Demons

Everyone knows we have driven out the demons. They are banished to metaphors, horror stories, and the politely ignored beliefs of recent immigrants.

But they sneak back in from the margins. A rationalist uses Moloch as a metaphor, then admits that in something like ‘a mystical experience’ he saw the demon embodied. An environmentalist asks us to ‘humour’ him, then speaks seriously about an evil intelligence working through history. A professor of literature tries to understand the US Capitol riots, then finds himself meditating on principalities, powers, and the rulers of the darkness of this world. All three prudently include caveats. After all, if you were to write literally about demons, people might mistake you for a madman or recent immigrant.

I am not going to be prudent. I am going to say that to explain existing social conditions it is necessary to conclude that demons exist. Or, to put it another way, demonology is a necessary mode of social explanation.

By ‘mode of social explanation’ I mean something similar to Oakeshott’s ‘modes of experience’. A mode of social explanation is not a particular idea or set of ideas about society. It is an internally consistent and complete way of thinking about society that structures how particular ideas about society are made and used. It is a mental mould used to press social concepts.

The default modern mode of social explanation treats society as an undifferentiated field populated by abstract impersonal forces. Jane believes that ‘structural racism’ causes ethnic differences in university outcomes. John believes that Jane is influenced by ‘woke ideology’. Whatever their disagreements, Jane and John are using the same mode of explanation. ‘Structural racism’ and ‘woke ideology’ are both abstract. Neither inhabits any precise time or place. Both are impersonal. Although they are believed to act on human agents, they are not themselves agents. Our political language has become littered with these abstract impersonal forces: ‘extremism’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘liberalism’, ‘empire’, ‘colonialism’, ‘secularism’, ‘authoritarianism’, ‘conservatism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘racism’, ‘race’, and so tediously on.

If you are fighting for or against any of these abstract impersonal forces, you are wasting your time. The abstract impersonal mode cannot usefully influence human action. To usefully steer action, a mode of explanation must be able to explain concrete events and connect to human intentions. The abstract impersonal mode does neither. It is incapable of explaining particular events, and it contradicts the fundamental structure of human reason.

Its inability to explain events is easy to miss because it produces the feeling of understanding. Let me illustrate what I mean. Once you have mastered the fashionable usage of the terms, you can assign any social occurrence you dislike to the influence of either ‘fascism’ or ‘Marxism’, according to taste. Details are irrelevant to this game. It can be played while ignoring all of the inevitable ambiguity and complexity of whatever happened. It is the very act of placing events within a simple framework of abstract forces that gives you the satisfying sensation of knowing what  is ‘really’ going on. Whatever other people might believe, you will know that it was ‘really’ about cultural Marxism attacking our institutions, or crypto-fascism undermining our democracy, or whatever. The abstract mode is beautifully efficient. You can nurture your anger and pride with a bare minimum of intellectual effort.

Although this mode produces the feeling of understanding, it does not produce understanding. Imagine that an appellate court hands down a judgment that will either make it easier or harder to convict drug dealers. If it makes conviction more difficult, it might be hailed as a victory for ‘liberalism’; if it makes it easier, it might be hailed as a victory for ‘conservatism’. Attributing it to one of these forces or the other has, however, explained nothing. No abstract force presented itself to the court. If you wanted to explain how ‘liberalism’ or ‘conservatism’ caused the result, then you would have to analyse the particular events that led to the case being brought, the procedural rules of the court, the exact words of the relevant legislation, the exact words used in relevant precedents, the skills and beliefs of the various lawyers involved, the small scale policy issues in play, and so on. But once you have explained a case in these detailed terms, then abstract words like ‘liberalism’ or ‘conservatism’ will not add anything. They are entirely empty.

The failure of the abstract mode to explain events leads to two characteristic forms of breakdown: the paranoid mode and psychologising mode. The paranoid mode maintains the scale of the default mode, there are still grand forces arranging society, but it abandons the idea that these forces are impersonal and abstract. Instead, they are shadowy cabals of powerful individuals. QAnon is a dramatic recent example, but anti-Semitism has been the paranoid mode’s habitual vice for centuries. The psychologising mode is subtler. It keeps the abstract impersonal forces of the default mode, but tries to bridge the explanatory gap by suggesting that they operate through unconscious psychological mechanisms. Current attempts to combat discrimination using implicit bias training are a dramatic example. Different outcomes for different groups are believed to be caused by the abstract impersonal force of ‘discrimination’ and it is believed that this force operates at a subconscious level in almost everyone. The flaw with the theory is the complete lack of convincing evidence, despite a 20 year-long research program. Its empirical weakness hasn’t stopped human resource departments from using it, though. It fulfils a purpose. It ‘explains’ things without anyone having to do the difficult and disturbing work of actually paying close attention to particular events, institutions, and social organisations.

The psychologising mode is the child of the default mode, and it inadvertently reveals its parent’s darkest secret: for all its pretensions to science, the abstract impersonal mode directly contradicts experience. For even when it begins psychologising, it has no conception of agency. It treats humans as billiard balls mechanistically moved by impersonal forces. It has psychological causes, ‘unconscious bias made him to do it’; but no human reasons, ‘he attended the meeting in order to influence its decision’.

By ‘human reasons’, I simply mean that human beings act intentionally in order to make things happen. As Anscombe put it, for many human actions ‘a certain sense of the question “why?” has application’. An example: ‘Why are you going upstairs?’ – ‘To get my camera’. This is not causation. Going upstairs does not cause someone to get a camera. It is a different sort of explanation, one that is part of a public order of intelligible reasons. ‘Public’ because these reasons are not the sole property of the person who is acting. If I say, ‘But you left your camera in the cellar’, then ‘getting your camera’ is no longer a reason for you to go upstairs, unless you disagree with me about its location.

Human reasons have a characteristic structure, which Anscombe calls a ‘chain’. It can be discovered by successive applications of the ‘why?’ question. Anscombe uses the example of a man poisoning the water supply of a group of Nazis: ‘Why are you moving your arm up and down?’ – ‘I’m pumping’ – ‘Why are you pumping? – ‘To polish that lot off’ – ‘Why are you poisoning these people?’ – ‘If we can get rid of them, the other lot will get in’ – and so on. This chain structure is universal and familiar. Toddlers discover it; and, to the frustration of their parents, delight in repeated applications of the ‘why?’ question. It is no coincidence that Anscombe had more direct experience of parenthood than most philosophers who preceded her. But the familiarity of this structure should not be confused with unimportance. The order of public reasons is a basic structuring pattern of human lives, of human communication, and of human societies. It can be ignored when attempting physics, but attempting social explanation without it is exactly as wrong-headed as asking an electron why it did something. The abstract impersonal mode might feel clever when you use it, but it lacks the wit of an annoying toddler.

The public order of reasons is not limited to human beings. ‘Why did Fido (a dog) jump over the fence’ – ‘To get the ball’ – ‘Why did he get the ball?’ – ‘To bring it back’. Animals that share our lives share our order of reasons. So, too, do some strange entities that humans create. ‘Why did Amazon buy that startup? – ‘To secure its intellectual property rights’ – ‘Why did they secure the property rights?’ – ‘To stop Google from getting them’.

This last example might look, at first glance, a bit like an explanation that refers to abstract impersonal forces such as ‘liberalism’ or ‘capitalism’. A company is not a human, and it might be huge, even global. The explanatory modes are, however, fundamentally different. Companies, families, and political parties have an internal structure and an edge that distinguishes between them and the rest of society. The members of social groups and their actions can be meaningfully identified. None of this is true of abstract impersonal forces. Such forces have no internal structure. Two ‘conservatives’ can have no connection to one another and believe nothing significant in common. Nor are these abstract forces distinct from the rest of society. It is the very way that they can be pictured as infiltrating everything that makes them able to ‘explain’ anything. A named company and ‘capitalism’ are simply not the same kind of thing. Saying ‘The Jones family killed Pa Watson in revenge for Matt Watson killing their cousin’ gives an intelligible account of some gruesome human events, even though ‘the Jones family’ is not a single human being. Saying ‘Honour culture killed Pa Watson’ explains nothing. It merely obscures the Jones family, its members, and its reasons behind a platitude.

It is not only animals and social groups that take part in the public order of reasons. Often, someone with anorexia nervosa will talk about the disease in the third-person: ‘it wants me to hide the food, so that I don’t have to eat it, so that I will stay thin’. The use of the word ‘so’ indicates that the anorexia is being described as something that acts for reasons. Addicts speak similarly, ‘it tempts me when I’m down, so that I won’t resist as much’. In this, addicts and the mentally unwell are no different to everyone else. Anyone who has ever struggled with a temptation can talk in the same way, ‘Although I wouldn’t see my children much, my greed wants me to go for the new job, so that we can have more money and a nicer house’. Almost everyone has experienced some temptation that can be described in this kind of way, using the public order of reasons. In a vestigial echo of the truth, we sometimes say ‘he is wrestling with his demons’ when such battles are particularly dramatic.

‘Addiction’, ‘greed’, ‘anger’, ‘lethargy’, ‘pride’: these are words for vices. There are countless others. Vice terms have two features that make them especially useful for social explanation. They meaningfully participate in order of reasons and they are intrapersonal. Let me explain what I mean. Vices, as we have seen, can partake in public order of reasons: ‘My laziness made me ignore my emails, so that I wouldn’t have to reply to any of them’. They can also be distinguished from their environment. If Alex does not act in a greedy way, is not tempted to act in a greedy way, and feels no greedy emotions, then it makes no sense to attribute greed to Alex. Vices are either there or not, and this makes their participation in the order of reasons meaningful. ‘Capitalism makes us miserable’ is meaningless when ‘capitalism’ is pictured as everywhere and nowhere. ‘Greed is making Alex miserable’ is meaningful because it makes a connection between two distinct and real parts of the world.

The other feature that makes vices useful for social explanation is that they are intrapersonal. They spread from person to person. Addiction is an obvious case; but so, too, is the rage that diffuses through the internet. The shared nature of vices is significant. It means that any lingering traces of the psychologising mode must be left behind. It is not ‘Alex’s greed’. It is simply ‘greed’, spread to Alex by the lifestyles of his friends, the things he sees on television, and other sources. Greed is a distinct entity, but it is a social entity, not a psychological one. It is intrapersonal, spread across the globe like the mycelium of a malignant fungus that infiltrates almost every mind. It grows through millions of loops in which your greed inspires my greed which inspires again your greed and so on. To understand what is happening in society, it is necessary to understand this vast entity and all of the others like it.

A good word for a non-human global entity that infiltrates human minds and tempts them to evil for its own reasons is ‘demon’. Demonology is a necessary mode of social explanation.

There is a difference of emphasis between what I am saying and the essays that I referred to at the start of this newsletter. Paul Kingsnorth wrote about a single entity, ‘Progress’; and Scott Alexander about a single entity, ‘Moloch’. Kingsnorth also used the word ‘Moloch’ in his essay, so I am sure they are writing about the same world-spanning evil. The demons that I have written about here – rage, greed, and so on – although vast, are smaller; and it is easier to see their work in our own minds. In some ways, they are more important. I am not denying the reality of Moloch, that infernal Machine; but I suspect that the way it holds our attention is one of its many tricks. As we contemplate of the demon lord on his terrible throne, we neglect the countless lesser devils working away in our own minds. There is a similarity here with the way that the abstract impersonal mode crushes human agency with a vast otherness, and it makes me wonder exactly what sort of entity first created that mode. Were the abstract impersonal forces ever more than shining mirrors for Moloch?

Someone might ask ‘if demons, then why not angels?’ It seems possible. There are intrapersonal virtues as well as vices. All the same, care is needed. If some intrapersonal entity seems to be angelic, then pause. A demon would appear that way, wouldn’t it? In these things, it is best to be slow. As Son House said, ‘the devil beats God to you every time’.

---

Image:  The Doomstone. A 12th century relief at York Minster, showing apocalyptic scenes of 'Hell's Cauldron' and the torment of the damned, by ‘It's No Game’ (CC BY 2.0).