Something obscurantist this way comes

Reading a book that appalls you can be a bracing experience. It was also unexpected; this is not a reaction I can remember having to a book before.

The book has a title I agree with: Ideas Have Consequences. Regarded as a classic text of  postwar American conservatism, the book is a long jeremiad at the corruption of culture and social life stemming from the nominalism of William of Ockham (him of Occam's Razor).

I have no problem with someone finding things to admire in medieval society and thought. But the notion that the passage of human history has, since the C14th, been a story of decline is such appalling nonsense that I am stunned any intelligent person can offer it seriously.

The Wikipedia entry on the author, Richard Weaver, tells us that he was both a Platonist and a defender of Southern culture. The former brings to mind Etienne Gilson's observations about Platonism in his The Unity of Philosophical Experience:

Begotten in us by things themselves, concepts are born reformers that never lose touch with reality. Pure ideas, on the other hand, are born within the mind and from the mind, not as an intellectual expression of what is, but as models, or patterns, of what ought to be: hence they are born revolutionists. And this is the reason Aristotle and Aristotelians write books on politics, whereas Plato and Platonists always write Utopias (Pp54-5).

Extending that point, as Gilson says, in his God and Philosophy:

Truly to be means to be immaterial, immutable, necessary and intelligible. That is precisely what Plato calls Ideas. (p.24)

Naturally, if ideas are so wonderful, then they are more “real” than mere transitory people: to have a “true grasp” of such wonderful ideas gives on a status far beyond that of ordinary mortals. Platonic Guardians here we come. Hence the politics of “my ideas are more important than people”. Not merely in the sense of ways of making people lives better, but in the sense of disregarding the actual consequences of one's ideas for people, of requiring people to conform to the ideas regardless of the consequences to them.

Willful blindness has consequences

Ideas Have Consequences does not argue, so much as assert; often in such rotund generalities that following how, if at all, it connects to reality is somewhat murky, to put it politely. There is a deep hankering for a sense of lost certainty that Weaver seems to believe reached some apotheosis in the C13th and began to be lost from the C14th onwards. For someone so clearly steeped in Western culture, Weaver has a remarkably poor sense of history. Far from being accidental, this poor sense of history appears to be necessary to protect his particular sensibility.

This hankering for lost certainties pervades the work, as in comments such as:

But the Symbolists retained a Romantic's interest in the intimate and in the individual, with the result that their symbols came not from some ideology universally accepted but from experiences almost private (p.82).

The notion that art based on private experience is somehow decadent or otherwise problematic is based on a conception of people-as-problem. The work is pervaded by a sensibility deeply reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor; people have to be controlled and moulded by their betters -- particularly in their beliefs. As when Weaver asks whether literacy has value (p.94), holding that truth can only be effectively conveyed by personal teaching (thereby limiting it to the elite with the leisure to undertake it). Obscurantism as self-satisfaction is not a pretty sight.

But this distrust of people goes with the horror of nominalism, for what would encourage a sense of the power of the particular more than taking people -- in all their variety of experience and sensibility -- seriously? Weaver again and again denounces manifestations of modern life as egotism and manifestations of a "spoiled child psychology". Yet, behind the jeremiad seems to be a disappointed scion of a culture fallen on hard times who resents that the modern world took his social toys away.

Naturally, he hates newspapers, radio, cinema, the mass technology of communication (Pp93ff); not for him Jefferson's preference of newspapers without government over government without newspapers. We are offered the banal observation that the great works of intellect are better than journalism (Pp98-9).

Naturally, Weaver also hates Jazz (Pp85ff); holds that music has been in decline since Beethoven while Impressionism is a similar sign of the degeneration of art (Pp83ff).

The book's sensibility rests on a frozen concept of social order and a hostility to cultural difference and the range of human experience. Weaver may be steeped in Western culture, but he has remarkably little sense of other cultures (which, of course, then limits his sense of his own). When he suggests that the growth of landscape painting as a sign of a loss of sense of divinity (p.88), do the rich traditions of Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings make this at all a sensible judgement?

This deeply limited sense of the past leads to a poor sense of the present, and of future prospects. Thus, the growth of democracy rather contradicts his expectations of despotism (p.91) and he is deaf to any sense of the genuine moral progress that Pinker has documented. He is blind to experience beyond that of the cultured, and privileged, Western male. So, for example, he appears utterly unaware of the imposed nature of female subordination (p.178) in what he regards as their "natural" role.

Weaver dislikes machines -- he is clearly unaware of the medieval fascination with them. He offers a ludicrously metaphysical analysis of the Great Depression and responses to it (p.144).

But this sense of loss certainties is itself deeply ahistorical. That, for example, Aquinas's thought was seriously controversial when it first appeared seems to pass him by. To the extent there were social certainties, they were certitudes based in part on ignorance and often defended by brutality.

For any serious outbreak of new knowledge and capacity encourages nominalism, as previous verities and categories are exposed as inadequate. Nominalism was as natural a result of the expansion in knowledge of the natural world and technological possibilities in the C12th Renaissance as it was to the Hellenistic Scientific Revolution or to the expansion in knowledge from C16th global exploration and the (second?) Scientific Revolution it kicked off. Nominalism--breaking things down to specific manifestations--is a way of absorbing new information and reconstructing categories better able to handle the same. This is also why becoming a nexus civilisation -- a civilisation newly connected to a range of other cultures -- so regularly leads to artistic and intellectual flowerings; it is a positive effect of the shock of the new.

If the previous conceptualisations were such eternal verities, further knowledge and experience would confirm them.  The problem is that expansion in knowledge and experience repeatedly undermined them.  For such verities and categories are creations of particular historical circumstances and rely on exclusions and ignorance to make them seem unchallengeable. The more limited and specific experience/available information, the easier certainty is because the more constrained one's experience of possibilities.

But there are also consequences for moral sensibilities and social possibilities from expanded knowledge and capacities. As the background constraints change, so do the possibilities and interactions we want to protect. Moral perspectives and social possibilities change according to constraints, possibilities and conceptions. There is nothing surprising about this.

Credence but not authority

The book encapsulates, in a particularly intense form, the difference between giving credence to the past and giving it authority. Far from being the same thing, they are, to a large degree, opposites (or, at least, antinomies). For to give authority to the past is to fail to give it full credence. To give authority to the past is choose which parts of it to give credence to. It is to impose a congenially selective sense of significance on it.

For example, how many of those opposing current claims to equal protection of the law -- often on the basis of defending tradition -- are beneficiaries of previous decisions that mere persistence through time was not enough reason to keep things as they had been? Traditions are not eternal things, they are responses to circumstances. Those responses might have been broadly based, or they might be exercises in social power. If we cannot revisit how and why they evolved, we attempt to make history the permanent possession of a given set of victors.

Due to the cognitive limitations of the human mind, reality is always going to be more complex than what the mind can grasp. The problem comes when the human mind insists on reality as conforming to those simplicities it finds congenial. The alleged respect for the past and (congenial) experience usually conceals a willful refusal to inquire into the realities of that past and what experience counts, or does not.

As I have noted before, conservatives turn out to be regularly very bad at learning from history. They tend to idolise the past in much the same way that progressives idolise the future. They are just different ways of ignoring and discounting human experiences, of sacrificing giving credence to the past in order to selectively give it authority (positively or negatively).

Not that the progressivist-modernist approach of giving the past negative authority is any improvement. On the contrary, the more such a view is taken, the more disastrous and oppressive the results are likely to be, as it gives little or no credence to the past (and all the knowledge of the human it entails), thereby making current theory the only reference point, while cutting off from consideration warnings and achievements from past experience. (Consider the way Leninism utterly disregards millennia of experience of the problems of political power.) The modernist impulse has been vastly destructive.

A form of destruction that Platonist worship of ideas feeds. Consider the society in Plato's Republic; is it not profoundly modernist, profoundly based on imposing a theory on human possibilities with pervasive discounting of past experience and institutional learning?

But obscurantism and modernism are not our only choices, no matter how much politics tends to devolve into Bagehot's stupid party versus silly party. Grounding our ideas in human experience -- all of it -- is a great barrier to sacrificing people to ideas.

Ideas do have consequences, and Weaver's massive discounting of human experience in the service of the authority of a past so selectively considered as to be a grotesque work of fiction is no way to understand the past, the present or prospects for the future. Weaver's book may have helped kick off postwar American conservatism but it is also a window into its flaws and limitations.

[A previous version was posted at Skepticlawyer.]

The revealing differences of returns to origins

Attempts to compare Christianity and Islam often involve citing Scriptures or specific doctrines. The problem with doing so is that, within any faith, people often ignore inconvenient Scriptures or doctrines, vary dramatically in how they read them, in what Scriptures and doctrines they focus on, etc. The logic of belief is not necessarily the logic of believers: as witnessed by the Theological Incorrectness phenomenon.

I tend to be more impressed by historical patterns, as they indicate what social logics are operating within a religion and what persistence (if any) they have.

Contemporary Islam and Christianity both have very significant movements within them which seek to return to the origins of the religion. A comparison of such is quite revealing.

I am not talking here of religious fundamentalism, which is a modern, even modernist, movement. Modernism seeks to eliminate the detritus of the past on the basis that new is (always) better. While fundamentalism may be about "seeking the fundamentals", in practice it is very modernist.

I mean attempts to go back to the origins of the faith in life and spirit. In their rejection of tradition, such movements can overlap with fundamentalism, but they are not identical.

Of course, in one sense it is impossible to return to the origins of any religion; the river of history has moved on, changing context and understanding. Thus, once the European Enlightenment happened, Westerners could never really be actively pre-Enlightenment, only Counter-Enlightenment.  Nevertheless, the desire to return to origins of faith can be a powerful one.

Returning to origins
The dominant such return-to-origins movement within Christianity is Pentecostalism. It is phenomenally successful--from a few hundred adherents around 1900, it had about 250 million by 2000: at that rate of growth (a large assumption), there will be a billion Pentecostals by the middle of this century.

If you seek to go back to original Christianity, what do you do? A lot of preaching, a lot of attention to the Gospels' you seek to have the experience of the Holy Spirit indwelling (hence Pentecostal, from the original Pentecost), speak in tongues, and engage in congregational togetherness. There is a strong aspect of collective self-help in Pentecostalism, as there was in early Christianity. Hence much of its appeal to the wretched of the Earth, both the materially wretched and the spiritually wretched.

If you want to go back to original Islam, what do you do? If you are following the received Muhammad of Medina--the flight to which is the Islamic Year Zero--then you seek to conquer territory to establish Sharia rule, destroy the holy places and religmous artefacts of non-believers, massacre male unbelievers and enslave their women and children and behead those who write nasty things about you. Which should all sound terribly familiar. How much of this follows the received example of the Prophet? All of it.

Islamic history is full of violent, purifying movements who seek to follow the example of the Prophet and go forth and conquer. They have the Medinan Suras and the life of the Prophet ("the walking Quran") as conqueror and ruler to inspire them.

The Meccan-Medinan cycle
Islam also has extended periods of intellectual and artistic ferment and tolerance. The Islam of the Meccan Suras. The Islam of pragmatic tolerance, of live and let live (as long as Muslim dominance is not threatened). The Islam of the Umayyad (661-750) and early Abbasid Caliphates (750-C11th), of early al-Andalus, of the Central Asian Enlightenment, of the great Mughals.

The problem is, Meccan Islam is always followed by Medinan Islam. Cosmopolitan al-Andalus was overwhelmed by the Almoravids and Almohades. The Seljuq Turk advance imposed a much more rigid and intolerant version of Islam. An anti-tolerance counter-reaction which became even more intense in response to the Mongol onslaught, finishing off the Central Asian Enlightenment. Islam under stress typically reacts by being much more Medinan.

Alas, stress can simply mean slights to Muslim self-image (particularly male self-image); as historian Bernard Lewis famously discussed in his essay The Roots of Muslim Rage.

Nor is stress necessary for the switch to occur. Even the periods of tolerance were punctuated by episodes of massacre and repression: either because some ruler shifted to the Medinan approach or due to clerical incitement. Or such "Meccan" periods are simply ended by such shifts. The period of Mughal tolerance came to an end when Aurangzeb (r.1658-1707) took the throne, though it had been declining somewhat under his father, Shah Jahan (r.1628-1658). The death of Meccan Islam is always an in-house killing: it is murdered by Muslims, not outsiders.

Needless to say, the jihadis are Medinan Islam.

It is not good enough to point to Meccan Islam and say "that is Islam". Medinan Islam is also Islam: and Islam regularly returns to it. The contrast between Pentecostalism and the jihadis does tell us something about the difference between Christianity (particularly Christianity in the contemporary world) and Islam.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Modernism in religion

One of the most enjoyable polemics I have read in recent years is Christopher Beckwith's denunciation of modernism.  Not modernity, but modernism -- the belief that the new is always better than the old. A monstrously destructive delusion that consigns centuries, even millennia, of human experience, striving and achievement to the tediously passe, beneath the concern of the so-much-more-enlightened present.


One of the great ironies of the modern age is that those forms of religion which most proclaim their devotion to the origins of their faith are most in thrall to this delusion. All the experience and wrestling with faith and life that has happened between those origins and now is consigned to the dustbin of history as corrupting pollution of the pristine original faith. That original faith as currently imagined, of course.


This modernism in religion manifests in modernism in architecture. The Wahhabism the al-Saud are allied to is just such a rejection of the history of Islam to return to its alleged roots. A return which includes obliterating historical buildings in Mecca -- even those intimately connected to Muhammad's family and companions -- to build modernist monstrosities, such as the tallest clock tower on top of the building with the biggest floor space overlooking the mosque which holds the Kaaba, the focus of the hajj and the lodestone for the direction of the prayers of believers.

No connection to that history is safe. This obliteration of the past includes:

the house of the prophet's wife, Khadijah, was razed to make way for public lavatories; the house of his companion, Abu Bakr, is now the site of a Hilton hotel; and his grandson's house was flattened by the King's palace.

But more is to come. Much of the Kaaba mosque itself, along with the core of the Old City of Mecca, is to be obliterated to construct 400,000 sq metres of prayer halls notionally able to peer at the Kaaba and to allow 130,000 pilgrims an hour to be funnelled through the holy centre. Stark modernist functionality literally built on the obliteration of the history of Mecca.

There is a profound arrogance involved in this rejection of human experience, achievement and striving in favour of present obsessions. An arrogance which is profoundly destructive. In this case, quite literally and physically so.

About modernism

Christopher I. Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present in a history of central Eurasia that anyone interested in the wider patterns of world history will profit from reading. It is a book with the “barbarians”, the steppe nomads, at the centre. In reconfiguring Eurasian history Beckwith, almost as an afterthought, puts European imperialism in the context of Eurasian history far better than anyone else I have read—even those who were deliberately, even ostentatiously, trying to do so.

I will have more to say about Empires of the Silk Road in a later post. It is Beckwith’s specific analysis of Modernism that interests me here.

In his preface, Beckwith has a wonderful denunciation of the effects of Post-modernism, particularly on historiography. He puts this denunciation in the context of a wider critique of Modernism that is developed later in the last two chapters of the book and associated endnotes. When one first comes across the brief gesture about Modernism, it is intriguing, especially when he casts religious fundamentalism as a manifestation of Modernism (p.x, n8).

Modernism one notes, not modernity.

Beckwith writes:

According to the Modernist perspective, the old must always, unceasingly, be replaced by the new, thus producing permanent revolution. The Postmodernist point of view, the logical development of Modernism, rejects what it call the positivist, essentially non-Modern practice of evaluating problems or objects according to specific agreed criteria. Instead, Postmodernists consider all judgements to be relative. “In our post-modern age, we can no longer take recourse to [sic] the myth of ‘objectivity’” (p.ix).

Beckwith is not having this, and is wonderfully scathing in explaining why.

Beckwith stands, instead, with the view Norman Geras defended when he wrote:

If there is no truth, there is no injustice. Stated less simplistically, if truth is wholly relativized or internalized to particular discourses or language games or social practices, there is no injustice. The victims and protesters of any putative injustice are deprived of their last and often best weapon, that of telling what really happened. They can only tell their story, which is something else. Morally and politically, therefore, anything goes.

Beckwith thinks a profound historiographical injustice (and plenty of historical ones) has been visited on the “barbarians” and he is very firm that the weapon to reveal and correct this injustice is the truth of what happened, to be determined by careful scholarship.

Good on him.

Beckwith comes across as a particularly grumpy version (when he is letting fly) adherent of the sceptical Enlightenment—the stream of thought that holds that human nature exists, is remarkably constant across time and we need to apply our reason to understand ourselves and history in that light:

The consistency of human behaviour over such great expanses of space and time can clearly be due only to our common genetic heritage. Viewed from the perspective of Eurasian history over the past four millennia, there does not seem to me to be any significant difference between the default underlying human socio-political structure during this time period—that is, down to the present day—and that of primates in general. The Alpha Male Hierarchy is our system too, regardless of whatever cosmetics have been applied to hide it. To put it another way, in my opinion the Modern political system is in fact simply a disguised primate-type hierarchy, and as such is not essentially different from any other political system human primates have dreamed up (p.xi)

Not one for democratic triumphalism, then.

At the end of Empires of the Silk Road, in Chapters 11 and 12, Beckwith returns to his critique of modernism in much more detail, explaining what he means:

The core idea of Modernism is simple, and seems harmless enough by itself: what is modern—new and fashionable—is better than what it replaced. … But Modernism was not merely a finite sequence in which something new (the industrial and urban) replaced something old (the aristocratic and rural) and that was that. If only what is new is good, it is by definition necessary to continually create or do new things. Full-blown Modernism meant, and still means, permanent revolution: continuous rejection of the traditional or immediately preceding political, social, artistic, and intellectual order.
Permanent revolution meant that what went before, including any previous evolution (and its products), was bad and had to be rejected. Even Reason—free enquiry, independent thinking, logic, questioning—was identified as one of the old ideas and practices of old aristocratic intellectuals (p.289).

He regards “religious-political fundamentalism” as “a particularly pernicious form of Modern populism” (p.289 n.69).

Beckwith puts the blame within the Enlightenment, specifically the ideas flowing from Rousseau (p.290). Which is to say, the radical Enlightenment, the stream of thought focused on the notion that even humanity itself could be transformed by human action. For if human nature is regarded as a constant, then there are lessons and value to be had from past experience. But if human nature itself is a work-in-progress, then the past is just the dross arising from fettered or untransformed humanity. The sceptical Enlightenment constructs the US Constitution based on a “failure analysis” of past republics. The radical Enlightenment produces Leninism, whose ultimate evolution (and stunting of the human) we can see in North Korea and its society of “racist dwarves”.

Beckwith sees Central Eurasia as suffering with particular intensity from the impact of Modernism, hence his concern. He deals at some length with the effect of Modernism on the arts because:

Even after the worst of the terror was over, Modernism in the arts continued to spread across Central Eurasia, especially via architecture, because the foreign rulers tore down traditional Central Eurasian-style buildings and replaced them with Modern buildings. The physical appearance of Central Eurasian cities changed drastically, and the cultural heritage of the region was impoverished accordingly (p.289, n68).

He sees Modernism not as a mere wrong turn in culture, art and appreciation of beauty but an attack on, and denial of, culture, art and beauty: as things rooted in, and carrying truths across, time. For Modernism, the new is always better, it is always more “truthful”. But the notion that there is no truth, beauty, knowledge or understanding embodied in the past which can be as powerful and profound, or more so, than new productions, is a nonsense that can only be sustained by attacking the very notions of truth, of beauty, of art and of culture. Beckwith’s claim that Postmodernism is just a hyper manifestation of Modernism (p.317, n26) seems to get to the heart of what is going on.

Beckwith’s claim that religious fundamentalism is a form of Modernism seems a bit odd at first, until one realises that religious fundamentalism is typically a rejection of evolved religious tradition in favour of the revealed Word. Its adherents essentially claim a direct connection to truth, one that is outside time and so remakes the faith, and the world, anew. Fundamentalism also includes attacks on science: thus on reason and truth applied to the world as it is, rather than as it is imagined it could be. That Christian fundamentalists build churches that are typically very Modernist in style is more indicative than one might think.

Beckwith sees the consequences of the French Revolution, the development of mass warfare, the industrial revolution and its accompanying urbanisation as leading to Modernism by undermining the social carriers of traditional ideas (p.292). As he writes:

The socio-political stripping of the elite aristocracy’s hierarchical position above ordinary “commoners” and the institution of populism was thus mirrored in intellectual and artistic life by the elimination of the dichotomy between the elite, which strived for perfection, and the ordinary, which strived for the commonplace (p.293).

This leads to an extended denunciation of the effects of Modernism on arts and culture (Pp293-301) even more extensive and scathing than his early critique of Postmodernism in scholarship. The reason for his passion seems clear enough in his concluding statement:

By the end of the twentieth century, the evil done in the name of Modernism and “progress” left Central Eurasians bereft of much of their past (p.301).

Which Beckwith holds a great injustice: his book is very much about reclaiming that past for the peoples of Central Eurasia. The concluding Epilogue of Empires of the Silk Road is a sustained attack on the notion of “barbarian”.

Reading this passionate attack on Modernism—including populism—I have a worry that the book will not have the influence and impact it deserves since these views are so dreadfully unfashionable: particularly as Beckwith’s rejection of modern “democracy” (as he invariably shudder quotes it) is so sweeping. There are definite indications of that being a problem among the comments on Amazon.com on the book.

Why Modernism?
It is worth taking a step back and asking what is the attraction of Modernism and populism.

Part of it, surely, is that there has been an immense expansion of human understanding and capacity. The notion that there was more truth in the new and to be had in the future was far from a silly thing. Even in ordinary life, there were lots of new things that just worked.

Much of these new understandings did call into question a wide range of past apparent verities. Starting with the impact of Charles Darwin’s analysis of biological existence and the acceptance of geological and cosmological time of millions and billions of years rather than scriptural time of thousands of years.

As human capacities expanded, so the possibilities down the social order expanded. Much of the history of the last couple of centuries is driven by the way the expanding circle of social capacity became an expanding circle of social engagement and involvement. People could do much more for themselves, either directly or through their chosen agents.

Some form of “populism” was surely inevitable. Beckwith’s tendency to let various monarchies off rather lightly—notably, the last Shah’s regime in Iran and the role of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanov dynastic regimes in the outbreak of World War One—seems to result from him being too aware of the downside of the new and not enough of the failures of the existing.

Which is not to deny that there was a great deal of destruction of what was still valuable, true, valid, viable and so on, in the name of things that turned out to be none of these things. The dreadful idea that human nature itself was being, or could be, transformed by all this—the wars against humans as-they-are in the name of humans as they were deemed-to-ought-to-be—led to all sorts of horrors.

Expanding capacity could certainly expand faster than sense, understanding, institutions, norms could keep up with, and did. But avoiding changes in politics that involved and engaged the mass of the population was surely unavoidable. The only live question was whether this would be done well or badly. Often it was done badly: sometimes megacidally badly. We are still in a collective learning process that is by no means complete.

That much of the intellectual classes have embraced ideas that elevate themselves has meant that their role has often been useless or actively disastrous in all this. The desire to seem “cutting edge” and superior to the mass society around them have made the seductions of Modernism very appealing. They are often the last people to think helpfully about what is going on and how it could genuinely be done better.

But it would be wrong to see Beckwith as some grumpy reactionary. He finds hope in popular music (including rock music) as new art forms unpolluted by the Modernism of the academy and the intellectual, artistic and literary elite. As he writes:

Although it is not yet possible to call it “high” art, at least it really is music; perhaps one day it will develop into an elite art (p.318)

Among the bright lights he includes:

… technologically the Internet, which has had a powerful enlightening influence (p.319).

He sees hope in new art and art forms because they are art, where ‘new’ is just an adjective (p.318).

Beckwith’s discussion of Modernism, however passionate, is only a small part of the effort in historical reappraisal involved in Empires of the Silk Road. But it has implications much wider than his specific subject matter and makes one look at our own societies, and the wider trends of human history, in a more critically enlightened way.