ordinary actions of the ‘little people’ knit communities together and create the warm and affective bonds between us, making us prepared to act to defend the places and persons we love and value. People turn to these solidarities, loyalties, and values first and foremost, and most especially when the public domain is increasingly emptied of meaning.
The globalisation of economic relations is a direct threat to these bonds and solidaries, a displacement that abstracts individuals from their connection to a meaning-space that is within their reach.
‘Separation’ is a key figure in this age of abstraction. A central separation in this regard is the separation of fact and value. The former is considered the realm of true knowledge, a public affair, the latter mere value-judgement, a private concern of no wider significance than personal preference, like tastes, likes and dislikes. That view spells the end of morality as central to social guidance and governance. The moral sensibility doesn’t, however, end or withdraw into the private realm, not so long as human beings remain social beings (and there is a definite sense in which the neoliberal relocation of freedom and happiness from the public realm to the market place does entail the atomisation of society and the privatisation of life. The privatisation of public business has run parallel with the diminution of the public imagination). As social and moral beings, human beings cannot but bring moral conceptions to bear in their engagements with others in public space.
So what form does morality take in the age of separation and abstraction? This is where things get awkward.
Capitalist modernity has confined the ‘free individual’ within the ‘iron cage’ of an economic system whose fundamental relations are purely instrumental.
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.8
Capitalist modernity is a way of life that is geared to the accumulation of money, capital, and power, to endless expansion as a condition of material success and survival, rather than to fostering the values of autonomy, creativity, sharing, and solidarity. In the process, politics loses its original meaning as a regime concerned with the best life for human beings and becomes instead a means facilitating the process of accumulation, a sphere of management and manipulation of individuals as against the communal shaping of a public life based on all that human beings have in common. Reason is reduced to mere self-interested calculation as a means to an end, an end which in turn has ceased to be a work of reason and become instead a systemic or institutional imperative pre-determined by the given social order. It is in this context that people assert, blithely and blandly, that morality is a private affair. The same view is expressed of religion. The view is either complacent or cynical, depending on the motives of the person expressing it. Some are merely seeking to preserve the civil peace in the context of rival self-created gods and goods. Again we see the reduction of the political realm to being no more than a neutral arbiter without any ethical implications of its own with respect to the good. That view is naïve and complacent (and also embodies a view of the good). The cynical view seeks to conceal a clear and systematic dissolution of ethics as a binding and obligating social significance behind the assertion of a neutralised public sphere. This is the rationalisation of a systematic de-moralisation of society, one that proceeds hand-in-hand with desolidarisation and de-socialisation. This is the cultural wing of capitalist modernity, working parallel to the economic wing. The terms Left and Right have come to be detached from their socio-economic roots and class basis and re-attached to symbolic forms to serve as the politics of the age of abstraction. Once this is understood it becomes clear that the Cultural Left is no Left at all, but very much an expression of the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ (to use the words of Marxist theorists in the 1980s). We have been living through a period in which the working class have been finally appropriated, expropriated, and supplanted in its own politics. And the process fits the new wave of the capital system like a glove. Culture has become a branch of material production, a lucrative industry in itself. Many of its most well-rewarded members possess a very exalted view of their seeming independence from the coal-face, seeing their success as a result of their talent and intelligence, treating us to lectures and harangues with respect to their favourite causes. It’s performative and is meant above all to publicize what good people they are. You will never see such people take a stand which involves some risk to themselves. Here is the new aristocracy, and it is rooted in a money and power accrued by way of the culture industry, the new coal face. If academia, the media, the corporations, and the activist class are all in unison, start to ask some pertinent questions, and quickly. Look for the end game, see who has the power and resources to deliver, ask who benefits, and work out who the officers and footsoldiers are. And in the process trace the connections of privatisation, liberalisation, and corporatisation. The dominant version of liberalism in the contemporary world is one that is untethered from place. Such a liberalism seeks to remove borders and barriers. They believe in free markets and open borders, seeing the world as just as land mass of inhabited not by citizens committed to a public life but by buyers and sellers seeking personal advantage. They see no value in social solidarity and national identity or social democracy or the health and safety of the public. They are willing to sacrifice all of these so that they get to open borders, feel good about themselves and expand the economy.
There are cultural developments underway which are not for the good, either the good of individuals and their liberty or the good of society. Social sites of joy and unity are being targeted and dissolved, to be replaced by favoured – and enforced – commonalities and unities fashioned in accordance with extraneous values. Whenever you are confronted by activists with a cause, always look beyond the claims to justice and goodness to assess the means of their promotion. When groups target injustice, envisage what is likely to happen when the boot is on the other foot. Are they seeking resolution and reconciliation or revenge and retribution? There are far too many involved in rights based political movements who are more concerned with putting the boot into groups they don’t like than actually achieving justice – to paraphrase Orwell, they don’t love the poor, they hate the rich. They are concerned to crush anyone who gets in their way. I would also draw attention to those who join in as a form of conformism. When struggles matter, cost something to the person (or the corporation), risk something in terms of health and wealth, a lot of these people are nowhere to be seen. Once the war is won, these people are everywhere, leading from the front, with all the zeal of the converted, becoming the most fanatical of all. Where wars are still being fought, such people are absent. This isn’t a true Leftism, it is a culturalism which is the window-dressing of a social order in which the only things of value are those things which can be measured, priced, and commodified.
For true believers, the irony is bitter. Whether we revert to socialist politics or to religion, we are presented with the spectacle of their supplanting by surrogates. The more the real things have lost public value, the more that public service has come to be performed by substitutes drawn from the private sphere. Meaning has been relocated from people in place and concentrated in the symbolic realm, putting that realm under a strain it cannot bear, twisting it out of true by the impossible demands being made of it. The symbolic life has thus started to exhibit a perversion and a pathology, with an obsessive sexuality invading politics and culture to take the place of a genuine political radicalism. Controversies over sex and gender offer a source of excitement in an exhausted political and cultural world. And a useful distraction from problems few seem to have the first idea how to solve. Since these obsessions reflect and reproduce the reified world around it, they offer nothing by way of resolution. But at least it allows people to hear and imagine genitalia in public. I treat it all with contempt. Diversion and distraction: whilst focusing on the hand being waved about in front of your face, you miss what the other hand is doing.
I have similar contempt for the kind of spirituality which has taken the place of religious life. In The Story of God, Robert Winston, internationally renowned biologist and practising Jew, describes New Age religion as a ‘spiritual Thatcherism.’9 Such a religion is more about celebrating the individual, tailored to a person’s own likes and preferences, than God. It is as inadvisable to write of a 'New Age' religion as such, the devil is in the detail. Winston is referring precisely to developments arising out of the 1960s counter-culture. New Age religion stresses the notion that the individual, as representative of God, has the power to find his or her own path to Enlightenment. In his work on New Age religion, Paul Heelas quotes a talk by healer Denise Linn in which she says, 'You'll be given suggestions. Always feel free to follow your own inner guidance . . . You are free to follow my suggestions or ... journey in whatever way suits you and your soul.'10 In other words, you – the discrete individual – are ‘free to choose.’ Winston quotes a certain guru, Ramtha, who delivered these words on the centrality of personal choice: 'Everyone is right because everyone is a God who has the freedom to create his own truth.' The self thus replaces God as a source of truth and value. New Age religion nips niftily into the space vacated by a failing public life to tell us we can now rely only on ourselves.
New Age religion shows little preoccupation with the origins of the universe, or even what happens after we die - staying safely out of the areas where science can refute it. Instead, it offers a sort of life-centred spirituality, based very much on obtaining personal happiness and fulfilment in the here and now. This contrasts very strongly with traditional religions, such as Roman Catholicism, which essentially tells people how to prepare themselves for the afterlife.11
Winston thus concludes; ‘There is a rather selfish quality to some New Age religion, a focus on individuals getting what they want… a cursory glance at the titles on offer in an average high street bookshop suggests that much New Age religion is focused upon individuals, not on society: Empowering Your Life With Dreams; The Alchemy of Voice; Transform and Enrich Your Life Through The Power Of Your Voice; The Power of Oneness — Live The Life You Choose. Moreover, some New Age religions promise not just happiness, peace, fulfilment and so on, but often material wealth… New Age religion is a kind of 'spiritual Thatcherism', stressing both the power of individual choice and the ultimate desirability of worldly success.12 It’s religion for people who want to do as they like and not be beholden to anything, least of all consequences.
There’s another side to this dissolution of religion’s public meaning – fundamentalism is the counterpart of New Ageist drivel. With the declining public profile of religion, spirituality split between soft and strong. Soggy spirituality is big on rejecting materialism. In this, too, it is in tune with the age. In The New Politics of Class, Klaus Eder writes of the emergent culture of post-materialism in which having opinions on what is good, beautiful, and just counts for more than having knowledge of them.13 He shows subjective attitudes, opinions and cultural practices to be expressions of a new class politics, supposedly beyond traditional class theory on account of its post-materialist ethic. Any member of the working class, innocent of such high theory, understands well enough that it is only the materially affluent who can afford to be post-materialist. It’s a front. The new class dynamics are rooted in the old, we are just talking a new wave of capitalist development. It also fits the new spirituality which makes the mistake of thinking that spirituality is the converse of the practical and material, a mistake that is easy to make when you are trying to put the material affluence of your ordinary existence behind you, (at least in thought, if not in deed). For the comfortable, the spiritual is merely the antithesis of the material, the realm of a manufactured esoterism. The woollier the better, since it contradicted the soulless calculations of the instrumental order. Such spirituality is a way of being both ‘in,’ whilst pretending to be ‘against’ the material world. It is the perfect religion for the age of ‘convulsive self-importance.’14
The symbolic realm has come to be pervaded by the features of the old public one in surrogate form, repackaged as profitable commodities to be acquired in the marketplace. Culture, art, spirituality have become matters of money, power, status, and capital. The much vaunted cultural creatives are most decidedly not creating a counter-culture but are agents of cultural capital. The places where meaning once had public expression have been appropriated by commercial forces, replaced by surrogates which are complicit in the continuing haemorrhaging of meaning in the contemporary world. The more the privatized domain of symbolic life has been pressured into delivering more than it was able, the greater the perversion and pathology. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to find meaning in the private sphere, now that it has been lost in the public sphere.
The task of re-enchantment – of recovering necessary illusions, if you like – cannot be undertaken by science alone, no matter the addition of Eastern spirituality and mysticism on account of its supposed compatibility with science. The metaphysical impulse is all too transparent and will be rightly dismissed as ‘not scientific.’ The people who seek re-enchantment will have to bit the bullet and embark upon a genuine metaphysical reconstruction in recognition of the fact that science needs metaphysics. The very possibility of science requires metaphysics, in that science as a meaningful activity is premised upon the answering of questions which are not scientific.
Despite the huge scientific and technological advances of the past two or three hundred years, the crises of the age indicate that human beings have lost the sense of being 'at home' in a meaningful world that makes sense of our lives. Human beings seem disinherited. In discarding God and seeking to go it alone, human beings have found themselves to be the masters of nowhere, at risk of being orphaned by their own powers in alien form. In spite of massive technical progress and power, human beings find themselves morally, intellectually, and psychologically adrift in a cosmos whose workings are indifferent to our concerns.
Many people find Einstein’s definition of God to be intellectually satisfying.
“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."15
This God of Spinoza and Einstein is, however, only half a God, the God of physical creation revealed by natural science. The other half is the God of Love and personal relationships. Together, the two concepts unify objectivity and subjectivity, physical nature and humanity. Nature in itself may not be concerned with the ‘fates and actions of human beings,’ but any civilisation that is built in this impersonal image will be unable to sustain the effort required for its reproduction. Einstein considered the belief in a personal God to be ‘naïve,’ by which he seems to mean a God that intervenes personally in human affairs.
Einstein understood that science is not self-sufficient and cannot go it alone. He also understood the extent to which the will to truth derives from outside of scientific investigation. He further understood the distinction between the description of what ‘is,’ which is the province of science, and what ‘ought’ be. He thus argues that “science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion”, since “knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to… what should be the goal of our human aspirations.” He continues that all the aspirations “exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions” which “come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition.”16
There is a simple distinction here which an age under the sway of scientism all too easily collapses into what William Blake condemned as a ‘Single vision’ founded on natural science.
Science investigates, religion interprets . . . Religion and science are two hemispheres of human thought.17
Science explains the nature of the ‘is,’ religion deals with meaning, seeking to secure the place of human communities within physical reality.
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche makes an insightful statement which ties the future of humanity to the future of science:
Future of science. Science bestows upon him who labours and experiments in it much satisfaction, upon him who learns its results very little. As all the important truths of science must gradually become common and everyday, however, even this little satisfaction will cease: just as we have long since ceased to take pleasure in learning the admirable two times-table. But if science provides us with less and less pleasure, and deprives us of more and more pleasure through casting suspicion on the consolations of metaphysics, religion and art, then that mightiest source of joy to which mankind owes almost all its humanity will become impoverished. For this reason a higher culture must give to man a double-brain, as it were two brain-ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of non-science: lying beside one another, not confused together, separable, capable of being shut off; this is a demand of health. In one domain lies the power-source, in the other the regulator: it must be heated with illusions, one-sidednesses, passions, the evil and perilous consequences of overheating must be obviated with the aid of the knowledge furnished by science. – If this demand of higher culture is not met, then the future course of human evolution can be foretold almost with certainty: interest in truth will cease the less pleasure it gives: because they are associated with pleasure, illusion, error and fantasy will regain step by step the ground they formerly held: the ruination of science, a sinking back into barbarism, will be the immediate consequence; mankind will have to begin again at the weaving of its tapestry, after having, like Penelope, unwoven it at night. But who can guarantee to us that it will always find the strength for it?18
Nietzsche thus argues that “science [Wissenschaft]" must work in partnership with "non-science [Nicht-Wissenschaft]," which he designates as the "consolations of metaphysics, religion, and art." The partnership between the two enables humanity to integrate and develop its "double-brain [Doppelgehirn]" to create a higher culture which permits ongoing inquiry and development. It is a requirement of health that humanity develop these two "brain ventricles [Hirnkammern]" in tandem with one another. The failure of science to work in partnership with non-science has dire consequences for human development. The possibility of science will be destroyed. Truth will cease to hold an interest for us. Human beings will pursue error and fantasy instead of truth since they give greater immediate pleasure. Most worrying of all, there is no guarantee that, once the will to truth is lost, humanity would come to regain its capacity for scientific inquiry. The pursuit of truth and knowledge is stimulated in the first instance by the non-scientific belief that truth and knowledge are both possible and valuable. There is a need, therefore, to heed the warning that science untrammelled is a self-defeating project that undermines itself in two ways (i) science provides us with decreasing pleasure and (ii) science impoverishes human joy by depriving us of the ‘consolations of metaphysics, religion, and art.’ ‘Consolations’ is in many respects a wholly inappropriate word in this context, and is better understood as ‘conditions.’ Science needs metaphysics in being premised on assumptions that arise from outside the realm of science.
Nietzsche makes it clear that science alone is insufficient to secure humanity's health and development, arguing that "non-science” such as the “consolations” provided by "metaphysics, religion, and an" is also important, since it spun on science.19 In this argument Nietzsche sounds a warning to an age standing on the brink of supplanting God with the new religion of scientism. What emerges from Nietzsche’s argument is a view of a dynamic and co-constitutive relation between science and non-science in keeping with humanity’s ‘double brain.’ For ‘double brain’ read the two concepts of God.
This was the road not taken. Balance has been lost through the overdevelopment of the physical and the concomitant de-development of the metaphysical.
We live in 'the best of times' and the 'worst of times', as Dickens put it in A Tale of Two Cities. Marx analysed the socio-historical dimension of this alienation with greater depth than anyone:
In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving-and overworking it. The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted. Some parties may wail over it; others may wish to get rid of modern arts, in order to get rid of modern conflicts. Or they may imagine that so signal a progress in industry wants to be completed by as signal a regress in politics. On our part, we do not mistake the shape of the shrewd spirit that continues to mark all these contradictions. We know that to work well the new-fangled forces of society, they only want to be mastered by new-fangled men - and such are the working men.20
Marx had high hopes for proletarian self-emancipation and socialist revolution. His error – or his achievement, depending on one’s perspective – is to have resolved metaphysical questions into the sociological and practical. Marx was right to locate the problem of alienation in specific social forms and relations rather than in some overarching process of Reason and rationalisation. His view grasps the extent to which the moral values that underpin our civilisation have come to be inverted. But he was blind to the extent to which the problem was spiritual and metaphysical and not merely sociological.
The socialist moment came and went. The Soviet Union boasted massive industrial and technological development, and the facts and figures proved its progressive claims. But the imbalance and the inversion continued to another level. In this, the East mirrored the West.
For those whose vision begins and ends with the facts, it is hard to see the problem. Human beings are healthier and wealthier, better educated and longer lived than at any time in history, and in greater numbers. The facts and figures presented by the likes of Steven Pinker are cause for celebration rather than concern.
I make the ‘healthier, wealthier’ statement in order to test both radicals and conservatives. I like to see who has the insight to look beyond controversies over the facts and figure to identify the real source of the modern malaise – the endless accumulation of material quantities attempting to fill the hollow hole where the soul – quality – once was. Apologists are cheered by the statement, confirming the triumph of capitalist modernity; radicals are concerned merely to challenge the facts and figures, as if it is here where the questions of the age are decided. Neither side has the moral and metaphysical insight to ask why things are so bad despite being so good. There is a problem, but what is it? Maladjustment? A psychological disorder born of easy living, assuming past achievements to be the norm, and having the freedom from necessity to be able to express displeasure?
Concern there is, and plenty of it – depression and suicide are on the rise. This is deeper than the issue of easy living breeding soft people. There is a pervasive meaninglessness and, with it, a chronic anxiety and disorientation. Emile Durkheim described this most salient feature of modernity as ‘anomie,’ denoting a normlessness that arises from the uprooting and dissolution of moral values and standards for individuals to follow. In a series of books beginning with Man’s Search for Meaning, neurologist Viktor Frankl predicted the coming crisis of meaningless in modern society. This loss of meaning, accompanied by a loss of belonging, is the fundamental crisis of our society. People see the symptoms of this crisis become pessimistic at the lack of redress. The issues cannot be properly addressed at the surface level, for the reason that crime, corruption, and violence are surface manifestations of a much deeper malady: the unquenched thirst for meaning to existence.
A disenchanting science that tells us that we are mere balls of meat whirling in space cannot satisfy the deep cosmic longing for meaning that is an ineradicable trait of human beings. We may denounce the quest as deluded, meaning as a chimera, finding proof in the fact that every search ends inconclusively, fractured between multiple and mutually exclusive points. But the end of the quest is the end of what it is to be human.
‘if men cannot live on bread alone, still less can they do so on disinfectants.’21
In achieving an unparalleled material abundance, society has come to lose its spiritual and moral bearings. In coming to achieve a material Heaven on Earth, we have come to forget the Heaven that lies beyond time and place. To be concise, we have lost a sense of transcendence and, with it, ends. Means have been enlarged to displace ends and, in the process, diminish meaning. The technical mastery of the world has brought about the instrumentalisation of relations. The modern world possesses a wealth of means but a confusion of ends. Reason goes silent on ends to focus on means. In the process, means are expanded to assume the status of ends. Exalting science at the expense of the ‘consolations’ of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, we are able to answer the question ‘how,’ but not the question ‘why.’ We have unprecedented knowledge of what ‘is’, and unprecedented technological power to bring the ‘ought-to-be’ about, but this immense power/knowledge is accompanied by unprecedented doubts concerning ends.
There is a deep malaise underlying Western civilisation, threatening to turn its huge achievements into sharp reverse. Alexander Solzhenitsyn described this as the 'spiritual exhaustion of the West' as a result of human beings supplanting God to place themselves at the centre and pinnacle of reality. Human beings taking morality, history, and responsibility into their own hands may sound liberatory and ‘grown up.’ But it comes with the hubristic danger of ‘men as gods’ seeing and valuing only that which humanity creates. Receiving the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1983 Alexander Solzhenitsyn told his audience that "Men have forgotten God" and “lost its sense of the invisible.”
The great crisis of humanity today is that it has lost its sense of the invisible. We have become experts in the visible, particularly in the West. If I was called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat again and again, 'Men have forgotten God'. The failings of human consciousness deprived of its divine dimensions have been a determining factor in the major crimes of this century.22
In the words of the George Harrison song, All Those Years Ago: ‘They've forgotten all about God / He's the only reason we exist.”
The book of Jeremiah seems so apt in these times.
Has a nation ever changed its gods?
(Yet they are not gods at all.)
But my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols.
Be appalled at this, you heavens, and shudder with great horror,” declares the Lord.
“My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
Jeremiah 2:11-13
Jeremiah identifies the root of the modern malaise. The sickness of contemporary civilization is fundamentally a religious one. It is this that makes it so hard to address, let alone resolve. The main protagonists in contemporary politics and culture, be they Left or Right, are fundamentally irreligious, at least in the sense of a God-centred religion. They have new, self-created, self-chosen gods. The atheistic Left have supplanted God in the attempt to put reason and humanity centre-stage. It’s a noble cause but one whose limitations have become clear. There is no singular humanity capable of taking the place of God. We have found that there are as many gods, or devils, as there are human beings, with each claiming the right to choose the good as he or she sees fit. They now choose truth in the same manner. The Right could once have been expected to challenge this but has long since exchanged the roots of conservativism in the sacred as well as the nation and its little platoons for an economic liberalism that seeks to advance free trade, free markets, and private gain over against public life, social existence, and moral order. The contemporary Right in politics is atheist and liberal to the core, certainly in practice and increasingly in theory. This has profound implications when it comes to resolving the contemporary crisis. The Right is effectively impotent in face of ‘woke’ and the culture wars, because it doesn’t grasp the true nature of the problem it faces. Least of all is it able to recognise its own complicity in what it derides as the great awakening, referring specifically here to the untethering of the individual from community, social solidarity, and a binding moral order that affirms values greater than the self-choosing individual. What is derided as ‘woke’ is merely the cultural expression of the individualising impulse of economic liberalism. A political Right that exchanged conservatism for economic liberalism is powerless to fight back. It disempowered the public realm, sought to remove boundaries and borders to open everything to the ‘free market’, and furthered globalisation in the name of free trade. That liberalisation is now engulfing the world, including much that conservatives hold dear. The same people who sat back, or put their feet down hard on the peddle, as social supports and solidarities were hollowed out and winnowed away, because it weakened the forces of labour and made the working class available to be flogged on the market, are now outraged that the same forces of displacement and destabilisation are coming to eat up their own sites of identity and resistance. This, the neoliberal revolution promoted as a class war from above, this is the revolution that is now devouring its children. Or, more accurately, the children are devouring their parents. It is ugly to observe. The Right can complain, and does so incessantly, often rightly, but it cannot bring its adversary to bay since it cannot properly identify its nature, let alone its parentage, not least because it would also involve recognising its own complicity.
So the battle lines continue to be drawn, pitching a false Right against a false Left, and provoking hostilities so as to draw people into taking sides. There are no sides to take in a civil war. And that is precisely what this is, an internecine conflict between those who reserve to themselves the right to choose the good as they see fit. Neither side is able to see that the religious roots of the contemporary crisis, because too few people possess the religious depth and knowledge. As Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in After Virtue (1981), our lack of awareness concerning the barbarians who have been governing us for some time is a large part of our predicament. The barbarism has grown worse since, much worse, with a coarsening of society and social behaviour and a corruption of public life. But the lack of awareness has become pervasive. Religion has been abused so hard for so long that people lack the tools they need to see the problem for what it is. Political voices are powerless in this struggle, being a part of the malaise rather than a coherent response to it. Only the prophetic voices of those who have stood apart from the modern Gnosticism are able to stand against the rising tide of self-aggrandisement and self-hatred. Human beings have taken the true, the good, and the beautiful into their own hands and replaced it with ‘my truth,’ my self-chosen god, right or wrong, and the result is a pervasive pornographic ugliness in all areas. Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton writes: ‘Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.’ We are in this spirit, but not only because we have ignored beauty. Truth, goodness, and beauty have all been rendered subjective things, matters of personal preferences, likes, and wants. The ‘free market’ was a powerful driver of this subjectivisation, validating individual choices backed by purchasing power. It should come as no surprise that the same individuation should come to be extended across all areas. Scruton also writes:
"The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant."
What is strange is that conservatives have so much trouble locating the cause of this superstition in the capital system, the most transgressive system in the whole of human history.
A false sense of morality has arisen in the world and assumed the dominant position, one based on not merely self-gratification but self-glorification. Human beings have not merely fallen from God but have overthrown God in asserting the claim to be Him. The result, inevitably, is a war between rival gods bringing about a self-cancellation.
That’s the problem. Who has the nerve and the nous to attempt the resolution in an age in which the rejection of religion is considered as proof of liberation and enlightenment?
Human beings are held either to create themselves in history or to be utterly subordinate to a cold, indifferent nature asserting its own imperatives with the force of necessity. The modern world is thus mired in bad, bogus metaphysics, split between a culturalism and constructivism detached from realities and a naturalism that is an inhumanism and impersonalism. The incoherence of environmentalism – and its predilection for authoritarian imposition – stems from this: premised on a disenchanting science that says the world is objectively valueless, meaningless, and purposeless and is utterly indifferent to human concerns, environmentalism asks ‘insignificant’ humans to supply value, meaning, and purpose as a matter of existential preference and choice. Human beings stand condemned for not caring about a nature that doesn’t care about us. The incoherence is manifest. But at least the view contains implicit recognition that nature cannot go it alone, no more than human beings can.
How are the two sides to be reconciled in dynamic, co-constitutive relation? By reference to a term that lies outside of them. It is precisely this that has been lost. Rebecca Goldstein writes of ‘the sad sight of human life untouched by transcendence.’23
Without transcendence and transcendent standards of truth and justice, humanity reduces to what Richard Dawkins has no compunction in describing as a blind, pitiless nature.
It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.24
That line ‘inanimate in an inert savoir’ offers the perfect description of an environmentalism fashioned in the image of scientism and naturalism. The passivity and unresponsiveness of human agents is a nailed-on certainty given a bad metaphysics modelled on nature’s amoral and indifferent imperatives. I call it out for what it is - an inhumanism.25
We are living in an epoch of cosmic homelessness, with our cosmic longing for meaning met only with a science that reveals a cosmic meaninglessness. We stand in need of guidance as how to exercise our freedom with responsibility and maturity, only to find that individuals have taken standards into their own hands, to be determined according to will and preference. The result has been an infantilism.26
Human beings need to know that they matter and are valued; they need also to know that truth matters. Instead, we are told that humanity is ‘insignificant’ and that truth doesn’t matter. I am not talking here about the intervention of a personal God into our lives in response to our bidding. Einstein was right to characterise such a view as ‘naïve,’ but it is not the Judaeo-Christian view. Such intervention would be the denial of our freedom to decide and take responsibility as moral agents, a central component of our dignity as human beings, making us passively dependent upon authority so as to confine and stifle us. The peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri correctly described free will as ‘God’s greatest gift,’ a gift that is our invitation into moral agency and the responsible exercise of freedom. In forgetting or excluding God, we close our hearts and minds to truth and find life losing its meaning.
Sooner or later (and sooner rather than later), those whom I have designated ‘environmentalists’ – those for whom there is only nature and what we make of it – will demand proof and evidence. My response, at the level of fact, reason, and logic, is no more compelling and cogent than past responses, all long since rejected as utterly baseless. I can assert that God loves us, seeks us, and invites us to participate in a never ending Love story. But the mystery of God is beyond all our conceptual grasp and imagination. Our metaphors for God are necessarily inadequate since God, as ultimate reality, can never be fully grasped in language. God is the anarchic excess or surplus that is beyond proof and evidence, transcendent was well as immanent, which is to say ‘non-existent.’ God is the anarchic excess that will forever evade capture and enclosure by a totalising Reason. You can never find God will conceptual tools fashioned for the physical world.
It is worth adding some sharp clauses and qualifications here, lest the argument be misunderstood as a Christian apologetics that doesn’t so much resolve the issues as invert them. It is not necessarily the case that those who reject a belief in God are condemned to the view that life is meaningless. Hegel didn’t believe in the traditional conception of God, creating a Spirit Reason whose progress to the consciousness of freedom in history affirms meaning in the most vigorous way. Marx is similarly vigorous in holding that there is an unfolding process of freedom in history, an immanentism which rules out extraneous theistic forces. Both Hegel and Marx thought that history exhibited a meaningful pattern. We can find similar views of history without God in the writings of the Philosophes. The issue is somewhat complicated by postmodernist critiques which claim to identify a hidden God at work in these histories. One reason these teleological grand narratives are now out of fashion precisely concerns the suspicion that God is still at work within them. It is certainly possible to view Marx as a Judaeo-Christian heretic, a Gnostic, and go further to argue that Marx needs the God he thought he discarded, but in truth buried, to make good his normative claims and sustain his emancipatory commitments. (That’s a view that I argue at length in A Home and a Resting Place Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience).
But, point made, the absence of God is not necessarily the absence of meaning, with many atheists affirming the possibility of meaning without God. It is possible to believe in the meaningfulness of life without holding this meaning to have a superhuman source. Many non-theists proceed on the assumption that there is a meaningful design immanent in reality and history. The question concerns the foundation of those assumptions. Nietzsche excoriated those liberals of his age who employed moral terms which had been rendered empty with the death of God. In that respect, Nietzsche seemed to hold that the absence of God spelled the absence of meaning. Certainly, the aftermath of the death of God brought about a stress on existential imposition of value and meaning on an objectively valueless and meaningless world. We are still here, the emptiness of existential choice becoming all the more apparent with the intensity of commitment behind it. The split is between those who would project a meaning and value upon the universe and those who would discern that value and meaning within the universe on one side, and those who see the pursuit of value and meaning as simply chimerical and not worth the effort. The latter view seems to be so utterly futile as to not be a serious option. If life is indeed meaningless, then there is nothing more meaningless than the science and philosophy that says it is so. This is no basis for a sane and healthy existence. As to the two groups fighting it out in the first option, there is a sense in which both are seeking some semblance of necessary order in a contingent, chaotic world, it’s just that one does it overtly and the other covertly. In this respect, the claims to objectivity are themselves projections and rationalisations reflecting positions, perspectives, and power-plays in the human social world. If this is so, then the battle between science and religion, Nature and God, is a phoney war. What matters is the mediation, not the abstraction. Nature, like God, just ‘is,’ a mere abstraction when considered apart from socially constitutive practices. It follows from this that we can write of meaning without presuming that it has some singular author. The universe may not have been consciously designed by any cosmic designer, but it is not thereby chaotic and contingent. Scientists reveal underlying laws that express coherence. Much more can be said than this, of course. These sketches are merely intended to avoid a false antithesis between God and a meaningful existence on the one hand and a random, meaningless existence on the other hand. It ain’t necessarily so (although those in the latter camp have the challenge of making good their claims in face of a disenchanting science that does seem to reveal the world as objectively meaningless).
Perhaps the most interesting point, however, is that theists themselves, who hold God to be the ultimate meaning of life, are not thereby obliged to maintain that there would be no coherent meaning without this divine bedrock. To argue that without God as the ultimate meaning there would be no meaning at all is a narrow and brittle view that has more in common with its converse view than it would care to acknowledge – fundamentalism and nihilism are twin reefs that claim unwary believers and non-believers alike. The view is remarkably fragile for a religious view, as though religion is such a fragile structure that the removal of one brick would be sufficient to bring the whole edifice crashing down.
It is perfectly possible to be a theist and reject the view that non-theists are condemned to meaninglessness. That view makes as little sense as to hold that the meaning of life becomes transparent as soon as one believes in God. Indeed, there is a strong case for arguing that God as both immanent and transcendent, in some sense non-existent, makes the world more rather than less unfathomable. God’s purpose in the world is remarkably inscrutable, so much so that it is well-nigh impossible for theists to defeat non-theists in philosophical argument, so long as the debate sticks to reason, logic, and evidence. The idea of God tends to make things more complicated rather than render them clear and incontrovertible. As philosophy friends have told me repeatedly, the burden of proof is on those making extraordinary claims, with the benefit of any doubt being given to the more parsimonious argument. If they are happy with such austerian standards, I am happy to concede defeat. And to remind the victors that the questions have not gone away. You may dismiss meaning as an illusion, but the cosmic longing for meaning is a very real fact of human nature.
In fine, I am not arguing something so crude as meaning is dependent upon God and that without God there is only meaninglessness. Things are a whole lot more complicated than that. If meaning were so self-evident, and so clearly substantively grounded, there would be no need for faith as well as reason. And if grounds were so clear, there would have been no philosophical disputation throughout history.
In the Acts of the Apostles St Paul debated at length with the Athenians about the panoply of Gods (Acts 17:16-32). The text is a species of the ‘one god further’ objection to theism effectively criticised by Edward Feser.27
In the debate, St. Paul points to the empty plinth standing amidst the sacred statues which carries the inscription ‘To an unknown God'. He explains that this 'unknown' God is the one who he is now proclaiming to them.
Paul Addresses the Areopagus
So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live yon all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. (Acts 17: 22-27).
Affirming the objective truth of that which he advocates, St Paul appeals to the reason of the philosophers of Athens in support of his own faith. But it is, ultimately, faith that is required, begging the question of how anyone is reasoned into or out of its truth.
The prayer of St Gregory Nazianzen, written in the fourth century, expresses the idea of a God that is beyond reason and language:
You who are beyond anything, are not these words all that can be sung about you? What hymn could tell about you, what language? No word can express you. What could our mind cling to? You are beyond any intelligence. Only you are the unutterable for all that is uttered comes from you. Those who speak and those who are silent proclaim you. Universal desire, universal groaning calls you . . . Have mercy, you who are beyond anything.
Not unreasonably, many will fail to see this unknown and invisible God and look for firmer grounds and guarantees of freedom and happiness in other places. Instead of a leap of faith, many will be more impressed by the massive tangible benefits yielded by the scientific and technological leaps of recent centuries. The endless debates provoked by the vagaries of a God that is beyond proof and evidence come to be felt as a waste of time and energy, resources that are more profitably used elsewhere to the end of progress and development. Religion and a belief in God thus come to be discarded as irrelevant compared to the tangible results of scientific advance, industrial expansion, and technological innovation. This assertion of human technical power is an assertion of human self-creation and is accompanied by the assertion of moral power.
In this understanding, human beings are self-authoring agents of ther own life, writing their own narratives rather than having them written for us by abstractions such as God or Nature. Nietzsche’s aristocratic anarchism holds that, if we had both the courage and the ability, we could be supreme artists of ourselves, as both clay and potter in one making ourselves to be whatever we like. Our identity is therefore constructed by ourselves rather than predetermined by some inner essence or potential. Each is able to do this in whatever way they choose. In choosing freedom we are able to choose who we are and what we are to become. The result is that creative human self-actualisation, once the communal concern of public life, has become a private enterprise.
Whatever else that describes, it isn’t socialism and it isn’t religion. And just be careful that some select group doesn't take it upon itself to do all the creating of the 'new man,' in accordance with its own political priorities.
Human beings have taken the true, the good, and the beautiful into their own hands to render the objective subjective, fracturing common standards into the personal, the wilful, and the preferential. As a result, morality in the contemporary world has dissolved into a fractured, self-cancelling terrain. Relativism undermines and, ultimately, effectively ends morality as a reasoned discipline concerned with the human good. This is the downside of human self-authorship. The quickest way to end moral debate is for just one of its protagonists to state ‘that’s just your opinion.’ There is no way past such an assertion. It’s a double-edged sword, of course, in that those who refuse to consider an alternative position on these grounds can have the same assertion levelled against them. The same applies to those who refer to an ethical position – or anything – as a mere human creation, ‘made up.’ I had a friend who thought himself issuing a clever rebuke to my references to God with the words ‘whatever created gods get you out and acting.’ The problem with the rebuke is this – once we recognise our gods or standards to be merely self-created value positions, they lose all the motivational force that is attendant upon their purported truth and objectivity. The point applies to God as some idealised projection of humanities best features. But the very same point applies to those offering morality as a self-authored creation. Such a morality is no more than irreducible preference and thus lacks authoritative force. Those who seek to dissolve morality into irreducible subjective opinion are playing a dangerous game, though. Because it effectively disables morality as the means by which human beings order their social lives. There is a strong suggestion that many who do this are upholding the fact and value dualism that lies at the heart of modernity, asserting science as the realm of genuine knowledge and reason, relegating morality to mere value judgement. The presumption is that science is sufficient when it comes to the rational ordering of civilised life. That’s a classic statement of the vice and delusion of scientism. I have discussed the issue at length elsewhere and so will give link and move on.
The view that a moral statement expresses no more than a personal preference or opinion contains the implication that one person’s judgement is as good as any other’s, and that there is no external, objective check on the world of self-assertion. Each has the right to choose the good as s/he sees fit and no one has a right to tell others what good they ought to pursue. Terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’, 'right' and 'wrong', 'virtue' and ‘rights’ are bandied about with no shared language or common understanding as to their actual meaning and general application. The moral world fractures into a mere congeries of particular individuals and groups, with what one person or group claims to be a fundamental human right being another’s abomination. The fact that one person likes one thing may state a fact about that person’s preferences but has no bearing on what others may enjoy. The objective dimension impinging on each and all equally is lost. Likewise, a person’s disapproval of something says something about that person but no relevance as to what others should do. Moralism is precisely what happens when, in the absence of objective standards outside of particular preferences, some seek to extend their value positions over all others. This, I contend, is precisely the place were morality finds itself in the modern world. Having deconstructed morality, some are seeing society going adrift and are attempting reconstitution on the basis of their own self-created standards. The grounds are utterly arbitrary with the result that disputes will default to power.
The confusion here starts from the premise that each is entitled to choose the good as s/he sees fit and that no one has the right to tell others what to do. So far, so liberatory. But this freedom to choose only works in the context of shared and generally accepted norms and standards, which is itself an embodiment of an objective standard of the good. Remove that standard and the entire moral fabric unravel. The position contradicts itself, and dangerously so. The attempt to deny a commonality that is repressive of individual choice and preference sees a dissolved common ethic return in the guise of an arbitrary moralism. The denial that moral claims are capable of binding each and all equally also contradicts itself in the assertion that there is indeed one moral claim which all should acknowledge, that is, the view that individuals ought not impose their views on others.
The situation is riddled with paradoxes that are impossible to sustain in practice. In the name of the central value of individual freedom, many assert morality to be no more than a personal matter of subjective preference. What one person deems to be right for them is not necessarily right for others. Whilst this seems a reasonable position of value pluralism, it only holds together within a widespread and shared understanding of freedom, toleration, and mutual respect. These ideas are not morally neutral, but are themselves value positions possible only within a certain kind of society, one which embodies, articulates, and inculcates a definite moral position. A society in which freedom, toleration, and mutual respect are only upheld so long as they are deemed right according to the preferences of self-choosing individuals is not one that most people would be comfortable living in. The idea that morality can never be more than irreducible subjective opinion or value judgements leaves too much of importance dependent on the transitory preferences of particular individuals. Human beings as social beings participating in a common life with others seek the reassurance of a substantive, overarching, and authoritative buttressed by the rule of law.
A right to individual autonomy in the choice and pursuit of the good entails a more than subjective demand that others respect personal choices. This demand may be claimed morally or enforced legally. Moralism arises when there is an attempt to enforce this moral claim on the basis of particular positions and preferences in the absence of an objective standard. This, I contend, is precisely what is happening in the contemporary age. Having deconstructed morality by reducing its objective standards to asymmetrical power relations, the most vocal and active groups in society are attempting to reconstitute a common morality in accordance with their own value and political preferences. This is quite arbitrary, an attempt to create and enforce unity and commonality without at the same time establishing the standards of truth and justice that transcend power and particularity.
The problem arises from the initial premise, the fiction of the discrete self-choosing individual. Individual choices and preferences are not expressed in a vacuum but in a society of others. Since these choices and preferences cannot but have public effects, directly and indirectly, the insistence on non-interference entails a demand that the individual is free to do as s/he pleases, regardless of the effects on specific others, and on the public good. Such a position is unsustainable in the context of social life. Each cannot choose and pursue the good as they see fit without coming into collision with one another. There is therefore a need for individuals to cooperate with others in a public life on the basis of shared and substantive standards of the good.
Morality cannot, therefore, be merely a matter of personal choice and preference. Nor can it be constituted by the value preferences of particular groups nor the customs and traditions of a particular society. In these latter instances, morality becomes the expression of the positions of dominant groups, a function of power. It is noticeable that the same people who seek to deconstruct the idea of any universal morality, on the ground that it is merely an ideological construct designed to impose racist and colonialist Western values, are the first to condemn the immorality of any politics it is opposed to. Relativists in moral theory, they become the most austere absolutists in political practice. Objectivity, absolute truth, and human nature are denied as ideological in theory, only for specific regimes and practices to be condemned as objectively wrong and inhuman in practice. According to what standards? If it is merely particular preference, self-created gods/values, then so what? Such things lack critical common purchase and can be ignored by those who disagree. Condemnation possesses force only on the basis of its appeal to fundamental and substantive moral principles that transcend the particular judgements of a particular society. Unless morality is merely being used as a rationalisation to give assertions and extensions of power the mere appearance of virtue. In an age of virtue signalling and performative protest, this is entirely possible.
Those reared on the view of morality as no more than personal choice and preference find it all too easy to adopt the position of that classic cynic, Pontius Pilate. Responding to Pilate’s questions, Jesus declared: “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” ‘Truth?’ ‘What is truth?’ retorted Pilate dismissively (John 18:37-38). It’s a good question to ask and an even better one to answer. The problem is that many people brought up on relativism take the question itself to be the end of moral debate, when it ought to be the beginning. That closure spells the end not only of morality but also of science – there is little point seeking truth if you consider it to exist, at best, only as a power play or projection. Those who, on the basis of the separation of fact and value, elevate science (as true knowledge) over ethics (mere value judgements), will find it impossible to defend the worth, value, and possibility of science should it come to be drawn into the world of power, politics, and projection.28
Science is based on assumptions that lie outside the province of science – which is to say that science needs metaphysics and moral motivations that arise elsewhere and which cannot be found in nature. Science can neither justify nor explain itself and cannot use 'Nature' as a god. Science cannot show why science is possible at all. Science rests on a number of assumptions that it cannot validate. These assumptions are of a metaphysical nature – the kind of metaphysical questions that those raised on scientism dismiss as religious:
1. The senses are reliable rather than deceiving; 2. The universe is rational and intelligible; 3. The mind is rational and intelligent; 4. The uniformity of nature is such as to make induction possible; 5. The existence of laws of logic; 6 The existence of numbers; 7. The existence of truth.
Spend much time in the presence of evolutionary psychology and biology and it soon becomes clear that human beings are not so much rational beings as rationalising animals, deceiving others in search of advantage, and being more than happy to deceive themselves in the process. I’ve read the books where natural selection does all the heavy lifting, Stuart Kauffman, Robert Wright and a countless others. To which I say: get lifting then. When it comes to ethics and politics – the complex human stuff – the arguments of these authors become pitiful. They have huge and powerful engines, but so little motive power as to cajole and coerce mere secondary and subordinate humans into doing all the pushing. It's called ethics and politicd and it is effective only when based on proper respect for creative and knowledgeable human agency.
And what applies with respect to metaphysics applies also to ethics. The pervasive idea that freedom can exist without reference to substantive and binding moral truths is a unique characteristic of the modern western world. That world has coasted so far on the basis of the moral capital of past civilisations and the material largesse of the present. But the position is unsustainable in the long run. All the time the issue goes without resolution there is a further hollowing out of the real. Lewis Mumford points to the paradox of civilisation: the effort to expand the physical shell of civilisation, misidentified as the source of values and progress, brings a thickening of its walls and a steadily diminishing amount of space for the living creature within. At some point, the will to order ceases to be self-sustaining and inherently purposeful. When life becomes empty, the sacrifices we make and the burdens we carry become greater than the tangible rewards. Civilisation then turns in and against itself. ‘Civilisation begins by a magnificent materialisation of human purpose: it ends in a purposeless materialism. An empty triumph, which revolts even the self that created it.’29
I would suggest that we are now at the revolting stage. For Mumford, this sudden evaporation of meaning and value, often coming at the time a civilisation seems to be at its height, is one of the enigmas of history: ‘we face it again in our own time.’
If the values of civilisation were in fact a sufficient fulfilment of man's nature, it would be impossible to explain this inner emptiness and purposelessness. Military defeats, economic crises, political dissensions, do not account for this inner collapse: at best they are symptomatic, for the victor is equally the victim and he who becomes rich feels impoverished. The deeper cause seems to be man's self-alienation from the sources of life.30
Mumford describes purposeless materialism as ‘the vice that now threatens to overwhelm our own civilization in the very midst of its technological advancement.’31 Our mistake is to have treated materialization as an end in itself. Mumford’s criticism of purposeless materialism implies the need to recover and revalue purpose as something more substantive than existential projection.
Not-scientific? I would suggest that you only find things you are looking for, and that looking is always based on a hunch, which some might call a belief or a faith.
The U.S. Declaration of Independence staked its claims to freedom and equality on certain 'self-evident' moral truths that are anything but self-evident. Holding truths to be self-evident is an expression of belief. The idea that all human beings are created equal is not a truth that is supported by biology.
It was once widely held that there was such a thing as moral knowledge and moral truth as well as scientific and that both existed in tandem as twin poles. It was also once widely held that freedom and reason existed in mutual relation. No longer. ‘Reason has always existed,’ wrote Marx, ‘but not always in rational form.’ In the dialectic of enlightenment, the liberatory connotations of reason turned repressive, taking the form of an ‘inert saviour,’ what Weber described as ‘mechanised petrification.’ The decoupling of freedom from truth, reason, and reality – from substantive and authoritative moral standards - led inexorably into license to become freedom's, morality’s, and society’s undoing. Without a shared and common substantive understanding of moral truth, morality is dissolved into a cacophonous assertion of everyone’s will-to-power. Such a morality is self-cancelling, bringing about chaos and uncertainty and causing people to seek unity and commonality in whatever form it is available. People deprived of a moral ordering of society will accept surrogacy, however repressive, just to put an end to chaos and uncertainty. Th lesson is plain: a freedom that is untethered from truth, reason, and reality is its own worst enemy.
The friend who gently chided me on being motivated by my ‘self-created god’ didn’t quite realise the extent to which he was opening up the gates to a moral and metaphysical hecatomb. I will guess that he didn’t care, for the reason that his standpoint is based on science. He thinks that it is science that provides the reality check and the only guide for action we need. The rest is ‘made up,’ to be taken with a pinch of salt. The view is remarkably complacent, expressing a faith in modernity that is remarkably untouched by doubt. (I feel the need here to emphasise that my position is not a diatribe against science, 'an anti-science rant' as someone once charged. I also feel the need to point out that I have a cousin who is a professor of biology with an international research reputation. I don't need lessons on the value of science - I give them. I have elsewhere demonstrated at length the need to recover the unity of fact and value and to bridge theoretical and practical reason.32
In making these points, I would strongly caution people to be on their guard against the reconstitution of religion in the guise of a secular religiosity, complete with taboos, original sin, devils, a creation myth, The Elect, the saved, and the damned. Such phenomena are born of the collapse of faith and belief and give us the worst possible form of religion – a religion without mercy, forgiveness, and possibilities for redemption. Such religiosity easily takes apocalyptic form, offering psychological comfort to those who have abandoned traditional religions but have retained a religious sensibility. For well over a century, going back to at least Emile Durkheim's Suicide, sociologists and psychologists have studied rising rates of depression and anxiety in an increasingly secular world. A large body of research indicates that people who lack a strong belief system that gives their lives a meaning and binds them with others in a common identity and purpose suffer from lower psychological well-being, generating higher levels of anxiety and depression. People who struggle with questions of ultimate value and meaning come to feel unhappy. Durkhem wrote of anomie, a condition of normlessness, a loss of moral anchorage and direction. Nihilism is the fate of the modern age. As Nietzsche put it in 1885: ‘Nihilism stands at the door. Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?’ The source is a disenchanting science which revealed the world to be objectively valueless, meaningless, and purposeless – and what applies to the universe in general also applies to human lives in particular. Human beings come to be reduced to no more than biological imperatives. Paraphrasing Alice, Francis Crick boldly declared that 'you are nothing but a pack of neurons.' “‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” (Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, 1994). Human beings are no different to non-human animals. There is no point to the game of life other than staying in the game long enough to engage in a mindless, instinctual procreation before dying and going to oblivion. Scientific reason reveals life to be entirely bereft of inherent purpose or meaning.' Those abandoning religion turned to science for answers to their questions of cosmic longing, only to find that science can say nothing on questions of value, meaning, and significance.
The matter was never going to rest there. As meaning-seeking creatures, human beings were never going to be able to live by disinfectants alone. The thirst for meaning had to be quenched otherwise. Nietzsche famously argued that guilt came from powerful people turning their will-to-punish inward. We live in an age of a secular religiosity in which powerful people are pushing their will-to-punish outwards, applying it to those deemed and damned as sinners against the new god of 'Nature,' destroying the foundations of a civilization deemed culpable in the violation of the new sacred. It is to avoid the insanities of precisely this form of religiosity that I am concerned to argue for the recovery of a properly religious sensibility. The denial of that sensibility will inevitably issue in the revanchism of a religiosity of damnation without redemption. Those who think that they can resist by simply restating the austere sanity of natural science simply have no idea of the nature and depth of the crisis we face.
Those who continue to assume the sufficiency of science and the inferiority of ethics (and politics) are simply not paying attention. It’s hard to understand their complacency at the level of assumptions given the continuous failure to achieve their ends politically. I shall simply refer to my work on this and return to the thread of this essay.
The idea that each person creates his or her own god is of a piece with the modernist view that each chooses his or her own good. This expresses the idea that morality is merely a matter of value judgements, with no way of deciding which are right or wrong given the absence of objective substantive standards. The view fails to see that this subjectivism or projection of existential power is a package deal. Science will go the same way as morality for the same reason. People whose concerns are with science are unperturbed by the loss of moral truth and knowledge, failing to see that the notion of scientific truth and knowledge are threatened by the very same forces. What makes science more resilient than ethics is the fact that it deals with the simpler subject matter of the physical world. But it is vulnerable the same way that ethics was vulnerable.
I cover this at length in this essay on Nietzsche33
The idea that truth is what is true for the individual, ‘for me,’ ‘my truth,’ goes to the heart of the modern moral malaise. I don’t obsess over ‘woke.’ Like 'postmodernism' back in the 1980s and 1990s, it is a phenomenon yhat impossible to pin down precisely. But there are a couple of key characteristics that are worthy of note. One is the tendency to reduce all things to power and asymmetrical power relations, the other is the ‘deconstruction’ of all substantive claims, the dissolution of objectivity, truth, and universality, another is the claim that every moral system is a social and cultural construct 'all the way down' .. to power.
The view of ‘rational freedom’ developed in my work accords a central place to the reality-shaping praxis of human agency, and to that extent affirms a cultural and social constructivism. But human self-creation proceeds as a sub-creation within a greater reality, in the mediated relation between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature. The freedom affirmed in this conception possesses an objective meaning in relation to reason and reality. This view of ‘rational freedom’ was developed in face of the opposition of postmodern thinkers, for whom both 'freedom' and ‘reason’ are socially and culturally constructed in the context of asymmetrical power relations.
The whole ‘problematic’ struck me as odd from the first, for the very reason that Marx’s critical notion of ideology was alive to issues of rationalisation, exposing the various ways in which power was preserved and reproduced by being concealed. Marx showed how the ruling class and its ideologues worked to naturalize what needs to be historicised. But – and this is the crucial point – Marx advanced this critical project whilst upholding reason in relation to a substantive notion of reality. And truth. I distinctly remember quoting Marx time and again using the word 'truth' and being advised that postmodernist thinkers would capitalise the word or put it in inverted commas. In light of the experience of ‘really existing socialism’ in the Soviet Union and other places, many would think that to write truth as ‘truth’ to be suitably sage, inviting critical investigation. That’s fine, so long as a critical view doesn’t harden into a denial of truth and its possibility. Such reductionism and cynicism renders the pursuit of truth pointless.
Against the fashionable deconstructions of the academy, Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor insisted that human beings are truly free and that this freedom is the condition for any serious concept of 'morality.'34
Pope John Paul's convictions about freedom and truth resonate with themes I developed in my conception of ‘rational freedom.’
Morality in the modern world has become a marketplace in which discrete individuals exercise their freedom to choose the good as they see fit. The 'freedom' of the market place is the 'freedom' of the consumer in consumer society. Individuals seek to exercise their freedom in the same way they seek to quench their thirst for meaning, with material goods and pleasures which they believe will satisfy their deepest needs, to find only emptiness and frustration. The reliance on the vagaries of the market place actually works to prevent human beings from assuming the responsibility that is key to freedom as a self-determination within substantive reality. Instead of learning to temper existential choice in relation to reality, individuals are emboldened to an ever greater self-assertion. The untethering of freedom from truth, reason, and reality emboldens individuals to such an extent that they curve inwards on the ego and its outsized wants and desires. With an endless quantitative expansion has come a coarsening of qualitative life. The images of fame and fortune that surround us make promises that they are incapable of redeeming. The endless accumulation of material wealth and power, the untrammelled pursuit of pleasure and instant gratification, the constant fashioning and refashioning of self-image and self-identity fail to nourish the human heart. An excess of material wealth can stultify joy and freedom. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx wrote ‘the production of too many useful things produces too many useless people.’35
In taking morality into its own diverse and divergent hands, humanity has supplanted God only to subordinate itself in the worship of the new idols of material wealth, power, and self-gratification. In a market society, each individual ‘regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers.’36 In asserting an individual freedom that has slipped the bonds of truth, reason, and reality, humanity has greedily grasped at the immediate goods of money and power, coming to be enslaved by them as new idols, their own powers in alien form - the very antithesis of the freedom, flourishing, and meaning for which the human heart longs.
The absence of God, when consistently upheld and thoroughly examined, spells the ruin of man in the sense that it demolishes or robs of meaning everything we have been used to think of as the essence of being human: the quest for truth, the distinction of good and evil, the claim to dignity, the claim to creating something that withstands the indifferent destructiveness of time.37
There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.38
The Western world is in serious danger of being consumed by consumerism, in both material and moral senses of the word. The idea of a society fractured into self-choosing individuals is hard to countenance. Such a thing is not a society but a congeries of discrete individuals united only by the competitive struggle for self-assertion. This is most assuredly the de-moralised society in which the only good is the 'good' each particular individual chooses, the only rights are the ones the individual claim against others and against society, and the only truth is ‘my truth.’ This is not the freedom and authenticity of the fulfilled and flourishing human being but the mediocrity and inauthenticity of Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man.’ It hardly seems worth all the effort it took to produce. Nietzsche writes of ‘this laboriously won self-contempt of man.’39
In stark contrast to this is model for living offered by Jesus Christ, a man who, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is 'the man for others.' This is to live in a truth that is beyond the self and its wants and desires.
‘My commandment is this, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for one’s friends.’ (John 15: 12-14).
The society we seek will be brought about by ‘the love that seeketh not its own,’ or not at all.40
Notes
1 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, 1947 p. 126
2 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, 1947
4 Camille Paglia Sexual Personae, 2001 ch 1
5 Paglia 2001 ch 1
6 Paglia 2001 ch 1
7 Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, London, Faber and Faber, 1993, Act 2 scene 7
8 Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 1985: 181
9 Robert Winston, 2005 The Story of God
10 P. Heelas, 'The Spiritual Revolution: From "Religion" to "Spirituality"', in L. Woodhead et al. (eds), Religions in the Modern World, 2002
11 Robert Winston 2005 The Story of God ch 9
12 Robert Winston 2005 The Story of God ch 9
13 Klaus Eder, The New Politics of Class, 1993
14 Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 1985: 181
15 Alice Calaprice, The Expanded Quotable Einstein. 2000 p. 218.
16 "Albert Einstein, Science and Religion (1939)". Panarchy.org. 19 May 1939
17 Martin Luther King, Jr, Martin Luther King and Susan Carson, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Advocate of the Social Gospel: September 1948 - March 1963, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007, p. 108
18 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 251.
19 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 250.
20 Marx, speech delivered at a dinner commemorating the fourth anniversary of Ernest Jones's People's Paper, in London on 14 April 1856, published in the People's Paper on 19 April 1856. (Marx Articles on Britain, Surveys from Exile 1973).
21 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, ch 4
22 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Address on receiving the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, 1983
23 Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, New York, Pantheon, 2010, p. 308
24 Wallace Stevens, 'The Plain Sense of Things', in Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, New York, Literary Classics of the United States, 1997, p. 428.
25 The Critique of Environmentalism as Naturalism and Scientism (2022) https://www.academia.edu/68328275/Essays_in_Environmental_Critique
29 Lewis Mumford 1957 The Transformations of Man ch 3
30 Lewis Mumford 1957 The Transformations of Man ch 3
31 Lewis Mumford1966. The City in History,
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/there-are-no-facts-only-interpretations
34 George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (London: Harper Collins, 1999), p. 689
35 Karl Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Early Writings 1975 362
36 Karl Marx On the Jewish Question, Early Writings 1975: 220
37 Leszek Kolakowski Religion, London, Fontana, 1982, p. 215.
38 Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 51.
39 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, Third Essay, 25:115.