My latest teleology

by Rod Cameron

I see one of the brothers has recently been writing about the end of teleology. I am a fan of teleology and whatever the brother was on about, it was not teleology. I wish he had found another word for his angst. Speculation about the future is what keeps us on the political margins going, so I thought I would show what it is about. Teleology is about joining a few dots to predict a glorious future. We all do it: take a few premises and cantilever an extrapolation till it crashes and burns. The critics of teleology say it is not within a million miles of being a pseudo-science, and they are right, but it is a lot of fun and I am actually serious, especially since the answer to the first question, “Where are we?” is damn obvious.

We are in a post-ideological age; we are beyond the debates based on political economy – Easy. Next dot, “What does that mean?” It means we are beyond trying to understand the world in terms of good and evil; we are beyond ethics. Dot 3, “Enlarge on that”. Basically ethics was behind ideology and in the end ethics had nothing to do with predicting the eventual answer which is known as liberal democracy or democratic capitalism. Dot 4, “So?” Well, look at our particular situation. Instead of a debate on immigration we get an ethical invective, “Racist!” And do we buy that as a comprehensive response? Does any-[intelligent]-one continue to think politics is applied ethics? Dot 5, “So?” Liberalism and its mate ethics are shagged-out. With their inane reply to the anti-immigrant protest they are begging us to say something really intelligent that will bury their faith in ethics. They are destined to be replaced and we have to get in early with some new Absolutes to replace the worn-out, simplistic one commonly associated with shagged-out Christianity. Dot 6, “You are sure history is against ethics?” All ethical absolutes finish up in the same place – the philosophy dump. Dot 7, “And you no doubt have a few Absolutes handy to fill the vacuum after ethics and thereby predict future developments in the world of ideas?” Yeah. And that is enough dots to get me started. I will have to make a few points before the teleology is launched.

Where are we headed? Actually, nowhere far because the key to the glorious future is in the recent past. The beauty of my teleology is that it is about attending to unfinished business left over from the age of ideology so that the desired future is built on a study of hard lessons from the recent past. What you will find in the following is I have a hatred of ethics; it should have been dead and buried by now. Part of the glorious future is the death of ethics. Certain new ideas are required, namely real Absolute values and the fabled non-dualistic philosophy.

Without fear of contradiction I can say there are no moral [big “A”] Absolutes – real ones. Opposition to paedophilia and rape are prohibitions against deviancy. They are moral absolutes, but they are not Absolutes per se. History and experience has proven ethics and monotheistic religion, which is big on ethics, is not acquainted with the Absolute so their prohibitions are petty in respect to a bigger/better ‘Idea’ that we could be mindful of. Christianity is an enthusiastic advocate of ethics, but after millennia it remains a received idea without any validation. The fact that people are leaving Christianity speaks against ethics. Ethics is abetted by dialectic, the only system of reasoning that we have. That is the main problem, but for now I will set dialectic aside to present replacement Absolutes.

Why make the point that there are no proven Absolutes? We live in exciting times and they are also intellectually momentous times. We are in the midst of the most exciting [non-] debate of our time: immigration/racism; it is emblematic of dualistic consciousness and if racism can present a rationale the consequences will be a change of rational consciousness. [As far as I am concerned global warming is not a debate, it is a certainty.] I could say, “Philosophically the clash over immigration/racism is bigger than ideology because one of the parties; the racist party, does not have recourse to ethics and is left with no alternative but to challenge the status of ethics. Political economy/ideology saw all points of view promulgate an ethic, but this time around the racist party cannot claim to be ethical. It has a reasonable argument and no alternative but to demolish ethics to gain respect for its point of view.” But the immigration/racism problem is a consequence of thinking dualistically and it has its solution lying in the outcome of the ideology contest.

Since ethics contributed nothing to the identification and formulation of democratic capitalism as the politico-economic strategy of the West, it follows that there are more fundamental forces in our world. Furthermore, love it or leave it, democratic capitalism facilitates interaction which I am all for. We give primacy to ethics in human affairs and yet here the most essential issue of social organisation is decided without any influence from ethics. But mention the ill-effects of immigration and ethics asserts itself. There is something about ideology that has not been assimilated. Find it and we have the capability to crush ethics.

In addition, eclipsing ethics requires going back to ancient Greece, rethinking the nature of virtue, demonstrating that ethics is not absolute and finding alternative Absolutes.

To dwell for a moment on this point in philosophical time: beyond a shadow of a doubt we are witnessing “due process” for the last great moral absolute before it passes into history. Anti-racism will go the way of all moral absolutes because the racist side of the argument is non-ethical and is in fact greater than ethics. Ethics thinks it has cornered a rat when in fact it has cornered a tiger. Sadly, the tiger does not know it is a tiger.

An alternative set of Absolutes

For a guide to Absolutes I interpreted Absolute to mean spiritual. The best definition of spirituality that I have found is “the interconnectedness of all things”. It is attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. As a simple definition it suffers from exceptions but this is not the time for exactitudes.

From the time of ancient Athens and with the collaboration of Christianity you have been told that goodness is paramount. Western civilisation could have come away from ancient Athens with a set of Absolute values focused on interaction, namely democracy, citizenship and environmentalism. Citizenship is implicit to being democratic so there is two-in-one. And Greece is not a fertile country so farming needed to be husbandry and therein is nascent environmentalism. So there are three values that could have come down to us as Absolutes. There is nothing sinister about these three values and I am aghast that they are not modern, absolute priorities – they are decent and proper ways of interacting. And I mention again, democratic capitalism is essentially about interactions.

To me the above three values are interactions which are beyond argument: Democracy accommodates argument; Race mixing has upset the natural order and created an argument over citizenship; Environmentalism is about survival. In ancient Athens the prize for what is most virtuous went to ethics and the dialectical method of determining it. And we have been wallowing in negativity and the particular ever since.

Fast-forward to modern Britain and a major immigrant problem. With the intellectual baggage we carry from Greece, abetted by Christianity, we have liberals who created the problem believing they have done no wrong. Indeed, they say evil resides with the racists. Here is Dot 8 because this an important point, “What is a racist?” — In the British context it is someone who holds citizenship to be an Absolute value. I say, without fear of contradiction, identity carries more consequence than ethics, e.g. Britishness means more than being politically correct; social cohesion/interaction is more desirable than political correctness after the fact of racially-based, social fragmentation. Interactive values are not strident like ethical values, but you have deep trouble if you abuse them.

The [non-] debate over immigration turns for the moment on the advantage for the Establishment of being ethical. Because ethics is an intellectual trollop it is not so much what you do, but what you say. So it does not matter that you let in a horde of ill-chosen immigrants and abuse the meaning of citizenship, the ethical thing is to scream “Racist!” – I can hear the dirty old slag saying, “Show them your principles dearie, they’ll like that. You must shout that word louder because that is all you’ve got”. Ethics can take advantage of a problem that ethics created. That is why she is a bitch like no other.

Non-dualism

Dialectic is reductive; it “does not do” interactions; it reduces interactions to the component parts. So dialectic has to be replaced. Non-dualistic philosophy is the opposite of reductive dialectic, which means it is syncretic. It is implicit that truth is relative because truths are what interact. Along with truth being relative, ethics is relative, and that is how ethics will be buried, while virtue becomes aligned with proper interactions.

The Teleology

To my mind the following three elements coalesce to promote a glorious outcome [D.].

A. Citizenship
At least three prominent theorists; Vico, von Herder and Hegel, have drawn attention to society expressing what is innate to our psyche, or in other words, society is the objectification of human nature. Hence citizenship is fundamental to our being and Hegel has said so quite eloquently for someone criticised for being obscure:
“Everything that man is, he owes to the state; only in it can he find his essence. All value that a man has, all spiritual reality, he has only through the state.”
Citizenship is a syncretic concept; it cannot be explicated by turning to reductive dialectic. We have two “truths”; the individual and society, and somehow they interact. Defining that connection is something philosophy is currently incapable of. The relationship between the individual and society is so fundamental it is spiritual. You would not learn this from Christianity, liberalism is in disbelief and ethics reckons it is spiritual.

B. Ideology
Democratic capitalism is about political and economic interactions. It is a phenomenon that resulted from ideological division but has achieved a working transcendence, removed from the crude ideologies/singular notions of truth that competed at the outset. Democratic capitalism is therefore a non-dualistic reality. It is an example that holds the key to what effects interaction.

C. Immigration/Racism
In modern immigration into Europe we have the historical event that provokes the division that generates intellectual growth from dualistic consciousness to syncretic consciousness. The advocates of ethics scream “Racist” and the advocates of citizenship philosophically say nothing because they have not got their act together, but they are not going to go away. Immigrants disrupt citizenship and natural social cohesion is destroyed. The outstanding feature is that the racist faction is denied any claim to ethics and ethical virtue. Accordingly it is necessary for the racists to produce a radically different philosophy.

D. “D” is the realisation of my conjecture in the form of a philosophy. Teleology is associated with determinism. Why should the above three points A, B, & C coalesce to form a deterministic progression? They need not but I see democratic capitalism as a prime exemplar for a philosophy that venerates interaction. Also the withering of ethics is inevitable in this and other social issues. The anti-racist stance is fundamentally weak. It asks so much of the racist reply that their position seems proper and sure, while I see it resting on nothing more than hollow tradition.

Reliance on a new philosophy extends to changing the image of the far right. The far right will remain the far right until it can capture the centre with a redefinition of virtue and values. Until ethics is proven to be a sandbar, the far right will live in the shadow of ethics’ pretence to be the high ground.

Summary

This is a small teleology dismissive of the intellectual strength of the Establishment, captivated by a finality implicit to the fact that racism cannot claim an ethical stance, [thank God, because ethics is a whore], while being laudatory of racism’s advocacy of citizenship. The glorious future it anticipates involves a major philosophical development arising from a study of ideology. Rather than just offer this as a lazy guess, I go the extra mile to elaborate on the required syncretic turn being aligning with at least three values which I am convinced are real Absolutes. We are overdue a good philosophy. It will be joy for some, fear for others and a lesson for all in how the West recalibrates life.

So what do you think: when it comes to fibs teleology is up there with the best, or it is clear thinking on the evolution of ideas?

Posted by Guest Blogger on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 12:42 AM in Political Philosophy
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