Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists
By Susan Neiman
The Bodley Head £20 480 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Philosophers don’t do cultural criticism. They write about arguments and categories, about truth and validity but not about how ideas are preserved or distorted or how they travel or vanish. This is a pity. Many of them know quite a lot about ideas that matter, and are well placed to explore how they spread and fade, and how they gain or lose cultural influence.

In Moral Clarity, Susan Neiman criticises the philosophical ideas that dominate contemporary culture and politics on a grand scale. She is well equipped to do this. She grew up in the US, has worked in Tel Aviv and now in Berlin. She is steeped in the biblical and classical texts that have shaped western morality, and in the philosophy of the European Enlightenment. She has written a penetrating book about Immanuel Kant’s challenging take on reason and morality, and a courageous work about evil, a topic most philosophers shun. And she leaps between different literatures with ease.

As she tells it, progressives, including those left-of-centre on the political spectrum in the US and elsewhere, have given up the ideals they had inherited from the European Enlightenment, in favour of (supposed) realism about markets, preferences and interests. Meanwhile conservatives headed back to basics, presenting themselves as champions of specific family, religious and patriotic values.

Although progressives may think that the right is pushing the wrong values, they now offer no sustaining or convincing alternative. Some embrace a tepid relativism, in which the worst that can be said about dreadful action – unless it violates someone’s rights – is that it is ”inappropriate”. Small wonder, then, that progressives find themselves without ideals that can convince or inspire those drawn to fundamentalist beliefs or terrorist tactics: they have nothing much to say about good or evil, about dignity or nobility. And they have no heroes.

This is a story of the left’s unease with moral ideals, and the right’s revived insistence on them. The narrative fits the US better than elsewhere, particularly in the Bush years – but even there the fit is not perfect. Those who think themselves progressive, in the US as elsewhere, still advocate ideals. But they often restrict themselves to abstract ideals for public life: human rights, equality, accountability, transparency and, above all, choice.

Neiman is right that progressives often end up being “agnostic about the good”, as exemplified by John Rawls, the best-known US political philosopher of the 20th century. “Few things”, Neiman remarks with acidity, “command more consensus than the idea that the path to global peace lies in abandoning strongly held beliefs ... in favour of increasing consumption.” As Neiman sees it, liberals and other progressives won’t regain their edge or others’ admiration by being more realistic than others but by taking their old ideals seriously.

Much of this picture fits Britain too. But in contrast to the US, that old idealism has faded across more of the political spectrum: all UK political parties hail greater choice as an uncontentious good and an obvious political aim but are embarrassed to say much about what is worth choosing. Religion is spoken of with formal respect but a cloud of multiculturalist rhetoric makes secularism the default position in public life. As Neiman notes, “most secularists’ comments on the revival of religious traditions treat it with a contempt that they would be ashamed to show towards other cultures”.

Progressive writers and politicians used to be clearer about their ideals. The philosophers of the European Enlightenment articulated views that were debated, adopted, refined and lived by generations of liberals and democrats; they became compelling not only to politicians and pundits but to millions of ordinary people.

A large part of Neiman’s book is about the discrediting of this Enlightenment legacy and its ideals among people who still take themselves for progressive, and might seem its natural heirs. “Western secular culture”, she writes, “has no clear place for moral language, and its use makes many profoundly uncomfortable.” This rings true of a world where those on the “front line” of the welfare state – teachers, social workers, nurses – are instructed above all not to be judgmental or discriminating, and to respect the choices of their “clients”.

Still, there is something to be said for eliminating censorious or punitive attitudes and ways of speaking to and about others. Perhaps, contrary to Neiman’s analysis, we are seeing the true culmination of Enlightenment ideals. That’s certainly what the legions of supporters of human rights assume.

But there are warning signs. Neiman sees a warning in the way philosophers turned Enlightenment thinking against itself in the last century. What began in the European Enlightenment as criticism of authority in the name of reason was used by its latter-day heirs to criticise reason as one more groundless authority. Recurrent nihilism about reason across the last century has now penetrated political and popular thought and life: from Nietzsche to Heidegger, on to Derrida and Rorty, the postmodernist retreat from Enlightenment claims has spread far. So it should not surprise us that by the end of the 20th century scepticism about reason, and agnosticism about morality, pervaded political life and popular culture.

Neiman skewers this well-worn genealogy with splendid directness. She exposes the embarrassing laziness and tendentiousness of many claims made by 20th-century critics of the European Enlightenment and its accounts of reason, from Adorno to Isaiah Berlin. She contrasts their assertions about the hubris of Enlightenment views on reason with the claims actually made, and shows that the philosophers of the European Enlightenment took seriously the limits of human reason long before their 20th-century critics lectured them for failing to do so.

She also insists with Kant, and against Hume, that the fundamental aim of human reasoning is not to know the world but to change it. She sees reasoning basically in Kantian terms as a matter of striving to meet standards that make it possible to communicate with others, and so to question claims to truth and plans for action. Reasoning, on Kant’s account, is intrinsically normative: it seeks to articulate standards for shaping knowing and doing. It assumes that there is a gap between what is and what ought to be, and proposes standards for reducing that gap. It denies that realism about the way things are can undermine idealism about the way they should be.

What then, Neiman asks, does moral clarity require of grown-ups in a world of moral evasion and unrealised ideals? She thinks they should start by being unashamed about ideals, and realistic about the gap between ideals and reality. Grown-up idealists don’t mainly go for grand gestures, lead heroic lives or die for their ideals. They do refuse to put away their ideals as childish. Like Job, those who live with and for ideals know that the world is recalcitrant, and that they may fail and suffer for their ideals. Values and norms are demands on the world, not facts about it – and grown-up progressives do not pretend that the gap between what is and what ought to be is illusory.

Baroness Onora O’Neill is president of the British Academy and author of ‘A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002’ (Cambridge University Press)