Living in the Post-Rational Age, Part II

For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

~ Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam

Our post-Christian, post-rational era is what science fiction writers and others have been warning us about since the 1930s. Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Malcolm Muggeridge come to mind: euthanasia, social engineering, brainwashing, indoctrination, forced re-education, biological warfare, eugenics, conditioning, the cottage industry of psychotropic drugs, scientism, corrosive positivism, and coerced exhaustion – through State-sponsored moral/spiritual entropy. We are alerted to this brave new dystopia in Psychological Warfare (1948) by Paul M.A. Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith, a science fiction novelist.

Our post-rational era is ahistorical and illiterate, an era of anti-philosophies that venerate nihilism; gloating in the promotion of perfunctory and vulgar social/political opinions and platitudes: progressively degenerate amnesia for the masses and sensual, unearned Elysium for people drunk with elixirs that soothe the burden of free will.

Postmodernism is the triumph and proliferation of mass man, an entity that is created through centralized State-power. The Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, describes our era in The Revolt of the Masses (1930) as one when “there are no longer protagonists; there is only the chorus.”

Welcome to the future! The future comes at us frightfully fast, doesn’t it?

Because we live in a post-Christian and post-rational era, our sensibility for the sublime, curiosity, the mystery of being, and awe and wonder have given way to inebriation with the promise of ever-expansive emancipation from the mooring of moral responsibility and prudence. These are old-fashioned values—the stuff of dinosaurs, we are told.

The radical emancipation that postmodernism promises is no less than a break with free will. Postmodernism has turned free will into one of a slew of words that ‘oppress’ mankind, circa 2024. Postmodernism sells and packages free will as a burden, a yoke that ties man to the hierarchy of values, an albatross around the neck that man should not have to bear.

We are now entering the post-human stage of human degeneration, Auguste Comte’s ‘positive age.’ To use beatnik lingo from long ago, transhumanism is ‘a strange cat, man.’  

Man’s post-human stage – transhumanism – as social engineers refer to this ominous aberration, signals the classic warning of thoughtful science fiction writers of the past, insisting and alerting us to the idea that man has the capacity to destroy itself.

Curiously, a literary aside about science fiction writers’ incessant warning of man’s apocalyptic end is warranted. In the future, after the apocalypse, science fiction will be considered the only serious form of writing, a moniker that it has been deprived of by ‘serious writers’ and the literati. Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz comes to mind. Undoubtedly, post the apocalypse brought on by transhumanism, book owners and readers will be in high demand.

Jean-François Revel’s Warning About Man’s Totalitarian Impulse

Beyond the ability to destroy ourselves, the psychopathic pathology of totalitarians is an indicator of perverted self-loathing that eschews purpose and meaning in private life and rebukes free will as an onus too great to uphold. This illness has become public policy.

Transhumanism is an ominous dare, albeit a dare to end all dares, a hedge on the future of man, a spiteful spitting in the face of Western civilization that begs the sophomoric question: ‘because we can.’

Man does as man is.

Society is the de facto union of differentiated beings, individuals, each with the capacity to cultivate a workmanlike perspective on their own existence, other people, the world, and the dissemination of thought, ideas, passions, aspirations, fears, and values. This has traditionally been achieved through a system of checks and balances that, as Plato has aptly written, sees truth eventually bubble to the top.

However, this is no longer the way society operates in postmodernity. Because ours is a totalitarian milieu, what was formerly the grassroots, organic organization of society is now managed through the coercion of a totalitarian ideology hell-bent on the messianism of the here and now.

Remember free thinkers? Ideas and values have consequences.

Postmodern writers ingratiate themselves with the clichéd notion of human evolution, a vague scientistic concept that signals the death of meaning, purpose, and the teleology of human life. None of these writers gives a minute’s thought to the possibility of de-evolution. How much of the human psyche is lost with the degeneration of values? The latter is the corrosive legacy of anti-philosophies.

De-Evolution: When Less is Construed as More

Postmodernism has destroyed man’s ability for critical thinking: to think for oneself and the attenuated values that non-conformist, free-thinkers embrace. Reductive-philosophical materialism has systematically dismantled the human psyche’s ability to cultivate the essence of the self and existential sense of human existence.

Totalitarian eras are corrosive periods of human history that derail man’s innate ability to cultivate life-affirming values. Instead, through social/political and moral conditioning achieved through social engineering, indoctrination, and brainwashing, totalitarianism forges a man into a malleable putty – a zombie that consents to be subjugated.

Our current totalitarian era, like others in the past, asphyxiates man’s quest to live as an individual. The techniques of State-sponsored terror, censorship, disinformation, and crushing collectivism that Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks perfected in the early twentieth century, following the precedent for intellectualized (rationalized) violence established by Proudhon, Marx, and Bakunin, which first saw the light of day in the nineteenth century, are staples of social-political indoctrination. “Critical theory” is the current embodiment of totalitarianism in the twenty-first century.

It has come to pass that the totalitarian impulse, a screaming primal instinct – in individuals and States – has re-surfaced as a predominant aim of postmodernity.

While other forms of totalitarianism have perished, only communism, through its systematic intellectual calisthenics and chameleon-like, ever-morphing dialectic that enables it to re-make itself, has survived in our era. Communism’s penchant for stealth and ability to hide in plain sight has enabled it to flourish, taking over legacy institutions of Western, democratic nations.

Man’s Need for Narratives

In nature, the species does not make progress.

Contradiction: if progress is deemed to take place in human history, it remains the case that genuine progress can only be of individual beings. It is the individual that grounds society. Individuals create the moral, metaphysical, and existential infrastructure of civilizations. To deny this basic truism of human agglomeration is to embrace a non sequitur.

So, how can individuals and society prosper, if postmodern totalitarianism squashes man’s capacity for self-reflection?

One of the items of Western civilization that postmodern social engineers aim to annihilate—deconstruct, they call it—is the idea of narratives, whether in history, culture, religious experience, the nuclear family, sex, the arts, or science. Why this compulsion?

Postmodernists single out ‘narratives’ because they hope to debilitate the cornerstone of human existence and reality: man seeks meaning and purpose in order to survive and flourish.  

What postmodernism disparaging calls narratives is itself a backdoor validation of the hegemony of Marxism to annihilate the values and metaphysical scaffolding of Western civilization.

The arrogant notion that “de-construction” is a value-free emancipation from Western values is a glaring contradiction. Logical claims must be defended on the strength of the inner working of the claim being made. Reality is always on the lookout for contradictions.

Whether through argumentation, relevant facts, data, historical examples, or appeal to basic principles of logic, claims will stand on their own or collapse under the weight of their contradictions.

Future Generations of Free Thinkers

Thoughtful writers today understand that all meaningful writing in our era, circa 2024, is done with a view to the future.

Ours is a totalitarian era. As we have witnessed in the past, totalitarian eras are lamentably throwaway periods of human history. Totalitarian eras are obsessed with controlling all aspects of human life. While social/political and economic control over nations and their citizenry is the staple of totalitarianism, this corrodes and corrupts all aspects of life: moral, spiritual, scientific, and cultural values.

Sincere writers and thinkers today realize they are writing for and addressing future generations. One reason for this is the realization that the primary unit of society is the individual. In the beginning there was man, differentiated, and responsible for locating the essence of the self (subjectivity) in the great scheme of things, what ancient Greek philosophers referred to as the Kosmos. It is this selfful being capable of self-reflection that is the source of a life-affirming weltanschauung.

Totalitarianism destroys the principle of individualization and differentiation in human life. Until the latter principle is restored, our era and the generations that make up its leadership will continue to invalidate the essence of the self and man’s capacity for self-reflection. This is violence against the human person.

It will take future generations of anti-totalitarians to supply Western civilization with the life-saving corrective that can rescue it from its own destruction. That will require the de-toxification of the totalitarian pathology – the impulse to control the Other.

In the future, perhaps the near future, refreshing winds of liberty and freethinkers will blow, a condition that has been squashed by the totalitarians that have ruined Western civilization, who rule by controlling social media, digital news, what was once the free press, and legacy institutions.

Like a J. G. Ballard novel, our grotesque and surreal postmodern predicament has shattered man’s quest for understanding, knowledge and reason; the appropriation of the structure of reality, making sure that 2+2 always equal 4.

The post-rational world has placed a moratorium on reason, sending it on a moral holiday.

Print