04 Mar Am I Evil?
For all the criticism it’s received since Elon Musk took the helm, Twitter/X continues to be a repository of ideas, a massive collection of the thoughts and beliefs that animate our world and drive our politics. The other day, for example, Elon himself set off something of a firestorm when he started a conversation about leaving government spending out of GDP, which concluded with him declaring that “Keynes was a great evil.”
Elon’s tweet sparked the furor of someone I follow on Twitter and whom I consider a friend, who wrote in response: “I don’t know why this triggers me, but it really does. Hitler was a great evil. Stalin was a great evil. Mao was a great evil. John Maynard Keynes was not evil. He was a good man. This really pisses me off.” This tweet, in turn, prompted a reply from another prominent tweeter (whom many of you may know), who concurred, noting that he “feels the same way” and lamenting that “If we do not know the difference between good and evil, then obviously we are in trouble.”
Now, before I continue, let me clarify a couple of things. I am not using the names of these posters/tweeters for a reason. The links are included above, obviously, for transparency purposes, but I don’t want it to seem like I’m calling anyone out or suggesting that either of these tweets was inappropriate or malicious. I don’t even necessarily disagree with the first one. As I say, it was written by a friend whom I like and respect very much. I just happen to think that the two tweets, taken together, provide an example of how historical ignorance infiltrates our political discussions these days. More to the point, they also demonstrate how “evil” comes to be an accepted part of our world and how we often fail to sense its relentless march through our civilization.
Given Musk’s invocation of Keynes in connection to government spending and the retort imparted to several of those who challenged the original responder’s comment that he was not evil – “the guy wrote a book” – it is clear that all of this is a discussion of Keynes the economist. Fair enough. That said, my interest in Keynes begins decades before he became the so-called “father of macroeconomics” and published his most famous and important work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. It begins with his arrival at Cambridge and his subsequent “membership” in the Bloomsbury Group.
As I have noted in these pages before, the Bloomsbury Group was a collection of left-wing intellectuals, most of whom were either members of the Fabian Society or friends of Fabians, who began to meet to discuss literature, art, philosophy, and politics around 1905 and reached the height of their notoriety between the world wars.
While each of the individual Bloomsburies eventually became known for his or her social and professional positions, the group itself became famous for its public celebration of unconventional sexual behavior. Of course, one can be quite certain that they did nothing to or with one another that had not been done to or with others since the beginning of time. What these folks brought to the party was the apparent belief that their unconventional sexual antics and their accompanying dismissal of prevailing morals, mores, and religious teachings were not only deserving of much public airing but also meritorious as a means of bringing ridicule on the Victorian virtues that they regarded as outdated and lacking the benefit of “reason.”
The late, great British philosopher Roger Scruton described their antics thusly in an article in the October 2009 American Spectator entitled “A Dark Horse.”
[This “new upper class”] adopted the habit of flaunting its effete sexuality. Lytton Strachey, whose Eminent Victorians, debunking the icons of the old moral order, appeared in 1918, advocated what he called “the higher sodomy,” in which the promiscuity of the public-school dormitory was combined with high romantic attachments designed to shock the few remaining advocates of marriage. The works of Freud, which were being translated by Lytton’s brother James, seemed to authorize all breaches of the old sexual customs, and — in the wake of the First World War — the culture of inversion acquired a sudden glamour. Homosexuality had been a hot topic ever since the pseudo-scientific explorations of [the extremely eccentric British physician and psychologist] Havelock Ellis and the trial of Oscar Wilde. But it enjoyed a kind of endorsement from the new elite that made it into a badge of membership, and a sign of moral distinction . . . Many of its leading figures were Communist sympathizers, many more were romantic socialists of the H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw variety. Among French intellectuals, leftist ideology, anti-patriotism, and prancing homosexuality were as frequent as they were in England — witness Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Gide. But in France the cultural and the political elite were distinct. Politics was conducted on the rive droite, culture on the rive gauche of the city, and they were divided from each other by the vast and unfrequented monument of Nôtre Dame. In England the very people who were dominating the arts were shaping politics. They could join the political discussion through the hereditary House of Lords, and the public school system meant that the intoxicating Hellenism imbibed by those who joined the bohemian circles of Soho and Bloomsbury was imbibed also by those who went into Parliament, and by those — a surprisingly large number — who inhabited both milieus: J. M. Keynes, for instance, Bertrand Russell, Leonard Woolf.
There was no formal membership involved in the Bloomsbury Group, so reports vary as to who was and who was not a regular at these meetings. Among the best-known participants were Virginia Spencer Woolf and her husband Leonard; Vanessa Spencer Bell and her husband Clive; E. M. Forster, the novelist; Lytton Strachey, the essayist and critic; John Maynard Keynes, the economist and one-time lover of Strachey; Duncan Grant, the painter and one-time lover of both Strachey and Keynes; Roger Fry, the noted Art Critic and lover of Vanessa Bell; Vita Sackville-West, author, poet, wife of Harold George Nicolson, and promiscuous lesbian lover of seemingly dozens of notable ladies of the day, including Virginia Woolf; and Harold George Nicolson, diplomat, author, Vita’s husband, and bi-sexual bon vivant.
Finally – and for the purposes of this discussion, most importantly – there was the philosopher G. E. Moore, whose 1903 book Principia Ethica formed the basis of the group’s secular “religion” and who personally became so central to the group’s early discussions that his biographer Paul Levy describes him as the “father of Bloomsbury.”
Moore was one of the founders of something called the “analytic tradition” in philosophy. He is also known for something called “common sense concepts.” Most significantly, Moore was also one of the chief developers and promoters of the moral worldview called “emotivism.” As I have noted in these pages repeatedly, the great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre defined emotivism as the belief that “all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Other philosophers are more closely associated with emotivism, but MacIntyre credits Moore with having moved the idea from the realm of philosophy to the drawing rooms of the radicals, where it became a foundational principle of the Left, which it remains today.
Keynes recalled the overwhelming influence of Moore on the Bloomsbury crowd in an essay entitled “My Early Beliefs,” which he wrote in 1938.
I went up to Cambridge at Michaelmas 1902, and Moore’s Principia Ethica came out at the end of my first year . . . of course, its effect on us, and the talk which preceded and followed it, dominated, and perhaps still dominates everything else . . . Indeed, in our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his religion, was that it made morals unnecessary – meaning by “religion” one’s attitude towards oneself and the ultimate, and by “morals” one’s attitude towards the outside world and the intermediate . . . In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men.
In sum, then, G.E. Moore helped fashion the moral chaos that plagues the entirety of our civilization today, the “emotivist” sentiment that stipulated that morality is, more or less, defined, by one’s feelings. That which one likes is defined as good, while that which one dislikes is defined as bad or evil. Traditional definitions of good and evil had, of course, been under attack since at least the Enlightenment, but the essential codification of their ultimate destruction can be credited to the emotivists and to Moore. And by extension, that means that Keynes, an ardent devotee of Moore’s, played a significant role in this process.
If you go back to the top of this (now interminably long) piece and look at the original tweets that piqued my interest, you’ll note that one is the complaint that we, as a civilization, “do not know the difference between good and evil.” That is correct. And it is important. But as a defense of John Maynard Keynes, of all people, it is also colossally ironic. Keynes was a part of the movement that made such confusion between right and wrong, good and evil a part of the moral mainstream. Indeed, he may be the most famous and is certainly the most lastingly consequential person in that movement. More to the point, by his own admission, he believed it. He ate it up.
This is important – and not just because it points out the silliness of a defense of Keynes. It’s important because it demonstrates how civilizations come to believe false and destructive ideas. Hannah Arendt was wrong, not just about Eichmann’s personal wickedness, but about evil and its advance more generally. THIS is the “banality of evil.” As I noted above, I agree that Keynes was not evil and that he doesn’t belong anywhere near a discussion that includes names like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Even though the Bloomsburies generally supported and advocated for Stalin during the period between the wars, they were not evil people. And that’s precisely the point. When, through hubris and ignorance, otherwise decent people adopt ideas that advance only their personal satisfaction and their discrete definitions of good and evil, they blur the lines between right and wrong and provide succor for true wickedness. “Who,” they ask, “are we to determine what is right for everyone? Who are we to say what a person should or should not do in their individual pursuit of pleasure and gratification? Who, pray tell, are we to judge?”
This is how evil advances. To paraphrase the (likely) apocryphal Burke quote: the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to repudiate all versions of the doctrine of original sin.” Or something like that.
As for Keynes the economist, it’s difficult to separate the older man from his younger ideas and ideals. He did start an economic “revolution” after all, in which he dispensed with and overturned all the existing ideas of neoclassical economics. It’s not easy to imagine someone without his background in revolutionary morality doing something so wildly destructive of the existing order.
Again, that doesn’t make him evil, although it does suggest that he and his revolution should be viewed with significant skepticism.
