The Enlightenment: a Faustian pact with the intellectual abyss

Why conservatism is failing

“If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle…Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.” ― Ayn Rand

“The beginning seems to be more than half of the whole.” — Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

Most “conservative” commentators are liberals in disguise. Unpicking the insane shibboleths of the radical left is simple. The patently absurd doctrine of transsexualism, for example, is easily dismantled. Reassuring the reading public that two plus two does indeed make four is nice work if you can get it — and there is plenty of such work to go round. It is not that these commentators are wrong to unpack the left’s cultural agitations: it is that we need only scratch an inch beneath the seemingly hard-nosed veneer of such pundits to discover that they are themselves committed apostles of the same intellectual framework on which the present cultural madness is predicated. They may be five steps behind the flag-waving leftists, but they are moving inexorably in the same direction.

Indeed, most of them already concede cultural ideas that would be unimaginably radical, even to liberals, twenty or thirty years ago. The fundamental reason for this lies in Modernity’s adherence to the so-called Enlightenment, whose innermost precepts of extreme scepticism and radical subjectivism tend necessarily towards the abyss. The Enlightenment is the cause of Western decline. Yet the mainstream political right is not only oblivious to this, but regards the Enlightenment as if it is the central tradition that must be conserved in order to defeat the progressive left.

Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson are two paradigmatic examples of this type of conservative. Murray’s latest book, The War on the West, unravels the accelerating disassembly of Western culture at the hands of the radical left. It shows that the assault is happening, and that is originates in our universities. Yet, eight years after the inception of the woke movement, is it interesting, or even useful, to simply explain what the radical left is doing to us? Murray, deliberately, I think, is quite careful to not ask why this is happening. All questions of the deeper, longer-term intellectual disintegration that has led the West to this point remain not only unanswered, but unasked.

“Wokeism is simply the latest, most obviously insane, expression of Enlightenment ideals. But the logic of wokeism is the logic of the Enlightenment.”

Peterson, likewise, confronts the radical left’s new assaults by untangling one obvious lie at a time. Both commentators host podcasts in ostentatious settings, decrying the leftists as “the real racists” and “the real misogynists”. Their discourse reformulates the left’s own vituperative, throwing the same cursed weapons back the way they came. In essence, mainstream conservatism’s core critique now rests on the accusation that the left is disavowing the sacred principles that undergird both liberalism and the Enlightenment itself.

Hobbes’ Leviathan, a core Enlightenment text, began the descent towards moral “constructivism”

What these writers fail to comprehend is that leftwing radicals are in fact agents of the Enlightenment: they act in accordance with its foundational intellectual premises, and merely enact the next steps in the endless “progressivism” those premises entail. It is because mainstream conservatives are themselves submerged in the dark waters of Enlightenment intellectualism that they fail to recognise this. They are in Plato’s Cave, attacking the shapes of their opponents on the walls, not realising that those opponents are trapped in the same fundamental delusion as themselves, and that the truth lies outside the cave entirely.

All too often we hear prominent conservatives make adulating references to Enlightenment thinkers, such as David Hume (1711-76), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), and John Stuart Mill (1806-73). The names of these men, along with the other fathers of the “Age of Reason”, are used as bywords for the highest traditions of Western rationalism. Yet these thinkers, each in their turn, progressively laid waste to Western civilisation by promoting absurd philosophies of extreme scepticism and moral radicalism. Together, they unhinged the Western moral and intellectual paradigm, based on Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy, that had unified Medieval Christendom for centuries, and had led directly to the Renaissance.

The Enlightenment, from its beginnings in the early seventeenth century, rapidly deracinated the roots of Western culture. In their place, a new iron crown of rationalism and endlessly agitating “progress” has sat enthroned for four hundred years. This paradigm-shift heralded a sustained onslaught against the idea of moral and metaphysical objectivity — the very assault that most conservatives claim to despise. At its heart, the Enlightenment attacked and denied the concept of truth on multiple fronts. The idea that societies and individuals can therefore “construct” themselves however they see fit has been in train, in various guises, ever since. Defeating wokeism is therefore no simple matter of collapsing the individual absurdities in front of our faces. It requires a deeper journey into the heart of modern rationalism to dethrone the false prophets by whose teachings the entire West is now guided.

David Hume: the rejection of objective reality

Hume usurped the Western tradition of metaphysics. And he is regarded, along with René Descartes as a great founding idol of the Enlightenment. He was a radical empiricist, a radical materialist, and a radical sceptic. A committed atheist, he claimed that the science of man is the “only solid foundation for the other sciences.” Experience and observation are the only lenses through which human inquiry can be conducted. Crucially, philosophy itself is subordinated on Hume’s view to a branch of science. This extreme empiricism was designed to block traditional metaphysics in its tracks.

Metaphysics uses a combination of empirical evidence, common experience and logical deduction to form rational conclusions. It is not based solely on observable data: it infers deeper truths through the highest forms of reasoning and argument. The greatest philosophers, from Plato to Wittgenstein, have been engaged principally in metaphysics. Is it through metaphysics that everything from God, to man’s purpose, to morality itself have been reasoned. By claiming that only scientific conclusions are legitimate, Hume simply denied the validity of all metaphysics. Most importantly, the arguments for the existence of God, which rely on reason being able to operate independently of scientific observation, are stopped at their first premises if the metaphysical method itself is invalidated. Only that which can be seen can be known to exist. God cannot be seen. Therefore God does not exist. This is the essential argument on which both the so-called New Atheism, and the entire secular West, has staked itself. It requires denying that human reason has the potency to deduce the deepest truths of reality. Ironically, this framework is called “rationalism”.

Hume thus applied a revolutionary scepticism to all of nature. Most strikingly, Hume argued that we cannot know that our basic concept of cause-and-effect corresponds with anything real. We can only say, for example, that events of type A tend to be followed by events of type B. As the philosopher Edward Feser explains, Hume’s view requires denying that we can know that the smashing of the window was caused by the throwing of the brick. We can only say that the events are “conjoined”, and that certain “regularities” pertain between such events.

Of course, this is simply nonsense on stilts. We do know that a brick launched at a window will cause it to smash. It is not merely incidental. How could it possibly be? Moreover, whilst modern intellectuals pretend to revere Hume, no scientist conducts his work as if Hume’s argument is true. Physicists accept that, as an immutable law of nature, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and so forth. Neither in science nor in everyday life do we apply this radical scepticism to causation. The entire argument, from start to finish, is just wrong. One of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Anscombe, thus described Hume as a “mere — brilliant — sophist.” He was an intellectual con artist, who conjured a vast and disorientating edifice out of a ridiculous — and patently untrue — scepticism.

Although Hume’s philosophy was a mere trick, it was a highly dangerous and beguiling one. Once we deny our ability to comprehend such fundamental things as bricks breaking windows, our grounding in objective truth is uprooted entirely. We are totally at sea. At once, everything and nothing at all can be true. And thus we have Modernity in a nutshell: the obvious truths of common sense can be denied on a whim; and the blatantly fanciful can be upheld as incontrovertible truth. This all goes back to Hume. And yet his name is used constantly as a synonym for sanity and reason and tradition, mainly by conservatives.

Importantly, the Enlightenment must be understood as a movement. Originally forged during the European religious wars of the seventeenth centuries, it was the de facto intellectual arm of the Protestant Reformation. Beneath the sophistic intellectual doctrines lay the chief political aim of dismantling the foundational precepts of traditional Scholastic thought on which Medieval Christendom rested: Aristotelian metaphysics, and the traditional arguments for God and Christian morality. Hume was a man of his time, responding to and furthering this movement into new and absurd territory. His arguments would have been laughed at three centuries earlier. Indeed, many laugh at them today — precisely because they do not make logical sense. And yet, because these absurd arguments are needed to block traditional metaphysics in support of the secular political paradigm, Hume as been deified as a god of Western intellectualism.

Thomas Hobbes: the rejection of objective morality

Just as Hume applied a radical scepticism to reality in the eighteenth century, so earlier thinkers in the seventeenth century had already laid waste to the idea of moral truth. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued in his work Leviathan (1651) for a version of “social contract” theory — another insidious hallmark of the Enlightenment. According to Hobbes, human nature is innately ugly. The state of nature is such that, without iron-strong government, humans are destined to live in a dreadful anarchy:

“In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all,continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” — Leviathan (Part I: Of Man)

Thus civilisation is the antithesis, not the product, of nature. Human affairs do not tend naturally towards order and custom, but towards a self-preservationist abyss in which “man is wolf to man.” The only power that can suspend the savagery of the jungle and provide justice is the fist of a profoundly powerful monarchy. This deliberately upended the “natural law” conception of human organisation that had prevailed under Medieval Scholasticism. The Scholastic tradition, following Aristotle, held that humans tend naturally towards social flourishing. We organise ourselves first into families and tribes, then into small townships, and finally into the polis (the city-state). We contain within ourselves — from birth — the social and moral elements necessary to the compromises and responsibilities of civilisation. On this traditional view, although we are of course imperfect, we are innately civilised and carry the seeds of our own flourishing. And we tend towards the Good — marriage; community; religion; learning; and order — of our own accord. Indeed, Aristotle’s view is surely empirically sound: all human cultures tend towards rule-based order, religion, and familial community — not anarchic chaos.

Hobbes’s argument requires that we reject this picture. But with his cynicism comes also an irrevocable scepticism about morality. He claimed that, because we understand the state of nature to be precarious and violent, we subject ourselves via a “social contract” to authoritarian monarchical rule. This, he claims, is the only route to justice and civility. Hence, the moral codes that pertain in that society only exist because they happen to be part of the social contract. Morality is based upon the law, not the other way around. In a state of nature there is therefore no sin and no injustice. These concepts only exist in relation to the law, as forged by the social contract. Murder in the jungle, on Hobbes’ view, is morally moot. Society creates good and evil. So we see that Hobbes, along with the other social contract theorists such as John Locke, opened the door to what we now call “moral constructivism”. Morality exists as a mere figment of the common social imagination, not as an objective reality unto itself.

As Edward Feser observes, the logical consequence of Hobbes’ view is that, in the event the social contract permitted it, there could be nothing in principle wrong with torturing and murdering children. Right and wrong become literally whatever we wish them to be. This is absurd: torture is not wrong because we agree that it is wrong. This argument, of course, hinged ultimately upon Hobbes’ own materialist metaphysics. Although he denied the charges of atheism that were levelled against him, he rejected the traditional arguments for the existence of God and the immateriality of the soul. This was itself radicalism by the lights of the seventeenth century. We thus see that Hobbes’ proto-constructivism was connected intimately to his proto-atheism. These are of course the dominant twin precepts of modern Western culture.

Once constructivism is embraced as an intellectual principle, de-constructivism will follow inevitably as the logical political implication. If human society and morality are mere constructs, based on nothing objective or preordained, then we can — and should — reconstruct our affairs in any way we see fit. This is the absolute essence of leftism. The world, and humanity itself, are things to be transformed in accordance with utopian ideals. The first intellectual step on this road is the denial of objective moral and metaphysical truth. The leftist believes there is nothing permanent or naturally immutable in the family, or logic, or biological sex, or natural social hierarchy etc. Such things are social inventions. And hence new societal orders can — and should — be imposed: obedience to the state over the community; “fluidity” between the sexes; radical material redistribution; and so forth. All of this relies first and foremost upon untethering people from the traditional notions of objective truth and the natural law.

The doctrine of the social contract, like Hume’s empiricism is a poisoned chalice. Once drunk from, the chronic, ever-worsening malaise of incoherence will follow necessarily. Here we come to another Aristotelian principle: A small error made at the start of a piece of reasoning will result in immense errors in its conclusion. So it is with both Hume’s scientism and the “rationalism” of the social contract. Initially appealing, harmless and straightforward, these precepts are in fact pernicious delusions, whose logical and practical consequences have unfolded down the centuries as one-way ratchets to absurdity. Once bad reasoning has been unleashed into the cultural fabric, the fallacies and errors cannot be unwound without great upheaval.

John Stuart Mill: the rejection of social and moral custom

Having seemingly divorced human morality from objective truth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the way stood open for the Enlightenment of the nineteenth century to invent an entirely new ethical framework in which Western man could ground himself socially and spiritually. The principal architect of this next stage in the progressive project was that most-hailed of English philosophers: John Stuart Mill. Mill’s famous essay, On Liberty (1859), although often wrongly assumed to be a bulwark of English conservatism, was in fact a Trojan Horse for modern cultural deterioration. As Patrick J. Deneen, Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies, at the University of Notre Dame explains (in this excellent essay):

The ascendant intellectual figure of our time is not Burke — nor Paine — but John Stuart Mill. Ironically, Mill is often regarded as a great hero of conservatism, lauded especially for his libertarian formulation of the “Harm Principle”, his argument that individuals should enjoy the greatest possible exercise of personal liberty until and unless it results in some measurable harm to others. Many conservatives with passing knowledge of Mill have some positive regard for what they think they know of his philosophy.

But Mill was no conservative: he was the midwife of modern liberalism, and in many ways the arch-foe of Burke.

Whilst many libertarians assume that Mill was applying his “Harm Principle” to the tyrannical overreaches of absolutist government, it was in fact against the ordinary morality of public opinion — what he called “Custom” — that he focused his attack. Custom, Mill argued, is the enemy of Progress. It is unreflective, common and slavish adherence to the stagnant mores and habits of tradition. Custom, he argued, constrained the spontaneous flair and creativity of extraordinary and unconventional individuals. Crucially, it was not the ordinary man or woman that Mill wished to emancipate from social Custom: it was the most educated, talented and unusual individuals in society.

“Conservatives, disoriented by the recent rapid advances of the radical left, feel inclined to fall back on Mill, as if he provides a sure footing in tradition. But his philosophy is the very source of the problem.”

The idea of liberty was thus reconceived as the freedom to conduct “experiments in living”, harnessing every form of “diversity” (note the familiar terminology). Mill was honest and perceptive enough to recognise that this would necessitate the “dominance” of the experimental over the ordinary. Progress would enjoy a cultural — and political — reign over Custom. A de facto aristocracy made up of the experimenters would rule over the adherents of ordinary Custom. In short: only the reign of a progressive elite could provide the spiritual and social guidance necessary to elevate humanity into an experimental Utopia. It is vital to recognise at this juncture the profound tension between Mill’s view and that of Edmund Burke, who championed ordinary sentiments and customs as the final bastions of resistance against revolutionary cultural innovators. As Deneen observes, post-Millian civilisation becomes riven with two adjacent battles: one between Progress and Custom; and the other between the Strong (progressive) and the Ordinary (customary).

It is obvious that Mill has won the cultural battle for the modern West. The attack on the conventional family, the breakdown of traditional relations between the sexes, and the rise of sexual abnormalities as the new spiritual outlets-in-chief are all symptoms of the experimental rubric that is now dominant. The polyamorous “family” — a nightmarish experiment in deviancy — is not only legally protected across the West, but its social critics are all but vanquished from the arena of public discourse. Remember: according to Mill, the Experimenters must be protected from the backwardness of the Ordinary. Indeed, so enshrined are these new, anti-conventional modes of living that our children must be taught in school not only to accept, but to revere, the Experimenters. A whole industry, for example, of picture-books embedding the Experimental lifestyle in infants has flourished, embraced by the corporate and cultural elites.

Moreover, Mill, through his rejection of the natural law, was also the architect of modern feminism. In The Subjection of Women (1861), he argued that the behavioural differences between men and women are most likely to be merely the products of their differential treatment in the culture. Only by ensuring absolute cultural equality between the sexes could the role of nurture be seen in full. Now that such complete equality has been realised, it is apparent that Mill was wrong about this, too. Even in modern conditions of maximal cultural freedom, study after study demonstrates that men and women, as groups, are immutably different — in their neurology; their interests; their ambitions; their emotional responses; and their cognitive abilities. But the notion of innate biological equivalence between the sexes is stubbornly persistent in the Western mind, and is the most foundational precept on which modern feminism rests.

Mill is the progenitor of the woke project, but also of liberalism itself. His influence on twentieth century philosophy and society is matched only by Marx. He revolutionised and distorted the conception of human liberty, and created the modern phoney “duty” to respect and embrace cultural degeneracy with which we are ridden today. As with Hobbes and Hume, we live in a world of Mill’s making. This is why conservatives, disoriented by the recent rapid advances of the radical left, feel inclined to blithely fall back on Mill, as if he provides a sure footing in tradition. But his philosophy is, of course, the very source of the problem. It is not that Mill would be pleased to see the cultural insanity that has arisen from his project. The point is that he unleashed a social logic that was bound inevitably, through its aggression against proven tradition and the natural law, to rupture good sense and to degrade that which had been built over centuries.

A Faustian pact: the rejection of Aristotle

The Enlightenment served a political purpose. The Reformation required that the intellectual underpinnings of Catholic Europe be attacked so that a new order, and a new elite, could be ushered in. Thus, all of its strange rationalisations, from abstractions about cause-and-effect to social contracts, were really attempts at unpicking Medieval Christian doctrine. That doctrine (Scholasticism) had, over centuries, woven together Christian theology with the metaphysics and ethics of Aristotle, who was arguably the greatest philosopher of all time. As Ayn Rand observed, human civilisation has reached unparalleled heights of brilliance only when founded on Aristotelian philosophical precepts. Adherence to his philosophy is a “barometer” for civilisational success. One of the great writers of the twentieth century, G.K. Chesterton, argued that twelfth century Europe was the absolute apotheosis of Western civilisation — a high-water mark of learning, culture and rapid advancement. Aristotle’s philosophy was an integral intellectual guide throughout this era. His ethics and politics built a Shakespearean picture of the human, based on an entirely convincing conception of a natural moral law. His metaphysics deduced an Unmoved Mover at the base of all reality, and showed the necessary immateriality of the intellect.

To this day, these central arguments are impregnable and entirely compatible with modern scientific understanding. The Enlightenment philosophers did not even try to collapse them: they simply went round them. To avoid confronting the potency of Aristotle’s metaphysics, Hume just denied the validity of all metaphysics full-stop. Only scientific knowledge counts as truth, and, even through science, almost nothing at all is knowable. This was intended to deprive Scholastic metaphysics of its oxygen: the arguments cannot get off the ground with a single premise, since the entire methodology has been dismissed as worthless. And Hobbes simply ignored the natural law conception of morality and civilisation. Instead, good and evil are human “constructs”, devoid of any objective meaning.

As we have seen, not only was this unravelling of Aristotelian philosophy wholly dishonest, but the alternative explanations of reality and morality advanced in its stead were simply wrong. Yet these incoherent concepts have been falsely sublimated as the highest precepts of the “Age of Reason”, which has guided the West for centuries. The so-called rationalism of the Enlightenment is a veneer — an advertisement designed to loudly champion the new progressive order, and to tacitly discredit the old benighted order. Beneath it lie bizarre doctrines that are constantly shape-shifting down the years in their incoherence, but which are ultimately needed to provide the intellectual foundation to the politics of Modernity. As Edward Feser remarks:

“The rabid anti-Scholasticism of the early moderns was driven less by dispassionate intellectual considerations than by a political agenda: to reorient human life away from the next world and toward this one, and to weaken the rational credentials of religion so as to make this project seem justifiable and inevitable.” — Feser, The Last Superstition

The Enlightenment was a Faustian pact with the intellectual abyss. It accepted its own essential incoherence so that the old Christian order could be overthrown by any means. And that pact therefore had to be embraced into the heart of the civilisation that grew out of the revolution. Its absurdities have only magnified with time, each progressive turn of the handle ratcheting us closer to chaos. Radical naturalism, radical scepticism, constructivism and “experiments in living” are now the deepest-held intellectual ideals of the West. More than that, they hold for us a moral, even pseudo-religious, value. Indeed, this is unsurprising, given that they were created for the purpose of usurping the old Christian spiritual order. Wokeism is simply the latest, most obviously insane, expression of these ideals. But the logic of wokeism is the logic of the Enlightenment. Woke dogmas are manifestations of Enlightenment doctrines.

It is therefore useless for mainstream conservatives to unpick the specific lies of the modern left in isolation. The cultural chaos is so deep that, like the Hydra, its snake-heads will simply regrow once decapitated. The “progressive” rubric of Modernity is in perennial motion: the whole point is that it does not stop. Tellingly, these “conservatives” very often accept relatively recent progressive innovations — the social predicates of the 1960s revolution, for example. They are liberals of a thoroughly modern mould, who implicitly accept the principles enshrined by Hobbes, Hume and Mill, even if they have no idea what these men said and would be unsettled if they did. It is, they argue, only very recently that things have gone too far. A correction of a few degrees will set the ship aright, they claim. This is simply wrong: the very waters in which we have sailed, for thousands of miles now, are toxic. The logic that is at work in Modernity tends towards the abyss through its violation and denial of the natural law and objective meaning. This is the fundamental reason for the accelerating decline of Western civilisation.

Aristotle was right: The beginning is more than half of the whole. The only way to rejuvenate our civilisation is to reconnect modern man to his Western philosophical roots. Like battling the Hydra, the hero must fight beyond the superficial snake-heads in front of his face, and decapitate the monster at the neck. As long as the so-called resistance to the progressive left refuses to venture into the philosophical belly of the beast, we will remain deracinated, demoralised, and bound for the abyss.