這位「哲學」博士偏見之深，知識之淺，以及隨兩者而來的思考之短，相當令我吃驚。他居然自認為有能力批判「現代社會」，大概因為肯恩博士本人正是他所了解「現代社會」的產物吧。

The Poison Pills of Liberal Institutions

Science, capitalism, democracy, and the liberal arts may not be sustainable

Benjamin Cain, 11/28/25

0.  前言 (編者補增；以下各節「子標題」為原文所有，僅序號為編者補增。)

The gods guaranteed the ancients that their way of life would endure or at least earn them supernatural rewards. Godless societies must labour without even the illusion of such mythic guarantees.

There are four main institutions of world-historic modernity: science, capitalism, democracy, and the liberal arts (freedom of thought in public places). Ironically, each of them threatens to undermine the secular humanist convictions that inspired the break from medieval social norms in Western Europe.

Modernists overcame the slump of the Middle Ages and retrieved an optimistic, Greco-Roman view of the civilized adventure. Contrary to medieval Christendom’s fatalism regarding our ability to solve our problems without praying to God for miracles or salvation in the afterlife, early modern thinkers and artists sought earthly progress based on human reason, liberty, and (eventually) empathy.

Unleash scientific testing, competitive markets, the majority opinion of the lower classes, and the neoshamanic insights of elite artistic commentators, and you’d have a society that improves itself instead of stagnating and settling for the animalistic social structure of the dominance hierarchy (the monarchical, feudalistic, patriarchal, theocratic, imperialist, slave-driving, mass-benighted society so beloved by conservatives, or closeted authoritarians).

Obviously, that modern ethos works since that part of Europe and its colonies advanced, according to numerous objective measures. Yet the sustainability of those advances is doubtful. At least, we may be poised for another Renaissance, a rethinking of the modern project, one that addresses the downside of modern institutions.

1.  Science versus humanism

Science works by objectifying its subject matter. Yet the more we objectify, the more we’re liable to lose our humanity, which is to say the esteem for our subjective side. Our bodies are physical objects, but our minds, personalities, rights, and cultures are nebulous abstractions.

If we exist solely as material things in a natural environment that’s full of them, why assume we alone have the right to terraform nature? Why assume that civilization is an improvement on the cosmic wilderness? Why assume there’s any such thing as right or wrong, or progress? We may have the ability to change the wilderness, but that wouldn’t be the same as a right or an improvement unless values were built into nature’s physical foundations, which would be contrary to strict scientific explanations.

Scientists uncovered nature’s godlessness, impersonality, amorality, and monstrous absurdity, which made for the Enlightenment. That secular enlightenment revolutionized Western philosophy, overthrew Church dogma, and slew God in the Nietzschean sense of reducing Christianity to a mere private concern in the Global North (or in all modernized societies that grappled with scientific discoveries and the humanist ethos).

But how we should apply that enlightened perspective is far from clear. What liberal societies do, in practice, is leave the decision-making to the free markets and elections. We’re supposed to let the majority decide instead of imposing top-down, elite plans since we assume that centralized power is corrupting in the long run. As we’ll soon see, though, bottom-up decision-making in free societies can be plenty corrupting too.

In any case, scientific objectification is antithetical to the lingering anthropocentrism in the secular humanist self-image that provides the rationale for the liberal, progressive lifestyle and its capitalist markets and political elections.

2.  Parasitic capitalism

Capitalism was a classic liberal invention that was supposed to free the lower classes from bondage or peasant penury. Along with the men who had ruled Europe for centuries, women, minorities, and outsiders would be free to compete, innovate, earn a profit, and thus live as independent masters of their private domain. In medieval Europe, the lower levels of the Great Chain of Being owed fealty to the higher levels. Women served men, peasants served their lords, foreigners served Christians, heretics served priests, the king served the pope, humans served angels and demons, and the Church served God.

Modernity undercut all of that theological malarky and authoritarian prejudice with cold, hard philosophy and science. Reason demolished the faith-based, dogmatic mythos of so-called Christianity, a religion that had sold out its founding apocalypticism for centuries to secure a profane, terrestrial hegemony.

And indeed, capitalists innovated and privatized great fortunes. Economies grew, and trust formed between borrowers and lenders. Corporations launched, solved practical problems, satisfied desires left and right, and elevated living standards in these same modernized societies.

Yet laissez-faire capitalism proved parasitic, as it conflicted with the other modern institutions. Far from liberating everyone, capitalism turned into a neofeudal system that concentrated wealth in a minority of monopolies that were able to consolidate their power and normalize their fraud by sabotaging democratic initiatives for social reform.

The greedy pursuit of wealth can easily overcome the scientific devotion to objectivity and progress, the democratic faith in the majority opinion, and the artist’s neoshamanic commitment to self-exploration and personal enlightenment. A consumerist monoculture developed to promote the capitalist’s pursuit of wealth and domination, and this monoculture is arguably corrosive and unsustainable.

For one thing, consumerism threatens the biosphere, but it also preserves the clash between the new nobility (the billionaires and coastal elites) and the peasants (the indebted service providers whose jobs are precarious since they’re potentially automated by machines or pseudo-AI).

3.  Liberal democracy succumbs to populist demagoguery

Functional democracy requires the humanist education of the whole society so that the majority’s judgment would deserve respect. You could count on many heads as being superior to one only if the majority learned how to avoid groupthink, demagoguery, and other cognitive fallacies and biases to which we’re prone.

As capitalism widened economic inequality in many modern societies (excepting the social democratic ones of northern Europe), education systems, too, became highly unequal since different systems arose to cater to a different neofeudal caste. The wealthy have their private, expensive schools, while the relatively poor majority was saddled with inferior schools run by bungling bureaucrats. As the ancient Greeks understood, democracies would then be vulnerable to demagogues or populists who would seek tyrannical power on behalf of a duped majority that no longer deserved to be heard, let alone obeyed.

The most egregious example of this downfall is Trumpism in the United States, but Freedom House has tracked a global decline of democracy throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Most voters are cynical about politicians, not just because of deficits in the education systems, but because common sense alerts us to governmental dysfunctions caused largely by parasitic capitalism. We feel we must distrust our politicians to counter their implicit loathing of us, their constituents. If politicians don’t loathe voters, why do the former constantly lie to the latter? Why do politicians condescend to everyone with flagrantly fallacious propaganda in political campaigns? Why do they typically embroil themselves in corrupt schemes and scandals?

But the electorate’s distrust is corrosive, and it may be inevitable in free societies.

Aron, Raymond：阿宏(法語發音)，阿倫(英語發音)

Getting Real About Realism

A brief discussion regarding theories of international relations.

Daniel J. Mahoney, 10/12/23

Among both the intellectual and political conservative worlds there is widespread frustration with “forever wars,” or ideological crusades to promote “democracy,” and the danger of “an escalation to the extremes” (as Clausewitz famously put it) implicit in our undeclared war with Russia. There is opposition to the foreign policy of the Biden Administration and its aggressive spread of a woke imperium—where LGBTQIA+ ideology and support for abortion-on-demand are prerequisites for belonging to the newly redefined democratic world. One also finds strong opposition to the “conservative” promoters of aggressive American power projection. The old conservative establishment is under attack.

Neoconservatism, for example, once stood for a proud and principled defense of the American republic, tied to realism about the hard choices that had to be made in a dangerous and contentious world. No friends of utopian illusions, the original neoconservatives preferred authoritarian regimes in South Korea and South Vietnam to their implacable totalitarian opponents to the north, and the imperfect regime of an ally such as the Shah of Iran to the fanaticism and unalloyed anti-Americanism proffered by the Shah’s most influential critics. The first neoconservatives were thus sharply critical of Jimmy Carter-style human rights promotion as a tenet of American foreign policy.

But at the end of the Cold War, Irving Kristol, the neoconservative par excellence, even called for the abolition of NATO, whose goal of preserving Western liberty during a civilizational emergency had been admirably achieved. President Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who intrepidly stood up to her country’s communist and Third-World enemies, called in Making War to Keep Peace for the United States to become a “normal country” by ceasing the effort to be a global hegemon or hyper-power. But a new generation of soi-disant “neoconservatives” continued to look abroad for dragons to slay. For them, any act of prudent restraint was immediately stigmatized as “appeasement.” They invoked “Munich 1938” as ritualistically as the neo-pacifist Left saw “another Vietnam” in any vigorous defense of America’s vital interests. Even the prostrate Russia of the nineties, wracked by economic collapse, lawlessness, and unprecedented levels of corruption, was seen as a permanent danger. “Eternal Russia,” and not communist totalitarianism, for them was the real foe in the Cold War.

After 9/11, the very real threat of Islamist extremism was said to justify a Third or Fourth World War, with “Islamofascism” taking the place of Nazism and Communism as the new primary ideological foe. By a sleight of hand, “democracy promotion” was militarized at the service of bringing human rights and “democratic peace” first to the Arab Islamic Middle East, and then the rest of the world. There was more than a whiff of utopianism (and messianism) in George W. Bush’s 2005 Second Inaugural Address, with its declaration and conviction that love of liberty was the dominant impulse of the human soul in every time and place. To suggest, as some did, that Monrovia and Baghdad were hardly good candidates for democratic transformation made one an unprincipled foreign policy “realist” (at best), or a racist (at worst). This giddy democratic euphoria did its best to pass for the face of conservatism in the post-communist world.

Meanwhile, democratic nation-building proceeded in an Afghanistan that barely resembled a modern nation, and NATO began moving inexorably to the east, a shift already begun under the Clinton Administration. After the ill-advised Russian intervention in South Ossetia in August 2008, the Bush Administration declared its intention to expand NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia. The thought that Russia had national interests of its own, and that it was the West that was moving east and not the other way around, was considered almost treasonous in elite foreign policy circles. In these circumstances, conservatives wary of “democratic triumphalism” began reconsidering the tradition of statecraft called foreign policy realism.

Meanwhile, neoconservatism radicalized even further, with many of its proponents promoting “progressive democracy” at home and abroad. The active encouragement and not-so-covert support for the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014 against a corrupt but elected government tilted Ukrainian politics heavily against its Russophone population and in the direction of Russophobic Galician nationalists from Ukraine’s east, and set the stage for the disasters that followed. A delicate balance was undone. This reckless interventionism was promoted and defended by the likes of Bill Kristol, Anne Applebaum, Robert Kagan, John McCain, and of course Victoria Nuland, the left-neoconservative who did so much to shape American policy toward Russia and Ukraine then and now.

While many prudent conservatives were ready to reconsider the virtues of foreign policy realism, some prominent conservative voices and venues saw, and continue to see, any departure from unrelieved hostility to post-communist Russia and support for limitless expansion of NATO as a dangerous departure from “Reaganism.” They simply assume that Reagan, a principled anti-totalitarian, would see in an authoritarian but non-ideological Russia a “revolutionary” state (in Henry Kissinger’s words from A World Restored) that aimed to upend the entire international system. The facts, however, do not justify that judgment.

After February 2022, the Russians could have destroyed Kiev in two weeks as the Germans did to Warsaw in September 1939. They did not do so because their aim was never to conquer Ukraine tout court. Only by falsely identifying Putin with Alexander Dugin’s “Eurasianist” imperialism rooted in Heideggerian fascism, by defining him as a mixture of Hitler and Stalin, and by ignoring important features of the post-communist Russian state (especially its aversion to Leninism and communist ideology), could Russia, weak demographically and far from powerful militarily, be turned into the permanent enemy of the human race.

It is true that Putin’s Russia is less free than it used to be, though it is much freer than the old Soviet Union. And there is a growing atmosphere of brutality that does not bode well for the future of the country. Putin has stayed in power for too long, thus crowding out the kind of political life that exists even in a moderately authoritarian regime. But, despite all this, Russia is hardly a revolutionary state. For instance, she is well disposed to Israel. She has no interest in restoring an empire in the east of Europe to replace the old Warsaw Pact, but she does have a palpable interest in preventing a Ukraine with NATO troops and nuclear weapons on her borders. One is hardly an “apologist” for recognizing this elementary point.

I therefore largely welcome (“two cheers”) the realist turn in conservative thought about statecraft and foreign affairs. Realism has always been a corrective, often a necessary one, to legalistic, moralistic, and utopian illusions. But it should be remembered that realism as a theory leaves much to be desired. Realists simplify the motives of statesmen, seeing rationality at work only in the calculation of forces and the judicious balancing of power, militarily and otherwise. This is to foreshorten our understanding of politics and statesmanship. Raymond Aron noted in his 1961 classic Peace and War (a book that Leo Strauss judged the greatest 20th century work on the subject) that realists tended to treat power or power politics as both an end and a means of foreign policy, thus ignoring “glory” and “ideas” as legitimate “goals of foreign policy.” Realism has always been more prescriptive than descriptive, despite its scientific pretensions.

There are other difficulties. In his 1951 classic In Defense of the National Interest, Hans J. Morgenthau, the most influential of the classical realists, took aim at the idea that a radical change of regime could do much to change the “national interest” of countries such as France, Germany, and Russia. To Aron, this dogmatic insistence made no sense. To recognize that all political communities calculate forces and work to maintain a reasonable balance of power congruent to a nation’s interests does not mean “that national interest might, can, or should be defined apart from the internal regime, the aspirations characteristic of the different classes, the political ideal of the state: the collectivity does not always change objectives when it changes its constitution, historical idea, or ruling elite. But how can the political units maintain, through revolutions, the same ambitions, and the same methods?”

Later in the same work, Aron wisely writes that “true realism…consists in recognizing the action of ideologies upon diplomatic-strategic-conduct. In our epoch, instead of repeating that all states, no matter what their institutions, have ‘the same kind of foreign policy,’ we should insist upon the truth that is more complementary than contradictory: no one understands the diplomatic strategy of a state if it does not understand its regime, if he has not studied the philosophy of those who govern it. To lay down as a rule that the heads of the Bolshevik party conceive the national interests of their state as did all other rulers of Russia is to doom oneself to misunderstanding the practices and ambitions of the Soviet Union.” Likewise, to see Russia today as a neo-Bolshevik state (in a country where Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is required reading in public schools) or that “eternal Russia” is inevitably despotic, expansionist, and a sworn enemy of the civilized world, is to substitute ideology for the concrete study of diplomatic-strategic conduct. By separate but converging paths, both the old realism and the new neoconservatism obscure reality in the name of holding on to old antipathies and misplaced theoretical categories. Both obscure far more than they reveal.

What of the newer school of academic “structural realists”? Alas, their account of statecraft and state behavior is even more abstract and reified than the “realism” of Morgenthau’s type. They are not interested in the motives—generous, self-seeking, grasping, or measured—that constitute a (more or less) unchanging human nature,as even the old realists were. The nature of regimes—their ends and purposes, their animating principles—are of no interest to them. Domestic structure, as Kissinger called it, is for them arbitrarily separated from the conduct of foreign policy. In their new book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy, John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato identify rationality with a single-minded attentiveness to the “structural” relations that define international relations. But is any real statesman or diplomat concerned with “structural forces” alone? Because of this strained foreign policy rationalism devoid of all ethical criteria, Mearsheimer and Rosato find rationality at work in Japan’s imperialist quest for economic autarky in the late 1930s, in Hitler Germany’s aggressive efforts to rebuff Soviet Russia and the Western democracies to its east and west, and even in the French political class’s lame response to the German threat post-Munich! Even Neville Chamberlain, for a time, is neatly placed in the camp of the structural realists.