I see a lot of Vikings on Facebook and Twitter, armed to the teeth with technology and warring daily on their keyboards. They are more pathetic than terrifying, though, as they pillage and plunder through the history books, seeking to rewrite the past in order to make up for their utter impotence when it comes to constructing a new politics in the present. In 1906 Weber attended the Social Democratic Party congress in Mannheim. Noting its ‘extremely petty-bourgeois habit of mind,’ Weber told Michels that ‘these gentlemen won’t frighten anybody any more.’ (Weber to Michels October 8 1906). I would caution against complacency here, though. Just as the bourgeois who expropriated socialism from the working class in the past turned it into a top-down bureaucratic collectivism, so the bourgeois of the present age have a very pronounced taste for legalism, restriction, regulation, and authoritarian imposition, however much they make a fetish of law-breaking for the right causes and values (theirs) and celebrate libertarianism (licence on their part). Incoherent from top to bottom, this is an elitist movement which asserts the exceptionalism of the elect. But, yes, having been radicalised by the Miners' strike of 1984-85, having lived in Sheffield at the time of that great class war, and coming from a family of miners and builders, I do find the outbreak of bourgeois vikings all over social media somewhat pathetic.
As you might guess from this rather tetchy preamble, I’ve been involved in some sharp exchanges with (now former) ‘friends’ on FB recently. As part of my involvement in Green politics, I have come to be in the company of people who embrace environmentalism in one form or another, many of whom stand close to my own position, but many others who are motivated by ultimately very different grounds and metaphysics with very different ends and ambitions. Whilst they see their naturalism as an anti-metaphysics, I consider it a bad, surrogate metaphysics with some desperately debilitating and dangerous implications. Since letting my memberships of The Green Party, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and many more such environmentalist bodies lapse, owing to an increasing awareness of political differences (in ends but more particularly in means), I no longer feel the need to be loyal to certain ‘friends’ who hold views that are not merely diametrically opposed to my own – such is politics – but express them with a vehemence, dogmatism, contempt, and intolerance that suggests that they are in the grip of an extremism and a fanaticism that would never ever have responded to the ‘hints’ I had sought to make to modify positions and change directions.
I write on a lot of subjects. I don’t necessarily agree with the positions I discuss and the ideas I raise. I have noticed that people tend to assume agreement on my part with views and viewpoints I raise. That is often a mistake. I like to explore, investigate, and test. For instance, I have at times been contacted by people whose special interest lies in the field of the ancient goddesses and their implications with respect to Earth spirits and natural relations in the present age. I have written quite extensively in this area, but critically as well as sympathetically. I tend to think that the return of the Great Mother in urban conditions is a sure sign of decadence, as it was in Rome. I also tend to think that the goddess can be little more than the assertion of blind, indifferent biological imperatives, a reduction to the endless cycles of life and death, mere survival by way of reproduction. People ignore my critical points and go straight to the goddess/nature worship, which is precisely the thing I am concerned to counter.
As odd as it may sound, given that I do advance a fairly definitive metaphysics, ethics, and politics, I can investigate and write as something of a skeptic. By that, I mean that I like to test claims. The more vehement the assertion I see on the part of others, the more I fear its implications in politics, and seek to identify the warranty – and otherwise – of those claims. I like to take the heat and intolerance out of ethics and politics. The greatest crimes against humanity are committed by the self-righteous possessed by feelings of right and certainty. Such people rarely, if ever, have the truth of any question as wrapped up as they think. They are a menace to politics and civil relations.
Permit me to ramble, if not actually digress, a little on this. I came across a curious piece of cultural analysis which speculates on the nature of fandom in the modern TV reality world we live in. The article suggests that the origin of Woke culture is to be found in fandom, particularly in relation to the Glee series. I have zero idea of what Glee is or was, but the arguments advanced in the article rang true in a broader and deeper sense to me. I watch little TV, and what I do watch tends to come from the past on You Tube. Contemporary TV culture is another world for me, a terrain I have briefly glimpsed and just as quickly turned away from: crude, vulgar, reductive in every sense, regressive, venal, and base. I am sure it must sully and corrupt all who come into contact with it. My standards and behaviours come from elsewhere. So I shall have to admit that I have no idea what Glee is or was. I do know that this article makes many pertinent points which are capable of extension and expansion so that fandom develops as fanaticism. People are taking sides in politics in the same way that they worship their favourite pop singer and band or support their favourite sports’ team. There are few more fanatical in their devotion than I am to Elvis, Françoise Hardy, Liverpool, and Llandudno Ladies FC, but I would be extremely leery of anyone who would extend such loyalty to politics.
The question as to the origins of cancel culture and ‘wokeness’ consumes the time of many contemporary conservatives. Most go little further than condemnation, but some are interested in the question of how to beat it. I have been doing precisely this, I would argue, since the 1990s, and from a leftist perspective, seeking to steer the political Left away from an arbitrariness that would leave the most cherished leftist principles and values dangerously unmoored and vulnerable to a reactionary predation and appropriation. I have far from been alone in issuing that warning.
“Listen to me. Postmodernism will be appropriated by reactionary conservatives to destabilize commonly-held notions of evidence. Farewell.”
Werner Herzog
Such conservatives, critics will accuse, reject the epistemological foundation of the Enlightenment (facts, logic, science, data). So the solution seems obvious enough: defend logic, evidence, and science. But things are not so simple. The problem is that the epistemological foundation of that Enlightenment itself lacked the foundations that modernists thought it had and still think it has, discarding transcendent standards for the contingency of the empirical world. Nietzsche rightly pointed out that with the ‘death of God,’ the notion of foundations for either science or ethics could no longer be sustained. Objectivity is merely a rational projection of power. The idea that science could be stabilized on its own grounds once metaphysics has been discarded and morals rendered subjective, contingent, and relativist now stands revealed as a delusion. Science needs metaphysics. It is only one small step from the argument that individuals are free to choose the good as they see fit in ethics to the argument that they can choose truth in like manner. To this extent, post-modernism can be characterised as modernism without the hypocrisy and self-deception.
To return to the article, Bill Hurrell writes: “While others have pointed to the rise of postmodern critical theory in universities in the 80’s, or to the political correctness wave of the 90’s, I believe these explanations only tell part of the story and leave a very important question unanswered: why now? Why this generation?” The whole business had to start somewhere, there had to be a first fandom that fell to social justice, and that then infected the others. Hurrell is concerned to identify the nature of that fandom and what it might it tell us about “the modern left’s nature in general?” I would immediately make a couple of points: 1) there is no modern left in general and 2) this phenomenon is not leftist, but a degeneration and corruption that says more about (post)modern culture and the way it infects politics and ethics of all persuasions. But I do tend to agree that wokeness is a plague, however much I would address it in the different terms of exposing and redeeming empty promises.
Furrell asks: “if wokeness was a plague, where was Patient Zero?” We are searching for origins. Only if a problem is correctly diagnosed in the first instance can there be possibilities for its resolution. I shall quote at length here, because some of the references are unknown to me:
"If the cause weren’t so trivial, this would be even more frightening than it is – the “representation” on Glee was apparently so significant and so accurately done that it reawakened ancient tribal hatreds among the teenagers watching the show because they could no longer tell the difference between the show and themselves. And again, twelveclara’s note got responses from almost 80,000 individual Tumblr users. That means that, conservatively speaking, tens of thousands of angry teenagers and young adults were shouting anonymous abuse at each other every week during the run of Glee. More likely, given that Glee’s pilot episode debuted with 9.6 million viewers, and one post-Superbowl episode commanded an audience of almost 30 million people, as much as ten percent of the entire US population could’ve conceivably been wrapped up in this crucible of adolescent cruelty. If those viewers had gone on to be Republicans, we no doubt would have heard more stories about the obvious toxicity involved, but as they ended up as SJWs, the fact that tens of thousands of teens were subjected to vicious weekly psychological abuse on Tumblr goes unremarked by the press, I guess on the theory that all’s well that ends well."
I consistently argue for the learning and acquisition of the virtues and for character construction. I have frequently noted that those moral and cultural libertarians, claiming to be leftist and progressive, who condemn such moral training and habituation as repressive leave the area wide open to other forms of socialisation and normalisation, as well as attempt to inculcate and impose standards of their own. The human social world is never ever the anarchy and free-for-all that certain people aver. In my view, a cultural libertarianism associated with the left is merely the counterpart of the economic liberarianism associated with the right. And neither are truly socialist nor truly conservative.
"This is the reality of wokeness: It is not a utopian philosophy,” writes Hurrell. “It isn’t even really a Leftist one, though it uses Leftist language to mask its true intentions.” This is true. I don’t like the terms ‘woke’ and ‘wokeness’ and examined this entire phenomenon more deeply before wokery exploded on the world. Wokeness is the surface manifestation of a deeper problem relating to the dissolution of moral truth and knowledge and the concomitant emergence of ethics as no more that subjective value judgements on the part of individuals. Far from being a utopian philosophy, it is the most basely realistic in reducing principles, values, and actions to power and the competition for resources within power relations. The emphasis has been on deconstruction in taking intellectual claims, political positions, authoritative standards, stable identities, and ethical values and reducing them to power. As I have stated many times now: either there are transcendent standards of truth and justice or there are not; if there are not, then all that there is and all that there can be is an endless power/resistance in the manner of Hobbes and Foucault. I note the popularity of Jordan Peterson, and acknowledge his insight and pertinence, not to mention courage in taking this issue on. But when he refers to a ‘postmodern marxism’ that sees the world as no more than a Hobbesian battleground I have to raise objections:
1) Marx affirmed the values of a truly human society as against the Hobbesian war of all against all;
2) Hobbes demonstrated the classic liberal split between authoritarianism and libertarianism, collectivism and individualism;
3) Hobbes reduces human relations to power and power relations, the instrumental relations in which ‘each sees the other as means to personal ends and all become playthings of alien power’ (Marx, On the Jewish Question).
4) The Hobbesian element comes with the loss of substantive grounds and the ontology of the good, something which, I argue in relation to ethics, Marx needed and marxists need to support their normative claims and emancipatory commitments.
I have stated many times that insofar as woke activists – postmodern, poststructuralist, and postmarxist thinkers as I analysed them – advance leftist values and causes, they do so only arbitrarily, without proper grounds, and with zero connection with the social agency with the structural capacity to engage in transformative action. Such endlessly recreative, anti-realist culture, can go to infinity and to extremes since it consumes the world in a nominalist madness. Where there are no grounds, there are no limits and hence no possibility of fulfilment. That danger was implicit in the notion of self-realization all the time. Without the existence and affirmation of standards that lie outside agents, there is an inherent danger of implosion by way of a curving inwards – a self-cancellation and self-consumption. These dangers have been present since Nietzsche noted the ‘death of God,’ and earlier, in Arnold’s Dover Beach, which the likes of Hegel and Comte saw, inducing them to attempt to reconstitute spirituality and religion on rational grounds. It’s all been a long time coming, and now here it is – a human world seeking to live by its own created, and endlessly recreated, values. It is the visceral hatred and intolerance that calls for an answer though. Liberals have tended to celebrate pluralism and ‘conflict pluralism,’ holding that the interplay of views in the market will lead to the emergence of a general consensus. That view held for a long time but now stands revealed as complacent. Max Weber’s reference to ‘polytheism’ contains the hint of menace that lies at the heart of such pluralism. The hatred indicates that we are in the presence of a false and inverted religion: the sanctification of the leaders of one’s own cult also involves the demonization of non-believers and opponents. This is so evident that I don’t feel the need to give examples, and hence invite my own cancellation and demonization. I am beyond cancellation, for the very reason I have never played this unwinnable game between irreducible values in the first place. On the contrary, I have been concerned to trace it to source and uproot it from the first.
Hurrell writes:
No, what it is, is a sad, pathetic teenage wish fulfillment fantasy: a reactionary ideology determined not to move forward, but to restore the power dynamics of high school, the only place where the woke have ever had any power, or where petty, cruel, emotional infants like them can ever have any power.
Here, I would refer people to Benjamin Barber’s book Consumed, where he identifies a concept of infantilism along precisely these lines, a behavioural trait that emerged under consumer capitalism in order to manipulate the emotions.
Benjamin Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole 2007
But even in the confession of one of those infants, there is hope, for as soon as these children experience the high school wish fulfillment fantasy they think they want, they soon regret creating it. Look at twelveclara/Erin. She speaks of her days in the Glee fandom as a solipsistic nightmare punctuated by endless persecution from other people. And are her goals more modest now? I’ll let her answer:
I did my time. Now I just want to enjoy things in peace and have a critical discussion about them when necessary and not every waking minute of the day.
Hear, hear. For the sake of America, let us hope that, understanding wokeness for the pathetic Mary Sue power fantasy that it is, we can finally laugh in its face as it deserves and return to a world where the entire West can, once more, “enjoy things in peace.”"
I write at length on Barber’s concept of infantilism here
I am happy to report that this work has reached the Top 5% on Academia. People are reading, are searching for answers: there is hope.
"harmless as this early phase of Tumblr looks in retrospect, that last point suggests something worth noting: that even in its most enthusiastic and least critical form, Tumblr was a site that ran on emotivism, and what’s more, one that privileged extreme emotivism. It wasn’t sufficient to merely like something. It had to drive the air from your lungs. It wasn’t enough to merely find something sad or upsetting; you had to question its right to exist. Coping with emotion and having perspective on it was not rewarded; instead, being rendered non-functional by one’s emotions (even metaphorically) had to be advertised and celebrated.
This was the polar opposite of the culture on 4chan, where caring about anything, let alone liking it, was considered a weakness that could be exploited by trolls in order to make you act stupid. And just as 4chan fostered an extreme ironic detachment that often shaded into callous nihilism, Tumblr cultivated a wide-eyed, emotionally unrestrained earnestness that just as often became indistinguishable from histrionic fragility.
This alone would have been cause for concern, but two other factors ultimately turned this relatively harmless, if slightly embarrassing emotionalism into a toxic and dangerous force.
First, Tumblr became known as a site that was most enthusiastically embraced by teenage girls. In fact, equal percentages of men and women use Tumblr in the United States as of last year, but the site’s culture arguably privileges traditionally feminine traits over male ones.
The “teenage” part, by contrast, was inarguable in the site’s early years. The site’s users skew disproportionately toward young Millennials, with a full 69 percent of its users coming from the Millennial generation, most of whom were in high school or college at the time when Tumblr’s popularity started to explode (around May 2011, the site had 5 billion posts, which ballooned to 166 billion by 2018). This teenage and feminine culture was prone, as teenage girls are generally, to huge amounts of relational aggression—i.e., attacking people through their friends and communities, rather than directly.
Second, as established above, Tumblr was a haven for budding artists in fan communities. While you’d think this would be a welcoming environment due to its non-monetizable interests, the reality of jockeying for status within fan communities can reach levels of brutality and absurdity commensurate with the professional art world. This was true even before Tumblr, as one can easily discover by looking at adult Harry Potter fanfiction communities from the early 2000s, or more specifically, the infamous case of a user called MsScribe. "
I quote and note, here, rather than unpack the precise nature of those claims. That world is a mystery to me, so I am concerned to broaden the question out. The part that interests me is the reference to emotivism - the idea that morality lacks any objective standards and is merely the expression of likes and dislikes. Emotivism is the target of moral philosophy I admire greatly, Alasdair MacIntyre (in After Virtue and other books), and is pretty much the modern view of ethics as no more than irreducible subjective opinion/value judgements. Many people share that view, grown adults and not merely teenagers, males at least as much as females. I have one male science friend who issued his manifesto rather pompously on FB, claiming science to be our best reality check and ethics to be no more than a series of value judgements, no one of which can claim priority over another. That is the general view of the modern world. What always strikes me is the extent to which a) its adherents don’t see the potential for mutual self-cancellation in that reduction and destruction of ethics; and b) that science will go the same way for the same reason: if Nietzsche is right, then it is no step at all from the view that each individual is entitled to choose the good as he or she sees fit to choosing truth in like manner.
Science friends have been happy with the view that there is no such thing as moral truth and knowledge (only value judgements), little realizing that - if you follow Nietzsche here - truth as such could come to be taken as a mere projection of power, with claims of objectivity and reality being no more than mere rationalization. I wouldn’t blame teenagers and teenage girls for this. This is all deep in the DNA of modern society and has been the central concern of my own work. It is worth citing Benjamin Barber's view, particularly in Consumed, where he identifies "infantilism" as the blight of the modern age. Barber located its origins in consumer capitalism. When I first started to address these issues, marxists like David Harvey, Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, and Istvan Meszaros had no compunction in identifying postmodernism as the "cultural logic of late capitalism." Somewhere, these views have ended up identified with the left (I would say on the basis of people arbitrarily advancing leftist values whilst rejecting 'necessary relations,' socio-economic and class dynamics, and the working class revolutionary subject. The whole area is a sorry mess. Rather than a genuinely radical politics, it looks more like Herbert Marcuse’s ‘Great Refusal.’ Perhaps the unpallatable truth for what is left of the Left is that the working class is only in one part socialist and is, in large part, conservative. To which I would say that it is better, safer, and more democratic to work with actual people than embrace unmoored and arbitrary principles of a priori rationality.
The radical moment will be missed as a result of self-cancellation, the linguistic and discursive turn, and bogus metaphysics of anti-realism. Norman Geras should have been my first Director of Studies back in Manchester when I started out. He wrote Discourses in Extremity back in 1990. Sadly his criticisms and his conclusion have proven to be all too accurate:
“So besieged, socialist thought - in all its currents and varieties - has an even heavier responsibility than it should generally own to anyway, to conduct its discussions in a spirit of sobriety and just proportion and with a sense of the complex paths that truth and error alike persist in tracing across all straightforward maps of the historical intellect. Argument by caricature and simplification; by easy reduction and intellectual short-cut; by light-minded use of such hackneyed vulgarizations as have already been answered many times over (and as will be seen today for vulgarizations not only by Marxists but by a substantial number of fair-minded, non-Marxist students of Marxism) - this is a dual dereliction. It obstructs fruitful socialist debate. And it reinforces the currently difficult external environment of that debate. It is no fit style for the kind of socialist pluralism we need. In any case, enough is now more than enough.”
The politics which is advanced on this basis is thoroughly regressive and reactionary - and utterly divisive in its core and in its intent.
"Imagine an hierarchy of victimhood where the ones on top have more voice and deemed more deserving of equality, while the ones on the bottom have less voice and are deemed less deserving of equality. This hierarchy immediately creates one class of “most victimized” people that deserves to enjoy the same privileges as the exploiting class, and another class of “less victimized” people that do not get to claim those privileges because they are already “adjacent” to them. The “less victimized” keep their heads low and suck up the mistreatment and exploitation. In short, they become willing victims that props up racism by their acquiescence. The “most victimized”, on the other hand, feel entitled to look down on the “less victimized” and deny them the equal treatment that they sought for themselves. In short, they prop up racism by actively enforcing inequality. Oppression loves to create the conditions for its own perpetuation."
You only need to examine the condition of contemporary leftist politics beyond media campaigns and culture to see how debilitating "woke-ism" can be. If you were a ruling class at bay, confronting by a radical and growing opposition, you could have done no worse than create identity politics to set your opponents arguing between themselves and against themselves as against the common enemy. ‘Whatever happened to the popular front?’ ‘He’s over there.’ ‘Splitter!’ Not a single solitary lesson has been learned by the way that sectarianism has blighted the Left. And these are the people who extoll the virtues of solidarity and affirm universal brotherhood! This way lies universal hatred. ‘Wok-ism’ and identity politics open internal conflict and dissension and create paralysis, hobbling the capacity of people to organize, communicate and persuade, and govern themselves. Why? For the simple reason that to be able to discuss, debate, disagree and ultimately agree, human beings require common and shared assumptions and concepts. Those things are lacking and have been lacking since long before ‘woke-ism’ and identity politics. Let’s be careful not to mistake the effects at their shallowest for the causes. Get rid of woke and identity politics, and the division and self-cancellation will return in other forms. It is the loss of an authoritative and overarching moral framework – and the ethico-social infrastructure of virtues, relations, and practices that goes with it – that is the cause of our diremption. ‘Deconstruct’ patriarchy and gender roles all you like, you will still be confronted by the conflict that arises in the aftermath of the ‘death of God.’
Christopher Logue’s Know Thy Enemy, written in 1968, is a poem I cleave to,
Know thy enemy:
he does not care what colour you are
provided you work for him
and yet you do!
he does not care how much you earn
provided you earn more for him
and yet you do!
he does not care who lives in the room at the top
provided he owns the building
and yet you strive!
he will let you write against him
provided you do not act against him
and yet you write!
he sings the praises of humanity
but knows machines cost more than men.
Bargain with him, he laughs, and beats you at it;
challenge him, and he kills.
Sooner than lose the things he owns
he will destroy the world.
SMASH CAPITAL NOW!
But as you hasten to be free
And build your commonwealth
Do not forget the enemy
Who lies within yourself.
I like every line of this poem. I like particularly the final passage, which emphasizes one’s own flaws, insisting that character formation and social formation go hand-in-hand and that collective effort in common cause depends also on personal moral effort.
This brings me, finally, to the virtues of skepticism as a necessary antidote to the collective hysteria that blights the modern age. I don’t need to know which side a person is on, I need to know whether what they say is true and on what grounds before taking any side.
I have never described myself as a skeptic in my writing and in my philosophy. My intellectual and ethical roots lie in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. That said, I do emphasise the importance of dialogue and dialectic in searching for and teasing out the truth in these ancient sources. All affirm rather than deny the possibility of truth and enjoin us to be truth-seekers, as against seeing ourselves as unanswerable authorities already in possession of truth.
The nature of truth, reality, and skepticism is a hot topic in an age of rising and competing fanaticisms and fundamentalisms. In the book The Importance of Being Interested; Adventures in Scientific Curiosity, Robert Ince makes several pertinent observations in light of the way politics and culture is being occupied by conspiracy theorists, tribalists, and cultists. He refers at one point to David Icke, the man who would incline us to believe that the world is governed by humanoid lizards. The last time I paid any attention to David Icke is when he was the football presenter who became a spokesperson for The Green Party and then went doollally. His claim that the world is run by humanoid lizards may be as ridiculous as it sounds, but it worries me much less than the way that other political positions dehumanize and demonize certain categories of human beings, evil nasty persons all, to receive appropriate damnation: males, white people, white males, rich people, rich white people, rich white males. Oh, and straight males – ‘smash heteronormativity!’ Select your target. At the same time, certain groups are sanctified and made unimpeachable authorities. I revealed my diagnosis of ASC to certain folk, only to be met with the public assertion ‘the power of neurodiversity!’ My writings stand and fall by their own merits and have squat to do with my identity. They may be complete rubbish. I don’t seek to protect my work from criticism by reference to my identity and I strongly refute the indolent view that the truth and morality of any position correlates with identity. People are seeking to protect their favoured views – and sides – from legitimate criticism by using identity as a shield. If I do use my own ASC in any way here, it is to ‘deconstruct’ those who set up neurodiversity or whatever as yielding special insight.
Ince comments that whilst Icke in his lectures can appear to be encouraging people to question things, he is actually doing precisely the opposite, encouraging people to reject things. The approach appears radical, but is in fact regressive, merely inverting credulity rather than dissolving it: “It appears that he is offering you a more expansive view, freed from societal shackles, when he is actually limiting what you can accept.” This observation is of general significance and embraces targets which are much more plausible and pervasive, and hence more dangerous, than David Icke. I saw Icke’s trick early on:, mix critical observations on the world of money and power with which many would agree with added and increasingly ludicrous claims. People inclined to say ‘he’s right, you know’ on the former may well in time become susceptible to believing the latter.
This observation neatly identifies the key differences between people who are genuinely skeptical and radical, in seeking truth by going to the roots of things, and people who think themselves to be radical but are in fact regressive and reactionary in the way that they simply invert existing belief systems. You see the latter all over contemporary culture, particularly in the push button, easy click world of social media. Religion is an obvious and easy target. Every day I switch FB and Twitter on to see self-styled free-thinkers and radicals denouncing religion as an illusion etc. Few of the people I see show any real understanding of religion, they know only the caricature and the straw-man or its worst and most public features (I condemn those too). Religion is an illusion embraced by stupid and gullible people based on the belief in a ‘sky-fairy’ (if I had a pound for every time I’ve heard that one), and they are highly intelligent people who embrace science; religion involves repressive moral codes, and they are free-thinking libertarians who let people do as they please etc. It’s not worth wasting breath on, except that its ubiquitous nature makes it all very irritating in its unavoidability. So irritating that I find myself needing to comment, knowing that it does no good whatsoever. Being an atheist is as easy as falling off a log in this culture and requires zero imagination and bravery. I see the same mentality at work in other areas of politics and ethics that I have worked hard on over the years. There is a plague of superficiality across social media. Every now and then I have to take people to task in a burst of irascibility. Rather than go over the precise views at issue – recently it has been the indolent naturalism of people who think ‘Mother Nature’ a benevolent goddess to worship – it is the incredulous mentality that needs to be noted, especially when such people consider themselves to be free-thinking skeptics and radicals. They are actually religious to the core, but only in the sense of a bogus and corrupted religion, as blinkered and repressive and dangerous as any religion they care to condemn. They are precisely what they claim others to be – zealots, bigots, and true believers, their vehemence and dogmatism being all the more extreme on account of their belief to be in possession of truth. Such people make the all-too-common mistake of conflating knowledge with certainty - the two are very different.
The strange thing is that the more knowledge I have acquired over the years, the less certain I have become. In my written work, I am not a skeptic. At the same time, the conclusions I have drawn and positions I have staked out have been the result of being a truth-seeker. Of course, to seek truth is not the same thing as finding truth, and any claims you advance as a truth-seeker are to be tested on their merits by others. I intrigued my Director of Studies who, one afternoon, tried to figure out exactly what my position was and what the grounds were of my views. In the end, he smiled and described me as a ‘true existentialist.’ And maybe even a skeptic, in the manner of Montaigne. It’s possible. A true skeptic is someone who eschews certainty in light of knowledge and will instead admit of uncertainty, searching for the evidence underlying any claims being advanced with an open mind. Such a mentality is the very antithesis of that displayed by people who seek to deconstruct and destroy certain claims and positions they oppose, without at the same time scrutinizing their own. Such people may consider themselves to be skeptics, radicals even, but they have not sought the roots of a matter in the spirit of genuine truth-seeking and have instead taken their membership of a side, a tribe, and a cult to reject one, dominant, orthodox view in favour of advancing and establishing their own. It is this that gets my hackles rising, seeing positions I have worked hard to present and articulate being reduced to caricature and dismissed by people who are presenting new orthodoxies of their own, insisting on conformity on pain of demonization and damnation. That is a sure sign that we are in the presence not of skepticism and radicalism but of bogus, perverted religion. In creating their own values, seeing the true and the good as they see fit, modern individuals have created their own gods, and with such gods there can be no negotiation, only appeasement, obedience, and abasement. I note the extent to which many espouse ‘Nature’ and ‘Mother Nature’ as their god to worship. In one exchange, views I hold to be true were dismissed as removed from reality. So I had a quick look at the things this person considered to be real. My response was as brief as it was blunt:
‘I thought I would scroll down and take a look at what you think reality is. 'Nature.' How profound. Nature doesn't give a damn (and is employed by people as an empty signifier, reified through the voice of science). This kind of naturism, which veers in the direction of primitivism, is plain decadence and a political dead-end. I've as little time for planetary fetishizers as I have for planetary managers and planetary engineers - they are all cut from the same cloth and evade the key questions of social form and mediation, ending up asserting some form of 'necessity' or another. I'm done with this kind of non-thinking. Indolent.’
So that was another ‘friend’ who was chalked off my friends list. I have no regrets. You cannot be all things to all people and are foolish to try: whereas others press on forcefully and dogmatically, you merely dilute your own views to empty generalities in the attempt to maintain a broad appeal. It is best to engage with people who show the will and inclination to read beyond their own prejudices, try with the others, but avoid wasting time speaking to deaf ears and closed minds. In complete contrast to genuine skeptics, the latter are characterised by their complete confidence and certainty with respect to their values and positions. This is the complete antithesis of skepticism. It is significant that such people are rarely, if ever, to be found expressing critical views of positions and claims advanced by their own side. I remember seeing Jeremy Lent, a writer I have a lot of time for, claiming that those either criticising Greta Thunberg, or not supporting her, are doing the work of the Koch Brothers for them. This is not merely nonsense, it is revealing nonsense. People who reason thus reveal, at best, their political naivety and ignorance of history – this kind of reasoning has undermined leftist causes since ever, as exemplified by the Stalinist line that those who do not support Stalin are ‘objectively fascist’ – or, at worst, their complicity in the distortion of truth and reality. Any political movement that loses the capacity for reflexivity and self-criticism is a menace to itself, let alone to others.
In the time I spent tutoring/offering advice to students, I insisted that they read against their prejudices. It was fine to have a certain view, but it was finer still to know why it may be wrong, strengthening your argument by understanding why its critics may have a point. I do it all the time in my own writings, which can make for difficult reading. Instead of stating precisely and concisely what I hold to be true, I can be found engaging with contrary views. ‘We don’t need any juxtaposition here,’ my DoS wrote in the margins on one of my research papers. Maybe not, but I like to anticipate and meet criticisms and dialogue with awkward interlocutors. I like the dialogical and dialectical approach, not least for the way that it incites the desire to know and seek truth on the part of readers. I can remember a quote falsely attributed to Aristotle here: “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.” That quote was first attributed to Aristotle by Lowell L. Bennion in his Religion and the Pursuit of Truth (1989, 52). The important thing here is the emphasis on the pursuit of truth and the willingness to test one’s views by seeking out contrary views. What Aristotle does say here, is much more nuanced (it is Aristotle after all):
“It is right that we ask [people] to accept each of the things which are said in the same way: for it is the mark of an educated person to search for the same kind of clarity in each topic to the extent that the nature of the matter accepts it. For it is similar to expect a mathematician to speak persuasively or for an orator to furnish clear proofs!
Each person judges well what they know and is thus a good critic of those things. For each thing in specific, someone must be educated [to be a critic]; to [be a critic in general] one must be educated about everything.”
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1 1094a24-1095a
You will find none of those clauses and nuances amongst those who are happy to destroy old orthodoxies only to raise new ones of their own. This view runs directly contrary to modern praxis-based views, in which understanding a view implies necessarily accepting its truth: those who refuse to so accept, obey, and conform are condemned on account of their failure to understand. We are in the presence of a modern form of justification by faith alone. In this faith, skepticism forever runs the risk of being denounced – damned, actually – as a denialism. In refusing to accept certain positions and a certain politics, in refusing to bow to certain authorities, I have no doubt that I have exposed myself to claims of being a denier. I wrote on this recently in light of Michael Mann’s encouragement to You Tube to ban certain platforms and certain people who refuse to conform to his fundamentally correct views on all things to do with climate. I wouldn’t trust people like this, people armed with non-negotiable truth, with an ounce of political and cultural power – they are censors and would-be tyrants, for our own good, of course. Such people know nothing of politics and history, for the reason they see nothing in politics and history – and people – that is worthy of knowing.
I see this mentality in many places. Politics and dialogue as a mutual learning have been replaced by a permanent protest, pressure, and proselytising in which contrary views are systematically suppressed. I’ve said my piece on Extinction Rebellion and don’t care to repeat it. I spent a decade and more before that locking horns with ‘climate deniers.’ Here is the point about those who end up in the grip of campaign imperatives – when you think you already know and possess the truth, you stop seeking the truth. Instead of listening to others, you immediately start to suspect the motives of all those who subscribe to views which run contrary to your own. Very rarely, with precious few exceptions, do I see people who are prepared to advance criticisms of positions and claimed advanced by people on their own side. The imbalance is striking – heated, vociferous, passionate denunciation of those with alternative and contrary platforms combined with coolness and indifference to errors and exaggerations made by those on one’s own side (along with loud and vocal cheer-leading for those on one’s own side). I’ll name no names, but some of the claims advanced for certain environmental leaders (raised to the status of prophets) have not merely been embarrassing they have been vomitable.
Although I haven’t been as critical as I ought to have been – suppressing my doubts and tempering my comments out of a misplaced loyalty to a political cause – I have been critical during my time in green politics. I had hoped that those with whom I came into contact would listen and learn. The Posts page on my Being and Page site is packed with criticisms of environmentalism and the environmental movement, despite the fact I am a broad supporter of ‘green’ aims and objectives. I have made those criticisms not because I am against green politics but precisely because I am in broad agreement with environmentalist aims and objectives, seeking their proper realization by guarding against bad process and inappropriate/ineffectual means. To many within the movement and subject to its campaign imperatives, it may seem that I have become anti-green and anti-environmentalist, thus becoming one of those dreaded deniers or one of those eco-modernizers now repudiating the green nature god that failed. That’s not true. And I never quite embraced Nature in that sense, either, for all that I dallied and trifled with a number of goddesses. I am a truth-seeker first and foremost and a cultist and tribalist not at all. In between, I have political commitments that are conditional upon internal coherence based upon adherence to reason as far as logic and evidence can go, then meaning, faith, and significance as far as possible beyond skeptical incredulity. To paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas, love takes up where knowledge leaves off.
In light of these observations, the criticisms I advance serve as a form of self-criticism, an expression of the kind of internal reflexivity that any movement or school in thought, politics, and practice requires to keep it in sane and healthy relation to truth and reality.
The notion of climate denialism is too blanket to be meaningful, effectively covering a disparate number of positions which lack internal coherence. In that respect, the accusation applies to anyone and everyone who refuses to embrace the one and only correct position on climate change. It is too general to be meaningful, embracing those who agree that global heating is occurring, but question its implications at the level of politics and policy, and those who say it is all a fake science to advance a political agenda. Too many jumble up diverse positions on this. I noticed immediately that once I started to make my criticisms of environmentalist ethics and politics with respect to climate change more clear and more public, I attracted the interest and drew the support of those who argue that climate change is not merely a political scam but is a bogus crisis whipped up by a distortion of science. The two do not necessarily follow. A wretched game is being played here, with ‘climate alarmists’ taking outliers in the science to make exaggerated claims and ‘climate deniers’ taking these claims as evidence of a long history of failed predictions to cast doubt on ‘the science.’
I am critical of the politics and ethics (as an anti-politics and a non-ethics), but hold that the science with respect to the crisis in the climate system is broadly true, and that if it weren’t, it would be the science itself that would correct any error that is identified. Science, I hold, is ultimately self-cleansing. Like any human invention, though, science can be misused, misdirected, and abused. That is precisely why a critical and skeptical view is much healthier than tribal loyalties and cultist mentalities. I have been incredibly loyal in the past to the green side in politics. Those loyalties, and the campaign imperatives arising from them, led me to downplay weak spots I identified in the politics and exaggerate claims based on partial and selective readings of ‘the science,’ that is, to use science as a false authority to coerce and constrain human behaviour by a false necessity. Rather than being overtly critical, thrashing issues out openly, I would make my criticisms in a covert manner, burying them in a supportive text in the hope that those who were in agreement would pick up on my ‘hints’ and modify their views and actions accordingly. This was a pious hope born of the view that human beings are fundamentally rational, as well as social, beings. My view is theological. Unfortunately, it is the biological view that has prevailed, the idea that human beings are rationalizing beings, setting out to deceive others – and themselves – to advance one’s own tribe at the expense of other tribes.
I have found that, in the main, people with a side to support will take the cheerleading for their pet peeves and positions and ignore the critical comments as a mild aberration or eccentricity on my own part. This told me to stop cheerleading. I think the final straw came for me not merely with the errant nonsense that Greta Thunberg was spewing when hijacking media events and the public sphere, but most of all with the utterly incredulous reaction this drivel incited in adults who ought to have known better. It told me that environmentalism really was as bereft of serious substantive politics and ethics as I had thought. I spent years arguing for a Green Republicanism, helping and supporting PhD candidates in similar work, only to find that it had counted for nothing. There is no serious interest in politics and ethics here, for the reason that those in the embrace of scientism, naturalism, and nature romanticism/moralism have zero interest in politics and ethics. It is no wonder at all why such people would respond so enthusiastically to the pronouncements of a child, a child who was basically telling them things they not only knew but had been telling others for decades. This was confirmation bias raised to the level of a cult.
The dead giveaway was not merely the extreme claims made on her behalf, as if she was some child prophetess straight out of the Middle Ages – a child was born to lead the environmental movement out of the wilderness and other such vomitatious rubbish – but the vehement denunciations of all who expressed criticism. This was not healthy, effectively seeking to insulate highly contentious and debatable points of politics from criticism on account of being launched from positions of unimpeachable truth and authority. As soon as that happens in politics, alarm bells ought to be ringing, and loudly. If in doubt, it is a good rule of thumb to understand that those who want you to panic very rarely have your best interests at heart. Even if you are facing a situation in which death is a near certainty, in no wise ever does panicking improve your chances of survival – the very opposite. I’m waiting for Pope Francis to begin the beatification of Greta Thunberg, or risk denunciation as a heretic before the goddess Mother Nature. But here I am guilty of argument by way of caricature myself.
Perhaps it is my grounding in politics, ethics, and religion, out of a belief in a substantive ontology of the good, that has left me entirely unable to take Greta Thunberg seriously, and those who do even less seriously. Greta Thunberg appears in the guise of an environmentalist, and it works to the extent that she serves as a signpost. But the repetition of the phrase ‘follow the science’ has all my alarm bells ringing. In the first instance, it is a meaningless phrase. Science leads nowhere; it is an ever-refining process for discerning truth and is to be valued as such; in the second instance, it is an attempt to use science as authority and is, for that reason, about as anti-scientific a statement as you can make. This is plainly an attempt to mug and bully and coerce a politics and an ethics, to make up for the fact that environmentalism as scientism and technological fetishism has nothing to offer the field of practical reason.
It seems like environmentalism but has the form of something else. At long last, and very late in the day, environmentalists have discovered that scientific knowledge and technological know-how give human beings the ability to act, but not the will, and therefore lack the true qualities of virtues in being able to move human beings in the motivational economy. Science and technology have nothing to offer beyond information and implementation (which is a lot) in the field of practical reason, the field in which theoretical reason/knowledge is acted upon. This leaves environmentalists having to find something that does have something to offer. Instead of a genuine politics and ethics, we are witnessing a bogus and perverted religion in which God is supplanted by religions, popes and priests by scientists. Environmentalism as perverted religion is characterized by original sin – selectively interpreted and applied – and demands for public contrition – again on the part of certain identities and not others. The world is divided up into the sheep and the goats, but without mercy and forgiveness and a proper sense of transcendence it is difficult to see exactly who the saved will be, if anyone. Environmental activism is a religious revival without God, redemption, and transcendence. In normal times we would be laughing our heads off at such people, or being amused by them as they stood on street corners with their placards and boards pronouncing that ‘the end of the world is night.’ I remember my old football magazines, with a Leeds fan coming home after a defeat to Manchester United seeing a man with a placard reading 'the end of the world is night,' mumbling under his breath that ‘the end of his world is more nigh than he thinks.’ The difference is that whereas the nutters of old would be sad, pathetic loners in shabby clothes, the new revivalists are well-dressed, well-resourced, and well-connected; and they are not on street corners, they are at the heart of media and politics. This makes me nervous. Ask yourself: who has the power and resources to push technology to the scale required to meet ambitious climate targets? Not green hippies with startup companies, I would suggest.
Let’s dispense with the alarmism first. If it is indeed true that an eco-catastrophe is on the horizon and the end of the world is night, then there is nothing we can do to stop it. I heard all this kind of talk two decades ago. A decade ago I was contacted by a prominent glaciologist, who told me that it is an ‘all hands on deck’ moment on the planet and called on me to help him raise the alarm. I did, in precisely those terms. The ship is still afloat. In Gods and Gaia, written in 2011, I decided to call the bluff of those using climate necessity to justify all manner of climate policies, from authoritarian imposition of austerity to geoengineering. Once things got so bad as to necessitate such policies then it was time to own up, beg forgiveness, and make your peace as best you can with the planet as it blows. How odd that when I call the bluff of those sounding the alarm in those terms they make no response. That tells me that they don’t actually believe that the end of the world is nigh but are making use of alarmist language to bully a politics out of the government and the governed. To which I say: do politics properly! And address individuals as citizens of the public realm with a right to determine the laws by which they are governed and their level of taxation and how it is spent.
Environmentalism in this pseudo-religious form is really a form of millenarianism. It is a well-known phenomenon that has occurred many times throughout history. It was analyzed at length by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, with obvious parallels being drawn to contemporary socialism and communism. It is just as easy to now make a comparison with environmentalism, especially with respect to its Nature worship. We have found that it is relatively easy to get rid of God, but well-nigh impossible to get rid of religion. I would suggest that that is because human beings are fundamentally religious beings, with a cosmic longing for a meaning, truth, and belonging that lies beyond the immediacy of the physical world. We have abolished God only to find that the theological assumptions and desires attendant upon God have become unmoored and in time re-attached to other objects. It is easy to see how modern environmentalists in a godless age are really Nature worshippers. That’s precisely what I saw in the green ‘friend’ I promptly unfriended a day or so ago. I went down his page and saw indolent views of a benevolent nature, images of happy vikings, anti-civ primitivism, celebrations of the virtues of animality and the wisdom of indigenous people. The hypocrisy is breath-taking. Such people are utterly oblivious to the extent that they use the ‘patriarchal technology’ of modern capitalism to wax lyrical on the primitive. I would bet they would barely last an hour once returned to the primal squalor they dress up as the Mother Goddess. I was once present at dinner with such environmentalists. Thinking himself among like-minded high priests, one opined casually ‘it is time to cull the herd.’ I asked him who would be in charge of the culling, and which government he would trust with the task. He backed off. With power, I doubt he would be inclined to retreat the same way. I’ve been doing some culling of my own, getting rid of nature cultists who are now so beyond reason as to require a deep process of deradicalisation that is well beyond my abilities. And beyond my patience. It is the repressive and unforgiving tone of this perverted, inverted religion I would warn people about. People who are so convinced that they are in possession of truth and right can do an awful amount of damage to the world and inflict an appalling amount of pain and suffering on others, and feel justified and vindicated in so doing. I wouldn’t let the flagellants anywhere near political power.
G.K. Chesterton said that when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing they believe in anything. There are a lot of gods in the modern world. The most common and most popular god is the self. People are worship the body and its pleasures – their own. This is the ultimate reduction which proceeds from Nature, a curving inwards. Environmentalists at least claim to be worshipping something greater in the form of Nature but, without transcendence, it ends the same way.
It’s hard to see the world rendered in black and white form as capable of capturing the diversity and plurality of positions. All that people seem to be doing is supporting their favourite sports team or pop singer/band and claiming to have scientific backing on their side. I used to do this by listing all of Elvis’ hit records, his number one singles, his gold records and sales and anything at all that offered objective proof to my claim that Elvis was the greatest singer ever. I don’t make these claims on skepticism to damn and denounce ‘climate deniers’ and ‘climate alarmists,’ although it may be to my credit that I have now tangled with all of them in one form or another, from those obstructing climate action to those demanding it, such as Extinction Rebellion and the unassailable Saint Greta. You can read my criticisms elsewhere on this site, if are as inclined to waste precious time as I have been. I would simply recommend that you be skeptical and critical at all times, examine your own assumptions and preferences, seek the logic and evidence of your own case before making any necessary leaps of faith. Remember that the more logic and evidence that you have on your side, the less of a leap you will have to make. But faith is still required, since you will still have to leap all the same.
I will bring this piece to a close by making this observation about the nature of skepticism. Genuine skepticism is characterised by humility in being open to the possibility of error. That being so, we can be as sure as we can be that those who advance claims with an exaggerated and extreme certainty are not skeptics. A genuine skeptic is curious about the truth regardless of who may be the vehicle of it in any one time and place. A skeptic looks first and foremost at the quality of arguments and supporting evidence and not at all to tribal loyalty or affiliation. It would be a great step forward should more people from a range of different standpoints come to approach issues and engage with others with a degree of humility, testing their grounds and the claims they make upon them. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my dad a few years ago, in the context of a heated debate on TV. I stated that it would be healthy if people who engaged in debate would start from the assumption that they are all probably all wrong! That statement was an exaggeration to make a point. I would replace that insistence on probability with possibility now that I am in a calmer mood. That temper is Socratic. Socrates would say that he didn’t know the truth, but that he could find it out.
None of this means that you are compelled to change your mind in face of contrary evidence. If the evidence before you doesn’t warrant a change in view, then not only are you justified in continuing to hold your view, you may well have strengthened it. More important than the view you hold and seek to advance at any one time is the reason why you hold that view and the process by which you have come to hold that view. Instead of being a representative of a tribe or a member of a cult, you exist as a truth-seeker. I would guess that pretty much most people would define themselves as a truth-seeker, as skeptical seekers of truth. The people who denounce my views as religious and therefore superstitious and repressive, clearly see themselves as free-thinking truth-seekers. The same with respect to those who damn civilization and the past on account of its whiteness and maleness. Such people are anything but skeptical, free-thinking radicals and truth-seekers. On the contrary, they are concerned most of all to ‘deconstruct’ and destroy a mainstream narrative in order to supplant it with a new narrative of their own. That is not truth-seeking, but a process of picking one side against another. The lesson is plain: be skeptical of all self-contained, self-serving, and self-validating bs systems that are impervious to logic and selective in relation to evidence. Take a quick peek at social media – such narrativity as a new religiosity is to be found all over the place. Trained in evidence and logic – history and philosophy – and taking politics and ethics seriously whilst affirming the existence of experiential and transcendental religious truths, I tend to find the people on social media something of a Hell to endure. I find such people to be lost and adrift, not so much seeking truth as confirmation and conformity. I am an inveterate contrarian in such a world.
I’ll end with a reference to the paper Idolatry and Science: Against Nature Worship from Boyle to Rudiger, 1680-1720 by Martin Muslow. Muslow writes: ‘The seventeenth-century debates about idolatry had a powerful influence, not only in theology and in religious struggles but in other disciplines as well. Since these debates have fallen into oblivion, their influence in an array of disciplines has been eclipsed or underestimated.’ (Muslow. (Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Oct., 2006), pp. 697-712, Published By: University of Pennsylvania Press). I would suggest that the significance of these debates is about to be rediscovered, and not before time. Many once thought that human beings through science could go it alone and build Heaven on Earth. The geneticist J. B. S. Haldane expressed this idea that science was the key to a "better" future in clear and forthright terms in 1928. He wrote that "civilization as we know it is a poor thing. And if it is to be improved there is no hope save in science. . . . Physics and chemistry have made us rich, biology healthy, and the application of scientific thought to ethics by men such as Bentham has done more than a dozen saints to make us good. The process can only continue if science continues." Haldane spoke for many in making science the key both to a better material world and to a more virtuous society. "We are far from perfect," he wrote, but "we do not hang starving children for stealing food, raid the coast of Africa for slaves, or imprison debtors for life. These advances are the direct and indirect consequences of science." In material, quantitative terms – the terms of reductive science – many will claim that Haldane has been proven right. Human beings are healthier, wealthier, better educated and better fed than at any time in history, and in much greater numbers. And yet now, in the moment of triumph, Steven Pinker’s indefatigable efforts notwithstanding, the modern western world evinces a collapse in confidence. The strangest thing of all in this is that science – or scientism and naturalism – is the dominant discipline within environmentalism. But is this science? Or is it a dubious and debilitating mix of scientism, naturalism, romanticism, and moralism? A mix that, in finally seeing the metaphysical void that has opened up and the paralysing effects that ensue, seeks recourse to a bogus religiosity. I think this is where we are at. And the situation is fraught with dangers.
Rather than be pessimistic, I would say it has made a pretty good job of it, with billions living in an affluence undreamt of in past ages, albeit at a price. It was easy to think that we no longer have need of God and religion, and that Nature and science would suffice. The loss of confidence overcoming modern western civilisation has left science vulnerable, having lost religion as its twin pole. Idolatry is coming back in all kinds of dubious forms, all the more dangerous for claiming a scientific basis and authority. It’s a bogus science and a bogus religion, an inversion and a perversion that demands the recovery of real science and religion in proper relation. Athens and Jerusalem stand together or fall together: lose the one and the other will fall in short order.