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Peter Critchley

The Best of People

Updated: Jan 1, 2022


The Best of People


Yesterday I exchanged unpleasantries with someone who holds that “the best people can do in a crisis is panic buy toilet rolls.”


That view is contemptible. I’ll be charitable and say it derives from disconnect and remoteness, the fact that many don’t actually know ‘ordinary’ people, not on any daily basis. Buying toilet rolls was far from the best that people have been doing in lockdown. But that view is revealing for the way it underscores how remote our would-be universal reformers are from ‘real people.’ They are autocrats to the core and have contempt for democracy. Let’s not forget that this language comes from people who are in full-blown fear, crisis, and catastrophe mode, demanding that we ‘panic’ because ‘our house is on fire,’ doing everything to incite urgency and immediacy and stampede government and government into unreasoning response. Sadly, the views were expressed by people who consider themselves to be progressive, liberal, green, and enlightened. The anthropological pessimism at the core of such views opens up a democratic deficit at the heart of any politics founded on such views. That way lies authoritarianism and autocracy.


I don’t need to switch social media on and see these kinds of views, which are lame excuses for political failure. If that’s your view of people, then please unfriend. I don’t need to wade through a swamp to get to the folk with something to say.


I affirm the extraordinary capacities of supposedly ‘ordinary’ people.


Coming from a building background, living and working in the local community, seeing daily the extraordinary efforts of ordinary people to keep turning up and putting a shift in to keep society going, having worked through lockdown in my local community, and as a Hillsborough survivor who joined with others to fight for justice against the authorities (including political parties of all persuasions), as a proudly ‘ordinary’ member of the public, I vehemently reject this systematic denigration of the people. If you premise your politics on an anthropological and democratic pessimism like this, then no wonder you remain on the margins – you may or may not be right, but you are unpersuasive.


If people are stupid, then they are not as stupid as their leaders and would-be leaders think they are, and nowhere near as stupid as these leaders themselves. People know contempt when they see it and wisely keep away, not least when they know that lending their support will cost them time and money in the service of others’ principles. That's not selfishness, it's a healthy scepticism with regard to political utopians and naifs. And self-appointed sheriffs of moral and intellectual truth. It has long been known that people turn away from being hectored and lectured, most of all when it comes from those who claim to be in possession of truths that are ‘beyond debate.’ There are far too many autocrats and would-be-autocrats in society and not enough democracy; too many people armed with a ‘truth’ that puts people and politics on ice, too few who understand that politics is dissensus, disagreement, and dialogue. The temper of politics is judicious; but if truth is all you want, then some tyrannical realisation of the Platonic philosopher-king will do for you.


And having finally, at long, long last, understood the need for myths, morals, and metaphysics, these extremely clever folk will set about doing what they have already set about doing with values, virtues, visions, stories, and emotions and set about engineering a ‘scientifically correct’ myth for the age of purposeless, valueless, meaningless materialism. And then howl contempt when people reject it.


The way forward involves another approach entirely:

Myths and morals, metaphysics and metaphorics, dialectic and rhetoric; virtues as qualities for successful living, values as more than irreducible subjective preference, visions and moral imagination and courage; narrativity and emotional intelligence; social formation and character construction. Scientific knowledge and technological know-how lack the qualities of true virtue in that they human beings the ability to act, but not the will. Knowledge is thus not a virtue in the truest sense, since it lacks appetitive content. To be a virtue, knowledge would have to make one positively desire to grasp the true and the good: it doesn’t. Hence the bewilderment of many as to why so much knowledge has yet to deliver on its promises. It won’t and it can’t. Not on its own. And turning on the people for being apathetic and ignorant (worse, for panicking in a crisis when so many people are telling them to panic!) is merely a pious and pompous lament, letting ‘extremely clever people’ off the hook for failing to see beyond their own blinkers. “Having knowledge does not make one want to consider the truth; it just makes one able to do so." (Aquinas QDVC 7c). Along with the ability to act well, we need, above all, the will to act well. Aquinas describes the intellect as "following the will." The underlying disposition "more truly has the nature of a virtue inasmuch as it gives a person not just the ability or the knowledge to act rightly, but also the will to do so" (Aquinas QDVC 7c). That will comes from within, something we are born with. The application comes from a social context or habitus which activates and canalises our innate moral capacity, builds the right character.


People who fail to understand that point continue to hammer away with facts and figures as if such ‘education’ or information alone will suffice to incite appropriate action. It doesn’t, and the absence of virtue and character here issues in a recourse to fear and force.


All of this entails bridging the gap between theoretical reason (scientific knowledge of physical processes, objectivity, the realm of fact, the external world) and practical reason (ethics and politics, with economics as a branch of both, the realm of value, subjectivity, the motivational economy of human beings, the inner world).


This is the diametric opposite of didactic education ‘from the outside’ and behavioural engineering via manipulation and fear. Most of all, it is premised on the inherent social and rational capacities of ‘ordinary’ people and proceeds by way of inner motive force and participation. Something I have noticed about vanguards is that the people involved in them are nowhere near as clever as they think they are. I am leery of ‘necessity’ in politics for many reasons, for the way it creates an air of urgency and immediacy in order to force drastic changes without negotiated consent from above, for the way it invites appropriation by less-than-benign political forces. It is utterly devoid of social content and democratic legitimacy and is the very antithesis of the inherently democratic ecopolitics and environmental ethics I have argued for. One of my proudest moments as an educator was to have helped a PhD candidate through her research to the award of a PhD and publication, arguing for a Green Republicanism. That view is premised on respect for people, not contempt for them. I continue to appeal to the “common moral reason” of individuals as citizens but also as human beings. I vehemently oppose those who proceed by terror and trauma by way of a thoroughly manipulative and cynical approach, and then turn contemptuously on people for having had the nerve and the nous to reject them.


My argument is inherently and actively democratic, emphasising human beings as knowledgeable and moral change-agents. Probably my most favourite line from Marx is that 'the educator must also be educated.' There is a systematic assault upon democracy underway, at the heart of which is a contempt for 'ordinary' people. I see it in too many places, not least on the part of those who, having done politics wrong for so long, presume the truth of their position and damn people for their apathy and ignorance. Ten, twenty years and more ago I heard the lament that ‘people don’t know’ and ‘people don’t care,’ hence the endless wake up mode of communication. People are not empty heads to be filled with knowledge and thereby incited to act, but are embedded in socially structured patterns of behaviour, which comes with certain social identities that are transformed only by a wider process of social transformation. That’s hard work. ‘Sure, that’s as likely as the entire world going vegan,’ I was told a decade ago in response to my argument for the virtues. Of course it is a long-term view and, of course, it presupposes some kind of foundation in an era of ‘groundless grounds’ (Jean-Luc Nancy) and ‘ironic liberalism’ (the idea that we act as if our most cherished values have a foundation even though we know they do not). That terrain is unsustainable. With the moral and intellectual virtues, character construction alongside social formation, without the recovery of moral knowledge and truth alongside scientific, without a habitus in which we may know, identify, acquire, and exercise the virtues, without social forms and relations appropriate to such actions, then the inner motive force will be lacking, forcing recourse to external education/manipulation and inviting condemnation and contempt for passive, inert, and ignorant people.


This is crude, inept, and pathetic, with debilitating political consequences. William Morris is hugely instructive in this respect. The existence of a physical crisis alone is not sufficient to motivate behaviour. The extent to which the economic stagnation engulfing Britain in the late nineteenth century had not generated a wellspring of revolt made it clear to Morris that revolutionary transformation could not be considered an automatic response to objective conditions and crises. He therefore emphasised the need to strengthen the subjective conditions of social transformation, a process of 'making socialists' by way of education and broad political activity. Without this, socialism would be but 'the mill-wheel without the motive power.' (Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist 2 434-53). Morris thus underlined the importance of devising modes of conduct and participatory structures that were educative in terms of character construction. Unless buttressed by self-conscious agency possessing structural capacity, social force, and motivational character and intent, knowledge and know-how are impotent, a blunt rationalism or engineering, whilst institutional action drifts to abstraction, idealism, and surrogate collectivities. That road wasn’t taken. Instead, the world went down the top-down, bureaucratic road to socialism. As Morris said: “The world is going your way at present, Webb, but it is not the right way in the end.” (William Morris, talking to Sidney Webb in 1895, quoted in R. Page Arnot, William Morris: The Man and the Myth, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1964). If you premise your politics on contempt for the people and disdain for the capacities of the people, then you will go the wrong way.



(This is one of many essays outlining my view).


A philosopher whose work I specialized in at doctoral level is Immanuel Kant. Kant was one of the most intelligent philosophers ever, and prone to an elitist arrogance and conceit. He was cured of this by reading Rousseau. He was particularly struck by Rousseau's moral vision of simplicity and integrity, his view of ethics as ‘the sublime science of simple souls.’ Kant wrote:


"I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless desire to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every step I take. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This pretended superiority vanished and I learned to respect humanity."


In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant wrote:


“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.”


Kant is here affirming the need to put the realms of fact and value together in true relation. He described Rousseau as “the Newton of the moral world.” The ‘starry heavens’ phrase was a reference to Newton and natural science, the ‘moral law within’ a reference to Rousseau. When these worlds separate, we lose touch with inner motive force, we lose touch with people, we come at the subjective world armed with objective truth but are unable to motivate change from within. If it is true that ‘freedom is the appreciation of necessity,’ then the key term here is ‘appreciation.’


At a time when people, abandoned by their societies, are abandoning 'elites' and 'experts' of all kinds, we need this humility - we need a philosophy of living that touches people. If you can’t move people by inner connection, then you are lacking something or doing something wrong:


‘We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.’


Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 2011: 184-185


“Of all persons and of each individual there is but one definition, and this is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God… Thus the entire human race is one.’ (from Apologetica Historia, Bartolome de la Casas).


The liveliest thinkers of the modern age have jettisoned that understanding, and it shows.


This laboriously won self-contempt of man.

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals


Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Michel Foucault


I shall sum the main themes of in these posts as best I can and encourage those who agree with this article to investigate further: scientific and moral truth/knowledge; overcoming the fact and value dualism; the need to cultivate the inner motives; the need to combine the exteriority and interiority of things; the need for dialectic and disclosure to tease out truth; truth-seeking; the need to proceed from first principles and firm foundations; the necessity of virtue; ecological virtues as qualities for successful living; happiness as flourishing in a public context; nature via nurture; establishing the happy habitus in which the virtues can be known, learned, acquired, and exercised; character-construction; establishing the character forming culture and discipline of family, work, community, place, and polity; character formation and social formation as integrating personal and social responsiveness and responsibility; co-responsibility; character and the common good; the cultivation of virtues within the forms of the common life; fostering creative human agency; the logic of collective action: resolving the paradoxes of individual freedom and collective unfreedom; overcoming alienating dualisms and separations; materialist dialectics; the moral sense of place; finding meaning through metaphor; the ethics of enchantment; economics, ethics, and ecology; sovereignty, subsidiarity, and democratic will; political control and the globalisation of economic relations; recovering the economics of the good; sustainable living; real growth and qualitative development; the qualitative dimension of wealth; the new economics of prosperity beyond the delusions of quantitative measures; the new path to prosperity: learning to collaborate and share; socially useful production; the cooperative commonwealth; the economics of purpose; The Republic in an age of moral ecology; Ecopolis; self-regulation and the virtuous eco-community; metaphysical recovery and reconstruction; giving practical force and democratic content to the terms of political and ethical discourse; ecological virtue; the need for behavioural and societal change to proceed hand-in-hand; a society of doers and of volunteers; the case for constituting a voluntary rational self-restraint as against the imposition of an involuntary external restraint; the commitment to a participatory social order in which individuals act well by virtue of dispositions rather than obedience to external directives; climate politics as the reconstitution of public life; The Republic in an age of social ecology; Green Republicanism against Anti-Political Extremism: a critique of the authoritarian, elitist, and coercive implications of the politics of non-politics; The case for a civic environmentalism and a moral ecology; rational environmentalism which steers beyond the twin reefs of scientism, culturalism, and naturalism; Individual Choice, Moral Responsibility and Collective Action - Changing Ourselves and Changing the World; communing together; beyond enlightened self-interest; the Field of Practical Reason; the need to foster moral capacity alongside technological capacity; political change as the key to addressing climate change; the need to foster the political will and motivation; the need to bridge the fields of theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world) and practical reason (ethics and politics); the need to connect scientific knowledge and technological know-how with ethics and politics within the motivational economy of human beings: integrating ability, capacity, will, artifice, motivations; building the political will and legitimacy for collective (climate) action; the politics of love and of friendship; civics; civic engagement; establishing a genuine public community as against environmental philosopher kings and rescue squads; against eco-authoritarianism; politics for the restoration of ecological hope; the unity of social formation and character formation (the unity of personal and social responsibility); taking practical reason seriously; making facts existentially meaningful; fostering the springs of action; inspiring environmental action; eco-praxis; making eco-citizens; the global civil society movement; networking and communing; existential truth; ecological restoration as a restorying; fostering the inner motives and virtues for collective (environmental) action; giving rational freedom appetitive resonance and force; fostering transformative motivations within communities of practice and communities of character; communalism and democratic confederalism; for the healing: the need to bridge divides and build commonalities; reasons, emotions, and motivations; the ecology of hope; looking after the human (moral, social, political) environment; the need to pay attention to the health and quality of the human environment as well as the natural environment; good government and representative government; rational freedom, public happiness and virtue; against sophism in ethics and politics; pleonexia and public life; against the moneyed nihilism corrupting public life; reconstituting public life; free choice and state authority: for genuine common force as against the external collective force generated by subjective choice; repersonalisation, responsibility, and establishing society on the principle of self-assumed obligation; rehabilitating the ethical life; virtuous communities fostering habits of the heart; the quest for community, meaning, and belonging; restoring the moral compass; liberty and license as generating a collective unfreedom; beyond libertarianism; for civility, public life, and reason; a positive and lasting peace in the presence of justice; restoring trust and connection in a new social order; liberty as licence destroys freedom; truth matters and is a work of reason; the moral law; social action and internationalism; love and the just society; the survival of the most loving; resolidifying.


I have withdrawn from social media and its continuous repetition of shadows, as amplified echoes of long lost hope. I despair of people who remain in the shallows, far removed from the primary questions of ethical foundations, values, and virtues.


I sum up my views here:

Rational Freedom: Reconciling Autonomy and Authority


As to the quote from bell hooks, I wholeheartedly agree. I wrote something along these lines a couple of years ago.



and I am leery of superintelligence


In fact, I am leery of people who make a point of telling us how intelligent they are and how unintelligent the people are.


As for the unpleasantries I exchanged with the enlightened green person, I left with this response to the claim that it is ‘sadly true’ that people are capable of nothing better than buying toilet rolls in a crisis:


Untrue. What is truly sad is the conceit and arrogance of you people. Your detachment from real people is evident. This kind of condescension explains why green politics, time and again, goes down elitist and authoritarian routes, demanding action at a distance from people, blaming people for lack of response when failing to address your own political failures, making huge demands of government, and expecting people to pay for your principles. The idea that you are smart and people are dumb is fanciful to say the least. That's far from the best that people can do, having worked throughout lockdown in my local community, meeting 'ordinary' people day-by-day, living with them. But I shall save myself time and yield to your dazzling intellect and supreme wisdom and hereby award you a lifetime membership in the Dunning-Kruger Club. It’s a win-win. You’re happy and I am happy.

But I'll leave you with some insight - climate change is not the problem, it is the physical manifestation of a deeper problem within social relations and the interchange between social and natural metabolisms. Invert the relation here and you end up with the constipated politics that you people express year in year out, blaming others for your own political inadequacies.


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