"The Propaganda of Irrationalism" from An Essay on Metaphysics by R.G. Collingwood: Quotes from His Argument

The beard a sign of radicalism? Just relaxed after a cruise.

I've begun reading Collingwood's An Essay on Metaphysics (1940), and I've found it quite engaging. But I've also discovered a wonderful polemic and commentary in it about politics, education, religion, and science. In other words, topics related to the main topic--metaphysics--but not required. Reading these words in the chapter entitled "The Propaganda of Irrationalism," provided a pleasant surprise. I knew that by the time he was writing this, Collingwood was on his way--if not arrived--at his position as a "fighting philosopher." He was keenly aware of the barbarism on the march in Europe. He was not prepared to stand idly by, and words--sharp words, incisive analysis--were his weapons. Please take special note of the final sentence of this extended series of quotes from the chapter. We, too, live in dark times.

Let us suppose a civilization whose most characteristic features had for many centuries been based upon the predominance, among those who shared it, of the belief that truth was the most important thing in the world, and that consequently scientific thinking, systematic, orderly thinking, theoretical and practical alike, pursued with all the energy at his command and with all the skill and care at his disposal, was the most valuable thing man could do. In such a civilization every feature would be marked with some peculiar characteristic derived from this prevailing habit of mind and not to be expected in a civilization differently based. 

To take a few examples. . . . . 

Politics would be predominantly the attempt to build up a common life by the methods of reason (free discussion, public criticism) and subject to the sanction of reason (i.e. the ultimate test being whether the common life aimed at is a reasonable one, fit for men who, no matter what differences divide them, agree to think in an orderly way). Education would be predominantly a method for inducing habits of orderly and systematic thinking. Social structure would be predominantly of such a kind as to place in the most honourable and commanding position those who were intellectually the élite of the people, the priest-kings of the god of truth, men of science and learning on the one hand, men of affairs on the other. Economic life would come into line with the prevailing habit of mind by converting customary methods of production, distribution, transport, &c., into ‘scientific’ ones; that is, by applying the notion of orderly and systematic thinking to economic matters no less than to any others. 

. . . . 

And suppose that now within this same civilization a movement grew up hostile to these fundamental principles. I will not speak of a conspiracy to destroy civilization; not because I shrink from a notion so reminiscent of a detective novel, but because what I am thinking of is something less conscious, less deliberate, less dependent upon the sinister activities of any mere gang, than a conspiracy: something more like an epidemic disease: a kind of epidemic withering of belief in the importance of truth and in the obligation to think and act in a systematic and methodical way. Such an irrationalist epidemic infecting religion would turn it from a worship of truth to a worship of emotion and a cultivation of certain emotional states. Infecting education it would aim at inducing the young to abandon the habit of orderly thinking, or to avoid forming such a habit by offering to their imitation examples of unscientific thinking and holding up the ideals of science to contempt by precept and example. Infecting politics it would substitute for the ideal of orderly thinking in that field the ideal of tangled, immediate, emotional thinking; for the idea of a political thinker as political leader the idea of a leader focusing and personifying the mass-emotions of his community; for the ideal of intelligent agreement with a leader’s thought the idea of an emotional communion with him; and for the idea of a minority persuaded to conform the idea of unpatriotic persons (persons not sharing that communion) induced to conform by emotional means, namely by terror.  [Emphasis added.]

Comment: I think that contemporary political events provide some telling examples of what Collingwood describes in the part of the quote that I italicized. 

Next let us suppose that the tissues of the civilization invaded by this irrationalist disease are to a considerable extent resisting it. The result will be that the infection can progress only by concealing its true character behind a mask of conformity to the spirit of the civilization it is attacking. The success of the attack will be conditional on the victims’ suspicions not being aroused. Thus in educational institutions an explicit proposal to abandon the practice of orderly and systematic thinking would only bring those who made it into disrepute, and discredit them with the very persons they were trying to infect. But so long as nothing like a panic was created, liberties could be taken which would quickly have proved fatal among persons whose faith in scientific thought had not already been weakened. Let a sufficient number of men whose intellectual respectability is vouched for by their academic position pay sufficient lip-service to the ideals of scientific method, and they will be allowed to teach by example whatever kind of anti-science they like, even if this involves a hardly disguised breach with all the accepted canons of scientific method. 

. . . . 

And has there been a tendency of late years to belittle the notion of scientific thought, either by magnifying emotion at the expense of intellect, or by expounding an ideal of disorderly or unsystematic thinking, called ‘intuition’ or the like, as something preferable to the methodical or progressive (if you want to sneer, you say ‘plodding’) labour of reason? Has there been a tendency towards belittling rules, principles, policies, in the field of action, and towards developing a kind of ethical intuitionism or a kind of ethical emotionalism? 

2. Has the political tradition of our civilization been based on the idea of a political life lived according to a plan whose chief recommendation has been its claim to reasonableness? Have political leaders been chosen in the past for their supposed intelligence, far-sightedness, grasp on principles, and skill in devising means to ends that accorded with these principles? Have their followers been persons whose intellect, inferior to theirs in power, nevertheless agreed with it as one intellect does agree with another, by thinking in the same way? Have the methods by which leaders carried their points against opponents and secured their hold over their followers been the methods of reason; that is, public discussion of principies, public statement of facts, and public debate as to the relation between principles and policies, between ends and means? And has there been a tendency of late years to become impatient with the work of politically educating an entire people; to choose leaders not for their intellectual powers but for their ability to excite mass-emotions; to induce in followers not an ability to think about political problems, but certain emotions which in persons untrained to think will explode into action with no questions asked as to where such action will lead; and to suppress discussion and information in favour of what is called propaganda, that is, statements made not because they are true but because they generate these emotions or spark them into action? And have these changes gone so far that even the characteristic facial expression of a political leader has changed from the expression of a thinker (the mathematician-thinker’s face of a Napoleon, the humanist-thinker’s face of a Gladstone) to the expression of a hypnotist, with scowling forehead and glaring eye?. . . .

Collingwood, R. G.. An Essay on Metaphysics . Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

Comment: Whoever could Collingwood have been thinking of when he wrote that final part of the quote that I've italicized? Someone Italian or German (or both)? Who might we think would meet this description? Do you have to think twice about your answer (assuming you're an American)?


ADDENDUM 2019 Nov. 8

In my post on An Essay on Metaphysics, I skipped a discussion of the chapter "The Propaganda of Irrationalism," saying that I'd post something separate about it. In writing that, I'd forgotten about this post, which includes the extended quotation from that chapter set forth above. I've decided that rather than do a whole new post or add a lot of chatter on my part (since I can't challenge the lucidity and gusto of Collingwood's prose), I'll just add some further quotations to help round-out Collingwood's point. Also, of related interest, I've re-advertised an earlier set of posts (12 in all) that includes quotes and commentaries from Collingwood's essay, "Man Goes Mad" from 1936. It very much reflects and expands upon the points made in this chapter. Here's the first post in that series, and you can follow the sequence from there if you prefer. Now, for more RGC!

Now let us suppose that such a civilization had been in existence for a long time, during which the application of its fundamental principles had reached a somewhat elaborate development. Suppose, for example, that the rationalization of economic life had reached such a point that its populations could not be kept alive at all, or protected from starvation and disease, let alone kept in the degree of comfort to which they had become accustomed, except by the ceaseless exertion of innumerable scientists. And suppose that now within this same civilization a movement grew up hostile to these fundamental principles. I will not speak of a conspiracy to destroy civilization; not because I shrink from a notion so reminiscent of a detective novel, but because what I am thinking of is something less conscious, less deliberate, less dependent upon the sinister activities of any mere gang, than a conspiracy: something more like an epidemic disease: a kind of epidemic withering of belief in the importance of truth and in the obligation to think and act in a systematic and methodical way.

Collingwood, R. G.. An Essay on Metaphysics. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

I quite like the "epidemic" metaphor, a "plague" if you will. (Hat tip to Camus.) 

An "it could happen here" turn of argument: 

The reader is lastly to suppose, if he will, that the situation I have described is the one in which, together with the rest of the world, he now stands. I do not wish him necessarily to confine this to a matter of mere supposition; I will confess that to myself it is more than a supposition, it is a fact, and I think the reader might be well advised to consider it in the same way. If he wishes to do something on his own account towards considering whether it is a fact or not, he should ask himself the following questions among others.

Id. 

Civilizations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realize, is worth achieving. On the other hand, this doubt is quite capable of destroying a civilization without any help whatever. If the people who share a civilization are no longer on the whole convinced that the form of life which it tries to realize is worth realizing, nothing can save it. If European civilization is a civilization based on the belief that truth is the most precious thing in the world and that pursuing it is the whole duty of man, an irrationalist epidemic if it ran through Europe unchecked would in a relatively short time destroy everything that goes by the name of European civilization.

Id. 

Science is a plant of slow growth. It will not grow (and for a plant the end of growth is the end of life) except where the scientist as the priest of truth is not only supported but revered as a priest-king by a people that shares his faith. When scientists are no longer kings, there will be (to adapt a famous saying of Plato’s) no end to the evils undergone by the society that has dethroned them until it perishes physically for sheer lack of sustenance.

Id. 

Prefatory note: This entire section of the book sets forth Collingwood's detailed criticism of psychology to the extend that he perceives it as getting out of its lane. As this quote indicates, Collingwood isn't damning the whole enterprise in toto; only to the extent it intends to establish the standards for judging "thought," about which Collingwood has some very firm, closely argued opinions. This quote ends the chapter. 

I do not wish any reader of these pages to form an impression, or even a suspicion, that I value these achievements at a low rate. The study by psychologists of sensation and emotion, whether in the laboratory or in the consulting-room or in what other conditions soever they think it capable of being pursued, is a most important kind of research and a thing which every friend of science will encourage by every means at his command.

My suspicions are not about this; they are about the status of psychology as the pseudo-science of thought which claims to usurp the field of logic and ethics in all their various branches, including political science, aesthetics, economics, and whatever other criteriological sciences there may be, and finally of metaphysics. In these fields I find it to be a fact that psychological inquiries have proved absolutely incapable of adding anything to our knowledge. I find it to be a fact that they are conducted in open defiance of the recognized canons of scientific procedure. I find it to be a fact that their devotees and advocates are not abashed by all this. They regard the calling of attention to it as a symptom of an obsolete mentality and a thing to be treated with obloquy and contempt, not as a criticism which they must meet by reforming their work or else by abandoning it. I do not think it possible to suppress, or conscientious to conceal, a suspicion that the true explanation of these facts may be that psychology in its capacity as the pseudo-science of thought, teaching by precept that what is called thought is only feeling, and by example that what is called science is nothing more, is no mere addition to the long list of pseudo-sciences; it is an attempt to discredit the very idea of science. It is the propaganda of irrationalism.

Id. 

Hannah Arendt on comprehension, resistance, beginnings, and political freedom

Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalizations that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden our century has placed on us--neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and reisisting of reality--whatever it may be.  

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951/1976), viii, quoted in Bernstein, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now (2018), 120 

Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically it is identical with man's freedom.  

Id. 479, quoted in Bernstein, id., 121. 

The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics by Mark Lilla

Published in 2001, new 2016 afterword

I'm going to do what a good reviewer probably shouldn't do, but life is short and sometimes its good to cut to the nub. Below you'll find the concluding paragraphs of this book by Mark Lilla, and if you read nothing else beyond these paragraphs, you'll have gained a significant value from the book--or at least I did. The topic of the book, generally speaking, is about political thinking by intellectuals in the 20th century, and more specifically, those who in the author's opinion (and mine), took a wrong term. But without further palaver, Lilla's concluding paragraphs:

There is certainly no reason to be nostalgic for the old ideologies and their Jesuits. But that is not to say that the problems they addressed were imaginary or beyond human reckoning. The grand systems were to be resisted because in the end they were inadequate to the task they took up, not because their ambition was wholly misguided. Their failures revealed the need for a more demanding ambition: to understand the present without self-deception. They did not signify the will to make sense of it is futile.

Yet that will has unmistakeably withered since this book was first published [2001]. It has been replaced by a soft dogma for which we have no adequate name. This dogma begins with basic liberal principles like the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, and the distrust of public authority, and advances no further. It is politically democratic but lacks awareness of democracy's weaknesses and how they can provoke hostility and resentment. It promotes economic growth with unreflective faith in the cost-free benefits of free trade, deregulation, and foreign investment. Since it presumes that individuals are all that count, it has next to nothing to say about collectivities and their enterprises, and the duties that come with them. It has a vocabulary for discussing rights and identities and feelings, but not class or other social realities. (The fact that race is now largely conceived as a problem of individual identity and not one of collective destiny requiring sacrifices to reach a common goal, as it was by the American civil rights movement, is significant.) 

This dogma is at once anti-political and anti-intellectual. It cultivates no taste for reality, no curiosity about how we got here or where we are going. It has no use for sociology or psychology or history, not to mention political theory, since it has no interest in institutions and has nothing to say about the necessary and productive tension between individual and collective purposes. It is simplicity itself. This explains why people who otherwise share little can subscribe to it yet draw very different conclusions from it. Small-government fundamentalists on the American right and anarchists on the European left, absolutist civil libertarians and neoliberal evangelists of free markets—the differences between them are superficial. What they share is a mentality, a mood, a presumption—what used to be called, nonpejoratively, a prejudice.

Ideologies inspire lies. But what is a lie? It is a pretense to speaking truth about the world—and thus betrays a recognition that people are after it. Dogmas inspire instead ignorance and indifference. They convince people that a single idea or principle is sacred and all they need to know in order to act in the world. Maintaining an ideology requires work because political developments always threaten its plausibility. Theories must be tweaked, revisions must be revised, evidence must be accounted for or explained away. Because ideology makes a claim about the way the world actually works, it invites and resists refutation. A dogma does not. It kills curiosity and intellectual ambition by rendering them pointless. Our unreflective creed is little different from Luther’s sola fide [by faith alone]: give individuals maximum freedom in every aspect of their lives and all will be well. And if not, then pereat mundus [perish the world].

An ideology gives people the illusion of understanding more than they do. Today we seem to have renounced trying to understand as much as we can. We suffer from a new kind of hubris unlike that of the old master thinkers. Our hubris is to think that we no longer have to think hard or pay attention to look for connections, that all we have to do is stick to our “democratic values” and economic models and faith in the individual and all will be well. The end of the cold war destroyed whatever confidence in the great modern ideologies still remained in the West. But it also left us incurious and self-absorbed. We have abdicated.

And so we need reminding, of many things. Reminding that the problems of capitalist democracies today—the hollowing out of the middle class, the erosion of family and community, the rage against the elites, the eclipse of political parties, widespread indifference to the public interest— cannot be grasped or addressed by focusing single-mindedly on individuals and their rights. Reminding that dealing with people outside our enchanted garden requires more than toleration and concerns with individual human rights. Reminding that we need a much deeper understanding of their histories and psychologies, free from idealization and fear and attentive to the explosive political power of pride and resentment. Reminding, finally, that the lure of tyranny is not the only force that pulls intellectuals off course. Self-deception has countless forms. Today, a decade and a half after its publication, my hope is that The Reckless Mind still serves as just such a reminder.

                                                                                                                --Paris, June 2016 

The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (with a New Afterword) pp. 225-227

Mark Lilla's book is a collection of essays about 20th-century intellectuals who ventured into writing and thinking about politics, often with distressing implications. Each chapter was written as a review of the works of the chapter subjects (the first chapter involves three thinkers, the rest address only a single thinker), but the collection works thematically. In brief, some very prominent European thinkers were either very wrong (or ineffective) about politics. Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt made camp with the Nazis (although Heidegger backed away, he never recanted his venture). Walter Benjamin and Alexandre Kojeve both skirted with radical politics and with unorthodox thinking. Although Kojeve held significant posts in the French government after his time as a lecturer on Hegel, he never acted overtly to implement a particular program consistent with his more radical thinking. Lilla also discusses the work of Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida, neither of whom contributed directly to political theory, although became influential about political thinking indirectly. But both followed the French intellectual fashion of commenting on contemporary politics, with sometimes embarrassing conclusions (the same may be said of Sartre, by the way).

I write none of the above to necessarily denigrate some aspects of the thinkers that Lilla discusses. With all thinkers, one gets both wheat and chaff (although too many are long on the latter). The fact that Hannah Arendt championed Heidegger (even late in life) and Benjamin gives us an indication of the value of their thought even as she would remain hostile to some of their political thought and action.

Lilla's essays provide an effective inoculation against taking in the speculations of philosophers-- especially politically naive philosophers--without a lot of critical judgment. Politics is informed by thought, but it consists of innumerable calculations of interest and belief that will continually defy easy schemes or remedies. As Lilla points out in the quote at the beginning of this review, it's easy to slip into either dogma or ideology when considering politics. I think he would agree with Hannah Arendt (and me) that political thought and action requires thinking--making judgments in the midst of the nitty-gritty stuff of everyday reality as experienced in the public sphere.

An excellent book.

Timothy Snyder on History

Timothy Snyder, American historian & political Cassandra. Will we heed him? 

One of my abiding interests is the study and use of history. History not just as a discipline, but as a way of knowing the world. And one of my other abiding interests concerns political thought and action. Every once in a while I come across an insightful piece of writing about one or other of these topics, but here I get a twofer from Timothy Snyder in his recently published book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia Europe America. In the prologue, Snyder writes:

History is and must be political thought, in the sense  that it opens a aperture between inevitability and eternity, preventing us from drifting from the one to the other, helping us see the moment when we might make a difference. 

As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of disintegration can be a guide to repair. Erosion reveals what resists, what can be reinforced, what can be reconstructed, and what must be reconcieved. Because understanding is empowerment, this book's chapter titles are framed as alternatives: Individualism or Totalitarianism; Succession or Failure; Integration or Empire; Novelty or Eternity; Truth or Lies; Equality or Oligarchy. Thus individuality, endurance, cooperation , novelty , honesty , and justice figure as political virtues. These qualities are not mere platitudes or preferences, but facts of history, not less than material forces might be. Virtues are inseparable from the institutions they inspire and nourish. 

An institution might cultivate certain ideas of the good, and it also depend upon them. If institutions are to flourish, they need virtues; if virtues are to be cultivated, they need institutions. The moral questions of what is good and evil in public life can never be separated from the historical investigation of structure. It is the politics of inevitability and eternity that make virtues seem irrelevant or even laughable: inevitably by promising that the good is what already exists and must predictably expand, eternity by assuring that the evil is always external and that we are forever its innocent victims. 

If we wish to have a better account of good and evil, we will have to resuscitate history.  

 

 The Road to Unfreedom: Russia Europe America (2018) 12-13. 

P.S. My review to follow soon.

Quotes from Ophuls, Pt. 4

 William Ophus, sage

N.B. Please read the quotes for today and consider the circumstances of the current election season.

More participation, for example, is often put forward as the panacea for our political ills. But this is a singularly inappropriate remedy – unless those who participate do so in a responsible and public spirited fashion, which is less and less the case. 68

Our myth, of course, is that in partisan debate "the marketplace of ideas" will result in good ideas driving out bad. But the actuality seems to be that all marketplaces, including those including that of political discourse, are dominated by Gresham's law. So slogans and symbols have driven out reasoned discussion; and systemic mendacity has largely preempted reasonable argument. Public discourse in a hyper pluralistic polity therefore generates heat, not light. In fact, that is the real purpose, for the winners of the political struggle are those who build the hottest fires under the politicians feet. 69-70

In effect, politics is now a spectator sport: the moral and social vacuum left by the decay of Lockean society has been filled by an ersatz media community. 78