The fundamental question of the age
Can a society sustain itself if its members aren’t willing to nurture the roots that gave birth to it in the first place?
I’d like to start with a few words on the image accompanying this piece. For the best part of a decade I posted regularly on environmental issues on Facebook. Rather idealistically and optimistically, I had thought that at least some of my one thousand plus ‘friends’ would actually read some of the words I wrote, understand some of them, and be inspired to read further. I discovered, instead, that people tend to read what they already hold to be true. They are seeking validation and confirmation, not challenge and change. I started to abandon social media as utterly hopeless over time. If one moment was the straw that broke the camel’s back, then it came when I made a statement of principles in relation to some environmental issue or other. I was not long out of hospital after a heart attack, so the fact that I was offering anything at all was an act of some considerable generosity on my part. I was immediately set upon by some hysterical oaf, who most certainly had seen my posts over the years, knew of my work, and knew also that I had recently been in hospital. Said person can usually be found posting on the climate catastrophe that he is no doubt is sure to come, indulging in hopeless lamentation in the context of a wholly unhistorical contrast of western civilisation with indolent fantasies of indigenous people. The incoherence of these people is hard to countenance. Denouncing the West as racist and rapacious, they demand open borders and defend the rights of non-indigenous people to enter as they desire. References to indigenous people are racist when made by people seeking to defend borders, but natural and pure when referring to non-western and pre-modern societies and cultures. It’s dreck, all of it, and I bitterly resent even having to refer to it again, let alone the fact that I spent years in its company. I was making a short statement on metaphysics and morals. Said person clearly had no time for such things and screamed ‘people are dying now! What’s your strategy?’ If a strategy was the thing he was after, I am sure he could have found what he was looking for in my ample writings. Such people want it easy and on a plate. The contempt in my response was palpable. The world isn’t short of strategies, means, and technologies. The deficiencies of the age lie elsewhere, which is something I have been concerned to make clear. I may as well have written in hieroglyphs for all that some have understood. This character is not the problem. His planetary fetishism is part of a much broader spectrum of environmental error, including also planetary engineering and planetary managerialism. In the absence of a genuine metaphysics and morals founded on a genuine referent, all that there is is scientism, naturalism/nature romanticism, and culturalism. But the demand for a strategy was telling. There is a presumption that problems and solutions are issues of technology and design, a matter of engineering. That presumption indicates precisely the problem. The focus is on the surface end of actions and behaviours, neglecting almost entirely the motivational economy and the normative structures and metaphysical assumptions within which it rests. That’s precisely what I have been attempting to get people forever demanding ‘action’ to see, hoping that their constantly thwarted hopes might cause them to look at the problem in more depth. If you think that the problems we face can be resolved by the correct strategy, then you really are part of the problem, not the solution. The people who stay at the surface level tend to seek to engineer, manage, and manipulate behaviours rather than inspire, move, and obligate them via the inner motives. The closer to the roots you go, the more you enter the realm of metaphysics and morals. Lose that inner core and you end up impotently demanding strategies at the surface level.
That lengthy preamble over, I now move on to the substantive issue at the heart of this essay.
I shall begin by quoting Russell Brand, as one of the few leftist voices with the courage and the imagination to address issues of a shared ethic and consensual devotion to common ends. I've been trying my best, but it seems only conservatives go anywhere near this fundamental question of the age. So few of my leftist friends 'get at' as to make me question whether I am on the Left at all. I think so. But times have changed. I have no problem in identifying a woman and defining what a woman is. And I refuse to be confused and silenced. And I thoroughly reject accusations of being in any way ‘ic’ or ‘ist’ for not complying with the arbitrary definitions of activists and for resisting their attempts to impose such definitions on all. I don’t write much if at all on the specific issues because, like Germaine Greer, I don’t give a damn and have more important things to be doing with my life. People are free to do as they please and call themselves what they like, so long as they do not insist on my or others’ compliance. Fourth wave feminism has been check-mated; all that it took was for men to declare themselves women.
"As Orwell perceived, the first target of every revolution is language. The need is to create a Newspeak that puts power in the place previously occupied by truth and, having done this, to describe the result as a 'politics of truth'"
Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
This has ever been the tactic – and fatal flaw - of Gnostic ideologies like those dominating culture, politics, and society politics today. Gnostics abandon transcendent truths and standards for their own self-created values/gods, which in turn express immanentized dream fantasies by way of a process of reification through which wilful projections are asserted as authoritative and objective truths and realities. From this follows the concern to change reality to conform to the dream world. There are many problems with this view:
1) There remains a reality and a truth about that reality which is independent of self-creation, fluidity, plasticity, and endless re-creation centred on the will to power:
2) The reality of others who assert their right to create and live by their own gods and truths;
3) The swallowing of reality and people into the endless cycle of power / resistance.
"It seems to me that the secular liberties on which our cultural and intellectual life depends would not exist, but for the Christian inheritance. And they would disappear tomorrow if that inheritance were ever to be suppressed. Just look at 20th century history for the proof"
Roger Scruton
The attack on Christianity and the Judaeo-Christian tradition as a whole, is now becoming explicit. It’s a dangerous game. For all of the assertion of extending rights and liberties, the whole thing reduces to power and power relations. I would compare it to a powerful animal that lives by endlessly gnawing on the branch it sits on. One day the branch can no longer bear the weight and just gives way. As I have said repeatedly, you cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too: once it is gone it is gone for good, to be replaced by countless cooks with recipes of their own, no-one of which can be shown to be more appealing than any of the others. The problem with (post)modernity is not that it is lacking in theories for the true and the good but that it is lacking in any grounds or foundations which can offer good reasons for the cogency of any of these theories over all other theories. Lose God, and humanity will follow in short order. I am now reading on pressures being put on people struggling in the face of adverse social and financial circumstances to euthanize themselves, or have the financially straitened health authorities do it for them. I predicted this years ago, arguing against those comfortable, well-off, self-absorbed bourgeois who assert ‘my life, my choice, my death.’ That’s good for them. Being self-regarding, though, they are blind to the dangers of that choice becoming socialised and taking the place of social welfare and health care. The only people resisting? People of a religious persuasion. The neoliberals long ago acquired the taste for authoritarian imposition. Be careful of what these would-be universal despots would do with the combination of knowledge and power. The oft-asserted ‘right to die’ issued by individuals concerned only with their own lives could very easily become the right claimed by governments and medical authorities to kill others should they become unproductive and inconvenient. And long before that eventuality, the weak, the poor, and the vulnerable might well just succumb to the inclination to kill themselves, having learned that ‘society’ doesn’t give a damn for their well-being. This would be the logical extension of Foucault’s technologies of the self, a biopolitics that ends in death. Be warned of the coming ‘medical violence’ in the name of ‘necessity.’ And be warned of all those who employ ‘necessity’ as an argument in politics.
Euthanize Poor People!
Why is Canada euthanising the poor?
Just be careful who calls that inheritance back and the reasons why. Better still, read the way that I call back the soul when seeking to restore transcendent truths and standards.
This book traces the collapse in the idea of an overarching objective moral framework in a line of development that proceeds from the Protestant Reformation to liberalism, secularism, relativism and atheism. The analysis charts the dissipation of objective morality from the intersubjectivism and universalism of Immanuel Kant to the nihilism of Nietzsche. The book identifies Max Weber as a key figure in giving sociological expression to the moral impasse which characterises the modern world. Weber’s much vaunted polytheism is shown to be an heterogeneity of values, the reduction of morality to value judgements, a conflict of irreducible value positions in which there is no objective way of deciding between them. The modern world is not so much a Nietzschean world which is beyond good and evil so much as a world in which objective moral criteria no longer apply. The book proceeds to argue the case for the importance of St Thomas Aquinas’ epistemological realism, rationalist metaphysics of being and natural moral law as supplying the objective foundations capable of resolving the impasse of morality in the modern world. The book considers Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx as key moral and political philosophers undertaking the task of recovering the common good that has been lost with the rejection of rational metaphysics and the natural moral law. To the extent that these thinkers failed, and the key aspects of modernity have remained in place, Max Weber remains the central theorist of modernity. Though profoundly influenced by Nietzsche, Weber’s tough-minded realism led him to reject notions of a ‘gay’ and ‘joyful’ nihilism and draw pessimistic conclusions with respect to the future. I argue that there is a line of development connecting Kant’s achievements and his failure to Weber and Nietzsche. I argue against the common understanding of Kant as a deontologist theorist pure and simple. A Thomist reading reveals that Kant sought not to reject virtue, but to place virtue ethics on a rational foundation. A Thomist reading also reveals Kant to be a teleological thinker concerned that human beings realize their rational nature through the pursuit of the summum bonum, the highest good. The problem is that Kant’s commitment to the highest good is undermined by Kant’s rejection of rational metaphysics, cutting his moral law off from its foundation in ontological nature. Kant cuts mind off from reality, denies causality and as a result comes to be trapped within a series of dualisms which undermine his commitment to universality – ‘is’ and ‘ought-to-be’, moral duty and natural inclination, reason and nature. Kant therefore fails to overcome the diremption of the modern world. Rather than achieve a genuinely universal ethic, Kant supplies an ethic which seeks to constraint the behaviour of agents in the modern world from the outside. Rather than a morality which operates at the level of character, Kant’s ethic takes on a legal form, constraining behaviour from the outside instead of forming behaviour from within natural inclinations and dispositions. As such, Kant’s ethical project fails. Kant’s self-legislation of practical reason amounts to no more than the self-sufficiency of reason. I argue that this fails to supply a secure foundation for Kant’s ethics of the summum bonum
I affirm Kant’s commitment to the highest good. The view is taken, however, that Kant is ultimately agnostic on the good, on account of his separation of reason from ontological nature. In time, Kant’s intersubjectivism and universality degenerates into the myriad relativisms, subjectivisms and nihilisms that inhabit the modern world. At this point, Nietzsche and Weber become key figures, showing the only form that Kantianism could possibly take within the framework of modernity. The book thus argues the case for the philosophical/theological synthesis of St. Thomas Aquinas as providing the only secure basis for the objective and universal foundations of the moral law and the common good. I show how Aquinas’ rational metaphysics and natural law theory join reason and nature together on the basis of a necessary ontological connection. I argue that to make good Kant’s moral claims, we need to recover St Thomas Aquinas’ natural moral law, rationalist metaphysics and realist epistemology. I argue that the universal claims of the greatest of the modern moral and political philosophers – Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx - can only be realised by being grounded in the natural law.
Here I examine the necessity for transcendent standards vs conventionalism, checking relativism, subjectivism and scepticism. I address Nietzsche's 'death of God' and its moral implications with respect to politics. I close with a substantial chapter on Alasdair MacIntyre's virtuous communities of practice, arguing for the necessity of political community in order to extend these communities on a large scale to achieve the widespread social and moral transformation required in the modern diremptive world.
In the eyes of many reading this, such words will identify me as a right-wing conservative and anti-leftist. I will state my view openly, I offer a blend of post-liberal socialism and conservatism. I characterise my view in terms of reclaiming socialism and reframing conservatism - or reclaiming conservativism from neo-liberalism and reframing socialism in light of transcendent standards and communitarian commitments. My view is predicated on metaphysical foundations and social roots, leading to visions and values that are grounded in something real, God, Nature, and human nature. The socialist radicals who followed Marx had the latter two terms but discarded the former. It is my view that once you abandon God, then standards become arbitrary and sooner or later consume themselves in an internecine conflict. I believe we are living through such a conflict and, optimistically, will come to see the impossibilities of living by self-created values. A self-legislating reason turns quickly to irrationalism. I still see myself as being on the Left politically, but prefer to offer constructive critiques and arguments rather than express loyalties to labels. A conservative would have no trouble in identifying my arguments on socio-economic questions as socialist. But here is the interesting thing to note about the changing times. I recently argued for equality in socio-economic and class terms, only to be told that I was out-of-date by a member of the new activist radicals. “It is 2022 and you need to do better. It’s all about providing safe spaces for the marginalized.” I replied that I am one of the marginalized, that nothing excludes people from society more than asymmetrical class relations, and that only those whose socio-economic situation is comfortable can afford to obsess over ‘marginal’ issues of culture and identity. The fact is that the new activist radicals are exploiting the safe socio-economic space that capitalism has opened up for them and for the inflation of discourse, language, and culture. The problem is that, blind to their own origins and their own privileged class position, they don’t see it. And the ‘ordinary’ folk? They lack socio-economic, cultural, and institutional power and so can be despised and ignored – a majority cast out to the margins. The inversion is remarkable.
It will end sadly and badly. How depressing to see how many social media ‘friends’ and friends of friends who consider themselves radical coming to be so easily swept along with the wave of fashionable nonsense. They are too easily impressed by the appearance of radicalism. This stuff isn’t radical at all but is the cultural counterpart of the economic neo-liberalism ushered in decades ago, that form of liberalism which is destructive of collective roots and solidarities, now reconstituting collectivity is ‘made-up’ form around group identity. I have described this as a combination of the Lockean tabula rasa or blank sheet with a Darwinism levelled on the group rather than the individual. And it is wretched. This is the radical moment. The verdict on neo-liberalism is coming in and instead of having a proper reckoning, what is considered to be the Left in politics is embracing a decadent, degenerate liberalism that is actually highly illiberal. This is what happens as a result of an ontology that falsely separates two things that are essential to human nature and its fulfilment, individuality and sociality. Economic neo-liberalism undermined the collective aspect of human life, and now rootless individuals are putting some form of collective identity back together, in cultural terms that are created at some remove from socio-economic, class, biological, and sexual realities. It’s nonsense and can’t end well, for the simple reason that it runs contrary to reason and reality.
But at least it proves the truth of my very unpopular and unfashionable judgement of years ago. I noticed how many of those who made a big issue of rejecting what they called ‘traditional’ morality - religion in general and Christianity in particular - on account of its being ‘moralistic,’ ‘repressive,’ ‘intolerant,’ and ‘judgemental’ were, in fact, among the most moralistic, repressive, intolerant, and judgemental people it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. I made this point repeatedly as a result of paying attention to the systematic targeting of Christianity, God, and religion. I sensed that there was an animus firing what was not a balanced philosophical and historical criticism but plain abuse. It was apparent to me that criticism pouring forth from this direction was consistent and insistent, repeating the same themes and never letting up in the attack. I noticed also that its sneering and contemptuous character completely contradicted the claim that a humanist liberation from all religion would usher in an age of universal peace and understanding without prejudice. The abuse of those holding to ‘traditional’ morality and the determination to present that morality in the worst possible light said that there would never be peace by this route. To people I knew, I simply repeated my observation that the most moralistic, intolerant, and judgemental people I have ever encountered are those who make an issue of condemning ‘traditional’ morality – or any morality at all – for being moralistic, intolerant, and judgemental. I saw clearly that the undermining of objective and authoritative moral standards as a result of rendering all things relative would not actually issue in a genuine relativism at all, but in the attempt on the part of the supposed relativisers to reconstitute absolute standards on their own terms. A world without foundations would thus be a thoroughly arbitrary world in which disputes would not and could not be settled by a common moral reason, only by the power of some over others. In fine, those who were concerned most to dismantle ‘traditional’ standards and foundations would in time attempt to impose their own political preferences and seek universalize them as the new authoritative standards and foundations which all must accept, on pain of who knows what. This effectively entails the replacement of the objective criteria which serve as a standard of evaluation outside of choice and preference by purely arbitrary values and imperatives imposed and enforced by power. People are noticing. Maybe conservatives noticed first and are pointing it out the most, but people of other political persuasions and none are noticing more and more – the ‘woke scolds’ are not as kind and non-judgemental as they have claimed to be. Well I never, who would have thought?
This nonsense will pass, as it must if the mere possibility of social life and reproduction, not to mention sexual, is to exist at all. But what is called ‘woke’ is not actually the problem, and neither is the ‘War on the West.’ These things are merely the symptoms of a much deeper malaise stemming from the loss of foundations. It is this loss of foundations that lies behind the loss of an authoritative moral framework and the resulting possibility of living at an ever greater remove from reason and reality. And it is this and not the errant nonsense of the age that is my concern.
In The War on the West, Douglas Murray specifically writes on the war on the moral and philosophical roots of the West, the history of the west, and the culture of the west. The problem has much deeper roots and wider implications than this. “The West” is being targeted in this instance for obvious political reasons, identifying dominant beliefs, norms, practices, and institutions as targets for subversion and destruction. In truth, both targets and the standards of their critique are quite arbitrary once foundations have been lost. This is a war on foundations – on the historical, philosophical, and cultural roots and inheritance of any time and place that may be targeted in the name of impossible standards. What is interesting to note about the ‘war’ that is being waged is the assumption of what can only be described as ‘transcendent’ standards on the part of the war-makers, impossible ideals that exist outside of history. This is an issue of enormous concern and importance to me having long argued for the existence of transcendent standards as a bulwark against the constant and unwinnable wars that will be fought within the endless cycle of power/resistance without them. In arguing that case I have always made it clear that transcendent standards exist outside of time and place but can only be incarnated, however imperfectly and conditionally, within time and place. That view accepts the imperfect nature of incarnation, placing the focus on creative improvement. The new war-makers recast ‘transcendent’ standards in their own arbitrary image of political choices and preferences and use them as an impossible standard to destroy every institutional, cultural, and historical form that stands in the way. Such a mentality also takes something else I have argued for – essentialism – and bastardizes it in surrogate form. The irony is a bitter one. These are people who, in the various ‘post-‘ schools, have been radical relativists and sceptics with regard to truth, justice, human nature, and transcendent standards. They now demonstrate a pronounced tendency to argue from the worst kind of essentialist position, to the effect ‘There is no good form of x and it is inescapable. There is only one good form and it is y and you either have it or you don’t.’ We have seen the rise of dubious forms of racial and sexual essentialism, which holds that all y are good and all x are bad, and irredeemably so. The people who hold this mentality are big and damning on the sins of others, but blind to their own. They demand a public contrition from others, with the promise not of redemption, but of compliant damnation. Which comes to another aspect of my thought which the war-makers appropriate, invert, and pervert: religion. Many are noting the religious character of these people. The issue goes far deeper than that – this is not religion, this is bad religion. In fact it is the very worst form of religion, a religion that divides people into the elect and the damned. It is a religion shorn of mercy, forgiveness, and the redemptive possibilities of each and all, which is to say no religion at all, but a demonology. The people in the grip of this demonology do not engage in religion, nor in politics, nor history, but are embarked on a witch-hunt, seeking out sinners everywhere in the past and present. This mentality has all the hallmarks of a new Puritanism, seeing evil and the works of the devil wherever it looks. They divide people between the sinless pure who are incapable of wrong – themselves and their favoured identities – and the damned who are incapable of redemption. I’m interested in the number of conservative critics, including Douglas Murray, who locate this demonology in Marx and Marxism. I don’t doubt that those who are motivated only by a hatred of its political targets and opponents are hell-bent on destruction. But this is a demonology that is quite distinct from Marx’s immanent and historicist critique of the capital system. Marx is clear that the future socialist society emerges through the realisation of potentials created but repressed within the capital system. The new war-makers see no good whatsoever in capitalism and seek to tear it up by the roots and knock its every institution down. Marx, following Hegel, took the high road of capitalist modernity to the socialist future. These people are hell-bent on digging up the road. The only outstanding issue with respect to Marx is whether his ideals were so utopian as to invite inevitable failure, leaving the radicals with nowhere to go except … hate-filled destruction. Either way, this is not the socialism envisaged by Marx but what happens when people exchange demonology for the creative appreciation of immanent potentialities.
Our culture is devouring itself – Russell Brand
"Are you getting the sense of a dystopia unfolding around you?
A hyper-reality …
What is happening to our culture?
We are in this continual state of fraught conflict and uncertainty with no principles to return to, no recourse to a set of shared values that we all know are basically correct.
We are defined at this time by oppositionism ..."
It's been coming.
The fundamental question of the age
Can a society sustain itself if its members aren’t willing to nurture the roots that gave birth to it in the first place?
This is the most important question of the age, and pertains to metaphysical frameworks and foundations as well as to the institutions, structures, and social and normative supports. We are living in an age of iconoclasm and destruction, but not of construction. Too many who think themselves radical are spending their energies in the damnation and destruction of the existent, too few giving much thought and even less practice in the work of reconstruction. Destruction is easy. Behind the nihilism of the age is a complacent assumption that by sweeping the negative out of the way, the positive will emerge as a natural growth. This is delusional. Reconstruction requires a positive vision, which itself begs an ontology of the good and the true. What is it? Does it exist?
I have been addressing these questions for decades. I have a dedicated group of readers on Academia and on the Humanities Commons and have maintained a rank of Top 0.1% on Academia for seven years or so now. Any influence I have comes indirectly through students, academics, and readers who may take the themes I develop in my work further in their own work. On social media and in my political activities I fear I have had zero influence. Politicians and ideologues who are already in the thick of the fight tend to think that they already know the truth and tend to have a closed as opposed to a self-critical and reflexive mentality. This is the paradox of praxis: those who most to learn tend to be the most incapable of learning. People who enter politics thinking that they are right and have the right cause tend to be more concerned with telling their truth in asserting their cause. As a result, they continue to repeat failure rather than learn from it. As a green campaigner for two decades and a former member of The Green Party, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and a million other environmental groups, I have consistently dropped hints to environmentalists that there is ‘something’ awry, ‘something missing,’ in environmentalism. I hoped that such hints would be taken as they were intended, as offers of friendly advice. In all honesty, I have been left with the distinct impression that the people I have addressed haven’t even seen the issue. They have seen literature, poetry, the humanities and social sciences, ethics and philosophy, politics, values and virtues, and concluded that I therefore work in the realm that is outside of ‘hard’ science, knowledge, and truth. Too late in the day they will see that I work in the hardest field of all, that of human beings as social beings immersed in culture as history-making agents. If you have nothing to say with respect to this field, then you have nothing to say, your truth and knowledge formulated in the objective world of physical nature being merely passive and inert in a practical and social sense. It is an age of expertise, with people demanding to know the academic credentials of anyone who offers a view on anything. Are you a climate scientist? Are you a biologist? Are you a doctor of medicine? Are you an engineer? Are you … ? This is pure Babelism, dividing a common humanity up into specialised and divergent voices, each allowed to speak only on narrow areas of expertise, that expertise never been synthesized and united for the common good. It is also apparent that there is a definite ranking system in place raising some specialisms much higher than others. I do, actually, have academic credentials and areas of certified expertise, having top honours in history, economics, politics, and sociology, having studied economics at masters, and having obtained a PhD in philosophy. I know about evidence and logic, I know about humanity and historical change and continuity. I know about politics and power, about decision-making and social movements. My first academic referee, historian Ron Noon, described me as an ‘academic range rider.’ I have a strong record across a number of disciplines. I have to record that my expertise in these profoundly human subjects has counted for precious little in the political circles I have moved. STEM subjects are fetishized, and the rest dismissed. When I first made my appearance on social media, I was met by a Green friend who posted a video of Richard Feynman on my page with the word “enjoy!” In that video, Feynman expressed his contempt for the notion of ‘social sciences,’ making the point that they are not true sciences. We learned in the first month at undergraduate level that different subject-matter requires different methods, and that the methods for investigating physical processes were inappropriate for investigating human society. The words ‘not scientific’ are issued by way of criticism and rejection. In truth, the human social world is not simply natural and physical but rests upon a complex and nuanced interplay of subjective and objective factors. Fail to understand that and what little you do understand will remain idle. This is a huge failure on the part of those who are explicitly seeking not merely to explain the workings of the physical world but motivate human beings into transforming their social world. They come out of their own realms and enter practical social realms they neither understand nor respect nor care for. The results have been predictable. For all of the radical rhetoric, the overall impression of such scientism as politics and ethics is one of constipation.
I have always been proud to point out that I am a historian by training as well as by inclination. Long before I went on to study economics and philosophy at postgraduate level, I was trained in history. That was a training in everything, most of all a training in judgement and discernment with respect to the most complicated ‘stuff’ of all – human beings. I know about the dynamics of change and continuity in time and place, I know how to make sense of messy stuff that is humanity and its actions and consequences. ‘By learning how to handle historical evidence well, you learn how to accept or reject what you hear or read … The historian’s skills are not just for doing history. They are for life.’ (Michael Burger, Sources for the History of Western Civilisation).
The historian's skills are for politics and ethics, for social action, for the presentation of issues and the advancement of causes, for clarity and understanding, and for beneficent practical effect. To put the point at a level of generality that has my historian’s hackles bristling in outrage, change is a synergistic combination of material interests, moral motives, and metaphysical ideals. From here, we can get into the specifics, the details, the acts undertaken by determinate human agents in particular contexts in time and place, and these are often, indeed usually, very muddled. If you don't know history, then you don't know humanity as it has been and as it is. And if you don’t know that, all your truth and knowledge of physical processes and nature is mere objectivity without subjectivity and goes nowhere. My history tutor always said that economics is too important to be left to economists. I would extend that claim to most other fields, at least within the humanities and social sciences. If it involves human beings, then it will involve a need to understand history, the nature of change and continuity. That’s my expertise, and it compasses the widest and deepest field of all.
I was listening to a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray on YouTube concerning Murray’s new book The War on the West. Nearly an hour in, the discussion took a turn into an area that has been central to my work since the 2000s, that of God, metaphysics, and foundations – can science and society survive the ‘death of God,’ that is, the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework? If not, what will it take to recover that framework? The most disquieting question of all is this: what if people prefer to be free without such a framework, preferring to cling to a personal space of choice, however small and narrow, within a general meaninglessness and chaos, for the illusion of meaning and freedom, as against submitting themselves and their existential choices to a greater, binding, and obligating framework? As Leonard Cohen asked, where do all these highways lead, now that we are free? The answer is that they lead nowhere, but people embrace the illusion of the highway to convince themselves that they are going somewhere, all evidence to the contrary. The issue is coming to a head. The key passages below are from 55:00
I shall present the views of Jordan Peterson (JP) and Douglas Murray (DM) interspersed with my own.
JP: Do you think that the core values of the West are tenable and maintainable in the absence of the underlying religious substrate.
Me: I would like to widen and deepen the scope here by putting Douglas Murray’s notion of the ‘war on the West’ to one side. Murray may or may not have a point. I think he most certainly has. But that assault on core western values is part of a general intellectual, cultural, and moral malaise, one that has been in the DNA of modernity since at least the Enlightenment, and which is explicitly stated in Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ and Max Weber’s disenchanting science.
By ‘core values’ here I would underline transcendent standards of truth and justice, standards which are innate in all human beings but which need to be incited, nurtured, and guided. Such standards serve to inspire, motivate, and obligate action. These standards have tended to exist as background assumptions, preconditions for moral and intellectual endeavour whose existence has tended to be taken for granted. Morality has long since fallen into emptiness through the loss of transcendent standards, standard which ensured a certain objectivity when it came to moral truth and knowledge. Many people no longer believe that such truth and knowledge is possible with respect to moral values. Values are a matter of subjective choice and preference, mere likes and dislikes, with no objective criteria available to make it possible to decide between them. We have lasted this far without imploding because people tend to assume the continued existence of some objective morality operating as a background assumption. Human beings, it is complacently said, know the difference between right and wrong. I call that view complacent because it comes with the corollary that standards of right and wrong don’t need to be taught. And here comes the problem. Those on the deconstructionist side of the argument have targeted existing codes and institutions and reduced them to iniquitous power relations in order to delegitimize and denormalize them, bringing about their dissolution and destruction. When it comes to their replacement, however, all that remains is power. In the absence of standards, the assertion of such power cannot but be arbitrary, pressing claims and issuing commands based on no more than political preference. A world of such self-creation is a world that ends in self-cancellation.
Either there are transcendent standards or there are not. If there are not, then all that there is is the endless cycle of power/resistance, with power as its own end, as determined by might (physical, economic, cultural etc). This dissolves human relations into power relations, relations between oppressor and oppressed, with the path to power being rationalized in terms of a fight for justice. In truth, power is its own argument, with not justice at the end of this process but revenge and retribution.
The greater context of this self-cancellation, dissolution, and implosion as a result of arbitrary power founded in no principle other than might and force is Nietzsche’s ‘death of God.’ The loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework – and the ethico-social infrastructure that incarnates transcendent standards – results in a collision and self-cancellation of ungrounded and unfounded rights.
In shedding its metaphysical support, liberalism ceased to be a comprehensive doctrine and instead became an explicitly political doctrine. In this view, rights cease to be something innate and universal, the patrimony and property of each and all on account of being human, and instead become something conferred by political power.
The identity of human rights as natural rights grounded in natural law. Remove those grounds, and there can only be rival claim and counter-claim in the form of politically and culturally constructed identities. Lose God, and humanity soon follows. The only thing that prevails is some humans as a consequence of their assertion and enforcement of power.
JP: Jacques Derrida for example criticized what he called the Logocentrism of the West and its emphasis, for example, on binary oppositions. Binary oppositions are the foundation of computation, so maybe criticizing that too deeply is unwise. But in any case, it seems to me that the notion of individual sovereignty is in some sense a religious claim.
You can think about one stream of Western thought as the Enlightenment and there’s a secular element to that but it emerged out of a deeper religious tradition that has this universalizing tendency and this universalising claim.
Me: It is most definitely a religious claim. I have argued at length that human dignity, the equality of human beings, personhood and personal autonomy, individual sovereignty, freedom and free-will, and truth-seeking are fundamentally theological concepts. I frequently cite the US Declaration of Independence when it states ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ That truth of equality is true neither biologically nor socially, only theologically in the sense of making a transcendent claim concerning the innate and equal worth of each and all. Biologically, human beings are very different, and very unequal in their attributes and endowments. The members of human societies, too, tend to be differently placed within asymmetrical relations of power and resources. Remove the theological standard of being created equally, with each being of equal worth in the sight of God, and the critical standard which holds unequal relations and treatment to account is lost. Again, the door is opened to power as its own standard and justification.
JP: then I would say to what degree is the assault on values you see and diagnose an assault on religious values?
Me: It is. I have been sensitive to the relentless, routine, and continuous assault on religion in contemporary culture for this very reason. Many of the people who express hostility towards religion and repudiate religion and religious morality no doubt think themselves advanced thinkers, asserting their freedom to think for themselves and live in accordance with their own values and standards. Fine. That is indeed part of the deal with free will. Human beings can issue their own declaration of independence, reject God, and go it alone. The problem, however, is that such a society loses internal unity and coherence and instead fractures into an endless and unwinnable war between rival gods. When each individual is able to choose the good as he or she (or whatever) sees fit, then there is no longer any objective standard by which to evaluate and decide the rival claims. In a world in which power decides, the loudest voice and the strongest arm (or whatever the cultural equivalent is) prevails. It is with bitter irony that we note how many people on the Left in politics have gone down this route, since it is the betrayal of all leftist principles. In the absence of genuine foundations, the normative claims and emancipatory commitments of the Left cannot be sustained and instead become arbitrary, mere power claims. ‘Where there is nothing,’ argued Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation, ‘both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.’ That ‘nothing’ is what is left after the ‘death of God,’ the moral ecology as a blank sheet wasteland.
Hence I take God and religion very seriously indeed. Very many people have taken morality and the moral instinct for granted, little realizing that they are living off the remnants of the moral capital of a past age whilst doing nothing to replenish the stock. Dissipation and dissolution follow. The problem is this, once killed, once destroyed, once the enveloping aura and mystery is dissipated, neither God nor religion can simply be reinstated. They will be as empty as all the other idols and competing moral theories of the age, just another rival god in the fight. This begs some interesting questions, questions I have been addressing for the past twenty five years.
JP: Is it possible to formulate a defence without simultaneously defending some of these underlying religious presumptions.
Me: Can society survive the death of God and religion? In its death throes, a society that thinks itself beyond God and beyond good and evil soon discovers that its most cherished norms and values are founded upon God / the belief in God, and finds that endless cultural creation and self-creation can supply no substitute foundation at all. Once the origins of a value or value system are revealed to lie in self-creation and self-authorship, then such values cease to be compelling and cogent, losing all claims to be able to obligate others – human beings are not gods and the expression of mere likes and preferences on the part of determinate others is not compelling grounds for a moral system.
DM: this is the dilemma: can you sustain a system that isn’t willing to nurture the roots that gave birth to that system [in the first place].
This is probably the biggest underlying question of our era.
Me: This is the question I have addressed over a large range of writings. In large books and short but substantial essays, I have laboured tirelessly to try to get people of all kinds – environmentalists, leftists, conservatives, atheists, scientists etc – to see this question of standards and standpoint as the fundamental question of the age. It is a question which underlines the importance of metaphysical reconstruction. The failure to address this question in the first place, let alone answer it, will ensure that our technics will continue to misfire, civilisation continuing to unravel owing to a confusion of ends despite a wealth of means. Those who work within the STEM field have tended to think themselves immune from the depredations of cultural self-creation, but this is a fatal conceit born of the very dualism that makes them vulnerable. To put the point simply, the modern world has divorced science and ethics, fact and value, elevating the former to the only realm of true knowledge whilst relegating the latter to the sphere of value judgements. That conceit is crude in the extreme and fails to register Aristotle’s old point concerning different methods appropriate to different subjects. You can only have that precision in knowledge as the subject-matter allows. It follows that greater precision is possible in the field of the natural sciences than in the human sciences for the reason that the subject-matter of physical processes is simpler than the messy, complicated, and contradictory beings that human beings are. The subjectivity at work in the human world makes the humanities far less precise. The big mistake that some working in the STEM fields make here is to understand that the greater precision in STEM compared to the humanities is the same thing as superiority with respect to truth and knowledge. Like is not being compared with like. Both the natural and human sciences need to be studied in equal measure. Lose one, and the other will follow. I have long argued the need to bridge the fields of theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world, the realm of science and fact, objectivity, with technology as its spin-off) and practical reason (ethics and politics, the realm of values, virtues, and inner motives, subjectivity, deciding what human beings do with the knowledge and know-how of the former). Scientific knowledge and technological know-how are not in themselves virtues, for the reason that they lack appetitive quality : they give us the ability to act, but not the will; they do not make us want to act. One of the most depressing spectacle of an age of depressing spectacles is that of reformers and educators persisting in pressing science, technology, and design into service as ethics and politics, and failing to learn the lesson from repeated failure that this cannot be done. The only question to ask in light of such unreflexive behaviour is why people persist in making the effort. The answer seems clear: they think little or nothing of ethics and politics, think morals and values are nothing more than value judgements, and humanities and social sciences as incapable of yielding genuine knowledge. I would go further and argue that, instinctively, such people grasp the self-cancelling nature of a realm of practical reason that has been shorn of objective or transcendent standards to become a world of pure cultural creation and social construction. They know, deep down, that such a realm is damned to endless circularity between rival claims, none of which are capable of objective resolution. So they abandon that world as doomed and retreat to a STEM world in which logic and evidence promise greater certainty. That is entirely the wrong approach to take. Shorn of any purchase and connection within the field of practical reason, those relying on science, technology, and design will find themselves lacking the means of realisation when it comes to acting on knowledge and know-how, means which involve connections to agents with the institutional, organisational, and structural capacity to act, virtues as qualities for successful living, visions and values within the motivational economy of human beings, modes of conduct and communities of practice and so on, all those things that give politics and ethics motive power and practical force. In the absence of these things, there is mere resort to endless education and information from some Empyrean height, followed by endless lamentation owing to the lack of appropriate response. That unresponsiveness is entirely predictable. If people fail to learn the lessons and instead continue to press hard in their attempt at external enlightenment, sooner or later you will be led into the explicitly anti-democratic anti-politics of management and manipulation, all in the name of ‘necessity.’
So the retreat into STEM is self-defeating, cutting knowledge and know-how off from the means of practical realisation required to make the transition from theoretical to practical reason. It is an act of cowardice born of a fear of politics and a fear of people. Such people express a disdain for the power of ‘no’ that each person possesses, seeking to remove that power by presenting people with a situation in which they can only say ‘yes.’ This is fear and cowardice in face of real human beings and human situations, in face of politics as dissensus and disagreement. It is also evidence of arrogance and conceit, tending easily to authoritarian rule. Such people are also predisposed to errors of group think of the highest order, legitimating only certain voices and closing their ears to contrary voices. And it is futile in any case, for the reason that the very forces which consumed the realm of practical reason will continue to encroach upon the increasingly beleaguered STEM fields, encircling them, and framing their cultural context to drive their agendas. This is why the source of the malaise has to be addressed and uprooted in the human fields of ethics and politics, rather than abandoning those fields to their fates. For the very moral and intellectual disaster which has befallen ethics and politics will, in one way or another, sooner or later, come to befall the realm of theoretical reason, the STEM fields. It is no step at all from the view that individuals are entitled to choose the good as they see fit – ethics – to the view that they can do likewise with respect to truth – science. Science needs metaphysics just as much as ethics does.
Can STEM survive?
DM: The claim has been for some time “yes of course,” and I think that that “yes of course” has been coming under significant strain in recent years.
It’s not clear that the sanctity of the individual is something that is enforceable purely through human rights doctrine and the court and the international court system.
Me: Precisely! Human rights are natural rights grounded in natural law. In dispensing with that metaphysical grounding, liberalism switched from being a comprehensive doctrine to being a purely political doctrine. That switch was made plain in the work of John Rawls. People went along with it because it seemed reasonable, liberatory even, human beings ‘growing up’ to take morality into their own hands. The problem with such a liberation is that we have come to find that there are as many goods as there are human beings, and as many gods for the same reason. The truth of such gods is non-negotiable. The basis for debate, dialogue, and compromise has thus been lost. Instead of resolution based on agreement concerning the common good, there is at best a temporary truce. The war is endless in these terms, ending only in the defeat and self-destruction of all. In discarding comprehensive and metaphysical assumptions, the assertion of rights is no more than that – mere assertion founded on nothing more than power of various kinds. Justice is the interests of the strongest. In a situation of endless, unwinnable, war, justice necessarily takes the form of revenge and retribution, lest the temporary loser regain strength and resume hostilities.
The problem here can be analysed further, beyond God and religion. We have moved to a culture which is explicitly anti-foundational and anti-realist, a culture in which plasticity, fluidity, and malleability characterize a process of continuous and endless self-creation. At some point, though, creation has to be based on something, some substance, some idea, determined in relation to some identifiable quality, purpose, direction, and end. This is precisely what has been lost in the war on ‘essentialism.’ This loss effectively empties politics and law of substance and science of its point. It is no step at all from the assertion that human beings are free to choose their own good to the assertion that they are entitled to choose their own truth in like manner. The loss of God thus turns out not only to entail the loss of humanity and human dignity and equality but also of reason and reality. Science needs metaphysics, needs a sense of reality as something substantial ‘out there,’ in order to incite and sustain truth-seeking as something meaningful and worthwhile. If there is no objective reality, only subjective truth, then the whole notion of truth-seeking is untenable. For years I warned that the realms of fact and value are essential to one another and need to be seen as complementary rather than antithetical. People outraged at the supposed rejection of science tend to lament the descent into a ‘post-truth’ society. It is telling that such people tend to equate truth with scientific knowledge and fact. Such people have been complicit in the long and systematic denigration of morality and the realm of value as mere ‘value judgement,’ that is, irreducible subjective opinion. They failed to see that this constitutes a destruction of morality and notions of moral knowledge and truth that will one day come to engulf the realm of science. That day has come. Athens and Jerusalem are twin poles. If one rocks, then you can keep tight hold of the other until the storm passes. Lose one, and the other will follow.
To those lamenting that we live in a post-truth society I say three things:
1) We have been living post-moral truth for a century and more now, a situation that Alasdair MacIntyre characterises as ‘after virtue,’ and the very forces which have operated to undermine morality and notions of moral truth and knowledge have the potential to do the same to science;
2) Science has retained far more status and centrality than morality up until now for the reason that it is more immediately useful and can demonstrate tangible benefits; the value of morality is much less clear in being more indirect;
3) Once we reinstate the notion of transcendent standards it becomes clear that we can never be post-truth; the laments that we live in a ‘post-truth society’ constitutes positive evidence for a belief in the existence of transcendent standards by which to condemn any existent society and its contingent standards.
JP: Well it’s not self-evident that it’s fundamentally a rational claim. It might be instead something more like the precondition for all claims that we regard as rational, which is an axiom rather than a conclusion. And axioms have to be accepted on faith by definition, if you define faith as operation within the system that the axioms give rise to.
Me: Indeed. It is for this reason that Kant defines God, freedom, and the immortal soul as ‘necessary preconditions’ for morality, without which moral action and its rational justification would be impossible. Such things cannot be scientifically demonstrated, but are the necessary foundations of moral action. It is for this reason that virtue philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that ‘at the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.’ To deconstructionists of various kinds, such a foundation is no foundation at all, so they have had an easy time of it revealing the nothingness behind all moral systems. The question, then, is what are they left with? Nothing at all. Only power, assertion, competition, the determination to get one’s way, for no great reason or end. In such a world, normative claims can be no more than rationalizations of power.
The whole question of foundations, reason, and reality therefore turns out to be far more complicated than the protagonists in this ‘debate’ have possibly understood. The irony is that there never were foundations in the sense the protagonists in the controversy understand foundations in the first place. Science certainly needs foundations – there is little point trying to discover the truth about reality when you don’t believe such a reality exists in the first place. Truth is never in plain view. You always have to search, on the presumption that the thing you are looking for actually exists and is capable of being discovered – those who insist on evidence will never be inclined to search for that evidence in the first place. Hence the whole notion of truth and truth-seeking rests on the belief in the existence of a world that is intelligible to intelligent beings. Hence I quote Chesterton a lot – you cannot find truth with logic (and evidence) unless you have found truth without them.
And that is at base a theological claim. That’s my point about foundations. God was never a foundation in the sense of objective knowledge and grounding with respect to physical reality. That conception of a foundation is the product of modern science in the aftermath of the secular Enlightenment. Many ‘enlightened’ thinkers felt that natural science could supplant God and perform the God-trick, with technology serving in place of redemption and salvation to create Heaven on Earth. Have they failed? In their own material terms, they could say that they have succeeded beyond all expectations, with human beings healthier, wealthier, better educated and longer lived than at any time in history, and in much greater numbers. But we know something is missing, that something that transcends material satisfaction. The foundation of a deeper satisfaction is lacking, and is not a foundation in the sense that it has been understood. The scandal of postmodernism here is to have pointed out that such a foundation does not exist and is an unwarranted assertion of knowledge and certainly, a false projection of objectivity which is read back and asserted through an amnesia of origins. That point applies to the ‘God’ of science, but not to God. God was never that foundation in being both immanent and transcendent, existent and non-existent.
Nietzsche challenges the attempt to project and employ objectivity and objective truth as an authoritative standard, much as people who say "follow the science" do, we can pursue science as the ever-refining method of discovering the truth about reality, but "the science" as authoritative standard is just reification. This is precisely what the quote from Nietzsche above refers to, science, religion, claims to knowledge as projections of power bound up with social perspectives and positions. It is a view that has found its way into the contemporary culture wars, and leaves us without objective standards of truth and justice – only war settled by power remains.
I hate to sound like I am pushing religion here. I know the arguments against religion. I was an atheist until around 2013. But I was led in this direction by a lot of hard thought and experience. I saw the threat to truth, and how science needs metaphysics to support, justify and frame itself (the big questions of value, meaning, and significance). If there are only our concepts and categories, then reality is lost to an anthropocentrism that is vulnerable to Nietzsche's assault. Nietzsche is a sharp critic, capable of cutting all that we hold dear down with respect to truth, justice, and equality. People loved the way that he overthrew God and dissolved religion. They didn't notice that he did the same to science. They are noticing now. Nietzsche writes:
"Science, along with morality and religion, is to be understood, not in terms of objective truth and falsity, but in terms of the aspirations, projects, hopes and fears of its proponents. The scientific picture of the world is an expression of a particular kind of will to power, and to seek objective guarantees of its veracity is a timid evasion."
I have been accused of being anti-science and anti-technology for trying to recover morality and a religious sensibility against both Nietzsche’s assault and the domination of scientism. Not so. I saw the threat to science, objectivity, and reality coming all along and have long sought to check it. And, being sensitive, I do remember the sleights and abuse sent in my direction by those asserting the imperious superiority and self-sufficiency of STEM subjects. Such people are in a much weaker position than they realize. It would be a good start for their re-education for them to learn some humility and identify the causes for their failure in something other than the ignorance and stupidity of others.
JP: I’ve been trying to puzzle this out deeply.
Me: Me too, and for a very long time now. Sadly, I suspect that too many of the people I have been trying to address – leftists, greens, environmentalists, people in science and design – will see the names of Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray and conclude that they have been right to ignore me all these years. This would be the continuation of a gross error. Science, truth, reason, reality, foundations, and any number of key normative claims depend upon this question. Keep ignoring it and the malaise will continue, to be resolved by people of contrary views and politics.
JP: There’s the idea of the divine individual in the West is associated with the idea of Logos and it’s associated with the notion as well that there’s something about speech, in particular truthful speech, that is fundamentally redemptive and its recognition of that that I think gives rise to our notion that freedom of speech is a cardinal value, not because it gives you the freedom to speak exactly but because without that freedom we can’t think, we can’t improve our institutions …
DM: and we can’t get to truth.
I could cry hearing Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray say this. I have argued precisely this in my Dante book, which should have been published in 2021. Dante emphasises individual sovereignty, dignity, responsibility, free-will, truth-seeking and discourses at length on the unifying potentials of speech and rationality, innate and universal human endowments. Lose these and all is lost. Dante sends to Hell those who would dissemble and divide by using speech to turn human beings against one another and away from their sociable and civic instincts. It’s all in my book, Dante’s Politics of Love. I should just issue it as it is and make it a matter of public record, however imperfect.
DM: It isn’t a merely theoretical exercise. The point of freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, and all these things was to get to a truth. It wasn’t a game in itself; it was a belief that there was something to uncover at the end of that process that was more than worth discovering.
JP: When I talked to Richard Dawkins recently about such things. Of course, he’s arguably the world’s most famous atheist, but I like talking to him and I think Dawkins is possessed by the spirit of the truth to a marked degree and so one of the things I wonder is science itself possible in the absence of the proposition that the truth will set you free? I don’t think that’s a scientific proposition; it’s a philosophical or theological proposition.
Me: Precisely. I have argued consistently and at length that truth-seeking is a theological concept, motivation, and inspiration in being based on the assumption of a world that has been made intelligible to the intelligent creatures that human beings are. Why does truth matter? Why not merely live on the surface and accept a reality of chance and chaos? Why search further and deeper?
Further, as Roger Trigg has cogently argued in a number of books, science needs metaphysics in order to be possible and sustainable. For science as a reality-check to take place, there is a need to establish the value of reality-checking/truth-seeking in the first place and a need to establish that there is such a thing as reality. These are not scientific questions.
DM: This comes to one of the great jokes against conservatives in recent years. One of the great jokes against conservatives was that they tended to think the deconstructionists for instance would inevitably stop at the borders of STEM.
Me: This was always a complacent view, for reasons I gave above. The complacency persists, with far too many working in STEM still maintaining a condescending attitude towards the humanities and social sciences, that is, towards human beings and the human social world. The view is conceited in the extreme.
Science has been more resilient than morality for the reason that it is more tangible and more immediate in its connection to a physical reality, but the same destructive process of subjectivism is at work. The idea that each individual is entitled to choose the good as he or she sees fit bleeds over easily into the idea that each individual is free to choose truth likewise. And so it came to pass in a society in which culture and ideological media have gained central place.
DM: For years, people have said that your degree in lesbian dance theory, you know, you just wait until you have to go out into the market and find a job with that useless degree. But the joke was on the conservatives, they did all find jobs, they found them in HR departments and they told everyone else how to behave for the next generation.
Me; Yes, indeed, the joke was on me. I took history, facts, and truth seriously. I was a stickler for sources and standards, for seeing behind and beyond political and ideological claims and campaigns to check against reality. I worked long and hard, read and read, took copious notes, maintained the highest standards, and cultivated a certain disdain for those more concerned to press fashionable ideas and agendas. I knew them, I saw them in political meetings, and was appalled by their intellectual shoddiness and worse. I thought reason and reality would check their inanities and prevail. I was wrong. It was me who ended up being sidelined, overlooked in favour of people I trounced intellectually. I should have stayed on the building sites for what use my top grades and honours served me in academia.
I went on to study philosophy at PhD level. I specialised in ‘dead white males.’ I thought that this was the tough end of reason and reality which would be rewarded one day. I remember almost breaking my brain on Kant, with only the thought that if I can crack Kant I can go on to crack anything after this. Not a bit of it. I distinctly remember one job interview at a prominent UK university. I tried to impress my interviewer with expert arguments on Plato. Her revulsion was written all over her face. She passed in silence on Plato. And Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Habermas etc. They are all white and are all men. I read Naomi Klein in a recent book saying it is better if we don’t cite Kant and instead turn to the work of someone or other of colour. She then churns out a load of inanities and banalities, surely knowing them to be inanities and banalities. Klein is not stupid. This is intellectual corruption. She must know this stuff is dreck, but is willingly complicit in this compromise of standards. But, of course, we are now being told that Kant is a racist who uses racist terminology. That saves us the trouble of having to read and understand Kant, then, one of the most brilliant philosophers ever, and one of the most brain-breakingly difficult. More fool me for breaking my brain on Kant, then. I should have gone along with Lacan and Irigaray and Kristeva and Judith Butler, and written in the manner of Robin DiAngelo. Or not. I read them, and Derrida and Baudrillard and such like. I found it to be gibberish without substance. I hadn’t come off the building sites and the prospect of good money to waste my brain on such dreck, occasional insight notwithstanding. I went further back into ancient roots, just as the academic and cultural world was poised to condemn these roots as racist and sexist.
One day, and the sooner the better, a lot of people are going to realize that they’ve been had. I don’t regret my work in rational freedom, cleaving to transcendent standards, foundations, and reality. I do regret not staying in the building industry and making money by adhering to standards of accuracy and reality, making sure that things that are put up stay up. Had I exchanged this for the postmodernist dreck that has swept through the universities, I really would have been upset.
DM: And then there was the joke that conservatives again had: it will stop at the borders of STEM because at some point the bridges need to stay up. No. No. It turns out that if you’ve got a more overriding theory and claim and ambition and drive in your era, if the bridges do fall down it’ll be because of institutional racism and constructional racism and much more and it will be because you didn’t do it hard enough. It’ll be just like the nonsense that everyone said in communism.
Look at the stuff that there are different ways of knowing.
I have deep contempt for Derrida as I do for all the deconstructionists, not just because it’s so easy to deconstruct and so hard to construct, but because of course the deconstructionists always tried to deconstruct everything apart from their own university positions.
Me: This is a point I have made time and again, drawing upon my experience in the building industry. It is far easier to knock something down than it is to build something up. I should know, since knocking things down tended to be my job on the building sites. In my written work, I have been much more interested in the work of re/construction. The deconstructionists have it easy. On the basis of arbitrary standards/impossible ideals that exist nowhere except in their fancies and nightmares, they proceed to denounce, denigrate, devalue, dissect, and destroy extant norms, values, and institutions. It may seem radical but it is thoroughly reductive and regressive. Such views are incapable of substantive positive grounding. The war that they wage can never be won precisely because it lacks an end-point in the absence of objective transcendent standards. Standards are whatever the protagonists say they are, changing according to the vicissitudes of pure power politics.
JP: And Derrida and co definitely started some of this and it has led to this thing we now have, the ‘equitable maths’ nonsense, where we come once again to the anti-white and I would say also anti-black actually but certainly anti-western idea that mathematics is a western construct and that ‘there are other ways of knowing’ that exist and which must be brought forth. This is being taught in American schools, this is being rolled out in school district after school district in the U.S. The idea that in maths, in STEM in general, there are ‘other ways of knowing’ other than the scientific method, accurate mathematics, things like showing your workings is an example of white supremacy. This is completely mainstream today. These things are effectively in the realm of voodoo because nobody ever explains what the other ways of knowing are. You get this little hint sometimes that it has something to do with better intuitiveness about the concerns of others.
Me: What to say in face of this nonsense? Truth will out. That such nonsense will always fall foul of reality is not in itself a reassuring observation, not least given its capacity to take over the culture and intellectual reproduction of entire societies. Since this is so, the inevitable reality-check may take the form social destruction and implosion. I was in academia at the time these people were running riot through entire university departments. I thought their influence baneful then, within academia, and predicted worse to come should it bleed out into culture and society. (If anyone has the nerve to read, I shall supply links to my research notes from this period in the second half of the 1990s, documents consisting of over 1,000 pages).
JP: You could also argue it’s a sort of feminization of certain things, for certain realms of study, but essentially that the white supremacist male patriarchal thing is all about the answers and the accuracy and about being on time. To say that they are racist hardly needs saying. But all of these things are white and therefore we need to look at these other ways of knowing which are never explained but is something we are all meant to go along with. To say that this doesn’t bear examination is to vastly understate the matter.
Feminism had been going quite well, and then it took a bad turn for the worse. What happened? Judith Butler happened, and a war on the evil of ‘essentialism’ became a war on reason and reality. That’s the problem with a religiosity that isn’t grounded in a genuinely religious sensibility – it obsesses over evil and becomes unhinged, seeing evil everywhere, in all things to be damned and destroyed. The world is now being engulfed in notions of original sexual and racial sins, with the righteous going big on the sins of others whilst expressing pride at their own sinless state. We know how this ends, but the problem is that those in the grip of such fanaticism are beyond knowledge.
JP: Well I think the STEM types are completely defenceless against all of this. They tend to be apolitical in their machinations, if they are credible scientists and researchers almost by definition because they are busy obsessively detailing out their specialized concerns and not paying attention to the broader context which works fine if the broader context is one in which their narrow and specialized productive pursuits are valued but fatal when that isn’t the case.
Me: Absolutely, hence the extensive work I have done on metaphysics and morals, on the need to establish the unity of the realms of fact and value, on the need to bridge the gap between theoretical reason and practical reason, and on the need to establish the value of science on substantive grounds by reinstating the notions of moral truth and moral knowledge. That work is set out in a number of substantial books as well as in dozens of essays on my Being and Place site. I have worked long and hard on this very question. I have been read by some, with a Top 0.1% ranking on Academia, and have consistently received positive feedback. In presenting my views on social media, however, I have been met with indifference and sometimes hostile abuse. In the main, the political and ideological circles I enter on social media are immune to such thinking. It is, perhaps, they most of all who need to pay attention, since their normative and emancipatory claims and commitments depend upon clarity in this area.
JP: So one of the questions we’re facing now is what are the invisible ethical preconditions for the successful practice of science itself and weirdly enough that’s a kind of a postmodern question, because the postmodernists did insist to some degree that we exist within stories although they don’t believe in grand unifying narratives which begs the question for me then what unites us internally, psychologically, or socially if there is no unifying narrative, if narrative is the fundamental answer. The narrative in which science operates is something like the pursuit of truth is valuable in and of itself and it’s valuable because it’s a benefit to people at the individual level and as long as that’s in place it can all be ignored and science can act as if it’s something unto itself. I know that’s a tricky argument because it does veer somewhat into the postmodern direction, but we wouldn’t pursue science if we didn’t think the pursuit was valuable and redemptive.
Me: For ‘invisible ethical preconditions’ read the transcendent standards of truth and justice I have attempt to establish as a condition of metaphysical reconstruction. I am encouraged that, at long last, some prominent figures are beginning to see the central importance of re-establishing an intellectual and moral standpoint. I have laboured long and hard on this question, and have been met with incomprehension and indifference in the main, sometimes attracting ridicule and hostility, other times a certain condescension on the part of STEM people who merely think me deluded and misguided. I should be grateful that Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray are raising the question, given their huge following. My great fear is that the issue will as a consequence polarize along left and right lines in politics. Sad to say, I do know very many people who indulge in guilt by association. We seem to be locked in a world of tribes. If x says y, then it must be right/wrong (delete according to tribe, loyalty, preference).
DM: Can you say the same thing about the humanities? Can you say the same thing about art? Can you say the same thing about metaphysics? Politics or economics or anything else? And I think the answer in all of these things is that the priority of the era is representation and not the attainment of a goal that is worth attaining other than representation. And this is where we get to this underlying question we have to address, which is: is the game that our societies have decided to play worth playing and does it mean that we effectively win out in the end or not?
Let’s presume that we solve the diversity inclusion equity game and that every board in the US and every other country had exactly the right representation of minority groups, or over-representation, so that there are more trans people on every board, more black, etc or exactly replicated the exact percentage in the country, in every workforce, across every discipline and every industry, exactly replicated. Let’s say you get to there: do you beat China? I don’t think the answer is not clear.
Me: simply, it is an endless and unwinnable game fought between rival goods/gods, with there being no objective way of determining where truth and justice lie. It will lead to an unliveable life in a most disagreeable society.
Complete representation is an unattainable ideal and an impossible society. In ‘winning,’ you assert particular claims and privileges against others rather than the opportunity to do something productive and of value in and of itself. It embroils us all in the zero-sum society in which one accumulates power and resources or is accumulated. That dystopian vision is Hobbesian to the core. And yet the people pressing style themselves as leftists. It would be comical were it not so tragic.
JP: I don’t think that there is a humanities outside of the canon. So science is nested inside an underlying ethic that presumes that the universe is understandable and that there is some association between that and logic, that pursuing the truth in relationship to knowledge of the world has this redemptive quality and that there are very careful ways of doing that. But the humanities is also nested, but even in some sense more self-evidently inside the idea of a canon. And that canon is traditional. And if you throw out the traditional canon, I think by definition you throw the humanities out.
Me: This underlines the importance of a standpoint, a worldview, and of background assumptions – of metaphysics, frameworks, and foundations. Lose those and you are lost, swallowed up in a world of plasticity, fluidity, malleability, and manipulability.
DM: In the chapter on culture I go into this, because by this stage it is clear that there is not an aspect of western culture that has not been assaulted at such a fundamental and dishonest level that if you were to continue this game there’s just nothing left, nothing.
Me: OK … but … I don’t think Murray goes deeply enough into the problem. The political and ideological assault on the West and western culture is not itself the problem but is one possible manifestation of a much deeper issue – the death of God / loss of standards and foundations. Murray says that if we were to continue this unwinnable game there would be ‘nothing left, nothing.’ Of course. Long before the ‘war on the West,’ Max Weber wrote of there being ‘nothing’, metaphysically and morally nothing, rendering class wars, culture wars, all the internecine struggles of modernity, pointless. In other words, even if the traditionalists were to win this culture war against the ideologues, there would still be ‘nothing’ at the heart of the moral and metaphysical landscape. ‘The West’ that Murray seeks to defend and re-assert here is itself morally and metaphysically bereft and has been since long before the war on the West. In fine, for all of his criticisms of the unwinnable game being played by those adhering to identity politics, ‘where there is nothing,’ as Weber writes, no one can win. The case for metaphysical reconstruction goes far beyond winning in the culture war.
Further Reading
References to my writings which examine the themes adumbrated above at length and in depth.
For those who want shorter works, please go to my Posts page and investigate the essays on metaphysics, fact and value, ethics, and virtue theory.
The Ecology of Good (2020)
Dante’s Enamoured Mind (2013) 462 124,817
Immanence, Transcendence, and Essence: The Dialectics of Progress (2013) 373 121,828
Being and Place essays
The following essays may be of particular relevance to the issues raised above: