The silly season never ends

Any war is a test – of courage, morale, ethics, determination, economic strength, military nous. And, what is especially interesting to me, of intellect.

This test is at its most severe for the belligerents themselves. But outside observers have to take it as well, and the two on-going wars are no exception.

Both are rare, possibly unique, in modern history in that neither leaves any room for moral or intellectual ambiguity. The Ukraine and Israel are fighting for their life, having been attacked by evil aggressors seeking to destroy their countries and, in the latter case, murder everyone living there.

Both countries are our allies, Israel of longer standing, but the Ukraine just as clearly. Both find themselves on the receiving end of inhuman cruelty at the hands of self-proclaimed enemies of the West seeking to wipe out our civilisation. Both are bulwarks, the outposts of the West trying to keep barbarians at bay.

One would think that anyone with a modicum of intelligence and moral sense would know which side to support in both conflicts. Yet hardly a day goes by without some pundit delivering the stock mantra, along the lines of “it’s not all black-and-white”, “both sides are at fault”, “it’s not as straightforward as it seems” and so forth.

The motivations for such pseudo-balanced views vary. Some people sympathise with the aggressors, but don’t dare own up to that unequivocally. Others dislike the West and hence cheer for its enemies, whoever they might be. Still others aren’t sufficiently informed to assess the situation properly. But all of them without exception are intellectually underdeveloped.

The problem, I’m afraid, is not only individual but also systemic. For modernity has thrown out the baby of rigorous ratiocination with the bathwater of Christian habits of thought.

I specifically mean Christian thought rather than faith, even though it’s the latter that produced the former. When Christianity was the dominant, or at least essential, part of the Western ethos, it imposed certain patterns of thought that even unbelievers followed, consciously or otherwise. Not all thinkers were devout Christians, but most thought as if they were.

People breathed ambient air saturated with belief that one’s life and therefore thought were directed towards communion with absolute truth. That’s why Western thought was teleological even in its approach to secular problems. Whether or not absolute truth was fully accessible to human reason, people knew it existed and directed their thinking towards getting as near to it as their resources allowed.

Practically all Enlightenment thinkers, French, German or Scottish, illustrate that point. Few of them were pious Christians, and some were out-and-out atheists. Yet the intellectual rigour beaten into them by their teachers, most of whom were clerics, enabled them to think the tasks they set themselves through to the end.

Although I happen to think most of them were misguided most of the time, one can observe first-rate minds at work. Though they had blown up the foundations of the Christian intellectual structure, the structure itself was still upright, providing the framework of disciplne within which the mind could do its work.

Their heirs weren’t so lucky, although it took a while for that structure to totter and then collapse. But collapse it did.

Western thought has lost what I call the art of making the next step. It muddles through to some stopover on the way to the truth, and then a steel gate comes clunking down: thus far but no farther. Some people reach that stage sooner, some later, but few ever get to the final destination. Most don’t even know it exists and suspect it may not.

Thus they become susceptible to persuasion that bypasses reason altogether. If you look at advertising in commerce and propaganda in politics, you’ll see that neither owes its success to reason. Both appeal to the primitive pagan in man, an intellectually half-naked creature unable to tell shiny baubles from sparkling diamonds.

That’s what turned liberalism into the dominant element in the intellectual atmosphere of the West. It’s commonly believed that this word has changed its meaning, and there exist actually two liberalisms: classical and modern. Yet the essence of liberalism remains the same – it’s the ambient ethos that has changed.

Someone like Gladstone or Acton seems typologically opposite to today’s liberal saying that “both sides are at fault” and then screaming himself hoarse on a Free Palestine march. Yet both act according to type.

Liberalism starts from negation, dissatisfaction with things as they are. That was the starting point for both yesterday’s Whiggish liberals and today’s socialist ones. But the former still lived in an intellectual universe formed, if no longer dominated, by Christianity.

Thus they were still adept at the art of taking the next step. Having identified their bugbears, they would then activate their teleological thought to negate the negation, in that dread Hegelian terminology. You may agree or disagree with the solutions they reached, but you can’t say they stopped at negation and left it at that.

By contrast, today’s liberals live in a world of intellectual entropy. Having lost the Christian mental discipline, they have replaced it with no other. The thunderous egalitarian noises of the Enlightenment have busted their eardrums, and they can no longer hear voices of reason.

Ignorant opinion and kneejerk sentiments now enjoy equal, in fact preferential, rights with informed judgement, and today’s meandering intellectual roads bypass reason at every turn. Political propaganda and its commercial sibling, advertising, cauterise the last surviving receptors of reason in people’s minds, and they fall easy prey to bandits lying in wait by the roadside.

Gladstonian liberals knew what they wished to destroy, but they also had a clear idea of what they wanted to build in its place. Their minuses were even in number and hence turned into pluses – in their own minds at least. Such was the ambient intellectual air, and they had to inhale it or suffocate.

Yet the collapse of Christianity has sucked positive molecules out of the cultural and social atmosphere. Free destructive atoms no longer bond with intellectual rigour but run wild.

Coming to the fore are the kind of people William Safire used to call alliteratively “the nattering nabobs of negativity”. They send atoms of resentment out, and these bond together into molecules of antipathy to the West.

That explains why our writing and academic intelligentsia are predominantly left-wing. They aren’t necessarily wicked or stupid people – and yet they espouse wicked and stupid causes because their minds are in a state of chaotic clutter. They keep receiving and forwarding anti-Western messages so often and so eagerly that eventually they end up believing that’s where the truth lies.

Their negation is resolved into the assertion of nothing but falsehoods. And their minds no longer have the tools to sort the mess out.

That’s why next Saturday we’ll see many academics and ‘celebrities’ marching through London, their arms intertwined with Muslims and other rank anti-Semites. They’ll be screaming liberation slogans because their minds are enslaved in the modern ethos.

Many of the same people also root for Russia in the other war, but right-wingers outnumber such cheerleaders. These suffer from the same intellectual failings, but their emotional makeup is different.

Most of our political right is defined by the negation of liberalism. Hence both liberals and anti-liberals embark on their intellectual journey from the same starting point: liberalism. Since the anti-liberals too lack the intellectual rigour to resolve their negation into assertion, they too end up disliking the West.

They too are susceptible to semiotic signals bypassing reason, and Russia kindly obliges. Putin’s propagandists make all the right noises, identifying all the same liberal foibles that so excite our right-wingers. Hence they don’t – aren’t trained to – question the credentials of those who emit the signals they like so much.

People aware of our pathetic care for the elderly still wouldn’t credit Dr Shipman’s pronouncements on the subject, even if he said all the right things. Yet our right-wingers (note that I avoid calling them conservatives) happily heed sermons on traditional Christian values preached by mass murderers, torturers, looters and rapists.

Like the liberals they dislike so much, they start at negation and that’s where they end up as well. My contention is that, whatever other problems they may have, intellectual weakness is prime among them, which doesn’t necessarily mean they are stupid.

It’s just that they live in an intellectual climate that has only one season, the silly one. It’s called modernity.