Approaching The Nietzschean Moment
A young graduate recently informed me that her generation was much freer than mine. She had been told by one of her Sociology lecturers that the anxiety students experienced today was due to the amount of freedom they enjoyed compared to graduates of an earlier generation. I told her that this was untrue and in fact the reverse was the case. Students of decades ago – both at university and in school – enjoyed more freedom than she could possibly imagine; they were not ‘owned’ by society, as so many people now are. What her lecturer was conflating was freedom and choice which are very different things.
But what can one say? After 3 years of miseducation, she is a perfectly formed product of social conditioning – an impeccably crafted widget ready to be fitted into the societal machine. Naturally, she is clueless, seeing herself as the exemplary postmodern individual emancipated from a burdensome past through the dissolution of historical forms. Though what she hadn’t noticed in her eagerness to recite the emancipatory mantra is that it is precisely through that process of inculcation that the societal shaping has been slipped in. She has not been educated; she has been programmed. Like so many before her, she has been fitted to the mould of the societal functionary. So whatever choices she does make, the epistemological constraints will remain the same.
I mentioned the social theorist, Karl Mannheim. Unsurprisingly, she had never heard of him which is a shame because he speaks to exactly this point. What Mannheim saw, writing back in 1923 in ‘Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction’, was that in modern society people would need to be shaped to fit a purely functional ontology. They would have to develop a second nature in effect – a purely societal one. Because their role was to act as functionaries of the societal process: ensuring the smooth running of the social machine. The fact that they are human beings with a telos or purpose of their own is irrelevant. And in fact, any thoughts or yearnings they might harbour that could conflict with that social function would be deemed irrational, even neurotic and have to be sublimated.
You might think that so dramatic a reshaping would be obvious to everyone, but Mannheim insisted that was not the case. Because the functional remoulding of people is effected through reforming their thought processes which are redirected to emanate from the collective rather than from anything personal. According to Mannheim, it is through this process of thought redirection that the necessary social consciousness begins to develop; and once that has been achieved, humans come to see themselves primarily as aspects of the social rather than as anything individual. They then automatically begin to regulate their behaviour in accordance with their new found social consciousness. This does not mean that the individual sees themselves as socially determined. On the contrary, according to Mannheim, “the individual can retain the illusion of his intellectual independence since he no longer has the chance to see how his own actions and experiences have grown out of collective ones.” He may be a puppet, but he believes himself to be free because he does not see the strings. And, as long as they are kept out of sight, he can carry on insisting on his independence. Which is why keeping the strings hidden has become the most important objective of modern politics.
To describe human life as purposeful, i.e., teleological, is a classical idea that we can trace back to Aristotle, who saw all natural beings as self-maintaining wholes. Having a Telos means having a potential to realise. This potential has do with the development of our character, with our becoming virtuous individuals. For Aristotle obtaining virtue was as natural and essential as putting a roof on a house. It has nothing to do with social progress or matters of power, status, skill or intelligence. Teleology emphasises the importance of the individual person’s own moral and personal development separate from that of the collective. (Although it should be pointed out that in classical culture there was a concept of shared learning and development which was expressed by the term ‘paideai’.) Telos became part of Christian thinking in the middle ages when Aquinas produced a synthesis of Aristotelian ethics and Christian teaching. But it was lost to society when religion was discarded at the beginning of the modern era.
The roots of teleological thinking run deep, however. Even though we may not realise it, whenever we ask questions about the meaning of life or our purpose in the world, we are responding to the demands of the teleological urge within us that cannot be extirpated, notwithstanding psychology’s unrelenting efforts to do so. Writing in the 1920s. Freud was convinced that the benefits of science would soon replace the ‘illusion’ of meaning that so irritated him. He described it as a childish ‘obsessional neurosis’ and lamented the fact that so many uneducated people hung on to it. But even he had to admit that the scientific techniques he’d championed had not been able to work their magic on all of the populace.
This radical distinction between the functional way modern society sees people and the teleological way many individuals insist on seeing themselves is the reason why in the final chapters of ‘The End of History’, Fukuyama had to acknowledge that not all members of society would celebrate Liberal democracy’s global victory, which he believed was imminent, because not everyone was satisfied with material goods. There were a number, as Fukuyama recognised, who baulked at the ontological price that had had to be paid for so pedestrian an achievement. Of course, the book was premature and what looked like the unipolar moment for Western civilisation didn’t quite happen and it is not going to. Liberal democracy is not going to conquer the world. And in fact, looks unlikely to survive even in the West. But the point Fukuyama was making was that the material comforts of Liberal democracy were not sufficient for everybody.
The recognition of this fundamental distinction in people’s thinking only emerged into popular consciousness during the pandemic lockdown when precisely these fault lines formed in societies all over the Western world. There were those who unquestioningly identified with the social, just as Mannheim had described. But there were others who were appalled at that ready identification, regarding it as an insult to human dignity. This distinction in thinking is not new; Nietzsche was warning people about the ontological price they were paying for their societal ‘remoulding’ 150 years ago. But he also realised that people would not be able to see it until the fake values on which modern society was based were exposed which he foresaw might take another couple of centuries. But once that realisation occurred, he believed that the consequences would be devastating for individuals as well as society. Because people would then experience “the pain of futility” – being forced to recognise that they had wasted their lives invested in a project based on hypocrisy, “as if one had cheated oneself for too long ….. that Becoming has been aiming at nothing, and has achieved nothing.” At the same time, they would have to acknowledge “the lack of opportunity to recover in some way.” As Spengler put it in ‘The Decline of the West’, the culture is exhausted.
The difference in thinking between the two groups can be expressed in the notion of telos to follow Aristotelian thinking. Although the concept Fukuyama uses to illustrate this final human dichotomy, which he traces back to the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, is thymos or spiritedness, which he takes from Plato. However, the fundamental idea is the same. And the distinct viewpoints around this question are only going to become deeper and more divisive as Liberal societies attempt to further extend the reach of social consciousness, most likely with the use and threat of technology.
Classical Liberalism was founded on tolerance and dissent, especially religious dissent. And it became a tenet of Classical Liberalism that there was no shared concept of the good. Instead, individuals were free to explore and further whatever good they chose provided it did not conflict with the good chosen by others. This implies a certain distance between the individual and society: you allow others space to live their lives just as you require space to live yours.
Whatever distance there once was has now entirely disappeared and, ironically, given Liberalism’s origins, what is now being foisted on people is an arbitrary and dogmatic conception of the social good from which no dissent is permitted, as heterodoxy is becoming increasingly outlawed. No wonder Otto Rank described psychologists as secular priests, tasked with conforming individuals to the collective ideology, just as has happened to my young graduate friend.
Of course, someone might say that the same thing has been going on for decades and that it is just a matter of degree. But that is not entirely true, there has been a shift in kind. Under the Classical Liberal model a person’s choice of the good did not have to cohere with the good chosen by the rest of society. In fact, the good a person chose could be entirely contrary to the societal goods supported by others. But under Progressive Liberalism this is no longer the case: an individual’s ‘choices’ must conform to the goods promoted by the social orthodoxy. Not to cohere with that choice is seen as a moral failing. From my Classical Liberal perspective this indicates to me that the grip of the societal machine is tightening, whereas my young friend doesn’t know what I am talking about. She can’t see any machinery at all. Hence Mannheim’s pertinent observation that the more indoctrinated people are the freer they feel.
It’s commonly asserted that under Progressive Liberalism people are just as free to choose their own vision of the good as they were under Classical Liberalism. It is simply that they now more readily endorse the ‘good’ of the dominant narrative because they recognise its high moral path. The spurious rhetoric supporting this view is that people are now in possession of a more progressive moral consciousness: that they are actually more virtuous. And as a result, are naturally more aligned with an ‘aspirational’ progressive agenda. Implicit in this idea of Progressive Liberals being more ‘virtually-attuned’ is the notion that such individuals are now naturally more easily persuaded by the good ‘reasons’, ‘arguments’ and ‘evidence’ the dominant narrative provides to justify those progressive choices. The only problem with that explanation is that the dominant progressive narrative does not provide any form of justification for the agenda it promotes.
Reason, argument and evidence which were of fundamental importance to Classical Liberalism, being the fulcrum around which all moral decision-making must turn, have largely been abandoned. They are now nothing more than artefacts of a forgotten moral system and play no part in the ‘morality’ of Progressive Liberalism which is decidedly one-directional. Instead what we are now being subjected to is nothing short of social authoritarianism masquerading as a new form of supra-moral discourse.
According to Moral Philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, not only is society not engaging in a higher level of moral discourse, it has actually given it up entirely, moral theory having now succumbed to the overwhelming power of the social. And he suggests, just as Nietzsche did before him, that the calamity we have suffered in this regard is so profound and catastrophic that we won’t be able to recover from it. “We are all already in a state so disastrous that there are no large remedies for it.” Those thinking we can push back against our current authoritarian progressivism and return to the freedoms of Classical Liberalism are mistaken. Because, as MacIntyre points out, “We still, in spite of the efforts of 3 centuries of moral philosophy and one of sociology, lack any coherent rationally defensible statement of a liberal individualist point of view.” And the reason we don’t have one and can’t have one is because Liberalism has destroyed the traditional social framework of duties and obligations through which morality develops. Without a social structure, with boundaries and responsibilities, there is no reality within which we can shape and develop our character. Freed from those social relations we are nothing but isolated atoms of matter bouncing around according to the organisational rules of the societal enterprise. And any pockets of moral sentiment that we do retain are simply residue from the traditional social structure that has been abandoned. For decades we have been living off disparaged traditional obligations all the while assuming that it was only a matter of time before science worked out morality’s objective foundations. But it hasn’t. Because there are none. And now, for large sectors of society, the communal framework that sustained that residual morality is utterly threadbare.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s work ‘After Virtue – a Study in Moral Theory’, published in 1981 has been described as one of the most important philosophy books of the 20th century. But like so many works that have exposed the flaws inherent in Liberalism, it appears to have been forgotten, its challenge unaddressed. MacIntyre, who began his academic career as a Marxist and ended it a Catholic, does not mince his words. The problem, as he sees it, is that Liberal individualism, which embodies the ethos of the modern world, has led to a grave disorder in the language of morals. We may still use terms like duty and rights and good and wrong but they have no meaning. “We have a simulacra of morality,” as he puts it, “But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension both theoretical and practical of morality.” And the problem with that is not simply that we no longer have an understanding of moral behaviour, but we’ve also thereby lost any understanding of ourselves.
The state of disorder identified by MacIntyre consists in the fact that we simultaneously and inconsistently treat moral argument in two distinct ways. Both as an exercise of our rational powers- i.e., by using reason in an attempt to justify our position, but also simply as a mere expressive assertion – i.e., by saying that we don’t like something or claiming that something is bad because it makes us feel sad or unhappy or scared without giving any reason other than our feeling. The explanation as to why both these stances – the reasoned argument and the assertive statement – are accepted as statements of moral principle MacIntyre traces back to the emergence of the theory of Emotivism in the UK in the 1930s.
According to Emotivism, which is hardly a moral theory at all although it has been culturally embraced as one, statements about preferences are the equivalent to reasoned moral arguments. And it is that claim to moral equivalence that MacIntyre finds disquieting, and in need of investigation. The obvious difference between the two kinds of ‘moral’ statement is that the reasoned one is impersonal, i.e., if I give a valid reason for my view of something, you could give the same reason to somebody else because the reason is not tied to my identity. The reason does not belong to me, or indeed anyone. If you are persuaded by the reasons I give, they become your reasons also. This is not the case with emotive assertions which are really just expressions of opinion. Here identity is crucial. For example, if I say ‘X is a good thing to do. You should do it’, and don’t provide any reason why X is a good thing, then the power of that statement depends entirely on my identity. It is because I said so. So here, in the emotive statement, it is solely the social influence of the speaker that provides the power of the statement. But why should we listen to this speaker at all? Why should their opinions have some elevated status? Why are such statements being held up as having moral content? These are the questions MacIntyre sought to answer.
It should be remembered that MacIntyre was researching this book in the 1970s when emotive statements were not that common. It was a time when people generally acknowledged that reason was essential for all moral decision-making. This was before the cult of identity had developed to become the political phenomenon it is today. Back then, celebrities, role models, media pundits, social influencers and the whole raft of reality show ‘personalities’ were not yet available to be deployed as voice boxes for progressive programmes as they are today. In fact, many of the servile functionaries that now flesh out the machinery of social control have roles that had not been invented when MacIntyre was writing. However, Identity politics and social and media influencers are essential for this new progressive pseudo-morality. Because without them, the societal machine would lack the apparatus needed to control public discourse and would not be able to get its directives out into the cultural sphere. Since it is through the sponsorship and utilisation of public figures – who are permitted their status only if they concur – that the societal machine disseminates its progressive agenda. So we can now see, far more clearly than would have been possible for MacIntyre, that the power of the social machine, directed through its managed social influencers, has entirely replaced the moral content of reasoned argument.
As we all used to know, for a statement to be moral it is not enough to assert a preference. That assertion has to be justified. And the reason it has to be justified is because the person you are asserting your preference to is your equal. They too have reason and the freedom to use it to agree with you or to disagree with you, and it is that which you are addressing and indeed honouring with your proposition. Whether the listener agrees with you is a matter for them. It is their free choice through the exercise of their reason. So, by doing away with reason, we are not simply ditching moral arguments, we are also no longer treating people as subjects capable of rational choice or entitled to freedom. In short, people are being manipulated. As MacIntyre points out, “what is key to the social content of emotivism is the fact that emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative relations.” To treat someone as a subject of value and respect is to offer them an argument they can accept or reject. Whereas to issue an emotive statement as a form of social directive is to treat people as nothing but objects; “it is to manipulate them and makes them instruments of my purpose”.
Emotivism should really be seen as a theory of amorality rather than morality because its effect is to dissolve the essential element of moral arguments by making all statements indistinguishable in content. And in its ability to obliterate the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative relations, emotivism is enabling authoritarianism to speak through what is presented as moral discourse, blackmailing us all to display our moral credentials by getting on board with the progressive social programme. What confused MacIntyre was what he described as ‘the masquerade of moral terminology’. He couldn’t understand why the façade of moral argumentation remained in place when emotive assertions were increasingly becoming acceptable in their stead. But I imagine it was simply a matter of timing. Cranking out social directives in the form of emotive statements is an easy enterprise, but in order to establish them as normative in the public mind what was needed was an army of empty vessels ready to take those wares to market. Now those fleshy embodiments of social authoritarianism flood the airwaves eagerly endorsing the wares of enforced social cohesion.
In his investigation into the origins of moral theory, MacIntyre was searching for values that could withstand Nietzsche’s excoriating take-down of Western Liberal hypocrisy. Nietzsche was the first to see through the sham of social ‘morality’, realising early on that it was impossible to establish objective moral foundations and that the Enlightenment project to find them would fail. He recognised that what was being dictated to the masses under cover of ‘objective morality’ was nothing more than an expression of the subjective will of collective power – ‘the will to power’, as he famously put it. However, not everything was put to the torch by Nietzsche’s blistering invective. Aristotelian virtue survived the assault and it survived because it was not implicated in the failed modern project. And it was not implicated in modernity’s failure because it was part of the intellectual tradition that had been expressly repudiated by the thinkers of the Enlightenment in order to clear the ground for their own creation which was Liberalism. Whether or not Aristotelian virtue and the teleological thinking that supports it could found another era is impossible to say. But MacIntyre recommends holding on to that tradition in order to withstand what is coming to pass. Because when the edifice of Western Liberalism is cleared away, pockets of moral resistance may be all that is left in the rubble.
“If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought to conclude that for some time now we have reached the point of no return. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting at the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.” Alasdair MacIntyre ‘ 1981