Review of a new book that highlights themes that are central to my work.
Nominalism, Nihilism, and Modern Politics
By Matthew Barry
“In his 1943 book The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis predicts that there will be a time, “not too far off,” when humanity’s technological prowess will enable us to conquer human nature—to reject, alter, and abolish limits heretofore thought to be permanent.”
This is the key issue, which I have investigated at length in my own work. The age-old delusion of ‘men as gods’ has become enabled by technological and cultural expansion, making it seem as though the world is endlessly plastic and malleable – and manipulable. Rather than repeat my arguments in short form, I would encourage those who find the views expressed here to explore my work on this issue in the depth it deserves. References to some key texts below. I would also urge those interested to explore the posts on this site, where I cover precisely this issue.
From the article:
"Our society has left behind belief in natural values, but we do not trust ourselves to create their replacements. It is little wonder, then, that the dizzying expansion of mankind’s power over nature is today deployed almost exclusively for the gratification of base passions (e.g., pocket supercomputers used for social media and pornography). Our situation is at once horrifying and banal, our political pathologies at once unhealthy and uninteresting, our great criminals “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices,” as Lewis put it. We have become, as Ross Douthat argues, decadent. And rightly so if, as Bain’s conclusion suggests, the only alternative to decadent nihilism is the attempt to remake human beings, human society, and the international order from the ground up according to the arbitrary will of a merely human sovereign.
If the end result of the nominalists’ misguided attempt to vindicate freedom—both human and divine—culminates in the extinction not only of reason and knowledge properly so called but even of freedom itself, through our capitulation to will and brute force, then we must resist the influence of nominalism on political thinking, international or domestic. The belief that human beings and human communities can be rearranged in any way that suits our creative fancy is, as the examples of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union show, an invitation to tyranny and disaster. "
"The conclusion of Bain’s book is not exactly optimistic. It depicts a deified humanity that “acknowledges no restraint beyond self-assertion,” ruling over a disenchanted world in which Christian nominalism has become nihilism because we are no longer capable of belief, either in God or in nature. Unwilling to go back and unable to go forward, we find ourselves in a “paralyzing state of doubt.” Given this civilizational paralysis, it is going to take something practically miraculous to transfigure our situation: only a god can save us. But since we no longer believe in a God that became a man, we require that a man become a god. We require a “sovereign God-person, who constructs international order and the theoretical models used to explain it” based only upon his own will, for “the only ground to be had is conditional assertions of will, backed by professions of faith.”"
Also worth reading:
Bedeviled by Boredom: A Voegelinian Reading of Dostoevsky’s Possessed, Richard G. Avramenko
A sample of my own work on this;
FOR TRANSCENDENT STANDARDS AND A SUBSTANTIVE ETHIC OF THE GOOD (2020)
Rational Freedom, Transcendent Standards, and the Quest for the Good Life (2020)
BEING AT ONE: MAKING A HOME IN EARTH’S COMMONWEALTH OF VIRTUE (2016)
Cultivating the Morality of the Senses (2016)
Ecological Humanism (2016)
Being at One: Making a Home in the Earth's Commonwealth of Virtue (2015)