Hard Truths--It's About Human Nature

Is human nature really a “hard truth”? It seems that it is for the modern West, which implicitly and, increasingly explicitly, denies that there is such a thing as human nature. This ideology, which has been developing since the late Middle Ages, runs counter to ordinary human experience, but people who reject this pernicious ideology often have a great difficulty in explaining why they do. To do so would require taking tough positions, and that is antithetical to the ethos of the modern West. How many people do you know who will stand up against libertarianism of either the Left or Right and insist that morality is objectively knowable, and that the fundamentals of morality should form the basis for our laws? It’s not the American way to do that, and in fact the trend of our mainstream culture is to banish anyone who would stand up in that way from voicing such views. The whole point of the Trans movement is to enshrine relativism of morality and of human nature itself as our public orthodoxy. There’s an irony in that—radical skepticism embracing a public orthodoxy. But the real point is hatred for bounds and limits. And for the Creator of such a world.

C. S. Lewis is one who saw all this coming, and wrote a book about it: The Abolition of Man (1943). More than simply explaining the error of this ideology, Lewis foresaw where the West was headed, and expressed the fear that we would arrive in that dystopian future far more quickly than many might believe.

Subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools", it uses that as a starting point for a defense of objective value and natural law as well as a warning about the consequences of doing away with them.

By denying that values are real or that sentiments can be reasonable, subjectivism saps moral motivation and robs people of the ability to respond emotionally to experiences of real goodness and real beauty in literature and in the world. Moreover, Lewis claims that it is impossible to be a consistent moral subjectivist.

Lewis criticizes modern attempts to debunk natural values, such as those that would deny objective value to the waterfall, on rational grounds. He says that there is a set of objective values that have been shared, with minor differences, by every culture, which he refers to as "the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew...". Lewis calls that the Tao, from the Taoist word for the ultimate "way" or "path" of reality and human conduct.

The final chapter describes the ultimate consequences of this debunking: a not-so distant future in which the values and morals of the majority are controlled by a small group who rule by a perfect understanding of psychology, and who in turn, being able to see through any system of morality that might induce them to act in a certain way, are ruled only by their own unreflected whims.

It certainly seems that we’ve arrived at this point. As it happens, Steven Hayward says much the same today, quoting Stephen Hicks:

Thought for the Day: On “PostModernism”

From Stephen Hicks’ book, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault:

Any intellectual movement is defined by its fundamental philosophical premises. Those premises state what it takes to be real, what it is to be human, what is valuable, and how knowledge is acquired. That is, any intellectual movement has a metaphysics, a conception of human nature and values, and an epistemology. . .

My life experience has been that probably most educated Americans, if they don’t outright deny the validity of such ideas, strenuously avoid being pinned down in this regard. They certainly are very uncomfortable about discussing these ideas. Instead, they are comfortable with the Anthony Kennedy “Sweet Mystery of Life” idea that we all decide for ourselves about the meaning of life. That’s what America is all about, right? Opinions are like, well, … And yet, everyone subscribes to the supremacy of science. Go figure. It’s the kind of total confusion that Lewis saw coming.

Metaphysically, postmodernism is anti-realist, holding that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about an independent existing reality. Postmodernism substitutes instead a social-linguistic, constructionist account of reality. Epistemologically, having rejected the notion of an independently existing reality, postmodernism denies that reason or any other method is a means of acquiring objective knowledge of that reality. Having substituted social-linguistic constructs for that reality, postmodernism emphasizes the subjectivity, conventionality, and incommensurability of those constructions.

This is among the reasons why, whenever engaging the subject of postmodernism, I like to ask not only why are we having this conversation, but how are we having this conversation, if language itself lacks a basis in objective reality?

A few days ago a commenter recommended Glenn Ellmers recent article. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten who that was. However, Ellmers raises the same issues that Lewis and Hicks and Hayward raise. And he knows that raising these issues will be very “uncomfortable”—even for people who call themselves conservatives:

Hard Truths and Radical Possibilities

Only by confronting the most uncomfortable truths about our lost republican heritage will we summon the necessary courage and strength to fight for its recovery.

I’ll excerpt enough to give a general idea of Ellmers’ argument. I have to say, I largely agree with him about the death of our republic and the intellectual disease that led to that death. The one area I would have wished for Ellmer’s to be a bit more clear has to do with who controls American government. He talks a lot about the adminstrative state, the failure of our fundamental institutions to perform their duties, and that’s all fine. But the fact of the matter is that those institutions have largely been bought by amoral Big Money interests, who to a great extent dictate what our rulers do and enact. Big Money has no commitment to republican virtues—much less to the fundamental goods of an objective human nature—and so neither do the people they have purchased. The federal bureaucracy, the administrative state, executive agencies—Ellmers portrays them as hostile to We The People and actively resisting doing the will of the People in a constitutional way. The reality is that Big Money purchased the people who make the rules and those people follow the rules they were told to enact. It’s a tangled web, but that’s what it comes down to in the end. The bureaucracy that Ellmers rightly execrates has no real power except that which it derives from its backers. We see that in the Republican vote for homosexual “marriage”—a clear affront to decency and human nature.

Anyway, here are those excerpts:

The constitutional republic created by our founders no longer exists. Most everyone on the Right seems to agree with that—though we differ about how deep the rot is, and whether we are now living under a new regime that is essentially different in kind, not merely degree. 

Most of us also agree that we want to restore the American founders’ principles and institutions. … But how exactly we recover the founders’ constitutionalism is a question no one has been able to answer with any specificity. ... 

Here are the key things that I think are new or different, in some cases fundamentally so. These claims will be unsettling or even upsetting to some readers; but I don’t think they can be dismissed out of hand. At the end, I offer some ideas about what has not changed, which might provide some grounds for optimism. 

I.

Elections—and therefore consent and popular sovereignty—are no longer meaningful.

...

First, even if conducted legitimately, elections no longer reflect the will of the people. 

Set aside for the moment any concerns about outright fraud and ballot tampering. The steady growth of the administrative state since the 1960s means that bureaucracy has become increasingly indifferent to—even openly hostile to—the will of the people over the last half-century.

This is rule by experts, the ideal of the progressive movement—for whom a written constitution is nothing but a hindrance.

The Republican establishment in Congress—which made its peace with the deep state some time ago—… neither the United States as a nation nor its citizens can still be considered a sovereign people. 

... 

II.

The idea that the founders’ institutional arrangements still obtain is a nostalgic fiction today—especially the idea of checks and balances based on federalism and the separation of powers.

... 

The apparent reality of our constitutional forms is merely a Potemkin village; more on this below.

III.

Political competence, in the traditional sense, is becoming irrelevant. 

... We are in a post-constitutional, even a post-political, environment. 

For all his flaws, Donald Trump at least recognized that defending the sovereignty of the people (the most fundamental and meaningful definition of Americanism) meant striking at the legitimacy of the administrative state, especially its assumptions of rational expert knowledge. ...

...

IV.

The moral habits of self-government have been crippled.

… the American people have gradually lost the habits and virtues necessary for self-government. There is no short-term solution for this. 

…

V.

By carrying on with retail politics and accepting the current situation as normal, people on the Right are now legitimizing and strengthening their enemies. 

This may be the hardest pill to swallow. 

Our current woke oligarchy becomes more fanatical every month, yet instead of getting weaker or provoking a popular backlash, it seems to grow ever stronger. In part, this is because the elites have maintained a semblance of institutional normalcy. No matter how extreme its policies—COVID lockdowns, chemical or surgical castration of children, open borders—the ruling class carries on with a kind of constitutional kabuki theater. ... 

But the longer this goes on, and the more phoniness people are willing to tolerate, the more the whole rotten edifice becomes accepted as legitimate. ... 

That’s why I disagree with those who say we should simply go tit-for-tat with the Democrats. …

…

I know that what I am painting here is a pretty bleak picture. But while it reveals a rough road in the short term, I don’t think it necessarily dictates long-term despair, in part because there are certain truths about political life that the Left cannot change. 

Now let us move on to the question of what remains the same about our politics. What things are eternal and beyond the reach of the Left?

Human nature. If the Left were correct in its postmodern conceit that human nature supplies no grounds for justice, and power without principle is all there is, then we might as well give up now since we will never beat the tyrannical fanatics on their turf. But is the Left correct in its nihilistic rejection of objective morality and natural right?

... At the same time, however, we are told that humans are radically autonomous in their freedom to pursue whatever feels good: nature imposes no limits whatsoever on our desire to remake ourselves. Thus, with a few pills and strategic snips, boys can be made into girls. 

Mark this well—we are told this by both the Left and the political Right and Middle. By all except committed religious people.

You can throw nature out with a pitchfork, said the Roman poet, but she will always return. This fact is liberating and inspiring. Standing on the side of human nature is exactly where we want to be. 

The principles of just government. Natural rights, equality, and consent are the trinity of the founder’s theory of constitutionalism. All three reflect an understanding of political justice grounded in nature and human nature. …

…

Moral freedom. There seems to be no clear path, at least right now, to overcoming the woke oligarchy. But we might take some comfort in the second great error of the Left: history is not on their side because history doesn’t take sides. Deterministic “progress” is a myth because our destiny is not fixed. The eternal danger of tyranny—which confronts us now in a grave way—is coeval with the eternal possibility of freedom. Man, as Aristotle said, is the rational animal; because our nature does not change, ... 

... Only by confronting and accepting the most uncomfortable truths about our lost republican heritage will we summon the necessary courage and strength to fight for its recovery.

Now, retired Brit diplomat Alistair Crooke—who, in his interviews seems to me to exhibit sound anti-Woke instincts—has written an interesting article recently that takes a look at all this in the context of global geopolitics:

The Crux of the Putin-Xi Revolution for a New World Order – Arresting the Slide to Nihilism

It becomes questionable whether the West can compete as a civilisational state and maintain a presence.

Like Ellmers—and Lewis and Hicks and Hayward—sees the problem as the collective West’s “slide into Nihilism.” As I said above, it's a centuries long slide that has gradually accelerated over the years. Crooke’s central ideas will be familiar to those who have read Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (a book that Crooke refers to):

Huntington is best known for his 1993 theory, the "Clash of Civilizations", of a post–Cold War new world order. He argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures …

Map of the nine "civilizations" from Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations"

The connection to Ellmers is this. In domestic affairs, we see the Nihilist Progs engaging in scorched earth warfare against the remnants of Western Civilization. On the international stage, projecting outward, we see the same scorched earth approach to other cultures. We seem to be seeing exactly that playing out—with the collective West, led by US Neocons, seeking to “assimilate” the Russian and Chinese civilizations to Western Nihilism, and the “wounded civilizations” of Russia and China pushing back strongly. We see this in Putin’s appeal to Russia’s Orthodox heritage and the Chinese appeal to a sort of Neo-Confucian ideal embodied in the Party as a new Mandarin class.

The world ‘Map’ is accelerating its shift away from the paralysed Washington ‘hub’ – but to what? The myth that China, Russia, or the non-western world can be fully assimilated to a Western model of political society (any more than Afghanistan was) is over. So to where are we headed?

The myth of the pull of acculturation into western post-modernity lingers on however, in the continuing western fantasy of pulling China away from Russia, and into an embrace with U.S. Big Business.

The bigger point here is that former wounded civilisations are reasserting themselves: China and Russia – as states organised around indigenous culture – is not a new idea. Rather, it is a very old one: “Always remember that China is a civilization – and not nation-state”, Chinese officials repeat regularly.

Nonetheless, the shift to civilisational statehood emphasised by those Chinese officials arguably is no rhetorical device but reflects something deeper and more radical. Moreover, the culture transition is gaining wide emulation across the globe. Its inherent radicalism however, is largely lost to western audiences.

Crooke has an idea for why this has happened:

… the non-West now sees clearly that post-modern West is not a civilisation per se, but really something akin to a de-cultured ‘operating system’ (managerial technocracy). Europe of the Renaissance did consist of civilisational states, but subsequent European nihilism changed the very substance of modernity.

In other words, the collective West’s claim for the universal validity of its dominant Nihilism is viewed as inimical to the human good of other cultures as well as a ploy to attain domination. Everywhere in the non-Western civilizations this threat is seen.

Putin has eloquently voiced Russia’s unwillingness to be absorbed into Western Nihilism, but his protestations that different civilizations should live and let live in mutual respect actually smack of a slightly older liberal tradition. It’s difficult to know to what extent Putin truly means these statements as systematic expressions of principle, or whether they are more in the nature of rhetorical weapons against a hegemonistic West. Certainly the idea of differing political regimes based on cultural differences has a long history in Christian political theory—which is rejected by the Post-Modern West’s Nihilist universalism. Here is the way Crooke sees this:

Some will see this Russo-Chinese defiance as mere jockeying for strategic ‘space’; as a rationale to their claims for distinct ‘spheres of interest’. Yet, to understand its radical underside, we should recall that the transition to civilisation states amounts to a full-throated resistance (short of war) being mounted by two wounded civilisations. Both Russians (post-the 1990s) and Chinese (in the Great Humiliation) feel this deeply. Today, they are intent to reassert themselves, forcefully in uttering: ‘Never Again!’

What ‘lit the fuse’ was the moment when China’s leaders saw – in the plainest terms – that the U.S. had no intention whatsoever to allow China to overtake it economically. Russia of course, already knew the plan to destroy her. Even the smallest amount of empathy is sufficient to understand that recovery from profound trauma is what binds Russia and China (and Iran) together in a joint ‘interest’ that transcends mercantile gain. It is ‘that’ which allows them to say: Never again!

Steeped in cynicism, the West sees this stance as bluff or posturing. What values, they ask, lie behind this new order; what economic model? Implying again that universal conformity is mandatory, …

… the ability of western powers to spin their spiders’ web notion that their ‘ways’ should be World’s ways, remains the West’s ‘secret weapon’. This is plainly said when western leaders say that a loss in Ukraine to Russia would mark the demise of the ‘Liberal Order’. They’re saying, as it were, that ‘our hegemony’ is contingent on the world seeing the western ‘way’ – as their vision for their future.

Enforcement of the ‘Liberal Order’ largely has rested on the underpinning of an easy readiness of ‘western allies’ to fall into line with Washington’s instructions. It therefore is difficult to overplay the strategic significance of any withering of compliance to U.S. diktat. This is the ‘why’ to the war in Ukraine.

The U.S.’ crown and sceptre are slipping. The peril of U.S. Treasury ‘N-bomb’ sanctions have been key to induced ‘allied’ compliance. But now, Russia, China and Iran have charted a clear path out from this thorny thicket, through dollar-free trading. ...

Military deterrence has constituted the secondary pillar to the architecture of compliance to western models. But even that, though not gone, is lessened. In essence, smart cruise-missiles, drones, electronic warfare and – now – hypersonic missiles, have capsized the former paradigm. So too, has the game-breaker event of Russia joining with Iran as a military force multiplier.

And so Crooke concludes by speculating whether some convulsion in world affairs will give birth (“instantiation”) to a truly New world order:

Today, as the West turns away from its own key leitmotif – tolerance – and towards weird ‘cancel culture’ abstractions, it becomes questionable whether it can compete as a civilisational state and maintain a presence. And if it can’t?

A new order may come into being following one of two events: The West may simply self-destruct, following some systemic financial ‘breakage’, and the consequent economic contraction. Or, alternatively a Russian decisive victory in Ukraine just may be enough finally to ‘cook the dish’.

Much, much more at the link.