Furthermore, we suffer, just as Bakunin did after 1848, from an extraordinary if largely imperceptible destruction of faith in the future – the fundamental optimism that makes reality seem purposeful and goal-oriented. Back in 1994, Václav Havel could still point to the ‘new deity: the ideal of perpetual growth of production and consumption’, while lamenting the despiritualization enforced by modern society. Today, the belief in progress, necessary for life in a Godless universe, can no longer be sustained, except, perhaps, in the Silicon Valley mansions of baby-faced millennials.
The world has never seen a greater accumulation of wealth, or a more extensive escape from material deprivation. The fruits of human creativity – from smartphones to stem-cell reconstructions – continue to grow. But such broad and conventional norms of progress cloak how unequally its opportunities are distributed: for instance, nearly half of the world’s income growth between 1988 and 2011 was appropriated by the richest tenth of humanity and, even in rich countries, there is a growing life-expectancy gap between classes.
In an economically stagnant world that offers a dream of individual empowerment to all but no realizable dreams of political change, the lure of active nihilism can only grow. Timothy McVeigh with his quintessentially American and First World background illustrates the passage from passive to active nihilism as vividly as men from impoverished postcolonial societies. For he claimed to be defending, with his spectacular brutality, the ideal – individual autonomy – that modernity itself had enshrined, and then barred him from.
He was born into a way of life common until the 1980s among large numbers of the depoliticized and apathetic working-class and middle-class populations in the United States and Europe. George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four had conceived in dystopian terms this comfortable if regimented life of a remotely and lightly supervised proletariat – the last men of history:
So long as they [the Proles] continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern … Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
McVeigh grew up as this period of general affluence and leisure peaked, and a series of economic crises from the 1970s onwards began to make the American Dream, as he himself pointed out, seem less and less credible. McVeigh found it hard to get jobs commensurate with his sense of dignity. Brought up by a culture of individualism to consider himself unique, he seemed to have suffered from a sense of diminishment as he grew older and sensed the vast political and economic forces working around and on him. In our own time, support for Donald Trump’s white nationalism connects with middle-aged working-class men, who have suffered a dramatic deterioration in mortality due to suicide, and an increase in morbidity because of drug and alcohol abuse.
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Max Stirner wrote in 1842 that to be looked ‘upon as a mere part, part of society, the individual cannot bear – because he is more; his uniqueness puts from it this limited conception’. True freedom for this disaffected individual would consist of a renunciation of self-assertion, or a retreat into the kind of inner freedom that Rousseau finally sought, followed by the German Romantics. But a free will that chooses not to will itself has never been part of the design of the modern world ever since Descartes pronounced, ‘I think, therefore I am.’
From its inception in the Enlightenment, the modern world was driven, and defined, by the self-affirming autonomous individual who, condemned to be free, continually opens up new possibilities of human mastery and empowerment. His project was deemed crucial to the collective escape, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from prejudice, superstition and the belief in God, and into the safety of reason, science and commerce. Since then, freedom has been synonymous with the developing natural sciences, new artistic forms, free trade and increasingly democratic civil society and political institutions.
Intellectuals – writers, scientists, sociologists, historians, economists – have embodied the quasi-religious belief in continuous progress. From the very beginning of the modern era, they subsumed themselves, much to Rousseau’s alarm, into what they saw as the larger force and movement – the onward march of history. The iconic modern intellectual is, aptly, Voltaire, who helped found civil society and fought for freedom of speech while counselling ruling classes and participating in international trade. But history seems to have come full circle instead of marching forward.
The most convincing and influential public intellectual today – Pope Francis – is not an agent of reason and progress. In a piquant irony, he is the moral voice of the Church that was the main adversary of Enlightenment intellectuals as they built the philosophical scaffolding of a universal commercial society. He has acquired his moral stature largely because the ostensibly autonomous and self-interested individual, unleashed by the advance of commercial society, confronts an impasse. The contemporary crisis stems in large part from the failed universalization of this figure, and its descent, in the age of globalization, into either angry tribalism or equally bellicose forms of antinomian individualism.
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Power in secularizing Europe had been unmoored from its location in the transcendental and made immanent in society; it came to be seen as originating in the will of human beings: the free will that the Romantics, Napoleon cultists as well as economic liberals affirmed, embodied vividly in the individual with certain non-negotiable rights and entrepreneurial energy and ambition. Such an individual sought power – or what in a commercial and egalitarian society amounted to advantage over rivals and competitors.
Rousseau was among the first to sense that a power lacking theological foundations or transcendent authority, and conceived as power over other competing individuals, was inherently unstable. It could only be possessed temporarily; and it condemned the rich and poor alike to a constant state of ressentiment and anxiety.
This was already evident as nineteenth-century Europe, having abandoned its old social order, lurched with its new religions of power and wealth into the age of Social Darwinism; its masses, mobilized by strongmen through large states, then went on to participate in an extensive slaughter in the early twentieth century. In our own time, however, a brutish struggle for existence and recognition has come to define individual as well as geopolitical relations across the world.