The Dark Ages to Come Have Been Here a Long While

The Dark Ages to Come Have Been Here a Long While

The Dark Ages are already upon us and have been for some time.

“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.”

Alasdair MaIntyre, After Virtue 1981 ch 18

They are in our institutions and social bodies, too, including our supposed counter-institutions, with people offering solutions and alternatives that come from within the dominant modalities and mindsets of the age.

I wonder how many of the people who were responsive to MacIntyre’s description of our predicament back in 1981, but who rejected the implausibility of his solution, would be tempted to think again in light of continued disintegration and descent.

I have just been introduced to this essay by Steve Patterson, “Our Present Dark Age.”

I quickly read it and found that many of its themes resonate with my own work over the years. Given that similarity I shall resist the temptation to repeat myself and simply quote passages of commonality and comment briefly. If you follow my work on “Being and Place,” you will identify the clear parallels of this essay with key themes in my work. Otherwise, I would simply recommend that those who think the reasoning cogent to investigate my work further.

I shall give quotes from Patterson and comment.

"After careful examination, I have come to the conclusion that we’ve been living in a dark age since at least the early 20th century.”

My work on “Being and Place” was motivated by a concern that the intellectual, moral, social, and political world had lost its underpinnings and cohering principle. That’s not an original observation, of course, with new schools of thought celebrating the loss of foundations and openly embracing some form of contextualism, relativism, and varying degrees of subjectivism, existentialism, nihilism, constructivism … Keep looking for firm ground to stand upon and you became quickly aware that, beyond the temporary truces of pragmatism, solipsism holds all the trump cards. That is an invitation into social madness, an invitation that too many have been too willing to take.

In my work I focus on nietzsche’s “death of God” as the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework. Many people, particularly those with a background in science, engineering, and technology, have been happy with the separation of facts and values, means and ends, that this loss of moral and metaphysical reality has entailed. The realm of fact, of observation of physical reality, is the only source of true knowledge, with the realm of values being relegated to secondary status as irreducible subjective preference.

This division undermines not merely ethics but also science. It is no step at all from the view that each person is entitled to choose the good as he or she sees fit to the view that each is entitled to choose ‘their truth’ in the same way. Science needs metaphysics in order to do its work. Science presumes the existence of an objective reality to examine, observe, record, and report back on. But science itself cannot demonstrate that assumption. We have been living in an age in which epistemology – the question of what we know and how we know it – has supplanted a concern with ontology – the question of what there is. The result has been an attempt to level foundations on the means of knowledge rather than the actual (metaphysical) grounds of knowledge. It can’t be done. Sooner or later objective reality comes to be lost, leaving only the anthropocentric vision of science and its conceptual tools.]

“Our present dark age encompasses all domains, from philosophy to political theory, to biology, statistics, psychology, medicine, physics, and even the sacred domain of mathematics.”

This follows as a matter of course from the above. People with STEM background have been happy to see the domain of morals get swallowed up by subjectivism, relativism, and constructivism, little realising that the forces that have engulfed ethics also constituted a threat to the hard sciences. With defences of people asserting ‘his truth,’ ‘her truth,’ and ‘their truth,’ with science and technology being subjected to sociological revision, they are now beginning to notice the threat. They have been slow. In 1981 Alasdair MacIntyre wrote the book After Virtue. People with STEM backgrounds may have missed the warning, on the presumption that the virtues concern the realm of morals only. Morality matters. The truth pursued by the hard sciences is something that people need to be motivated to seek in the first place. The question of human beings as truth-seekers, venturing forth to seek knowledge, is a question of morals and motivations. It is also a metaphysical question. The pursuit of truth is premised on the assumption that truth exists and possesses some kind of objective reality in the world. The moral virtues and intellectual virtues go hand-in-hand. Metaphysics, morals, motivations, and virtues have all lost their compass, hence the ‘dark ages’ that Patterson writes of.

“Low-quality ideas have become common knowledge, situated within fuzzy paradigms. Innumerable ideas which are assumed to be rigorous are often embarrassingly wrong and utilize concepts that an intelligent teenager could recognize as dubious. For example, the Copenhagen interpretation in physics is not only wrong, it’s aggressively irrational—enough to damn its supporters throughout the 20th century.”

Back in 2006 I sketched a vastly ambitious intellectual programme under the name of “Being and Place,” taking extensive notes, some twenty and more ‘sections,’ each containing book length notes. The outlines can be found on the “Being and Place” page of this site. I still have those notes, heavily annotated and ready to be written up. I never completed that masterwork. I wrote lengthy introductions, prolegomena to more in-depth analyses to come, but which never did come. Instead, I got bogged down in metaphysical and foundational questions. For a long while I despaired at my lack of progress, and finally abandoned the “Being and Place” programme. But the work was not a failure at all. I had come to the realisation that the metaphysical, moral, and motivational framework and foundations of the (post)modern world were flawed, arbitrary, and incoherent and that all the sections I had lined up on economics, polity, infrastructure, energy, social systems etc would be rendered questionable without resolution of this primary question.

My “Being and Place” notes contain lengthy sections on physics, biology, and psychology, with references to many of the liveliest theories of the liveliest minds of the age. The Copenhagen interpretation is in there, as is Quantum theory, with many fancy arguments for the quantum self, the quantum society, the quantum economy, the quantum everything. It all sounds ever so profound. But in getting so bogged down in moral and metaphysical questions I had intuited that to seek foundations in the latest fads and fashions in physics was a gross error, one that would assuredly mean that my masterwork would be as baseless, arbitrary, incoherent, and insecure as all the other dominant theories. In other words, in gathering notes so extensively from all of the main subject disciplines I was in danger of reproducing the errors of the age rather than transcending them. The work I did accomplish in those years was all about breaking the impasse. In failing to even begin, let alone complete, writing on physics, biology, ecological science, and psychology, I have saved valuable time. As much as I felt guilty at being so slow to get round to that work I see now that my instincts and intuitions were fundamentally sound. The resolution I was seeking does not lie in those areas but elsewhere; the error of the age consists of so many people seeking to ground assumptions and certainties in the wrong area, in a word in ‘nature,’ or a nature reified through various, changeable, disciplines seeking to know nature. You can’t found ethics on the latest fads and fashions in physics. String theory, chaos theory, parallel universes, M theory, quantum, relativity etc etc etc. As atheist associates and family members have put it to me about the world’s many religions – they can’t all be right. Of course, science is not about proving truth, still less about yielding certainty. Knowledge is not certainty (it is ideologues and activists seeking to dictate truth to politics who equate knowledge with certainty and authority – they turn science into bad religion and are to be avoided on all counts).

“Whether it’s the Copenhagen interpretation, Cantor’s diagonal argument, or modern medical practices, the story looks the same: shockingly bad ideas become orthodoxy, and once established, the social and psychological costs of questioning the orthodoxy are sufficiently high to dissuade most people from re-examination.”

In fine, in leaving those extensive notes from the various sciences unwritten I saved myself a lot of wasted time, energy, and effort. In remaining divorced from the dominant intellectual traditions I can also see how many are wasting their own time, effort, and energy. Regardless of the specific form the argument takes with these people, it always has the same character: there is only ‘nature’ and this nature has certain qualities (interconnection is always a favourite) and these ought to form the basis of our social action and social systems. I’d call it the pathetic fallacy writ large were it not for the fact that many who argue thus also make a virtue of the fact that nature is indifferent to human concerns. The whole area is riddled with incoherence, with assertions of indifference accompanied by assumptions that nature is benign and benevolent, at least to the extent that if we follow nature (and ‘follow the science’) we will all live happily ever after – at least those with the power, energy, and talent for it. I see it as a high minded re-assertion of the ‘survival of the fittest.’ The weak and the botched go to the wall, as ever, existing only as a tool of resentment to be used by those seeking to demonstrate their virtuous nature verbally, but not practically. Sadly, this mentality has swallowed up the progressive side in politics, with many well-meaning people succumbing to the perils of groupthink. The politics is as mediocre as the thought processes behind it. My argument for transcendent standards as against constructivism and conventionalism has the merit of offering ‘progressives’ a better and more secure way of grounding and attaining their ends. Unfortunately, I have found said progressives to be bound together in error, subscribing to and reproducing deeply flawed modalities and mentalities.

Patterson’s article seeks to examine the breadth and depth of “our present dark age.” To be able to resolve a problem it is imperative to name it for what it is in the first place. MacIntyre did precisely this in After Virtue. His book was ignored by those who considered morality to be mere value judgement, incapable of true knowledge, and of secondary importance at best to the natural sciences. Irrelevant, in other words. That has been a fatal error. As I insist in my own work, there is such a thing as moral knowledge and moral truth just as much as scientific truth and knowledge, and such a thing is as much a work of reason as it is of emotional intelligence.

“The best explanation for the current madness of the world is that we're in a dark age and have been for at least a century.”

“The process that results in the production of knowledge in textbooks is flawed, because the methodology employed by intellectuals is not sufficiently rigorous to generate high-quality ideas. The epistemic standards of the 20th century were not high enough to overcome social, psychological, and political entropy. Our academy has failed.”

I gathered extensive notes from the entire range of literature, the best, the latest, the liveliest. It all looks like high class groupthink. It would have taken me a decade to write those researches up. It would have been a waste of time. All I would have achieved would be to have proven that I knew as little as everyone else, with most of that being wrong. It can be a hard and lonely life when you go it alone. But it does save you from the perils of groupthink. I have never been firmly ensconsced in academia and have no academic position and reputation to defend. My greatest errors grace of groupthink came as a result of my long membership of The Green Party and dedication to the environmental cause, all that “x years to save the planet” and predictions of four degrees of heating hyperbole. But at least I never had any academic allegiances to lead me astray. When I was in academia I was aware of swimming against the intellectual tide, and I have continued to swim the same way. Whenever I post my idiosyncratic views of ‘rational freedom,’ social media ‘friends’ sympathise with my misadventures and send me some variant of Eastern psychobabble mixed with science and nature. I am far too politie a person to tell them that such work is moral and intellectual dreck and that they are too stupid and conformist to grasp the points I am seeking to make. Most of all, though, I find it all predictable and boring, not original at all. Reading the opening words, I know exactly what will follow. In the main, people are seeking some kind of meaning and purpose by natural and scientific means in a nature which disenchanting science shows to be meaningless and purposeless. They purpose all manner of intellectual contortions merely to avoid the obvious conclusion – the thing they seek is religious to the core. I am much less elastic and gutless not at all. The people who insist that they are ‘spiritual but not religious’ are really subjectivists and narcissists, wanting a nature that conforms to their sense of well-being, but not a spiritual practice and discipline that binds their preferences and actions to a supra-individual standard. They want a nature that is nice for them. They are victims of the pathetic fallacy.

Why Did This Happen?

“Here’s my best explanation for why we ended up in a dark age, summarized into six points:

1. Intellectuals have greatly underestimated the complexity of the world.

I have observed that very many who claim to adhere to ecological principles don’t actually practice what they preach. They assert holism and interconnection, yet are specialists and reductionists, particularly when it comes to the natural sciences, technology, and design mimicking nature. Such people have little time if any for politics, ethics, religion, philosophy, metaphysics, literature, art, everything concerning the intangible. They specialise in the easy and the obvious and spend their days lamenting the fact that their work doesn’t resonate. In practice if not in thought they violate the ecological principles they claim to espouse. Swept along by their group mentalities and loyalties, belonging to some form of academy, such ecologists, designers, and engineers fail to understand that by segregating themselves in remote compounds they effectively violated the first principle of ecology, which is the law of "integrated systems." Instead of an interactive cooperation in recognition of interdependence within a coherent whole, there has been isolationist behavior and specialism, with particular knowledges proving wholly inadequate when it comes to grasping the complex whole. My first academic referee described me as an “intellectual range rider.” My first degree is in history, which is good preparation for range riding in pertaining to everything human in relation to the world and to life. I proved able to cross subject disciplines with ease, so much so that when it came to an academic career it was difficult to identify a specialism on my part. One academic described me as a ‘hybrid,’ the maverick who roams through entire departments, offering unique twists on familiar subjects. It also made me somewhat inomprehensible to specialists, unnerving and uncomfortable company. ‘That’s got to be wrong,’ the specialist who called me a hybrid shouted at me during one lecture, before giving me a perfect description of how neurons pack and fire, which is all he thought that consciousness reduced to. ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’ I have known all along that however well qualified these people were, they were leading us to a dead-end and therefore must be wrong.

The mainstream in academia and culture has been sending out all the wrong messages. Unfortunately, those on the inside have learned the wrong language and are now fluent in error. They are incapable of understanding words that seek to convey other meanings.

All of which brings me to this:

2. Specialization has made people stupid.

“Contemporary minds are only able to think about a couple of variables at the same time and do not entertain variables outside of their domain of training. While this myopia works, and is even encouraged, within the academy, it doesn’t work for understanding the real world. The world does not respect our intellectual divisions of labor, and ideas do not stay confined to their taxonomies.”

The person who took me to task on neurons was a top-flight academic, and was correct in what he was saying. But he never remotely understood the point I was making with respect to consciousness and qualitative, subjective experience, clearly deeming it as something that wasn’t physical and observable and therefore unimportant, ephemeral, and non-existent, mere delusion. Confined within the intellectual division of labour, he was able only to see certain things, seeing the entire world in those terms. He assured me that ‘science is everything.’ I could just as easily say that ‘history is everything,’ and explain just as little. The whole mentality is suspect, having the hallmarks of the fanatic who, claiming that God – or climate change – is everything, proceeds to reduce everything to God – or climate change. Such people are blinkered. Thankfully, having earned my spurs in the academic world, swimming against the intellectual tide, I got out and could never quite get back in.

“A competent political theorist must have a good model of human psychology. A competent psychologist must be comfortable with philosophy. Philosophers, if they want to understand the broader world, must grasp economic principles. And so on. The complexity of the world makes it impossible for specialized knowledge to be sufficient to build accurate models of reality. We need both special and general knowledge across a multitude of domains.”

I am thankful that my struggles with academic life led me to come off the beaten track and pursue my intellectual interests wherever they may lead. My natural curiosity was never impaired and curtailed by academic practice. I did specialize and am a historian by training. But in my period as a historian I proved adapt at addressing methodological and philosophical problems. The degree was interdisciplinary by nature, and a solid foundation for my later range riding. With that background, I could see clearly, in a way that specialists could not and still cannot, that there was something faulty in the dominant intellectual modes.

“Specialization fractures knowledge into many different pieces, and in our present dark age, almost nobody has tried to put the pieces back together. Contrary to popular opinion, it does not take specialized knowledge or training to comment on the big-picture or see conceptual errors within a discipline. In fact, a lack of training can be an advantage for seeing things from a fresh perspective.”

I saw things from a fresh perspective. I saw the limitations of those who sought to address big-picture questions armed only with specialist knowledge and sought to undertake the work of integration.

3. The lack of conceptual clarity in mathematics and physics has caused a lack of conceptual clarity everywhere else. These disciplines underwent foundational crises in the early 20th century that were not resolved correctly.

This is a hugely important issue given the extent to which many have sought to reconstitute lost foundations on the grounds of those disciplines they have considered to offer certain knowledge – the proof and evidence of mathematics and physics. This has been a gross error.

“In our contemporary paradigm, mathematics and physics are considered the most important domains, and mathematicians and physicists are considered the most intelligent thinkers. Therefore, when these disciplines underwent foundational crises, it had a devastating effect upon the entire world of ideas. The foundational notion of a knowable reality came into serious doubt.”

To repeat, you cannot found ethics and society on what always proves to be the latest fad or fashion in physics. Try it and you soon find yourself out-of-date; try it, and you will find that such physics is not up to the challenges of practical reason. People fully subscribing to the hierarchy of knowledge, however, persist in making the attempt. The great irony of this approach is that, in seeking to base certainty on ‘nature,’ the notion of an objective and intelligible reality is quickly lost from the account. Roger Trigg explains how this happens in a number of his books (I have explained elsewhere). In effect, certain thinkers of a scientific and naturalist persuasion are seeking to recover foundations by the very means that led to the loss of those foundations in the first place. It hasn’t been done, for the very reason that it can’t be done.

“In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation claimed that there is no world outside of observation—that it doesn’t even make sense to talk about reality-in-some-state separate from our observations. When the philosophers disagreed, their word was pitted against the word of physicists. In the academic hierarchy, physicists occupy a higher spot than philosophers, so it became fashionable to deny the existence of independent reality.”

The loss of an objective, knowable reality means the loss of science and the subsumption of reality within a world of human construction and conceptualisation. Reality becomes a matter of human projection, as Nietzsche had told us all along. Many – particularly secular humanists and those who took their stand on science and nature – cheered Nietzsche’s overthrow of God, religion, and morality on. They failed to see that his points also applied to science. Many complacently accepted, even agreed, with the Nietzschean sidelining of ethics and religion. They failed to notice that Nietzsche’s point applies also to science:

‘Science, along with morality and religion, is to be understood, not in terms of objective truth and falsity, but in terms of the aspirations, projects, hopes and fears of its proponents. The scientific picture of the world is an expression of a particular kind of will to power, and to seek objective guarantees of its veracity is a timid evasion.’

Putting the point provocatively, if Nietzsche is right, then radicals like Marx needs the reality of God and religion in order to sustain their normative claims and political commitments. In having his transcendent cake and eating it too, in abolishing God in favour of a positive human self-affirmation, Marx loses the moral standards by which to evaluate natural development and social realisation. He has lost the sense of alienation as an individual self-alienation that requires personal responsibility and individual moral effort to overcome, not merely a socio-structural transformation. It is that loss, the loss of something that is core in the religious sensibility, that contains the potential for Marxist emancipation to tip over into something else entirely.

Secular humanists make statements concerning reason and evidence as entailing a critical thinking that is independent of dogma and religion. It all sounds very reasonable. It is a classic statement of secular humanism, flattering each person’s sense of their own free thinking, open minded, and reasoning proclivities. I never concede difficult points to warm words. Happy statements such as this tend to be much more problematic in practice, not least when human beings effectively become their own gods, choosing their own good – and truth – in the absence of objective standards. The secular humanist will claim to adhere to such standards, but note how easily objective reality has come to be lost in the contemporary world and you will see that it takes much more than assertion to establish a case.

It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. Nietzsche warned against replacing religion with an idolatrous humanism. Fine. But if human beings are essentially religious beings – and there is strong evidence that spirituality is as profoundly real a human characteristic as is language and sociability and sexuality – then religiosity is never going to go away and needs to be properly addressed rather than denied and extirpated. Like nature, you can drive religion out through the front door only to find it returning by the back door. The religiosity of certain contemporary political movements is palpable. The problem is that it tends to be a religion of resentment as against redemption, demanding public contrition from sinning others without offering the prospect of mercy and forgiveness at the same time. I was a ‘secular humanist’ for over a decade, taking my stand on a common moral reason in the manner of Kant. In time, however, I saw how easily Kant’s universality and intersubjectivism dissolved into subjectivism, demonstrating a curving inwards and a replacement of objective foundations by construcitivism and projection, to which humanism will always be prone.

The entire notion of being “rooted in” certain foundations rather begs the question. Neither nature nor physics nor mathematics can offer these foundations; people are barking up the wrong tree, and barking all the louder, one suspects, because deep down they know the truth of the religious sensibility. Philosophers like Roger Trigg demonstrate that science itself needs metaphysics. Ironically, the attempts to found ethics on natural reason has resulted in a loss of reality and an irrationalist turn.

“Intellectuals have been abusing Godel’s theorems for a century, invoking them to make all kinds of anti-rational arguments.”

“Due to the importance of physics and mathematics, and the influence of physicists and mathematicians, the epistemic standards of the 20th century were severely damaged by these foundational crises. The rise of logical positivism, relativism, and even scientism can be connected to these irrationalist paradigms, which often serve as justification for abandoning the notion of truth altogether.”

Paradoxically, the result of naturalism and rationalism has been the abandonment of reality, reason, and truth. The naturalists and rationalists stand perplexed and impotent in the ruins, because they have no idea what has happened. No one has taught them how to integrate the various specialist knowledges, only prioritise some over others in an intellectual hierarchy. One of the most salient characteristics of the contemporary intellectual – and political - situation is the incomprehension of those raised under the technocratic spectre of scientism. They are unable to identify and understand the nature of the current predicament because nobody has taught them to do so. They are prisoners of a trained incapacity. Committed to a certain kind of reason and reality, they have lost reality and succumbed to irrationalism: for the reason that their grounds constitute no grounds at all.

4. The methods of scientific inquiry have been conflated with the processes of academia.

“Real empirical inquiry has been replaced by conformity to bureaucratic procedures. If a scientific paper has checked off all the boxes of academic formalism, it is considered true science, regardless of the intellectual quality of the paper. Real peer review has been replaced by formal peer review—a religious ritual that is supposed to improve the quality of academic literature, despite all evidence to the contrary. The academic publishing system has obviously become dominated by petty and capricious gatekeepers.”

Sadly, intelligence has succumbed to the rule of that most loathsome of creatures, the bureaucrats of knowledge. I had abrasive contact with them during my academic days and it never once went well. Always there was interference and constraint, stifling independent thought within protocol. Always I was told that I had to do certain things I knew to be decreative in order to express at least something of what it was I needed to say. Always there were the Faustian bargains being offered, tempting you to sacrifice a little bit more of yourself in order to obtain some reward. My PhD thesis was all about recovering ethical foundations as against the fashionable nonsense of postmodernism and poststructuralism. To that end I returned to Plato and Aristotle. I was offered the opportunity of being published if I dropped Plato and Aristotle and replaced them with … postmodernism!! The very thing I was concerned to check. The reasoning was that this is what students really want, texbooks on current ideas rather than monologues. I replied I give students what they need rather than what they wanted. My work went unpublished and fashionable nonsense spread like a virus through academia and out into society.

5. Academia has been corrupted by government and corporate funding.

I am thankful that owing to quirks of character I could never compromise, no matter the rewards being offered. I am only able to write on things that are of interest to me. I would like to claim that my incorruptable character is down to firm moral principles. I have such principles and have refused to compromise on them. At the same time, I only work and write out of a genuine interest. But I saw close hand how, once you are caught inside the system, you have no option but to make a certain peace with those who pay the piper and call the tune. In one academic post I was told candidly that my job was to ‘keep the students entertained,’ ensuring that they pay their fees and enrol again. The students were not merely customers, they were effectively my employers. That inverted the entire relation between academics and supervisors. In earning my spurs on Hegel, Kant etc, I felt like I was being tortured rather than entertained. This is a recipe for mediocrity.

6. Human biology, psychology, and social dynamics make critical thinking difficult.

“Nature does not endow us with great critical thinking skills from birth. From what I can tell, most people are stuck in a developmental stage prior to critical thinking, where social and psychological factors are the ultimate reason for their ideas. Gaining popularity and social acceptance are usually higher goals than figuring out the truth, especially if the truth is unpopular.”

As I have argued time and again, evolutionary biology and psychology reveal human beings not to be the rational beings celebrated by secular humanists but rationalising beings, deceiving others and even themselves in an attempt to seek advantage. Loyalty is to the self and to the tribe rather than to truth. Obtaining and maintaining position and securing acceptance and belonging are much more important motivational drivers for most people than truth-seeking. People compromise standards very easily. It takes real guts to be critical, intellectually fearless, and independent, so much so as to face social isolation and ostracisation. This works on many levels, from the academy to politics. I have many political ‘friends.’ I have found that such friends are loyal to the shared ideals and aims. Dare deviate slightly, dare question and criticise, and such people become much less friendly. In being critical you are always exposed to the danger of being isolated, shunned, and excluded. It has happened to me many times now in politics. I have found that secular humanists and greens committed to the peace and love of all humanity are actually incredibly intolerant towards those actual human beings who don’t sing from the same hymn sheet. I don’t take their claims of universal love and sweet reason with respect to all humanity seriously at all. It is an appealing self-image, a projection of themselves as all sweetness and light. Remain critical and ask awkward questions and you will be abused and ostracised. That pressure keeps most people within the safe and narrow parameters of social acceptability – and intellectual mediocrity.

“Rather than grapple with difficult concepts, nearly every modern intellectual is trying to avoid embarrassment for themselves and for their social class. They are trying to maintain their relative position in a social hierarchy that is constructed around orthodoxies. They adhere to these orthodoxies, not because they thought the ideas through, but because they cannot bear the social cost of disagreement.”

Precisely. Evolutionary biology and psychology reveal human beings to be rationalising beings rather than rational beings. To recover the commitment to reason and reality through truth-seeking you have to transcend the naturalist terms of the foundations. Seek to found ethics on natural reason and you lose reason and reality.

“All fields of thought are under constant threat of being captured by superficial “consensus” by those who are seeking to be part of an authoritative group. These people tend to have superior social/manipulative skills, are better at communicating with the general public, and are willing to attack any critics as if their lives depended on it—for understandable reasons, since the benefits of social prestige are indeed on the line when sacred assumptions are being challenged.”

This applies in academia and the intellectual field just as much as it does in poliics. In the academy there are institutional loyalties and dependencies as well as schools of thought; in politics there are parties, causes, and ends. Those who remain critical and independent will be punished by excommunication. Most prefer not to rock the boat and so pass their time parrotting the conventional wisdom. The situation incentivises groupthink and disincentivises critical thinking.

“In conclusion, the legacy of the 20th century is not an impressive one, and I do not currently have evidence that it was an era of great minds or even good ideas. But don’t take my word for it; the evidence will be supplied here over the coming years. If we are indeed in a dark age, then the first step towards leaving it is recognizing that we’ve been in one.”

I feel somewhat vindicated in taking an independent line over the years. My greatest errors have come from advancing arguments based on political loyalty. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way. Over the years I offered mild criticisms in the hope that people would respond to reason. Those appeals were ignored on account of not conforming to the dominant understanding. As I offered stronger criticisms I was subject to dismissal and abuse. When I made strong criticisms I was unfriended, blocked, excommunicated. The world is in the grip of groupthink and fake religiosity. We can fear the worst should such groups ever attain an ounce of power.