End Times by Kenneth Smith   

17. Modern Civilization II

B. The Postcredal Epoch and the Death of Truth

Moderns who actually read the Greeks are generally shocked to see how acute and clarified their expressions are; how spare, direct and essential. Everywhere one sees the classic economical fit of form to matter. The Greeks spoke rupturing or disillusioning, critical things in far more stark and audacious ways than moderns would ever dream of doing. Not only were the Greeks dedicated to puncturing the delusions of their own society, but they did it with an elegance and surgical certainty that remain astonishing millennia later.

Such candor and essentiality are the Greeks' aristocratic fealty to impartial truth, a determination to transcend popular opinion as a moral pigsty: to them self-interest was as clearly the earmark of a mercenary banausos or bourgeois as subjectivism was the symptom of an emotionalist doulos or slave. To the Greeks these outlooks were patently vices, the pathos of lower mentalities from which any sane and scrupulous individual would impulsively distance himself. Nietzsche argued that the age of "faith" or "belief" was an era of profoundly mendacious slavishness — something only a Hellenophile could detect, not a Christian swathed in sentimentalisms from birth — as is evident from the historical record that no other world religion has been more ravaged by the virus of hypocrisy than Christendom. Just as the Christian epoch was a civilizational relapse into a culture fit only for douloi, so modern civilization is a system in which materialist banausoi reign supreme, exempt from criticism or even detection. The syndromes definitive of those types could not be more naked among us; only an ideologically controlled culture has obstructed a clear grasp of those implicit typologies.

Before truly becoming fit for truth, especially spiritual truths, one must cultivate a stringent moral ethos against illusion and delusion, against believing merely what one "needs" or "wants" to believe. Such stringency is impossible for those who do not fundamentally know their own proclivities for gullibility and self-deception. What ancient culture manifests is the ultimate rootedness of truth in specifiable values, in an art of thinking and a corresponding characterology. It does no good for God to reveal arcane truth to humans — even in their sleep — if they have done nothing to be apt for it, up for the task of seeing its meaning and logic. Impoverished, simple minds all throughout history have deformed spiritual truth, recasting it after their own biased image, sorry human nature triumphing time and again over divine revelation. "Fundamentalism" is merely an obtuse self-righteousness erecting its own sacrosanct stupefaction as the ultimate criterion, a ceiling on what may be seen or thought.

Chief among the repugnant truths the Greeks made themselves recognize are the severe characterological limitations most humans are subject to: two of the three primary personality types are mentalities to whom truth means utterly nothing. At court or in business the slave or doulos' "word" is vapid: he is a pleasure- or comfort-seeking organism, the creature of his own craven emotions, and thus will say whatever the most powerful party wants, anything to please the master. Likewise the mercenary or mercantile banausos, whose words are light craft without ballast sent out on missions of self-interest. When a slave testifies to something that will cause him pain, that may well be the truth, just as when a businessman testifies to something contrary to his self-interest. But neither of these types comprehend viscerally what it means to concentrate the entire honor of their principled existence — the integrity of their character, the very justification for living and being respected — into the giving of their word. "Death before dishonor" has always been the code of aristoi, and Greek tragedies, including Socrates' Apology, are replete with the self-destruction of individuals to whom principles or values meant far more than fortune or life. Gilbert Murray's succinct testimonial merits repeating:

It is the great characteristic faith of the ancient world, revealing itself in many divergent guises and seldom fully intelligible to modern men: faith in the absolute supremacy of the inward life over things external. These men really believed that wisdom is more precious than jewels, that poverty and ill health are things of no import, that the good man is happy whatever befall him, and all the rest.

Values require of us the sacrifice of things that are not values: if we believe in values we must combat everything in ourselves contrary to them. As a man speaks, so should he live: indeed the earliest philosophies contrast how people speak and what is actually the case — an archetypally Greek format. To know what a value truly is, we must first become fit for it ourselves, exemplary of it. A value is to be lived, not propounded in some form of rhetoric. A human life should be no less than the clothing worn by a value. It is solely by being exemplary of some value that excellent individuals deserve to be memorialized or immortalized. — All of this expresses the existential authenticity of the Greeks; their grasp of the highest values or ethos of their culture; their esteem for the spirit that giveth life over the letter that killeth. How many ways must this alien obviousness be phrased to get it across to moderns, bred to superficiality by a culture of witless verbalisms?

It could not have occurred to Socrates or Plato or Aristotle that truth might not have any value: truth to all Greek philosophers, even the sophists, is precisely what is most worth knowing, what obliges us to reorganize our entire understanding. Truth is inevitably a challenge to our preconceptions that we dare not ignore. By how much are the philosophically cultured superior to those who are not? "As much as the living are to the dead," Aristotle replied. Humans should philosophize if they have such a talent in their nature because this is of course good for them, healthy, a tonic for the whole personality. Modern concepts of value-free knowing and understanding — empty and abstracted intellect, purely utilitarian — could have made no sense to ancients who took for granted nature's ultimate authority as an organismic teleological system, the orchestrated currents of purposes and needs and predispositions, a whole that demands we too should be whole, sane and integral. Life itself polices humans' failures in judgment and intelligence, their lapses in coherence and self-truth. The drive for mastery, self-mastery most of all, is the central ethos of aristocratic culture, the realization that form is superior to matter and nowhere is this mastery so difficult as in one's relation to oneself. Eukosmia, inner well-orderedness, is a work not of abstracted intellect but of the whole self and its connoisseurial intelligence.

In recent centuries some philosophers — Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger — have realized that modernity stands destitute on the issue of truth. Modern intellect, both academic and philistine, cannot comprehend how ages past ever came up with such an idea: as Nietzsche asks, "Whatever gave humans the notion that they might want to know the truth?" In just those matters where premodern cultures saw the most profound need for truth, anomic modernity denies that there is or can be such a thing as truth at all: in values, morality, religion, politics, philosophy, etc. In rough correspondence to the concept of truth, modernity has a diminished, morally insignificant notion of "accuracy" or "factuality." But this is merely a way of grounding remarks in some empirically obvious standard, confounding objectivity in reality with objectivity in norms, values or principles, which modern anomie makes highly dubious if not unthinkable. Marx's criticisms of capitalism were profound and structural but did not grasp the infinite sophistic deviousness that Spaetkapitalismus would have at its scientific command: culture, language, politics, education, economics, are thoroughly corrupt with self-interest, drenched with delusion, sophistic "spin" and mendacity. Not just the market and media but the whole society is polluted with self-serving characterizations. Is there anywhere on vital or controversial issues a disinterested truth, beyond our vicious economic universe of "weasels fighting in a hole?" As in wartime, so in ideological conflicts: truth is the first casualty of campaigns in which misinformation, disinformation, strategic misrepresentation, plausible deniability, and scores of other ways of deforming the truth are the modern Machiavellian repertory. The potent but unnamed nihilism Marx identified in the culture and workings of capitalism had indeed mutated into an ideological superstrain by the close of the 20th century. Truth is to capitalism as great an economic liability as is every other moral value, all impediments to maximizing profit and intensifying the exploitation of man and nature.

Kierkegaard elaborated a parallel train of criticism. As its ultimate human reality, modernity seized on a retarded stage of ego-development Kierkegaard calls "esthetic," oriented utterly in terms of feeling, a cultureless and self-uncritical narcissism analogous to the Greek doulos or slave. It sees only in terms of its own idiotia, and all the world and other humans are instruments for its own gratification: "Life is to be enjoyed" and Nil admirari, "Nothing is to be respected," are its ultimate precepts. As it grows more sophisticated and self-controlling, esthetic ego is correlatively less able to make itself confront distasteful or repugnant aspects of itself: it "knows" itself only as a highly selective fiction, an idealization. It cannot grasp its entire and actual self because its mentality is overgrown by fantasies and flattering self-images; losing its grip on its own natural and actual existence, it has mutated into a virtual self, an abstract possibility or subjunctive being. In Kierkegaard's time, such a predatory consumer — a systematically amoralized "user" of other humans — was growing from a naturally occurring extreme form of personality (Homo lupus hominis, "man a wolf to man," said Hobbes) into a mass-replicated, culturally reinforced type. The esthetic is the generic model of modern personality; modified in one way he is the capitalist, in another the proletarian. His entire form of character is based on self-repellency, a profound aversion to being conscious of himself as he is. He lives solely to be distracted and entertained in a culture composed of other extraverts, all types imagining themselves to be "individuals." The truth of what these people are cannot be presented to them, is not tolerable in any way by them. They have been culturally engineered to be allergic to truth. Kierkegaard's ingenious method for circumventing their claustral mentality was to contrive enigmatic volumes credited to pseudonymous authors as symptoms of their life-perspectives, thus an Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of modern psychic malformations. Such an oblique method of communication is the most that pseudophilic or delusion-loving moderns will tolerate. Since Kierkegaard's time, the pitch of modern intelligence has decayed far below any ability to rise to his lures and concepts.

Nietzsche seized on a parallel devolution in the ascendancy of doulic personality in Christian and in modern culture: the very meaning of "man" has been devalued abysmally from ancient times, the rights of the "higher" forms of intelligence or personality driven down by modern democratist revolutions. Modern culture is a war against authority and superiority of any sort, the heinous arête or "excellence" of aristocratic culture serving as a viscerally unwelcome reminder that the cultureless economic animal of modern times is not necessarily the upper limit of human self-development. Doulic-proletarian workers and consumers find their interests coincide with those of banausic-bourgeois managers, engineers, financiers, etc. on the point of their mutual hostility toward aristoi. Modern economy and culture are notoriously "dehumanizing." to the degree that moderns cannot comprehend the very meaning of this. Antiquity understood "human" to be a normative, almost an asymptotic concept: the Many fell short of its criteria because "human being" was the potentiality proved by the well-developed or -cultured at their best. Humans differ from animals in their teleological drives, knowable not from their most stunted forms but from their full maturation or perfection. "Human" was thus an honorific term, and did not mean what all Homines sapientes have in common factually. It is revelatory to Nietzsche that "human" has come modernly to mean the most basal or minimal traits, the apologetic "human-all-too-human" tendencies of our hapless animalism. Modernity is not the apex of human self-improvement but an ideological scheme for rationalizing vices and pathos (anti-heroism, ressentiment). Like the ancient slave (the ideal object of comedy) the prevailing modern character prefers narcotic rhetoric over difficult and offensive truths: its sentimentalizing mendacity, customary belief in "Progress," in bourgeois "reason" and divine "justice," bear no relation to history or actuality. Self-flattery is the ultimate touchstone for anything's believability to moderns. They cannot comprehend what a cancer their civilization long ago became for the ecosystems of the world, for primitive and traditional family-structure and economy, for culture and values, for systems of education, justice and morality. From the inflated idealities they carry in their heads moderns cannot possibly decompress to face ugly truth; indeed they are baffled why anyone would want to believe in ugly truths in the first place. After all, the modern cornucopia offers an array of artfully designed fantasies to choose from, as with cosmetics or rhinoplasty. Modernity will never comprehend itself as the historical high tide of a mentality incompossible with the truth.

Modern science arose in a naive hope of exoteric culture, the shared understanding of an international fraternity of inquirers such as Leibniz sought to organize. But the shadow cast over science from its birth was Bacon's blunt dictum, Knowledge is power. That is the tacit "value" of knowledge to modern culture, its subservience to the program of domination and all mentalities obsessed by it. The inexorable logic of this idea played itself out as modern science evolved into techniques of control and destruction, production and generation. Not just in war but in economic competition science grew advantageous, proprietary and covert, a means to the end of consolidating power and wealth in the hands of a few. "What is truth?" — in the 20th century Pontius Pilate's question was placed on a need-to-know basis: the modern state, "an earthly God" to Hegel, and most of all its strategic intelligence centers, had indeed usurped jurisdiction over truth, over the right to know what is disillusioning, dissolving the programs of systemic deception spun by the state-apparatus. Wartime campaigns made not just the enemy's awareness but their own populace's consciousness into a manipulable tool of propaganda, so thoroughly that, two generations later, even citizens of putatively open governments are not disabused of programmatic official lies once deemed strategic.

In politics as in intelligence, the sheer miseducability of entire masses — the bigger the lie and the greater its constituency, the more powerfully it enforces itself by mass-conformism — proved too potent an instrument to be left idle. The mass consciousness of entire nations could be steered however the overlords of the coordinating media wanted. All too eager to be complicitous in what their regime wants of them, massified modern "mentalities" are utensils for others' purposes. Properly phrased and disseminated, almost any simplism could be set in motion via the most influential tastemakers, and mimetic mentalities would gladly adopt it as the obligatory party line of a "free" and "democratic" people whose irrational hostilities toward dissident, disloyal ("unAmerican") thinking run deep. The art of governing the Many by means of its own unreflective "common sense" grew into a true science, but the credit is not merely to the professionals; the irrational megaforces of social and ideological cohesion have indeed done most of the work for them. Modernity has been fulfilling its destiny as the age of massified, impoverished or abstracted man, a culture that cannot begin to comprehend its own visceral abomination of exceptional or deviant individuals, i.e. vestigial aristoi, anymore than it can grasp why forms of past culture have been systematically foreclosed on. This collectivization or corporatization — the gathering of many sectors and cells within society into one functional "body" responsive to controls — has made possible not just a relatively predictable economy but the effective militarization of social order. Rightly exercised, modern systems of crypto-authority (nowhere manifested as direct, partisan, moral, or even political) can have the philosophically desolate psyches of their subjects literally for a song.

Nietzsche grasped that the ultimate reason God was dead for moderns was that they had cultured themselves to be incompetent to grasp what God had even meant to millennia past; modernly formatted personality, as Kierkegaard also saw, is profoundly unfit to be religious, to rise above its own myopic psychology. So too truth has died for moderns; they are just as certainly destitute in those philosophical and characterological values by which the significance of truth might be grasped. Moderns are pathetic subjectivists, each one inhabiting his own idiotist cosmos under a regime of anomic culture, his private dreamworld to whose mechanisms however service-personnel do have a few keys. It does not even occur to moderns that culture, philosophy, conscience, critical intellect, all serve prophylactic purposes against the invading hordes of mass-propaganda, ideology, rhetoric, etc. Moderns bed down naively with whatever buys them a drink to put their judgment to sleep; and curiously, the whorish Many speak contemptuously of "prostitutes."

The trajectory of modern civilization describes its loathing not just for ancient or medieval values or virtues, but for any sort at all. It is an order of culture devoted to control, the leftbrain-driven subordination of the natural, the divine, and the human to the artificial, that is, the logically/pathologically architected system of man's mere works and words. A culture selects for those character-types that most profoundly personify its mode of order, and modern techne-culture has naturally promoted, reinforced and hardened in their delusions the banausoi. Technocracy and finance are merely dimensions of this mentality's fantasia of perfectly dominated existence. Like banausic mentality per se, this regime is radically without principle: it is amoral, anomic, hybristic, profoundly inept to despise itself for its own one-sidedness and incurable narcosis. Throughout the modern world these psychic forces conspire to form, wherever circumstances favor the concentration of wealth and power, some sort of totalitarian order which is merely the extrapolation of the banausic lust for control into an extremized system, a sociopolitical universe, a dystopia.

Such conscientious and comprehending aristoi as may still survive look aghast at the atrocities banausoi have wrought over the past century, always employing armies of sadistic, appetite-driven douloi, now ideologized to dehumanize their victims into mere abstractions. Modernity still has not grasped, and never will, the true significance not just of the Holocaust but also of the Stalinist purges, the genocides of aborigines and peasants, the death squads, the desaparecidos, the political witchhunts against dissidents, and everywhere the obligatory conformism and obeisance of the vast corps of modern slaves: in one society after another, the same kinds of forces rise to power, bent on exterminating the same counterforces. The operative mendacities and cultured delusions of the Cold War have made moderns imagine that East and West (so described exactly to foster this illusion) are absolute polarities, as unlike as forces of nature. But in truth the same nexus of power and wealth, the same mentalities and strategies of privilege and coercion, set the policies in the former USSR as in the USA. In severely orchestrated modern culture as in a well-rehearsed and long-evolved cult, novices to the system find their psychic elements magnetized, evaluated and sorted for one kind of use or another. Good cogs, bad cogs. Nothing makes a functionary more unfit for duty than a vestigial naivete about truth, a reluctance to flush unpleasant realities down the Memory Hole. Nothing marks an intellectual as suspicious more than having curiosity about "the big picture," a sense that "specialization" turns minds into utensils for the Machine. The stock market, the fiscal structure, the tax system, the credit apparatus, all fear that a briefly sobering chill thought will pass between the ears of a few too many consumers, that it will dawn on the Many that the same economic mechanisms that built up this order can also be thrown into reverse and demolish it, with unbelievable efficiency. Truth in almost all forms is very bad for Business, and Business-culture has padded itself with ideological orthodoxy, Babbittry, happy talk, jargon and buzzwords, just in order that troublesome matters can be referred to in perspectivally controlled, euphemistic ways. No less is true for Government, Education, Religion, Media and the other constellations composing the galaxy of modern order.

The ultimate truth about truth is extremely unflattering: had the aristocratic Greeks not invented such a value, it would never have occurred to medieval Christianity or modern techno-plutocracy to do so. Not only do these latter civilizations have no use or tolerance for truth, but their populaces have been cultured to be incompetent for it; and it is wholly subversive to their ultimate drives as doulic and banausic cultures. In the age of their sophistic and materialist decadence, Athenian pseudoaristocrats were insulted in the incisive way that only Greek philosophical genius knew how to: Diogenes the Cynic, who had renounced the luxuries of that corrupt culture to live in the streets, so put the issue of degeneration that even subphilosophical banausoi and douloi would get the point. Asked why he was peering about the streets with a lantern at midday, he said he was trying to find an honest man — one who cared about the truth and was in such possession of himself as to be able to see and speak the truth. The intolerable truth about that culture was that it was making itself unfit to confront the truth; the aptitude for truth, the keystone of aristocratic ethos, had perished and with it the very competence to see this. Humans had become too servile and too greedy even to want to know what the truth was. Medieval and modern civilizations have never known such aristic respect for the intrinsic authority of the truth; these cultures have no esteem for contrarian or philosophic intelligence but always sought to destroy it as heretical or subversive. These cultures are like a prejudiced judge who is willing to be told only what he already wants to hear, like an addict whose personality has been reorganized around his acquired derangement.

To call medievals and moderns the thralls of a culture of mendacity or obligatory untruth certainly offends moderns as a pessimistic and misanthropic evaluation, and of course nothing can possibly be true that makes too many people unhappy to hear it. Such reactions are beside the point: the primal consideration is not how we like such a characterization but whether it is in fact true. Marx accused the system of capitalism of perpetrating by design an epidemic false consciousness; Freud thought the normal and ordinary condition of human beings was one of structural delusion, a function of inner psychic metabolism in which even the practical and sober Ego was complicitous — with the exception of a tiny corps of psychoanalysts, humans have a profoundly pathetic relation to their own psychic mechanisms. Eastern philosophy and religion have for millennia agreed with the Greeks that the vast majority of lives are fatally intoxicated by their own desires and self-interests. Any sufficiently critical intelligence about human thought and behavior, as actually manifested, has to recognize the primal significance of mass-apathy toward philosophy, ethics, values, ideas: most people do not live in terms of categories of truth — it does not even occur to them to test the soundness of the vagrant assumptions and rumors that pass through their minds, much less to test the criteria by which they would have tested those concoctions. Most people merely read the emotional flavor of what is told to them and weigh whether they like it or not. Children and animals could do as much, were their vocabularies sufficiently ideologized. Supposing they could live and prosper very well without any concept of human truth, moderns have constructed an imperial delusion they believe to be impervious to rupture.