A polemic on why the lukewarm “center” cannot hold.

There is an episode of the sitcom Parks and Recreation featuring a cult that named themselves “the Reasonabilists”.[1]  The cult worships “Zorp, the giant lizard god who will destroy the earth with his cleansing fire of judgment.”  When asked why the cultists call themselves “the Reasonabilists”, Amy Poehler’s character answers, “Well, they figure if people criticize them, it’ll seem like they’re attacking something very reasonable.”  As Adam Scott’s character remarks, “that’s weirdly brilliant”; if one may package their beliefs in the right way, it almost does not matter how absurd, ridiculous, or antithetical to reason they are—especially if they can be made to seem reasonable, or even as though those beliefs are the grounds of reason itself.

While a giant lizard god with cleansing fire of judgment will not seem very reasonable to most people (at least, not here and now) most unreasonable beliefs are not so immediately or directly presented, else Scientology, which seized upon the spreading 20th century view of Christianity as irrational and anti-scientific—not to mention Christian institutions’ unpreparedness to handle the apparent increase in psychosis and mental illness subsequent to the Second World War, the advent of television, and the introduction of psychedelic drugs—would never have grown the way it did.  The same appearance of relative reasonableness goes for most cults, and even for many conspiracy theories.  You may more easily lure someone into an uncritical and ultimately unreasonable belief, that is, by threatening them with that which is more obviously contrary to reason.  Raise up a terrible and dark evil, and your own foolishness may seem as though a shining beacon of reason by contrast.

In the last three decades, a new variety of obviously and unashamedly unreasonable thought has become a prominent fixture in the theater of public attention: once called “social justice”, more recently “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” or the “woke”, but also frequently (if inaccurately and uncritically) labelled as “postmodernism”.[2]  It is, without a doubt, an incoherent ideology, lacking any semblance of principles and operating off a profoundly anti-realist and emotivist base: that you can be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do, think whatever you want to think, and that any challenge to the slightest pursuit of your whims constitutes an act of oppressive violence against which violent rebellion is itself fully justified.  At times, one can find its adherents quite literally denouncing reason—as a glorified invention of white cisgender patriarchal phallogocentric imperialist hegemony, or some such—and claiming that one’s singularly-personal umbrage at differing opinions trumps another’s rational arrival at that opinion.  The result is the “intolerance of intolerance”[3] taken to a very intolerant and sometimes even physically violent, murderous extreme.

Some years ago, against this foil, a new set of “Reasonabilists” emerged—not ones that believe in a giant fire-breathing lizard god (not that I know of, anyway), but who are deceptively adamant about their own reasonableness nonetheless: a loosely collected set that could be and have been described as centrists, or classical liberals, or neo-Enlightenment moderates, or any number of associated terms, but for whom the central uniting concern is the defense of “free speech and free expression of ideas” and the broad conception of civil liberties (roughly grounded in the political being constituted through social contracts) against the rabid emotivism of the “woke left” mob—though always, it turns out, with certain arbitrarily stipulations about which ideas actually deserve a platform for expression, and thus, now, they repudiate the “woke right”. 

One first found and still often today finds them at sites such as Quillette, the Babylon Bee, formerly Arc Digital and Areo Magazine, and now New Discourses—in figures such Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, the Weinsteins and the Winegards, Dave Rubin, and all the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web”,[4] among many others.  Some will undoubtedly balk at being grouped together.  Some do not care for each other—Areo Magazine, for instance, once readily criticized the quality of work on Quillette[5] (including implicitly—given Areo’s self-professedly liberal perspective—by labelling it a “conservative” site[6]), and Quillette once published an essay blasting the lack of political diversity in the “Intellectual Dark Web”,[7] resulting in snarky tweets being volleyed around between various persons involved—and many have inarguably entered this broadly centrist sphere as little more than enterprising capitalists who have discovered a moment of profit—the game played by grifters.  More recently, James Lindsay has turned on Benjamin Boyce for hosting, on his podcast, guests who profess anti-liberal ideas.

But despite their divisions, these varied groups have remained largely united (though occasionally only by ostracism of those who go too far in opposing the party line) both by their common opposition to the contemporary mobs bent on smashing reason beneath the boots of DEI (the “woke left”) and by their common commitment to the principles of the Enlightenment.  By comparison, then, they have appeared as reasonable, given that many within the Western world take “reason” and “freedom of speech” as self-evident goods—and so anyone they can paint as being opposed to these supposed goods appears as someone against the good.  Indeed, these varied groups seem even more reasonable insofar as they seem in love with the idea of reason, specifically as the engine through which any and every thought may be processed, tested, and accepted or rejected when it comes out the other side.  Thus, Quillette says that they[8]

respect ideas.  Even dangerous ones.  Our writers are a collection of individuals from across the political spectrum, with different life stories and backgrounds.  We aim to bring our expertise together into one platform – to create an organic group committed to free thought… [and] to provide a platform for original thought and quality cultural criticism… to give writers freedom to take risks and express controversial ideas.

Arc Digital—now reduced to the newsletter of a singular individual but formerly a regular home to many authors—likewise summarized their raison d’etre by saying, “Our core value is responsible intellectual pluralism… The pluralism part means we are committed to publishing a variety of perspectives.  Ours is a platform for omnidirectional opinion.  That’s a non-negotiable for us.  But the responsible part means we set certain editorial parameters so that our pages don’t turn into a bad-faith free-for-all.”[9]  New Discourses lists among the defining values at the core of their perspective to be “profound respect for the power of reason and the utility and strength of science” and that “when failures of reasoning occur, it is better reasoning that reveals them”[10] and claims that their site aims “to be a place where dialogue is possible and encouraged, regardless of differences in politics, aiming to be responsible with our speech and thought while not feeling fettered by restrictions of political correctness in any of its myriad manifestations.  It also hopes to inspire dialogue—both new ways to discuss old topics and new conversations in their own right.”[11]

Yet despite their apparent adoration of reason, these “Reasonabilists” are in truth no more than “reasonablish”, I say somewhat tongue-in-cheek; for they are clearly not so unreasonable as the raving leftist woke ideologues they justly lambast nor are they lost in the clouds of Gnosticism and mystical superstition belonging to the laughably inaccurate caricature of pre-modern thought which many of them believe historically accurate and to which they so readily refer.[12]  But adamantly clinging to this caricature reveals undeniably the limits of their reason: for a critical examination of the true contours of pre-modern society would show it to be no less and in the vast majority of instances a great deal more reasonable than what arose as “scientific” during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and perhaps therefore induce reflection upon the modernist principles which they have uncritically taken for granted.[13]

This is to say that the “reasonablish” centrists (or non-radical, anti-social-justice-woke-DEI-mobbery leftish liberals; or pseudo-realist empirical scientistic progressives—whatever one might choose to call them) affix their beliefs in the method that Charles Sanders Peirce described as the “a priori”: which is to say, a system of beliefs constructed with relative internal consistency and coherence, but which edifice rests itself upon foundations not subjected to a critical evaluation or careful thinking, and therefore leaving the entire system of beliefs on fundamentally unstable grounds.[14]  Far from the least of these uncritically-adopted and insecure foundations is their common presupposition concerning the meaning of “reason” itself.

Liberalism’s Bad Faith

The common rallying cry of today’s self-professed “classical liberals” or “modernists”—both of which I will use as justifiably-accurate catchall terms—are the irreproachable values of free speech and reason; and that by upholding scientific standards of reason, we may entertain any well-presented argument and rationally expose what flaws it may have while retaining its true merits, thereby improving our stock of knowledge and wisdom.[15]  This exaltation of “the rational” (or “reasonablishness”) is a continuation of the Enlightenment spirit, which combined the empirical approach to knowledge initiated by Locke with the faith in reason proposed by Descartes:[16]

It is true that there is a sharp contrast between the geometrical reason of Descartes and the empirical common sense of Locke, which reflects the difference in spirit of the two cultures.  Nevertheless, these two schools of thought met and mingled with one another in the culture of the Enlightenment.  The philosophy of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists was that of Locke rather than of Descartes.  Yet the driving force behind it is still the Cartesian rationalism with its sublime confidence in the infallibility of reason, its dissolvent criticism of received beliefs and traditions, and its determination “never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such.”

And yet if one looks closely at the philosophies informing the Enlightenment (and the adjacent growth of liberalism in nineteenth century England), whether Cartesian or Lockean, Hobbesian or Berkeleyian, Leibnizian or Humean, Wolffian or Kantian, one finds the nature of reason and knowledge always presumed—the disputes between rationalists and empiricists not being over the nature of reason itself but rather over the how of reason, specifically in competing theories of ideation and in how that ideation results in knowledge of the extramental world.  To explain, we must touch upon some abstruse points of philosophy.  For underlying and undermining both sides—“rationalist” and “empiricist” alike—is a common error: namely, the presumption that ideas are the direct and immediate objects of our acts of knowledge.[17]  While every era of human inquiry has its presuppositions and flaws, the uncritical appropriation made by every well-known “modern philosopher” of the Cartesian postulate—that we know ideas directly and the “extramental world” only indirectly, through a direct “internal” knowledge of those ideas (and the often-shared presumption that “knowledge” consists in propositions indisputably demonstrable, while all else is opinion)—would be laughable had it not been for centuries, and still to this day, so devastating to the formation of human minds.

The result of these presuppositions—somewhat ironically, given the atheistic inclination of many of Enlightenment heirs—is a kind of dualism: for the only valid method of arriving at knowledge, given these presuppositions, is the scientific;[18] and yet our experience extends so far beyond what science may divulge, since science can reveal facts but not meaning, that systems of unscientific opinion inevitably come to dominate, for they become the frameworks through which meaning is rendered.  By abandoning the methods proper to philosophical inquiry and idolizing the methods of science—resulting in a monistic theory of knowledge—one severs the factual from the meaningful.[19]

That is, by failing to understand how facts and meaning can be united—that is, how facts can be interpreted as to their meaning, a process which per se stands outside the scope of scientific methodology—the “standards” by which the reasonableness of arguments and ideas are measured invariably become increasingly narrowed and therefore committed to one or another ideologically exclusionary perspective.  However often the call to renewal is sounded or however frequently “diversity of opinion” may be lauded for its own sake (if never long exercised in practice—some ideas or beliefs being Verboten in accordance with the unquestioned a priori principles of belief), even a small error in the beginning becomes great in the end.  

But this is no small error.  For not knowing how things are known leads inevitably to mistakes in knowledge.  Right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice, truth and falsity: none can be known by modern empirical science (whatever Sam Harris might claim) but require philosophical insight,[20] through which they are not only discovered but defined, refined, defended, and explained.  Eschewing genuine philosophical thought inevitably leads to self-professed centrist or classically liberal venues becoming not only exclusionary to those who express genuinely different perspectives, but so too to developing an ever-increasing animosity for one another.[21]      

This is not to say some of these venues have not given a voice to those who deserve to be heard; many worthy authors have been published in one or another outlet, and rightly so.  But these authors have been published, near as I can tell, not only because they are good writers who articulate their points thoughtfully, but because the points articulated sufficiently overlap with the views guiding the editorial directions of the sites in question.  It is a common sleight of hand: including authors who describe themselves as from various political, ideological, religious, or philosophical backgrounds, so that one can claim diversity, without allowing the expression of truly diverse viewpoints.[22]  Everyone has an ethics, conscious or not—insamuch as everyone has have a conception of the good.  But the hubris of the human heart obscures whether those things we hold as good are true—instead, we often hold as true only those things that befit our unquestioned belief in what is good.

I do not think that this duplicity is fully intentional, or even close to conscious.  But having adopted an intellectually effete “worldview”, the self-professed champions of free speech and reason have succeeded in establishing a far narrower and less stable foundation for themselves than they recognize.  That is, deriving their principles from the Enlightenment—not adherence to all that came out of that specific period of time nor of any definitive roster of thinkers, but belief in the merits of individualism, an opposition to authoritative interpretations of dogma, a commitment to “progress”,  and an exaltation of the scientific method (in consequence of which, an implicit tendency towards reductionism likewise emerges), which ideas have developed and not necessarily consciously or thoughtfully in the intervening centuries—they have constrained themselves to a position which believes the human mind needs no rigorous education in the foundational arts of thinking itself, but only training in specific scientific endeavors.  The resultant cultural modernity is not the same as modern philosophy, but dependent upon it—and thus, inheritor of that philosophy’s greatly erroneous principles.[23]

It is just this dependence which undermines the integrity of the modern project as a whole, leaving some parts which may be redeemed, but which cannot stand in the crumbling edifice built by thinkers of the Enlightenment.  This undermined integrity is unrecognized by those who have built their homes of belief on this shaky ground—possibly out of mere ignorance, for the Enlightenment was nothing if not the product of a successful historical and intellectual obfuscation,[24] but likely out of obstinate clinging to that ignorance as well.  Convincing them they ought to leave their unstable home is no small task.  But perhaps others can be dissuaded from joining their doomed enterprise by exposing the rot at its foundations.

Lacking from the support structure of cultural modernity is any appreciation of the kind of philosophical insight necessary to have a lasting ethos.[25]  The result is, just as it was in the Enlightenment, the proliferation of a “self-confident, superficial rationalism of the new lay intelligentsia.”[26]  That is not to say the men and women writing for these publications or engaging in debates on social media are not intelligent—but even a great intelligence fixated by poor principles will err more often than not.[27]

Among these advocates for modernity, it is New Discourses (property of James Lindsay and heir apparent to Areo Magazine) that most ardently propagandizes for a modernist perspective, and which most clearly opposes itself against both “postmodernism” and “premodernism” (and thus admits the least intellectual diversity to its publication).  The bullet points which summarize their “Manifesto against the Enemies of Modernity”, written by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, are worth presenting in full:

• Modernity, in terms of the views and values that have brought us out of the feudalism of the Medieval period and led us to the relative richness and comfort we enjoy today (and which are rapidly spreading around the world), is under threat from the extremes at both ends of the political spectrum.
• Modernity is worth fighting for if you enjoy and wish others to enjoy the benefits of a first-world existence in relative safety and with high degrees of individual liberty that can express itself in functional societies.
• Most people support Modernity and wish its anti-modern enemies would shut up.
• The enemies of Modernity now form two disagreeing factions — the postmoderns on the left and the premoderns on the right — and largely represent two ideological visions for rejecting Modernity and the good fruits of the Enlightenment, such as science, reason, republican democracy, rule of law, and the nearest thing we can claim to objective moral progress.
• Left-right partisanship is the tool by which they condemn Modernity and continually radicalize sympathizers to choose between the two warring factions of anti-modernism: postmodernism and premodernism.
• A “New Center” centrist position is well-intended, represents most people’s politics, and cannot hold. It is naturally unstable and reinforces the very thinking that perpetuates our current state of what we term existential polarization.
• Those who support Modernity should do so unabashedly and without reference to relatively minor partisan differences across the “liberal/conservative” split.  The fight before us now is bigger than that, and the extremes at both ends are dominating the usual political spectrum to everybody’s loss.
• Modernity can be fought for, and it’s probably what you already want unless you’re on the lunatic fringe of the left or right.

This bullet list—and the full manifesto no less—presents a mythos of the supreme reasonableness of modernity that could rival the most dogmatic of authoritarian religious proclamations.  It claims science and reason are the fruits of the Enlightenment (as though these two things never existed at all before Bacon and Descartes lit the sparks of the so-called “Scientific Revolution”[28]), implies that material comfort and its associated individualistic freedom are the fundamental yearning of the human spirit, and that if you disagree with their position, you belong to the “lunatic fringe”—you must be Woke, and now, if not of the Left variety, then of the Right.

Of course.  Who else but a woke lunatic would attack the Very Scientific and Reasonable fire-breathing giant lizard god of modernity? 

One could criticize any of the points structuring Lindsay and Pluckrose’s manifesto at great length.  But what is held in common with other perhaps less obvious and maybe even less self-aware modernist propagandists is the adoration of amorphous concepts of science and reason.

Holding Untruths as Self-Evident

The attitude commonly taken by Enlightenment-minded classical liberals towards the thousand years intervening the Christian baptism of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance recovery of antiquity is one of derision: what good came out of that millennium being regarded as only despite and not in the least because of Christian belief.  “For the men of the Enlightenment,” writes Christopher Dawson, “viewed Religion—and above all Christianity—as the dark power which is ever clogging and dragging back the human spirit on its path towards progress and happiness.  They saw in the development of the historic religions an unrelieved tale of deception and cruelty.”[29]  It is, of course, futile to ask those who do not believe in a God to see what is of value in the study of divine revelation—since such is already prejudged as a product of human deception or madness—and thus to recognize that there is a merit in what is thus received.

But it is not only explicit atheism that prevents the modernist from the requisite intellectual humility needed to appreciate theological wisdom; rather, there is a deeper obstruction which also prevents them from grasping genuine philosophical insight, which stands always an antecedent necessity to the science of theology.  For in following the way of ideas characteristic of modern philosophy, rational order becomes seen as the product of human reason, rather than the other way around.  That is: one of the greatest scientific inaccuracies long and widely believed, the varieties of geocentrism established in ancient Greece and unchallenged until Copernicus—and remaining widely believed for centuries afterward—was interpreted as exhibiting an anthropocentric universe: for we, on earth, were thought to quite literally be at the center of everything.

But with Galileo, the evidence became too strong that geocentrism (strictly conceived, at least) was an untenable position.  Though Galileo’s own proposed heliocentrism likewise turned out to be false—and though one new inaccurate cosmology followed another as the decades and centuries passed—gradually the mysteries of the corporeal cosmos and its constitution became better known, as better and better models for understanding were developed.  Along the way, many of the commonly-employed arguments—rooted all the way back in the theories proposed by Aristotle in the fourth century bc—for an intrinsically ordered universe disappeared; or so it would seem to those who understood the arguments at only the most superficial of levels.

The Aristotelian picture of the cosmos saw the regularity of heavenly motion as determining a repetitious regularity on earth: the recurrence of the seasons and thus the perpetuation of species both animal (by inducing them to mate at regular times of the year) and plant (by allowing the cycle of decay which enabled them to grow and bear fruit).  Deviation from the natural course was observed as being normal but also circumscribed within limits by these celestial determinations.

With the advent of a new cosmology, which revealed that the heavens were neither so regular nor so directly impactful on earth (though certainly correlated to the regularity we do observe), and especially with the discoveries that led to the theory of evolution, the Aristotelian image of the cosmos was shattered.  In correcting these errors and proposing more viable alternative interpretations, the idea of intellectual progress emerged as though an inevitable consequence of the consistent and rigorous application of the scientific method.  The belief thus rose that truth would be progressively unveiled by discovering more and new phenomena that help explain the functioning of the universe.  Thus “order” came to signify the result not of anything natural or cosmic, but of the regulation of facts discovered through the industrious application of the human intellect.  However, this apparent revolution was only a deception—one that ran deep and that has led to a state of absolute intellectual chaos.  In truth, the ancient belief—that order is discovered in rather than imposed upon the universe—was only the picture of Aristotelian cosmology, and not its principles.[30]

The ancient belief (constant throughout the intellectual world until Galileo) in an intrinsically ordered universe, put otherwise, followed most fundamentally not from observations of the heavens but from a belief about what we are ourselves: namely, the belief about how we acquire knowledge.  This theory of knowledge,[31] which began with Plato and Aristotle but in the medieval synthesis received developments from Augustine of Hippo, Ibn-Sina (Avicenna), Ibn-Rushd (Averroes), Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Cajetan, Domingo de Soto, the Conimbricenes, and perhaps reached its peak in John Poinsot (also known as John of St. Thomas for his fidelity to the thought of Aquinas), has its scholastic development so thoroughly ignored in all the authors of modernity that it can only be concluded they had no substantial knowledge or comprehension of it.  In direct consequence, the theory of human freedom in scholasticism likewise fell into neglect and thus human freedom became conceived as something purely negative, i.e., the absence of restraint—“the last conquest of the Gospel.”[32]

Indeed, ignorance of history is not only a hallmark of the Enlightenment and its contemporary advocates, but a deliberately cultivated characteristic.  Rather than engage with the whole system of scholasticism, men such as Descartes, Cudworth, and Leibniz extracted points for criticism that, once deprived of context, appear absurd; while Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau emphasized an interpretation of history and society—likewise satirizing a caricature of the past—which positively centered around practical economics, technology (broadly conceived), and politics; and thereby skipping over many details of life which unfolded during Middle Ages, where all these things were intertwined with questions of faith, details which show how instrumental Christendom was to European culture—including to the incorporation of classical learning.[33]  That is: having the Enlightenment and its heirs as the only source of learning for understanding the Middle Ages would be like having Aristophanes as the only source for understanding Socrates.

In the place of the tradition-preserving and synthesizing scholasticism, thinkers of the Enlightenment strove for novel solutions—much more inclined to use the works of ancient Greece and Rome as aids to rhetoric than as sources of understanding—to the intractable problems contrived by not only the contentious political discord into which Europe fell after the Protestant fragmentation of Christendom, but also the disagreements rendered through modernity’s hare-brained nominalist presuppositions.

It is little surprise, in fact, that the Enlightenment “philosophers” painted themselves gradually into obsolescence, for their contributions to the intellectual life of Europe were decreasingly philosophical and increasingly enamored of “science”: that is, the process of hypothesis, experimentation, observation, and repetition.  Philosophy became an auxiliary, relegated to questions for which methods of scientific observation and experimentation had not yet been developed, a merely transitory “thinking for the gaps”, self-effacing as it helped science to improve.[34]

But this is a failure to understand what it is that philosophy does or seeks.  Without dwelling on what I have discussed at length elsewhere,[35] it can be succinctly stated that philosophy is that science[36] through which we discern intelligible meaning, a phenomenon which is neither new nor factual, but which permeates our entire lives.  Without a science capable of discerning intelligible meaning, we invariably reduce “meaning” to and confine within the worst tendencies of our nature: our selfishness, self-centeredness, and most of all our conceit in the sufficiency, accuracy, and completeness of our own knowledge. 

The Center Cannot Hold

Thus it is that without any training in the science of discerning meaning—or with only pretended education at the hands of sophistical nominalists—that the heirs of the Enlightenment are doomed to a culture of continual fragmentation.  Credit must be given to some within the movement for recognizing the untenability of a “new center”; but this credit is minor, for their objection to the “center” is that it attempts mediation between the “existential polarization” between “left” and “right”; and so instead, they exhort doubling-down on the ungrounded principles of modernity without recognizing that those very principles give rise to the so-called “postmodernity” to which they so vociferously object.[37] 

That is: presuming meaning, reason, and order, to all be the inventions of the human mind, rather than what it discovers (at least in origin) within the things themselves as existing regardless of our interpretation of them—and thus with an order that is not merely factual but also normative—modernity cannot but give rise to the so-called “postmodernity” running rampant today.  That outlets like New Discourses and Quillette, figures like James Lindsay and Clair Lehman, protest the “postmodern” only shows that they have not yet allowed or not yet recognized (and likely never will) that the principles of modern philosophy oust the natural orientations of human cognitive existence, and thus, these outlets—though ignorant of its structure—still maintain a semblance, consciously or not, of belief in the discernibility of extramentally-constituted meaningfulness.

It is inevitable, in other words, that lacking belief in the ability to discover principles free of human caprice which explain or provide a normative order of life, the universe, and everything—not as something we can grasp immediately or with a perfect comprehension, but which we might unfold gradually and over time—no system can endure without subordinating the freedom of the many to the decisions of one (or at least, the united few).  Upholding any sort of individualistic, nominalistic theory of ideation for all things non-empirical entails the absence of principles through which disagreement about meaning can be resolved.

Attempting to combat all the individual errors of unreason in today’s world is a fool’s errand: the digital diaspora[38] has led to a fragmentation of ideological perspective unlike anything seen in the past.  Every academic engaged in the digital sphere, every writer, every pundit, every numbskull with a computer or a smartphone and social media accounts can become an “influencer”, capable of distributing ideas and interpretations into the ether, for better or worse (and usually the latter).

If one is looking for reason today, as something solid against which the upheaval of ideologies run amok can do no harm, modernity is not the answer, but only a return to the roots of the current problem.  Perhaps instead, one ought to look at those in eras long past who studied—and those who now again are returning to a study of—the arts and human faculties of reasoning themselves.

---

[1] Season 4, episode 6: “The End of the World”.

[2] On the terms “postmodernism” and “postmodernity”, see Kemple, 5 November 2023: Peripatetic Peridiocal, “On Modernity, Ultramodernity, and Postmodernity”.

[3] Marcuse 1965: “Repressive Tolerance” in Wolff, Moore, and Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, 91-117.

[4] A group of individuals that are certainly contrarian, seen from the perspective of the so-called “postmodern”, but which is relatively homogenous in their views—with the one significant exception, I would say, being Ben Shapiro, who alone possesses pre-Enlightenment principles in his worldview (Jordan Peterson having violently appropriated anything drawn from before the Enlightenment into a Frankensteinian monster of his own creation).

[5] Pluckrose, 14 April 2019: Areo Magazine, “No, Secular Humanism is Not a Religion”.

[6] Watts, 26 March 2019: Areo Magazine, “On Quillette and the Engaged Left”.

[7] Harris, 17 April 2019: Quillette, “Is the Intellectual Dark Web Politically Diverse?”  Outside the ambit of these venues one will find, on occasion, similar sentiments to those in the broadly-centrist movement published at Aeon—but the discussion of Aeon and other such sites falls into the ambit of another discussion for another time.

[8] 16 October 2015: Quillette, “A Platform for Free Thought”.

[9] 09 April 2021: Arc Digital, “The Next Phase of Arc Digital is Here”.

[10] 21 January 2020: New Discourses, “A Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity”.  Originally published 22 August 2017: Areo Magazine.

[11] New Discourses, “About”.

[12] One can frequently find “medieval” used as a pejorative (see, e.g., Francis 29 March 2019: “The Democratic Revolution of the Enlightenment”—originally published in abbreviated form on 19 March 2019: Areo Magazine, “The Enlightenment and the Democratic Revolution”—where slavery is identified as a “Medieval institution”, revealing both the author’s bias and his historical ignorance), while Christianity and the cultural benefits it rendered as the dominant form of belief from late antiquity until the Enlightenment is often relegated to the condition of being incidental (see, e.g., Bassett, 23 August 2018: Quillette, “Progress and Polytheism”; Wakeling, 30 June 2024: Quillette, “The New Political Christianity”); the idea of creation is identified as an “ancient myth” (Krauss, 14 November 2023: Quillette, “The Return of the Creationists”); books promoting the return to religious sensibility are blithely dismissed (Daseler, 28 May 2025: “Religious Reasoning”; Coyne, 13 March 2025: “Religion: A Bad Prescription for America”).

[13] To extrapolate from many personal anecdotes, worshippers of the Enlightenment regularly engage in both polemic and apologetic gymnastics of remarkable gracelessness in vilifying religion and excusing secularism: the Spanish Inquisition and Crusades being exemplars of the evil inherent in religiosity while the Terror was merely a mistaken speedbump in pursuit of freedom, and the countless millions murdered by twentieth century totalitarian regimes not a consequence of rejecting religion, but of rejecting liberalism.  This is not to say certain reprehensible excesses have not been pursued in religious societies—but so they are in every society, for human erring occurs in every human era.  “Utopia” is a “no-place”.

[14] See Kemple, 16 April 2019: Epoche Magazine, “C.S. Peirce on Science and Belief” for an accessible presentation of Peirce’s 1878 article: “The Fixation of Belief” in The Essential Peirce, vol.1.

[15] A call also recently championed by institutions oriented towards or within higher education, such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and the University of Chicago.  Their drums signify no impending march on an improvement to thinking: only sound and fury.  But this is a digression.

[16] Dawson 1959: The Movement of World Revolution, 40-41.

[17] Thus, all modern philosophy falls into the pit of nominalism, which may be defined as “the denial that relations as such possess an ontological status independently of the mind, or, being effectively the same thing, if they do exist they cannot be known.”  Cf. Deely 2001: Four Ages of Understanding, 511-89.

[18] Voegelin i.1945-1953: From Enlightenment to Revolution, 3: “The eighteenth century has been variously characterized as the century of Enlightenment and Revolution or alternatively as the Age of Reason.  Whatever the merit of these designations, they embody a denial of cognitive value to spiritual experiences, attest to the atrophy of Christian transcendental experiences, and seek to enthrone the Newtonian method of science as the only valid method of arriving at truth.”

[19] Cf. Simon 1970: The Great Dialogue of Nature and Space, 163-178; Maritain 1959: Degrees of Knowledge.

[20] One of the most valuable—if extracted—insights of any philosopher belonging to modernity was the distinction that Jeremy Bentham proposed between idioscopic and cenoscopic sciences (appropriated by Charles Sanders Peirce).  Idioscopy is the branch of science that operates through specialized observational means in pursuit of discovering new phenomena; cenoscopy is the branch which operates through the common reasoning faculties possessed by all human beings.  Among the asinine consequences of scientistic tendencies is the belief that human beings need little training to excel cenoscopically, despite all historical and present evidence to the contrary.  See Kemple, 16 April 2019: Epoche Magazine, “C.S. Peirce on Science and Belief”.

[21] Thus not only does Quillette publish a piece criticizing Dave Rubin, but Rubin fires back and derides Quillette’s declining standards, to which Claire Lehman, founder of Quillette, responds by implying Rubin is a hypocrite.  James Lindsay drives a wedge between Christians by conflating Christian charity and liberal neutrality. 

[22] That is, “diversity” often signifies nothing more than a “superficial quantitative plurality of identity characteristics”, used as a smokescreen to mask the lack of genuine diversity—and even an ignorance of what “diversity” as a cultural phenomenon truly means.  Thus one will find the occasional, truly diverse piece on any of these sites, written by a truly diverse author—one who does not share the viewpoints of the editors—but these are scarce, and included strictly because they fit the ideological commitment to a superficial, quantitatively-measurable concept of diversity.

[23] The term “modernity” being one which has suffered some confusion, given its historical usage as signifying something like the recent past and present, as well as its application to various philosophical and cultural events, thinkers, and movements.

[24] Reference to the historical

[25] See Kemple 24 April 2019: The Synechist, “The Sophistication of Sophistry”.

[26] Dawson 1959: The Movement of World Revolution, 41.

[27] I think, for instance, of Immanuel Kant, who was nothing if not a brilliant philosopher, but also one who began from and never left an erroneous principle concerning the nature of human knowledge, and thus undermined the entirety of the philosophical system he quite brilliantly constructed.  I am quite confident that many of the frequent contributors to these sites are gifted with a greater natural intelligence than my own, just as was Kant—but also quite confident that I have been fortuitous in my education with exposure to great minds and, moreover, to the truth of wisdom as something beyond any human mind.

[28] Which was not really a revolution at all, but rather the continuation of an intellectual trajectory begun centuries before, with the recovery of Aristotle’s texts through receipt of the Islamic tradition, which allowed science to become distinctly recognizable as, conversely, philosophy deviated into the unphilosophical path of modernity.  See Deely 2001: Four Ages of Understanding, 487-510.

[29] Dawson 1929: Progress & Religion, 21.

[30] St. Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens and Earth (1272/73: In de caelo et mundo, lib.2, lec.17, n.451) noted that all the given explanations of cosmological observation merely attempt to “save the appearances”; that is, that they are not necessarily explanations of what is being observed, but ones which accord based upon the present evidence.

[31] Which may be seen in part by an enormous number of writings, beginning with Aristotle’s c.330bc: Περὶ Ψυχῆς (On the Soul), but found intelligently developed into a coherent and consistent whole with parts from St. Augustine’s i.397-426: De doctrina Christiana and c.389: De Magistro, Avicenna’s i.1014-20: Kitab al’Shifa, Averroes’ commentaries (c.1180) on Aristotle’s On the Soul, St. Thomas Aquinas’ i.1256-59: Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate, 1259/65: Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II, 1266-68: Summa Theologiae prima pars, q.75-88, his 1268 commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul, Cajetan’s commentaries on Aquinas’ De ente et essentia (c.1493) and the Summa Theologiae prima pars (1507), John Poinsot’s i.1631-34: Cursus Philosophicus (especially the parts edited and contained in the edition prepared by John Deely, Tractatus de Signis and the Quarta Pars Philosophiae Naturalis), and as explicated in the past hundred years through Etienne Gilson’s 1935: Methodical Realism, 1939: Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, Yves Simon’s 1934: Introduction to the Metaphysics of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain’s 1959: The Degrees of Knowledge, John Deely’s 1982: Introducing Semiotic, 1994: Human Use of Signs, 2001: Four Ages of Understanding, 2007: Intentionality and Semiotics, 2010: Semiotic Animal, and my own 2017: Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition and 2019: Introduction to Philosophical Principles, among many other worthy works.

[32] Manent 1987: Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme: Dix leçons in the English translation by Balinski, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (1995).

[33] Cf. McLuhan 1943: The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, which explains the reception, development, and struggle over classical learning (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) from the end of antiquity through the Latin age and into the Renaissance.

[34] Evidenced in the 20^th century by the quite silly claim of Wittgenstein—who was proud of his ignorance of the history of philosophy—that it belongs to philosophy to discover the problems that science solves.

[35] 2022: Introduction to Philosophical Principles: Logic, Physics, and the Human Person.

[36] See n.20 above.

[37] And thus the so-called “postmodernism” is really better termed “ultarmodernism”.

[38] Kemple, 5 February 2019: LapsusLima, “Leaving the Global Village” – republished 29 August 2021 on Covidian Aesthetics.