When the Critic Proves the Point
A Response to a Critic Who Demonstrated Exactly What I Set Out to Show
This is not one I thought I would be writing so soon, but the timing is frankly to great an opportunity to miss. Within hours of my post “Scarred Before It Served: A Wall, a City, and the Culture That Celebrates Destruction” going live, the very point it was trying to make was made for it by one of the responses, almost as if the essay itself had written its own critique.
My essay examined the moral consequences of contempt for creation, using the defacement of a newly constructed building as a microcosm of broader cultural decay, tracing a pattern that stretches from streets to media, from architecture to education, where public spaces are desecrated, craftsmanship mocked, excellence vilified, and life itself trivialised; it argued, at some length and with insistence, that when society tolerates derision and destruction, reason, creation, and achievement are endangered, and that the human responsibility to observe, understand, and uphold standards of value, skill, and life itself cannot be evaded, even if most choose to avert their eyes and pretend there is nothing to see.
The response, from a critic of the intellectual class, while generous in recognising the craft of the writing, read the essay almost entirely through the lens of Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism, turning the work into a mirror of a template rather than engaging with the argument it made. In essence, it suggested that my lament was nostalgia for lost cultural purity, demonised intellectuals, appealed to a morally aware majority, emphasised action over reflection, and framed the “good” as besieged, requiring some corrective force. Beyond that, it claimed my treatment of Left and Right created a false symmetry, that the essay exhibited an obsession with hidden plots, anti-intellectualism, permanent warfare, selective populism, and contempt for weakness, before finally shifting responsibility to structural forces, claiming managerialism, commodification, and market pressures were the primary drivers of the derision and destruction I documented.
Each of these claims, however, collapses under scrutiny.
1. Modernity vs. decadence
Eco: Fascism glorifies tradition and rejects modernity.
Critic’s summary: My essay expresses nostalgia for lost craftsmanship and implies a rejection of modernity.
Rebuttal: My argument does not reject modernity; it rejects decadence. Condemning contempt for skill, craft, and life is a defence of reason, achievement, and the proper application of human intelligence. To assert that admiration for excellence implies fascism is to erase distinctions between what is good and trivial, competent and inept. Objective standards exist, and recognising them is rational evaluation, not sentimental longing.
2. Intellectuals and ideology
Eco: Fascism demonises intellectuals as corruptors of society.
Critic’s summary: The essay locates moral corruption in professors and cultural elites.
Rebuttal: Professors, journalists, and cultural figures are criticised only when they abandon rigorous thought in favour of ideological indoctrination. This is not anti-intellectualism; it is a defence of intellect itself. Ignoring the betrayal of reason by those entrusted with shaping minds is complicity, not prudence. The essay targets the abandonment of thought, not thought itself.
3. Responsibility, not victimhood
Eco: Fascism appeals to a humiliated majority, presenting the people as morally superior victims.
Critic’s summary: Ordinary citizens are depicted as morally aware victims of contempt.
Rebuttal: The work indicts moral passivity, not class or social position. Refusal to act or judge in the presence of contempt is itself a moral failure. There is no populist flattery, only a call to moral vigilance.
4. Reflection, not action
Eco: Fascism prizes decisive action over reflection.
Critic’s summary: The essay glorifies the “merciless Right” as corrective, implying action is preferable to reflection.
Rebuttal: The essay does not glorify destructive action. The “merciless Right” is described analytically, not endorsed. Reflection, judgment, and moral discernment are the only actions it prescribes. The purpose is not purgation but observation: understanding decay and its ethical implications.
5. The besieged good
Eco: Fascism frames the world as a battle of absolute good vs evil.
Critic’s summary: The essay presents creation as besieged, implying it requires a saviour.
Rebuttal: The “good” is under siege, objectively observable in acts of destruction, ridicule, and the celebration of harm. Defaced walls, vilified achievement, and the online applause of murder are not metaphorical; they are evidence that moral reality is under assault.
6. Symmetry of critique
Eco: Fascism justifies one side’s violence by portraying the other as inherently destructive.
Critic’s summary: Denouncing both Left and Right creates a false symmetry, implying excusal of the Right.
Rebuttal: Both Left and Right are critiqued where they undermine reason: the Left through relativism and moral inversion, the Right through authoritarian impulses. Recognising both as errors does not create false moral symmetry; it is an accurate identification of multiple sources of unreason.
7. Causation, not conspiracy
Eco: Fascism exaggerates conspiracies, seeing decay as orchestrated by a cabal.
Critic’s summary: Locating decay in “architects” of culture implies conspiratorial thinking.
Rebuttal: There is no hidden cabal, only observable consequences of ideas. Teach generations to see virtue as oppressive, beauty as elitist, and achievement as tyrannical, and contempt becomes instinctive. Structural pressures, managerialism, and markets may exacerbate outcomes, but they cannot produce deliberate moral corruption. Philosophy, ideology, and moral choice are the real causes.
8. Intellectual standards
Eco: Fascism disparages intellect, replacing reason with dogma.
Critic’s summary: Critique of professors suggests hostility toward intellect.
Rebuttal: The essay defends reason, aesthetic judgement, and moral discernment. Pseudo-intellectualism, relativism, and the reduction of thought to sophistication are the true threats to intellect. To confuse the defence of standards with anti-intellectualism is a failure of critical thought.
9. Moral conflict, not warfare
Eco: Fascism frames existence as perpetual battle.
Critic’s summary: The struggle depicted is interpreted as societal warfare.
Rebuttal: The struggle described is ethical and epistemic, not literal war. Framing it as warfare misrepresents the essay; it is the tension between reason and unreason, creation and destruction.
10. Class, populism, and cowardice
Eco: Fascism flattens moral responsibility into mass identity and denigrates perceived weakness.
Critic’s summary: The essay supposedly appeals to the people and despises the weak.
Rebuttal: Contempt is reserved for moral failure, not social groupings. Ethical courage and willingness to judge are the criteria, not identity or social status.
Economics and structural forces
The critic emphasised managerialism, commodification, and market pressures as the root causes of the decay I documented, claiming cultural failure is systemic and inevitable, that the contempt, derision, and mockery I described are nothing more than the mechanical outcome of incentives, structures, and impersonal forces rather than the result of conscious choice. The essay, by contrast, recognises that economic and institutional structures do influence behaviour; they shape incentives, impose constraints, redirect attention, and create environments where craftsmanship, careful thought, or aesthetic consideration can be deprioritised, ignored, or actively discouraged, but to treat them as the origin of contempt is to invert cause and effect. Graffiti on a freshly painted wall, public mockery of skill, the casual applause of harm online, and the celebration of mediocrity are acts of conscious moral choice, deliberate acts informed by philosophy, by values, by the way an individual has trained themselves, or failed to train themselves, to see the world. Market pressures may make it easier to ignore quality, managerialism may reward efficiency over care, and commodification may incentivise spectacle over substance, but none of this compels a person to destroy, deride, or devalue what is good.
Structures can create a terrain in which negligence or indifference is more likely, but they do not dictate the choices people make when confronted with the tangible results of creation. Individuals still decide whether to honour or deface, to cultivate or deride, to acknowledge achievement or treat it as irrelevant. To claim that the economic or structural context is the primary cause is to absolve humans of moral responsibility, to shift the blame from those who act, or fail to act, onto faceless systems, and by doing so, to erase the essential role of ethical judgment in shaping culture. Structural pressures can explain patterns of behaviour, they can contextualise tendencies toward compromise or laziness, they can clarify why certain environments reward the trivial and punish the excellent, but they cannot replace the moral agency that chooses contempt, derision, or destruction over care, attention, and respect.
In short, economic and institutional forces provide conditions, but they do not generate moral corruption on their own. Systems may nudge, push, or create pressures, but they cannot remove the responsibility that each individual bears when faced with the option to honour or violate standards of value. Recognising structures is important; failing to recognise agency is fatal. Contempt remains a deliberate ethical decision, guided by the mind and the values of the person who acts. Structures may shape the stage, but they do not write the play.
In effect, the response proves the essay’s point: intellectuals cannot engage with moral seriousness without pathologising it. To identify decay is read as a threat; to defend standards is framed as proto-fascist. The wall, scarred and silent, remains indifferent to ideology, a testament that creation, achievement, and reason endure only when defended and acknowledged.
The irony is instructive. The critique enacts the reflex I documented: moral clarity is equated with authoritarianism, judgment with danger, recognition of decay with complicity. Moral observation is pathologised, and the defence of value is treated as threat.
And so, one must offer thanks where it is due. By reflexively framing moral observation as a threat and the defence of standards as authoritarian, the critic has done precisely what I predicted: demonstrated the very pattern of evasion, misreading, and moral abdication that the essay identifies. In their zeal to interpret careful reflection as proto-fascism, they have provided a perfect, unintentional case study, showing exactly why the vigilance I call for is necessary, and why, absent it, even the intellectual class cannot face decay without recoiling in panic. The wall, unbowed and scarred, watches on, confirming all that the essay set out to prove.
I apologise if this reads rushed; it was. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.
And you will note i have expressly used AI to comment, making the dialogue transparent.
On Moral Seriousness and the Grammar of Decay
Alex, I want first to acknowledge the eloquence and conviction of your replies. They demonstrate the very moral seriousness your original essay called for, and they also clarify our real disagreement. It’s not about whether contempt and derision exist — they plainly do — but about how we understand their origins, and what moral language is adequate to name them.
Your position is that moral corruption begins in personal failure: in the abdication of judgment, the refusal to see, the collapse of care. Structural pressures — markets, managerialism, commodification — may set the scene, but the act remains a matter of choice. The graffiti artist, the cynical pundit, the sneering student are all conscious moral agents, not puppets of system. To claim otherwise, you argue, is to excuse moral cowardice. “Structures shape the stage,” you write, “but they do not write the play.”
It’s an elegant metaphor, but it rests on an older philosophical inheritance — what we might call moral voluntarism — the belief that will precedes world. It’s the conviction that moral choice exists in a space untouched by history or culture. My difficulty with this view isn’t that it’s wrong to affirm agency; it’s that it mistakes the medium in which agency moves. Critical realism, my own standpoint, holds that structure, culture, and agency are interdependent strata of reality. We are not puppets, but neither are we free-floating souls. We act through moral vocabularies we did not invent, within institutions that reward some virtues and penalise others. The will may choose, but it chooses among meanings already historically shaped.
That is why I framed your essay through Eco’s Ur-Fascism — not as accusation, but as description of a recurring grammar of moral imagination. Eco identified a pattern that emerges whenever societies feel disoriented: the longing for order, the language of decay and purity, the identification of elites as corruptors, the call to moral vigilance. None of these are “fascism” in themselves; they are emotional and rhetorical structures through which moral seriousness can, under pressure, harden into moral closure.
Your rebuttals restate those very structures. You argue that to recognise decay is to be accused of authoritarianism; that defending standards is itself treated as threat; that moral observation has been pathologised by an evasive intellectual class. In doing so, you complete the circle: the critic becomes the exhibit, the act of interpretation becomes proof of moral corruption. It’s a brilliant rhetorical move, but it also closes the very space of reflection you say you wish to preserve. If critique can only confirm guilt, then reason has already been moralised into orthodoxy.
My point was never that moral clarity is dangerous; only that moral clarity without reflexivity becomes dogma. The task is not to abolish standards but to understand how standards arise — who defines them, under what conditions, and to what ends. To describe contempt as a social pattern is not to absolve it, but to illuminate the forces that make contempt feel natural. The critical imagination complements, rather than negates, the moral one.
You say the wall, scarred and silent, is indifferent to ideology — a testament to endurance. Perhaps. But it’s also a social artefact: a product of economic relations, aesthetic values, and public investment. Its scars are material and symbolic, marks of a civilisation that has made creation both possible and precarious. To see those marks sociologically is not to recoil from morality, but to extend it — to ask what kind of world breeds such contempt, and how agency and structure conspire in its making.
So let me offer my own closing irony. The exchange between us doesn’t prove that moral seriousness must be pathologised; it shows that moral seriousness, if it is to remain alive, must also be self-reflective. The courage to judge and the humility to question are not opposites but twins. Without the first, civilisation decays; without the second, it condemns in order to feel pure.
The wall, then, stands for both of us: as witness to the need for care, and as reminder that every act of care takes place within history — scarred, situated.