A truth-seeking telos can help us escape Toynbee's trap

Civilisations die by sacralizing fixed values. By adopting a sacred principle that can't ossify, we can avoid decline.

Over the last century, a number of civilisational histories have been written: Spengler, Toynbee, and Quigley are the main ones that come to mind. But little effort has been made to translate those insights into a political or social reform programme. We should aim to build a society immune to decline, and these thinkers are a good starting point.

Let's start with Toynbee's trap. He said that a society starts to fail when the governing elite sacralises institutions, values and past achievements that later prevent the society from adapting to new circumstances. He invokes the example of the Greek city-state, whose size could not match that of the emerging Macedonian and Roman empires, and whose philosophy hindered it from cooperating with other city-states to mount sufficient resistance.

Examples abound in our own day. The sacralisation of international human rights and their deep embedding into the legal system mean that many governments either don't believe in stopping migration, or are legally prevented from doing so. The sacralisation of the idea of free trade helped create a dependency on China that Western nations are struggling to minimise. The sacralisation of egalitarian individualism, and the resultant welfare state, has taxed Western fiscal resources so much that states struggle to execute core functions such as defence and law enforcement.

An even worse failure mode is where we sacralise multiple ideas, each cleaving off promising areas of the solution space. The left sacralises the welfare state and unskilled immigration and excessive regulation on business. One of these may be feasible without the other two, but the combination proves fatal. A society boxed-in by its own ideology. And internally divided on what its own sacred values are, the right can't even decide which side of the box to break through.

So can we create an ideology immune to Toynbee's trap? That would also give the right something to work with rather than promising a better implementation of the left’s agenda.

Imagine an ideology with one sacred principle, where everything else can be questioned. We would not need to worry about means promoting themselves to ends, or multiple sacred principles leading to deadlock.

But what should the sacred principle be?

Let's examine one candidate: the imperative to answer the question of whether the universe has a purpose, and if so, to figure out what it is. Whatever aids it would be classed as provisionally good. This principle is an open-ended mission, not an institution, policy, or past achievement: it cannot be sacralised in a way that rigidifies the society.

There are good grounds for such an imperative.

Either there exists an external concept of good, or not. If not, there is no common standard by which to evaluate moral systems. This is the condition of the secular West: entire moralities cannot be criticised on external moral grounds, for the Enlightenment failed to provide any.

That situation does not justify nihilism. If there is an objective good, we could have an obligation that we are ignorant of. Not knowing what the obligation is, our goal should be to acquire knowledge to figure that out. We win if we find the actual binding obligation. If we don't and there is none, morally speaking we have done nothing wrong.

What kind of knowledge should be acquired? Scientific knowledge, self-knowledge, deep contemplation, perhaps even revelation. To precommit to a certain type of knowledge requires a strong instinct of what the purpose could be: necessary for the individual, but fatal for an ideology which must seek out all kinds of knowledge.

Perhaps when all forms of knowledge are exhausted, that will be the only activity left: self-contemplation. Some may consider that a dead-end, or worse still, a universalisation of narcissistic navel-gazing. It also makes the mission seem a bit circular: the means has become the end, knowledge was acquired just to reflect on knowledge.

But self-contemplation as an end-point has history. For Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, self-contemplation was the most excellent form of contemplation for a being without equal in beauty and goodness. Hegel theorised Spirit moving through spheres such as art, religion, and philosophy, the end point being Absolute knowing where Spirit recognises all the different forms as part of itself.

As a philosophy that seeks to integrate the wisdom emanating from other domains, let’s call it the Metasophist Imperative.

By leaving the question of whether there is a purpose and what it could be open, knowledge acquisition as a telos smuggles in the minimum amount of metaphysics. For example, ruling out the idea of purpose would immediately eliminate the idea of a God, and yet there is no proof for that. But equally that telos as formed does not commit us to the idea of there being a God, or indeed an external purpose at all. We may discover that it is for us to define.

There is a parallel here to Pascal's Wager, where it is rational to believe in God because the expected benefits of eternal life and happiness vastly outweigh the costs and inconveniences of belief. But unlike Pascal’s Wager, the Imperative does not require one to commit to a single god at all, only the truth. For a true-believer, those could be the same. The Wager chains you to one God while forbidding you from further truth-seeking; the Imperative lets you keep both your God and the truth.

The Imperative also imposes some limits. Not knowing what the actual purpose of the universe is, we cannot say which method, culture or field will lead us there. In the spirit of Symmachus we could say "Not by one road alone can we arrive at so great a mystery". At the time, he could not have anticipated the contributions the troublesome barbarian invaders would ultimately make to world civilisation. Equally, today's down-and-out societies may surprise us in the future.

However, this does not make the Imperative relativistic. Some individuals and societies would be better motivated to pursue this mission, especially if they eventually adopt specific institutions aiming to immunise their society from decline. There are societies that would completely reject it: they will fall into predictable traps of decline. While there may be things that can be learned from such societies, they cannot perform a mission they cannot embrace.

For an idea to be adopted, it's not enough that it be right. It must be useful. So what advantages would the Metasophist Imperative permit to the society that adopts it?

First, the society could become an incubator for sub-ideologies. In the current system, leaders drill ideologies into the young, even aiming for an harmonisation ideologies across countries and disciplines. Fostering sub-ideologies would aid the circulation of elites, and would prevent worldviews from monopolising institutions or professions. Science would no longer need to progress one coffin at a time.

Second, it could be a way to co-ordinate nationalism without suppressing it. One could imagine that each nation has a specific role in the mission or an angle for how to further it. Nations don’t just compete with each other to see who is better, but complement each other. This is in contrast to current right-wing nationalism, which often leads to ultimately fruitless point-scoring such as when Europeans and Americans try to denigrate each other's systems, the end result being a mutual demoralisation.

Third, by fostering knowledge, it places an emphasis on capability over pleasure. This could help demote conspicuous consumption, allowing the community that follows it to accumulate resources over time.

Fourth, it could motivate the creation of environments where one can practise sincere truth-seeking. Many institutions in modern life elicit dishonesty as a way to get ahead. Being brutally honest is often not politically smart, within organisations or in public life in general. If truth-seeking is adaptive, a community where virtue and honesty should have a competitive advantage.

But perhaps the greatest advantage of this Imperative is that its mission-like structure can offer every individual a role in its pursuit. Nations offered a crude form of this when they had an actual mission, but they have been hollowed out by vested interests and political actors who now see the state as a source of loot. By leaning too much on individualism and top-down policies that have no role for most of the population, the right has lost the ability to inspire through story. The Imperative can win it back.