In this blog, I want to share some ideas inspired by Polanyi about the cultural challenges we face as many scholars move away from higher ideals like truth, goodness, and beauty. Since the Enlightenment, many thinkers have embraced materialism. One key part of this view is the belief that there’s no higher source for faith or morals, and that neither exists independently. Instead, many see all value judgments as just human preferences. This focus on materialism also influences how modern science tends to analyze things—breaking them down into smaller parts, with the idea that you can keep reducing until you reach the tiniest units, such as fundamental particles in physics.
Interestingly, even though we’ve known for more than 100 years that this vision of reality is profoundly false, intellectuals remain captivated by the power of materialistic, reductionistic thinking. One of my favorite quotes is from the author and physicist Henry Sapp, puts it as follows:
[We] are faced today with the spectacle of our society being built increasingly upon a conception of reality erected upon a mechanical conception of nature now known to be fundamentally false. … As a consequence of this widely disseminated misinformation, “well-informed” officials, administrators, legislators, judges, educators, and medical professionals who guide the development of our society are encouraged to shape our lives in ways predicated on known-to-be-false premises about “nature and nature’s laws.”[1]
Given the utter disrespect that Marxist ideology and many pragmatic capitalists have for intellectuals, it is surprising, and it surprised Polanyi, that intellectuals, and especially those in academia, actually supported regimes that hold them in utter disregard. This disregard is exemplified by Lenin’s apocryphal description of Western intellectuals as “useful idiots.” [2]
Basis for Disillusionment in Western Culture
We experience the same phenomenon today, where many in academia support Marxist ways of thinking or where certain intellectuals embrace the ideology of radical Islam and its critique of Western culture, even though they would be the first to be oppressed if radical Islam came to power in their nations. Polanyi saw this problem in Western intellectuals’ continued support for Soviet communism long after its economic foolishness and moral bankruptcy were abundantly obvious. Therefore, in Personal Knowledge, he attempted to both understand and illuminate the dynamic that caused this perversion of common sense.[3]
The technological and bureaucratic biases of modernity, along with its trust in human reason to rationally control the world, resonate with the beliefs of many thinkers who view human society’s issues through an idealistic lens. That’s why Marxism has continued to appeal to these individuals, as it offers an approach to problems that seems both morally grounded and practically effective, blending intellectual perspective with tangible solutions. In a bizarre way, the state’s control of all of life was attractive to many intellectuals, even though they would be among the first to be suppressed and co-opted by any such regime. [4]
Since the 19th Century, the alienation of intellectuals and their institutions from what critics call “bourgeois culture” (i.e., modern industrial and mercantile culture in which business interests are dominant factors in social organization) has bred a kind of hostility among intellectuals toward any cultural organization or institution, including religion, that might be seen as supporting it. For these intellectuals, then and now, the ideals of freedom, democracy, and self-reliance are simply tools of domination that must be unmasked and destroyed in the search for the perfect society.[5]
Once again, this disaffection is exacerbated by the rootless moral aspirations of modern people who have no heaven or nirvana to look forward to. Therefore, whatever hope for a better life there is must be acted out and achieved in the material world as they experience it. The fact that his fundamentally eschatological ideal is unachievable and fantastic when combined with the lack of any firm moral grounding for political and social action, can and does lead to a kind of nihilistic totalitarian fervor that is both frightening and destructive.
This nihilistic moral fervor is vividly illustrated in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s powerful work, often translated as “The Demons” or “The Possessed.”[6] The novel depicts a small group of radicals, led by a charismatic intellectual, who spread chaos and destruction in a 19th-century Russian town. The unrest we see in our cities today echoes these ideas, the leaders of the movements they spawn, and their tragic consequences, illustrated by the human suffering engendered by the Russian Revolution. This turmoil reflects a distortion of traditional values, in which revolutionary ideas such as nihilism, atheism, and radical socialism are glorified. We notice a loss of the virtues of faith, hope, and love, leaving human beings capable of great evil.
As one author put it, the book illustrates the “suicidal clownishness characteristic of late modernity since the French Revolution, an epoch in which convulsions of ideological insanity have periodically torn apart physical and political bodies across the globe. The United States has long avoided such fits, but it seems our hour has come round at last.”[7]
Polanyi, though offering a different example, points out that one impact of the Enlightenment was the gradual weakening of the logical basis for many moral judgments found in Christianity and other traditional cultures. As the 19th century unfolded, and even more so in the 20th century, many, if not most, intellectuals and those influenced by them lost faith in the possibility of a traditional foundation for moral beliefs and fundamental human values. In fact, it’s now almost expected that intellectuals will adopt a skeptical attitude toward traditional moral views, seeing it as part of their journey.[8] The result is a kind of moral nihilism that eventually results in social decay and disorder.
The Vulnerability of Intellectuals
The loss of faith in traditional ideas like goodness and justice has made many modern thinkers more receptive to moral inversion. What began as a challenge to strict, possibly hyper-Protestant morals eventually led to a situation in which thinkers find it hard to make any moral judgment beyond personal or group preferences. Still, Polanyi believes that our core moral instincts are intact. Unfortunately, when people lack a clear foundation and a developed system for understanding morality and making decisions, it becomes difficult to tell right from wrong. As a result, there is a temptation to become deeply committed to immoral beliefs and to take immoral actions, all the while considering oneself morally upright.[9]
The result of this in Soviet Russia and in many other places is the emergence of a kind of self-righteous totalitarian violence:
A great surge of moral demands on social life, such as a rose at the end of the 18th century and has since flooded the whole world, must seek in more forcible expression. When injected into a utilitarian framework, it transmutes itself and this framework. It turns into the fanatical force of a machinery of violence. This is how moral inversion is completed: man masked as a beast turned into a Minotaur.[10]
As modernity developed, and the ideals of a more humane social order became part of the intellectual heritage of not just intellectuals but the majority of society, there came an increasing demand for justice and equality.[11]Once again, as Polanyi eloquently puts it:
We must acknowledge that personal nihilism has served for a century, as an inspiration to literature and philosophy, both by itself, and by provoking a reaction to itself. A loathing of bourgeoisie society, a rebellious immoralism and despair, have been prevailing forms of great fiction, poetry, and philosophy on the continent of Europe since the middle of the 19th century.[12]
Not surprisingly, intellectuals were most impacted by this phenomenon and the most likely to be disappointed when their moral aspirations were not met with either immediate approval or inevitable achievement. This in turn as resulted in kind of dissatisfaction of many intellectuals with the pace of change in society, which they consider backward, and even a hatred of existing social relations. This, in turn, causes a loss of faith in the fundamental ideals of a free society. In the end, this can and did in some cases result in approval of a form of despotism that promises the social achievements they endorse.[13]
This process involves connecting the unlimited moral demands of today’s thinkers with the potential to gain the power needed to pursue their seemingly impossible goals. According to Polanyi, when the false idea of objectivism is combined with human moral urges, it creates a kind of “dynamo-objective coupling.”[14] This means that so-called “scientific assertions” are often accepted because they falsely promise to satisfy people’s intense moral passions. In simple terms, the strong moral impulses can be misused when traditional morals are dismissed, and an objectivist justification is used to channel moral energy toward a specific cause. Unfortunately, the result is not the satisfaction of human beings’ moral impulses (which have been effectively neutralized by being cut off from their society’s moral tradition) but tyranny.
Spurious Moral Inversion
One indication of an inversion is when otherwise moral people begin to speak immorally. One example given by Polanyi is that a Sigmund Freud, who just before praising and honoring Romain Rolland for avoiding the false standards of those who seek power, success, and wealth, and who are motivated by the admiration of achievement by others, proceeds to state that all seemingly moral acts are mere actions of self-interest. Nothing could more clearly indicate what happens when intellectuals buy into a reductionist view of morality that they implicitly reject in their actions.[15]
In one of his most perceptive comments, Polanyi goes on to say:
A utilitarian interpretation of morality accuses all more sentiments of hypocrisy, while, the moral indignation which the writer thus expresses is safely disguised as a scientific statement. On other occasions, these concealed moral passions reassert themselves, affirming ethical ideals either backhandedly as a tightlipped praise of social dissenters, or else disguised in utilitarian terms.[16]
In the end, Polanyi believes this in many other examples illustrate the fundamental problem with contemporary moral discourse. Having reduced morality and ethical concerns either to utilitarian or emotional bases, the writers nevertheless must speak in more terms because morality actually does exist. Moral inversion, discloses, the fundamental moral character of people even where that reality has been twisted and is unrecognizable.
Overcoming Materialistic Reductionism
One reason I’ve spent so much time talking about Michael Polanyi and his work has to do with its importance for the maintenance and renewal of our free society. A free society cannot exist on the basis of radical individualism or radical social reorganization. Instead, a free society recognizes the independent reality of truth, beauty, goodness, justice, and other values. In addition, such as society recognizes that, motivated by the reality of their subject, a free society relies upon specialists or committed practitioners, who perpetuate traditions of the search for truth, beauty, justice, and other moral values. [17]Religious communities have an important role in such a society as they provide the transcendent ground for the independent operation of other groups.
The propensity for radical and dramatic action that we see on both the right and the left in contemporary society, Polanyi urges, careful, graded, intelligent, and thoughtful actions designed to create a more just society while at the same time, maintaining those freedoms upon which the society must rest. If a society refuses this tactic, it will experience constant conflict. That conflict, and the role of power in a free society, is the subject of the next blog.
Now, for anyone who has read this far, I want to announce that, in the next few weeks, the final novel in the Arthur Stone series, Leviathan and the Lambs, will be available on Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, and at the bookstore at Bookbaby, among other venues.
Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved
[1] Henry F. Sapp, “Whitehead, James, and the Ontology of Quantum Theory” 5(1) Mind and Matter (2007) downloaded at https://wwwphysics.lbl.gov/~stapp/WJQO.pdf (June 16, 2020), 85. In this quote, Sapp is not speaking of the exact phenomena that I am concerned with here—the tendency to view all reality as a machine—but his quote is equally applicable to what I am saying in this essay. Sapp is concerned with the assumption of materialistic theory that our experience of human freedom and the efficacy of human thought is an illusion.
[2] The term “useful idiots,” usually attributed to Lenin, has entered the lexicon as a term for people who simply do not get it and are willing to be duped by totalitarians, tyrants, and various other characters. According to Lenin these “simpletons” were nominally socialists, but they were really accomplices to his enemies. In this context the term “simpletons” may be viewed as the ideological mirror-image of “useful idiots. See 1947, The Essentials of Lenin In Two Volumes by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Volume 2 of 2, Chapter: The Tax in Kind, Free Trade and Concessions, Quote Page 722, Lawrence & Wishart, London.
[3] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1974), 235-239,
[4] Id, at 235.
[5] Id.
[6] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994). There are many fine translations available. The book is published under various names. I prefer the translation “The Possessed” because it suggests the fundamental humanity of those led astray by nihilistic thinking.
[7] Jacob Howland, “Demons at 150” The New Criterion (March 2021) https://newcriterion.com/article/demons-at-150/ (Downloaded January 20, 206).
[8] Personal Knowledge, 234.
[9] Id.
[10] Id, 234-235.
[11] Id, 235.
[12] Id, 236.
[13] Id.
[14] Id, 233-5, 237.
[15] Id, 233.
[16] Id.
[17] Id, 244.
Leviathan & the Lambs is the third and final book written under the pen name “Alystair West” (which must be used in any search on Amazon or other website) in the Arthur Stone series, which also includes Marshland and Peace at Battle Mountain. The first two books in the series take Arthur Stone from his days as a young lawyer often unsure of himself to an accomplished trial lawyer. Each novel involves a financial disaster, murders, economic crime, and seen and unseen spiritual realities.
