Meaning Rules: Faust's Redemption - An essay in Philosophy

Morality has been squeezed out by pretensions to absolute knowledge. Claims to absolute knowledge of self-interest squeeze morality out of the personal world, claims to absolute knowledge of scientific laws out of the natural world. A knowledge that could read off self-interest and the laws of its operation as if they were inscribed on some presumed constitution of the world would give me all I need. The double squeeze reduces the world’s activity to all-maximising instrumental rationality.

Because of the extensive use infallibilist theories of truth have to make of the term, ‘absolute’ has become devalued. I therefore want to introduce a new term and speak of ‘metaphysical’ certainty whenever the absolute, absolute, absolute Certainty is meant which would make truth in a correspondence sense possible. To know with metaphysical certainty would be to have knowledge hard enough for total objectification. The truth claims held could then be said to mirror the projected reality.

If I could know my best interest with metaphysical certainty, and also know laws of bringing it about with metaphysical certainty, then nothing could, or should, stop me from doing my utmost to secure it. By giving myself less than possible, I would effectively be harming myself, and how could that be in my interest ?

Short of attacking the knowledge claims, no argument could convince a rational agent to care about an idea called morality – unless it should happen to coincide with self-interest. The question Why be moral ? is rendered unanswerable.

The infallibilist epistemology leaves only dishonest means of arguing for an honest cause: Morality, where it does not end as an empty threat, is blown up into a supercharged mystery.

Three ways of being amoral

It seems a distant memory now, but moral systems were once believed in. Not that the world was the better for it.

Whatever you may think about the egoists, because they calculate they tend to be calculable risks. Moralists need not be so harmless.

Under an infallibilist morality, the more religiously it is applied, the more disastrous the outcome.

Utilitarianism

That individual interest consists of X – Bentham said: psychic satisfaction – does not make maximising the societal sum total of X the self-evident goal of action. After all, why can’t I be Pharaoh and have everyone work to maximise my X ? So by setting the sum total as the target measure, an additional assumption has been slipped in.

And that extra assumption is a gruesome one: Utilitarianism is based on the largely unacknowledged axiom that individuals are bound by an unlimited duty to serve the collective interest.

The derivation is then as follows:

1) The only moral good is the collective interest.

2) The collective interest is equal to the greatest sum total of individual interest.

3) Individual interest (“utility”) consists of X.
(Bentham: pleasure, pleasure and pleasure; Mill: the means to pursue respectable middle class leisure activities; Others: various.)

Therefore: All actions are to maximise the sum total of X.

The doctrine’s collectivism could not have been disguised more cunningly than by defining the collective interest in terms of individual interest. But this recognition of individual interest is worth little, since Axiom One states that individuals must give way in every conflict they may have with the collective. In other words, the realisation of individual interest is seen as valuable only as far as it agrees with the collective interest. And the axiom cannot be dropped – without it to defeat my wish to be Pharaoh there would be no utilitarianism.

Take the following five characteristics of utilitarianism into account …

· Utilitarianism requires descriptions of individual need that can be written down, and preferably quantified. Such descriptions favour the tangible over the intangible. If you have ever been shopping in Eastern Europe before the Wall came down you will know what this means.

· Aggregating individual utility into a sum total is only possible if individuals are so many copies of a single universal type. Assuming that human needs conform to strictly universal laws, it is a logical ambition to leave their determination to a centralised agency (“Gosplan”). Assuming that individual needs are facts of nature, unchanging and fastened on with scientific certainty, a masterplan must seem the most efficient way of providing for them. If the people should prove less uniform than the resulting targets would have them, the standardised satisfaction meted out by centrally planned production will certainly make them more uniform.

· The laws according to which consequences are calculated must not only be reasonably held, but descriptively true of the universe. Reasonableness on any attractive account is a value-laden concept, which utilitarianism cannot assume without reneging on its claim as a moral foundation. Only when laws are known with metaphysical certainty can calculations be trusted irresponsibly. Nothing less is required than the deterministic laws of classical science, infallibly true of a clockwork universe. And since sociological laws or laws of historical development are far more relevant for moral conduct on a grand scale than physical laws, it is those a utilitarian would be most interested in. The doctrine exerts powerful pressure to look out for such laws, however inadequate they may be.
For Bentham, social engineering would not have been a metaphor. He really did think of society as one vast steam engine to be tinkered with in order to maximise a single technical parameter.

· A society run on utilitarian principles would have a massive problem with motivations. Why the idea of society’s unlimited right of disposal over the individual should appeal to those at the levers of power is clear enough. Quite why I, though, should wish to contribute anything to a collective intent on treating me as an expendable unit fully fungible with other expendable units is beyond me, and I presume beyond just about everybody else, too.

Since people are evidently unlikely to give up life, limb and property willingly when the utilitarian governor expects them to, force will come to be used.

· That maximising the collective sum total of utility should be consistent with human rights for all would be, at best, a happy accident. Sacrificing, as the Soviet leadership did, the upper peasant class (“Kulaks”) for the ostensible benefit of future proletarian generations would seem to be altogether more in keeping with the doctrine.

… and I think it would not be wrong to say that the most rigorous practitioner of utilitarianism the world has seen was one Joseph Stalin. (The only serious contender is Pol Pot.)

What counts about a doctrine is not how it sounds in the bland exposition by a well-meaning Englishman – J. S. Mill –, but what it would do in the heat of application, when the niceties are shorn off.

Kantianism

All obligations under utilitarianism derive from an unconditional duty to society. If these obligations are to be more than a pretext for bullying, they require an account of moral duties. To this we now turn.

In order to avoid the infallibilist squeeze, collapsing it to either self-interest or fact, morality was made out to be categorically and unbridgeably distinct from the one as well as the other. Yet by insulating morality so completely against self-interest and fact, philosophers also risked denying it any intelligible basis.

Moral Commandments must be obeyed. Why is that ? Because they are right. And what makes them right ? That they are right.

It is the hollowness of these duties coming out of nowhere that gives morality a bad name. And they are not only irritating, they are dangerous, resulting in obedience for obedience’s sake.

There is, as a matter of fact, nothing particularly moral about obeying allegedly true commandments, except for the coincidence that the observance has conventionally been tied to a belief in moral equality. The tie has usually come in the form of a criterion of generalisability – What would happen if everyone did it – or reciprocity – Do onto others as you would have done onto you.

The problem with this way of deriving commandments is that it leaves moral equality unargued for. An assumption of equality is already built into the procedure, so running the procedure does nothing to justify or explain it.

Why should all people be invited to join the negotiations for a social contract, and if all are invited, why on equal terms ? The real world rarely works that way, so why should we for deriving rules use criteria that imply that all be considered equally ?

What feeble gestures towards justification Kant does make come down to this: That humans are endowed with a funny capacity called reason (read: are created in the image of God) and therefore deserve moral equality (read: God loves all his children). Unless you believe the God story, this is very hard to swallow.

To justify the initial assumption of equality one would need nothing less than – a moral theory. By way of that, the only resource left to Western culture was Christianity. Without Christianity – or a new alternative – to back it up the equal worth of all would be only a fond figment of the humanitarian imagination.

So as we follow the trail of justification to its origin, we are sent back from something dowdy to something even dowdier: Utilitarianism presupposes Kantian duties, Kantian duties presuppose Christianity.

Kant’s imperatives are quite simply a throwback to the Ten Commandments. They were even weaker than the Ten Commandments, because they raised the suspicion that they themselves may be constructed without then facing up to it. Thin secularisation in the end only undermined morality. It lasted for Kant’s own lifetime but by the end of the nineteenth century the moral capital of Christianity was running out. We cannot even say that it had been squandered, it had simply been used up.

The Enlightenment was about getting away from something. Rightly so. But it had nowhere to come home to.

By the time the Nazis arrived on the scene, the Christian props were worm-eaten. They inherited the empty form of the moral commandment, egalitarian strings cut off. It became their moral mask.

The sort of moral certainties they as seekers of commandments could still arrive at were either too anemic to be any good – Serve your country, Keep your promises – , or too trivial – Do not kick your dog. A booklet full of these would be custom-made for an outfit like the SS. The commitment to moral equality, not least because it had been left unargued, fell away dutifully.

The appeal to true commandments had the same effect the correspondence theory has had generally: Conscientious people ended up obeying what the authorities said was true. The correspondence, which the theory says is to reality, has in practice almost always been to authority.

The conclusion has to be that the totalitarians’ amorality stemmed not so much from a lack of interest in morality, but rather from supermorality overreaching and then collapsing in on itself. It was the wrong morality but they were still using the best moral systems available at the time.

Capitalism

There was a third way. This deviant variation on utilitarianism is genuinely – and refreshingly – amoral. Here they do not give a toss for moral pieties. The infallibilist squeeze is ratified, the world de-moralised, instrumental rationality enthroned. Society, in the theoretical ideal at least, degenerates into to an atomised agglomeration of egoists who cannot be reasoned with. It is the ideology of capitalist economics.

The failure of Bentham’s model of the human as pleasure machine allowed modern economics to abandon cardinal utility scales, and with them the idea of a societal sum total. Having found that the comparability between individuals was less than perfect, they jumped to the ideologically convenient conclusion that there is no comparability at all: The technical issue of the interpersonal summability of utility translates into the assertion that it is unscientific, possibly meaningless, and definitely improper to speak of society having been improved by raising the standard of living of the poor at the expense of the rich. Economists shunted aside the uncompromising egalitarianism of Bentham’s vision to come within range of denying common humanity.

So whereas classical utilitarianism underpinned a statist paternalism more or less obnoxious depending on the rigour of the application, deviant utilitarianism underpins a more or less uncaring form of capitalism.

The difference to classical utilitarianism arises from a different approach to the epistemological problem of determining individual interest. The thought of universal prescription is given up, the assumption of infallibility shifted from the social plane down to the individual. Uniformity gives way to unfettered individuality. It is effectively assumed that people infallibly know what is good for them, and there can be no arguing with them about it. Individuals retreat into their shells, their preferences sacrosanct, not to be challenged by overtly moral appeals. We have arrived back at egoism.

The libertarian variant of utilitarianism can be unpleasant because it imposes an arbitrary ban on the language of social justice. It does not take much imagination to predict that where people are discouraged to even talk about injustice – which is what most economics textbooks implicitly do – not much is going to be done about it.

Although it presents a seriously foreshortened vision of life, giving the people who have the money what they say they want is still likely to do less damage than when some impose choices on all.

By being the least moral, capitalism managed – arguably – to be also the least intolerable. Or to put it another way, by being the least acceptable by an old standard, it managed to be the least unacceptable by a new emerging standard. But this only underlines the desperation of a situation in which all the available moralities worth the name were ultimately incompatible with what is called a free society.

All three ways of being amoral – Utilitarianism, Kantianism, Capitalism – fell victim to a vain quest for certainty. I want to put an end to the entire misguided quest. Learning from these failures, the sceptical morality to be put forward here is to elaborate on the paradox that the greatest moral certainty is uncertainty.

Truth, efficiency, synthesis

Implementation vs Creation

What is the nature of the problem posed by a disagreement in discussion –

implementation or creation ?

Defining disagreements as calling for the implementation of an existing truth, inevitably one’s own, implies the heroic assumption that those who disagree are at least informationally disadvantaged, if not downright intellectually inferior. And since that is a view unlikely to be shared on the other side, efforts of implementation by one party will immediately stimulate similar efforts by the opposition, leading to the bloody stalemate of trench warfare where no side can relent, but no side makes any progress, either.

In its baldest form, it would be hard still to find someone willing to defend the implementation view. In better disguised forms, however, the view is very much alive.

One form of defining the problem as implementation is to suppose that if a discussion finally ends in disagreement at least one of the participants must have been behaving less than rationally.

Since reconciling positions are extremely unlikely to arise spontaneously, to suppose that any rationally conducted discussion must lead to an agreed answer is in effect to suppose that all debatable questions already have answers.

We are to believe that the only cause of the failure to reach agreement is that a consensus position within the participants’ grasp is being wilfully resisted. To bring about agreement is to take no more than to rectify disturbances in the transmission of this true position. The belief in the resolving power of rational procedure is tantamount to a belief in the unreality of disagreements.

In a world in which discussions were guaranteed to end in agreement if only proper rational procedure were followed there would be no need of discussion. Instruction - ‘straightening out’ - would replace discussion. For if all questions of truth already had rationally identifiable answers, “discussion” could only serve to reaffirm the consensus.

The belief that dialogue must eventually lead to binding agreement is therefore a version of infallibilism.

And it is simply ludicrous to believe that disagreements as persistent as they are in the real world could be illusory, the result only of misunderstanding or misrepresentation. On the contrary, the beautifying and the vilifying effects of misrepresentation might be expected to cancel each other more or less out, leaving no overall effect. On anything domestic, people tend to disagree not because they misunderstand each other, but because they know the other position only too well.

It is only to be expected that the even best intentioned discussion will usually not end in agreement unless some creative, ‘synthesising’ leap is made.

The disagreements that can be clarified away and therefore brought to an end by good will on all sides are the trivial ones; all serious disagreements, if they can be resolved at all, require innovation.

No one has the answer. The answer has yet to be invented.

The whole point of having a discussion is to facilitate the production of clues leading to invention. Only cynics hold discussions for other reasons.

Any position needs committed champions to hold its own and develop. Fruitful discussion requires the most forceful statement possible of all participating positions. But attack and defence should be undertaken with a view to creation, not unchanged implementation.

Discussions are a device for soliciting sparks. The skill is in reading the pattern the sparks make when they fly.

The sparks are allowed to be emotionally charged. If agreement could only fail because of deviation from cool rationality, emotional inputs would be inadmissible. But since the rational is no more infallibly successful than the emotional, both ways of arguing are valid. In the sober register greater differentiation is possible, making for more exact clues; the temperamental registers have greater clarity about the basic issues to offer. And we can at least sometimes see in emotional eruptions the promise of a sober articulation. Yet the best arguments are still those that are maximally bold while causing minimal offence.

For infallibilists, who fancy themselves in possession of a truth others need only be made to see, discussions must seem a tedious struggle against ignorance. For anyone else, the discussion represents a process able to bring forth valuable information.

Efficiency

Nothing haunts infallibilists quite as much as the dazzling diversity of human opinion. Faced with disagreements that stubbornly persist in persisting they must feel threatened with losing the right to their claim of being in correspondence with reality. Their only hope of rescuing a truth that corresponds from all the opinions is to claim privileged access to reality for themselves. No wonder disagreements make them uneasy.

For individuals, the notion of epistemic privilege may have some plausibility; for groups is has next to none. As soon as groups of any size are concerned, there will be perceptive, informed and generally impressive individuals in each one of the groups. But then the assumption of roughly equal trustworthiness seems less forced than that of unilateral privilege.

On this principle, we would for example conclude that in spite of the claim to exclusive truth the different world religions have traditionally upheld, there is a roughly equal amount of truth (and error) to all of them.

What makes any exclusive claim suspicious is that the factions are mostly unable to give a good explanation of where the alleged superiority of their own position should come from. One example of a particularly bad explanation is the claim of divine revelation.

That I am right and the other party wrong – a heroic assumption unless I have put significantly more thought and effort into the matter than everybody else. But whatever the parties may say about each other, there is almost never hard evidence to suggest that techniques are more advanced, techniques are used more efficiently, or researchers are more competent on any one side. The expertise marshalled by individual parties might be markedly superior in specific areas – one side might be more proficient in economics, say, the other know more about emotional needs –, but almost never is the expertise of any one party superior across all areas of human competence.

So rather than accepting any of the conflicting self-reports, and thus allowing superiority of knowledge to be put down to magical causes, we might do better by letting the market decide, ie polling actual distributions. The closest thing to truth we have lies not in any section of opinion, it is the cross-section.

That there is more information, and in this sense also more truth, to be gained from observing the interplay of factions than the pronouncements of any one faction may be a truism, but one which can hardly be reconciled with that other truism, the correspondence theory. For philosophy, which could be defined as studying the interrelation of truisms, the result has some importance despite not being news.

Truth resides in the patterns in which agents claim truth, not the individual truth claims. Just as the the focal bit of information on any stock exchange is an aggregate of orders, the market price.

It is now time for me to come out and declare that I believe in something like an efficient market hypothesis for belief systems. In the same way that the actual market prices of stocks are almost always the best indicator of fair value, the actual distributions of belief systems are hard to fault.

If the market doesn’t back your bet, it can always be that the market is being irrationally exuberant or despondent, or is rigged, or what have you. But it can also be that your own attempt at beating the market was just not good enough.

And similarly, if your argument fails to win acceptance, it may be because the other side is venal, or blinkered, or what have you; it can also be that your argument is just not good enough.

Not that some predestined harmony makes the efficiency perfect. Far from it. Rules and context clearly shape the outcome, the winner in one setup could finish last in another. Suggestions of harmonious perfection – an invisible hand in Adam Smith’s metaphor – do little more than cover up existing distortions. While the valuations emerging in open exchange are definitely not incontrovertible, the point is that one would still be hard pressed to come up with more sensible ones. The alternative to polling all parties’ spin doctors is to fall prey to any one of them. Good in this world is in the nature of a least evil.

If you don’t like the actual distributions, don’t repeat your old theory – in a mature market, which is characterised by rapidly pricing in knowledge as it becomes available, almost certainly futile; don’t rant about the stupidity of the opposition –certainly futile; invent a better theory.

Although there may sometimes be room for quibbling about the meaning of ‘available’ – Are all the options fully articulated, optimally presented, distributed widely enough ? – once best efforts of distribution have been made, invention remains as invariably the hardest but also the only promising approach to shifting the existing balance.

We have no way of defining what a strong argument is except by saying that it will under normal circumstances win acceptance. If you therefore think that your argument is receiving less than its due, it is up to you to explain in what way circumstances are unusual. The allegation would deserve to be listened to, but also deserves the scepticism wisely reserved for special pleading. With every dispensation from the market verdict issued we are in danger of taking a step back in the direction of pandering to privilege.

Synthesis

The hard-headed conclusion to draw from a persistence of alternative positions is that none of them is even roughly satisfactory. Heroic assertion aside, the only hope for truth is a future synthesis.

When a number of positions have coexisted for a time, it begins to be very unlikely that any one side will ever convince the others. If there should ever be a position on which all, or more sides than earlier, can agree, it would have to be significantly different from all of the established positions. Only positions that cut across existing divisions have any chance of becoming the synthesis.

Talk of the partial truth of incompatible positions in fact only makes sense in anticipation of a synthesis handing all parts their due. The synthesis would have to be a rounded theory dealing rebuke and praise to each of the previous contenders, and to each in a different way.

Innovation may be the only realistic way of moving the average argument forward, but innovation can take a long time. Even if we should never come to revise our expectation that one answer is possible, the answer may be very far off, so far off in some cases as to be irrelevant for all but academic purposes.

Where the resolution of a disagreement could be centuries away, we must learn to live with disagreements for the meantime, reach an accommodation, find a modus vivendi. We are forever living in meantime.

Two broad cultures have grown up around the vagaries of meantime, one adversarial, one consensual.

The adversarial system accepts the persistence of contrary positions as a fact of life, and consequently makes no particular effort of bridging the gap. People profess not to be too bothered by the inconsistency of positions. Synthesis fades as an ambition. Everybody stops working towards a synthesis, making it even less likely that one will ever materialise. Where the possibility of a discursive resolution has been discounted, disagreements must be addressed on a non-discursive plane. The done thing is to talk small and smile.

Adversarially inclined cultures would in the education of their elites aim for a discipline that is – in a pinch – social, not intellectual. Debating would typically be seen as a sport, not an earnest exchange of convictions.

The strategy is one of containing disagreements, not the full-blooded attack on resolving them. And containment is certainly a valid objective. It buys time for a synthesis to emerge. It will not make things better, but it will also not make them worse.

The consensual approach, while it does occasionally lead to synthesis, far more often produces something that is rashly called a synthesis but in reality amounts to a horribly fudged compromise. Discouraging the unequivocal or even overblown statement of disagreements can actually hinder the growth of a synthesis, by suppressing potentially important clues.

The consensus strategy is serious about finding a synthesis, bringing more intellectual rigour, but making it also more socially abrasive. Its highlighting of inconsistencies means that disagreements are less easily forgotten. The done thing is to think big, mutter, and scowl.

With truth in a state of perpetual development, we have to negotiate where agreement is possible, and where separate ways are better for the moment. And more fundamentally, for which sort of questions a single answer is achievable, and for which the management of changing but never disappearing disagreements is the more realistic approach. The consensual and the adversarial strategy are two ways of erring on what is perhaps impossible to get right.

The longer an argument has resisted synthesis, the further afield the solution is likely to lie. The more obvious attempts are likely to have been made.

To find the clues pointing to a more radical departure, we may have to look in remote or exotic places, in reviled subcultures[*], in early drafts, subtle inflexions, the margins of texts, in revealing asides, throw-away remarks or vulgar jokes, in quarters close to the edge of science – which is more likely to be the fraying edge of a fabric than the cutting edge of a knife.

The search might take us several orders of evolutionary branching backwards. For if nothing is ever established with metaphysical finality, then nothing can ever be finally dismissed. History matters for remembering where a wrong turn might have been taken.

Part of what it means to be a synthesis is that it should make it easier to place and evaluate earlier positions, helping to identify their false starts as well as their successes. As on a day of judgement, the synthesis would retrospectively try to sort the partial truth from the partial falsehood in the previous competitors.

With the hindsight of a synthesis, we might thus be able to retrace the workings of the spirit much as Hegel might have envisaged it: Later proposals will not convince unless they can do something to explain the data presented by the past distributions of systems.

But no synthesis is ever complete, odd ends will fall by the wayside, giving rise to new contests. Every new agreement becomes a cause for new disagreements. Pluralism is irreducible and self-reproducing.

Because even a successful synthesis does not entail that a history of searching should have come to a metaphysically final end in truth, there can be no extrapolation, and hence only rudimentary foresight deriving from it. Compared to what Hegelian ambitions seem to imply, a synthesis can never be more than a ‘synthesis’.

The game goes on, even with shifted goalposts and half the players exchanged. Those same goalposts might then one day be shifted back the other way again and the grandchildren of the players recalled.

The arrival of a synthesis will never be entirely controllable. The shape it might take will only gradually become clearer, and not be entirely clear until it has arrived. Systematic searching can go only so far. Over and above the planful exertions remains an element which refuses to be forced, an element of what an earlier age might have called grace. While you can, indeed must, earn your way towards a synthesis, you do not earn the synthesis. It will bubble up inside you not when you, when it feels ready.

The invasion of the world by a new human product shows creation at work – no more, nor less, mysterious than at any other stage of the evolutionary process. To this essential openness, no teleological or otherwise deterministic view of history has anything comparable to offer. Expect plenty of surprises, confounding pessimists and optimists alike.

We have no certain way of knowing of how future generations will live, and what they will hold true.

Truth vs Argumentative Strength

There is an important distinction still to be made. Quotations on the public exchange of opinion are presumed efficient with respect to argumentative strength, not truth. Valuations are based on current information, and can be swung dramatically by new information – new theoretical inventions, new experiences, or the successful creation of new evidences. Argumentative strength does therefore not imply, as correspondence truth did, stability or convergence, ie stability in either the short or the long run.

There exists no guarantee, speculative or other, that the strongest argument currently available will always remain the strongest. Being the strongest argument today does not exclude the possibility that in a later period an argument to the contrary may emerge which is yet stronger. It always remains possible that the next favourite will contradict the earlier favourite. It always remains possible that the next move derails convergence. Nothing in the a priori could exclude it absolutely.

Even a long-standing consensus does not necessarily mean that a final plateau of truth has been reached. The consensus represents a natural limit only insofar as no longer being able to call on an organised body of dissenting opinion makes the generation of clues so much harder for the innovator.

Because of non-finality, argumentative strength does not carry the moral obligations of truth. It is never wrong to follow the truth. But it can be wrong, and not just a little wrong but wholly wrong, to follow the strongest argument.

This is not paradoxical since argumentative strength is in no sense absolute. As we found, a strongest argument is not necessarily the strongest for all times, it is only the strongest currently available. Argumentative strength is a thoroughly historical concept.

Assuming efficiency with respect only to relative argumentative strength does in no way commit one to accepting any of the currently available alternatives. It is perfectly consistent to believe that the currently available alternatives are rated fairly in relation to each other, and still think that they are all rubbish.

So even if we believed in the efficiency hypothesis enough to conclude that the majority position is actually the argumentatively strongest, we would not be forced to go along with it. Dissent from the currently strongest position is rational to the extent that it is plausible to expect a stronger opposing position to develop in due course.

Precisely because there is no guaranteed convergence is there also no moral obligation to obey convergent opinion. Participants on a market would be bemused if you told them that they were under an obligation to accept the prevailing assessment without question. Every day financial markets are open there are thousands of speculative traders who follow the trend, and also thousands who bet against it. Not one of them thinks the least of it.

The patterns of distribution we observe need to be interpreted. There is still an attitude to be taken towards the claim enjoying majority support.

We can expect argumentative strength to rise steadily over time, for much the same reasons that manufacturing productivity rises. People are not normally motivated to discard good tools for worse. So barring cataclysms, if the quality of arguments moves at all, it should move up.

Even though strength rises, there needs to be no continuity in the way it is achieved. Argumentative strength, again in contrast to correspondence truth, implies no continuity of content. A strong argument raises the hurdle for any later proposal but has no power to determine the principles on which they will operate.

Take steel for example. Once there may have been a trend towards ever larger steel plants, but in recent times minimills have come back. Probably the only consistent trend in steel making or any other technology with a longish history has been the rise in productivity. Argumentative strength can be thought of as an abstraction similar to productivity.

There are continuing threads. But none that could be relied on to go all the way.

Just as for productivity, no upper limit exists for argumentative strength. Whereas correspondence had a natural limit in perfect approximations to the truth, there is no limit in principle to the mental fitness of a meme. Every set of beliefs is constantly liable to be supplanted by a new set of unprecedented persuasive power.

The efficiency hypothesis makes for a picture of truth that is, for better or worse, much more democratic than the arrogant elitism fostered by the correspondence theory.

Efficiency is the rationale for holding popular elections – it is in fact hard to believe in democracy unless you also believe in a rough sort of efficiency of the public exchange of opinion; damage limitation the rationale for a bill of basic rights. By abiding by a bill of rights we insure against the majority ever going down a blind alley in the process of discovery.

And blind alleys are certainly possible. In the very long run, the arguments on both sides of a dialectical divide should improve in tandem. But there can be dramatic imbalances in the short, medium, and even fairly long term. The emphasis on correspondence snapshots – factual propositions like There are two apples on the plate – as prototypical of language might be one of the lopsides of Western thought. Why shouldn’t Let’s go count as a prototypical utterance ?

In a hopeful mood, we could thus see in free and fair elections something of a truth finding mechanism. To build a better democracy is to try and increase efficiency by removing whatever might be defined as a distortion of that process.

Peaceful competition under the law is usually more efficient, but this is only broadly and roughly the case. To establish and hold people to the terms of peaceful competition may require the use of armed force. Moreover, to the extent that people’s willingness to defend a position if necessary by force can be indicative of the strength of that position, militaristic competition has historically itself been a driver of efficiency. But the idea of deciding the worth of social systems in a virile struggle between nations died with wave after wave of conscripts on the mud fields of Flanders. The Great Butchery 1914-18 proved once more what war and political violence are almost all of the time: only a costlier route to the same stalemate that would have been reached in unarmed debate.

With respect to truth, the efficiency hypothesis must seem hopeless; with respect to argumentative strength it becomes at least interesting.

Hypothetical history

Some of the things I have to say in this section will to some ears sound apologetic, so in order to preempt any insinuations I have the following declaration of interest to make: I was born in Germany of German parents, and have lived most of my life there, which I suppose makes me of them.

Erosion

Suppose a transition were to take place from one theory of validity – an integrated account of factual correctness and moral rightness – to another, how would it happen ?

One would not be able to detect the linear fading of an old theory and the parallel phasing in of a new theory until after the transition were over. The new theory would not come into existence until the very end, and even the old theory would only reach full explicitness when it is about to be rejected. Both the old and the new theory are creations of hindsight, much as we infer after the successful analysis of an amalgam that the pure elements must have been there all along.

The critical stage in the transition would be marked by a process that could be described as the erosion of intermediate forms.

Pressure from the heterodox drives the orthodox towards ever more strenuous assertions of orthodoxy, pressure from the orthodox the heterodox towards ever bolder heterodoxy. With each side scampering for a stable position, the gap between them keeps widening. We witness a process of specieation by purification.

But the relation of orthodoxy to heterodoxy would not be symmetric. The orthodox are driven ever harder to the core of the still dominant theory, the heterodox ever more precariously towards the edge.

As more and more intermediate forms are either demolished or shown to lead to heterodoxy, the defenders of orthodoxy retreat into secondary primitivism: The thesis hardens into a position apparently primitive, but primitive in a way historical primitives never were.

It is worth keeping in mind that the doctrine of papal infallibility for designated teachings is not a survival from the Dark Ages, but was officially promulgated only in 1870. Similarly, on the Protestant side, nothing as inflexible as the scriptural literalism now current in fundamentalist circles existed before the late nineteenth century.

And until the heterodox manage to come up with an equally smashing alternative, the defenders of orthodoxy would be within their rights to hold out. No one could yet be certain that the orthodox position will soon be known as the old theory.

Their opponents, on the other hand, would be straining against old words to express new meanings. In the process they would find themselves saying things less and less acceptable by the standards of orthodoxy. Unable yet to free their minds of the grip of the dominant theory, their position would be weak, even in their own eyes. Their faltering stammer would be drowned out by the relentless repetition of orthodoxy.

The contest would be very uneven, a fledgling theory against an established theory at the consumptive height of its power. Outlying parts that were functioning well enough on their own had to contend against a cancerous core. It did not help them that they were modernising fast. The opponents of infallibilism, who had not yet been able to constitute their own pole, were arguing themselves into an abyss.

Supreme efficiency

Some exchanges of opinion are more efficient than others. So which was the most efficient ? In the years 1918 to 1933 there could have been little doubt. At a time when the “market” – a discussion group which best approximates to the ideal type of being through shared premises closed to the outside and uniform on the inside – was typically a nation state, the most lively was German.

Here are some reasons to think highly of efficiency in the Weimar republic (which is how this period of German political history has come to be known, named after the town where the constituent assembly convened):

The country was famously diverse, with crisscrossing cleavages e.g. between Catholics and Protestants, highlands and lowlands, outsized Prussia and the many smaller states, cities of government and cities of business, or the rather more feudal east and the more individualistic west. Thanks to a federal constitution the individuality of these subdivisions was well protected. Regionalism remained strong, Berlin never turned into an all-conquering capital. Diversity without crushing hegemony meant that many points of view had adequate access to the means of articulation. To the extent that diversity, when integrated, tends to correct for biases, this should increase confidence in the result.

The country’s governing classes were never fused into one homogeneous corps. There remained at least three identifiably separate strands, an old aristocratic-agrarian elite, a newer industrial-bureaucratic elite, and a brandnew republican-socialdemocratic elite. All three had the means of making themselves heard and felt. The absence of a clubby consensus just short of civil war meant that fewer variables were taken for granted.

There was a broad and varied spectrum of parties represented in parliament at all times, so broad that the political spectrum of many other countries could have been fitted into a subsection[†]. Breadth of choice should increase our confidence in the political process.

The population was educated, not only the elite but down to tradesmen and skilled factory workers. This ought to have improved their grasp of subtleties.

The press, and the publishing trade generally, was free, lively and diverse. Uncensored speech generally increases the reliability of discursive outcomes.

Civil society was rich and multi-layered. There were plenty of organisations for people to congregate outside the purview of the state. Good mediation should have improved the tone of the debate.

The republic was culturally vibrant, innovation rampant in the arts, its capital city one of the most exciting place to be at the time. Roaring with the twenties infused vitality into the mix. It suggests a society where people were alert to a wider than usual range of options.

The newborn state also inherited a strong academic tradition that was second to no other country’s. This again should have tended to raise the standard of the debate.

Attitudes to sexuality and the body were relaxed for the time. Less repression spelt more informed discourses.

As its people were perhaps too fond of observing, the country was geographically central in Europe, with many neighbours, and influences coming from all sides. And this at a time when Europe was in many ways still the hub of the world.

The Germany of the time was no colonial power. What insignificant colonies there were had been lost as part of the peace settlement. Its people thus had no occasion to indulge in self-flattering comparisons with overseas territories. They were, for better or worse, focused on Europe. The absence of bigger differences to the chosen peer group threw smaller differences into sharper relief. Postcolonialism might have increased the acuity of their self-knowledge.

Businesses were technologically advanced, leading globally in more than one industry. There can be no question of backward modes of production holding back consciousness.

In terms of economic structure, Weimar Germany was more than up to the standards of other European countries though possibly lagging behind the United States. But the lag in economic modernity, if and where it existed, was not serious enough to have made an appreciable impact on the rate of turnover of the public conversation.

Internal contradictions apart, the Weimar republic had its existence blighted throughout by the treachery of the Versailles treaty powers, who would not concede to it what they were quick to concede to Hitler. Real-political opportunism made the Western powers antagonise a good-natured democracy thereby contributing to its collapse, and in its wake appease a militaristic dictatorship, thereby contributing to its entrenchment. Their catastrophic blunder must count as a classic example of how foreign policy can do palpable damage to the national interest precisely because it fails to adhere to principles of natural justice and human rights. The harshness may have been understandable, the inconsistency was unforgivable. (It is no excuse to say that one thing led to another when the point of having principles in the first place is to prevent this from happening.)

External pressure made the expense of using second-rate systems harder to afford. The crisis brought a more accurate assessment of current realities bought at the price of a less accurate assessment of future potential. It was rather like a company slashing its research and development budget after a steep downturn in profits.

There was enough pressure to prod people into a rethink, but not the overwhelming pressure that would have led to an emergency shutdown of all non-essential functions. Fighting for naked survival they were only in the political rhetoric. They were not starving, they still had energies for politics.

Political upheaval puts old certainties up for question.

Social turmoil scrambles class based discourses.

A break of traditions removes inhibitions.

Failure necessitates new departures.

The repeated shocks of defeat in the first world war, the end of monarchic government, revolution on the streets, a coup successfully suppressed, military occupation of parts of the country, hyperinflation and prolonged depression brought about a sweeping deregulation, heightening the competition among belief systems. Probably not since Periclean Athens or revolutionary Paris has the Western world seen an ideological marketplace as fiercely competitive as the Weimar republic. Nowhere else where people as motivated by circumstances to reexamine their assumptions, or better equipped to do so. This is why I believe that no other laboratory provides as true a reflection of the relative argumentative strength of belief systems available at the time.

How infallibilism leads to totalitarianism

To claim truth under a correspondence theory is to claim a perfect match. Just about all the bad habits engendered by infallibilism flow from the fact that truth is reserved for the statement which locks into a supposed reality.

A theory of truth is only worth its keep if achieving truth under it is a practical possibility. Under the basic form of correspondence achieving truth entails claiming possession of a perfect match, under the more guarded forms it entails claiming to be on track for straight-line convergence.

Whenever possession is not claimed for either the present or a future already discounted as inevitable, correspondence truth threatens to slip away into a maze of hedges or recede into the distance, to finally disappear into the unknowable.

The correspondence theory will therefore encourage uncritical minds, minds under pressure, to claim truth indiscriminately, and lead critical, leisurely minds to despair of truth.

A match is only a match if it is final. Since a correspondence claim of truth entails finality, we could not admit a mistake without undermining future claims of truth. And if we did possess a truth corresponding to some objective structure of reality, it would be morally wrong to deviate from it. It would be wrong to learn.

Since discussion could only threaten claims of finality, we would have every reason to be impatient with nagging doubters. If the truth we had were the Truth, it would be morally wrong to compromise. A compromise could only result in an adulteration of the Truth.

The correspondence theory makes it appear as though the only interesting degree of confidence were absolute certainty. Because the stakes are so high – either absolute certainty or nothing – any debate about whether a correspondence obtains is going to be shrill.

Infallibilist truth is indivisible: there can be only one perfect match. If I am perfectly right, and you think differently, then you must be perfectly wrong. A truth that has a reality to correspond to cannot be spread among parties, it must necessarily be the monopoly of one party. Compromise by sharing out parts is all but impossible.

If the truth we knew were the Truth, we could have no use for toleration. And toleration has in fact never come easily. The civil wars which ravaged Europe in the seventeenth century (The Thirty Years War, among others) were at least ostensibly fought over religious truth, and probably more vicious for it. Toleration was usually only acceded to in a state of acute exhaustion, when more pragmatic concerns took over.

There is no surer way of antagonising your opposites than by claiming some sort of election. One tribe’s claim of epistemic privilege will galvanise its own opposition into action. Seeing the inevitability of a violent struggle, we would be well-advised to think highly of it.

Under the auspices of a correspondence theory, agreement must be considered the normal state. There would be no truth otherwise. By creating unanimity we would be protecting our right to claim truth. We would have a strong preference for homogeneity over diversity. We would have a strong motive to suppress dissent. We would have a motive for ethnic cleansing.

Correspondence truth only effectively exists if we possess it. Possessing it, the only thing left to do is to implement it.

As deliberation could only call into question our right of claiming truth, we would want to cut deliberation short. We would want to see only decisive action.

Knowing the Truth, the only right thing is to obey it. Hence military-style discipline.

For unity of purpose during the implementation process, we would want a strong leader.

Transcendental reality, if it existed, could only be tidy. If our image of it is to be equally tidy, it better coalesce in a single mind, that of our leader.

When it comes to implementation, it would be wrong not to call on the most powerful agency available: government.

Thinking in terms of implementing finished truths, we could only be baffled by the elaborate procedures, the extensive consultation, and the drawn-out bargaining of parliamentary government. The Truth has no reason to respect checks and balances.

If demanded by the Truth, it would be wrong to leave rights unviolated.

If the truth we knew were the Truth, it would be morally imperative to bring as large a tract of territory as possible under its jurisdiction.

If error were Error, the right thing is to annihilate it. Error must be chased from the face of the earth. In chasing, it would be wrong to stop short of conquering the world. And since the world is not going to submit voluntarily we must assemble an army strong enough to subdue the planet, and later the universe.

Fascism could be interpreted as a way of taking the correspondence theory of validity literally. Fascists believe that underneath the squabbles of the parties true answers already exist, that the true answers are there to be grasped in one bold stroke, that all competition between positions could be made to disappear right now.

What has been called the opportunism of fascist doctrine may only be a consequence of the difficulty of squaring the correspondence ideal of reality with reality as it is. Conning themselves that choices are unnecessary while still facing the same dilemmas as everyone else renders their choices highly volatile. Belief in a magical cure gave choices over to the whim of accidental factors.

For correspondence theorists, the idea of the social construction of knowledge is anathema. The spectacle of several competing bodies of claims, each systematically informed by the social position and/or cultural background of the claimants, makes any claim of epistemic privilege look so highly implausible that it is bound to lead to what they call relativism, the complete loss of the right to claim truth in a correspondence sense.

Fascists respond by attempting to spirit away the socially or culturally conditioned diversity of opinion into something alleged to be nature. Only in nature can they still hope to find the unchanging essences necessary to support unchanging truths.

The less radical fascisms attempt to avert the appearance of social construction by essentialising current preconceptions about the nation, the state, the family, the army, the church. The nation becomes the homogenous community of the epistemically elect.

But borders shift, and citizenship is conferred, making the nation still too much of a social construct. A more consistent solution would be to opt for ethnicity; most consistent is what nationalsocialism does, by opting for a substratum that must appear untrumpably biological: race.

And again, the less radical fascisms arrive at corporatism with its taxonomy of professions by essentialising occupational functions so that they can be neatly labelled and slotted into a grid. The more radical nationalsocialism wants nothing less than a synthesis of all sectional interests into the common good of a community free of conflict.

On the question of why the Jews I cannot contribute much. It is not rare for a group assigned marginal status to become associated with minority strands of thought. Jews were associated – partly in reality and much more so in the public’s imagination – with internationalism, economic values, and the intelligentsia, all three enough to stir the antipathies of infallibilist doctrinaires. (Nazispeak for this tangle of their best-hated ideas: Kulturbolschewismus, or Culturally Bolshevist.)

Economic thinking is in general corrosive of the absolute. Where everything has potentially a price, everything can be traded off against something else. Hitler, in contrast to Marxists, was consequently anything but an economist. In his economics, if one can call it that, the unrelenting stress on Lebensraum implies that economic prosperity is thought to depend on the number of acres ploughed.

Capital and markets stand for fluid contractual relations between people, which are impossible to explain in terms of stable essences. And there is no more blatant social construction than money. If the monetary language is intelligible without corresponding, why should ordinary language have to correspond ? – The trade of the money lender, having in the Middle Ages offended the infallibilism of the Church, now offended nationalsocialism’s much purer infallibilism.

In a system based on nations, a transnational minority like the Jewish people stood out as odd. They could easily become identified with the counterprinciple to nationalism. Yet so banal a form of internationalism as trade could already seem threatening to the infallibilist: Merchants, not in the colonial context where they might have a monopoly charter and gunboats to call on, but merchants engaged in trade between nations on a roughly equal level of economic development, when they are small stallholders on a big foreign market, are unlikely to do well unless they work up some respect, however grudging, for their customers and their ways of doing things. Contempt would lead to bad service, and bad service usually does not sell. This is significant despite the many ifs because as soon as you sincerely believe in the approximately equal validity of two or more ways of living are you lost to infallibilism.

The realism of high theory is always questionable. As a formalism takes on a life of its own, it must begin to look more and more like an imaginative construction of the human mind. The Nazis may have disliked the theory of relativity for more reasons than that its author was a Jew. They very much preferred the applied, the militarily useful sciences with their hands-on realism.

Last but not least, the movement’s primitivism could be certain to find some of its most caustic critics among left-leaning intellectuals, including a substantial contingent of Jews. So given the tendency to essentialise, and the inevitability of a dualistic struggle, settling on antisemitism was perhaps not too far-fetched.

The fascists’ belief in instant synthesis is easily ridiculed. But in ridiculing it, you should also concede that without some such belief the correspondence metaphysics cannot take off.

The infallibilist system can produce tolerable results, but only when it is driven gingerly. It can then just about handle the evidential sophistication of the ordinary criminal law case, the court room being the roost of the common sense realist.

Driving it softly, we would cease to expect ever to make contact with reality, and begin to use the idea of absolutely independent reality, against the system architects’ intention, as an ethical ideal guiding truth-related action.

To sustain this attitude, the system has to be kept suspended in mid-belief. Users would have to be simple-minded enough to believe in absolute reality, and level-headed enough not to claim to be in touch with it quite yet. They would have to carefully steer between the extremes of defiance and the extremes of despair, between epistemic exceptionalism and all-out relativism.

Because of the delicacy of the operation, the common sense in common sense realism is a fair-weather creed. In a spiritual emergency, when urgency makes you drive it hard, the system is guaranteed to let you down. The common sense improvisation on the theme of realism, lacking a theoretical spine of its own, will collapse.

Driven hard, the infallibilist system leaves only the options of heroic assertion in the face of diversity, or relativistic despair. Common sense realists will either be paralysed or, more likely, retreat to such parochial truths as they can still muster.

What right have principles whose effects are tolerable only when they are applied in muddled and half-hearted ways ? – For it to be a good policy not to push a system to its logical conclusion, the system must indeed be diabolically bad.

The infallibilist system was undeniably primitive, but nothing if not robust. It got humanity through the better part of five millennia.

The opposition had no theory sturdy enough to oppose it with, nothing that could have held its own in the unforgiving competition of the public arena. Alternatives were coming into being in academic circles, and more temperate versions lingered on in the private atmosphere of family homes, but none of them would have passed muster next to the correspondence theory, with its strikingly simple image of truth as a photographic copy of independent reality.

Those who think that they can get by without philosophical theory will simply end up being ruled by an alien theory.

Counterintuitive consequences

The erosion process has the curious effect of making the old theory for a brief historical moment appear stronger and stronger at the very time that it approaches its end. Only an advanced intellectual culture could give rise to secondary primitivism. The primitivism of the reaction is in direct proportion to the vigour with which intermediate forms have been cleared away. In the most advanced surroundings we would see reactionaries in full swing, and progressives in disarray.

The consequences can seem counterintuitive. Tendencies that do not belong together suddenly appear to be correlated. The 1920s and 30s were strange times, when all were groping in the dark, and hardly anyone came to lie with a natural bedfellow.

It was unnatural that one was running a greater risk of going wrong by being honest about which theoretical constructions will not work, by striving for consistency, by following the argument to wherever it leads, than by being intellectually lazy and sloppy. When the dominant theory deteriorates it becomes an advantage to be brought up well and then remain as unthinking as possible.

That what is supported by the strongest rational grounds is morally desirable is in part true by definition. We only award the label ‘rational’ to behaviour we in some way approve of. If crime were a sustainable way of organising societies, it would not be called by a derogatory name.

But as soon as we stop judging positions by their desirability directly, and start using autonomous criteria which are expected to further desirable outcomes only in a long run average, it becomes at least theoretically possible that rationality and desirability should diverge, and even diverge drastically. The weightings of argumentative strength we record need not agree with what anyone with any humanity might like to find. We may have to conclude that the worst conceivable outcome is delivered by the conceivably best process.

It was unnatural that some of the most exciting of recent writers – Bergson, Heidegger, Nietzsche – could come to be seen as the court philosophers of fascism. What made them exciting, their lack of illusion about what kind of philosophy had a future, also made them easier to mistake. So it was that progressive philosophy became associated with regressive politics. No one’s moral philosophy was as clear-sighted as Nietzsche’s. Yet it lends itself to use by any willing fascist.

Announcements of an entirely new philosophy are something of running joke in the history of the subject. What actually happened was that the system was being stripped bare. They never tipped the pot, only succeeded in boiling the stew down to something ever stronger.

It began with Descartes who pretended to be a radical sceptic but whose scepticism was geared towards the production of cheap certainties. Having doubted the existence of the external world and much else, he went on to prove, of all things, the existence of God.

And culminated in Nietzsche, whose barbs hit home with devastating effect, but who never got around to fusing his aphoristic fragments into something constructive and solid. He even sneered at systems, which only meant that he left his contemporaries caught up in a bad system.

It was unnatural that some of the most energetic intellectuals should have advocated political arrangements that, if realised, would soon enough have taken away their freedom of speech. The freedom to speak, which means more to dealers in ideas than any other group, had its least inadequate basis in beliefs those same intellectuals would have had to find repugnant.

It was unnatural that the most modern form of government, the bourgeois republic, should appear old and tired. As the philosophical bases of liberalism were mostly located in intermediate forms – new testament theology, the philosophy of natural law, enlightenment ideals – they were among the first to be eroded away. That a younger doctrine would always be more humane became something of the opposite of the truth.

It was unnatural that the anything but modern Catholic church should in some instances become the last defender of the achievements of modernity. The church itself had not greatly changed, it had only been outflanked by even more rabid forms of illiberalism.

It was unnatural that material greed could appear less threatening than idealistic zeal. The warping effect arose because greed was less laden with infallibilist theory.

The great transition is not only a hypothesis. I claim that it happened. Its critical stage was played out most memorably in the Weimar republic, ending in Hitler’s ascension to power.

The Classic Case

For a first quantitative approximation to argumentative strength, we look at market share. General election results have the unique advantage of providing quantitative data on the political mood of very large samples.

This makes more sense in the case of Weimar Germany, where the electoral system was one of near pure proportional representation, than it would under e.g. first-past-the-post. Proportional representation does not force voters into tactical voting, or smaller parties to lose themselves in a larger alliance. Party formation is as free as possible, the reflection of voting intentions as straight as possible. Whatever it may do to the stability of governments, from the pollster’s point of view proportional representation is ideal.

The attempt to derive truth weightings from election results is not quite as naïve as it may seem.

We have no particular reason to believe that any one segment of society is uniquely disinterested. But if no segment can rightfully claim to possess a metaphysically pure truth – a standard against which everybody else’s view could be shown up to be tarnished by sectional interest –, then it makes more sense to think of sociologically patterned biases innocently, as arising from different experiences, different sets of evidence. Universalised cynicism thus allows innocence a cautious comeback.

Parties present competing proposals for organising society. The democratic process, though massively imperfect, is quite probably the most reliable method of evaluating such proposals yet devised. Taking into account the black market of gossip and rumour as well as the official media the public exchange of opinion can be relied on to retain some of its efficiency under all but the nastiest regimes.

The exchange might be expected to be most efficient for questions everybody must have an opinion on. The perennials of philosophy fall into this category. All people must have some idea of what they are going to do with their lives, and how, in other words a concept of morality, as well as some idea of whom they are going to believe, and why, in other words a concept of truth. Somewhere down the line these philosophical assumptions translate, in a two-way process, into fundamental ideological orientations, which again everyone must have.

So what happened in the Weimar republic ?

As one might expect under infallibilism, the political spectrum was organised from the extremes, with an evacuation of centre which accelerated until it had become a void.

Emblematic of the fate of Weimar democracy was the decline of the one party unequivocally committed to it in ideology, the left-liberal DDP. Its share of the vote fell on a downward trend from a euphoric 18.5% at the first election to about 1% at the last (for its successor organisation). There is reason to think that the poll returns, dramatic as they are, still understate the weakness of liberalism, in that the decline of the liberal parties’ electoral fortunes occurred in spite of their moving ever farther to the right, away from classic liberal positions.

With little ideological strength to sustain them, the left-liberal party was perpetually liable to become a hanger-on of the left, and the other, right-liberal party a hanger-on of the right. Their inability to sell a compromise was astonishing. With every major agreement for which they shared government responsibility, another part of their clientele would feel offended, and break away. Lacking the unity of a strong ideological vision, the liberal parties deteriorated into special interest groups for narrow segments of the middle class. The rise later of special interest splinter parties which were to cannibalise the liberal vote only made apparent what had been happening earlier.

That the only alternative to orthodox infallibilism the liberal democratic forces had at their disposal was some form of relativism perhaps explains their strange paralysis in the face of rising Nazism. The heterodox were perpetually on the brink of doubting the justice of their own position.

Relativism cannot properly be called a theory of truth, just as fatalism cannot be called the theory of morality, they are both rather the result of despairing of infallibilist theory. And despair is evidently not the right frame of mind to take up a firm stance against anything.

To survive, a liberal democracy must have a state doctrine. (It not only needs a hard ideological core, but as a self-consciously designed form of government needs it more urgently that any other.) Not as harsh and inflexible as the state doctrine of a communist one-party state, but a state doctrine nonetheless that is firmly held, and ruthlessly defended where it has to. It must at minimum compel all forces to behave in a way that is compatible with pluralism. In Weimar Germany, it was not the doctrine, but the absence of one that rose to the level of conspicuousness.

As the argument drew to a close, liberalism had been all but wiped out. The weakest of the competitors had been eliminated.

Socialdemocracy, on the centre left, was ideologically an awkwardly restrained communism. Their commitment to the republic did not flow from the inner logic of their position, but rather in resistance to that logic. They were republicans as revisionists, reluctant revolutionaries. The anti-republican logic of revolutionary socialism was expressed so much more clearly by the communist party.

The difference between the way in which the socialist parties were reasonably successful in integrating the working strata and the way in which the liberal parties struggled to integrate the middle strata seems insufficiently accounted for by any observably greater homogeneity of ‘the working class’ over ‘the middle class’. The cause could therefore be surmised to lie in greater ideological coherence. The socialists had a wealth of theory to draw on, not least Marxism. Since in modern societies there is usually more than one plausible way of carving up the population into classes, there is certainly room for ideological strength to partially determine the making of classes.

Coherence facilitated unity. The socialdemocratic party, having split over the war, was reunited soon afterwards. The liberal parties, despite many attempts, never managed to unite. Socialdemocracy was thus in a somewhat better, but still far from good position to make a stand.

They remained faithful to the republic to the end. The socialdemocrats were the only party – the communist party having already been declared illegal – to vote against the Enabling Act that set the seal on Hitler’s dismantling of the Weimar constitution. They paid a heavy price in the concentration camps. Yet there was something limp about their bravery.

It is significant that the only party of the non-socialist centre that remained relatively stable throughout should have been sustained by a non-political ideology, Catholicism.

There is nothing inherently attractive about Catholic infallibilism. The cruder refining techniques of an earlier age resulted in a less pure, and therefore less potent product. That the adulterated stuff was still around may have been lucky in this case, but would not normally be a cause for celebration. Administering a lesser dose is not the way to fight a poison. And sure enough, when it came to it, the centre party’s resistance to Hitler was none too stiff.

The organisational form the Roman Catholic hierarchy had assumed since the counterreformation was not very different from the messianic command structure of a Führerstaat. Compared to the Catholic vision, Nazism was only a more convincing realisation of infallibilism because relieved of the restraining baggage of tradition.

What is anti-infallibilist about the former monopoly church is the largely ineffable, rests more in the surrounding sentiments than formulated official doctrine. Alongside a belief in their own election, say, subsisted a more compassionate belief in equality and universality. Which aspect would win, hatred of the descendants of those accused of killing the true messiah, or love of fellow humans, was always dicey.

That the world of Catholicism in the pockets where it survived could seem positively progressive compared to the bestialities the Nazis were committing by very modern means is an argument only against Nazism, not an argument in favour of Catholicism.

As for the antidemocratically inclined parties, the ideological veneer of the conservative right was so thin that it is hard to describe it as anything other than a glorified special interest coalition, harking back to feudal privilege. The impossibility of their position can be judged from the fact that conservative intellectuals had started to toy with the oxymoronic concept of a ‘conservative revolution’.

Their record was, with rare exceptions, one of obstructionism. Fancying that they could co-opt the Nazi movement, they eased Hitler into power, only to be themselves co-opted.

All the while, the extremes were growing stronger. As for the choice between the two totalitarianisms, communism was the weaker of the two.

The teleology of utilitarianism presupposes the deontology of Kantianism, making it weaker. The communists were also held back by their adulation of science, which made them rather too modern, and by their pseudo-Christian humanism. There was no Marx with do-gooding intentions behind Nazism.

That the Soviet empire lasted more than five times as long as Hitler’s millennial Reich – 70 years compared to 12 – does at least suggest that communism was somewhat less impracticable than nationalsocialism, ie less infallibilist.

But the Communists, although they were in opposition to the Nazis, could be counted as tactical supporters of the republic at best.

In the end the country was swamped by nationalsocialism. It is of course hard to compare the poll returns for a party that rose meteorically within three years from next to nothing to close to 40% and may have slumped again with the steadier figures for the other parties. But it does seem fair to say that the Nazi party, and with it the Nazi ideology, has shown itself as strong or stronger than any of the other Weimar parties. It was – after the socialdemocrats in the somewhat anomalous elections to the constituent assembly – the only party in Weimar’s electoral history to top 30%, and did even this decisively.

Even allowing for the effects of non-voting behaviour – previous non-voters coming in, previous voters abstaining –, if one party alone can move from a negligible share to an absolute majority in some areas, voter mobility must have been considerable. It would seem that at least a third, or perhaps even half, of the electorate must have changed its voting mind at one point or another during the republic’s 15 year existence. If so, sociological determination cannot have been all that strong. The extent of mobility is another reason to admire the efficiency of Weimar democracy.

The Nazi support has often been said to have been disproportionately young, lower-middle class, and Protestant.

Independently of class, nationalsocialism probably attracted a high proportion of those who were hardest hit, and had therefore most reason to question their previous assumptions. As arguably the most violently shaken class in a violently shaken nation the German petite bourgeoisie made obvious game.

It is not too hard to see why nationalsocialism could have appealed to young people, whose belief in the workability of a pure metaphysics was not tempered by contrary experience, not burdened yet with the scruples of middle age. The susceptibility of the young to fascism was in fact only another reflection on the inability of their elders to articulate the truth of those tempering experiences in a teachable theory. The only tempering they had to offer was a muddle, eclectic and hence inconsistent.

That Catholicism seems to have had a far greater integrative potential than either Protestantism or common Christianity might have more reasons than just the peculiar minority status of Catholics in Protestant Prussia. To the extent that Protestantism is more individualistic, it is something of a halfway house between Catholicism and secular modernity.

Secularisation was far advanced in Weimar times, especially among the leading and educated, the nominally Protestant classes. The textual criticism of biblical sources that did so much to call literal faith into question had after all originated in Germany. The Nazis’ flirtations with pagan forms of worship were only possible because the credibility of Christianity as well as the Enlightenment religion of reason had been so comprehensively reduced. Weimar Germany was one country where a whole people had come close to facing the fact that Christianity is too quaint to explain morality to the modern world.

The average shares in the two elections in 1932, in round numbers, were as follows[‡]:

Nationalsocialist workers’ party: 35%

Communist party: 15.5%

DNVP (national-conservative): 7%

Centre party (bourgeois-catholic): 15%

Socialdemocratic party: 21%

Combined liberal remains: 2.5%

On the back of this totalitarian majority, and anti-democratic majority within sight of two-thirds, Hitler was able to assume power by (almost) constitutional means. Liberal democracy, unable to win in passionate but still orderly debate, could only be reestablished by military force.

Radicalisation, the questioning of a system as a whole, is not the inevitable outcome of shocks. Shocks could just as well lead to people rallying round, pulling together. And even granted that a majority was disaffected and eager for change, why should they have turned to the Nazi party ? There were any number of fringe ideologies available, so why was nationalsocialism selected ?

Hitler in his formative years was an outsider not bound by the written or unwritten consensus which virtually any membership context enforces. The only effective constraint on his development was the symbolic logic of belief systems. A failed artist, a tramp, impecuniary as he was, he could not have been freer to dream up a shape that fitted. His sociological position was, in some respects, not unlike mine.

Nationalsocialism was obviously not true in a detailed sense. Such are the ideas of infallible certainty and correspondence that whenever they are examined in any detail they run into intractable problems.

But it was true in a visionary sense, true to some of the deepest metaphysical prejudices of the age. Herein lies perhaps the secret of Hitler’s undoubted charisma, the quasi-religious air of the Nazi movement generally, and the subliminal, creeping character of their appeal.

Nationalsocialism was the latest, purest, least encumbered, most radical, most perfect realisation of an ancient and dying paradigm. It was therefore both, modern and not, atavistic as well as futuristic. A re-formation, the energetic return to basic convictions. It was the final push.

The pattern carries over into the resistance to Hitler’s regime. There were socialdemocrats and communists; mavericks striking out on their own accord; churchmen; youngsters; and old-school conservatives. These were already few, but there was practically no one among them who could have been called a ‘liberal’, by any stretch of the imagination.

It makes for a schizophrenic sense of national pride: a nation which evinced the greatest intellectual courage at the worst possible moment in history to all but destroy the old Europe, to all but destroy itself and to all but destroy a people with which it had until then had a relationship both sides had occasionally allowed themselves to think of as special. The very language of the East European Jewry, Yiddish, was a close cousin to German.

Accepting Nazism may seem an overstrung exhibition of intellectual courage. But earning knowledge means taking risks. The risk of getting entangled, and being drawn on. There is no obvious point at which to cut off the risk taking. Every failure still leaves one with a choice of whether to try harder, try something wilder still, or give up. We could interpret the stab-in-the-back ploy (a staple of right-wing propaganda, alleging that the first world war was lost by the revolutionary government betraying the front, not Allied tanks breaking through) as the expression of a nation bitterly blaming itself for failure, and resolving to try harder. Although failure to win an expansionist war is of course not the best of reasons to be depressed.

Paradigms are only paradigms because they do not logically lead on to their successors. It seems to be almost a requirement to get lost on the journey. And if going wildly astray is indeed an occupational hazard of trying to make progress, it is not clear that those who never fail for lack of trying are morally more admirable.

This is taking the leap that the Nazis were in their own way trying as honestly as anyone else. It was only sixty years ago. I do not believe they were a different race of people.

However, that does not mean that I would not fight them today. There isn’t always time to sort out differences. And even if there were time, the opponent does not always give one a chance.

If we believe the Weimar verdict, and there are very good reasons for doing so, we must conclude that it would not have been irrational to vote for the Nazi party, and may even have been more rational than to support the republic. On the basis of the knowledge available at the time something very much like nationalsocialism, though not necessarily nationalsocialism with Hitler’s characteristics, might have been the strongest available political position.

If for some extra-philosophical reason you happened to be looking for a new beginning when the alternatives were infallibilism, strained versions of infallibilism, and mental cramp, where would you have turned ?

Methodology

To avoid flagrant misunderstandings, a few methodological remarks are in order:

I am not advocating what could be called ideological determinism. I do not want to claim that ideas are the sole, or invariably the crucial, determinant of history. I do in particular not intend to make a claim about the direction of causation. My preferred image of the relation between ideas and material productions is that of cross-fertilising technologies that may sometimes develop at cross-purposes.

I like to think of textually captured ideas as the articulate end of movements which also have other manifestations, social and economic, emotional and aesthetic. For the historian, textual documents have the advantage of being easily traceable. And because language is such a highly differentiated medium, they have the even greater advantage of being the documents which are most nuanced and settled in meaning. They have the disadvantage that people can more easily lie with words than any other way.

What I actually mean to say is nothing more controversial than that philosophies, or operating systems for brains as one might call them, are particularly important pieces of technology. Important because they go into determining the uses to which the other capabilities are put.

Philosophy does not produce eternal truths; philosophy provides the disposable service of a superannuable technology. Like operating systems, philosophies should ideally be robust, flexible, powerful, resilient, and user-friendly.

Philosophical systems can be put to many and even contradictory uses, just as many different applications can be run under an operating system, but they tend to support some rather better than others. It is these performance constraints that go into determining the course of events. Under an infallibilist operating system, authoritarian and especially totalitarian applications outperform liberal applications. Only with the shift to a new operating system could the superiority of liberal programmes become apparent. When the infallibilist system is put into overdrive, it can come to such non-obvious uses of productive capacities as the building of death camps.

The metaphorical apparatus of operating systems and the like has the advantage of not carrying any presumption of unchangability. Categories such as supposed psychological constants of human nature seem too coarse to be useful in explaining phenomena like totalitarianism. Until we have experienced life in a community which confidently uses an entirely different system, we cannot know how large a part of the totalitarian tendency was due to the infallibilist operating system.

Its focus on the general shapes of philosophy means that the approach has more to say about structural possibilities than timing, more about extreme than mundane behaviour, and relatively more about behaviour heavy on theory. The approach has thus something to say about political terrorists, and very little about tax consultants or professional football players.

If there is no such thing as society, then in that sense there is no such thing as an individual, either. Individuals are at most points in their lives only the unconscious executors of belief systems they themselves have not developed. The brain-based software may be a human production, but usually only small pieces are the individual’s own production. Most of the pieces are collective, cultural productions.

It would be naïve to expect the casually interested to be able to go beyond assumptions those dedicated to thinking have not been able to overcome. Amateurs may perhaps venture beyond tentatively and randomly, but not consistently and decisively. It therefore seems a safe bet that when no conceptual alternatives are recognised by the philosophers of an age, none will be available to laypersons, either.

What I hope to have traced in the philosophical corpus are the limits of articulation, in the belief that these are also the limits of action. My one worry is that the result, by turning modern history into one long morality play, somehow seems too comfortable to be true.

Counterfactuals

That the outcome was nationalsocialism seems to have had a lot more to do with the perfections than the often alleged deficiencies of Weimar democracy, and nothing at all with a depravity of some hypothesised German national character. Had the competition been as sharp as in Weimar, liberalism would have been competed into the ground anywhere. Where it survived, it must be suspected that it had inefficiencies to thank.

In other words, I want to let events in what I take to be the most competitive environment suggest the following generalisation:

Between about 1910 and 1940 we can observe, in Europe and countries of European settlement, an inverse correlation between the openness of political debates and the “liberalness” of the outcome. The correlation is not an iron law, but to me it seems as neat as anything to be found in the confusion that is history. And although the term ‘totalitarianism’, lumping together fascisms and communism, is an essentially polemical creation, the polarity liberalism vs totalitarianism seems apt in this case. (This is of course philosophical history, not historians’ history. The evidence I give does frankly not prove my case. Rather, what I would like to do is propose the interpretative framework for a historical research programme which I hope will find takers.)

The main barriers protecting liberal freedoms took the form of – in a single provocative phrase, with due excuses – cultural isolation in the United States, artificial restraints in Britain, and provinciality in a number a smaller countries. What saved them was never having been put to the test with sufficient brutality. As for France, it would take an ardent patriot to maintain that what happened under Pétain demonstrated immunity to fascism.

Had the ground been prepared by the right shocks, then even England – the country which has often been portrayed and liked to portray itself as magnificently immune to totalitarian impulses – might have succumbed. Do not underestimate the wonders even a single invasion and brief occupation, much what Napoleon did in Prussia, could have worked; especially if reinforced by a severe economic crisis some time later, or indeed anything else that might have shattered a complacent belief in the superiority of the English national tradition, and deprived the English of the luxury of leaving what they thought was well enough alone. The totalitarianism could then easily have been homegrown. Wimpish Fabians might have been diehard communists, or Mosley, the aspiring British fascist, more of a success. One only has to go back to the time of Cromwell to see that the English once did have a talent for ideologically inspired radicalism. Would it really have taken so much to stir this talent back into life ?

In the first part of the twentieth century, nearly all attempts of building new democracies failed. Where recognisably liberal institutions survived, they survived because they could be rolled over and thus avoid coming up for a review they would in all likelihood not have passed. The inertia of tradition tided them over liberalism’s most vulnerable phase.

Other countries had the luck to stage a revolution at a time when the liberal ideals still commanded enthusiasm. In the United Kingdom, in the United States, and – more problematically – in France, the antitotalitarian rudiments of the rule of law, a separation of powers, and accountable government were established early on, and then disturbed seldom enough to become encrusted. These achievements became incorporated into the national self-image, the story of the struggle a cherished part of the collective memory.

By the time Germany was unified in 1871, or Russia had its several revolutions, it was too late; someone like Locke could no longer have inspired even a revolt. Russia and Germany had the misfortune of arguing it out at a time when the most likely outcome was totalitarianism. Given the state of intellectual arts, the premises of the October Revolution were not far-fetched; given the premises, something like Stalinism was probably the most forcefully arguable position. Both countries ended up putting enormous resources to all the wrong ends.

At the low ebb, the typical response, and instinctively right response, of liberals everywhere was to compartmentalise their thinking, not look too hard, repress when necessary, and generally get on with the more practical things that had to be done. It was, however, only a second-best response. Evading because they could only have lost in a direct confrontation left them exposed to the very dark forces - dark is what these forces had to look like - they were trying to evade. They had no choice but to lie low, wait, and pray for it to pass, or the American tanks to arrive.

The typical argumentative strategy employed by liberals everywhere consisted of postulating an intuitive certainty, and then hoping that no one would object. This of course only works with people who are inclined to agree anyway.

The way some English commentators had of preening themselves on their good sense and aversion to theorising might be interpreted as a response to a situation where all the options available in the realm of grand theory were in the final analysis incompatible with what the English used to call liberty, and Americans call freedom. But because common sense, the hallowed term of this way of thinking, is only another word for benign muddleheadedness, it is ill-prepared to meet any sustained theoretical onslaught.

The only powerful arguments the liberals could look to were arguments for capitalism rather than democracy. Though capitalism and democracy go together, they are not quite the same thing. Capitalism alone has a tendency to degenerate into a brute conservatism, which is unlikely to appeal to more than the richest 10 per cent of the population.

Looking back, it seems right that modern democracy should have developed largely on the margins, on the off-shore island of Britain, in the faraway American colonies, behind Dutch dikes, down under in Australasia, on the Nordic fringe, in the mountain fortress of Switzerland.

A new paradigm takes a long time catching up before it can overtake. Until it has drawn level in strength, it has little choice but to hide on a backwater. Only a competitively dull environment is able to tolerate the eccentricity out of which something entirely new might grow.

Almost by necessity, really new developments acquire their justification only after the fact. There would not be much development if it only went along lines people could imagine, let alone project, in advance. The medieval barons who made up the original parliament would have had great difficulty imagining the modern institution at Westminster, notwithstanding the superficial continuity.

And until successful experiments have created abundant evidence, until the development has acquired a solid track record and a theoretical justification to go with it does it remain vulnerable to a backlash.

Rights and Religion

In 1925, shortly after Hitler had made his first appearance on the German political scene, the United States held the socalled Scopes trial, in which a teacher was charged under a state law proscribing the teaching of the theory of organic evolution in publicly funded schools. This is how they operated in the same moral-theoretical vacuum on the other side of the Atlantic.

We have seen how the Enlightenment discourse of rights – epitomised by Kant for Central Europe, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man for France – was but a secular shadow of Christian beliefs, and so had to shadow the continuing decline of Christianity, even hastening it by the very precedent of their existence. Superficial impressions bear out the point. The dependence of rights on religion perhaps explains how it is that the one country in which, of all Western countries, rights talk is most prominent in the political language should also be so very religious, at least in some quarters.

The concept of equal inalienable rights has from independence downwards been central to politics as practised in the United States of America. And if America was on the whole a more liveable place than continental Europe in the 1930s then to the extent that this exact concept could be made to stick, as it rarely could for southern blacks. Yet in terms of cultural resources, equal rights in their more expansive sense were backed by little more than the ill-defined enthusiasms that continued to emanate from the new testament.

Unless you believe in the creation, or at least still feel the mental habits of believing after you no longer literally do so, it is hard to hold the truths announced to the world in the American Declaration of Independence to be self-evident. Early in the twentieth century these habits had begun wearing so thin that upholding them called for such unabashedly desperate measures as banning the teaching of good science.

We may, to a degree, take the creationists at their word when they claim to be defending the basis of the American constitution, or even more broadly, the American way of life. It was an appallingly poor basis, but if anything more effectual had been available, it would probably have been found. Or so the efficiency hypothesis suggests, crediting people with the ability to hit on the least inadequate way of expressing their meaning at their disposal.

The fervour of the attackers suggests that the theory of evolution was not attacked for its own sake, but for the sake of a metaphysical framework the acceptance of evolution would have rendered practically indefensible – the conglomerate of divine creation; the human species’ separateness from nature; dualism or the soul as a non-material substance; reason as discontinuous with the capacities of animals; the person as in some recesses impervious to causality; and individual responsibility as uninfluenced by social setting. Sad to say, but this threadbare package was probably the best philosophical underpinning political liberalism could rely on, at least until after the second world war.

Beliefs associated with traditional religion were not unreasonably thought necessary to justify rights as anything other than codifications of might. The evolution debate was thus about morality, not fossils. The heat it continues to generate to the present day would be inexplicable otherwise.

We could similarly speculate that materialism – the programme of explaining events in terms of natural causes – was resisted because of the determinism is was thought to entail. What alarmed was again not the science itself, but the perceived threat to free will, the bearing on morality.

That no amount of rehearsing the biological arguments has ever moved a creationist does therefore not make a mockery of the efficiency hypothesis. Conceived narrowly as a myth of origins, the evolutionary story is miles ahead of the biblical account. But remember that the competition is best thought to be at the level of belief systems, not individual theories.

The morality of science hawks was utilitarianism. The doves, as so often, came closer to truth, and got there, as so often again, by way of a blatant fudge: They advocated a division of labour between the authority of science over facts and the authority of the churches and others over values, based on the questionable proposition that science could produce value-free facts and somehow still leave room for morality.

People have every right tenaciously to defend their old ways of speaking and thinking until either they themselves or someone else supplies them with a way they find acceptably better. When traditional ways do not fall into disuse, it is most likely because they still have a use which no modern alternative has adequately replaced yet.

If mechanistic science with presumably a utilitarian morality were to be pitted against a vaguely Christian worldview, the distribution of merit would not nearly be as clear-cut as over narrowly biological matters. Every belief system has its weak spots, has positions its users would gladly abandon but are forced to defend in order to maintain the integrity of the whole. Concede these strategic points, and your opposition will go for the kill. At the forlorn position of anti-evolutionism, rights talkers had to dig in. Viewed in this perspective, creationism will seem less irrational than it otherwise might.

That religion has not withered away in the way some nineteenth-century partisans of science expected may be due to the fact that the scientific enterprise has not met at least one of the traditional functions of religion: The scientific enterprise has been enormously successful in the sphere of facts, more disruptive than successful in the moral sphere, and has failed completely to integrate the spheres of fact and value into a comprehensive vision of the world. We might hazard the prediction that if secular philosophy were to relieve the churches of their authority over values as completely as science has already relieved them of their authority over facts, then traditional religion is going to start withering again. The vast majority of church leavers would probably be absorbed by a mainstream secular in all but trappings, a handful of hardliners might go all the way to the extremist fringe, and perhaps ultimately to terrorism. The prediction goes as far as we can towards opening the efficiency hypothesis to testing and falsification.

Democracy may have held up in America, but there were contradictions. It increasingly required the support of a diffuse Christianity that was determined to remain unphilosophical, e.g. in the form of literalism. For if theology ever became sophisticated, it would have run into the same antinomies as secular philosophy.

The American republic never lived up to its promise for almost the first two hundred years of its existence. Not until the Civil Rights movement did the gap between declaration and reality shrink to less than laughable proportions, with Christianity serving both the cause of slavery and liberation.

The framers of the constitution were great pragmatists, but they had lacked a theoretical structure into which their piecemeal efforts could have fitted with any coherence. The salient features of their brain child – the separation of powers, checks and balances, neutrality between religious sects, free speech and enterprise, a strong constitutional court to guard fundamental rights, elaborate procedural guarantees of fair trial and appeal – really only make sense as measures of coping with a fallibility more radical than perhaps they could have stomached.

That people in what was one of the most democratic countries on earth should on the philosophical front have been reduced to defending creationism and other absurdities of the same order shows just how fragile supports were. The arrant nonsense of these views made them suitable only for a minority, but they may represent what the majority would have had to think had it been forced to.

We democrats were always travelling on extremely thin ice. In the thirties, the ice broke.

In the absence of sound theoretical underpinnings liberal democracy might have been thought to work in practise, but even that was not evident at the time. The Great Depression was not exactly an advertisement for capitalism and, by implication, liberal democracy. In the interwar years democracy thus only had a limited practical, and no theoretical justification to speak of. The very fact that people kept trying other things suggests this much.

The liberal polity was built on the flimsiest notions, the crudest sentimentalities, the blandest professions. You may not have noticed. If you failed to notice, it was perhaps better that way. You have been mercifully spared a torment.

Central section

Totalitarianism may have been defeated as a purely secular ideology; in the form of religious fundamentalism it is still with us – predominantly Protestant in the US, Islamic elsewhere.

Civil society cannot afford to let the ideas of religion and morality drift into the exclusive preserve of cultural extremists. Control, even partial, over the associated emotions of guilt, shame and awe hands those who exercise it considerable, sometimes life-wrecking, power. These symbols are too critical not to be reclaimed, and to be reclaimed without compromise.

What we need is to take another look at the religious and mystical literature in order to import in a rational reconstruction the insights that have not yet found a secular equivalent. The liberal clergy have not the means to do it, serving as they will in the end only a watered-down and artificially sweetened brand of fundamentalism; analytical philosophy – the philosophy practised at most English speaking university departments – has not the guts.

I am fully prepared to contest ownership of the sacred texts, in the name of a godfree tradition. To meet and beat the fundamentalists on their own turf. Their job as caretakers of religious ideas has largely been done. It is now time for them to retire, and time for us to take the critical spirit which animates the best of science and the humanities into the value sphere also.

Attack on instrumental rationality

Where the infatuation with certainty had applied a two-way squeeze, accepting fallibility brings release in two ways: There exist no descriptions of self-interest, and no scientific laws, true in a correspondence sense. Fallibility is the breach through which morality enters.

The egoism of rational choice theory is implicitly infallibilist, assuming true knowledge of the right preferences, beyond sceptical reproach. What has the instrumentally rational agent got to say in answer to the sceptical challenge: You seem to think and act on the assumption that X is in your best interest, but how can you be so sure ? Is the way you are pursuing what you are pursuing – happiness or whatever else it may be – all things considered the best for you ? Are you really able to describe the ‘it’ you are after ?

Knowing what would “genuinely” be in one’s self-interest is not a trivial task. Catching something as elusive as happiness cannot be easy when already profiling it – knowing what it would take to be happy – is far from an easy art. If it were so simple, we should see more “happy” people.

Rationality transcends the instrumental, becomes “reason”, inasmuch as it recognises the fallibility of its own choosing of ends – what economists nowadays call preferences. Once you accept that you could be radically mistaken in some of your preferences or even most, naïve self-interest maximisation is no longer possible.

To cure yourself of a religiously strong belief in self-interest maximisation imagine that in your life you arrived at an existential turn, where what mattered before ceases to matter, or begins to matter in a completely different way. Confront the possibility of coming to admit to yourself that basic assumptions according to which you have lived your life were wrong-headed. That you could see the need for a “conversion” – a turnaround in personal priorities of close to 180 degrees. That the supposedly rational choices you made were crap.

This is the breaking point of egoism, it takes only a little sceptical imagination to make it collapse. Egoism fails because it fails epistemically. And kills by distortion people’s capacity for outgrowing themselves.

Human definitions of life interests – their answer to: What matters ? – vary enormously, and quite independently of levels of income at that. Apart from the very few screamingly out of their minds, I am inclined to think that they all have a point.

The endless variety substantiates fallibility by making it seem highly unlikely that a definition of self-interest as some sort of objectifiable fact could be given. Self-interest is not a fact of nature. Nothing about it is certain in the requisite metaphysical sense.

The following remarks want to sow some doubts about interests more frequently said to be undeniable and hence universal – a list of things you do not have to do in order to feel that you have done yourself justice:

Staying alive is not an undeniable interest. I find it hard to dismiss all those who have taken their own lives as deluded. And what is more, knowing something worth dying for, or at least worth incurring the risk of death, is a not unenviable position to be in.

Longevity is not. ‘Live hard, die young’ does not seem an irrational motto to me. Neither does ‘Liberty or Death’.

Absence of pain is not. The classic counterexample to any simplicities on this front is consensual sado-masochism.

Safety is not. People have courted danger.

Wealth is not. Fortunes have been given away. It is at any rate far from obvious that the career plan of saints – renouncing financial wealth to throw yourself wholeheartedly into charitable activism – should lead to less satisfying lives than the conventional guarding of monetary interests. St Francis followed that path, and yet seems to have been very much content with his lot. Much the same applies to creative types. For a modern day example, consider Wittgenstein, who signed away enormous wealth, and seems never to have regretted it.

Propagating one’s genes is not. One can have a perfectly good life without leaving children behind (or nephews and nieces).

Status is not. Leadership tends to be a bargain between the leaders and the led. While those at the very bottom mostly do get a raw deal, it is not always obvious that being at the top is preferable to being some way further down.

Power is not. Surely gratifying, but when no one around you tells you the truth anymore ?

Success is not. The word can mean anything to anyone. What, in any case, would winning change ?

Being healthy might, having friends might, being loved, and perhaps loving itself might. But no proper definition of “real” love – as opposed to smothering or possessive –, “real” friendship – of what makes a relationship sound – or “real” health – especially mental or psychological – seems possible without reference to a normative theory.

That pleasure is an undeniable self-interest is either tautologous – made true by defining ‘pleasure’ as the optimal state to be in – or false. Pleasure in the abstract singular is anyway a highly dubious construct. As for individual pleasures, one man’s pleasure is another woman’s horror.

Because it is so hard to find things that have not been renounced by people not obviously deluded – if not even wealth qualifies, and what could be less ambiguously an asset than money ? – modern economics has, in a break with the older utilitarian school, retreated from postulating universal desirables.

The only remaining candidate with some plausibility as a “natural” self-interest, at least in the Western context, was voluntariness. Having given up universality for first order preferences, they clung to a second order preference. Voluntariness means not a preference for getting a specific X, but one for specifying what you get yourself. It ranges from the negative freedom of not having anything done to you against your will over choosing for yourself rather than having choices made for you to the positive freedom of getting what you want.

But the preference for voluntariness is again not undeniable. Only if I could be infallibly certain of my present view of my own self-interest would not having my own way be unequivocally wrong for me. If, on the other hand, my knowledge of my own interest is radically fallible, not getting what I want is only probably bad, not automatically bad. It is in principle open to me to welcome any opposition to my desires as a suggestion of desiring otherwise. The ideal state of affairs for infallibilists would be never to encounter resistance to their will. The ideal for the fallibilist to encounter only interesting resistance.

And again, having an easy life, as free as possible from resistance to your will, is not an undeniable self-interest. (Self-)Education would not be education if it never attempted to reshape what it found. If you want to learn, seek out adversity. For if you don’t, you will probably only repeat what you already know.

To be engaged in something mildly interesting – a very elastic concept ! What jobs are worth doing well ? One thing is clear: Tasks that are not hard are unlikely to fascinate. And why does one have to be occupied ? Are not contemplation, and lazing, also ideals worth pursuing ?

Self-interest can lie both ways – in the order provided by submitting to the discipline of an institution, or the freedom of remaining outside. Do you buy a proven model off the peg, or do you design your own ? Compared to a boring concern only with self a life of service could intrigue.

The probability that the consequences of what you have committed to are against your interest rises sharply with the roughness of coercion, along the spectrum from friendly suggestion to forceful imposition, physical violence, torture, and killing there will soon come a point where it is beyond reasonable doubt that to make this experience is against your interest, but at no point would – just to be perverse – metaphysical certainty set in. That there is practically nothing that has not been renounced voluntarily by sane people, and there is a slippery slope towards the involuntary, leaves nothing axiomatic enough to found a principled egoism. Without infallibilism, no ethical egoism.

While conforming is not obviously inferior to wanting to stand out, being paternalistically looked after not obviously inferior to having to fend for yourself, surrendering control not obviously inferior to being in charge, there is one good reason to think that the choice between voluntariness and involuntariness is unequal, namely that knowledge of myself is not symmetrically distributed. I presumably know myself better than anybody else, and so have a better chance of knowing what is good for me than anybody else. (No one else has spent as much time with me, I have access, partially exclusive, to the richest body of evidence, so for someone else still to arrive at better-founded conclusions either this someone else must be impressively perceptive or I must have made a real mess of self-interpretation.) In this asymmetry rests the moral case for individualism.

Human interest is not something to be known with metaphysical objectivity. It has to be explored. Still the best test of discovering someone’s interest is to ask them for what they want, talk to them about it, and argue with them about it. Outside of these clashes self-interest does not exist.

Even if there exists no transculturally self-evident, no historically or even biographically stable definition of self-interest, motives existed for desiring one. Western economics wanted self-interest to be a natural given so that it could claim to be a positivistic science; orthodox Marxism, so that it could avoid a feedback loop from the superstructure into the base. Both were served well by the Benthamite concept of utility.

When we observe the economists observing us, whose interest in stable preferences is stronger – ours or theirs ?

Fallible self-interest and fallible morality thus become one, which only expresses that I have a responsibility for myself as well as for others. Neither of these responsibilities can claim to be the representation of an objectifiably true self-interest or an objectifiably true moral duty. And so neither of these two has a superior claim in the a priori, considered apart from situations and experience. As the tradition has it – Love your neighbour as you love yourself.

There will still be myriads of dilemmas between a narrower and a more generous course, but no big, fundamental question of Why be moral rather than simply self-interested ? Morality could not be reduced to self-interest because the reducing concept would have no more substance than it.

What is conventionally called a self-interest need not accord with a deeper sense of self-interest, nor need it disagree with morality; what is conventionally called moral need not accord with a deeper sense of morality, nor need it disagree with self-interest.

Words like ‘selfish’ and ‘altruistic’ can be misleading because they deliver description and evaluation rolled into one. The connection is nowhere near as simple as they suggest by equating self-directedness with moral wrong, other-directness with moral right.

I am not denying that selfishness can be beastly. But altruism alone does no more guarantee a desirable outcome than do good intentions.

Nor do I want to deny that altruism is often moral in the sense of praiseworthy, although praiseworthiness has its own problems: Because individuals differ, it need not be hypocrisy to praise in others what you would never do yourself. The idea of a necessary congruence between doing and praising, and the implied idea of a single society-wide scale of right action, are incompatible with more than perfunctory freedom of the individual. They deny people the right to make their own mistakes. They lead back to collectivism.

The question of praiseworthiness belongs with the individual. The false essences of what ‘is’ praiseworthy, of what stands where on an unaccountable scale, are better operationalised to considerations of what to praise, encourage, which initiatives to support, which to resist.

To give another example of how actions, not essences, matter: The issue is not whether people ‘are’ responsible or ‘have’ free wills, but whether and where holding them responsible makes for a sensible social arrangement. Determinism is a non-issue. We always knew that we had to respect regularities, in people’s as much as in particle behaviour. It is just that none of the known regularities are hard enough for total objectification.

I have lost so many words over self-interest because Kant was not alone among moral philosophers in the Christian tradition in having a hang-up about self; he was rather typical.

Running scared of the infallibilist squeeze, moralists were out to find something equally absolute with which to oppose a self-interest known with metaphysical certainty. So altruism, for instance, could not be left to mean what it is pragmatically taken to mean, but had to become a metaphysical caricature of itself. Being considerate, being generous was no longer enough, to qualify the motives of an action had to be proven to be absolutely devoid of self, had to be certified as saintly, as godly even. The notorious adverb – ‘absolutely’ – gives away the infallibilist preoccupations.

And so Kant wrote gushing paeans to a sense of duty so preternaturally pure that it defies belief. The altogether fictional character of this sense of duty is apparent, to have a chance of coming close would require the seamless internalisation of commandments willed by a supernatural being.

In this confusion, self-mortification could be proffered as proof of ethical stature, could the kind of altruism that results in martyrs harming themselves draw rapturous applause, irrespective of the cause, the aim, the purpose.

While the honesty with which contrite Christians scrutinise their self-explanations is to be commended, their obsession with self still causes them to miss the point. Actions are not morally right because they are in some recondite sense selfless, but because they make sense.

It is wholly irrelevant for ethics whether or not the altruism of human action is ever absolutely unimpeachable. The surface altruisms people display day in day out are quite sufficient. Whether these actions can, or cannot, in all cases be traced to some ultimately selfish motive must be one of the deadest dead ends of the ethics debate; it is simply uninteresting.

To impress me with your moral standards, do not try to convince me that you are being unselfish. Your protestations will meet only cynicism. (Not literally boundless cynicism, but stronger candidates than you have failed to plump the boundary.) Convince me instead that want you are about – doing or planning to do – makes eminent sense. For you, for me, for the people affected. Then I might praise and perhaps one day support you.

As concerns altruism generally, I might very well want to do something for you, but I do not like to be badgered into it, and I especially do not like being exploited under the banner of some supposed moral obligation.

What matters is not the spurious opposition between some ultimate morality and ultimate self-interest, but whether the interests pursued, which may or may not involve other people, are meaningful.

To be moral is to act in full awareness of the (epistemological) difficulties of being self-interested. Morality is for those who want to be really tough-minded.

A new imperative

The picture we come to is that of a world awash with assumptions and people in the middle trying to keep afloat. There is no metaphysical fixity anywhere. Humans are restricted to fallible assumptions about what, ultimately, is in their self-interest, is morally right, is factually correct. The task of life is to face the uncertainty, and juggle well.

To juggle well is to stabilise the juggling, minimise the times a ball is dropped on stage (which may well mean dropping it a lot of times during practice). One way not to minimise the uncertainty of juggling is to go stiff with idolising certainty.

Saying the same with somewhat greater formality, we arrive at the meaning rule (‘meaning’ as in ‘the meaning of life’), a paramount rule of action positionally equivalent to the Judeo-Christian first commandment or Kant’s categorical imperative:

Meaning rule: Minimise your exposure to assumptions.

Minimising exposure would only rarely be the same as minimising the total number of assumptions. Counting assumptions is silly anyway. The relevant measure is total exposure, conceived as a kind of weighted sum.

Minimising total exposure is not necessarily the same as avoiding assumptions which carry high exposure. The imperative of minimisation is not to caution against staking a great deal on individual assumptions, as long as concentrating exposure on a few bold assumptions would help to reduce exposure overall. When the conditions are right, risk taking is strongly encouraged.

Minimisation is not concerned with attaining zero. A certain amount of exposure is inevitable, living without assumptions impossible. So although we want to push exposure as low as possible, to be exposed is natural and not bad. It would be pointless to decry the inevitable. There is necessity in having to take on assumptions, freedom in the choice of which.

While one cannot get out of being exposed, it is not a burden to be borne passively. Exposure to assumptions, in contrast to traditional religious concepts such as original sin, is not a fixed quantity – the lower bound is not eternally fixed, but historically moveable. Its boundary has to be tested.

Hence define moral progress as a lowering of the dependency on assumptions. Progress here carries no presumption of convergence towards a transhistorical telos. Lowering dependency on assumptions might entail switching to a very different set of beliefs, and possibly switching back on an earlier switch. The underlying development from which we abstract the continuous quantity of exposure could be very ragged indeed.

A measure of exposure to an assumption might be by how much the course of your life would have to change if you came to the conclusion that the assumption was wrong. To minimise exposure to an assumption is thus to take action in advance to minimise the regret you might experience for falsely relying on it. Behave in such a way that even if you were wrong your actions would lose as little of their meaning as possible. Preserve meaning in the sense that you could carry on believing in your choice under the curse of hindsight. I doubt that anything more precise could be said. It would certainly be too optimistic to expect right living to be easily measurable. What you come to after you have run through all the options, found them unsatisfactory and been driven to exclaim “But I have to believe in something”, that is likely to be the exposure minimising path.

The minimising of exposure is wryly sardonic where the maximising of utility was overenthusiastic. Infallibilism demanded maximisation. If infallibly true descriptions of good could be known, it would only be right to realise them to the fullest possible extent. Fallibilism largely eschews substantive conceptions of good, arguing that since wrong tends to be easier identified than right, we can go a long way towards doing good by not doing anything stupid. Negative utilitarianism – as this bit of common sense is known – is another example of how what was marginal now becomes paradigmatic. Utility maximisation caps the world of experience, minimising exposure leaves it open to the sky.

At first sight, not much may seem to separate the enlightened egoism the best infallibilists are capable of and the fallibilistic pursuit of life interests.

But there is all the difference in the world between a friendly merger and a hostile takeover. Under the fallibilist epistemology, morality is not annihilated through reduction to self-interest; morality lives on and even pervades self-interest. Maybe the merged entity should have a hyphenated name. Can I introduce you to Mr&Ms Morality-Selfinterest ? They are forever fighting, but divorce would drive them both to suicide.

If you conceive the truth of that which remains with you all your life (“conscience”) in a correspondence sense, you are bound to think in terms of substantive definitions. Since any substantive definition of life interests excludes some ways of life, it limits the scope of possible learning experiences. A definition in substantive terms leaves hardly enough room for so radical a reorientation as the conversion.

This matters because infallibilists who hold a substantive definition not just on the operational level, as everyone does, but also on the most fundamental level can have no vested interest in tolerating ways of life that have no role to play, not even a subordinate one, in their own plan of life. Toleration must then appear as something to be suffered, not actively sought.

For unless you can see yourself as potentially changing beyond any of your current definitions of life interests will you be unable to see people who live very differently as keeping alive or developing something from which you yourself might one day draw dividends. With radical learning, on the other hand, there is nothing that could not potentially become relevant.

For an infallibilist the individual will is final. By contrast, considerations of how their own will is formed lead fallibilists to an interest in embedding themselves in an environment that can support them through the perpetual confusions of minimisation. The ideal unit in which to attempt exposure reduction may often not be the individual, but a family, group of friends, or modern tribe.

From the possibility of radical learning – as long as it is acknowledged, however feebly – derives a positive justification of the sort of equal chances of development enshrined in human rights for which the infallibilist, whether enlightened or brute, can give only a negative one, dictated by the fear of an uprising by the disadvantaged groups.

Moreover, to the extent that it can further the development of their own knowledge fallibilists have a vested interest in supporting the articulation of dissent. It is again hard to see how the infallibilist could.

Fallibilists are interested in encouraging broad participation because they believe that the pattern of responses in open discussion is the most sensitive indicator of what a position is worth. Infallibilists would always be tempted to suppress open discussion in order to preserve the appearance of an agreed truth.

And similarly, because fallibilists see a process resembling free and fair referenda as still the best gauge of the relative merit of political belief systems, they would not want to deprive themselves of it. There is nothing to counter the temptation of suppression in the infallibilist’s mind. Assured of the truth of their own position, they could see no point in submitting to the test of an open election. They could only feel contempt for the process.

These sources of republican virtues – tolerance of non-destructive ways of life, patient engagement of disagreeing parties, and the defense of human rights – are barred to even the shrewdest self-interest defined in infallibilist terms.

Here are some further consequences of the meaning rule – a rigorously sceptical morality:

· a premium on trying to make assumptions explicit and conscious.

This is hard work, but one of the essential drivers of progress.

· a principle of subsidiarity.

The meaning rule advises to decide matters on the level of the richest manageable description. Base your arguments on categories as concrete as possible, as abstract only as necessary. Cherish the smallest observations.

· the avoidance of irreversible action.

By practising what Buddhism calls non-violence you insure against ever destroying something you may have underappreciated. This risk-hedging technique implies imperatives like Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not exterminate species, or Thou shalt not wreck old towns.

· a suspicion of tidiness.

The cost of implementing any pure system is high for a reason. Although they lack elegance and consistency, mixed systems are often better overall. Even democracies can be improved by an admixture of aristocratic or otherwise elitist elements.

· a suspicion of arguments from tradition.

A tradition can pick up much collective wisdom as it evolves. It can be adaptive in more ways than anyone could fathom. Which explains why one-for-one replacements are often hard to find. Traditions can also be outdated or plain wrong.

· a suspicion of arguments from authority.

Authority turns on a trade-off between the risks of trusting and the difficulty of finding your own way. People with natural authority are the recognised good risks.

· a suspicion of arguments from nature.

Morality as defined here means the regulation of action; it is only tangentially concerned with sexual morals. What the meaning rule does bring to the discussion of sexuality is a certain impatience with arguments from something sold as being nature, e.g. in favour of monogamy, or against the use of contraceptives, or against homosexuality.

A quick test of whether a body of moral doctrine has its priorities right is to measure the importance it attaches to rulings on sexuality and obscenity. They should not play more than a marginal role[§]. For example, sexual orientation is about as relevant for morally judging a person as knowing their preference for tea over coffee.

· a suspicion of arguments from given fact.

The meaning rule has an orientation towards managing fallibility, and a concern especially for managing innovation. With most people alive today, fallibilism expects the relevance of almost all knowledge to decline over time. Moreover, it does generally not expect current knowledge to be sufficient to tell us in which direction we ought to be heading. This might go as far as occasionally recommending randomised thrashing about as a strategy for serendipitous discovery. Drifting with evolution may sometimes be smarter than trying to outwit it.

The search for truth turns on a trade-off between the urgency of the decision, the costs of invention and the benefits of improving the decision by waiting for a better basis to develop. The estimates involved are of course very uncertain. And thinking of the joys of invention, it may not be a pure trade-off.

For where these trade-offs lead, the fairness of incentives matters. At the moment, the non-patentable social or theoretical kind of invention is risky almost exclusively for the innovator, for the non-innovators in society it is a virtually free lunch – except for the minor expense of maintaining a university system. A structure of incentives that is likely to lead to underinvestment may partly explain the patchiness of progress in many badly remunerated areas of human interest.

Democracy is a way of managing the radical fallibility of political belief systems; the free enterprise system is a way of managing the radical fallibility of methods of production, of the methods of satisfying or even conceptualising needs.

The meaning rule thus gives a first morality unreservedly supportive of the open-minded inquiry modern science aspires to, and the tolerance modern democracy requires. And it is perhaps also unusual among moralities in not being stridently opposed to laissez-faire capitalism.

What could be expected

First principles cannot be deduced. The derivation of the meaning rule was meant to be not so much a proof as an intimation of unity, a hand waved towards resolution. By adding an ideal point – a vanishing point as it were – the demonstration hopes to have simplified the picture the world presents, making it comprehensible in a single glance.

Some may be disappointed by the non-committal nature of the result. But more cannot be said in the a priori mode of philosophical theory, since not much can be decided sitting in an armchair, with eyes closed, thinking.

Moral theorising solves not a single real life problem. For those, you rely - before knowing the theory as much as after – on common sense, analytical sharpness, empathy, persistence, intuition, playfulness, experience, a sense of humour, all those general abilities which allow one not to make a mess of life.

It should also be evident that the meaning rule is not intended for the early stages of moral education; it is to help those who already know something about living systematise their knowledge.

The fallibilist theory of morality does not want to give substantive answers. It only hopes to structure reflection when alone, regulate discussion when in conversation, and to do both with the lightest possible touch. It hopes to extend the largest consistently possible franchise. The ideal aim would be provide a universally acceptable platform for discussion, on which people can stand together and talk, sometimes to agree, sometimes to agree to disagree, sometimes not to agree on anything.

To those who might make demands for a somehow more muscular morality, I can only say that I cannot see how ‘more’ could be justified; how ‘more’ would be a good thing; that ‘more’ would almost certainly only mean more confusion, more hypocrisy, and more abuse.

The moral theory of truth

Truth is a moral concept; so is reality. Facts are relatively unsuspicious truth claims; values are strategies for minimising assumptive exposure; character is an assembly of such strategies. By saying ‘ought’ you recommend a course of action you reckon makes the most sense, because it would, for all concerned, minimise exposure best.

The difference between fact and value is one of degree, not kind. Factual assumptions are often narrowly focused, evaluative assumptions more sweeping; factual assumptions are mostly concerned with things one cannot influence, evaluative assumptions with things one can; factual assumptions tend to concern detached descriptions of the past whereas evaluative assumptions declare intentions for the future; and so on, in several other dimensions.

Claims of truth have always had moral force. To claim truth for a statement is to claim that all reasonable people ought to respect in their actions what the statement says; is to claim, conversely, that whoever disregards the statement is acting unreasonably, and at any rate cannot be “one of us”.

P is true.

understood in the bad but usual way means something like

You are deficient as a person if you do not (with us) accept P.

The truth values of this statement and P can vary independently. With the moral meaning, P is true is not equivalent to P. Truth does not cancel without trace[**]. Calling on truth is a way of turning the argument ad hominem, of turning it away from the evidence and towards the person. It is a move towards escalation, potentially explosion. Value-free objectivity is a worse than value-less illusion.

That said, the concept of objective truth was moral in the equality it demanded: A committed search for truth can require you to listen to and believe the child, the madman, the beggar, not the adult, the doctor, or the millionaire. It was less than moral in the claims of finality and perfection it takes on under the correspondence theory.

By trying to be being impartial, by extending equal consideration to all talking animals we are able to reduce exposure to our own preconceptions. Reaching merit requires the hard-nosed stripping away of irrelevant factors – race, sex, age, etc. Science is the dream of judging truth claims by merit only.

Because the word TRUTH is so mercurial, so aggressive but also poetic, it is ill-suited for the day-to-day. It should probably be retired and reserved for very few, very special occasions. (Before you pronounce the name of truth stop to think of how observant Jews avoid the name of YAHWEH.)

P is true.

is best avoided, or failing that, consciously used as a shorthand for a more
cautious kind of claim that does not scare off dialogue:

My friends and I recommend P as the best option currently supported by our evidence (for reasons A,B,C,...)

Truth is exhausted by a presentation of the evidence. Nothing beyond follows. The only way of transcending the evidence is to search for better evidence.

Truth thus reduces to an ethical commitment to seek the best available evidence while acknowledging the continuing fallibility of even the best justified beliefs.

Everything else is rhetoric. Divisive, unconvincing, autistic rhetoric. A form of preaching to the convicted that may bore even them.

The correspondence theory tried to hide the moralising effect of its claims behind the mechanical image of copying reality. What might be called the argument from certainty made it possible to moralise without being seen to moralise.

When condemning the wrongs of totalitarianism, you do not want to quibble over the scientific merits of racism, or historicism; you want to condemn an entire form of argument; you want to condemn the argument from certainty, the fallacy behind such inferences as: The survival of civilisation depends on racial purity. Therefore we must purify.

The infallibilistic validity claim tolerates no question of whether or not to accept it. The action element, the choice of accepting or rejecting, is frozen out. The attitudinal element, how fully to assent to the claim, is pushed to the limit.

The argument from certainty short-circuits the loops from being presented with to acceptance, from limited confidence to absolute confidence, from acceptance to execution, loops which could otherwise have filtered out many totalitarian impulses. The appearance of metaphysically removed objectivity made statements all the more moral.

Fallibilism, on the other hand, by recognising a gap between claiming and accepting leaves room for personality, history and tradition. Truth being the radically fallible outcome of the least unreliable procedure yet devised cannot ever become totally impersonal, ahistorical, or decontexual.

The two theories which dominated under the infallibilist paradigm can be recovered from the meaning rule. Correspondence realism can be thought of as a limiting case of moral truth, rational choice as a limiting case of minimising exposure to assumptions. They are limiting cases in the true sense of never being literally attained. And even the range over which they approximately apply is fairly narrow.

Rational choice theory already has difficulties modelling such straightforward choices as are involved in going shopping for a carton of milk. Whether you buy full-fat or skimmed touches on much broader concerns. And unless these preferences were rationally formed in their turn, the resulting choice can hardly qualify as rational in a full, more than formalistic sense.

For a clear case of rational choice we must therefore look to a preference so nearly self-evident that its formation can be neglected. That is the preference for more money rather than less, involved for instance in buying a product that has already been decided on from the cheapest source. And even here the rationality is dampened by the uncertainty of search costs.

Retreating to probabilities does not tame the uncertainty. As little as there are objectively certain preferences are the probabilities of where true preferences may lie certain in a correspondence sense.

By admitting the preferences pursued as well as the laws according to which manipulations of the world are attempted to be only reasonably held, not descriptively true, instrumental rationality has in effect conceded relying on a moral theory. Once we talk about reasonableness in holding true, not correspondence, infallibilism can no longer squeeze morality out. The middle, previously excluded as a matter of logic, now provides ground to stand on: Reasonable people may disagree about the beliefs they hold.

Reasonableness in doubting is most naturally explained as a strategy, a bundle of tried and tested ways for minimising exposure by balancing the opportunities of discovery against the need for efficiency. Invoking correspondence facts of reasonableness would only add epicycles while still failing to avoid a regress. (Is the correspondence fact of reasonableness – It is reasonable to believe P – itself an infallibly certain correspondence fact, or again only reasonably held ?) What we judge in deciding reasonableness is the act of adopting – and following up on – a preference, a law, a statement of fact; we are not judging any kind of metaphysical relation of correspondence.

But then the naïve maximiser is at a loss of what to do. Without some minimising of exposure first, the rational chooser would not know what to maximise, and not know how. In other words, we cannot do economics without doing sociology, too.

Preferences are not intelligible as a laundry list of unconnected, unreasoned items. To restore their intelligibility we would need to consider what the standard model has simplified away: That preferences have lots of stories, some coherence and at least a vague sense of purpose behind them. In other words, psychological depth. Real people may be exposure minimisers; they are certainly not preference maximisers.

The more settled area of knowledge tend to something very much like correspondence realism, though never quite. The higher the degree of certainty, the less care we have to take in reifying our projections of accepted statements.

Correspondence realism could usefully apply to the mundane parts of mathematics – small number theory, the sort of arithmetic you can do in your head –, and also to such philosophers’ favourites as “This is a table I am banging, and it has no rhinoceros under it.” Venture outside of these narrow confines, and you are liable to fall into the age-old trap of overestimating the transhistorical validity of your own tribal beliefs.

Language is a system of presentation, not representation; and dealing with truth claims therefore a special branch of moral activity. Epistemology, the theory of truth and knowledge, becomes a subdiscipline of ethics, the theory of morality. Epistemology is concerned with regulating truth-related action, the making of truth claims as much as reacting to them.

Truth in no strict sense concerns representations of reality, in statements about truth we judge acts of presenting. Representing reality can mean only the most desirable mode of presenting, desirable because it is open, honest, inspiring.

Scientific standards of evidence are in practice standards of honesty in presentation. This is to say they are quietly moral.

The moral theory of truth has nothing to fear from the idea of knowledge being a social construction, historically situated and evolving. The how of constructing goes naturally with the how of presenting, just as the whether of correspondence went naturally with fixed essences.

There is relativism here in the sense of a healthy respect for the full variety of approaches. There is at the same time absolutely no relativism in the sense of being indifferent between competing validity claims. The moral character of the theory encourages, even demands, that people become judgmental about the quality of claims they encounter.

To repeat the obvious: Some theories are solidly constructed, and stand up. Others are a danger to their inhabitants.

Certainty is a useful organisational category in handling assumptions – certainties are those assumptions expected to repay doubting least. Certainties in this sense need not be eternally true because assessments of the payback can change. Not infrequently, the certainties of one age are the laughing-stock of the next. We have simply no need for eternal verities, substantively defined. What we need is what we have: often reliable procedures.

The point where doubting becomes frivolous and time-wasting, or the weighing of alternatives becomes paralysis is for moral judgement to define. No one doubts the existence of certainties. The argument is about what it means to be one.

Because the correspondence theory required statements to objectify easily when projected – which then, backtracking, originated the claim that the statements mirrored reality –, it was biased in favour of the propositional form, A is B.

Knowledge that could be assimilated to propositional form was made to appear more solid than knowledge that could not. Factual truth seemed normal, moral truth odd; cognitive knowledge normal, intuitive knowledge odd; knowing that normal, knowing how odd; language-based reasoning seemed normal, emotions odd.

Because morality rests in the halo of preferences or factual propositions, in the inexpungable possibility of their being transcended, it could not been seen by a vision focused on the substantive statements themselves. In rushing towards the limit of total objectivity, the halo was lost.

Under a moral theory of truth by contrast, there is a sense in which morality could be said to underlie and so be more certain than factual truth.

Family resemblances

On the periphery of the moral-theoretical discourse dominant in the West a number of formulations have lived inconspicuously that bear a resemblance to the meaning rule:

Man and Woman fell from grace when they pretended to know good and evil. The original sin could be interpreted as a belief in the infallibility of one’s knowledge, and especially moral knowledge. A taste of the tree of knowledge split morality and self-interest apart, a taste of the tree of life heals them back together again.

Socrates summed up wisdom when he said: I know that I know nothing (in a correspondence sense). Wisdom is not in a piece of knowledge, it is an attitude to knowledge – the sceptical but firm attitude prescribed by the meaning rule.

An idiomatic expression that is common in English provides the most straightforward way of paraphrasing the meaning rule: Make sense, or rather, Do what makes the most sense. This is a good example of popular, tacit philosophy being ahead of its academic counterpart.

The fallibilist morality could with Nietzsche’s slogan claim to have gone beyond good and evil, believing in the totally objectifiable reality of neither. Our assumptions about what might be good, what evil, are irredeemably fallible. Thus transcending any substantive definition of humanity is perhaps what Nietzsche meant by humans becoming superhuman.

Define a possible world, unorthodoxically, as a comprehensive set of assumptions individuals hold true of their world. In eternity all possible worlds will have time to occur. By Nietzsche’s criterion of eternal recurrence an action is moral if I am prepared to choose it without reservation in all possible worlds. The best course of action is thus the one that is most stable across the range of possible worlds, least sensitive to changes in the underlying assumptions.

The general cause of inauthenticity as diagnosed by existentialist philosophy might be a hankering for knowledge of a sort that is not available. With the consequence of giving comforting certainties more than their due, and uncomfortable truths less. Where existentialism warned against bad faith, the meaning rule gives a direct definition what it is to act in good faith, to be authentically oneself.

The first line in most editions of the Daoist classic, the Dao De Jing, reads: The Dao that can be named (“daoed”) is not the unchanging Dao. Paraphrased even more colloquially: If you can put it into words, it’s not the real thing.

Although I do not know whether this is an interpretation that would find favour with scholars of Daoism, the sense does not seem too far away from saying that what assumptions we may have about reality are radically fallible. The most fundamental thing to know about the world, the classic seems to say, is the ultimate inability of language to correspond. There is no such thing as a structure of reality for it to latch on to. The focus is this-worldly, minimal exposure is characterised by the suppleness of your responses to the way the world twitches.

If language is a system of presentation, then dealing with truth is a practice, the walking of a path – which is one of the literal meanings of Dao. Life is like picking your way through a crowd while having claims shouted at you from all sides. Blessed are those who can keep their head.

In relation to occidental religions, what is perhaps much the same idea was expressed by the iconoclasts, who have come in waves over the centuries.

In monotheistic religions God is virtually synonymous with ultimate reality. The prohibition against harbouring an image of the deity might therefore also be a prohibition against trying to pin down any sort of ultimate reality.

Rejecting a system from within is never easy. In a framework that expects all descriptions to correspond, saying that no word or image could adequately describe ultimate reality is the closest thing possible to saying that there is ultimately no point in speaking of correspondence. Talking about truth as a never-ending quest indirectly denies the existence of metaphysical truth in a framework that must expect all searches to arrive.

On a positive note, the idea of transcendental reality – the god of monotheism or some other wholly independent reality – may also be seen as a metaphorical way of underscoring the sceptical possibility that any given consensus could be wrong. A consensus is merely human, and humans are given to idolatry.

Immortality, transcendence, invisibility are examples of how the gods are even imagined to share attributes of truth. This is especially true of the word-like god of Jews and Christians.

The iconoclasts failed because by destroying images they only succeeded in displacing idolatrous worship onto words. Removing the counterweight of images produced a representational monopoly for scripture. Fallibilism by contrast is akin to a balanced prohibition on all forms of idolisation, without exceptions or favourites. This is not all that far removed from believing in a deeply incrutable God who refuses to be defined by words, images or any other formatting.

Review of alternatives

Elements of existing moral systems can continue under the meaning rule as rules of thumb. While they may in some applications be broadly correct – no one would ever have bothered with them otherwise – they cannot be strictly so because they imply infallibilism, either in the objectivist form of true commandments, moral facts, or in the subjectivist form of moral sentiments, moral intuitions.

What was true about Kantianism

If criteria of generalisability do no justificatory work, what is their point ?

The golden rule, the generalisability figuring in Kant’s moral writings, or at its most elaborate in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, are perhaps best thought of as something like a windtunnel, design aids for streamlining norms and other institutions. Much as a windtunnel is used to optimise a vehicle according to given specifications, criteria of generalisability take the moral intention for granted. The issues they address are essentially technical, not foundational.

I have an interest in living within a social arrangement that almost everyone finds tolerably fair, because any other is very likely storing up trouble for itself; and emerging favourably out of a violent escalation is a gamble at the best of times. The threat apart, I have a positive interest in seeing others flourish, which they are again most likely to do under a fair arrangement. The design aids can now help us develop an arrangement that will enjoy the voluntary assent of the people it concerns because it is perceived to be fair.

There is nothing remarkable about this justification for using criteria of generalisability or reciprocity as technical aids in the process of designing fair arrangements – it is only a string of rearranged commonplaces –, except perhaps that it takes a route which would not be open to theorists like Kant who make morality retreat into other-worldliness.

As little as a windtunnel aims to simulate realistic road conditions does the scenario of a state of nature set out to reproduce social reality. We base our designs on a contract struck under highly idealised conditions because we want our arrangements to be transparent and therefore our rules to be relatively simple. Such simplifications are legitimate as long as they are deliberate. By tilting the balance further in the direction of empirical adequacy we would lose in ease of monitoring what we gain in accommodating variability.

We shroud ourselves in what Rawls calls a veil of ignorance to order to ensure that the resulting arrangement will be seen as fair not only from our own particular point of view, but from the viewpoint of everyone who could potentially become involved.

Apart from making the rules as simple as possible and applying them consistently, still the most reliable way of ensuring that an arrangement will be perceived to be fair is to try and make it fair.

All political ideologies promise fairness. They differ on the form of equality their concept of fairness involves – equal justice done to people’s essential nature, equality of property, equality of opportunity, etc. They also differ in what they consider workable. Since what is workable has always been, and will always be, subject to debate and experiment, fairness is not something that could be decided in philosophical theory alone. Fairness is intensely political, so political in fact that we could classify political ideologies according to the way in which they define fairness, that is propose to reconcile equality with workability.

The trouble with the non-comparability assumed in neoclassical economics is that people are never going to believe it. The interpersonal comparability of humans may not reach the standards expected in the physical sciences, but it is good enough for estimates to constitute sensible inputs into decisions.

People compare themselves all of the time, and will continue doing so whether economists show themselves interested or not. Because of this ingrained and entirely reasonable habit, any economic system preserving a more than moderately unequal distribution of income is going to have a problem explaining its fairness. The greater the inequality, the greater the problem.

The problem need not be insurmountable. Under certain conditions – for example when opportunities are ample, civil liberties secure, wealth creation is fast, corruption low, participation possible – even the less well-off can sometimes be persuaded of the fairness of a highly unequal distribution. At least the more enterprising type of person may feel favoured by the offer to trade rougher than necessary starting conditions in return for a credible chance of making it big; many others would understandably decline.

People do not have a metaphysical right to, say, their property; nor does society, ie other people. It all depends on how much material and non-material wealth the rich can convince the non-rich to let them get away with. In these negotiations of a fair arrangement we have everyone’s interest in minimising exposure to appeal to.

Rights are the entitlements, duties the obligations allotted under a fair arrangement, whether that arrangement be an already existing reality or a still imaginary anticipation.

Moral constructions such as these are ultimately pragmatic; some are pragmatic in a higher sense, and called principles.

What was true about Utilitarianism

Bentham’s bid to cut through the shibboleth of the common good by reducing it to individual interest was certainly bold, but perhaps too bold. Because of the difficulties of first determining and then aggregating individual interest even so fuzzy a notion as the common good may sometimes offer better guidance. The individual or society, which fiction lets you achieve more in the case at hand ?

And however much appalled Bentham might have been, this is how the doctrine has mostly been used: The sloppy definition of utilitarianism as seeking “the greatest good for the greatest number”, by sliding over the all-important issue of distribution, effectively returns it to the emasculated worthiness of the common good.

To the economists’ continuing dismay, people believe in their rock-bottom equality with others, and usually also believe in diminishing returns to income. Starting with these attitudes, classical utilitarianism contributed to the fairness debate a formalised explanation of why, other things being equal, the equal distribution of incomes is optimal. Assuming identically calibrated utility functions, and diminishing returns to income, the equal distribution is optimal because it produces the greatest societal sum total. (As long as an extra dollar does someone poor more good than the last dollar of income someone rich, we can raise the societal sum total of utility – which if we are rash we can equate with happiness – by redistributing, a process that ends only at complete equality.)

But other things are almost never equal. And so people believe in many other notions of justice. Notions that are always fuzzy, sometimes justifiable, usually enshrine local group interests, and with few exceptions militate against income equality. The claimed justice, for instance, of being allowed to pass on wealth in the family, or what in medieval language was called the just reward for work and is known these days as adequate compensation for entrepreneurial risk taking.

The result is a patchwork of arrangements, each based on a particular version of fairness. One of the main sources of tension for these arrangements is how wide to cast the net of membership. Equality wants to globalise and include, practicalities caution to localise and exclude. Choose your reason for failure – ambition or a lack of it.

Utilitarianism can safely be applied only in cases where individuals can be assumed to be alike enough to be treated alike:

For distributing basic necessities certainly – for all the glorious crudity of the Benthamite pleasure machine, the inbuilt assumption that people respond in much the same way to rations of basic necessities, and other shows of common kindness, is not an ignoble one.

For designing economic institutions perhaps. We should remember that Bentham had intended his utilitarianism primarily for the drafting of laws.

And probably not for much more. As we approach more sophisticated needs, the doctrine proves increasingly misleading. There are places where one should never take Bentham.

Utilitarianism is often justified with reference to the “intuition“ that in a situation where a direct and clear-cut decision has to be made between a smaller and a larger number of lives, the larger number should be saved. But would your intuition about saving the larger number of lives be as firm if it was not you disposing over other people’s lives, but your own single life were the smaller number ?

Hard cases such as this can be used to support an ethical doctrine only by insisting that they must have one right answer. But to insist on an answer that could comfortably be made binding is really to deny their character as dilemmas. There simply exists no guarantee for a creditably good way out of every situation.

I personally probably would save the larger number, but I would not condemn anybody out of hand for saving the smaller number, even one against a hundred. It is a decision over which I would not, so to speak, want to enforce the party whip, allowing everyone to decide according to his or her own wits. Putting them to a perpetual free vote seems to me the best way of dealing with the worst of dilemmas.

Strictly speaking, utilitarianism is all wrong. There are no scientific laws and no descriptions of human interests true in the required sense of correspondence to a metaphysically fixed reality. And what was true about it is embarrassingly vague: a concern for consequences, material equality, and general welfare. Utilitarianism was, in one way, unquestionably modern: in acknowledging the relevance of science to morality, the relevance of rigorously tested truth claims.

What was true about the Rest

Virtue

The feel of the meaning rule is perhaps not too different from Aristole’s metaphor of the mean, which also suggests the idea of striking balances; its practical effect is very different. By reducing what is right to what is considered a normal average, the mean has the effect of dressing up the most boring (and sometimes even pernicious) prejudices of your own particular reference group as morality.

Aristotle was right in saying that virtue is grounded more in habit than conscious deliberation. But even good habits sometimes need correcting. And even such wonderful dispositions as the aversion to kill cannot always be indulged in.

The meaning rule further agrees with Aristotle in taking ethical conduct to be a skill, in the higher reaches an art. The trouble with unlearned innocence is that while pretty to watch it is thrown off balance so easily. Everyone has to do it – juggle assumptions –, but some manage rather better than others.

It finally agrees with Aristotle’s warning against expecting too much precision. The controlled vagueness that our moral knowledge shares with ordinary speech is suited to an uncertain world.

The meaning rule defines Virtue as opposed to virtues. Individual virtues have limited applications, whereas Virtue is a technical name for doing what is right, and therefore always applicable. Virtue is to display in every situation the appropriate one of the virtues. Virtue in this sense of a second-order meta-virtue might also be called (Practical) Wisdom.

There are situations where it would be wrong to be e.g. courageous, patient, prudent. Conceived as having substantive definitions – in the case of courage for instance: not running away; in the case of patience: holding back – virtues have exceptions.

Alternatively, one could choose to interpret every action under the aspect of courage (“the courage to take a shameful but necessary flight”), turning Courage into another word for Virtue. But as metaphors for right action Courage, Patience, Prudence etc seem even less illuminating than the Mean. Nor is Love, the Christian metaphor, very helpful.

Intuitions

Intuitions that are not backed up by a publicly arguable account cannot be more than a way of passing off culturally entrenched prejudice as morally profound. So far as useful at all, they should be conceived as half-articulated thoughts still in the process of becoming publicly arguable.

You will believe in intuitive moral certainties only for as long as you have never met – and taken seriously – people who intuit otherwise. And if private intuitions give others no reason to believe them, they do not even give me a reason. For what makes it wise for me to trust my own subjective feelings of certainty ? – The validity of intuitions either reduces to the validity of publicly arguable justifications, or they have none.

Sentiments

There is absolutely no reason to believe that emotions are of themselves more moral than ratiocinations. When ratiocinations are stuck in the wrong groove, emotions are often the only corrective. But emotions need the check of ratiocinations just as much.

The simple fact that I experience a sentiment is no reason to go along with it, as every sentiment still leaves me with the choice of trying to resist it, and resisting might be the right choice. (An emotion could initially overpower my resistance, but if I resist repeatedly I may eventually succeed in harnessing it. Or I might be wrong in resisting, and by suppressing the emotion be strangling the better part of me.) Sentiments are only so many inner opinions. They present the same problem as public opinions, namely which to believe.

The sentiments I experience would therefore leave me without a way of distinguishing between good and bad sentiments – unless they were infallibly right. Yet my sentiments could only be infallibly right if my emotional make-up were somehow inherently good. So unless one is prepared to go back to a belief in a benevolent creator who by equipping me with an inherently good nature also bestowed unfailingly right sentiments on me, appealing to them would not settle anything. Theories of moral sentiment hence collapse into the triviality that emotions have a role to play in morality.

The practical effect of non-cognitivism, the search for a non-rational basis, is to reduce morality to what the normal majority considers healthy. The implied standard of wholesomeness or well-adjustedness makes for a conformist and anti-intellectual public climate. Sufficient cause for emigrating, to my mind.

Utilitarianism encapsulates the immorality of Stalinism, Kantianism the immorality of Hitlerism, and the remaining immoralities are ways of promoting parochial prejudice. If the positive case for the meaning rule did not convince, maybe the unpalatability of the alternatives does.

Epilogue

Phases

We can distinguish four phases in the transition. After obscure beginnings in the late Middle Ages, we enter the first phase with perhaps the Renaissance. In the first phase, the old paradigm is still very much accepted, but is made more productive by stretching.

One way of getting more mileage out of infallibilism was by temporalisation. Instead of knowledge being immediately possessed, they now expected an accumulative progress of knowledge. The idea of accumulation assumes that we may not possess perfect knowledge now, but that any new findings will be final. It was later further relaxed to convergence towards the truth, according to which individual results could be superseded, but convergence not derailed. Under either formulation, the area of agreement could only expand.

The teleology of utilitarianism could similarly be seen as a temporalisation of the immediate duties of deontology. Another one of their tricks was empiricism, the patient gathering many small facts, which can with time add up to some big conclusions.

Great and ever greater strides were made. The spirit was expansive, the age generally flush with optimism. It was as if they felt safe in their adventurous pranks, knowing that if something went wrong they could always come running back to their parents.

If one had to put a date on the end of the first and the beginning of the second phase it would probably have to be the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the origin of species in 1859. The implication is remote, but arguably the most mischievous of all the implications of Darwin’s theory: If knowledge itself is an evolving production, then any static picture of truth is doomed.

The famous controversy over the theory of evolution marks the beginning of the end of the compatibility of science with the old metaphysical order, as science began to outgrow the setting that had hatched it. Two tendencies which had for a long time been in agreement were quietly opening hostilities: Science had to come to a decision between the ersatz-religious dogma of absolute objectivity, and the spirit of critical inquiry.

The old order naturally put up a rearguard action, and successfully even in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Going against Darwin himself, and against what was to become the modern consensus, they expended considerable ingenuity in trying to fiddle a purposive direction into evolution so as to restore a metaphysically final truth if not in the present then at least in the limit.

The overstretched paradigm was on the point of snapping. In conditions where it would have been easy to mistake the decline of the dominant strand for a general decline, the cultural tone became pessimistic, even nihilistic.

Having been away for too long, they found to their sudden dismay that coming home was no longer an option. They were disoriented by their own success. It was as if their parents had gone before they had been able to consolidate their own identity.

Next, in the third phase, came the hollow heroics of the old order making its last stand – from the Bolshevists’ October revolution in 1917 over Mussolini’s antics and the Spanish Civil War to the rise and defeat of Hitler’s Reich, to the death of Stalin in 1953, to the delayed implosion of Cambodia. Heroic assertion met dull despair. This was the time when liberal democracy was shored up by something amounting to unreconstructed prejudice, argued for most persuasively by what dropped down from Angloamerican bombers, and advertised most convincingly by another American specialty, chewing-gum.

Catalysed by the challenge of totalitarianism, we then see phase four, the gradual emergence of a new theory of validity. Long before a new theory finally arrives, forerunners will have begun feeling for it. The outline will in all areas have been traced by trial and error, at the end it only remains for someone to come along and see in a flash a satisfyingly simple shape in it.

It is perhaps fitting that some of the main contributions should have arisen out of a crossover between the totalitarian territories and Angloamerica. Émigrés from central Europe such as Popper or Hayek were well prepared to undertake the job because they shared liberal instincts but had through experiencing the contingency of the liberal world also been inured against complacency.

In terms of big names in the philosophy of science – which since science is widely believed to deliver the best of truth means epistemology generally – the farthest outpost of infallibilism was occupied by Karl Popper.

He would of course have protested against the bad guy label of infallibilist – and with some justice since he did in fact make many sensible fallibilist noises – but on the crucial issues this is what his record reveals him to be: Popper was an old-fashioned metaphysical realist, who believed in convergent progress towards the truth and, as a condition of that, in the ability of falsification to prove with certainty the superiority of one theory over another. (If you believe in convergence, you must be certain that every time you do switch between theories you are making progress.) He also believed in a demarcation criterion between science and non-science, or nonsense even – between what is allegedly objective and what is not.

His convoluted version – several insulated ‘worlds’ of truth – could not hope to erase the core theory. The very title of The Open Society and its Enemies has to resort to a demonisation of the other side as enemies to make up with an emotional charge for weakness of argument. (I am only being so rude about Popper because I want to supplant his way of justifying on epistemological grounds a system broadly like liberal democracy. Or in more practical terms, use the opportunity presented by the spread of education to decentralise knowledge work.)

If Popper was the last infallibilist, the convenient marker of a first thoroughgoing fallibilist to surface in the English speaking world was Thomas Kuhn.

He did not believe in even the most attenuated form of convergence. The word ‘revolution’ in the title of his main work – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – speaks for itself. But because he was primarily interested in identifying typical patterns in the history of science, for which he by and large fails to give a philosophical analysis, his work could not escape the charge infallibilists routinely level at anyone they deem too far removed from their own objectivism, the charge of relativism.

He himself was a moderate relativist, but there were others who embraced relativism with a vengeance. Their mixed success can be judged by the reaction to the French theorist Derrida, a much more flippant proponent – who meets adulation from some, violent antipathy from others. The vehemence both ways underlines the fact that the acceptability of relativism is a moral question: At issue is what constitutes responsible behaviour. When is it irresponsible to intervene in the free play of forces, when would it be irresponsible not to ? To draw these lines is to decide what you want to fight and get maimed for.

That the scientific search for truth should be governed by paradigms – the term made famous by Kuhn – is just another way of saying that truth is historical. When history enters truth, it brings along periodisation, the problem of grouping events in time. The reign of a paradigm is then simply the largest unit of periodisation in the history of ideas.

On the European continent moves to make truth face history had got underway much earlier, still in the nineteenth century, which were bolder but also more turgid. The fact remains that Kuhn’s sort of fallibilism was published only in the 1960s, long after the heyday of fascism.

Germany Postwar

Cities lay in ruins, the rows of graves were long. The sensual evidence had to be overwhelming, there had to be mountains of bulldozed corpses, before the head would reluctantly reconsider its conclusions.

The Nazi experiment had finally put it beyond doubt what the “old theory” was. But that the right conclusion had now become abundantly clear did not mean that they suddenly knew how to get there.

Germans reacted – predictably perhaps – with embarrassed, guilty silence, followed by moralising indignation, sometimes verging on self-flagellation.

But moralising doesn’t help. Calling Hitler and his henchmen evil – or as has recently been more fashionable: psychologically stunted – may be good for a short-term reprieve from psychic tension but blocks any analytical understanding, which alone could bring lasting relief.

The Wirtschaftswunder, the rapid economic success of reconstruction after the second war, demonstrated that democracy could work in practice, at least in the sense of generating prosperity, as well as providing a welcome distraction. Hence its importance in German popular mythology.

Capitalist restoration in western Germany had come to pass only by default – and Allied prescription. The state was founded on the provincial Catholicism of an Adenauer that had only got a turn after the metropolitan extremisms had ruled themselves out.

As in the first republic, it was still to some extent true that totalitarianism was more alluring in theory, if no longer thought so in practice. But in contrast to the first republic, rightish tendencies had been irreparably discredited. That left, as a second best alternative in the infallibilist scheme of things, was the cry for leftish revolution.

So when a new generation questioned the postwar timidities, it was to lead to the murderous anti-establishment campaign of the Red Army Faction. Helmut Schmidt’s justification of democracy – he was chancellor at the time – was effectively Popper’s, the strongest available then. It was not strong enough to convince brilliant students like Ulrike Meinhof not to wage a terrorist war against a Popperian state.

The Bonn republic – the seat of government having been moved out of Berlin far to the west – had its blemishes, but it did not deserve to have bombs thrown at it. Just as the Weimar republic did not deserve to be ransacked by stormtroopers.

Willy Brandt, the first chancellor not in the mould of Adenauer, was right when his campaign slogans invited the electorate to risk more democracy. Free thinking always carries a risk, and we should ban it, if the risks of unfree thought were not even greater.

US outlook

The easy compatibility of Christianity with democracy turns out to have been only an accident of US history. The constitution has so successfully domesticated the bible that for some Americans liberal democracy and Christianity have fused into a nationalist creed. And this although history in any other perspective than the United States’ own suggests a much more antagonistic relationship between the two: In country after country can we find examples of the more fervently Christian side lining up against a growth in democracy.

After the accidental birth, religion returned to prominence in the good fight against the lapsed Christianity of Nazi Germany, and the official atheism of the Soviet Union. But now that the totalitarian enemies are themselves religious, the fusion of Capitalism, Democracy and Judeo-Christianity is likely to become unstable.

As systems, both the market economy and liberal democracy are inherently agnostic. Nothing quite mocks orthodox belief like a constitutional principle of viewpoint neutrality. Nothing undermines traditional authority quite like the marketing principle of consumer choice.

It is easy to be secular and a believer in capitalism, easy to be secular and a believer in democracy. It is quite hard to be a conservative Christian and to stand against the logic of both constitutional democracy and advanced capitalism. And the odds are that it will only get harder in future.

Polarities

Schematically speaking, my thesis is that the endpoints in the great transition have been fallibilism with a moral theory of truth against infallibilism with a correspondence theory, and that intermediate positions are in disequilibrium and drawn to either one of these poles.

Positivism in science, for instance, tilts via Baconian induction to verifiably true descriptions of absolutely independent reality, and hence infallibilism; or via Humean scepticism to habits of the mind, and – when we start sorting these inductive habits into good and bad – to a moral theory of truth.

Or to take a different context: As the contestants have progressively been finding out probably the only argumentatively stable positions are the inerrancy of scripture or taking the bible as a secular text – a partially accurate historical account, influential in literature, and an important early though no longer satisfactory contribution to moral philosophy. A classic rich in metaphorical, poor in literal truth. As far as morality is concerned, the book has historical value, and no other. The nuggets of wisdom are interspersed with too many potentially fatal impurities.

I contend that the fallibilist ethic, though most naturally combined with atheism, is more truly religious than many of the teachings of contemporary Christian churches. If you are a believer, you should perhaps ask yourself which attitude to knowledge is the more religious, infallibilistic hubris or fallibilistic humility ?

The religious are right when they assert against the rationalists that faith is inevitable. The facts are never enough. What we can know with any kind of certainty is too little to live a life by. People inevitably have to put their trust into much shakier assumptions. Placing bets without sufficient reasons is the human condition.

The religious are wrong when they claim an exemption from the general ungroundedness of all belief for their own pet dogmas. To cling to the infallibility of a text (the Protestant posture) or the infallibility of an interpreter (the Catholic posture) is to display a serious lack of faith.

While some varieties of religion may be able to engineer an accomodation, for others that is clearly impossible: If fundamentalists were to brand my attempt of providing foundations for a civil religion as – in their terms – the work of the Antichrist, they would at least be correct in recognising a diametrical opposition.

In political terms, finally, I recommend the meaning rule as the natural background to an anti-totalitarian politics, a politics which for want of a better term I have taken to calling ‘liberal’. The market metaphor seems congenial to the idea of political pluralism as much as the correspondence metaphor was not. In sum, a unique way of being radical and centrist at the same time.

I cannot see a middleground between these two poles. Unless you can, you will have no excuse for not making a choice.

To Close, an Allegoric Tale of two Germans

First there was Thomas Mann, born into the merchant liberalism of a sleepy trading port long past its prime. He was a novelist, interested in the tics of people, in quirky detail, not given to the ruthless abstractions of philosophers. As a writer he forced himself, with obsessive steadiness, to turn more nice phrases than was perhaps good for him. His political books went on in unending convolutions, rambling on for hundreds of pages. Full of rhetorical bluster, and observant asides, there was frightfully little substance to them. Evocative yes, but aimless.

He was, moreover, something of an haute bourgeois. He had a to all appearances happy family life, a villa, and a steady income. And he knew that if a new regime were ever seriously to threaten him the same comforts would be waiting for him across the border in neutral Switzerland.

He was cosseted in his position, and woolly in his thinking. We can dismiss him for it, and perhaps we should. But for all that he did the decent thing. Having overcome his initial reluctance he did during the Weimar republic speak out in favour of democratic freedoms and republican institutions. He emigrated, not allowing himself to be claimed by the Nazis. And finally, he lent moral support to the Allied war effort, and his moral support meant more than the fighting strength of any one man on the front could have meant.

These were eminently decent things to do, they were quite probably the only right things to do.

On the other hand we have someone whom I regard as the preeminent philosopher of the postmodern age. Someone who saw the bankruptcy of contemporary thought. Someone who like no one else struggled to find the words for a new philosophy. Who managed to put the question in the right terms. Whose thinking was top-notch, first-rate, no doubt about it.

And then, what does he do ? He gets himself elected as the first vice-chancellor of the new era at his university of Freiburg, and in acceptance of the post delivers a speech in which he – not in crude terms because that is not be what such a person would do, but everybody knew what it meant – endorses the Nazis.

It does not matter that he resigned a few months later. Nor does it matter that apart from lending some credibility to the regime he is not in any meaningful sense responsible for Nazi atrocities.

The someone I am speaking of is of course, many will have guessed, Martin Heidegger[††].

One of the finest minds of all times endorsing one of the most absurd regimes of all times – that for me sums up the tragedy of the twentieth century.

With such a perverse correlation in place – the best people being driven to think the worst things – not the holocaust but something on the horrendous scale of the holocaust was bound to happen. It was practically inevitable.

All my efforts in this essay have been directed towards putting the correlation right.

Acknowlegments

Arendt, Hannah. The origins of totalitarianism. 1951

Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea. 350 BCE

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790

Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. Idiot. 1868

Fama, Eugene F. Random Walks in Stock Market Prices. 1965

Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. 1975

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil. 1808

Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. Die philosophische Weltgeschichte. 1830

Isherwood, Christopher. Goodbye to Berlin. 1939

Kierkegaard, Søren. Sygdommen til Døden. 1849

Koestler, Arthur. The Yogi and the Commissar. 1942

Lao Zi. Dao De Jing. ca. 500 BCE

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. 1869

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also sprach Zarathustra. 1883

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile. 1762

Tocqueville, Alexis de. De la démocratie en Amérique. 1835

[*] I must be one of the few people who have actually read Mein Kampf, cover to cover. I will always remember how, before I was allowed to borrow it at the city library, I had to fill in a form declaring innocuous intentions. About time to lift the ban on the book in Germany.

[†] In the United States the constitution enshrines classical liberalism to such an extent that all political players are forced to accept considerable parts. Because of the redundancy, the term ‘liberal’ has in the US taken on a different meaning. It has come to apply to only the left half of the liberal spectrum, what in Europe would be called an unorthodox sort of socialdemocracy.

Conservatism on the other hand was almost non-existent in a country forged by revolution. Lacking any genuine specimen the term ‘conservative’ was free, and has come to denote nothing very conservative at all: What in the US today is called a conservative is typically either a Christian neo-traditionalist (= religious radical) or just a right-wing liberal (= free market radical).

[‡] Because of rounding and the omission of splinters, these figures do not add up to 100%.

[§] At least I’m meeting my own test: two paragraphs out of over fifty pages should qualify as marginal.

[**] Ultimate explanations are inevitably self-referential. So a theory of truth, if it is to be universal, has to account for its own truth. But what kind of fact could the truth of the correspondence theory correspond to ? A regress seems inevitable, suggesting a relation to the paradoxes – ‘This sentence is false’ etc.

The correspondence theory definitely commits one to cancelling, and might even be said to be identical with the view that truth cancels. Yet the statement that truth cancels: True(P) « P is characteristic of what in a different paper I have called a circular language. (For details see Restructuring Logic)

The formalised paradox that proves the inconsistency of circular languages could thus be said to prove the inconsistency of the correspondence theory. The paradoxes have the correspondence theory commit suicide by making it apply to itself.

By contrast, the meaning rule does appear to be at least able to satisfy itself. Consciously adopting the principle of minimising exposure should help to minimise exposure. Taking on the meaning rule could be approved by it.

[††] The supreme irony is that this very speech with which Heidegger’s notoriety as a protofascist began should contain a phrase that does not have to ask for much generosity in order to qualify as an anticipation of the meaning rule: ’... das Wesen der Wissenschaft im Sinne des fragenden, ungedeckten Standhaltens inmitten der Ungewißheit des Seienden im Ganzen …’ (Roughly: … the essence of science and the humanities to hold out inquiringly, without taking cover, in the midst of all-encompassing uncertainty as to what is ...)

Disclaimer

Good coaches do not have to be exceptionally good players. In fact, they are often mediocre players or worse.

And authors of coaching manuals, standing at a further remove, need to be neither good coaches nor good players.

So when I claim to have written the best available coaching manual on morality, I do not thereby claim saintliness.

If the theory I present is worth anything it should make a difference in helping people to lead better lives. But once the theory is in the public domain, I as the author have no specific advantage in putting it to use.

Faust's Redemption - An essay in Philosophy