Nihilistic Idealism

As the postmodern outlook gathers itself for action—“making a better future”—Rorty’s cheerful, idealistic nihilism turns into something dark and dangerous. Recently, the Harvard Corporation stood behind the school’s president, Claudine Gay, when she came under fire for congressional testimony that seemed to minimize campus anti-Semitism, along with accusations of plagiarism. Christopher Rufo, Heather Mac Donald, and others have noted that Gay is a woman of mediocre academic attainment. But this observation misses the mark. In our time, making has supplanted knowing as the highest good for the life of the mind. Harvard’s trustees emphasize that she is the right person “to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.” Gay is not the academic leader of a truth-seeking institution; she is the moral leader of a revolutionary institution that is committed to transforming society—as Rorty put it, “constructing a utopian, democratic society.”

In this enterprise, those who do not share the progressive vision of “addressing the very serious societal issues” must be managed, and if they are truculent and stand in the way of progress, they must be destroyed. What possible reason could anyone have for resisting the construction of “a utopian, democratic society”? Who would object to a perfect regime of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or a view of male and female that allows individuals greater freedom to create themselves anew? The ideals born of nihilism admit of no debate. Objections are mere foot-dragging, motivated by hatreds, phobias, and other disorders of the (nonexistent) soul. Or, worse, resistance signals a revanchist political mentality, one that is “far-right” and “authoritarian.” No reasonable person can object to the suppression of such dangers!

At Harvard and elsewhere, it is very nearly impossible to be hired or receive tenure if you hold conservative social views. (Free-market purists and libertarians, both utopian in their own ways, are clubbable.) At some state universities, legislators and politically appointed regents try to resist the progressive takeover by establishing new institutes on campus. Faculty and administrators do everything in their power to isolate these initiatives, which have, indeed, proven incapable of altering the campus climate. The reason for the full-spectrum resistance is simple: The proponents of “making a better future” feel themselves duty-bound to cancel, subvert, and destroy anything that might impede its arrival.

We should not underestimate the impulse to smash and annihilate. Three years after 9/11, I attended a lecture by the French philosopher Alain Badiou. He was deft enough to avoid outright endorsement of Osama bin Laden’s mission to destroy nearly three thousand lives. But his joy was evident. The empire had taken casualties, a good in itself. We must not deceive ourselves, Badiou insinuated in his recondite remarks to the audience. A great deal must be destroyed to make way for a better future. Today, progressive college students are sharing bin Laden’s 2002 manifesto condemning the United States and justifying the attack, commending it to others as the best way to understand why one must support Hamas and its nihilistic enterprise. “Settler colonialism” must be extirpated if we’re to break through to a just and righteous condition.

In the United States, we are fortunate that the killing remains symbolic. Andrea Douglas and Jalane Schmidt organized Swords Into Plowshares for the purpose of melting the statue of Robert E. Lee that had been removed from its pedestal in Charlottesville. In October 2023, they achieved their goal. While witnessing Lee’s face sliced by a blowtorch, Douglas said, “It feels like witnessing a public execution.” Anthropologist Michael Taussig described the statue’s destruction as a necessary ritual of desecration. Whether it was “necessary” is something I doubt. But he’s right about desecration. Melting Lee amounted to a ritual assault on the world over which his figure presided, from the erection of the statue in 1924 to the present. Our idealism demands this assault. Just as English departments executed the “dead white males” a generation ago, we must kill the “old gods” to make way for a new spirit, one that will usher in a truly inclusive society, or so we are told.

As Rorty promised, metaphysical nihilism has stimulated a utopian idealism. It takes many forms. He preferred American liberalism; others adopt Marxist and post-Marxist programs. But these visions of reform and revolution are united in their refusal to allow reality (which nihilism denies has essential characteristics, characterizing its apparent substance as a linguistic convention, social construction, and projection of power) to constrain our dreams. This refusal of limits incubates extreme demands for freedom, equality, justice, and many other urgent though formless notions. (Without some account of human nature, one cannot articulate stable notions of freedom, equality, justice, or anything else pertaining to human flourishing.) However vague in actuality, these aspirations are expressed in the noblest terms our tradition possesses, and those employing them claim the moral high ground.

But the idealistic nihilists are wrong about reality. It does impose limits, not out of malign intent or in order to claim “privilege,” but simply because we are creatures in a world not of our own making. This deep truth angers progressives. Reality has no essential form or structure, nihilism teaches; therefore, all limits are unjustly imposed by bad actors and wicked cultural systems: racists and patriarchy, fascists and white privilege, and on and on. These latter-day principalities and powers must be deposed, deconstructed, and smashed. In this rage against limitations, the utopian projects become nihilistic, not in the metaphysical sense of denying transcendence, but in the moral sense of embracing destruction as a sacred act of cleansing that will midwife a new creation.

Andrea Douglas and Jalane Schmidt seem to imagine that destroying the Lee monument will enable the arrival of a harmonious, equitable, and inclusive society. This is naive. One cannot desecrate the image of a man venerated by millions without stoking enmity. At times, the victory dances and fist pumps in celebrations of toppled statues suggest that today’s protagonists relish the dream of trampling, subjugating, and defeating adversaries. By and large, however, idealistic nihilism refuses to acknowledge its aggression. It responds to backlash by denouncing it as racist or some other pathology that must be extirpated. Our universities have already written the script. Efforts will be redoubled. More will be destroyed.

A few weeks after October 7, as donors revolted against the shocking pusillanimity of university leaders in the face of student and faculty support for Hamas’s atrocities, Harvard’s president sought to change the subject. “Antisemitism has a very long and shameful history at Harvard,” Gay intoned. “For years, this University has done too little to confront its continuing presenced. No longer.” The problem was not student activists and faculty who embrace a virulent anti-Western ideology. Rather, it was the WASP grandees, long dead, who besmirched Harvard with their sins. Committees must be formed to determine how to counter this legacy! Isn’t it past time to expunge the name of A. Lawrence Lowell from Harvard’s campus?

“From the river to the sea”: Students do not chant this refrain in the hopes of establishing an Islamic regime. They are taking up the call of nihilistic idealism. In order to make way for the glorious future, we must destroy that which is established, extirpate those who are recalcitrant, and wipe clean the slate of history.

Against those who question God’s wisdom and benevolence, Alexander Pope famously declaimed in his Essay on Man: “Whatever is, is right.” Samuel Johnson found the assertion too sweeping. Something of what is arises out of our wicked choices, and whatever obtains as a result is not right. That said, Pope’s sentiment is generally correct. Our disposition toward reality should be one of gratitude, not anger and hostility. In good times and in bad, we are blessed by reality’s luminous power of existence. Today’s utopian moralists are inclined toward the opposite, a spiritual nihilism: Whatever is, is wrong.