Progressivism, anti-semitism, and the "nihilism" of our postmodern moment

What would Nietzsche say?

In the year 1885 the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche penned these prophetic words: “nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?”

Nietzsche, of course, is most well-known for his saying “God is dead”. 

But if you read his writings thoroughly and meticulously (which few scholars ever do), you will discover that the two pronouncements are surgically sutured to each other.  

In contrast with all the contemporary cheery secularists who in recent decades have celebrated the death of God as some kind of joyous coming out party for an emergent class of cosmopolitan free thinkers, Nietzsche envisioned it as a cataclysmic event.

In the same posthumously published collection of drafts and notes where proclaimed the advent of “nihilism” Nietzsche also foresaw in almost eerie detail the coming of the Great War (i.e., World War I) , which shattered Europe at its very core, although nobody in his smug and prosperous era could possibly imagine and would have instinctively dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic.

I have been a close reader of Nietzsche my entire adult life, which is why the just published article “The New Progressive Nihilism” by Ashley Frawley grabbed my attention.

Frawley opines that the abominable reaction of so many of the West’s cultural elites to Hamas’ mass slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7, together with their ongoing and unabashed participation in public demonstrations of anti-semitism since that dreadful day, put this new “nihilism” on parade.

“It takes a profound pessimism about the world”, Frawley writes, “to see mass slaughter—carried out by a group animated by overtly anti-modern politics—as an ‘exhilarating’ act”, a not so oblique reference to an infamous statement by a Cornell University professor right after Hamas’ pogrom.

According to Frawley, the overt Jew-hatred found among so many of our “thought-leaders”, comparable only to what occurred during heyday of the Third Reich, throws into relief the illimitable decadence of our progressive neoliberal knowledge class.

This decadence, in turn, stems from a bankrupt and what the Frankfurt School doyen Theodor Adorno termed a “negative dialectical” logic that has become chronically and fatally obsessed with an end of the world as we know it.

It is the buoyant vision of destruction minus any possibility of reclamation, or redemption. 

The problem, for Frawley, is that such logic rests on the conviction that “whatever perpetuates the existence of a politically unsalvageable world, consciously or not, is morally suspect.” 

Moreover,

Families that reproduce patriarchy, institutions laden with racism and sexism, and so on—all are complicit in the perpetuation of a system that must be brought down. Ordinary people going about their lives are also complicit and deserve to be disrupted—hence, the tactics of climate activists who blockade roads and prevent commuters from getting to work. But within the capitalist-realist framework that ‘there is no alternative,’ there is no faith in a better future. All that is left, then, is an endless politics of ‘resistance’: not overcoming, not creating, but resisting, subverting, and disrupting.

Although conservative media routinely portrays the progressive left as “Marxists”, the new “nihilists” are much closer to the youthful members of Russia’s miniscule mid-nineteenth century educated classes for whom the turn of phrase was initially designed to describe. 

Unlike the social democrats and Bolsheviks who sparked the revolutionary upheavals in the early twentieth century, the original nihilists had no prescription for a better world. 

As one American commentator observed in 1879, these proto-nihilists did “not present any definite or political social creed”, but consisted in a “heterogeneous mass of various political tendencies, which are bound together by one tie only – a profound feeling of discontent with the present political conditions of Russia”. 

That characterization from a century and a half ago still sums up many of today’s progressive nihilists in America. 

Both can be distinguished by a pathological penchant for suppressed rage and hallucinations of violence, all serving as an addictive anodyne for the brutal fiasco of their utopian fantasies and vainglorious political posturing clattering against the rocky face of reality.

The absurdity, for instance, of transgender activists cheering on Hamas, who if given the chance would turn around an execute them on the spot, can be viewed soberly in this light.

 “Helicopter parenting” and hothouse learning environments from the 1990s onward for a generation or more of the children of the burgeoning professional classes nurtured a magical mindscape well into adulthood.  The social world became gradually indistinguishable from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

When the opium dream disintegrated following the run of planetary disasters such as the Great Recession, Covid, and the Sisyphusean boulder of student debt, Harry Potter morphed into Voldemort, Obama’s “hope and change” into “from the river to the sea”, the genocidal chant championing Hamas’ murderous militancy.

“What does nihilism mean?” Nietzsche asked. “That the highest values devaluate themselves”.

Empathy for the unfortunate and the saintly sentiment of self-sacrifice are alchemized into an unhinged enmity toward the totally abstract “other” – the “racist”, the “colonialist”, the “fascist”, and now – as if some archaic and sulphurous geyser of satanic malice had erupted from the molten crevices of human history - “the Jew”!

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in 1985 defined the “postmodern” - a word he himself invented - as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” 

Metanarratives, he insisted, are the outsize stories people have told about themselves down through the ages in order to make sense of not only their present distresses, but also their pride in the past and their aspirations for the future.

What encapsulates the current era, Lyotard lamented, is a total disenchantment with these grand narratives.  That includes not just the Jewish and Christian versions of what the Germans dubbed Heilsgeschichte -  literally, “sacred history”.

Examples are the Biblical account of creation, fall, and redemption through a messiah who is to come, or has indeed come already; the Marxist myth of the workers of the world uniting in a Communist revolution; the American fever dream of despoiling dictators everywhere they find them and the ubiquitous triumph of democracy.

One could add the revived radical Islamist ambition of global jihad.

Yet these grand récits, as those all-encompassing stories are termed in French, those episodic wraiths of the popular historical imagination that over the ages bequeath some solace of maximal meaning for the masses, have withered in the grey gaze of the very relentless skepticism and academicism of the knowledge classes who have now, according to Frawley, turned on the public itself and are clamoring to bring the house down.

Again, Nietzsche: “Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values one recognizes; plus the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things that might be ‘divine’ or morality incarnate.”

God did not “die” naturally, Nietzsche proclaimed in 1882 book The Gay Science.  “We have killed him, you and I.  All of us are his murderers”.

Again, Frawley:

Hamas and many on the Western left agree on one thing: The world should not continue to exist. Whereas religious zealots eschew life for something beyond this world, secular Westerners increasingly eschew life as retribution for human complicity in injustice and environmental degradation; witness the rise of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

One of the clichés that has been repeated for years by superficial acolytes of Nietzsche is that the “death of God” actually signifies the death of humanity.  But every cliché has a certain ring of truth about it, and in this case it can no longer be dismissed as mere metaphor.

As late founder of the “God-is-dead theology” movement Thomas J.J. Altizer once upon a time leaned over and muttered earnestly to me in a noisy bar in the Atlanta suburbs: “every damn Christian who sings every Sunday morning that ‘Christ died for me’ is proclaiming the God’s death”.

Yes, but that darkening of the skies over a crucified limp body hanging from a wooden Roman cross on that very first Good Friday could have been taken by his disciples in the same way Nietzsche anticipated the coming of the next century and thereafter:

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism.

But that’s not what ultimately transpired. The Christian metanarrative, which some would argue secretly permeates the feeble, secularized grand narrative of liberal democracy, one of not only death, but resurrection. 

It is the grand narrative of an abject death and the mystery of life rolled together into an unprecedented, inconspicuous, and hitherto inconceivable event that offers a grand hope.

We may have “incredulity” toward our metanarratives, but the paradox is that we cannot exist without them.

And that is why as we inch ever nearer as a civilization toward the nihilistic abyss, a strange new uplifting canticle spirals out of the morbid silence.