Steve Watson

Thoughts on Our Troubled Souls

1

In discussion, we have wondered about the lunacies that are afflicting us, and I have been asked what I make of them. I begin by noting that the nonsense we observe is characterized by its uniformly destructive nature. I have previously noted that in order to determine whether the agents of apparent madness will approve or disapprove of something there is always a simple litmus test to apply: something will be approved just insofar as it leads to a degradation of the institutions of the West or to the weakening of the West or to some other deleterious effects on the West (which is to say, on modernity itself.) I observe this with claims that CAGW/Climate Change/today’s label means we must destroy our energy system; humanitarian compassion means we have to open the borders to all comers; tolerance means that we must accept multiculturalism as the state ideology and no assimilation can be encouraged; historical guilt means that we must behave as if we have no right to exist in this country, aborigines must be privileged, obeisance must be paid at every public event, their flags need to be flown and their Voices dominate; and so on. The outcomes of these postures are so obviously and uniformly disastrous for the West (or for any Western country in which they are enacted) or for modernity, and the arguments for them are so weak, that one has to suspect that the outcomes are desired for reasons other than those provided by in those arguments.

What could motivate such nihilism? I think this enmity of modernity and of the West as its avatar is somehow related to the fact that modernity does not admit the role of any metaphysical element that provides an overarching organizing principle for one’s life. The modern zeitgeist is essentially materialistic and hedonistic (if anything.) There is no supernatural world to which the natural world is subordinate and for whose benefit the events and entities of the material world exist. In fact the ultimate pointlessness of existence is widely accepted amongst the class of those who consider such things – and this attitude percolates through society.

In the Christian period (300-1700) which was the precursor of modernity, life in the world had a purpose determined by an eternal principle of goodness, God, (the ultimate positive value) and everything that one did in the world was evaluated ultimately wrt that purpose. It wasn’t necessary that one was conscious of this dependency at all times or ever; it was sufficient that one knew that there were those who could, if called upon, explain how one’s life and choices fitted into the great eternal plan. There was a purpose, and you were a part of it. Other civilizations had similar, more or less sophisticated, systems that gave purpose to their members. The West had such a system but has now abandoned it.

This abandonment has resulted in a type of spiritual crisis – or a crisis in mass psychology if one would prefer – from two directions. In the first place, the fact that modern culture fails to satisfy this essential demand of any culture – to integrate the life of the individual both externally (in the world and society) and internally – has direct results on the participants in that culture. Their lives are unintegrated, with all the psychological ills that follow from that of dissatisfaction and aimlessness; and the effect of this may be disintegration of the culture itself, perhaps followed by atomisation (Bowling Alone) and re-integration into whatever units of sense-making present themselves (Neo-tribalism.) In the second place, the realisation of the meaninglessness, pointlessness, or sheer absurdity (in Nagel’s sense) of life in modernity manifests in a reaction against the culture that fails to satisfy this essential integrative demand of any culture. The realisation may come by observation of the lives of others or of one’s own situation, and the realisation may be either explicit or merely implicit. In either case the culture that fails to do its job will be rejected.

2

Our modern civilisation fails to satisfy our need for deep meaning and participation in something greater than ourselves and our own petty preferences. It was one of the boasts of those who argued the modern world into existence that this new civilisation would be self-consciously rational, by which we mean practically rational, and that mere traditions and irrational motivations would be set aside with the Morris dancers and transubstantiation. Weber, for example, was big on this characteristic of the modern world as it manifested itself in his time. In this new world, however, if we seek the ultimate motivations for our actions and the great purpose of our existence on Earth, we get no further than Aristotelian happiness. This compares unfavourably with the eternal struggle against absolute evil that justified the past worlds. The modern motivation – if it even counts as such – is obviously trivial, and our lives are diminished by its inescapability. Many people react to this pointlessness even if they are not explicitly aware of this being their motivation, by rejecting the modern world almost in toto, and yearning for release from its bonds of banality. Thus, we see large swathes of the populace leaping from one doomsday promise to the next – Global warming, the population bomb, organophosphates, hormones in the water, peak oil, limits to growth, etc. ad nauseam. It is a desire for destruction as a punishment for the ‘sin’ of diminishing the human spirit. Escape from contentment. Fear that this is all there is and it’s not enough, forever.

3

The modern secular, rational, individualist, materialist world lacks the magic and moral majesty that some people seem to need in order to give their lives meaning. It is not a ‘noble’ goal to seek one’s own happiness. A society built on that as its goal must be a trivial and unworthy society, and whatever can be done to humble it should be done. The fact that Western liberal market democracies have delivered more happiness and prosperity and general flourishing than any competing system by a long, long way is not at all to the point and will not move these dissatisfied folk at all. They will take the ‘emptiness’ of this success claim as further evidence of the vacuity of the West.

4

Deborah wondered whether there were non-religious formations that could play the integrating role that I’ve proposed for Christianity in the case of the west. I had been wondering about that, because it would be disappointing result to find that the only thing that made decent society possible was (sincere) acceptance of an ontology and associated teleology that was false – or that many people would find it impossible to accept. I hadn’t thought of an argument for either side, but Bill opined that the idea of a metaphysical principle of the appropriate sort really did seem to be restricted to religious thought and he could see no prospect of developing one independent of religious connotations.

In this case we may have something like the problem with ethical categorical imperatives or absolute obligations. It seems impossible to justify these in any way that doesn’t depend upon unacceptable metaphysical assumptions. What can be done is to explain how they come about according to naturalistic processes, how they contribute to the pursuit of societal goods when widely accepted, and why they should be encouraged as a kind of fiction or Noble Lie. What can’t be done is to make them independent objects in the world with non-instrumental justification. An ‘ought’ can only come from an ‘is,’ and such an ‘ought’ cannot be other than hypothetical or instrumental.

I made the pessimistic point that I’ve usually avoided mentioning before, that if it is indeed the case that people just can’t cope with a culture in which there is no external objective power to impose an unambiguous and non-arbitrary order upon their values and in which it is left up to themselves to create a value order whose arbitrariness is inescapably obvious, and if it is the case that modernity necessarily involves just such a culture, then we are in a pickle.