The Pope stands up for Truth where his predecessor stood against Communism

Pastoral visit in Poland - Eucharistic Celebration in Pilsudski Square (Warsaw)

What is truth?

Wikipedia article on truth

On Decadence

What else do you call it when an individual - or a society - acts against their own interests simply because it is entertaining, or it feels immediately gratifying? Newspapers trying to drive out Tony Blair because they want a new target for their columns. People indulging their personal whims, such as having babies in their fifties and sixties, because they feel an overwhelming urge to do it. It is odd, the selfishness of the Noughties. As I said in an earlier post, the selfishness of the Eighties is now anathematised, while we live currently in a Randian hell of social conduct, in which the idea that if everyone only follows their heart, we will all be happy, has conquered all. And the state chases around after the lives this ruins, desperately patching the unpatchable, trying to shore up its equally false principle that such choices make no actual difference to how our lives go. Some choices -- like bringing your children up in a marriage -- are wiser than others. And our hearts are not wise, individually or collectively, any more than our appetites, if freely indulged, will settle on a diet of celery, boiled rice and healthy living for all. We are stuck with our needs for wisdom and virtue. But these truths are too awkward to face. Decadence is the product of welfare living: the confidence that your actions have no meaningful consequences. That is an illusion that will be brutally shattered by the world eventually. Until then, we play with opinions and actions, as if who rules over us and how we choose to live were choices between flavours of ice cream and nothing more.

Tony Blair misses the point on animal terror

Tony Blair finally comes out against animal extremists now the case against the Darley Oak campaigners has been safely won. But while he is at least pointing in the right direction now, he still manages to miss the point. He said that these vicious fools were 'out of touch with public opinion', as if what they did would have been fine if more people thought that guinea pigs were people. That is to give up on truth altogether in favour of what is popular. It is utter moral insanity, and a sign of decadent thought in a civilisation far from health. He may be signing a petition, but he knows too many of his party's supporters are fond of animal rights claptrap -- Labour were elected in 1997 on a platform of ending animal experiments, after all. When people start talking about 'the tiny minority of animal rights activists' who stoop to violence, you know we are in as much trouble over this as over Islamist terror. As there, the point is not how many will act in this way, but how deep is the attachment to and justification for violence, and how wide the sea of support in which such vile people hide.

The Apprentice as a moral puzzle

Is it right to try to sell someone something? The Apprentice has in recent weeks done a lot to make people answer , 'yes'. But it isn't always so. We have a great suspicion of sellers. Why else do we want advertisement regulated? Why do we hate estate agents and used car salesmen? And yes, selling is an aggressive attempt by another to bend us to their will. It is more as well. If we step up to it, a sales conversation is a robust two-way encounter in which our understanding of how much we want a good or service negotiates with the seller's knowledge of how much he or she can afford to let it go for. Think of haggling in an Arab souk. In fact, you could argue that the absence of haggling in the West has made us go rather soft on the other side of selling. If we as buyers don't engage, prices don't reach the right level. Consider Adam Smith's famous comment about how we do not need the butcher or the baker to look to the common good but only their own to get meat and bread at a fair price. True enough, but I always think of a quote from Dickens. I think it is in David Copperfield. Dodie's lovely but scatterbrained wife is failing to learn how to keep house and he asks her if she would know how to ask for a leg of lamb or somesuch in the butchers. She giggles and tries to distract him with kisses and says, 'but he would know how to sell it to me, and isn't that enough?'. It isn't enough, because the price will be too high and not in the buyer's interest. You could say a price is always right: if someone chooses to pay it, then they are willing to accept it. But if they choose without the capacity to fully engage in the transaction, they are only half-choosing. This is the problem we have with selling, in the end. We worry that in many circumstances, the seller takes advantage of us. But it seems to me the answer is not to move further and further back: regulating the seller and conceding our lack of autonomous control. Freedom demands that we take on the responssibility to make choices for ourselves. That may mean we should not let sellers target children, but we must allow adults to engage in the game. If only because there is no other way to find a fair price than creating an army of canny consumers. In some ways we are very canny: Which? magazine buyers and so forth. But we need more emphasis on the importance of the buyer's role in any transaction. Caveat emptor is still the rule, and we need to prepare people for that task. After all, this transaction of buying and selling is a training ground for far more important transactions where the power of character is tested. Any human interaction, especially in business and in any area where someone wishes to persuade you into their corner, requires the same skills. Now eristic, combative dialogue which aims to win and persuade may not always be the best way to the truth as it is to the price, but it can do very well, as in law courts. It needs a grounding in the trivium: grammar, the exact use of language, dialectic, the ability to think and reason well, to be able to spot logical flaws, and rhetoric, the capacity to put a true, clear point over to another person. When we manage that we can go far. Where we fail, we are at the mercy of charlatans. And when we turn our back on discussion because we say that every viewpoint is the same, we weaken these abilities, just as our muscles atrophy when we give up on the gym. Engaging as a seller and buyer, of goods and services and also of ideas and values and concepts and projects, is central to the life of a free thinking individual. We retreat from it at our peril.

Norms or laws: which is worse?

In the last of his Reith lectures, Daniel Barenboim said something extraordinary, which nevertheless probably speaks to an idea deeply embedded in popular thought these days. He said there was noting worse than norms and a good society was not possible unless taboos were expunged.

Well, one can see where this comes from. A liberal democracy leaves people free to regulate their own lives, and social norms and taboos provide an informal constraint on that freedom. And yet, it seems to me a remarkable claim. Assent to norms and taboos provides group identity, for the Jews as much as anybody. At the least, one should say that norms are yet far better than social preferences being encoded into law, such that they cannot be escaped. Think of poor Abdul Rahman, sentenced to death for converting to Christianity in Afghanistan. A norm pushes one in a certain direction, but it cannot be enforced.

And if we wish to say (as Barenboim didn't), yes, norms are less bad than legal infringement on natural freedoms, but nevertheless we would be better without them altogether, do we really mean it? For one, such a policy is hard to enforce, normative emergence being natural to human groups, so that it will require extreme legal interventions in favour of re-education and the curtailment of speech and drift towards cutting back on those natural freedoms in the name of which the well-meant actions are taken. In the second place, to deny the value of norms is give up on wisdom as a useful source of human knowledge. The idea that life possesses traps for the unwary that those who have passed the same way can warn us against in advance, that this capacity can help us in situations where our own reason in insufficient, is longstanding and not lightly to be set aside. As a corollary, such a position may well drift from saying we each must try our own experiments and enjoy the consequences (which being so our family and friends would be duty bound to exercise normative pressure on us to conform to more reliable paths of action and only extreme legal penalties will prevent them) , to saying that we each must follow our impulses and yet all impulses are equal so whatever consequences follow the state must cushion us against. At that point our freedom and dignity are again eaten: what we choose makes no difference, or we feel that it does and must be treated as if it doesn't. This kind of doublethink is confusing at best, patronising and malign at worst, keeping its subjects in that childlike state which Aristotle thought no one could prefer, for all the pleasures of childhood, if the cost were the loss of the power to fashion one's own best life through reason. There is a hidden sense in such thinking of course that norms are all taboos of the most irrational kind, which is to say they bear no relation to consequences at all. This seems unlikely at the most cursory glance, considering where normative pressure is most brought to bear: in matters of sexual conduct, whose consequences can be lifelong and shattering.

Thirdly, it may be that norms are important for us to react against. After all, they are by definition not legally binding. They say, 'danger: keep off,' and as such warn away the merely curious. But this encourages the true adventurer. Going into the forbidden may be unwise, but the willingness to do so, knowing the risks and ready to bear the consequences, this is an act of true character and courage. And surely some norms are foolish, or have been kept up through mere empty tradition. We need adventurers to take on the risk of finding out for us. If they are wrong, we will see. If they are right, we can give up the norm and follow them. We find our freedom in seeing that we live in a world of guidelines, rather than rules. Better this than a world of strict law. Better this than a world of pure anarchy that offers us nothing to decide for or against, trapped in a solipsistic paradox of freedom that cuts us off from the wisdom of our fellow human beings, prisoners of the same nature but locked from us by the fear of the norm.

Finally, as in a recent post, to give up on norms is to give up on truth. It says there is no wisdom to be had, and therefore no room for debate. In a world of norms, people give me advice and I must then decide for myself: I argue my way along in life and learn to fight my own corner. Without norms, no advice is possible or permitted. No discussion is meaningful. And even retrospectively, I cannot learn from mistakes because the state has erected safety nets everywhere since it has prejudged that there can be no difference between my choices. In such an environment is it any surprise if some fools decide on a thirst for truth at any cost, and try to explode a hole in this world that so benevolently dispenses with the norm?

Doing for others

The selfishness you don't even admit to is the most deadly. People are all too ready to admit now of the Eighties' excesses. Yes, that Randian view that simply going for your own desires with full force will make everything work out is dangerous. Yet Adam Smith is still right that we do not need butchers who are saints to get food at a fair price. And as America has found, a constitution that does not require or assume goodness in its political appointees has considerably more lasting power than one that does.

It it the new selfishness that alarms me: the one that no one admits to. If the 80s shouted 'ME!' at the top of their voice, the nineties and the noughties whisper '(me me me me me)' in a far more insidious fashion. I call it 'doing for others'. Its core principle is that nothing you do that makes you feel virtuous and altruistic can be wrong, and that this emotion is what virtue is all about. Such first-person-centred, feeling-led charity has no room for unpleasant sacrifice or difficult choices: it is virtue-lite, favoured by dilettantes with no objection to using other people's lives like toys. The archetypical example is giving spare change to a beggar who then goes and dies of an ovedose purchased with your money. The more subtle example would be something like aid to an African nation that hollows out local capacity and entrenches corrupt elites so leaving it worse off than before.

What this 'moral selfishness' forgets is how hard it is to act even in our own best interests. The combination of arrogance and uncertainty in acting for others is perilous in the extreme. But no one seems to remember that old staple of conventional wisdom, 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions', or the cruel recurrence of unintended consequences. Here, the feeling of virtue justifies, or renders irrelevant, the actual consequences.

It is true that where people only attend to their own interests civil society falters. It is also true that when they use the suffering of others as a means to stroke their own conscience, regardless of the result, they partake in a form of egocentrism at least equally deadly. The best thing to do for another person is not necessarily (why should it be?) what makes us feel good about ourselves. All too often it will remind us of the limits of our power. I think of Wagner's Wotan, in Die Walkure, Act II: 'dem selbst muss der Freie sich schaffen -/Knechte erknet' ich mir nur!' (for the free man has to fashion himself-/serfs are all I can shape!).

Truth and Terror

We have given up on truth. Why else are we so frightened by people who hold dangerously false positions? We simply do not know how to handle islamofacists or animal rights terrorists because they are wrong and we have stuck ourselves with the view that there is no such thing. Views, we have liked to think, are like ice cream preferences -- a matter of pure taste, with no room for judgement. This is dangerous nonsense: it was Nietzsche who first used the word 'values' in place of virtue, with all its implicit sweeping away of judgement and natural law. In fact, what is swept away is rational discourse at all. If all answers to all decisions are equally valid, why waste time arguing in favour of one answer? We had hoped to build a cosily inclusive society this way, but have weakened ourselves terribly in the process. Worse, we have in some sense bred the terrorism that now faces us. For all our claims to democracy, if we create a multicultural, norm-free, values society, there is no place for truth and no place for debate. Then those movements with horribly wrong-headed ideas come along and they claim to be right. Yet no one will debate with them. 'Yes, that's fine: you think that,' we tell them. And they scream back, 'No! It's not a matter of opinion: it is true!' And we turn away in embarrassment, so they scream louder and louder and eventually pick up a broken bottle and rush us, since they can find no other way to engage. This is not the way to run a society. It is decadent. As Allan Bloom says at the beginning of 'The Closing of the American Mind', the basis of Western civilisation is that there is truth, but that people must assent to it for themselves and have the right to be wrong. This is a very different position, but far more robust. We should rediscover it, so there is a way to debate points of fact without explosives. Having come so far down the line, the worry is that we cannot retrieve our former position without great upheaval. But upheaval is coming, one way or another, invited by a disdainful attitude to truth.