Promoting Wellbeing or Anti-thinking?
Correcting an editing error
Thanks to reader Evan for pointing out that the video gradually fades to black over the course of the discussion. And I hope you’re an “always suspect a stuffup” kind of person because it wasn’t a conspiracy. The error has been corrected below.
Apologies
Promoting Wellbeing or Anti-thinking?
This is the second part of a great discussion I had with friend and colleague Gene Tunny on wellbeing agendas, how they go wrong and how transformative they could be.
We begin by exploring what I call ‘top-down thinking’ — a style of strategising that was largely (and mercifully) absent from life fifty years ago. That’s the style of thinking which begins with fine sounding apex statements — Mission, vision and values statements — and then builds plans and priorities by ‘drilling down’ from such statements.
Wellbeing agendas too are tied up in pleasant-sounding objectives. However they pass over many of the important questions. They relate firstly to how trade-offs are made and secondly to how we'll acquire the knowhow to get what we're after. Planning from the top rarely addresses such questions.
This doesn't just mean we won't make much progress. It can actively undermine progress, as for instance when central planners insist that the measures by which projects will be assessed must be consistent across projects. Such stipulations sound like the soul of reasonableness. But quite obviously they dictate to those running programs in the field the way they’ll be measured. And this prevents such projects from developing their own monitoring and evaluation focused on their needs to understand what they’re doing and how they can improve. If you'd prefer to listen to the audio file, it's here.
Martin Wolf on AI
I’d love to regulate AI to prevent its destructive potential. But I can’t really imagine how. Neither can Martin Wolf.
The problem with regulating AI … is that unlike, say, drugs, which have a known target (the human body) and known goals (a cure of some kind) AI is a general purpose technology. It is polyvalent. It can change economies, national competitiveness, relative power, social relations, politics, education and science. It can change how we think and create, perhaps even how we understand our place within the world.
We cannot hope to work out all these effects. They are too complex. It would be like trying to understand the effect of the printing press in the 15th century. We cannot hope to agree on what is to be favoured and what is to be prevented. And even if some countries did, we would never stop the rest. In 1433, the Chinese empire halted attempts to project naval power. That did not stop others from doing so, ultimately defeating China.
Humanity is Doctor Faustus. It, too, seeks knowledge and power and is prepared to make almost any bargain to achieve it, regardless of consequences. Even worse, it is a species of competing Doctor Faustuses, who seek knowledge and power, as he did. We have been experiencing the impact of the social media revolution on our society and politics. Some warn of its consequences for our children. But we cannot halt the bargains we have made. We will not halt this revolution either. We are Faustus. We are Mephistopheles. The AI revolution will roll on.
John Cleese retweets Charles holding the holy hand grenade
Horror, Shakespeare and the madness within
A nicely written piece
If my many years of teaching Shakespeare taught me anything, it’s that that real horror doesn’t live under the bed, in the dark cupboard, or on a desolate Scottish moor. It lives in the people we think we love and trust. It thrives in our desires, our doubts, our self-justifications.
It is born in the deepest recesses of our hearts.
Ray Monk on how R. G. Collingwood’s early death set British philosophy back decades
A great article about a favourite philosopher of mine, by a friend and distinguished author and academic.
For decades, it was possible to do a degree in philosophy at a major university in the UK or the US without once encountering any of the continental philosophers mentioned. This splintering of the discipline would have appalled many philosophical greats from earlier ages. And—just possibly—the great schism would never have set in at all, had RG Collingwood, one of the most remarkable, open and eclectic minds of the 20th century, not died prematurely in 1943. But as it was, his Oxford chair was filled by Gilbert Ryle, a man in whose image British philosophy was soon remade.
Before WWII, Ryle had been sympathetic to continental streams of thought, delivering a measured account of Husserl’s work in 1932, and reviewing Heidegger’s Being and Time with respect (even if with robust dissent) in 1928. … But after the war, dissent hardened into hostility, and, in place of respect he offered derision. Things came to a head in 1958, at Royaumont in France. A conference had been held here to connect a group of continental philosophers (mostly French phenomenologists) and their Oxford counterparts, with the aim of bridging the gap between their two schools.
But, as if determined instead to reinforce it, Ryle gave a paper called “Phenomenology versus ‘The Concept of Mind,’” the latter being the title of his most famous book. That “versus” captured his pugnacious mood. In this paper, Ryle outlined what he regarded as the superiority of British (“Anglo-Saxon,” as he put it) analytic philosophers over their continental counterparts, and dismissed Husserl’s phenomenology as an attempt to “puff philosophy up into the Science of the sciences.” British philosophers were not tempted to such delusions of grandeur, he suggested, because of the Oxbridge rituals of High Table: “I guess that our thinkers have been immunised against the idea of philosophy as the Mistress Science by the fact that their daily lives in Cambridge and Oxford colleges have kept them in personal contact with real scientists. Claims to Führership vanish when postprandial joking begins. Husserl wrote as if he had never met a scientist—or a joke.”
To invoke the old cliché about Germans lacking a sense of humour was bad enough, but talking about “Führership” at a time when memories of the Nazi regime were still raw was crass in the extreme. And yet, in this paper, Ryle did it, not once, but twice: British philosophers, his second “quip” ran, “have not worried our heads over the question ‘Which philosopher ought to be Führer?’” Unlike the Germans, he seemed to suggest, the British trusted in logic rather than leadership: “At least the main lines of our philosophical thinking during this century can be fully understood only by someone who has studied the massive developments of our logical theory.” Awkwardly for Ryle, two out of the three founders of what he called “our logical theory,” namely Frege and Wittgenstein, were continentals. However, as Russell and Wittgenstein had both worked at Cambridge, he was able, at a stretch, to characterise it as “The Cambridge Transformation of the Theory of Concepts.”
The jingoism of one scholar would, ordinarily, have been something the world of philosophy could have laughed off with a shrug. But unfortunately there was nothing ordinary about Ryle. He was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics, the oldest and most prestigious chair of philosophy at Oxford, by far the largest British philosophy department—and this deep but curiously narrow thinker used this lofty position to remake the British discipline in his own image. If there was any 20th-century philosopher who might have merited Führer jokes, it was not a continental: it was Ryle himself. Indeed, Michael Dummett, who was until his death in 2011 Ryle’s successor as the most eminent philosopher in Britain, called Ryle “the Generalissimo of Oxford philosophy.”
(You can read the whole article, though sadly its formatting has degraded with time. I guess that’s an improvement on what happened to Collingwood with time. He died in his mid 50s.)
Louis Ardine
Philadelphia-based artist Louis Ardine has worked primarily in abstract forms, producing elaborate drawings with micron pens. But in 2021, after he and his brother completed a cross-country charity walk, from the New Jersey coast to San Francisco, he began to gravitate toward landscape pieces, rendered on canvas in oils and watercolor.
Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS): the asbestos in the global architecture
I expect ISDS made some sense to prevent expropriation in low income countries when it started out. It still makes some sense to prevent outright expropriation. But with corporate lawyers beavering away on it, it’s metastasised into a quiet takeover of legal systems — including our own. And because it’s encoded into endless international investment treaties and manifests itself in the regulatory micro-detail, it’s worthy of a Bond villain. Incredibly difficult to remove. Our political system doesn’t do micro-detail.
A stream of European countries have exited the controversial Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) over the past year. France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Denmark have all withdrawn from the ECT, or announced their intention to do so, joining Italy, which left in 2016. By allowing foreign energy investors to sue national governments for losses caused by policy changes, the ECT prevents countries from delivering on their commitment to meet the Paris climate agreement’s targets and effectively neutralizes their plans to tax oil companies’ windfall profits. …
Established at the end of the Cold War, the ECT was designed to encourage Western investment in the energy sector of former Soviet bloc countries, particularly the fossil-fuel industry. To assuage concerns about expropriation, breach of contract, and other discriminatory treatment, the treaty permits investors to submit disputes to international arbitration, a supposedly neutral forum, rather than national courts. Through this system, corporations can sue governments for investment losses, including future profits, which can amount to billions of dollars. As of June 2022, at least 150 investment-arbitration cases have been brought under the ECT.
But the ECT is just the tip of the iceberg. Roughly 2,500 investment treaties – most of them bilateral – permit international investors to use ISDS arbitrators to settle disputes with states. Corporations can sue states for any judicial, legislative, or regulatory decision, including at the municipal level, that could affect their bottom line. Investment treaties thus make it harder for governments to implement stronger and more effective environmental safeguards, labor rights, and safety standards. Even the threat of an investor suit can stymie policymakers.
What did Sophocles’ music sound like?
I’m afraid I find the introduction to this piece completely thrilling. Then again I’m odd. I’m thrilled by our proximity and our distance to worlds that seem completely other to us: and yet our very capacity to understand something of them, however little however mistaken shows that they are not completely other. And that with effort, and with letting go, we can in the strange words of the great philosopher Hegel, go out of ourselves in order to return to ourselves — enriched.
The fifteen chorus members, robed and masked to represent the elders of Thebes, march in unison to the centre of the orchēstra, the dancing space in the centre of the theatre that has been erected in the precinct of Dionysus at Athens. It is 438 BC, a year since the dramatist Sophocles (c. 496–406 BC) has returned from active service as a general on the island of Samos under the command of the celebrated statesman Pericles (c. 495–429 BC), and his tragedy Antigone is being performed for the first time.
The successful but violent conquest of Samos has led to murmurs of unease among some Athenians, who fear divine retribution for Pericles’ decision to leave unburied the enemy commanders executed on his orders. Through the initiative of Pericles’ astute wife Aspasia, such retribution has been averted, at least for the time being, by propitiatory sacrifices. But one of Sophocles’ main themes will be to stress that human beings should observe divine commands or expect to face certain tragedy.
Meanwhile in a former reality: Dame Edith Sitwell
Speaking of cross-cultural experiences.
I know next to nothing about Dame Edith Sitwell, but (via the Barry Humpries interview below) the YouTube algo served up the interview below. And there’s no need to go back to 5th-century BC Athens for a gobsmackingly cross cultural experience. Watch (or convert it to an audio file) for an experience which is about as foreign to our culture today as it's possible to imagine. It’s funny that we think of British culture as stuffy and preoccupied with appearances. Here it’s certainly stilted in manner, but far more direct than is customary in Australia today. Most Australian interviewers today either ingratiate themselves with their subjects (esp if they’re literary figures) or perform ritual and unenlightening hostilities.
Angus Deaton on economics and its influence
To quote a favourite comedian Stewart Lee, I agreed the fuck out of this column by Angus Deaton, and yet it is little more than the usual disciplinary skirmish in which an economist complains about what a deranged subject his discipline is at heart. But any reasonable person knows that. And they know also how unlikely it is to change.
In 2010, an influential, Oscar-winning documentary portrayed us as scoundrels concerned only with our own financial gain, and as lobbyists and apologists for the rich, who reward us generously for our work. Our pronouncements are often predictable from our politics. Whenever several hundred economists signs a petition in support of some policy, it is only a matter of days before several hundred other economists sign a petition condemning it.
Moreover, we economists often assume a mantle of policy expertise for which we have no qualification, with predictably disastrous outcomes. Even so, thoughtful critics contend that we still retain great influence over economic policy, and thus continue to cause great harm. But does the fault lie with just a few powerful individuals, or is there a deep flaw in economics that continuously leads its practitioners astray?
I tend to favor the latter hypothesis. American democratic capitalism is serving only a minority of the population well. The 2008 financial crisis and its grim aftermath gave the lie to the fable that everyone would benefit from letting financiers get richer. In the intervening years, less-educated Americans have been succumbing to deaths of despair and turning to populism in reaction to a political system that is not helping them.
Not only did most economists fail to predict the crisis; by some accounts, they facilitated it. After all, they are proud apostles for the globalization and technological change that have enriched a narrow financial and managerial elite, redistributed income and wealth from labor to capital, destroyed millions of jobs, and hollowed out communities and their residents’ lives. Worse, when confronted with deaths of despair, some economists blame the victims and those who try to help them.
Anyway, this is the ‘case against’. Deaton does get a little more ‘nuanced’ as we’ve taken to saying later in the column, but if you read these kinds of things, it’s nothing you haven’t already read. And the inevitable Keynes quote gets thrown in:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.
Engaging interview with Barry Humphreys
Being interviewed by England’s answer to Margaret Throsby (I prefer Margaret Throsby!). But an engaging interview and intriguing music.
How to Fix the Platform Economy
People say that Daron Acemoglu will win the Nobel Prize. Perhaps he will. But for me he fits perfectly into a category it would be good to have a name for — perhaps the Germans already have the perfect word. He’s someone whose broad ideological sympathies I find myself agreeing with and yet whose work never seems to illuminate anything much for me.
This piece is as good an example as any to pick. Below some extracts with my comments interpolated.
A few … tech companies have come to dominate what we see and hear on the internet … their algorithms are programmed to show us content that will hold our attention – including extremist videos, disinformation, and material designed to stimulate envy, insecurity, and anger. With the rapid development of “large language models” such as ChatGPT and Bard, Big Tech’s hold on impressionable minds will only strengthen, with potentially scary consequences.
But other outcomes are possible. Companies could deploy the latest wave of artificial intelligence much more responsibly. … But we also need public-policy interventions to break up the largest tech companies and to tax digital advertising. These policy levers can help change Big Tech’s pernicious business model, thereby preventing the platforms from inflicting so much emotional harm on their users – especially vulnerable young people.
I’d like to break up these companies, but for economic reasons. Forcing them to compete more vigorously will presumably intensify the incentives to engage rather than inform. Taxing digital advertising is probably a good idea, but so is taxing all advertising which is more manipulative than informative.
If platforms are acting more like news outlets than mere online repositories when they recommend videos, tweets, or posts, they should be held to the same standard as established media, which, under existing defamation laws, are not allowed to publish what they know to be untrue.
But existing defamation law is a very poor mechanism for steering social media towards socially beneficial content. Bullshit is at least as much of a problem as lies.
If an algorithm is exploitative or manipulative toward children (or anyone else, for that matter), the responsibility for such harm should lie with the humans in charge.
Too right. But the fundamental point is that social media is a public good and it needs to be managed as a public good. That does not mean government should run it, because social media is a cultural public good — like language or culture itself. We need to establish the middleware of democracy — a subject I sketched out some ideas for here and here.
The Germans always put it best
Walter Lippmann on accommodation, nihilism and the death of God
4. The Language of Accommodation
MEN HAVE been laboring with the problem of how to make concrete and real what is abstract and immaterial ever since the Greek philosophers began to feel the need to accommodate the popular Homeric religion to the advance of science. The theologians, says Aristotle, are like the philosophers in that they promulgate certain doctrines; but they are unlike them in that they do so in mythical form. 11
The method of accommodation employed by the philosophers has been to treat the materialization in the myth as allegory: as translation of the same knowledge into another language. 12 To converse with the devil, for example, could then mean what literally it says — to talk face to face with the devil, a concrete materialized personage. But it could mean, also, the imitation of a wicked nature without — as the Cambridge Platonist John Smith wrote, “a mutual local presence,” 13 that is to say without meeting a devil in person. This was an accommodation to those who, believing in the wickedness of evil, could not believe in the personified devil. The devil could mean either “some apostate spirit as one particular being,” and also “the spirit of apostasie which is lodged in all men’s natures.” This is the method of plural interpretation; it uses “the language of accommodation.” It is justified and legitimate, said John Smith in his discourse entitled “A Christian’s Conflicts and Conquests,” because “truth is content, when it comes into the world, to wear our mantles, to learn our language, to conform itself as it were to our dress and fashions…it speaks with the most idiotical sort of men in the most idiotical way, and becomes all things to all men, as every sonne of truth should do for their good.” 14
5. The Limits of Accommodation
BUT THERE are limits beyond which we cannot carry the time-honored method of accommodating the diversity of beliefs. As we know from the variety and sharpness of schisms and sects in our time, we have gone beyond the limits of accommodation. We know, too, that as the divisions grow wider and more irreconcilable, there arise issues of loyalty with which the general principle of toleration is unable to cope.
For the toleration of differences is possible only on the assumption that there is no vital threat to the community. Toleration is not, therefore, a sufficient principle for dealing with the diversity of opinions and beliefs. It is itself dependent upon the positive principle of accommodation. The principle calls for the effort to find agreement beneath the differences.
In studying how accommodation is achieved, we may begin by observing that it is the philosophers, using Aristotle’s broad terminology, who work out and promote the plural interpretation. They propose the terms for accommodating their immaterial belief to the concrete and materialized imagery of the fundamentalists. Thus it was the Cambridge Platonist, John Smith, who took the initiative about the devil. John Smith was not addressing the fundamentalists who believed in the personified devil; in fact what he said about the whole matter was not meant to trouble the fundamentalists at all. He was addressing men who were unable to believe in the personified devil and yet were still in essential communion with the fundamentalists. For they did believe in the spirit of the devil which, as everyone knows, is in all of us. In this accommodation the Christian Platonists gave up trying to believe what they could not believe. They went on believing that which in its essence their fundamentalist neighbors believed. Thus they could continue to live in the same community with them.
There is an impressive historical example of how by accommodation it is possible to communicate these difficult truths to a large heterogeneous society. In mediaeval Christendom a great subject of accommodation was the origin and sanction of the public philosophy itself, of the natural laws of the rational order. Otto von Gierke says that despite the innumerable learned controversies of the lawyers, the theologians and the philosophers, “all were agreed that there was natural law, which, on the one hand, radiated from a principle transcending earthly power, and on the other hand was true and perfectly binding law…the highest power on earth was subject to the rules of natural law. They stood above the Pope and above the Kaiser, above the ruler and above the sovereign people, nay, above the whole community of mortals. Neither statute nor act of government, neither resolution of the people nor custom, could break the bounds that thus were set. Whatever contradicted the eternal and immutable principles of natural law was utterly void and would bind no one.” 15
But though there was agreement on this, there was deep controversy over whether the natural laws were the commands of God or whether they were the dictates of an eternal reason, grounded on the being of God, and unalterable even by God himself. How were men to imagine, to materialize and make concrete the natural law which is above the Pope and the Kaiser and all mortals? As decrees of an omniscient and omnipotent heavenly king? Or as the principles of the nature of things? There were some who could not conceive of binding laws which had to be obeyed unless there was a lawgiver made in the image of the human lawgivers they had seen or heard about. There were others to whose capacity it was not necessary to condescend with quite that much materialization.
The crucial point, however, is not where the naturalists and supernaturalists disagreed. It is that they did agree that there was a valid law which, whether it was the commandment of God or the reason of things, was transcendent. They did agree that it was not something decided upon by certain men and then proclaimed by them. It was not someone’s fancy, someone’s prejudice, someone’s wish or rationalization, a psychological experience and no more. It is there objectively, not subjectively. It can be discovered. It has to be obeyed.
6. The Death of God
AS LONG, then, as both the philosopher and the theologian believe in the objective order, there can be accommodation about the degree and kind of materialization. The range and variety of men’s capacity to understand is very great. So, too, must be the range and variety of the images which condescend to their varying capacities. We can, therefore, avoid much misunderstanding if we do not confound the materialization — which is the mode of communicating belief — with the subject of the belief. For not until we go down under the comparatively superficial question of belief or unbelief, in any particular materialization, do we find the radical problems of belief and unbelief.
When Martin Buber speaks of “the great images of God fashioned by mankind,” 16 he recognizes that there can be many images, or indeed that there can be no image which has concreteness to our sense perceptions.
The critical question does not turn on whether men do or do not believe in an imagery. It turns on whether they believe that a man is able “to experience a reality absolutely independent of himself.” When Sartre, following Nietzsche, says that “God is dead,” the critical point is not that he refuses to believe in the existence, however attenuated, of an anthropomorphic God. There can be, indeed there is, great faith and deep religion without any concrete image of God. The radical unbelief lies underneath the metaphor of God’s death. It is in Sartre’s saying that “if I have done away with God the Father, someone is needed to invent values…life has no meaning a priori…it is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.” 17
With this, Sartre has done away not only with God the Father but with the recognition that beyond our private worlds there is a public world to which we belong. If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual “chooses” to “invent,” then we are outside the traditions of civility. We are back in the war of all men against all men. There is left no ground for accommodation among the varieties of men; nor is there in this proclamation of anarchy a will to find an accommodation.
And why, we may ask, is there among such modern philosophers as these no concern like that of their great predecessors, to find an accommodation? It is not only because they themselves have ceased to believe in the metaphors — in the sacred images. They have ceased to believe that behind the metaphors and the sacred images there is any kind of independent reality that can be known and must be recognized.
Thus they reject “the concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control,” which, as Bertrand Russell says, “has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness — the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte…and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.” 18
7. The Mandate of Heaven
AT THE end, then, the questions are how we conceive of ourselves and the public world beyond our private selves. Much depends upon the philosophers. For though they are not kings, they are, we may say, the teachers of the teachers. “In the history of Western governments,” says Francis G. Wilson 19 “the transitions of society can be marked by the changing character of the intellectuals,” who have served the government as lawyers, advisers, administrators, who have been teachers in the schools, who have been members of professions like medicine and theology. It is through them that doctrines are made to operate in practical affairs. And their doctrine, which they, themselves, have learned in the schools and universities, will have the shape and the reference and the direction which the prevailing philosophy gives it.
That is how and why philosophy and theology are the ultimate and decisive studies in which we engage. In them are defined the main characteristics of the images of man which will be acted upon in the arts and sciences of the epoch. The role of philosophers is rarely, no doubt, creative. But it is critical, in that they have a deciding influence in determining what may be believed, how it can be believed, and what cannot be believed. The philosophers, one might say, stand at the crossroads. While they may not cause the traffic to move, they can stop it and start it, they can direct it one way or the other.
I do not contend, though I hope, that the decline of Western society will be arrested if the teachers in our schools and universities come back to the great tradition of the public philosophy. But I do contend that the decline, which is already far advanced, cannot be arrested if the prevailing philosophers oppose this restoration and revival, if they impugn rather than support the validity of an order which is superior to the values that Sartre tells each man “to invent.”
What the prevailing philosophers say about religion is not itself, in Tillich’s terms, religion as an ultimate concern of worship and of love. But if the philosophers teach that religious experience is a purely psychological phenomenon, related to nothing beyond each man’s psychic condition, then they will give educated men a bad intellectual conscience if they have religious experiences. The philosophers cannot give them religion. But they can keep them away from it.
Philosophers play the same role in relation to the principles of the good society. These require, as we have seen, the mastery of human nature in the raw by an acquired rational second nature. In the literal sense, the principles of the good society must be unpopular until they have prevailed sufficiently to alter the popular impulses. For the popular impulses are opposed to public principles. These principles cannot be made to prevail if they are discredited, — if they are dismissed as superstition, as obscurantism, as meaningless metaphysics, as reactionary, as self-seeking rationalizations.
The public philosophy is in a large measure intellectually discredited among contemporary men. Because of that, what we may call the terms of discourse in public controversy are highly unfavorable to anyone who adheres to the public philosophy. The signs and seals of legitimacy, of rightness and of truth, have been taken over by men who reject, even when they are not the avowed adversaries of, the doctrine of constitutional democracy.
If the decline of the West under the misrule of the people is to be halted, it will be necessary to alter these terms of discourse. They are now set overwhelmingly against the credibility and against the rightness of the principles of the constitutional state; they are set in favor of the Jacobin conception of the emancipated and sovereign people. 20
I have been arguing, hopefully and wishfully, that it may be possible to alter the terms of discourse if a convincing demonstration can be made that the principles of the good society are not, in Sartre’s phrase, invented and chosen — that the conditions which must be met if there is to be a good society are there, outside our wishes, where they can be discovered by rational inquiry, and developed and adapted and refined by rational discussion.
If eventually this were demonstrated successfully, it would, I believe, rearm all those who are concerned with the anomy of our society, with its progressive barbarization, and with its descent into violence and tyranny. Amidst the quagmire of moral impressionism they would stand again on hard intellectual ground where there are significant objects that are given and are not merely projected, that are compelling and are not merely wished. Their hope would be re-established that there is a public world, sovereign above the infinite number of contradictory and competing private worlds. Without this certainty, their struggle must be unavailing.
As the defenders of civility, they cannot do without the signs and seals of legitimacy, of rightness and of truth. For it is a practical rule, well known to experienced men, that the relation is very close between our capacity to act at all and our conviction that the action we are taking is right. This does not mean, of course, that the action is necessarily right. What is necessary to continuous action is that it shall be believed to be right. Without that belief, most men will not have the energy and will to persevere in the action. Thus satanism, which prefers evil as such, is present in some men and perhaps potential in many. Yet, except in a condition of the profoundest hysteria, as in a lynching, satanism cannot be preached to multitudes. Even Hitler, who was enormously satanic and delighted in monstrous evil, did nevertheless need, it would seem, to be reassured that he was not only a great man but, in a mysterious way, a righteous one.
William Jennings Bryan once said that to be clad in the armor of righteousness will make the humblest citizen of all the land stronger than all the hosts of error. 21 That is not quite true. But the reason the humblest citizen is not stronger than the hosts of error is that the latter also are clad in an armor which they at least believe is the armor of righteousness. Had they not been issued the armor of righteousness, they would not, as a matter of fact, be a host at all. For political ideas acquire operative force in human affairs when, as we have seen, they acquire legitimacy, when they have the title of being right which binds men’s consciences. Then they possess, as the Confucian doctrine has it, “the mandate of heaven.”
In the crisis within the Western society, there is at issue now the mandate of heaven.