38 responses to “Nihilism Where America is Going / Glenn Beck”
Bootiful. Although I’m sure he would cast me as one of the bad guys, I actually agree with his appraisal of the stakes, if not the problem. Enforced ignorance (via some form of neofascism) is one of the most likely scenarios I see arising out of the technologically driven disequilibria to come… He’s mobilizing.
well if anything the vast majority of people will likely to keep over-reading meanings into world events and keep overestimating their positive roles in those happenings, for me reading the tea-leaves (and the daily news) I see continuing collapsing of major/industrial economies and infrastructures and with that the further splintering/disintegration of states into warring tribes for all in the midst of the death-throes of our bio-sphere, how much time/resources left for high-tech-influences I don’t know but probably relatively little in the big picture, new dark ages anyone?
We’ve reached the magical point where our supercomputers can out-crunch our brains. This is where our lesson in Moore’s Law begins for real. There’s no realistic model of impending environmental collapse (that I’ve seen) that even approaches how quickly our technology will overthrow social equilibria–overthrowing them as we speak, actually. I see the environment as a canard anymore, a way to keep what critical resources the system has left preoccupied while capitalism retools itself into the perfect suicide machine.
time will tell…
..hence the need for a post-nihilist response: self-deconstructing narratives of bricoleur ecologicians flinging metaphors and telling stories that resonate and move bodies. People who develop adequate vision-logics and hyper-reflexivity might be immune to fascism…
couldn’t hurt to try
Tis the hope. The research doesn’t seem promising though.
RSB, certainly won’t be a vehicle for large scale social-engineering but might help give some of us a bit of breathing room as things come crashing down around us.
I think given some augmentations to the hominid CNS and its public interface we might see forms of “rationality”, or cognitive adaptability that habitually (and perhaps violently) reject doxic modes of concluding. Perhaps similar to how most adults now violently reject having sex with their siblings, e.g., tuned afffect response of disgust or horror?
It was definitely weird watching this – I agreed with Glenn Beck for much of his segment, an unsettling feeling on top of the original weirdness of a society I the throws of nihilism. His call for good old fashioned religious values is the stuff of reactionary fascism and what the stakes are for us on a planet that people are increasing realizing is deteriorating. I actually think that we do need to overcome this nihilist thought that has crept ever more widely, yet more or less out of sight, but through it and not against it. I still don’t think anyone has done it better than Nietzsche with the thought of the eternal return: a cosmic yes in any case that is so thoroughly invigorating. Hopefully a positive value at the cosmic level will force humans to acknowledge their earthly predicament, and we could do all of this without worship.
hey brt, I just don’t see this widespread nihilism (anymore than I see evidence that we have somehow become too scientistic) I see a world full of people who believe in all kinds of supposedly Universal (god-given or otherwise) values and other forms of inflationary narcissism.
where are these masses who have lost faith in there being Meaning (and they somehow being central/vital to that Meaning) in Life?
as far as I can see this is akin to the FauxNews paranoid propaganda of the homo-secular war on Christ-mas, the messenger in this case should be a clue, no?
Where are the nihilistic masses? It’s an issue of vision. What I see is the fervent religious types desperately trying to hold onto a belief and making up enemies to keep that belief relevant. There is an nervous/aggressive stance that seems to accompany the religious right (in America anyhow), like they are holding onto something that keep slipping out of their hands and looking for someone to blame. These people are trying to ward off nihilism.
But I see this combative stance amongst my friends too: talking about climate change, monetary reform, most philosophy, etc. is something to get through very fast until I shut up. Nobody wants to tackle problems, everyone just seems to want to jump ahead to the “oh well, we’ll all be dead soon anyways so fuck it all” moment, or the “destroy all the things and have a spectacular revolution!” moment.
I know that this is my own limited sphere of influence, but there is definitely a difference in our secular society from when religion was a common currency that captured all people’s imagination in those intensive personal moments. Even those that did not believe had to work it out in the terms of the culturally instituted religion, and face the wrath of the public. I’m about to dive into Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age where something like this is detailed in ~800 pages.
I’m not looking for a replacement religion here; more like a release of the imagination, so that ‘nothingness’ stops blocking it from planning, strategizing, and critical engagement. My wager is that it is in the absence of public assembly and commoning, the weakness of people in determining their own future, that we find the true culprit: we lack Common Notions. Fascination with nothingness and the void (and ending there), prevents us from seeking to create more powerful bodies.
Dmf: Well, with Adorno, perhaps, you can see it as functionally nihilistic. This is a big part of the problem: The way things look now is pretty much what you would expect if *nihilism were true* for a species hardwired to think otherwise. States retreat from the objective meaning business, and thus from the endless argumentum ad baculum that is history, organizing themselves around the efficient servicing of our shared animal imperatives–consumerism–instead. These become the anchors of social cohesion, allowing the old anchors, like Christianity, to become another mass consumer good. So I agree with you that his thesis of ‘nihilism overrunning culture’ is absurd. Hollywood cannot make a movement–er, movie–without extolling the ‘power of belief.’ But at the same time I think this incapacity on Hollywood’s part is symptomatic of the way nihilism is clearly overrunning culture. The content is chock full o semantic nuts, but the form is perfectly instrumental.
The great problem that Glen Beck poses in this video is not so much his ideology as his *predicament.* The problem is one of *not sounding like him* in the course of condemning nihilism. There is simply no claim regarding ‘objective meaning’ that anyone can now make that isn’t simply rank speculation, and therefore utterly incapable of rallying ‘rational consensus,’ and so requiring coercion to organize collective behaviour.
My fantasy series is actually all about this troubling connection between meaningfulness and chauvinism and oppression, btw.
RSB, I don’t think that govts/industries etc are suffering from nihilism as they from an inability to exercise much in the way of top-down control because they are operating on different scales, with differing technologies, than before,
their histories were always conflict-ridden and otherwise buggy and now we have more players/interests/modes involved than ever, just too messy/complex to really manage…
Scott, I completely agree with what you write here and elsewhere about our inability to use rational consensus about objective meanings as a way to organize action and life, but there are options for organizing other than crude forms of coercion. Here I’m thinking of non-invasive affording infrastructures. That is, by creating ecosocial niches that cue, prompt, guide (as all infrastructures already do), yet also provide, afford and enhance prosociality, cognitive sensitivity and bodily flourishing, we can enact pre-ideological modes or organizing. Of course we would still need deliberational processes and forms of consensus (that are more about semio-affective resonance than conceptual fit), but this can, and I would argue must, all be done after the advent of a nihilistic intelligence not opposed to it.
Bill, when you say you agree with much of what Beck was saying which part exactly did you mean? Beck want to fight off nihilistic intelligence in favor of (re)installing the logic of rote tradition and doxic unthinking. His yea-saying is a full inflation of the theological, and not the stuff of an acceptance of finitude which would allow us to put away our silly, self-mutilating ideological fetishes in favor of a more humble working with affective materiality.
And I agree with Dirk, in that I don’t see a full-fledged nihilism at work in the world – outside of white bro academia and their pop culture dark-arts expressions. What I see is incoherence and fragmentation at all levels of ideology – with some people amplifying their Christian sentiments and cognitive habits here, and others perpetuating some alternative tradition or given habit of reasoning there – but not much in the way of abandoning the whole metanarrative project altogether. People everywhere are stressed and scared and overrun by media to the extent that they form all sorts of patchwork or hybrid Metas in order to cope with uniform onslaught of capital. And as we all know as things start to deteriorate people will be tend towards defensive reactionary positions and social conforming in order to band together and make sense and subsistence of their lives. So no, a virulent nihilism is not Glenn’s conjured enemy here but instead SECULARISM, and narcissism and kludgey smorgasbord Metas that get fashioned for coping in a secular society. The anti-secularists are trying to ward off nihilism not embrace its accompanying insights and grow from it.
I do appreciate your comments about how a loss of meaning can block us form progressive action. I find this to be the case with many of those I talk to about these issues as well. The problem is a kind of existential blockage that follows from the REACTION TO nihilist thinking. First exposures to nihilist thought tend to generate types of melancholia born out of our existential need for coherence. The a loss of coherence viz. cognitive evaluations results in a habitual default back into meta-narrativization, which leads to the refashioning of theology into yet another ISM in place of the old Gods. In this case a “dark” theology of Nihil-ISM – as the dwelling on our lonely lot and a mourning of the death of the Gods. Oh so dramatic, and pacifying, and paralyzing – all the while not realizing that their ISM (however unreflective and informal it may be), with its associated affects and reasoning styles, is just one more deity in the pantheon of idealist longings: a dwelling or “fascination” that, as you say, confines us and shelters us from actually engaging the intensive forces at play in the wild.
Nihilist thinking is a cognitive and methodological achievement not a confluence of negative tropes and coded affects. What will move us forward in our exploration of the abyss might not be “common notions” but common and earthly effective resonances between and within bodies. I follow Arran in this regard with wanting to understand notions or “ideas” as embodied information events, or states of multiscalar oscillations with rhythmic-affective force. We can resonate and oscilate and thus act in inter-corporeal (“common”) ways that don’t rely on semantic inflation but instead generate new capacaities for sustaining more progressive ecologies/matrices. The tyranny of Meaning must be overthrown by what really ‘matters’ – a revolution of the flesh.
Michael,
Sorry for the late response, I’ve been away from the internet for a spell. I must say, again, that I agree with everything you say. The part I agree with Glenn Beck about is the emergence and visibility of nihilism as a force within our culture and its appearance being a problem that we must deal with. His solution is for more of the same religious commitment getting injection into the masses yet again, in a truly panicked reactionary form. Rather than being a problem that comes from the outside or infiltrates our precious culture or youth or whatever, this isn’t something that can be warded off or replaced with The Real -ISM. There is a danger (in my view) of groups reinvigorating the religious within the commons because of a perceived fragmentation of a once great whole, but religion did once pervade the public realm as indistinguishable from it. A public body could have life breathed into it again with proper assembly and, as you rightly write, resonance. Common notions used here was a reference to Spinoza which, as I understand it is a kind of nexus between the ideas people communicate with each other and the bodies coming together and sharing a place. So, bodies in concert will inevitably share the same notions.
Dark theologies, ontologies, and ecologies don’t seem to sidestep the -ISM problem to me, though I’m sure plenty will have something to say about this.
-Bill
from a secular materialist take you seem to be confusing entropy (a fact of physics) with nihilism (an all too rare human patho-logos), as for the mythical questing theo-logos of “common” notions there has never been nor could be such things/doings/experiences (by what supra-human means would this sort of transmission/coordination/program-coding take place?)
Also this “deep down those who hold it know, that all that is finished” doesn’t match with what we are beginning to understand about cog-biases, Freud was largely wrong to frame our un-conscious processes in terms of repression/denial and so is more of what we should be leaving behind.
I think we can talk about two different kinds of nihilism. The first is philosophical nihilism. Philosophical nihilism is a formidable and interesting position that takes as its task the critique or elimination of ontotheological / metaphysical dogmas and opens out into constructivism, participation, responsibility, and epistemic humility. The second is something we can call everyday nihilism. Everyday nihilism represents the pinnacle of postmodern (i..e., hyper-perspectival) laissez-faire individualism and apathy. Everyday nihilism is a kind of reckless submission to doxa, to ideology, to deity, to markets, to the idea that we have no power or influence. The former is very rare and interesting while the latter is widespread, I think.
hey AR, I think that the everyday as you phrase it is more with what used to be called a herd-mentality and not so sure it is as much a symptom of our times as it is of our species. Tho apparently there is some anxiety/precarity making its way onto the radar of more people than I had expected but even then they keep pushing the same rocks up the hill just with more juice: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/sheryl-sandberg-marianne-cooper-talk-anxieties-modern-families
I like the differentiation Adam. Thank you for that. I do believe ‘philosophical nihilism’ is more than an interesting position. I’m thinking it is more of a cognitive achievement or post-formal developmental ‘stage’ crystalized into discursive operators. As for everyday nihilism, like I said above I think that kind of sentiment is actually the symptom of a mode of affect generated by secularization and its deterritorialization of traditional meta-frames that produces a loss in coherence leading to a subsequent mourning. I think this awkward dwelling in incoherence in certainly growing (how can it not in this insane civilization?), but I think the reactionary impulse is also quite strong and pervasive with its reterritorializations viz. religion, sports affiliations, sub-cultural identifications and so on…
Insofar as it directly follows as a forceful implication of science I’m inclined to agree. Every time I hear an argument for compatibilism, I always say, ‘Explain that to a crowd of fourteen year olds.’ Just talk to people who work on a neurology floor: as seamless as it seems for the body, the fit between medicine and the mind is profoundly uncomfortable. Anything can be rationalized: we are fucking humans after all. Except that. When our brains break down it never stops being inexplicable in some way.
The continual expansion of the sciences just is the extension of nihilistic implicature. Rosenberg, for instance, adheres to a hardline appraisal of theoretical competence (the same as I do) outside the sciences. Given a domain general application of the domain specific skepticism that plainly renders science such an extraordinarily effective claim-making institution, you accordingly become a meaning skeptic. (The position has two primary vulnerabilities, one merely apparent, the other very real. The merely apparent vulnerability is the charge of question-begging incoherence. The real vulnerability lies in the failure of eliminativism to produce any positive account of the phenomena eliminated, leaving the door open to infer varieties of meaning realism as best explanations. Since this is the way the grain of our intuitions run, this is the way the majority run.)
It’s no coincidence that ‘scientism’ is the charge raised in concert with nihilism. Nihilism just is progress. The real question is one of whether we’ll be able to keep abreast it, generate the conceptuality we need to at least understand what is dismantling us from without and within. To be scientifically reverse-engineered is to be understood as another machine, end of story. To be understood as a machine is to be something that can be manipulated, to become the site of intersecting interests. The cures will make people weep for wonder.
To be scientifically reverse-engineered is to be understood as another machine, end of story. This is why something miraculous is always required, some kind efficacious lacuna or some kind of emergent spark or some kind of real-but-not-natural social function. Meaning always requires something more because nihilism is simply the shout of nature.
(Talk about a late reply) I think this distinction was one that I failed to make explicit, so right on. With philosophical nihilism I would equate the owning of the title Nihilist, as some people do. This is less of an issue as I take it, as few would ever try to build a nihilist institution, with canon literature, and recruit. One could imagine a Monty Python sketch to that tune, that would be by turns intensely apathetic and contain horrendous infighting. The nihilism I was referring to was more of the everyday kind: affective nihilism. But the polarity of apathy and non-participation contra dreams of destruction seems to me what we are left with absent a way out of this situation.
I tend to work with Simon Critchley’s active/passive framework, but ultimately it is Nietzsche who saw the advent of this dilemma and he was thinking of what happens to our bodies and our will when the basic beliefs and values that carried our culture along just vanish. Like when a satisfactory end of a string of thoughts is never reached but, collectively, we can’t stop retracing those strings.
synthetic zerØ 
Bootiful. Although I’m sure he would cast me as one of the bad guys, I actually agree with his appraisal of the stakes, if not the problem. Enforced ignorance (via some form of neofascism) is one of the most likely scenarios I see arising out of the technologically driven disequilibria to come… He’s mobilizing.
well if anything the vast majority of people will likely to keep over-reading meanings into world events and keep overestimating their positive roles in those happenings, for me reading the tea-leaves (and the daily news) I see continuing collapsing of major/industrial economies and infrastructures and with that the further splintering/disintegration of states into warring tribes for all in the midst of the death-throes of our bio-sphere, how much time/resources left for high-tech-influences I don’t know but probably relatively little in the big picture, new dark ages anyone?
We’ve reached the magical point where our supercomputers can out-crunch our brains. This is where our lesson in Moore’s Law begins for real. There’s no realistic model of impending environmental collapse (that I’ve seen) that even approaches how quickly our technology will overthrow social equilibria–overthrowing them as we speak, actually. I see the environment as a canard anymore, a way to keep what critical resources the system has left preoccupied while capitalism retools itself into the perfect suicide machine.
time will tell…
..hence the need for a post-nihilist response: self-deconstructing narratives of bricoleur ecologicians flinging metaphors and telling stories that resonate and move bodies. People who develop adequate vision-logics and hyper-reflexivity might be immune to fascism…
couldn’t hurt to try
Tis the hope. The research doesn’t seem promising though.
RSB, certainly won’t be a vehicle for large scale social-engineering but might help give some of us a bit of breathing room as things come crashing down around us.
I think given some augmentations to the hominid CNS and its public interface we might see forms of “rationality”, or cognitive adaptability that habitually (and perhaps violently) reject doxic modes of concluding. Perhaps similar to how most adults now violently reject having sex with their siblings, e.g., tuned afffect response of disgust or horror?
It was definitely weird watching this – I agreed with Glenn Beck for much of his segment, an unsettling feeling on top of the original weirdness of a society I the throws of nihilism. His call for good old fashioned religious values is the stuff of reactionary fascism and what the stakes are for us on a planet that people are increasing realizing is deteriorating. I actually think that we do need to overcome this nihilist thought that has crept ever more widely, yet more or less out of sight, but through it and not against it. I still don’t think anyone has done it better than Nietzsche with the thought of the eternal return: a cosmic yes in any case that is so thoroughly invigorating. Hopefully a positive value at the cosmic level will force humans to acknowledge their earthly predicament, and we could do all of this without worship.
hey brt, I just don’t see this widespread nihilism (anymore than I see evidence that we have somehow become too scientistic) I see a world full of people who believe in all kinds of supposedly Universal (god-given or otherwise) values and other forms of inflationary narcissism.
where are these masses who have lost faith in there being Meaning (and they somehow being central/vital to that Meaning) in Life?
as far as I can see this is akin to the FauxNews paranoid propaganda of the homo-secular war on Christ-mas, the messenger in this case should be a clue, no?
Where are the nihilistic masses? It’s an issue of vision. What I see is the fervent religious types desperately trying to hold onto a belief and making up enemies to keep that belief relevant. There is an nervous/aggressive stance that seems to accompany the religious right (in America anyhow), like they are holding onto something that keep slipping out of their hands and looking for someone to blame. These people are trying to ward off nihilism.
But I see this combative stance amongst my friends too: talking about climate change, monetary reform, most philosophy, etc. is something to get through very fast until I shut up. Nobody wants to tackle problems, everyone just seems to want to jump ahead to the “oh well, we’ll all be dead soon anyways so fuck it all” moment, or the “destroy all the things and have a spectacular revolution!” moment.
I know that this is my own limited sphere of influence, but there is definitely a difference in our secular society from when religion was a common currency that captured all people’s imagination in those intensive personal moments. Even those that did not believe had to work it out in the terms of the culturally instituted religion, and face the wrath of the public. I’m about to dive into Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age where something like this is detailed in ~800 pages.
I’m not looking for a replacement religion here; more like a release of the imagination, so that ‘nothingness’ stops blocking it from planning, strategizing, and critical engagement. My wager is that it is in the absence of public assembly and commoning, the weakness of people in determining their own future, that we find the true culprit: we lack Common Notions. Fascination with nothingness and the void (and ending there), prevents us from seeking to create more powerful bodies.
Dmf: Well, with Adorno, perhaps, you can see it as functionally nihilistic. This is a big part of the problem: The way things look now is pretty much what you would expect if *nihilism were true* for a species hardwired to think otherwise. States retreat from the objective meaning business, and thus from the endless argumentum ad baculum that is history, organizing themselves around the efficient servicing of our shared animal imperatives–consumerism–instead. These become the anchors of social cohesion, allowing the old anchors, like Christianity, to become another mass consumer good. So I agree with you that his thesis of ‘nihilism overrunning culture’ is absurd. Hollywood cannot make a movement–er, movie–without extolling the ‘power of belief.’ But at the same time I think this incapacity on Hollywood’s part is symptomatic of the way nihilism is clearly overrunning culture. The content is chock full o semantic nuts, but the form is perfectly instrumental.
The great problem that Glen Beck poses in this video is not so much his ideology as his *predicament.* The problem is one of *not sounding like him* in the course of condemning nihilism. There is simply no claim regarding ‘objective meaning’ that anyone can now make that isn’t simply rank speculation, and therefore utterly incapable of rallying ‘rational consensus,’ and so requiring coercion to organize collective behaviour.
My fantasy series is actually all about this troubling connection between meaningfulness and chauvinism and oppression, btw.
RSB, I don’t think that govts/industries etc are suffering from nihilism as they from an inability to exercise much in the way of top-down control because they are operating on different scales, with differing technologies, than before,
their histories were always conflict-ridden and otherwise buggy and now we have more players/interests/modes involved than ever, just too messy/complex to really manage…
Scott, I completely agree with what you write here and elsewhere about our inability to use rational consensus about objective meanings as a way to organize action and life, but there are options for organizing other than crude forms of coercion. Here I’m thinking of non-invasive affording infrastructures. That is, by creating ecosocial niches that cue, prompt, guide (as all infrastructures already do), yet also provide, afford and enhance prosociality, cognitive sensitivity and bodily flourishing, we can enact pre-ideological modes or organizing. Of course we would still need deliberational processes and forms of consensus (that are more about semio-affective resonance than conceptual fit), but this can, and I would argue must, all be done after the advent of a nihilistic intelligence not opposed to it.
Bill, when you say you agree with much of what Beck was saying which part exactly did you mean? Beck want to fight off nihilistic intelligence in favor of (re)installing the logic of rote tradition and doxic unthinking. His yea-saying is a full inflation of the theological, and not the stuff of an acceptance of finitude which would allow us to put away our silly, self-mutilating ideological fetishes in favor of a more humble working with affective materiality.
And I agree with Dirk, in that I don’t see a full-fledged nihilism at work in the world – outside of white bro academia and their pop culture dark-arts expressions. What I see is incoherence and fragmentation at all levels of ideology – with some people amplifying their Christian sentiments and cognitive habits here, and others perpetuating some alternative tradition or given habit of reasoning there – but not much in the way of abandoning the whole metanarrative project altogether. People everywhere are stressed and scared and overrun by media to the extent that they form all sorts of patchwork or hybrid Metas in order to cope with uniform onslaught of capital. And as we all know as things start to deteriorate people will be tend towards defensive reactionary positions and social conforming in order to band together and make sense and subsistence of their lives. So no, a virulent nihilism is not Glenn’s conjured enemy here but instead SECULARISM, and narcissism and kludgey smorgasbord Metas that get fashioned for coping in a secular society. The anti-secularists are trying to ward off nihilism not embrace its accompanying insights and grow from it.
I do appreciate your comments about how a loss of meaning can block us form progressive action. I find this to be the case with many of those I talk to about these issues as well. The problem is a kind of existential blockage that follows from the REACTION TO nihilist thinking. First exposures to nihilist thought tend to generate types of melancholia born out of our existential need for coherence. The a loss of coherence viz. cognitive evaluations results in a habitual default back into meta-narrativization, which leads to the refashioning of theology into yet another ISM in place of the old Gods. In this case a “dark” theology of Nihil-ISM – as the dwelling on our lonely lot and a mourning of the death of the Gods. Oh so dramatic, and pacifying, and paralyzing – all the while not realizing that their ISM (however unreflective and informal it may be), with its associated affects and reasoning styles, is just one more deity in the pantheon of idealist longings: a dwelling or “fascination” that, as you say, confines us and shelters us from actually engaging the intensive forces at play in the wild.
Nihilist thinking is a cognitive and methodological achievement not a confluence of negative tropes and coded affects. What will move us forward in our exploration of the abyss might not be “common notions” but common and earthly effective resonances between and within bodies. I follow Arran in this regard with wanting to understand notions or “ideas” as embodied information events, or states of multiscalar oscillations with rhythmic-affective force. We can resonate and oscilate and thus act in inter-corporeal (“common”) ways that don’t rely on semantic inflation but instead generate new capacaities for sustaining more progressive ecologies/matrices. The tyranny of Meaning must be overthrown by what really ‘matters’ – a revolution of the flesh.
Michael,
Sorry for the late response, I’ve been away from the internet for a spell. I must say, again, that I agree with everything you say. The part I agree with Glenn Beck about is the emergence and visibility of nihilism as a force within our culture and its appearance being a problem that we must deal with. His solution is for more of the same religious commitment getting injection into the masses yet again, in a truly panicked reactionary form. Rather than being a problem that comes from the outside or infiltrates our precious culture or youth or whatever, this isn’t something that can be warded off or replaced with The Real -ISM. There is a danger (in my view) of groups reinvigorating the religious within the commons because of a perceived fragmentation of a once great whole, but religion did once pervade the public realm as indistinguishable from it. A public body could have life breathed into it again with proper assembly and, as you rightly write, resonance. Common notions used here was a reference to Spinoza which, as I understand it is a kind of nexus between the ideas people communicate with each other and the bodies coming together and sharing a place. So, bodies in concert will inevitably share the same notions.
Dark theologies, ontologies, and ecologies don’t seem to sidestep the -ISM problem to me, though I’m sure plenty will have something to say about this.
-Bill
from a secular materialist take you seem to be confusing entropy (a fact of physics) with nihilism (an all too rare human patho-logos), as for the mythical questing theo-logos of “common” notions there has never been nor could be such things/doings/experiences (by what supra-human means would this sort of transmission/coordination/program-coding take place?)
Also this “deep down those who hold it know, that all that is finished” doesn’t match with what we are beginning to understand about cog-biases, Freud was largely wrong to frame our un-conscious processes in terms of repression/denial and so is more of what we should be leaving behind.
I think we can talk about two different kinds of nihilism. The first is philosophical nihilism. Philosophical nihilism is a formidable and interesting position that takes as its task the critique or elimination of ontotheological / metaphysical dogmas and opens out into constructivism, participation, responsibility, and epistemic humility. The second is something we can call everyday nihilism. Everyday nihilism represents the pinnacle of postmodern (i..e., hyper-perspectival) laissez-faire individualism and apathy. Everyday nihilism is a kind of reckless submission to doxa, to ideology, to deity, to markets, to the idea that we have no power or influence. The former is very rare and interesting while the latter is widespread, I think.
hey AR, I think that the everyday as you phrase it is more with what used to be called a herd-mentality and not so sure it is as much a symptom of our times as it is of our species. Tho apparently there is some anxiety/precarity making its way onto the radar of more people than I had expected but even then they keep pushing the same rocks up the hill just with more juice: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/sheryl-sandberg-marianne-cooper-talk-anxieties-modern-families
I like the differentiation Adam. Thank you for that. I do believe ‘philosophical nihilism’ is more than an interesting position. I’m thinking it is more of a cognitive achievement or post-formal developmental ‘stage’ crystalized into discursive operators. As for everyday nihilism, like I said above I think that kind of sentiment is actually the symptom of a mode of affect generated by secularization and its deterritorialization of traditional meta-frames that produces a loss in coherence leading to a subsequent mourning. I think this awkward dwelling in incoherence in certainly growing (how can it not in this insane civilization?), but I think the reactionary impulse is also quite strong and pervasive with its reterritorializations viz. religion, sports affiliations, sub-cultural identifications and so on…
Insofar as it directly follows as a forceful implication of science I’m inclined to agree. Every time I hear an argument for compatibilism, I always say, ‘Explain that to a crowd of fourteen year olds.’ Just talk to people who work on a neurology floor: as seamless as it seems for the body, the fit between medicine and the mind is profoundly uncomfortable. Anything can be rationalized: we are fucking humans after all. Except that. When our brains break down it never stops being inexplicable in some way.
The continual expansion of the sciences just is the extension of nihilistic implicature. Rosenberg, for instance, adheres to a hardline appraisal of theoretical competence (the same as I do) outside the sciences. Given a domain general application of the domain specific skepticism that plainly renders science such an extraordinarily effective claim-making institution, you accordingly become a meaning skeptic. (The position has two primary vulnerabilities, one merely apparent, the other very real. The merely apparent vulnerability is the charge of question-begging incoherence. The real vulnerability lies in the failure of eliminativism to produce any positive account of the phenomena eliminated, leaving the door open to infer varieties of meaning realism as best explanations. Since this is the way the grain of our intuitions run, this is the way the majority run.)
It’s no coincidence that ‘scientism’ is the charge raised in concert with nihilism. Nihilism just is progress. The real question is one of whether we’ll be able to keep abreast it, generate the conceptuality we need to at least understand what is dismantling us from without and within. To be scientifically reverse-engineered is to be understood as another machine, end of story. To be understood as a machine is to be something that can be manipulated, to become the site of intersecting interests. The cures will make people weep for wonder.
To be scientifically reverse-engineered is to be understood as another machine, end of story. This is why something miraculous is always required, some kind efficacious lacuna or some kind of emergent spark or some kind of real-but-not-natural social function. Meaning always requires something more because nihilism is simply the shout of nature.
(Talk about a late reply) I think this distinction was one that I failed to make explicit, so right on. With philosophical nihilism I would equate the owning of the title Nihilist, as some people do. This is less of an issue as I take it, as few would ever try to build a nihilist institution, with canon literature, and recruit. One could imagine a Monty Python sketch to that tune, that would be by turns intensely apathetic and contain horrendous infighting. The nihilism I was referring to was more of the everyday kind: affective nihilism. But the polarity of apathy and non-participation contra dreams of destruction seems to me what we are left with absent a way out of this situation.
I tend to work with Simon Critchley’s active/passive framework, but ultimately it is Nietzsche who saw the advent of this dilemma and he was thinking of what happens to our bodies and our will when the basic beliefs and values that carried our culture along just vanish. Like when a satisfactory end of a string of thoughts is never reached but, collectively, we can’t stop retracing those strings.