Enlightenment; or, Myth
Better the Light
In October 2017, an article in the Atlantic compares the vision Senator John McCain has for the Republican Party with that of Donald Trump: “Better to heed the voice,” Eliot A. Cohen writes, “of someone who has … emerged from great suffering with a great love of his country’s ideals and not just its soil, and who, as he faces his own end, celebrates his country’s future with the optimism that is natively American. In short, better the light.”1 In contrasting soil and light, one need not necessarily be thinking of the divided legacies of Voltaire and Herder, of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment—though Cohen may well have these or similar figures in mind—in order to make immediate sense to the reader. Whether capitalized or not, and whether we reject it or not, enlightenment continues to have considerable purchase, as a metaphor, on the way we make sense of society, history, and politics.2
It is difficult to say, precisely, when the era of the Enlightenment, with a capital E, begins, or where it begins. The term has often been used as a synonym of “eighteenth century,” or perhaps of “the long eighteenth century.” Jonathan Israel, in a series of compelling historical works,3 has sought to show that the most “radical” period of the Enlightenment had already begun by the middle of the seventeenth century, as epitomized in particular by the work of Spinoza, who died in 1677 and whose Ethics was published later that year. If we see Enlightenment as centrally involving the project of using one’s individual faculty of reason in order to cast “light” upon the surrounding world, then we may see the project as starting considerably earlier. The phrase “natural light of reason” occurs already in Descartes’s 1628 Rules for the Direction of the Mind.
By the eighteenth century, the high hopes for the power of reason to solve all human problems, which had characterized so much thinking of the previous century, began to show signs of stress. It became increasingly difficult to conceal, from public debate as well as from one’s own conscience, the fact that the incredible attainments of modern Europe were the result not just of the ingenious breakthroughs and diligence of individual men, but also of the plundering of the rest of the world, both for resources and for labor. The inhabitants of the rest of the world had often been thought to live their lives for the most part below the threshold of reason, according to nature and instinct. And yet it often happened that European colonists depended on local knowledge—of tropical medicine, for example—for their very survival.
This peculiar dependence charged the eighteenth century with a certain unmistakable paradox. The great victory of reason on the Continent, it was imagined, cast modern Europe as a sort of island afloat in a sea of unreason: the supposed unreason of the non-European peoples on whom Europe depended, as well as the unreason of the violence and domination that underlay this relation of dependence. Perhaps nowhere was the paradox more evident than in the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, which had been explicitly modeled by its leaders, particularly François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, on the French Revolution’s promotion of the universality of the ideals of freedom, equality, and brotherhood.4 Even postrevolutionary France, it turned out, for all its talk of such abstract principles, needed to preserve its power over a slave colony in the faraway Caribbean, thus revealing the inherent limits of its claim to be in possession of universal ideals. In a parallel motion back at the heart of the metropole, in Paris, in 1791 Olympe de Gouges published the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. She intended this as a natural extension of what had been laid out by the revolutionary authors of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. But the men, who had presumed the gender inclusivity of the occurrence of “man” in the title of their work, took de Gouges’s work rather as a parodical affront, and in 1793 she had her head cut off by the Jacobins.
Both the Haitian revolutionary and the Parisian feminist were seeking to test out the limits of the French revolutionaries’ insistence upon the universal validity of their claims. Toussaint Louverture “called out,” as social-media activists might say today, the French colonial power-holders in the most elegant of ways, by simply making the same demands that they had already made for themselves. At the same time, other Europeans were calling out French claims to be the world’s purveyors of reason and enlightenment, by questioning whether these were in fact the best principles on which to base human life. The Enlightenment barely had time to get its bearings, to come into its own as a historical moment, before what is commonly called the “counter-Enlightenment” came to challenge it. This countermovement is most often associated with German thinkers of the Sturm und Drang and of the romantic movement, who insisted in their various ways that it is not reason at all, but feeling and passion that must govern human life, including human political life. For romantic thinkers, society is based not on an abstract idea of the state that brings people together on the basis of universal ideals, but rather on an idea of community to which people are attached at an affective level.
As discussed in the introduction, Pankaj Mishra has recently argued that the counter-Enlightenment reaction begins, in fact, within the French-speaking world, that the first modern Western thinker to construct his intellectual identity upon the bold rejection of the piety of smug universalist rationality was none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We see this most clearly in the bitter disagreement between Rousseau and Voltaire over the best way forward for the nations of eastern Europe. Voltaire had enriched himself as the favored courtier of Catherine the Great of Russia. With his help, Russia became a great luminary pole of the Enlightenment, but it did so in the most top-down way imaginable: by decree of the sovereign. What Catherine achieved, Rousseau could see, was what the French theorist René Girard, briefly mentioned in chapter 2, would later call “appropriative mimicry.”5 Russian Enlightenment was largely formal, an imported style all the rage among the aristocracy in a country whose economy was still based on serfdom. This did nothing to curb Voltaire’s enthusiasm for Catherine’s project. In fact he believed she would do best to spread Enlightenment further, by force, exhorting Catherine “to teach European enlightenment at gunpoint to the Poles and Turks.”6 For Rousseau, by contrast, such a top-down approach can only be both wrong and futile.
Voltaire, in broad outline, wrote the urtext for the neoconservatives who invaded Iraq; Rousseau anticipated the jihadists who took over amidst the chaos left by the neoconservatives after they failed in their foolish quest to export democracy. Rousseau also anticipated Trump, or at least Trumpism: the idea that America is for Americans, and must be made great again for Americans. Who was right? A wide-scoped historical view can, at least, help us to see how futile it is to take sides here. Voltaire’s universalism, when applied, is always a blind and destructive juggernaut; Rousseau’s subaltern resistance seems always to grow dark, if it does not start out that way, when it gains in power.
The German counter-Enlightenment would focus on precisely the sorts of knowledge that rationalist philosophy of the seventeenth century had sought to eliminate or suppress. Now imagination was back in fashion, taking precedence over the abstractions of reason. Rather than emphasizing a priori principles, the new spirit of inquiry focused on fieldwork, the study of culture; one of its greatest attainments was, in the nineteenth century, the collection of folklore that we know today as the fairy tales of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. These brothers were part of a broad movement that may be called “soft nationalism”: the effort to promote the greatness of Germany by revealing what is particular about it, what is irreducible and distinctive, rather than trying to measure it against some sort of absolute standard of reason imposed from outside. This model—the cultivation of national pride through institutional recognition of iconic markers of a national culture imagined as autochthonous—would in turn be duplicated throughout Europe, and to some extent would echo in the nation-building projects of Africa and Asia in the period of decolonization in the late twentieth century.
Reason had been present as an ideal since Greek antiquity, but it turns aggressive, to again invoke Paul Hazard’s fortuitous phrase, only toward the end of the seventeenth century, setting off, in this French historian’s view, a “crisis of the European conscience” (or “consciousness,” as the same word does double duty in French). Between 1680 and 1715, in Hazard’s view, Europeans became intent on enthroning a mental faculty “by which we suppose that man is distinguished from the beasts, and in which it is evident that he surpasses them by far.” In order to do this, it was necessary, Hazard thought, to
extend without limits, to audacious extremes, the powers of this higher faculty. Its privilege was to establish clear and veritable principles, in order to arrive at conclusions that are not less clear or less veritable. Its essence was to examine; and its first charge was to take on the mysterious, the unexplained, the obscure, in order to project its light out into the world. The world was full of errors, created by the deceitful powers of the soul, vouchsafed by authorities beyond control, spread by preference for credulity and laziness, accumulated and strengthened through the force of time.7
The author, writing in the mid-1930s, has trouble concealing for more than a few sentences his sharp awareness of how utterly this earlier period’s optimism would eventually be dashed. Particularly striking is the retreat from that era’s universalism, reflected politically in its transnationalism and secularism, toward crass nationalism and religious persecution. “They were French, English, Dutch, German,” Hazard writes; “a Jew despised by the ghetto, Spinoza, provided support to them with his genius. How diverse they were! How they came from opposed worlds to arrive at the same goal!”8
Descartes is the king of the aggressive rationalists, but his royal stature “is not absolute, since none ever is in such domains of the spirit, and since, even in the most barren and abstract forms of thought, certain national or racial originalities endure and cannot be eradicated.”9 Thus Descartes proves unable to “conquer that part of English intelligence, that part of Italian intelligence, that defends and maintains the specific existence of England, of Italy. But to the extent that thinkers are speculating on the plane of the universal, Descartes reigns.”10 Hazard does not make clear what part of Descartes’s intelligence is sufficiently universal as to not betray his own Frenchness, and as to be transmissible to thinkers of other nationalities with no threat to the integrity of their own nationally specific thought. One of the most fundamental challenges of the Enlightenment, in fact, was that one nation’s universalism was another nation’s imposition of a peculiar foreign way of doing things. In particular, it was generally the French who mistook their own traditions for universality, and it was their neighbors, most vocally the counter-Enlightenment thinkers of Germany, who sought to unmask this purported universality as in fact merely French, and therefore as incompatible, to speak with Hazard, with the “specific existence” of Germany.
It is instructive here to contrast Leibniz’s intense interest in absorbing the novissima sinica, the latest news from China, and from all around the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, Descartes’s near-total silence about the existence of a world beyond Europe’s borders.11 The French philosopher was not particularly interested in the diversity of humanity, because he took the model of the human being that he himself was articulating as universally valid. He neglected the specific existence of other forms of human social life, which in the two centuries or so following his death in 1650 would begin to be articulated and defended under the banner of nationalism. It is in the eighteenth century, to quote the title of a book by Marc Fumaroli, that “Europe spoke French,”12 that is, that any European could be expected to express in French an idea that was to have more than local or national validity.
The presumption was that French was simply a neutral vehicle of international communication. The very term lingua franca is still used to refer to a language shared by many nations, not as a pidgin or an underdeveloped rudimentary language for basic commerce, but a full-fledged language that all speakers strive to perfect in the aim of participating in a flourishing culture. The adjective franca means here not “French,” which in neo-Latin is usually designated rather as the lingua francogallica, but rather “Frankish,” a term for western Europeans in general that dates back to the Crusades. In Turkey even today, modern toilets are sometimes described as a la franga. The ethnonym franc will gradually evolve into a general term to describe a person who is honest—that is, “frank”: a straightforward speaker of truth. But to the German counter-Enlightenment, the French language is anything but a lingua franca in this sense, and the French have no particular claim to being truth-speakers. The Trojan horse of universalism, some would protest, allows what is specific to the existence of the French to move across borders. Thus J. G. Herder, in his 1768 poem “To the Germans,” exhorts his countrymen to “spew out … the ugly slime of the Seine / Speak German, O you Germans.”13
Aggressive reason provokes violent reactions. Herder is often described as a “soft nationalist,” defending German sensibility against French reason, and articulating a view of the nation as the locus of community values and of the irreducible particularity of culture, against the blinding glare of uniformity and indifference to community that seemed to radiate from the Enlightenment. And more recently we have seen the blinding glare of Obamacare radiating from Washington, DC, and the Tea Party protesters who come together in sentimental community, and lovingly shade each other from the light.
The World-Soul on Horseback
On October 14, 1806, Napoleon’s troops engaged Prussian forces in the Battle of Jena. Just under seven thousand French troops were killed or wounded, and around thirty-eight thousand on the Prussian side.14 The day before, G.W.F. Hegel had observed the French leader entering his quaint university town on horseback. In a letter to Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, the philosopher would effuse: “I saw the emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance.”15 This single individual, Hegel wrote, while “concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse,” nevertheless “reaches out over the world and masters it.”16 What Hegel means by “world-soul” is complex and would draw us considerably off course if we were to attempt to do it justice. In brief, it is something like the philosophical reflection of the course of humanity’s development through history. It exists objectively, and not simply as the narrative that we give to history in order to make sense of it. And it encompasses both the emotional and the intellectual realms of human life. The history of the world is the history of the unfolding of this spirit. For it to be embodied or concentrated in a single person is for that person, by accident or by will, to come objectively to hold the destiny of the world in his hands.
That sometimes the weight of the world can fall into one’s hands quite by accident is, some have argued, crucial for understanding Hegel’s take on Napoleon. This issue has lately been of some importance again in discussions of political leadership in Europe. In an October 2017 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, President Emmanuel Macron of France went into considerable detail in clarifying his position in relation to Napoleon Bonaparte. The German interviewers had asked him whether he agreed with Hegel that one man, such as the French emperor, can steer history. Macron denied that this is what Hegel said: “He wasn’t being nice to Napoleon,” Macron explains, “because he of course knows that history can outflank you.”17 Hegel had believed rather that an individual can “embody … the zeitgeist for a moment,” but that “the individual isn’t always clear they are doing so.”18 Nonetheless, Macron reveals that he aims to do so himself, and to do so with clarity. “I think it is only possible to move things forward if you have a sense of responsibility. And that is exactly the goal I have set for myself: to try to encourage France and the French people to change and develop further.”19
Months of speculation about the new president’s Napoleonic ambitions could not have been more decisively confirmed. He goes on to declare that what must be restored (and what, presumably, Hegel had seen Napoleon as providing) are, precisely, “grand narratives” of the sort that French postmodernist philosophers of a generation earlier, such as Jean-François Lyotard, had mocked and dismissed. In his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard had gone so far as to assert that the grand narratives that had supported the Enlightenment project are inherently unjust.20 These narratives concerned, first and foremost, the emancipation of the individual rational subject, and, second, the Hegelian vision of history as the unfolding of the universal spirit. Macron rejects Lyotard’s view. As he tells Der Spiegel: “We need to develop a kind of political heroism. I don’t mean that I want to play the hero. But we need to be amenable once again to creating grand narratives. If you like, post-modernism was the worst thing that could have happened to our democracy.”21 Macron’s self-positioning relative to French history is nonetheless clear: he would like to reach back to a moment before doubt took over, before the defining trait of his culture was a brooding hyperawareness of the limits of what can be known, and what can be done.
The fact that overcoming this species of unreason must go together with taking up the mantle of the Enlightenment, warming up to the legacy of Napoleonic imperialism, and rejecting many of the bona fides of the French left, in favor instead of promoting American-style market-driven growth, is as fascinating as it is historically complicated. It is by no means clear that all of these elements naturally belong together, and the fact that Macron is defending them all, in the spirit of a new, no-nonsense, proactive politics beyond left and right, may well be a peculiar circumstance of French history—even if, as we will begin to see further in this chapter, the defense of a vision of politics purportedly beyond left and right has, in the most recent era, come to be seen by many around the world as inseparable from the defense of rationality.
Macron’s call for political heroism, while vastly more sophisticated, is not entirely different from Trump’s call to make America great again. Or, at least, if we find ourselves attracted to Macron’s learned invocations of Napoleon, while repulsed by the memes that are circulating of Trump enthroned as some Nero-like emperor, we may do well to reflect on whether the distinction we make between the two is not more a judgment of taste than an informed articulation of our political commitments. Trump has expressed his admiration for French-style military parades and has said he would like to host some of his own in the same style.22 We are a long way, now, from the Bush-era mockery of the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,”23 as hopeless ineffectual pacifists, who, of all unspeakably shameful things, also eat cheese.
Macron has for his part found a wavelength for civil and productive communication with Trump. Yet the two are invoking very different mythologies in their respective forms of political heroism. Trump does not appear to know what the Enlightenment is, let alone to be seeking to restore its principal legacies. It is difficult to imagine him taking sides, as between Lyotard and Macron, on the question whether postmodernism was wrong to seek to abandon grand narratives. Trump would almost certainly not wish to institute the emancipation of the individual rational subject as one of his own society’s grand narratives, since the more individual rational subjects there are of voting age in American society, the more voters there will be who understand that the call to make America great again is a call not of reason, but of mythology.
There have been few occasions since 1806 on which German philosophers have perceived French leaders as the embodiment of world-spirit, and few times when—beyond perceptions, at the level of hard geopolitical facts—France was so well poised to dictate the future course of the Continent. But Napoleon’s own place in the legacy of the Enlightenment—a legacy that Lyotard would consciously reject, and that Trump would not be aware he had the option to take up—is complicated. Napoleon is neither ubiquitously memorialized today in France nor consistently villainized. It is widely acknowledged that his outsized ambition is what led to his loss, and that France has no business dominating Europe from Iberia to Russia.
But there are further more nuanced questions as to what Napoleon really represented: in particular, whether his period of imperial expansion abroad, and of consolidation of absolute power at home, amounted to a continuation of the aims of the French Revolution, rooted as it was in the pursuit of the Enlightenment values of equality and freedom, or whether rather it was a reversal of these aims. Napoleon himself did not have much to say that would help us to resolve the matter. According to Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who accompanied Napoleon as a naturalist during the Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801, the military leader was very fond of science and imagined that the important work left for science to complete was to describe the infinite “world of details,” now that Isaac Newton had described the world’s universal general laws.24 But years after that encounter what struck Geoffroy most was Napoleon’s resignation to the fact that he had chosen to pursue a different course in life, that he was now a military strategist and had no time for big ideas of any sort.
At the strategic level, it is clear that the Napoleonic expansion began in the need to secure the border areas that posed a threat to the gains of the revolution within France itself. But it would be difficult to make the case that this effort of securing and reinforcing compelled French forces to expand the buffer zone around the newly founded republic all the way to Moscow and Cairo. The justification for such an expansion, if it is to be found, can only be philosophical, and not strategic: that it carries the promises of universal equality and freedom beyond the boundaries of a single republic, because these are the inheritance of all humanity and not of a single nation. Yet by the time the French Revolution made it to Jena, it was not at all clear to many of the locals that these were the values it was in fact exporting. Hegel welcomed him, but Hegel himself was no simple defender of Enlightenment, if we understand this to centrally involve the emancipation of the rational individual.
Canonical Enlightenment philosophers had argued that the state’s legitimate function is limited largely to aiding in individual emancipation, and thus tended to defend theories of state power that supported some version of liberal democracy. In Hegel by contrast, particularly by the time of the 1820 Philosophy of Right, it is the state itself that is rational, not the individual, and it is the duty of the individual to submit to the state. This view is at the heart of so-called Right Hegelianism, which would be very influential in Germany in the years of restoration following Napoleon’s retreat.25 This path may easily be seen to be a third way, different from both Enlightenment universalism and Herderian communitarianism. More than once in the past two centuries those who have been attracted to the latter, who have been attached to their communities and wary of what lies beyond, have turned over their hope for survival as a community to a strong state, as personified by a seemingly strong leader, who promises to look out for their community interests. This arrangement seldom ends well, neither for the local community that had been promised protection, nor for the peace of the international community, whose very existence the pandering leader either mocks or denies.
Poetic History
We may find the roots of counter-Enlightenment well before Herder. As we saw in the introduction, Zeev Sternhell identifies Giambattista Vico as one of its early harbingers, and if Sternhell is correct in this, it is because, indeed, the Neapolitan polymath had been an early defender of the view—later associated with names such as Herder, and with the late nineteenth-century anthropologist Franz Boas, among others26—that the ways in which individual cultures articulate and define their place in the world, in part by reference to a mythical past, are not signs of stupidity or stuntedness at all; rather, they are simply articulations in a different genre or at a different register of expression.
It is remarkable that Vico’s New Science of 1725,27 a milestone of the early emergence of history as a scholarly discipline, should offer such a sympathetic take on myth, which has so often been conceived as the opposite of history, as the preference for some imagined dreamtime out of which a people emerged, over cold and well-founded facts. History, as an intellectual endeavor, is often held to begin only once we have made our way out of mythmaking. In Greek antiquity Thucydides, Herodotus, and Polybius had made significant contributions to the advancement of this discipline, but for the most part well into the seventeenth century history remained principally a matter of genealogy, of tracing out family ancestries, and the ultimate such genealogy was the one found in the Bible, in the long list of generations that begat other generations leading, as a sort of culmination, to the birth of Jesus Christ. Most such genealogies were at least partially mythological. As noted in the twelfth century by Saxo Grammaticus, to whom we have already been introduced, the official genealogical records of Danish royalty in the Middle Ages typically featured marriages with bears, and bear-human hybrid offspring, somewhere back in the fog of time past.28
Vico believes, and argues at great length, that all the gentile nations are descended from “giants,” which is to say both large and robust people, but also people who are, according to the Greek etymology of the Latin gigantes, literally “born out of the earth.” If this seems credulous on Vico’s part, the author himself also devotes much room in the treatise to the analysis of credulity. He is sympathetic to those who appear to believe in outlandish things, as he maintains that such people are simply expressing themselves in poetic terms, and that there is a logic to this sort of expression. What Vico describes as the “poetic metaphysics” of the giants is in fact the various traditional belief systems of non-Christian, or perhaps more broadly nontextual, peoples.
Significantly, however, Vico believes that originally the stories that native peoples, or “the poetic nations,” told about themselves were straightforwardly, factually “true narrations,” since “the first men of the gentile world had the simplicity of children, who are truthful by nature,” and therefore “the first fables could not feign anything false.”29 But these narrations would later become figurative, as “with the further development of the human mind, words were invented, which signified abstract forms or genera comprising their species or relating parts with their wholes.”30 And so began the process of deliteralization of language, which would ultimately issue in myth. Thus for Vico it is not in the childlike stage of humanity that we make up fantastic stories about who we are and where we come from, only growing into factual, historical descriptions later on. Rather it is exactly the other way around. We start out as historians and later develop into mythologists.
By the late nineteenth century a prominent strain of history would become intent on returning to what Vico saw as this primordial state. The school of positivist historiography, as represented by Leopold von Ranke, insisted that the prime imperative of all history writing is that it must stick to telling us, simply, wie es eigentlich gewesen (how it actually was).31 Any other objective, Ranke and his followers thought, would amount to a degeneration of history writing into mythmaking. Of course this sets up an impossible ideal for the historian, as to simply select some facts to relate rather than others is already to fail to tell how it actually was. Yet because, as already established in reference to Kellyanne Conway, there are infinitely many facts about the past, the historian has no other choice than to make such a selection. The criteria for selection are various, and often include the use of the imagination or the pressure of ideology, but it is hard to see how these criteria could ever be dictated exclusively by the facts themselves. And thus the dream of a positivist historiography was, though many would continue to pretend to believe in it, dead on arrival.
Today most professional historians believe that a good historian will cultivate what is called “historical imagination.” This is the ability to fill out “how it actually was” with a bit of “how it might have been,” and also, inevitably, a bit of “how it should have been.” It is, moreover, the ability to think about how the “was,” the “might,” and the “should” that are incorporated into the writing of history help to shape our sense of the reality of the present and the possibilities of the future. In short, one is today generally more comfortable than Ranke had been in recognizing that the task of history is not totally separate from the task of myth, that both emerge from the same human needs and satisfy the same desire for self-knowledge, whether of individuals or of communities.
It is undeniable that often history writing has been rather too liberal with its admixture of “should have,” and too casual in its loyalty to “was,” with the result that many accounts of the distant past come across as mere wishful thinking. In the seventeenth century considerable effort was expended, in some circles, to give an account of the unity of all ancient wisdom, to show that all great intellectual and spiritual traditions in fact flow from the same source. This effort was sometimes called prisca theologia, or ancient theology, and it often placed the beginnings of all wisdom deep in the past, in figures who straddled the boundary between the historical and the mythical, such as the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, or even further back still, in the Egyptian god Thoth.32 Often the most important task was to show how all advanced or “civilized” peoples could have had their roots in the ancient Near East, and thus been party to the revelations made to Moses and the other prophets. It was, moreover, important to show that supposedly pagan intellectual traditions, such as that of the Greek philosophers, were likewise part of the same unified tradition of revealed wisdom that also includes the prophets, and thus that Greek philosophers may be saved from the First Circle of Hell, where Dante had placed them a few centuries earlier, since they were not ignorant after all of the revealed truths held by the people of the Book. It was speculated, for example, that Plato had disappeared for some time during his youth into the deserts of Sinai, where he had learned directly from Moses, who, himself a prophet, had foreknowledge of the coming of Jesus Christ. Thus Plato could be retroactively made out as a Christian.33
Moving further afield, variations on this same approach to wisdom led some, such as Athanasius Kircher, to argue that the Chinese are originally of Middle Eastern origin, and that their writing is a variation on Egyptian hieroglyphics,34 while others argued that the Native Americans were one of the ancient tribes of Israel that had gone missing long ago, and could now, in the modern era, finally be brought back into the fold.35 Knowledge is one, and humanity is unified, according to the prisca theologia, and all of history leads back to the same source. All wisdom flows forth from the same primordial origin in the deep past; there is one truth, and it is shared by Christians, pagan Greek philosophers, and even the Chinese and the Native Americans. The impulse to unification was strong, and it yielded up, in prisca theologia, a new sort of poetic history as a way of molding the past to fit a new vision of the unity of humankind.
When I was little I sincerely believed, somehow, that my maternal grandfather was an avatar of George Washington, that there was some sort of deep identity between the two of them. I saw the silhouetted head of the first president of the United States on the twenty-five-cent coin, and I sincerely believed that this person was my grandfather, even though I also understood that this person was a founder of the country and had lived a considerable time earlier than the living and breathing man who had raised my mother. This sort of simultaneous identity and difference, between living beings and their timeless, or primordial, or transcendent exemplar, is typical of mythical thought, and somehow I managed to come up with it spontaneously, as a child to whom the responsible adults were at the same time trying, as well as they knew how, to give a proper, nonmythological historical education.
Family lore, even when it does not involve such avatars, is inherently mythological. To learn of some great-great-grandparent who crossed the ocean or the frontier to settle in the region of our birth is to learn something that is of vanishingly little importance for world history, but that cannot but seem, when we learn it, to rival the Odyssey or the legend of King Arthur, or indeed the Bible, in its power to give meaning and orientation to our own present existence. These are the stories that shape us, that make us who we are, that make us fully human, though they are also, by and large, lies. Every attempt that I have ever made to corroborate my father’s tales about ancestors I never met has revealed to me that his version of the story had little relation to historical events. We were religious dissenters kicked out of England by the king himself; we were immigrants with pluck and wit that got us out of all manner of scrapes; we were Cherokees, somewhere back there. Except that we weren’t. These stories shape us and make us fully human not because they are true. We may imagine that a child raised by cruel experimenters who was allowed to hear only accurate accounts of well-documented events would probably show some signs of developmental deficiency. Legends shape us and make us fully human because they fire our fantasies, and enable us to root ourselves in a largely imagined past, so as in turn to be able to project ourselves, with a developed idea of who it is that we are, into the future.
The current prevailing division of tasks in our society places the responsibility for such edifying mythmaking within family units. When we move from the home to the broader society, there is a corresponding expectation, at least if we value Enlightenment, that we will move from uncorroborated lore to documented, or documentable, facts. Yet there are many societies that make no such division, societies that are unified rather in the way that we imagine a family should be: by stories. These societies are held together, and are enabled to find meaning and to orient their practices and plans, by invoking events that happened in a timeless, undocumented, mythical past. They do not do this as an abnegation of the responsibility to know the real historical truths about themselves. Rather, they do this because myth has not for them been switched out for history at the suprafamilial level as the preferred mode of reckoning with questions of identity.
When there is a disagreement between Euro-American archaeologists on the one hand and a Native American group on the other as to the origins or the arrival of that group in a given region—the archaeologists generally dating the earliest events back only a number of thousands of years, while the indigenous people cast themselves back into deep time, into an original era in which animals talked, and the regularities of the natural world as we know them today did not hold—most of us are inclined to think that we should defer at least to the extent possible to the account the indigenous people give. And we do not feel as though we are reverting from Enlightenment to mythology when we do this. Rather, we feel as though this deference is required by the principles of intercultural understanding and toleration, which in turn are part of the inheritance of the Enlightenment. This inheritance is compromised only when we come to believe, as sometimes happens among political activists invested in indigenous causes, that the only intercultural understanding that is adequate is the one that accepts at face value the literal truth of the claims made by an indigenous group about its own origins.36 This is in fact to fall into the very same trap that has also ensnared Ken Ham and other creation-science defenders: to stake the integrity of a culture’s values and faith commitments, whether one’s own or those of another group to which one is bound by respect, on the answers it comes up with to mundane empirical questions.
In Trumpian dreamtime, in the primordial era in which the regularities of the present world did not hold, everything was “great.” This is a multipurpose adjective and it may be understood in various ways. Presumably any past greatness of the United States would have been forged in the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century, an era that, for many Americans, appears so far back as to be effectively disconnected from our present reality. I myself have learned, largely through my formation as a specialist in seventeenth-century philosophy, to see the late eighteenth century, the era of the American founding fathers, of the Revolution and the Constitution, as not so long ago at all—as, basically, current events. But for many Americans, brought up in a society with a public school system that has abandoned its responsibility to make students into historically well-informed citizens, the deeds of George Washington may as well have been contemporaneous with those of Moses. And as long as the past is jumbled in this way, basic elements from one long-past period easily surface in another. Thus throughout American history there have been rumors of politicians and public figures claiming that the Bible was written in English, or that English should be the official language of the United States on the grounds that it was “good enough for Jesus.”37 Here the distinction between what Washington and Jefferson themselves recognized as “the ancient” and “the modern” falls away, and the eighteenth century may as well be the first century CE, the high Enlightenment assimilated to antiquity. Once this happens, it is much easier to think of the founding fathers of the United States as deeply Christian, rather than deistic in their private beliefs and secular in their public commitments, as they are imagined to inhabit that primordial domain that also includes Jesus Christ himself.
All of this makes good poetic sense, just like the identity between my grandfather and George Washington, and just like the poetic history of the giants as described by Vico; it is useless to seek to defeat it by bombarding with facts someone who feels the poetry of it. I still cannot entirely disabuse myself of the identity I discerned early on between my mother’s father and my country’s founding father. Both of them emerged for me out of some incalculably distant primordial past, and the head on the US quarter remains to me something like an image from a family album. But I know to keep this to myself (until now anyway), and this is the principal difference between me and the politician who believes, or feels and therefore claims to believe, that English was the language of the apostles; or the creation scientist who believes, or feels and therefore claims to believe, that the inhabitants of the ancient Near East walked the earth—speaking English, of course—alongside dinosaurs.
Poetic history is good. Or, at least, it is such an essential part of the way human beings orient themselves in the world that it would be meaningless to call it bad. It can be edifying, revelatory, even a vehicle of understanding. This is what Matthew Arnold understood when he wrote in his 1852 poem “Empedocles on Etna,” “He fables, yet speaks truth.”38 It is difficult to determine what explains the difference between my own private poetic history and the one that some politicians seek to impose on society as a whole. It does not seem that my myth about my grandfather could ever be anything more than a private quirk of my own development. Yet as with the difference between aviophobia and racism described in chapter 2, it may be that I am simply underestimating the potential for building a community among those people who believe that the founding father of our country is also, biologically or metaphysically, an ancestor. Similar beliefs, in fact, seem to be fairly common in quasi-mythological folk genealogies throughout the world. I could probably found a movement, if I really wanted to, organized around the idea that George Washington is the ancestor of all of my fellow Americans, and I could perhaps have him mingling with Jesus Christ millennia before his actual birth. If my movement worked at it, we could likely insert ourselves into the institutions of American government, and produce a few crackpot judges and other public officials who would argue that our beliefs should be enshrined into law and should constitute part of compulsory public education. But of course this is not going to happen. I have no impulse to turn my private poetic history, my dreamtime, into the collective mythos of a community, and from there into the hardened ideology of a modern administrative state.
Vico represents a hopeful tendency of early counter-Enlightenment thought, to the extent that he recognizes the ineliminability and the power of the poetic histories by which communities orient themselves, without for that reason failing to recognize the need for real facts about the past as the basis of his “new science.” Thoroughly anti-Enlightenment, as opposed to merely counter-Enlightenment, is the judge who appeals to the Bible as the basis of his commitment to English-only laws in the United States, who wants, in other words, poetic history to be enshrined into the laws of a country whose legal system has historically been rooted in the protection of rights and freedoms, and not in enforcing conformity. To the extent that he gets his wish, we have a clear illustration of Adorno and Horkheimer’s warning that Enlightenment threatens ever to degenerate into mythology. The danger of such degeneration can only be heightened by the new imperative to “make America great again,” which is itself a four-word distillation of the very spirit of poetic history.
Enlightenment into Myth, Again
In recent years the defense of rationality has, for some, become mixed up with the project of defending a variety of political centrism. Some are convinced that humanity is perpetually balanced between opposite extremes of destructive action, and it is only centrism that can enable us to maintain this delicate balance. We are balanced, among other things, between backward-looking mythopoiesis and radiant utopian visions projected onto what is in fact an almost totally indeterminate future. Best, the centrists say, to just do what we can to navigate our way through the short term. Rationality thus comes to be exemplified in the virtues of prudence and humility. Many who oppose this middle path from both the left and the right, in turn, echo the wisdom of Melville’s confidence man: “You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man,” he announces to a potential customer who is uncertain as to whether to purchase a bottle of the protagonist’s herbal potion. “You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right.”39 This wisdom appears particularly compelling in the current political climate, and moderates have a difficult time avoiding, for long, the accusation of being useful idiots for sinister causes, of holding to a center that cannot hold. It is, however, important to recall, even or especially in such a climate, that the confidence man was, in uttering these words, attempting to pull off a con of his own, to play on a fellow human being’s innate impulsiveness, to convince him that it is always better to do something than to do nothing, and, finally, to sell him a useless vial of herbs.
On the other hand, by choosing to do nothing, by supporting the status quo or the reigning order, one can contribute to gross injustice just as surely as if one were to join up for some bloody upheaval of the reigning order. The status quo is in any case an illusion, and to defend it at one point in time seldom has the same moral and political significance as defending it at a later point. This is the insight that underlies Tancredi Falconeri’s observation about the fading Sicilian aristocracy in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”40 Not to see this, and to insist that things simply stay as they are, without changing, is to defend something different from the status quo; it is to defend an impossible version of the present based on a version of the past that only grows the more mythological, the further it recedes.
The mass slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 was, surely, an outburst of irrationality; and irrational, too, is the everyday functioning of a bureaucracy, such as the notorious DMV, that allows its agents to exercise their gentle sadism behind the safe cover of rules, and of the way things are done and long have been done. Of course the Rwandan genocide, or any such moment of punctuated violence, is the culmination of a process that begins with intimidation, threats, pressure on the part of groups that may be operating within the constraints of the bureaucratic system, and even priding themselves on their respect for the rule of law—for example, the anti-immigrant demonstrators who celebrate the Second Amendment by openly carrying automatic weapons in close proximity to an Islamic community center.41 Even though following rules and transgressing rules are in a sense opposite actions, the latter sort of action can evolve out of the former. Lawful application of heat can lead to chaotic boiling over. Patriotic defenders of the Constitution, or free-speech activists whose patent purpose is to lend legitimacy to a white-supremacist demonstration that threatens to spill over into violence, often continue to operate within a discursive range inherited from, and authorized by, Enlightenment rationalism.
In actual fact there are few people who represent a pure and consistent version of the latter. Many will talk of war and battle against the enemy, but when they are arrested, they will often fall back on legalistic demands for due process, and on an expectation that there is a system in place that recognizes that we are all equal before the law. Infamously, the Norwegian mass murderer and nationalist Anders Behring Breivik filed a petulant complaint in prison when the authorities declined to furnish him with the most up-to-date model of Nintendo PlayStation.42 This is in the end only a more extreme expression of the basic incoherence at work wherever an extremist hides behind the hard-won triumphs of justice and fairness, enshrined into law and institutions, in order, quite simply, to get what he wants. Violence can be carried out not just in explosive rejection of rationality, but in devotion to it, and a violent life can also be a rational one. A vivid reminder of this might be discerned in Isidore of Seville’s discussion of something seemingly as mundane as rational conjunctions, such as the Latin ne. These are so called, he writes, “from the reasoning [ratio] that someone uses in acting, as, ‘How may I kill him so that [ne] I won’t be recognized? By poison or blade?’ ”43 One can be rational, in a strict sense of rationality, simply in making the proper choice of murder weapon.
No principle or ideal is so pristine as to not be subject to distortion, depending on who takes up its defense. Consider, for example, the rise and brief career in the limelight of Milo Yiannopoulos, who came to fame as the technology editor for Breitbart News, and became an icon of a certain sector of the alt-right, only to see his public following plummet after a comment about pedophilia. Although the niche he occupied placed him alongside sundry species of anti-Enlightenment ethnonationalists, white supremacists, enemies of democracy, and defenders of patriarchy, his ostensible cause was one that he inherited directly from the Enlightenment: free speech. A generation earlier, this was the issue that had galvanized the student movement at Berkeley, under the leadership of figures such as Mario Savio, who could, for their part, plausibly claim to descend directly from the philosophers of the Enlightenment to the extent that their other political commitments included, for example, racial and gender equality, opposition to nationalism, and international solidarity.44
And Yiannopoulos is hardly the only member of the new, mutated extreme right to think of himself, whether through willful self-delusion or simply an honest lack of self-understanding, as a descendant of the Enlightenment. The degradation of the ideal of free speech that Yiannopoulos evidences, an ideal that had once been a cornerstone of classical liberalism, offers us a vivid case study of the decay of enlightenment into mythology. From an ideal that had been seen as vital for the survival of both public honesty and, at an individual level, self-knowledge, free speech has been transformed into a cudgel by which to intimidate and antagonize other groups. The ideal became a caricature of itself, yet it has so far been hard for many to appreciate the totality and depth of this transformation, as it has generally been assumed that when anti-Enlightenment forces assert themselves in the public sphere, they will do so by announcing what it is they are against. We are less attuned to their strategy of appropriating and adapting for their own purposes the language of Enlightenment, and, in this language, emphasizing what it is they are for.
Many of the participants in the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, seem sincerely not to have understood that they were participating in a white supremacist rally, as they had been convinced that this was a rally for “equality”—more precisely, for ensuring the equality of white Americans in a political landscape where this is threatened by affirmative action, political correctness, and other such sinister forces. Certainly, some participants, such as Richard Spencer, explicitly called for the transformation of the United States into a white ethnostate, and many displayed Nazi symbols in full consciousness of what these were.45 But the default rationalization for many involved was that they in fact wanted the same basic social goods for everyone, and were simply worried about not getting their fair share. Even Spencer claims not to be a white supremacist, but only a white nationalist, who is in reality seeking nothing more for white people than what people of color in turn rightly demand for their own communities: Spencer is, as he explains it, no more and no less “identitarian” than his political opponents.
This rationalization masquerading as rationality is packed into the mere three words of the now-familiar slogan of reaction: “All lives matter.” On the surface this is a pristine expression of Enlightenment universalism and egalitarianism. It is also true, yet its truth alone cannot account for the majority of recent instances of its pragmatic usage. Recall in this connection the extensive discussion in chapter 1 of a number of ancient criticisms of logic, for example in Cicero, to the effect that even when perfectly sound and valid, logical arguments can still be deployed to gain the rhetorical upper hand, nor is there always a clear boundary between the honest work of the logician and the deceitful work of the rhetorician. The public force of the three-word phrase in question has most often been to deprive the more particular claim “Black lives matter” of its power, to change the subject away from the injustice and oppression black Americans face. And it is not only in the United States that we see this rhetorical move in operation. In France, over the past several years, the movement against same-sex marriage, spearheaded by the Catholic right, has come to be called La Manif pour tous, “the movement for everybody.”46 Whatever one thinks about the political aims of this movement, the pour tous is something of a rhetorical ruse. It is lifted from the common phrase mariage pour tous, “marriage for everybody” (that is, marriage for same-sex pairs as well), and adapted for a phrase in which its new meaning, should anyone be called on to explicitly state it, is that a society in which there is only other-sex marriage—and in which traditional family structures are preserved—is a society that is healthier and better for everybody. Thus the pour tous functions differently in Manif pour tous than in mariage pour tous: in the latter it is part of a demand for equal rights, based on the principle of universal equality; in the former it is part of an insistence on the preservation of a traditional inequality, based on the presumption that this inequality is better for society as a whole, and that this overall social good trumps individual rights.
And yet the organizers of the Manif pour tous understood that it would be useful to dress their movement for traditionalist inegalitarianism in a phrase that resonates with the spirit of Enlightenment egalitarianism. In both the American and the French cases, it is that curious quantifier “all” that allows the forces of counter-Enlightenment to disguise themselves as their opposite, much as creation science, to return to the topic of chapter 5, disguises itself as science. Here, too, it may be asked why those who disguise their movement in this way should bother at all, why they should willingly move to the playing field of their opponent, and subject themselves to home-team rules, where their own game is bound to be at its weakest.
Back in the United States, a critical moment seems to have been reached in 2017 in the debate over the place of free speech in society. In the Charlottesville incident in August of that year, one woman was killed and several people seriously injured when a young demonstrator drove his car into a crowd, in a scene that was very reminiscent of similar attacks by Islamist extremists in London, Nice, and Berlin. Trump responded by condemning the violence that he took to be occurring on “many sides,” rather than doing what numerous Americans felt to be incumbent upon a person occupying his position: to denounce neo-Nazi provocations. Many other Americans, however, had come to believe that there is in fact a moral equivalence between extreme-right and extreme-left violence, and, furthermore, that the violence in Charlottesville was the result of extremism on both sides. Things would not have turned violent, many believed, if the left, particularly the activists involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, had not sought to prevent the participants in the Unite the Right demonstration from exercising their First Amendment rights. The American Civil Liberties Union, for its part, sought to ensure that the white nationalists be able to exercise these rights, thereby provoking the anger of many other organizations and commentators on the left. In earlier decades, many Americans had taken it for granted (in part because of a common conflation of “liberal” and “left” in US political debate) that there was no surer sign of a person’s left-wing orientation than the ACLU membership card in her wallet. This had been a repeat joke on All in the Family and other barometers of US culture in the 1970s. And now the ACLU seemed suddenly to belong to another era.
What had changed? It may well be that in earlier generations, when the ACLU was defending the right of American Nazis to speak and to assemble, this support, and the abstract liberal principles behind it, were based on the presumption that whatever the Nazis were advocating could never in fact come to pass in such a successful liberal democracy as the United States. By 2017 this presumption no longer seemed reasonable: our understanding of the boundary between “mere speech” and speech that can bring about real, immediate harm had shifted. The fact that the marchers’ views seemed to garner some sympathy at the highest level of officialdom, notwithstanding the president’s minimal and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to follow protocol and to denounce “hate,” was a sign of the real danger that one march may spawn further marches, and that these may quickly develop into organized militias or an extensive campaign of seditious terror. And like Breivik before them, who discovered in himself at least some appreciation for the rational system of official prison rules and regulations, the same activists who wished to see exactly such developments found it convenient and useful to draw in their own defense on the political philosophy enshrined in the First Amendment—the philosophy celebrated in the 1960s student movement, and mocked by the bigoted (but in the end good-hearted) Archie Bunker.
It was long presumed by many that there was something both politically more pragmatic and morally more virtuous in the American accommodation of political speech that is beyond the pale. The United States had enshrined into law and realized in practice an approach that was markedly different from that of most Western European democracies, notably France and Germany, in which the expression of Nazi sympathies, the supportive display of Nazi imagery, and the promotion of conspiracy theories denying the Holocaust were, and remain, illegal.
One reasonable objection to such prohibitions has been that no state official can be expected to be qualified in matters of semiotic interpretation, which is just what is required in order to distinguish a pro-Nazi display of a swastika from, say, a display in which the symbol is incorporated into a work, however mediocre, of “provocative” art. In the 1970s swastikas proliferated in the United States and Britain, not only among neo-Nazis, but also among outlaw bikers and punks who were seeking precisely to claim for themselves the most charged symbols floating around in the culture.47 A symbol, as the punks and bikers seem to have understood, is nothing in itself, and it is for that reason a mistake to impose prohibitions.48 And yet the European laws, while often curtailing freedom of expression in ways that would never have risen to the level of judicial attention in the United States, have often also done an effective job of curtailing right-wing radicalization. At the present moment Western European democracies seem at least slightly further from the precipice of fascism than the United States, though it would be difficult to make the case that the explanation for this current difference lies in the different limits placed on freedom of expression of extremist ideas in Europe as opposed to the United States. Rather, again, it is the hearing this expression gets at the top that seems to be responsible for the difference: the legitimation, by the highest powers in the land, of extremist ideas, and the consequent erosion of norms that kept these ideas, or so at least we believed, on the margins of society.
Symbols change, as the swastika did when it migrated from Nazi Germany into 1970s British and American counterculture—which had no essential far-right character and was much more often associated with the left—and from there to the websites of the alt-right in the lead-up to Trump’s election. The evident irony in the alt-right’s proliferation of potent and often bedazzling memes led many to conclude that the alt-right was not literally, directly promoting Nazism, but was, rather, somehow “playing” with it. They are devoted to Hitler in the same way that heavy metal in the 1980s was devoted to Satan, it was said.49 Andrew Anglin, the founder of the overtly neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, averred that he drew much of his inspiration from frivolous, gossipy websites like Gawker, whose preferred mode of discourse was not hate, but “snark”—that is, chattiness and playful vituperation for its own sake. The white nationalist and anti-Semite Mike Peinovich, host of the podcast the Daily Shoah, acknowledges Seinfeld as one of his early influences: to the extent that that epoch-making sitcom was “about nothing” and rigorously depicted an amoral universe of self-interested pursuit of meaningless distraction—a universe in which no moral lessons were ever learned, and no episode ever concluded with hugs and reconciliation—it provided a template for the next generation’s use of social media for “lulz.” But lulz, in turn, were seized upon by some, including Anglin and Peinovich, for old-fashioned rabble-rousing.
The passage of time, and some needed historical perspective—as, for example, what should have been the obvious fact that the Ku Klux Klan, too, had originally introduced its ridiculous hoods and its talk of “wizards” and “dragons” as, in some sense, a joke50—have caused this initial judgment to appear as naive wishful thinking. And yet it is not the swastika itself that is the fixed reference point here, staying the same from one era to the other. The swastika had already been through remarkable transformations of context and of charge by the time it ended up in a meme on the armband of Pepe the Frog. No Nazi of the 1930s, certainly, would have been able to make any sense of this, nor recognize in the person who had created it a like-minded fellow. Again, one of the most remarkable transformations in the context of the symbol’s display is that its spirit was borrowed from countercultural playfulness of earlier decades, generally more associated with the left. In the serious, nonplayful, articulation of defenses of this playfulness on the part of those involved, there was a common, widespread appeal to the unassailability of free speech—which, again, had also been most commonly associated with the left in the preceding decades, and had even been the rallying cry of much of the 1960s student movement.
By late 2016 there was a widespread public sentiment that “alt-right” was a deplorable euphemism, and that it would be better to call the people associated with this movement by their true name, “neo-Nazis,” perhaps, or “white supremacists.” But the term really did pick out a new cultural phenomenon, with the rise of the meme warfare that seems to have played a measurable role in Trump’s election. The new generation of extreme-right activists had won for themselves the label of “alternative” with their sophisticated irony, their speed-of-light inventiveness, and their seeming commitment to no other objective than to épater les bourgeois. This had been an ethos much more strongly associated with the left, and by claiming the “alt-” distinction for themselves, the new extreme right effectively claimed its place as the vanguard of youth counterculture, even as its sensibilities placed it in a legacy whose earlier ancestors were icons of the left. Pepe the Frog owes more to Abbie Hoffman than to William F. Buckley; by certain measures Trump himself has more in common with, say, Wavy Gravy, than with Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. The Republican Party is now a monde à rebours, a topsy-turvy Dadaist-situationist stunt. As Angela Nagle has perceptively written, “Those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention or differentiation, are wrong … It has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan ‘It is forbidden to forbid!’ than it does with anything most recognize as part of any traditionalist right.”51
At the present moment, we are witnessing what may turn out to be the complete breakdown of American democracy, for all its shortcomings and unfulfilled promise, with its hard-won and long-thought-out basis in constitutional law, as well as of the international liberal-democratic order that the United States, for better or worse, symbolically served to anchor. A form of insolent demagoguery is poised to replace the old brand, and this as an expression of the popular will of people who do not think of themselves as enemies of American political tradition, but who on the contrary have sought to restore the greatness of it, which they feel has been lost or degraded. This restoration movement has detached itself from the prevailing political tradition of the country that generated it, to the extent that it has embraced irrationalism as its motor and its method. It is a movement that gleefully rejects facts and arguments in favor of feeling, of passionate group identification and the titillating prospect of a fight: in a word, of irrationality.
But the right has no particular monopoly on unreason. As recently as the 1960s it was the left that was busy promoting its own trifecta of self-induced irrationality through sex, drugs, and rock and roll, while at the time conservatives were mostly the parent figures of the hippies, imposing on the younger generation their stifling rules. These rules, most agreed, were generally fairly sound when considered soberly, but the spirit of the revolution was to reject sobriety and judiciousness in search of extreme states and intense experiences, whatever their long-term effects may be. The tables have turned, and dramatically, since the dawn of the twenty-first century. Today it is often the right that is engaged in reckless stunts, while the left, typically, urges caution and hesitation, and top-down enforcement of this moral outlook. From electoral politics to informed-consent rules for campus dating, the left is nothing if not sober, while meanwhile the right has gone out on a bender. In 2016 it was at Trump rallies that we saw what anthropologists of religion call “effervescence,” while supporters of Hillary Clinton meanwhile were congratulating themselves for their composure. The Democrats were fighting to preserve the status quo, while the popular sentiment driving the Republican Party was little more than a will to blow things up and to see what emerges from the rubble. The internet troll armies of the alt-right, a decisive force in the success of Trump’s campaign, shared more in the spirit of explosive hijinks of Woodstock than they did with the Young Republicans’ associations of old. Woodstock was an explosion of irrationality; so were the Nuremberg Rallies. Irrationality is in itself neither left nor right, nor good nor bad.
Why Democracy?
We have for the most part been proceeding in this book on the implicit understanding that democracy is the most rational political system, that the democratic society is the equivalent at the macroscale of the right-thinking rational individual at the microscale. But this is the sort of thing for which one must provide an argument, rather than simply assuming it. In recent years political scientists have taken seriously the possibility that there are other more rational systems that might be tried out, and that any a priori commitment to the superiority of democracy, without empirical data measuring how it fares compared to alternatives, is wholly ungrounded. One alternative system that has garnered a good deal of attention is lottocracy, in which capable citizens are chosen at random to serve in government, much as one would be chosen for jury duty.52 In such an arrangement, political figures would be significantly less prone to the corruptions of power. The concern that they might be incompetent, in turn, hardly seems relevant in the present era: behind the veil of ignorance, many of us would find it rational to choose a random American citizen to serve as president, when the system that works through election rather than through lottery has proven so flawed as to propel into power a man with as many cognitive limitations and moral impairments as Trump. On these measures, Trump is significantly below average; therefore, it is proven that an electoral system carries with it the same risks as a lottery-based system, while also lacking some of its benefits.
In his book Against Democracy,53 Jason Brennan makes a compelling case that at present the great majority of American voters are either “hobbits” or “hooligans”—that is, they are either “know-nothings” or ideologically committed to one side or the other of an issue for reasons they themselves do not understand, and fundamentally unable to articulate the opposing view in accurate terms, let alone to assess the arguments in favor of the opposing view. In Brennan’s view, Americans are simply too ignorant to be entrusted with the responsibility of voting. His favored alternative is not lottocracy, but “epistocracy,” in which mechanisms would be put in place to ensure that only people who have a certain level of political literacy, a competence in assessing arguments, statistics, and other social-science data, might be able to vote.
Brennan has thought of nearly all possible objections to his view, and has argued against them preemptively. His arguments are sometimes convincing, though he does not seem to be able to offer a plausible account of how, practically, the transition to such a system could be brought about in a way that does not advance the interests of those already in power, and who stand to gain from the further disenfranchisement of people who are already marginalized and estranged from the political process. Such people, as the history of IQ testing abundantly shows, very often find themselves in the social category of the unintelligent, of the epistemically inferior, but for reasons that have nothing to do with innate aptitude, and certainly not with a freely chosen social identity, but only with the economic and social obstacles to acquiring the sort of cultural capital that, in the end, being held to be intelligent is.
Nor are the only compelling objections to Brennan’s argument of a simply practical nature. It is not just that it is unlikely that epistocratic government would work; we would also be giving up a great deal if we were to abandon the idea, inherited from the Enlightenment, that each individual has an inalienable right not to be dominated, and to participate in his or her own government. Rights of this sort, many have believed, are “trumps,” on an earlier and more innocent connotation of this monosyllable, which has it that they cannot be traded, as if on a stock exchange, for something that promises to be more efficient. The warning against such a trade appears particularly compelling when we consider just how mercurial are our society’s ever-shifting standards of excellence or accomplishment that might be interpreted as qualifying a given individual for inclusion within the epistocratic elite. At present, we already have an unelected and nonrepresentative epistocracy of sorts, but it is one made up almost entirely of grown men with the moral and intellectual depth of seventh-graders: the elite class of tech-industry nobles, namely, who often seem to have the power to plow right through or ignore existing laws and public institutions in order to achieve their own goals. They have managed to convince many people, including many politicians (witness Mark Zuckerberg’s senate hearings in early 2018) that they know enough and are responsible enough to handle a significant proportion of the responsibilities many had once thought best left to the democratic process.
Herman Melville warned in 1857 that in a country where all the wolves have been killed off, the foxes will thrive. By the mid-nineteenth century European settlers in America no longer lived in constant fear for their lives, but they had a new existential worry to occupy them from birth to death: that of being taken for a ride by the frauds, charlatans, carnival barkers, hustlers, kayfabe illusionists, and confidence men who had rapidly populated the land. The metamorphic appearances of the confidence-man on Melville’s Mississippi steamboat seem smart, seem as though they might be good candidates for the epistocratic elite of their era. They seem worthy of confidence. But with their ledgers embossed with the names of the Black Rapids Coal Company or of the Seminole Widow and Orphan Asylum, which may or may not be real, these characters anticipate nothing so much as the strange hybrid of philanthropy and self-serving ambition that we have learned to expect from those who have come out on top in the most recent era of American capitalism. It is naive in the extreme to believe that we can plausibly separate out our judgment of “intelligence,” of epistocratic merit, from the general “big man” anthropology that has shaped American history, and that again and again conflates coming out on top with “smarts.”
The dream of conducting politics only in “adequate knowledge situations” has been around for a long time. For Leibniz, as we have already seen, the locus of the specialized knowledge was to be not an elite group of people, but rather machines, or at least formal processes that could be either written out on paper or instantiated by data-processing engines of some sort. For Brennan these will be human beings, but also presumably aided by far more powerful engines than Leibniz ever imagined. What prevented Leibniz’s vision from taking hold is, first of all, that even those with adequate political knowledge might not choose to consistently make their choices on the basis of the knowledge, might reject the results their engines give them; and, second, that the passions and fantasies of the know-nothings are going to continue to complicate political matters, whether the political system is one in which they have the right to vote notwithstanding their ignorance, or whether they are deprived of this right. The know-nothings might become gate-crashers at any moment.
Brennan envisions a scenario in which the nonvoting majority might pass its time going to sports events or to Applebee’s. But this does not seem to exhaust the range of what the masses do, or have ever done, under any political arrangement. Even if the demand for political participation might decrease when times are good, and even if we might expect that a well-run epistocracy would ensure that things remain more or less good, the future is nonetheless simply too precarious, for reasons often quite beyond human control, to permit us to expect that the nonepistocrats will be content to linger in their booth at Applebee’s forever.
What the rise of the internet shows, with all of the disastrous consequences of the absence of democratic deliberation over how it is going to be used, is that such deliberation still holds out the best hope for ordering society in a rational way conducive to the greatest thriving of the most people. The internet was unleashed by self-appointed experts, who knew how to engineer, but had very little ability to reason about the social consequences of what they were doing. Many of them already think of themselves as epistocrats, of sorts, as sufficiently qualified to take over where failed democracy has left off. But the engineers have proven themselves no better able to make good decisions about how to order society than any Trump-voting denizen of Applebee’s. Restoring the ideal of universal democratic participation, even only as an ideal, and restoring along with it rigorous civic education, remains the best hope for staving off—indeed reversing the rise of—both the illiberal populism of “real America” and the new technocratic anti-Enlightenment forces emerging out of Silicon Valley.