My latest teleology

Posted by Guest Blogger on Wednesday, 10 March 2010 01:42.

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?

Tags: Political Philosophy

Comments:

Posted by Wandrin on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:41 | #

Off/ topic. Apologies. Review of the Solzhenitzen book whose lack of publication in the west says so much.

http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres10/WALENDYsolje.pdf

Posted by PF on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:52 | #

Good work, Rod. Obviously there’s a lot of good thinking thats gone into this piece.

The contradiction over the use of the word teleology is probably something that we can resolve instructively, will look more into it in the future.

cheers.

Posted by PF on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:48 | #

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.

“Teleology (Greek: telos: end, purpose) is the philosophical study of design and purpose. A teleological school of thought is one that holds all things to be designed for or directed toward a final result, that there is an inherent purpose or final cause for all that exists.”

In the context of this blog teleology is contrasted with ontology. The purpose of teleology is to become an image of greatness or glory - to develop into some promised grander future. Ontology sees being and what is, as justified in itself, and not requiring to become anything greater. This doesn’t exclude ontologically minded folks from having goals and aims, or favoring certain outcomes over others, but it forbids them from thinking that the realization of their goals is the purpose of existence, or the locus for a moral ordering of the world that conveys anything essential.

“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. “

Thank god you have the humor to write in this way and acknowledge the short-comings of everyone’s thinking on these subjects.

“We are in a post-ideological age”

Disagree. I think we are in an age where the critiques of intellectuals are not primary motive forces in shaping how people think about the world. Ideologies are therefore more inarticulate than before, and make less use of reasoned arguments. As the saying goes, even if you dont think you have a philosophy, thats still a philosophy. Even people who dont hold to articulated ideologies still have beliefs about the structure of the world and life, and this is their ideology.

It means we are beyond trying to understand the world in terms of good and evil

Disagree. If you look closely at the thinking of teleologists and others, you will find ‘good and evil’ reestablished under different names. Even your model allows for the reinstatement of these terms, just not in the religious context, but in a political one.

“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”

Evaluations that are basically ethical are constantly being reestablished even in frameworks from which they have supposedly been banished. This is a function of teleology’s image of greatness or perfection, which immediately establishes an ‘internal merit hierarchy’ (in the person thinking this way, or the group) based on image comparisons. It’s a manner of thinking thats hard (perhaps impossible) to be free from, but in ontological thinking it has ceased to be sovereign. Guessedworker says we can only be one thing, and this relativizes images because we cannot become them.

“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. “

Brilliant, I love the spiritedness of your writing.

Without fear of contradiction I can say there are no moral [big “A”] Absolutes – real ones.

The reign of an image is the same thing as an absolute - only an absolute has been intellectually scrutinized, which is why the name Absolute is applied to it. Any philosophy that posits images of greatness and glory - most crucially for our thinking, if it posits that we can *become* the images or become like them - immediately transitory absolutes are re-established.

I also see a problem in your use of the term ‘ethics’.

The idea of ethics is many-layered. Firstly there is what a man thinks to be right and wrong in his own behavior. Then there are social group strategy ethics, such as not being promiscuous. Then there are virulence ethics (e.g. anti-Racism), which are ethics desiged to weaken the function of those to whom they are promulgated. There is adaptive morality, and there is hypocritical morality (morality as intergroup competition in signaling *goodness*), and there is foreign imported morality (e.g. Christianity). I see morality and ethics being interchangeable.

When you make a blanket statement like: “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,” I can’t help but seize up a bit. Morality contributed nothing to the arising of democratic capitalism?

People interested in sociobiological/evopsych theories of culture will stand up and tell you that without white morality, we wouldn’t have democratic capitalism. They can do this issue better justice than I can though.

All criticism aside, I love your writing style and the spirit that you came at this problem with, and hope to read more about your thinking on here.

Posted by Gorboduc on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:34 | #

Would RC kindly inform me what he or “the brother” (shades of Myles na gCopaleen) means by “the end of teleology”? Does “end” here mean “terminus” or something else?
Admitteedly the piece he links to begins

Teleology is the attempt to become an image of greatness, or perfection, or fruition.

Odd, that. It was formerly thought that the T-word was a department of philosophical discourse, not an exercise in self-aggrandisement. It’s a way of determining what’s going on in the universe and why: it’s not “the key to a glorious future”. (Well, it COULD be that, if the discovery of what’s going on leads to a conversion to Christian orthodoxy, which might well lead to a “glorious future” - but not one of the Olaf Stapledon kind)

I’m old enough-sufficiently antique (if not actually antediluvian, whatever value that word has for all you ape-descended evolutionistss) to be able to say, in my superannuated dialect,
“Aaar! Oi mind when that term were a-taken to mean summat quite else, and by volks of greater wisdom too!”

By projecting your own self-devised values onto the term, RC obscures, if not destroys, its meaning where it occurs in earlier rational discourse. He commits verbicide. (He’s not the only one.)

The claim that one can devise at pleasure new “Absolutes"is intriguing. It used to be believed that like axioms. they were not things you could make up, but things that were there from the start, things which form the basis of reasoning.
To equate the term with “Spiritual” is ludicrous, and leads to nonsenses like, “Fr. Peter suggested St. Ignatius could form part of my Absolute reading”, “Meditation may enhance the Absolute side of your nature” and ” Try Absolute healing to get rid of your headaches”.

As a corrective to this arrogance,here is submitted, from the old Catholic Encyclopedia (the entire piece can be found here: http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=11340 ) the beginning and end of the relevant article. This should demonstrate that the classic use of the term is almost totally disconnected from the novel meanings which MR (here and elsewhere) forces onto it.

Teleology is seldom used according to its etymological meaning to denote the branch of philosophy which deals with ends or final causes. It means the doctrine that there is design, purpose, or finality in the world, that effects are in some manner intentional, and that no complete account of the universe is possible without reference to final causes (for the notion of final cause, see CAUSE). With mechanism, teleology admits the determinism of physical efficient causes. It also acknowledges that the object of scientific research is to discover the laws of phenomena, and that any fact is scientifically explained when adequate causes are assigned to it, and the conditions of its occurrence are known. But against mechanism, teleology claims that this determinism, these laws and the mode of activity of efficient causes reveal the existence of a directive principle and of finality in the works of nature. Hence the question is not whether there are efficient or final causes, whether, for instance, man sees because he has eyes or has eyes in order to see. Final causes and efficient causes are not mutually exclusive. It must be admitted that any result in nature is to be ascribed to an unbroken chain of active causes, and the function of the final cause is not to supply any missing link but to explain how the activity of efficient causes is directed toward useful results. Nor can the teleologist be asked to indicate the end of every activity any more than the mechanist can be required to indicate the efficient cause of every phenomenon. Finally the problem does not refer to conscious and intelligent finality such as is manifested in human purposive actions, for it is obvious that in many of his actions man is guided by the idea of a preconceived plan which he endeavours to realize. Human works are for something; the house is built to live in; the clock is made to keep time ; the machine is constructed to perform some work; the statue is carved to realize some ideal; etc. Are we justified in speaking of the works of nature in the same way?

And here’s the end of the article:

Thus the unconscious finality in the world leads to the conclusion that there must be an intelligent cause of the world. The whole preceding doctrine is well summed up in the following passage from St. Thomas ( Summa Theologica I:103:1 ad 3um ): “The natural necessity inherent in things that are determined to one effect is impressed on them by the Divine power which directs them to their end, just as the necessity which directs the arrow to the target is impressed on it by the archer, and does not come from the arrow itself. There is this difference, however, that what creatures receive from God is their nature, whereas the direction imparted by man to natural things beyond what is natural to them is a kind of violence. Hence, as the forced necessity of the arrow shows the direction intended by the archer, so the natural determinism of creatures is a sign of the government of Divine Providence “.

Posted by Grimoire on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:33 | #

Excellent article. Very glad to have read it. However, i’m disturbed by the assertion we can exist without ethics, unless I have mistaken the point. My understanding of the necessity of ethics is that society is like a piece of architecture or a building constantly in need of upkeep and repair. Ethics is analogous to the architectural principal of plumb and level, along with other constructive principals - without which you get Daniel Libeskind - of which nothing more need be said.

I shall check out this Olaf Stapleton character

Posted by NeoNietzsche on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:49 | #

I would have preferred more zest in application of the orange crayon.

Posted by NeoNietzsche on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:53 | #

And we, over here, thought that Fukuyama had been dismembered and buried.

But the Monster has evidently been sown back together and walks among you.

Posted by NeoNietzsche on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:29 | #

“sewn”

And, come to think of it, it’s an Impostor as much as a Monster.

[Having to do Corporate Taxes this morning - not my best day.]

Posted by The Absolute on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:27 | #

Ouch. The real Nietzsche would never conflate “sewn” and “sown.”

[As the Impostor seizes Rod’s orange crayon to scribble out his malapropism.]

Posted by Gorboduc on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:11 | #

SR and NN, the old “sewn-sown” homonym was effectively played with when a prison visitor spotted the famous “patriotic” fraudster Horatio Bottomley MP, with whom justice had at last caught up, sewing mailbags with his fellow-convicts.
“Ah, Mr. Bottomley - sewing, I see!”
“No,” replied Bottomley, “Reaping!”
Bottomley seems to have been chosen as a role model by establishment politicians of every stripe, and has a number of imitators today.
However, some of his revelations, concerning the workings of international finance and the origins of WWI, are not without value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Bottomley

Posted by NeoNietzsche on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:34 | #

Ouch. The real Nietzsche would never conflate “sewn” and “sown.”

Indeed, so little would have been beneath him.

A conflation of Christianity and Judaism (GM, First Essay) was more worthy of him.

Posted by Grimoire on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:35 | #

@NeoNietzsche: Indeed, so little would have been beneath him.

..........they say simplicity is the hallmark of greatness…......

Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:28 | #

Isn’t everyone properly impressed,by now, with the competition between Pomponious Ego and Bombsates Furioso?

Posted by Grimoire on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:06 | #

Another lion give a grievous roar;
And the first lion thought the last a bore.

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