After the Future

Boredom, Dionysos, and the Ethic of Authenticity

For people like Trump there is no good or bad; there is only boring and entertaining, and so anything is permitted so long as it is entertaining. The only sin is to be a bore, and it is better to be a boor than a bore.  This is a truth someone like Matt Gaetz well understands. And for the bread-and-circuses constituencies that are not within the Liberal bubble, this sells. People vote for the feeling that certain candidates give them, not for the policies they espouse. NY Times policy-oriented editorials, and the morally earnest editorials of other Liberal newspapers have got to be among the most boring, most unread, and most irrelevant things produced on the planet. I doubt most Liberals like to read them. 

Trump better than any other pol understands how people hate being bored. I remember my feeling of horror when he was elected in 2016, but I remember also feeling, somewhat guiltily, that the next four years, at least, are going to be more interesting than if Hillary had won. Hillary was one of a string of boring politicians Liberals love, perhaps only to be outdone by Al Gore, John Kerry or Michael Dukakis. Like likes like, I guess. 

This is something that Liberals need to understand about themselves--they are toxically boring. They may be right on substance, but they make being right about as unattractive as it could possibly be. To be 'not-boring' does not require that you be a showman or boor like Trump or Gaetz, but to be authentic, i.e., to be a mensch. A mensch can get morally outraged over something that is morally outrageous, but a mensch is never a moralistic scold. 

This is the key to the appeal of Stacy Abrams. She is not boring, and whether or not you agree with her policy preferences, she commands respect because she is interesting, and she is interesting because she is genuinely thoughtful. She is unlike almost every other Dem pol you listen to--even Bernie--spewing the talking points of the moment. Even if what she says isn't that different in substance, it's honestly acquired. It's not the content of what you say so much as the degree to which it is something that comes from an independently thought out understanding of what's called for.

Someone like Joe Biden speaks in political cliches and memes like most conventional pols, but he's won me over to the extent that as much as I saw him as a weathervane on policy, he seems to have thrown all that to the side and we are now seeing a level of honest commitment from him that has required from him a departure from his historical mo. Even though I would not have said this about Joe Biden a year ago, he has a kind of authenticity that comes across in his understated self-presentation. I think he's liberated by the idea that this is the last thing he is going to do. There is no need to triangulate with an eye to the future. 

But the kind of liberalness that gets Al Franken to resign his senate seat or Donald McNeil kicked out of the NY Times or a school renamed in San Francisco is so unattractive because it is so reductively, adolescently moralistic and really just so predictably stupid, and it gives Liberals a bad name for a good reason. And Liberals are for the most part as clueless about that and about how their priggish snowflakiness is so appallingly unattractive to anybody who is not them. I got involved in local Democratic party politics here for a few years about a decade ago, and I was bored to tears by everyone's toxically correct, humorless Liberalness, their obsession with process, their inability to be even in a normal-human-everyday-way interesting. The niceness of it all was suffocating. I'm exaggerating--there were important individual exceptions--but as far as the basic ethos goes, not by much. 

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And so this screedlet sets up what I really want to talk about which is our condition as moderns, which is alienation and boredom, and how this is not a bug but a feature of contemporary life because of the opportunity it affords. I think this is a part, at least, of understanding David Foster Wallace's spiritual project, but awareness of it as a spiritual opportunity traces back to the condition of the ancient Israelites wandering in the Sinai wilderness. Many of them were so bored that a return to slavery in Egypt seemed a better option. 

I've written here for years about how the gradual disembedding shift from outer to inner requires a degradation of the outer. In other words, the current experience we are having of the collapse of almost every traditional norm is dizzying, but necessary for moral cultural progress. Morality must now increasingly come from an interior source because--for most of us, there are some exceptions-- there is no longer a living tradition to provide a trellis on which our souls might grow. And so this presents an opportunity.

Since the axial period, the shift from outer to inner has been the most important development in human evolution. If in the early days of Christendom the spiritually gifted would leave the conventional, i.e., the normal, outside-in, world for the Egyptian wilderness, now the wilderness has come to us.The monk in the desert confronted his demons as a necessary prequel to his finding God. 

But now there is no need to flee into the wilderness, because the wilderness has come to us, and everything depends on how we respond--whether like the Israelites of old wandering in the Sinai wilderness, we long for the fleshpots of Egypt or whether we walk with hope toward a better future, a future that can only be better if we find a way collectively to confront our demons and discover the possibility to live something collectively more authentic, which must be something more inside-out. 

Nobody wants to feel bored and alienated, so it's understandable that the most spirited people search for a way to overcome it. Kids particularly in their teens, the high-spirited ones, take risks and find all kinds of imaginative ways to beat the boredom, but then they settle into a conventional life of career and family that is often marked by quiet desperation. They seek all kinds of ways to bring back some excitement into their lives, and the results at best provide only a temporary fix.  

This is the basic polarity that pop culture sets up in so much of its fiction: on the one hand, the boring and the conventional; on the other, the Dionysian rules breaker unconstrained by convention and norms, someone deeply in touch with the will to power. But are you familiar with Nietzsche's description of it in Zarathustra?--

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving towards the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms towards the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming which knows no satiety, no disgust no weariness: this my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil”, without goal, unless the joy of the circle itself is a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power— and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power— and nothing besides!

There's a lot to unpack here, but it's important to understand here that the Will to Power is a much broader category than just the will to dominate as it's often described. Nietzsche saw that need to dominate as a kind of weakness, as a way to compensate for one's feeling of being nobody by proving himself superior to an inferior. For Nietzsche the will to power was not egoism in this sense, but more a surrender to this monster of chaotic energy and letting it carry you wherever it will. In my opinion this is what Heidegger thought he was doing in embracing Nazism in the early thirties. He misidentified it as the upwelling of the Dionysian rather than what it really was, which was a mob of Last Men living out a resentment-driven adolescent power fantasy. For Nietzsche it was an openness to an amoral, chaotic power at the heart of Being.

For Nietzsche, this was the only remedy for boredom and alienation. He was half right. That chaotic power is the stuff of all human creativity, and human creativity is the only real antidote to boredom and alienation, but it must be organized or channeled in lawful ways. By law here I mean only what all the great Axial traditions pointed to--from the Tao of Lao Tse to Torah of the ancient Israelites to the Logos of Heraclitus and the Stoics. Nietzsche's Will to Power is another name for Deep over which the spirit of the Lord hovers in Genesis. The story of earth evolution is the story of the interpenetration of the Deep with that Spirit, and the human being is the place where they meet and where this interpenetration is effected.  Lawfulness becomes alienation when it becomes an end in itself, when loses its relationship with chaos on the one hand and the dynamic movement of grace on the other.

Nietzsche embraces the Will that Schopenhauer identified as the the malign driving force of earth existence, but unlike Schopenhauer's rejection of it, Nietzsche surrendered to it. But either utterly to reject it or abjectly to surrender to it is a mistake because it lacks metaxis; it must instead be worked with, and to work with it means that you are in relationship with it, and to be in relationship means that you are separate from it. You are in conversation with it, not absorbed into it. 

But the solution for late modern cultural elites, under Nietzsche's influence, has been to surrender to it. This is the choice that all the most compelling, rules-and-conventions-breaking anti-heroes of pop culture make. They are pure, unrepressed, liberated id or or instinct. The rest of us watch such people with a kind of awed, vicarious fascination. It gives us a frisson, as when we watch a horror film or play a video game. We get the feeling without having to live the reality, which in turn only increases our alienation from the actual world we live in. We haven't the courage to live our real lives in such a surrender to chaos, which is why so many admire people like Donald Trump--whose charism derives from his being possessed by the chaos archetype. We disapprove of him and people like him, but secretly we admire them because they are living something larger than the rest of us, and we all want what they have--something bigger, freer, more intensely real. 

I thought this tension was captured well by Breaking Bad's Walter White. We meet him as a decent guy living a life of quiet desperation. He's financially strapped public school science teacher, his wife is sick, and so he takes a leap into the wilderness--literally the New Mexico desert--to discover that he likes walking on the wild side because he's no longer bored or alienated. He meets his demons and he embraces them, and he's never felt so alive. It becomes impossible for him to return to a normal, conventional life. He has opened himself up to the Dionysian and become a Nietzschean uebermensch. He is both admirable and loathsome for viewers, admirable because he is clearly living vitally in a way that most bored, alienated viewers do not experience in their own lives, but loathsome because of all the moral lines he's crossed. We admire him and yet we must condemn him. 

I think this in part explains what we saw on January 6 when Trump supporters stormed the capitol. This is not about people unhappy with Liberal policies, but people who are deeply alienated and want to live something larger. Liberalism with its process and rules and moralistic priggishness represents for them what is small and soulless, and they're not wrong, and I sympathize with their need to reject that. It's just that their remedy is so much worse. But this has always been true during historically decadent periods. Decadence is when a vital cultural impulse dies and there's nothing living to replace it.

Enlightenment rationality was the vital impulse that organized Western societies at least since the late 1600s. It no longer does so, and the fallen stature in the last year of the CDC has become emblematic of that decline in a particularly dramatic way. Science has been reduced to a particular kind of politics, an iffy interpretation of the Real that's part of the Liberal mythos. Enlightenment rationality was always problematic because of its inherent reductiveness and its disdain for the wisdom of the ancestors, but it had energy and it provided a principle around which a society could organize a sense of optimism about the future. It no longer has that energy, and so people are naturally attracted to whatever does have it, and to whatever provides some sense of optimism about the future.

That explains Trump, and it explains Qanon. It's all about energy that presents itself as an alternative to boredom and alienation that define the ethos of the late modern, i.e., the decadent, Liberal Order. That such energy is based purely on delusion is what makes it so destructive.This makes attraction to Trump and cults like Qanon understandable, but it doesn't make such attractions any less destructive. The Trump/Qanon crowd are today that faction of the ancient Israelites who can no longer tolerate the boredom of the desert, and so are inclined to worship golden calves or to head back to Egypt. These are the people who while wandering in the wilderness surrender to their demons rather than learn to work with them, and this leads inevitably to slavery and destruction. 

So is there a vital, authentic remedy? I believe there is. I believe that it's germinating underground--in the depths of the souls of millions of humans of good will--and that at some point it will break the surface and manifest in the daylight world. In the meanwhile we wander in the wilderness, and in our wandering we must hold fast to the hope that we are not lost. As the ancient Israelites had their daily ration of manna, we too are given just enough to get us through the day and to put one foot in front of the other. It is enough for us now simply to resist surrendering to our demons and in doing so to prepare a place for something deeply real, something holy, to grow. This is what the path of authenticity looks like, at least for now.

Anne Applebaum on the Psychology of Collaboration

Why do people collaborate with people they have before seen as their enemy? What explains a Lindsay Graham or a Ted Cruz or a Nikky Haley? Or perhaps the more interesting question is what explains the motives of those who resist--the Liz Cheneys or Adam Kinzigers? Well, there are so many good reasons to do the wrong thing. Applebaum in an Atlantic article appearing last summer lists them:

1. We can use this moment to achieve great things;
2. We can protect the country from the president;
3. I personally will benefit;
4. I must remain close to power;
5. LOL nothing matters;
6. My side might be flawed but the political opposition is so much worse;
7. I am afraid to speak out.

She develops each of these motivations and provides apt examples. I can't think of anything she missed, but my favorite is number five:

LOL nothing matters. Cynicism, nihilism, relativism, amorality, irony, sarcasm, boredom, amusement—these are all reasons to collaborate, and always have been. Marko Martin, a novelist and travel writer who grew up in East Germany, told me that in the 1980s some of the East German bohemia, influenced by then-fashionable French intellectuals, argued that there was no such thing as morality or immorality, no such thing as good or evil, no such thing as right or wrong—“so you might as well collaborate.”

This instinct has an American variation. Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules and watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance, may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. He lies; he cheats; he extorts; he refuses to show compassion, sympathy, or empathy; he does not pretend to believe in anything or to abide by any moral code. He simulates patriotism, with flags and gestures, but he does not behave like a patriot; his campaign scrambled to get help from Russia in 2016 (“If it’s what you say, I love it,” replied Donald Trump Jr., when offered Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton), and Trump himself called on Russia to hack his opponent. And for some of those at the top of his administration, and of his party, these character traits might have a deep, unacknowledged appeal: If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. If the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the president can cheat in elections, then why can’t I? If the president can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn’t I?

This, of course, was the insight of the “alt-right,” which understood the dark allure of amorality, open racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny long before many others in the Republican Party. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary critic, recognized the lure of the forbidden a century ago, writing about the deep appeal of the carnival, a space where everything banned is suddenly allowed, where eccentricity is permitted, where profanity defeats piety. The Trump administration is like that: Nothing means anything, rules don’t matter, and the president is the carnival king.

And number 6 is also particularly apt--

My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse. When Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of collaborationist France, took over the Vichy government, he did so in the name of the restoration of a France that he believed had been lost. Pétain had been a fierce critic of the French Republic, and once he was in control, he replaced its famous creed—Liberté, égalité, fraternité, or “Liberty, equality, fraternity”—with a different slogan: Travail, famille, patrie, or “Work, family, fatherland.” Instead of the “false idea of the natural equality of man,” he proposed bringing back “social hierarchy”—order, tradition, and religion. Instead of accepting modernity, Pétain sought to turn back the clock.

By Pétain’s reckoning, collaboration with the Germans was not merely an embarrassing necessity. It was crucial, because it gave patriots the ability to fight the real enemy: the French parliamentarians, socialists, anarchists, Jews, and other assorted leftists and democrats who, he believed, were undermining the nation, robbing it of its vitality, destroying its essence. “Rather Hitler than Blum,” the saying went—Blum having been France’s socialist (and Jewish) prime minister in the late 1930s. One Vichy minister, Pierre Laval, famously declared that he hoped Germany would conquer all of Europe. Otherwise, he asserted, “Bolshevism would tomorrow establish itself everywhere.”

...

The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about—outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America—are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance.” Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame, has also described his belief that “militant secularists” are destroying America, that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” Whatever evil Trump does, whatever he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you are convinced we are living in the End Times, then anything the president does can be forgiven.

This blog is largely dedicated to a defense of "axiality" in a secular postmodernist milieu. Numbers 5 and 6 in Applebaum's list describe two particularly potent anti-axial factors that are shaping the contemporary postmodern ethos--cynicism and fanaticism.

I have argued that religion isn't going away and that the only real question is whether bad religion or good religion will come to dominate American society. My definition of good religion is one that is based in hope and that frees people to  become bigger and more open to the world and its complexity. My definition of a bad religion is one that is based in fear that closes people down and starts making judgments about who's in and who's out. I think it should be clear which category the religiosity of Pence, Pompeo, and Barr fall.

The axial religions from Taoism to Christianity assert that there is an underlying lawfulness or metaphysical foundation that determines what is most deeply real, that there is Deep Truth and Deep Goodness that transcends and "corrects" the codes of customary cultures, which at best crudely approximate this Deep Lawfulness. That there is such a metaphysical foundation is one thing, but the impulse to reduce it in some dogmatic or fundamentalistic way is to make a parody of it. The Logos or Tao is the Deep Real, but we never possess it or grasp it in its entirety. It is a dynamic, enlarging force in history whose impulses must be discerned anew in every generation.

No doubt Pence, Pompeo, and Barr think they are doing that, so who am I to say that they're wrong? Well, by their fruits you will know them, and January 6 reveals Trumpism for what it has always been. More than anything else it represents the fruit of Trump collaborationism. It was an exercise in fanatical delusion and mob violence, and you'd think that Mike Pence, among the three might have learned that when the crowd chanted for his lynching. But I doubt it. See number 3 and 4 above. If Pence, Pompeo, or Barr are truly men of faith, they have yet to show any signs of it. They are just run-of-the-mill religious fanatics.