Alastair Crooke
Can civilisations pull together the fragments of older insights and knowing to give the context by which to make moral discourse intelligible again?
Outline of a talk given at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, 7 Sept 2026
The global future is often framed as being that of a muli-polar or multi-nodal world, with the implicit assumption that states would get along better - and would resolve their differences more easily through discussion than through war.
This was a meme that was in wide circulation in the Pre-WW1 years. Books were written to suggest that war could not happen: The definitive text on this concept, originally published in 1910 as The Great Illusion, became an international bestseller.
Its author, Norman Angell, argued that because nations relied heavily on a highly intertwined global trading system, the economic cost of war would drastically outweigh any potential gains. He asserted that a victorious nation would suffer just as much economic ruin as the vanquished - making the traditional concept of military conquest obsolete. His argument was popularly interpreted as making war "impossible".
His argument proved fallacious; the Great War duly erupted.
Today, the idea of some multi-polarity interplay persists, but the threat of war remains and is heightened by the West's refusal to hear - or understand - what civilisational sovereign states are saying. This inability to listen with empathetic engagement lies at the root of the catastrophic western Intelligence misreadings of Iran and Russia. And the casting of China as so 'other' to make it a closed-book to western ears.
In his influential 1981 book, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment project cut Western man off from his roots in tradition, but had failed to produce a binding morality based on Reason alone. Consequently, many of those who live in the West live a world of "moral chaos and fragmentation, in which 'chaotic', disintegrative forces have very nearly obliterated true moral inquiry from European culture".
What is important to understand is that MacIntyre's "moral chaos and fragmentation" is deliberately fostered to weaken national, community and religious attachment - precisely in order to target and weaken national cohesion and civilisational sovereignty.
MacIntyre's argument is that it is cultural tradition alone, and its moral tales, that provide context to terms such as good, justice and telos:
"In the absence of traditions, moral debate is out of joint and becomes a theatre of illusions in which simple indignation and mere protest occupy centre stage".
"Lines are drawn early, and participants rush to take sides. But in taking sides they appear to render themselves incapable of hearing the other... Everyone feels the heat, but no one sees the light", MacIntyre underlines.
What we possess today, MacIntyre suggests, are nothing more than mere fragments of an older tradition (Heroic Society). These fragments simply are too sparse, since our moral discourse, which uses terms like good and justice and duty, has been robbed of the context that would make it intelligible. In other words, it places the virtue of the heroic, Homeric world beyond western reach.
Lines are drawn. There is a rush to take sides. The 'chaotic', disintegrative forces of today have very nearly obliterated moral inquiry from European culture. The more striking feature of moral debates is their tendency never to reach resolution.
When all moral judgments - stripped of context - become little more than expressions of preference, of attitude or feeling - emotivism, in other words - debate is out of joint; it is transformed into a theatre of narratives in which indignation and polarity take centre stage.
But, in taking such emotive partisan sides, actors render themselves incapable of hearing The Other. 'Others', then, whether Russia, Iran or China, simply become invisible by the norms of this approach - as their ways of orienting human attention to the world are quite distinct.
Thus, we can (and are) being led to war by narrative messaging specifically intended to compel humans to spatialise the world in a certain way, without our being aware of it. We are being led to an Enlightenment-driven 'one world' in which all 'Otherness' - whether Russian, Iranian or Chinese - becomes invisible by the norms, the mode of presence, by which we approach 'things'.
In this 'war', the world is turned 'upside down'. Most people are not actively spatialising the world around them, but seemingly have become content to have it spatialised for them. Narratives are kneaded and rolled out before our eyes. This is how the machine works. Most people in the West believe themselves to have a firm handle on reality - facts, evidence, and conclusions. But effectively, we face a structure that purposefully turns that imagined grasp on reality inside out.
In the machine, the 'spatialisation' is backwards: First, they receive the messaging, then they knead and roll out a narrative of 'reality' like dough, until it fits the design. And if required, they put the Media machine into reverse and knead that same reality in the opposite direction.
So how can sovereign civilisations escape the 'MacIntyre trap' ? Can civilisations pull together the fragments of older insights and knowing to give the context by which to make moral discourse intelligible again?
To climb out of the Fustian space of mechanistic thinking and manipulated narrative is not easy or simple. Quite the contrary. But notice what it requires - a change in our mode of presence; how we dispose our attention toward the world.
How you dispose of consciousness towards the world, neurologist Iain McGilchrist tells us, is crucial: For, the way that you do it, alters and determines what you will find and understand. And as we spatialise the world around us differently, perception widens and the (until then hidden) spaciousness of what lies beyond comes into view.
A recovery of older ways of thinking - the 'all-at-once, all together' way of thinking (thinking through image) and other sources of cognition - can open a path to mediation between the seemingly oppositional polarities of the subjective and the objective which mechanical rationality so often leaves hardened into unresolvable impedimenta. The apophatic approach too can blunt the sharp edges of conceptual thought by introducing 'betweenness' finding its space between sharp angular argument. These modes of thought possess logic of their own that stands apart from the Enlightenment rigidities.
This is the lesson that Iran and its re-discovery of ancient thought is providing to the world today.
Albert Einstein once noted that "the rational mind is a servant; but the intuitive mind is a precious gift. Our world, however, honours the servant - but forgets [ignores] the gift".