Hart doesn’t call it the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, but what he describes here as ‘modernity’—I think what he means is its terminus in ‘late modernity’ or ‘early postmodernity’—is what I’m talking about when I use the phrase:
PSYCHE: I fear—I dread—a nihilistic narrative reaching its ineluctable nihilistic terminus. Whatever else modernity is, good and bad alike, it’s most definitely also the project of a fully realized nihilism, in the most neutral philosophical sense of that term: the belief that there’s no eternal scale or realm or horizon of meaning and moral verity, and that instead the will in each of us stands before a universe devoid of any intrinsic structure of moral truths, and is now at liberty to create or destroy values as it chooses.
No doubt, in its dawn, this reduction of lived existence to the dialectic between an objectively meaningless cosmos and a subjectively self-creating will must have felt like a kind of emancipation; but it has always also been the metaphysical accomplice of a project of setting loose the will to power, now unencumbered by any sense of anything inviolable or sacred, or any sense of the self’s dependency upon a higher order of truth.
It was inevitable, really, that in time the mechanistic method should mutate into—or, perhaps, be revealed as—a metaphysics as well, and an ideology, and a program not merely for investigating nature as if it were a machine, but also for actually transforming the world—nature, but also culture, politics, economics, and everything else—into a machine. Thus the insane intellectual ethos of absolute reduction: of the dissolution of reality into principles of impersonal force and function, the systematic stripping away of the whole rational, vital, sensuous semantics of life from our picture of the “really real,” as though all of them were nothing more than an impasto of epiphenomenal conventions concealing the real nature of things.
And what a strange animosity toward the real world of experience it all requires of us. It must now be reduced to the ghostly syntax of the purely impalpable, imperceptible, lifeless, mindless realm of the quantitative. And mind must be reduced to the bare syntax of a functional system for processing stimulus into behavior, operating through a neural technology, denuded of the semantics of real qualitative experience, intentionality, consciousness, unified subjectivity, rational thought, and immediate intuition. And life must be reduced to a bare genetic syntax of determinate traits constructed upon a purely chemical platform, so that in the end life proves to be nothing more than a somewhat more elaborate modality of death—inert matter with ideas above its station, so to speak.
And language must be reduced to the functionalist syntax of a mechanical system for processing data and converting stimulus into behavior, to which the apparent semantics of communication and communion has been applied as a mere system of manipulable user-illusions. The fullness of reality and of awareness and of life must be dissolved into a collection of spectral paradigms, inhabiting a phantom order of the real, where the rose is not red, or alive, or known to any intending conscious mind, or loved in the light of its eternal value as something good and true and beautiful. None of this is truly rational. None of it’s an enlightened or enlightening view of reality. None of it’s logically warranted, or even logically defensible.
None of it conforms to any reality that could actually exist in any possible frame of being. It’s pure ideology dissembling itself as scientific realism; it’s the will to power wrapping itself in the stolen garments of disinterested reason. It’s also pure insanity. Systematic disenchantment is, as it turns out, a mad and destructive delusion, which sees everything as machinery and so makes everything into a machine—a delusion that sees everything as already dead, and then contrives with boundless ingenuity and ease of conscience to prove the point by progressively killing the world. It’s all a cruel alienation from life . . . the very death of nature . . . of the soul. (pp 547 ff.)
And yet here we are.
Do you understand that the argument that he’s making (and that I am) is that because this mechanistic nihilism shapes the entire system, it affects the lives of those of us who reject it as much as it shapes the lives of those who promote it? It’s not that we who don’t believe this nihilism can just go our own way. Secular Liberals like George Packer might say to us: “Good for you if ‘transcendence”—or whatever—is what you’re into. But let us skeptical, sophisticated sorts in media, academia, and other cultural institutions believe in our nihilism if that’s what we’re into.”
But It doesn’t work like that, because the nihilists are driving the bus, and all the rest of us are in it with them, and we’re all going off the cliff they’re driving us toward even if they can’t bring themselves to believe that it’s toward a cliff that they’re heading.
Hephaistos responds to Psyche as I’m sure the ‘enlightened’ members of the editorial board of the NY Times would:
HEPHAISTOS: You’re growing just a little apocalyptic, you know. Is this really all you see in the—and forgive me for using the traditional term—the Enlightenment?
Tut, tut. Let’s not get too bent out of shape here. Psyche responds:
PSYCHE: Oh, no, of course not. Don’t talk in historical abstractions. I believe in the freedom of the mind, I detest dogmatism, I despise arbitrary authority. God bless the Enlightenment. But not everything we associate with that term is actually enlightening, is it?
I agree. It’s not the Enlightenment that needs to be rejected, but one strain of it that became dominant. The Enlightenment didn’t have to take a nihilist turn, but it did. Guys like Rousseau and Kant were not nihilists. Their feet were firmly planted in the transcendentalist tradition I’m trying to defend.
So there were many possible paths Western elites could have taken in the 1600s and 1700s. But nihilism was always a dark potential that was implicit in the Baconian project because of the way it turned against Nature, the way it came to look at Nature as a machine to be exploited for human benefit no matter what the cost to the non-human world.
This mechanistic nihilism implicit in Baconism manifested in its rawest form in the period between 1850 and 1950, but it was buffered somewhat by a Christianity that still played the role of phantom limb. But whatever was healthful and legitimate in that gradually evaporated after WWII, and was gone by the ‘80s. We got instead this bizarre simulacra of it in a Reaganism and forms of zombie Christianity that tried to look like what had been lost, but was never anything more than nihilism with a smiley face. And at the same time transhumanism—the celebration of a cyborgian human future—emerged as the creepy new religion of the techno-capitalist elites who were driving the bus.
In a Politico interview the other day, Tim Walz said that a charismatic leader isn’t going to save us. In the short run, he’s right—but neither are the Democrats going to save us. What I’m calling for, if it’s to emerge, will emerge in the long run. In the short run we need good-faith Democrats like Tim Walz to resist the nihilists and hopefully buy us some time. And out of that resistance something new must emerge, something radically discontinuous with the regnant nihilism in a new social-cultural movement. And it will be its freshness, its originality, the truth of it, the justice of it that will shine through its leadership. If you think anything else can save us, I’d like to know what it is.