I have organised my philosophical work around three core and recurring themes: Being and Place, Rational Freedom, and the Natural Law. These core themes frame and orient the integral approach I have taken to ecology over the years, with a moral ecology taking its place alongside a social, political, and natural ecology. That vision takes us to the ecology of the human heart.
Being and Place is the name of my website, giving links to my work and presenting essays developing the theme of a place-based moral and social meaning. The vision is one of being grounded and rooted and, from there, growing and flowing. The notion of Being and Place entails putting human beings in touch with their sources of nourishment, locating them in the happy habitas which fosters the sense of meaning, identity, and belonging.
Rational Freedom is the idea that an authentic freedom is not the satisfaction of immediate wants and desires but the deeper and richer freedom that transcends a sensual immediacy to compass the wide range of human needs. The view also holds that freedom for the kinds of social beings human beings are is a shared and common endeavour and not an individualist undertaking. Jurgen Habermas defines the conception of Rational Freedom concisely:
Freedom, even personal freedom, freedom of choice in the last instance, can only be thought in internal connection with a network of interpersonal relationships, and this means in the context of the communicative structures of a community, which ensures that the freedom of some is not achieved at the cost of the freedom of others. Interestingly, abstract right is not sufficient for this purpose. One must make the effort to analyse the conditions of collective freedom, which remove the dangers of individual freedom, its potential for social-Darwinistic menace.
The individual cannot be free unless all are free, and all cannot be free unless all are free in community. It is this last proposition which one misses in the empiricist and individualist traditions.
Jürgen Habermas Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas 1992: 146
The conception of Rational Freedom emphasises the socio-relational quality of personal freedom, something that tends to be missed in individualist conceptions. Valuing that quality serves to check the potential for Social Darwinist predation that exists in crudely naturalist accounts of human nature. The critical concept of Rational Freedom enables us to expose the self-contradictory character of a libertarian freedom in which the freeing of individuals from inhibition and restraint serves only to enslave all to the necessity of sensual immediacy and the external constraint of unintended consequences.
That brings me to the third pillar of my moral ecology – the natural law.
If notions of the natural law seem archaic, then that is because they are – the natural law is as old as humanity, and is something ancient and true. I make no apologies for cleaving to the natural law in an age which openly scorns the idea – the age is far from being so sane, healthy, and happy as to be in a position to deride the ethics and ideas of wiser ages. It is the very fact that the natural law is 'outdated' in these times that makes it pertinent. And, of course, it is the nature of the natural law that it can never be outdated: as something eternal, the natural law is for all people in all times and places.
“All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The ancients stole all our great ideas.”
Mark Twain
The natural law clashes directly with modern ideas of the good as no more than the subjective choice of individuals. The good is something much more than the projection of choosing individuals upon the world. To the essential moral question as to where value lies, in the valued or the valuer, the natural law answers emphastically in favour of the intrinsic goodness of the universe of which individuals are members.
The problem with the modern world is not that it cannot generate its own moral theories; modernity has no trouble at all in producing any number of moral theories, all too many of them, in fact. If each person is indeed entitled to choose the good as he or she sees fit, then it follows that there are as many moral theories as there are individuals, each following their own private moral code. The problem is that these moral theories are not moral theories at all, they lack the true quality of morality as something that is both motivating and obligating with respect to broad sections of the great public. Whilst modernity has generated any number of moral theories, none of these theories are able to offer sufficiently good reason for people to accept their claims as plausible, compelling, and binding – hence the moral and metaphysical carnage and chaos of an age in which pursues their own good, with no common standard or criterion of evaluation available enabling us to determine the rightness and wrongness of each choice.
The result is that the only potential source for constituting a new moral code is a very old one, the natural law, the law that is inscribed in the human heart for all eternity:
“History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.”
James A. Forude
That natural law is both ancient and modern, belonging always to the eternal now.
Cicero gave the classic statement of natural law in book three of On the Republic, where he writes:
True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, although neither have any effect upon the wicked. It is a sin to try and alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal a part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one rule, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.
It goes without saying that this understanding of the natural law has precious few defenders in the modern world and is treated with scorn and derision in the Academy whilst being completely neglected by wider society.
But if the age has learned to do better than the natural law, why do so many cry and complain at the general malaise into which the world has fallen?
The idea of the natural law entails the understanding that the universe is objectively and inherently valuable, meaningful, and good, and that these qualities are intelligible to the kinds of intelligent moral beings that human beings are. The view entails the belief that there is a discernible moral order in the universe which is accessible by human beings. To live in accordance with that moral order serves the human good, with attunement meaning harmony. The good life requires being in tune with the natural moral order of the universe. Things started to go wrong with this idea of the natural law during the Enlightenment. The Philosophes affirmed the sufficiency of science in revealing the moral order of the universe to human beings, setting the template for human beings to follow. The basic claim is that we are to look to and learn from nature if we wish to live and flourish well as human beings in tune with our own natures. This determination to refer the living of human lives to an external standard established a laudible moral goal, offering a check on the vagaries of a relativism and conventionalism that reduce all too easily to power and the notion that justice is the interests of the strongest, giving us instead a law that, as Cicero reassured us, is "valid for all nations, and for all times." The problem is that modern science took a very different, and disenchanting, direction from the one anticipated by the philosophes, effectively 'dis-godding' the universe and emptying it of value and goodness. The universe was now declared to be objectively valueless and meaningless, leading Nietzsche to pronounce the “death of God” and Max Weber to declare that the rights over which our most intense political struggles are fought are empty in being grounded in “nothing.” The result was that the reason which once possessed an ethical and cosmic component became something narrow, taking the form of instrumental rationality. Applying the methods of the natural sciences to human affairs, the new rationalists demonstrated the impossibility of deriving any natural law or moral principle from nature. Instead of a purposeful universe enthused with moral meaning, a disenchanting science found only an inanimate machine, mere dead matter as resources to be appropriated, used, exploited, and exhausted by business and technology to expand our material wealth and power, but not thereby make us happier or better.
Nature in this view is nothing more than a machine governed by physical laws capable of being expressed by mathematical formulas. That nature, and the science which speaks with the voice of nature, can teach us nothing about how we should live our lives. The liveliest minds of modernity declared the natural law to be dead, a mere superstition left over from our ignorant past. We now know better than to search the world for the natural moral law – we are alone, architects of our own standards, our own gods. And this seemingly emancipatory declaration of human indepedence brings us to the impasse of the contemporary age – an age of rival and conflicting gods, with no standard for deciding between them. We are finding that an existence determined by pure self-authorship and cultural self-creation is not freedom but a self-cancellation as choosing, assertive, non-negotiating individuals as gods get in each other's way. In time, the naked pursuit of self-interest, uninhibited by the old inhibitions and restraints, turns liberty into license and, in short order, spreads demoralization. Emile Durkheim called this right in his book Suicide, the title of which sums up the self-destructive nature of the modern malaise perfectly:
“Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.”
We return to the need for meaning and belonging – to say that there is no meaning in the universe, no inherent goodness, is to tell human beings, meaning-seeking creatures, that their lives are hopeless. If the universe is indeed meaningless then nothing is more meaningless than the science, philosophy, or politics that says it is so. “Where there is nothing,” argued Weber, “both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.” (Weber Politics as a Vocation 1918). If there is indeed “nothing,” then there is no point to anything. The moderns have been trying to create something on the basis of nothing, producing only an “iron cage” which confines individuals consumed by a “convulsive self-importance.”
We still live under the shadow of Nietzsche and Weber. A revitalised natural law offers us a way out of the cage. The Being and Place tab on my website details my researches from 2006-2013, in which I attempted to gather the findings from a range of disciplines to show the existence of a moral order inherent in the natural world. I never got round to writing up my research notes, for the reason that the undertaking proved too vast. I still have myriad folders containing those Being and Place notes and am tempted to issue them notes in shorthand or as aphorisms, to give people the key points in accessible and digestible form. The moral for this short piece is easily enough stated: the epistemological and ontological revolution entailed by the range of subject disciplines has decisively overthrown the mechanical conception of nature and re-opened the door to a revalued natural law, enabling us to derive ethical principles from a world that is not “nothing” but is very decidedly “something,” something more than the arbitrary subjective choice of individuals, principles that can serve as the foundation for society and polity in this age and those to follow. The principles of this 'new' natural law are not new at all. However much they may well be based on the discoveries that the universe is not an inanimate machine after all, they are principles which the wise of every age, culture, and tradition have known and advocated. The clever once told us that they were 'not scientific.' Science changes, nature doesn't. A disenchanting science once told us that nature was a machine of physical laws and mathematical formulas that taught us nothing about how we ought to live our lives. Physics, ecology, biology, and psychology now tell us that nature does, after all, give clear instructions as how best to live our lives. The natural law tells us that there is such a thing as physical nature, biological nature, and human nature, and that notions of social construction and cultural creation are best understood as subcreations within the universal metabolism of nature that enfolds and sustains all things. This nature yields fundamental and eternally valid moral principles with which to determine the virtuous foundations by which to reconstitute our society, culture, and polity.
And God? Well, yes, God would appear to be in rather sprightly form for a dead man. In writing of “the disenchantment of the world,” Max Weber sought to describe the rationalized, bureaucratized modern society in which processes are oriented toward rational goals within an instrumental means-ends rationality. Weber took the German term for disenchantment, Entzauberung, from Friedrich Schiller to describe the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion which characterised in modern society. The term literally means 'de-magification' and 'dis-godding,' indicating the devaluation of the world, the stripping of the world of intrinsic value and meaning, in contrast to traditional society, where "the world remains a great enchanted garden."
Weber stated the moral malaise with precision:
“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together. If we attempt to force and to 'invent' a monumental style in art, such miserable monstrosities are produced as the many monuments of the last twenty years. If one tries intellectually to construe new religions without a new and genuine prophecy, then, in an inner sense, something similar will result, but with still worse effects. And academic prophecy, finally, will create only fanatical sects but never a genuine community.”
The age reeks of religiosity, of bad and bogus religion, and of surrogate, ersatz communities, artificial collectivities in which those stripped of meaning and belonging seek a saving identity. Weber thought that we were fated to try and live in 'disenchanted' times. The epistemological and ontological revolutions of the age tell us that these times are over and that we live in an enchanted universe after all. For the purposes of natural law this means that we can legitimately search for the natural moral law inherent in the world in which we live, discerning moral principles to live in accord with. It makes sense, after all, to ground ethics in physical, biological, and human nature, turning aside from the nominalist madnesses and unreasoned nihilisms and relativisms of the age to once more cleave to a reality that is something more substantial than a human choice and creation.
Importantly, the natural law holds that the moral order that is “out there” is also “in here,” in the human heart. Harmony is achieved by way of effecting an attunement and accordance between the two. The greatest Platonist of the modern age is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for the reason he democratized Plato, giving us a Plato for the age of democracy. In The Social Contract, Rousseau argues that “the most important law of all is not engraved on marble or brass, but in the hearts of the citizens. . . . It preserves a people in the spirit of their founding, and it imperceptibly substitutes the force of habit for that of authority. I am speaking of mores and customs, and above all of opinion, a subject which is unknown to our political theorists, but on which the success of all the other laws depends.”
Rousseau here underlines that central notion of a law that is engraved on the human heart. The idea was expressed by St Paul, when he argued that “the requirements of the law are written on their hearts.” (Romans 2: 15).
Rousseau’s enduring significance lies in the way he incites a radical need in exposing the gap between what we are induced to settle for and what ought to be, inciting us to undersand ourselves as a communal whole. Once more, the idea savours more than a little of St Paul, who declared that we are members of one another:
“For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. (Romans 12:3–5 ESV)
This notion of membership means that we are all connected in some kind of extended family, distinct individuals who are members of one another. It means to be interdependent rather than independent. This familial understanding of a common humanity is also presented in Ephesians: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” (Ephesians 2:19 ESV)
Rousseau developed this familial conception in his very distinctive idea of a social contract. I say distinctive for a very definite reason – I don't consider Rousseau to be a contractarian thinker at all, precisely on account of his interdependent conception of human beings and because the social contract he proposes seems a mere frame or familiar device for him to inhabit, doing no heavy lifting at all in his theory. To be viable, Rousseau argues, a culture requires the wholehearted commitment of its citizens to a shared ideal. The social contract is thus not a historical event but a living belief that animates the community from within, with each individual fully part of the whole. Rousseau designated the community a moi commun, a common self (a “common me”), in order to emphasise the belonging and interdependence that lay at its heart. It follows from this idea of the interdependence of each and all – a core principle of Rational Freedom - that the individual is not to be considered a subordinate “subject” but as an equal member of the “sovereign.” Whilst the term “sovereign” normally designated a monarch, Rousseau understood it to mean the whole body of citizens, who had the power to delegate executive powers to any agent they might choose, a monarch, a president, or otherwise.
It was from reading Rousseau's Social Contract that Alexis de Tocqueville coined the justly famous phrase “les habitudes du coeur,” meaning the “habits of the heart.” This is a hugely important notion, fostering the habits that unite individuals in the social practices that keep societies functioning, cultivating the character traits that knit communities together and keep them together. I also agree very much with Tocqueville's emphasis on intermediary associations and the way that they bring otherwise isolated individuals together to integrate them within the social fabric.
These “habits of the heart” are nurtured within virtuous communities, communities in which the virtues can be known, acquired, internalized, and exercised. In examining the nature of Democracy in America from 1835 to 1839 Tocqueville discovered the habits of the heart which he considered to be key to a healthy social order. He identified these habits as family life, religious convictions and participation in local politics. These habits form the right character for a viable democratic way of life. The habits of the heart serve to sustain free institutions, De Tocqueville argued. Tocqueville identified individualism - a word which he was one of the first to use - as the force which threatens to corrode that democratic way of life from within, separating citizens from each other and setting them against one another, thus rendering positive collective action difficult, if not impossible, and coming in time to undermine those same free institutions. This individualism has grown cancerous in the contemporary world, expanding to destroy those social integuments that Tocqueville considered essential to check its destructive potentialities, thereby threatening freedom itself. Tocqueville is bang on point when he establishes the connection of individualism and despotism, the idea that the atomisation of society and the centralisation of political control are the twin reefs of the modern condition. This is a key passage from Democracy in America and it worth quoting – and pondering – at length:
I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I am trying myself to choose an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, but in vain; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new; and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it.
I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest,—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not;—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2, Book 4, Chapter 6, London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, pages 378–384
This is where we now are, except that we are facing not a benevolent despotism, but a despotism staffed by despots intent on making our lives much less and much worse than they already are – a top-down revolution of decreasing expectations. We are confronted not with Guardians but with would-be tyrants masquarading as Guardians.
The question, then, is how we are ensure a degree of independence within a familial community of interdependence so as to buttress and sustain free agency, keeping the predations of Guardian/Tyrant/Despots at bay. Rousseau's solution still strikes me as the most cogent of all the moderns.
The extent of Rousseau’s influence on Alexis de Tocqueville is not generally appreciated, but it is clear. Tocqueville once confided to a lifelong friend that ‘there are three men with whom I commune a little bit every day; they are Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.’ Tocqueville shared Rousseau's preoccupation with the relationship between liberty and equality. Rousseau argued that each of these principles was indispensable to the other, leading to a democratic polity. By equality Rousseau did not mean a flat egalitarianism, only that none should be so rich as to buy another and none so poor as to have to sell themselves. Only under conditions of equality understood in this way could liberty replace privilege; and only if each citizen had sufficient independence with respect to his interests could a debilitating dependence on others be avoided. By participating together as one in exercising sovereign power, all citizens were able to retain their autonomy in civil society, exchanging their natural liberty as individuals for a moral and civil liberty as social beings.
We return once more to the recognition of locating the conditions for the flourishing of Being in place – the need of human beings to know both “who” they are and “where” they are:
'All human beings have a deep psychological need for a sense of security which comes from knowing where you are. But "knowing where you are" is a matter of recognizing social as well as territorial position.'
- Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication (1976)
To sum, my argument on Being and Place, Rational Freedom, and the Natural Law concerns being and belonging, affirms interdependence, the unity of each and all within virtuous communities; argues for genuine common force as against the external collective force generated by subjective choice; argues for a sense of ownership and responsibility in establishing society on the principle of self-assumed obligation; seeks to rehabilitate the ethical life; foster habits of the heart; guide human beings in their quest for community, meaning, and belonging; restore the moral compass; transcend the collective unfreedom of a libertarianism that descends into licence; restore trust and connection in a new social order; reclaim the natural moral law; resolidify, resocialize, and remoralize.
I cleave to the perennial philosophy, the rational and natural philosophy of life which is incarnated in time and place but endures beyond both. The right, rational, and natural way of doing things is the enduring way, and will always prevail over against the attempts of those to impose their own way. The nominalist madnesses, rootless rationalizations, and unreasoning nihilisms and relativisms of this and any other age will pass as the mere tumbleweed they are. There is a reality that is more than human self-creation and truth will prevail. Because that's the way it is. That's the way the world is and that's the way human beings are made to be.
My work stands on the pillars of Being and Place, Rational Freedom, and Natural Law. These themes are interwoven throughout all of the books and papers I have written. They can also be seen in the titles of some of the works I have written:
Being and Place: The Dialectics of Catastrophe and Hope: Restoration and Restorying (2019); Being at One: Making a Home in the Earth's Commonwealth of Virtue (2016); Being and Knowing: A Thomist Reading of Immanuel Kant (2013); Being and Place: Reason, Nature, and Society; Being in Touch with Life; Rational Freedom, Transcendent Standards, and the Quest for the Good Life (2020); Critical Studies in Rational Freedom (2001); Plato - The Architect of Rational Freedom (2004); The Rational Freedom of Plato and Aristotle (2001); The Rational Freedom of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2001); Rousseau, Natural Law and Rational Freedom; The Religious Roots of Rational Freedom; Rational Freedom: Establishing Autonomy and Authority in Balance; Rational Freedom: Reconciling Autonomy and Authority; Dante's Dream of Rational Freedom; Aquinas, Morality and Modernity. The Search for the Natural Moral Law and the Common Good (2013); Reason as the Realisation of Nature: An Excursus on Philosophy, Natural Law and Ecology (2010); Kant: The Ethics of Rational Nature (2007); Tolkien's Natural Anarchy (2013); Natural Teleology and Moral Praxis (2012).
That's just a selection from a much greater body of work. I have known what was to come since I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s and deliberately worked against the dominant trends and fashionable ideologies of the age to chart the way out. In 2000 my Director of Studies praised my work, saying he didn't know of anyone doing work like this. He noted that my perspectives set me against the intellectual trends of the age, which were sweeping through the universities and, from there, would permeate the culture and change society. But there is a right way in the end. There is always the right way. And the wrong way. My DoS told me that the various “post” modes of unreasoning relativism and nihilism with which I contested would, one day, be up a creek without a paddle. My fear was that they would take society and its culture and politics with them.
I was conscious of swimming against the intellectual and political tide in the 1990s, and knew then it would cut me off from the Academy. Being alone and working alone is now ingrained in my nature. I challenged the fashionable and dominant nonsense that prevailed throughout the 1990s and it takes nothing for me to do so today. It takes nothing for me to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable, because that is how I have always lived – at a slight distance from the prevailing norms and conventions – and because that is how the conventionally disregarded and discarded true, good, and beautiful will prevail. The attack on the good has become endemic in contemporary culture, with the good now considered to be a matter of subjective choice and personal preference. Ethics in the contemporary world has been dissolved into the assertion that each individual is free to choose the good as he or she sees fit. I would say that most people agree with this view and find it most reasonable and liberatory in affirming that people can do as they please. The rather optimistic assumption of the optimists is that individuals will always choose goods that yield pleasure, do no harm to others, and which will always converge in a general good that pleases all. Those happy assumptions are unwarranted. We can now see that a world in which value is determined by the valuer is a world of rival and competing gods, each negating the other in a general self-cancellation. Truth has gone the same way, with individuals now insisting on speaking 'their truth,' 'my truth,' 'her truth,' 'his truth.'
Beauty has been the last of the three great transcendentals to fall, but it is certainly falling if it has not yet fallen. Beauty is the last bastion of evangelisation in our culture, for the reason that it is the only one of three transcendentals that people respond to any more – and maybe even then only in the most shallow and superficial, even narcissistic, of senses. But the fact that beauty still has a place in people’s lives gives grounds for hope and inspires efforts to get the world back on the right and true path, what the peerless poet-philosopher Dante called “the infinite way” of the natural and divine order of places, persons, and things. If human beings can continue to strive for beauty then they may well in turn come to appreciate truth and goodness once more. Being the three great transcendentals, truth, goodness, and beauty are all inter-connected. Those so inspired by beauty as to carry on the right and rational way will discover that what began as an appreciation of the good things in life will lead ultimately to the contemplation and, one may hope, recognition of the divine – ultimately, truth, goodness, and beauty are all qualities of God. The natural way is the divine way, and truth, goodness, and beauty will prevail because God and the universe want it that way.
It is worth commenting in this regard on the onslought against beauty in the contemporary world. This world is not merely bad and false it is plain ugly, and the ugliness is so relentless as to be systematic and deliberate. Not a day goes by without some outrage against the senses being perpetrated, with beauty subjected to a diabolic mockery and perversion. Again, the age is so indolent as not to notice how liberty has passed over into licence, with those normalised to the pervasive normlessness affirming unthinkingly that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' As with the dissolution of ethics into mere subjective choice of particular goods, so with beauty. The result is that there is no objective good that transcends will and choice, only particular goods; there is no objective beauty yielding standards with which to conform, only particular preferences; there is no God, only 'men as gods.'
The assertion that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' is subjectivist in rendering beauty a matter of personal taste and preference – upon which there can be no disagreement, since there can be no object standard or criterion of evaluation. The phrase is almost certainly a paraphrase of the view that Plato expressed in The Symposium. The problem is that the paraphrase doesn't merely alter Plato's original meaning but inverts it. In The Symposium Plato wrote of the divine beauty which is beheld by the eye, which is the very antithesis of the subjectivist view:
‘The contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold.’
‘But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life—thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.
Plato Symposium
“What if” indeed. I call back truth, goodness, and beauty in the spirit of that “what if,” seeking to turn people on to things greater than their own likes, dislikes, opinions, choices, and personal preferences. The freedom of doing as one pleases results, paradoxically, in a collective unfreedom – and a general and pervasive misery. “What if” human beings could be induced to use their senses and their intellects once more to contemplate, recognise, and appreciate the true, the good, and the beautiful. Getting in tune with the right and natural way depends on that turning.
The idea of a ‘true’ ‘divine’ beauty which is beheld with ‘the eye of the mind’ is a very different notion to that of a beauty that is merely in the eye of the beholder. The former locates beauty, truth, and value in an order that is “out there” as well as “in here,” the latter merely in the arbitrary personal values of the valuer. Beholding beauty with the ‘eye of the mind’ brings forth ‘not images of beauty, but realities, for he has hold not of an image but of a reality.' Plato therefore argues for beauty as an objective reality which the ‘eye of the mind’ must apprehend as a beautiful reality rather than as mere image.
The view is ancient, which is to say that the perennial philosophy is as true now as it was then, true for all people in all times and places. Pythagoras taught the means to attain freedom and happiness by way of rational conduct and the philosophic life, by cleaving to the natural divine right and true way. 'Pythagoras' metaphysics enables the Intellect to approach and know the ultimate truth. His moral precepts ensure conformity with the perfect goodness. To complete the trinity, he also adored the supreme beauty which inspires the Muses as they do our Arts.’ (Fideler ed. 1987 Source Book 13). Music, art and architecture all adhere to the cosmic principle of harmony, a word which means 'attunement.' To get on the right path means to get in tune with the infinte way. Disobedience to harmonic laws leads to ugliness, and commits a sin against the Muses; such disobedience is a denial of the divinely beautiful order of the cosmos. Obedience to harmonic laws leads to beauty and presupposes a state of soul open to Intelligible Beauty; music and architecture open our souls in the same way. Obedience to harmonic laws is an affirmation of the divinely beautiful order of the cosmos. Truth, goodness, and beauty will prevail for the reason that God and nature will that it should be so. It is in cleaving to that idea that we will prevail against odds that seem stacked against us in a world driven by money and power. Money and power are ephemeral things when set in the light of all time and existence.
There are few things more admirable and praiseworthy than the existence of those individuals who, often alone and apart, usually ignored, sometimes disdained, even vilified, are prepared to sacrifice their personal interests and happiness, by setting their faces against the relentless life-hating hubris that prevails in any age that has sold its soul to the pathetic frauds that are money, power, and self-serving self-interest, and who, in the spirit of moral courage, imagination, and independence, steadfastly affirm the three great transcendentals and the humane values they embody and articulate, dedicating their lives to the defence and advance of life, liberty, and happiness. Such people know the dark times that lie ahead but choose to march to the sound of the guns rather than flinch and hide in some fantasy world which says that things will blow over. Bad things never blow over, they have to be blown away by those who have the root of the matter in them. The bad, can, however, be blown away, and more easily than it may seem, for the very reason it is ultimately rootless, severed from true sources of nourishment. The bad is rooted in nothing more substantial than Max Weber's “nothing.” There really is “nothing” to beat and everything to play for. The problem lies in the process of abstraction and deracination that has removed us ever further from our roots in the natural, rational, and divine matrix, from what St Thomas Aquinas called “our true native land.” The further we are removed from the sources of life, meaning, and belonging, the less powerful we are, the less capable we feel to resist the bad. But the bad really has “nothing” to support it.
The age is full of scare stories concerning some 'global' elite that plans to incarcerate the people of the world in a Digital Cage. The prospect fills me with much less fear and trepidation than it does others for the reason that it expresses, in extreme and caricatured form, the rationalized and bureaucratized condition of modernity in which supposedly free and certainly self-important individuals are confined within an “iron cage,” their lives determined with “irresistible force” by institutional, organisational, and economic imperatives. (Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). It matters not that this “iron cage” is also in large part a “gilded cage,” millions are confined mind, body, and soul either way. The dystopian future that is being promised / threatened by would-be universal Guardians has been in the offing from the very beginnings of modern society, characterised as it is by the appropriation, centralisation, monetisation, and bureaucratisation of social power and communal vitality. The Guardians who seek global governance in order to rule for our own good will happily disregard and discard our rights to life, land, liberty, property, and happiness. In owning “nothing” we will be nothing and belong nowhere, mere numbers in the “nothing” world.
It is in this context that I contemplate the “zero” in Net Zero, and ponder the ease with which Greens won this greatest of political battles. As a former member of The Green Party and other ecological organisations, I know the extent to which Greens were always struggling against the political odds. Net Zero entails a top-down transformation on a scale and expense that far, far exceeds even the wildest plans of the socialists that the establishment fought tooth and nail to keep out of office, and fought even harder to bring down when in office. And yet the Greens have won this enormous victory without ever coming even remotely close to winning a parliamentary majority anywhere. This is a battle that could never have been won without the backing of important allies, except that in this instance the allies are actually the architects – the hard-faced inhumanists who possess the money and power to have their interests served. Anyone who thinks this has anything to do with Green politics and socialism needs to up their game and quick smart – know your enemy if you seek to resist them and ultimately defeat them. "Zero” is the highest political goal of a world order that is rooted in “nothing.” These 'men as gods' are nothing and have nothing. To God there is no zero.
The Net Zero nothingness that is being planned is designed to incarcerate us in the infernal eternal cage of the digital, artificial, surveilled anti-society. We can be pessimistic and feel that there is no hope, succumbing to the hell that seems inescapable. That sapping of hope and energy is, of course, part of the plan, the daily war of attrition that has us focusing on trivia and ephemera, taking our eyes off the prize, reducing our hopes and ambitions to within such narrow parameters that they cease to exist. We are being reduced to size, to the size of “nothing” world of the “nothing” people. Which brings me to another question – what of the architects and engineers of this Zero world? What do they win? It's an old question that human beings have forgotten to ask, in their deluded belief that they are clever enough and powerful enough to go it alone.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
Mark 8: 36-37
What, exactly, shall the global Guardians win should their plans for global control and domination ever come to fruition? Because the wretched future they plan for the rest of us is one that they cannot but come to share. The most striking thing about all their plans is their narrowness and negativity, their scarcity in both material and psychological terms, their poverty when it comes to generosity of spirit. It is patently obvious they think nothing of human beings. Dante wrote his Inferno as a diabolic parody and inversion of Paradise, the perversion of all that is good, true, and beautiful. This is precisely the nature of this global planning authority being proposed by our would-be Guardians, with policies premised on poverty, scarcity, competition, and rationing. And distrust. It is plain that the planners do not trust human beings to be rational enough and generous enough to be able to make all the right decisions when it comes to their best interests – the Guardians, as ever, know better, which is to say, they know that which serves their own interests the better. There is another ancient question which the age has forgotten: Who guards the Guardians? You had better start remembering, because the failure to ask that question may cost you your life, liberty, and happiness. We may be right to be afraid of what the future has in store for us, certainly the future that our would-be Guardians have in store for us. But, to repeat, the intention is to instil fear. Fear is inhibiting and debilitating; it makes people defensive and causes them to close in on the little that is familiar and certain. The way to defeat these encroachments on freedom and happiness is to expand being outwards and expand our horizons – it is to oppose our “something” to their “nothing.” These would-be Guardians are defeated and dead already, having long since given up on humanity and its most noble ideals and aspirations. These Guardians have inverted and perverted the original conception of politics as a search for the best regimen for the human good – they are planning to institute the worst regimen, a totally controlled global order that regulates for the human bad. And that is why they are beaten. We really are looking at the fag-end of an exhausted system that is ripe for transformation and transcendence. How do we do that? Most simply by cleaving to healthy human potentialities and seeking the most appropriate and effective means of their realisation. This exhaustion has been a long time coming, and has its roots in the very idea of freedom upon which liberal modernity is premised. Liberalism is based on an ontology that is false to human nature, holding apart and opposed to one another two things that belong together – individuality and sociality. In the context of this separation, liberalism eschewed the uncertainties involved in defining a positive freedom based on a substantive conception of the good in favour of a negative freedom, which effectively meant the freedom of the individual from other's definitions of the good. The view was parasitic on the moral and cultural capital of past generations, using up the stock without being able to replenish it until the day of depletion came. We are now running on empty.
The ancients held a very different view, affirming that ethics and politics are intimately related in their concern for human flourishing. Being truly human entails flourishing, which is something that can only be achieved in a social context. Since human beings are social beings, no-one is able to flourish in isolation. Separation, however, is the key figure of liberal modernity, running throughout the social and institutional fabric, removing people from their means of production, control, and administration, ultimately separating individuals from one another and from their own selves. Flourishing requires a social environment in which individuals are brought into connection with one another; it also requires an appropriate political regimen. In fine, flourishing requires an institutional framework and an ethico-social infrastructure which enables human beings to become the best that they can be. It is telling that politics in the modern world has been premised on curbing and constraining the worst that human beings can be. Liberal modernity is premised not merely on a material scarcity but a psychological scarcity, contained in Hobbes' assertion that life in the 'state of nature' is 'nasty, brutish, and short.' Hobbes' view here implies that without curb and constraint human beings would predate on one another. The assumption turns the ancients on their heads to assert that human beings are anti-social rather than social beings, enemies to one another rather than friends. That view has prevailed and is the assumption that underpins plans for global order. But it is plain wrong and always was. It is contrary to the right, true, and natural way. Hobbes' view of the 'state of nature' was not a true description of nature but a prescription for the atomistic, competitive, individualistic anti-society to come. That inhumanism is now being writ large on the global scale, written into the legal and instititutional fabric that is being designed to incarcertate us. This can be checked and reversed, but only if we know how deep the rot actually is. The rot is pervasive, we see it readily enough, and on a daily basis. We can smell it – it is the stench of a dead politics and culture. But the rot cannot be tacked on the surface level. You have to go deep to find the corpse.
Moral and political questions have been falsely abstracted from their social and relational contexts and need to be restored to source again. That means that ethics and politics have to encompass all the elemental, taking in all dimensions of a decisions and actions within a way of life, not merely personal choices.
The conception of negative liberty is premised on an anthropological pessimism, demonstrating an awareness of the potential harm that human beings can do to one another, and not least when claiming to be good and to be doing good. The decision to settle for the protective conception over the developmental one entailed by flourishing was based on the hard experience of religious wars in which human beings had tortured, maimed, and murdered their way across Europe for the best part of two centuries, every one of them thinking they were doing good on the one and true way. But if your politics and ethics is premised on the worst that human beings can be rather than the best, it is inevtiable that in time that people will settle for the worst rather than the best and be much less than they could and ought to be. Ethics and politics in origin concerned the realisation of healthy human potentials, not merely the curb and constraint of the worst aspects of human nature. Worse, we live in an age in which the release of individuals from inhibition and taboo has been celebrated as a liberation. The age has made the virtues sins against the GNP, and the deadly sins the means of its expansion.
Negative liberty is premised on the assumption of mutual enmity. The vision is mean-spirited and narrow. Politics in origin concerned setting goals to achieve. Model your politics around the worst that human beings can be and, in time, they will be that very thing. The space involved in love and amity is more positive and involves goals that are served in the act of relationship, encounter, solidary exchange and interaction. To be considered worthy of positive freedom is to be graced by a politics which allows a person to be at his or her best without undue fear. The view is premised on an anthropological optimism and is key to happiness as flourishing. In this view, individuals are free to realize their nature, but in the moral rather than naturalistic sense of simply acting out of the immediacy of desire. Not all potentials are to be realized – some are unhealthy – and not all desires are to be expressed – some are bad. The view rests on the capacity for discernment. It also rests on a sociality which assumes the unity of the freedom and happiness of each and all. Human beings thus realize their healthy potentials in a way which allows others to do likewise. Such realization cannot be attained in isolation, since the individual human being needs others in order to be himself or herself. The result is that we each realize our better nature – ultimately that nature at its best – in and through others, since the flourishing of others is the medium through we are able to flourish ourselves – we are members of one another in the one familial community.
Establishing the ethics of flourishing in a political context envisages a society in which each person achieves freedom and happiness in and through the self-fulfilment of all others. That is the central claim of Rational Freedom as a moral and political freedom. The political question involves determining precisely the systems of provision and institutions of governance are required to facilitate the realization of that vision. It is clear, too, why the unity of each and all as a central principle of Rational Freedom requires equality. The process of reciprocal self-fulfilment leading to the flourishing of each and all is possibly only among equals. Equality is a condition of philia or friendship, and is the form that love takes in the political world. Full friendship is not possible between non-equals. This is why Rousseau insisted on equality in the sense in which he defined it – affirming an independence within a greater interdependence:
“With regard to equality, this word must not be understood to mean that degress of power and wealth should be exactly the same, but rather that with regard to power, it should be incapable of all violence and never exerted except by virtue of status and the laws; and with regard to wealth, no citizen should be so rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself.”
Rousseau, The Social Contract
Freedom can only be attained in a relationship of equality and sustained through the nurturing of that relationship. That the unity of each and all lies is a central premise of the Rational Freedom I argue for – we are all one and all connected to one another, members of one another, regardless of any division, enmity, and separation that may be introduced along the way. Whatever fate some may suffer may one day be suffered by others, and even all, strong and weak, rich and poor alike. Which brings me back to the question of our would-be planetary controllers. These people appear to be rich and powerful, command vast resources and are embedded in the world's governing institutions. They appear to be so rich and powerful as to be irresistible. But they are weak to the extent that they are rootless and grounded in “nothing.” They can be opposed, so long as we cleave to the substantial “something” that is the right and natural order.
The developments currently transforming our entire way of life are an example of an engineered and enforced change, something mechanical and inorganic, as opposed to organic change. These changes are being compelled, forced on people without their consent. The fact that it is happening on a global scale makes it a somewhat anonymous process, something intangible whose targets are hard to see let alone hit. It is an attempt at remote control on the part of people and interests abstracted from place. People are rooted in place and are having their lives constantly disturbed and altered from the outside and from above. These techno-bureaucratic managerialists are using their power and resources to change everything and everyone everywhere and are doing so all at once, keeping people in a constant state of fear and anxiety, desperately clinging on to the little that is familiar and certain in their increasingly unfamiliar and uncertain lives. This permanent revolution is designed to put people on the defensive, sapping their hope and energy, breaking them up, rendering them passive, preventing them from ever associating together in furtherance of their own transformations. This is a war for control in which an organised minority is determined to prevent people from coming together to restrucure power and resources in favour of the many. The would-be universal controllers know that this is a war that cannot be won on the defensive – hence they are on the attack, constantly disrupting things, distracting people, making changes, all the time forcing the global millions onto the backfoot and wasting their time and energy in inane controversies based on myriad stupidities, which seem unavoidable for the reason that they do indeed cause real harm. My advice is that whilst one hand is being waved provocatively in front of your face, make sure to note what the other hand is doing. And get on the front foot. As the world of politics is consumed by inanities and insanities the biggest shift of money and power to the ruling class in history proceeds apace.
Politics has been inverted and perverted. From being concerned with the search for the best regimen for the human good, our would-be universal rulers are engineering a change for the worse. In their deluded minds, the worst for the majority of people is the best for them. It's a conceit born of weakness and exhaustion and is doomed to failure. Put aside the distracting controversies, end the defensive posture, get on the front foot and start punching back. The planetary architects, engineers, and managers are clever but only narrowly and superficially so. Rather than being clever they are predictable, obvious, and transparent, so much so that you can anticipate their next moves. They are also mediocre and cowardly, furthering their designs by stealth, employing indirect force to 'nudge,' constrain, stifle, and suffocate, gradually narrowing options until there are none.
Matt Goodwin in Values, Voice, and Virtue (2023) refers to a 'new elite,' a credentialed elite of the educated and professional. It's a little vague and loose (so much so that Goodwin himself could easily be considered to be one of that elite - and me too). That sounds pretty much like the old elite, like the professional and educated middle class who took control of socialism in the early years of the twentieth century and relocated it from the social to the abstracted political terrain, removing it from the hands of the working class. That class is now larger owing to the expansion of higher education, and is dominant throughout all the institutions of culture, media, politics, and society. Whilst this isn't quite the class of global Guardians, its members are servants and footsoldiers, wittingly or otherwise. You will find them in the NGOs, the not-for-profit and philanthropic organisations, the global 'network of experts,' the myriad 'schools' and campaigns educating/indoctrinating us on the crisis and issue of the day. Michael Lind writes of the 'new class' in his book The New Class War: Saving Democracy From The Managerial Elite (2020). I've written on the subject myself, not in terms of the threat that managerialist constitute to democracy within a particular national polity, but globally, paying particular attention to environmentalism.
Affirming Freedom and Democracy and Resisting the Authoritarian Temptation: The Allure of Eco-Authoritarianism under the Sign of Climate Necessity (2022)
The Critique of Environmentalism as Naturalism and Scientism (2022)
Affirming Democracy and Politics against Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism (2020)
Climate Rebellion and System Change: Rebellion or Revolution?
Greens have been too absorbed in their (legitimate) cause and crusade to consider these works as anything more than treachery and heresy – they need to remove the ideological blinkers and filters and see that the treachery lies in the way that environmentalism has been appropriated by the most anti-ecological and inorganic forces and that, in their desperation, they are cheering on their enemy, for no other reason than they are getting things done. Many who have been committed to a cause their entire lives will remain loyal to organisations that claim to advance that cause but do the very opposite. It takes guts to break free and call out the deviation for what it is; it takes guts to admit you have been duped. It is easier to continue with the illusion, in the hope that things will turn out well in the end. They won't. But people will express anger against those who have found the courage to point out that the king is without clothes – that there is “nothing” of substance to the claims of creating a better world. Many idealists, reformers, and campaigners have fallen among the acronym gang, the credentialed people who have the semblance of expertise and cleverness but in fact commit all the errors of groupthink. Among these are people who think that eliminating fossil fuels amounts to system change, devoting all their time and energy to the cause. As a socialist I have devoted my political life to the cause of “system change,” by which is meant the fundamental transformation of capitalist social forms, structures, and relations and their supplanting by democratic forms. The politics and language of “system change” has now been appropriated to mean something else:
“You're the system they want to change:
No cars, no flights, no heat, no cooling, no fireplaces, no meat.
Net Zero for you peasants.
There's too many of you anyway.”
Jordan Peterson
I'm being provocative. But if you think that's an exaggeration, then keep your eyes and ears open for daily examples that fit the bill – only 'important people' should be flying, not 'ordinary people' eco-activists routinely claim. And as for overpopulation, the misanthropy is so relentless that you get the impression that any population is too much people for some. I've been among environmentalists long enough and often enough to know the truth of the exaggerations. 'It's time to cull the herd,' one said around the dinner table, when he believed he was among friends.
Which returns me to numbers.
I've seen people claim that this 'new class' amounts to a mere eight thousand or so individuals. Such numbers leave me profoundly unmoved. I was singularly unimpressed by the Occupy movement's condemnation of the 1% and its claim to speak for the 99% That's not how politics works. There are layers and layers of complicity and dependency beneath that 1% In taking on that 1% you will soon be confronted by a series of defensive layers and bulwarks, with ever expanding numbers of people being found to have a little stake in 'the system.' Weber characterised modern society as an “iron cage,” but it may also be called the “gilded cage” in that it pays better to be inside than on the outside. For all that Occupy spoke of the 99%, for all that Jeremy Corbyn spoke of “the many” rather than “the few,” political experience shows the extent to which minorities are more than capable of managing, controlling, and ruling majorities – by breaking them up, separating them from one another, turning them against one another, distracting them, weakening them, putting them forever on the defensive. Two quotes from Machiavelli are sufficient to make the point that this is a political truism that idealists need to know:
“Anyone who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it; for such a city may always justify rebellion in the name of liberty and its ancient institutions.”
“It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.”
If the ruling class want to accustom people to their servility then our political task is to raise their aspirations for freedom and happiness in a public as well as personal context. To repeat, people have to come out of their defensive posture and abandon the pathetic hope that these crises will blow over – those aiming to remove our freedom need to be blown away.
This would-be universal class is not only attempting moves that come out of the tyrant's handbook, they are also committing some of the oldest mistakes in the book – they display all the fatal conceit of centralized planners past, the people who presided over the false and empty universalism of empire and who thought they could change and control all things whilst accurately predict and manage all the consequences of their actions. Like central planners past they think themselves all-knowing and all-powerful.
It doesn't take the joint action of “the many” to challenge and overthrow any would-be tyranny. Start with yourself and find and use your own internal 'yes' and 'no' and simple refuse to go along with the lie, call it out as a lie, and continue to cleave to the truth. This can make all the difference and has throughout history.
In 2015 I delivered a paper at California State University entitled We are One. I spent most of the time making it clear that whilst humanity is a singular biological entity, it was socially and politically divided – we stand charged with the political task of creating a oneness among us, in recognition of our shared home, community of life, and fate. But the title of the paper was apt – we are one in our common home. What befalls – and befouls – one will befall – and befoul – others, the things that affect the 'little people' will also impact on the great. I return to the familial notion of the many forming one body, with each member belonging to all others, envisioning a world in which we all belong to one another. (Romans 12: 5). In their conceit, arrogance, and stupidity, the rich and powerful tend not to see things this way, believing that they are able to remove themselves from the people and go it alone. They are now seeking to recreate the world in their own selfish image. Knowledge and power breed a fatal conceit: “Those who bring trouble on their families inherit the wind. The fool will be a servant to the wise.” (Proverbs 11:28-30)
The full quote is worth contemplating for the way it emphasises organic growth in the household and the wisdom obtained by those who cleave to the truths engraved on the human heart:
He who trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will thrive like foliage. Whoever brings trouble on his own household will inherit the wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise of heart. The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, and he who wins souls is wise.
When being, belonging, borders, and places have all been eliminated, leaving only the blank oneness of a universal nowhere, when everyone belongs to everyone and therefore to no-one, and exist anywhere and therefore nowhere, when the global commons have finally been totally enclosed, and people have finally been separated from their means of life, connection, and control, when all have been reduced to dependency and all is fake and simulated and surveilled, when there is nothing accessible and affordable to sustain everyday living, and we are confined in the digital cage, when life is merely a living death, what next? It's a question that I have spent years putting to environmentalists who make survival the summum bonum of political ambition. Human beings need a reason to survive, the reduction to life and the stripping away of our highest ideals, values, and pleasures is a certain recipe for extinction. Having faced death on a couple and more occasions, I know for a fact that the goal of survival is nowhere near enough to enthuse and inspire people into taking the actions that ensure survival. And yet the constant emphasis is on 'survival,' with everything else dismissed as mere luxury ephemera. This is short-sighted and stupid, it is plain wrong, it is inhuman. One is left to wonder whether it is an unconscious expression of the misanthropy that continues to stalk environmentalism – or a quite deliberate inhumanism that is designed to sap hope and make us all so miserable as to happy to be euthanized – paying for the privilege. Beyond such idle speculation, it is clear that contemporary politics has been overtaken by a debilitating distemper and sickness. Looking at the corrupted, perverted condition of politics in the contemporary age it is worth asking what the leaders, politicians, and decision-makers are in it for – what do they hope to gain, if anything? Mere survival as mediocrities? I don't see leaders, only followers, politicians who are quick to blame the constraints they have to work within for the many problems they fail to resolve. To which the answer is the same as it ever was – if there are constraints which are generating problems and preventing remedial action, remove them.
And beyond the politicians what of the great public? The hijack of the commons is transparent, so why the lack of protest? We have been living through the greatest transfer of wealth to the rich – now superrich – in history, and yet so many are so busy squabblinb between themselves over trivialities (trivialities which, at the same time, cause real harm to real people, hence the need to fight back – remember, as you watch the hand that is being waved in front of your face, watch what the other hand is doing – and make as short a work of the trivialities as you can).
Whilst we may be inclined to see our futures in the darkest terms, it is worth getting on to the front foot to imagine what that future has in store for our would-be rulers. Once you understand that the future will be as bleak and empty for the rulers as it will be for us you start to appreciate the emptiness and the weakness of this seemingly all-powerful new class. The misery they seek to inflict on us by way of their many agendas, targets, and devices will engulf them also – that's the nature of being one humanity in the one world. It would appear that they imagine that they can rule over a placeless, faceless, borderless world by remote control, protected by private armies and electronic walls beyond the reach of the impoverished and disempowered members of the demos. But it's a delusion and a madness, a sure sign of a ruling class that has lost the ability to rule. The concern to separate from the people betrays a fear of the consequences of their actions – they plan the worst and expect the worst, and think they can hide at a safe distance. This remoteness of a ruling class is one of the classic characteristics of civilisation collapse. The global ruling class aims at global governance not because it is powerful but because it is weak and exhausted. They have nothing but retrenchment to offer. Rather than lead people to a better life, as true aristocracies and elites have done throughout history, these would-be rulers are actually predators who seem determined to hit the till while they can and then clamp down on dissent in the aftermath. They are freebooters and freeloaders serving no public purpose, only their own private interest. And I'm not sure why people are quaking in their boots in face of them. They are waging war on 'ordinary' people, draining their energy, making them fearful, dividing them against themselves and distracting them. They have to do this because should people shed the defensive mode and join together to go on the attack, this ruling class will fall.
In my economics masters thesis from 1995, Industry and Europe, I made the point that the globalisation of capitalist relations called forth the need for a global planning authority, something which the capital system, which is by definition a competition of capitals, is incapable of providing. There is simply too much internal division within capital for the system to be able to supply the universal agency it neeyds to survive on a global basis. The result, I predicted, would be an endless crisis and stagnation. The path was clear for socialism – so long as people knew what that entailed. Thirty years on, socialism is nowhere in sight, but the global planning agency I anticipated is being constructed by the acronym gang. It is easy to see how this will function to preserve, protect, extend, and entrench the corporate form. But the crisis tendencies, contradictory dynamics, and internal divisions of the capital system remain in place. Will this global planning agency function on the global stage as the national state has done on the domestic stage, which is to say as a crucial second order mediation supplying the unity and coordination that the process of capitalist accumulation requires, but which capital itself cannot supply? Or are we moving to another system entirely, a neo-feudalism in which power prevails over money? I predicted the demise of the capital system and moved on to evaluate possibilities for a socialist and cooperative mode of production. I underestimated possibilities for a bureaucratic collectivism on a global scale, for the reason that such a system is empty and parasitic and hence no true solution. But it's a possibility. But the fact of internal division remains to blight ideas that such a system could be stable. Let's be frank, these would-be rulers are devious, ruthless, cold, calculating, and thoroughly inhuman in the contempt they have for their fellow human beings. Mention that we are all members of one another to these people and they will spit their contempt in your face. I have a feeling that they will turn on one another before they have finished the rest of us off. They will turn on one another as rivals for power and resources. That's the inevitable consequence of division and separation turning human beings against one another – once people fall into divide and conquer mode they cannot but carry on dividing and conquering in face of new threats. And in a world in which human beings are seen as enemies of one another rather than friends, there will always be new threats arising as quickly as old threats are countered. It's a world of constant battles and endless wars, Hobbes' 'war of all against all' writ large. And it's unreal, inhuman, and impossible.
I see nothing to fear. For all of the scare stories people are frightening themselves with, those stories are tending to magnify the fearsome nature of some rather weak and mediocre people. I wouldn't underestimate such people on account of their being so pathetic – the biggest crimes in history have been committed by weak men with power. But the point is still worth making that these are weak men, weak in themselves, and weak in their rootlessness. They may be rich in material wealth but they are extremely poor in terms of the wealth of human connections. I also say they are cowards. The way they act indirectly and by stealth is the hallmark of the coward. They will use laws and targets and regulations to intimidate and bully, squeeze and suffocate, coerce and control. But when confronted will they have the backbone to do the dirty work? Do they have the authority to have others do it for them? At present they can count on the subservience of weak and compromised politicians and captured institutions. Those things will crumble under assault.
They do not constitute a true aristocracy, which is to say the rule of the best for the best, but the very observe; they are an anti-human kakistocracy, the rule of the worst, least capable and qualified, most unscrupulous. This is what politics reduces to after decades of assault on the public realm and the public imagination. It is time to reclaim and restore the original conception of politics, which is to say, the best regimen for human flourishing, acknowledging that we are one, each a member of the other, in the one community.
That's Rational Freedom and the Natural Law, and it cleaves to the true, the good, and the beautiful as it guides people to the right and natural way. It's all rather simple, human beings have an innate instinct to join together in place to make a family, a community, a home. That natural instinct to nurture is far more powerful than any law or regulation or technology our would-be Guardians may attempt to control us with. The right, rational, and natural order of things will prevail over the false and the forced, because that's simply the way it is. Rather than keep frightening one another with scare stories about what our would-be tyrants are planning on doing next, remind yourself of the things that are true, good, and beautiful, and act in accordance with these; stop responding to provocations; fight the fights that need to be fought, but keep your eyes on the bigger fight to be won; don't be distracted and diverted; cease being defensive and go on the front foot to attack the people who may look strong but are anything but; and most importantly of all resocialise, remoralize, and resolidify – build social supports and stabilizers and extend them deep and wide and far.