Ideological wrecking ball

Melanie Phillips from her brilliant book; The World Turned Upside Down:

[pp.280-281]

“Ideology represents the triumph of power over truth. Far from telling truth to power, a dismaying number of people  in the contemporary West – on issues from climate change to anti-Zionism, from anti-Imperialism to scientific materialism – have allowed truth to become subordinate to the governing power of an idea. Isiah Berlin lamented that it was with German Romanticism that truth died. The Eighteenth Century, he said, “saw the destruction of the notion of truth and validity in ethics and politics, not merely objective or absolute truth but subjective and relative truth also – truth and validity as such – with vast and indeed incalculable results.”

It was the French Revolution that introduced secular ideology to the Western world. The destruction of freedom and truth that this entails has left a bloody trail across the world. It is a lesson which, despite all the vast and incalculable horrors that ideology has brought in its wake, we still have not managed to learn.

In the West, the forces of ideology are well on the way to unstitching the fabric of society. With Britain in the lead, and to varying degrees in other Western Countries, the precepts that we most prize and take for granted are being turned inside out. To the bewilderment and dismay of many, freedom is giving way to coercion, order to anarchy, progress to obscurantism, modernity to medievalism, tolerance to bigotry, rationality to dogma, truth to lies.

This is not widely understood because the hijacking of reason has created fundamental confusion. People assume that to be secular is to be enlightened and to be religious is to be irrational. Since the West keeps religion in a box - if not repudiating religion altogether – it tells itself that it is a culture quintessentially founded on reason. What if fails to grasp is that as a result of the thinking outlined in previous pages, some of what currently marches under the banner of enlightenment is not reason at all but ideology, which has replaced truth by power.”