This is a guest post from Homestead: Theatre of Words.
Imagination is a profound skill, but its use is simple. We have it from our infancy and train ourselves in it through play and pretense and nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes touch us the most deeply when they are fanciful and yet feel true. Here is one that is both:
If all the world was apple-pie,
And all the sea was ink,
And all the trees were bread and cheese,
What should we have to drink?
This feels good to say, the argument is comic and the images are delightful and silly – and yet it encapsulates exactly what it is to think creatively. It has in it the sense of a test: if creation was only made of apple-pie, ink, bread and cheese then we should not drink, but we do drink and therefore there is more than apple-pie, ink, bread and cheese.
It might seem unfair to do this to a nursery rhyme, but if we did not we might begin thinking that a suggestion that all the world is apple-pie might lead directly to a fact that we have nothing to drink, and then to a proposal to tax the water in our bodies because otherwise we might die.
This kind of mad thinking – the belief that whatever we can think becomes true because we think it – is anti-realism. It is the belief that because we can conceive that gender, say, might be different to how it appears that it is not actually what it is but only something that we conceive.
We know this kind of thinking very well. It surrounds us in all our affairs. It fills our culture. It is the belief that the world can be made perfect – that all evil can be swept away by the pressure of our will. John Grey calls this Utopianism and finds its roots in Christian eschatology. Roger Scruton calls it Unscrupulous Optimism, and finds it deeply embedded in human nature. In a recent book – The Uses of Pessimism and the Dangers of False Hope – he sets out an outline of the major strategies of anti-realism and offers a couple of tools to help us understand it.
He opens by drawing a distinction between two attitudes that are common to us all, and that have profound implications depending on how we extend them. The first he calls the ‘I’ attitude. This is not simply egoism. It is, rather, an imaginative projection of our individual experiences into a foreseeable future: “It is infinite in ambition and recognizes no limits, only obstacles.” The ‘I’ attitude can be collective; Scruton calls this the Collective ‘I,’ and finds it typically in communist movements.
The alternative is the ‘we’ attitude. This is not collectivist, but the sensation of individuals as they recognise their interest in and relationship to the individuals around them. It is inevitably concerned with the past and the present as well as the future. It “recognizes limits and constraints, boundaries that we cannot transgress and that create the frame that gives meaning to our hopes. Moreover, it stands back from the goals of the ‘I,’ is prepared to renounce its purposes, however precious, for the sake of the long-term benefits of love and friendship. It takes a negotiating posture towards the other, and seeks to share not goals but constraints. It is finite in ambition and easily deflected; and it is prepared to trade increases in power and scope for the more rewarding goods of social affection.”
This distinction between attitudes is the first tool. “Whereas the ‘I‘ attitude seeks change and improvement, overcoming the challenges presented by nature, the ‘we‘ attitude seeks stasis and accommodation, in which we are one with each other and with the world.” Ventures that are concerned with thrusting into the future and remaking the world are of the ‘I,’ those that are concerned with affirming the here and the now and learning to adjust to the constraints of nature are of the ‘we.’ Anti-realism is necessarily of the ‘I.’ It supports itself against the pressure of the ‘we’ by a series of strategies.
Scruton nominates these as fallacies, and gives each a pithy tag:
The Best Case Fallacy, in which only the best case scenario is considered; worse case scenarios are ignored or rejected.
The Born Free Fallacy, in which it is supposed that people are born as free beings and have their freedom stripped from them by their families, their fellows and their communities, rather than that freedom is a consequence of the discipline of family, fellowship and community.
The Utopian Fallacy, in which ideals are made safe from refutation by casting criticism as hatred, sociopathy and violence.
The Zero Sum Fallacy, in which the good experienced by one is matched exactly by the misery experienced by another so that the having of goods is seen as nothing other than theft.
The Planning Fallacy, in which outcomes are treated as though they can be planned precisely, with no interruption by events.
The Moving Spirit Fallacy, in which the purposes of the spirit of the age are divined by the planners and enacted in the plan.
The Aggregation Fallacy, in which contradictory goods are believed to be compatible because they are good.
He then goes on to offer some further strategies by which the falsity of each position is made invisible. These are, in his words, “defenses against the truth:”
The Onus-Shifting Argument, in which those that offer a plan to change the world require proof from their opponents that their plan won’t work, rather than themselves providing proof that it will. “Those who said that making divorce easier would threaten the stability of marriage and the interests of children were faced by a challenge to prove the point, and also to disprove the claim of their opponents, that easy divorce would make good marriages last.”
False Expertise, in which experts, specialised scholarship and self-referential peer-reviews are invented to conform to an agenda.
Transferred Blame, in which blame for obstacles is shifted from a true and intractable obstacle to something irrelevant that may be addressed and affected by policy.
Hermeticism, in which the degeneration of of specialised terms into jargon and then nonsense is used to conceal rather than defend agendas, aims and policies.
Scapegoating, in which the ruin of an opponent of the plan is made acceptable and wholesome by identifying him as irrepressibly evil (‘racist,’ ‘homophobic,’ ‘religious,’ ‘irrational,’ ‘bourgeois’ and so on).
With these strategies in mind, Scruton then offers his next valuable tool. He imagines a prehistoric community clinging together to hunt on a savannah. In this instance, each of the fallacies above, and the defenses against truth that support them, become essential rather than destructive. More, he suggests that such a community is necessarily a collective ‘I.’ It cannot afford to be ‘we.’ In that instance, every moment is an emergency. The need for food, water shelter and sanctuary demand Best Case Thinking, Utopianism, and absolute adherence to a Plan. There is only a zero sum: food that feeds one does not feed another.
The hunter-gatherer community that he describes is a tribe. When tribes settle upon arrangements that allow them to live close by, then the community that emerges becomes a city. This is Scruton’s other great distinction, and he extends it from tribe/city to brotherhood/citizenship. In the city, citizens are able to develop a ‘we’ attitude. They are no longer facing continuous emergencies, and so are able to lay aside the strategies that kept them alive during those conditions and develop new, realist strategies that will enhance their settlement and their collaborations.
The ‘I’ attitude is survivalist; it is proper for a community that is at war. We recognise all Scruton’s fallacies and defenses as the behaviours of liberalism. In Scruton’s terms, liberalism is the result of being on a war footing when there is no war. It is a thinking that, proper in itself, is radically misapplied because there is no emergency. This is the final extent of Scruton’s book, but some thoughts follow naturally from his conclusions.
For those of us that looked to liberalism as our only hope during the 60s and 70s, following on from our elders through the preceding post-war decades, it did not seem that there was no emergency. In face the crisis felt so immediate, so inescapable that, even though we could not define or analyze it, it was not possible to deny it. From the perspective of the present day, it is still not clear that the emergency was false. That is, it is not clear that liberalism was the wrong philosophy for the time, no matter how wrongly it was applied and no matter what wrongs are now justly laid at its door.
For continental Europe, there were many emergencies and each was great. For the Anglosphere, however, there was only one, and it may be summed up in the question “How may we enjoy our wealth?”
This is actually many questions, among which are: How may we enjoy it when we are to be killed in a war? How dare we enjoy it when the third world has nothing? What is wealth? What is enjoyment? Who are we? These are all good and fair questions, and they have not yet received answers. Inasmuch as this is an emergency, it is still present and it continues to motivate liberalism. Inasmuch as there is a ‘we‘ to ask, then there is no emergency. Acknowledging the ‘we‘ is Scruton’s alternative to Unscrupulous Optimism. He calls it Scrupulous Optimism and describes it through a parable:
“The midwife who knows her job respects the solutions that have been proved by the generations who preceded her; she recognizes those with authority and instinctively obeys their advice. And she does not hesitate to offer advice of her own. She measures her own judgement against the accumulated wisdom of tradition, and if she takes a risk, because the problem before her is without a clear precedent, she is careful to measure the cost of failure and to ensure that it can be borne.”
A Scrupulous Optimist uses pessimism as a critical tool whenever an emergency arises. Pessimism – the knowledge that things can easily go wrong – is the pivoting point between the proper uses of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ attitudes. In the end it is the pessimist who says:
If all the world was apple-pie,
And all the sea was ink,
And all the trees were bread and cheese,
What should we have to drink?