Moral inversion arises when you think anything you or your friends or allies do is wicked while anything your enemies do is virtuous. It can arise simply from an uncorrelated 'information' asymmetry- viz. the fact that you are more likely to have alethic data about your own actions, or those of your allies, than you do about the enemy. Moreover, information the enemy makes available is likely to be propagandistic. The result of 'moral inversion' is Chomsky type indignation that the US killed Osama bin Laden but failed to kill some Cuban dude who had tried to assassinate Castro. However, what is even more shocking is that Chomsky wiped his own bum but totally neglected to come and wipe my bum back in 1966. Was it because he was a RACIST? I suppose so.
Michael Polanyi, who invented the term, thought “moral inversion”- which may be broadly understood as the process by which the fusion of scientific scepticism (“extreme critical lucidity') with utopian social aspirations (“intense moral conscience” ), is what produces the dystopia of moral and political nihilism out of which arises the modern totalitarian state.
Polanyi was wrong. Totalitarian states arise out of and for the sake of total war. What produces them is ruthless killers backed by sadistic torturers who can rely upon a horde of civil servants shuffling files filled with reports from spies.
Polanyi was a pal of TS Eliot. He should have known that there can be a totalitarian theocracy- e.g. a state ruled by the Inquisition or Calvin's Geneva. It is not the case that totalitarianism arises where 'the only principle of social order is absolute coercive power and in which material welfare is embraced as the supreme social good'.
Spiritual welfare or the 'purity of the race' or building pyramids for pharaoh may be considered the supreme social good. However, if you want to maximize 'material welfare', you will minimize coercion because the thing is costly. This is the folk theorem of repeated games.
D.M Yeager, in an essay titled 'Confronting the Minotaur: Moral Inversion and Polanyi’s Moral Philosophy' writes-
The exposure and critique of moral inversion is a project to which Polanyi reverts repeatedly between 1946 and 1975, and it can fairly be said that diagnosing this pathology, analyzing its causes, and devising a remedy constitute the social objective to which his philosophical work is ordered.
It was shit but slightly less mischievous than the work of his elder brother, Karl.
In 1968 Zdzislaw Najder
who was Polish, not Hungarian.
published, in the collection Intellect and Hope, an adept, biting, and comprehensive critique of Polanyi’s discussion of moral inversion. So far as I know, this powerful set of objections has gone unanswered.
because the dude was Polish. Anyway, Polyani could be considered an economist, as well as a Chemist, and it is economics alone which can explain 'moral inversion'- e.g. Polanyi's own preference for Christianity over his ancestral religion.
Consider the following-
To accept the indeterminacy of knowledge
is easy. This is because we know that we are uncertain or hazy about things we really ought to know- like where I left the fucking TV remote.
requires, on the contrary [contrary to the objectivist picture of the “functioning of a mindless knower”]
There is no such picture. Even God is pictured as having a mind.
, that we accredit a person entitled to shape his knowing according to his own judgment, unspecifiably.
We are all entitled to do that. But entitlement does not entail capability. You may tell me that I am entitled to get as rich as fuck and to lose weight and become sexually attractive to women. What good does that do me? I'm incapable of doing anything people would want to reward me for. As for women, if they can't be bothered to form an orderly queue outside my bed-room door, they don't deserve my jizz.
This notion— applied to man—implies in its turn a sociology in which the growth of thought is acknowledged as an independent force.
i.e. a Sociology even shittier than that of his pal Mannheim.
And such a sociology is a declaration of loyalty to a society in which truth is respected and human thought is cultivated for its own sake.
Smart Hungarian Jews emigrated to places where money was respected and human thought was cultivated for the sake of raising productivity and Social Welfare- not to mention aggregate Profit. Otherwise, there would be a Marxian 'general slump'.
Yeager thinks
Polanyi is probing a moral paradox: namely, that the twentieth century’s unprecedented lake of blood had its springs, not in moral decay or complete amorality, but in pathological moralism.
Fuck off! It had its springs in a spat between Imperial cousins. Apparently, Willy was jelly of Uncle Teddy but failed to keep cousin Nicky on side. By its end, no multi-ethnic Empire was left standing. Even India, despite Mahatma Gandhi's best efforts, was crawling down a one way road to Independence- and the blood-bath that was Partition.
The demonic is not a force that opposes the moral; it is Western morality’s own deepest and, in ways, most seductive temptation.
No it isn't. It wasn't true that the Archbishop of Canterbury vied with the Pope to get first suck of Satan's cock.
Although this has presumably been a perpetual danger, in late modernity, the demonic subversion of moral intention became nothing less than inevitable when certain supporting conditions conspired to defeat critical moral self-consciousness. The puzzle that totalitarianism
which Britain, in 1917, was doing better than the fucking Krauts or the Rooskis because the Brits were smarter, more patriotic, and better able to mobilize resources- including female labour- for the war effort.
presents to him is, thus, the puzzle of how profound and noble moral aspirations could be so completely twisted and perverted as to result not only in the callous forms of dehumanization epitomized by the unthinkable slaughter of millions of citizens by their own various governments but in the complete subversion of justice, the wholesale sacrifice of freedom, and the systematic substitution of purposeful lies for inconvenient truths.
There is plenty of ethnic cleansing and wholesale enslavement and transportation of nations in the Old Testament. Also, the fucker might have heard of a little place called America. Did he think its indigenous people had names like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Perhaps. TS Eliot was obviously a Cherokee maiden dressed in deer-skin.
Polanyi, being an actual scientist, was less stupid than Popper. One may say 'moral inversion' arises out of Popperian 'Conjectures & Refutations'- where conjectures regarding the virtue of your own side are more easily refuted because relevant information is more easily accessible- which, unfortunately, was the credo adopted by George Soros who has financed the circular-firing squad of woke 'moral inversion' which has been so fatal to Western Liberal Democracy.
No comments:
Post a Comment