A great analysis by Polanyi of the cultural structure that maintains (or at least maintained) Marxism:

This is the characteristic structure of what I shall call a dynamo-objective coupling. Alleged scientific assertions, which are accepted as such because they satisfy moral passions, will excite these passions further, and thus lend increased convincing power to the scientific affirmations in question—and so on, indefinitely. Moreover, such a dynamo-objective coupling is also potent in its own defence. Any criticism of its scientific part is rebutted by the moral passions behind it, while any moral objections to it are coldly brushed aside by invoking the inexorable verdict of its scientific findings. Each of the two components, the dynamic and the objective, takes it in turn to draw attention away from the other when it is under attack.

We can see that this structure underlies also a logical fallacy exposed by the academic critics of Marxism, and explains why the fallacy survives its exposure. The critics say that no political programme can be derived from the Marxian prediction of the inevitable destruction of Capitalism at the hands of the proletariat. For it is senseless to enlist fighters for a battle which is said to be already decided; while if the battle is not yet decided, you cannot predict its issue. But within a dynamo-objective coupling, the logical objection against using a historical prediction as an appeal to fight for the certain outcome of history no longer arises. For the prediction is accepted only because we believe that the Socialist cause is just; and this implies that Socialist action is right. The prediction implies therefore a call to action.

— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 230–31

Three incredibly important paragraphs from Polanyi:

Every acceptance of authority is qualified by some measure of reaction to it or even against it. Submission to a consensus is always accompanied to some extent by the imposition of one’s views on the consensus to which we submit. Every time we use a word in speaking and writing we both comply with usage and at the same time somewhat modify the existing usage; every time I select a programme on the radio I modify a little the balance of current cultural valuations; even when I make my purchase at current prices I slightly modify the whole price system. Indeed, whenever I submit to a current consensus, I inevitably modify its teaching; for I submit to what I myself think it teaches and by joining the consensus on these terms I affect its content. On the other hand, even the sharpest dissent still operates by partial submission to an existing consensus: for the revolutionary must speak in terms that people can understand. Moreover, every dissenter is a teacher. The figures of Antigone and of the Socrates of the Apology are monuments of the dissenter as law-giver. So are also the prophets of the Old Testament—and so is a Luther, or a Calvin. All modern revolutionaries since the Jacobins demonstrate likewise that dissent does not seek to abolish public authority, but to claim it for itself.

Admittedly, submission to authority is in general less deliberately assertive than is an act of dissent. But not always. St. Augustine’s struggle for belief in revelation was much more dynamic and original than is the rejection of revelation by a religiously brought up young man today. In any case, at every step of the process by which we are brought up and continue to participate in an established consensus, we exercise some measure of choice between different degrees of conformity and dissent, and either of these choices may mean a more passive or a more assertive reaction.

We should realize at the same time how inevitable, and how unceasing and comprehensive are such accreditive decisions. I cannot speak of a scientific fact, of a word, of a poem or a boxing champion; of last week’s murder or the Queen of England; of money or music or the fashion in hats, of what is just or unjust, trivial, amusing, boring or scandalous, without implying a reference to a consensus by which these matters are acknowledged—or denied to be—what I declare them to be. I must continually endorse the existing consensus or dissent from it to some degree, and in either case I express what I believe the consensus ought to be in respect to whatever I speak of. The present text, in which I have described in my own way the interaction of every utterance with the public consensus, is no exception to what I have said in the text about utterances of this kind. Throughout this book I am affirming my own beliefs, and more particularly so when I insist, as I do here, that such personal affirmations and choices are inescapable, and, when I argue, as I shall do, that this is all that can be required of me.

— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, 208–09

We should also remember that the rules of induction have lent their support throughout the ages to beliefs that are contrary to those of science. Astrology has been sustained for 3000 years by empirical evidence confirming the predictions of horoscopes. This represents the longest chain of historically known empirical generalizations. For many prehistoric centuries the theories embodied in magic and witchcraft appeared to be strikingly confirmed by events in the eyes of those who believed in magic and witchcraft. Lecky rightly points out that the destruction of belief in witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was achieved in the face of an overwhelming, and still rapidly growing, body of evidence for its reality. Those who denied that witches existed did not attempt to explain this evidence at all, but successfully urged that it be disregarded. Glanvill, who was one of the founders of the Royal Society, not unreasonably denounced this method as unscientific, on the ground of the professed empiricism of contemporary science. Some of the unexplained evidence for witchcraft was indeed buried for good, and only struggled painfully to light two centuries later when it was eventually recognized as the manifestation of hypnotic powers.

— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 168

“[Dynamic] relationships are not only more important than the entities related, but… ontologically prior to them — so that what we call ‘things’ arise out of the web of interconnectedness, not the web out of the things.”

— Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 1224

It is the normal practice of scientists to ignore evidence which appears incompatible with the accepted system of scientific knowledge, in the hope that it will eventually prove false or irrelevant. The wise neglect of such evidence prevents scientific laboratories fron being plunged forever into a turmoil of incoherent and futile efforts to verify false allegations. But there is, unfortunately, no rule by which to avoid the risk of occasionally disregarding thereby true evidence which conflicts (or seems to conflict) with the current teachings of science. During the eighteenth century the French Academy of Science stubbornly denied the evidence for the fall of meteorites, which seemed massively obvious to everybody else. Their opposition to the superstitious beliefs which popular tradition attached to such heavenly intervention blinded them to the facts in question.

— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 138

This column / book review by N. S. Lyons is worthwhile — as much for its ultimate affirmation that this may be “neither the best nor the worst of times, but simply the time we have been given” as anything else. There is one feature I find odd. Toward the end of the piece, Lyons cites Jordan Peterson’s recent proclamation that we are living on the cusp of (or indeed in the early moments of) the Counter-Enlightenment. He then goes on to cite Oswald Spengler’s suggestion in The Decline of the West that the collapse of the “age of theory” might give way to a “sweeping re-Christianization” (Lyons’s term, not Spengler’s). The effect is to suggest that “the Counter-Enlightenment” and the “sweeping re-Christianization” will be, if not perfectly co-constitutive, at least a 90% overlapping Venn diagram.

But, as Lyons (and Peterson) surely know, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments before, and likely will be again before Enlightened modernity has run its course. Probably a majority of the most celebrated philosophical thinkers active since 1800 have been, in some sense, Counter-Enlightenment figures: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Spengler (!), Scheler, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault are the first ten names that come to my mind, and obviously there are others — Wittgenstein, anyone? (Crack open the bibliography of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things for many more!) The interwar German philosophical coterie of which Heidegger was the most prominent figure even seems to have self-consciously identified as a new Counter-Enlightenment school. None of these figures, whatever their individual religious beliefs, can really be said to have contributed to any sort of sweeping re-Christianization, though in my estimation some are more readily appropriated for the tasks of Christian philosophy and theology (Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and — in a roundabout way — Nietzsche) than others (Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Foucault, and probably Derrida too, whatever Jamie Smith says).

And — to turn the screw further — what could be more quintessentially Enlightenment in its underlying attitude than, say, a project to refound all of metaphysics from first principles? Every Counter-Enlightenment inevitably has a great deal of Enlightenment still in it. That is because the Enlightenment is not a philosophical school — Wolffian deductive rationalism, Kantian transcendental idealism, Benthamite utilitarianism, or whatever it is that Steven Pinker and Peter Singer have in common — so much as a set of postures, habits, and — for lack of a better word — vibes. An extremely persistent and evolutionarily successful set of postures, habits, and vibes, no less, which has spent the better part of three hundred years displaying an extraordinary capacity to adapt and co-opt opposition. The Enlightenment mold, it seems, cannot be shattered from within: now that Kant’s “sapere aude!” has become conventional wisdom, anyone who self-consciously tries to break with it is still, by definition, daring (in some measure) to use their own understanding. Once one has grown up and been educated under the plausibility structures of post-Enlightenment modernity, it is extremely difficult to shake them off and abandon them entirely. (See also: theologically educated Protestants converting to Roman Catholicism.) Neither can the dialectic of Enlightenment be simply ignored; its embodiment in modern technologies and technological society shows it is almost no use deciding you are simply uninterested in the dialectic, since the dialectic remains just as rapaciously interested in you. The rise of a purportedly Counter-Enlightenment movement in Western public life neither guarantees a sweeping re-Christianization of society nor promises a breaking out of the Enlightenment mold.

An oddity of philosophical / theological history: the great minds, whom we now remember, often developed their ideas in contradistinction from, not principally a preceding great mind who founded a school, but that school’s later and lesser lights who took their founder’s insight too far — whom we do not now remember.

[Despite] our always contributing to the reality we experience, there is something apart from ourselves to which we can be true — that reality, in other words, is not purely made up by the brain. There is a relationship there — something to be true to. Assuming there is something there to know implies that some understandings will inevitably be better than others. And since each hemisphere provides a different understanding of it, it is perfectly coherent — and indeed necessary — to ask which is superior. (The validity of the question is not affected by the observation that we can, and may be best to, use both.) If a pilot is flying blind and has two navigation systems to rely on, each of which, though they differ, provides significant information, the criterion for having to prefer one over the other is clear: following which one is less likely to lead to a crash. Or again, as a piece of music cannot be experienced without a player, who inflects what it is that we hear, there is nonetheless such a thing as a better or worse performance, one that is more or less faithful to the potential enshrined in the piece — a potential that is, essentially, the piece of music, and becomes realised in every true performance, The arbiter, then, in either case, is the experience of the whole embodied person as he or she responds to a more, or less, accurate — a richer, or poorer — account of the world.

— Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 1:379–80.

Why, then, the unscientific scorn for practical knowledge? There are at least three reasons for it, as far as I can tell. The first is the “professional” reason mentioned earlier: the more the cultivator knows, the less the importance of the specialist and his institutions. The second is the simple reflex of high modernism: namely, a contempt for history and past knowledge. As the scientist is always associated with the modern and the indigenous cultivator with the past that modernism will banish, the scientist feels that he or she has little to learn from that quarter. The third reason is that practical knowledge is represented and codified in a form uncongenial to scientific agriculture. From a narrow scientific view, nothing is known until and unless it is proven in a tightly controlled experiment. Knowledge that arrives in any form other than through the techniques and instruments of formal scientific procedure does not deserve to be taken seriously. The imperial pretense of scientific modernism admits knowledge only if it arrives through the aperture that the experimental method has constructed for its admission. Traditional practices, codified as they are in practice and in folk sayings, are seen presumptively as not meriting attention, let alone verification. And yet, as we have seen, cultivators have devised and perfected a host of techniques that do work, producing desirable results in crop production, pest control, soil preservation, and so forth. By constantly observing the results of their field experiments and retaining those methods that succeed, the farmers have discovered and refined practices that work, without knowing the precise chemical or physical reasons why they work. In agriculture, as in many other fields, “practice has long preceded theory.” And indeed some of these practically successful techniques, which involve a large number of simultaneously interacting variables, may never be fully understood by the techniques of science.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 305–06

[Lenin] was famous for claiming that “Communism is Soviet Power plus the Electrification of the whole countryside.” Electricity had, for him and for most other high modernists, a nearly mythical appeal. That appeal had to do, I think, with the unique qualities of electricity as a form of power. Unlike the mechanisms of steam power, direct waterpower, and the internal combustion engine, electricity was silent, precise, and well-nigh invisible. For Lenin and many others, electricity was magical. Its great promise for the modernization of rural life was that, once transmission lines were laid down, power could be delivered over long distances and was instantly available wherever it was needed and in the quantity required… Man’s work and even the work of the steam-driven plow or threshing machine were imperfect; the operations of an electric machine, in contrast, seemed certain, precise, and continuous. Electricity was also, it should be added, centralizing. It produced a visible network of transmission lines emanating from a central power station from which the flow of power was generated, distributed, and controlled. The nature of electricity suited Lenin’s centralizing vision perfectly.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 166