Mythos and Logos - The Delusions of Rationalizing the Non-Rational

MYTHOS AND LOGOS - THE DELUSIONS OF RATIONALIZING THE NON-RATIONAL.

"I've always preferred mythology over history because history is made up of truths that fit along lies, while mythology is made up of lies that fit along truths."

- Jean Cocteau

Or

"history is made of truths which in the long run become lies, whereas mythology is made of lies which in the long run become truths."

These quotes made me think. They reminded me of Aristotle, who said something to the effect that poetry is more truthful than history (or the history as it was practised in his day, as the dry collection of facts without any pretensions at linking events to reveal a coherent and meaningful pattern). I like history because it does expose the lies behind the narratives, even and especially the narratives of those who make a big thing of history as being a collection of constructed lies (the deconstructors of the past tend also to be construction workers of the present). We need mythos and logos together. When logos attempts to go it alone, we end up with the worst form of mythos, lies under a political form. Our new 'mythos' is that of the machine, the edict that we should pursue the 'things' (and people) of this world "rationally" by way of empirical, logical, analytical, objective, and mechanical means. That's our 'metaphysics,' our standpoint, from which our intent and motivation arises. This has consequences.

“A utilitarian civilization will always go on to its logical conclusion—forced labor camps.” —Romain Gary “Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life.” —Gregory Bateson

Life ceases to be sacred but is thoroughly secularised and instrumentalised, with the means being elevated to the status of ends in themselves, an expansion of means that results in a dimunition of meaning. There is no longer any such thing as the transcendent, still less the divine. The anima mundi is supplanted by the machina mundi, the soul of the world by a soulless world machine. Those still in tune with mythos are still in touch with the original participation in a meaningful and purposeful universe, and have not been entirely swallowed up in the estrangement that has accompanied the greater abstraction of thought that has accompanied a civilisation that lives at ever greater remove from the biological and ecological and spiritual matrix: such people may well still seek communion with an unseen supernatural reality – the greatest heresy in an age in which all reality reduces to a calculating reason which insists on measuring the immeasurable, and deeming all of no account until it is calculated and quantified. We live in the world of Thomas Hobbes: "REASON . . . is nothing but reckoning, that is adding and subtracting." The split between mythos and logos entails a split between revelation, intuition, insight, and imagination and logic and fact, opposing to one another two aspects of living that properly belong together. Neither can govern alone, and when they seek to go it alone insanity and (self-) destruction is the result. That's where we are today. We live in a world of distractors, dividers, and detractors. The terms used to describe the only legitimate form of knowledge in this world are revealing: objectivist, positivist, and reductionist. The participatory universe is supplanted by the idea of a nature that is a remote external object to be observed, measured, and manipulated as something entirely distinct from feelings. Objectivity and subjectivity are torn asunder and set in antagonistic relation. The imperative to manage and manipulate 'things' extends naturally into the socio-political world as an attempt to rule human beings by remote control – from above and from without by the new church of Reason. The positivist forswears all forms of intuition, imagination, introspection, and speculation and takes the world as an objective datum, a phenomenological given in which the real is limited to only those things that can be measured or metered, all else dismissed as unreal or epiphenomenal (disbelieved, because this is a new religion, A Science as a new church, as against science itself). The crime is not naturalism – we are nature – but reductionism which deconstructs perceived reality into ever smaller parts which, when measured, purports to explain the whole. With such measurement comes quantification, commodification, manipulation, control. And destruction and despiritualiation, disenchantment as a demagification or dis-godding. As a result, human beings are removed from nature and is therefore free to pursue knowledge with a dispassionate rigor which extirminates feelings and intuition, all things that cannot be quantified. All those intangible human qualities that we understand, access, and value by way of heart and soul, and all those natural properties we understand by the word 'alive' have no legitimate place in the new way of knowing. The current ways of resolving the converging crises that are upon us are actually intensifying the problem, for the reason too few people realize that, beyond faulty social relations and economic systems, the deeper problem is one of a bad and bogus metaphysics. A major – and maybe the major – task of the age must be to redress the radical imbalance in modern civilisation between 'hard' knowledge/power and 'soft' culture. Which is to say that a civilisation raised on instrumental reason (and generating instrumental relations between self-interested individuals) has not simply exalted fact, as the only true knowledge, over value, as mere subjective preference, enlarging means to the status of ends, dispensing with true ends, but has exalted the preoccupations of the rational-logical left brain over those of the artistic-intuitive right brain. Drawing on Pascal, himself a scientist and mathematician of repute, we can say that civilisation is confronted by the deleterious consequences of overemphasizing the "rationality" which has its neurological seat in the left brain to the exclusion of the "reasons of the heart" that rest in the right brain.

‘The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is but feeble if it does not see so far as to know this.’

Blaise Pascal, Pensees, Section IV: Of the Means of Belief, 267

Pascal held reason in the highest regard, as do I. My work is organised around the guiding concept of 'rational freedom,' seeking to establish the moral, psychic, social and institutional conditions for establishing the connection between reason and freedom. 'Reason has always existed,' wrote Karl Marx in 1843, 'but not always in reasonable form.' I'm interested in determining the nature of these reasonable forms in our social, moral, cultural, and institutional lives. Reason is the foundation of our freedom and happiness, which are forever threatened by the forces unreason. But the choice is not one between reason and unreason, still less rationalism and irrationalism. On the contrary, in denying the legitimate claims of those things which lie outside the province of reason, an arid rationalism generates its converse irrationalism (or, as in the ideological war of all against all, the heresy of fideism). Reason would take a truly reasonable form should it respect and preserve space for the non-rational or arational. To understand precisely what reason can do, the extent of its power in creating and sustaining the free and happy life, there is a need to know what reason cannot do and ought not attempt to do. The problems stem from the insistence on the part of some rationalists to extend reason into areas where it has no remit. When reason encroaches on the space of the non-rational and arational, an irrationalism that disturbs the peace and undermines freedom and happiness is inevitable.

As Pascal understood, there is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason. Which is to say that there is a world, an anarchic surplus that is core, that will forever escape a totalising reason's attempt at enclosure. That modern rationalists have been guilty of attempting such enclosure should come as no surprise given the age's origins in colonisation and expropriation, first internal, then external, from the local to the global, finally incarcerating the psyche itself in a 'steel-hard cage.'

William Blake knew it all along – his 'dark satanic mills' were not, strictly speaking, the mills and factories of the early industrial revolution, accompanied by the destruction of nature and human relations to nature and to fellow humans. Blake's 'dark satanic mills' refer to something deeper, to a prior mechanism of the mind, Urizen as a physically and spiritually repressive Reason premised on a quantified reality, an abstraction from nature which prepares the psychic and intellectual ground for the industrialisation which followed. Blake saw the mills and factories of the period as a mechanism which would come to encompass one and all, things and people alike in one big thingification. A disenchanting science left nature dead and 'man' an orphan, having to go it alone, in time becoming an orphan of his own technology - self-made man and his undoing:

“And all the Arts of Life they changed into the Arts of Death in Albion.” (William Blake, Jerusalem Chapter 3).

Blake concerned himself with questions went beyond sense experience to address Eternity, God, Creation, Infinity, Heaven and Hell. He was an Artist in the most expansive sense of the word, deeply intuitive, seeing everything in abstract but interconnected ways. He challenged the key architects of the age, Newton and those subscribing to the new scientific reason.

“Now I a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me

Tis fourfold in my supreme delight

And three fold in soft Beulahs night

And twofold Always. May God us keep

From Single vision & Newtons sleep”

William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butt, 22 November 1802. Quoted in Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Letters of William Blake (1956)

“Art is the tree of life,” Blake objected, “science is the tree of death.”

Blake's target is the linear-thinking, left-brained science of the age, obsessed with enclosing the world in a scientific reason at the expense of all else. If science could feasibly explain everything that was capable of rational explanation, dismissing all that was left over as meaningless, science was not and couldn not ever be everything. Blake thought the physical world to be just one part of our existence, however essential, and that to value reason at the expense of the arts, the humanities, the imagination, the emotions, and the spirit was not merely foolish and shortsighted but ultimately destructive.

“A truth that’s told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent.” (William Blake, Auguries of Innocence).

The origin of 'intent' here is the disguised, surrogate, bogus metaphysics of an age that prides itself as a destroyer of metaphysics. Behind the rational intentions of Enlightenment epistemologists lurk inverted, even perverted, tendencies of mind, megalomaniacs intent on dominating a nature stripped of meaning and value violently, totally, and absolutely, with the aim of "effecting all things possible” (Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, which envisions a transhumanist utopia governed by a scientific priesthood). The road to Hell is paved with good inventions. Which is to say that the concern to build Heaven on Earth by way of our own powers - and our own values - may well have been motivated by good intentions at the surface level, whilst also being predicated on an increasing abstraction from and domination of nature, not least our own nature.

The 'progress' entailed by such a civilization entails living at an ever greater remove from our ecological matrix, a matrix that is as spiritual as it is natural, an increasing movement away from the immediacy of participatory perception within a largely organic environment towards an abstract mode of perception within a predominantly self-created and artificial environment, involving living by self-created gods and values. Each lives by their own god, each their own non-negotiable truth. The result is not merely incoherence but the ideological 'war of all against all,' a mutual cancellation by way of an endless and unwinnable war.

Primal 'man' participates in nature with such an immediacy that reality blazes with intrinsic worth and meaning. The sacred is neither invented in these terms, and hence cannot be reinvented. Once human beings become self-consciously aware of their authorship, the sacred loses its enveloping aura and mystery and ceases to be an object of reverence. The sacred has to be something that inheres in reality, as in the term ‘inherent worth.’ The word ‘worth’ here derives from old English ‘woerthership,’ the origin of worship. When affirming the ‘inherent worth’ of nature and the beings and bodies it comprises, we are effectively making a declaration with respect to the things we worship, the things we consider worthy of consideration. Putting the point that way begs the question of which gods we worship and serve? If we worship and serve only the gods - or goods and values - we have created, then we basically worship and serve ourselves, and hence curve in ourselves. The Latin term Incurvatus in se, coined by St Augustine, means to be turned or curved inwards on oneself, enclosing and imprisoning being in the discrete self, instead of expanding being outward toward others or toward God (or nature). When individuals become turned in upon themselves they begin to use environing things as others for their own gratification and validation. As Marx argued, in a competitive market society, each individual "acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers."

Thomas Hobbes' 'war of all against all' was a false description of the state of nature which he turned into a prescription for a capitalist anti-society held together only by an external and authoritarian state mechanism, the Leviathan. Society was stripped of its self-regulating communal properties, politics of its moral qualities.

Such a politics and society issues from an epistemology - theory of knowledge - that exalts reason in the form of a purely instrumental rationality, one that Gregory Bateson declares to be "necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life." Such a calculating rationality precludes imagination, emotion, intuition, and a moral, prudential, awareness of the appropriate regimen for the human good. This pathogenic epistemology is the metaphysics of an age that thinks it has ended metaphysics; whilst destructive of nature within and without, it serves as the perfect instrument for the will to power and domination driving modern civilization. Those who think science and technology will be our saviour are caught in the progress trap, seeking remedial action in the very forces implicated in the crises to be resolved. We will not get out of a self-created Hell by the same means that plunged us into it, albeit with the intent of creating Heaven on Earth.

When the old gods withdraw, the empty thrones cry out for a successor.

—E. R. Dodds

Except that the old gods didn't withdraw, they were ejected and killed.

Which gods, then, do we worship and serve? Are there any gods other than self-created ones? If not, why should anyone be expected to follow any gods but their own? The problem of modernity is not that it cannot generate values and goods and moralities but that, without an overarching and authoritative moral framework, grounded in an objective morality, it cannot supply good reasons for anyone beyond those personally and existentially committed to adhere to them. "We make our destinies by our choice of gods," wrote Virgil, but those choices impact on us as unavoidable, tragic, fate rather than freedom in a world in which means have become enlarged so as to displace true ends. We are in the grip of our own powers in alien form, a world in which ungovernable power supplants our ends with imperatives. We live in a civilisation that employs powerful means in pursuit of ultimately destructive, megalomaniacal ends, in the grip of a rationality that has turned irrational for want of true ends.

We are, in other words, beyond the remit of a disenchanting science. The term ‘disenchantment,’ coming from Schiller and Weber, in the German referred to a ‘demagification,’ a ‘dis-godding’ and devaluation. Re-enchantment is a revaluation of the more-than-physical properties of nature and all it contains. Life thus comes to be directly perceived to be vital and sacred, burning as brightly as Blake's tigers in the forests of the night:

“Tyger, tyger, burning bright/in the forests of the night/what immortal hand or eye/could frame thy fearful symmetry.” (Blake, From Songs of Experience).

The myths of primal man are thus ancillary, providing additional help and support to what the senses in a participatory mode of being reveal directly, immediately, and continuously — to whit, we are all interconnected within a ceaselessly creative universe and hence able

To see a World in a Grain of Sand.

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.

And Eternity in an hour.

- Blake, Auguries of Innocence

The problem is not science but Science, that is, a Science that seeks to encompass the whole of reality into itself (like a new church of Reason), bringing about the end of the mythos altogether. Such a (disenchanting) rationality advances a conception of knowledge which is not only incompatible with but antagonistic to the mythic mode of understanding which is concerned with meaning. To 'scientism' there is no knowledge outside of that which can be measured, quantified, and calculated, and no meaning either way. This abstraction from an increasingly disenchanted and de-animated nature ultimately destroys the cosmic connection once provided by myth, with destructive consequences we can see all around us today. It is frustrating seeing so many trying to address these consequences with the very instrumental mentalities and modalities that generated the converging crises we face in the first place. "Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation” (Joseph Campbell). You don't have to accept the metaphysical reality of myth — and those who think empiricism is the only basis for knowledge never will and never could. But its metaphysical function is clear, and its denial as a result of supplanting metaphysics and ontology with epistemology is nothing short of disastrous. “Science” (that is, the “big” disenchanting Science, scientism, as distinct from science as a healthy reality-check, the Science that has taken the place of religion) has destroyed the meaning attendant upon myth (and as expressed in the various religions that emerged from the mythopoetic mode of understanding the world). Such “Science,” however, can neither satisfy the cosmic longing for meaning on the part of human beings, nor abolish the need for human beings to make sense of their world, nor provide satisfactory answers to the suffering which is the inevitable accompaniment of the ultimate finitude of human life.

Jonathan Sacks writes well here:

"But faith does not operate by the logic of the left brain and the law of the excluded middle. It feels both sides of the contradic­tion. God exists and evil exists. The more powerfully I feel the existence of God, the more strongly I protest the existence of evil. That is why in the Abrahamic faith it is the giants of faith, not the sceptics or cynics, who cry aloud, as Moses and Jeremiah and Habakkuk cried aloud, with a cry that echoes through the ages. That is why Job refuses to be comforted and why he would not let go of God.

There is a difference between a contradiction and a cry.

You can solve a contradiction by sitting quietly in a room, thinking, using conceptual ingenuity, reframing. Philosophy, said Wittgenstein, leaves the world unchanged. But faith does not leave the world unchanged. You cannot solve a cry by thinking. Moses, weeping for his people, is not consoled by Leibniz's admittedly brilliant proof that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Theodicy, the attempt to vindicate God's justice in a world of evil, is compelling evidence that in the translation of Abrahamic spirituality into the language of Plato and Aristotle, something is lost. What is lost is the cry."

Sacks The Great Partnership ch 12

However brilliant the philosophy, it won't wipe away a tear, still less deliver a world in which all tears shall be wiped away. If you want such a thing, you will need to look elsewhere.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was claimed by the Logical Positivists, not unreasonably. But by pushing the hyperrationalistic doctrines of logical positivism to their bitter and barren and meaningless end, Wittgenstein showed the severe limitations of a Logos severed from Mythos. As he wrote his Tractatus: "We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched." I take Wittgenstein to be pointing towards an anarchic excess or surplus that forever escapes enclosure by a totalising Reason, scientific, religious or otherwise. Science, religion, and philosophy approach the same reality from different directions with different intent and motivation, but even when ranged end-to-end are just our finite little fingers pointing at the infinite moon, sun, and stars. Beyond a supposedly totalising reason, then, lies Wittgenstein's vast realm of "silence" "whereof we cannot speak," a realm that consists of everything that is of the greatest importance to human beings in search of a meaningful life.

The mechanistic epistemology that enabled “Science” to conquer and colonise a nature emptied of objective value, purpose, and meaning – Weber's 'disenchantment' as a dis-godding, a de-magification – was also inimical to the symbolic and psychic processes by which human beings have constructed emotional meaning of such a quality as to support a sense of belonging, a sense of being at home. If rational explanation satisfies the human intellect more than the myths it destroyed, that intellect was increasingly one abstracted from our originary and primary commonwealth of Earth. And the gains obtained at the level of the disembodied mind were bought at the price of deep wounds to the ecology of the human heart, with human beings being shorn of having any way of accessing, understanding, and communicating the mysteries of being.

An orgy of metaphysical carnage has left the world without coherence, leaving us feeling as though we are on a destinationless voyage forever suspended over an abyss of meaninglessness and purposelessness.

E.F. Schumacher was right: metaphysical reconstruction is the key to resolving the potentially catastrophic crises of this age, and that entails much, more more than constructing a science-based narrative to live by. Science needs metaphysics to even be possible in the first place.

We need communities in which the virtues can be known, accessed, acquired, learned, and exercised. The moral life is something that can only be sustained in a community. It cannot be done by self-choosing individuals alone. The atheist John Stuart Mill, who never had a religion to lose, understood this point very well indeed. He expresses what society stands to lose with Nietzsche's 'death of God' (which is to say, the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework):

Whenever and in proportion as the strictness of the restraining discipline was relaxed, the natural tendency of mankind to anarchy reasserted itself; the state became disorganized from within; mutual conflict for selfish ends neutralized the energies which were required to keep up the contest against natural causes of evil; and the nation, after a longer or briefer interval of progressive decline, became either the slave of a despotism or the prey of a foreign invader.

- John Stuart Mill, On the Logic of the Moral Sciences, 1965

Bertrand Russell wrote that the greatest civilisations come eventually to lose their 'traditional moral restraints.' Individuals attaining a degree of material comfort and autonomy feel confident and assertive enough to take their affairs in their own hands and determine the good as they see fit, placing faith in themselves and their own choices rather than in the ideas that sustained the traditional restraints. Writing of Renaissance Italy, Russell cautions that 'the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilized than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion.' (Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, p. 19).

This warning of internal incoherence and fragmentation making societies pray to external domination takes new form in Marx's sense of the human creators coming to be governed by their own creations in alien form. Marx writes of the 'private individual' who 'regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.' (Marx, On the Jewish Question). Separated from and set in opposition to one another as rivals for scarce resources, human beings confined within instrumental relations become prey to their own powers in external form of institutional and systemic force. The autonomy-impairing and autonomy-denying force of such estrangement throws the complacent assumptions of liberal philosophy in sharp relief. The idea that humanity as a whole could come to take morality and control over its affairs into its own hands is a mystifying abstraction, not least when said 'humanity' is fractured into no more than an assemblage of discrete, self-choosing individuals, each pursuing subjective preferences with respect to the good. Power can only be obtained and exercised in concrete social situations and, as such, is either a power exercised with others or over others – the latter has been the dominant social relationship in history. As C. S. Lewis argued in The Abolition of Man: "What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument."

Man's conquest of nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on man's side. Each power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows in the triumphal car.

- C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man 1947

A scientific revolution which shought to extend human power over nature engendered its political counterpart in the form of Leviathan, a powerful and power-hungry polity devoid of moral purpose, giving rise to new aristocracies and new forms of domination. Hobbes understood from the first that the power that was about to be unleashed on the world possessed overwhelming force and stood in need of strong restraint. This was his justification for the Leviathan, a veritable state machine which possessed the coercive political means to restrain the passions of individuals who had come to dispense with the traditional restraints of religion, custom, and communuity. The problem is that a politics that comes to be governed on Hobbesian principles is impelled to continuously expand power to such a scale as to be well-nigh impossible to control. Like many great revolutionaries in thought and politics, Hobbes barely glimpsed the consequences of his innovations, underestimating the scale and insatiability of the power he was unleashing. Nor did he anticipate the force of the economic and technological power unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, a power which would prove even less capable of political and moral control. The alien power of which Marx warned has overwhelmed human authority and control in all their forms.

The ideologues of economic, scientific, and technological progress complacently presumed the permanence of a communal, moral, and intellectual stock, upon which further development could continue to draw, without at the same time putting something back in. The presumption of a moral cohesion based on a natural sympathy and enlightened self-interest persists to this day, taking for granted the very thing that is now increasingly in ruins: a strong and united civil society of individuals expressing a consensual devotion to common ends. Presuming the permanent existence of such a unified and integrated order, the philosophers of the liberal order played fast and loose with social bonds and moral commitments, deeming it safe to liberate individuals from the traditional canons of virtue and thereby liberating the power drive. The presumption was that individuals freed from traditional restraints would soon come to reunify and reorder social existence around a new ethic based on what is "natural" to man. A traditional morality, religious or otherwise, would be replaced by a natural sympathy freed from its artificial institutional fetters. To this day, there are people who think themselves radical in arguing the case for individuals being free to choose the good as they see fit, arguing as if the traditional restrains are still firmly in place, repressing natural tendencies for sociability. Such radicals are reactionary to the core, practising liberals who have yet to see the extent to which the facts contradict their faith. We have come to learn that this happy state of affairs is not modernity's endpoint at all: ethical confusion and social incohesion are widespread, whilst conflict between irreconcileable goods is widespread. Natural sympathy is in short supply when individuals are drawn into the endless and unwinnable war between rival self-created, self-chosen gods/goods.

The moderns are therefore in the grip of a paradoxical rationality which, in instrumentalising the world and its relations, pushes essential areas of human life and experience outside of the realm of reason, going so far as to condemn the non-rational or arational as irrational and even unreal. The effect is to expand the realm of that which is deemed irrational. In denying the so-called irrational, it doesn't thereby go away but is driven underground, where it acquires a new power which is all the more dangerous and destructive for being denied and hidden. The return of the repressed is countered by various rationalizations that seek to control the irrational without ever giving it its due. The result is that the modern era generates new gods and superstitions in the form of a secular religiosity which, without mercy and forgiveness, inflicts the worst ills of religion without offering either consolation or redemption. Once rationality destroys notions of objective, inherent goodness, value, meaning, and purpose in the cosmos, there can be no foundation for values that lie outside the individual and subjective preferences, perceptions, and projections. Science assumes a radically value-free position, presenting a view of the world that is so mathematically abstract from experience as to be unrecognisable. It is also so specialised as to offer no basis for a philosophy to live by. Individuals are thus left existentially alone to attempt to construct a worldview that gives their lives intellectual coherence and emotional meaning. Such self-choosing individuals are, in effect, charged with the task of being as gods: it is a challenge that is beyond their all-too-human powers. Tocqueville declared the impossibility of each individual coming to act as his or her own philosopher to "settle his opinions by the sole force of his reason":

There is hardly any human action, however particular it may be, that does not originate in some very general idea men have conceived of the Deity, of his relation to mankind, of the nature of their own souls, and of their duties to their fellow creatures. Nor can anything prevent these ideas from being the common spring from which all the rest emanates.

Men are therefore immeasurably interested in acquiring fixed ideas of God, of the soul, and of their general duties to their Creator and their fellow men; for doubt on these first principles would abandon all their actions to chance and would condemn them in some way to disorder and impotence.

This, then, is the subject on which it is most important for each of us to have fixed ideas; and unhappily it is also the subject on which it is most difficult for each of us, left to himself, to settle his opinions by the sole force of his reason. None but minds singularly free from the ordinary cares of life, minds at once penetrating, subtle, and trained by thinking, can, even with much time and care, sound the depths of these truths that are so necessary. And, indeed, we see that philosophers are themselves almost always surrounded with uncertainties; that at every step the natural light which illuminates their path grows dimmer and less secure, and that, in spite of all their efforts, they have discovered as yet only a few conflicting notions, on which the mind of man has been tossed about for thousands of years without every firmly grasping the truth or finding novelty even in its errors. Studies of this nature are far above the average capacity of men; and, even if the majority of mankind were capable of such pursuits, it is evident that leisure to cultivate them would still be wanting. Fixed ideas about God and human nature are indispensable to the daily practice of men's lives; but the practice of their lives prevents them from acquiring such ideas.”

- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Chapter V

In fine, the attempt to reconstruct the cosmos by way of individual reason is a conceit that is doomed to failure (and worse). Philosophical reason has a tendency to undercut itself. Reason cannot constitute itself own grounds, and a self-legislating reason contradicts itself. The (post) modern world makes it abundantly clear that modern philosophers, thinkers, intellectuals, and scientists —those whom we may consider to be “far above the average capacity" (Tocqueville, Democracy in America) — have singularly failed in the attempt. The only intellectually honest conclusion is the one drawn by Wittgenstein: not only can rationality not provide the meaning we seek, it takes us to the frontiers of a vast "silence" beyond attempts at a purely rational explanation of life.

Confronted with rationality's impotence in face of an objectively meaningless and purposeless universe, many cleaving to reason advance a counsel of despair, seeking to suppress the cosmic longing for meaning and purpose on the part of (still) human beings. They urge us to accept the utter meaningless of life in a world of chance and necessity, and enjoy the freedom that such such cultural nihilism affords within an indifferent nature. Bertrand Russell states the case most eloquently in A Free Man's Worship:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspi­ration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffold­ing of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's salvation henceforth be safely built.

- Bertrand Russell, 'A Free Man's Worship', in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, London, Routledge Classics, 2009, p. 39.

I once admired Bertrand Russell (I cut my philosophical teeth on him), but now see such courage as cowardice. Russell asserts that the soul's salvation can only be 'safely built' on 'the firm foundation of unyielding despair,' which seems to be no foundation at all. Such counsel is rootless, bootless, and fruitless. As Russell, deep down, must have at least suspected. Elsewhere, Russell conceded that 'the age of Epicurus was a weary age, and extinction could appear as a welcome rest from travail of spirit' (Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 1972, p. 258).

'I never understood why it should be considered more coura­geous to despair than to hope,' Jonathan Sacks writes. Sacks rewrites Russell's peroration above in praise of faith:

That man, despite being the product of seemingly blind causes, is not blind; that being in the image of God he is more than an accidental collocation of atoms; that being free, he can rise above his fears, and, with the help of God, create oases of justice and compassion in the wilderness of space and time; that though his life is short he can achieve immortality by his fire and heroism, his intensity of thought and feeling; that humanity too, though it may one day cease to be, can create before night falls a noonday brightness of the human spirit, trusting that, though none of our kind will be here to remember, yet in the mind of God, none of our achievements is forgotten - all these things, if not beyond dispute, have proven themselves time and again in history. We are made great by our faith, small by our lack of it. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding hope, can the soul's salvation be safely built.

Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership, 2011 ch 1

The 'unyielding despair' of which Russell writes has an impossible air of abstraction and remoteness about it, the kind of thing that the leisured and materially comfortable can entertain for themselves as they idle their meaningless lives out. It's not a serious social ethic. As social beings living in mundane reality, 'ordinary' men and women cannot ordinarily bear to live with pain and suffering without either meaning and moral and cultural orientation. Social life seems barely conceivable without some framework of "higher" ideals and values. Nietzsche's elitist and aristocratic anarchism of living "beyond good and evil" is fit only for the 'overman,' one who has overcome the bondage of the human condition and attained a life of free creativity. To have individuals each inventing his or own distinct meaning and morality may promise the freedom of a completely self-authored existence, but assuredly spells the demise of the public life that human beings as social beings need in order to be themselves. The idea of discrete individuals determining their own morality and living in unity is errant nonsense. A mass of atomised individuals is incapable of generating society and morality, only a maelstrom of conflicting and self-cancelling values. In consequence, the 'free individuals' of the modern age caught within a vicious circle: lacking any "traditional" faith or restraint with which to orient their choices and behaviours, they project their inner meaninglessness upon the world; and the world, becoming more fractured and confused in time, reflects that meaninglessness back at them.

Each individual is a variation of an ancient theme, with the modern psyche being moulded by the same life forces that have shaped human beings in all ages. The big difference is that, with the Logos shedding the Mythos in the name of progress, the moderns lack the robust mythological apparatus with which to make sense of these processes. The result is neurosis. Rationalisation is the disease which is also offered as the cure.

The loss of moral and metaphysical coherence and social cohesion has been extreme — an arid rationalism generates nihilism at one pole and fideism at the other, splitting the world between despairing unbelievers and fanatical true believers. Jung lays down the basic law of the human psyche to explain why this is so: “If anything of importance is devalued in our conscious life, and perishes . . . there arises a compensation in the unconscious .. No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.” Hence the return of the repressed, in which the devalorised and denied psychic energy finds some way to return to surface life. In a rationalized society that values only one those aspects of the human experience amenable to reason, an incessant urge for the opposite will arise from within the psyche, taking unhealthy and even dangerous forms. The greater the repression, the more furious its expression by way of return. Vaclav Havel is worth quoting at length on this:

The civilization of the new age has robbed old myths of their authority. It has put its full weight behind cold, descriptive Cartesian reason and recognizes only thinking in concepts.

I am unwilling to believe that this whole civilization is no more than a blind alley of history and a fatal error of the human spirit. More probably it represents a necessary phase that man and humanity must go through, one that man—if he survives—will ultimately, and on some higher level (unthinkable, of course, without the present phase), transcend.

Whatever the case may be, it is certain that the whole rationalistic bent of the new age, having given up on the authority of myths, has succumbed to a large and dangerous illusion: it believes that no higher and darker powers—which these myths in some ways touched, bore witness to, and whose relative "control" they guaranteed—ever existed, either in the human unconscious or in the mysterious universe. Today, the opinion prevails that everything can be "rationally explained," as they say, by alert reason. Nothing is obscure—and if it is, then we need only cast a ray of scientific light on it and it will cease to be so.

This, of course, is only a grand self-delusion of the modern spirit. For though it make that claim a thousand times, though it deny a thousand times the "averted face" of the world and the human spirit, it can never eliminate that face, but merely push it further into the shadows. At the most, it will drive this entire complex world of hidden things to find surrogate, counterfeit, and increasingly confusing manifestations; it will compel the "order" that myth once brought into this world to vanish along with the myth, and the "forces of the night" to go on acting, chaotically and uncontrollably, shocking man again and again by their, for him, inexplicable presence, which glimmers through the modern shroud that conceals them. But more than that: the good powers—because they were considered irrational as well—were buried along with the dark powers. Olympus was completely abolished, leaving no one to punish evil and drive the evil spirits away. Goodness, being well mannered, has a tendency to treat these grand obsequies seriously and withdraw; evil, on the contrary, senses that its time has come, for people have stopped believing in it altogether.

To this day, we cannot understand how a great, civilized nation—or at least a considerable part of it—could, in the twentieth century, succumb to its fascination for a single, ridiculous, complex-ridden petit bourgeois, could fall for his pseudo-scientific theories and in their name exterminate nations, conquer continents, and commit unbelievable cruelties. Positivistic science, Marxism included, offers a variety of scientific explanations for this mysterious phenomenon, but instead of eliminating the mystery, they tend rather to deepen it. For the cold, "objective" reason that speaks to us from these explanations in fact only underlines the disproportion between itself—a power that claims to be the decisive one in this civilization—and the mass insanity that has nothing in common with any form of rationality.

Yes, when traditional myth was laid to rest, a kind of "order" in the dark region of our being was buried along with it. And what modern reason has attempted to substitute for this order has consistently proved erroneous, false, and disastrous, because it is always in some way deceitful, artificial, rootless, lacking in both ontology and morality. It may even border on the ludicrous, like the cult of the "Supreme Being" during the French Revolution, the collectivist folklore of totalitarian systems, or their "realist," self-celebrating art. It seems to me that with the burial of myth, the barn in which the mysterious animals of the human unconscious were housed over thousands of years has been abandoned and the animals turned loose—on the tragically mistaken assumption that they were phantoms—and that now they are devastating the countryside. They devastate it, and at the same time they make themselves at home where we least expect them to—in the secretariats of modern political parties, for example. These sanctuaries of modern reason lend them their tools and their authority so that ultimately the plunder is sanctioned by the most scientific of world views.

Generally, people do not begin to grasp the horror of their situation until too late: that is, until they realize that thousands of their fellow humans have been murdered for reasons that are utterly irrational. Irrationality, hiding behind sober reason and a belief that the inexorable march of history demands the sacrifice of millions to assure a happy future for billions, seems essentially more irrational and dangerous than the kind of irrationality that, in and through myth, admits to its own existence, comes to terms with the "positive powers," and, at most, sacrifices animals.

Václav Havel, Thriller, translated by Paul Wilson, November 1984.

Originally written at the request of the Hessischer Rundfunk for their series on mythology in modern life, this essay first appeared in English in The Idler magazine, no. 6 (June-July 1985), Toronto.

Morally, metaphysically, and spiritually lost and longing, human beings will cast about not only for surrogates by which to articulate their existential concerns but also for scapegoats and enemies in an attempt to exorcise their frustrations. The metaphysical void is also an inner void which strongly impels individuals to attempt to restore lost coherence and cohesion by whatever means are available to them, when shorn of supporting myths. If they demonstrate a tendency to look inside themselves to create their own gods, they will also look outside themselves in search of devils to whom all their ills can be ascribed, finding something or someone else to blame for their repressions and frustrations. The most dangerous aspect of this is the expression of the repressed social dimension of human life. A subjective spirituality – as expressed by people who insist 'I'm spiritual but not religious' – neglects the social character of human life, leaving that collective dimension wide open for colonisation by irrational furies and forces. Many reject religion as a repressive moral code that inhibits and restrains the individual; they object the interference in personal choice and preference. The strength of religion is to acknowledge that human beings are social beings and, as such, need a certain routine and ritual that brings people together in common worship. Lose that collective dimension and it will most likely be reconstituted in other forms. As social beings, human beings are strongly influenced by group pressures. "Madness is rare in individuals," said Nietzsche, "but in groups, parties, and nations, it is the rule." The process of rationalization characterising modernity is prone to psychic contagion and collective delusion demanding human sacrifice. The rational ideologies spawned by the modern age have been impersonal, inhuman, and heartless, repressing and killing with cold-blooded efficiency for the best of reasons. The ideologues are remote from life, people, and reality. As Paul Johnson writes with respect to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, "It is notable that, while this group of ideologues preached the virtues of rural life, none had in fact ever engaged in manual labour or had any experience at all of creating wealth. Like Lenin, they were pure intellectuals. They epitomized the great destructive force of the twentieth century: the religious fanatic reincarnated as professional politician. What they did illustrated the ultimate heartlessness of ideas." (Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties.)

Milan Kundera writes of “the totalitarian poesy that leads to the gulag by way of paradise”:

The whole period of Stalinist terror was a period of collective lyrical delirium. This has by now been completely forgotten, but it is the crux of the matter. People like to say: Revolution is beautiful; it is only the terror arising from it that is evil. But this is not true. The evil is already present in the beautiful, hell is already contained in the in the dream of paradise, and if we wish to understand the essence of hell we must examine the essence of the paradise from which it originated. It is extremely easy to condemn gulags, but to reject the totalitarian poesy that leads to the gulag by way of paradise is as difficult as ever.”

Milan Kundera in Philip Roth, Talk Shop, 97.

A one-sided, instrumental rationality has thus come to generate irrational forces and consequences from within its totalising impulse. Whatever its theoretical intent, a supposedly liberatory rationality has emptied the human cosmos of inherent, objective value, goodness, meaning, and purpose, resulting in an internal incoherence that makes it well-nigh impossible for individuals to locate and orient themselves metaphysically or practically. Modern humanity has not merely lost its bearings but actively destroyed the means by which they could take them. The result is that individuals fall into a state of existential despair which, for all of Bertrand Russell's aristocratic urge to an 'unyielding' heroism, in fact fuels the urge to embrace a secularized religiosity which gives us the worst of religion – the intolerance, the judgmentalism, the emphasis on sin – without the best – the consolation, the healing, the mercy and forgiveness, the redemption. The single-minded pursuit of a rationality defined in instrumental terms of knowledge/power/utility suppresses art, religion, metaphysics, dream, and such like and is thus necessarily pathological and destructive of life.

Such rationality is actually a modern day exercise in hubris. For all the emphasis on mastery and domination vis nature, 'men as gods' prove, as ever, to be powerless to effect anything other than destruction. The greater the progress of such rationality, the less and less capable of comprehending and controlling our powers and the problems they generate. The striving for power and domination over nature in the end brings about precisely the situation dreaded most of all: a world of power that is increasingly out of control. In the name of freedom, moderns have created the psychic, intellectual, and social preconditions of a thoroughgoing despotism, Lewis Mumford's Megamachine. The pursuit of power has been allied to the neurotic concern with achieving control over nature, life, contingency, and chance, but the effort to assume and exercise control has caused the rights, liberties, and power of individuals to be absorbed in the ever-expanding power of gigantic, impersonal bureaucratic-managerial systems. All in the name of reason and freedom.

The true believers and diehards of progress through reason and reason alone have attempted, from many and diverse directions, to discern coherence in the nihilistic morasse of modern life, but have failed so consistently that most have given up the ghost. That strongly suggests that what has been rent assunder as a result of a rationalizing drive cannot be put back together on the basis of rational principles alone. The drive to fulfil the Enlightenment project and rationalize existence completely is fundamentally flawed: "For the most part what we call 'irrational' is just the natural; but our 'rationale' has become so unnatural that we see everything natural as irrational." (Otto Rank). The fear of a realm that lay outside of our control incited an attempt to dominate it rationally. Freud expressed the neurotic drive at the heart of modernity perfectly when he wrote: "Against the dreaded external world [we] can only defend [ourselves] by . . . going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will." (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents). In choosing rationality as the developmental principle governing modern life, a 'liberated' and 'free' humanity has renounced a belief in the super-natural only to succumb to a neurotic fear of the natural, which it seeks to master and dominate by supplanting it with a self-created rational order. The attempt to "rationalize the irrational" cannot, however, succeed, for the reason that the irrational is neither irrational nor unreal after all, merely that essential part of human life that evades rationalization.

In fine, the moderns are caught in the tragic dialectics of a progress in which things get worse as they get better, forever seeking solutions through the mentalities and modalities that caused the problems in the first place. Such is the nature of the progress trap. Our fundamental political and political economic doctrines are ultimately self-destructive: they are acidic of all that human beings need for a flourishing existence, of social and spiritual life, of public community, of connection, of the natural and social ecology both. Mechanicism is also an atomism, walling up human beings in their selves and, through the assertion of the right to choose the good as one sees fit, encouraging a prideful self-worship that makes it well-nigh impossible to create, join, and sustain common endeavour. Embedded in liberalism is a remorseless logic of self-aggrandizement that brings into existence the very “war of all against all” the contractarian liberal state was supposed to prevent. Civil society, which, through the free expression of natural sympathy, ought to have been a check on the anti-social competitive instincts of the market, is dissolved into a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism, engulfing one and all in a ceaseless and all-consuming struggle to expand and accumulate power. One accumulates or is accumulated. The result is social and moral breakdown, which means that society loses the capacity for self-government and self-regulation. In unfettering human passions and desires from the constraints of tradition, community, morality, customs, and the mores liberalism advanced the freedom of the discrete individual whilst destroying the social and moral basis of the deeper freedom which is supportive of individuality. The result has been to create a lonely crowd of isolated and solitary beings, in fear of and flight from their anxious state, longing for the certainties of Leviathan. The restraint that cannot be supplied internally now has to be imposed externally.

To understand the dialectic at work here, it is worth pondering the political axiom articulated by Burke:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

— Edmund Burke, letter to a Member of the National Assembly of France (1791)

Virtue forging the capacity for self-governance and coercion exist in dialectical relation: the less there is of virtue as the capacity for internal control the more there will be of coercion as an external control. When individuals exercise personal moral restraint and a sense of responsibility towards others, a society stands in least need of external authority. When that sense of self-restraint breaks down, anarchy eventually ensues, with fear of disorder paving the way to acceptance of authoritarian rule. Whereas Hobbes thought he had found the solution he had merely restated the problem at a much larger level: if the destructive capacity of the individual is large enough as to warrant external restraint, the destructive capacity of the centralised state is larger still and tends to expand without limit: 'expand the state and that destructive capacity expands too' (Paul Johnson).

Moral and social breakdown through atomisation, egoism, and social disintegration lead in time to attempts to recreate communal connection. The problem is that, removed from common ground and unable to see the common good, fragmented individuals seek to create the good in their own image, as a matter of personal private choice, as something to consume at will. The result is not genuine community but a hyperpluralism of competing groups and identities, something which encourages factionalism, the ideological war of all against all, and self-cancellation. This is not so much nihilism, as Nietzsche understood it, a creative state beyond good and evil, as a nullity. This denouement reveals finally the extent to which the urge for domination is inherent in liberalism and liberal political economy and which, connected to an arid, narrow, and colonising rationality cannot but come to dissolve morality, meaning, and communal connection, frustrating and denying cosmic longing and belonging to an extent that the secular monotheisms of the various rational ideologies cannot restore, however hard they may try by way of totalitarian force.

Burke's political axiom expresses the central dialectic of internal and external forces and relations in social life. It articulates Newton's Third Law of Motion in human affairs: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Every change in the political order and social system will be met - directly or indirectly, sooner or later, positively or negatively, for better or for worse – by a corresponding change. This is where the damaging implications of a shift from an organic to a mechanical, artificial, and engineered order become apparent. An organism is self-healing and self-reproducing in a way that a machine is not. In ceasing to be organic, the human social system has lost the capacity to respond to change in spontaneous, healthy, and unforced ways, with the result that the reactions have become increasingly pathological, expressing tendencies to degeneration and disorder, requiring further extraneous intervention in search of redress. It's a vicious spiral to ultimate collapse.

It is testimony not only to Rousseau's genius and insight but also to his intellecutal, moral, and personal courage that he stated a conclusion that was repugnant to most in his age, both traditionalists and progressives alike, and downright shocking to liberals of every age – that individuals need to 'force' themselves to be free, and submit voluntarily to a self-made law and self-assumed obligation that forces them to be free, or be a slave to egoistic desire. Rousseau's genius was to have understood that autonomy and authority are not dialectical opposites that are forever in contention but integral to one another.

I argue this at length in my book:

Rousseau: Autonomy, Authenticity and Authority (2003)

https://www.academia.edu/688392/ROUSSEAU_AUTONOMY_AUTHENTICITY_AND_AUTHORITY

Many know Rousseau's quote 'man is born free but is everywhere in chains,' without understanding it. Rousseau was not arguing the libertarian view that the individual should be liberated from all chains restraining and inhibiting choice, will, and desire but that the free individual counts as free in submitting to be governed by the legitimate 'chains' of a self-imposed authority. The truly free individual is therefore not the discrete individual contracting in and out of social connection and obligation in service to a presocial will or desire, but the individual who is virtuously obedient to a self-assumed social, political, and moral obligation. Rousseau makes it clear that the freedom and happiness for which human beings long are the product of a balanced and organic way of life which is grounded in a moral community in which the virtues can be known, acquired, and exercised in relation to virtuous others. Social harmony thus supplants social conflict by way of embedding individuals in a public order in which a unified institutional framework above is buttressed by an ethico-social infrastructure below to authoritatively uphold and articulate certain canons of virtuous behavior. My PhD thesis sought to show that the 'true democracy' that Marx sought is ultimately a self-rule along lines developed by various philosophers in the tradition of rational freedom, not least Rousseau, but also Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. All these thinkers argued for a social or public freedom and happiness, transcending the enslavement to immediacy and necessity that follows the pursuit of a merely sensual and purely selfish desire. In fine, there is a sharp distinction to be made between liberty and licence. A striving for a purely personal freedom and happiness in which each individual chooses his or her own good/god as he or she sees fit cannot but come at the expense of the very organic moral community that human beings as social beings need in order to be themselves. Self-choosing, self-willing individuals who refuse to be constrained by each, any, and every chain, effectively contract out of the unified institutional and ethico-social public community which alone is able to authoritatively maintain and express the canons of virtuous behavior which are key to a deeper, richer freedom and happiness. They reject all authority as a repressive and authoritarian infringement on liberty and in so doing reject the very organic community they require in order to be truly free. As civil society dissolves into a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism, individuals become enslaved to their immediate appetites, each pursuing their own desires and interests, seeing others as rivals and obstructions to personal goods. The result of each pursuing their own good – and truth - is a frustration, chaos, self-cancellation, and confusion that makes the external imposition of unity inevitable.

Rousseau's great insight was to have seen that the most fundamental political choice facing the individual when it comes to social living is not between authority and autonomy but between authority and tyranny. Those who reject authority in the name of liberty make a crass, predictable, and profoundly self-destructive error. They make the mistake of equating liberty with licence and, in fracturing polity and civil society, make tyranny all but inevitable.

It is important to recognize that the great liberal philosophers were very well aware of the dangers of unrestrained passions and sought to undergird reason to ensure civil freedom. My argument is that their measures to preserve the conditions for freedom proved inadequate to the task and were so overwhelmed by the aggregated passions as to generate a collective unreason and unfreedom. But John Locke's view of freedom is not so distinct from the views I have set out about in relation to Plato, Aristotle, and Rousseau, and is a lot closer to that older tradition of the virtues than it is to the liberalism that took shape in the modern world:

"The Freedom then of Man and Liberty of acting according to his own Will, is grounded on his having Reason, which is able to instruct him in that Law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the freedom of his own will. To turn him loose to an unrestrain'd Liberty, before he has Reason to guide him, is not the allowing him the privilege of his Nature, to be free; but to thrust him out amongst Brutes, and abandon him to a state as wretched, and as much beneath that of a Man, as theirs."

But it is the next part of this passage which reveals the extent to which Locke upheld the optimistic thesis that individuals could come to be so mature and rational as to be able to dispense with moral and institutional constraints:

"This is that which puts the authority into the parents hands to govern the minority of their children. God hath made it their business to employ this care on their offspring, and hath placed in them suitable inclinations of tenderness and concern to temper this power, to apply it, as his wisdom designed it, to the children's good, as long as they should need to be under it."

John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) chap VI Of Paternal Power Sec.63

That's the optimistic thesis that one finds running throughout the Enlightenment and its concern to free the individual as a rational being from overarching authority. Kant thus opens his essay What is Enlightenment? with a statement with which those concerned to establish the connection between freedom and reason would agree:

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor."

To be reasonable and free is to emerge from one's immaturity and be able to govern oneself without the need of guardians.

So far, so reasonable. But putting the point this way merely underscores the fact that there is an implicit and potential libertarianism in the liberal tradition, the presumption that once individuals have come to internalize the requirements of the law so as to be reasonable in their thoughts and deeds they could come to enjoy "an unrestrain'd Liberty" after all - but with this crucial qualification: the restraints would still exist, only as internal rather than external. Which is to say that an inner self-restraint would replace a coercive external restraint. Individuals would therefore enjoy freedom in a virtuous community that effectively regulates itself. The greater the internal regulation, of both self and society, the lesser the need for external regulation. Locke's view that the private will of the individual must be made subject to "that Law he is to govern himself by," a law which is discernible by a "Reason" which is innate to all. This view is in fundamental agreement with the view set out about, namely that if individuals do not voluntarily bind themselves internally with legitimate chains, then the binding will be done for them involuntarily, illegitimately, and externally. How could the discrete, pre-social, self-interested, self-maximising individuals of liberal theory come to make such a choice? It is here that liberal optimism is revealed as naive and presumption. The fatal flaw is the liberal ontology which falsely separates the two essential aspects of human nature which require each other if they are to be fulfilled - individuality and sociality. The notion of a discrete, pre-social individual who contracts into society according to self-interest also implies that such an individual will just as easily contract out of public life and moral commitments should they fail to serve, advance or inhibit self-interest. Locke presumed the continued existence of a strong civil society, whilst later liberal thinkers were confident that natural sympathy would suffice to hold individuals liberated from authorities, moral codes, traditions together. They failed to appreciate the extent to which self-interested individualism would work as a universal acid dissolving the moral and social fabric from within.

Hence the emphasis that this essay has placed on the need to create a virtuous habitus which teaches self-restraint so as to create the character, dispositions, and habits of the heart which lead individuals to act reasonably with respect to the common good. This would be to create a social identity in which the individual good and the social good coincide in such a way that in acting for oneself the individual acts also for others. That's Rousseau's argument in The Social Contract. It remains to be said that Rousseau has been persistently criticised for theorising the totalitarian democracy of the centralized nation state. That criticism is the precise opposite of the truth. Rousseau sought to reduce scale, quantity, and complexity to make the small and simple society of the virtues possible. His ideal polity was that of a civic republic scaled to human dimensions and proportions. He would have been horrified to have seen his views equated with a totalitarian gargantuism, just as liberals like Locke, Smith, and Mill would have been horrified by the illiberal ends to which their doctrines have been put. Hobbes excepted, the classic liberals envisaged a society of small-hold, independent proprietors enjoying strong but limited property rights within a limited government, not huge bureaucratic states ruling in tandem with transnational corporations, merging economy and polity so as to erase the distinction between private and public, effectively abolishing both spheres as meaningful domains. My point is that whilst liberal thinkers wanted precisely the opposite, such a denouement is implicit in liberal premises. And not the least of the problems in these premises is the understanding of "Reason" in the modern world.

And this is where the damaging consequences of supplanting of organic community by machine order make themselves felt. Having destroyed the moral and social bases of authority and virtue, human beings seek to remedy the ills of the age by recourse to tyranny and vice. If it is vice that brought us to this impasse, progressives continue to insist that it will be vice who will suffice to take us out of it. Witness Keynes' diabolical reasoning in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren:

I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. ot. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

Keynes openly declared himself an 'immoralist.' His view is sophisticated, sophist, and employs precisely the acidic reasoning that brought down the city-states of ancient Greece. Plato and Aristotle saw the ruination to come but were powerless to stop it. In declaring avarice and usury to be 'our gods,' Keynes reveals precisely which new idols now sit on the thrones vacated by the old gods – the new idols of money and power, the self-created gods of human beings: which is to say with the sophist Thrasymachus that justice is the interests of the strongest. That's where liberty as the right of individuals to choose the good as they see fit, to choose their gods as they see fit, ends up – with the right of the strong to predate on the weak, the rich on the poor.

Keynes unwittingly reveals the flaw in his reasoning when he argues that when we are rich enough 'to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue,' we shall do so, and live in a society in which 'we shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.' If we could once value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful, and practise the virtues rather than the vices, then why not now? Such moral ends are not conditional on wealth at all. Keynes shows himself to be a prisoner of the progress trap, running on a treadmill in pursuit of more of the same in order to remedy problems caused by running in the wrong direction. If we could be virtuous when we were poor, then we do not need to be rich enough to be able to afford a return to the virtues.

Keynes' diabolical statement reveals precisely what is missing in a social system that is increasingly showing the signs of moral and political degeneration. Civic, moral, and intellectual virtue allied to legitimate self-imposed authority performs an effective maintenance service that keeps the social order functioning as it ought. Once these are removed and human affairs rendered instrumental, then mechanicism replaces organicism, and external engineering replaces self-regulation. The result is the moral and social breakdown that presages the absolute power that is tyranny. Hobbes knew from the start that freeing individuals from traditional constraints would unleash individual passions and desires to such an extent as to constitute a threat to the civil peace. He therefore argued for the necessity of the Leviathan state ruling by absolute power. And if all power corrupts, then absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton). As moral and legal principles come to be discarded in face of expediency and utility, organic order – self-regulation for free – is lost, and the descent into tyranny begins. The irony is bitter: in the concern to liberate themselves from the supposedly inherently repressive implications of morality and authority, the 'free' individuals of the modern liberal age have come to be doubly enslaved: first of all to their immediate desires, secondly to the systemic and institutional imperatives of the market economy and the Leviathan state.

As Burke argues: "Society cannot exist unless a controlling power on will and appetite be placed somewhere." Rousseau makes it clear that the choice lies between the self-imposed moral and political chains of a legitimate authority (legitimate in being predicated on a self-assumed obligation) or externally imposed "chains." The choice is not between freedom and authority. On the contrary, autonomy itself depends upon a properly constituted authority, involving the willingness of human beings to submit their will and appetite to something greater than their own ego and self-interest. Understood in these terms, the choice lies between authority and tyranny – which is to say, between virtue and vice, between liberty and licence. This choice was set out in ancient Greece by Aristotle, who castigated those who asserted liberty when, in truth, they pursued licence. Aristotle is clear that human beings as social beings, (politikon zoons) require a public life (politikon bion) in order to enjoy a flourishing life for themselves as truly human beings: “For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice . . . [because he] is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence, when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals.” (Aristotle Politics).

That view points to the need for a proper socialisation and moralisation through the cultivation of the virtues within communities of character and practice. The problem with the libertarian view which releases the passions and appetites from restraints of all kinds (religious, communal, traditional, customary) is that it produces an individualism and atomism that soon causes the 'liberated' to start seeking to reconstitute the lost public and social dimension in ersatz forms – hence the myriad ideologies of the contemporary cultural and political 'war of all against all,' each of them secular monotheisms arising in the aftermath of the 'death of God.' Individuals as isolated, fearful, powerless social atoms individuals gather in crowds, forming an electronic mob in the mediated world, to magnify and amplify every human flaw and generate a few more besides.

Nietzsche saw the age of collective madnesses coming: "Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule."

Rather than play the sane individual against the insane collective, however, the key is to establish individuality and socialiity in proper relation. As social beings, human beings require a properly ordered collective or community or public life in order to individuate themselves and be themselves. Separated from social connection, discrete individuals become isolated, fearful, and powerless, falling prey to ersatz forms of social identity, belonging, and community, hence the insanity of the secular ideologies proliferating in the absence of a discarded God. Whilst the collective human ego possesses an inordinate capacity for mass destruction, the diremptive, desocialised, demoralised conditions of the modern world are the perfect breeding ground for these collective insanities.

Jung writes: "The masses, always incline to herd psychology, hence they are easily stampeded; and to mob psychology, hence their witless brutality and hysterical emotionalism.” Jung goes on to say: “The universal man has the characteristics of a savage and must therefore be treated with technical methods. It is in fact bad practice to treat collective man with anything other than 'technically correct' methods, i.e. those collectively recognised and believed to be effective.” The reference to 'technical methods' comes over as cold and clinical, seemingly making individuals available for external manipulation and training. That's not quite what Jung means, however. “In this sense the old hypnotism or the still older animal magnetism achieved, in principle, just as much as a technically irreproachable modern analysis, or for that matter the amulets of a primitive medicine man. It all depends on the method the therapist happens to believe in. His belief is what does the trick. If he really believes, then he will do his utmost for the sufferer with seriousness and perseverance, and this freely given effort and devotion will have a curative effect – up to the level of collective man's mentality.” (Collected Works of C.G. Jung: The First Complete English Edition).

There is much to discuss with respect to such methods. Jung's central point is that human beings come with archaic matter that requires a curative socialisation and moralisation.

The experience of history is that the human capacity for evil knows no limits. Those in the contemporary world who claim that we ought to be shocked and outraged by history are not historians, nor even moralists – they are naifs and innocents engaging in demonology and are the most dangerous creatures of all – they are purists and puritans who are in denial with respect to the human capacity for evil. As self-righteous ideologues, they are perfect specimens of the kind of people who have committed some of the worst atrocities in history. The lesson is plain: unless virtue and character are taught and nurtured via communities, practices, and mores to counteract ego's potential for destruction, destruction is all but inevitable as individuals forget their better nature and revert to a primordial savagery.

This is an ancient wisdom. The 'free' individual may be liberated from traditions and religions and customs and institutions, but can never be free of what in an older idiom were called "the passions." The passions refer to the welter of driving, often conflicting, and potentially dangerous and destructive appetites, impulses, and emotions that are innate to every human being and which may always erupt when triggered in social interaction. The pre-moderns understood well the need to keep such passions in check by personal self-restraint, character-construction, and social and moral control. Liberty as liberation from restraint and inhibition has resulted in a licence in which the passions have been given free reign.

Our liberation issues in a short-lived freedom, for the progressive removal of inhibitions and restraints undermines the conditions for a flourishing existence. Recognising the need for limits and restraints via a properly constituted authority is the first step in resocialisation and remoralisation and resolidification. As Lewis Mumford wrote in Programme for Survival:

“there are two places that call for self-preservative effort. Negatively, we must impose restraints and restore inhibitions. Positively, we must overcome our frustration, our hatred, our aggressiveness by removing both the inner and the outer blockages to sympathetic understanding and loving co-operation.”

There is a need for limits, restraints, and constraints, personal, social, moral, and institutional. The message sounds austerian but, properly understand and properly realized, is the opposite, allowing us to access a natural abundance that is within our ordinary reach. At the same time, the view rejects the mechanically produced excess that satisfies no-one and keeps all frustrated. My criticism of contemporary environmentalists is that they seek to coerce what ought to be cultivated. Seeing the need for limits, restraints, and constraints, their anthropological and democratic pessimism causes them to turn away from 'greedy,' 'selfish,' and 'stupid' human beings and reach for whatever tools may be available by which to engineer and enforce the necessary austerity. Those tools – institutional and technological – have been forged within the very anti-ecological civilisation they are seeking to restrain, and are largely under the control of the dominant commercial and command centres of that civilisation. It's a controversial point that is unlikely to win friends, but far too many of those who call themselves environmentalists are prisoners of the fundamentally anti-ecological mentalities and modalities that have brought the world to this impasse; their ostensibly 'anti-political' or politically neutral prescriptions for ecological survival fit the technocratic design of modernity's 'empire of man' like a glove. The result will not be the ecological society but a technocratic centralism, a techno-bureaucratic managerialism and collectivism. It is impossible to imagine a more anti-ecological 'political' form. Such people remain in the grip of a Logos that thinks it possible to govern alone.

Affirming Freedom and Democracy and Resisting the Authoritarian Temptation: The Allure of Eco-Authoritarianism under the Sign of Climate Necessity (2022)

https://www.academia.edu/70272394/Affirming_Freedom_and_Democracy_and_Resisting_the_Authoritarian_Temptation_The_Allure_of_Eco_Authoritarianism_under_the_Sign_of_Climate_Necessity

The Critique of Environmentalism as Naturalism and Scientism (2022)

https://www.academia.edu/68328275/Essays_in_Environmental_Critique

Climate Rebellion and System Change: Rebellion or Revolution? (2019)

https://www.academia.edu/40951916/Climate_Rebellion_and_System_Change_Rebellion_or_Revolution

The world is fluid, relational, and dynamic; it is a dance, an art, a participation. We do not need command and control, still less colonisation and enclosure. That view is not libertarian but affirms authority as against an authoritariansim which is merely the flipside of the licence of individualism.

In fine, if you value authenticity, then learn that autonomy and authority are not antithetical to one another but exist in integral relation.

The great disembedding which saw human beings settled in place uprooted from their communities, traditions, and communities also possesses a psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimension. The modern mind is the disinherited mind, shorn of metaphysical and psychological roots in myth, lacking a clear and coherent picture of the world. In essence, modern humanity is at a loss, destroying the old cosmos and renouncing the traditional answers only to create in their place a meaningless mechanarchy that offers no answers at all. Disconnected from tradition, history, place, nature, God and religion, even from mind and body, modern humanity is homeless and adrift in a world of its own creation, lacking clear and coherent philosophical and practical answers to the basic questions of life. Attempts to reconstruct by reason that which has been deconstructed by reason is not only doomed to defeat, it invites a dangerous and destructive "return of the repressed," as irrational forces in the guise of rational solutions are unleashed on the social order. What makes the turn to irrationalism even more dangerous is that the Enlightenment didn't so much abolish religion as secularize it, re-directing the spiritual drive for salvation and redemotion toward Earthly ends ends. What was once projected upwards to infinity has been brought down to Earth. In horizontalizing the vertical, modern 'men as gods' have come to employ technology to seek infinity within a world of finite resources. Further, the destruction of authentic religion has given rise to "millions of spiritually sick people . . . shopping around for a patent medicine of the soul" (Irving Kristol). The unremitting effort to create the rational society has produced a rationalization that impels disinherited and dispossessed human beings to seek belonging, meaning, and coherence in new forms, surrogates and superstitions in ostensibly rational form. To the extent that our inherent and cosmic longing for mythological meaning is frustrated and denied, it will necessarily incite an urgent response that comes from deep within the psyche.

"Mythology, like the severed head of Orpheus, goes on singing even in death and from afar."

Carl Kerenyi

Which is to say that the Logos can never rule alone, but only in tandem with the Mythos.

Thinkers and doers beset with the seemingly intractable problems of the contemporary world continually proclaim the exhaustion and bankruptcy of all political and moral traditions before going on to call for new ideas and practical strategies. Much that they embrace as 'new' is little more than a reheating and recycling of enlightenment, liberal, and progressive pieties, much that they dismiss as 'old' and 'antiquated' are the transcendent truths and virtues upon which the modern age has been parasitic, living off them until, thinking itself the sole author of its largesse, it cast them off in the name of freedom. That freedom is coming to an end in a civilisation that has been taking a free ride to oblivion. The problem now is that generations have been raised to be accustomed to equating freedom with the freedom of the individual from constraint, valuing rights as entitlements whilst neglecting duties and obligations. Once the culture of discipline and self-restraint has been lost it will not be easily recovered. Those weened on freedom as the right of each individual to choose the good - and increasingly truth - as he or she sees fit will not readily and voluntarily submit themselves to any supra-individual authority or ethic that requires sacrifice or service to the common good. It doesn't matter whether we cast that common good in the patriotic terms of national strength, in the economic terms of productivity and prosperity, in the civic terms of the health and vitality of political institutions, or the ecological terms of planetary well-being : individuals accustomed to serving their own interests first and last, with public goods presumed to follow only by way of indirect consequence, lack the will and motivation

To put it simply, to ask individuals to serve any common good in a liberal market society is to demand a sacrifice on their part which cannot but be construed as irrational given the dominant conceptions of rationality. The social identity by which the individual good and the public and social good coincide simply does not exist - the connection was severed in the liberation of the individual from all traditional, moral, communal, and customary 'fetters.' That liberation was what socialist William Morris called 'the great sundering,' the uprooting of individuals from their ties and relations to entities, codes, and commitments greater than their individual selves and self-interest. The society of 'free' individuals comes in time to discover that these supra-individual structures, norms, and systems establish the moral, social, and institutional conditions of the free society and that freedom cannot long survive without them. Unfortunately, the discovery comes long after their disintegration has gone past the point at which it could be arrested and reversed. If, indeed, the discovery is made at all. The evidence of the contemporary age is that, even in the midst of their decline, with the fracturing of public life and breakdown of society, 'progressives' of all kinds persist in demanding their further destruction, on the presumption that their complete disappearance will remove the final obstacles to freedom. They cannot see that it is the unintended and ungovernable collective consequences of the liberation from restraints of all kinds that has forged the greatest constraints upon freedom, constraints which are all the more repressive for being external.

The old questions of politics retain all their force - can democracy supply itself with a self-limiting principle? Can human beings develop the will and the wit to make common cause in governing their common affairs? Are the many able to subordinate their private wills to the public good for the mutual benefit of all? Rejecting morality as inherently repressive, religion as outmoded superstition, authority as necessarily authoritarian, truth as totalitarian, and each, any, and every common body or ethic as an infringement on individual liberty, particularly on the right of each individual to choose his or her own good, so that each individual becomes in effect his or her own god, it is difficult to see how any of these questions can be answered in the affirmative. 'You gotta serve somebody,' sang Bob Dylan. A disgusted John Lennon scribbled an angry 'serve yourself' in the margins. Ayn Rand would have been proud. It's Lennon's world. That sixties counter-culture is now the dominant culture, and it is libtertarian to the core. That's why the age finds it well-nigh impossible to generate the collective wit and will to address the 'global' crises that beset us. Lennon had laudible ideals of peace and freedom, but these can never be realized on his libertarian premises. The paradox of this age is that 'progressives' continue to think that collective goods can be attained on the basis of individualist premises. They are modern day heirs to Smith's 'invisible hand' and Enlightenment notions of natural sympathy and enlightened self-interest. The presumption that the common good will issue from individuals being allowed to pursue their own distinct conceptions of the good, without harm or hindrance from fellow pursuers. The good ceases to exist as a public good and instead withdraws into the private sphere, where people are told to keep it to themselves. That is tantamount to the death of morality, sociality, and publicity: it is the end of the public life which human beings as social beings require in order to realize their potentials in a flourishing existence.

People still want the good. The problem is that they have no idea how to constitute it. Worse, they lack the character and the culture of discipline and restraint that alone serves to bring that good about. People are crying out for genuine public community but have lost the capacity to build it for themselves. This view may seem overly pessimistic in an age dominated by activism in the name of various causes, but such activism merely confirms the negative assessment. These myriad campaigns are not looking to reconstitute public life, merely to capture what is left of the public realm and divert its remaining resources to a favoured interest or cause. That merely feeds entitlement as against citizenship and serves only to extend the bureaucratisation of politics.

I shall conclude by quoting Walter Lippmann at length in The Public Philosophy (1955). I make no apologies for the length of the quote. Lippmann's argument is cogent and compelling and has become even more pertinent in the decades since it was written.

"Behind all questions of politics and armaments, of personalities and parties, there is a question whether a self-governing people will impose upon itself a self-discipline strong enough to insure its own defence... Liberty without discipline cannot survive. Without order and authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence, and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself.

The tragic ordeal through which the Western world is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty during which men forgot the elementary truths of human existence. They forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice; they became so accustomed to freedom that they thought it was as normal as the air they breathe, and they came to believe that the heroic virtues were antiquated and that sacrifice was a bore and bother. They forgot that their rights were founded on their duties, and they thought that to get while getting was good, whether by private smartness or by collective pressure, was the normal and natural thing to do. They forgot that unless they bear themselves so that the eternal values of truth, justice, and righteousness are perpetually revealed to them, they will not know how to resist the corrosion of their virtue or how to face the trials that life will bring to them upon this earth. They had become too comfortable and too safe and too sophisticated to believe the first things and the last things which men have been inspired to understand through generations of suffering, and they thought it clever to be cynical, and enlightened to be unbelieving, and sensible to be soft.

And so, through suffering, they must rediscover these first and last things again, and be purified once more by repentence.

The free peoples of the Western world have lived upon a great inheritance which they have squandered recklessly. When they were put to the test, they had come to the point where they took the blessings of this inheritance so totally for granted that they no longer knew, and their schools had almost ceased to teach them, and their leaders were afraid to remind them, how the laws and the institutions and the great controlling customs of our civilization were made. They thought that the God whom they believed in dimly or not at all had conferred these blessings on them gratuitously, that somehow they, as distinguished from their own ancestors and from millions of their fellow human beings in less fortunate lands, were exempt from the labors and the sacrifices and the trials of man. They did not know that the products of civilisation which they so greedily consumed are not the enduring inheritance of man.

These pleasant things are no more than an estate accumulated by the labor of the father and easily ruined by the dissipation of the son.

They did not believe any longer that the true inheritance of man is the capacity to produce these products, to preserve the estate by remaking it. Only that. All that has been conferred upon man is the capacity to know what is good and the freedom of will to strive for it.

What is left of our civilization will not be maintained, what has been wrecked will not be restored, by imagining that some new political gadget can be invented, some new political formula improvised that will save it. Our civilization can be maintained and restored only by remembering and rediscovering the truths, and by re-establishing the virtuous habits on which it was founded. There is no use looking into the blank future for some new and fancy revelation of what man needs in order to live.

The revelation has been made. By it man conquered the jungle about him and the barbarian within him. The elementary principles of work and sacrifice and duty - and the transcendent criteria of truth, justice, and righteousness - and the grace of love and charity - are the things which have made men free. Men can keep their freedom and reconquer it only by these means. These are the terms stipulated in the nature of things for the salvation of men on this earth, and only in this profound, this stern, and this tested wisdom shall we find once more the light and courage we need.

The revival of the public philosophy depends on whether its principles and precepts - which were articulated before the industrial revolution, before the era of rapid technological change, and before the rise of the mass democracies - depends on whether this old philosophy can be reworked for the modern age. If this cannot be done, then the free and democratic nations face the totalitarian challenge without a public philosophy which free men believe in and cherish, with no public faith beyond a mere official agnosticism, neutrality, and indifference. There is not much doubt how the struggle is likely to end if it lies between those who, believing, care very much - and those who, lacking belief, cannot care very much."

Walter Lippmann The Public Philosophy, 1955, ch 9 in The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy, Clinton Rossiter and James Lare ed. Harvard University Press Cambridge, 1982 pp. 185-187

Part 2

Metaphorics - Myth, Metaphysics, and Metaphor

https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/metaphorics-myth-metaphysics-and-metaphor