We have lost that connection between reason and morality …. We have decisively lost our idea of the commonweal as the anchor from which reason will make its case.
(Geralt/Wikimedia Commons)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
Remarks delivered in late August at the annual congress of Mut zur Ethik, which translates (a little awkwardly) as “the courage of one’s ethics.” This group gathers in Zürich’s environs each summer to hear a variety of speakers consider a selected theme. This year’s theme was “Reason and Humanity.” — Patrick Lawrence
I have titled my remarks this summer “Our Age of Unreason,” and I am aware this may seem a touch grandiose. If this is how my title strikes you I have chosen well, as I mean to imply precisely that we have entered a new age, as consequentially distinct from previous ages as those ages were in their time — the Golden Age of Athens, the Age of Reason, the Age of Materialism, the Atomic Age.
There are many cases in point:
- The Zionist state’s genocide campaigns,
- The dismantling of democratic rights in the West in the name of defending democracy,
- Our purported leaders’ brazen abandonment of law—domestic and international—in the name of upholding the law,
- Pseudo-seriousness diplomats and uniformed officers who advance patently nonsensical military strategies such as “escalate to de-escalate.”
- In everyday life, psychological operations and what we call cognitive warfare have so corrupted our public discourse that we are no longer be certain what is and is not true. Large proportions of the populations across the West are now incapable of understanding the world in which they live — this while remaining obstinately confident they do.
We have taken the ground out from beneath our own feet.
These are varied manifestations, among an infinite number, of our age of unreason. I choose these to mention because each also goes some way to explaining how we arrive in circumstances warranting that we name our age as I propose. Each case is suggestive of whose interests this new age serves.
What Is Enlightenment?
My immediate reference, of course, is the Age of Reason, so named by Tom Paine, the American revolutionary, political philosopher, and pamphleteer. Paine’s “Age of Reason” is otherwise known as “the Enlightenment.” And it is well to spend a few minutes considering what Paine meant and what is meant by “the Enlightenment” so that, as in a concave mirror, we recognize what our age, so far as I argue today, is not.
My editor at Yale University Press told me years ago about a book he was editing but would never publish because the author had died before finishing the manuscript. The book was to be titled The Endarkenment. I have ever since thought what a pity it is the book will never come out. And here, in broad daylight, I am going to steal this succinct term as a useful companion to my “Age of Unreason.” At the horizon they come to the same thing.
Thomas Paine by Gutzon Borglum, parc Montsouris, Paris. (couscouschocolat from Issy-Les-Moulineaux, France/Wikimedia Commons)
In The Age of Reason, the book that named his time, Tom Paine argued in favor of rationality as against revelation and other features of orthodox Christianity, the Christianity of the temporal church. His argument was in large part theological, so it is better we resort to Kant for a very basic understanding of the Enlightenment.
In 1784 a German pastor named Johann Friedrich Zöllner asked publicly about the meaning of the term “Enlightenment,” which was by this time coming into common use.
This was in a monthly journal called Berlinische Monatsschrift. Zöllner’s curiosity seems to have prompted a lively debate in Berlinische Monatsschrift’s pages. Kant responded in the journal’s December 1784 edition with “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” and this is, of course, the reply that comes down to us in history.
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” Kant wrote in his famous first sentence. “Immaturity,” he immediately explained, “is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”
Kant was very certain that the condition essential to the transcendence of humanity’s state of immaturity is freedom. “If it is only allowed freedom,” he wrote with reference to the public, “enlightenment is almost inevitable.”
Here I suggest we consider the term “discernment” according to the Jesuits’ definition. In Jesuit education, “discernment” means one’s capacity to make judgments, choices, plans of action, and so on as an autonomous individual, free of the interventions of others, or coercions, or other sorts of external influence.
It means listening to oneself, in a phrase—which implies a certain measure of confidence in oneself. What is more — a key point here — the discerning individual judges and chooses according to his or her moral values and with reference, always, to the commonweal, the greater good of humanity.
Returning to Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” is but seven pages in the English translation with which I work, and there is a very great deal of insight in it. “Self-imposed immaturity,” an inability to understand anything without guidance from someone else: These are damning phrases to describe the unenlightened, I would say.
What is more, Kant argued that most people prefer this unenlightened state—this endarkenment. “If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me,” he wrote, “I need not exert myself at all. I need not think: If only I can pay, others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.”
Being a sympathetic sort, Kant attributed this tendency among the majority of people to “laziness and cowardice” — Kant’s precise words. He meant that listless state of conformity that is now all too familiar among us.
But the new freedom announced by the Age of Reason, Kant asserted, will advance humankind beyond this condition such that he concluded his time deserved the name it had by then acquired.
“Nothing is required for this enlightenment except freedom,” he wrote. And, against the background of the ancien régime, Kant could credibly assume people’s ardent desire for freedom. “If it is now asked,” he wrote, “‘Do we presently live in an enlightened age?’ the answer is ‘No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.’”
Our reality is very different. We have no ground upon which to make assumptions as to the inevitability of progress, as Kant did. We are, indeed, profoundly mixed up on this point — mistaking as we habitually do technological progress, material progress, for genuine human progress.
Running From Freedom
Kant. (Unknown, possibly Elisabeth von Stägemann — Anton Graff school)
As [Erich] Fromm and others have persuasively argued, a fear of freedom is now prevalent in our societies. Most people are frightened to death of freedom, and when I say “frightened to death” I mean this literally: They die to their lives, to their own sources of vitality, leading lives that amount to subsistence survival, or “quiet desperation,” as [ ] Thoreau had it.
The prevalence of ideologies in our societies seems to me a point requiring no elaboration. And the appeal of ideologies, of course, is that they require belief but not thought or judgment — or, indeed, reason. And so we find that state of self-imposed immaturity everywhere we look.
Ideology, conformity: These are the shelters within which many people, and I would say most, indulge their fundamental fear of freedom. They both derive from what Kant called “guidance from another,” and this implies a certain kind of submission to one or another manifestation of power, as Kant surely meant to suggest.
There is an infinite variety of these manifestations in our lives today, and how very, very dependent upon them are most of us. We are dependent, in other words, on authorities above us to know what to think—“the irksome work”—and equally what not to think and altogether how to live and not live.
How deeply committed are we, to make my point another way, to our Age of Unreason. This age unburdens us of the responsibilities that come with freedom, with the capacity to discern, with the duty to exercise autonomous judgment.
All that is taken care of by those forms of power that hover above and around us to such an extent we internalize them. In this state one need not think, as Kant wrote 241 years ago. We need not today change a syllable of this passage. And it is when we no longer think that power grows ever more independent from us, ever more sequestered and, so, ever more corrupt.
So do we tumble ever more inevitably into our Age of Unreason.
The Age of Reason was inspired by the scientific advances of the 16th and 17th centuries, and this raised a concern among Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant and, indeed, Paine, who was a Deist.
If scientific laws governed our world, what would become of our morality, our defense of such values as justice, our commitment to, in my terms, the human cause? Where would reason, exercised by the individual, untethered by all [that] the Enlightenment would leave behind in the name of freedom, lead us?
To unalloyed materialism, to indifference toward others, to narrowness of mind, to narcissism, to hedonism, to nihilism?
Reason without morality: At the risk of reductive thinking this was a commonly shared anxiety.
And how well we can see now that this concern was justified. Reason was intended to be the agent of human emancipation. In our time reason subjects us to a tyranny of systems, technologies, dehumanized scientific management procedures, and power elites that know no ethics, no morality (broadly defined), no anything other than their own imposition, enforcement, and reproduction.
John Ralston Saul, a Canadian writer I hold in high regard, published a book on this phenomenon in 1992. He called it Voltaire’s Bastards, which he subtitled The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Ralston Saul argued that the whole of life in the West has been disfigured by the perversion of reason.
Reason no longer has anything to do with human emancipation: It has become a device by way of which elites — political, economic, technocratic, cultural — exert surreptitious control over the fabric and direction of our societies, our public discourse — and, indeed, our ability even to see the world around us — and so our ability to reason.
This is what I mean by our Age of Unreason. At the core of it we find what I took many years ago to calling “the irrationality of hyperrationality.” To put my case I hope not too simply, everything makes sense if we take matters strictly on the terms of their internal frame of reference and remain in the eternal present within which the corruption of reason maroons us.
If we manage to step outside this construct — if we find our way out by means of authentic reason, I mean to say — very little makes any sense at all. This is what I mean by the irrationality of hyperrationality.
In One–Dimensional Man [Herbert] Marcuse wrote of “technological rationality.” I think my “irrationality of hyperrationality” approximates Marcuse’s thought, “The totalitarian universe of technological rationality,” he wrote, “is the latest transmutation of the idea of Reason.” He wrote then of “the process by which logic became the logic of domination.”
This is another way of saying what I mean.
Herbert Marcuse giving a lecture in Berlin, 1967. (Isaactrius/Wikimedia Commons)
Reason Before Belief
I want now to historicize our Age of Unreason, and to do so I reference another book, one that has meant a lot to me over the course of many years.
Max Horkheimer published Eclipse of Reason in 1947. In it he made the case that reason had been, by the time he brought out his book, “instrumentalized.” This is to say reason is no longer a means of understanding the world around us but is instead applied to justifying and achieving one’s objectives. Horkheimer called this “subjective reason,” as against objective reason.
Going back to the Greeks, objective reason requires that thought be conducted without reference to the desirability or otherwise of its conclusions. Reason should determine belief and not the other way around, as Socrates taught us all: To allow belief to determine reason is the danger implicit in subjective reason. And, staying with Horkheimer’s term, subjective reason lies at the very heart of our Age of Unreason.
To illustrate the point in the most commonplace terms, what do we mean when we say, “That sounds reasonable,” or “That stands to reason,” or simply “That makes sense”? We mean, one or another way, that for your reasoning to be valid it must serve you in the achievement of your objectives. It is not a big leap to recognize that it is Voltaire’s illegitimate offspring who have instrumentalized reason in this way, just as Ralson Saul argued.
Cold War ‘Certainty’
We should pause to think about Horkheimer’s publication date, two years after the 1945 victories.
Big Science, as we now call it, had begun to rise in the 1930s, and with it came a preoccupation, especially evident in America, with total certainty and total security — neither of which is ever even remotely possible. If ever there was an agent more purely dedicated to the irrationality of hyperrationality than Big Science, I mean to say, I cannot think of what it may be.
By the end of World War II this preoccupation with certainty and security more or less dictated American foreign and military policies. Nineteen forty-seven marked, of course, the start of the Cold War, and this turned what had been a preoccupation in scientific and policy circles — total certainty, total security, the elimination of all risk — into a national obsession.
Authoritarian Reason
To finish with Horkheimer, he associated the corruption of reason with the increasing seclusion of power and a tendency toward authoritarianism in the Western democracies. In response he argued that reason must again be exercised in the cause of fundamentally moral and just societies and altogether the cause of human emancipation.
In Marcuse’s terms this required of us what he termed a “Great Refusal,” a rejection of the dehumanization of humanity by way of what he called “technologies of pacification.”
It may be impossible, or mere folly, to assign a date as the beginning of our Age of Unreason, but I propose, with a view to all I have very sketchily described, the mid–20th century. It was then Big Science and the Cold War converged in the unhappiest of combinations to assign ideology, on one hand, and technology on the other, the primacy that will be evident now to all of us.
Ideology and technology: Are these not our bane? Both have devastated our common capacities of discernment, judgment, and altogether our ability to think and reason, while encouraging — going back to Kant — our immature over-dependence on various forms of power and authority, which manifest ever more diffusely and remotely.
What Horkheimer and others detected in the 1940s seems to me so entrenched, so woven into the fabric of our societies as to mark out our time as distinct from what preceded it. Seventy-eight years after Horkheimer published his book, what he saw as an eclipse seems to me the dark dawn of another age.
We in the West have suffered a radical collapse of meaning in this age. We have lost, I think decisively, that connection between reason and morality the 18th century saw as essential. We have decisively lost our idea of the commonweal as the anchor from which reason will make its case.
We have lost, in other words, any kind of larger notion of a shared telos, an ultimate object or aim. These are casualties of our lapse into hedonism and nihilism, and, among the power elites — to borrow again the phrase of C. Wright Mills — a preoccupation of power for the sake of power, power as the ultimate measure and vessel of value.
As we gather here, and it is always a delight for me to be with you for exactly what I will now say, we are living, breathing proof that there is a way forward from our Age of Unreason, a thought I assume I do not have to explain.
Ages come and expire, and so will this one. I may be stretching Marcuse’s term, but I do not think by much, when I suggest we must consider the value of habitual refusal as a very important means of making our way in our age.
I don’t think we can proceed with our reasoning with any notion that the project is one of retrieval or restoration. There is no going back.
New sensibilities and a new consciousness are in history preface to great change. And so we have to think in terms of a new consciousness such that, with our faculties of reason and judgment, we can see the problems and crises of our time as they are, and with no “guidance from another,” to go back to Kant once more, no reference to any higher or remote or powerful authority simply because such an authority is above us or remote from us or more powerful than we are, and with no presumption that what I call the “what-is” of our civilization is rational or sensible simply because it is the “what-is” we see out our windows.
Equally, we have to find for ourselves a new language, reminding ourselves as we do that the primary function of language is not speech but thought. We will need this new language as we think anew — as we reattach reason to the human cause.
The late Robert Parry was a journalist of impeccable integrity and founded, 30 years ago this year, Consortium News, where I write regularly and whose editor, Joe Lauria, is among us this year. Bob once memorably remarked, on the occasion of accepting one of his numerous awards, “I don’t care what the truth is. I just care what the truth is.”
This is an argument — succinct and elegant all at once — for a return to the Socratic. It is an argument for objective reason, an argument against the blight of subjective reason as we are borrowing this term from Horkheimer.
It is a protest. It is a great refusal, it is an argument against our Endarkenment.
And this is the argument we need to make, just as we make it as we gather here.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
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We cannot reason from “the commonweal” or what’s best for humanity, because that is a great unknown. We don’t even know for certain what is in our own individual best interest, as shown by the many self-destructive behaviors among us humans.
It is not that humans need to mature by rejecting outside guidance, but rather that those institutions who have claimed to be gatekeepers of such guidance have been so thoroughly corrupted. Counterfeit money does not disprove the existence of real money. Bad advice does not disprove the existence of good advice. Authority and power poorly or oppressively exercised, do not disprove the existence of power and authority well-exercised in some other time or place.
If, ever there be a week-end to “fly”on a “Higher Level of Consciousness”; it’s NOW! Piloted by P. Lawrence, Co-Piloted by C. Johnstone. *“Realizing that you’ve been indoctrinated into accepting a pernicious status quo unlocks an important door within yourself, but just because that door is opened doesn’t mean you have to walk through it. Walking through it requires another kind of awakening?—?an awakening of the heart;” &/or, a Higher Consciousness, “a state of increased alertness; an awakening to a new perspective,” now more than ever per Patrick Lawrence’s “Our Age of Unreason.”
Basically, the “buy-in” is “Invest in caring NOT Killing.” Regardless, that DJ “The Snowman” Trump “Cometh,” i.e., w/a helluva lot of elbow grease, the American Eagle, aka DJTrump, w/bad genes, is jones’n to get his grubby, dirty, bloody, smelly Cat paws on the “anti-melting gene” to avoid melting down, for f/ever. No doubt, before 2025 is over!!!
AND, to date, the reply is, “When pigs fly!” The United Nations aka “The Keeper of The Keys,” holds 142 Countries in favor of denying “the Cat” access to the “anti-melting gene,” to avoid “melting-Down” for f/ever, before 2025 is over!!! Seven (7) Months later, Trump-Vance, Inc., registering an altered state of consciousness & their 8th Veto, @ the UNSC to “Free, Palestine, NOT Bury It.” AND, Mr. Trump-Vance, Inc., bogey the shot, BIGLY!!!
Ethics is “The study of principles relating to right and wrong conduct.” Numerology is “the study of the occult meanings of numbers & their supposed influence on human life,” @ hxxps://numerologist.com/astrology/famous-presidents-astrology
“Through the Lens of Numerology” this suggests that the US Constitution is a testament to its founders’ creative spirit & vision, who sought to establish a new form of government that would ensure freedom, justice, and happiness for all. It also implies that the US Constitution communicates the ideals and values of the nation to the world, inspiring others to follow its example. The US Constitution embodies the balance and harmony between the different branches and levels of government and between individual and collective rights and responsibilities.” “The US Constitution is so good on. So, romantic. So, bewildering.” In the wrong hands, it’s benevolence into malevolence.
“LOOK-UP!” Astrology: “Millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do.” JPMorgan was the first person to ever become a billionaire. JPMorgan was also an industrialist who played a key role in creating General Electric. Plus, he went on to found the Federal Steel Company.” And it’s widely believed that he used astrology and horoscopes to influence his decisions.”* hxxps://numerologist.com/astrology/famous-presidents-astrology
Concluding, “Life is short. “Live” It!”” TY, Patrick Lawrence, CN!!! “Keep It Lit!”
Sources: *hxxps://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/03/23/just-seeing-through-the-propaganda-isnt-enough-weve-got-to-open-our-hearts-as-well/
*”Courage the Cowardly Dog, where Courage and his owners, Muriel and Eustace, encounter a snowman who tries to steal their anti-melting gene to avoid melting himself. The 10th episode combines elements of dark comedy and supernatural adventure.”
…p.s., The US Constitution is “so good on paper. So, romantic. So, bewildering” @ hxxps://medium.com/the-vinci-town/the-power-of-numbers-a-numerological-journey-through-the-us-constitution-the-vinci-town-ee4783de4480
Any ordered system requires guiding (controlling) principles that ‘lie outside of the system’: the physical order has its laws, the living order has evolutionary processes mediated by the DNA/protein nexus, but the consciousness order, which was once guided and controlled by the immediacy of ecological engagement, no longer has an ‘external’ force; it is almost entirely self referencing.
The structure of our human growth and development isolates us within the cultural moment…and the cultural moment is essentially arbitrary as it relates to the biophysical realities of living existence: this ‘arbitrariness’ even begins in the womb with confrontations with the manufactured chemistry of the moment.
It has long been my argument that the many valid concerns, details of our moment, will never be satisfactorily addressed until humanity either uses our great capacities of invention to create a solution to the arbitrariness of self referencing or when a solution is forced on us by the seriousness of our disconnection from those ecological realities that our capacities have allowed us to, for so long, forestall.
To Mr. Lawrence, this is a beautiful essay, but most likely suffers from being a bit too far ahead of the present moment.
Around and around we go on the musical chairs of time. The characters and the sets change but everything remains the same essentially. When I think of reason I think of wisdom as both are intrinsically entwined. If you lack in wisdom then reason itself will fail you. In my thought both of these are tied to truth – Allah – Love, Compassion, Peacefulness, tranquility, Patience etc. as in Sufism. Man over the centuries has failed both in understanding himself and his creator conceptually. God is neither up there, over there, or somewhere else, but everywhere all at once. Think not of God as a man but a power. Man either manifests this within themselves or fails at it and falls to satanism – evil thoughts, deeds, qualities, actions, character etc. Faith in Allah is not irrational but supported by logical and rational conclusion as to mans condition. Mankind does have a tendency towards irrationality and it seems to rear its head in every sort of ism and various obsessions of mind and desire. No matter what economic construct employed mankind will find their way to collapse because stability in our life and in the world is directly tied to the above noted considerations. Therefore, reason itself is insufficient since mankinds condition relies on their connection to God – every good quality – light of the soul, or their failure at that when they descend to animism and satanism – every evil quality – darkness of the soul. Think not of religion but conceptually rather. When you consider the world as it is it always leads to the big questions. Specifically. What is wrong with mankind? It’s right in front of us.
‘ Wisdom, also known as sapience, is the ability to apply knowledge, experience, and good judgment to navigate life’s complexities. It is often associated with insight, discernment, and ethics in decision-making. Throughout history, wisdom has been regarded as a key virtue in philosophy, religion, and psychology, representing the ability to understand and respond to reality in a balanced and thoughtful manner. Unlike intelligence, which primarily concerns problem-solving and reasoning, wisdom involves a deeper comprehension of human nature, moral principles, and the long-term consequences of actions. ‘ – wiki
Hence, “The wise continue while the fool is always beginning.” Zambian proverb.
Identity. Individual versus that of collective humanity.
Thank you for your essay. As I am old and not as quick as I’d like, I will have to put this away for a day or two to re-read and try to digest. Maybe then I might be able to elaborate on the first line above.
Thank you again for this effort.
From Mr Lawrence:
As [Erich] Fromm and others have persuasively argued, a fear of freedom is now prevalent in our societies. Most people are frightened to death of freedom, and when I say “frightened to death” I mean this literally: They die to their lives, to their own sources of vitality, leading lives that amount to subsistence survival, or “quiet desperation,” as [ ] Thoreau had it.
From Easy Rider (Terry Southern, perhaps?)
George Hanson: You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.
Billy: Man, everybody got chicken, that’s what happened. Hey, we can’t even get into like, a second-rate hotel, I mean, a second-rate motel, you dig? They think we’re gonna cut their throat or somethin’. They’re scared, man.
George Hanson: They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to ’em.
Billy: Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.
George Hanson: Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.
Billy: What the hell is wrong with freedom? That’s what it’s all about.
hxxps://youtu.be/Gc11mJGre10?si=DkrPoOnrGhDdgsz3
George Hanson: Oh, yeah, that’s right. That’s what’s it’s all about, all right. But talkin’ about it and bein’ it, that’s two different thangs. I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em.
Billy: Well, it don’t make ’em runnin’ scared.
George Hanson: No, it makes ’em dangerous.
What Jacques Ellul called technique was a pattern via which nations, societies, and corporations went about achieving ends, goals, or products. A pattern that was tantamount to maximum efficiency. He would stress that technique is not the actual material technology, but it’s a feature of the way humans and machines do things. One aspect of it I gleaned was that it, though efficient, seemingly was blind. It would continue to build/create new things simply because it became possible to create them. It would seem like a blind zeitgeist that kept trying to add features to the F-35 versus say Russian planes and missiles. Humans in Russia had more input with this technology of theirs, whereas the way I see it it was technique all the way governing the evolution of the F-35.
I wonder if one aspect of this new age of unreason is that the powers that be have decided to try turning the method of technique into an actual physical thing. Or things, an idol spread out in all kinds of electronics. Palantir for example. And then there’s the proxy war, which was birthed mainly due to the fact that making the bombs and missiles became possible.
David.
This is wonderfully astute. Our obession with efficiency, and so with method as against purpose, is indeed a featire of the age I name. And, so, thanks for sharing the insights. The lecture was groundwork, an early draft, for a longer essay of the same name. I will purloin your thoughts as I realize it.
I, too, an a student of Ellul, on propagandas as well as technique.
& thanks also for the compliment in your other note.
P.L.
It seems as though Patrick Lawrence himself is the best evidence of a new consciousness and a new language. Anyone that gets into it it seems to me might be selecting sayings from writers whom youth would not hear much about under eg a Trumpist/austerity education situation. Those speaking this language won’t be able to pass on everything such writers wrote; it will be necessary though to gather things they said that are relative to now, a kind of group of such viewpoints that will hang together. Or groups. Passing on a thing something like the jam packed Ford Econoline van Yvon Chouinard and friends drove to Patagonia in? [1968, surfboards and climbing equipment] Like a Lawrence article, thoughts from all over the place knit together in a fashion that can travel. Thoughts can keep developing at anytime offline unlike speech-into-transcipts that live on hard drives where algorithms can go over them and over them and over them…making them invisible whenever the content is judged from on high as too “left.”
Thanks to all who take the time to comment.
Several readers seem to’ve missed my point, or part of it.
I am perfectly aware of the consequences of late-stage capitalism, class conflict, and other such realities. My topic concerned something different. I was thinking and writing on a different plane. In this lecture I was after a psychological state, a shared consciousness, a collective submission to various forms of power and authority, and a collective abdication of our selves (two words).
David Otness: What a wonderful idea. Open bar, I assume.
P.L.
As a Marxist, I attribute all social evil to unrestrained capitalism, and that goes for your so-called “different plane”. Is it the astral plane? If not, do you consider that the shared consciousness and collective submission are attributable to anything other than late-stage capitalism? I would suggest that a shared indoctrination by capitalist propaganda is what we have and what we must abandon, sooner rather than later. Anything else is Ivory Tower unreality.
I would suggest that our consciousness arises more from the social reality of life under capitalism, eg. wage labour, commodity production, and class rule, than from propaganda.
I believe that the propaganda is meant to try to trick people into believing that capitalism is good. That is, of course, a result of the true condition of wage labor, commodity production, and class rule. The propaganda tries to hypnotize the population and it has proven very effective. The methods of commercial advertising are doing their work.
Funny, as both capitalism and Marxism are philosophical outcomes of the enlightenment: with a basis on private ownership of resources versus basis on labor ownership of resources. Both are logical, enlightened and reasoned explanations of the workings of society. Both are not where we are today, during the endarkement.
ENDARKENMENT ,
GOODONYA PATRICK LAWRENCE.
This is brilliant… ought to be on everyone’s breakfast table. A petite education!
Patrick certainly thinks so. I generally support his point of view but this article is too academic for my taste.
On the perennial, fundamental philosophical debate topic described and understood here as “Enlightenment vs. Endarkenment”:
The disciples asked: “On what day will the Kingdom come?” Jesus said: “It cometh not with observation. They will not say: Lo, here! or Lo, there! But the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the Earth, and men do not see it.”
– The Gospel of Thomas
“And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.”
– Black Elk
Yes I know my enemy,
they are the teachings that taught me to fight me:
Compromise, Conformity,
Assimilation, Submission,
Ignorance, Hypocrisy,
Brutality, The Elite,
All of which are American Dreams…
-Zach de la Rocha
‘Age of Stupidity’, is more like it. The events of the last five years, for example, haven’t been caused by unreasonable behavior, Trump is not unreasonable, neither was Biden. Let’s not dress it up or sit on the fence, government in the west is moronic. We are ruled by imbeciles – that we voted for.
No. “We” did not vote for these imbeciles. I have not voted for a capitalist candidate in over 25 years. I support the Socialist Equality Party. I really dislike the assumption of a “we” that does not exist. I say “speak for yourself”.
It is not by Reason but by propaganda that “elites” control “public discourse…our ability even to see the world …and so our ability to reason.”
The article does not identify the causes of amorality, which are primarily the corruption of political parties and mass media by money power, and the marketing scams of an unregulated market economy. This requires amendments to the Constitution to prohibit money influence upon elections and mass media beyond registered individual contributions.
The loss of public acceptance of the common good as the goal of public policy (the “connection between reason and morality”) and the equation of money=power=virtue (the “measure of value” indicating a “lapse into hedonism and nihilism”) result from the propaganda of money power, due to (1) mass media propaganda control by money power, and (2) failure of public education to counteract the social and economic dependencies that lead to tribalism and tyranny.
Notes:
1. Science is not “hyperrational;” it can be misused but does not itself lead to amorality.
2. Post-WWII militarism was due to the runaway MIC in politics, and “security” propaganda caused amoral foreign policy, but not personal amorality.
3. Morality requires moral education, not a “new language of thought”
4. The distinction of “objective reason” vs. “subjective reason” is illusory and not useful.
5. Academic flourishes, subject diversions and “returns” serve academia better than journalism.
Thank you.
This piece displays a complete neglect, perhaps even an ignorance, of how the profound changes in economic conditions have shaped the political and ideological landscape in the ‘west’. Hence in the name of ‘reason’, we have the following:
“We have lost, in other words, any kind of larger notion of a shared telos, an ultimate object or aim. These are casualties of our lapse into hedonism and nihilism,..”.
This is exactly the unreason a reverend, religious preacher or tele-evangelist would have you believe, to scare their flocks into submission, as their ‘explanation’ for today’s woes. The shared telos of the 1960s, for example that many of us old enough to remember was one of unbound potential, of space exploration, the moon landings, and all manner of technological progress accompanying ‘Big Science’. And big science was by no means certain, even if its propagandists and marketeers claimed it so. No practising scientist would ever claim science to be ‘certain’.
What came of this progress or telos, then? In short, it was the major recessions of the 1970s that ended the long postwar boom, along with all the illusions that US industrial and scientific ‘largesse’ could prop up the capitalist world and propel it forward. Investment in industry slowed, a decline only accelerated from the 1980s and 1990s. Industrial capital left the US, with production offshored to China and Mexico, and the new economic religion of neoliberalism replaced the dominant economic ideology of the time, Keynesianism.
Restoration of capitalism in the USSR was the other major turning point, which only accelerated the demise of the welfare state and the remains of the ‘New Deal’. Not only was there no meaningful work for many, there was little to no safety net, and for those workers still employed, their hard-won conditions were reversed through union leaders only too willing to do deals with the class enemy.
The new ‘telos’ became the ‘health’ of the capitalist economy itself, and above all the worship and striving for capitalism’s ‘free’ market. No more regulation, no more ‘production for purpose’. Hourly reports of stockmarket indice became a staple of the news cycle, like the weather, and gone were any notions of common human goals of social progress based on technological or social advancement. Instead the naked aim of capital accumulation and enrichment of the capitalist class, and indefinite and evermore ‘growth’, were pushed by the practitioners of the neoliberal religion. By definition, the abstract goals of neoliberalism — ‘growth’ , ‘market liberalisation’, ‘tax relief’, corporate welfare and so on — are the annihilation of telos.
Accompanying the de-industrialising of the US imperial hegemon, which only ensured the dominance of finance capital, came all the social pathologies of unemployment, lumpenisation, and so on. That is, the “lapse into hedonism and nihilism” followed. Not the converse, certainly the ‘lapse’ was not the ’cause’ of a loss of “any kind of larger notion of a shared telos”.
And so, the author sees ‘Big Science’ and technology as ‘banes’, yet appears not to understand that science and technology are in the hands of the capitalist ruling class, who alone decides what is funded for exploration/investigation or development. With the dominance of finance capital, technological and scientific illiteracy now abound, as does science’s abuses in the name of capital accumulation. In short, it’s not science and technology per se that are the problem, it’s the uses they’re put to.
As Marx, was wont to say, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” What we witness today is a ruling class in terminal decline and decay without a shred of reason to justify its existence except its mantra of “There is no alternative”. Its ideas are barren and devoid of intellectual rigor, reflecting the dominant outlook of parasitical finance capital. Hence its continual and relentless efforts to infantalise the population to not think for themselves, to rely on ‘superiors’ to do it for them.
Thank you. I believe you are quite right. But then, I am a Marxist.
After reading this for the first time (there will be further readings,) and then the comments by Messrs Perkins, Hays, and Simonton, my initial conclusion is how with Patrick’s presence, what a delightful and informative salon to attend if such were ever to be. If t’were, I’ll provided refreshments—and be “all ears.”
I am going to criticize this author. Although Mr Lawrence is a journalist I respect more than any other he has in this instance created a contradiction. While arguing for enlightenment, the power of reaching conclusions without relying upon the guidance of others, he repeatedly quotes the words of others.
I would be content to hear the direct opinion of Lawrence. He has no need to recite the guidance of others.
When people learned oral history and knowledge, it was the knowledge of a culture, of a people. Now that we learn from written texts we are expected to acknowledge a source. This is a problem for humanity. It marks the loss of another freedom. The freedom to express ideas unless we can recount the pathway by which we found our ideas. Knowledge is not created by individuals. It should never be a private property.
There are those literary moments when I deliberately slow down my reading. To savour every word. To appreciate every nuance. This piece is one. Thank you Patrick.
I was very impressed indeed with this article. Thank you.
I started to read, and thought oh no, not another tribute to rationalism as the sphere of the superior. Something that distinguishes them from us, the inarticulate masses, and our foolish beliefs. But then to mention John Ralston Saul?! Yes!
Of course Enlightenment reason was a huge benefit for humanity, bringing science and a philosophy of government. But at the cost of everything else. My simple example: scientifically analyzed, a painting is a chunk of botanically derived fibrous cloth with splotches of chemical pigments. The non-rational artistic, poetic, mystical, and religious aspects are what give it meaning.
What most of us would consider horror is objective logic to rationalist authoritarians. Ask the neocon products of the Ivy League. If the goal is the most enemy dead in the shortest time, then the biggest, most efficient nuclear and bio-weapons must be developed and stockpiled. Ask the neolib (technically neoclassical) economists. Since personal gain is the only real motivation and the only duty of corporations is to make a profit, then dismissing devastated communities and destroyed ecosystems as irrelevant externalities is reasonable.
Love your comment: ‘My simple example: scientifically analyzed, a painting is a chunk of botanically derived fibrous cloth with splotches of chemical pigments. The non-rational artistic, poetic, mystical, and religious aspects are what give it meaning.’ As an aside (I don’t usually read fiction), might I recommend to you Iain Pears’ book, Stone’s Fall? I don’t recommend the plot, the style, etc. but I found some of his comments regarding the amorality of money most interesting. I noted specific pages: 287F;322,369,429, and 435.
I would argue that to consider religious “belief” is irrational on its face. There is no such thing as a deity. There is the material world and the universe in which our planet exists. There are no gods, no heaven, no hell. Pleasure and pain, reward and punishment are human things. As sentient beings (and I know there are quibbles about how sentient we actually are, given our many mistakes) it is up to us to think about the actual world in which we live, not some fake simulacrum based on prehistoric ignorance. The clinging to religion is one of the worst examples of failing to think for oneself that I know of. We will not be a mature species until we let go of this idea. And here is where Karl Marx was correct.
“There is no such thing” you declare authoritatively. Because of course you know a priori what is or isn’t possible and what the entire universe can or cannot contain. Interesting logic.
Never mind the vast majority of humans, East to West to Indigenous, who don’t just “believe,” but know by experience. In contrast, the tired assumption of dogmatic leftists that religion is merely an assent to propositions their rationalism can’t make room for. So they must dictate to us working class lessers what’s best for us since we’re so demonstrably stupid.
I prefer the decentralized I.W.W. approach; my grandfather was a Wobbly and I was a rank and file blue collar union activist for over 28 years. To hell with smug, self-appointed vanguards who don’t really respect us but see us only as abstract pawns for their theories. My hero Eugene V. Debs, well able to sincerely quote Bible verses that resonated with his audiences, thought differently. “I would not lead you into Paradise even if I could because If I lead you in someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads and well as your hands and get yourselves out of your present condition.” Yep. Some of us can read, write, and think.
All our lives we learn
Of the rise and the progress of man
How he rolls out?of?his sleep
Into the?light of reason
We learn how we?will conquer the world
With just the power of our mind
How all myth and superstition
Are left far behind
Of all the lies that I’ve heard
Of all the cruel, cruel tricks that have been played
Of all the plagues sent down upon this earth
This could be the worst
Now the sun takes its turn
While the moon is hidden and the spring is capped
And th? beast of the ocean is ignor?d
Half of my soul is dying
Apollo God reigns unchecked
While the earth man slaves in the heat
But in the night, I can’t help it
God, I dream of freedom
Of all the lies that I’ve heard
Of all the cruel, cruel tricks that have been played
Of all the plagues sent down upon this earth
This could be the worst
Now that reason in its glory
Has finally shown us what is real
New visions that arise
Are just called illusions
The asylums are overflowing
For those who can’t face what they see
But out here on the street
We just smile and keep on walking
Of all the lies that I’ve heard
Of all the cruel, cruel tricks that have been played
Of all the plagues sent down upon this earth
This could be the worst
—
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK94bd5PWXw
IMMERSED AS I AM IN CONSTRUCTING “DER SCHLEIER DESS UNWISSENS” I AM IMPRESSED WITH PAT LAWRENCE AND HIS VIEWS, SIMILAR TO MINE OF COURSE. HANK, ps i do not at 97, know what URL means.
Since one of my uncles was a user of the Internet at age 97, I would suggest that you look up the meaning of URL.
Various strands of bourgeois, or mainstream, psychology, economics, and the like explicitly reject any link between morality, ‘telos’, or the commonweal on the one hand, and reason or rationality on the other. Followers of these faiths or ideologies maintain that it’s perfectly rational for individuals, corporations, or nations to pursue gain for themselves at the expense of everyone else, even at the expense of the planetary systems making life possible for all. They even have a name, Homo rationalis, for economic agents who behave in such an obviously irrational way.