The Triumph of the Virtues (also known as Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue) by Andrea Mantegna, 1502.
Passing on the Virtues
The contemporary western world is a nightmare. We may well be witnessing the self-destruction of civilisation. The apathy and indifference of so many is bad enough, the people who seem to have adopted a waiting posture, in the belief that things will just blow over. They are being called on to actively participate in rebuilding and renewing the moral, social, and intellectual stock. Unfortunately, they have been socialised according to the asocial and even anti-social standards of private pleasure. They are practising hedonists and atomists and will not lift a finger to preserve the common fabric; they wouldn’t know how to, even if they wanted to. They will continue to wait passively for a saviour. Then there are the activists. These people are motivated more by what they are against, which is everything we have inherited from a past they condemn as irredeemably corrupt, than what they are for. Their prescriptions involve less any work of reconstruction on their part than huge commitments levelled on ‘governments.’ Behind it all are corporate forces. We are being played, gamed, trolled, and triggered by the masters of the art.
It’s not that the adults have let the children take over but, much, much worse than that, the adults have become children. This is the infantilism that contemporary theorists such as Benjamin Barber have long warned about (Consumed). In my own work I have shown how the rejection of morality as inherently repressive of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ and of common and shared moral standard as authoritarian and judgemental would not lead to a society that is beyond morality at all. The deliberate and systematic deconstruction of an overarching and authoritative moral framework based on a substantive conception of the good would be accompanied by the reconstitution of a morality of favoured particularisms aimed against other, rival, particularisms. An authoritative morality based on objective, substantive standards thus comes to be replaced by a morality that is entirely arbitrary but no less authoritative. One can only savour the bitter irony of a situation in which the sweeping rejection of morality as repressive and judgemental has been accompanied by the imposition of particular ‘moralities’ based on arbitrary preferences, authoritarian, intolerant, dogmatic, and repressive to the core.
My comment on infantilism is well-founded, in experience as well as in theory. As someone who is very ‘other’ and ‘different,’ I became keenly aware of the ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups of the school environment. People on the inside think themselves smart and clever and, indeed, very kind – to their own … to people who think as they think, who like the things they like, who do as they do and say as they say. They are not merely intolerant of those who are outside of the favoured group but openly contemptuous and actively vicious towards them. This moral infantilism is running rife throughout contemporary politics, culture, and media.
Who or what is responsible? We can waste our time playing the blame game. The problem with the blame game is that it involves us harping on our own pet peevs and prejudices. We can blame ‘the media’ and ‘culture,’ for sure. We can certainly blame social media, an arena that seems overrun by abusive sociopaths to such an extent you are reluctant to make any comment at all for fear of the likely response. Then there is the education system, with many educators having the character of activists and indoctrinators, spreading the new orthodoxy like a virus.
My view is that all of these things are symptoms rather than causes; they are not explanations in themselves but stand in need of explanation.
My explanation is readily available in my numerous – lengthy and closely argued – works. The loss of objective reality, the loss of substantive moral truth and knowledge, the loss of moral and intellectual virtue, the loss of the practical ethico-social infrastructure that incarnates and exemplifies the good, the loss of character and the character-forming modes of conduct and discipline that come within well-defined, supported, and protected families, communities, and polities.
Will and Ariel Durant spent the best part of half a century studying and reflecting on the history of humankind, publishing the magisterial 11-volume survey of human history entitled The Story of Civilization (1935-1975).
In The Lessons of History (1968), the Durants take up a question which is on the mind of many people today: the forces which cause a civilization to decay and finally collapse. The problem is not that people are not concerned with the question, but that their focus has become almost exclusively environmental in the narrow sense of natural or ecological stresses. In this reading, moral and civic factors – like humanity in general - have come to be treated as secondary and subsidiary, subordinate to physical reality. This is a profound misreading of human history and its making and remaking and entails a destructive unmaking and undoing of creative, knowledgeable, and moral agency, something that will ensure the fall of civilisation much more assuredly than ecological stresses.
I shall summarize the key conclusions of the Durants, and comment briefly on each:
1) The persistent and increasing failure of leadership to respond to challenges:
“When the group or a civilization declines, it is through no mystic limitation of a corporate life, but through the failure of its political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenges of change.”
Many professed conservatives are lamenting the failure of supposedly conservative politicians, political parties, and leaders of institutions to stand up and defend conservative values in response to a determined and vigorous ‘deconstruction’ on the part of the cultural Left.
There should be no surprise at all here. Said conservatives are not conservatives at all. On the contrary, the capture of politics, culture, and society and its principal institutions was effected by economic liberals (or neoliberals) a long time ago, under the auspices of a conservative reaction against socialism. The result was a deliberate relocation of the good from the public realm to the private, from collective bodies and shared experiences to the market, from recognition of a common good within which all participated and shared to the pursuit of personal pleasures and enjoyment of individual choices. It should come as no surprise, then, that when common culture and public life should come under stress and assault by determined critics, those charged with defending (and advancing)
Commonality, publicity, and civility have been hollowed out over a long period. The retrenchment of public commitment to the welfare of the people has been accompanied by a diminution of the public imagination. Critics refer to institutional cowardice in face of political and cultural assault. The situation we face is much worse than that, with the deliberate diminution of public institutions and common values and traditions being such that only cowards are required to occupy positions of authority within the institutional fabric. There has been a loss of confidence brought on by a systematic assault on commonality at all levels, fracturing society into a congeries of self-seeking rootless atoms incapable of making common cause. That being the case, it is small wonder that leaders fail in face of challenges that require effective collective response. The sense of the common good has been lost. There is no longer any common ground to stand on. The destroyers are free to run a coach and horses through the entire flabby terrain.
The ‘progressive’ Left as the alternative public order? I once thought that. I once considered myself to be helping to create that alternative. I now see only destroyers parasitic on the remnants of publicity, utterly incapable of constituting any genuine public order of their own. Them and their own kind is their idea of collectivity. It’s a war of rival gods, a war without the compromise that is the condition of a viable political and social life.
According to the Durants, decay and collapse may come as a result of either one or several unmet challenges in a number of spheres: economics, education, agriculture, etc.
2) The growth of inequality.
“Since inequality grows in an expanding economy, a society may find itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority of men and women too unfortunate by nature or circumstance to inherit or develop standards of excellence and taste. As this majority grows it acts as a cultural drag upon the minority; its ways of speech, dress, recreation, feeling, judgment, and thought spread upward, and internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control of educational and economic opportunity.”
3) The loss of confidence:
“Our capacity for fretting is endless, and no matter how many difficulties we surmount, how many ideals we realize, we shall always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable; there is a stealthy pleasure in rejecting mankind or the universe as unworthy of our approval.”
Environmentalism in its dominant manifestation is a naturalism and an inhumanism; it systematically denigrates and devalues creative human agency to such an extent that human beings are seen as a virus detrimental to planetary health. Such environmentalism is characterised by a negative perceptions bias that accents the worst that human beings can be, sapping hope and energy, bringing about the very catastrophe warned of. Viktor Frankl was a Jewish neurologist who was a survivor the concentration camps. He noted that it is those who lacked a sense of the future who lost the will to live and tended not to survive. If human beings are so bad, so cancerous, and so irredeemably destructive, then what’s the point? The anthropological and democratic pessimism of environmentalism renders it self-defeating (and, maybe, deep down in the subconscious, there is a death-wish stalking the entire mindset).
4) The loss of religion.
“As education spreads, theologies lose credence, and receive an external conformity without influence upon conduct or hope. Life and ideas become increasingly secular…”
We live in godless and prophetless times, Max Weber warned. But I am less than sure that this is a genuine secularisation at all. The ‘death of God’ as an authoritative and overarching moral framework has not been accompanied by a thoroughgoing secularisation at all but by the dissolution of the moral terrain into a battleground of warring gods. Liberal pluralism optimistically entertained the view that a neutral institutional sphere could hold the ring between rival claims, but this has proven chimerical. In the first place, the assumption of a neutral public sphere itself represents a value commitment in favour of a certain view of the good. Instead of secularisation, there has been the reconstitution of particular social and political values and interests as new gods and religions. This is not merely a ‘new religion’ as critics allege, this is bad religion, perverted religion, religion without mercy, forgiveness, and redemptive possibilities, religion of forced public contrition over personal confession.
This won’t end well:
“Generally religion and puritanism prevail in periods when the laws are feeble and morals must bear the burden of maintaining social order; skepticism and paganism (other factors being equal) progress as the rising power of law and government permits the decline of the church, the family, and morality without basically endangering the stability of the state.”
“There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion. France, the United States, and some other nations have divorced their governments from all churches, but they have had the help of religion in keeping social order.”
5) The loss of morality.
“Caught in the relaxing interval between one moral code and the next, an unmoored generation surrenders itself to luxury, corruption, and a restless disorder of family and morals, in all but a remnant clinging desperately to old restraints and ways.”
I would argue that the dissolution of morality proceeds in terms of the relativisation and subjectivisation of notions of moral truth and knowledge. I would further argue that the same process is at work with respect to science and scientific knowledge and truth. The modern world has effected the rigorous separation of fact and value, claiming the former the only true realm of knowledge, with the latter being the realm of mere value judgement. That separation fails to see that Athens and Jerusalem, scientific and moral truth, stand together or, in their separation, fall the one after the other. The pursuit of science as a check against reality is based on the presumption that such an endeavour is worthwhile, that behind the surface-level chaos and uncertainty there is an order that is intelligible to reason and that, further, seeking the truth about that order is worth the time and effort. That is a value commitment. Hence the irony of an age in which the value and worth of science can only be made in terms of non-reason. That is a direct consequence of the separation of the realms of fact and value, the former considered the only true realm of reason and knowledge, the latter merely a realm of irreducible subjective opinion. Given this separation, it is only a matter of time before the subjectivism and emotivism that has engulfed ethics should come to claim science. It is no step at all from the view that individuals are free to choose and pursue the good as they see fit to the view that they are free to choose their truth in like manner. The only thing that has prevented that step from being taken so far is the practical, tangible, immediately useful nature of science makes it much easier to defend than the more abstract and difficult areas of metaphysics and morals. But the loss of the latter spell the loss of the former, sooner or later.
In the end, write the Durants, “a decisive defeat in war may bring a final blow, or barbarian invasion from without may combine with barbarism welling up from within to bring the civilization to a close.”
Incompetent leadership, growing inequality, a progressively dumbed down population, secularization, and a dissolution of morality… Throw in perverted religion as religiosity, infantilism, and the loss of the moral and intellectual virtues, and it is clear that ecological stresses are the least of our worries. Ecological crisis is not the cause of the problems our civilisation faces, but the most obvious physical manifestation of contradictory dynamics at the heart of its social relations, forms, and structures. Miss this and you have missed everything.
Will and Ariel Durant conceived of philosophy as total perspective or seeing things sub specie totius (i.e. "from the perspective of the whole")—a phrase inspired by Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis, seeing things under the perspective of eternity.
I argue explicitly for transcendent standards of truth and justice against conventionalism and constructivism. I have made my work available in free access throughout the 2000s, in the hope that those arguing for ecological transformation might come to see the centrality of the moral, social, and civic ecology. ‘Sure, that’s about as likely as the entire world going vegan’ was one charming environmentalist’s observation on my case for cultivation the ecological virtues alongside the moral and intellectual virtues. I had thought that environmentalists were serious about system-change, institution building, and civilisation. Raised under the sign of technocracy and scientism, they seem able only to envisage change as a matter of pushing buttons and pulling levers.
The superiority of the virtues comes with notions of a superior few:
“The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.”
Henry David Thoreau
OK, fine, but … how many people there are who conceive themselves to be superior, not least when they decide to blow all over the members of the common herd. It all depends. I’ve rarely found the pushers and pullers to be the most insightful, still less the most humane, the very contrary in fact. Nevertheless …
“Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realizing.”
—Gustave Le Bon
Modern politics is rootless and fruitless precisely because the moral and social conditions for doing politics well do not exist. There can be no genuine common good when the common ground has been dissolved under our feet. The people are crying out for genuine public community but have lost the capacity to constitute for themselves through their own social practices and solidaristic relations. All that there is instead are projections of collective identity, meaning, and belonging born of desperation, lack, and frustrated need. Activists and ideologues pressing their causes and crusades take past achievements for granted, normalising them as givens for all time as they set about extirpating the traditions, institutions, and practices that brought them about. In mistaking the fruits they enjoy as in themselves sufficient foundations they destroy the very conditions for the rights, liberties and civic and democratic norms they exploit so aggressively. They will realize that they are cutting the branches they are standing on only when it all comes crashing to the ground.
Let me quote Thomas Babington Macaulay with caution and qualification. Writing to Henry S. Randall, the Speaker of the House of Representatives in Congress, in 1857 (Letters and Addresses), Macaulay made this statement:
"I have long been convinced that institutions, purely democratic, must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals, who ravaged the Roman Empire, came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay
Macaulay was so right and so wrong in what he says here. Much that he writes here tallies with my own views set out above. But much that is crucial to my argument doesn’t. Macaulay’s pessimistic instincts alerted him to the fact that there was something awry in modern progress, but in applying that pessimism to the mass of humanity his argument goes array. Macaulay warned that the age was drifting toward the Scylla of dictatorship and tyranny on the one hand and the Charybdis of anarchy on the other. Isn’t this precisely where we are today? How could it not be so when the modern liberal order, founded on an ontology that falsely separates and opposes the two essential aspects of human nature, individuality and sociality? As a result of this split, liberal modernity suffers from a bifurcated identity, swinging perennially between libertarianism and collectivism, each as abstract and empty as the other. The dangers of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and techno-bureaucratic managerialism and collectivism are real enough, and are to be checked and resisted at every turn. But far from being aberrations from the natural order of things to be corrected by a return to classical liberalism – limited government, low taxation, individual rights, property rights under law – such totalitarianism is itself engendered by the fertile breeding ground of atomised society and privatised happiness. As civil society dissolves into a sphere of universal competition and mutual antagonism, the social nature and need of its members comes to be frustrated. Thus denied, the commonality, sociality, and universality that human beings as social beings require comes to be projected upwards and outwards to ideal realms and abstract forms.
Macaulay’s anchor is no anchor at all, merely the bulwark of monopolised power and control:
"Supreme power . . . in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select; of an educated class, of a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order."
That’s a classic statement of the classical liberalism that in atomising society, privatising happiness, and individualising the good creates the fertile terrain for the totalitarian imposition of commonality.
My anchor is very different: it is a moral anchor firmly rooted in and, in turn rooting, the common moral reason that lies in each and all. My view is therefore inherently democratic. Elitists come in many forms. But they have this in common: those who succumb to the totalitarian temptation do so because they do not believe in democracy – they do not believe that the mass of humanity possesses the qualities for self-governance. How paradoxical it is, then, to see how many people holding that the solution to the failures of liberal democracy is less democracy and more (economic) liberalism, letting property and the markets go free. And how disappointing that so many supposed leftists are prepared to wave goodbye to both liberalism and democracy. My solution is to not to reject democracy but to further a process of democratisation that stalled in face of concentrations of economic and political power. All concentrations of power and money are baneful. Here, in the idolatry of things, is the source of the moral, political, and social malaise. I reject the vesting of supreme power in the hands of any select class, whether that selection is made on the basis of money, education, or expertise.
It is significant that in his letter Macaulay makes no reference to improving the lot of the poor he condemns as barbarians. Instead, he urges that "malcontents are firmly but gently restrained" . . . in the interest of the "security of property and the maintenance of order." He is oblivious to the fact that these classic liberal institutions are precisely the social causes of barbarism. But once these criticisms and qualifications are in place, it is indeed possible to assent to Macaulay’s view that modern political forms are ‘all sail and no anchor,’ perched precariously between totalitarians and barbarians, with this difference, the despots and the anarchists are one and the same, cut from the same cloth.
Macaulay warned that whilst the barbarians who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, the barbarians of the modern age have been engendered within. He didn’t know how right he was. Conservatives are apt to repeat Jacques Mallet du Pan’s adage that "like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children." They do this on the assumption that the revolutionaries are leftists and therefore socialists. There are two points to be clearly established here. The French Revolution, against which this adage was aimed, was not a socialist or working class revolution but a bourgeois revolution. The atomistic conception of rights as creations conferred by – and just as easily withdrawn by – the central state machine is an impeccably bourgeois conception. Which is to say liberal. And which brings me to my second point. Many of those who style themselves as conservatives in the contemporary world are not conservatives at all but economic liberals, atomising the social realm, uprooting sites of social interaction, connection, and solidarity, subverting traditions and communities and common purposes. That is the revolution that is now eating itself, a process that has been accelerated as a result of the demise of the Social Left by way of its complete supplanting by the Cultural Left. The cultural libertarians of the Left have now joined economic libertarians of the Right to fight out a phoney war in the shadows and shallows. The one side is as little conservative as the other is socialist.
Alasdair MacIntyre gets much closer to the truth:
"Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition."
My allegiance is to the moral and intellectual virtues, to their teaching and to their practice. My political ideal is a society in which the virtues can be known, acquired, and exercised. We live ‘after virtue,’ and it shows.
"It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different —St. Benedict."
MacIntyre After Virtue chapter 18
So I shall keep ideals and values alive for the generation that not only needs them but is prepared to look for them. The answers to the most profound questions of the age are out there, but are interesting and intelligible only to those who want to know them and who are prepared to seek them out and live them out.
Which brings me back, in conclusion, to Will and Ariel Durant’s lessons of history:
“Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man’s understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.”
“If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.”
Which is now what I am most concerned to do with my writing. I had thought to inform and orient politics with the true, the good, and the beautiful, only to see it dismissed as ‘idle intellectualising.’ Predictably, the ideologues and activists have overwhelmed the contemplatives and drowned ideals and principles in campaign imperatives and self-defeating short-cuts.
Passing on a cultural, intellectual, and historical heritage is something very different from indoctrinating children and turning them into activists making claims on the public realm rather than citizens capable of constituting and sustaining civility and publicity. If there are more people who see politics in terms of making claims on the public left than there are who make a contribution to that realm in terms of their own service, constantly drawing down resources created by others without creating any in return, in time there will be no public realm left.