We’ve been here before . . .

The modern world is intent on imposing a new uniformity of thought.  Anything that doesn’t fit in with its agenda—in other words, everything that has been traditionally taken for granted—is destined for the melting pot.

This is the work that moral philosophers or ethicists are nowadays engaged in—testing all your preconceived ideas to—as they see it—destruction.

The idea of an inherited moral compass within the individual, which we have been discussing, while inconvenient, is dealt with less by denial than by disparagement.  It is old-fashioned, not encyclopaedic, it cannot be relied upon to deliver an accurate judgement in the many situations that confront us nowadays.

In such a situation a new and imposed system of moral judgement is needed—which was, of course, the plan from the outset.  A system which will operate rather like the multiplication tables at school.  Three times three is nine—one doesn’t even have to think about it.  And so it will be with matters of right and wrong, good and evil.  Just reach out your hand and pick up a preformed answer to your problem.

And if on occasions something as old-fashioned as conscience threatens to get in the way, then just bin it.  It’s old hat, it’s stale.  The so-called ‘best minds’ of your generation, haven’t they after all decided otherwise?

Something analogous happened in the Third Reich—and in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China etc. too.

The leadership of Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen—the extermination squads which travelled in the wake of the military forces and were responsible for the mass killings of Jews and others in the eastern territories—were irredeemably academic.  Lawyers, philosophers, writers, university lecturers etc. comprised the main content of the leadership.  Indeed, it was hard to find anyone of officer rank who didn’t possess at least a university degree.  And all of them believed in what they were doing, or at least claimed that they did.  They persuaded themselves, or were persuaded, by means of philosophical argument, of the rightness of their cause.

Of course, it wasn’t necessarily all that cut-and-dried.  One has to believe that most of them were driven by ambition and the desire to get on within the Nazi hierarchy; the whole ideological argument being a convenient means of self-deception; a useful figleaf.

Yet without it what happened was unlikely otherwise to have happened.