Will We Go Under This Year?
If you are my age, you may catch yourself saying: I’m glad I won’t be alive …
If you are of a philosophical or historical bent, then periodically in times of chaotic uncertainty—violence in the streets, rising totalitarian ideology and politics—you stop to assess. If you are my age, you may catch yourself saying: I’m glad I won’t be alive …
You might be amazed at the individuals steeped in a positive philosophy like that of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism—metaphysically optimistic, rationally assertive, pro-mankind—who express this sense of pessimism.
Nothing about history is inevitable. Human history is a drama of human free will.
No, Ayn Rand wrote repeatedly: Nothing about history is inevitable. Human history is a drama of human free will. But still, we know that great civilizations, rooted in reason (Ancient Greek) and law (Ancient Roman) have gone down before rising empires or the barbarian night. The last holdout of Roman civilization, the eastern Roman Empire, its capital Constantinople, resisted the Islamic onslaught for several times the entire length of the existence of the United States of America. Constantinople finally fell in 1453 to slaughter, sack, and rapine of the Muslim hordes.
Oh, ancient history! But in the time of my father, a glorious European-based civilization had emerged from the rise of nineteenth century capitalism, liberalism, and republicanism. At its height in the last quarter of that century, it was worldwide. But two closely related ideological destroyers had arisen. Both were rooted in Germany in what is now called the anti-Enlightenment. Beginning with Immanuel Kant (1724 –1804), but also his philosophical successors, the English and French Enlightenment ideas—reason, science, individual rights, limited constitutional government, and the worldwide regime of trade—came under attack from philosophical skepticism (denial of the possibility of knowledge), irrationalism (the claim to knowledge by a leap of intuition to a higher realm), collectivism (the German volk), racism (the German “race”), and the statism and welfare state of Otto von Bismarck.
This admittedly brilliant, celebrated rise of German anti-Enlightenment philosophy, driven by worldwide imitation of German scholarship and universities, led in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to two philosophical progeny that would make the twentieth century a hell of (world) wars and totalitarianism for much of mankind:
- The philosophy of socialism, or communism, by the German philosopher, Karl Marx 1818 –1883).
- The philosophy of National Socialism (Nazism) by Adolf Hitler (1889 –1945) and sundry German thinkers and supporters such as existentialist and Hitler-supporter Martin Heidegger (1889 –1976).
By the 1940s, these two ideological manifestations of the anti-Enlightenment philosophy in Germany had engulfed Russia, which had been on the very verge of liberalism and constitutional republicanism, into a totalitarian socialist dictatorship that murdered some 100 million of its own citizens in purges and concentration camps spread across Siberia.
The same anti-Enlightenment philosophy caused Germany to slip into one of history’s most nightmarishly evil and brutal totalitarian dictatorships, National Socialism, which with deliberation and efficiency murdered six million Jewish people and countless others.
By the 1940s, just before I was born, German National Socialism had the world at war, the most costly war in all human history. It had been enabled, in part, by the agreement of Soviet Russia to a non-aggression pact with the Nazi Germany. That liberated Hitler to turn all his forces against the West. Until, of course, he had the opportunity to attack his socialist rival, Russia.
By the war’s end, one of these dictatorships had been defeated—National Socialist Germany. The other, Soviet Socialist Russia, used the postwar period to conquer and enslave Eastern Europe. At the same time, the Soviet counterpart of Hitler, Joseph Stalin, enabled the communists in China to take over that country. The world’s most populous nation under yet another mass murderer, Mao Zedong, adhering to Marxist principles, became the world’s single most murderous regime. Supported by both Soviet Russia and communist China, the cadres of Marxist Pol Pot killed between two and three million Cambodians—one third of the population.
The United States of America, the world’s freest, most productive, most stable nation, brought to bear freedom’s unstoppable power of production, patriotism of a free people, and loyalty to its ideals to put down Nazi Germany in my father’s time and Soviet Socialist Russia in mine.
And so I review the historical record, the philosophical trends, the politics of our day, and I wonder. For me, it is too easy to be glad I am not going to live to see the final triumph and catastrophe of what today is called “postmodernism”: the name today of the German anti-Enlightenment philosophy that devastated the twentieth century. And that today utterly dominates American universities and with that decisive position also American politics, intellectual life, culture, and media.
She wrote at one point: “a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”
How bad is it? Following the 2016 election, in America’s “newspaper of record,” a few editors at the New York Times insisted that the newspaper’s reporting and opinion had been totally out of touch with most Americans. They had been speaking only to a narrow audience of what might be termed “liberal-leftists.” These editors had the clout to hire a few special editors to try to bring some mainstream, even conservative, voices into the Times. One was journalist Bari Weiss. Recently, she resigned with an astoundingly powerful, courageous letter of resignation. One could quote every paragraph, but her most quoted comment was that the Times and others in its liberal-left universe were in the grip of a “new McCarthyism,” a “postmodern” (my term), politically correct orthodoxy. She wrote at one point: “a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”
Ouch! That is from family. And how about this: “My work and my character are openly demeaned on companywide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.”
Ayn Rand, who hardly was an ideological fan of the Times, seldom quoted any other publication.
Should we crow at this discomfiture of the mighty New York Times, which Allen Drury satirized “The Greatest Publication that Absolutely Ever Was” and Gay Talese wrote about in “The Kingdom and the Power”? Sorry. I would like to join you, but I can’t. I grew up with the Times. Every noon at Brown University, the alma mater of the Times’s present publisher, I sat in the Faunce House student union—eating my sandwich and reading the Times. Ayn Rand, who hardly was an ideological fan of the Times, seldom quoted any other publication.
The 1,500-word letter was reported in a story in the Times of less than a half-dozen sentences, although linking (in the online version) to the letter. The brief story mentioned only the issue of workplace harassment.
And this final quote from Ms. Weiss’s letter: “What rules that remain at the Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.
I can’t dismiss the future as someone else’s problem. I have a son. And the world in which he will live never is far from my mind.
The German philosopher and advocate of Nazism, Martin Heidegger, was a powerful influence on the chief founder of postmodernism, Michel Foucault (1926-1984).
In what form does German anti-Enlightenment philosophy, postmodernism (“modernism” denoting the heritage of Enlightenment ideas and values), dominate American public life?
- It is the philosophical skepticism, and the nihilism, that dominates our universities in the humanities and social sciences and makes their students prime recruits for socialism.
- It is “identity politics”—the equivalent of German race conflict and Marxist class conflict.
- It is the furious rejection in the academic and the intellectual world-at-large of capitalism, free markets, industrial technology, and, increasingly, science.
- It is the interpretation, today, of the meaning of all politics as “oppressors versus oppressed.” In this context of understanding, America’s ideals, principles, and ideology are dismissed, out of hand, as rationalizations of the oppressor.
- It is the resort to violence in the streets as the logical outcome of dismissing arguments and appeals to reason as mere “power politics.” In the postmodern view, discussion is a power play, so let’s get right to the “power”—in the street.
- It is the predominance of insult and invective in public life as politicians, Hollywood stars, and sundry celebrities hurl insults unimaginable even a decade ago. In politics, today, it is only the media and political impact of words that have any significance. The words have no meaning in fact, only as propaganda.
So, take to the streets, hurl insults, manufacture scandals, and attack, attack, attack: If you largely control the media as do the postmodernist leftists, that is the best strategy.
So, take to the streets, hurl insults, manufacture scandals, and attack, attack, attack: If you largely control the media as do the postmodernist leftists, that is the best strategy. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph Biden, supports and advocates every element of the postmodernist political agenda. That includes not only fully socialized medicine and elimination of coal, oil, gas and other carbon-based energy, but lionizing the violent protestors and cheering defunding of the police. His only politics are identity politics and stirring up racial conflict. His is obedient to the socialist policy proposals of the left. And early predictions (likely just propaganda) are that he can beat President Trump easily.
Tell me where an old man finds hope. Yes, I have something to weigh against the bitter rise of resignation:
- Ayn Rand, who has inspired my thinking, and whose philosophical analysis first fully illuminated the evil of the German anti-Enlightenment—and its stranglehold today on American universities and intellectual and political life. In her novels and nonfiction are the full refutation, reply, and alternative to postmodernism at every level. More than 60 years have passed since these ideas joined the philosophical and intellectual fray.
- With no remote equation of importance, I also view President Donald Trump as the locus of an American reaction against the grotesque conceits of political correctness, lame-brained Sanders-Biden socialism, and the amazing herd of sacred cows in politics from global warming (a.k.a. climate crisis) to racial quotas, to violence in “good” ideological causes, to socialized medicine, to immigration as a Democratic political strategy, to exploitation of the justice system to attack individuals and ideas. Writing in Breitbart News, reporter John Nolte says of the new draft of the proposed Democratic national platform for the 2020 election: “All Democrats (and their propagandists in the corporate media) have left is the un-American poison of identity politics, which means they have to keep us divided, keep us at each other’s throats, and even go so far as to declare Rev. Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind society “racist.” Specifics? The draft platform refers some 15 times to “whites,” each time in a damning content.”
- The American sense of life—the emotional equivalent of the philosophical foundations of Enlightenment America—has given Americans an almost infallible guide to rejection of ideas, policies, and cultural trends that overturn American ideals. See the landmark 1971 essay “Don’t Let It Go!” in Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand.
Such as they are, these are grounds for optimism. Certainly, the promise of Objectivism will live if men read and think—and the cultural record survives.
Trump is a powerful short-term force because the strength of reactionism has defeated and reversed many a revolution.
And, finally, the American sense of life, is even now a powerful antibody to the plague of postmodernism in academia, the media, and politics.
Tell me then, because I genuinely do not know: Will we want to live in the future that faces us, now? What will we tell our children to prepare them?
Yes, in the timeframe of centuries, eons, mankind will endure and prevail. But what of the future for us and our children? How do you see it?
About the Author: Walter Donway
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