Because we live in an age that is dominated by bourgeois values and the bourgeois
worldview, we assume that this is the way it will always be because what else could be better? All the world strives to become what the democracies of the West have become, right? They’re not perfect, but is anything better imaginable? Francis Fukuyama, echoing Hegel, asks whether bourgeois democracy isn’t the whole goal (end) of history. Is the bourgeois human type, then, the pinnacle of human development?
Let’s hope not.
There is much to commend in the bourgeois as the ideal type who replaced the courtier aristocrat as the modern age supplanted the medieval. He was the self-reliant family farmer, the tradesman, the entrepreneur, and the businessman whose initiatives propelled the West into the modern age. But in late modernity, the bourgeois has become a degraded into the consuming organizational man or woman and now has a moral stature very similar to the degraded aristocrat of the 17th and 18th Century. The bourgeois has become increasingly the Last Man who is interested only in his bread and circuses.
Nazism was among other things born of a kind of revulsion with the degraded bourgeois, and its appeal lay in its enshrinement of the older ideal of manhood embodied in the Aryan warrior as the national type. That longing for a more noble, pre-bourgeois past is a key to the emotional appeal of fascism. We look now at Hitler and Mussolini as clowns whom now it is hard to believe any one could take seriously in their day. But if we are to learn anything from that experience, it’s important to understand what made fascism so attractive to so many people, particularly the young.
For what might be described as the spiritual condition of late modernity that gave gave rise to fascism has not gone away; if anything it has gotten worse. The spiritual vacuum created by the dissolution of modern rationalist optimism continues to define the cultural mood of the contemporary West. The West is thrashing around trying to find its lost soul, and for that reason feels all the more threatened by a more primitive but aggressive cultural movement looming in the Islamic East that seems to have no such problem with its soul or sense of purpose.
We have lost faith in the ideals of Enlightenment humanism and with nothing having taken its place, we have defaulted to the Last Man, the man who is incapable of transcendent aspiration. An echo of Enlightenment ideals born in the modern era and of the transcendent ideals born in the premodern era, still shapes the contemporary world to some extent, but it’s doubtful these echo ideals will stand up to pressure. They didn’t stand up in Germany, which was a great creative center for the development and propagation of Enlightenment rationalism, and we are deluding ourselves if we think that we Americans are strong enough to stand up to the kind of pressure we’re likely to face in the coming decades. The Last Man doesn’t care about ideals; he only cares about his security and his entertainments.
The events of the
last six years in a time when the pressure has been relatively weak are
very ominous in this regard. Things are going to get tough, but they
haven’t yet, and even so Americans have shown that they are easily frightened and
manipulated and quite willing to trade their liberty for security. For me the real problem lies in that there is no sufficiently robust counterbalance to the free-floating anxiety and fear that pervades the culture at a time when it should feel relatively strong and secure. We are so easily scared because we lack confidence in ourselves. There are always going to be threats of one sort or another, but by world-historical standards no country is safer or more secure than the U.S. at this time.
A self-confident culture would have the poise and intelligence to deal with threats to its security in effective proportionate ways. Instead we have responded to them hysterically and with disproportionate brutality. A self-confident culture would trust that it’s ideals and moral stature would sustain it in the long run. But since America has no such confidence, it has reverted to behavior typical of the insecure bully which obsesses and preens about its masculinity (see below), and in doing so makes things far worse than they need to be.
This is a proto-fascist cultural state of mind. Fascism is not something that presents itself in obvious ways. It happens when a nation feels insecure and is full of resentment. The people who welcome fascism don’t believe they are supporting a dictator; they believe they are supporting a savior, someone who will deliver them from their fear. The Germans who voted for Hitler didn’t think he was an evil guy; nor will Americans believe that of any fascist leader they may embrace.
Intellectuals will be taken in as well, but for different reasons. In retrospect we wonder how people with the acuity of Martin Heidegger or Ezra Pound could have fallen for fascist rhetoric and could have bought into its twisted vision. But for them, and for so many others, the attraction lay not so much in what fascism affirmed, but in what it rejected—modernity and its Last Man mediocrity. We look in hindsight at Heidegger and Pound and regard them as morally deficient for their fascism, but what attracted them to fascism was not its brutality, but rather its hatred for modernity and its business culture, and the hollow, timid, flat-souled, overly cerebral human type it created. Fascism, in other words, is a product of bourgeois self-loathing in a world devoid of grace.
As such fascism is best understood as a primitivistic, anti-modern movement that attracted people with its romanticism of a return to the purity of its warrior tribal origins as a way to be anti-bourgeois. It is a masculinity cult that celebrates the bold, audacious will to power–an adolescent preoccupation, perhaps, but no less dangerous for that. It’s a lot easier to imagine a boy idolizing a gallant warrior, even if he’s an outlaw—even if he’s a Nazi storm trooper–than to imagine him doing the same for the bourgeois investment banker, accountant, or shopowner.
The left makes its anti-bourgeois statment by tattoos, body-piercing, the celebration of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The right by its celebration of the gun. The effete, cosmopolitan, liberal bourgeois find it extremely difficult to understand the appeal of the National Rifle Association exactly for this reason. Owning a gun, like piercing one’s tongue, is an effective way to say I’m not one of those empty corporate or bureaucratic suits who has no real idea who he is or what he stands for except to measure his life by his climb in the hierarchy or by the amount of money he has made. “I own a gun,” says the NRA redneck. “I am a hunter warrior–don’t mess with me. Just try taking my gun away, you gutless bourgeois. Make my day.” Either way, left or right, these responses are fantasies that have nothing to do with the world in which we live.
So my point here is not to justify fascism or the NRA mentality, but to try to understand its pervasive and persistent appeal. It goes back to a longing to assert ourselves as a people of valor by showing that we are willing to refuse craven self-interest, and to gallantly risk all for an honorable cause. We don’t look at Nazis that way, but that’s how they looked at themselves. We don’t look at Islamic terrorists that way, but that’s how they look at themselves. And all of our action movies celebrate the same pose. We admire the gallant risk taker, the man with guts, not the sweet guy who wants everybody to be safe and happy. And for that reason fascism remains a compelling and attractive way to fill the West’s spiritual vacuum, and in America, that’s why Dominionist Christianism, a zombie form of Christianity, is rightly considered a form of protofascism.
This obsession with guns and with masculinity is all regressive and nostalgic, especially now since real warfare has offered little possibility for gallantry, from the mindless mechanical slaughter in the trenches during WWI to the bureaucratic futility of Vietnam to the high-tech risklessness of the airwars in Serbia or Afghanistan. The warrior has evolved into the technician, and the technician is a classic bourgeois. Perhaps that’s another reason the neocons were for the last decade so eager to go into Iraq–Americans needed to prove to themselves they still had the guts to fight on the ground. The Democrats fight girly, high-tech air wars in which Americans don’t get hurt; Republicans fight their wars in the streets and Americans get hurt by the thousands. Boo yah. And thousands more will die pointlessly until we get rid of these chickenhawk fools trying to prove to themselves they are not the scared little boys deep down they know they are.
Greenwald has been talking about this need to prove one’s manhood in a post yesterday about Chris Matthews and Fred Thompson’s pheromones. He makes points similar to those made here and by others about the Republican cult of masculinity and of its strategy to feminize the Democrats, who let’s be frank, are too willing to play along. He points us to an old post by Digby in which he talks about the chickenhawk pathology of nerds who need to prove they’re men by talking tough without ever having put themselves in harm’s way. Both are worth reading if you want to get a better grasp of how pathetic and pervasive this mentality is. But the point is that these are the behaviors of men who do not really know who they are, who feel weak, who are trying to fill a spiritual vacuum with some fantasy derived from the premodern past. They are exemplars of the failed bourgeois, and as such they are dangerous protofascists and they need to be kept away from the levers of power.
And then let us hope that we will sooner rather than later be able to retrieve a post-bourgeois (whatever that is) masculine and feminine spiritedness, a "mensch"-iness, to use the Yiddish term, that is at the heart of all virtue. That is a spiritual task for the cultural sphere.
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