Locating the Origins of the Modern Malaise
The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.'
(Max Weber, 'Science as a Vocation', in From Max Weber, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, p. 155).
Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?
(Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale, New York, Vintage Books, 1968, book one, I, para. 1, p. 6)
I have been asked to comment on Carl R. Trueman’s Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, 2022. I have to confess immediately that I haven’t read the book and – in the middle of meetings and classes with a view to setting up my own business – I don’t have the time to search the book out and read it. So this is more a commentary on my own views in light of contemporary controversies than it is a review of the book.
But a quick glance at the book’s main thrust did incite some immediate thoughts on my part, which I thought worthy of noting for future reference. I can’t offer a direct commentary on the book, merely observations concerning its principal theme and direction. Whilst some of the points I make may well apply to the book, and others much less so, they will all be pertinent points in their own right. So I offer these words more as my own observations on the relations between conservatism and liberalism in the contemporary age.
Trueman’s book covers a lot of the ground that I cover in my work, draws many of the conclusions I draw, and discusses many of the thinkers I have discussed over the years. If I may, having studied the likes of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche at PhD and post-doctoral level, I am entitled to claim expertise in this area. The same with respect to Plato and Aristotle. I tend to get somewhat tetchy when the name of Rousseau is mentioned, given the seemingly congenital incapacity of his critics to understand him right. Time and again, Rousseau is excoriated for the very things he himself criticised. Whenever I see Rousseau criticised as a ‘back to nature’ romantic with indulgent dreams of authenticity I know I am in the presence of second-hand criticism at best. I have criticised Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche at length in my own work, but I have done so from a position which understands and appreciates their strengths. I like to ‘iron man’ an interlocutor, not straw man them. My alarm bells were ringing as soon as I saw the direct line being drawn between leftist thinkers and the supposed perversions and inversions of sexual identity in the contemporary age. As though there is a direct connecting thread from the authenticity of Rousseau, the freedom of Kant, the communism of Marx, and the will to power of Nietzsche to the cultural libertarianism of the contemporary age. As a specialist in those thinkers I have no doubt that they would repudiate contemporary excesses. I have argued at length for Marx as an essentialist in holding that a thing is something essentially and is essentially something, with inherent potentials and lines of development in which a thing becomes in its final form what it is in essence.1
The thread connecting leftist thinkers – and the very far from leftist Nietzsche – to contemporary extremes and excesses in cultural thought is not a direct one and comes more by defeat and default than by design. I have in my own work demonstrated how Kant is ultimately agnostic on the substantive good, rendering the universality and intersubjectivity he sought vulnerable to dissolving into subjectivism. The forces for that subjectivism are present in the wider world, which Kant sought to check and overcome by way of a universal rationality. I once argued for a rational freedom along the lines of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, as a freedom that is self-authored by a self-legislating reason. It is in many ways a noble vision, born of the Enlightenment. I no longer believe that that project is viable without God. Kant, at least, recognised that God, freedom, and the immortal soul were necessary preconditions of moral agency and moral life, preserving a space for faith.
I argue the insufficiency and ultimate dissolution of modernity’s self-legislating reason in this book on St Thomas Aquinas.2
I cite the book to make the point that in being a specialist on Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx I am not an apologist. My view now substantially departs from theirs. So when I say that they are not directly responsible for the contemporary culture wars, and that other thinkers, traditions, and forces bear a much heavier responsibility, there is a need to take note. I am not into apologetics of any kind. And I am quick to detect attempts on the part of supposed conservative thinkers to deflect attention away from the classical liberalism which bears the heaviest responsibility of all for cultural and moral libertarianism.
I have over the years sought to define a position on what I call ‘Rational Freedom.’ This view affirms the unity of the freedom of each and all, a unity that is anchored in a common moral reason. The more human beings use their innate reason, the more they will be free. As my view has become richer and deeper over the years I have moved from the view of the self-sufficiency of a universal human reason to state a theistic view, acknowledging that innate reason – and free will – as ‘God’s greatest gift’ (in the words of peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri). I now argue that the noble vision of a self-legislating reason and self-authored existence in time comes to close in on itself rather than expanding outwards towards something greater than the ego. The loss of metaphysics – and God – entails the loss of a supra-individual force that draws the ego out of itself, beyond itself, into relation with a wider and greater Being. Kant and Hegel thought a universal reason enough, Marx likewise with respect to a self-creating labour. They missed that the greatest estrangement of all is the self-estrangement from God.
(These are big claims. I trust that readers understand that I do the necessary heavy philosophical lifting to support these claims in my main work. Here I can but comment briefly whilst moving quickly on the hoof).
I note that Trueman’s book directly targets identity politics, and so could be classed as part of the ‘culture wars,’ taking up the cudgels against ‘woke.’ I was quick off the mark here. I was criticising identitarianism, the ‘discursive turn,’ and the supplanting of politics and class by culture, language, and identity in the 1990s. I criticised the ‘post’ marxists of poststructuralism and postmodernism as not merely ‘ex’ marxists but as anti-marxist. Their views were openly inimical to socialism. I was far from being alone in making these criticisms. Marxist thinkers such as Terry Eagleton, David Harvey, Frederic Jameson, and many more identified postmodernism as the cultural counterpart of the prevailing economic liberalism. Conservatives are actually very slow off the mark here. Fredric Jameson published Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991, a book which began life as a 1984 article in the New Left Review. That’s nearly four decades ago. Jameson develops a critique of modernism and postmodernism with which I wholeheartedly concur. I have published my doctoral notes from 1997, which develop the view that postmodernism is the cultural wing of the ascendent neo-liberalism.3
Conservatives in the 1980s and after) were actually economic neoliberals, and political authoritarians to boot, in order to force through the marketisation of society. Now that that marketisation has taken the form of a cultural and moral liberterianism, conservatives seek to call halt, parenting upon others the problems that are self-authored. To repeat, I and others were condemning the unholy alliance of economic and cultural neoliberalism or libertarianism back in the 1990s (it is basically a licence and libertinism rather than genuine liberty).
To put the point bluntly, supposed conservatives in the late seventies and 1980s were not conservatives at all but economic liberals. Inevitably, the liberalism of individuals being ‘free to choose’ (Milton Friedman) spilled over from the economic sphere to embrace the social, cultural, and moral spheres. That, I would argue strongly, was the deliberate intent with respect to society and the principal centres of collective loyalty and restraint. The inhibitions were deliberately liberated in the name of freedom. The architects of this are now seeing the things they hold dear coming under threat in the maelstrom they unleashed and are seeking to call a halt. I make this point not against conservatives but against those who conflated conservatism with neoliberalism and did so for political and economic self-aggrandisement. Those chickens are now coming home to roost. Many conservatives at the time warned that the embrace of neoliberalism would prove toxic and destructive for conservatism, rendering it as ideological, as prone to division and dissolution, and as distant from reality as left-wing theory and practice.
In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen does from a conservative position what I have sought to do from a socialist position over the year, which is to identify the war being fought between Left and Right in contemporary politics as a phoney war between the economic and cultural wings of an individualist liberalism shorn of its metaphysical supports and commitments.4 These wings possess a common root and together promise a common ruin. Premised on the assumption that individuals are self-possessing beings able to choose the good – and the truth – as they see fit, this liberalism engenders an abstract individualism on the one side and an equally abstract collectivism on the other. As warm, affective ties and bonds are uprooted and society is atomised at its heart, social connection comes to be reconstituted in artificial forms. We have the surrogacy of ersatz commonality as against a real sociality and solidarity. If economic neoliberalism has been characterised by the hyperreality of globalised economic relations abstracted from politics, place, and production, so cultural neoliberalism is characterised by a similar abstraction from substantive realities. We thus enter a world of media, culture, and the endless manipulation of symbols and manufacturing of identities and opinions. The yearning for community and connection thus comes to take ersatz, surrogate forms.
In my view, however, identity politics is not the cause of the modern malaise but the consequence of much deeper problems which reside in the very DNA of liberal modernity. The likes of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx diagnosed these problems at the early stages of the process of modernisation, noting that we were entering an age in which all things seemed to contain their opposites. We live in the best and the worst of times, and explained the complex, contradictory dialectics and dynamics of progress is precisely the task of critical thought today. This requires the unmasking of ideological conflation and mystification.
The war on ‘woke’ is as miguided as the war waged by ‘woke’ on social institutions, practices, and traditions. ‘Woke’ is not the problem, but is itself a conequence of a much deeper malaise which testifies to a loss of meaning, identity, roots, and belonging. Seen from this angle, the attempt to recreate identities is in part a recognition of how much the permanent revolutionising of stable conditions, characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, has sundered meaning and connection to leave individuals adrift, isolated, and craving community and connection. Even ersatz forms of community, meaning, and identity are better than none at all; a distorted picture of reality is better than none at all. The challenge, however, is to redeem empty promises by bringing people back to realities. Our senses have been alienated from us in an age of expropriation and commercialisation. We have become strangers to the world we have created, to others and ultimately to ourselves. Marx showed what was required to bring people back to their senses. Unfortunately, he utterly misread the greatest estrangement of all, the self-estrangement from God, which is the root of all other estrangements.
I have in my work sought to diagnose these moral and social problems of modernity. To put the point concisely, I hold that the modern malaise is no recent and transitory abberation but possesse roots that run long and deep in the modern terrain. The malaise expresses a ‘strange’ combination of three things:
1) the Lockean tabula rasa, the idea that the human being is a blank sheet without innate and essential potentialities, creating and endlessly recreating character, personality, and identity;
2) the liberal value of the self-choosing, self-possessing individual, and
3) a Social Darwinian collectivism in which the competition for resources is levelled on discrete group.
That’s a complicated conception which I seek to map elsewhere. At base, it merely refers to the twin reefs of an abstract individualism and an abstract collectivism which characterises a liberalism raised on an ontology that falsely separates two essential and integral aspects of human nature – individuality and sociality. Separate these two things and set them in opposition to one another and mischief is inevitable. The age of mischief is nigh (as the old Delphic oracle warned).
Here, I wish to comment on the seeming similarities and possible differences between my work and the view which Carl Trueman seems to set out in Strange New World.
Trueman’s book covers a lot of the ground that I cover. But I need to tread warily here, lest similarity of concern and points of agreement be construed as complete endorsement, effectively assimilating my own work to that of others. Whilst I make ample use of a wide range of sources, I would prefer not to be beholden to others’ views. I develop my own view on ‘rational freedom’ through a critical engagement with others, rather than taking clear ideological sides. I am not clubbable in that sense, making it impossible to place me clearly on either side of rival camps. My thought is dialogic, which is to say that it is designed to make people think in and through the nuanced terrain between the extremes of black and white. I would rather be responsible for my own arguments, errors included alongside insights, than be beholden to those of others. I dislike identity politics intensely and see it as pernicious, often in intent, and nearly always in its effects. I have a long history of being critical of identitarianism and the turn from politics to culture and discourse. From the late 1980s I identified this ‘discursive turn’ as a turn away from and a turn against socialism, the centrality of class and class dynamics, and from the working class. I saw its influence as pernicious, an intellectual threat to socialism, and politically debilitating for the Left. I feel vindicated. I don’t feel the need to join the conservative opposition to ‘woke’ and identity politics for the very reason I was calling these things out at source from the very beginning, and did so as a socialist. The contemporary conservative critique seeks to identify these developments as a new phase of leftism. Beaten on the socio-economic terrain, finding the working class against them rather than with them, leftists have opened up a new front on the intellectual and cultural terrain. Such is the criticism of conservative critics. But please read my work from the mid-1990s, where I explicitly condemned what I termed ‘the academicisation of marxism’ and the concomitant abandonment of class and the working class, not to mention the increasing divorce from socio-economic reality. I made these criticisms from a socialist perspective. And I was concerned to establish the point that supposed conservatives were actually in the vanguard of the neoliberal revolution that was sending us into a hyperreality, a mediated and abstracted world that proceeds without regard for substantive realities. This process began first in the economic realm but inevitably spilled over into the cultural realm. Here we are today, with supposed political enemies being revealed as allies in the same libertarian repudiation of reality.
All I can say is that I saw it coming. As did others. And I argued the case against it from a socialist and marxist position.5
That one thousand page piece of work from my period of doctoral research makes it crystal clear that what we are dealing with is not a ‘rebranded Marxism,’ with ‘woke’ being a ‘disguised Marxism,’ as conservative critics allege. This mode of thought is anti-marxist, anti-socialist and anti-working class at every key point. What we are dealing with is an ‘academicisation’ in which ideologues attempt to rename and redirect leftism by a cultural sleight of hand. Marx would have made short work of this conflation of self-image and reality and I would suggest that others do too.
Rather than being the cause of the malaise, ‘woke’ is the latest expression of an individualism that has its roots in a liberalism that shed its comprehensive, metaphysical assumptions, in alliance with a disenchanting science that revealed the world – and by extension life and humanity – to be objectively valueless, purposeless, and meaningless. Being charitable, identity politics can be read as an attempt to recover meaning, connection, and community out of the ruins of a modern diremption. That’s a view I have presented myself, in an attempt to pull the world out of an interminable trench warfare.6
In other words, postmodernism is merely a modernism without the innocence, hypocrisy, and self-delusion that human beings could go it alone by force of their own reason and power. Post-Enlightenment modernity sought to put science, reason, nature, humanity, technology, and, indeed, culture where God once was. It can’t be done. One by one, each of these candidates for divine centrality dropped the baton, leaving us still searching for the divine anchor-point. Postmodernism is merely the assertion that, with ‘the death of God’ (Nietzsche) there can be no such centrality – the world is fractured, a mere conjeries of projects launched under the sign of the will to power. Hence the overt denial of objective reality and morality accompanying the reduction of everything to power and the concomitant assertion that ‘everything is political.’ This anti-realism and anti-foundationalism, this denial of necessary relations, is effectively the repudiation of the old socialism.7
I have examined these problems at length over the years and would prefer to cleave to my own careful diagnosis rather than translate in order to fit the concerns of others.
Trueman is a critic of what he calls ‘expressive individualism.’ He writes:
‘Expressive individualism is the notion that every individual has an inner core of feelings, and in order to be authentic, need to be able to give outward expression - one might say, need to be able to live outwardly consistent with that inner core of feelings. [...] the real me is this inner core of feelings. So the most significant things that can be done to me are the things that affect that inner core of feelings or stop me giving full expression, outwardly, to that inner core of feelings.’
This strikes me as an attempt to deflect attention away from individualism as such, without doubt the central problem of the age, towards one of its particular forms, targetting those strains of thought which accent emotions, feelings, and authenticity and condemning these a leftist. The ‘most significant things’ could easily be construed in terms of the group hate of identity politics in the culture war. Leftism thus stands convicted as asserting feelings over fact and reason, articulating a vacuous authenticity over reality.
This is facile, reductive, and far too pat to be satisfying. And it ignores the profound critiques of emotivism that have been made of the fate of morality in the modern world. The problem is not a new one, and this focus on ‘woke’ as a rebranded marxism misses the target by a very wide mark.
It also fits the world of political identities and rivalries rather too neatly to be anything other than suspicious. And it proceeds by the very reductionism and tendency to caricuture I identified earlier with various ‘post’ schools of thought in the critique of ‘discourses of extremity.’ There is a need to come out of the shallows and the shadows.
There are ways of combining autonomy, authority, and authenticity, uniting both reason and the emotions by recognising that human beings are reasoning, feeling, sensing, and intuiting beings. The problems come when these essential aspects of human nature come to be split up and turned against one another in their abstraction.
I would pit my reading of Rousseau as modernity’s greatest Platonist against all those who persist in reducing him to being a ‘philosopher of feeling,’ ‘feeling’ here being used in the pejorative sense. This is plain wrong
I would argue the point this way: the war against the ‘expressive individualism’ of the cultural Left could be won – and should be won, in my view – but will not in itself uproot the problem. The problems lie much deeper.
Views that are launched from the trenches of pre-set opinions are to be avoided. The challenge is to survey the whole terrain from a standpoint that transcends the warring parties. (I note Trueman’s religious concerns here, which does imply an attempt to find that transcendent vantage point). The danger lies in making this an issue of Right vs Left, the Left as in the contemporary cultural Left being related and reduced to past Left thinkers. In the 1990s coming into the 2000s I sought to differentiate Marx from poststructuralists and postmodernists, identifying the latter as very definitely ‘post,’ ‘ex’ and in key respects ‘anti’ marxists. Thinkers who asserted that ‘there is no necessary relation’ between socio-economic reality and culturally created political and ideological positions and identities; who repudiated foundations; who openly advocated an anti-realism; and who criticised what they called a ‘labour metaphysic,’ ‘productivism,’ and the ‘privileging’ of the working class over ‘marginal’ and ‘different’ and ‘other’ identities cannot by any stretch of the imagination be conceived as marxists and socialists. That identification only works on the presumption that leftists recognised the failure and defeat of socialism and, rather than cleave to reason and reality, ditched both for the continuation of an ideological crusade. Some such thing would apply to the academics, ideologues, and vanguards who had minimal connection with the working class in the first place. But such people were always a blight on marxism and socialism. That was my view in the 1990s and it remains my view, regardless of the self-image and self-identity of contemporary leftists. Marx and Engels would have wasted no time in identifying these characters as political and ideological opponents, as they did when excoriating what they called ‘the German Ideology.’ The German ‘ideologists’ targetted by Marx and Engels in this work were intellectuals who sought to effect transformation by way of raising consciousness at a remove from socio-economic struggle and organisation. Sound familiar? Marx had no time for it.
Whilst I agree with the critique of expressive individualism, I would target individualism in much broader and deeper terms, paying close attention to assertions of a natural reasonableness and sympathy in Eighteenth Century thought. There was an emphasis on affectations here, but also on what was called enlightened self-interest. It is this emphasis that advanced a methodological – and practical – individualism that undermined collectivities and subverted communities as abstractions raised over the head of the self-choosing individual.8
The loss of belonging, meaning, and morality is the real source of the modern malaise, and this lies in what William Morris called ‘the great sundering’ of the means of social production and reproduction from traditions, communities, and environing relations. We came adrift. From this perspective, the culture wars being fought by certain groups and identities constitutes an attempt to reconstitute sociable and solidaristic connections broken up by an atomising economic liberalism in the first place. The upshot of this is that any victory that is won in pushing back against identitarianism will still face the prior problems of atomisation, displacement, social and moral dislocation, and meaninglessness. To target attempts to overcome this diremption and excoriate them for their failures and their extremity leaves the basic problem unaddressed, inviting ever further extremity and even more damaging failure. This is how civilisation becomes tired and collapses from within – by fighting the wrong fights, by wasting energies in futile wars, by misdiagnosing the nature of the problem.9
Trueman targets a lot of the thinkers I have specialised in – Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. I feel obliged to underline my expertise here, for the reason that many critics give tendentious accounts of the thoughts of these thinkers, all the better to fit a pre-determined political narrative. Last month an academic messaged me to say that ‘your knowledge and understanding of Marx is truly impressive.’ Indeed. I am critical of Marx, but I also see where he made valuable contributions to thought. The same with respect to Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. We need to avoid reduction and caricature and instead wrestle with substantive issues the way that these thinkers and others did. I engaged with these thinkers because they were the ones who were most alert to destructive dimensions of Enlightenment, liberalism, and modernity. In many respects, they also embody and in turn reproduce these dimensions in new form. I have made my own criticisms of these thinkers to precisely this effect. But to make these thinkers the architects of the problems we face is to invert the true relation, with the danger that rather than being resolved, the problem comes to be entrenched and extended. The impression is given that had these troublesome philosophers never philosophised in the first place, there would be no trouble in the world of liberal capitalist modernity at all. This I wrong and apologetic, leaving the basic parameters of the diremption afflicting the world untouched.
I make this criticism generally here, rather than specifically, because I know that Trueman seeks to reinstate the religious dimensions of both problem and solution, accepting that the attempt to construct the free society by a self-legislating human reason alone has failed. I have argued this very thesis myself.10
The universality sought by the likes of Kant, Hegel, and Marx has dissolved into a subjectivism and nihilism, very much against the intent of those philosophers. Which is to say that the solutions these thinkers pursued have turned out to be indequate to the task. No amount of ‘rebranding’ will suffice here. To put the point simply, human reason cannot be its own foundation; a self-legislating rationality soon fractures into a congeries of discrete, self-choosing selves. I spell out how this process takes place in a number of works.11
I am a critic of a self-creation that is ontologically unmoored, but would caution modern conservatives against making continental theorists – conveniently identified with the contemporary Left - the scapegoats here. This is far too broad brush to address the real issues at stake. It is of tactical advantage to those more concerned with politics, rendering complex problems easier to grasp in the thick of the fight, but is utterly lacking the depth that gives an enduring significance and resolution. I am more interested in addressing and resolving problems than winning transitory political battles.
The problems of the age are located at a far deeper level than ‘expressive individualism,’ authenticity, feelings, and culture. The problems go right to the heart of the moral malaise of modernity.
With the exception of Nietzsche, the thinkers identified here were attempting to recover the grounds of commonality and authenticity via a common moral reason. They were dealing with the aftermath of what Nietzsche would call “the death of God,” by which is meant the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework. The problem is not that modernity cannot generate any moral theories but that it cannot offer good grounds and sound reasons to take any of them seriously – one self-created ‘god’ is as good as another and none can persuade, compel, inspire, motivate, and obligate.
The problems are to be located not in the errors of the thinkers targeted here but in the diremptive nature of the liberal modernity these thinkers wrestled with. The danger lies in targetting a culturally ascendent – and thoroughly destructive, pernicious, and misguided – Left as the problem so as to locate the problem in thinkers and philosophers identified with that Left, not the reality they sought to address. The belief is that once these misguided leftists are seen off the problems of the world will be over. They won’t. Simple. Those supposed leftist thinkers and philosophers developed their work in an attempt to address problems of moral and social diremption that were already in evidence and already threatening the unravelling of the moral and social ecology.
It should be born in mind, too, that these supposed ‘leftist’ thinkers were not all leftist in any case. Kant was a liberal, Hegel a conservative, and Nietzsche an elitist who loathed socialism, democracy, egalitarianism, and, most of all, the Christianity he felt engendered those very things, condemning it as the ‘morality of slaves.’ He loathed feminism, too, and had a problem with women. Nietzsche would positively loathe identity politics as a group mediocrity, the morality of ressentiment. He had predicted that with the death of God, that human beings would seek to reconstitute a herd-like group identity in surrogate forms, condemning humanism as merely the religiosity he sought to extirpate in surrogate form.
The loss of an overarching and authoritative moral standard – God – needs also to be located in a disenchanting science that declares the world – and hence life – to be objectively valueless and meaningless. The thinkers who sought to reclaim commonality and meaning in the world did so on the assumption that value was a human projection upon a meaningless world, not an attempt to discern and disclose an inherent meaning and purpose. It is not only the cultural Left that holds this assumption. It is a standard assumption on the part of those adhering to positivism, scientism, and naturalism.
In addressing this problem, I go much deeper and go much further back than the continental thinkers of the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century. I would locate the problems in the English tradition of individualist liberalism – in Thomas Hobbes’ purposeless materialism, the ‘war of all against all,’ and the drive to constantly expand power; in John Locke’s tabula rasa, the idea that humans are a blank sheet; and in David Hume’s absolute nihilism and scepticism, his anti-realist denial of necessary relations. These are the true authors of the modern malaise, thinkers far more subversive of God, morality, and social connection than those routinely targetted by conservative critics. The philosophical materialists of the Enlightenment were true heirs of Hobbes. Rousseau explicitly repudiated the philosophes of the age for precisely this reason, condemning atheism as the ‘philosophy of the comfortable.’ These are the thinkers who abandoned God and argued for human beings to go it alone in a world of their own creation. (Although Locke is the exception here, his defence of the natural law is so weak as to pave the way for a morality beyond God).
It is too easy to make the likes of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche the principal culprits of the modern malaise when, in fact, these thinkers were seeking to deal with what the Germans called ‘the Adam Smith problem’ – the problem of an individualism that was corrosive of social and moral standards and supports. The thinkers being targetted as the architects of the modern malaise were actually attempting to piece back together the meaning and commonality that individualist liberalism had already rent asunder. That the ‘great sundering’, as William Morris called it, didn’t destroy modern civilisation immediately was due to the availability of a moral and social capital built up over time, going back to the Christian Middle Ages. We have been living off borrowed capital and doing nothing to replenish the stock.
Nietzsche gave up the ghost entirely and went in another direction, challenging us to live by pure existential self-creation and self-assertion. My view is that it can’t be done, and that Nietzsche’s descent into madness prefigured society’s similar descent. But, to repeat, the likes of Nietzsche were addressing a problem that pre-dated them and which they were not the authors of. If their solutions are failures, then the problems remain. Hence the route I took in my work on Rational Freedom, from the attempts to establish the free society by a self-authored and universal human reason back to the transcendent source and end of that rationality, sociability, and universality, which is God.
It is in light of an individualist liberalism and disenchanting science – and the practices they entail – that the modern world has been shorn of objective standards of value and methods of evaluation enabling it to decide between distinct subjective preferences. We have become accustomed to the idea that morality is merely a series of value judgements, with each individual choosing the good as s/he sees fit. Many agree with this. It seems to be liberatory. Few saw that, as Nietzsche made clear from the first, that this is a package deal, with the notion of objectivity in both morality and science considered to be mere projections and rationalisations of power. It is only a short step from individuals choosing the good as they see fit to individuals choosing truth the same way – ‘his truth,’ ‘her truth,’ ‘their truth.’ Here we are. Nietzsche didn’t make this view up and invite people to follow, he was stating that this is the world without God, a world of will to power, of projected truth, of self-assertion. We may regret the postmodern turn of the contemporary age – I spent the 1990s contesting it – but restating modernism and reason won’t cut it.
Whether we call it expressivism or emotivism, the meaning is clear – the assertion of an objectively valueless and meaningless universe leaves us bereft of a substantive notion of the good, with the result that the good becomes a matter of personal subjective choice and preference.
I find it interesting that Trueman’s book condemns ‘expressive individualism’ whilst targetting Rousseau, Kant, Marx, and Nietzsche. I criticised the individualism in Rousseau’s own thought, the tendency to subjectivism in Kant, and highlighted the radical individualism in Marx’s own work (something which checks the reading of Marx as advocating a thickly-textured communitarianism or collectivism). But that individualism is something they shared in common with their historical social mileu.
I affirm the existence of moral truth and knowledge as well as scientific. But that means engaging with the issues Nietzsche et al engaged with, rather than making them the authors of them. Identifying them as the architects of this malaise seriously risks missing the target by a very wide mark, ensuring that we continue inexorably on the descent into meaninglessness and incoherence. I engage with the likes of Nietzsche, Rousseau, Heidegger etc because they have a sense of the depth of the modern malaise, and know its origins to lie much further back and much deeper. To be radical means to get to the roots – we need to be radical. I am seeing people who describe themselves as “classical liberals” take aim against continental philosophy, asserting ‘reason’ over ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings.’ This is not being radical at all, this is merely to take a particular political and ideological position that has far more in common with the source of the malaise than its adherents are prepared to recognize.
The real architects of the modern malaise are Hobbes’ purposeless materialism, Locke’s tabula rasa, and Hume’s absolute nihilistic atomism – the English tradition of liberalism, in other words. Somewhere along the line, an anchoring in material reality – socio-economic as well as natural – has come to be supplanted by a cultural self-creation, a mixing of Marx with postmodernism that would have been anathema to Marx himself. I acknowledge that Marx, in analysing estrangement in social and political terms, completely misreads the most fundamental estrangement of all, which is the self-estrangement of the person from God.12
But my view is that many conservatives are in fact classical liberals; rather than offering a coherent response to the contemporary malaise, they are actually a key contributory part of it. There is a danger of reducing this complex issue to a war on ‘woke,’ reimagining this as a continuation of the old war of Right vs Left. This is a profound misreading, and credits ‘woke’ with far more significance than it actually has. Woke is destructive, certainly, and is to be resisted. But it is a rather stupid, high-intensity, expression of a much deeper malaise.
My view is far more nuanced. On God, I note how many of those claiming to be conservatives fighting ‘woke’ are either atheists or merely express an antipathy to religion. They are as indifferent to God and religion as they are to any objective morality and substantive good. They reserve to themselves the right to choose the good as they see fit. (That’s not the case with respect to Carl Trueman). Such people are really heirs to the 18C Enlightenment, the true source of the contemporary malaise. We often hear the quote that the revolution eats its own children. This is precisely what is happening here. Except that the revolutionaries here are not the Leftist thinkers being targeted (and Kant and Nietzsche were not Left, either), but the classical liberals who freed the individual from authoritative structures and moral and communal constraints, permitting them to choose the good as they see fit. Now that they are seeing how far that ethos of self-authorship can go in destroying moral and social order and civility, they are seeking to call a halt.
It is interesting to note in this respect what Patrick Deneen – author of Why Liberalism Failed – says here with respect to Douglas Murray’s book The War against the West:
‘Murray’s book is a typical conservative liberal’s litany of grievances against the rise of identity politics, albeit limited almost exclusively to its expression through racial “wokeness.” Wholly ignoring, for instance, even more prevalent advances of identity politics in the sexual domain, the author laments a revolution that was inaugurated by liberalism itself, and that he believes can be arrested at the point he prefers …. He wants to preserve the revolutionary fruits he enjoys up to a point, beyond which he exclaims, “No further!” Murray’s is thus a book that obfuscates both the nature of the West and of the war that is afoot. It is more a work of liberal-regime propaganda than the ambitious examination promised by the title.’
Murray may be right that there is a war being waged against the West, but the remarkable thing is how little he says about this ‘West’ in terms of its Judaeo-Christian origins and notions of objective moral truth. The book is the expression of an individualist liberalism at bay and unable to defend itself with substantive notions of the good. The reason for this is that liberalism long ago shed its metaphysical assumptions and supports and became an overtly political doctrine, proceeding by self-authorship and self-assertion. Now that we are finding that not everyone agrees on cherished liberal values, and that many are opposed, liberals are concerned at how defenceless they seem to be – they lack the wit and the will to mount a collective defence of liberal values precisely because the substantive ground underpinning these values has disappeared. It is worth noting the complete fatuity of notions of ‘ironic liberalism,’ the idea that whilst we recognise that the most cherished values of liberalism are lacking in foundations, we carry on as if they were founded on something real. It won’t work, it is an act of bad faith that eats away at the moral consciousness. The people who reason in this way lack the confidence of their beliefs.
Trueman’s book doesn’t ignore the advances of identity politics in the sexual domain, of course. But what concern’s me is the way that it focuses on continental theorists identified as leftists whilst leaving the classic liberals of the English speaking world unexamined and uncriticised. (I see the author has written other books on expressive individualism and the rise of the modern self, so I suspect he has covered the ground on Hobbes, Locke, Hume in other work.)
Earlier I referred to what German thinkers and philosophers described as ‘the Adam Smith problem,’ the problem of an unmoored individualism that threatened to unravel social bonds and subvert common morality. This identification is entirely unfair to Smith, who was a moral philosopher before he was an economist, and who was also a political economist who took questions of public order, civility and morality very seriously indeed.
I write on this misunderstanding of Smith here13
When Thomas Hobbes reduced politics to a concern to expand power over against rivals, when John Locke discarded essence and innate potentiality in favour of the blank sheet of individual self-creation, and when David Hume reduced value to the serving of immediate impulse, the doors were opened to the nihilism that now threatens to engulf the modern world. The wise words of Lewis Mumford need to be carefully parsed given the tendencies of people on the Right in politics to locate the problem in a leftism that has its roots in the French Revolution:
‘It was not in the bloody operations of the guillotine in 1793 that the forces of revolution and disintegration showed themselves most clearly; for behind the Reign of Terror were centuries of human anguish, the sense of old wrongs and new promises; impulses that took shape in a demand for justice as well as in a demand for revenge: indeed, even the punishment rested upon social premises, however brutally these showed themselves. No: it is in the apparently innocent lucubrations of David Hume that the real Reign of Terror began: the beginnings of a nihilism that has reached its full development only in our own times. In his 'Enquiry on Human Understanding' the assault upon historic filiations and human reason reached a pitch of cool destructiveness. Hume used the technical processes of reason to sap its very foundations. He was far more radical in his attack than Rousseau, far more devastating than d'Holbach or La Mettrie.
This is spot-on. Rousseau is frequently targeted for the reason he is so easily misinterpreted and caricatured as a ‘philosopher of feeling’ extolling the virtues of the ‘noble savage’ and arguing that we go back to nature. This is a profound misreading.
Rousseau was supremely logical as a thinker, but also placed the emphasis on the mores and customs of the patrie. Rousseau argued not for the modern centralised nation state, but for the humanly-scaled city republic like his home town of Geneva. He was a philosopher who rightly understood human beings to be reasoning, sensing, feeling, and intuiting beings at once. Far from arguing that human beings go ‘back to nature,’ Rousseau argued that humanity progress to the realisation of their healthy natures through the establishment of a civic freedom. He was a far greater influence on the US Founding Fathers than many know or are prepared to acknowledge. Most of all, Rousseau was far more of a conservative than his critics know, as big a critic of the geometrical method in politics as was Burke (see David Cameron’s book from 1973 on this, The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke A Comparative Study.)
No. If you want to get a true angle on the modern malaise, don’t blame Rousseau. Rousseau was concerned to identify, check, and uproot the very problems of diremption that now threaten to engulf us, locating them in the ascendant bourgeois society of his day. There is the revolution that is now eating its own. Rousseau was very much a man out of his times, in and against his times, an ancient among the moderns, as he called himself, swimming against the moral and intellectual tide.
If you want to understand the nature of the contemporary malaise, I would suggest that you pay closer attention to Hume, a man whose scepticism is the real source of postmodernism’s denial of reality and objective standards of truth and morality. In the 1990s, the old socialist Left was beaten not just in the political field but in the intellectual field, with a wave of post-structuralist and postmodernist thinkers asserting the new dogma of ‘no necessary relation’ – all was accident and chance, mere cultural creation unrelated to the actualisation of potentials and inner lines of development. This, as I have argued in several places, runs directly contrary to Marx’s view and is in direct line of descent from Hume.14
Lewis Mumford continues:
Hume's essential doctrine was the autonomy of raw human impulse and the absolutism of raw sensation. In analyzing cause and effect, he broke down the rational connection between human events to a bald sequence of abstract sensations in time. That, however, was a mere refinement of Locke's analysis of sensations as the building-stones of "ideas," and in terms of isolated sense experience Hume's description was the most accurate report possible of the operation of one agent upon another. But Hume went much further. A passion, for him, was an original existence: it did not derive from any sense impression or copy any other existence: impulses were primordial in a fashion that was not true for any response to the outer world.
Lewis Mumford, (1944) Interpretations and Forecasts ch 16 p 11
I argue the view that the world at present is witnessing a bastardized merging of Locke’s tabula rasa / blank sheet (denial of innateness and essentiality) and a Socio-cultural Darwinism levelled on the group via Hume’s sceptical destruction of the realism of necessary relations and innate potentials.
In For Transcendent Standards and a Substantive Ethic of the Good (2020),15 I describe this phenomenon as the merging of a liberal Lockean blank sheet individualism with a Darwinian collectivism (at group level, rather than species level) to produce a toxic and anti-social combination of libertarianism and authoritarianism. Instead of a genuine mediation of the individual and the socio-relational to unify the two aspects of human nature, the social dimension that is missing in liberalism comes to be supplied by an exclusive group identity to produce a sectional fracturing so deep and wide as to be beyond recall by the endless empty verbiage of ‘intersectionality.’ I have no time at all for this kind of thinking. Let’s break society apart and then claim that we have the means to put it all back together. This is a social and political cretinism born of the narcissism of lesser differences. I would prefer not to waste my energies engaging with it, but it profits us nothing – it is the manifestation of a deeper problem that I would prefer to be engaging directly with. There is nothing to be gained wasting our time and energy in the shadows and the shallows.
The result is not so much a post-modernism as a hyper-modernism in which the self-creating activities constitutive of a transgressive capitalist modernity come to be extended and intensified in the form of a full-blown social and cultural constructivism. Identities come to be conceived not as the realisation of healthy innate potentialities, as in the essentialist conception, but as self-constructions which inflate to infinity without endpoint. Seen in this light, the contemporary obsession with identity can be explained by the fact that this is the ultimate space in which the individual self-realisation implicit in the original Lockean project can take place. Unbounded by social reality and human nature, that self-realisation is a fantasy, and a destructive one to boot, in that it entails a drive to infinity in the context of finite resources.
Part of the current wave of activism and ‘movementism’ has to do with the decline of traditional religion. G.K. Chesterton famously said that “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Not everyone becomes a believer in new gods and a follower in new cults. Many fall into an apathy and indifference which engenders the psychic and social climate for ‘anything goes.’
Defenders of the Enlightenment optimistically hold the view that human beings will come to abandon belief and faith – identified with superstition and ignorance (religion) - and opt instead to use their reason alone in apprehending sense experience. This is a remarkably thin conception of reason that either ignores or more often than not dismisses a crucial part of what it is to be human. Human beings are meaning seeking creatures possessed with a cosmic longing for meaning. Regret and condemn the fact all you like, you may as well lament the fact that human beings have to live, breathe, and die. The view also ignores history. Those who continue to argue this thesis seem to think that we are still in the Eighteenth Century and contesting feudal authorities. Humanity has long since ‘graduated’ from the state of innocence and taken morality out of the hands of God and into its own hands. The corollary of this is that liberals, progressives, humanists et al are no longer the plucky outsiders advancing the revolution from the margins but form the dominant culture. That they have been the dominant political, intellectual, and cultural force for a long time now means that the problems of the age, the problems they purport to contest, are self-authored. The challenge for conservatives now is to ensure that the authors are made to own the problems they have created. My concern is that by locating the source of the malaise in the cultural Left, liberalism in its wider dimensions escapes scrutiny, giving ‘classical liberals’ a new lease of life in the socio-economic sphere. This is not only a threat to socialism, it is positively subversive of conservatism and of civilised order.
We are witnessing the search for meaning and belonging in an age that has undermined the key supports of these things.
Human beings have a fundamental need for meaning through the transcendental. The human species is the only species that has knowledge of its own death. Human beings alone among creatures have a sense of finitude with respect to their lives, which creates a profound need for meaning and the transcendental, something which brings the sense of living one’s life to some worthwhile purpose. ‘Life’ alone is not enough, since human beings need to know that their existence has a meaning. ‘Life’ reduces to a survival that, one day, will come to an end. The recognition of that finitude is not enough. It was Plato who said that the only place that you will find equality is the cemetery. Human beings need more than this levelling to ultimate futility and meaninglessness; they need to get some sort of meaning out of their lives. In the past, before “the death of God,” traditional religion brought that sense of meaning and significance. It is this that makes Nietzsche such an important figure. He thought religion a lost cause. Once science has penetrated and dissolved the aura of meaning and mystery around God, it cannot be put back. Faith is not an engineering project. Social engineers may be able to identify the functions of religion in producing the confidence and coherence that are crucial to a viable social order, but they cannot create those functions as a matter of design. Faith is something that is inner, something voluntary. We are living in an age in which a disenchanting science holds that we live in an objectively purposeless, meaningless, and valueless universe, removing the foundations of traditional religion, thus leaving human beings spiritually homeless as meaning seeking creatures. The age of human self-creation risks ending in human beings becoming the orphans of their own creations, mere appendages of a technology that is subject to imperatives of its own cares nothing for humanity.
Human beings continue to search for the transcendental. This search expresses the need for meaning and for belonging. Human beings need to see that their lives are lived to some purpose, and they need that purpose to be affirmed by others. Even in the absence of God, human beings still feel the profound need to commit their lives to something meaningful, something that is in tune with some kind of meaningful, even heroic, vision of themselves and their lives. In a secular society that has discarded God, people have embraced environmentalism as a substitute religion. I have been reading Viktor Frankl, a Jewish neurologist and psychologist who survived the concentration camps, but lost his entire family to them. He writes of man’s search for meaning, the unconscious God, and the unheard cry for meaning. Whilst I oppose its most divisive and pernicious aspects, I don’t dismiss the concerns of ‘woke.’ More positively, I look upon the issues raised in terms of an attempt to redeem the broken promises of liberal modernity and mend the broken communities that have grown in its wake. The unheard cry for meaning and belonging is now being heard. That cry may often be misguided, and it may often be malicious – but the fact is that there is an emptiness and a soullessness to the purposeless materialism of the modern world, and people are crying out for community. Rather than dismiss the cries, it is more positive to lend a hand and offer guidance in the creation of that community, identifying the conditions of reconnection and communion. That is the direction I take in my forthcoming Dante book, Dante’s Politics of Love.
It is interesting to note how seamlessly contemporary environmentalism maps onto Christian theology. The Garden of Eden is the world before industrialisation. The Industrial Revolution is the Social Fall. We have sin and evil in the form of fossil fuels, Co2, and carboniferous capitalism. We also have the saints, the priesthood, and the Church in the shape of the scientists and the IPCC and other such bodies. For theology, we have ‘the science.’ We also have the old medieval indulgencies in new form, with the elect being permitted to fly the world in private jets, to lecture us on the need for ecological austerity, their sins washed away by a combination of the right incantations and monetary gifts to the right authorities.
At the centre of it all is the ‘End of Days,’ the apocalypse, when the old world will be washed away and the world will begin anew. It is very strange to note that as the world has continued to demonstrate substantial material improvement in living conditions, the number of apocalyptic movies has grown steadily every decade since the 1950s, with the exception of the 1990s. Human beings are healthier, wealthier, longer lived and better educated than ever before, and this even as the world population has risen. Poverty has diminished markedly around the world. There has never been a better time to be alive. And yet political activism is dominated by fears and concerns that the world is about to end and that there is no future. In condemning the diremption of liberal modernity, it is worth pondering the improved human condition. There is a paradox here: the expansion of material means has brought a quantitative improvement but also a diminution of meaning at the qualitative level. How to attain one without losing the other is the challenge.
This brings me back to Viktor Frankl. Frankl criticised the concern with equilibrium or harmony as a political end. Human life, he argued, ought to have tension. Human beings need a certain tension in their lives, to draw them out of apathy and indifference, to stave off moral laxity and laziness. He further argued that when human beings lacked tension in their lives, they will go out and find it or invent it. In light of this, I would suggest that the cries incited by fear of the future in contemporary politics really express a cry for meaning that has come to be badly deflected as a result of a godless and purposeless materialism. (The Hobbesian view). Critics condemn ‘woke’ and environmentalism as ‘new religions.’ This is not only superficial, it badly misses the deeper points at issue, effectively returning us to a restatement of the Enlightenment reason and natural – individual – reasonableness that plunged us into this mess in the first place. They talk as if religion as such were a bad thing. The problem is with a bad religiosity, a religion without mercy and forgiveness and redemption. The critics are happy to consign religion as such to the past as just so much superstition. In other words, critics object to the cannibalisation that comes at the end of the process, but fail to see that the problem lies with the revolution that was launched in the first place. It is a statement of permanent innocence in denial of experience. I would look beyond the fear and division and the deliberate creation of tension to seek out the unheard cry of meaning behind the political noise. People need meaning, and they need a sense of belonging.
In sum, I would be cautious of a supposed conservatism that merely returns us to the individualism of classical liberalism, giving us a familiar litany of grievances and blaming one and all for crises that are, ultimately, self-authored - lamenting a revolution that was inaugurated by ‘classical liberalism,’ which they believe can be arrested by that liberalism. This is reactionary and hopeless and ensures a continuation of the descent into incoherence. If you think that “woke” is a calamity, then there is a need to diagnose its origins properly.
Beware that stripe of conservative who is really a classical liberal who believes that the revolution can be halted at the preferred moment in history, still godless beyond the all-important deified ‘I.’ This ‘supposed conservatism’ is no conservatism but, at best, a classical liberalism with the old metaphysical assumptions preserved but, in the main, without those comprehensive commitments, leaving only the self-choosing, self-possessing individual. By metaphysical assumptions I refer to notions of common ground and common good, God and religion.
That is not conservatism at all, but liberalism. Liberty, they say, when they mean licence. A libertarianism masquerading as conservatism is in large part responsible for the current state of social unravelling, cultural decline, and moral degeneration. If individuals are ‘free to choose’ in the economic market, then why not everywhere else? Individuals are separated from traditions, communities, and social centres of loyalty, commitment, and solidarity, society is uprooted and atomised, the world becomes a moral and cultural marketplace.
Notes
10. Aquinas, Morality and Modernity. The Search for the Natural Moral Law and the Common Good (2013)
11. A Home and a Resting Place Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience (2018)
12. A Home and a Resting Place Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience (2018)
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