Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history. Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.
But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.1
Why are Garsten’s students so attracted to illiberalism? Why are these students moving to the Right rather than to the Left? Why can’t they just be like other normal, educated young people? Why can’t they just adapt and flourish in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix like nice, young, meritocratic Liberals do? Well, because It’s the nihilism, stupid.
It used to be the young people on the Left who offered resistance to Late Capitalism and all the ways that it was hollowing out American culture. They wrote humanistically idealistic documents like The Port Huron Statement. They appealed to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They were the ones who first saw the insanity and nihilism of the Vietnam War and the rank injustice of Jim Crow. But now young people on the Left seem happily inured to life in the TCM, and they are more influenced by Foucault and Deleuze and so more inclined toward an identitarian politics that accomplishes little except to inflame an culture war that even Foucault understood was unwinnable.
And so where do young people go who want something that “feels” real? Well they go where the energy is, and there’s a lot more energy now on the Right than there is on the Left, and Liberals had better face the fact that the Right offers a path to give many young people a “sense of meaning and purpose” in their lives that the Left just does not.
I put quotes around “feels” and “sense of meaning” in the previous paragraph because I believe that these young people are being seduced by something that will prove to be smoke and vapor. Avant-garde, right-leaning intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and others were similarly seduced in the 1920s and ‘30s. Their hatred for Liberalism and modernity led them to love something that proved to be far worse. I fear Garsten’s students are on the same path. But for now it feels like something real to them, more real than whatever the nihilism of the TCM offers. And that’s why I’m inclined to think that the real threat in the long run from the Right does not come from yahoos at a MAGA rally, but from young people looking for meaning and purpose outside the TCM. Many of them have looked to find that meaning on the Left, but find only emptiness and nonsense there.
So here, for what its worth, is how I see our predicament: I have always believed that pluralism is a good thing, that differences make life more interesting, that they prevent us from ever becoming complacent and rigid in our thinking, that our limited, provisional understanding of the world is expanded by our being confronted by others who see things differently. But the problem with pluralism is the way that it keeps us divided and conquered in the face of enormously powerful nihilistic forces that seek to drag us where we don’t want to go.
Is it possible to find a place of unity that affirms something positive rather than just says No to what it fears? I think it is possible, but I think first we need to understand why it’s so difficult to find the solidarity required if we are to face the challenges that await us in coming decades.2
I hesitate to use a mechanistic metaphor, but it's perhaps never more appropriate for our current predicament: The TCM and its Rationalist Materialist presuppositions provide the “developed” world's OS, so to say. Not just here, but everywhere its influence is hegemonic—Europe, Asia, and among elites in the southern hemisphere. It runs China in pretty much the same way it runs the U.S. They are competitors playing the same video game, so to speak.
All of our individual beliefs—religious, philosophical, whatever—are like apps that must run on this OS. We don't have any choice about that because whatever our individual beliefs, unless we choose to live off the grid, we must live in a world whose fundamental presuppositions are shaped by the OS that runs the TCM. So some apps run smoothly, and others don’t. The problem for people with religious commitments lies in that most of the world's great religions originated in societies that ran on an OS that had a fundamentally different architecture. Let’s call it the Axial OS, which is the cultural OS that ran all the great civilizations from Taoism in the East to the Greek transcendental philosophy in the West starting in the mid-millennium BCE.
This OS was capable of runnning lots of different local apps like Buddhism, Vedantic Hinduism, monotheistic Judaism, and others. For over two thousand years the architecture of the underlying OS remained fundamentally unaltered, and it was flexible enough to allow for innovations and new developments like Christianity and Islam. But something changed in the west starting in the 1300s3 and culminating after the Reformation. The old Axial OS was replaced with something that had a fundamentally different architecture. Let’s call it the Baconian OS, after the founder of Western empirical science, Francis Bacon. And while the Baconian OS tried at first to run apps like Christianity and Judaism, they ran buggy at best, and eventually in ways that many found unusable.
I don’t think that the nihilism of the TCM was the intended consequence of the early Baconians, but it was implicit in the new architecture of its OS, and so it was only a matter of time before what was implicit became explicit. The emergence of the implicit nihilism in the system accelerated in the decades after 1850, and culminated in the decades after WWII. In the 1970s this new situation, the complete victory of Baconism with the emergence of the TCM, came to be referred to as Postmodernism. As Perry Anderson says, after the war, modernization was all but complete—
obliterating the last vestiges not only of pre-capitalist social forms, but every intact natural hinterland, of space or experience, that had sustained or survived them….
Where [high cultural] modernism drew its purpose and energies from the persistence of what was not yet modern, the legacy of a still pre-industrial past, postmodernism signifies the closure of that distance, the saturation of every pore of the world in the serum of capital. Marked out by no stark political caesura, no sudden storm in the historical heavens, this ‘very modest or mild apocalypse, the merest sea breeze presents a momentous transformation in the underlying structures of contemporary bourgeois society.4
Postmodernism is the slow-motion apocalypse that we are all living through mostly without understanding its significance. It is, in other words the triumph of Baconism in its Late Capitalist form, the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, and as such is its reductio ad absurdum. The Baconian OS brought us modernity and all its material bounty, but at the cost of suffocating what is most deeply spiritual in the broader culture. And that experience of suffocation, I would argue, is what’s motivating Garsten’s smart, young students to search for a place where they think they can breathe more freely.
So why don’t the ancient religions meet this need? Because they cannot flourish in the TCM.5 Does the problem lie with these religions or with the architecture of the Baconian OS on which they are forced to run? I rather think the latter. But that's extremely hard to accept by anybody who has been acculturated into a society like the TCM. We're all in the Matrix created by the Baconian OS, and extricating oneself from it is not easy for those who want to–and impossible for people who don't feel a need to do it the first place because they're quite comfortably adapted to life within it.
And so people who are well-adapted to the TCM naively believe that everybody is free to think or believe whatever they want. But in fact, they’re not free if their personal beliefs are incompatible with the underlying architecture of the Baconian OS. That OS–not one's personal beliefs–plays the dominant role in shaping all our experience of the world–regardless of one’s metaphysical commitments. The OS matters because of the profound way it filters our experience of what is real and unreal.
The idea of a sacrament, for instance, depends on an imagined and experienced sense of the Cosmos that is shot through with the divine. Symbols like sacraments only symbolize, i.e., they only “work” as portals into the mystery of Being in societies where people have some collective sense of the sacred—not just an idea of the sacred, or a theory of the sacred—but a day-to-day experience of the world that is shot through with the divine.
That's not how we experience the world in the TCM’s Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary.6 The Baconian OS excludes that as a possibility. Rather, the Baconian OS structures our experience of the world and our thinking about it as just stuff to be used. Just so many atoms and empty spaces. Nothing sacred or sacramental about anything in it. It’s just there for humans to exploit in ways to improve their material flourishing. And boy did they exploit it.
Some religious people today might believe in sacraments, but they cannot, with some rare exceptions, experience their power in the way our ancestors did. We no longer live in a world where symbols symbolize. And so many people when they look for meaning in religion don’t find it because the rituals enacted in them don’t work, they don’t “symbolize”. And religion just becomes a set of implausible propositions and repressive codes that no “normal” person within the TCM finds believable or attractive.
But that’s not the symbol system’s fault; it’s rather the culture’s fault for having adopted an OS that gives them material prosperity while at the same time diminishing its capacity to cultivate in people a responsiveness to the mystery of Being that their ancestors took for granted. We’ve become gradually sealed up in the totalizing system I’ve been calling the TCM, and It’s reached a critical stage in Postmodernity.
So this mentality among young conservative intellectuals should be seen as a miner's canary. The empirical reality, whether Liberals recognize it or not, is that everything the TCM produces is nihilistic. And spirited young people are repelled by it, and want something more. And if the Left—or any progressive imagination of a better future—offers no means of resisting it, then more and more young people will go to the Right.
And so in the meanwhile, those of us who are repelled by both the TCM and by the Right have no alternative place where we might work. We are more comfortable in Blue parts of the country because we are committed to retaining an open, pluralistic society, but we are concerned that Blue Americans are way too comfortable in the TCM. And because they are so focussed on the threats posed from the MAGA Right, they have no clue about how their Liberal Order with all its cherished freedoms is crumbling from its own dead weight. There would be no room for MAGA to thrive if that were not true. MAGA is like a pack of hyenas attacking a sick elephant.
Let’s hope the elephant stays on its feet through the next election cycle. But even if it does, the long-term problem remains. It’s the nihilism, stupid. MAGA, its delusions and tin-pot bufoonery, is not the threat I worry most about. It’s rather about where the TCM left unchecked will take us. That’s the real source of the nihilism, and that’s where the real power lies, and neither a MAGA GOP or a Dem soft-Neoliberalism is remotely capable of dealing with that. And effective resistance to the TCM will have to be global because the TCM is everywhere.
Notes:
1. Graeme Wood, “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right”. The Atlantic, September 2023.
2. I cannot predict how something more positive might emerge, but I can look to some historical examples that provide a model. I’ll try to develop some ideas along those lines in future posts.
3. In a future post I’ll lay out how a dispute among some theologians in the 14th century created the conditions that made Baconism a possibility. Shifts like this are overdetermined, but Baconism wasn’t possible until after Aristotle and Plato were thrown out, and this theological debate in the 1300s set the stage for rejecting Plato and Aristotle in the 1500s and 1600s. And so here we are. The theological argument that won in the West was rejected in the Eastern Orthodox churches, and that’s a big part of why in the East they think that Western Christians, particularly in the Reformed traditions, are all heretics. Like most things it’s more complicated than that, but ideas matter, theological ones evern more than most others.
4. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, Verso, 1998,
5.The kind of right-wing Catholicism that some of the kids are attracted to is an understandable response to this longing for meaning in a nihilistic world. But it becomes dangerously misguided when it entertains fantasies of theocracy. And these kids are deeply deluded if they think that a society that is so Calvinist in its roots would ever accept a Catholic Integralist solution. Nobody wants to live in someone else’s theocracy, and these Catholics better realize if it’s theocracy they want, it’s more likely to be a Dominionist Fundamentalist theocracy that they’ll get, and in it they will be just as oppressed as everyone else.
6. I’m not saying people who live within the TCM don’t have religious experiences. Read Wm James. But such experiences make no sense in the TCM. They are anomalies that usually get reduced to “aesthetic” experiences, experiences from which no metaphysical significance can be extrapolated. And so such experiences become, to use the gospel metaphor, a seed that falls stony, infertile ground. Cultural context for interpreting such experiences matters.
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