Nihilist America
September 6, 2018
FROM Our Borders, Our Selves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism, a forthcoming book from VDare Books by the late Lawrence Auster:
We do not resist, and in most cases do not even notice, the desacralizations that surround us because they constitute the very fabric of our culture. Every culture has an organizing idea that is expressed, consciously or unconsciously, in every facet of its physical and social environment. Just as the organizing idea of medieval Europe was Christianity, and the organizing idea of nineteenth century America was democracy, so the organizing idea of our present, multicultural society is nihilism.
To characterize modern society as nihilistic may strike the reader as extreme. Nihilism is conventionally thought of as an attitude of total negation, as “a rage against creation and against civilization that will not be appeased until it has reduced them to absolute nothingness.” [Eugene Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, Forestville, CA, 1994]. What does this frightful will to destruction have to do with our happy-go-lucky, prosperous, fun-loving country? The answer is that there are degrees and stages of nihilism short of the extreme kind described above. As Fr. Seraphim Rose writes, nihilism is entirely compatible with a “positive” attitude toward life, with enthusiasm, goals, self-esteem, creativity, and most of all with a sense of limitless freedom. What defines nihilism in all its variations is not an attitude of total negation toward everything (which, as we have said, is only the most extreme form of nihilism), but the belief that there is no absolute truth and no rational basis for determining right and wrong. In its early stages, nihilism simply denies the existence of moral truth. In its advanced stages, nihilism replaces moral truth by a new, non-moral criterion of human action–such as “power,” “vitality,” “self-fulfillment,” or “prosperity.”
In criticizing modern America, neoconservative writers such as Paul Johnson and Alan Bloom have referred to this belief system as “relativism.” But that is an inadequate and misleading term. Relativism means that you have your truth, and I have mine, and there’s no way to choose between them. People who are described as relativists (i.e. most contemporary Americans) typically say that they believe in right and wrong for themselves, but that they don’t want to “impose” their moral code on others. There are two problems with characterizing this view as relativistic. A true relativist believes in his own moral truth and is willing to defend his own society, even though he doesn’t believe that his morality and his society are based on absolute truth. By contrast, it is never clear what moral principles today’s so-called relativist does believe in, even for himself, other than the vague imperative of being a “good” person and not judging others. Second, even if the so-called relativist does believe in moral standards for himself, his refusal to affirm any common moral standards for the community is indistinguishable from nihilism. If we, as individuals or as a society, are unwilling to say that a manifestly evil act is wrong, then we are nihilists. A society which can’t say that a horrible act of rape or murder is evil, a society which describes mass murderers as “troubled” rather than wicked, is not just relativistic, it is nihilistic.
And if there is one thing that can be said with certainty about contemporary Americans, it is that most of them, particularly those who like to think of themselves as “good” people, feel it is not possible to make judgments of good and evil.
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The “God” Americans believe in is merely a projection of indiscriminate niceness. Such niceness, the moral ideal of our democracy, releases demonic evil and has no way to stop it.
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The passive nihilism of declining to make moral judgments easily mutates into active nihilism, a will to destruction. This dynamic is inherent in the nature of nihilism. The modern liberal, who is a passive nihilist, believes in freedom and tolerance for all kinds of once-forbidden behaviors, but he has no notion of what the freedom is for. If freedom is the only good, then the more “free” an act is (i.e. the more transgressive it is), then the better it is. Thus the liberal, who initially asks for a suspension of moral judgment against such things as illegitimacy, abortion, and perversion, inevitably embraces these things as manifestations of ever greater freedom, and demonizes anyone who does not embrace them. For example, the cultural left finds it disturbing that, despite middle-class America’s unprecedented tolerance of diverse “lifestyles,” there is still one lifestyle of which many middle-class Americans are decidedly not tolerant–homosexuality. Enraged by this fact, feminist writer Anne Roiphe calls for a culture war to be waged against “the bigots of the fundamentalist church,” by which she means all Americans who don’t yet embrace homosexuality as normal behavior.
And who does she call upon to wage this war against “bigotry”? “[T]he world-weary, post-Salem, post-Freudian … ironists, doubters, urbanists, drinkers of caffe latte, denizens of the postmodern night.” In calling for the majority of Americans to be converted into “denizens of the postmodern night,” Miss Roiphe acknowledges that she has no moral good to put in place of the traditional norms which she condemns as bigotry. All she wants is to turn everyone into a nihilist like herself. [Anne Roiphe, “Common Values? No, Homosexuality Divides America,” New York Observer, March 9, 1998].
Nihilism thus reveals itself, not as a passive reluctance to make and enforce moral judgments, but as an activist program for the reorganization of human reality. This nihilist program culminates in the systematic inversion of moral values–of normal and abnormal, good and bad, law and lawlessness–that characterizes contemporary America.
[….]
The nihilist inversion of moral truth, which has become the organizing principle of American society, corresponds with the inversion of America’s racial and national identity. As we have just seen, if you don’t believe in the good, you will inevitably start surrendering to evil. In the same way, if you have no love for your country or your race, you will inevitably start surrendering to those things that threaten your nation or your race. The correspondence between moral inversion and national suicide has been made explicit by Gregory Wolfe, the black homosexual director of the messianic gay play “Angels in America”:
If we wanted to know what America was becoming, we used to look at the center–that which was constituted as [sexually] normal, American, Protestant, and white. Now, if we want to know where America is and where it’s going, we need to look at the fringe. The fringe is now the center. [Gregory Wolfe, The NewYorker, May 31, 1992, p. 137].
In other words, the center of America is now sexually abnormal, as well as non-American, non-Christian, and non-white.
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What are the practical results of this pervasive nihilism on white, middle-class Americans? What does the human product of a nihilist culture look like? As white America has progressively lost its belief in God, in objective truth and morality, in law, in nationhood and in race, whites have acquired an increasingly bland, complacent, pacific aspect. This seems to be true not only in the United States but in the white West as a whole. One is especially struck by this ennervated quality in contemporary whites when observing them at their leisure, on Sundays, or on their innumerable vacations, or when they are shopping. In the all-white or predominantly white pockets of society, the environment is orderly and peaceful and aesthetically attractive, but something vital is missing. I have noticed it when strolling in downtown Chicago, or on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on a Sunday afternoon, or watching on tv the audience of a July 4th concert of Broadway show tunes (not traditional patriotic songs) held on Capital Hill in 1996. Even the relatively refined whites (i.e. those who avoid the aggressively nihilistic “grunge” look of today’s pop culture) have their own, passively nihilisticstyle–dressed down, neat but nondescript. There is the predominance of t-shirts and shorts, the absence of clothing that conveys dignity or a large sense of self, the vaguely unisex fashions that deny the true scale of man and woman. Whites seem have lost the energy, confidence and leadership qualities that once created a civilization. Absent is any sense of the long views and great plans, the intensity and faith that once bestrode a continent. There is no look of destiny, or even of character, in the faces of contemporary whites. Even the “WASPy” upper-class types on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, for all their supposed elitism, do not have the aspect of leaders of society, but of an enervated clique maintaining a residue of manners. It might be said that they have declined into a mere ethnic group; but even that would be an overstatement. What they are is simply consumers.
