On the Reign of Stupidity and the New Totalitarianism

Guest author Michael Hanby describes how a perfected system of totalizing control can be instituted without apparent violence and without firing a shot.

I recently watched this brilliant lecture from my friend Michael Hanby. Although he gave this talk seven years ago, his insights are even more relevant today. I’m pleased that he’s granted me permission to republish it here. Yes, my friends, he’s a philosopher, and his argument is dense in a few places, so this piece may challenge readers a bit. But I truest it will be well worth your effort to engage in a close reading…

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The Reign of Stupidity

The dismal election of 2016 and its astonishing result have painfully exposed the deep divisions ailing our country. Yet it has also revealed, albeit somewhat less visibly, a point of profound agreement among all but the most partisan combatants. That our 200 plus year experiment in ordered liberty has come down to this—that there are people in the millions who apparently think or more cynically pretend to think that Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump was a good idea—is surely the most obvious among many signs that we are living through some sort of deep civilizational crisis. Of course, the agreement starts and ends there, because no one can agree on what sort of crisis this might be.

And why should they? The great German philosopher G.W.F Hegel famously said that “philosophy is one’s own time apprehended in thought.” But our liberal and technological culture excludes philosophy as a form of (public) reason. So, when faced with a civilizational crisis, we dispatch an army of economists, sociologists, and psychologists to analyze it and an army of journalists to report on it, never pausing to consider that the heart of our civilizational crisis may be imperceptible to the forms of reason which dominate to our civilization. Thus, while the effects of the crisis are painfully felt, and its manifold effects measured, its essence goes unperceived.

This loss of vision and the corresponding thoughtlessness on evidence everywhere in our culture—proportional, perhaps, to the predominance of journalism as a thoughtform—lie at the heart of what the late Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce called “the new totalitarianism.” Del Noce regarded this thoughtlessness—“the reign of stupidity” he sometime called it—as extremely dangerous, despite its relative lack of overt violence and coercion. It is, after all, only an imperfect totalitarianism that coerces externally through violence and the force of a law, and this is often counter-productive.

Externally coercive systems have been known to awaken depths of soul and reservoirs of strength heretofore previously undetected, because untested, in those who suffer its brutality. Think Solzhenitsyn or the famous statement of Tertullian, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. By contrast, in a perfectly absolute society, whose rule was indeed total, no one would ever know he was being coerced. There would simply be truths that could no longer be perceived, ideas that could no longer be thought, experiences that could no longer be had, and no one would ever know what he was missing. 

Now I am aware that this description will seem to many of you to be a little overwrought.  It seems inconsistent with the many personal freedoms we obviously enjoy and obscene when we compare ourselves to the murderous totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century. So it requires a defense if we’re going to use it. The key to understanding the so-called new totalitarianism, and its peculiar way of being total, is to understand just how it is new, what its novelty consists in. 

Unlike the authoritarian states of the last century, the new totalitarianism is not a positive political program aimed at world domination. In fact, it presents itself as the defender of freedom and democracy and a bulwark against fascism. It is rather a negative totalitarian of dissolution or disintegration which advances by negating every form of transcendence—the transcendence of God over the world, of eternity over time, of being over history, of nature over art, of reason, and truth over historical circumstance. It dominates by dissolving, precisely in the name of freedom, every form of given order that precedes our choosing. Hence the rapid disintegration and atomization of what was once culture and civil society.

The Technological Society

Every form save one, that is. For once all forms of transcendence are negated, political order itself becomes the transcendental horizon, the all encompassing totality within which we live and move and have our being and to which all meaningful public order is referred, determining—and disfiguring—the limits of our vision, thought, and action.

All of this is true, I think, but it is not the whole truth. For political order can never really be first or fundamental. Every political order presupposes and puts into effect a certain view of nature and human nature; otherwise the nature and ends of government would make no sense. So political philosophy is secondary to natural philosophy and metaphysics, perhaps not in the mind of political philosophers, but in the order of things. The revolution in political thought in early modernity which helped birth the American experiment took place within a larger revolution in metaphysics and natural philosophy.

Its most cherished notions, like the notion of freedom as power or possibility, reflect this revolutionary new view of nature. This new view is at bottom artificial or technological. Nature is an artifact, manufactured first by the gracious hand of a contriving God and later by the gracious hand of history or natural selection.  But in either event, the idea that natural things are essentially machines means that the knowledge of nature is something like engineering, and truth, like freedom, is something like technological possibility, which can only be determined by perpetually violating the present limits of possibility.

The logic of liberal order, which exists to above all to secure freedom as possibility, thus presupposes and sets in motion something like what we now have, a technological society perpetually at war with given limits of every kind, whose dynamic exigencies that govern us more deeply than the rule of law and largely determine what it now means for us to think.  A technological order, in other words, that has become for us a new regime of necessity.      

Reality within the physical sphere is reconceived, in Del Noce’s words, as a “system of forces, not of values.”  In the social sphere, truth and universal reason are eliminated, the one reduced to social and psychological “situations” administered by the social sciences, the other to empirical or quasi-empirical analysis. Argument becomes impossible because truth claims are attacked as expressions of class interest, bigotry, or psychosis.  Ultimate questions can no longer be posed in a public way, much less answered, because their objects—truth, human nature, innate ends given with our nature—no longer exist.

The Perfect Totalitarianism

The perfection of totalitarianism, then, consists not in the abolition of rights, the multiplication of which is not inversely but proportionally related to the power of the state instituted to secure them, but in the abolition of truth. Contrary to the pervasive liberal understanding shared by both the political left and right, freedom is not antithetical to truth but depends on it; for it is only in seeing beyond the horizon of our liberal and technological order that we can act beyond its immanent necessities.   

Our freedom is in peril because reason and truth are in peril, as John Paul II and Benedict XVI so profoundly recognized. This crisis obviously precedes and goes much deeper than the rise of Donald Trump and the sudden discovery of so-called “fake news.” It is a crisis endemic to late modernity, I am tempted to say that it belongs to the very essence of the modern, insofar as modernity is defined, in Stephen Gaugroker’s words, by “the assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific values.”

At any rate it is a crisis perpetuated by our most authoritative forms of reason, which reduce knowledge to empirical analysis and experimental success, equate truth with technical possibility, and dismiss classical forms of philosophical inquiry as meaningless. It is perpetuated by the omnipresent media, now worn like a prosthetic attachment, which mediate what counts as the real world while perpetually reducing it to an image of its two-dimensional assumptions. And it is furthered by an educational establishment which confuses education with ignorance by systematically excluding from consideration the great questions of human existence and systematically erasing from our memory the answers that our ancestors gave to them, the intellectual and spiritual roots of our own civilization. 

If all of this sounds a bit overwrought, I would ask you to reflect on this question.  Why is it, especially at this moment, when we know how to do things to ourselves and our posterity that we don’t know how to think about, when our society is frantically settling questions of the deepest truth under guise of adjudicating contests of rights, when we are rapidly redefining the fundamental realities of human nature and life—man, woman, mother, father, child—why is it, that there is simply no such thing as a profound question in American public life? 

Beauty That Wounds

The future of Christian freedom, indeed human freedom, hinges on a renewal of the Christian mind.  Yet how are we to overcome a crisis of reason and truth in a society that has systematically relinquished the claim that these make upon the soul?  (A society that has relinquished the soul itself for that matter).  We are not likely to get far by force of argument alone, though mysteries ought to be contemplated and things that are true ought to be said because they’re true whether anyone understands them or not. 

In any event, I want to suggest that we cannot begin to recover an adequate notion of truth without at the same time, or perhaps first, recovering another transcendental property of being with which the tradition has always it is inseparable from it.  I am speaking, of course, of beauty.  Hear the words of the great Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Hurt von Balthasar at the outset of his magisterial theological aesthetics:

Beauty is the word that shall be our first… Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

When beauty ceases to be an objective reality, part of the fabric and meaning of being and a reflection of its inner depth and integrity, then truth as the measure of being and the intelligibility of this depth eventually loses its objectivity as well, and becomes merely the functional. Conversely, we may hope that the rehabilitation of beauty, and the renewal of an art—both secular and Christian—which aims not at pious didacticism, or self-expression, or political protest, but aims rather to penetrate the world in order to reveal its mystery and beauty, may yet lead to the rediscovery of truth and the overcoming of our civilizational crisis.

What has beauty to do with the rediscovery of truth?  Well, let me suggest three things, though this is not exhaustive or even fully developed. 

First, by its very nature.  Beauty is the visible manifestation of a hidden interior depth, and therefore of a mysterious unity that cannot be reduced to a complexification of quantity or taken apart and analyzed without destroying it.  The only proper response, besides delighting in it, is to abide in and contemplate it.  By visible, of course, I not just mean visible to our physical eyes, but to what we used to call our mind’s eye.  This is one reason why the beautiful should not be reduced to the pretty and why beauty can often be hidden within sensible forms that appear to be ugly or disfigured, or intelligible forms that seem tragic. 

Second, because beauty is useless. Beauty serves no other purpose but to be, and to be itself. In a society in which everything, including persons is a means, anything which retains the status of an end in itself is precious and to be treasured.  Precisely in its uselessness beauty manifests the inner integrity, the goodness, the truth of creation, which exists not first as an instrument for our use but as something good, and indeed very good, in itself and in the eyes of God.  Beauty therefore reveals something fundamental about the nature of reality.

And finally, because of its effect on the soul, which wounds before it delights. And there is nothing like a good shock of pain, says C.S. Lewis’s Puddleglum, for dissolving certain kinds of magic. An encounter with true beauty, especially perhaps, as is revealed through tragic or misshapen forms, inflicts a wound upon the soul. It breaks us open and forces us to see and to long. Beauty thus opens us to depths both in the world and in the soul itself that are otherwise invisible to the eyes of our reigning instrumentalism and empiricism, which see only surfaces.

Realists of Distances

I’d like to conclude by reflecting on an example from American literature that I think illustrates much of what I’m talking about, Our Town, the classic play by Thornton Wilder, which I find devastatingly beautiful no matter how many times I read it or see it  I presume many of you are familiar with it. The play gives us an inside view of a slice of early 20^th century history in an ordinary New England town. ‘Our town’ could be and is indeed meant to be any town. I grew up on a small town that was a lot like this, which is probably one reason why the play really resonates with me.

These notions of an ‘inside view’ and a ‘brief slice of history’ are crucial to the meaning of the play, because one of the important contrasts that the play sets up—and the same juxtaposition appears in a very different way in Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey—is the contrast between what we might call a horizontal, empirical, external knowledge of superficial ‘facts’, and a vertical and interior knowledge of depths. The former is exemplified by the “experts” which the stage manager drags out at the beginning of act one to educate us about the town of Grover’s Corners, a professor from a nearby college who gives a geological history of the area and its migration patterns since the neolithic era and the editor of the town newspaper who gives a census-like demographic summary of the place.  The latter is symbolized by an odd letter to one Jane Crofut and recounted by young Rebecca Gibbs, sister to George, one of the play’s main protagonists. It was addressed “Jane Crofut; the Crofut Farm, Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Universe; Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.”

What we begin to see in this juxtaposition is that from the horizontal, empiricist point of view represented by the journalist and the professor, each of these ‘slices of time’ looks pretty much like any other: Grovers Corner and its citizens look like the families living in ancient Babylon: buying and selling, getting married, having children, and dying, destined to be unremembered by history except, perhaps, as some sort of anonymous fact. This is one of the ways that ‘our town’ really is ‘any town’. But from the vertical point of view, from eternal vantage point which sees within as well as without, each of these otherwise anonymous, statistical instances is a life dense and dramatic, and saturated with meaning too weighty and too beautiful for us mortals to bear. 

We get a glimpse from this point of view in the final act, in the play’s famous graveyard scene. There we encounter young Emily Webb, who has died during childbirth, received into the company of friends and neighbors who have gone before her. Throughout the play we have watched Emily grow into a woman. We have seen her as a young girl pleading with her mother to reassure her that she was pretty. We have watched as she and the boy next door, George Webb, flirted with each other from their bedroom windows. We have watched their awkward high school courtship and the joy and terror of their wedding day. 

And now, with George lying prostrate in the rain before Emily’s gravestone, we find Emily, on the other side of the veil, longing wistfully to re-live just one day of her old life, with the benefit of the understanding she has acquired in death. Her neighbors and her mother-in-law plead with her not to return—she doesn’t really understand as well as she thinks she does. She is undaunted, but at least they prevail upon her to return not for her wedding day, or the birth of a child, but for an unimportant day.  “Choose the least important day,” Mother Gibbs tells her.  “It will be important enough.”  Emily chooses her twelfth birthday.

She returns only to discover that the living cannot see what she sees, that we apparently do not see much at all. She pleads silently with her mother to look at her, to really look at her—as she had once pleaded with her to look at her and tell her she was pretty and to understand what the question really meant. But her mother is busy…and oblivious. Forlorn, she declares “I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.” She breaks down sobbing and decides to return to the other side, saying, “I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and I never noticed. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every every minute.” 

“No,” replies the omnipresent stage manager who, hovers over and haunts the play.  Then pausing he adds, “The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.” 

Wilder’s beautiful play unveils depths that are invisible to all of our predominant forms of reason. The beauty of this story wounds us and forces us to see and to remember just how densely saturated this life is with beauty and with meaning. It reminds us, as all great philosophies have and as Christianity, to live life in view of our death. He shows us the poverty of what passes for knowledge. And he helps us to see the blessing inherent in our finitude, the mercy in what we can’t see. For if we truly understood the full weight and meaning of our every action, we couldn’t bear it.  

In unveiling these mysteries with such beauty, Wilder unveils something of the truth of our existence. But he also reveals something about the vocation of any true artist, which Flannery O’Connor, speaking of the novelist, calls “prophetic.” “His kind of vision,” she writes, “is prophetic vision. Prophecy, which is dependent on the imaginative and not the moral faculty, need not be a matter of predicting the future.” The prophet, rather, “is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that goes into great novels. It is the realism which does not hesitate to distort appearances in order to show a hidden truth.”

Let us pray that God will send us such “prophets,” these “realists of distances.”  For genuine human freedom, the freedom to know and to embrace and even to suffer for the truth, cannot survive without their vision. And we will need a good deal more of them if we hope to overcome our civilizational crisis and the “reign of stupidity” which characterizes the new totalitarianism.  

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