Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it is no longer by any means clear who is leading whom. So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved, because the Democratic Party is, for them, an unthinkable alternative. The result is that they have been sucked, cognitively and psychologically, into their own alternative reality, a psychedelic collage made up of what Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to Mr. Trump, famously called “alternative facts.”
Wehner's essay references Allan Bloom's 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, at the time a critique of the postmodern Left's epistemic nihilism. Wehner's point here is that what Bloom complained about then is now a far more significant problem for the Right than for the Left, at least insofar as it threatens the stability of the political and social order.
I agree, but it's not that the Cultural Left has moved on from epistemic nihilism. Nihilism is the most influential shaper of our public metaphysical imaginary, no matter what one's personal beliefs might be, no matter whether one leans to the cultural and political Right or Left.
While most decent people don't think of themselves as nihilists, nihilism is so much in the air they breathe that they are unaware of how it influences their thinking and behavior. So the next thing you know a perfectly decent evangelical Christian finds himself voting for an uber-libertine in Donald Trump, believing his lies, and storming the Capitol to save his presidency. And perfectly decent, morally earnest college students find themselves marching to justify Hamas's butchery in southern Israel. It's the most morally earnest, whether they're aware of it or not, who are the most impassioned agents of a nihilism they would insist they don't believe in.
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The world is run by the ambitious, not the wise. I understand that. And the ambitious have no need of wisdom or knowledge except that which serves their ambitions. And yet humans don't want to live in chaos to which the unchecked ambitions of the ambitious lead us. So in a world where transcendent values have no public legitimacy we are given two basic choices: (1) either the Hobbesian state of nature in which a violent anarchy reigns, and where life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', or (2) the Hobbesian Leviathan that produces a 'brave new world' of frightened, flat-souled Last Men, distracted by bread and circuses--a lot like the world satirized in WALL-E. On the globals scale, Neoliberalism is producing the worst of both.
Is there no alternative. I, of course, think there is, but we are reluctant to choose it for complicated reasons. It comes down to this:
Every society needs forms and norms, but the healthiest society has norms that are aligned with Reality, that is, with the way things are, not with the way we wish them to be. And yet because there is a transcendental dimension to Reality, it must be a part of what a healthy society seeks to be in alignment with. (See diagram below.) Because this affirmation of a transcendent dimension is so difficult for us to enshrine in any vital way in our public discourse today, we cannot affirm it except as individuals. But as individuals we are divided and conquered.
A broadly accepted sense of Justice as metaphysical balance is essential for a vital sense of social order. Even Machiavelli would agree with that. (See Note 1) Without a center pole to organize and orient our navigation of the world, we spin purposelessly and allow those with the coarsest ambitions to drag us where they may. That's why the idea of justice embraced by the intersectional Left is so useless for us today. It's a symptom of what ails us rather than any kind of cure for it. Whatever its good intentions, it has very little to do with Reality--either in terms of the way the world works or in its relationship to Justice as an inspiring transcendental. It's metaphysical foundations are nihilistic, and its program drags us toward chaos.
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I make the case for this in the informal series I've been writing on and off called A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity. The basic argument I make largely relies on the structure diagramed below. Every civilization needs a vertical pole as part of its metaphysical imaginary. But the intellectual elite in North Atlantic societies for complicated historical-cultural reasons beginning in the 14th century amputated what had been its vertical pole since the mid first millennium BCE. It remained as a phantom limb so long as religious faith--in a fideistic form that rejected Greek metaphysics--remained robust. But it was just a question of time before the loss of this limb would be broadly felt in practical ways, and that time came in the mid-19th century.
After Darwin, any idea of transcendent dimension interpenetrating with the immanent was fairly quickly supplanted--in about 50-60 years--by a wholly horizontal, i.e., wholly immanent, cosmology. Henceforth the imaginary that dominated elite discourse essentially framed the human project as metaphysically meaningless, as an utterly random production of an impersonal, cruel, and purposeless universe that eventually ends with a whimper in heat death. To believe anything else was either naive or medieval.
Now most Americans--at least 85%--believe that there is some kind of God or transcendent dimension or order despite what the scientific narrative tells them about the origin and history of the cosmos. The 15% who don't largely comprises overclass elites. Many of these Americans among the 85% might not go to church, but they don't believe the narrative of meaninglessness, even if they don't have a better narrative to replace it. Some, of course, on the religious Right completely reject this narrative and the science that promotes such meaninglessness. But while those on the non-atheistic Left embrace science, they are capable of only weakly affirming some vague understanding about there possibly being a transcendent dimension, but who really knows? And certainly those crazy religious people can't be right.
So among the non-religiously fanatical, vagueness reigns, and vagueness always loses when it comes up against fanaticism on one side and scientistic dogma on the other. So, if you have to choose, it seems more respectable to lean toward scientistically based meaninglessness. It's as conventional an attitude on the cosmopolitan Left as believing in climate change. No one will challenge you at a cocktail party in New York or Seattle if you favorably quote Sagan, Hawking, or Dennett in making your point. However, describing yourself as a Neoplatonist and quoting Plotinus or Meister Eckhart at such a gathering would come across as bizarre, to say the least.
So it's easier, especially for young people, to embrace the meaninglessness. Some read Ayn Rand or come up with some other pop-Nietzschean ideas about making their own meaning in a meaningless world or whatever. But the naiveté of such adaptations should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two minutes. And besides, there was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum. And Ayn Rand is no Nietzsche.
Along these lines, I had a conversation recently with a physics major who told me she cannot believe in free will, but chooses to live 'as if' she has it. That exemplifies the kind of cleverness that typifies the postmodern way of coping with its nihilism. We play all kinds of tricks on ourselves so that we may eat our cake and have it to. Cleverness in this sense is a poor substitute for intellectual honesty, but it passes in a world where nihilism is our public metaphysics. So, you know, whatever. Who am I to judge what lies you tell yourself? Whatever gets you through the night, right?
So lying to oneself is not just something people on the Right do. Many on Left do it too, but with a sophistication that avoids criticism because it's attuned to the postmodern nihilistic aesthetic. If you challenge them by saying it makes no sense, they reply "Of course it makes no sense. Nothing does. Why should I care about making sense?"
Now there are still some Rationalist Materialists, you know the kind who 'believe' in science. They want to insist that their commitment to 'reason' and 'objectivity' absolves them of any accusations of nihilism. They just "follow the science". How can that be nihilistic? They believe in objective Truth. But here's where the postmodern thinkers do us a service. They have taken the presuppositions of Rationalist Materialism and pushed them to their logical, i.e., nihilistic, conclusions. There's no such thing as knowable objective truth, they correctly insist--there are only interpretations.
But are some interpretations better than others? No--if there are no criteria by which you can judge better and worse. But yes, if there is some scale that measures deeper and truer, and more superficial and less adequately true. The point is that none of our propositions are absolutely true, because absolute truth is unknowable, but that doesn't mean that we can't move toward a deeper appropriation of the truth and talk about it in ways that make sense.
As illustrated in the diagram below, if there is no vertical dimension to orient our thinking on the horizontal dimension, then there can be no way to evaluate better and worse, truer and falser. Maybe on a purely utilitarian level, but not in any way that truly matters for the way we live meaningful lives.
If there are no depths and heights, there are only surfaces, and if there are only surfaces, there are only shifting habitual patterns of perception that are 'truthy', but never really true in any profound sense. This was Hume's insight three hundred years ago, and postmodern thinkers are simply putting a point on it. What we think is truth, they more or less say, is whatever we all agree it is, and what's fashionably truthy one moment isn't in another. What is fashionable on the Left is rejected by the Right, and vice versa. And truth becomes whatever whoever has the power to force it on those who disagree.
So here we are. This is really what the culture wars are all about.
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But truth as fashion is not the only possibility. In my Genealogy Series I attempt to make the case for human reason having to operate on both horizontal and vertical dimension as illustrated below. The vertical dimension is what makes meaning in a deeply satisfying way a possibility.
Now let me say that while accepting this imaginary is not the same thing as having religious faith, it is not incompatible religious faith. Indeed it diagrams the Christian metaphysical imaginary bequeathed by the early Church Fathers and accepted in both the East and West until the Reformation. I would also argue that it maps what Taoism, Vendantic Hinduism, the esoteric branches of Islam and Judaism affirm. But I'm more interested in retrieving an imaginary that does not require faith or confessional commitments.
In other words, in a pluralistic, globalizing society, I believe it's possible to develop a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary with a vertical or transcendental dimension. It will be accepted to the degree that all people of good will would find it reasonable and desirable because restorative of cultural vitality and as a robust alternative to the meaninglessness and nihilism that is currently hegemonic in our public discourse.
I believe the embrace of such an imaginary is inevitable at some point in the future, but not in my lifetime. But until that happens, the nihilism of Rationalist Materialism that currently shapes our collective metaphysical imaginary rules by default. Our social and political disorder are its symptoms. I suspect we must (continue to?) go through a collective dark night of the spirit that strips away all our delusions to clear the way for the emergence of something new. In the meanwhile we sow seeds in the hope they may germinate in the future when the time is right.
In the long run, the only real cure is to re-member the amputated vertical limb. Until then we all spin in ontological dizziness in a world without a center. BTW, I envision such a re-membering as a cultural project, not a political one. It cannot be forced. If we shift to a social imaginary that has regained its center, it will happen in much the same way that we shifted from a geocentric idea of the cosmos to the post-Copernican one--it will just make sense to anyone who thinks about it, and in time will become common sense. As our ideas change, our work in the world changes. And as our work in the world changes our ideas change, and the next thing you know, as our ancestors became no longer medievals but moderns, so will we become no longer moderns, but whatever comes next.
Yes, even after such a transition, the world will continue to be run by the ambitious, not the wise. But the ambitious won't be allowed to run amok as they do now. There will be resources within the culture that will allow sane people of good will to push back. The problem for us now is that most people of good will have no deeply held convictions, and to the degree that they do, they are fragmented, divided and conquered in so many ways. And so with no common ground on which people of good will can set their feet to push back, an impassioned bad will takes the field unopposed. And I'm not as worried about how that bad will manifests in MAGA as I am as in how it manifests in the C-suites of the financial and techno-capitalist overclass.
Note on this diagram. I have no expectations that this is more confusing than helpful for most people who look at it unless they are already familiar with the presuppositions that undergird it. But I'd like to emphasize that I don't see this diagram as describing a static situation. The movement from ignorance to knowledge is dynamic, experiential, and developmental. As is the movement toward self transcendence. Wisdom as Phronesis and Sophia is a function of the experience of a movement away from ignorance on the horizontal dimension, and delusional, self destructive thinking and behavior on the vertical dimension.
Both axes describe growth upward toward becoming a more densely, i.e., a more fully realized or formed or individuated Self, which in turn leads to the development of capabilities to see and understand the depths of things on the horizontal dimension, the world around us. So I mean for this diagram to suggest that a human life well lived requires the integration of the vertical with the horizontal in whatever measure that is possible for each of us within the limits of our particular existential situations. That growth toward integration changes the way we experience and imagine Reality. Its fruits are apparent in the generally good judgments we make as we grow in wisdom in both dimensions. As one becomes wiser, he or she makes better judgments both in practical matters as well as in matters of cognizing truth in art, religion, and philosophy. Nobody knows everything, but some people get it right more than they get it wrong, and there's a reason for that.
In previous posts I talk about four criteria that define what a healthy society's metaphysical imaginary should comprise: Here's a summary:
Scope: The best metaphysical imaginary has the broadest scope on both the horizontal and vertical axes. Premodern societies have more scope on the vertical axis and less scope on the horizontal, but it could be argued that premoderns had a better grip on reality than moderns because they were not as profoundly alienated from the world as moderns are. We moderns know more "about" the world, but we are at the same time more disconnected from its vitality, and in that sense have less of a grip on it. A remedy for us now is to restore the individual's ability to get a better grip on reality, or in Neoplatonic terms, to participate more deeply in it. This requires self-transformation in both a psychological-therapeutic sense and in a spiritual sense. We need to expand our scope on both the horizontal and the vertical, but it's more important now that we expand on the vertical because we desperately need more wisdom to deal with the crises looming on the horizontal as it expands especially in the domain of information technologies--AI and VR.
Coherence: The best metaphysical imaginary therefore integrates in a coherent way what it knows on both the vertical and the horizontal. This is the task of philosophy. As we learn more on the horizontal, we need to integrate it on the vertical. As more people take seriously the importance of growing in wisdom, i.e., as a new participatory epistemology and ontology becomes increasingly legitimated, humans will find ways to understand and interpret what we know as knowledge expands on the horizontal in ways that help us to get a healthier grip on the world. We need science, but we need its findings now more than ever to be wisely interpreted in such a way that it serves the deepest human needs, not the needs of shareholders.
Adaptability: The best metaphysical imaginary is in a continuous process of expanding and deepening our grip on reality. Coherence requires the development of the ability to adapt what is known on the horizontal to what has broad consensus on a restored vertical, and vice versa. As new knowledge becomes legitimated on either axis, it is likely to challenge existing imaginal models on either the vertical or horizontal, and so the Wise celebrate as progress (rather than resist as disruption) the need to revise the imagined models because our doing so effects the expansion and deepening of our grip on reality. Self-transcendence on the Vertical axis means that our model of reality is continuously developing as we become wiser, and analogously our expansion of knowledge on the horizontal requires a continuous adaptability in our thinking and knowing on both horizontal and vertical axes. The best metaphysical imaginary is a dynamic, evolving system. But such evolution is healthy only so long as it retains a creative tension between the horizontal and the vertical.
Richness: The best metaphysical imaginary enriches, complexifies, and deepens our experience of the mystery of Being--or what I call the Living Real. When a society loses touch with the Living Real, it sickens and it must find a remedy. It should be obvious to anyone--even those who are best adapted to living in a late-modern milieu, i.e., educated, affluent cosmopolitans, that late Modernity has produced a sick, spiritually impoverished society for most people who are living in it. The problem of spiritual poverty cannot be addressed from within Liberalism because Liberalism has created the problem, but neither can it be addressed by the Religious Conservatives because while they want to restore the vertical axis, their solutions are incoherent and maladapted to the reality on the horizontal axis. An important task for 'richness' is to develop some consensus about what a rich, deeply human life comprises. Right now, as a matter of cultural consensus, we haven't a clue.
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Note 1: As Charles Taylor points out in his A Secular Age:
Even Machiavelli still has an understanding of this kind when it comes to Republican forms. There is a certain equilibrium-in-tension which needs to be maintained between the “grandi” and the people, if these forms are to survive. In healthy polities, this equilibrium is maintained by the play or rivalry and mutual surveillance between the orders. But there are certain developments which threaten this, such as an excessive interest on the part of citizens in their private wealth and property. This constitutes “corruzione”, and unless dealt with in time, and severely, will bring about the end of republican liberty. There is a causal attribution here: wealth undermines liberty; but the term used, with its strong normative resonances, shows that the understanding of society is being organized around a concept of normal form. (p. 182).