“Of all the monopolies enjoyed by the Soviet State, none would be so crucial as its monopoly on the definition of words. The ultimate weapon of political control would be the dictionary.” — Robert C. Tucker, historian of Soviet Russia
Language is the tyrant’s principal tool. It is through the distortions of words that sceptics become “traitors”; murder becomes “pacification”; and a child’s denunciation of his own parents becomes “heroism”. Stalinist Russia was the paradigmatic case of despotism progressing through totalitarian language-games. But it was that great chronicler of the Soviet nightmare, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who warned as early as 1983 that the West, too, is “ineluctably slipping toward the abyss.” He saw that a form of poisonous secularism had taken root in Western culture, as it had in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and that morality, liberty and dignity were rotting from it.
Solzhenitsyn was right. The Sovietisation of Western culture has worsened for decades. As the classicist Victor Davis Hanson has observed, the adherence to compulsory political dogma is now the reigning facet of American public life:
“Experts become sycophantic. They mortgage their experience and talent to ideology — to the point where society itself regresses. The law is no longer blind and disinterested, but adjudicates indictment, prosecution, verdict, and punishment on the ideology of the accused.”
It is in this vein that is has become boringly commonplace to see the English language warped at the hands of the progressives. To take just one example in a competitive field, stating banal biological facts in the face of trans ideology is now “hate speech”. And this sort of Kafkaesque hyperbole is not restricted to the Twittersphere either: in many Western countries such imbecilities now have legal teeth. Crucially, this dictionary-fixing to ideological ends has been at work for decades in that most foundational pillar of the progressive edifice: modern science.
“Logic and language have become not only malleable in themselves, but the cynical tools with which the broader pack of lies at the heart of the prevailing ideology is enforced.”
A staggeringly candid example of this was given in a conversation between biologist Richard Dawkins and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss at The Australian National University in 2012 entitled Something from Nothing. Its purpose was to ridicule religious belief, to champion science as the key to human civilisation, and to show that, counter-intuitively, something (the physical universe) could “literally” arise from nothing at all.
Krauss, who was fifty-seven years of age at the time, wore to the event a suit with purple Converse shoes. His comically infantile dress sense was a fine illustration of Peter Hitchens’ observation that it is quite normal now for people (liberals) in their sixties to never become morally and socially mature — to quite deliberately dress, live and think as teenagers for their entire lives. And so, too, Dawkins’ and Krauss’ attempts at metaphysics during the discussion were quintessentially childlike. But if we look deeper, we see that their claims were not merely ignorant, but also fundamentally ideological — indeed, Sovietised — in important ways.
Krauss attempted to explain how the universe could have arisen spontaneously from nothing:
“The problem is I’m often accused of not talking about the ‘nothing’ that classical philosophers two thousand years ago, or theologians, talked about. And the answer is: I’m not really interested in their nothing: I’m interested in the real nothing. The answer is: based on our understanding of the universe, science changes what we mean by words. And it changes that meaning because we learn about the universe.
We actually make progress in science, unlike theology. ‘Something’ and ‘nothing’ are not theological or philosophical quantities. They’re physical quantities . . . The ‘nothing’ of the classical Greeks and of the Bible — an eternal empty void — is certainly not nothing, because empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of particles. . . There’s not much difference between nothing and something, and for some reason that offends people.”
Hence, argues Krauss, the vast regularity and complexity of the natural world really did originate from nothing. But we need to understand that “nothing” in this context was in fact a nascent physical matrix of particles and laws. Therefore the timeless philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing is dissolved. And so, too, is the logical requirement for a creator. So runs the argument.
Of course, this is question-begging nonsense. “Nothing” really means literally no thing at all: no laws; no matter; no forces; no particles. The “nothing” of Aristotle is, by absolute definition, the only true nothing: a resolute void. If there is literally any single thing in that void, then it is not nothing. Thus Krauss’ theoretical “nothing” (and it is only a theory) is in fact something — a set of vastly complex physical conditions from which galaxies and brains would eventually emerge. Far from nothing, it is in fact a great many things.
So Krauss and Dawkins remain unwittingly stuck on the horns of an intractable logical dilemma. How did this pre-existing physical state arise? Either:
It arose spontaneously from literally nothing. This is logically impossible, and is the very problem Krauss is trying to circumvent by dictionary-fixing. Or:
It has existed since the beginning of time. But since time and space cannot have a beginning on this view (because that would demand an explanation), it therefore implies a literally infinite causal and temporal regress with nothing at the metaphysical base of it all. This absurdity, too, is not where Krauss wishes his argument to lead.
Hence Krauss’ naturalistic first-cause explanation for the cosmos faces the very logical problems that it was meant to unknot. We can replace Krauss’ latent physical “nothing” with a galaxy or a whale, and the dilemma above re-emerges in any case. Krauss’ explanation itself requires an explanation.
The intellectual incompetence of this argument is important. It is obviously fallacious. So why do Krauss and Dawkins think it has logical traction? As the philosopher Edward Feser observes, genuine polymaths in academia have become extremely rare. Scholarship is now so specialised that academics will spend their entire lives absorbed in myopic endeavours, gaining virtually no learning in any other discipline. Whereas in previous ages a scientist would have some grounding in the classics and philosophy, he is now a single-subject expert, ignorant of almost anything outside of his field.
Thus, as Feser explains in The Last Superstition, because Dawkins knows only evolutionary biology, he views everything through the Darwinian rubric. And so, too, Krauss shoehorns the current doctrines of theoretical physics with which he is comfortable into grand pseudo-philosophical notions that ultimately do no explanatory work. The argument is merely a scientific hypothesis posing as a metaphysical proof. Such “public intellectuals” are encouraged into these sorts of overreaches by the scientism of Modernity, but also by their sheer ignorance of the classics and philosophy.
Hence the New Atheists are merely a symptom of the age. Indeed, they serve the age by giving it what it wants. Krauss, Dawkins and the other luminaries of New Atheism, with their purple Converse and their illiterate arguments, tell modern Western man what he wants to hear: that the cosmos is devoid of all meaning and purpose; that life is a moral abyss; and that pleasure and material progress are therefore the ultimate ends of human existence. During their conversation, Krauss and Dawkins revealed their leftist political leanings, and parroted the progressive idea that global secular movements are necessary to combatting humanity’s problems.
It is not simply that these men are wrong. They are the new de facto high philosophers of liberal progressivism, justifying the innermost foundation of the atheism and nihilism on which the entire movement is philosophically predicated. As with the science of the Soviet Union, logic and language have become not only malleable in themselves, but the cynical tools with which the broader pack of lies at the heart of the prevailing ideology is enforced. The great lesson of the Soviet experience, however, was that an artifice of gratuitous trickery and lies cannot stand for long.