Only a Game

Termites vs Meerkats in the Knowledge Wars

12 minute read

Among the more surprising things I've been told by an intellectual acquaintance this year is that there was no point debating the evidence on a certain contentious issue because we could each cite our own supporting research. Yet this amounts to saying we've given up on empirical science - and honestly I rather fear this might be the case. But if this were so, how can it then be insisted by those who purport to possess authority that we must 'follow the science'...? There are questions here that matter and that can hardly be ignored without undermining any plausible concept of democracy.

When we encounter strangeness, the easiest psychological defences will always tend towards either denial or demonisation - hell, the whole of the political landscape in almost every democratic nation is almost entirely explicable through cognitive dissonance. The path less taken (especially by contemporary philosophers) is thinking. To borrow my mentor Mary Midgley's metaphor of philosophy as conceptual plumbing, this means tearing up the floorboards underneath our house of concepts in order to discover where the nasty smells are coming from.

In this instance, and indeed many like it, the problem originates in the loss of something we didn't even know we had: our shared framework of collective knowledge, that is, an epistemic commons. 'Epistemic' is the adjective for knowledge, and a 'commons' is something everyone makes free use of, while communally agreeing on the practices relating to it (for instance, a field that anyone can bring their sheep to for grazing, and the community itself decides how to organise this). A civic society requires an epistemic commons, not least of all to ensure we are talking about the same things. That major political arguments can now occur over such traditionally uncontroversial concepts as 'woman', 'man', 'climate' and 'weather' - not to mention 'safety' and 'efficacy' - are clear warning signs that something has gone horribly wrong with our epistemic commons.

This problem is rooted in radical and unprecedented changes to our academic circumstances. Up until the twentieth century, it could be claimed that the primary civic role of universities was to cultivate a community of virtuous scholarship that maintained the epistemic commons. Since then, alas, research investment has usurped and supplanted this purpose and arguably led to the end the university as such (see After Universities). The impression that this is 'how it is supposed to be' is merely back projection to justify the enslavement of scholarship to technology (that is, 'science plus money'). We have forgotten what a university was and now resolutely believe this to denote a research institution, a concept that arrives only after 90% of the history of universities to date has passed.

We cannot afford to leave this matter unattended, much less permit the cognitive dissonance it engenders to heighten our denial or our demonisation. Without either a newly negotiated epistemic commons (see No Reality without Representation) or an entirely unconceived alternative, we are slouching towards civil war on a global scale, the outcome of which could be far more catastrophic for human life than current anxieties about our every-growing environment impact. This question is thus a most urgent locus for thinking, perhaps the most urgent our species has yet faced, and it is no solution whatsoever to refuse to talk about it.

In order to trace possible solutions, I want to present two different metaphorical images for epistemic commons, one that I believe lies behind my academic acquaintance's ongoing allegiance to the ruling power structures, and another that I suspect underpins my own rejection of this new whirled order. Neither is 'right', both have strengths, weaknesses, and risks - both could be corrupted... indeed, my sense of the crisis we have sleepwalked into (see Awakening the Sleepwalkers) is precisely that both have been corrupted in radically different ways.

Termite Knowledge Networks

Of all the incredible aspects of the natural history of Africa I witnessed during my brief time in what is now Burkina Faso, little was more impressive than termite mounds. Towering above the ground - often at twice my height - these insect-built skyscrapers are constructed above underground nests that are home to thousands of termites, each specialised to different roles within the colony. Workers, soldiers, reproductives... specialisation is key to the extraordinary achievements of these relatives of the earliest winged insects, who in parts of Africa have transformed the entire local ecology in ways that have benefitted all the local wildlife.

The names of 'queen' and 'king' termites are misleading - they do not rule as such, but merely provide the eggs for the huge number of nymphs that then differentiate into specialist roles. Rather, each termite colony is a collective (a so-called 'superorganism'), where the contributions of each insect is vital to the prospering of all. This kind of eusocial arrangement has developed among many other largely unrelated insect species such as ants and bees, and the key in every case is specialisation and not - as the regal euphemisms imply - hierarchy. This is not hierarchical monarchic rule but a network of mutually defined purposes.

By analogy, then, we can speak of a termite knowledge network, where specialisation of roles is the underlying principle. Indeed, intuitively this what we imagine underpins our industrial knowledge economy. Specialist researchers and non-researcher experts (whom today we often forget exist) maintain knowledge in compartmentalised domains. Journalists with their own specialisations (sometimes asininely conceived, as with the absurdly broad term 'science reporter') then propagate changes with respect to this knowledge as 'news', while book publishers try to capture lightning in reference books.

I feel confident that faith in the efficacy and reliability of these networks are the reason so many, including my aforementioned academic acquaintance, place their trust in government and industry sponsored narratives, despite a lack of trust in both government officials and corporate CEOs. Indeed, this is the only way to explain the widespread acceptance of such diverse and otherwise arcane popular beliefs such as 'climate change is so vital we must not research it', 'vaccine candidates without pharmacovigilance are safer than with rigorous oversight', or 'pornography in school libraries saves lives'. Yet the strangeness of these claims is not prima facie evidence that our termite knowledge network has been corrupted. Remember the oddness uncovered in quantum mechanics, after all...

However, the termite knowledge network absolutely requires that those who have been specialised to a role are able to fulfil it. The sign of the corruption of our knowledge network - and the consequent collapse of the epistemic commons - is that those who are best positioned to advise are prevented from doing so if they do not align with pre-prescribed positions. The strongest evidence of this can be found in the lawsuit Missouri vs Biden administration (now, Murthy vs Missouri), legal discovery for which showed how epidemiologists and health economists were censored on social media at the command of the US government (shredding the First Amendment), solely because they brought attention to the lack of reliable knowledge behind what were very odd courses of action to undertake. Likewise, despite their evident qualification to speak on the topic, detransitioners are routinely excluded from the conversation about how to approach the fraught political quagmire that is gender metaphysics (see Were You Born This Way?).

As always, denial and demonisation remain the most common result of confronting any aspect of this corruption of our termite knowledge network. Ever wondered how a diverse range of people are suddenly 'far right' - even committed lefties like Russell Brand! - and thus necessarily deplorable...? The tremendous desire to believe that there's no reason to be concerned and that the problem is entirely up to those terrible Others is in itself a sign of the problem. But to truly get to grips with the situation requires us to wrestle with the other go-to cognitive dissonance avoidance phrase: conspiracy theory. And this brings us to the meerkats.

Meerkat Knowledge Communities

Unusually for social mammals, meerkats do not have a strict hierarchy. It is not that no meerkat is dominant - there is always a pair 'in charge' - but unlike wolves (or indeed chickens) there isn't a strict 'pecking order'. Up to thirty meerkat cooperate in each mob, pursuing a variety of communal activities including keeping watch for predators. There are even birds, drongo, that will stand guard in return for some of the food the meerkats gather - a situation that sometimes becomes a real life Prisoner's Dilemma when the bird proves less than trustworthy.

Again, by analogy we can speak of a meerkat knowledge community, where trust and cooperative practice underpins the activities, the groupings are smaller, and roles are mutable and overlapping. Historically speaking, many academic fields went through a stage like this: when Isaac Newton wrote about the mathematics of planetary motion, the number of 'natural philosophers' with skin in the game was few enough that everyone had read everyone else with anything to say on the matter. Anyone with an interest in Newton's physics simply read Newton's own book. (Of course, a printer also produced the book itself - but they changed nothing in what Newton wrote, which is never true of publishers today.)

The impression that this form of knowledge curation is no longer around is caused by our false association between knowledge and research. But maintaining knowledge is a much older and indeed far more crucial practice than research, which has only risen in importance owing to the commercialisation of the sciences through technology. We can find meerkat knowledge communities at every church, temple, mosque, and synagogue; in every scout and guide troop; at every gun range and bowling alley - even pubs and bars can be meerkat knowledge communities. Wherever knowledge is conserved and propagated, there will be a knowledge community... and the communities entailed are typically small and localised.

An authentic meerkat knowledge community maintains the practices of a form of knowledge, and these are legion. Such communities can also adapt to almost any change in the circumstances surrounding their practices - consider the enormous transformations entailed by raised row gardening as a brilliant example of how even successful knowledge practices can undergo radical and unexpected transformations, even within comparatively short intervals.

Furthermore, because such communities are usually comparatively small (many have no more than a hundred or so people) they can also maintain practices which may or may not constitute knowledge as such. Some may be metaphysical, such as theology or faith in the sciences; some may be speculative in other ways - and this is where we find conspiracy theories being shared. Despite the archetype of the lone kook, communities of one kind or another connect almost all conspiracy theorists (by which I mean people speculating about actual conspiracies, not people being censored for holding inconvenient views).

Now it is an interesting feature of our times that 'conspiracy theory' has been massaged into the implication of being false. Because this could only be a plausible assumption if nobody was ever involved in conspiring - which would be a ludicrous assumption. Indeed, the people who benefit from a blanket dismissal of conspiratorial thinking are precisely those most likely to conspire. Still, most conspiracy theories are not knowledge as such but rather speculative scenarios that seek to provide explanations of events in terms of the causal actions of people who would plausibly deny wrongdoing (i.e. everyone). Authentic conspiracy theories inevitable lack decisive evidence (although evidently some of the reports that are now dismissed under this term are well-evidenced e.g. that the Biden administration has censored inconvenient discourse, which disclosure in Missouri versus Biden confirmed as factual).

The meerkat knowledge communities of conspiracy theories are thus engaged in discussing speculative models of events that run ahead of the evidence to some degree. As such, they perhaps ought to be called speculative hypotheses, and we might therefore talk of meerkat speculation communities as a specialist kind of knowledge network. It is my conclusion after observing the discussions of this kind of community online that they occur in a pattern of layers, from the surface layer of a meerkat knowledge community that constrains its speculations to the available evidence, to the most fanciful deep layers that explain half a century or more of events as the result of interlocking conspiracies. I cannot prove these hypotheses false, and if they become extremely fanciful in the depths they are not more fanciful than the hypothesis that everything done by government politicians and corporate executives is strictly for the good of humanity.

Thus much as strange conclusions from our termite knowledge networks are not evidence of their corruption, neither are conspiracy theories evidence of the corruption of meerkat knowledge communities: nobody is in a position to discredit or debunk speculation that further evidence might yet reveal to be true, and by definition conspiracies are underdetermined until such time as substantial evidence is unearthed (especially but not exclusively through legal disclosure). It is worth remembering, after all, how preposterous heliocentric cosmology, continental drift, and even hand washing to prevent infection were in their times. It is certain that some subset of conspiracy theories will be validated - and nobody can reliably predict which will come to be accepted. (Look at the utter reversal of beliefs about Emily Dickenson, for instance).

Rather, the corruption of meerkat knowledge communities is evidenced by the collapse of the community itself. The minimum knowledge any community possesses is an understanding of how to remain a community - a far more significant achievement these days than we give credit! No matter the weird and wacky beliefs of any group that associates, the fact of their continued association is a kind of knowledge (often of a habitual rather than a propositional kind), and it is the corruption of this knowledge that will destroy the association.

This provides a clue as to the other reason why the epistemic commons has collapsed. In addition to the corruption of our termite knowledge network through censorship, we have also thinned down our knowledge of how to maintain meerkat knowledge communities by supplanting them with an automated alternative: social media. Yet the knowledge entailed in participation with these digital tools is not knowledge of how to associate, but merely interface competence. Worse, the associations we make in such spaces (follows) and their opposite (blocks) serve not to foster community but rather to purify ideology - they group people into an illusion of community without providing any knowledge of how to associate. Indeed, the habit inculcated through participation in these non-communities is how to push a button in order to self-alienate from anyone remotely different from us - it is a sick joke to then make claims that our motivations are 'diversity and inclusion'!

We have thus corrupted both aspects of the epistemic commons, and the illusion that our collective knowledge is still functioning normally is scaffolded by the manipulation of the very tools that facilitated this wretched calamity. I am largely agnostic to the question of whether this dreadful state of affairs was intentionally manipulated or the consequence of a cascade of incompetence, although it is my default policy - we might call it hokum's razor - to avoid invoking conspiracy where ineptitude suffices as an explanation. Frankly, how this happened is far less important than what we do about it... and in this regard, it matters greatly that an enormous number of otherwise sapient people, like the associate I mentioned at the beginning, continue to have faith that our epistemological situation remains fundamentally trustworthy.

Conclusion

It will come as little surprise if I say that I place greater trust in meerkat knowledge communities than I currently can in our termite knowledge network. Yet I would be the first to admit that we do not currently have a means of maintaining a global epistemic commons without the help of the termites. It is a luxury I possess as a voracious reader that I am willing to negotiate the conflicted accounts of the meerkats with some confidence, sorting wild speculation from grounded interpretation with the care that flows from perpetual agnosticism. It is evident that this is not a general solution to the problem, but rather a situation evoking endless ambiguity, and whatever my competence I am limited by all the weaknesses inherent to any lone investigator.

Of course when the termites are causing more harm than good they become a pest - I find it easy to abandon premature certainty under such wretched circumstances, yet acknowledge the psychological costs involved will not appeal to most academics, who derive a great deal of their self-worth from the legitimacy claims of the network they participate in. This is also true of those downstream of academics, most obviously science reporters, who are apparently woefully incapable of the thinking required to operate without termites, or else perhaps have 'purified' their associations of anyone who might be so endowed with prudence.

The crisis here is exacerbated by the fact that all the oddest positions taken up by the termites are politically aligned with the blue team in the United States - this, indeed, is the most plausible explanation for why the termites have fallen into corruption: politicisation. This is why this nightmare could result in civil war if it is not resolved, since a nation of gun owners founded upon 'the shot heard around the world' requires an epistemic commons to bolster any stable national identity. Furthermore, the collapse of the US would trigger a global destabilisation (if indeed one is not already underway). The epistemic commons has been helping to stabilise international relations far longer than banking and commerce, which have failed to achieve the international peace Kant and others hoped for (see The Great Graveyard of Humanity).

If we want to escape the worst consequences of this ever-growing catastrophe, we must begin by admitting we have a problem. Termites see the problem in those who don't acknowledge their network's authority, but a great many meerkats don't seriously recognise any authority but their own liberty. Small wonder this dispute frequently manifests polemically as authoritarians versus libertarians. Yet we agree on one thing: we have a problem with our knowledge, and anyone who thinks the solution is going to come from a policy of 'shut up and accept what we say' is more naïve than the most credulous of conspiratorial speculators.

The only viable solutions begin by admitting failure and renegotiating the terms of our collective knowledge. There is more than enough political, historical, scientific, religious, and ethical knowledge held in our extraordinarily diverse meerkat knowledge communities to rebuild a termite knowledge network capable of acting as a viable epistemic commons. But to get there, we first have to recognise that a metaphorical wasteland we cannot bear to acknowledge has been encroaching upon our termite mound for decades. Now and forever, we need the wisdom of Socrates who warned "all I know is that I know nothing".

Comments always welcome, although my replies here may not appear swiftly.

The Minds of Squirrels

My last long-form essay for Only a Game this year has been drafted for quite a while, but I haven't had time to paste it up and run it owing to requests at other publications for submissions. The first of these, The Minds of Squirrels, picks up two themes of mine with quite a history at this blog: evolutionary mythology and, of course, squirrels. Here's an extract:

Indeed, if we take a long hard look at the role of genetics in animal behaviour, we may find that we are so closely related to everything from worms, to lobsters, to fish, to birds, and of course to squirrels in terms of the key genetic contributors to behaviour. It then becomes laughable to suggest, as so many do these days, that the behaviour in, say, the corridors of contemporary desk slavery can be explained in terms of what human ancestors were or were not doing on the African savannah. We would be on surer footing explaining anything we observe in terms of what early mammals did in the Cretaceous period, or fish in the Devonian—but in all these cases the genetic explanation provides only one thing: the Lego blocks behind emotions.

You can read the entirety of The Minds of Squirrels over at Analogy magazine.

PS: While I'm cross-posting, I should mention the final part of Origins of Ghost Master, over at ihobo.com, which I ran for Halloween this year.

How The Left Stopped Thinking

In the 1950s, movie audiences were wowed by monsters bursting out of the silver screens. All they had to do was put on a pair of paper glasses with a red gel over one eye and a blue gel over the other. Each eye then saw a different part of the image on screen, and the small differences between them created the 3D effect through an illusion of stereoscopic vision. Today, however, people put on a pair of glasses with the same colour gel over both eyes, and consequently see only one half of the image on screen. It is small wonder that when people exit the cinema, it turns out they've been watching an entirely different movie!

There is a long-standing joke about US politics: the Democrats are the Evil Party, the Republicans are the Stupid Party, and every now and then they get together and do something that is both stupid and evil, and that is called 'bipartisanship'. Of course, those on the blue team are convinced its the red team that's evil, and those on the red team think the blue team is stupid (or, more commonly, crazy). The truth, as ever, is not so simple. The electorate in the United States is neither evil nor stupid, but it is spectacularly distracted, in the sense traced by French philosopher Jacques Rancière. We don't so much stop using our intelligence as deploy it almost exclusively to uncover the horror caused by those wearing the other colour gels over their eyes.

I am ambivalent as to whether this perpetual distraction is the result of an intentional collaboration to keep the populace fractious, or whether it emerges blindly from the commercial properties of news media. For instance, consider why George Floyd's murder was singled out for media attention in 2020 and not, say, Donnie Saunders who was killed by the police two months earlier. (There are many more depressing examples I could choose even in that one year.) The Floyd murder was 24 hour news catnip. Those wearing blue gels would respond to either of these dreadful incidents the same way, but those wearing red gels over their eyes would see Floyd as a criminal who had been arrested nine times for drug and theft charges... Whenever you really want to turbo-charge your news cycle, you need a story that sets the red and blue team against each other, ramping up the outrage and cognitive dissonance. I can't rule out that this entails some attempt at supra-political control of the populace (how could you...?), but we don't need to resort to conspiracy to explain how this happens.

However, by the time of the Black Lives Matters protests and riots, the legacy media was already shooting fish in a barrel in terms of stirring up the political left in the United States. For it is my accusation that long before 2020 the left stopped thinking, primarily because they were distracted in Rancière's sense. The evidence of this distraction was felt most astutely in that very year, because nearly everyone on the political left jumped upon a hastily constructed media bandwagon the moment the panic word 'pandemic' had been spoken. In the wake of this, the zeal with which denouncements of 'misinformation' and 'disinformation' leapt above the necessarily-prior task of establishing the facts was staggering.

Although I am saying the left has stopped thinking, I ought to make it clear that this is not the same as the loss of their intelligence. It is simply that those wearing the blue gels have been so distracted by the fault lines being farmed by the legacy media that they apply their intelligence almost exclusively to justifying their hatred for the other team. Yet whichever gels you wear, it's a certainty that you've witnessed the other team engaged in this grubby process of informed hate - it's impossible to miss once you take off the gels of either colour. This is where our capacity for thinking is expended, safely exploded where it can do absolutely no harm to the guilds and houses of the contemporary technocratic empire.

Yet thinking can also means something more than the application of our intelligence. The German existentialist Martin Heidegger asked what it is that calls for us to think. Whenever we are genuinely engaged in thinking, we are not simply pursuing partisan reasoning. He suggests: "Thinking is thinking solely when it pursues whatever speaks for a matter." What calls for us to think is never as readily visible as the moral flaws of our political opponents. That which calls for thinking withdraws from us, remaining hidden and beyond experience. This withdrawal is something more than a blind spot - our own moral flaws, which our political opponents see all too clearly, are unseen to our own mind's eye, but they are not withdrawn from us in Heidegger's sense.

That which calls for thinking is always beyond our intelligence until we learn how to think about it, and that withdrawal creates a kind of draft, the pull of which can be felt even though what is calling for thinking is not there. Like birds pulled along by the wind, we find ourselves thinking only when we take a leap from the ground and let this draft carry us onwards. This is akin to Alain Badiou's idea (inspired by Plato) where truth is something that punctures the order of everyday existence, an event that upends what we previously believed. Thinking is what happens when we let ourselves be caught up in such an event, just as Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière were in May 1968.

This traces an answer to the question 'how the left stopped thinking'. If thinking is our capacity to encounter that which goes beyond the dogmas and lazy intellectual accountancy of everyday life, if thinking always speaks for a matter, and never against, then the left stopped thinking the moment it became the left. For the origin of the left-right distinction is the French revolution, and the seating arrangements within the National Assembly. Those who sought to uphold aspects of the traditional structures prior to the revolution sat on the right of the hall, and those who sought greater change sat on the left. But at this very moment the left came into being, the left stopped thinking - because those belonging to the left were immediately and permanently committed to opposing tradition, to political partisanship against the right. And this remains the case, more than two centuries later.

The surest sign of the failure of the contemporary left to engage in thinking is its hatred for the right, and its refusal to recognise the legitimate and even at times admirable ways the political right deploys its intelligence. I read a lot of what is said by those on either side of United States political partisanship (not the politicians, of course, the clever people). At this time, I find the intellectual right using their intelligence far more creatively. They have come to recognise what fools they were for instituting the Department of Homeland security. They have maintained their suspicion of collaboration between corporations and the government. They are applying their intelligence to the question of how to dismantle the corrupt and disastrous federal agencies. In the Bizarro World that is the United States today, the right is closer to the naïve politics that the left explored in the 1960s, while the left is closer to the ghastly politics the right inflicted in the 1950s. What obscures this amazing circumstance is hatred of the other - which is to say, the left's hatred of the right and the right's disgust at the left. This more than anything else keeps us away from any hope of thinking.

If we wish to attempt the infinite challenge of thinking, if we wish to discover all that has withdrawn from us, to find ways to let the truth puncture through the familiar prejudices of our everyday lives, we may need to abandon this split into left and right. Yet we cannot do this, can we...? We must keep the coloured gels over our eyes or else disaster will surely follow soon after we remove them because 'the other side must be stopped'. Horror at the thought of a second term by whichever terrible president it is that you happen to despise compels you to squander your intelligence in partisan in-fighting, and never once to stop and attempt to learn how to think, to seek that which calls for us to think.

Perhaps it is time to abandon our allegiance to right and left, and to give thinking a chance. A future worth sharing lies in rallying those who might attempt to think together, and there is an ancient name for these people: citizens. The left-right divide does nothing now except prevent any hope of thinking, and the partisans of the left and the right need to be contrasted against the citizens of the future. Decide for yourself who you will be: the partisans whose intelligence is squandered upon demonising their political opponents, or the citizens of a future world that is open to thinking. It is calling to us, inviting us to learn how to think together. All you have to do is take off your coloured gels, blink, and look for the first time at worlds that were always far stranger, far more wonderful, than any 3D movie ever imagined.

A journey away from partisans and towards citizens takes two steps forward every Tuesday at Stranger Worlds and How to Live in Them. If you're interested in the challenges of thinking, please join me there.

Eighteen Today

It is with a certain misplaced pride that I celebrate Only a Game turning eighteen today. The blog is now old enough to drink in the city of Manchester, United Kingdom, where I just left, but still not old enough to go drinking in Nashville, TN, where I now am situated. My satisfaction is not so much grounded in the fact that we've lasted eighteen years, because this blog is nothing like what it was back in 2005! It is rather that since my first Substack, WAMTNG, reached one year of age two weeks ago, it is clear that my moving into Substack hasn't removed the need for me to have an outlet for my long-form rambling. While I am far happier putting most of my energy into Stranger Worlds, which has grown to the same size as WAMTNG in half the time, it makes me smile that I still have here to retreat to, my little Fortress of Scholartude, to write longer essays and pontificate while stroking my beard thoughtfully.

With unlimited love to all the Players of the Game,

Chris.

 

Were You Born This Way?

Can you be 'born Christian'? 'Born gay'? 'Born trans'? This is a perilous question to ask, because frankly everyone reading will already have an answer to these questions. What's more, the more certain you are about how to resolve these questions, the angrier you will get when you confront those who believe otherwise. It is absolutely vital to some Christians that their children were 'born Christian' i.e. born into a Christian family, and it is equally vital to others that they were 'born gay', or 'born trans'. If we are used to encountering fights here, we expect it to be between the Christians and the gay community... so it's a new and fascinating situation that we are now witnessing battlegrounds between trans advocates and their gay and lesbian opponents who amazingly have now forged political alliances with certain Christians. How did this happen?

These topics stray into what philosophers call 'metaphysics', and all your untestable beliefs can be described as 'metaphysical'. This includes such diverse subjects as the qualities of God, or the belief that the sciences are destined to achieve ever-more-accurate descriptions of reality. It includes belief in your own nation's existence, and the existence of yourself as an individual. It includes the idea that a child can be 'born gay' or 'born trans', or that either is a 'lifestyle choice'. In short, in includes everything that lies outside of the possibility of definitive evidence, although an unfortunate quality of contemporary metaphysics is that people have become incapable of recognising this.

Pragmatically, a complete discussion of metaphysics is impossible. If I focus primarily upon Christians here it is solely because this religious identity has the key role in the United States where the political skirmishes I am sketching originated and from whence they propagated. They apply just as well to Hindus, Sikhs, or indeed Odinala of the Igbo, at least some of the time. Likewise, I am going to use 'gay' as shorthand for 'gay and lesbian', and I shall avoid using any of the various vowel-free Scrabble words deployed to pretend that there is still a unified community represented by the Rainbow flag, rather than the grim 'queer wars' that have been raging for more than a decade now.

The roots of these issues are far older. Aristotle coined the term 'metaphysics' for whatever thinking could happen 'beyond physics' (hence the name), but for our purposes we only need to go back a hundred and not two thousand years. For if there was a single topic that dominated the trajectory of the twentieth century it was metaphysics... specifically, the steadfast avoidance of this philosophical hinterland, and the denial of its relevance. From the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 30s onwards, metaphysics were marked as suspect, deemed the exclusive preserve of that catch-all category of dismissal 'religion'. It is frankly no surprise at all that the bizarre fruit grown from this trend in the twenty first century are beliefs that to the eyes of many people are indistinguishable from religions.

Yet metaphysical commitments are not religions, not least of all because they do not foster a direct community of care, which is a central defining trait of all religious traditions. The association of 'metaphysics' as purely a religious matter, therefore, distorts religion as much as it does the sciences, knowledge, and morality - all of which must be bootstrapped by metaphysical commitments. It is the breaking away from organised religion (primarily but not exclusively Christianity) that is the historical backstory of the twentieth century turn away from metaphysics, and that legacy has had unfortunate consequences.

Part of this story is the one I have told many times before, about how the association of metaphysics with nonsense by the Vienna Circle of philosophers and scientists led inexorably to new and more disturbing forms of nonsense. These prototypes for the analytic philosophers' fateful trajectory tried to 'think scientifically' by dismissing everything that could not be known as irrelevant to all rational thought. Perhaps if they'd read and understood Friedrich Nietzsche, they'd have appreciated the bitter irony of this curiously self defeating move, as nobody before or since Nietzsche has been so spot on about it being "still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests."

We deceive ourselves when we think we can secure our knowledge without resort to metaphysics, because even the commitment to investigate matters through research requires a metaphysical foundation. Albert Einstein and his generation of scientists understood this. They had necessarily read Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy underpinned every position on scientific matters after him. But the current generation of researchers not only don't know Kant, they don't know Karl Popper, or even Francis Bacon - indeed, they seem to know nothing at all about the established practices of the sciences. How else are we to explain utterly incomprehensible remarks like Peter Hotez's recent and bizarre suggestion that "one doesn't typically debate science"...?

A great deal of trouble has been caused by this century-long attempt to brush metaphysics under the carpet. Quite honestly, scientific investigations are extremely difficult to pursue if you cannot distinguish experiment and theory from metaphysics, something that arguably reached peak nonsense in evolutionary psychology and related subjects that throw away all the complexities involved in investigating biology and behaviour over geological time. As I accused in The Mythology of Evolution, these half-metaphysical domains offer the kind of simple pat answers that we also find in Victorian natural historians attributing the perfections of nature to God.

But all this is nothing next to the metaphysics of gender, which is now eclipsing the blurring of scientific research via various forms of 'science-loving' beliefs as the premier metaphysical battle line. On the one hand, there are trans activists espousing gender metaphysics that mean that you can be born a different gender to your biological sex, a gender that exists in the mind of the individual and can only be known by them. I have some sympathy for the radical existentialism being attempted here, and also for its inherent absurdity since I am a lover of the absurd. But I draw the line at death threats, something trans activists have repeatedly engaged in and refused to denounce.

When your metaphysical beliefs tell you that other people have to believe a particular way, you are immediately in the problematic territory that caused the Abrahamic religions to get their bad reputation. 'Believe or die' has been the clarion call of the metaphysical fanatic for millennia. Any attempt to defend against this by evoking the image of 'trans genocide' is a gross insult to the historical victims of genocide, such as the 1994 mass murder of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Supporting trans people in their individuality is a key contemporary challenge - yet this is categorically not achieved by vocal advocates being unable to distinguish between literal and figurative genocide, nor indeed by a refusal to condemn those who purposefully terrorise their political adversaries.

Don't think for a second, however, that the trans activists are the only people whose gender metaphysics have spun out of control. Among their political opponents are gender-critical feminists who assert the absolute truth of biological sex and the utter unreality of gender. While I support their freedom to break out from the strictures of social gender however they wish, it can hardly be said that this position represents truth to the trans activists falsehood. The 'unreality of gender', after all, is in the same boat as the reality-or-otherwise of nations and individuals - if we are to disbelieve social realities, why stop at gender...?

It was difficult to appreciate the vast cultural problems of metaphysics when the topic was 'atheists versus Christians', because each side had their own metaphysical commitments to 'God' or 'Not God' and could only encounter the other side's perspective as madness. Now we have reached an equivalent state regarding the metaphysics of gender as well - nobody seems to have realised that we are facing multiple radically different gender metaphysics. Two of these are visible in the clash between the classical gay and lesbian belief that 'you are born gay' and the new metaphysical belief that 'you are born trans'. Factions in the gay community now claim, not without justification, that foregrounding trans gender metaphysics amounts to 'erasing' gay culture. Small wonder the Rainbow Alliance has been torn asunder by this new factionalism that brings to mind the wars in the wake of the Reformation in 16th and 17th century Europe...

Of course, it doesn't end there. There is also the metaphysical belief of certain Christians that being gay, lesbian, or trans is a 'lifestyle choice', which was in fact a major cultural battleground before gender nonsense took the main stage. We might recall that the New Atheists made a push not that long ago to have us rethink religion so that all religions might be deemed a 'lifestyle choice' - another pointless and offensive metaphysical skirmish to throw onto the ever-growing pile. Honestly, if you can accept that you can be 'born Christian', it's not that big of a stretch to being 'born gay' or 'born trans', yet all of these descriptions fall short of getting to the heart of the matter.

What's frequently in conflict here is somewhat closer to 'family versus individual' - since 'Christian' is an identity built over millennia upon ideal conceptions of the family and, for good or ill, both gay and trans identities were predicated at least in part of their troubled history upon breaking with the family. If you take a visit to a Spencer's store in the US and browse their 'statement' T-shirts you'll immediately see why I can say this ('This is not a phase' is clearly a message intended for parents). The battleground over access to medications for trans people has become so fraught precisely because it continues this undermining of the legitimacy of families.

It is staggering to me that those who argue for the medical autonomy of minors cannot even conceive of the risks involved in handing the responsibilities of parenthood over to government intervention. The trans community urgently needs to think through the problems it actually faces. On the one hand, the power of doctors is denied in the trans invocation of 'assigned at birth'. On the other, the trans community is enslaving itself to medical corporations that are far more interested in selling drugs than in respecting what it means to be trans. All manner of disasters lie not very far along this path.

So what's the truth about how we are born? Can you be 'born Christian'? 'Born gay'? 'Born trans'? It depends upon what you believe, upon your own metaphysical commitments. Sadly, it is precisely because these commitments are untestable beliefs that these disputes have become largely meaningless distractions from far more important political matters. If you are a Christian, your children can be 'born Christian', and if you are gay or trans you can back-project and say you were 'born that way'... but in so much as there is any kind of absolute truth here, it is only that you are born a baby, and what you may discover you are or are not as you grow up has precious little to do with your birth.

The political skirmishes in the early twenty first century that railed against the idea of 'gay' or 'trans' being a 'lifestyle choice' revolved around what kind of legal protections ought to be afforded. That's precisely what made these disputes so bitter. Frankly, acknowledging that these are metaphysical beliefs ought to be enough to see that we must allow these diverse perspectives, because religious freedom is supposedly protected. Today, the category of 'religion' obscures more than just the truth about religious practitioners - it conceals the necessity of recognising all metaphysical beliefs and thus never instituting one set to the exclusion of all others. Teaching young students that there are 1,001 genders is to take one set of metaphysical beliefs and to canonise it - if that would not be an acceptable thing to do with Christian beliefs, it cannot be acceptable for gender metaphysics either.

Freedom, the authentic capacity to set your own purposes, rests upon the demilitarisation of metaphysics. Freedom of religion was the formulation that made sense to the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, but today limiting metaphysical beliefs to 'religion' is causing more trouble than it is worth because the term 'religion' has devolved into merely a generic bogeyman. What is needed now is freedom of metaphysics, and this is next to impossible when gender metaphysics are absurdly couched as a scientific dispute, all while prominent imbeciles insist that the sciences are not in the business of discussion, as if truth emerges from the heads of scientists by divine intervention. What a mess!

You must own your metaphysics, or else your own beliefs will betray you without fail. You - along with every other human - cannot live from moment to moment without embracing a peculiar set of untestable beliefs that underpin everything meaningful about you and those around you. Only when you can do this, when you can acknowledge that your metaphysics make you who you must be will we come close to ending the uncivil war of gender metaphysics, and behind and before it, the cultural skirmishes over religious practice and its alternatives. Freedom of metaphysics is the unrecognised political necessity of our time. Until we appreciate this, there will be nothing but endless, intractable culture wars that harm everyone involved in ways we have not even begun to acknowledge.

The opening image is a detail from Sonia Gechtoff's 1959 Children of Frejus. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down as asked.