Continued from Part 1.

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.

“I see everything,” he cried, “everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered.’

“It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom he has accused. At least—”

He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.

“Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?”

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”

(source: The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton)

You Become What You Assent To

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

(source: Nihilism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy])

Of course, I had to cut my letter about the planned sacrilege at the Oklahoma City Civic Center to the bone to get it under the Letters to the Editor word count (any shorter and you’d have to chirp, er, whistle, er, tweet it). The original version, still only about 400 words, had a slightly clearer explanation of my objection to civic facilitation of this particular class of sacrilegious acts. In addition to the obvious spiritual consequences, there were important civic considerations that should concern even those who are not yet persuaded of the religious facts in the matter:

We understand, as all civic-minded people should, that public life involves a give-and-take of constructive and corrective expressions. This act, however, is an act of sheer nihilism, at best, and demonism, at worst.

Whether you believe it or deny it, there really are powers of good and evil that go far beyond human imagination and will. Even those who do not accept this reality, however, live in a world whose understanding of good and evil is wholly conditioned on this understanding. Civil society can profit by lively debate among different ways of accounting for these basic understandings; as an English professor, this lively exchange is precisely what I promote in the classroom daily. Civil society cannot, however, thrive in an environment where mere destruction of meaningful distinctions and cultural institutions becomes mainstream.

Nihilistic outbursts and sacrilegious demonstrations are not part of civic discussion; they are an assault on the very possibility of civil society. They intend to exclude the faithful from public life without offering any social benefit in return.

If this event takes place, it will mar this wonderful city; and it will damage the souls of all who facilitate it.

To understand the difference between the “sheer nihilism” which is, in the best case, what civic officials are facilitating here and the general give-and-take of culture-making social behavior and discourse, we will first need to understand nihilism a bit better.

As the IEP article cited above suggests, the “true nihilist” is a rare bird. Generally, discussions of nihilism quickly turn (as IEP does) to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.  Krzysztof Michalski helpfully distinguishes in what sense we might call Nietzsche a nihilist:  [.PDF]

what Nietzsche calls nihilism is not an outlook, or at least it is not principally an outlook. Specifically, the nihilism he speaks of is not the view that everything is meaningless, that there’s not really any point to anything we do, that what seems to us to be “every-thing” is really “nothing.” The nihilism that Nietzsche has in mind is first of all something that happens and not something that we, correctly or in-correctly, think about reality. Nihilism is therefore an event, or a chain of events, a historical process—and only secondarily, if at all, an attitude, outlook, or position.

Nietzsche’s view is that nihilism, as “a historical process,” is an inevitability that we must embrace. He takes it as granted that what previously made the world intelligible to us no longer makes sense to us, and that this is an inescapable fact of world history (not merely some variation in certain individuals or groups). As Michalski puts it, “the basic principles organizing our reality no longer organize or order our lives.” It is this same apparent condition which spurred Rudolf Bultmann to write that

It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. … We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.

(It is the word “irrevocably” that gives away the game, by the way.) Heidegger speaks of the “destitute time” that “does not know its own destitution,” in which “there fails to appear to the world the ground that grounds it” (handy reference here). H.P. Lovecraft, who devoted much of his career to inculcating a “cosmicist” viewpoint that rejected the notion that human concerns were of any significance in the cosmos at large, reflects the same view when he exclaims in a letter,

No level-headed modern either wants to be “immortal” himself (gawd, what boredom!) or to have his favourite characters immortal. Each appears for a second in the pattern and then disappears . . . . . and what of it? What more could anybody not filled up with infantile myth expect or even dream of? It is overwhelmingly true that no sane adult, confronted with the information of today, could possibly think up anything as grotesque, gratuitous, irrelevant, chimerical, and unmotivated as “immortality” unless bludgeoned into the ancient phantasy by the stultifying crime of childhood orthodox training.

If Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lovecraft, and Bultmann are reading history correctly–if their allegoresis of their own ideological journeys and recent cultural history proves to be the most accurate, useful, and compelling reading available–then some process not strictly subject to any particular human’s conscious control has made us unable to trust the evidences, employ the categories, or feel compunction about the obligations that moved our forebears. (One should always be suspicious of the necessitarian and historicist strains that underpin much modern thought; they may have rejected the idealism that Hegel perfected, but almost without exception they seem to have retained the historicism by which Hegel achieves his most profound effects.)

Heidegger provides some of the most powerful language for identifying the lack, what makes “the destitute time” a time during which many organizing ideas and inspiring goals seem irrelevant to daily life:

The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. The default of God forebodes something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default.

(clipped from a convenient blog post: The lack of god in the destitute times | thinking and thoughtlessness)

Of course, we must not miss the fact that these philosophers are making falsifiable claims of at least two kinds: claims about belief, and claims about historical fact. Moreover, it cannot wholly escape us that to some extent the matter of belief determines the matter of fact, here; for unless “gathers … visibly and unequivocally” means to gather with immediate, total, and irresistible force, then what we believe may well have everything to do with whether we see the gathering “visibly and unequivocally” taking place. There is also an interesting challenge where this interacts with Christian belief, insofar as even the period of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion was not possessed of the clarity and distinctness of the Parousia: that is, when Jesus preached the Kingdom, He preached it as something not yet “visibly and unequivocally” present in every respect:

“The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off. When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well. The slaves of the householder came to him and said, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where have the weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ His slaves said to him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ He replied, ‘No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest; then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters, “First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”

(source: Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time)

Nonetheless, if the era of the shopping mall could hardly have been better described than in George Romero’s brilliant depiction (which nonetheless oddly imbued it with a mysterious radiance that was “probably nuclear” so they could talk in hushed tones about an “important place for them”), then the era of Reality TV and the Like button is surely easy to recognize in the pages of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra:

Lo! I show you the last man.

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”- so asketh the last man and blinketh.
The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.
“We have discovered happiness”- say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one’s neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.
Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!
A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.
One still worketh, for work is a pastime.
…………………………………
People still fall out, but are soon reconciled- otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.
They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.
“We have discovered happiness,”- say the last men, and blink thereby.

(source: Internet History Sourcebooks)

All of these thinkers, of course, fall into one and the same trap: although they think of nihilism as a condition that requires a response, their conviction that anyone who does not agree with their diagnosis is confused about reality means that they must also become advocates of a nihilist view, as must their disciples. They must convince others (for their own good) to embrace the unbelievability of inherited understandings and to help them disrupt institutions that tend to make those understandings plausible. Like a virus–a true meme–the nihilistic vision remakes those who reluctantly assent to it into vectors for its propagation.

Therefore, we should carefully note that every one of the serious thinkers we have looked at (and here we must leave out Lovecraft), whatever their approach, have viewed this condition as cause for concern. All the most serious thought about nihilism views it as a problem.

Bultmann, as the marker of the radical edge of Christian liberalism, believed something important for human self-understanding was being lost if we could not find some essential, believable understanding in an otherwise unbelievable Christianity. Heidegger and Nietzsche, both atheists with religious training, took somewhat different tacks; Nietzsche basically urged humans to accelerate the evolution of the species, while Heidegger tried to conceive of life during this “default” in a way less determined by Hegel’s ideas of historical progression.

Following Heidegger, Sartre’s important essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” explains why even the thought of what he calls “atheistic existentialists” is not mere nihilism, even though it begins with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism as the modern condition (a diagnosis repeated in different forms throughout the past 150+ years–see, for example, Lyotard’s “The Post-Modern Condition,” which acknowledges what Sartre also acknowledges, that Marxism cannot be the replacement for orders which now seem unbelievable, any more than Hegelian historicism could).  Sartre defends existentialism from the charge that their subjectivism is so radical that it amounts to mere nihilism:

Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this decision proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.

(source: Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sarte 1946)

Sartre steals a lot of bases, here, but his concern is obvious: A school of thought which begins with the nihilist assessment of history and the believability of inherited understandings, and cannot then account for the responsibility each person bears for others, has essentially failed. More than that, it is actually destructive; it eliminates any basis, even of mere social convention or Rousseauian “social contract,” for peaceful social order.

In its pure form, which none of these thinkers dared embrace, mere nihilism is a declaration of war on humanity.

Next, then: Bakunin!