Who are the Enemies of the Open Society?

Answer 1

Among the enemies of open society, Popper points out the ethical positivism, a key element, though little noticed, Marxism and Nazism. Positivism ethical "claims no other standards than those laws that were actually spent (or positive) and therefore have a positive existence. Other patterns are considered as unrealistic imagination."

The obvious problem with this theory is that it prevents any kind of moral challenge to existing norms and moral limit any political power. If there are no moral standards than those positivized law, the law that exists is that which must exist. This theory leads to the principle that force is the law. As such it is radically opposed to the spirit of the open society: it is based, as we saw in the possibility of criticizing and gradually alter or preserve laws and customs. The ethical positivism, to enact the lack of moral values beyond those contained in existing legal norms actually leads to the demoralization of society and, thereby, the abolition of the concept of freedom and moral responsibility of the individual.

This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of the work of Popper. The idea of "openness" was captured by intellectual fashions and relativistic theories that Popper actually condemned as enemies of open society. The ethical positivism, Popper warned, generates a rampant relativism and, as the theory of popular sovereignty, paving the way for an unlimited state, a state that recognizes no moral limits.

The challenge of ethical relativism leaves mankind in doubt about the standards with which it can critique the ethics of a different society on account of the fact that the theory states that societies develop ethics in order to cope with both their physical, and social environments. The central tenet of the dogma is that there is no universal truth in ethics, and therefore critics speak in vain when criticizing the ethics of another society; rather, the critic ought to tolerate the ethics of another society because the ethics he obeys, and those that he critiques developed in two different environments. However, ethical relativism can lead mankind down a path to aberrant ethical positivism where the only standard of ethics are the existing ethics of the day thus denying man the capability of improving his society via reason.

In fact, the entire concept of tolerance, while it is certainly a keystone to an open society in which individuals of differing judgments of value (especially ones of a metaphysical character) can unite in the division of labor that is the engine of prosperity, should not hinder man from critiquing himself, his society, or that of others. There is absolutely no reason to uphold the status-quo as the absolute best of all outcomes.

This process should provide an alternative to the utopia promised, for exemple, by terrorists-to the open society, and it gives Muslims, like Christians and Jews, an opportunity to liberate themselves from the ever-present menace of hell, which is the single most effective threat the fundamentalists employ. And yet suggestions like this cause many people in the west to flinch. Many hold that questioning, or criticising, a holy figure is not polite behaviour, somehow not done. This cultural relativism betrays the basic values on which our open society is constructed. We should never self-censor.

The persistence of closed societies would be the cause of recurrent wars, said Bergson, but wars among themselves rather than wars waged by closed societies against open ones. For Popper the impulse to the closed society would be the cause of recurrent revolt against freedom and reason within societies that were trying to make the transition from one condition to the other.

Whatever the current object of adulation- the wisdom of the East, tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian America -the message is the same: the absolute superiority of Otherness. The Third Worldist looks to the orient, to the tribal, to the primitive not for what they really are but for their evocative distance from the reality of modern European society and values.

The western cultural relativists, who flinch from criticising Muhammad for fear of offending Muslims, rob Muslims of an opportunity to review their own moral values. The first victims of Muhammad are the minds of Muslims themselves. Moreover, this attitude betrays Muslim reformers who desperately require the support-and even the physical protection-of their natural allies in the west.

Muslims must reform their approach to Muhammad's teachings if we are all to coexist peacefully. Terrorists and fundamentalists should not be permitted to dictate to us the rules of the game. Core western values must be maintained, and proclaimed. Our struggle should focus on persuading the large middle group of Muslims that they need not give up their religious beliefs if they engage in a process of clear and honest thinking about the need for Islamic reform.

Professor Hayek also attributed the recent revival in tribalist thinking to the fact that more and more people were obliged to work in larger and larger organisations, both public and private.

Globalists are committed to mass people conditioning along the lines advocated by B.F. Skinner, and in a society supplied with an abundance of material goods, in which information is carefully controlled by the mass media, and in which independent thought is discouraged from an early age by an education system which rewards conformity, it is possible to achieve that. Masses of people, through the encouragement of mental laziness and reliance on authorities, can be lulled back into bicameral mode. Once there they can be induced to believe almost anything provided it comes from an accepted authority figure or source, such as political leaders, professors of this or that, newspapers with coloured pictures, teachers in the classroom, the lyrics of Pop Music, or the TV.

Globalists are socialists and therefore collectivists, in other words, tribalists. They view society not as many individuals, but as various tribes, pressure groups, or human resources whose interests are necessarily in conflict. They readily accept concepts such as inherited tribal guilt, guilt for past wrongs allegedly committed by people of the same tribe or race. It is therefore meaningful for them to apologise for the alleged crimes of their tribal ancestors, and to try to persuade others to do likewise. They are obsessed with issues of race, culture and group rights, while they ignore and set about abolishing individual rights.

The more disturbing aspect of global tribalism lies in the adoption of policies which are having the effect of causing the masses to reject their morality and to adopt values actually threatening to themselves and their society. They can be induced to believe the butchery of defenceless civilians by NATO is a humanitarian action, that war-making is peacekeeping, and that it is wrong to judge people who do such things because moral rules are merely an outmoded form of social control, a conspiracy by naughty people from the old individualist order. Faced with ideas seemingly too difficult to grapple with, they will reject them out of hand as conspiracy theories or just another person's opinion, and move on to easier things, like sport or gossip.

Globalism is merely the latest version of these reactionary movements, this time striving to create one big global tribe, or global village, an attempt to recreate paleolithic tribal society on a global scale.

The sociologist Edward Shils was certainly no enemy of what Sandall champions as "civilization." But in his book Tradition (dedicated, incidentally, to the spirits of Max Weber and Eliot), Shils observed that "a mistake of great historical significance has been made in modern times in the construction of a doctrine which treated traditions as the detritus of the forward movement of society." If romantic primitivism is an enemy of civilization, so too is the view that piety toward the past is always an impediment to progress.