Today's Person of Faith: The Nihilist
Czeslaw Milosz won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature and lived in Poland during and after World War II. He watched Nihilism play a role in society and formed a unique perspective. In his collection titled Road-side Dog, he writes a uniquely styled poem called The Discrete Charms of Nihilism. Here is an excerpt:
Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it is promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.
His point: for his Nazi and Soviet oppressors, Nihilism and the belief in no standard of truth meant that there is no judgment. Why? If there is nothing out there, no meaning, no objective truth, then there is no position anyone can hold on anything. Thus, the birth of postmodernism: no view is privileged over another. The postmodern man of today espouses: “who are you to tell me my views are wrong? It is my truth after all.”
Essayist and novelist Edward Docx says it another way in his 2011 essay Postmodernism is Dead. First, he highlights some of the good that postmodernism has done:
This idea of de-privileging any one meaning, this idea that all discourses are equally valid, has therefore led to some real-world gains for humankind. Because once you are in the business of challenging the dominant discourse, you are also in the business of giving hitherto marginalised and subordinate groups their voice.
He goes on, however, to highlight the other side of the postmodern blade:
If we de-privilege all positions, we can assert no position, we cannot therefore participate in society or the collective and so, in effect, an aggressive postmodernism becomes, in the real world, indistinguishable from an odd species of inert conservatism.
The wrong position can be incredibly dangerous. We must be in the business of giving marginalised and subordinate groups a voice. To de-privilege positions that oppress and marginalise is to do justice. We have postmodernism to thank for the unprecedented progress in human rights of the twentieth century.
The paradox, however, lies in the fact that if we hope to hedge our bets by de-privileging all positions, we throw out objective truth. We throw out the fabric of reality under-girding all things. If there truly is nothing, it takes a leap of faith to hold any perspective at all. For example, the scientific method specifies that scientific results must be repeatable in order to be predictive of future results. However, if there is no fabric having woven two mere instances in time together - if there truly is nothing - how do we know that the governing laws of physics, for example, will stay the same from experiment to experiment? Faith. Faith that the laws won’t change. The Nihilist, the postmodern man, the atomic materialist, and the atheist all have one thing in common: a deep religious faith that reality makes sense.
This is not a veiled argument for the merits of religion. So long as the agnostic does not assert the postmodern position, he has not committed any foot-fault. So long as he believes in absolute truth, he can assert the humble view that he does not know the identity of absolute truth itself. It follows, however, that some answers are closer to absolute truth than others, or else he must de-privilege all views. If he does this, he asserts that it is absolutely true that no views are of merit except the one de-privileging all others, and he ceases to be agnostic. But since he is agnostic, he must acknowledge that some views are worthy of privilege, but he cannot make judgments about which ones those are. If he does, he makes a statement about belief in an absolute truth, and again he is no longer agnostic. Exhausting.
This explains today’s political and social climate. If I cannot through reason de-privilege all positions without de-privileging my own, I must compel people to adopt my view. Hence the ad hominem and coercion, along with the desire to merely silence the other side. And so in our effort to protect the oppressed, we become the oppressor and marginaliser.
Perhaps today’s contentious social and political climate is attributable not to disagreeable liberals and conservatives, but to the loud minority of unwitting “inert conservatives” who believe in nothing, Lebowski, nothing.
