Making Excuses for Murderous Modernity
The View from Oregon — 346: Friday 20 June 2025
I used to be quite sympathetic to Karl Popper, both his works on philosophy of science and his political philosophy, but I’m much less sympathetic, and much more skeptical, at present. There were several causes for this change of heart. A major cause was reading more deeply in philosophy of history, which made me realize that The Poverty of Historicism mostly attacks straw men. And Walter Kaufmann’s paper critiquing Popper’s critique of Hegel from The Open Society and Its Enemies was another major blow to my opinion of Popper. I’m on the fence about Popper’s use of falsifiability as a demarcation criterion to distinguish science from non-science. Certainly it’s nice to have a rule that’s as clear as that, but it fails in some cases, and that calls the value of the rule into question. Still, a rule of thumb is handy. But did Popper view this as a rule of thumb or a fundamental truth about science?
One of the problems with The Open Society and Its Enemies is that Popper’s scholarship was cut a lot of slack because people saw him as doing the Lord’s work. (We find the same sort of thing with Isaiah Berlin, who netted the same kind of praise.) This has, in fact, become one of the major challenges to intellectual honesty in our time, and, to be honest, it’s not clear that our contemporary conceptual framework is going to survive the reckoning once the bill comes due. Popper wasn’t the first to do this, but it has spiraled out of control since Popper’s time, to the point that scholarship has become subordinated to moral concerns. In a perfect world, perhaps, moral concerns and intellectual integrity would coincide, but in our world they don’t, so that if you force a moral framework onto scholarship (i.e., any moral framework other than intellectual integrity), you compromise the scholarship. Arguably, the entire history of our civilization is compromised in this way. Perhaps less so in the ancient world, but certainly from the Middle Ages to the present, bad scholarship and slipshod reasoning have been praised and rewarded if they were believed to contribute to the good of society. No one seems to have asked, at least not very often, about the moral cost of checking one’s intellectual integrity at the door.
Whatever one thinks of Popper’s critiques of Plato, Hegel, and Marx, The Open Society and Its Enemies raises the question of what constitutes an open society, and, if an open society is desirable, why it is desirable. Is this a specifically modern ideal? Is it an Enlightenment ideal? For those who saw Popper as doing the Lord’s work, the ideal of an open society seemed like an unquestionable good — perhaps even a good that it is impious to question. And is it a matter of an open society versus a closed society, or is it more like a continuum that admits of degrees of openness or degrees of closure? And if there are degress of openness and closure, ought we to always and necessarily prefer the maximum degree of openness? It seems pretty obvious to me that social openness is a matter of degree, so that insisting on a dichtomy between open and closed societies is a gross over-simplification. But granted that openness or closure is a relative measure, how much openness is desirable? And if we acknowledge that some mixture of openness and closure is desirable, what do we open, or attempt to open, and what do we allow to remain closed?
Should we presumptively prefer a fully open society, or, even if it were possible to have an absolutely open society, are there things that might better be left in obscurity? Ought a society to air all its dirty linen in public? Is an open society a society without privacy? Since privacy is valued, at least by some of us, we would presumably want to have some balance between openness and privacy, reserving the possibility of a private life as against those who would assert that the private life is dead and that the personal is the political.
Is an open society a transparent society? Today “transparency” is regarded as an unquestioned good, but when people get a good dose of transparency it usually cures them of any desire for transparency for a time. A little transparency goes a long way. Lovecraft said “the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents” is a good thing, and, should we ever piece together all our dissociated knowledge, we would probably go mad. In fairness to Popper, he does attempt an exposition of the open society at the beginning of his book:
“It sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization — a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humaneness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind. It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or ‘closed society’ with its submission to magical forces, to the ‘open society’ which sets free the critical powers of man. It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism. And it suggests that what we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself.”
Here Popper has thrown out a lot of glittering generalities — humaneness, reasonableness, equality, and freedom — but it’s not at all clear to me how these ideals are related to the virtues of an open society. Perhaps we’re to take this relationship as self-evident, but I think that a lot of highly creative interpretation would have to be mobilized to show how civilization since the Enlightenment is more humane or more rational than pre-modern civilization.
Indeed, one of the great complaints about the development of civilization has been its convergence, especially since the scientific revolution, on inhuman ideals and practices that leave individual human beings feeling unhappy, isolated, and alienated — exactly the social red flags of totalitarianism according to Hannah Arendt. Popper, as we see in the above, also positions himself as an critic of totalitarianism.
The writings of Popper, Berlin, and Arendt are filled with Manichaean dualisms of open and closed, freedom and its betrayal, and democracy and totalitarianism. We could say that Popper was simply taking Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction seriously, and it could be argued, I think rightly, that the clarity and single-mindedness with which Popper and his fellow travelers promoted their Manichaean dualisms as the correct way to view society was in no small way responsible for the triumph of Enlightenment ideology. Enlightenment partisans continue to propagate their friend/enemy distinction much more successfully than any reactionaries, and there is no major institution of Western society at present that has not modeled itself on this distinction, to all appearances, if not also in reality.
But if we reject the dualisms and see openness and closure as a matter of degree, then the insistence upon these dualisms comes to seem a little (and sometimes more than a little) shrill. The shrillness, I think, is an attempt to shout down anyone who points out the obvious: that the modern world is murderous. The Enlightenment friend/enemy distinction has set up an unstable ideal as its norm, and the result has been mass death. The partisans of this one-sided ideal try to explain away the mass death as a relic of the past, or of the earlier society that Popper called “tribal,” but what reason do we have to believe this is other than wishful thinking? The past is full of violence and brutality, but no mass death as we have come to know it. And the more ruthless we become in attempting to root out the “evils” of past tribalisms, the more mass death results. The enlightened feel no compunction in massacring the unenlightened, so as to make the world safe for democracy. This was already becoming obvious in the nineteenth century when Dostoyevsky wrote, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”:
“All the combatants at the same time firmly believed that science, wisdom and the instinct of self-preservation would force men at last to unite into a harmonious and rational society; and so, meanwhile, to hasten matters, ‘the wise’ endeavoured to exterminate as rapidly as possible all who were ‘not wise’ and did not understand their idea, that the latter might not hinder its triumph.”
An exacting historical inquiry would have to be undertaken in order to determine what aspects of the present authentically can be traced to the past, and what aspects of the present are novel forces of history that appeared with modernity. Given the ongoing Löwith-Blumenberg debate over modernity, I wouldn’t expect such an inquiry to result in an unambiguous judgment on this question. But any judgment other than an unambiguous vindication of modernity would be a condemnation of modernity for the unprecedented scope and scale of violence that has marred the last few centuries.
