The Successor Ideology | Commentary

After Liberalism

It appears we are coming to the end of something. I previously discussed how Western liberalism is unwinding. There’s the collapse of all the grand narratives,¹ the carnival-like inversions², iconoclasm³, and general incoherence. It is unclear how long the last vestiges of Western liberalism can remain and what will replace it.

Scientism appears to be the distinctive ideology of our technological age and could well be the successor ideology to liberalism. Friedrich Hayek described the concept of scientism⁴ whereby non-scientific endeavors imitate science. The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce describes scientism as the “view of science as the ‘only’ true knowledge.”⁵ Scientism elevates science and reason over things like intuition and imagination, forgetting that we cannot properly apply science or reason without intuition and imagination. And so scientism dismisses questions of meaning and purpose as non-rational since these things cannot be evaluated empirically.

Scientism is not to be confused with science. Science is a process, not an ideology. This process involves making an observation and considering all possible explanations. It involves figuring out what predictions are downstream of each of these alternative hypotheses and designing experiments to meticulously test them. Science involves collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data. And then it involves communicating what you’ve found in speech and in writing. The scientific method is not some self-standing truth. Instead, it is wholly situated within a body of knowledge and experience that it could never have created for itself.

Scientific truth and respect for objective facts have made humans highly proficient technologically. This allowed us to discard the superstitions of the past and gives us vast power over nature. Without a doubt, science has improved countless lives in meaningful ways.

But scientism is something else entirely. Scientism attempts to replace the metaphysical underpinnings of society with science. It pretends to be purely pragmatic. Philosophical presuppositions are rarely acknowledged. “For example,” says mathematics professor Carlo Lancellotti, “sociological, pedagogical, or psychological studies are routinely invoked in order to justify various public policies, say, regarding education or family law. What is almost never discussed are the rubrics that underpin those studies, namely the criteria used to define a priori what constitutes human flourishing, educational success, mental health, and so on. The human sciences use those criteria but cannot establish them, since they involve fundamental philosophical questions. But the criteria are taken for granted.”⁶

Metaphysical Underpinnings

Scientism does, in fact, rest upon a metaphysical proposition. I explain in a previous post:

We need to recognize that the modern perception of reality is based on a sixteenth century theological invention known as natura pura which views the natural world as entirely self-standing. This way of looking at reality isolates “real” objective things from their “constructed” subjective meanings. Modern knowledge eventually became embedded in this “pure nature” vision of reality. This came to dominate the modern imagination, giving us license to stand over nature with an instrumental and controlling intent. As a self-imposed constraint this is useful. It allows the flourishing of scientific discovery. But as a metaphysics this concept is dangerously impoverished. No one actually lives in a purely naturalistic reality. Consciousness plays a key role in how the world reveals itself. The world manifests itself to us through attention. Giving something attention requires us to value one thing over another. It’s as if the world of objective facts is overlaid with value. Yes, we live in a world of objects. But we can just as easily say the world is a stage for action. Every time we act with intention, whether we are conscious of it or not, we are responding to some system of value.

The dogmatic faith commitment to natura pura makes for a rather poor metaphysics. It reduces the natural world to an entirely self-standing reality. This immanent frame then circumscribes our lives entirely within the natural world. Scientific advances are considered ‘progress’ without any regard for whether they are directed toward some objective good. This mechanistic metaphysics is sterile as far as it relates to questions of value, meaning, and purpose. Tragically, it dismisses such questions as unintelligible, unanswerable, and uninteresting.

At its root, scientism precludes all forms of transcendence. Scientism avoids the contemplation of the good and the true by maintaining the illusion of philosophical agnosticism. We end up with the fiction, not only of value neutral science, but also value neutral consumerism, value neutral foreign policy, value neutral education. As a result, there is a tendency to approach tradeoffs through the lens of cost/benefit analyses. Matthew Crawford points out the the flaw with this approach by considering how it might treat theft. Stealing from someone would be more or less neutral in the sense of pure cost and benefit since the degree of loss exactly matches the degree of gain by the thief.⁷ Because scientism is impotent with respect to assessing value, technological society is no longer unified by any objective notion of the good. Expansion of individual ‘well-being’ becomes the defacto moral aim. This is achieved by eliminating every form of ‘repression.’ And that involves the banishment of any objective claims about truth or values that threaten to impose limits or constrain base desires.⁸ Self-indulgent pleasure becomes the defacto aim when cut off from the possibility of transcendence.

It’s a worldview that looks at matter and energy and that is all it sees. From the section on Technological Absolutism in Part 1 of the Komorebi primer:

Anything that doesn’t fit this model is shaved off. We “isolate ‘real’ objective things from ‘constructed’ subjective meanings,” and as a result we cannot “integrate knowledge and wisdom, facts and meanings, truth and quality, instrumental power and morality, beauty and science, technology and goodness, …faith and reason.”⁹ This reductive materialistic view of the cosmos excludes anything that doesn’t exist materially. The confusion about the cosmic order that ensues, which even grips most religious people, fails to address value and meaning since these are non-material. Matter is essentially all that matters. The transcendent and timeless realities of purpose, value, significance, meaning, community, friendships, pride, and dignity which exist apart from space-time, the very qualities of being that are more real than reality itself, are negated. We conclude that beauty, joy, suffering, and evil are not actually real because they are not matter and energy and we know that only matter and energy are real because we know that we know. As David Bentley Hart says, it’s a “feat of sublimely circular thinking: physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything.”¹⁰ Iain McGilchrist likens this to a hall of mirrors. A society captured in this dysfunctional madhouse finds it hard to get out of the mechanistic fragmented decontextualized virtual world that it created, particularly when traditional routes of escape through art and religion have been blocked off. This is the type of society that embraces technology and bureaucracy. It sees virtually no other solutions.¹¹

Soft Totalitarianism

Scientism is totalizing. Nobody rules over this “technological absolutism” as Michael Hanby calls it. There is no police state forcing this on us. The institutions lording over us answer to no executive, much less any lower level members. It’s a self-perpetuating system accountable to no individual or political entity. The fact that few even notice this is happening is even more concerning. As Hanby postulates, under a truly absolute rule we wouldn’t even be aware that we are being coerced. Certain truths simply wouldn’t be perceptible; certain ideas couldn’t be thought; and certain experiences couldn’t be had. Nobody would even know that something was missing.¹² Most of us never notice we’re imprisoned in immanence.

We are much less in control than we realize. Few marry with the intention of getting a divorce, and yet about half of all marriages dissolve. No one aspires to be overweight and yet many are. Parents have little choice but to outsource childcare. We might prefer to stay close to our aging parents but we have to go where the jobs are. As Patrick Deneen puts it, “We have endless choices of the kind of car to drive but few options over whether we will spend large parts of our lives in soul-deadening boredom within them.”¹³ According to Lancellotti, under this technological totalitarianism “all human realities (the state, sexuality, work, the family) lose their symbolic or ideal significance and become ‘dumb’.”¹⁴ But at least we have smart phones, smart TVs, smart watches, and the like. In fact, we have trouble imagining life without these contraptions.

Not only that, but we have trouble imagining man as anything other than the radically “autonomous ruler of himself, able to define right and wrong and frame statutes according to whatever he defines as just.”¹⁵ It’s a religious precept perpetuated not through coercion or the threat of physical force, but simply by removing philosophical reason, non-utilitarian education, traditions, and the family. We’re left without any of the tools needed to liberate ethics and culture from subordination to politics. This is less a totalitarianism by domination and more a totalitarianism by disintegration. We’re left with no shared values to bind us together. It’s a radical rejection of the past that proposes no path forward. Society slowly dissolves into what Augusto Del Noce calls a “non-society,” because no shared ideals bind its members together.¹⁶

Social Disintegration

Lancellotti describes what’s happening at the societal level today as “the slow process of decomposition” similar to what happens to an organism after it dies. “A society that embraces scientism and instrumentalism must literally stop thinking in the properly philosophical sense, and become incapable of generating new ideals and new forms of life. It can only live by slowly consuming the ‘reserves of meaning’ it received from the past, until they run out and its contradictions explode.”¹⁷

Technological absolutism dissolves religion. And that has frightening consequences. There is this widespread impression that the era of totalitarianism ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism. This is mistaken. Like its predecessors, scientism has a utopian tendency. Wars are supposedly caused by religious fanaticism. So if we can just eliminate religion that will presumably usher in a lasting peace.

Scientism does not directly persecute religion. Instead it progressively hollows out religion by denying religion’s significance and declaring it meaningless. It pushes religion into the private domain of feelings. Belief comes to be seen as one option among many, and thus contestable. Religion then becomes something therapeutic. Only then do we get the idea of religion as an “opiate of the masses.”

The current political strife and sexual libertinism¹⁸ are downstream from this. Because we no longer take religion seriously, politics steps in as a new source of identity and meaning. But politics itself lacks any ideal. It provides no point of reference and so it inevitably devolves into “a management technique at the service of the strongest.”¹⁹ Lancellotti observes that this form of politics tends to hold things like the continual expansion of consumption or the advancement of individual autonomy as its primary goals. Del Noce saw this all leading to the “extinction of the individual” when the individual cut off from transcendence becomes a “social atom.”²⁰

The New Authority

Notice what authority these politicians now appeal to… Science!^TM The Covid pandemic made this all the more clear. They tell us they’re just “following the science.” Every time one of these technocrats issues a new decree notice how they begin with, “Experts say…” as if these unnamed so-called experts were infallible. What they are really doing is telling us what to value. Decisions pronounced in the name of science are now arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Evolutionary biologist Heather Heying explains the ‘Follow The Science” slogan:

#FollowTheScience is a rhetorical trick. It’s a political move. And science never flourishes when it is in the grip of politics… This isn’t how science works and it certainly isn’t how education works. We see such ignorant statements as ‘follow the science’ to shut down debate. …[W]e have seen that the authorities—government officials, journalists at legacy institutions, and fact checkers hired by big tech companies—appear to be so worried that the masses are going to make bad decisions, that they feel compelled to keep information from us, giving us only conclusions. We are told that nodding along in agreement with those conclusions, and acting accordingly, is to #FollowTheScience.”²¹

Heying lays into these ~~Red Guard~~ fact-checkers:

Fact-checkers are doing the work of an ideology, which is also anti-scientific. If you’re going to “fact-check” things out of existence, at least be transparent about what you are doing. This is not virtue or goodness, or indeed science or inquiry that you are standing up for. In all cases, it is quite the opposite. In science, uncertainty is a virtue, but fact-checkers would cleanse the world of uncertainty—or rather, tuck it safely out of view… know that when you shut down discussion because the ideas are considered transgressive, what you are doing is following orders. The world is now well aware that ‘I was just following orders’ is a poor defense. And even if those orders are well-intentioned, you are definitely getting in the way of science…
Fact-checkers are not scientists. What they are, far too often, is censors. Science and scientists are being censored, and science cannot flourish when it is censored. Censorship can be understood through the lens of evolution—it is a kind of resource guarding, a not so subtle form of competition. The powerful—and the actual censors who do their bidding—compete in part by compelling disagreement among the rest of us. When we allow censorship, therefore, we are making the job of those who would control us easier.²²

Posttotalitarian Society

Czech dissident Václav Havel, someone with direct experience under totalitarianism, saw the fates of those living under communism as a warning to the West. Havel drew a connection between the ‘posttotalitarian’ system, as he called the Soviet machine, “built on the foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society” and the “unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity.”²³

Havel uses the term ‘posttotalitarian’ to refer to the social and political reality that the Soviet state existed within. Havel saw the conditions within the Soviet block as “simply another form of the consumer and industrial society, with all its concomitant social intellectual, and psychological consequences.”²⁴ This was no mere dictatorship. This was an inherently ideological “network of manipulatory power” comparable to a secularized religion, with metaphysical and existential certainties that cannot be accepted only in part, where the center of power is synonymous with the center of truth.

In response, Havel promoted the idea of “anti-political politics,” which basically distills down to “living in truth.” He describes this in his famous 1978 essay titled “The Power of the Powerless” which invigorated resistance to Communism in Eastern Europe.²⁵ In it, Havel uses an illustration of a greengrocer living under Communism. Havel’s greengrocer puts a sign in his shop window saying, “Workers of the World, Unite!” The language on the sign seems harmless enough. But there is a deeper message. The slogan is a declaration of loyalty. It signals to the commissar that he is not a threat. Our greengrocer may not have strong feelings one way or another about workers of the world uniting. He simply doesn’t want trouble. He knows that if he refuses to lend his tacit support he will be seen as a threat. He will be relieved as manager and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His benefits gone. His children’s access to education will be restricted. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will become suspicious. Most of those who apply these sanctions will not do so from any authentic inner conviction, but simply under pressure from the same conditions that pressure him to display the sign. They will persecute the greengrocer because it is expected of them in order to demonstrate their loyalty. There is a general awareness that this is how a situation like his is dealt with. Each person compels others to abide by these terms. In doing so they affirm the power mandating the sign. They are objects in a system of control. But at the same time they are its subjects. Havel sees them as “both victims of the system and its instruments.” The benign language on the sign allows the greengrocer to conceal from himself his pitiful obedience. It also conceals the foundations of power. “It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.”

Instead of “Workers of the world unit!” signs, people now put out yard signs affirming that “Black Lives Matter,” or “Love is love,” or “Science is real.” Again, at face value the messages are not controversial. But, like the greengrocer’s sign, everyone understands that these slogans signal loyalty to a particular Ideology. People want to be perceived as being on the right side of history, as if anyone could be certain of that. In particularly woke cities like Portland people display these signs for protection.²⁶

Oblivious to the history of hard totalitarianism and the pogroms that accompany it, the tech sector lends its support by making it even easier to sort people by race and gender. Google now allows businesses to display icons that signal LGBT allyship or identify Black-owned businesses. Yelp, a company specializing in crowd sourced reviews of businesses, recently added a feature that alerts people to businesses accused of racism, creating a vast network of informants greater than that of the East German Stasi. The lack of historical understanding is astounding. They have no idea the demons they summon, in part, because they don’t believe in demons.

Suppose Havel’s greengrocer snaps and decides to stop putting up the slogans to ingratiate himself. His act contradicts the official ideology. It’s a denial of the system. It’s a declaration that the emperor is naked. This is something quite dangerous to the system. He has enabled everyone to look behind the curtain. He has exposed the rotten foundation. And he has shown that it is possible to live within the truth. The greengrocer has addressed the world in a public fashion. He bears witness to the truth of his convictions. This modest act of living in truth is inescapably political. He is a threat to the system and he must suffer, not because of any physical or actual power he holds, but because his action went beyond himself, illuminating its surroundings, largely as a result of the disproportionate consequences he faces. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth. And it will cost him dearly.

People like Rod Dreher and Charles Haywood take seriously these warnings from Havel and others with firsthand experience under communism. Dreher’s recent book, Live Not by Lies was inspired by a tip he received from the U.S. born son of Milada Kloubkova Schirger, a former Catholic prisoner of conscience in Czechoslovakia. Schirger grew concerned because she was seeing things in America circa 2015 that reminded her of what she experienced under communism. Live Not by Lies includes chilling accounts from heroes of the communist resistance. In a review of Czeslaw Milosz’s ‘The Captive Mind,’ Haywood affirms, “Most of the wealthy portions of the West are, of course, currently in the grip of a totalitarian ideology – a new religion, a combination of neoliberal, corporatist extraction economics, the erasing of the West’s culture and cultures, and even-nastier moral degeneracy, collectively enforced with an iron hand by our ruling classes, who control all the levers of power. It seems inevitable that this headlong flight from reality, with its fractalized manifestations, from the mendacious falsification of history in the New York Time’s ‘1619 Project,’ to the physical and mental mutilation of children to advance insane transgender ideology, to funding mindless blinding consumerism with Chinese debt and pumping up the money supply, is going to be ultimately caught and thrashed by reality.”²⁷

The Town Square Test

So how do we know when a system is totalitarian? Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy introduce what they call the Town Square Test to distinguish between free societies and fear societies. It goes as follows: “Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society.²⁸ There is an alternative version of this Sharansky and Troy offer that says, “In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled?”²⁹

In other words, we know a system is totalitarian by how it treats those who do not comply with its demands. What happens if you refuse to view people as abstractions and judge them as individuals based on the quality of their work and the content of their character? What happens if you object to being reduced to a racial category? What happens if you take a stand against segregation? What happens if you say what you really think at the diversity, equity, and inclusion training mandated by your employer? What happens if you challenge your company’s neoracist approach to hiring and promotion? What happens if you refuse to go along with the new gender ideology? What happens if you point out biological differences between men and women? What happens if you refuse to deny biological reality? What happens if you express skepticism about transgenderism? What happens if you support someone who does? What happens if you object to biological males sharing a locker room with your daughter? What happens if you donate to a popular cause and later it becomes unpopular? What happens when the democratic process doesn’t deliver the desired results?

Sharansky and Troy go on, “In the West today, the pressure to conform doesn’t come from the totalitarian top—our political leaders are not Stalinist dictators. Instead, it comes from the fanatics around us, in our neighborhoods, at school, at work, often using the prospect of Twitter-shaming to bully people into silence—or a fake, politically-correct compliance. Recent polls suggest that nearly two-thirds of Americans report self-censoring about politics at least occasionally, essentially becoming a nation of doublethinkers despite the magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights.”³⁰

Those focused solely on the threat of totalitarianism coming from the state miss the point. Totalitarianism seeks to control every aspect life. In a totalitarian society, according to Hannah Arendt, ideology aims to displace all prior traditions and institutions.³¹ It particularly targets ethics and culture.

The New Religion

No matter how much we deny religion, it just keeps coming back to us as we see with the new postmodern woke religion. James Lindsay and Mike Nayna detail how social justice parallels a religious movement with its mythological core and its scriptural canon rooted in ‘grievance studies’, and its adherents who dogmatically subscribe to a form of ritual introspection:

Social justice has arranged things such that it can treat its beliefs as knowledge… disguising the fact that they forward opinion and prejudice as though they are knowledge. The effort to create and manipulate vulnerability in potential converts to Social Justice is plain in the constant prioritization of feelings — as ways to knowledge, as guides to right and wrong, and in terms of close-reading every possible social interaction for real and imagined slights and offenses against the marginalized…
They focus on moral purity, they focus on the in-group, they demonize the out-group, and they demonize and excommunicate blasphemers… In religion, blasphemy is the act of speaking against doctrine, and apostates must be shunned or excommunicated. The Social Justice analogue to this is political correctness, which serves precisely the same function… Non-atoners are shunted to the outgroup and attacked.
The Social Justice analogue [to original sin] is privilege. In religion, we have “born again,” which is an indication that atonement for original sin has been made before peers, and an individual has been officially moved from the outgroup to the ingroup by accepting the indoctrinations. The Social Justice analog to this is “woke.”
There are only two effective paths toward redemption in the Social Justice soteriology: one, a commitment to an impossibly complicated set of behaviors that fall under the overlapping but distinct rubrics of allyship and solidarity, and, two, identifying, adopting, and attempting to legitimize one’s own status among intersectionally “oppressed” identities. To the degree that we can accept that Social Justice is a faith-based program based upon a kind of locally legitimized special revelation, we should have serious concerns and discomfort about institutionalizing its beliefs in any space that isn’t wholly devoted to them.”³²

I suspect there are many on the left who are not true believers in critical theory who hope the stupidity will burn itself out. Yet they go along to avoid suspicion of racism, sexism, or bigotry. Likewise, plenty of social conservatives feel compelled to wear a “Pride” pin in order to blend in at the office.

The French polymath René Girard saw what he calls this “other totalitarianism” as the one with the greatest future. Instead of directly opposing Judeo-Christian aspirations it claims them as its own. It goes so far as to question Christianity’s concern for victims. “The other totalitarianism does not openly oppose Christianity but outflanks it on its left wing.”³³

Breaking the Spell

We have to break the spell of this anti-scientific scientism by living in truth. We need honest and continuous questioning and we need to explore alternative paths. It’s not about following the science. The science doesn’t lead us anywhere. Values are what lead us places. As powerful as science is, scientific knowledge has limitations.³⁴ Science only tells us what is; it will never tell us what ought to be. Those who implore us to follow the science are actually telling us what to value. In the case of Covid, for example, safety is the absolute value. And we must be willing to sacrifice bodily autonomy, our children’s education, and even their childhoods. This isn’t about science. It’s about a competing set of values.³⁵

We have to stop dismissing opponents as morally repugnant ‘bigots’, ‘racists’, ‘misogynists’ and otherwise attributing their motives to prejudicial animus. The enemy is not my neighbor with the BLM yard sign, nor the person wearing the MAGA hat. Humanity’s real enemy involves the powers and principalities at play in this world that produce these false idols. We all do things we wish we would not do and do not do things we know we should do. We want to be thin and yet we sit on the couch despairing. We waste time and then feel bad about it. But we do not change. Psychologist Jordan Peterson reminds us, “It was for such reasons that archaic people found it easy to believe that the human soul was haunted by ghosts – possessed by ancestral spirits, demons, and gods.”³⁶ Today we conceptualize these as impulses or as chemically regulated emotions or psychological states. Perhaps we would do well “to revise the superior assumption that we understand the world better than our ancestors, and adopt a more realistic view that we just see it differently – and may indeed be seeing less than they did.”³⁷

^{Photo Credit: “Hubble image of variable star RS Puppis” by NASA Hubble is licensed under CC BY 2.0}