A number of recent posts have mocked currently fashionable nonsense and political advocates who seek to impose nonsensical controls on society in service of those fashions and enthusiasms. The ideas advocated don't pass intellectual muster, as even the most cursory examination reveals, but the advocates press on in bloody minded faith that they can pummel opposition with brute force, and then, and then, well, they are underpants gnomes.

Some argue that it isn't just that none of the totalizing systems on offer are viable, it is that totalizing systems are inherently wrong, inappropriate for humans.

If all political struggle is underpinned by myth, if all progress is theological residue, what does [John] Gray suggest [in Gray’s Anatomy, a selection of his articles and essays published over the past 30 years] in its stead? ‘[W]e need an ideal based not on the best way of life, nor on reasonable disagreement about it, but instead on the truth that humans will always have reason to live differently. Modus Vivendi [way of living together] is such an ideal. It embodies an older current of liberal thought about toleration, and applies it to our own new circumstances.’ This notion of toleration amounts to what he calls ‘value pluralism’, an acceptance that people will pursue their own versions of the good life.

As opposed to classical liberalism, which, maintaining a belief in the truth, conceived of toleration in terms of tolerating the false, value pluralism possesses no such judgement. It is inimical to all strains of ‘fundamentalism’. ‘The ideal of Modus Vivendi is not based on the vain hope that human beings will cease to make universal claims for their ways of life. It regards such claims with indifference – except where they endanger peaceful coexistence’. Or as he writes in a 2006 article on Isaiah Berlin: ‘Liberty is one thing, the good life another.’

This seems obviously true to me. People are diverse. Attempting to shoe horn them into any value system, especially when accomplished with brute force political majoritarianism, is not just stupid, it's sociopathy. Even the proponents of various value systems seem to realize this since they try to leverage various threats - climate change, economic woes, terrorism - to institute controls on society that are intolerable. Their arguments are that some crisis justifies their otherwise unacceptable ideas.

Yet this is an end-of-history position more stultifying and more degraded than anything Gray imagines for his opponents. Simply recognising that different sets of people within a society have differing, incompatible notions of the best way to live, whether born of religion, ethnic-cultural or economic differences, is to elevate the present itself into the political end-point. For such differences are not refutations of universalism; they are simply what is. This is presentism as political project. It is a thoroughly disillusioned, intellectually bereft gesture which, in its aversion to history as process, instead brings history to a perpetual standstill.

Nonsense. Human knowledge continues to increase even if the childish political projects of the past that sought to impose some value system and its institutional trappings on humanity are abandoned as the stuff of immature youth. There are always new challenges and so new values evolving in response to them. What, for example, will be the consequence of the continued increase in human life span? One of the drivers of past change has been the fact that one is not considered to be especially ancient after 35 years of life. Another is that a high percentage of infants don't die, women are not doomed to bear many children, and societies do not need to be structured around these biological issues in order to avoid collapse.

through struggle, many human qualities beyond Gray’s gloomy ken, such as courage and self-sacrifice, come into being. Writing in defence of human as opposed to animal being, French philosopher Alain Badiou argued: ‘To forbid him to imagine the Good, to devote his collective powers to it, to work towards the realisation of unknown possibilities, to think what might be in terms that break radically with what is, is quite simply to forbid him his humanity as such.’

Nonsense. Courage and self-sacrifice are the ancient stuff of pedestrian existence. They are forged at the micro level of society in relationships among family members and local communities. No political struggle is useful in this, much less necessary. Go ahead, imagine Good, just don't imagine that imposing your clumsy ideas on others is Good. They have their own imaginations.

The belief of people like ‘Marx or Herbert Spencer’ that we would adjust as population grows gets short shrift: ‘Such technological hubris – advocated, or presupposed, in our own time by thinkers such as Julian Simon and, in some of his later writings, by FA Hayek – is objectionable, in the first place, because of its overestimation of human inventiveness and its underestimation of the fragility of any natural or Gaian order that has a place in it for humans. It is to be resisted, secondly, because, even if human technology had the virtuosity attributed to it by these forms of Positivism and scientism, human institutions would break down long before technology could develop to such levels of virtuosity, or be applied in practice.’

For Gray, it would seem there is nothing to live for. Amidst the wreckage of political, social ideals, he eagerly foresees the end of human striving, and revels in it.

Childhood's end, one can hope. It isn't that such problems are novel - humans have been exceeding the capacity of their range for all of history. Like any other species they expand until they reach some local limit, altering their environment in profound ways. In this they are no different from trees, which become forests, and make some life forms within them nonviable. Then they expand into new territory, or nomadically move house, and settle down to another cycle of growth. Life grows: local violations of the laws of entropy. The limit at this time appears to be the planet as a whole and there is no precedent, so far as we know, for expansion in the solar system or universe, though we have imagined it. Now, as in all previous cases, this physical reality is made more complicated by the inadequacy of human institutions - evolved to deal with old problems - to deal with new problems.

I fail to grasp why people find this to be disappointing and wish to cling to childish illusions of perfectibility, or at least childish definitions of perfection. I think of a character in the movie The Last Samurai who spent his life seeking a perfect plum blossom only to realize in his moment of death that they were all perfect as they were, that he had not been seeing seeing clearly due to false assumptions and obdurate refusal to accept reality.