NOTE: See Section I Introduction, “Postmodernity’s Shadow” to put this essay in perspective.
Something’s afoot in our times, an ominous mood, a feeling throughout the West that its centuries-long Modern Era of exceptionalism, advance, development, and global influence comes to an end. A sensation of finality envelops us, our future purpose unclear. Our greatest days fade to the past; the future appears more mystery and threat than opportunity for continued progress ever upward and higher. What are we feeling, exactly? And from what perspective can we grasp this sensation of the ending of an era?
Perhaps we’re feeling that the West’s era of uniqueness has passed by, that the rest of the world simply has caught up with the West, maybe even surpassing it. Perhaps we sense, rightly, that the West no longer is the sole competitor in the worldwide competition for respect and dominance. In a global age, especially as ancient civilizations—East and South Asian especially, but also in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa—recoup their strength and global influence after centuries of Western domination, we in the West are coming to see ourselves as not so unique after all, not so special on the world’s stage, feeling guilty for our past behavior. Our greatest historical qualities have been revealed to be good only relatively—for better or worse—to the greatness of the ‘others.’ So then, give the global ‘others’ their due: Grant them space to reshape the world on their own terms. Our self-appointed global mission to “civilize” the rest of the world—the French put it best: mission civilisatrice—is stopped in its tracks, finished, further efforts irrelevant. The era of Western exceptionalism is over. It’s time to put it behind us and to humbly join the rest of the world in figuring out a joint vision for the world.
Or, maybe, we’re finally starting to realize that the secular trends discussed in Essay 1 actually are about to overwhelm us and to redefine human experience at a level where recourse to our past traditions no longer makes sense. If obsolete, why keep them alive? After all, these same traditions got us into the mess we’re in in the first place. Let them end. What does it even mean to be “western” in a globalized, overheated, crowded, transhumanist world of data-driven consciousness? We’re about to find out as a new era dawns, and our past that is ending does not prepare us for it.
Or, like civilizations past, the West and its centuries of global domination are simply worn out. A civilization lasts only so long before it ends, yields to another, and declines. Who’s up next? But at least we’ll be relatively comfortable in our long slow slide into decadence, even if the destination for many of us, as libertarian economist Tyler Cowen predicts, looks something like present-day Brazil: beachfront high-rises for the economic ‘winners,’ favelas for the rest.
I
If anything best describes postmodernity it is the sensation of an ending, a perception that Western “progress” has stopped, that we now have nowhere to go; that we’ve become frozen in a perpetual present without plans for the future. This sensation hasn’t gone without notice, and various writers have tried to put this sensation of “ending” into words.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama captured the postmodern mood in his 1992 classic The End of History and the Last Man. Could it be, he asks, that—following the Soviet system’s collapse which also took down leftist ideologies with it, and with the apparent global triumph of democratic-capitalism—our latest stage of historical evolution will be our last? That with the rise of the post-1989 liberal global order, history’s advance toward world human maturity is now complete? Could it be that after 300 years of political, commercial, and cultural revolution, we’ve finally solved our fundamental social problems with the global success of democratic states and free capitalist markets?
If so, there is nothing significant left to fight over; the age of revolution is done. If true, it’s a pretty picture; it’s time to enjoy our new world order. Time and events will continue, of course, but at the end of history, the human struggle for a lasting political and economic order is over. Politics will continue only as a mopping up operation: securing our prosperity, extending social justice and human rights, and bringing the rest of the world into a prosperous liberal democratic form of life. History’s “big picture” is settled.
Fukuyama raised his analysis more as question than pronouncement, but upon his book’s release, many on the right ran with it to celebrate the final global triumph of American destiny, a final form of world order to enforce upon others, for instance, Saddam Hussein. But assuming Fukuyama’s hypothesis correct, his real question concerned something else, something far more important to us: the “last man.”
By the term, the “last man,” he didn’t mean the end of humanity. To the contrary, he raised the question: What is the ongoing meaning of human life at history’s end, at its final stage of peace and prosperity beyond struggle? In the past, much of life’s meaning developed from the struggle to find a proper way of living together. So, without struggle, will life mean anything at all? Or will we lapse into a boring homogeneity, all greatness absorbed into triviality, and our freedom mindlessly absorbed into technology and bureaucracy? And here Fukuyama picked up worries with long roots in the history of nihilism.
Similar questions were raised on the left as postmodern critical theorists picked up “endism” as a theme (“critical theorists” will be explained in Essay 3). They also assumed the triumph of democratic-capitalism, asking then, what is the meaning of human society when, for the first time, material scarcity is overcome by affluence in capitalist societies? Is there any meaning at all beyond affluence and the capitalism that provides the abundance?
Literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson famously summed up postmodernity as “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” In such a condition of life, culture comes to reflect nothing more than the experience of economic forces churning all of us through the same endless system of accumulation. Even our desire for liberation—to be free to create personal meaning; free to carve out spaces to freely express our identities—feels deadened; feeling itself dulls. What is left to think about except, perhaps, the naked power of the machinery itself, and rage against the machine? In this condition, we’ve reached the end of revolution, the end of art, of literature, of thought itself. We experience postmodern cultural life as nothing but disconnected, simulated images and thoughts, mere “memes” running through our minds and which added together tighten the noose of capitalism’s all-encompassing power. Again, the collapse of meaning has long roots in the history of nihilism.
Other notable scholars gravely warn us that there are objective signs that literally we are at the end of a major historical era, specifically at the end of the Modern Era, the vast centuries-long Western historical experience of human advance that has defined the world as we’ve long known it. One such scholar is the preeminent historian Jacques Barzun, whose landmark book From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life sketches the rise and (for our purposes here) the end of the Modern Era. We will discuss him further down after first saying more about nihilism.
But here, let’s listen to the globally renowned economic sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, who, in the 1970s, founded a school of thought called “world-systems analysis.” Wallerstein challenged us to lift our thinking beyond individual countries (long the concern of citizens and social scientists) or regions like the “West” (that self-preoccupied Westerners can rarely think beyond) in order to understand the crisis at hand in our day of “endings.” We must consider the world as a world-systemic whole to fully analyze the challenges ahead, especially under the pressures of our latest forms of globalization.
Wallerstein argued that all major civilizations constitute historical world-systems. All of them, that is, are “worlds” unto themselves. Even ancient civilizations like Rome or Han China or Mauryan India created historical world-systems. Civilizations are comprised as systematically unified social, cultural, and political wholes—systems—that define their “worlds” and solidify their power to expand. Ultimately, at the end of a long era, each world-system decays as its inner values fragment and lose their persuasive power and public legitimacy.
But only one “world-system” ever became truly global—the modern world-system that emerged from Western Europe in the 1500s. And it is this world-system, like every before it, that reaches terminal crisis today, its ending threatening the globe with economic, political, and cultural instability.
The thrumming heartbeat of the modern world-system is the global capitalist world-economy. And even though we might think of capitalism and globalization as relatively new, in one form or another they’ve both been thrumming along for about 800 years. Other scholars (see notes) trace globalization’s origins to the twelfth-century Mongol Empire (later, the Ottoman Turks) which created a pan-Eurasian trade bloc linking production, markets, and exchange between East and South Asian production centers with those emerging in Europe. Wallerstein picks up this world-linking proto-capitalism, and describes its gathering energy and power after 1500—a good marker for the beginning of the Modern Era—as the West incorporated the western hemisphere and Africa into the existing global system, eventually amassing the imperial power to absorb the entire world into a unified production and trading system.
Along with its global economic dominance, the West also injected its cultural values into the world-system, creating what Wallerstein calls the Western-dominated “geoculture.” We might think of this geoculture simply as natural worldwide “modernization” and take it for granted, but historically it was the West that created it, often haphazardly, either by direct, frequently violent imposition or by persuasive example.
The geoculture’s main features include: the “interstate” system of modern constitutional national States, most nominally democratic, at least espousing or giving lip service to liberal values such as universal citizenship suffrage, rights, and freedoms; universal human rights; rule of law; welfare expectations for healthcare, education and social security; civil society innovations like an independent press, political parties, labor unions, and independence movements; and expectations for economic development, literacy, technology, and science.
Creating this geoculture, of course, carried the West’s paternalist and racist baggage along with it: a claim to bring “civilization” to a benighted world—the mission civilisatrice—or in vulgar terms, the “white man’s burden.” In truth, these structural innovations were hardly innocent. They were purpose-built constructions required to uphold and support ongoing capitalist economic expansion, both during the imperial period of colonization and, following it, Western-directed economic globalization.
To the question, then, is the West “ending”? Wallerstein would answer that the question is ironic and irrelevant: The whole world including the West itself has been caught up essentially and equally into a single world-system. In broad terms—crucially, political and economic terms—each country now plays the same world-system game by the same rules, some with better cards to play, obviously, but each betting and bluffing in its own peculiar way, though none escapes the game. The West created the game and set the rules; now it loses its distinctiveness because everywhere and anywhere has substantively (politically, economically, technologically) become “westernized.”
Wallerstein warns us that after 500 years of continuous development, the modern world-system, including its capitalist world-economy and its geoculture, now fragments, unable to meet the challenges ahead. The Modern Era’s game is over, its world-systemic decline, terminal. Something new must take its place. In later parts of Section I, we will look in detail at this systemic crisis and explain why the world-system as we’ve known it is ending. But for now, let’s look at it in broad perspective.
Much as a single biological cell eventually splits and forms two cells, Wallerstein observes that a world-system in decline splits, first into two, later into more. This splitting into two (and more) he calls the “bifurcation.” Bifurcation means, merely, that at some point toward the end of a world-system’s life, its values, ideologies, and the life experiences of its people lose their inner unity, common purpose, and united vision, and the system no longer receives respect, persuades allegiance, commands legitimacy, or makes sense. Its culture splits apart over fundamental differences about what is true and good and desirable. Society divides over class, race, and identity. Politics polarize over ideology; economics over confusion about the economy’s purpose, how it works, and what should happen next.
At the point of bifurcation, these differences congeal into at least two irreconcilable ideological visions at odds with each other—if not at war with each other, or revolution. For example, the growing tension over prevailing development models and their legitimacy between Western democratic-capitalist liberalism and Chinese authoritarian-capitalism which polarizes the development choices of many nations. The world-system, divided as such into combative factions, ceases to operate coherently, wobbling into the future without decisive direction, control, or popular support, putting at risk the world’s peoples and their chance to flourish.
Wallerstein claims (and I agree) that the Modern Era’s global world-system began to bifurcate in the 1960s. In fact, he identifies the tumultuous year, 1968, as the decisive point at which, worldwide, the world-system’s legitimacy fundamentally broke down, and we’ve been dealing with the consequences of a widespread legitimacy crisis ever since. Again, we’ll look at the reasons why later on as we address culture, politics, and economics in later essays.
But the crux of Wallerstein’s warning to us is that once the world-system bifurcated around 1968 or so, we entered a long period of transition that will last until a new world-system solidifies; a “time of troubles,” he says, “a black period that will last as long as the transition lasts.” How long? Perhaps 50 years, he thinks. Perhaps until the middle of the twenty-first century. Who knows? As long as the transition lasts, we will continue to live in the interregnum between coherent world-systems, and our problems keep piling up, as we noted in Essay 1.
Hope is not gone: “Though [the transition] will be terrible to live through,” says Wallerstein, “it will not go on forever.” Thankfully. A new world-system will form, and hopefully the transition will give us time to get it right. And maybe the future world-system, too, will last another 500 years. Still, there is great risk ahead: no guarantee that we’ll like the new world-system any better than the old one; it might even be worse than the old one, authoritarian and oppressive—or maybe better, prosperous, and free. Let’s hope for the best and take advantage of our transitory time to work to achieve it.
Maybe now, with Wallerstein’s analysis in mind, it is easier to understand the commonplace sensation of an “ending” that has come over us, at least we in the West, because we really are at the end of a major historical era, at the end of a past way of life, of an old familiar world. We live in a time of transition between one settled form of life, one that’s lasted five centuries, and another yet to take shape. We’re waiting, frustrated and impatient, for a new form of settled life to begin.
Let’s also put postmodernity in perspective: Postmodernity’s emergence marked the beginning of the time of transition between the end of the Modern Era—whose modern world-system began to bifurcate in the 1960s—to whatever new world-system it is that lies ahead of us in the future. Over five decades, postmodernity has given us a taste of what it’s like to live in a time of transition. It’s not hard then to imagine why the entire period has felt so scattered and conflicted.
Postmodernity is the condition of living between two worlds, between the modern one which is failing, and the new one which is yet to come. And perhaps in the ashes of the postmodern struggle to survive the transition, we might find the first traces of an emerging metamodern future, and a way forward beyond the transition.
II
For many generations, we in the West put our trust in progress to make each new generation’s life better than the one before it. And for many generations our trust was rewarded. So, it comes as a shock to our elders that our rising generations today are finding such trust violated, promises empty, their lives empirically poorer, less secure, chaotic. Our world unravels before our eyes.
Shocking to many of us, perhaps, but not surprising. Especially because the phenomenon of our “unraveling” was in fact diagnosed almost 150 years ago. Every civilization or era or world-system—however one describes any historical form of life—carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, its Achilles heel, a virus in its blood that eventually produces a life-threatening disease. This is obvious enough to be a truism. The Modern Era, the modern world-system, is no exception.
Deep within the Western rationality that formed the Modern Era; deep in its inner logic, ideas, and ideologies that gave us our scientific, material, and political advances; lies the inevitable, debilitating contradiction—our “blood infection.” Our civilization is not perfect, none are. We need to diagnose what’s wrong within us to heal our disease, if we can.
Fortunately, in the 1870s and 1880s, a philosopher who styled himself as a physician of life, a diagnostician of culture, a vivisectionist of thought, gave us a clear diagnosis of our hidden inner infection. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche, his diagnosis: nihilism. His warning was grave, so it’s important to hear him out.
Nietzsche is on most short lists of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers, even though he died in 1900; and he ranks as one of the finest writers in the German language. His writing is voluminous, unsystematic, and complicated to sort out; it covers just about everything, from art to morals to politics, reason, psychology, history, theology, and mythology. He pronounced himself human “dynamite,” ready and willing to blow up the foundations of any existing philosophy, theology, ideology, or way of life. History remembers Nietzsche as a dark prophet, as God’s undertaker—he famously pronounced God “dead”—palace herald of the will to power and of course nihilism.
Why bring up this long-dead philosopher? Two reasons. One, Nietzsche was the first philosopher to diagnose nihilism as a problem of devastating consequence. No-one before him grasped nihilism as the central and signal phenomenon of modernity. None had described its penetration into the West’s cultural, social, and political life and thought, or given a thorough explanation of it, or most importantly, issued a warning of its threat to the future. His wake-up call resonates still.
Secondly, not only was he the pioneering philosopher of nihilism, Nietzsche also perceived a world that looks at lot like postmodernity. Think of him as a proto-postmodernist and as postmodernity’s preeminent ancestor. So closely, in fact, does postmodernity—our age of nihilism—match Nietzsche’s description of the West’s unfolding nihilism in his own time, that it’s hard to deeply understand postmodernity without him.
This is not to say that Nietzsche caused postmodernity, or that the postmodern is simply Nietzschean philosophy writ large. But it is to say that postmodern thought leaders—artists, writers, critics, sociologists, theorists, philosophers, theologians, politicians—discovered in their own time so much of what Nietzsche described as the nihilism of his own time, that they found in Nietzsche a fertile field in which to grow their own postmodern ideas and criticisms of society. His work remains vitally alive today as a tool to interpret our current reality.
So, what is nihilism and what did Nietzsche mean by it? Nihilism, the word, draws its meaning from its Latin root nihil which means nothingness, the absence of anything, nil, zilch. It’s used, for instance, in the Judeo-Christian phrase creatio ex nihilo—the creation of the world out of nothing.
To take a nihilist view on the world, one would hold that in the end, or at the bottom of reality, there is only nothingness. None of our perceptions of the world ultimately can be proven true or real. Thus, to claim a truth about reality is to ultimately claim nothing at all. Nihilism means a condition of living that has its roots in nothingness, that all thought is, past a point, an illusion, an artificially constructed story we tell ourselves about reality. Life, therefore, must be lived without ultimate meaning. We are deprived of any secure divine, rational, or scientific foundation for values and morality or for discovering ultimate truth. Nihilism doesn’t paint a particularly comforting picture of life. But in postmodernity, we’ve found it difficult to refute it, thus, our age of nihilism.
Many postmodern thinkers readily agree with this nihilist world-picture; indeed, it pretty much defines postmodernity’s mind-set. It may be hard to face it, but we have no ultimate “foundations” from which to build our perceptions of reality, let alone our morality, our social worlds, and our theories about how they should work.
From a nihilist perspective, at bottom, everything we believe about the world is “self-constructed.” Our “constructions” may indeed reveal truth at some level but are never free of illusion. However, illusory or not, we need our illusions because they are pragmatically useful stories, in fact necessary stories that we must tell ourselves to organize ourselves into complex cultures, societies, and civilizations.
Perhaps, if we don’t like the “constructions” we inherit from history, we can always “deconstruct” them and start over again. Or so we think, until we face the empirical truth that a historically-rooted, civilization-sized “construction”—the West for example—once destroyed, is nearly impossible to quickly replace by force of will. Civilization-sized opportunities to construct new “worlds” come along at a pace of only once in a few centuries or longer.
Herein lies Nietzsche’s worry about nihilism. Civilizations may indeed arise from an original “nothing,” but once they do, they develop and solidify their systemic structures, powers, complexity, and meaning—their world-systems—over centuries. And like living organisms, they cycle from birth to death. As they cycle upward, the world they produce feels real, fresh, convincing, meaningful, and solid; nihilism is the furthest thing from our minds.
Ultimately, though, they are undone by their inner contradictions and hypocrisies; they “bifurcate,” as Wallerstein would put it; and cycle downward in the direction of nothingness. It is then that we begin to feel the nihilism of an age, when we feel the age coming apart, returning to “nothing,” and we lose confidence in it. Nietzsche’s concern—and his warning—was that precisely this was occurring in his day in the West. The West had entered a nihilist downcycle, and that it would be a very long time before the damage is fixed.
Nietzsche described the late nineteenth century’s growing nihilism concretely and in practical detail; his was not the abstract word-picture philosophers so often draw. And we’ll look at his description of nihilist society and his warning to future generations in a moment. But first, there remains one other way in which Nietzsche defined nihilism. We need to grasp this before going on. He called nihilism the “devaluation of all values.”
What did Nietzsche mean by the devaluation of values? Simply that a civilization arising in history is constructed with a certain kind of building material that is concrete and meaningful: Values. Values are things people find valuable, value for their intrinsic worth, and fight to protect: Moral values, for instance, such as virtue, honesty, generosity, or for some, violence; personal values like freedom, autonomy, identity; some values are universal, like belief in God or human reason; we value science, markets, democracy, religion, philosophy in different ways; and in different ways, healthy living, mindfulness or veganism.
Regardless the value of a value we cherish, individual values don’t exist in a vacuum. They require institutions, ideologies, and theologies to organize them and make them cohere with each other. Otherwise, we have only a confusion of values. Values arise and naturally coevolve with the institutions and ideas that support them and shape them into a common whole. Institutionalized systems of value such as governments, markets, political parties, religions, schools, families, and so on, shape civilizations—world-systems—into recognizable wholes.
Further, Nietzsche pointed out the obvious, that all values are not equal; some more important, some trivial. Through history, values are naturally rank-ordered, or as Nietzsche described it, rank-ordered into hierarchies of value, each hierarchy arranging a set of values from top to bottom in order of importance. Value hierarchies generate order for the whole system and put each value in its proper place.
Think of a value hierarchy as a medieval cathedral. Europe’s high Gothic cathedrals are grand spectacles, each the consummation of its city’s grace, art, and wealth. Yet each one is fragile, a delicate balance of forces supported by slender arches, each leaning on the others to carry the weight, held in place by buttresses, keystones, and domes. Loosen these structures from the top and the edifice unravels—like Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral who’s recently burned roof nearly collapsed the entire structure.
Great universal values represent the buttresses and domes of our cathedrals of value: God is one such, and religion; so are faith in reason, science, truth, freedom, constitutions, democracy, tradition. Universal values structure the whole and tie the structure together. So long as the structure holds, a civilization grows and strengthens. We celebrate it in the arts; tell myths and stories of its wonder; proclaim its exceptionalism; and its people come to love it. But what does it mean when these great universals, like bad investments, lose their value?
Collapse: And this, Nietzsche told us, is the problem. He watched in real time as, in his generation, the vast cathedral of Europe unraveled, its keystones crumbled, its arches weakened, its value hierarchy eroded from the top. As the structure weakened, the lesser values came unstuck from each other, a slow collapse of value ensued throughout the system, and the long slide back toward nothingness began. Nihilism meant, from Nietzsche’s perspective, the subsequent devaluation of all values. What is the crisis we confront, he asked? “Our highest values devalue themselves.” And they are collapsing the relative value and meaning of all the other values along with them.
To be specific, in the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche observed the end-stage of the collapsing Judeo-Christian value hierarchy. For more than a millennium this historical world-system of institutionalized values had united, through a common belief in God, all of Europe’s values: the full range of them, from church to state, the personal to the political, art, law, philosophy, morality. A secular tide undermined its foundations. Europe’s Christendom tradition was weakened and unmoored by rationalist philosophy, science, political revolutions, individualism, the rise of democracy, and popular sovereignty. No longer did it command respect or legitimacy.
At the time, Nietzsche merely observed what others refused to: He announced that for all practical purposes, “God is dead.” And his proclamation left us with questions that still hover over the West without resolution: What does it mean to live in a brave new world without God? What replacement will give life meaning?
Certainly, religion hadn’t disappeared. Nietzsche meant only that Christendom’s value hierarchy no longer defined and no longer held together Europe’s Christendom-shaped values, which then devalued like the pound sterling in the Great Depression. They collapsed into a confusion of fragments: of values, meanings, and conflict among them, a modern Tower of Babel collapsing into a confusion of languages.
But as Christendom’s world-system collapsed, another world-system formed in its wake and surpassed it with a new value hierarchy and an utterly different organization of life. We described it earlier as the “modern world-system,” gestating since the sixteenth century, and now in the nineteenth century coming into its own. And its great innovation was to replace the Church (which was based on faith in God) with the modern governmental State (which is based on faith in freedom) as the keystone of the new cathedral of value.
Europe’s nineteenth-century governing elites, in fact, were intoxicated by the coming of age of the Modern Era. A glorious vision: rising new republics; shining, efficient governments; energized by ‘enlightened’ reason, by science, by progress, by capital, by world empire. A revolution in human consciousness unfolded before them, a bold new masterplan for the ages. Optimism (to the point of absurdity as the world discovered in 1914) saturated Nietzsche’s Belle Époque Europe, America too.
But of the modern State and the modern world-system it guided, Nietzsche remained dubious. Yes, it was a big, grand, global vision. Nonetheless, Nietzsche realized that it was not a vision big enough to replace Christendom. Nor was it coherent enough to maintain its own new value hierarchy, not at least over the long-run. And this is the crisis that preoccupied him: He predicted the modern world-system’s demise—and the devaluation of its values—at some postmodern future point in the twentieth century.
III
We can let philosopher Simon Critchley—well known as the editor of the New York Times’ philosophy page “The Stone”—summarize our discussion of nihilism this way:
Nihilism is the obvious response to the death of God, by which we mean the collapse of any transcendent basis for morality, the collapse of the value of everything. Just to say “Well, God is dead” in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness.
It is something that happens historically with the collapse of religion and the end of belief in the infallibility of leaders and so forth.
But to unpack this more, let’s turn to political philosopher Hans Sluga, an important interpreter of Nietzsche’s political and cultural significance for today and for our understanding of postmodernity. Nietzsche, as Sluga describes him, played a crucial role as a “diagnostician” of culture and politics. What comes out clearly from Nietzsche’s diagnoses are the consequences of nihilism for culture and politics, beginning first with the collapse of Christendom’s value hierarchy, and then with that of the modern State that was meant to replace it. Here’s Hans Sluga’s take on Nietzsche as diagnostician (and since I’m quoting Sluga as he quotes Nietzsche, to make things simpler I’ve bolded Nietzsche’s own words):
[T]he end of Christianity … has generated “a repugnance against the falseness and mendacity of every Christian interpretation of the world of history” and this has, in turn, produced a “rebound from ‘God is the Truth’ into the fanatical belief ‘Everything is false.’ … [It] awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false.”
Nietzsche may have been the first to grasp nihilism in depth, but the word itself was coined a few decades before him, and first employed by a fanatical Russian movement, The Nihilists, whose solution to the belief that “everything is false” was to tear down the world. Unfortunately, they gave nihilism a bad reputation for bomb-throwing terrorism and assassinations. But their tradition continued well into our own time—in 1970s movements like Germany’s Baader-Meinhof, Italy’s Red Brigade, America’s Weather Underground, and later, militant, “monkey-wrenching” anarchists I’ve interviewed in my own social movement research—whose solution to a meaningless society is to jam up its machinery, blow up its institutions, and hope something meaningful grows up in its place.
This is the extreme end of the scale, of course, but the suspicion that “all interpretations of the world are false,” naturally arises as the sign of a disillusioned culture losing trust in its traditions and institutions, both religious and political. Collapse of trust in “truth” as revealed in religion, or in “truth” as constructed by political theorists to replace religion, becomes the seedbed for anxiety and fodder for fake news and conspiracy theories. Having once believed—in either Christendom or in the modern State—belief betrayed makes the willingness to believe at all a dead letter. Once lost, trust is hard to reactivate. All too many are left in despair and cynicism, unmotivated to help create something new or to believe in the future.
Nietzsche, Sluga says, believed such fanaticism and cynicism overblown, but that he had to address it at all shows that it was an easily observed reality in his day, as well as in our own. Rage against “truth’s” betrayal has remained an enduring theme throughout the age of nihilism. But run-amok suspicion, however fanatical and addicting for those susceptible to it, really wasn’t Nietzsche’s paramount concern. His concern was about the loss of value. Sluga continues:
Nietzsche finds the essence of nihilism not in the loss of all values but in the loss of a hierarchy and order of values, and that this has for him political as well as moral implications.
The loss of a hierarchy of values is dangerous … Without such a hierarchy values prove anchorless, unstable, and shifting. It is not that all values have disappeared under nihilistic conditions … but the relation of these values to each other is unsecured.
In this culture of ours the most trite and trivial counts in consequence as much as the greatest and most profound. Triviality itself has, indeed, become a value for us and all values have become trivial. What is acclaimed today is discarded tomorrow. Our values have been reduced to fashions and as such to something of no consequence.
The problem lies in the confusion of disconnected moral and political values following collapse of the value hierarchy. Now, values and their claims to truthfulness become disengaged from the whole. They retain only relative value to each other, and this begs a devastating question: Which value is more important than another? With no universal value to order them, there is no way to answer this question, at any rate, no easy or universally convincing way to answer it. Values devalue themselves; one value, one opinion, as good as another.
The “political as well as moral implications” of a lost value hierarchy, as Sluga puts it, are familiar to us at the end of the Modern Era. The relativism of moral values has resulted in a culture war for decades and is difficult enough to resolve. But the greater problem with relativism has been the loss of a universally accepted measuring rod (a “great universal value”) for making and enforcing political decisions. And this problem plagues us today, at the point of our world-system’s bifurcation, when many political values are asserted, but none command robust legitimacy.
But even this isn’t our greatest problem in an age of relativized, devalued values. Nietzsche warns us (perhaps his most important warning) that the only value that seems to possess the energy to maintain its value in the face of nihilism is the value of not having values at all other than one’s own whim, opinion, and choice.
The one value to retain a forceful hold on us is only the private freedom of the individual to choose to do or to believe as one pleases. The force of this value undermines our other shared values that once felt sacred to us: such as fundamental equality, the perfection of the commonwealth for everyone’s benefit, a willingness to sacrifice some of one’s freedom for the common good. And this overvaluation of “freedom” is the “blood disease” that infects the modern State and the hierarchy of values upon which it rests. Again, Hans Sluga:
It would become clear then that this [modern] state was based on a single-minded commitment to the freedom of the individual and not much else. … [D]esire for [collective] political self-determination would eventually give way to unconstrained selfishness . . . unremitting social and political competition.
Once the state was ruled entirely by private interests, its functions would be taken over more and more by those who sought to make private profit. “Private companies will step by step absorb the business of the state: even the most resistant remainder of what was formerly the work of government … will in the long run be taken care of by private companies.”
A note in a bottle from the 1880s washes up on our beach: Nietzsche’s nihilist future history of devalued values becomes today’s reality. The State’s once unquestioned value has been relativized (even trivialized) by personal private economic claims that demand value superior to the State itself.
The most obvious problem of our past fifty year period of bifurcation and transition—postmodernity, from the 1960s to the 2010s—is the West’s (and beyond) flailing, if not failing, modern democratic states and the growth of economic power as a replacement power to govern our lives. Many have lost substantive faith in the democratic project and in the dream that it can be perfected. In postmodernity we have been content to drift, to let capitalism set our course.
Nihilism in its postmodern guise has created powerful ideological movements—to reduce or replace the State: to downsize government, privatize governmental functions, dismantle welfare programs, promote austerity, and let private markets shape our societies on a global scale—all in the name of protecting personal “freedom.” Nietzsche’s foresight connects the nineteenth-century’s growing capitalist power with our own market-saturated, politically chaotic postmodern present.
Social conservatives tend to think of nihilism only in moral terms: especially, the ‘breakdown’ of the family which they blame on the relativism of the 1960s sexual ‘revolution.’ But how often do we think of the modern democratic State, overtaken by private economic interests in the name of “freedom,” as nihilism, as nothingness? Yet this is a much greater worry.
IV
Nihilism is a sign of a singular historical moment beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing now; a unique moment in Western history that as time goes on must certainly pass away. And it must pass away, lest we die out from the disorder, especially in the face of the unstoppable secular trends-from-the-future that define our future-present. And Nietzsche believed that, yes, the age of nihilism shall eventually pass away, but he was not sanguine about how long and difficult our passage through it might be. Hans Sluga goes on to say:
Nietzsche was convinced that the process [nihilism’s rising tide] would reach its logical end in the disintegration of the entire political order and thought that at this point “a new page will be turned in the story book of humanity.” But he was not at all keen to see this day come too soon. . . . [It would come slowly] over the course of “the next two centuries.”
There is a convergence here with Immanuel Wallerstein’s idea of the “transition,” the unsettled time between past and future world-systems each with its own coherent and vital hierarchies of value. Though, on Nietzsche’s timetable (if he is correct) the transition from one world-system to the next might well last until the 2080s, far too long for us to wait. There is a connection as well between Wallerstein’s “bifurcation” and Nietzsche’s “disintegration of the entire political system.”
But how do we turn a new page in the story book of humanity? What did Nietzsche say about doing this?
Nietzsche thought that we have no recourse other than to let nihilism run its course, to take nihilism to its logical end, and even to help nihilism push what remains of our old value hierarchy over the edge. He called this active nihilism.
What he meant was that, if our existing value hierarchy no longer holds, if it has been dismissed as illusion and corruption and declared illegitimate, then we must tear it all down and start over again. Contrary to nihilist stereotypes, Nietzsche wasn’t advocating bomb throwing or revolution. Merely, he told us to apply our philosophical, intellectual, and critical resources to expose and to unthink whatever is left of our existing value hierarchies, institutions, and illusions until we reach the bottom of their contradictions and failures.
Where postmodernity succeeded, it did just this: it applied critical scholarship to expose our blindness, discrimination, and naked power to dominate others, power that disrupts the world rather than healing it. Postmodern researchers demanded our attention to address, especially, what I called the “problematic triumvirate” in Essay 1: patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism. And they did it to emancipate the oppressed, of course, but also to free the rest of us from continuing down a destructive path.
Critique alone, however, is insufficient. It is not enough just to expose, criticize, and break down existing social structures, even as essential and profound as this work is.
Nietzsche’s ground-clearing exercise in active nihilism was meant to plow the field free to plant anew. The next step, however, must be to rebuild our hierarchies of value, a step he referred to often as creating a new “transvaluation” of our highest values. We must create a new order out of the demolition of the old; invent the world over again. But trans-valuated values don’t grow on trees. That’s why periods of uplift, of transvaluation, are so rare, and why we might have to wait 200 years.
In the West, such vast transformations of values have grown from singular historical events: Socrates and the rise of Greek rationality; Jesus, St. Paul and the rise of Christianity from its Hebrew roots; the rise of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment; and the industrial and political Age of Revolution. These are all rare and complex intellectual, cultural, social, technological, and political events, yet events with the power to shape the modern world-system, though they are few.
Nietzsche expected a Socrates, a Buddha, a Jesus to arise, to set the new world in motion. He called such a figure the Übermensch—literally, the “overman” or “superman.” Only such could conger the boldest vision and the highest values to set the other values straight, and to create The Event that reorders the cathedral of values.
We take Nietzsche’s point seriously: Both the need to critique our values and institutions from top to bottom and “deconstruct” them as necessary; and the need to create a new intellectual and cultural formation to guide us through our time of transition and to achieve a new trans-valuated world-system. Having said this, at this point we must also take leave of Nietzsche.
We take leave because Nietzsche was famously an elitist and dismissive of the democracy of the masses which he viewed at best a bumbling, middling herd to be led around by the geniuses of the age. Our future, he thought, lies in the hands of elite Übermenschen, not in each other. In fairness, when he wrote, French democracy was in its infancy (and chaotic), German democracy wouldn’t arise for decades, America’s disastrous Civil War still a fresh memory, and a mature popular culture unknown.
All that changed as the Modern Era evolved. Today, we take it for granted that culture—new ideas, art, politics, innovation—arise from the “bottom” and the “middle” as much as from the “top.” Yes, we may benefit from a few Übermenschen, those great minds and strong, authentic personas, if they arise and if they are wise and command our respect. None such appear on the horizon.
An authentic transvaluation of values is more likely to arise cooperatively from many sources within our democracies, if we can keep them healthy, than from an aristocracy of elites however well-meaning. However, our democracies face a challenge of the greatest magnitude: Creating a transvaluation of all values at a scale powerful enough to match and exceed that of Christendom’s and the Modern Era’s past—if indeed we wish to see a future world-system worthy of those worlds we leave behind.
V
From beginning to end, postmodernity has been a reckoning with nihilism, and postmodernity at its end leaves us with nihilism still working its way through culture and consciousness, our public orders of life, and the institutions that sustain them. What once provided a secure civilizational order has crumbled: first, Christendom, secured by the Church; then Modernity secured by the modern State. Our previous historical value hierarchies became delegitimized in the mind of a disillusioned public, never to return in their past forms. All that is left is critique—active nihilism—without recourse, yet, to a suitable replacement.
Can we at least see traces of a new value hierarchy forming on the horizon as we stumble through Wallerstein’s time of “transition” between world-systems? Yes, we certainly can, though prudence warns us to be careful. In the absence of alternatives, the trans-humanist vision of tech-driven human evolution from Homo sapiens to Homo deus (the autonomous secular trend described in Essay 1) already commands ‘enlightened’ public imagination and growing scientific legitimacy, especially in major tech centers. But we might not like what we see if we still wish to preserve anything of our humanist past. We will look closely at this possibility, and at Yuval Harari’s provocative future vision of a technologized humanity, Homo deus, later in the last part of Section I’s discussion of postmodernity.
For now, let’s think one last time about our sensation of living in our present postmodern moment of “ending.” What do we see? What are we losing? And more importantly, what consequences for our democracies in this age of nihilism, if we indeed wish to democratically address the future?
Here we pick up the eminent historian Jacques Barzun whom I mentioned earlier, and his monumental book From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, published in 2000. An early pioneer of the field of cultural history and designer of Columbia University’s Great Books and Western Civilization curriculum, Barzun’s impressive erudition will seldom be matched. And his longevity—he was still writing at his death at 104; Dawn was published at 93—enabled a long life of deep reflection and rich synthesis of the cultural trends, ideologies, and arts that formed the Modern Age.
Barzun expertly traces the many thematic cultural developments and values that defined the Modern Era from beginning to end, demonstrating how thickly and richly these intertwined to produce a durable and increasingly humane and enlightened civilization—though in postmodernity, claims to ‘humane’ and ‘enlightened’ certainly are, and often rightly, contested. Throughout, Barzun highlights two of the boldest through-lines defining the era: The emancipation of peoples from domination to enjoy independent lives; and the maturation of popular sovereignty over monarchs and hereditary elites. In a word: the rise of the free citizen, and the triumph of democracy in the modern State.
Like Wallerstein, Barzun views the Modern Age as beginning around 1500, and evolving as a coherent set-piece—the modern world-system—until reaching its exhaustion in his lifetime. Further, he would agree with Wallerstein that what some today call “the end of the European age” looks to him more like the “Europeanization of the globe”: Thus, the modern world-system is a global world-system; modern problems are now global problems.
And though Barzun doesn’t use the word “bifurcate,” he clearly describes our fracturing (bifurcating) Western culture and its spreading consequences over the last half of the twentieth century. He tells us that we have indeed reached the Modern Era’s fragmented end.
Barzun wrote his book to describe modernity’s rise and fall; thus to show:
[T]hat during this [500 year] span the peoples of the West offered the world a set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or elsewhere. . . . Borrowing widely from other lands, thriving on dissent and originality, the West has been the mongrel civilization par excellence. But in spite of patchwork and conflict it has pursued characteristic purposes—that is its unity—and now these purposes, carried out to their utmost possibility, are bringing about its demise. (emphasis added)
By “demise” Barzun means descent into decadence: Decadence, which he defines as a “falling off,” a collapse of forward vision, a sense of stopping, of values collapsing under their own weight. He describes the feeling of “falling off” as arising almost without our notice:
[Decadence] implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time . . . but particularly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility.
And, like Wallerstein, Barzun projects a long time of transition (lasting maybe 300 years) to follow the end of the Modern Era, stymied as it is in decadence, before a renascence, possibly based on a recovery of westernizing values and ideas, and the rise of a new ‘enlightened’ age which he hopes might appear.
Then, like Nietzsche, though without much using the word “nihilism,” Barzun traces the collapse of meaning since the nineteenth century in terms Nietzsche could agree with. His history of the last stages of modernity match Nietzsche’s description of the West’s collapsing value hierarchy and the devaluation of its values.
Barzun identifies a paradox in Western tradition: The rise of free citizens and the democratic State—the final keystones in the evolution of the Modern Era’s cathedral of value—are exactly the same accomplishments that are bringing about modernity’s decadence. An overvaluation of freedom is itself (as Nietzsche also noted) collapsing the democratic State’s institutions that hold it together in the name of personal liberty.
He argues that the democratization of the masses has undercut the power of the Western mind and the intellectual tradition that sustains democracy; the mind and tradition, that is, which formed the great universal values and designed the architecture of the Modern Era’s cathedral of value. Too much democratization of opinion, critique, and fanaticism has cut away the hard-won authority of the fundamental ideas that shaped the democratic West slowly over centuries.
Also, in keeping with Nietzsche, Barzun was an elitist, an “aristocrat of the mind.” He was suspicious of the democratic masses, believing many to be incapable of education at all, the majority awash in ideological pablum; most feeding on the daily news without insight (Nietzsche himself derided the middle class as mere “readers of newspapers and ‘thoughtful’ journals”); followers of half-baked ideas; agitators of ignorant and dangerous conjectures; fodder for popular demagogues; unwilling or incapable of doing the work required to authentically understand their own Western heritage.
So then, without the sustenance of enduring ideas of the highest order, the otherwise quite important pursuit of “rule by the people” in an ever-deepening, well-informed democracy has degenerated into the disorganized moods, self-interests, demands, and uniformed opinions of “the people” with little real interest or desire to rule as citizens. Barzun calls this situation “demotic” (“populist” is a synonym), a reduction of principled and engaged democracy to a self-absorbed, reactionary populace lacking wisdom and capacity to keep the democratic tradition alive.
The word demotic is pejorative, directed at a careless democratic culture paralyzed by indecision and bifurcation. However, the “demotic,” as Barzun describes the contemporary West, is nihilism by another name, the signature of a people that has given up trust in the hierarchy of values and institutions that formed it in the first place.
Demotic society, viewed in Barzun’s pejorative sense, replaces life-long education with entertainment; public politics with private markets; fraternal fellowship with social media; national solidarity with multiple identities; cultivation with kitsch; and surrenders depth of meaning to shimmering surfaces in thought, art, and politics—precisely the same observations made by postmodern writers, though Barzun would be horrified to be called “postmodern.” In other words, as Hans Sluga reminded us, “The most trite and trivial counts in consequence as much as the greatest and most profound. Triviality itself has, indeed, become a value for us and all values have become trivial.” The powerful Western tradition fades away in decadence and ignorance.
Reading Barzun’s conclusions about the Modern Era’s ironic end gives one the feeling of an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn. Is he unfair to us? To us, the currently existing, middling, demotic, democratic, end-products of 500 years of Western development? Most likely we bridle at hearing him (and we should) and likely protest Barzun’s elitism and judgement upon us (I do, anyway). It’s simply not true that art, thought, and achievement don’t continue and continue at a high level of advance, or that we’re lazy and content to watch the world burn. Most of us are proud of what we do and take seriously our contributions to a democratic society.
But this is not Barzun’s point. He grants that ours is a “very active time.” His point is that our activity and advancements continue without transcendence: They lack a sublime greatness that elevates our vision above prosaic short-term concerns, and they lack a transcendental connection between our deepest realities and everyday life. We once had such a vision—all civilizations do as they rise—and we once found it convincing.
Now, in our postmodern hast to dismantle and discredit the past, we’ve forgotten what a rare commodity a deeply-shared sublime vision actually is, how delicate, and what it means when consciousness of it is lost. As evidence: look at the demotic mess our democracies are in. And take Barzun’s point as a warning.
There is little left of the modern sublime vision for an egalitarian liberal democracy promoting the flourishing of all. Worse, a bifurcated reality; a growing acceptance of inequality and the inevitability of a permanent class divide; of futility in correcting it; of the construction of a global gated community for elites escaping the politics of redistribution and social justice; and its opposite, social backlash producing populist movements and authoritarian politics. Where classes lose concern for one another lie police states on one hand, or civil unrest or revolution on the other.
The challenge facing democracies is one of trust and value. Only sublime and transcendent grand values (however defined in any world-system, and there are many) have ever possessed capacity to shape everyone’s actions toward a state of mutual prosperity. And in the West, these have been stripped away in our age of nihilism. A democratic vision for a transvaluation of our highest values begins here: in the historical reality of our present nothingness, and in the need to rethink and to reinterpret reality itself.
We must demand much from our ourselves, much more than most believers in democracy have been willing to give for decades. The “demotic” plagues our democracies with anti-intellectualism, feigned ignorance (I’m not smart enough to get it; it’s always over my head), radical disinterest and disengagement from politics, and unwillingness to push to be informed at a level beyond gossip, the daily news, and propaganda, much less to consider what an historic transvaluation of values might even look like.
If this seems harsh, consider the stakes involved in the fractured, bifurcated, nihilist reality postmodernity leaves us with. We continue to confront the “hard” problems at hand, unresolved and bitter enough for people to take the streets, and for governments to suppress with troops and tear gas: the all-to-familiar “problematic triumvirate” of patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism of which inequality at home and abroad is its chief contemporary expression. These pale in comparison with our looming “wicked” problems from the future: population growth and migration, climate change and habitat loss, and financially-empowered technology and artificial intelligence.
It is not a foregone conclusion that we will weather these storms in stable democracies or without violence. Postmodernity’s failure to shelter us from the storms haunts us in this present age of nihilism and triviality. We must move on together—if we still can, and still are willing to believe in the sublime human capacity to achieve a flourishing public order beyond nihilism.
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Notes:
“Postmodernity and nihilism”: Ashley Woodward, “Nihilism and the Postmodern in Vattimo’s Nietzsche,” Minerva, 6 (2002); Ken Gemes “Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche” in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (March 2001).
“Trump administration”: see George Packer, “How to Destroy a Government: The President is Winning His War on American Institutions,” The Atlantic (April 2020).
“Favelas for the rest”: The terms “Brazilification” / “Brazilianization” (with apologies to Brazil) are sometimes used descriptively to illustrate the segregating effects on poor and rich of urban globalization, and as a general warning about the consequences of inequality. As far as I know, only Tyler Cowen positively recommends it as a productive way of dealing with inequality which he believes is natural and inevitable; see his Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of The Great Stagnation (Plume, 2013), p. 245.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992).
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, 1/147 (July/August) 1984, pp. 55-92.
“Mongol Empire”: Capitalism’s international roots, going back to the Mongol Era, are traced by Cambridge University and University of Westminster political and international studies scholars Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu in their How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2015).
“World-systems analysis”: Immanuel Wallerstein, whose productive and pioneering work continued until his death in 2019 at 87, was a Yale University professor and mentor to many scholar-activists around the world. Quotes are from Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century (The New Press, 1998), pp. 33, 63. Also see, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Duke, 2004); European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (The New Press, 2006); and The Essential Wallerstein (The New Press, 2000).
“Fredrich Nietzsche”: My discussion of Nietzsche in parts 2 and 3 draws substantially from Hans Sluga (see below) and from Walter Kaufmann’s classic Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, 2013 [1950]), and his translations of selected works: The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin, 1976 [1954]). In particular, see Nietzsche’s “The Madman” (aphorism 125) in The Gay Science (1882); his political references in “Section 8: ‘A Look at the State’” of Human, All Too Human (1878-1879), especially aphorism 472; and his The Antichrist (1895). Helpful surveys of Nietzsche’s entire work are found in Alex Ross’s New Yorker article “Nietzsche’s Eternal Return: Why thinkers of every political persuasion keep finding inspiration in the philosopher” (7 October 2019); and in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry “Friedrich Nietzsche,” a thorough survey of his life and work, including a comprehensive bibliography of his writings. Sue Prideaux’s biography, I Am Dynamite: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), provides a helpful orientation to his life. Another wonderful source of scholarly (yet accessible) discussion about Nietzsche is Robert Pogue Harrison’s Stanford University podcast Entitled Opinions (various episodes) found here.
“Simon Critchley”: Quotes are from the interview “A Living, Breathing Philosopher” in the journal Vice, 1 June 2009, found here. In his Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007), Critchley develops a philosophy of ethical commitment beyond the “death of God.”
“Hans Sluga”: Quotations of Sluga were drawn from his analysis of Nietzsche’s political writing, pp. 96-113 and elsewhere in his Politics and the Search for the Common Good (Cambridge, 2014); I also draw on his workshop lecture at the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, “Donald Trump: Between populist rhetoric and plutocratic rule” (March 2017)—and from his discussion of this lecture on the Stanford University podcast Entitled Opinions (20 May 2017).
“Jacques Barzun”: Quotations are from pp. xv, xvi, 670, 799 of From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (HarperCollins, 2000). See the final chapter, “Demotic Life and Times,” which includes his speculation about the future.
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