Neglect

 

Cemetery photo taken during a short walk through Matlock two days ago. It doesn't usually look like this, but the word neglect came to mind, associated with the word Britain. Plus this famous quote of course - inevitable really.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana’s 1905 work The Life of Reason

The immovable standard and silent witness

George Santayana on truth as what he calls the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions. 


The eternity of truth is inherent in it : all truths—not a few grand ones—are equally eternal. I am sorry that the word eternal should necessarily have an unction which prejudices dry minds against it, and leads fools to use it without understanding. This unction is not rhetorical, because the nature of truth is really sublime, and its name ought to mark its sublimity.

Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions ; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.


Not far removed from Baruch Spinoza’s idea of God where the only possible interaction with the immovable standard is to understand as far as we are able.

This is what we compromised with the rise of secular culture, that immovable standard. It was not improved or replaced by immovable truths so many crooks, charlatans and fools try to foist on us today. Santayana goes on –


It is not necessary to offer any evidence for this eternity of truth, because truth is not an existence that asks to be believed in, and that may be denied. It is an essence involved in positing any fact, in remembering, expecting, or asserting anything; and while no truth need be acknowledged if no existence is believed in, and none would obtain if there was no existence in fact, yet on the hypothesis that anything exists, truth has appeared, since this existence must have one character rather than another, so that only one description of it in terms of essence will be complete ; and this complete description, covering all its relations, will be the truth about it.

No one who understands what is meant by this eternal being of truth can possibly deny it ; so that no argument is required to support it, but only enough intensity of attention to express what we already believe.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

A rudimentary intelligence

We are old men trying to sing the loves of children; we are wingless bipeds trying to understand the gods. But the data of the immediate are hardly human; it is probable that at that level all sentience is much alike. From that common ground our imagination can perhaps start safely, and follow such hints as observation furnishes, until we learn to live and feel as other living things do, or as nature may live and feel as a whole. Instinct, for instance, need not be, as our human prejudice suggests, a rudimentary intelligence; it may be a parallel sort of sensibility, an imageless awareness of the presence and character of other things, with a superhuman ability to change oneself so as to meet them. Do we not feel something of this sort ourselves in love, in art, in religion?

George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine Studies in Contemporary Opinion


Awareness is a rum aspect of life, we all know what it is but can’t easily be aware of how aware we are. Santayana’s take on it highlights the animal nature of awareness, how it has always been an aspect of what we are, that rudimentary intelligence we had before we were even human.

awareness
noun
1. the state or condition of being informed or cognizant of something
2. concern about and well-informed interest in current developments


We divide it down into social awareness, political awareness, physical awareness, spatial awareness and so on. Yet all these overlays tend to obscure how basic it is, how simply noticing something or not noticing it sits below those layers of interpretation. Often enough, awareness doesn’t extend to those layers of interpretation perpetually skating across the surface of what we are. It’s just awareness, that ancient rudimentary intelligence.

We’ve all seen a uncountable examples of awareness and lack of awareness, in numerous guises. It’s a complex, familiar and basic aspect of daily life. The person in the supermarket who blocks the cheese display, trolley held at arm’s length while gazing at the cheese as if hoping to watch it ripen a little more.

The car in front where the driver is obviously chatting away to a passenger and isn’t fully aware of other traffic, road conditions or the blue flashing light hurtling up behind both of us.

The UK Prime Minister who isn’t aware of his own abilities and how they don’t align with the requirements of the position, the expectations of those around him, the views of his voters and the promises he both made and implied.

Starmer’s inadequacies could be recast as inadequate awareness, particularly awareness of himself. Words such as dishonest, mendacious, ideological, bureaucratic, evasive, indifferent and even evil may be used to explain his inadequacies, but a lack of awareness does that too. His rudimentary intelligence is too rudimentary we might say, even without wishing to be sarcastic.

However obvious it may be to others, Starmer clearly isn’t aware of important political aspects of his role. He wasn’t aware of the impact of his winter fuel payment debacle, wasn’t aware that it was an absurd decision which could damage or even wreck his political career.

His assertions, explanations and pronouncements don’t work, his language doesn’t work, his political rhetoric doesn’t work, he lacks the awareness to make it all work. He is not aware of his own limited awareness, not aware that he should have stayed away from politics.

Myths and Metaphors

In what sense can myths and metaphors be true or false? In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from literary psychology, they may report the general movement and the pertinent issue of material facts, and may inspire us with a wise sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false.

George Santayana - Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy: Five Essays (1933)


An interesting quote where Santayana says that Greek mythology, the conflicts, quests, battles, heroics, successes, failures, rewards and punishment, magic and mysteries can guide us towards wisdom in the real world. Calvinist theology does not guide us in this way and in this sense is false.

A fascinating distinction because reasoning isn’t about sticking with what we think we know. We may usefully spread our wings via myth and metaphor. We could go on to rephrase Santayana’s quote and make a similar contrast between ancient Greek mythology and our political Calvinists –


In what sense can myths and metaphors be true or false? In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from literary psychology, they may report the general movement and the pertinent issue of material facts, and may inspire us with a wise sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek mythology was true and Marxist doctrine is false.

Representing no public interest

Where parties and governments are bad, as they are in most ages and countries, it makes practically no difference to a community, apart from local ravages, whether its own army or the enemy’s is victorious in war, nor does it really affect any man’s welfare whether the party he happens to belong to is in office or not. These issues concern, in such cases, only the army itself, whose lives and fortunes are at stake, or the official classes, who lose their places when their leaders fall from power.

The private citizen in any event continues in such countries to pay a maximum of taxes and to suffer, in all his private interests, a maximum of vexation and neglect. Nevertheless, because he has some son at the front, some cousin in the government, or some historical sentiment for the flag and the nominal essence of his country, the oppressed subject will glow like the rest with patriotic ardour, and will decry as dead to duty and honour anyone who points out how perverse is this helpless allegiance to a government representing no public interest.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905-6)


Santayana writes here about armed conflict before the Great War, but any country could decline into this state of affairs. Governments always seem to find reasons to ignore the public interest. This key phrase describes very well the UK democratic decline we have seen for years - a government representing no public interest.

Net Zero – represents no public interest.

Forced uptake of EVs – represents no public interest.

Gender politics – represents no public interest.

VAT on private schools – represents no public interest.

Great British Energy – represents no public interest.

Mass immigration – represents no public interest.

For decades, the major UK political parties have have shown no interest in representing the wider public interest of voters, the day-to-day, life as it is lived interests. 

The implications of an argument

Imagine Socrates “viewing with alarm” the implications of an argument! This artificial prejudice is indeed modern and will not be eternal.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905 - 1906)


Prejudice may be seen as a defence against something, often defence against an abstraction such as a particular stereotype, but often something such as stupidity, bombast, dishonesty, chicanery and so on. It’s a long list, but defensive prejudice may be a way to avoid but also a way to begin an argument such as this is stupid because... 

In other words, prejudice may have considerable personal and social value as well as its vastly more usual negative connotations. It’s worth some thought too - the reasons why prejudice in general has such strongly negative connotations.

For example, a characteristic of our times has been the attack on useful defensive prejudices and their replacement by directed political prejudices where the value of personally and socially defensive prejudice is degraded or lost altogether. We have a political ethos where it is common to see people “viewing with alarm” the implications of an argument! Gosh - they could become entangled with old prejudices.

By attacking prejudice itself and substituting politically favoured prejudices, useful defensive prejudices are undermined as new political prejudices are covertly fostered. Even old prejudices against stupidity, bombast, dishonesty and chicanery are swept aside by…

By stupidity, bombast, dishonesty and chicanery.

Not a symbol, but a fraud

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905 - 1906)


Familiar difficulties arise when we attempt to define what is going wrong with our political culture here in the UK and elsewhere in the developed world. Many possibilities seem to fit the circumstances tolerably well without quite offering a satisfactory theme. Possibly there is no single theme, but if our various failures stand alone, maybe they do have a few common features.

For example, we seem to have a serious problem with language, more specifically with how we use symbols to connect ourselves with both the familiar world of daily life and the less familiar world of current affairs. Buying groceries, sending the kids to school and the daily commute encapsulate familiar symbols of daily life, they are reducible to the small change of daily experience. Yet they do not fit comfortably with the obviously fraudulent use of symbols in numerous media headlines.

The so-called green revolution is nothing like making coffee and a round of toast while gazing out of the window at garden birds pecking away at the bird feeder. The green revolution has symbols we can see such as wind turbines, electric cars and recycling bins, but these symbols are not reducible to the small change of daily experience. Daily life would lack nothing if we did not have wind turbines, electric cars or recycling bins.


Wind turbines are not symbols of sustainable power, they are based on old technology, are inefficient and unreliable with their own sustainability problems.

 
Electric cars are not symbols of a sustainable lifestyle. They are not yet superior to traditional cars and have their own sustainability problems.

Recycling is not a symbol of a sustainable lifestyle. It is wasteful in terms of human effort and there are practical limits on what can be usefully recycled.

Gender is not a symbol of socially inclusive progress, it is a fact of human reproduction.

Pale skin colour is not a symbol of privilege, it is a fact of biological heritage.

Equality is not a virtuous political policy, it is a fraudulent depiction of social reality.


The point to be made is that the symbols we rely on to navigate daily life, do not necessarily allow us to navigate public debates with integrity or even dignity. Much public debate merely expresses symbols of allegiance, compliance or fashionable acceptance, not reducible to the reality they supposedly symbolise.

The elusive nature of the problem is its weakness, we must use symbols within the public arena. Yet fashionable symbols of allegiance are far too powerful to be demolished merely by confrontation with more honest symbols, For those prosperous people dominating the public arena, their reality is too benign to threaten the fraudulent symbols they use to maintain their dominance.

When this diversity between the truest theory and the simplest fact, between potential generalities and actual particulars, has been thoroughly appreciated, it becomes clear that much of what is valued in science and religion is not lodged in the miscellany underlying these creations of reason, but is lodged rather in the rational activity itself, and in the intrinsic beauty of all symbols bred in a genial mind. Of course, if these symbols had no real points of reference, if they were symbols of nothing, they could have no great claim to consideration and no rational character; at most they would be agreeable sensations.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905 - 1906)


This is the problem - much of what is valued in science and religion is not lodged in the miscellany underlying these creations of reason, but is lodged rather in the rational activity itself.

If important arenas of rational activity are not rational, but fraudulent, then they are valued fraudulently, being based on nothing more substantial than agreeable sensations. That is to say, agreeable to a certain social class. This seems to be one underlying theme of the malaise – fraudulent symbols.

Echo chambers

Anyone who is at least moderately alert will listen to King Charles speaking about climate change knowing well enough that he does not understand the issue in any meaningful technical sense. He speaks from a climate echo chamber, not even a specifically royal echo chamber.

The metaphor ‘echo chamber’ where people merely echo the words of like-minded people is a good one, although it tends to be misused by being relegated to a term of abuse. A pity because echo chambers are an essential aspect of how we all acquire and maintain our ideas.


Whereupon I may proceed laboriously to create and modulate my opinion, groping perhaps to a final epigram, which I say expresses just what I think, although I never thought it before.

Such is my discourse when I am really thinking; at other times it is but the echo of language which I remember to have formerly used, and therefore call my ideas. It is clear therefore that even in expressing my own mind when I conceive what I have felt, I have never really felt just that before. My report is an honest myth.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)


Ideas are almost always remembered language, usually the echoes of echo chambers. We think and as we think we talk to ourselves with or without speaking while mulling over remembered language. This is what thinking is. There are no ideas in the sense of facts and analytical structures lodged in the brain.

We recall images, feelings and emotions too, because remembered language doesn’t come without baggage. Yet this remembered language is the intellectual basis of what we experience as an idea, there is virtually nothing else. To say so is no more than a change of perspective, but it can be useful.

When activists chant their radical ideas in the street, they are almost always chanting remembered language, nothing else apart from the baggage which can be equally prominent. No carefully structured reasoning, no facts and analytical structures lodged in radical heads, only remembered language inserted via an echo chamber.

Nobody is immune. The MP who stands up in the House of Commons to pontificate about Net Zero is almost certainly repeating remembered language and nothing else. Given the composition of the House technical understanding is unlikely anyway. 

Similarly, most UK voters vote for red, blue or yellow echo chambers. Unfortunately, the voter’s echo chamber is not the MP’s echo chamber, still less the government’s echo chamber.

This is the point to be made - nobody is immune from echo chambers. It’s what we do. We use the word ‘idea’ because we must, but ideas rarely have any depth to them, they are almost always remembered language. As is this blog post, built from the remembered language of B.F. Skinner, George Santayana, King Charles and a host of others imperfectly remembered. 

A strange poverty in their minds

From over a century ago we have a powerful insight into the art of reason as a cultural heritage, which of course it is. Santayana uses it to point out that revolutionists are inevitably disinherited from their cultural heritage and thereby disinherited from reason.


The life of reason is a heritage and exists only through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so much as to understand one another.

Now the misfortune of revolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their folly is that they wish to be disinherited even more than they are. Hence, in the midst of their passionate and even heroic idealisms, there is commonly a strange poverty in their minds, many an ugly turn in their lives, and an ostentatious vileness in their manners. They wish to be the leaders of mankind, but they are wretched representatives of humanity. In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything.

George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine (1913)


It is still a powerful insight today, uncompromisingly bleak in its implications but powerful. Substitute ‘revolutionists’ for ‘progressives’ and today we have the same grim and intractable problem. 

When we see progressives, preach their progressive views, do we see a strange poverty in their minds? Of course we do, we see that an essential aspect of their cultural heritage is missing.

A country without a memory

Starmer accuses 'weak' Sunak of harbouring 'extremists' in his party

Sir Keir Starmer has accused the prime minister of harbouring extremists in his party after a senior Tory MP was suspended for "Islamophobic" comments.

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

George Santayana

 

Swamps v Sceptics

It can’t be a wildly uncommon issue this. You have a friend, relative or acquaintance who is pleasant, easy to talk to, intelligent and quite well-informed. Yet something is missing - you sometimes wish that he or she would be more sceptical.

Perhaps you wish that this friend, relative or acquaintance would be less inclined to believe official explanations, the media or TV news. Less prone to accept conventional viewpoints as facts without questioning them.


The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular; nor does it assure me that not to live would not, for this very reason, be far safer and saner. To be dead and have no opinions would certainly not be to discover the truth ; but if all opinions are necessarily false, it would at least be not to sin against intellectual honour. Let me then push scepticism as far as I logically can, and endeavour to clear my mind of illusion, even at the price of intellectual suicide.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)


Suppose we consider two aspects to intelligence. Firstly the traditional aspect of IQ and some vague add-ons such as retained knowledge and verbal agility. Secondly Santayana’s scepticism, clearing the mind of illusions about good or bad, true or false, dishonest or honest and so on.

Of the two, scepticism seems to be more important in that it is much less likely to lead us into illusions. As communication has become easier and broader over the past century or so, and especially in the digital age, popular illusions have become bigger, far more heavily promoted and more swamp-like. Even people who may be conventionally intelligent are sucked in if they are not natural sceptics.

Can scepticism be taught and learned? Possibly not.


…the faculty of judgment is a special talent which cannot be taught, but must be practised. This is what constitutes our so-called mother-wit, the absence of which cannot be remedied by any schooling. For although the teacher may offer, and as it were graft into a narrow understanding, plenty of rules borrowed of others, the faculty of using them rightly must belong to the pupil himself, and without that talent no precept that may be given is safe from abuse.

Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason (1781)


Kant’s mother-wit is a close relative of scepticism in this respect - without that talent no precept that may be given is safe from abuse. Including the scientific method, basic economic realities and even simple arithmetic.

An unfortunate effect of this vast swamp-like nature of modern illusions is that they resist change. Money is involved, often huge amounts of money. Plus reputations, education, careers, mortgages and an impossibly complex morass of vested interests.

Sceptics need the patience of Job in addition to their scepticism, because reality may take decades to drain away yet another swampy illusion.

Contagion v Belief

The most contagious feelings, the clearest thoughts, of others are clear or contagious only because I can readily make them my own.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

Suppose we choose Prince William as an example of celebrities who strongly support the orthodox climate change narrative. Wills believes the climate doom narrative we might say with a considerable degree of confidence. For example -

Jacinda Ardern appointed trustee of Prince William's Earthshot Prize

Prince William said it was an honour to welcome the former leader of New Zealand to the Earthshot Prize.

Yet –

If Wills doesn’t have a solid grasp of the scientific complexities, what specifically does he believe? Presumably he accepts lots of orthodox climate hearsay, as his father does. Maybe that isn’t too serious, apart from supporting the futile expenditure of billions of pounds. That level of expenditure shouldn’t be driven by those who merely believe hearsay though.

Alternatively, anyone may be sceptical about the climate narrative after observing the inconsistent behaviour of believers, including Wills, other celebrities and even climate scientists. The private jets, the international conferences, the absence of any observable intention to adopt a low impact lifestyle. Wills appears to believe without worthwhile changes to his personal lifestyle.

Either Wills cannot believe the orthodox climate narrative or –

Or maybe ‘belief’ isn’t the best word. It has all the baggage of ideas coherently organised inside a person’s head. Suppose belief isn’t like that at all, being a much shallower and significantly impersonal consequence of popular language.

Wills takes ownership of orthodox climate language because socially it is inescapably appropriate for him to make it his own. Because the clearest thoughts, of others are clear or contagious only because I can readily make them my own. 

Polar bears on ice floes, impassioned rhetoric, dire predictions and much more. Wills can make all this his own and he does. The language is easy to learn and socially contagious. Acquiring the contagion is caused by inadequate social distancing we might say, tongue in cheek.

Wills and many other celebrities do not need to understand the real world complexities of climate change. All they need to understand is how to use the popular language and that is a simple matter of imitation. The private jets and trivial lifestyle changes tell us how shallow it all is. Very shallow indeed.

A stupid convention

During a recent thunderstorm I had a momentary sense of how fine it would be to watch the storm from a remote moorland cottage. It was an imaginary sense of being closer to a natural world which has not been sanitised by modernity. A sense of being apart from the pressures and intrusions of modernity.

Following a similar theme, the passage below is taken from one of a series of detective novels by Josephine Tey. Her Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Alan Grant, has a period of debilitating mental fatigue due to overwork so takes himself off for a holiday in the Outer Hebrides. Here he begins to recover his equilibrium on a wild and lonely beach where he escapes the pressures and intrusions of London life.

 

He walked down over the fine white sand to the edge of the water, and let the tumult roar over him. At close quarters it had a senseless quality that dissolved his uncomfortable sense of diminution and made him feel human and superior. He turned his back on it almost contemptuously as one would on a bad-mannered child who was making an exhibition of himself. He felt warm and alive and master of himself; admirably intelligent and gratifyingly sentient. He walked back up the sand, absurdly, and extravagantly glad to be a human being and alive. The air that came off the land when he had turned his back on the salt sterile wind from the sea was gentle and warm. It was like opening the door of a house. He went on across the grassy levels without once looking back. The wind hounded him along the flat bogs, but it was no longer in his face and the salt was no longer in his nostrils. His nostrils were full of the good smell of damp earth; the smell of growing things. He was happy.

Josephine Tey – The Singing Sands (1952)

George Santayana had something to say along similar lines - our spiritual need to be among natural causes and to experience them as natural. It’s where so many modern environmental causes fall flat as they seek to wrap the natural world in fluffy political virtues. 

 

A stupid convention still looks on material and mathematical processes as somehow distressing and ugly, and systems of philosophy, artificially mechanical, are invented to try to explain natural mechanism away; whereas in no region can the spirit feel so much at home as among natural causes, or realise so well its universal affinities, or so safely enlarge its happiness. Mechanism is the source of beauty. It is not necessary to look so high as the stars to perceive this truth: the action of an animal’s limbs or the movement of a waterfall will prove it to any one who has eyes and can shake himself loose from verbal prejudices, those debris of old perceptions which choke all fresh perception in the soul. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational decencies, make man’s chief desolation. A slight knocking of fools’ heads together might be enough to break up the ossifications there and start the blood coursing again through possible channels. Art has an infinite range; nothing shifts so easily as taste and yet nothing so persistently avoids the directions in which it might find most satisfaction.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905)

Today the the natural world is still partly obscured by yet more stupid conventions. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational decencies, make man’s chief desolation. Indeed they do.

Time Stands Still

Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised himself to his earthly eminence : it opens the gates of nature to him, both within him and without, and enables him to transmute his apprehension, at first merely æsthetic, into mathematical science.

This is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom. Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in experience.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)


It’s an old social division this one. There are those who understand the importance of experience and those who only partially understand it. The latter are those who stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom.

By poetry, Santayana meant the seductive and beguiling art of the wordsmith misapplied to social and political life. Unsurprisingly, people with a practical outlook seem to value practical experience of the real world instead. The art of the wordsmith they leave to others, which has never been a good idea.

Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. In our day they are only partially welcome and understood too. The green revolution could almost be described as an attempt to run the world on poetry. Time stands still, especially for progressives.

That luminous modern thing

A system, even when it has serious rivals, may be maintained for centuries as religions are maintained, institutionally; but a movement comes to an end; it is followed presently by a period of assimilation which transforms it, or by a movement in some other direction. I ask myself accordingly whether the condition of the world in the coming years will be favourable to refined and paradoxical science. The extension of education will have enabled the uneducated to pronounce upon everything. Will the patronage of capital and enterprise subsist, to encourage discovery and reward invention? Will a jealous and dogmatic democracy respect the unintelligible insight of the few?

George Santayana - Five Essays (1933)


We now have an answer to that one – a jealous and dogmatic democracy does not respect the unintelligible insight of the few. It has no use for the vast uncertainties of climate science but demands high drama, facile predictions, celebrities, two-dimensional villains and vicious vengeance. The extension of education will have enabled the uneducated to pronounce upon everything. Particularly politicians, journalists, pundits and celebrities.

It has been a mistake to view good science as some kind of imperishable discovery which once found cannot be lost again. A citadel which once built cannot be destroyed even if it has to be repaired every now and then. It isn’t a citadel. Climate science, gender politics and the pandemic debacle tell us it isn’t. 

Then perhaps that luminous modern thing which until recently was called science, in contrast to all personal philosophies, may cease to exist altogether, being petrified into routine in the practitioners, and fading in the professors into abstruse speculations.

George Santayana - Five Essays (1933)


The foresight may be chilling, but today we know enough to see it as foresight and draw conclusions from that. For example, it is unlikely that there is a route back to more a more rigorous science. A century of mass entertainment, advertising, public relations and the politics of centralisation seem to have buried the habit of rigorous language.

Now that luminous modern thing is no longer modern, it is no longer fashionable. No amount of argument can bring that back. 

Socrates and Net Zero

Powerful responses to the apocalyptic climate narrative are not only found in the flaky science, they are also found in human behaviour which hardly ever matches the rhetoric.

The personal behaviour of its proponents almost always shows apocalyptic climate claims to be an imposture. The imposition of increasingly rigorous climate “duties” by media, politicians and celebrities are clues to the imposture. The "duties" are imposed on us, not them.

This method, the Socratic method, consists in accepting any estimation which any man may sincerely make, and in applying dialectic to it, so as to let the man see what he really esteems. What he really esteems is what ought to guide his conduct; for to suggest that a rational being ought to do what he feels to be wrong, or ought to pursue what he genuinely thinks is worthless, would be to impugn that man’s rationality and to discredit one’s own.

With what face could any man or god say to another: Your duty is to do what you cannot know you ought to do; your function is to suffer what you cannot recognise to be worth suffering? Such an attitude amounts to imposture and excludes society; it is the attitude of a detestable tyrant, and any one who mistakes it for moral authority has not yet felt the first heart-throb of philosophy.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905 - 1906)


Telling the general population to do what they cannot know they ought to do and suffer what they cannot know they ought to suffer in the name of climate change - that should not be mistaken for moral authority. It is an imposture.

A large majority of people promoting the climate imposture politically and in the media, cannot know why it ought to be pushed nor why it ought to be endured.

As for people we encounter socially who profess to believe the climate imposture – most of them cannot know why it ought to be pushed nor why it ought to be endured.

Simple, widely observable human behaviour tells us quite clearly that the apocalyptic climate narrative is an imposture. The science may be blatantly flaky, but ignorant behaviour is the bigger clue.

Or we watch television

The ideas we have of things are not fair portraits; they are political caricatures made in the human interest; but in their partial way they may be masterpieces of characterisation and insight. Above all, they are obtained by labour, by investigating what is not given, and by correcting one impression by another, drawn from the same object—a thing impossible in the intuition of essences. They therefore conduce to wisdom, and in their perpetual tentativeness have a cumulative truth.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

Most of us accept the reality of cumulative abilities. We know we can’t acquire any kind of skill, knowledge or expertise in a single flash of inspiration.

We don’t become better tennis players by watching Roger Federer – not even in our own minds. We don’t acquire much insight by watching television. Our pursuit of truth is cumulative in an analogous manner – we go out there and pursue truth with serious intent or we watch television.

Wider problems in pursuing a cumulative truth as it unfolds step by step are obvious. The media are not interested unless it is an unfolding scandal or something which can be unfolded into a scandal. Political actors are not interested because it isn’t immediate enough. There is no persuasive finality in cumulative truth. Unless charlatans give it that persuasive finality of course.

Yet Santayana was describing how we make thinking worthwhile – the perpetual pursuit of cumulative truth. That’s it – the whole shebang. Cumulative experience of right, wrong, true, false, dubious or promising. Outside of this, thinking really isn’t worthwhile. It isn’t even thinking if it doesn’t attempt to accumulate better over worse.

Unfortunately, not everyone wants thinking to be worthwhile in all circumstances – or so says one result of cumulative truth.

A Problem Problem

It is not necessary to fathom the ground or the structure of everything in order to know what to make of it. Stones do not disconcert a builder because he may not happen to know what they are chemically; and so the unsolved problems of life and nature, and the Babel of society, need not disturb the genial observer, though he may be incapable of unravelling them. He may set these dark spots down in their places, like so many caves or wells in a landscape, without feeling bound to scrutinise their depths simply because their depths are obscure.

George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913)

Wake up and smell the coffee - we’ve all heard that one, it’s too common to be anything but a cliché even though it encapsulates a problem we often have when arguing against conventional but blatantly dubious points of view. Sometimes conventional viewpoints seem to owe more to dreamlike fantasy than analysis, as if those who subscribe to them really should wake up and smell the metaphorical coffee. 

We navigate through life by avoiding surprises because surprises have to be resolved and that involves effort and risk. Avoiding surprises is the low risk, low effort way to go. Also the most efficient in that we avoid unnecessary expenditure of energy, especially cerebral energy. What counts as a surprise though?

In one sense, a surprise is problem to be resolved, but here we seem to have a key difference in how people perceive certain social and political problems. Not a sharp difference with no overlap, but one of those fuzzy differences which are nevertheless real and important.

We could attempt to clarify this by saying that some people are reality-bound. They take reality as the ultimate arbiter of what counts as a problem. All problems are aspects of the real world and have to be defined as such even if they are social problems or problems of human behaviour. They navigate through life by avoiding inadequate descriptions of reality in favour of better ones. Frequently this requires us to acknowledge uncertainties without feeling bound to scrutinise their depths simply because their depths are obscure.

Others are more socially-bound, although everyone is of course both. But some people seem to sleepwalk into a social consensus they cannot analyse objectively. To do so would be deemed socially inappropriate even if uncertainties are an inescapable aspect of the problem. In these situations, socially appropriate equates to true – there is nothing beyond it. Socially inappropriate is to be ignored or made to go away.

Social hierarchies could be guided by real world problem-solvers but too often they are not. They are frequently guided by those who peddle socially appropriate answers which cannot be analysed objectively. The battle lines are drawn, the abuse begins and problem-solvers are left beyond the pale.

Then reality takes over.

Inherited from a totalitarian past

The life of reason is a heritage and exists only through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so much as to understand one another.

George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913)

Language is part of our heritage – obviously. Political language is too, it doesn’t disappear as political systems evolve. Political language evolves too, but in a connected age it did not necessarily evolve from our democratic heritage. It’s a problem we don’t discuss in the public arena, the political underbelly, the question of where our current political language came from, how it evolved from evils of the past to blight our political lives today.

Today we see what are effectively evolved totalitarian language games from the era of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, from the era of the Little Red Book, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, from Baader-Meinhof and the madness of jackboot politics. However vile, those political language games didn’t die when the main characters died or even when their regimes died.

Now we are left wondering how corrupt the roots of our current political language games are and if they could evolve into something even worse. Unfortunately there is something morally corrupt about democratic politics to begin with. It does not attract many honest, tough-minded and professionally competent people. Almost none we might say without being unduly cynical.

We see political moral corruption all the time, but the pressure not to see it is enormously powerful, enormously wealthy and if challenged, increasingly vindictive. Play our language games they insist – we refuse to recognise any other. Very much like waving the Little Red Book.

Take climate change for example, one of the more obvious issues when we mull over the corruption of democratic political language. There is something disgusting about adults playing political language games with children. Lying to them about their climate because this is how the game is played at the highest level. Doubt or deviation are punished socially, professionally and politically.

Political language games have corrupted the language of altruism and charity, the language of progress, science, technology, economics, social life, family life and even human biology. Political language has almost become too corrupt to conduct civilised political discourse across political divides, a form of corruption clearly and unambiguously inherited from a totalitarian past.

The courage to believe in experience

Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in experience.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

It does take courage to believe in experience. As a consequence it is possible to condition people to be dumb. Straightforward stimulus, response and reinforcement will do it. Reward people for being dumb with social and official approval. Reward them socially or financially for saying dumb things. It happens on a vast scale and we know it happens.

Tell people we are all doomed by climate change and it’s our fault. Offer social or official approval when they demonstrate a range of appropriate behaviours, particularly verbal behaviours such as deploring consumption, condemning capitalism and praising sustainable energy. That’s it and it works. We know it works if we have the courage to believe in experience. 

Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. These are the antidotes, but even today they are only partially welcome or understood. In some respects it seems to be worse than it was in Santayana’s day. Experience suggests there will be reasons for that too.