The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: "Mute Inanimate Nothing!"

{While Dostoyevsky’s tale of “The Grand Inquisitor” is frequently invoked against modernity, Jean Paul’s “Speech of the Dead Christ” has long since faded into obscurity. I had never heard of it until I found it quoted by Michael Alan Gillespie (in his book, Nihilism before Nietzsche). First published in 1796, Jean Paul’s fable reflected not his beliefs (he was a Christian) but his fear that the secular Enlightenment was bringing a godless world into existence; think of it as a sadly neglected precursor of Nietzsche’s cry that “God is dead.”}

Jean Paul:

I lay down once on a summer evening on a mountainside and dreamed that I awoke in a graveyard. Now a sublime noble figure, bearing an imperishable sorrow, sank down from on high, and the dead all cried: "Christ! is there no God?"

He replied: "There is none."

Each whole shadow of the dead, not only their breasts alone, shook, and one by one they were ripped apart by their quaking.

Christ went on: "I traversed the worlds, I ascended into the suns, and soared with the Milky Way through the wastes of heaven; but there is no God. I descended to the last reaches of the shadows of Being, and I looked into the chasm and cried: 'Father, where art thou?' But I heard only the eternal storm ruled by none, and the shimmering rainbow of essence stood without sun to create it, trickling above the abyss. And when I raised my eyes to the boundless world for the divine eye, it stared at me from an empty bottomless socket; and Eternity lay on Chaos and gnawed it and ruminated itself. Shriek on, discords, rend the shadows; for He is not!"

The pallid shadows dispersed just as a white vapor formed by the frost will melt in a warm breath; and all became void. Then came into the temple a heartrending sight, the dead children who had wakened in the churchyard, and now cast themselves before the sublime form on the altar saying: "Jesus! have we no father?" --And he replied with streaming tears: "We are all orphans, I and you, we are without a father."

Then the discords screeched more harshly -- the quaking temple walls sundered -- and temple and children sank -- and the entire earth and the sun sank after them -- and the whole immeasurable fabric of the universe sank past us, and high on the summit of boundless Nature stood Christ and gazed down into the universe, pierced by a thousand suns, as into a mine dug out of eternal night, where the suns are pit lamps and the Milky Ways the veins of silver core.

And when Christ beheld the grinding convergence of worlds, the torch dance of heavenly will-o'-the-wisps, and the coal banks of beating hearts, and when he beheld how one orb after another emptied forth its ember souls on the sea of the dead, as a water globe scatters floating lights over the waves: he, the highest of finite beings, lifted his eyes sublimely toward Nothing and Void Immensity, saying: "Mute inanimate Nothing! Chill eternal Necessity! Insane Chance! Do you know that which lies beneath you? When will you destroy the edifice and me? -- Chance, do you know when you'll stride with hurricanes through the flurry of stars and extinguish one sun after another, and when the sparkling dew of the stars will be quenched as thou pass? -How alone each one is in the vast sepulcher of the Universe! Only I am next to myself -- Oh Father! oh Father! where is your infinite breast that I may rest upon it? If each self be its own Creator and Father, why can it not be also its own destroying angel?

"Is that beside me a human being still? Thou poor man! Thy little life is Nature's sigh, or but its echo. A concave mirror beams its rays among the dust clouds of the ashes of the dead to your earth below, and then you come into being, you clouded tottering images. Look down into the chasm across which the ash clouds drift -- fogs full of worlds come swirling out of the sea of the dead, the future is a mist rising and the present a falling one. -- Do you recognize your earth?"

Here, Christ looked down, and his eyes filled with tears, and he said: "Alas, I was on it once: I was happy then, I still had my infinite Father, I gladly lifted my eyes from the hills to the boundless heaven, pressing my pierced breast against his soothing image, saying even in bitter death: 'Father, divest your son of his bleeding winding-sheet and lift Him to your heart!'  Alas, you delirious earth dwellers, you credit Him yet. At this very instant your sun may be setting and you fall upon your knees among blossoms, radiance, and tears, raising your blessed hands high and calling with a thousand tears of joy toward the open heavens: 'You know me also, Infinite One, and all my wounds, and after my death You will receive me and heal them all.' Wretched ones, they shall not be healed after death. When man of misery lays his weary frame into the earth to slumber toward a lovelier morn full of Truth, Virtue, and Joy: he shall awaken in turbulent chaos, everlasting midnight -- and no morning will come, no healing hand, no Infinite Father! -- Oh mortal at my side, if you be living still, pray to Him: else you shall lose Him forever."

And as I sank down and gazed into the shining fabric of the Universe: I perceived the raised coils of the giant serpent of Eternity, which has couched itself around the galaxy of worlds -- and the coils fell away and it encompassed the All doubly -- and then it wound itself around Nature a thousandfold, squeezing the worlds together -- and crushingly compressed the infinite temple into a churchyard chapel -- and all became close, dark, and fearful -- and a bell clapper, infinitely extended, was about to strike the ultimate hour of Time and shatter the Universe...

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Jean Paul, Speech of the Dead Christ - 50 Watts

Note: You would never guess, based on this despairing tale, that Jean Paul was known for his humor, but that seems to have been the case: Jean Paul - Wikipedia

“The Speech of the Dead Christ to the Universe, that there is no God”

 (art by Ernst Fuchs)

 

Saturday Lecture: Enlightenment by Accident

{Quite frankly, I am not the least bit interested in Krishnamurti, the subject of the following excerpt, but Ligotti’s description is so entertaining, I decided to share it.}

Thomas Ligotti (from The Conspiracy Against the Human Race):

Perhaps the capital instance of enlightenment by accident is that of U. G. Krishnamurti. Although U. G. gave no credence to any doctrine of awakening, he claimed to have experienced “clinical death” at the age of forty-nine, after which he returned to life as the kind of being glorified in the literature of enlightenment. Through his clinical death and its aftermath, which he called a “calamity” due to the pain and confusion he felt during this process, U. G. was transformed.

For decades prior to his calamity, U. G. was an earnest seeker who sought enlightenment by effort rather than by accident. But his efforts got him nowhere, and he ended up financially drained. By chance he met a woman who was willing to support him, and for years he was something of a layabout. It was while living with this woman that his calamity struck. Upon recovering from his calamity, he had what he once looked for and in disgust had given up trying to find. U. G. was no longer the person he once was, for now he was someone whose ego had been erased. In this state, he had all the self-awareness of a tree frog.

To his good fortune, he had no problem with his new way of functioning. He did not need to accept it, since by his report he had lost all sense of having an ego that needed to accept or reject anything. How could someone who had ceased to participate in the commerce of selves, who had inadvertently forfeited his personhood, believe or not believe in anything so outlandish as enlightenment … or any other spiritual vendibles, none of which are evident in the least and all of which are as outmoded as the gods of antiquity or tribal deities with names that sound comical to believers in “real” religions?

While it may seem that U. G. had become a zombie, in a non-philosophical sense, his post-calamity life was nothing like that. Until his death in 2007, he spent much of his time berating people who came to him for spiritual succor. Cantankerous and opinionated as some of the more famous masters of Zen Buddhism, U. G. arrestingly and often humorously told those who had made the pilgrimage to his door that everything they believed about anything was wrong. Few of them could get a word in edgewise as he assassinated all that humanity has ever held sacred.

Some would view U. G.’s disrespect for spirituality to be in happy rapport with the nature of enlightenment, which they have been taught cannot be pinned down by doctrines of any kind. Others would deny this assertion, perhaps because they have been indoctrinated to believe that both irreverence and deference toward the transcendent are off the mark once one has “awakened.” Neither side of this squabble would have tempted U. G. What he enunciated in interviews is the near impossibility of human beings, except perhaps one in a billion, to think of themselves only as animals born to survive and reproduce.

U.G. never spoke of a solution for what consciousness has made of our lives. We are captured by illusions and there is no way out. That U. G. came upon a way out, as he told his countless interrogators, was nothing but luck, nothing he knew anything about or could pass on to others. Yet they still came to him and asked for his help. To their pleas he immediately replied he could not help them, nor could they help themselves. No help could be had from any sector in which they searched. They could seek deliverance their entire lives and make it all the way to their deathbeds with nothing but the same useless questions and useless answers with which they began. U. G. had his, but they would never get theirs. So why should they go on living? Naturally, no one bluntly posed this question to U. G. But they had his answer: There is no “you” that lives, only a body going about its business of being alive and obeying biology.

Whenever someone asked U. G. how they could become like him, he always replied it would be impossible for them even to desire to become like him, because their motive for wanting to be like him was self-interested, and as long as they believed in a self that was interested in canceling itself, that self would want to keep itself alive and thus would not want to know ego-death. Whatever people did with their lives was of no concern to U. G., as he tirelessly recapitulated to those who engaged him in conversation. He did not see his himself as a sage with spiritual merchandise to sell. That was for the mountebanks of salvation who infested the world with their codified sects, each baring its teeth to defend some trademarked trumpery.

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A description of the young Krishnamurti:

“…apart from his wonderful eyes, he was not at all prepossessing at that time. He was under-nourished, scrawny and dirty; his ribs showed through his skin, he had a persistent cough, and his teeth were crooked...moreover his vacant expression gave him an almost moronic look….” (Mary Lutyens)

Wednesday with Pascal: Too Much of Nothing?

{As he was pawing through my bookshelves the other day, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat managed, intentionally or not, to knock one book to the floor. The book was Thomas Ligotti’s ‘The Conspiracy against the Human Race,’ which I had purchased on a whim a year or so ago (for $.99, as I recall), skimmed briefly, and then dismissed as too bleak for my taste. It had been sitting unread on the shelf ever since, until Pascal got his paws on it. As it turns out, the book aligns perfectly with Pascal’s pessimistic view of existence, so much so that he is now encouraging all the other cool existential cats to read it, too.}

Consciousness is an existential liability. Existence is a condition with no redeeming qualities. (Thomas Ligotti)

Life presents itself as a task, a drudgery to be performed. Everything living works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that is of no value. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

When there's too much of nothing, no one has control. (Bob Dylan)

Back in 1912, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, in his The Tragic Sense of Life, wrote that “Consciousness is a disease.” I mention this only to demonstrate that Thomas Ligotti was not breaking new ground with his relentlessly grim 2010 book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. He was, however, digging the hole of nihilism deeper than had most of his predecessors (e.g., Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Unamuno) or his contemporaries (e.g., Emil Cioran). ¹

Like the ancient Gnostics, but without their metaphysical flourishes, Ligotti makes the case that, when it comes to existence, a mistake has been made; we ought not to be here, he insists, and certainly not saddled as we are with consciousness. What, precisely, does Ligotti object to about consciousness or about existence itself? Let him explain:

For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And as such, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones. Nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death. But we are susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void.²

Ligotti’s train of thought, explicitly building on the radical pessimism of the mid-20th century Norwegian writer Peter Zapffe, in some ways tracks that of Ernest Becker. Becker's thesis (in Denial of Death) was that our awareness of death would have been psychologically crippling if we had not developed ways to distract and to distance ourselves from that awareness. All human activities—the building of civilizations, the construction of cities, the creative arts, religion, etc.—are nothing but frantic efforts to avoid facing our mortality; or, as Ligotti puts it, “Every human activity is a tack for killing time.” ³

All human activities are not created equal, of course; some serve our death-denying purposes better than others. Ligotti notes that deep existential contemplation—or, better, deep ontological contemplation—tends to be a minority preference at best:

That being human might mean something very strange and awful, something quite uncanny, is not given a passing thought. If it were, who knows what would happen to us? We could disappear in a puff of smoke or fall through a mirror that has nothing on the other side. The single most startling and dreadful revelation for human beings is that we are not what we think we are.

In the twentieth century, German philosopher (and sometime Nazi) Martin Heidegger drilled down to the philosophical bedrock by asking, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The radical nihilist responds by saying, “Maybe there isn’t.”

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¹ Spoiler alert: the “conspiracy against the human race” turns out to be life and life only.

² “The silent staring void” evokes none other than Blaise Pascal himself! Pascal was not a nihilist, of course; he was a Jansenist, which Catholic authorities considered even worse.

³ To be clear, Ernest Becker, while probing human motives, generally approved of the ways in which humans kept mortality's skeleton in the closet; Ligotti, on the other hand, was pretty sure there's no point.

I fought the Abyss and the Abyss won.

Wednesday with Pascal: Entropy, Everyone?

{Like other existentialists, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has frequently been accused of being a Nihilist, a charge which elicits from him a shrug: “Much ado about Nothing,” he says. However, a good friend has referred us to a website, The Stand-Up Philosophers, whose proprietors take Nihilism seriously.}

“Entropy is the motive force that drives the arrow of time.” (Epicurus of Albion) 

Entropy—defined as “the gradual, inevitable decline from order to disorder” and enshrined in the Second Law of Thermodynamics which declares that “entropy always increases with time”—is the acid that dissolves time, space, matter, and energy. It is the slow transformation of order into chaos and of form into formlessness; do what we will, and entropy will undo it. This is as true of ideas, thoughts, passions, and purposes as of palaces, pyramids, and penthouses. Consider:

 All that you impute on yourself, on others, and on objects will shift into the void of nothingness because consciousness, values, and ideas themselves are predicated on a body, a brain, a mind that will one day cease to be. When we die so will the consciousness, values, and ideas that we held, even those espousing nihilist philosophy. [Our death] is the destruction of our concepts, values, knowledge, pain, and pleasure.

Nothing lasts. Entropy always wins.

Epicurus of Albion, writing at the Stand-up Philosophers, ponders the fate of what another friend of mine has called “little human things”: “What is to be made of those doings that people enact day after day, the everyday frivolous dramas you see on a Saturday night?  Human activities and services can hardly have been said to have existed at all, because they are actions which are perishable just like the passing impulse of a sine wave. All the daily labors of [mankind] have never and will never have any lasting presence in the future configuration of the universe.”

This is not, to be sure, a uniquely modern insight, sprung from the forehead of Nietzsche or Marx. The author of Ecclesiastes, for one, understood it, and dismissed all human activity as vain. Epicurus, our Stand-Up Philosopher, adds, “The Stoic philosopher Seneca, a man of antiquity, didn’t need to understand the laws of thermodynamics to understand the principle of entropy, of impermanence, and the certain potential of all things towards degradation: ‘The seven wonders of the world, and any even greater wonders which the ambition of later ages has constructed, will be seen some day leveled with the ground. So it is: nothing lasts forever, few things even last for long: all are susceptible of decay in one way or another.’

To understand and to accept entropy is to appreciate what we have while we have it and to accept who we are while we exist; the universe does not grant us a second act. “We must cherish the objects that we already have,” insists Epicurus; “the Stoic advice is to want what we already possess and appreciate that instead of wanting more objects.” The very transience, impermanence, and fragility of the world is what grants this life value. Our insatiable desire for more and more objects, things, trophies, and possessions may be nothing more than a sublimated desire for the one thing we cannot have: permanence.    

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The Trump Card of Modern Nihilism – Entropy – The Stand Up Philosophers

Entropy: A Self-Portrait

Wednesday with Pascal: The Rise and Fall of Reason

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat believes you can tell a lot about a person based on whether they are Promethean or Antimethean. As for Pascal, he is on the fence on this issue, content to be just one more voice in the bewildering, and increasingly bewildered, modern chorus.}

“Reason has risen against itself.” (David Ohana, Intellectual Origins of Modernity)

According to David Ohana, “The paths of modernity were tortuous, and its roots are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or progress but in the Promethean longing of Western humankind to be their own masters, to impose their own rationality, and consequently to mold the world in a form different from that in which they received it.”

Is it true that Promethean ambition has nothing to do with “a desire for enlightenment or progress”? As unlikely as that seems, it is what Ohana claims. In his narrative, modern man, wanting to supplant God, has replaced God with, well, nothing:  

Modern humanity is faced with the consciousness of nihilism. They are homeless, and the question is where can they turn now? Nihilistic criticism paved the way to the will to power, the desire for independence. This is the modern situation: a world created in one’s own image without reference to God. The Nietzschean revolution is the reflective self-awareness of the modern human who constructs the world out of personal creativity. The axis of the revolution is not reason but aesthetics; not Judeo-Christian morality but the principle of the will to power; not knowledge but creation; not essence but existence. The death of God is the announcement of the possibility of the birth of modern humankind.

A century ago, Walter Lippmann claimed that “the acids of modernity” had caused “the dissolution of the ancient order.” In David Ohana's telling, the chief acids have been “critical reason” and the associated “products of rational activity”:

The idea of modernity could be described as the triumph of critical reason over the hallowed principles of the old world, whose foundations were religious salvation, metaphysical redemption, and the Lord of history. The new principle of modern society was that everything may be judged and criticized: the social order, the political system, economic activities.  Modernity is made up of all the products of rational activity: scientific, technological, or administrative. If the hallowed old order was based on a total concept, the modern order was divided into separate critical categories that consequently were essentially secular. The social differentiation of politics, economics, and family affairs led at the same time to different critical categories. Religion was no longer the sole principle according to which life was organized and the motive force behind everything. In its place, one had divisive and subversive Reason.¹ Max Weber described modernity as a process of intellectualization, meaning that modernity is a break with the finality of the religious spirit.

Christianity offered an eschatology, whereas secular history is (and can only be) just one damned thing after another ("the end of History," my eye!):

The religious vision hopes for a final accomplishment of God’s plan and thus expects an end of history. Historicism, on the other hand, finds meaning in historical events but not beyond them. Modernity is the contrary of the idea of an end to history and can be described as an end of prehistory, that is, of the totality of the events and personalities of traditional society, the feudal system, the royal dynasty, aristocratic privileges, of traditions, beliefs, and prejudices.

Enlightenment thinkers, destructive as their methods (in the wrong hands) would prove to be, at least replaced the eschaton with the idea of Progress. If History wasn't coming to some predetermined end, at least it was going somewhere:

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the modern consciousness, utilizing reason, differentiation, and criticism, believed it was promoting universal objectives. The Enlightenment was characterized by three elements: reason, nature, and progress. The main contribution of the Enlightenment to human thought was the universalization of reason. Reason related to all human beings in the same way. What distinguished the Enlightenment from all previous philosophies was its intention of extending to everyone what had previously been the property of a few: a life based on reason.

The more modern we have become, the less tenable our faith in Progress or even in Reason, the latter being, as we have said, remarkably pliant and ever subject to the passions. David Ohana laments “the triumph of instrumental reason over fundamental reason,” meaning he still retains belief in the latter. He cites the Frankfurt School’s Max Horkheimer; Horkheimer, he says, “declared that the meaning of reason had long been the exercise of understanding and the internalization of eternal values that were said to be the proper objectives of mankind. Today, Horkheimer thought, we witness an opposite process. The means have replaced the ends, and people have become dependent on the political, economic, technological, and communicative powers that they themselves unleashed and that they were supposed to control. What can modern humans do to find themselves again? Are they capable of acting without any guiding, accompanying, directing, and restraining forces? Are they able to control their own powers that have exceeded their limits?”

Leaving those questions unanswered for the moment, David Ohana sadly remarks that “Modern humankind does not act as expected according to the universal rules of the Enlightenment.” What a surprise! Of course, in pre-modern Europe, humankind failed to act according to the supposedly universal rules of Christianity. We humans are perpetually disappointing ourselves and each other. Meanwhile, for all the good it has accomplished, the light of Reason has also served to illuminate the darkest and most unreasonable corners of our souls.  

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¹ Reason may be characterized as the two-edged sword by which modernity both lives and dies. Joseph de Maistre denounced it in no uncertain terms: “Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs.”   

Bits & Pieces

Good news! David French believes the culture wars are, if not exactly over, definitely on the decline. “We’ve passed ‘peak woke,’” French writes. “I think we’ve seen the peak (for now) of left-wing institutional intolerance and illiberalism regarding race, sex, and religion.” 

French bases his optimism on “the demonstrated inability of cancel culture to truly ‘cancel’ most of its targets. My friend Bari Weiss, for example, is now far more influential and widely read than she was before her New York Times ordeal. Andrew Sullivan is thriving at Substack after being forced out at New York.”

Moreover, French continues, “Key institutions are opening themselves up to dissenting voices. It’s incredibly heartening to see my friend Tish Harrison Warren, a devout orthodox Evangelical, now share space in the Times with Ross Douthat. In many spaces there is actually a hunger for a diversity of views.”

In other words, so long as David French’s friends have platforms, the culture wars are a non-issue. The fact that those ‘wars’ were manufactured for political gain by the political Right is apparently not worth discussing, nor is the fact that Republican controlled state legislatures are currently busy ‘canceling’ books, curricula, and teachers’ opinions in the public schools.    

Culture Wars End With Consequences - by David French (thedispatch.com)

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According to David Kamioner, liberals simply can’t take a joke. Sure, they once produced actual comedians like Woody Allen and George Carlin; and sure, “Tina Fey is adorable (okay, so I have a crush on her) and brilliant. When she strays into politics she generally puts the jokes above ideology.” For that matter, “Bill Maher is the closest thing we have today to a Will Rogers or Mort Sahl, in that his takes on topical subjects are not only witty but cut through BS to get to the heart of a matter. ¹ That’s why few skewer the left like Maher. He rips them apart with slashing comedic gusto.”

What is more important, however—at least to David Kamioner—is that Dave Chapelle, who “has taken on, both on his former show and his sold out live performances, about every left wing trope including that holy of holies the transgender movement,” has been subjected to “the usual hysterical pushback from the PC left, which accused him of all the isms and seems particularly offended that Chapelle is a black American, a Muslim, and chooses to live in a small Midwestern town and not in NYC or LA.” 

So—that’s it? The Left doesn’t like, and has criticized, Dave Chapelle, and therefore has no sense of humor? That seems like—and please pardon this reference—a rush to judgment. I could just as easily claim that the Right has no sense of humor because Greg Gutfeld exists or because conservatives take Dinesh D’Souza seriously.

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¹ For those of you too young (or too old) to remember Mort Sahl, consider this: after John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, “Sahl's comedy would often reflect his politics and included readings and commentary about the Warren Commission Report, of which he consistently disputed the accuracy. He alienated much of his audience, was effectively blacklisted, and more of his planned shows were cancelled. His income dropped from $1 million to $13,000 by 1964. According to [a biographer], the excessive focus on the Kennedy assassination details was Sahl's undoing and wrecked his career. Sahl later admitted that "there's never been anything that had a stronger impact on my life than this issue," but added that he nonetheless "thought it was a wonderful quest." And here we thought the cultural Marxists and Social Justice Warriors invented cancel culture!

The Unfunny Left (lifezette.com)

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Joe Lonsdale does not like “the largely negative mood of the current historical discourse,” including episodes of the TV show ‘Picard’. “It’s not totally clear,” writes Lonsdale, “why so many hold our past (and even the present) in such extreme contempt, but there is probably a combination of factors:

1. The West “won,” and some feel guilty about that;
2. There are far more written records of the West’s mistakes and crimes than those of other civilizations;
3. In its decadence, the West has become bored and enjoys self-criticism;
4. Attacking the past is a good pretext to seize political power today.”

Irrational guilt, literacy, boredom, and the lust for power: those are what Lonsdale would have us believe motivate our contemporary historical discourse. By the same token, one could speculate, never having met Mr. Lonsdale, that he is motivated by overweening pride, Western chauvinism, ignorance, and a desire to control the historical narrative for political advantage.   

Lonsdale’s defense of Western civilization includes an innovative ranking of historical horrors in which the “An Lushan Revolt” of the 8^th century and the “Mongol Conquests” of the 13^th century caused death tolls proportionately higher than those of the twentieth century. For that matter, and following Steven Pinker, Lonsdale points out how lucky we are not to be governed by either Aztecs or Kiowas. Putting modernity in perspective, Lonsdale ranks World War I only sixteenth in his table of twenty-one global horrors, while ranking World War II ninth, just behind “The Annihilation of the American Indians” and the “Atlantic Slave Trade”.

In fairness, I should allow Lonsdale to make his point:

It’s absolutely fine to teach and learn about the beauty and wisdom that comes from other cultures. What isn’t fine is to teach that our own is evil and immoral. Our children will be bereft of the foundation they need to understand why our country works; why it is that people from all over the world want to be here; and how we can apply these values to make our future even better.

We should be biased toward pride in our civilization, and we should harness that pride in order to build new things. If we teach children that our past is evil and irredeemable, then they’re going to think our future is, too.

Solving problems is hard, and retrospective moral judgment is very, very easy. But we should have high expectations for ourselves, because we can be great. We should do the hard thing.

The word “nihilism” comes from the Latin nihil—nothing. If we continue to indulge the historical nihilism that ignores the unique and positive qualities of the West and of our country, that’s exactly what the future holds: nothing.

Well—the future always holds something; as conservatives are fond of noting, genuine nihilism would be self-contradictory and self-defeating, which is why it is rare if not non-existent. In any case, there is no such thing as “historical nihilism”; there are simply differences of opinion regarding which aspects of history should be emphasized, who should be praised and who criticized, and what lessons should be drawn from the past.

In Defense of Us - The American Mind

We Have Met the Demons and They Are Toxic Nihilists, Pseudo-Intellectuals, and Others with Whom We Have Nothing in Common

Writing at Law and Liberty, Daniel Mahoney rightly celebrates the genius of Fyodor Dostoevsky:

“The 150th anniversary of the publication of Dostoevsky’s Demons (also known as Devils and perhaps less accurately as The Possessed) provides a welcome opportunity to reengage this timely and timeless literary dissection of moral and political nihilism. In it, Dostoevsky gathered all his imaginative and prophetic powers to confront the spirit of radical negation that defines the modern revolutionary project. This powerful novel is at once an unerringly accurate diagnosis of the sickness of soul that drives the totalitarian temptation as well as an inexhaustible literary monument to the ideological scourge that is coextensive with late modernity. It is at moments darkly humorous even as it delves into spiritual and political pathologies of the first order.”

While Dostoevsky, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, understood that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, Mahoney’s interpretation of Demons implies that the line is externally present in America’s current culture wars and partisan politics. He leaves no doubt as to which side of those conflicts is good and which is evil:

“Dostoevsky had an uncanny ability to see both profound truths about the soul and the human condition, and to foresee in all its demonic depths the totalitarian tragedy that would come to mark and deform the twentieth century.  Albert Camus turned to Dostoevsky to rescue himself from the moral abyss that haunted existentialism and to diagnose the totalitarian temptation in all its amplitude. As we in the United States confront new waves of moralistic fanaticism and toxic nihilism, as spiritual and cultural repudiation have become both fashionable and obligatory, and as many young people and pseudo-intellectuals bow before the cult of revolution and increasingly fashionable nostalgia for Communism, it is time to turn once again to Dostoevsky’s jarring literary and political masterpiece as a source of unsurpassed spiritual nourishment and untimely wisdom.”

Mahoney keeps using words like "totalitarian" and "Communism". I do not think they mean what he thinks they mean.

Mahoney directs our attention to Dostoevsky’s character Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, who “chronicles all the “soft utopians” (the phrase is Reinhold Niebuhr’s) who have already succumbed to moral nihilism and political insanity: children who have been taught by their teachers to laugh at God, lawyers who shamelessly defend the deeds of murderers for fear of being insufficiently progressive, schoolboys who kill “just to see how it feels,” academics who defend murder as either a sign of insanity or material necessity, but never of evil. They are “ours,” Verkhovensky proclaims, fellow-travelers and even unbeknownst foot soldiers of the party of nihilism. Many are “drunk” with ideology; many more will “get themselves even drunker,” inebriated by the cult of revolution, half-science, angry atheism, and contempt for all permanent standards and solid foundations for the indispensable distinction between good and evil.” ¹

In Mahoney’s estimate, “Dostoevsky’s book speaks not only to the crisis enveloping Russia (one tied to, and initiated by an intelligentsia that hates God, morality, country, and simple decency), but to the spiritual and political crisis that is coextensive with late modernity itself. Demons is a book for East and West alike, one for all those who wish to rescue the soul of modern man. With the descent into open nihilism comes the paradoxical possibility of spiritual (and political) resistance to these demons who have taken monstrous human form. Dostoevsky is thus our master diagnostician of the entire soul-destroying project to replace God and the nation with all-consuming “self-will” and the nihilistic and eternally self-negating effort to turn Man into God.”

If only it were all that simple, that neat, and that clear; if only demons took possession only of others. Daniel Mahoney praises Demons for probing the depths of the human soul; but that is precisely why the book cannot be reduced (as it too often is) to a political pamphlet. Demons ought not to be used, as Mahoney seems inclined to do, to demonize anyone.

Nihilism today is not limited to one side of our politics or of our culture; it is endemic, it pervades modernity, and it infects even our best intentions. In fact, Mahoney’s reference to “all those who wish to rescue the soul of modern man” signifies yet another Promethean impulse, one more rough beast cloaking itself in righteousness, Bible in one hand and Dostoevsky’s Demons in the other, slouching towards some moral Armageddon.    

Encountering the Spirit of Revolutionary Negation – (lawliberty.org)

¹ While the Dostoevsky/Verkhovensky portrait of 19^th-century Russian radicals and intelligenty is not entirely inaccurate, it is, let us say, incomplete, as is Mahoney's. A more balanced description comes from Avraham Yarmolinsky (The Road to Revolution): “The men and women behind these [radical] efforts and exploits included a variety of human types. They illustrated what Pascal called ‘the glory and the baseness in man,’ and, of course, a mixture of the two, as also of insight and dunderheadedness. Along with zealots and triflers, there were a few crackpots and many innocents. And there was the sinister premonitory shadow of a being less than human; in later years, the center of the stage was held by idealists, in some cases willing to use any means for the sake of the end, people who had learned to forego pity and were ready to immolate others as well as themselves in the service of what they believed to be just. The tale is a tragic one, though not without moments of comedy.” Dostoevsky, for that matter, was no saint, nor were his politics altogether admirable. Readers who prefer complications to simplifications should consult biographies of Dostoevsky by, e.g., Joseph Frank, Alex Christofi, or Kevin Birmingham, among others.

The Goldmann Variations

“A specter is haunting the modern Western world—the specter of market nihilism.” (Apologies to the specter of Karl Marx for my unauthorized modification of his words.)

I am currently reading Lucien Goldmann’s extended essay The Philosophy of Enlightenment, published posthumously in 1973. Goldmann (biographical link below) was a philosopher in the “Marxist humanist” tradition whose influence and reputation have only grown since his death in 1970. * The Philosophy of Enlightenment was originally conceived as a briefer essay on the relationship of the Enlightenment to Christianity; that essay appeared in the book as a chapter on “The Enlightenment and Christian Belief”.

In his overview of the Enlightenment, Goldmann wrote:

The Enlightenment is a historically important stage in the development of Western bourgeois thought, which constitutes a unique and vital part of human intellectual history. To understand the essential ideas of the Enlightenment, one must accordingly start by analyzing the activity that was most important to the bourgeoisie and most influenced its social and intellectual evolution. This was the development of the economy, and above all its essential element, exchange.

The history of the bourgeoisie is primarily economic history. A bourgeois economy exists only where economic activity is not governed by the use-value of the goods produced—the use of the goods to people, individually or socially—but by the possibility of selling the goods on the market and realizing their exchange-value. ¹ As the organization of production and distribution based on exchange-value develops within the previously established framework of production and comes to supersede it, a progressive change in the people’s manner of life and thought sets in.

The most important consequence of the development of a market economy is that the individual, who previously constituted a mere partial element within the total social process of production and distribution, now becomes, both in his own consciousness and in that of his fellow men, an independent element, a sort of monad, a point of departure. The social process of course continues and implies a certain regulation of production and exchange. This process was not only objectively present in the earlier social structures but also consciously realized in the traditional, religious, and rational rules governing people’s behavior; these rules now begin to fade from consciousness. The regulation of the market is now implicit, governed by the blind forces of supply and demand.

The total social process is seen as operating mechanically and independently of the individual will from the action of countless autonomous individuals on each other and in response to each other, behaving as rationally as possible for the protection of their private interests and basing their actions on their knowledge of the market with no regard for any trans-individual authority or values.

It was thus inevitable that the development of a market economy, starting as early as the thirteenth century, should progressively transform Western thought. It seems self-evident that there is a close relation between the development of the market economy, in which every individual appears as the autonomous source of his decisions and actions, and the evolution of different philosophical visions of the world, all of which treat the individual’s consciousness as the absolute origin of his knowledge and action. Likewise, the disappearance from human consciousness of all trans-individual authority regulating production and distribution is matched by the fundamental claim of all the writers of the Enlightenment that individual reason must be recognized as the supreme arbiter and subjected to no higher authority.

The Protestant Reformation having paved the way, economic individualism emerged and developed alongside social, political, religious, and even moral individualism. Various anti-Enlightenment factions resisted the encroachment of individualism into certain aspects of social life, but the simple truth was that it could not be resisted piecemeal; if it was to be successfully resisted anywhere, it had to be resisted everywhere.

Perhaps surprisingly, Lucien Goldmann accepted one of the fundamental criticisms of modernity often made by conservatives: the accusation that, unable to provide an objective source of or foundation for morality, secular individualism’s logical terminus was nihilism. While the Invisible Hand was believed, rightly or wrongly, to reconcile competing economic interests and to guarantee the common good, the moral market had no such built-in arbiter, God having been displaced by Reason and the common good having been displaced by “enlightened self-interest”.  As Goldmann wrote, “The problem of basing bourgeois morality on the individual conscience remains unsolved to this day, though the progress of historical development has made it ever more urgent. To give it its modern name, it is the problem of nihilism.” ²

Following a surge of nihilistic thought in 19^th-century Europe, both Bolshevism and Fascism were attempts to escape nihilism and to impose meaning by diktat, indoctrination, and brute force. The appalling consequences of those regimes disqualified ideology as a source of meaning (at least in the West), opening the door, post-World War II, to the triumph of neoliberal capitalism: that is, to market nihilism. Lucien Goldmann’s concerns about that latter nihilism, and about how to escape it, prompted much of his philosophical thought.    

_______________________________

Lucien Goldmann - Wikipedia

*For those who doubt that “Marxist humanism” even exists: in a 1968 essay (“Is There a Marxist Sociology?”), Goldmann issued a condemnation of Stalinist/Communist “obscurantism” which had, he said, suppressed fruitful debate on the Left:

“The triumph of Stalinism was to put a stop to discussion of a Marxist ‘ethics’ or ‘sociology,’ just as it stopped all the other great theoretical discussions which were the pride and the very life of Marxism. In fact, since about 1930, a great wave of obscurantism has continued to spread over the working-class movement; on the one hand, the Stalinists replaced living thought by a scholasticism limited to quotations from the ‘masters’ and a servile interpretation of them; on the other hand, in the reformist camp, there was a progressive abandoning of any attempt to connect in any way with dialectical thought and Marx’s work. It was only a few isolated thinkers here and there who, as free-lancers and against the stream, tried to continue a tradition which social and political evolution seemed to be condemning to oblivion.”

There is no doubt that Goldmann himself was one of the “free-lancers” who struggled against the stream of so-called “orthodox Marxism”.

¹ Goldmann clarified: “There is no ‘economy’ in the bourgeois sense in a medieval peasant family growing food for its own consumption, nor on a feudal estate living on its own produce and on natural abundance obtained without cultivation, nor in a large-scale system of planning like the Soviet Union. In all these instances the commodities are produced and distributed—fairly or unfairly, in humane or barbarous manner—on principles governed by the use-value and actual quality of the goods.”

The differential between use-value and exchange-value is called "profit" and it provides, in Marxist analysis, the basis of capitalism.

² It is not only moral nihilism that concerns anti-Enlightenment thinkers; they also fear cultural nihilism and the reign of market-based (or market-debased) pop culture. In the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham famously said that “Pushpin is as good as poetry,” horrifying High Culture aesthetes everywhere; in 1959, RCA Records issued a record album entitled 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong, at which point High Culture is rumored to have given up the ghost. Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s soup can” art (1962) put the last nail in High Culture’s coffin. In the Sixties, of course, “high culture” would come to have an entirely different meaning.

Stabbed?

{Writing about  politics may be the last refuge of scoundrels, but, distasteful as it is, it is sometimes  necessary.}

Defeat in war is unquestionably traumatic, which is why the losing side often seeks to rationalize it away. Neither Napoleon nor Hitler could accept that their armies were defeated by the Russians; in both cases, the severe Russian winter and over-extended supply lines were blamed. In America’s Civil War, the myth is that the Confederacy was not defeated on the battlefield; it was simply overwhelmed by superior troop numbers, the Union’s industrial might, and the treacherous desertion of its slaves (abetted by Grant’s and Sherman’s barbarous conduct in violation of all the rules of war).

Then there is the "stab-in-the-back" theory, which, as a rationalization of defeat, has a distinguished history. After the US was forced out of Vietnam, supporters of the war claimed that dissenters and protesters at home had undermined our brave troops; Jane Fonda (“Hanoi Jane”) had personally stabbed them in the back.  Most famously, of course, “stab-in-the-back” served disgruntled Germans as the excuse for their nation’s defeat in the Great War:

The belief was that the German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield, but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially Jews, revolutionary socialists who fomented strikes and labor unrest, and other republican politicians who had overthrown the monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918-19. Advocates of the myth denounced the German government leaders who had signed the Armistice on 11 November 1918 as the "November criminals".

The myth immediately became central to German politics:

When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, they made the legend an integral part of their official history of the 1920s, portraying the Weimar Republic as the work of the "November criminals" who had "stabbed the nation in the back" to seize power. Nazi propaganda depicted Weimar as "a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest 'national opposition'—fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and 'cultural Bolsheviks', who had at last been swept away by the National Socialist movement under Hitler and the victory of the 'national revolution' of 1933".

As is often the case, history has lessons for us in the present moment. What is being promulgated in America by Donald Trump and his die-hard supporters—what is being called by others the “Big Lie”—is a variation on “stab-in-the-back”. It makes perfect sense, given that, since the early Nineties at least, Republicans have been conducting politics as a form of warfare. In that vein, Trumpsters claim that the 2020 election was stolen and that nothing less than American democracy was stabbed in the back. The latest suspects in this crime, according to Trump himself, are the computer “routers” in Maricopa County, Arizona; other suspects include random poll workers and ballot counters in battleground states, postal carriers, shady operatives driving vans clearly labeled “Biden/Harris 2020,” Dominion Voting Systems, Republican governors and Secretaries of State, state legislatures that confirmed the results, the federal Congress that accepted and certified the electoral results, numerous federal courts (including the Supreme Court of the United States) which either dismissed or refused to hear challenges to the results, the Deep State, the Chinese government, cyber criminals in Italy, and whoever scheduled Rudy Giuliani’s press conference at the Four Seasons Landscaping Center.

It is helpful to have some background to this increasingly demented theory. In November 2012, Donald Trump, who had endorsed Republican candidate Mitt Romney, claimed, against all the facts, that Romney had won the presidential election. Trump’s public comments in the wake of Obama’s victory included: “The electoral college is a disaster for democracy,” “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” “Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble…like never before,” and “He [Obama] lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country! More votes equals a loss…revolution!”

With that in mind, Trump’s continued insistence, during his own 2016 campaign, that “The system is rigged,” should have come as no surprise. Even after gaining the Republican nomination, he declined to say he would accept the results of the November election. ¹ In August 2016, Trump tweeted, “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary—but also at many polling places—SAD.” That same month, Trump told a crowd in Charlotte, North Carolina, “The whole system is rigged and that’s why, when the media does what they’re doing now, that’s rigging the system, folks. It’s rigging the system. The election is rigged. It’s rigged like you’ve never seen it before. They’re rigging the system.”

Nor was Trump reluctant in 2016 to make unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud, although, unlike in 2020, he focused more on alleged in-person fraud. “Voter fraud is very, very common,” he told a Wisconsin audience. “People that have died ten years ago are still voting. Illegal immigrants are voting.” Even after winning the election (thanks to the very Electoral College he had previously maligned), he insisted that the popular vote tally had been falsified due to “millions of illegal voters” casting ballots for Hillary Clinton. Trump and his surrogates pushed urban myths about “busloads of voters” showing up in New Hampshire and Kansas; he even rambled, bizarrely, about voters who disguise themselves to vote multiple times—“Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”

In short, Trump's fabled "populism" was founded on his claims that the democratic "system" is rigged and that American elections are crooked. It was obvious from the start that such allegations were Trump's preemptive airing of his excuses for losing, because losing was anathema to the god-king of New York real estate and reality TV; it was equally obvious that the allegations were dangerous. 

In 2020, it was no longer in-person voting that concerned Trump; it was Democrats’ expected advantage in expanded mail-in voting, a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump predictably spent the weeks and months leading up the election railing against mail-in ballots; he had help from administration officials like Attorney General William Barr, who said, “There’s no more secret vote with mail-in vote. A secret vote prevents selling and buying votes. So now, we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes. Capricious distribution of ballots means (ballot) harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postman … ‘here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots.”  So much for the integrity of ballots; so much for the integrity of mail carriers and Postal Service employees. Barr also speculated that “It might even be cheaper for the foreign government to counterfeit ballots in some critical districts than to engage in the other kinds of activities they have. What I'm saying is foreign intelligence services are very able. They can counterfeit currency and they have a lot of capacity. And I don't think counterfeiting a state ballot is particularly challenging for them if they wanted to do it.”

Russia, if you’re listening…

This is all old news, of course, but it is worth rehashing. From the time he entered politics, Donald Trump has repeatedly assailed America’s electoral process without providing a scintilla of evidence for his claims. Psychologically unable to accept defeat, he has explicitly insisted that only fraud could explain such an outcome.  His “Big Lie” about his 2020 loss is the culmination of a multi-year effort to undermine faith in our democracy and to convince his supporters (who have proven surprisingly easy to convince) that Democrats cannot win without cheating; thus, any Democratic victory is ipso facto proof of cheating. That reasoning applies even more, of course, to any purported Democratic victory over Trump himself; as he said in August 2020, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” ²

This is dangerous. No major party presidential candidate ever attacked the legitimacy of the electoral process the way Trump did in 2016; no sitting President ever attacked it the way Trump did in 2020; and no ex-President ever reacted to defeat the way Trump has reacted and continues to react. We cannot afford not to take this seriously; what are the chances that the Republican Party as currently constituted will abandon either Trumpian rhetoric or Trumpian lies about voter fraud? I am afraid that January 6, 2021, may prove to have been just a dress rehearsal; I am also afraid that upcoming election results will be challenged to an unprecedented extent and in unprecedented ways, that access to the ballot will be increasingly restricted, and that Republican-controlled state legislatures will intervene to subvert the process and to decide elections on their own. How long can democracy withstand such attacks?

I am not given to alarmism, and I hope I am wrong, but the Big Lie, which Trump continues to promote, is guaranteed to foment anger, division, and chaos in this country. The Big Lie needs to be exposed wherever and whenever it is deployed; if it comes down to it, and if all else fails, I say we stab it in the back.

________________________________

Stab-in-the-back myth - Wikipedia

Trump's Bogus Voter Fraud Claims - FactCheck.org

Fact check: Echoing Trump, Barr misleads on voter fraud to attack expanded vote-by-mail (nbcnews.com)

¹ In 2016, Trump did not hesitate to use claims of "cheating" against his GOP primary opponents. When he lost the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz, he tweeted: "Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified."

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016

² In August 2016, Trump told a crowd, “We’re gonna watch Pennsylvania. Go down to certain areas and watch and study and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times. The only way we can lose, in my opinion – and I really mean this, Pennsylvania – is if cheating goes on. I really believe it.” It has been the playbook all along.

Nothingness and Its Discontents (Part Four)

{After a youthful fling with countercultural perspectives, the late Michael Novak came to terms with the experience of nothingness, seemingly setting aside his concerns about capitalism’s despoiling of the planet, about learned helplessness, and about the modern culture of inauthenticity (shrewdly packaged and promoted as its very opposite). Insisting that “The darkness is habitable,” Novak succumbed to a philosophical version of Stockholm syndrome; or perhaps, discouraged by his knowledge that “there is no resting place,” he just grew tired of looking for a way out.}   

Michael Novak, from The Experience of Nothingness:

Our modern sense of reality has as its ground the experience of nothingness. It recognizes the emptiness, terror, and formlessness at the center of human consciousness. It also recognizes that a man glimpses all that only by virtue of his honesty and courage. In the exercise of his freedom, he is indebted to the accumulated insights of his community. Consequently, the experience of nothingness is not paralyzing—it is liberating. In its dark light, nothing is beyond questioning, sacred, immobile. On the other hand, since that dark light springs from honesty, courage, freedom, and community, everything in life that promotes these qualities becomes precious and sacred. The sense of reverence that disappears when totems and taboos perish is regained when honesty, courage, freedom, and community are cherished.

The choice to remain faithful to the drive to question (the fertile source of the experience of nothingness) brings with it an obscure joy. To be faithful to that drive—to allow it to function as the integrator of one’s senses, instincts, sensibilities, emotions, perspectives, insights, judgments, and actions—is to be constantly expanding one’s horizon, constantly losing one’s life, and constantly regaining it. It is to be as alert to other persons, to situations, and to events as one can: to their fragility and terror, as well as to their obscure coherences and often veiled beauty. To be faithful to the drive to question is to accept despair as one’s due, to accept risk as one’s condition, and to accept the crumbs of discovery as joy.

The darkness is habitable: that is the first message of our modern consciousness. It is inhabited; that is our discovery. Those who seek security could never amass to themselves enough objects, or persons treated like objects, even if they had all of history at their disposal. Those who accept the darkness are instantly secure, through the perception that insecurity is man’s natural state, a truthful state, a healthy state.

Who are you? What do you want? Society’s sense of reality? The experience of nothingness grounds the minimal necessary skepticism to survive as a person of integrity today. Without it, the machines, the mythmakers sink their hands deep into one’s soul. The experience of nothingness requires a constant return to inner solitude, an unbroken awareness of the emptiness at the heart of consciousness. It demands a harsh refusal to allow idols to be placed in the sanctuary.

The experience of nothingness arms us against our own puritanism, our desire to be perfect, and our despair at not being able to be honest, courageous, free, or brotherly. Who are we—who are, at our center, nothing—to be dismayed because our actions prove our worthlessness? Our selves are not at the center of the universe. The sun shines no less brilliantly, the skies are no more thickly gray because we have betrayed our resolve. We are too insignificant to be preoccupied with our own failures.

Whatever energy we have is required for attending to the loneliness, the pain, the needs of others. No contrition is more truthful than other-centeredness. To make our failures the occasion of more sensitive attention to others is to turn decline into growth.

Our new, modern consciousness, arising from its base in a technological society, passes judgment upon the myth of the tool and the technician, upon the liberal capitalistic, democratic society (as well as upon its socialist mirror image). In the name of the experience of nothingness, the new consciousness impels men to invention, discovery, and growth. It is through one small step after another that the human pilgrimage, wherever it will end, proceeds. There is no resting place.