Diagnosing Disaster

Why Did We Destroy Europe?” It’s an arresting title, chosen by Michael Polanyi for a 1970 essay that looks back on the conflagrations that consumed Europe between 1914 and 1945. (The essay can be found in Society, Economics & Philosophy, a posthumous volume of selected papers by Polanyi.) The short answer: “a fierce moral skepticism fired by moral indignation.”

The skepticism arises from the critical thrust of modern thought. Already in the seventeenth century, philosophers were judging inherited modes of thought and patterns of life to be irrational. Descartes compared the traditional knowledge of his time to a medieval town, with crooked lanes and houses built here and there without a coherent plan. Reform was impossible. Better to raze the town and start anew, this time in accord with reason.

Hostility to the status quo increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rousseau regarded existing society as a vicious conspiracy against our humanity. Jeremy Bentham formulated the philosophy of utilitarianism, which finds wanting all existing laws, traditions, and mores. Everything must be demolished and rebuilt in accord with a single moral maxim, the greatest good for the greatest number.

This is what Polanyi means by “fierce moral skepticism”: All that we inherit is guilty until proven innocent at the bar of unsullied nature, pure reason, and objective science. Polanyi notes a persistent characteristic of this approach. It accords moral prestige to outrage, protest, and revolution. Society is a cesspool of irrationality and injustice. No measure is beyond the pale, as long as it expunges the grave evils besetting society.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, moral indignation served an optimistic view of the future. Reformers pivoted from searing criticism of the status quo to hopeful accounts of the new society to be midwifed by reason and science. Once we were freed from ignorance and superstition, the better angels of our nature would take over. The past might be filled with cruelty and darkness, but the future would bring sweetness and light.

Polanyi was a professor of chemistry, a discipline that made him fully aware of the way in which science can shape our metaphysical imaginations. Scientific explanations are reductive. They rest on the assumption that the driving forces of the universe are impersonal and indifferent to human concerns about meaning and morality.

As a consequence, the rationalistic optimism of nineteenth-century progressivism was foredoomed. Reformers insisted that once the necessary demolition of our social system was complete, science would serve as the instrument of social reconstruction. But science offers no moral wisdom. Science analyzes; it does not guide and inspire. The French positivist Auguste Comte recognized as much, which is why he invented a new religion, the Religion of Humanity, to take the place of Christianity in his utopian scheme. Reason destroys, but it does not govern; rather, a new mystification arises. In the twentieth century, it was given a less than noble name: “propaganda.”

Polanyi calls this dynamic “moral inversion.” Modernity’s zeal for scientific critique destroys the moral traditions of the West. These critical techniques readily unmask these putatively baseless traditions, but that’s all. What they cannot do is create new foundations. Into the resulting vacuum rushes a moralistic pseudoscience.

Karl Marx offers a particularly clear example. His reductive scientism is complete. While writing a biography of him, Isaiah Berlin researched Marx’s manuscripts. Berlin observed (as Polanyi cites him) that the communist philosopher marked up the socialist manifestos of his time, vigorously crossing out appeals to rights and statements of the principles of justice. In the margins he penned fierce comments denouncing these moral terms as bourgeois ideology.

Hostility to moral language arose from Marx’s scientific reductionism. As he stipulates in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Economic conditions determine what we believe, including our beliefs about right and wrong. As history marches forward, moral truth changes accordingly.

In itself, the reduction of morality to economic conditions leads to the conclusion that there exist no transcendent truths by which to judge this or any other society. Marx solves the problem of relativism by boasting that he has discovered an objective science of history. This science purports to demonstrate the inevitable triumph of the proletariat and the inauguration of the end of history, which fulfills our humanity. In this way, Marxism does not condemn capitalism on moral grounds; it claims to serve the “objective” necessity of capitalism’s overthrow in order to usher in the “objective” truth of communism. As Polanyi observes, “Such an ideology simultaneously satisfies both the demands for scientific objectivity and the ideals of social justice, by interpreting man and history in terms of power and profit, while injecting into this materialistic reality the messianic passion for a free and righteous society.” The “science” of critique demolishes all current moral principles and political ideals. New imperatives take their place. But they are not moral; rather, they are “scientific.” They express the “laws of history,” which are as ruthlessly fixed as the law of gravity.

The upshot is moral nihilism. Armed with skepticism about the justice of present arrangements, “progressive” men give no quarter to the status quo. It must be destroyed without qualm. Those who hold power in the bourgeois order are merely masking their privilege with “ideals.” The agents of change, therefore, must be clear-minded. They should wield power so as to destroy power. Polanyi notes that such an attitude provides “moral justification for violence as the only honest mode of political action.” Lenin never disguised this logic. He once said, “Morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society.” Assassination, mass murder, torture—these are means justified by the demands of “historical necessity.”

Polanyi notes that Nazism differed from communism in its determination of the driving force of history. Rather than resting on economic relations, Nazism sprang from a neoromantic blood-and-soil philosophy. But the upshot is similar. Like communists, Nazis derided liberal principles as weak and dishonest, and they relished violence as the honest refusal of the moral precepts that limit human action. Immorality becomes a higher morality. (Nietzsche often speaks this way.) Transgression gave birth to “the new,” the hoped-for future that realized the inner greatness of the individual (Nietzsche and countless bohemian artists and wannabe individualists), or of humanity (communism), or of the German people (Nazism).

The word “nihilism” is open-ended. In its strict philosophical sense, it denotes the denial of real existence: The world is founded on chaos, meaninglessness, and the void. In its moral and political sense, “nihilism” refers to a mentality that does not simply reject all norms and values as false and baseless, but aims to destroy their role and influence in society. In contrast to ancient skepticism and Epicureanism, which counseled calm acceptance, moral and political nihilism motivates an angry disposition, one bent on annihilation. Here is how the early twentieth-century French surrealist André Breton described his movement (which echoes the Russian radicalism of the previous century): “We were possessed by a will to total subversion.”

In Polanyi’s account, we destroyed Europe because we were bewitched by a perverted science. Its critical power stoked our outrage, drawing us toward moral and political nihilism. We seduced ourselves with imaginings of a saving science (communism) or a pure deed (Nazism and other movements). Hope was transmuted into belief in a redemptive “necessity” that was immune from critical examination: History, the People, Blood, the Will. But there can be no saving science. Nor are there pure deeds. Sinful men can be restrained only by moral discipline. Society can be governed humanely only by means of considered moral judgments. Having annihilated the past, which is the wellspring of wisdom, the West not only lost its defenses against the barbarians within. Much worse, it created some of the most destructive barbarians, “armed bohemians,” as Polanyi calls them. Armed with moral indignation and infused with an urgency that would not countenance moral constraints, they brought cataclysm and disaster.

The fact that we’re doing so again troubles my sleep.