Premodern Authority

• When refined to an analysis of justification, religious authority underwrote all power relationships before the Protestant Reformation.
• The fall of the western Roman Empire did not affect the caesero-papism that structured medieval life.
• Modernist and postmodernist axioms of commitment distort historians’ views of the religious foundations of the era; the modernist axioms favor individual agency and universal reasoning; the postmodern presumes the former and replaces the latter with environmentally molded reasoning faculties.
• We seek prophets of our own axioms in the premodern era, ignoring that their frame of reference was fundamentally distinct from our own.
• To discover the beginnings of modernism requires first that we differentiate “modernism” in its intellectual, political, or literary sense, each of which takes us to a different era.
• I choose 1517 because it marks the beginning of an uninterrrupted withdrawal of trust that continued unabated for half a millennium it was caused by the deficiencies of authority as a warrant.
• Trust relies upon a surrender of rational and moral agency that, once conceded to authority, is quite resistant to challenge.
• This resistance is reinforced in trusting religious authority because no act of severance to isolate the truth and goodness claims of the authority is possible, further increasing its resistance to interrogation and doubt.
• But this resistance masks an inherent weakness, for authority as a warrant can offer no means to refute other challenges founded upon the same basis.
• Once considered, these challenges definitionally require a resumption of agency by individuals, which axiomatically requires at least a temporary loss of trust even if only to reassign trust elsewhere; this weakness explains the violence typical of defenses of religious authority, for it cannot accept competition from other authority without eroding trust.
• This cycle was repeated countless times in medieval life, and it might have succeeded in the Reformation also if not for Martin Luther’s core concept of a priesthood of all believers.
• Luther confused the operations of belief and trust, allowing one to erode the other; over eight desperate generations of religious conflict and disruption of institutional norms, authority itself became suspect and was challenged by the axioms of modernism as admittedly more uncertain replacements for the composited truth and goodness claims of religious authority.
• The operations of belief and trust now had to be analyzed by modernist axioms of commitment and were found to be so fundamentally distinct that the former could not be converted into the latter; the refusal to accept that finding is what distinguishes contemporary premodernists.
• A product of the desperate search for alternative public warrants gradually produced empirical science, whose success is achieved by an act of severance in which the search for truth is procedurally isolated from the uses to which truth may be put, precisely the opposite of religious authority’s processes, a distinction that partially explains their mutual hostility.
• Luther’s revolt mucked up the oil and water of justification, appealing both to revelation and to reason; his attempted solution was to use reason only after receiving revelation; this effort inevitably perverted both.
• The U.S. government was founded upon separating religious belief from institutional authority; rather than taking the premodern view of formative association with authorities built upon a surrender of agency, modernism gradually assumed the axioms of individual experience and universal reason, which would allow informative relations with institutions that would prove mutually advantageous.

Modernism’s Midwives

• We cannot imagine the desperation with which premodern thinkers faced the epistemological crisis of the Protestant Reformation, one in which all roots of trust were severed, and no truth or goodness claim could be reliably warranted.
• Combatants in the Reformation faced three knowledge problems: the desire inherent in revelation rendered all conflicting claims equally suspect; only by sleight of hand could private belief be converted to institutional religious authority; and such authority still could appeal to no dispassionate arbiter when confronted by conflicting authority.
• Only gradually did a few thinkers began to suspect that authority per se might be the core problem.
• The first of these was Descartes, who found in mathematical proofs the evidence of universal human reasoning that might ground consensual public truths to end Europe’s Reformation nightmare.
• The Cartesian method of rigorous rational “proofs” left something to be desired once individual experience was considered; the result was a “modernist cannibalism” in which every effort to ground universal truths upon individual experience produced some level of doubt; this process occupied the seventeenth century birth of the Enlightenment, definitionally a search to increase the reliability of modernist axioms of commitment.
• The first modernist cannibal was Francis Bacon, who was forced to accept less certainty by examining the peculiarity of experience.
• Only gradually did rigorously rational examination of experience produce empiricism as a partial solution to ground public truth claims; this effort was the beginning of modern natural science.
• This modernist cannibalism did not only threaten religious authority; it also found natural explanations for what had formerly been considered divine prerogatives, leading to Deism.
• Skeptical empiricist philosophers continued to apply their critique to experience, producing both rigor of thought and skepticism of conclusions through the work of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.
• The result of these philosophers’ work was to confine consciousness within the perceptual wall of the thinker’s own awareness, with no certain means to guarantee her judgments; Kant’s emphasis on “phenomena” provided only intersubjective reliability sufficient to ground universal rational thought.
• The need for consensual public morality, including law, was satisfied by social contract theory, which was rapidly cannibalized by later thinkers.
• Using the framework of the empiricist philosophers, experimental and observational science began its long period of increasing rigor, though many studies we consider to be pseudo-science were considered empirical until science was finally professionalized at the end of the nineteenth century.
• By the eighteenth century, modernist axioms guided social reformers, though most persons still sought at least some guidance from institutional authority, including formal religious authority, despite the obvious clash of guiding axioms of commitment.
• The implicit clash of these guiding axioms produced four effects: first, an ongoing nostalgia for a revival of religious authority as a more certain guide to moral ends; second, an attempt to pierce the perceptual wall through some means other than reason, which gave rise to Romanticism; third, an appeal to a range of pseudo-sciences to provide moral guidance, all of which became known as the human sciences; and fourth, a plethora of hypocrisies as institutional authority sought to base its appeal on some impossible composite of premodernist and modernist axioms of commitment.
• It is these hypocrisies that postmodernism was all too happy to reveal over the course of the dismal twentieth century.

Why Invent a Social Contract?

• Social contract theory emerged from the Reformation chaos to justify government by the consent of the governed; it replaced a far older origin theory that posited an organic growth of government founded upon the family as the model of more complex associations.
• We have reason to ask why the organic model of political association needed replacing and why social contract was the form of that replacement; the answer to both questions can be found in the axiomatic disjunctions spawned by the Reformation.
• The paternalism of the organic model easily accommodated the hierarchical authority of the aristocracy and was thought at the time to provide no means to relocate political power to individuals, which was required by the emerging modernist axioms of commitment.
• Those axioms, individual experience and universal reason, were inherently hostile to the surrender of agency that defines trust and characterizes authority.
• Because it was a product of the bitterest contentions resulting from the inability of authority to resolve challenges to trust in the Reformation, social contract theory presupposed such dissension to be the natural state of association and peaceful arrangements to be both unnatural and difficult to maintain.
• Aristotle had proposed political states as natural but not instinctual; he saw the challenge as extending the natural tribalism of the family to associations with strangers based not on love but on justice.
• Various modes of simulating “natural” affinities had emerged by the age of Reformation, including tribal, dynastic, and economic identity, but the most powerful spur to political association had always been divine right; because of its close association with the ravages of the Reformation, modernist theorists chose to reject the natural model of political association and so invented a novelty, a social contract, to replace it.
• The first contractarian, Hobbes, mistook the conventional modes of association from family to tribe to polity to be both unnatural and destructive of individual agency; because he proposed social contract theory in the shadow of religious regicide and civil war, he wrongly thought traditional conventions of political association to be artificial and imposed by power rather than embraced by trust; thus he germinated the seeds of mistrust that had been planted by the wars of the Reformation that would grow through the modernist era.
• Hobbes’ vision of artificial association made the state the arbiter of what he thought to be irreconcilable conflicts of self-interest; he failed to see that political associations are as fundamental to self-interest as other needs, and that the autonomous individual in the state of nature was neither historically possible nor metaphorically accurate; this error could never be separated from the contractarian model and continues to plague it in the form of political libertarianism.
• Hobbes explicitly rejected both the organic model of government and the natural rights theories that had accompanied it; any future attempt to graft rights to contracts would have to discount all but civil rights explicitly retained in originalist contracts; this liability largely explains the failures of contemporary theories of natural or human rights except as idealized ambitions of future civil rights progress because “justice” is conferred by the contract.
• The organic model is fully compatible with modernist axioms and also with the natural and human rights that enshrine justice as the arbiter of the quality of any civil statute; what is more, it sets these political rights in the larger context of the universal human needs that governments exist to facilitate.
• Adopting a contractarian model, by contrast, sees law as an inevitable imposition on human freedom, an alien and artificial limitation that obstructs rather than expands individual liberty; thus the contractarian model continues to propagate the historical distortions that attended its creation.

Modernism and Its Discontents

• Though the term “modern” is broad, I mean it in the sense of the domination of unique axioms of rational and moral commitment different from those employed in earlier and later eras.
• Because it was begun, maintained, and ultimately challenged by other foundational convictions, modernist axioms have always suffered from attacks on their legitimacy; additionally, its nature requires an ongoing self-critique that has revealed its deficiencies while masking its successes.
• Modernism was framed by Martin Luther’s revolt against Catholicism in 1517; he made it clear his conscience was captive only to his own reason, that he would either be convinced or remain an outlaw in defiance of religious authority.
• Though we find nothing extraordinary in his rebellion now, institutional authorities could hardly begin to process a justification for truth or goodness based merely on reasoned, private experience in opposition to dogma, established order, and trust in institutional authority; their bewilderment and the horrid reaction it endorsed reflect their own premodernist axioms of commitment.
• We might see Luther’s revolt in terms of an heroic rebel speaking his own truth to power, fighting the hypocrisies of vested interest and institutionalized privilege; that viewpoint reflects yet another set of assumptions and marks a postmodern set of axioms that characterize contemporary life.
• When seen in this light, an axiom takes on the quality of a set of presuppositions, rarely examined, that determine the perspective we use to understand the warrant for an experience or to prescribe its potential goods.
• The dominant premodern warrant was trust, considering institutions to be formative of individual identity; a bestowal of trust definitionally transfers the power to decide to the authority considered better able to arbitrate issues of truth, goodness, and beauty than the individual who bestows it; this willing surrender is inconceivable to postmodern thinkers, who regard all such bestowals as a theft of agency made in bad faith whose real agenda is maintenance of disparities of power; between these fundamental oppositions, the first as old as civilization and the second the product of the miserable twentieth century, modernism found its footing.
• In his stand at the Diet of Worms in 1519, Luther appealed to universal reasoning based upon his own private experience as a revocation of trust and a reacquisition of the power to decide; he implicitly appealed to others’ reasoning to reveal the same inconsistencies and hypocrisies in Catholic authority that he had discovered; this appeal was fundamentally inconsistent with premodernism because it placed the capacity for judgment in the individual rather than in the corporate body and it appealed to a common reasoning faculty to make sense of Biblical truth.
• Unfortunately, Luther’s axioms could not be comprehended by the religious authorities whose failures had created them because reasoning on the meaning of scripture relied on a prior revelation that must always be private when subjected to “the priesthood of all believers,” rendering all such convictions acts of private belief rather than universal reasoning; this inherent flaw in religious conviction crippled the potential of the modernist axioms that would grow from Luther’s revolt and prolonged the bloody conflicts that resulted from it.
• Luther’s revolution began a century and a half of savage religious contention in which institutional authority itself suffered a wholesale loss of trust without revealing any other compelling warrants for social comity and moral direction; those warrants had to be shaped in the maelstrom of the collapse of all social order over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hammered out in the midst of ongoing epistemological crisis.
• Though the distinction between belief and knowledge has not been consensually accepted to this day, the abject failures of institutional authorities were made abundantly clear over eight generations of struggle, leading to the relocation of rational and moral agency in individuals, transforming subjects into citizens in the process.
• By the end of the Reformation, authority’s inability to resolve conflict without forfeiting trust proved as impossible for public morality as revelation’s private nature proved for public consumption; these manifest failures gave modernism the space to mature but also composited the judgment that it relied upon with the desire characteristic of religious beliefs.
• Rene Descartes attempted to eliminate this taint by appealing to the intersubjective quality of human reasoning; he argued that our thinking, not our believing, can prove universal, though he mistrusted experience as inescapably private.
• Francis Bacon accepted the Cartesian solution of universal reasoning, but he sought to minimize the subjectivity of private experience by standardizing the processes of experience itself so as to create a more universal process of perception; ultimately, this effort produced the scientific method, but first it had to accept a lower degree of certainty than religious authority had provided; establishing a minimal standard proved extremely difficult, a point revivalists of religious authority never fail to notice and one always disputed by modernists.
• Over the course of the seventeenth century modernism began to be constructed on the twin pillars of universal reasoning and examined experience, but every assertion was open to challenge on the same grounds that founded it; modernist cannibalism was the process of critical examination and modification of its warrants and sustained criticism of its axioms.
• One fertile area of critique was the reliability of human perception and of the reasoning that made sense of it; examinations of human nature suffered from the “black box” of human preferential freedom and temptations to “perfect” its operations; ultimately, these temptations produced one of the continuing embarrassments of modernist axioms: the pseudo-scientific efforts of the human sciences, most obviously exemplified by social contract theory.
• What began as good-faith efforts to mimic the emerging natural sciences eventually saw the human sciences indulge in imaginative prescriptions for human perfection as simulacra of morality in the twentieth century, which proved fatal both to modernist axioms and the effort to create postmodernist ones.
• At the same time, modernist axioms succeeded beyond expectations in the natural sciences, producing deep explanations and bountiful technologies; but by perfecting its methodologies over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, empiricism starkly revealed its incapacity for moral prescription while also highlighting the failures of other modernist warrants to produce them.
• These failures were magnified by the continuing appeals of premodern authority to trust even in the face of modernist warrants that rejected authority’s maxims, producing ongoing hypocrisies, exploitations, and contradictions that modernist cannibals were all too eager to highlight and postmodernist ones to exploit.
• Together, the misdirection of the human sciences combined with the contradictions of institutional authorities produced the moral crisis so clearly revealed by World War I; the conflicts that characterized the twentieth century attested to modernism’s failures and launched the postmodern revolution.
• Literacy and mass cultures, particularly popular entertainment, allowed postmodern values to permeate Western societies even before postmodernist axioms were fully articulated by the last third of the twentieth century.
• While postmodern values confirmed modernist emphases on individual experience, they considered reasoning the product of that experience rather than its director; this change inspired both existential angst and the identity politics that followed it.
• These changes were a direct result of “modernist cannibalism,” particularly the epistemological contention that perception must be inescapably separated from reality by a perceptual wall.
• This logical conclusion was partially obscured by the power of empirical science to bridge that gap by a formulaic constriction of experience to formal observation and experimentation, but though this effort increased the prestige of science, it also eroded the value of “common sense” as a reliable guide to experience, which devalued moral reasoning.
• This crisis of modernism eventually produced a postmodern rejection of intersubjectivity, but before the twentieth century crisis, there was an earlier attempt to pierce the “perceptual wall,” the nineteenth century movement called Romanticism.
• This effort relied on intuition and emotion to provide a certainty that reasoning could not match; its impact on early mass cultures was incalculable, and because its greatest influence coincided with both imperial expansion of European powers and the birth of true mass cultures, Romanticism became the first worldwide cultural value system.
• Romanticism faded in the last half of the nineteenth century, in part because of the bulldozing power of empirical discovery that challenged its pantheist assumptions and in part because Victorian cultures attempted to domesticate its means to truth and moral certainty.
• Romanticism was the last universal effort to prescribe moral truth; its failure was magnified by the awesome powers of natural sciences and magnified yet again by the final breakdown of institutional authority, all leading to the civilizational crisis that was World War I.
• This crisis centered on a single question, “What is progress?”
• Since this question requires an answer involving goodness — and ultimately moral judgment — it forced a full awareness of the vacuity of possible responses.
• This failure was highlighted by the final collapse of religious authority, a slow-motion disaster that had begun with Martin Luther’s attack on institutional morality in 1517, but this reallocation of agency was finalized in the first decades of the twentieth century.
• The catastrophes of the twentieth century were magnified by the abysmal failure of the human sciences to replace religious authority as arbiters of moral truth and procurers of progress.
• One way to view this disaster is to see it as a conceptual field of battle over moral truth, with postmodernism championing a radical individual agency creating personal standards of value versus a modernist position rooted in the human sciences, the former proclaiming radical freedom and the latter radical contingent determinism.
• A false reconciliation emerged with the view of the unconscious as the mediating mechanism of preference; it was claimed to be both scientifically sourced and privately directive; it is difficult to gauge whether its fictive existence was more damaging to real science or real morality.
• The twentieth century was one long attempt to bridge the gap that the act of severance creates between what we think we know and how we employ it to find the goods we value.
• The very odd outcome of this effort was an enshrinement of belief as the medium of moral commitment, with premodernists considering it to be an attachment to a transcendent moral system and postmodernists thinking it an intricately constructed structure of privately experienced reality; this shared devotion to private belief cannot produce a reconciliation because premodern religionists mistake their beliefs for trust in authority and postmodernists are axiomatically hostile to all authority.
• This conflict over the true nature of belief has yet to reach its crisis point, which will arise when religious authority is definitively and universally rejected and the human sciences alternative is similarly denied as inconsistent with felt preferential freedom; at that point, advances in true empirical work in neurology, genetics, and artificial intelligence will more clearly reveal what is universal to human preference; at that point, empiricism’s act of severance will force a concession to species-specific universal reasoning to engage in a competent search for universal human rights discovered, defined, and defended through modernist axioms of commitment.

The Calamity of the Human Sciences

• Definitionally, human sciences attempt to determine and explain the causes and effects of human behavior.
• The domain of these “soft sciences” is the “black box” of human choice-making; they include psychology, sociology, economics, history, criminology, anthropology, education, ethnology and other subsets.
• In some ways, the human sciences are modeled on the natural sciences: they use a specialized vocabulary for a limited sphere of study that excludes outsiders that then branch into sub-disciplines; they set up experiments and academic journals to publish their results; they form academic departments and confer degrees.
• But though they are intentionally modelled on the “hard” sciences, the human sciences have utterly failed to emulate their success.
• The foundation of empiricism is close examination of experience, but accomplishing this requires that experience itself by subject to restrictions and refinements to minimize its subjectivity and uniqueness; this was slowly understood over the four hundred years between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century in Europe; it involved a gradual restriction of the kinds of experiences considered “scientific.”
• This refinement gradually came to mean “quantitative” and “predictable” so as to allow analysis and replication of results; as natural science professionalized, those studies that did not qualify were dismissed as “pseudo-science” unworthy of empirical study.
• By employing this restriction, science produced three levels of utility to warrant its methodology: first, the interlocking disciplines of science that confirm the findings of contingent disciplines, producing a very sturdy structure of discovery based upon disciplinary paradigms that channel work in each discipline; second, the ever-increasing depth and complexity of each discipline; third, the astonishing technology produced by applying these discoveries, using a simple rule of utility.
• One way to summarize science’s maturation is to say it is a learned process of minimizing experience while maximizing reasoning on that experience.
• During the Enlightenment, natural philosophers assumed this lesson learned from “the science of nature” might also be applied to “the science of man.”
• From its beginnings, this “science” went wrong, for its perennial quest was not merely to understand but to perfect human nature, a task suited to morality rather than utility, but given the primitive state of contemporaneous natural science, this insuperable obstacle was not apparent.
• During its maturation, natural science discovered the dangers of premature closure, the temptation to rush determinations of truth so as to exercise preference of goods; this temptation is most clearly indulged in operations of belief, which make truth and goodness determinations simultaneous; modernism was made necessary by the exercise of religious belief, but only natural science has standardized the act of severance that largely eliminates premature closure.
• The human sciences have not employed the act of severance despite their pretensions to empirical methods for three reasons: first, they can never separate the determinations of truth from those of goodness that take place inside the black box of human consciousness, so their observations can never be complete; second, ethical considerations limit experimentation on human subjects and the kinds of discoveries that might open human preference to more accurate analysis; third, as a result, human sciences can never be predictive for individuals’ preferences and so must always remain merely statistically descriptive rather than experimentally predictive.
• The failed effort to make human sciences “true science” has resulted in tortured qualification and wild speculation to make felt human freedom subject to empirical prediction; these efforts have always made space for premature closure and disguised moral prescription that true science could never justify; further, human sciences have denied the essence of moral responsibility, felt preferential freedom, so as to make human behavior appear as determined as the natural processes real science studies.
• The twentieth century vivified the damage societies have suffered as a result of attempting to make persons into things so their behavior may be predicted — i.e. scientific — while also seeking their improvement through theoretical constructs that are incompatible with real scientific work.
• An early example is Rousseau’s advocacy of “natural education” that was embraced two centuries later by John Dewey as the basis for progressivist educational principles arguing for structuring classroom environments as “laboratories of learning” wherein children followed their instinctive curiosity as guided by practitioners; supposedly based on psychological theories of development combined with counterfeits of laboratory conditions, constructivist educational was exclusively taught to practitioners for most of the twentieth century through colleges of education in response to universalizing secondary education.
• Both communism and fascism were built upon fallacious social science theories; they also combined broad and non-empirical analysis of social conditions with Romanticized theories of social perfection.
• The archetype of this development was Freud; although a medical doctor, his clinical work was the tip of a fanciful theoretical substructure that was in no way justified by experimental evidence; despite its profound influence on twentieth century thought, not a single clinical term invented by Freud has been substantiated by neurological science, and psychology has challenged all of them by competing paradigms that deny them; Freud’s perverse views on human motivation were less diagnostic than theatrical, which given the perversity of Victorian morality and the dominance of narrative in mass cultures of the twentieth century, ensured their wide distribution.
• The successes of these composited diagnoses/prescriptions for mental and social health were intended to reflect the wildly productive work of natural science; this ridiculous presumption was largely ignored because it coincided with the moral vacuum left by the final collapse of religious authority after World War I.
• This tragic composite of failing authority and pseudo-scientific prescription produced the threat of entirely new, “scientific” efficiency experts who would remake societies and create new bureaucracies to replace discredited authorities, but since the human sciences that guided these efforts were inept predictors, the efforts to impose a new order most frequently led to totalitarianism, surrender of moral responsibility by individuals, and increased human misery.
• The antidote to temptations of scientism is to test human science’s laws, theories, and entire paradigms by the theory of falsifiability.
• Predictive theories will never eliminate persons’ felt preferential freedom, and so the human sciences must engage in more modest descriptive studies of human activities, particularly those that yield observational and experimental statistical data rather than fanciful predictions for human perfection or speculative prescriptions for individuals.
• Alternatively, the human sciences can broaden their analysis by abandoning empirical operations entirely so as to merge with traditional studies in related fields; this transition will become more likely as neurological research and artificial intelligence software continue to advance the work of true science to explore the brain’s workings.
• Until human preferential freedom is consensually understood as the source of human dignity rather than as a frontier of contingent determinism, the human sciences will continue to degrade rather than improve social comity.

The Victorian Rift  

• Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837 marked an era of industrial and imperial dominance that transformed Britain into a modern nation-state; this transformation was won at the expense of workers and women in the home country and non-European peoples in the rest of the world who were forced to modernize in the Victorian model.
• Daily life changed far more in the sixty-one years of Victoria’s reign than it had in the preceding two thousand; this dynamism was largely fueled by the successes of empirical science, but the era is shot through with deep fractures: hypocrisies and contradictions that climaxed in the horrors of World War I and the century following.
• Historians have teased out political, intellectual, economic, religious, and social strands that tangled together to motivate the major actors of this era, but this view either privileges the impersonal forces that determined outcomes or denies them in favor of a psycho-social analysis of motivations, both of which imply determinist forces dominating intentionality .
• My interest here is solely in examining the warrants that moved individuals’ and cultures’ moral preferences during the era and to examine the irreconcilable conflicts of intention that produced so much progress tainted by so much hypocrisy; this focus portrays World War I less as an avoidable catastrophe than a natural outcome, the climax of five centuries of axiomatic contradiction that cumulatively produced the second great moral crisis in human history.
• Its outcome largely shaped the era to follow, largely because analysts mistook a moral crisis for an epistemological one, the error beginning in Victoria’s reign.
• The Victorian era marked the mature phase of modernism, a movement forced into being by the crisis of religious authority in the sixteenth century; its guiding axioms privileged closely examined individual experience and universal reasoning as the means to determine truth and goodness.
• As seventeenth century modernist thinkers investigated a means of verification to replace religious authority, they engaged in modernist cannibalism: a critical analysis of the nature of both experience and reasoning that revealed serious difficulties in the truth and goodness claims that these axioms of commitment produced.
• The eventual beneficiary of this cannibalism was empirical science, which gradually used this self-critique to perfect its methodology of limiting experiences and maximizing reasoning on them; mature science only emerged toward the end of the Victorian period, but nevertheless its methods and technological products dominated the era.
• As capable as emerging science proved to be, its restrictions also began to close off any utility in using it as a consensual moral guide capable of replacing institutional authority; by Victoria’s coronation, this limitation had not only begun to emerge into public view, it had spawned a popular cultural response, Romanticism.
• Romantics were definitionally anti-science; they saw pantheistic intuition as a certain guide to universal truth and moral goodness; such truth was most clearly revealed in nature and in powerful emotional responses that were renewed by exposure to varied exotic experiences.
• Romantics were as opposed to institutional authority as they were to scientistic thinking, so although they admired intense belief, they were unwilling to champion a revival of institutional religion.
• A cultural battle ensued, with religious authority always asserting its (now ironic) demands for trust in opposition to Romanticism’s admiration for private agency guided by intuition; these contradictions were also in conflict with empiricism’s restrictive methodology and stern devotion to immediate utility; the Victorian mind was somehow expected to arbitrate the conflicting axiomatic demands of competing methodologies to find truth, goodness, and beauty, an effort that could not succeed, even as it planned imperial conquest and revolutionized societies.
• By the last third of the nineteenth century, a reconciliation of sorts had been found: a “moral” philosophy ostensibly scientific, ostensibly individualistic, and ostensibly moral, a “system” of preference that privileged utility and majority will above all: utilitarianism.
• But utilitarianism could not resolve the inherent contradictions that had produced it, not to mention the ones it added; though it claimed scientific validity, it was pseudo-scientific, and though it pretended to value individual preference, it demanded persons sacrifice their own desires to majority interests; and though it pretended to reduce societal choice to mathematical precision, it could prescribe no means of preference other than majoritarian desire.
• As religious authority’s axiomatic contradictions tainted institutional structures for the larger society, Victorians began gravitating toward scientism at that historical moment when empiricism found the means to professionalize; this produced a proliferation of pseudo-sciences, particularly in the “human sciences” that sought to subject preferential freedom to empirical determinism and therefore perfect society.
• This toxic emulsion of moral vacuum and axiomatic contradiction culminated at the end of the century with admixtures of authority, Romanticism, and the human sciences that highlighted both the inherent contradictions of each and the impossibility of blending them into consensual moral direction.
• Victorians utterly failed to blend individual agency with trust in institutional authority, empirical determinism with human freedom, intuition with inductive reason, and private belief with public will.
• Whereas cultural voices had reinforced institutional directives early in Victoria’s reign, by the end of the century, popular culture began a sustained critique of existing mores, an exercise in modernist cannibalism that lasted for the entire twentieth century.
• The first to fail was Romantic intuition, felled by the mechanistic theories of empirical discovery and technological invention; scientific progress then stretched the distance between ordinary reasoning and empirical research and found the former painfully inadequate, leaving a broad space for the interjection of the human sciences as the moral arbiters of the new century.
• The twentieth century was shaped by this sense of failure so powerfully reinforced by the Great War; Western civilization had conquered the world, but the moral vacuum it created was inadequately filled by the human sciences after 1918.
• Throughout the twentieth century, scientism pitched its false hopes, postmodernism continued to exploit what modernist cannibalism had revealed, Romantic pantheism devolved into the virtual circle, and nostalgists bemoaned the loss of religious authority as moral arbiter.

Postmodernism Is Its Discontents

• While examining postmodernism is beyond the scope of this essay, an examination of its warrants is possible and profitable.
• It is impossible to examine the beginnings of the movement without also reviewing the reasons for modernism’s failures.
• First, for its entire history, modernism was unable to extricate itself from the axiomatic claims of institutional authority, whose expectation of trust could never be reconciled with modernism’s basis of individual agency; at least part of this failure can be attributed to the claimed certainty of religious moral guidance, which modernism could not only never equal but which was also eroded by its own methodologies.
• Modernism applied its critical lens also to another of its axioms: the ability of individual experience to warrant universalist claims to knowledge of truth, goodness, and beauty.
• This incapacity directly resulted in the scientific method and the success of empiricism; indirectly, it produced the “science of man” as a modernist alternative to the moral power of religious authority, an effort whose utter failure has yet to be fully appreciated.
• Postmodernism began as a defense of human science against the encroachments of the physical sciences; though it was as axiomatically incompatible with authority as modernism had been, postmodernism fetishized not only an absolute rejection of all institutional authority but also a condemnation of modernism for its hypocrisies in tolerating it.
• Postmodernism’s axioms of commitment began with these discordant critiques, made even more discordant by an increasingly ambivalent relation with the human sciences that had stimulated its initial rejections.
• The bipolar relationship between postmodernism and science began with a Romantic rebellion against empirical determinism, producing existentialism and nihilism; but by the last third of the twentieth century, postmodern notions had so permeated popular culture that the academics who finally formalized postmodernism as an epistemology returned to contingent determinism — specifically cultural influence — to posit postmodernism’s axiomatic conviction: that reasoning must be as idiosyncratic as the environments that shape it.
• Another formative influence was the school of European thinkers known as phenomenologists, who stressed the privacy and subjectivity of individual experience; this development traces to Kant’s separation of reality and our experience of it; it was reinforced by Romanticism and the new “sciences” of anthropology, sociology, semiotics, and, most forcefully, psychology.
• This privatization of experience argued for the impermeability of the perceptual wall; utilitarianism had sanctioned social utility as a bedrock moral principle in the nineteenth century, and with the final collapse of religious authority after World War I, rapid social change foreshortened the moral horizon, promoting immediate utility as both private and public “moral” guide; this movement so conducive to materialism and the virtual circle was called pragmatism; it facilitated the decline of popular sanction for the modernist axiom of universal reason and further degraded public moral consensus.
• Postmodernists argued that either modernism had not tried to overthrow the yoke of authority, in which case it was hypocritical, or it had failed in its attempt, meaning it was incompetent; but the combined depredation of the first half of the twentieth century were in themselves proof of modernism’s abject failures to deliver on its axioms of individual agency and universal reasoning.
• Postmodernism’s influence may be summarized as the elevation of private belief as a legitimate guide to rational and moral agency; but this limited ambition failed first as epistemology and then as guide to public morality.
• The privacy of experience coupled with the limitations of language guaranteed subjective and competing appraisals of reality, a contention endlessly disproved by the only universalist source of knowledge available: the natural sciences.
• Legitimizing belief guaranteed that individuals would defend their virtual circles publicly, but the power of desire also guaranteed that no private truth could be isolated from the private appraisals of goodness that desire introduced; this condition guaranteed an endless contention of private goods advanced as public ones with no consensual means to arbitrate preference.
• This fatal impediment was obscured by postmodernists’ obsession with power as an imposition on personal freedom, thereby implying that all social order and law that violated individual belief was coercive and illegitimate despite postmodernism’s denial of an objective stance whereby to render that judgment.
• Postmodern thinkers went to great lengths both to deny postmodernism’s inconsistencies and to build the theory through academia, mass entertainment, and the press; but their squabbles only further splintered what had never been a fully coherent philosophy even as their ideas gained popular credence in the moral vacuum of the twentieth century; this constructive failure produced irony, alienism, and chaos.
• A secondary consequence of an obsession with impositions of power was to view all human interactions in which power may be exercised, meaning all without exception, as political interactions, struggles between imposed order and personal freedom, while also providing no means to resolve either individual or societal conflict..
• Lyotard attempted to instill some order in this chaos by advocating for the mini-narratives of exploited groups and opposing all grand narratives, the self-serving stories, of institutional authorities, but while this advocacy elevated the formerly exploited, it necessarily condemned all institutions as the veiled imposition of present exploitation, though complex societies can hardly function without them; because postmodernism could never warrant any preference as superior to any other — excepting only the avoidance of hypocrisy, and because its theory of environmental determinism would in theory hold the powerful to be no more responsible for their nature than the powerless, Lyotard’s advocacy could be easily dismissed as only one more private perspective.
• The thrust of these efforts was egalitarian, arguing for respect for all beliefs, but while this stab at equity proved liberating and supportive of individual dignity in practice if not in theory, it utterly failed to provide the means for public moral consensus, leading instead to the jockeying of interest groups to pursue their own vision of the good without a means of reconciliation.
• Despite its permeation into popular cultures, the postmodernist axiom of private reasoning has not been as successful as its premodern and modern predecessors for three reasons: first, it atomizes power and pits each against all; second, its self-contradictory foundations produce even further contention as theorists attempt to employ it; and finally, the earlier axioms of commitment are still operative to some degree in Western societies, and these are obviously hostile to postmodernism’s assumptions.
• So in addition to postmodernism’s internal confusions, it also faces competition from earlier movements that continue to champion their own axioms of commitment in the public square: pre-romantics continue to seek a revival of tradition and religious authority as formative necessities for public moral consensus but mistake their private religious beliefs for such a commitment, wishing to impose them on cultures as absolute goods; modernists continue to admire natural science and its discoveries as they seek informative interactions with institutional authority through the exercise of universal reasoning that defends individual agency and confines belief to private concerns; and postmodernists are perpetually on guard for hypocrisies and coercions as they seek performative opportunities to demonstrate the power of their private beliefs against authority of all stripes, always seeking the irreconcilable goals of total liberty and absolute equality of degree.