Germany: a few thoughts and impressions

https://markenglish.substack.com/p/brief-travel-update-germany?r=3knty7

A few thoughts and personal impressions garnered from my twelve-week stay.

Politics, personal attitudes and the approaching crisis

The following observations had their origin in an exchange I had with a friend, some of whose ideas about, and attitudes towards, politics and human freedom I saw – rightly or wrongly – as being false (the ideas) and counterproductive (the attitudes).

1. Attitudes

For me politics is a boring necessity which, at its best, runs in the background. Enthusiasm for politics is always a danger signal.

Such enthusiasm may manifest itself rhetorically or be rhetorically generated, but I am not condemning rhetoric per se. Rhetoric is an inevitable feature of any communication which incorporates a human element and engages the emotions. You can’t avoid it, and political talk – which is often designed to persuade or (let’s face it) to manipulate – is always going to be rhetorical to some extent.

So I am not criticizing people for utilizing rhetoric in the political sphere so much as for believing it – for falling for their own or other people’s rhetoric. Doing so, they are often implicitly seeking in politics something which politics or political action cannot, in the end, provide: that is, some kind of deep satisfaction or “salvation”. They are turning politics into a religion-substitute. This is a very dangerous thing to do.

Emotional satisfaction is a personal rather than a political matter and is best sought, I believe, in interpersonal relationships and personal, non-political activities and practices (work, hobbies and “creative” activities, walking, sitting in the sunshine, etc.). When people get (or seek to get) their deepest satisfactions from political or, more broadly, from ideological beliefs and activities, something is amiss.

2. Romanticism and politics

I keep seeing not only ideological (that is, political and personal-value-based) but also metaphysical elements in the political views of activists both of the left and the right. Much has been written about the implicit (and in my view dangerous) metaphysics of Marxism but right-libertarians – with their views on natural rights and their fetishization of freedom – are also committed to their own, ultimately empty and baseless, metaphysical ideas.

The origins of many current ideological fashions can be traced to the 19th century and the Romantic movement. Many Romantic ideas carry religious and metaphysical baggage deriving from Biblical as well as classical sources (Plato, the Stoics). It took me some years to see my own Platonist and Romantic commitments and assumptions for what they were – and so let go of them.

One’s views on art and human creativity and action need not have a metaphysical dimension but Romantic aesthetics certainly does, and these ideas have and still do play into political thinking in unfortunate ways. I am not saying that we, as individuals, can’t find deep satisfaction in creative activities at a personal level. My point is that no political solution can ever alter the underlying realities and imperatives of social and economic life and deliver the sorts of universal freedoms and satisfactions which are typically promised by radical, progressive or libertarian ideologies.

3. The current situation

Ideologies are real in the sense that they motivate political action and affect the way people interpret history and current events. They are essentially action-oriented, reality-distorting mechanisms and are worse than useless as analytical tools.

The “system” we currently find ourselves in is not capitalism, at least in the historical sense of the term. Western capitalism had deep cultural roots and was associated with certain patterns of thought and behaviour which no longer prevail (work ethic, deferred gratification, thrift, certain religious ideas, etc.). It involved the slow accumulation and deployment of actual capital, “creative destruction”, unprofitable companies being allowed to fail, and so on.

This is nothing like what we are witnessing today where everything is driven by debt and derivatives and there is an unholy alliance between heavily indebted governments, central banks and financial institutions. Markets are grossly distorted. Currencies are losing purchasing power. The financial system has become detached from economic reality.

The seeds of the current crisis were sown when the USD’s link to gold was finally severed in 1971. Or actually before that: in the fiscal profligacy of the 1960s which made the suspension of the Bretton Woods arrangement necessary.

Governments and central banks have played a major role in creating the current perverse and dysfunctional system, but other groups have also been involved (Wall Street bankers, certain business people and billionaires, NGOs, big tech and media). The system – such as it is – is now collapsing.

There will be inevitable pain.

Politics and personal values; the Taiwan question

Personal and political values can be intertwined in complicated ways. Even within close families, there are often serious, politically-driven divides. I talk here about the way my own foreign policy views and attitudes developed, referring to the influence of my father and also to bitter, politically-driven personal rifts which existed at one time within my father’s family.

The latter part of this episode of Culture and Value is devoted to a review of a recent discussion about China’s regional ambitions and to the dangerous game (as I see it) that the United States is currently playing in the Western Pacific, especially in relation to Taiwan.

Jules Monnerot and the concept of "secular religion"

Jules Monnerot [1909–1995] was born and spent his early years in Martinique where his father (also Jules) was a lawyer and left-wing activist. Jules Monnerot, fils went from being a Marxist in his youth to being a cold warrior after World War 2, subsequently moving further to the right.

Some see him as having been a fascist in his later years. Dan Stone, for example, tracing Monnerot’s intellectual trajectory, highlights the preoccupations of the Collège de Sociologie which Monnerot co-founded in 1937 and suggests that the notion of “secular religion” which formed the basis of Monnerot’s mid-century critique of the extreme left played into his gradually-evolving – and allegedly fascist – stance.

The Collège de Sociologie did promote some ideas – a sort of anti-rationalistic primitivism, for example – which could be seen to exhibit similarities to or (at least) compatibilities with certain fascist ideas. But it was a loose alliance of intellectuals concerned with directions in the arts and the broader culture and in social research, not a political organization.

Though there are many ways of using and understanding the concept of “secular religion”, one common (and I think quite acceptable) way involves highlighting psycho-social parallels between the behaviors and attitudes of members of religious groups – as we typically see and understand them today or as we know them from historical sources – and those of people who are bound together by political ideology or other other kinds of secular allegiance. Such parallels might include the following: in-group/out-group dynamics; a set of core values and beliefs which is seen as being in some sense “sacred”, or at least not to be questioned, and which forms the basis of decisions concerning inclusion and exclusion; a tendency to sanctify or make heroes of founding figures and prominent practitioners of the past and to demonize opponents and apostates; moral certainty, and a sense that a vindication of core values and a fulfilment of goals and expectations will be forthcoming; an important role for ritual; and so on.

Such comparisons may be merely observational and descriptive but, more often than not, comparisons between religious and political structures are critiques and have a polemical aspect. For example, authors aligned with a specific church or denomination may present political ideologies as ersatz religions, as weak or dangerous religion-substitutes. Thinkers ill-disposed to religion may take a similar line. In both cases, drawing parallels with religion is specifically designed to undermine the credibility of the ideology in question.

My focus here is on Monnerot the cold warrior of the late 1940s and early 1950s and specifically on a defense that Monnerot made of his position which was prompted by an attack on his ideas by Hannah Arendt.

Monnerot’s works are written in an erudite but journalistic style. They do not purport to be empirical or scholarly studies. Certainly, they do not aspire (as Max Weber’s works generally do) to sociological neutrality. When, in Sociologie du communisme (1949), Monnerot compares contemporary communism with historical Islam, he is consciously engaged in a polemic. He is seeking to draw attention to the dangers implicit in Marxist ideology which he interprets as a political mythology. He calls his approach “aetiological” and “clinical”, and sees himself as exploring the politico-mythological causes of social and cultural maladies.

Specifically, it was Monnerot’s utilization of the concept of secular religion which prompted Arendt’s ire. Both Monnerot and Arendt took religion very seriously but their perspectives on religion were far apart. Arendt was operating within a broadly Kantian context and her views were heavily influenced by Christian thinkers of the past and by the liberal theology of her time. Monnerot (like other members of the Collège de Sociologie) was not associated with these traditions of thought, but nor was he advocating an entirely secular or science-centred point of view. The sacred meant something for him, something real, something which had a continuing relevance. It could manifest itself in various ways and contexts: in ordinary life, in the arts, in politics.

Monnerot was especially interested in political manifestations of the sacred. He recognized, however, that the ideologies of the time were seriously flawed. Hitlerism, obviously. As for communism, it was an unstable hybrid of rationalistic and philosophico-religious elements.

Monnerot was particularly concerned with communism’s intrinsically totalitarian and universalistic nature. It sought to dominate all aspects of life and to subvert all local loyalties. As such, it operated much like historical manifestations of Islam. The ultimate goal was to dominate the entire world, to create a universal state.

“As universal state,” argues Monnerot, “it would seek to abolish all the differentiations which keep the world divided into distinct and individual units (the most recent unit of this kind being the nation). In its role as secular religion, communism encourages and harnesses discontent, it reinforces and exploits every impulse which sets individuals against their native society and works relentlessly to undermine the vital psychological and social forces which prevent societies from plunging into dissolution and ruin.”

Though Arendt moved in left-wing circles (her family were socialists, her mother was a follower of Rosa Luxembourg, her first husband had communist links and her second husband was a Marxist), she did not see herself as left-wing. Most of her political thought and activism was preoccupied in one way or another with Jewish themes and specifically with combating anti-Semitism.

Given that she was not a communist or a committed Marxist, her strong negative reaction to Monnerot’s attempt to compare communism with Islam seems to call for an explanation. She insists that politics and religion are incompatible concepts. Especially puzzling is her use of the concept of blasphemy. She accuses Monnerot of blasphemy (against whom or what exactly?).

From what I have read, even scholars who are very sympathetic to Arendt concede that she is not at her best in this encounter with Jules Monnerot. And Monnerot, however his later views are understood or interpreted, makes some strong and valid points in the letter he sent to the editor (Henry Kissinger, no less) of the journal which had published Arendt’s critique of his work. While not endorsing Monnerot’s broader point of view, I think his criticisms of Arendt for rejecting out of hand any possibility of overlap between the political and the religious are entirely justified. I also share Monnerot’s puzzlement concerning Arendt’s blasphemy accusation.

Here are a few excerpts from Monnerot’s letter:

Ms. Arendt cites Kierkegaard, Pascal, Dostoievski […] but she also draws on Marx and particularly on his shifting and somewhat imprecise notion of ideology. In Marx’s writings, the notions of superstructure and ideology are sometimes interchangeable. Sometimes “ideology” is one of the superstructures (others being law, the arts, religion); sometimes “ideology” and “superstructure” are synonymous such that art and law, for example, are seen as “ideological” phenomena. The same can be said of religion within a Marxian framework. […] We do not find in Marx an absolute opposition of ideology and religion. It is Ms. Arendt who decrees that there must be such an opposition, but without any justification.

[…] Setting aside details of the evolutionary schemas utilized by the pioneers of the religious sociology of primitive peoples, their way of seeing the whole of humanity as being interconnected and their insistence on a kind of continuity between very lofty and very humble things had a positive impact on Western thinking. From this perspective, a higher or universal religion – which exceeds by definition the limits of a race, or of any “closed society” – is the most complex […] form. A glance at history teaches us that such complex forms arise quite late, that they presuppose, and derive from, previous contingent forms. […] Nor are such complex and differentiated forms immune to regressions. […] The expression “secular religion” (the adjective modifying the noun’s meaning) can, within this framework, be usefully employed in connection with communism, just as it can with respect to Hitlerism. This may be theologically absurd, but it is not sociologically absurd.

[…] The “bourgeois” communist is an agent of self-destruction of the real in the name of the unreal. Communist beliefs about the function of the Red Army or that of the State Security Ministry are not realistic representations. What such Marxists put above mankind they do not call God but, if one analyzes their thought, one arrives at the conclusion that what is being actualized is a conception of the human species as an alienating and mystifying abstraction (as the Marxists would say if they applied their criticism to themselves).

Functionally speaking, the human species – conceived in relation to a recognizably providential view of history, courtesy of Hegel – plays the role of a kind of divinity within Marxist thought.

In both the Russian and Chinese communist systems […] man suffers from separation from himself. The movement of history will cure it, but only in terms of the species. The individual person in this system, the individual who is this one or that one, you or me, is (as I have previously written) “the manure of history.” […]

The communist has an answer to everything. This phenomenon characterizes unitary orthodoxies. Such a system of ideas rejects what cannot be assimilated and assimilates the rest. And the elements it assimilates it renders homogenous, changing them beyond recognition.

[This is an abridged and slightly revised version of an essay which appeared last month at The Electric Agora].

Radicalism and religion

Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul, had been involved with a mystical form of Judaism (possibly Merkabah) before he joined the early-first-century Jewish sect which became (largely through his own writings and missionary activities) a new religion quite distinct from Judaism. Paul knew that his teachings were unacceptable to most devout Jews and would be perceived as utter foolishness by most non-Jews, especially by those educated in classical culture. The Mediterranean world was dominated by the Roman Empire; Koine Greek was the main language of international trade and culture. Paul, as a practising Jew, a Roman citizen and a speaker of Greek, understood – and unequivocally rejected – both classical values and the tribal aspect of Judaism. Arguably, more than any other single figure, he universalized and so cut loose from its ethnic moorings the radical political morality which had become a significant feature of the Judaism of the time.

Though Christianity is now in rapid decline, secularized versions of Biblical ethics and eschatology still flourish and continue to exert a profound influence on moral and political thinking, especially in left-wing and radical circles. Unfortunately these modes of thinking become very problematic if you remove them from the theological context in which they arose. The moral imperatives of the Biblical and Christian world cannot be divorced from the absolute and morally engaged deity who lies at the heart of most Biblical texts without creating major distortions.

What gives force to notions of moral responsibility which go beyond our natural instincts and the requirements of social life? If there is a morally engaged creator-God involved, a God who communicates with us and cares about us, an absolute and demanding Biblical-style morality makes sense. If not, not.

On the Christian view, we are called to feel in some sense responsible for and to truly care about everybody on the planet. And this may be psychologically possible – if one believes in prayer and providence and a beneficent deity.

If you take these radical moral imperatives seriously in the absence of religious belief, however, they create an absolutely crushing and debilitating psychological burden. It is a recipe for cognitive dissonance and worse. Self-protective moral contortions and distortions, compartmentalized thinking, cynicism and hypocrisy are not restricted to the atheistic left but such cognitive and moral aberrations are certainly in evidence in contemporary progressive circles. What’s more, in the absence of actual religion, social and political causes have a tendency to become cults, or at least vehicles for cultish or tribalistic behavior. Activist groups typically involve a strong in-group/out-group dynamic.

Moreover, there is a demonstrable link between radical Western social and political thought and Biblical ethics.

Thinkers with a Jewish background (amongst them Heinrich Heine, Alexander Herzen, Karl Marx, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Saul Alinsky and Noam Chomsky) have been prominent proponents of radical ideas within the Western tradition, especially over the last two hundred years. It would be naive to attribute their prominence solely to a shared, secularized religious culture. Much can be explained in terms of social and economic history. But it is not unreasonable to see many of these thinkers as having being influenced, directly or indirectly, by the radical morality implicit in certain books of the Hebrew Bible as well as by a sense of belonging to a group with a long history of persecution and resistance.

Many Christian radicals also took their cue from the Bible, of course. Over the centuries, anti-establishment Christian thinkers of all kinds have found inspiration for religious reform and radical politics in both the New and Old Testaments. The New Testament draws heavily on the prophetic and apocalyptic literature of postexilic Judaism. Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, is just one of many apocalyptic texts, the vast majority of which were associated not with Christianity but with Judaism. Perhaps the most influential of these was the the Book of Daniel, composed in the second century B.C..

Despite attempts by later thinkers to Christianize them, mainstream classical values stand opposed in quite fundamental ways to the uncompromising moral spirit of the prophetic literature and the New Testament. The contrast between mainstream Greek and Roman philosophy (with its emphasis on reason and moderation) and the apocalyptic literature (with its emphasis on revelation and its often extreme and violent imagery) is even greater.

Many points of difference could be enumerated between the moral attitudes which are evident in these various traditions. The contrasts, however, are not just between Roman and Jewish or Pagan and Christian, but also between specific strands of Judaism or Christianity or Pagan philosophy. The New Testament narratives and other documents of the time make it clear, for example, that not all Jewish religious groups were committed to the values and beliefs of the apocalyptic and prophetic writings. And there were also many assimilated Jews (like Josephus) who took a basically pro-Roman stance.

Nonetheless, the contrast between the early Christian view and the classical view is pretty clear. Drawing on certain strands of Jewish thought, the Christian tradition defined morality or ethics in narrower terms than the classical philosophers. Prudential considerations were excluded (thus the emphasis on self-sacrifice and martyrdom). And moral considerations (in this narrow sense) trump all other kinds of consideration. Also, the Christian view is that we have a direct responsibility not just for our family members, friends and neighbours, but for everybody. My main point is that this style of ethics evolved within the context of a particular system of religious beliefs and, divorced from such a context, it is neither logically compelling nor (and I am speaking from personal experience here) psychologically bearable.

To summarize: I am saying that Western culture has inherited (at least) two very different – and incompatible – ways of conceptualizing and judging human behavior, and that the form peculiar to certain Hebrew and Christian texts in which commonsense and prudential considerations are marginalized or excluded altogether, is only sustainable within a religious framework of some kind. Furthermore, I am suggesting that, in many cases, traces of Biblical morality mark the thinking of people who see themselves as being non-religious and quite unaffected by the Biblical traditions of which I am speaking. This applies particularly in the sphere of radical politics.

I mentioned tribalism. As I see it, we are inveterately tribal creatures, but our tribalism may express itself in different ways. Traditionally it was associated with actual tribes and clans. But the radical moral views of the New Testament led to a tribalism of ideas, beliefs and values totally unconnected with – and in fact inimical to – family and clan loyalties. Radical forms of socialism clearly inherit such notions.

Finally, a brief mention of a couple of specific concepts which are are associated (mainly) with progressivism and the left and which also bear the marks of their religious origins: social justice and human rights.

The rhetoric of social justice has Christian roots but it was also a focus of much secular activism during the 20th century and beyond. In the 1930s the demagogic Charles Coughlin probably did more than anyone else in the United States to popularize the term. But, for him, the concept was still essentially a religious one in the sense that the moral imperatives involved had a religious basis. Remove that basis and you change the concept entirely.

The concept of human rights (taken from the natural law tradition rather than Biblical sources) is also a staple of today’s radical progressivism. Activists find the rhetoric of human rights extremely useful in pursuing their political goals. Few however have any interest in or commitment to the underlying metaphysics. Again, the result is unfortunate: conceptual confusion and a loss of meaning and coherence. As rights inflation has inexorably taken hold, the emptiness and absurdity of many of the claims being made becomes increasingly evident.

[This is a slightly revised version of an essay published at The Electric Agora.]

Moral reputations and politics

[This is an extract from my latest post at The Electric Agora.]



Ethics or morality is not private in the sense that it is social and mainly about how we treat one another as human beings; but, in another sense, it is private. It is private in the sense that it is not just about the way we act and treat others; it is also about the way we see others and ourselves. (‘Opaque’ might be a better word than ‘private’ here.)

Moreover, I would suggest that, on the whole, the reputational side of things is taken too seriously. Simply put, reputations – which are by definition public and subject to rhetorical interventions, both positive and negative – typically bear little relationship to the (private, or opaque as I am calling it) reality of the person in question. And I believe that reputation as it pertains to the moral qualities of a person is something that we can – and should – remain agnostic about, under normal circumstances at least.

If there is a thing which we cannot know, the proper response is agnosticism; and we cannot know another person’s self-perception. We can see a small part of what they do. We can hear a small part of what they say. But – with a few possible exceptions (life-long friends, spouses, certain confessional writers perhaps) – we cannot know the details or nuances of the value systems of other people, nor how they see their own actions as relating to these value systems.

Of course, we can judge the actions and statements of others against our own value systems and/or against a legal framework. In fact, we need to do this. Anarchism is not a realistic option. But we need to be clear about what it is we are doing here, what it is we are judging. And what it is that we are not doing, not judging.

Even in its more mundane applications (relating to accomplishment, expertise or practical reliability, say) we often get things wrong when it comes to a person’s reputed qualities. The implication of the common idiom, “So-and-so has a well-deserved reputation for …”, is that reputations are often (usually?) not well-deserved.

Given the above points, it seems to me that there has been far too much emphasis on moral reputation in recent times, both on the positive side (in respect of certain historical figures, but also some contemporary figures) and – especially – on the negative side. Given the infinite possibilities for spin and communicational distraction and deception, this obsession is arguably having a serious adverse effect on our politics.

Monarchical systems of government were effective for long periods of history. Maybe they got certain things right that we get wrong. The monarch was not in the position he or she was in on account of his or her virtue or accomplishment but rather by an accident of birth. There were some advantages to this state of affairs which could be seen to have contributed to political stability, social harmony and continuity. “The King is dead. Long live the King!”

There is a moving scene in the film La Nuit de Varennes in which the ceremonial cape of the fleeing Louis XVI is displayed and the woman responsible for looking after it talks about having once watched the king address a large crowd. It was not the man that she saw in the distance but the red cape. In other words, it is not the person of the king but the role and the symbols of kingship which really count and which constitute the true focus one’s loyalty.

Truth and justice

This is an abridged version of an essay of mine which appeared recently at The Electric Agora. My Twitter profile: @mark_english1.

It seems from a slew of documents that have made their way into the public domain over the last year or so that the FBI and the Department of Justice have become unacceptably politicized, allowing political considerations to affect internal decision-making. No doubt there always has been and always will be a degree of politicization within such agencies and departments, but this tendency does seem to have got out of hand in recent years, and it is no surprise that matters are coming to a head. Juridical and law enforcement systems need to be seen to maintain a certain degree of integrity and independence from politics if they are to operate in anything like an effective way.

Certainly, one doesn’t expect a lot of truth and justice in the broader political sphere. Politics is essentially a power game and often a very dirty one at that. So, naturally, to the extent that the legal system finds itself influenced or infiltrated by political players, it loses credibility.

Lawyers I have known have, on the whole, been pretty cynical about the law and sometimes cynical in other ways too. I was shocked as an idealistic young man by the attitude of a highly-regarded progressive lawyer I once consulted. He was not much older than me, but he confided to me in a dismissive kind of way that he had given up entirely on the sort of sincere idealism that he saw (rightly) as lying behind my preoccupations of the time. His public reputation and profile belied his real views and continued to do so as he rose to national prominence.

Idealists and well-meaning intellectuals who might seek to engage with, or who happen to find themselves caught up in, the alien world of politics – or the law, for that matter – tend not to thrive. On the other hand, though, ideologues will often find a lucrative niche in today's think-tank-infested world.

Rather than talking directly about politics, however, I just want to make a few remarks and observations about the two concepts – both fundamental to an understanding of social and political questions – which I alluded to above: truth and justice. The notions of truth and truthfulness happen to be central to my own view of things; justice not so much. Let me try to explain why.

Life, it seems to me, is deeply and irredeemably unjust, from the womb. Our attempts to “make things right” are worthy, even inspiring. But it is wishful thinking to believe that political or judicial actions can ever have more than a very modest positive effect on the scheme of things; that they can ever right more than a minuscule fraction of the countless wrongs and injustices that surround us on every side. Putting the matter less emotively, I would say that the domain of predicates such as ‘just’ or ‘fair’ is quite constrained and that related or cognate terms like ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ have very limited applicability.

High-minded intellectuals – who, along with less high-minded intellectuals, were until a century or so ago sponsored almost exclusively by churches or religious organizations – have over the centuries worked out various schemes in which justice does prevail in very significant ways. The only trouble is, these systems – whether one is thinking of the politically-charged apocalyptic literature of Judaism and early Christianity, more sober accounts of divine judgment focused on an individual’s moral choices, or Eastern ideas of karma and reincarnation – do not correspond with reality. As I see it, unless you are committed to such or similar religious notions or at least to the implicit metaphysics of the Natural Law tradition, justice is a problematic concept. Too grand, too ambitious and (in many cases at any rate) not altogether clear.

We have certain instincts that we share with some non-human animals which entail reactions and behaviors that give the appearance of involving a basic, inbuilt sense of fairness or justice, but our developed ideas of justice are heavily mediated by culture and subject to cultural variation.

The current notion of social justice, for example, is clearly culturally determined. It has a peculiar and fascinating history which I may discuss in a future piece. It is also notoriously controversial. Friedrich Hayek rejected the concept of social justice as nonsense. Justice, as he saw it, is essentially a process and not about engineering some predetermined outcome. In general terms I go along with this but will not attempt to defend a Hayekian view here.

Of course, in cases where there is common agreement, I’m for justice rather than against it. Who wouldn’t be? But in many cases it is either impossible to clearly and uncontroversially define or, if it can be clearly defined, it is unattainable.

Truth does not have things stacked against it in quite the same way. Sure, it’s philosophically contentious. But so long as it is understood in an ordinary, everyday, lowercase kind of way, it is quite within reach and attainable much of the time.

I will try to spell this out a little. We often get things right in everyday life in the sense that the claims we make are in accordance with the relevant facts. The cat is in the kitchen. Dinner is served. The coffee is cold. You lied about where you were last night. Such claims, if they are in accordance with the relevant facts, are deemed to be correct or true (it doesn’t really matter which word we use) rather than incorrect/untrue/false. I am just talking about ordinary usage here. Someone accused of lying might deny it by saying: “That’s not true! I was at my grandma’s as I claimed.”

Truthfulness is quite distinct from truth, of course. It is synonymous with honesty and relates to one’s communicative intentions. One is being truthful if one tells it as one sees it, without trying to deceive one’s interlocutor in any way. The facts may be wrong, but it is the intention that counts here. Truthfulness and fallibility are quite compatible.

Truthfulness is inextricably bound up with intellectual integrity. The scientist or historian who fudges her data or distorts the facts is not a real scientist or a real historian. The intellectual or writer who presents the work of others as his own is a fraud and is rightly ostracized.

I have argued that it certainly does make sense to talk of the truth or otherwise of specific claims in the course of everyday life. But truth in its grander or more scientific or scholarly manifestations may be something of an illusion.

Although facts of various kinds may be verified by observation, experimentation, documentation or plausible testimony, how we conceive of facts in the context of scientific research is often determined to a greater or lesser extent by the theoretical framework. Cats and kitchens and coffee and grandmothers are givens within the framework of ordinary natural-language-based conversations. We are using ordinary words in ordinary ways. But when the framework is, say, a scientific theory, and we are moving beyond the normal social framework for which natural language evolved, we need to be more circumspect both in our claims and how we express them. The facts in the context of a scientific theory may be expressed in terms of the theory itself, and so become dependent on that particular conceptual framework (more or less as ordinary facts are dependent on the framework of natural language, social interaction and ordinary life). Do the English words ‘true’ and ‘truth’ carry over into a scientific context? Perhaps. But I don’t think it ever really makes sense to talk of a complex theory as true.

There is a website with the unfortunate name, Why Evolution is True. This just sounds wrong to me, a poor use of English. If ‘evolution’ is taken to refer to a process, then obviously the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ cannot apply. They can only apply to claims, beliefs, etc.. Even if the term ‘evolution’ is taken as shorthand for ‘the theory of evolution’ we still have problems. A theory is not a claim; nor is it merely a set of claims. It is a framework within which various claims are made and tested. Can a theory be true? This sort of statement doesn’t really make sense to me. A theory can be good or sound or well-established. Scientific theories are complex objects and they are not set in stone. There will always be modifications in the offing, of one kind or another.

Just as scientific theories are open to being shown to be incomplete or inadequate, so complex narratives purporting to be true accounts may be rejected as such if they are shown to be fictions, i.e. not in accord with certain known facts. But I think it is appropriate to be skeptical about all complex narratives. Inevitably, many quite different stories can be told which fit the known facts, and many more which fit some of the facts.

Much of our social and personal lives is driven by justificatory narratives of one kind or another. Political narratives could be seen as a subset of these: specifically as those justificatory, secular narratives which are shared (or which are designed to be shared) by large numbers of people.

I want to finish up with a few random observations on how antonyms and negation play into this discussion of justice and truth.

Just as the positive rights implicit in social justice are more controversial and contested than negative rights (like liberty), so the concept of justice is (I would suggest) more problematic than the concept of injustice or of a miscarriage of justice. You could argue about whether a person guilty of a crime, for example, ought to be punished in this way or that or punished at all or even blamed. (There might have been extenuating circumstances.) But there would be no disagreement at all about the wrongness of a miscarriage of justice, where a person innocent of a particular crime was convicted for it; or with respect to cases of a broadly similar kind but which do not involve the court system (so that the term miscarriage of justice would not apply). With respect to the latter, I am thinking of situations – not hard to find, it must be said – in which a person is disadvantaged or penalized in some significant way for what is generally accepted as honest and exemplary behavior.

Note that the two concepts, truth and justice, are not symmetrically related. Truth relates directly to justice. The legal process is designed to uncover the truth of what happened, and perjury is a serious offense. One talks of someone being falsely accused. But justice doesn’t relate directly to questions of truth and falsity. Claims are true or false according entirely to non-justice-related criteria. Justice (or injustice) just doesn’t come into it.

[...]

One example I have come across of truth being presented as being more problematic than its opposite is a literary one. No doubt there are countless possible examples one could give. This just happens to be one which stuck in my memory.

It comes from the author’s preface to a very controversial book by the literary academic and cinema historian, Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg ou La terre promise. The book was published in 1948. The épuration légale was still underway. The execution of his friend and brother-in-law, the journalist Robert Brasillach, had politicized Bardèche. But my point here is logical and rhetorical and any discussion of the politics involved will be left for another time.

“I do not know if truth exists,” Bardèche wrote. “Many people have tried by subtle arguments to prove to me that it doesn’t. But I know that lies exist. I know that the systematic distortion of facts is a reality."

Watching, waiting and thinking small

I haven't been posting much lately, partly because I've been preoccupied with other matters and partly because I'm a bit more uncertain these days, not about my basic values so much as how those values might relate to current political realities and options.

As I have explained in the past, my kind of conservatism is pragmatic and responsive to changing circumstances. Any intelligent strategy must be responsive in this way.

And circumstances are changing. In terms of global institutions, power relations and general culture, the post-World War II order is fading or failing and it is unclear what kind of order – or disorder – is going to take its place. One thing which is clear is that the more or less continuous economic progress which has underpinned stability in Western democracies seems to be coming to an end.

Continuing financial and economic troubles portend social and ultimately political crises in Europe and perhaps in the US and other developed countries.

As geo-political and economic realities change, political ideas must change. The basic principles and themes may remain the same but the way individuals interpret them and align themselves doesn't.

Sometimes old ideas gain new relevance, or standard assumptions are exposed as inadequate in the light of current events.

I'm not sure if the political center is shifting in Western countries or if we are simply losing that space which has allowed the center-left and the center-right to cooperate and compete and dominate the political landscape since World War II.

Nor is it clear whether the Chinese model of state capitalism or other possible alternatives to liberal democracy will continue to look viable. Corporatism seems to be making a comeback as well as various forms of economic nationalism. Patriotic protectionism is one of the key policies of many far-right Western European parties (the Front National in France, for example).

I am by nature an observer rather than a player, a political quietist rather than an activist. The distinction between watcher and participator is not a clear one, however. There is no neutral place from which one can watch history unfold; what happens inevitably has ramifying consequences, sometimes very significant consequences. And, if we are talking about epochal changes, everyone will be affected in one way or another.

Could what we are currently witnessing be described as epochal change? I think so. There is certainly a lot going on at the moment.

And, though these changes are driven more by economic realities than anything else, ideas play a part too: the crude, emotion-driven ideas that motivate ordinary people to support this or that leader, to protest or not to protest; as well as the more sophisticated ideas promoted by ideologues and intellectuals.

As I have argued elsewhere, these latter kinds of ideas – the more elaborated and intellectualized ones – are often merely post hoc rationalizations or justifications, attempts to make courses of action decided on for other reasons appear morally or intellectually respectable. But ideological structures also play an active role in recruitment and in defining and sustaining political groupings.

Ideological structures, however sophisticated they may appear, are always inadequate as models of social and political reality. They are merely useful (or dangerous) abstractions, attempts to impose some kind of value-based order on an immensely complex social and political landscape.

When we move from the personal to the political, from the particular to the general, there is always some distortion and loss of meaning. The concepts become thinner and more abstract and run the risk of losing touch with psychological and social realities altogether. At least in the social sciences quantifiable measurements are made which guarantee some kind of link to the real world (tenuous though that link all too often is).

I try to keep my orientation empirical and my main focus on the particular rather than the general, on psychology rather than on political or social theory, on cultures and customs rather than on universalizing ideologies, on particular languages rather than on language.*

In line with this way of thinking, the basic values that I cleave to manifest themselves at the level of individual experience, at smaller rather than at larger scales.

This is reality. This is where we truly live.



* Even the notion of a language is at several removes from reality. There are, of course, dialects and regional and social variations. And, as Noam Chomsky has emphasized, in the end there are only idiolects which change over time: the linguistic structures or sets of structures which each of us has internalized are in the final analysis quite individual and unique.

Gloomy about Europe

Borrowing costs may have come down across Europe – even in Greece – but the underlying economic situation in many euro zone countries is still grim. And it may well be that the political consequences are only just starting to emerge.

In a recent piece in the Financial Times Gideon Rachman suggests that the euro crisis hasn't gone away: it has simply moved from the periphery to the core.

Italy, for example, has lost 25% of its industrial capacity since 2008, and the real level of unemployment is about 15%. The country's ratio of debt to GDP is more than 130%. France too has double-digit unemployment and the national debt is rising towards 100% of GDP.

Tension between European Central Bank president Mario Draghi and the German economic establishment including finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble seems to be increasing. And Rachman fears that Europe is very vulnerable to an external shock – such as higher energy prices as a result of any standoff with Russia over Ukraine.

Europe's fragile economy is in danger of being tipped into a deep recession. "And," writes Rachman, "a return to deep recession would favour the radical fringes in Europe."

Anyone who has witnessed Marine Le Pen's unequivocal and outspoken but brilliantly controlled television interview performances will be only too aware of the dangers.

But though she has made the Front National far more respectable than it was under her father and has achieved impressive electoral successes (such as in recent mayoral elections) with the prospect of more to come, she has not moved her party into the political – and certainly not into the economic – mainstream. She appeals directly (and effectively) to the French people and scorns the institutional status quo. And her protectionist economic policies are quite at odds with the economic thinking of both the centre left and the centre right.

The situation in other European countries, of course, is different but groups supporting policies similar to those of the FN are now a common feature of the political landscape.

In Asia, by contrast, despite rising nationalism and real threats to the continuing growth of trade and prosperity, bilateral free trade deals and other new arrangements to facilitate international trade and financial transactions are somehow continuing to happen. (Deals between Australia and Japan and Australia and South Korea have been finalized in recent days, for example, and a suite of new arrangements between Australia and China is expected to be concluded this year.)

Despite problems in some regions – like poor air or water quality, or food contamination – much of East Asia (and South and South-East Asia and Australasia) continues to benefit from strong levels of economic activity, with most countries still firmly committed to further lowering barriers to increased trade and investment.

Meanwhile Europe, driven by long-term historical, economic and demographic trends as well as more contingent cultural factors, is moving slowly (but apparently inexorably) to the periphery of global politics and trade. It doesn't help that, under an ineffective President and an increasingly dysfunctional political system, the United States seems to be drifting into a long, drawn-out and perhaps inevitable decline.

Such prognostications, I know, are not worth much. But as more people come to see things in this way – and they will if nothing happens to suddenly render this narrative implausible – these expectations will affect behaviour, feeding and consolidating deep, underlying economic and social trends. Even now, many Asian cities (like Singapore, for example) are booming and attracting some of Europe's and America's best talent.

I don't know that it makes sense to talk about Europe as a single entity. It has always been a patchwork of nations and regions with very different cultures and levels of prosperity. And – despite attempts over recent decades to create a more unified and homogeneous union – it remains something of a patchwork, more interdependent, certainly, but also more divided in new and complex ways.

Some regions, no doubt, will prosper; others will languish, relatively speaking. Given the overall economic situation, however, the best one can hope for, I think, is that the countries of Europe will maintain social harmony and hold at least to the general levels of prosperity which currently exist.

This would not be so bad. But such an outcome is far from guaranteed.

Political philosophers

Elsewhere, I have been questioning the viability of philosophy as a discipline, emphasizing its curious dependence on a basically religious – or at least pre-modern – view of the world.

But I have also noted another side of the issue, the way some academics may use their professional status as a means of promoting a favored ideology.

This may be done, as the linguist Noam Chomsky does it, in such a way as to keep separate the scholarship and the ideology; or, more questionably, as many humanities academics do it, injecting partisan politics into their teaching and research. It is not hard to find evidence that many philosophers follow the latter course.

Not only do these players have a vested personal interest in protecting and promoting 'the profession', they also have an ideological interest in doing so. Not surprisingly, skeptics about philosophy, from Wittgenstein to present-day critics, are very unpopular in professional philosophical circles.

Nonetheless, it seems pretty clear that – at least for those who reject a religious perspective – academic philosophy as an area of research is very problematic, and not many people apart from academic philosophers (and by no means all of those) take it seriously anymore.

Paul Horwich, writing at The Stone (the New York Times philosophy blog) has recently defended a scaled-down, Wittgensteinian vision of philosophy as purely descriptive and clarificatory. Whether such a limited and unambitious style of philosophy could form the basis of a viable academic discipline or profession I very much doubt, but I am sympathetic to Horwich's general – deflationary – approach.

He notes the propensity of academic philosophers to build rather dubious theoretical constructs: theories of meaning or theories of truth, for example, when there is simply no need for such things.

Take the words 'true' and 'truth'. They do not add anything substantial to a direct assertion which does not use these words. They do allow us, however, to make certain general statements in concise and convenient ways. But to ask, "What is truth?" is to ask an effectively meaningless – and certainly futile – question.

As Horwich puts it, "Truth emerges as exceptionally unprofound and as exceptionally unmysterious."

Interestingly, the inevitable reply defending the philosophical status quo published by The Stone a few days later was more concerned about the non-political – or politically quietistic – nature of Horwich's view of philosophy than anything else.

Michael P. Lynch unequivocally rejects a merely descriptive philosophy which leaves the world as it is.

"I think philosophy can play a more radical role," he writes. For example, his normative version of philosophy would seek to attack the idea of authority "which has been used over the centuries to stifle dissent and change."

And, sounding rather authoritarian himself, he insists that the philosopher must also take "conceptual leaps".

"She [note the irritating choice of pronoun as a badge of the author's progressive credentials] must aim at revision as much as description, and sketch new metaphysical theories, replacing old explanations with new."

On one level (the level of literal content) such empty rhetoric says very little. On another level, however, it provides yet another indication of the politicization and decline of the humanities.

Sadly, Lynch's reply to Horwich only serves to underscore the fact that a great many academics working in the humanities, philosophers amongst them, see their role not so much in terms of contributing to the stock of human knowledge, as of promoting progressive causes and social change.

Luther's politics

It is no accident that secularism and progressive politics go together. It's basically because the left has made a religion of politics by applying Christian principles and values, a disastrous move which inevitably leads to economic, political and social decline - as we see dramatically illustrated in the decline of Europe, and, increasingly, America as post-World War II social welfare policies and an out-of-control notion of human rights take their social and economic toll.

The irony is that the dangers of applying Christian principles in the political sphere have been known about and talked about by many thinkers, religious and unreligious, Christian and non-Christian, in the course of the last two thousand years.

I recently came across this reference to the views of Martin Luther (a thinker who once meant a lot to me).

Luther rejected philosophy - and so logic and reason - as a starting-point for faith. He drew a clear distinction between the law and the gospel, between conscience and faith.

"[U]nlike most of his contemporaries, Luther did not believe that a ruler had to be Christian, only reasonable. Here, opposite to his discussion of theology, it is revelation that is improper. Trying to govern using the gospel as one’s model would either corrupt the government or corrupt the gospel. The gospel’s fundamental message is forgiveness, government must maintain justice. To confuse the two here is just as troubling as confusing them when discussing theology. If forgiveness becomes the dominant model in government, people being sinful, chaos will increase."

Secular conservatism is a difficult path to follow because it doesn't provide an outlet for our religious instincts. It's 'unnatural' in fact, like science (both requiring an overthrow of built-in instincts and proclivities). I fear it is destined to remain a minority position.

No foreign devils

A friendship with the daughter of one of Mao Zedong's generals gave me an insight into some aspects of recent Chinese history and culture. Her political perspectives (for example, on Tibet – which her father helped to 'liberate' – or on the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square) often struck me as naive, but they were always sincere and apparently based on humanitarian values. She was probably more conservative than many of her contemporaries, having been educated in classical Chinese culture by her maternal grandmother who had been a concubine in the old China. Her views were a mixture of Confucianism, Buddhism, socialism and nationalism.

I was reminded of my friend when I read a piece recently about the Children of Yan'an Fellowship, a political association comprised of children of party leaders of earlier years. Hu Muying, the daughter of the chief speechwriter for Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, gave a speech at a recent gathering in Beijing which had an almost religious flavor:

Thirty years of opening and reform have achieved remarkable economic achievements, but those brilliant achievements were followed by class polarization, a public spiritual vacuum, chaotic thinking, moral decline, prostitution, drugs, triads and so on... These evils that were exterminated at the founding of New China have made a comeback and may even have grown worse.

We, the children of veteran party members, keep thinking, "Is this the New China our fathers sacrificed their blood to fight for and establish?"

According to Geremie Barme of the Australian National University, Hu Muying's organization represents the first attempt since the 1980s to establish a 'loyal opposition'. "They matter because in China today the only legitimate form of critique is from within the party's own heritage, which is a socialist-Maoist amalgam." It is easy to overlook China's deeper search for meaning and to forget its capacity for abrupt policy changes. According to Professor Barme, China's red culture is far from over.

And it is well to remember that the Chinese radical tradition – drawing on much older traditions – incorporates nationalism into its very core.

As a child my friend – despite her privileged background – had been sent to stay with peasants as part of her education, and I was struck by her genuine sense of solidarity with the poor. But her point of view was certainly not a universalist Marxist one.

Once she made a strange sign as we were walking down an ill-lit street after dark. When I queried her she admitted it was a gesture designed to keep spirits away. She was reluctant to talk about these matters, but I did discover that her view of heaven was very exclusive. The celestial paradise had places for her family and fellow countrymen but not for me. No Europeans. Or as she put it, "No foreign devils."

Deeper than language

Polonius: ... What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.

I suspect that the strings of words we use to explain and justify our behavior may be insignificant froth compared to the deep neural sources of our convictions and our actions. As split-brain and similar experiments have shown, we have a natural tendency to confabulate, to rationalize behavior after the event - and the stories we tell (and believe!) are often utter fictions.

Arguably, most of our decision-making occurs below the level of conscious awareness. As a schoolboy, I was taught to make important decisions by creating lists of fors and againsts, and weighing them up rationally. This never worked, and I thought the fault was with me. But the recommended technique was based on an utterly false view of the human brain, one that saw consciousness as all.

Intuition is an important element in certain types of complex, real-world decision-making, especially in relation to pattern-recognition and also in relation to judgements about other people. The trouble is that, though intuitions can usefully draw on sub-conscious processing of complex data, they also incorporate input from primitive, value-related systems of the brain which were appropriate to the sorts of quick, rough-and-ready judgements required by our ancestors, but are inappropriate to people living in technologically-advanced societies.

Of course, language affects cognitive processing (conscious and unconscious) in complex and subtle ways. But it is a mistake to think that the structure of language - its concepts and categories and so on - reflects the underlying nature of reality. The most one could claim in this regard is that it enhanced our ancestors' ability to deal with their environment in a practical way. And language itself is a key component in the social environment which makes human intelligence possible.

Natural language is good for many things - for sharing knowledge and enabling complex group operations, for inspiring and encouraging, for misleading and discouraging, for cementing social bonds, for fomenting rebellion, etc. But one thing it is not good for (except as an adjunct to scientific methods) is discovering new truths.

Metaphysics was the ultimate armchair discipline. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries metaphysicians in Europe and America created vast linguistic and conceptual structures which purported to explain the underlying nature of reality and much else besides. But they were blinded by the structure of language and their own rhetorical flights, and their prolix works now gather dust in library basements and warehouses.

Of course, there have always been those, of an empirical cast of mind, who saw little value in metaphysics, but perhaps the most formidable attack on this style of thinking was mounted in the 1920s and 1930s by the so-called logical positivists. They sought to discredit metaphysics entirely and had a huge impact in the middle decades of the 20th century.

In the latter part of the century, however, certain philosophers tried - with some success - not only to attack logical positivism but also to rehabilitate metaphysics. They claimed, for example, that the logical positivists' anti-metaphysics campaign was flawed and indeed ultimately metaphysical itself.

In general terms, though, I think the logical positivists were right - science (broadly understood so as to incorporate the historical disciplines) is the only way to push back the frontiers of knowledge. Not only do metaphysics and philosophy lack the empirical dimension of science, they are generally pursued via the medium of natural language, whereas the underlying structure of the world is amenable only to approaches which are heavily reliant on quantitative and mathematical methods.

But science has little or nothing to say about right and wrong, or about political and social ideals. By contrast, natural language might be seen to be ideally suited to deal with such issues. Perhaps, but caution should be exercised in this area. The trouble (as I see it) is that value-based political and ethical theories proliferate, not unlike the metaphysical theories of the 19th century, without any way to test them and weed out the rubbish.

I am inclined to think (like Wittgenstein) that value-related issues are real, and they can of course be discussed, but they are not the sorts of things one needs to have theories about.

Value systems are real and inescapable aspects of social relations, built into the manners and customs and expectations of any society. And, of course, individuals and groups may and do challenge certain conventions, but always within the context of a complex network incorporating many other conventions. (Such a view seems to me compatible with virtue-based approaches to ethics, by the way.)

This process of review and revision happens. Conservatives may prefer that it happen more slowly, liberals may prefer that it happen more quickly, but it is an inevitable part of the life of society.

And though language constitutes a key element in the social environment and so profoundly affects cognition, and though words may inspire, instruct, clarify, warn and all the rest, the ultimate driving forces of human existence will always be wider and deeper than language, in the still obscure dynamics of social and somatic processes.