The Sound of Inevitability

 

Nevertheless, however fervently Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox writers called nihilistic Christendom back from the abyss, theirs remained little more than a cry in the wilderness.

The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars, by John Strickland

Communism and liberalism (of a sort) came out of World War Two as victors.  Communism would fall first, at least its Soviet incarnation.  Liberalism would limp along, albeit that limp grew increasingly more noticeable over time.

Secular ideology was not the solution; utopia, whether communism or liberalism, was a failure.  While many Christians continued to pursue utopia, there were those who saw the problem clearly.  Nicolas Berdyaev would write:

“…what is taking place in the world today is not a crisis of humanism (that is a topic of secondary importance), but a crisis of humanity.”

It was a process of dehumanization in all phases of culture and social life; most importantly, the dehumanization of moral life.  Man ceased to have any value at all; to be powerless and to be replaced.

Referring to C.S. Lewis:

To confront this development, the Oxford literary scholar and accidental theologian wrote a book with the dystopian title The Abolition of Man (1943).

Man was reduced to instinct, and he was allowed only his rational mind to confront this life.  In other words, men without chests.

T. S. Eliot would write (sounding a lot like Doug Wilson):

“…we must abandon the notion that the Christian should be content with freedom of cultus…. The Christian can be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organization of society.”

Not that every member of society need be a Christian, but it would be a society that the natural end of man is acknowledged for all, with the supernatural end of beatitude for the Christian.

Absent this, in other words, and continuing down the slide of secularism, totalitarianism was the likely outcome.  Yes, perhaps a soft totalitarianism, but it would be totalitarianism nonetheless. 

Stalin was out, Kruschev was in.  Although a true believer in communism, he at least toned down the actions of the police state within the Soviet Union.  But it remained totalitarian.

Liberalism fared little better; this was even anticipated by many.  Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World offered a picture of this illiberal future dressed in liberal garb.  Totalitarianism was the inevitable destiny for the West:

“The quaint old forms – elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts, and all the rest – will remain.  The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism.”

Yes, the forms remain: we still pretend to hold elections, pretend that there is a Supreme Court that applies justice, pretend that our parliament represents us and upholds the Constitution.  But it is all a façade, a Potemkin Village of governance.

There is the Frankfurt School and critical theory – negation: every expression of contemporary culture is considered oppressive, as are science and rationality.  Deconstruction, disintegration: this was the purpose and objective; it was becoming the reality.

Jean-Paul Sartre.  The child of a loveless marriage, the grandchild of a man who refused to speak to his wife for forty years.  Suffice it to say, he was deeply critical of human relationships.  He had a mistress for life, but wouldn’t marry her: she would cook, clean, sew, and even manage his affairs with his many other lovers.  This mistress was Simone de Beauvoir – surprisingly, or maybe not, she became a founder of the feminist movement.

Alienation became an important theme in Sartre’s work.  Love, and especially the sacrificial love found in Scripture, subverts human authenticity.  In addition to attacking Christianity – a given by this time – even humanism came into focus for attack.  Human life is totally meaningless. 

The ends justify the means.  Show trials are morally legitimate, as long as the ends are objectively progressive.  Innocent victims in this way share in the guilt of standing in the way of progress. 

The 1960s.  As meaningful a decade for the West as that which followed Luther’s ninety-five theses.  In the United States, this meant the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.  The Great Society.  But the big step was Vietnam. 

Napalm showers

Showed the cowards

We weren't there to mess around

A complacent society stepped into the mud that would help to usher in nihilism with full force.  Kennedy first sent in a few thousand “advisors.”  They would support a coup against Diem – he was assassinated.  Kennedy was shot; the Gulf of Tonkin was spun in favor of war.

More than a million Vietnamese and over 50,000 Americans; more American bombs dropped on this enemy than against all of Germany in World War Two.  Purposefully killing civilians by the thousands.  My Lai, 1968.  Some eighty-thousand Vietnamese captured and tortured as suspected Viet Cong sympathizers.

In 1972 the contradictions of liberal world building were captured graphically in an image of a nine-year old girl named Kim Phuc running naked in terror from an American napalm strike on her village.

More soldiers conscripted.  Drug use, fragging. 

Years and years of

Bloodshed and warfare

Our mission was only to get in and kill

A free vacation of palm trees and shrapnel

Trading innocence

For permanent psychotic hell

-          Dream Theater, War Inside My Head

As time went on, the US civilian population became disgusted with this war.  Of course, the risk of the draft added fuel to this disgust.  College campuses became a flashpoint for this disgust.  Berkeley, Columbia, Kent State: four dead in O-HI-O.

Conclusion

The Graduate.  Plastics.  A perfect metaphor for the replacement of something real (Christianity) with a cheap imitation (whatever label one might apply to what the West had become by then).  Ben Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, epitomizes the nihilistic man.  No desire for anything meaningful.  After a rush to the church, he gets the girl moments after she married another man.

The two escape by bus, a brief smile on Ben’s face.  Then, nothing – a return to a catatonic stare.

As the bus continues into the distance, the viewer is left with a realization that these is nothing on the road ahead – the American Way – that promises an escape from dystopia.

How easy it was for nihilism to walk in the front door.