The Fraud of Theology

In an interview with The Washington Post, one of Donald Trump’s advisors on theological matters, Robert Jeffress, supported Trump’s apocalyptic August bluster against North Korea, by citing Romans 13. At the beginning of that chapter of the epistle, Paul recommends that Christians obey their secular rulers, because “the authorities that exist have been established by God” (13:1). But in a NY Times article, Steven Paulikas, an Episcopal priest, contends that Jeffress tore that scriptural passage out of context and perverted Christian theology in Jeffress’s fetishizing “message of violence over the clarion call to love of Romans 13:8,” which speaks of love of others as the fulfillment of Jewish law. That latter idea of the Golden Rule seems to derive from Rabbi Hillel who lived a century before Jesus is supposed to have lived.

Paulikas’ point about context is that “Paul is telling Christians to obey the Roman authorities in temporal matters such as taxation, not justifying the authority of one ruler over another,” such as Trump over Kim Jong-un. But Paulikas seems to be forgetting Rom.13:4, which says the secular authorities “are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” Just because a ruler’s power derives from God doesn’t mean the ruler can’t misuse his power. For example, Jews considered Moses to be an instrument of God’s wrath against the Pharaoh. Instead of being commanded to obey the Egyptians, the Jewish slaves (who never historically existed) rebelled against Egypt to build their own society in Israel, according to Exodus. So if Christians can construe Kim Jong-un as a “wrongdoer,” they’re free to interpret Rom.13 as meaning that Trump might be “an agent of wrath” who will “bring punishment” upon North Korea.

Moreover, while Paulikas calls it a “clarion call,” meaning that the call for love of others trumps the advice to obey secular authorities, the context actually indicates that this allusion to the Golden Rule is just a digression and an extended figure of speech. It’s just a fancy way for Paul to make his point that his readers should “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law” (13:8, my emphasis). The rest (13:9-10) pursues the tangent about love as the fulfillment of Jewish law, a digression invited by that turn of phrase about the only “debt” that should be left standing (the obligation to love others). It’s like saying, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. And fish don’t need land transportation, because they live underwater. Did you know that fish come in a variety of sizes and colours? And fish taste differently too, especially if you choose to add a sauce. The best way to catch fish is with the special lures I sell at the local shop, which I’m pleased to announce is open six days a week.” The intended main point, of course, is that women don’t need men, the rest being a tangent that follows only from the rhetorical way of expressing that point. Likewise, the main point in the middle of Romans 13 is that Christians should pay all their secular debts, not that love is all-important.

Mind you, if secular authorities as well as their subjects can misbehave, as Jeffress would have to be assuming, there’s no longer an imperative to obey any particular secular ruler, since perhaps President Trump is as bad (as sociopathic, psychotic, and otherwise loathsome, etc.) as the North Korean leader, in which case Jeffress’s case falls to pieces, after all. Alas, this criticism is mooted by the rest of the context which Paulikas doesn’t address, in Rom.13:11-14, which begins, “And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.” So the overriding reason for Christians to obey their secular masters, to pay their taxes and avoid debts, besides the interest in avoiding secular punishment, is that the whole natural world was about to end in any case, so presumably there would be no time to make like Moses and rebel against society to establish a new earthly one. And of course, once this bit of context is entered into the hermeneutic ledger, both Jeffress’s and Paulikas’s arguments come to nothing, since obviously the Kingdom of Heaven didn’t arrive in the lifetime of those early Christians. The Jewish Temple fell in 70 CE, but the apocalyptic significance of that event was only subjective, since it mattered much more to Jews than to the Romans, for example. The secular world as a whole endured for two millennia and persists to this day despite Paul’s assurances that the contrary scenario would unfold. So this entire theological discussion of Trump and North Korea falls apart because Rom.13 itself implodes. 

Theology, Fiction, and Reason

In any case, Paulikas’s discussion raises a deeper, more interesting question, when he lays out an assumption that’s crucial to his article. According to Paulikas, “There is such a thing as incorrect theological and moral thinking, and the best way to neutralize it is with an intellectually and morally superior argument on the same terrain. Only good theology can debunk bad theology.” 

Is it true that theological statements, as such, can be correct or incorrect, and that the best way to conduct theology is by offering an intellectually superior argument? If so, theology would be a lot like Western philosophy. In fact, theology would be indistinguishable from a branch of philosophy called the philosophy of religion, because argumentation is philosophy’s specialty. And if we’re meant to yolk theology with the burden of engaging in hyper-rationality, as in the testing of hypotheses with excruciating attention to empirical detail, theology would instead fall under scientific cosmology and other sciences. In that case, theology would be dismissed in Laplace’s manner, since scientists have no need for the God hypothesis. Moreover, theology’s assumption of supernatural metaphysics would be barred by science’s methodological naturalism.

The reason Paulikas seems confident in asserting that theological statements should be rationally evaluated is that he confuses the literary, textual sort of analysis in which he engages in his criticism of Jeffress’s support of Trump, with what Paulikas presumes is a separate discipline called theology. The giveaway is Paulikas’s appeal to “the context” of Romans 13, and indeed Protestants in general, who are those Christians who seemingly idolize the Bible, can be counted on to argue explicitly about the scriptural context of this or that verse, in virtually every one of their writings. Their “arguments” are actually textual analyses and belong in the field of literary studies. This is to say that Protestant “theologians” should be regarded instead as literary critics whose operating assumption is that the Bible is a work of fiction, in which case the question isn’t whether a biblical statement is factually correct, but whether an analysis of the text is coherent. Likewise, the Christian religion that built up around this work of fiction would be comparable to a zealous fan base, such as the cult of Star Wars. Fans of Star Wars aren’t interested in whether the contents of the movies or books are factually “correct” in terms of having anything to do with events transpiring in a real, faraway galaxy; instead, they argue vociferously over questions that arise only within the fictional universe. Given that Han Solo said such and such in the fictional narrative, is it plausible that he would have fired his gun first in the Mos Eisley cantina? Similarly, you could argue about the correctness or incorrectness of biblical interpretations on literary grounds, as Paulikas seems to have done in his appeal to context in his dispute with Jeffress, and as I did in my above criticism of both of their interpretations of Paul’s epistle.  

To understand theology as being the literary criticism of a great work of fiction, namely of the myths told in texts held to be scriptural or ultimately authoritative by an ardent fan base is to view religion as Yuval Harari does in Sapiens. He writes, “Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination” (30). He thus contends that the ancients regarded their religions much as we regard the brands of our favourite corporate suppliers of goods. Effectively, the gods were idols, that is, entertaining characters that signified collective differences in brand loyalty, and the myths were treasured fictions that defined and maintained group identity and kept the peace in large societies that otherwise would have collapsed for the reason discovered by the philosopher Sartre: hell is other people. Ancient religions were one with their corresponding secular empire, and the theocratic synthesis operated in some ways like a modern corporate monopoly. Compare the Aztec or Babylonian religions, for example, to Apple or to Google. In either case, you have a massive secular power the deeds of which are justified by a set of stories—in the modern case, bogus economic models, advertisements, propaganda, intertextual allusions in other cultural works such as movies or television shows—that imply social conventions essential for maintaining group cohesion by fostering enthusiasm for the brand and thus a corresponding way of life for the fans.  

Religious people today will be loath to think of their scripture as being comparable to the oeuvre of J.K. Rowling or to the blockbusters of George Lucas, and that’s because the Scientific Revolution has established a division between purely literal, natural, physical, factual truth, on the one hand, and subjective impositions of meaning and value on the other. The ancients may have had a semblance of some such distinction between, say, mere mundane, practical questions and matters of ultimate significance. But they had no globe-spanning enterprise that cemented the dichotomy and thus thoroughly disenchanted what we now think of as the whole universe of natural time and space. Instead, the more or less animistic ways of thinking in the ancient world took the natural world to be infused with spirits, including immanent deities or other such powerful agents, and thus with purpose, meaning, and moral value. So if you told an Aztec farmer that Quetzalcoatl is only a fictional character, he wouldn’t have taken it as an insult, because for him what we call the world of cold, indifferent natural facts is instead itself halfway fictional. There was no ironclad fact-value distinction, so only if you belittled Quetzalcoatl in something like the way a Star Trek fan might slight the greatness of Darth Vader in Empire Strikes Back would the farmer set upon you with pitchfork in hand. To question Quetzalcoatl’s existence would have been as nonsensical as making a point of saying that Darth Vader doesn’t really exist. You would have been subjected to medical treatment on the assumption that you’d have to be insane to bother being an atheist, just as you’d have to be churlish to interrupt the showing of a Harry Potter movie to announce that there’s really no such thing as magic wands; you’d be booted from the theater, not because your statement is “incorrect,” but because you’d have spoiled the entertainment.

Again, the fictional status of the gods would have been taken for granted, but only because fictions were elevated as the best available theories that both explained how the world worked and kept civilizations running. Now that after the rise of science the value of fictions has instead been demoted to being a private matter of opinion, to equate the Bible or the Koran with a Harry Potter novel is to take for granted that the scriptures might be factually correct on some point or other only by accident, given the authors’ need for verisimilitude to enable the reader to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story. Moreover, to kill in the name of a religion would necessarily be as insane as waging war to convert Star Trek heathens to the cult of Star Wars. Violence caused by confusion between entertainment and reality does still happen, as in the case of football hooliganism in Europe and elsewhere. But the pressure on religious individuals like Jeffress and Paulikas to insist on the objective, absolute correctness of their theological statements, as opposed to conceding their mere aesthetic status, is overwhelming primarily because of science’s impact on modern epistemology and metaphysics.

Modern Theology as a Fraud

So if theology isn’t a kind of literary criticism, nor is it a branch of philosophy or of science, what else might it be? There is an even less flattering alternative, which is that modern theology operates as a massive con. Theological statements are shape-shifters, their meaning kept nebulous in the service of self-deception. Take Paul’s assurance that Christ would soon return to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and put aside how premodern Christians might have understood the truth of that prediction. Today, we know that Paul’s theology would fail drastically as philosophical argumentation or as scientific investigation. Moreover, Christians can’t afford to concede that Paul’s eschatology is entirely fictional—and not just because the religious entertainment would have to compete with the secular variety, such as with the Hollywood superhero movie, but because religious fictions, when viewed as such, can no longer function in the ancient fashion, as the glue that binds together a population. Again, this is because the world in general has been disenchanted, as Weber put it, so a fiction no longer has universal scope. The animistic dream of a living universe is dead, and all fictions are only so many futile diversions or protests against nature’s indifference, whispered in terror of the dark.

Paul’s theological statement is really just fiction and it was always just so, but Christians today can’t accept it as such. Instead, they maintain the statement is factually correct, as Paulikas presumes, but the Christian must evade not just the rock of an admission of theology’s mere literary status, but the hard place of the philosophical or scientific standard of inquiry. Thus, to avoid Paul’s prediction of the imminent end of the world being dismissed as obviously false on empirical grounds, the theologian will say the prediction is “rational,” “factual,” or “correct” even though it refers not to any ordinary temporal or otherwise natural matter. One of the epistle writers himself ventured that since a day is like a thousand years to God (2 Pet.3:8), when he implies that his first-century audience is living through “the last days” (3:3), that could mean Christ would nevertheless return millennia after all their deaths. This is semantic sleight-of-hand, though, since the epistles were addressed not to God but to human readers. From our vantage point, at least, the equivocation suggests, then, the advent of a duplicitous genre, the theological charade, which takes place in a halfway house between the literary analysis of fictions and the rational discovery of facts.

Again, knowing that theology has always been merely fictional, whereas the ancients wouldn’t have understood our distinction between fiction and fact, we might be inclined to credit the author of 1 Thess.4:14-15 and of Cor.15:50-52 with prodigious chutzpah because he had the nerve to maintain that even though Christ’s second coming hadn’t happened before some of his readers had gone and died, there was nothing to fear because they could still be resurrected even after their corpses have been turned to dust; after all, as those epistles say, the archangels themselves would descend and blast God’s trumpet to raise the dead even before the living are raptured, awarding all with “spiritual bodies” since nothing as corrupt as flesh could enter God’s kingdom in any event.

Certainly, a twenty-first century theologian who cites approvingly that ad hoc Pauline defense of the seemingly already-falsified predictions of the world’s end that was supposed to have occurred in the first or second century must be perpetrating a farce rather than interpreting or arguing in good faith. (The defense is ad hoc despite the superficial plausibility of saying that flesh couldn’t be expected to enter Heaven, because if matter can’t enter the kingdom of God, it’s not literally a kingdom either and we’re led to a mystical disavowal of any theological specificity. Likewise, “spiritual body” is oxymoronic: if God’s domain is ghostly, what makes the resurrected self a body distinct from anything else? How is the personal self retained without anything analogous to a brain? Of course the matter must be entirely mysterious, which means Paul’s apology to his readers—who had had their hopes up about the imminent end of the world, only to watch some of their fellows die before the saviour had returned—amounts to brazen hand-waving, whereas Paul might have admitted he’d been wrong and recommended that his readers shouldn’t waste their life on his nonsense.) The breezy New Testament prediction along with the apologetic epicycles and rigmarole are presently fictions that can’t be enjoyed with a suspension of disbelief unless they’re read as somehow factual despite all rational appearances to the contrary. So theology must now be akin to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme or to any other massive fraud in which certain insiders, such as cynical televangelists or church officials cook the books and pull the levers behind the curtain to preserve an illusion for the multitude of victims.

In short, those who are currently religious have the benefits of enjoying their myths as socially meaningful and as objectively correct, even though these folks take upon themselves none of the responsibilities of literary critics or of philosophers or scientists. No need to deal with the cognitive dissonance involved in suspending disbelief in a story that isn’t supposed to be merely fictional, as you go back and forth in your experience between the real world and what is secretly just an imaginary one. No need to base your cherished belief on logic and on empirical evidence, when statements about gods and miracles can be interpreted as being so hallowed as to deter open-ended scrutiny from those who are thusly misled. You can engage in literary analysis of the Bible as though it were just a work of fiction, citing contexts to support your interpretations of passages, and you can credit theological statements as being backed by fallacious arguments, ensuring the superficial facticity of some such statements even while retreating to faith, dogma, church authority, or private religious experience whenever the rational going gets tough, and even while simultaneously treating scripture as if it were just poetic fiction subject to infinite and unfalsifiable, personal interpretations. It’s a shell game, a fraud of sustaining the illusion that theology has a viable intermediate position between literary critique and rational investigation of the real world. For moderns living in disenchanted nature, the way to mythopoeic reverie is lost, just as the adult can no longer experience truly childish glee—not without a fraud like theology or the secular enterprise of creating technological substitutes for gods, miracles, and the spirit world. 

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Prophets of Woe

Woe to men, for you shall be replaced by machines and shall lose your manhood.

Woe to women, for you shall have no men to shelter and comfort you in the wasteland to come.

Woe to children, for their cuteness promotes their self-love, and they lack the reason to see that love is a puppet string.

Woe to consumers, for you’ve sucked the earth almost dry.

Woe to advertisers, for you’ve made an art of deception and manipulation, and are cursed to wander as cynics in a herd of dupes. 

Woe to movers and shakers, for you’ve moved to outer space, making aliens of yourselves, and have shaken the peasants from their slumber, endangering your material foundations to which they tend.

Woe to environmentalists, for you love wild animals that wouldn’t hesitate to eat you for breakfast.

Woe to Americans, for your time has nearly come to join the legions of peasants in other lands whom you’ve squeezed and exploited since the end of the Second World War.

And woe to anti-Americans, for your sanctimonious rage betrays the ugly American within you.

Woe to liberals, for there’s no longer faith in your worn-out myths, and you’ve become scholastics idling until the next renaissance.

Woe to conservatives, for your talk of old-fashioned utopia is a smokescreen for a return to the primitive state wherein the dominators succumb to the temptations of godhood, are swiftly corrupted by their power, and drag their slaves down with them.

Woe to you professional philosophers, for your title is an oxymoron: a lover of knowledge must cower in angst rather than adjust to the horrors of nature to make of philosophy an academic field of study for charlatans, pseudoscientists, and bored young transients in colleges that have turned into mere businesses.

Woe to the gods, for they’ve failed to grace us with their existence.

Woe to monotheists, for you have poor taste in fiction.

Woe to optimists, for you dishonour the multitudes that have fallen.

Woe to pessimists, for you waste your life in grief.

Woe to Hollywood, for your creativity is as bankrupt as that of the Chinese market you seek to plunder with remakes and superheroic trivialities, which market is a giant, ravenous copying machine.

Woe to the computer, for digitization drains the value from that which is encoded, and the internet and the smartphone erase the humanity from their addicted users.

Woe to pornography, for it proves that sex is a ridiculous spectacle.

Woe to sex, for its pleasures must be kept secret to preserve the sophisticate’s illusion of superiority.

Woe to the large, for it is comprised of myriad small things and is at their mercy.

Woe to the small, for it is confined within the behemoth and is blind to the latter’s grandeur.

Woe unto the earth, for once it has killed off the wise apes, there shall be none to cry foul at its monstrosity.

And woe to dabblers in prophecy who pilfer the language of the fictional Jesus, which has become a cliché.

Is there anything worth saying in a world that has lost the ears to hear? Has the prophet still a reason to step atop his stump to be heard above the rabble’s noise? Is prophecy even possible in such a new-fangled wilderness? Prophecy, the inspired telling of deep, subversive truths, is for those seeking knowledge, but knowledge itself has become old-fashioned. The great loves now are for power and entertainment.

Postindustrial Westerners are divided into those who know science and those who don’t but who use its applications. Physicists are the scientists who identify what things ultimately are, and most no longer pretend to understand their theories, since physics is mainly a tool for tinkering with the machine of the military-industrial-entertainment complex that is our high-tech civilization. Having dispensed with metaphysics along with religious myths, after the positivist purification early last century, physicists usually see themselves as calculators, adjusting their equations to spit out useful predictions. But since understanding requires myths that resonate with intuitions and emotions, and scientists are professionally objective, the world that’s been reduced to physical properties has thereby been deprived of sense or meaning. Life for the technoscientist who idolizes physics and who prizes personal integrity is thus necessarily absurd.

As for the multitude of ignoramuses, they’re content to be entertained since they’re untroubled by the Faustian impulse to strive to learn the inhuman truth and thus to condemn themselves to unhappiness.

For those two reasons, the aspiring prophet is irrelevant. The ultimate secrets of existence might be recorded somewhere and would be lost in an avalanche of cat videos on the internet or in a polluted sea of unreadable scientific or philosophical journal articles. We no longer want to know the ultimate truth, and perhaps the world has thereby spared us by releasing us from that Faustian curse. Or perhaps we do unconsciously understand our predicament, and we lack merely the counterproductive inclination to obsess over a mental disorder—the love of knowledge—for which there’s no cure.

Why, then, do outsiders continue to harangue the masses for following conventions or for failing to fulfill their potential? Why criticize society, biting the hand that feeds you? Why does the wolf howl at the moon? Prophets were once widely believed to have divine authority, when the masses were more desperate for answers, thanks to the absence of a middle class under the ancient theocratic regimes. In modern secular societies, ranting is at best an art form, an expression of tolerated madness. Just as alcohol and nicotine are sanctioned by capitalism, modern art used to function as a pseudoreligion that distracted secularists from contemplating the calamity of God’s metaphorical death.

However, art in that sense is itself dead, having been slain by scientism, postmodern cynicism, and shallow consumerism. Art has been commodified or been reduced to claptrap for scholastic liberals who need to gossip around the water cooler to pretend they have something elevated to live for, something besides their animal pleasures of food, sex, possessions, and the like. We enslave and eat animals on a holocaust basis, so we can’t ourselves be mere animals—not without our incurring an experience of life-altering horror. Rather than having much impact, then, even the most visionary secular rants and prophetic speculations, such as those disguised in popular novels and movies, are soon lost in the data glut. None originating within the last century will be read centuries from now in a new Bible for naturalists. Again, this is partly because (1) technology alters society at such breakneck speed and on so many levels, (2) our attention span is shortened by our need to multitask to keep up with computers, and (3) our post-religious focus on nature is detrimental to any interest in morality or in how society ought to be changed, that we must content ourselves with being passive spectators as society transforms with no one at the helm.

But there’s another reason for the persistence of dark philosophical reflections on the state of popular culture. The majority of so-called humans is, and has always been, spiritually inferior to an elite assortment of horrified outsiders. When, therefore, that which is popular oozes into the mental space of an ethically superior being, that purer individual is bound to feel disgusted, and if that pollution is virtually omnipresent, as it is in the Western monoculture, the elite soul may lash out, not in the hope of changing anything but just to express reactionary contempt. His or her rants are the verbal equivalent of sneering.

Moreover, the capacity for intellectual condemnation must be exercised or it will atrophy. The Buddhist will say that that critical faculty should indeed go to waste, because it’s one of the ego’s illusions. Alas, the power of technoscience has put a premium on reason, not on direct experience. Scientists have taught us not to trust our intuitions, however comforting they may be. Thus, the self is no illusion since it’s a natural construct, and if nature is generally an illusion, words have no meaning and Buddhism is a game. If the only goal is to end suffering for the sake of inner peace, the Buddhist can have no objection to a drug-induced coma or to suicide. In any case, there’s no such thing as immediateexperience; all experience is interpretive, since it’s processed by the brain and by the mind’s representations.

A display of disgust, then, may be more or less useless or even counterproductive, but the difference between the philosophically-ignorant masses and the enlightened few is real, not imaginary. The mob’s adoration of conmen and strongmen, while it ostracizes the genuine spiritual elite is historically obvious. The social dynamics of forming dominance hierarchies that celebrate amoral power as a means of maintaining social stability, while demoting deviants to omega status are manifest. So maintaining that differences in social control are insignificant, because all egos are equally impermanent is a sad strategy for preserving a semblance of inner tranquility. Moreover, it’s far from obvious that equanimity should be the supreme response to nature’s monstrosity. A lobotomy could just as easily create inner peace. Indeed, Buddhism fails to contend with the possibility of nature’s heroic undoing of itself via human enlightenment.   

“Woe unto the world,” says the outsider. That is the outsider’s function, to be cast out and to report back from the fringes. How does the shiny, happy world appear from the outer darkness? Like a sinister joke. Few know they should be laughing, because few have an inkling of the ultimate question. The joke that’s on all of us is that irony rules over all things in the absence of any human-centered ideal. When we think we’re socially progressing, we’re adopting a self-destructive ideology (secular humanism) that enables us to perpetrate our greatest atrocities so that we come to embody nature’s inhumanity. Most of what we do in our artificial oases backfires, since we must compromise in adapting to the norms of civilization. The greater the population, the lower the cultural standards and this mass production of mediocrity saps the strength of the spiritual elite.  

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Civilization requires Myths, and Myths are Absurd

There’s good reason to think that the culture of any mass society depends on myths which are fictions, which is to say lies we’re too polite to identify as such because these lies achieve a higher good. But what are the implications of this hypothesis, for moderns and liberals who flatter themselves that they’re rational and not so credulous?

Myths Define Cultural Identity

Every large society is founded on myths which are fictions that collectively distort the population’s perception of reality to maintain its group cohesion. In his book, Sapiens, Harari sets forth one explanation of how these myths arose, which begins by pointing out that our social instincts were adapted to stabilizing small tribes of around 150 members. In such groups we can use gossip and memory to form social bonds, based on familiarity with each other. But the agricultural revolutions in the Neolithic Period drew masses of thousands and millions of strangers together, which created the problem of unifying these masses to prevent them from splitting into more manageable subgroups. The solution was that although in the actual world a multitude may have many reasons to split due to natural differences of race, gender, character, and opinion, belief in an alternative, fictional world could compel everyone to imagine themselves as having a single, collective identity. This solution was made possible by our large, flexible brains, which allow us to dissociate information, to mentally model possible worlds and to overlay values and counterfactual interpretations onto sense data. For millennia the myths that sustained nations and empires were religious and cosmological, instilling in the citizens their collective values, and constructing theological or philosophical justifications for them in the myth’s narratives.

A second cause of the prevalence of myths is apparent from the Handicap Principle in biology. In a context in which deception is often in creatures’ self-interest, a signal is more reliable if it’s delivered at a cost to the signaler. Thus, an animal may really be formidable if it can afford to squander its strength on ostentatious displays. For example, the male peacock signals to the female that it’s a worthy mate, by finding a way to cope with its gaudy and comically-oversized tail feathers. (This has given rise to the term “peacocking” in the game of pickup artists.) In the same way, conspicuous consumption indicates that the consumer has money to waste on frivolous and often self-destructive entertainments. And whereas our imagination and reasoning may be geared to planning on how to exploit regularities in the natural environment, to increase the chance of our survival under the condition of nature’s indifference towards us, a decadent population finds itself able to squander these mental resources by entertaining outlandish scenarios and having them colour its perception of reality. Thus, the more absurd the myth, the greater the population’s apparent willpower. A foreigner might be led to think, “They can afford to believe the most errant nonsense without dying of embarrassment, so their group cohesion must be superhuman.”

This leads to a third root of our large-scale reality distortion, which is that the more counterfactual the cultural narrative, the greater the test of an individual’sfaith in the collective identity. A classic example of this is Tertullian’s boast that he believes the Christian creed becauseit’s absurd. The fideistic rationalization of that faith would be that a doctrine’s absurdity may be a sign of its supernatural, transcendent origin. Similarly, Saint Paul said that the wisdom of the natural world is foolishness to God, and Jesus is alleged to have said that we must be childlike to enter the kingdom of God. These would be rationalizations, of course, not epistemically worthy justifications of faith, because not every childlike act of avoiding the natural world need be a sign of some connection to a supernatural reality. Even if there were some higher realm that we could access only nonrationally, many nonrational expressions may be merely insane or serving the purpose of a fraud, as in the case of cults, for example.

An unsettling implication of this hypothesis, that every large population holds itself together by suspending disbelief in a cultural fiction, is that even the so-called modern, secular West depends on myths in that respect. As Harari also points out, these secular myths are economic and political rather than explicitly theological or cosmological. Since the Renaissance, Westerners have trusted in science, capitalism, liberalism, and above all in individualism. We believe individuals should be free to decide how they should live, and that scientific exploration and capitalistic struggle for private profit are progressive. In The Age of Insanity, Schumaker distinguishes between modernity in general and the Western, American-led form of it. Modernity after the Scientific Revolution he characterizes as “a postindustrial order whose primary features are commodification, consumption, social marginality, technological encroachment, amplified organizational power, homogenized drives and tastes, deregulation of volition and emotion, incomprehensible abstract systems, simultaneous communication, and the shift toward reflexive knowledge.” The values of the Western form of modernization are “personal autonomy, self-reliance, future orientation, a strong appetite for change, capitalistic heroism, and success-mindedness.”

But there’s another implication, which Harari doesn’t consider, which is that because these myths are fictions, they’re necessarily preposterous when viewed from an outsider’s vantage point. Unless you identify with the characters in a work of fiction, the fiction will seem merely counterproductive to the extent that it departs from the pressing features of the apparent world. The greater the author’s license to misrepresent the facts or to imagine a farfetched alternative, the more absurd the story will seem and thus the harder it will be for a foreigner to avoid ridiculing the believers for entertaining their bizarre worldview. When you emotionally identify with the characters, you share an identity with them which allows for cathartic release or for collective action. But when your values are based on your commitment to a myth that monopolizes your emotions, so that you can’t spare empathy for the plight of the mythical characters that bedazzle the foreigners, you’re disposed to belittle the mob that succumbs to that foreign piece of fan fiction. Moreover, in so far as you can be sociologically objective about allsuch myths, including the domestic ones, you can find yourself an alienated outsider to humanity in general, so that the conventional way of life that happens right in your midst will likewise seem as absurd as the one you’d find in a remote land or time.

Medieval European Absurdity

To see this, let’s compare how Westerners view the medieval Christian mindset and behaviour, with how an objective future historian might regard Western modernity. It’s commonplace for us to mock not just medieval peasants for their astounding ignorance, but also the priesthood and medieval intellectuals in Europe for their lack of originality, that is, for their dogmatism. Although our understanding of the period has been influenced by rationalist propaganda, medieval Christianity is still palpably absurd from our vantage point. Racism and sexism weren’t just nurtured in secret suspicions of others’ inferiority; ideological hatred motivated horrific collective action in the barbarities of the witch trials, pogroms, crusades, and inquisitions.

It seems impossible even to speak now of the medieval practices of conducting full trials of animals, including pigs, horses, rats, and even insects, and of often executing the accused on that preposterous basis, without feeling condescending pity for the childlike naivety of those involved centuries ago. From Wikipedia:

Animal defendants appeared before both church and secular courts, and the offences alleged against them ranged from murder to criminal damage. Human witnesses were often heard and in Ecclesiastical courts they were routinely provided with lawyers…If convicted, it was usual for an animal to be executed, or exiled. However, in 1750, a female donkey was acquitted of charges of bestiality due to witnesses to the animal's virtue and good behaviour while her human co-accused were sentenced to death.

The lunacy which passed for normality in that period extends to the fact that these “trials” were “part of a broader phenomenon that saw corpses and inanimate objects also face prosecution.” Needless to say, animals considered “familiars” of witches were burned at the stake along with the witches.

Comedians often use logic in their rational presentation of an absurdity, to help the audience suspend its disbelief for the sake of having a laugh. That is, a comedian might begin from a silly premise and follow through with a dramatic telling of what would logically happen next in the possible world in which that premise were actualized. With that in mind, the medieval animal trials seem now as if the witnesses, lawyers, and judges were staging a comedy: their assumptions were absurd, since even if animals had moral agency, they lack the means to communicate with us, not to mention a shared culture with their accusers, so that they couldn’t hope to understand the trial. But the medieval folks went to great lengths to put those assumptions into practice. Yet those folks were obviously not acting as comedians. Their myths and superstitions supplied them with a cultural identity, but those fictions had the byproduct of causing the population not just to detach from reality, but to land itself in what seem to us—having no cultural investment in those ancestors—like so many epic failures. Some of these trials were meant to assuage the guilt of peasants for killing what they deemed to be God’s creatures, as in the case of a French bishop’s order of “three days of daily processions where the slugs were told to leave the area or be cursed, thus making them free game for extermination.” Still, this only pushes the absurdity back a step. How bizarre must their beliefs have been for the peasants to have been able to feel less guilty about killing slugs when the slugs were merely cursed in an ecclesiastical ruling!

Imagine witnessing the plight of the pig that was put on trial for damaging property, or that of the rat that was tried and executed for running across the floor and upsetting a woman. These animals would have been just as clueless about what was happening to them as they are when they’re fed to be slaughtered or are killed by rat traps. But if a time traveler visited one of those animal trials, she would likely have felt that the practice was unseemly, because morally innocent creatures were roped into an insane conspiracy by deranged, self-righteous fools who must have congratulated themselves on their Christian virtue, for giving those animal “criminals” the benefit of the doubt. The practice was enabled by theological dualism, which was needed to justify the religious faith in an afterlife despite the body’s decay. If immaterial spirits are responsible for personhood, the physical difference between species is irrelevant and so a pig or a rat could be just as noble or as evil as a human.Liberal Westerners after the Enlightenment don’t share those medieval assumptions and so can scarcely believe that anyone could take them so seriously as to have engaged in such madness.

To take another example, Jews were demonized because some ancient, cherry-picked scriptures scapegoated them to curry favour with the Roman Empire, depicting Jews as those most responsible for failing to appreciate the god in their midst, Jesus Christ. And so Jews were murdered by Christians throughout Church history. Even Shakespeare demonized them. Again, Judaism can be rationally criticized, but here we’re talking about the necessary absurdity of how it will seem when a myth motivates a population to dissociate from reality, to act as though the fiction that emotionally binds the masses were worthy of being taken so seriously even when the myth is plainly fanciful.

Modern Western Absurdity

What’s shocking is that on the foregoing analysis, our secular culture must be capable of being perceived as being just as ludicrous as medieval Christianity (or as any ancient or foreign culture in its peculiar myth-ladenness). This can be tested if we manage to de-familiarize ourselves with our culture, perhaps by some rhetorical trick, so that we come to feel that same twinge of condescension—except now for our neighbours and for our encultured selves. We should be able to find a striking example of any of the features that Schumaker picks out (quoted above) and then imagine how that behaviour would strike someone who doesn’t share our culture. But let’s take just modernity’s fixation on abstract systems. This is a carryover of scientists’ use of artificial languages for the sake of greater precision in their predictions and calculations. The symbols in natural languages have intuitive, metaphorical undertones, and thus are counterproductive when the goal is to objectify and to quantify some phenomenon. Abstract systems dominate in the bureaucratic jargon of businesses and governments, in the dehumanizing rhetoric of militaries, and in the mass production of merchandise.

Take, for example, Big Agriculture’s practice of torturing millions upon millions of domesticated beasts to cut down on the costs of feeding pampered, short-sighted consumers such as you and me. Pig farmers keep sows in isolated gestation crates that are so small, the sows can’t turn around. The female pigs spend their entire life in these steel crates, except for the brief periods twice a year when they give birth. Whereas medieval peasants had no conception of the brain’s importance to the mind, biologists today understand that pigs are highly intelligent and social animals, so that we have no such excuse for failing to realize that not being able to turn around or interact with other pigs must constitute torture for those animals.

Thus, while the peasants personified pigs by trying them in court for imagined criminal offenses, we sophisticated modern folk imprison and torture pigs because our myths enable us to regard the animals as machines whose suffering serves a greater good. Medievals thought in terms of divinely-mandated hierarchies, of Creation as being governed by a benevolent deity so that no subject could be divorced from moral evaluation. Everything served God’s purpose, including the devil who badly miscalculated that he could rebel and establish an independent order of being, according to the myth. By contrast, moderns assume there’s no such overarching moral order, nor any immaterial life forces, so that all that remains are natural mechanisms, some of which add up to living things. As this Slate article points out, medievals “saw aspects of animal behavior that we don’t see anymore,” because they lived daily with animals, whereas consumer societies delegate farming to huge corporations that serve not God’s laws but the capitalistic imperative to struggle greedily to maximize profit. The gestation crates are kept from public view, so that most moderns never see living pigs. All we care about are the products we pay for, the bacon and hamburgers and ribs. Thus, we deride the medievals for their naivety in treating animals as though the animals’ behaviours were morally relevant, for going as far as to prosecute them for criminal offenses. But our callousness and cowardice involved in keeping the torture of livestock out of sight and mind must be just as bewildering from an alien perspective. Christian theology is gratuitous in its disregard of natural facts, but so is the modern penchant for abstract systems which blinds us to the anomalousness and thus the preciousness of life.

Living pigs are not really objects or machines; they’re just mistreated as such by faceless corporations that compartmentalize unpleasant truths. For example, no report on bacon profits in a Big Agra office will refer by name to the individual pigs which that corporation owns. Instead, the livestock will be quantified by an abstract system of calculating materials, costs, outputs, and the like. Perhaps the pigs are assigned a numerical designation. The sow’s happiness would matter to the food producers or consumers only if the moral question entered into our individual concerns—because as moderns, we’re individualists who worship our autonomy. If profit can be maximized by ignoring the sow’s unhappiness, because her ability to socialize doesn’t affect the number of piglets she can produce, and if the squalid state of corporate pig farms can be kept from public view, on the grounds of private property, to avoid a boycott, the moral question becomes irrelevant for capitalistic purposes. And if modernity is defined by the myth that capitalism matters more than traditional spirituality, the inhumane practice of torturing millions of animals for the mass production of food will continue as though we needn’t be ashamed of it, just as the practice of animal trials persisted for centuries because the medievals didn’t know better.

Moreover, if consumers can ignore the fact that to furnish us with our cushy modern lifestyle, most wild animal species have had to be exterminated (due to encroaching human habitation and industries), leaving mainly the domesticated, tortured animals, so that the bacon’s taste isn’t tainted by unwanted knowledge, we consumers will perpetuate the disparity between how the world really is and how it seems to us, given our ideological filter. The disparity is more unseemly in the modern case, because we have only false consciousness, not wholesale ignorance to enable the dissociation that sustains our myth-laden practice. We know that pain and pleasure are matters of biology, not immaterial spirit, and being individualists we glorify personhood as the pinnacle of natural creation, even though we must differ from animals only by degree. Thus, the fact that we consumers indirectly torture millions of sentient creatures, by demanding their meat for food and by participating in a neoliberal society that prioritizes economic evaluations must be as sad and grotesque as the medieval’s childlike ignorance, although in our encultured mindframe we can’t appreciate the absurdity.

Myth-Making in Politics

This assessment of the cost of social unity can be applied to the mystery of Trumpism. Liberals wonder how Republicans can afford to lie with so little shame, but liberals thereby miss the point of authoritarian propaganda. As one author puts it in the New York Times, the goal of such propaganda is “to sketch out a consistent system that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups. It is openly intended to distort reality, partly as an expression of the leader’s power” (my emphasis). If Democrats are more loathe than Trumpian Republicans to publicly stray from a literal reading of facts, this shows only that Republicans operate at a meta-level of myth-making. Liberals are beholden to the Enlightenment-era myths about the individual’s sovereignty through rational self-control, while Republicans understand that politics isn’t a science but an exercise in maintaining social unity through the cultivation of a mass fiction. What Trump is doing is bypassing feminized, obsolete liberal myths and reframing American social issues in terms of authoritarian fantasies that spring from his gut reaction to the anecdotes he comes across in his binges on late night television. Instead of creating his religion in the traditional manner, by sojourning in the desert like Jesus or on the mountaintop like Moses, Trump aggregates the upshot of infotainments that bubble up to the surface of social media. The result may be an uglier, regressive American self-image that befits that country’s lesser standing in a multipolar world. In any case, the fact that Trump doesn’t attempt to hide the political process of fictionalizing daily events to unify the public is itself evidence for the above analysis. Trump’s motives aren’t selfless, but the public nevertheless needs an imaginary collective identity to avoid brutalizing the strangers next door at the slightest grievance.

What’s more, though, the liberal reaction to Trump’s audacity is likewise evidence that Trump opposes a received myth to which liberals are unwittingly enthralled. The conventional wisdom is that political leaders should be honest and rational, because democracy, like capitalism, is meritocratic. In a free society, we strive to better ourselves, taking advantage of opportunities to gain knowledge, and politicians and businesspeople will be modest managers whose power is reined in by the voters or shareholders. That so-called wisdom is mythical and fantastic. In reality, the chance to exercise power over others attracts not the best but the worst members of society, namely psychopaths. Decent individuals would abhor the opportunity to dominate others, fearing that such a temptation would naturally corrupt their character. Meanwhile, zealots with the most ambition who leap at the chance to “serve” the nation or the market are actually the most likely to be inwardly monstrous. Outwardly, these “leaders” will be attractive, since the electoral and promotional processes are superficial, but ethically the winners will be disproportionately predatory or parasitic.

Now Trump represents a backlash against that liberal convention. The “elites” and the “establishment” are blamed for double-crossing the middleclass, which they’ve done non-stop since Ronald Reagan was president. Trump won’t address the problems of globalization or automation, since there are no political or economic solutions to them. A technological miracle will save the bulk of humanity or there will be a wave of neo-Luddite slaughter and all-out war against the top one percent. But what Trump is clearly trying to do is to reframe American culture to lend the white male have-nots some self-respect. Trump’s fantasies and lies and spins are laughable, but that’s irrelevant since every culture is laughable, being a practically-necessary mass fiction that requires the believers’ suspension of disbelief. Liberal faith in democratic and capitalistic institutions is also laughable. As this article explains, these institutions are currently in the business of putting most humans out of work. Robots are taking over—and not just in science fiction. Liberals want to raise the minimum wage and improve education to ensure the masses have good jobs, but those measures are obsolete and even counterproductive. Raising the minimum wage, for example, will escalate the outsourcing of jobs not to foreigners but to machines that work for free.

Trump is an abomination, but so is civilization which condemns us to lie to each other. Trump is only exploiting the depravities of a social order that’s operated on principles first devised twelve thousand years ago. The leaders must lie to the masses, and those lies must be captivating so that the masses will beg for more. The alternative is to stare reality in the face with no protection by way of self-serving myths. That existential confrontation is deathly and suitable only for the marginalized. Mass society itself is possible only if the majority is put to bed by a lullaby, otherwise called the myth that defines the population’s cultural identity. Liberals are free to oppose and to ridicule Trump, but they shouldn’t pretend that myth-making is unknown to politics, because that gives their game away and makes them look foolish in turn.

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Clash of Worldviews: The Meaning of Trumpism

MODERATOR: Good evening and welcome back to Clash of Worldviews, the show in which we try to get to the bottom of big issues. You may have heard that President-Elect Donald Trump is a charlatan and an ogre, and that Hillary Clinton is crooked and phony. But Trump’s election has cast doubt on so much of our conventional wisdom that we’re still wondering—as though lost in a wasteland—just what the true meaning of Trump’s election might be. To help answer that question, we’ve asked Adam Garnett, famed liberal humanist and Hillary Clinton supporter, and Fred Gulpa, a Donald Trump supporter and self-described member of the alt-right to be with us to discuss the matter. Gentlemen, who would like to begin? What is Trumpism all about? 

ADAM: In a word, Trump is about himself, while his supporters are about having a laugh at the country’s expense. They’re not downtrodden, these older white working class folks; they’re just venting because they’ve fared badly under globalization, they know the days of exclusive white power or imperialism are over, and they mean to take the country down with them. If they can’t rule any longer like they used to in the first half of the last century, they’re going to pollute the discourse with their vulgarity and send a bull into the china shop.

FRED: So “they’re not downtrodden,” but they’ve also “fared badly under globalization”? Which is it, I wonder? You see how the elites can’t even think straight? No wonder they were ripe for being humiliated by Trump and by the rise of the alt-right!

ADAM: I meant that these Trumpists have benefited from governmental support. They’re part of the middle class, but they’d like to blow up the social system, thus committing collective suicide by voting against their economic interest. Trump, in other words, isn’t an expression of revolt against the powers that be. Instead, he’s a rogue power, an agent of anarchy.

FRED: Keep telling yourself that, Adam! Keep patting yourself on the back. You’re one of the good guys, right? Not some useful idiot to plutocrats.

ADAM: And who are you, Freddy? What vile hate speech will you treat us to this evening? I can hardly wait to plug my ears.

FRED: Yeah, because you’re a feminized liberal who can’t stomach the naked truth. You think Trump’s supporters are all morons and only liberals have reason on their side. That’s where you’re wrong. Many of Trump’s voters aren’t highly educated, but that doesn’t make them stupid. Just look at what foolishness was wrought by Clinton’s neoliberal class of professionals: they’re the Ivy Leaguers but they got it all wrong. Their polls, their history lessons, their self-serving analyses were so many paper tigers squashed by the juggernaut Trump. You think Hillary Clinton deserved to win, because she was the more rational and responsible candidate. That’s what that euphemism was about: Trump supposedly lacked “the demeanor to be president.” But you know what Hillary Clinton lacked? An honest bone in her body. She couldn’t speak the unpopular truth to the public and she lost because hardly anyone trusted that she would change the United States for the better.

ADAM: And what will Trump do? Wave his magic wand and make American great again? Is that supposed to be some profound truth he told?

FRED: Trump doesn’t speak in fancy academic double-talk. I’ll grant you that. His language is seldom precise, but the essence of his diagnosis was highly negative and thus accurate. Trump’s view of America’s standing in the world is apocalyptic, as even the Democrats pointed out. Maybe Trump exaggerates for rhetorical effect, but his main point is that the United States isn’t doing well on the whole. That’s the truth that Hillary Clinton couldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, because she had to own Obama’s legacy. The public no longer respects the system, they were disappointed by Obama who ran falsely as a change candidate, and they wanted a leader from outside the corrupt establishment who would at least have a fighting chance of effecting radical change.

ADAM: Who is supposed to benefit from Trump’s administration? Surely you don’t mean the older blue collar whites who have been misled by Republicans for decades. Surely you’re aware that the Republicans have used social wedge issues to stir up animosities and compel these folks to vote against their economic interest. Surely you understand that trickle-down economics just further enriches the top one percent while everyone else falls further behind, that a smaller government with fewer taxes gets out of the way only of giant corporations which are already as powerful as some entire countries, but that the little guy may need government support if he’s going to survive globalization.

FRED: But he’s notgoing to survive globalization. Again, that’s the sort of dark truth you don’t want to hear. The system that maintains the economic status quo is rigged against him. That’s the system that Obama and Hillary defend as the technocratic managers they are. That’s the system we want Trump to destroy. 

ADAM: And your street smarts are supposed to enable you to divine the contents of Trump’s mind? When you psychically peer into its depths, how do you get past the boatload of mental disorders to discover his true intentions?

FRED: Oh, is Trump unfit to attend one of your dinner parties? Is he too coarse for polite company? And that would be the company of smug liberal professionals like you, the company of system managers and consumers who boast that they’re “progressive” when the system they’re upholding is impoverishing billions, enslaving or exterminating all nonhuman animal species, and destroying the planet.

ADAM: When did alt-right conservatives become tree-huggers?

FRED: I’m not opposed to eating meat. But I am disgusted with Big Agriculture. We should be upstanding men and women who earn what we have. If you want to eat meat, go out and hunt; be sustainable in your way of life. Don’t be a sissy who whines when you discover there are bad chemicals in the plastic-covered beef you buy at the supermarket.

ADAM: So now you want a sustainableway of life? What happened to Trump blowing up the system?

FRED: There’s no contradiction there: it’s the global system of crony capitalism that’s unsustainable, so it has to be destroyed to give us a chance to put something else in its place.

ADAM: And do you really think Trump will destroy the system that he admits to having gamed for decades to enrich himself?

FRED: I’m not a psychic or a prophet. I don’t know what Trump will do as president. But we’re not talking about Trump. We’re talking about Trumpism. The meaning of Trump is that he rose to power on a wave of resentment against the neoliberal social order.

ADAM: Resentment against social progress, you mean. Trump ascended thanks to a global backlash fuelled by churlish contempt for foreigners who threaten whites’ narcissistic, nationalist delusions of grandeur. You don’t want to share power with blacks, gays, or Muslims, so you empowered a regressive champion, like they’re doing in Europe.

FRED: Minorities and women have played the race card and identity politics for several decades now, but when white men stand up for themselves they’re being racists and misogynists? That’s a tiresome double standard.

ADAM: Yeah, it’s double because there are two things there. Blacks were literally slaves under whites, and women were oppressed in patriarchies around the world for millennia. White men benefited from those inequities, so now they’re not just “standing up for themselves”; they’re trying to reinstitute imperialist power structures.

FRED: Your beef then is with nature. You think we progress by departing from what’s natural, but that bit of liberal humanism is as delusional as belief in a sky-god with a white beard. Nature is filled with inequalities. Men aren’t the same as women, and races aren’t culturally or even biologically all the same. These are some more of those dark truths that terrify liberals.

ADAM: Races aren’t biologically the same, eh? So we’re back to the quackery that drove fascism in the Second World War?

FRED: Tell me, then, why wouldthe races be biologically the same? What would make them identical, overriding the genes that cause different skin colours, for example? You sound like Isaac Newton who assumed God must be holding the orbits in place, preventing planets from falling into the sun.

ADAM: Liberals don’t think races and sexes are identical. Obviously men and women have different physical characteristics, and blacks and whites, for example, have different skin colours. The point, rather, is that all people should be held in equal regard, the physical differences between them being irrelevant to their human rights.

FRED: That’s the liberal myth alright. But there are no human rights, you know. That’s a fiction we’ve been telling ourselves in the modern world, to replace the old religious stories that rationalized how we thought the world should be. You may prefer to treat men and women the same, but that civic religious dogma of yours is currently backfiring. When men treat women the same way they treat men, for example, that’s unromantic. Even if women are too politically correct or clouded by feminist platitudes to call metrosexual men on it, they won’t appreciate that sort of equal treatment. It’s boring and unsatisfying to them. That’s why their soap opera daydreams and romance novels tell a very different story. A woman wants a world to correspond to her fantasies in which a heroic man sweeps her off her feet.

ADAM: I’m pretty sure women have been clamouring also for equal pay for equal work.

FRED: Sure they have, because like children they don’t know what’s best for them. It’s in their best interest to be led by strong men. They may think they want to do men’s dirty work in business and politics and the like, and perhaps some women are exceptions and that’s what they truly want. But many feminists are lying to themselves and only pretending to be content with modernity. And I note again the shadiness of this talk of equality: the flip side of human rights is our domination of other species, which will lead to our downfall.

ADAM: Authoritarian men like Trump may prefer sheepish women, just as white bullies may presume that the white race has a manifest destiny to rule the planet while so-called inferior races are doomed to languish under the whip. But these are atrocious stereotypes, not dark empirical truths as you would have us believe.

FRED: They’re truer to nature than is your liberal humanistic happy-talk! You have to be blind and deaf in a bubble of political correctness to think the races are all the same. Think of races as breeds. We breed dogs or horses and we prize pure breeds, the ones that best display the characteristics of their type. A mutt, by contrast, is a dog with mixed blood and muddled traits that don’t allow it to excel in a particular environment. Natural selection works the same way, so when we interbreed as humans, we pollute our gene pool and lose the traits and skills required to excel or even to survive. 

ADAM: There’s just one problem with that bit of eugenics: natural selection doesn’t work the way same way on our species, because we’re not mere animals. Animals are slave to their programming, but people are self-aware and autonomous. That’s why blacks can be enslaved for generations, but an African-American can still be educated and can rise to become President of the United States. Likewise, a woman such as Hillary Clinton can study at Yale and Oxford and become as qualified as any man for that same position. As individuals we can defy our programming and our “blood,” and that’s the source of our equality: we have the equal potential to excel as free beings, liberated from the natural laws that rule over the animal kingdom. But your throwback rhetoric would have certain out-groups regress and be treated as animals so they can be conquered by a so-called exceptional class, by the “power elites.”

FRED: You establishment liberals need to listen more closely to the progressives you’ve ignored. Bernie Sanders and leftists such as Thomas Frank, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi recognize that there are power elites and plutocrats who run so-called democracies behind the scenes. I agree that humans have greater self-control than animals. But our freedom isn’t supernatural and it can be overcome by the environment. Look at what happened since the advent of Neolithic farming: we became sedentary and formed unequal, hierarchical societies—regardless of the culture or style of politics. Democracy is based on the assumption that voters have equal rights, but the ancient Greeks understood that democracies devolve, because demagogues arise, whip up mass resentments, and establish a tyranny of the majority. So instead of one from many, as it says on the American seal, we have inequality from equality. The clash between Democrats and Republicans this election cycle was between different economic classes vying for power, but because Trump is a far superior demagogue, he was able to energize his base and get them to vote for radical change. Despite Clinton’s superb self-control and intellectual heft, her voters were uninspired by her tired rhetoric. So where then was our vaunted equality? Our nonrational side got the better of us, and the more beastly class—the white older males and blue collar workers—took political power from the demoralized and decadent millennials and liberal professionals.

ADAM: So what’s your solution to this imperfect state of modern democracy? Elect the most egregious demagogue possible on a wing and a prayer that you just might be left standing after he hurls us all into the apocalypse?

FRED: You still don’t understand. The apocalypse is all around us; it’s been there since the beginning. It’s the state of nature. All human efforts are taken on a wing and prayer. We delude ourselves into thinking that we’re supernatural agents, free from natural processes so that we can forge our path in the wilderness. And being the hypocrites we are, we condemn out-groups who are likewise as deluded by their myths which are unfamiliar to us. You say the alt-right demonizes minorities and other groups, but Hillary Clinton was quick to demonize the alt-right as a “basket of deplorables.” Instead of exercising our autonomy and empathizing with others, we circle the wagons, applauding our tribe and howling at our opponents—just like a troop of monkeys. Instead of listening to what the alt-right is saying, liberals cherry-pick unflattering quotations from this or that website, and thus still don’t understand what the election was really about and why they lost to Trumpism.

ADAM: I know what the alt-right is about. It’s the Frankenstein monster created by the Republican establishment, including Fox News; it’s the set of wedge issues that kept the Republican base in line until the Great Recession unleashed the Tea Party which morphed into the birther movement, joining forces with a thousand conspiracy cliques on the internet, whether it be Alex Jones’ Infowars, the 911 Truthers, the pickup artists, the videogamers, and even the white supremacists. The alt-right is a form of conservatism that speaks to the underclass rather than to “the establishment” or to the wealthy managers of the Republican infrastructure. Instead of the neoliberal, globalist myths peddled by the New York Times and the like—the myths of the free market and of entrepreneurialism, upward mobility, and the need to get the government off our backs—you have the more vulgar myths that sprouted in the dark alleyways of the internet such as 4chan and Reddit.

FRED: Your analysis is incomplete, because the backlash against neoliberalism is global. The internet merely allows for freer communication. So we had Occupy Wall Street and then the Arab Spring, Brexit, the ascent of Putin, China, and Iran, and a rightwing insurgence across Europe. And now we have Trumpism. We use the internet to find the ideas that most interest us, but we mustn’t confuse the messenger with the message. The internet doesn’t cause hostility to free-market capitalism, globalization, and democracy; chat rooms and blogs, Facebook and Twitter merely bring that uprising to the fore. To understand Trumpism, you have to recognize the fault of liberalism, but you’re too invested in your myths to scrutinize them.

ADAM: You’re muddying the waters. Liberalism isn’t responsible for globalization, for so-called free-market economics, or for the libertarian frontier culture. Liberalism is just the modern faith that humans are obligated to be godlike, because we enlightened Westerners discovered that a nonhuman god is irrelevant and probably nonexistent. We’re free as individuals from the religious dogmas and traditions that oppressed the masses for most of our history. We have the right to self-determination, to find our own way to be happy as long as we don’t interfere with other people’s equal right to the same. The U.S. Declaration of Independence is a classic liberal document.

FRED: Sure, that’s where liberalism starts, in the ideal of self-determination, because the rational individual must take over for the old gods we’ve left behind. But the institutions of capitalism and democracy arise from that ideal. “Let the individual sellers and buyers select their prices and what to produce or purchase.” “Let the voters choose their political representatives.” We invest power in all of us, because we worship ourselves after the death of God. But look what happens to liberal economies and governments. Monopolies, oligopolies, and plutocracies emerge, and the wealthy exercise their unequal power to entrench their privileges, manipulating the laws to their advantage and going round and round the revolving door between the private and public sectors so that the majority falls far behind with stagnant wages and no political power. And when developing countries adopt the neoliberal Washington Consensus, we have a global competition and a race to the bottom for the sake of private profit, further hurting the chances of millions of Americans to “find their own way to be happy.”  

ADAM: But the irony here is appalling! The so-called Washington Consensus was established mainly by Republicans. Free market ideology grew out of right-wing, libertarian think-tanks.

FRED: Then how do you explain Bill Clinton’s NAFTA trade deal or his repeal of Glass-Steagall?

ADAM: Clinton had to triangulate to outmaneuver the Republican-led congress.

FRED: No, that’s a pitiful excuse. The Clintons and other Democratic leaders are one with establishment Republicans in their neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is just a name for the bipartisan consensus that’s based on the sacrosanct classic liberal ideal of individual freedom. Bill Clinton was indoctrinated into neoliberalism under Carroll Quigley at Georgetown University, subsequently influencing his wife and thus another leader of the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama adopted the cutthroat, careerist culture of neoliberalism at Harvard Law School and was further indoctrinated by the neoliberal establishment figures he had picked for some reason to fill out his economics cabinet (I’m referring to Jaimie Rubin, Geithner, and Summers). What do these Democratic leaders have in common? They’re fatalistic about the powers that be, so that these neoliberal Democrats conclude that only incremental, not radical social change is possible. They take a neutral, “scientific,” hands-off, “no-drama” perspective on world affairs, seeing themselves as mere technocratic managers, because the system is already in place and functioning as it should. The system in question is capitalistic and democratic: it spread from Britain in the Industrial Revolution to the United States and then to other parts of the world. Liberalism was almost defeated by Nazi and Soviet ideologies, but the West won out and the American way of life is supposed to stand now as the goal for all humanity, the United States being the indispensible, exceptional nation that can do no wrong. That’s what all the American power elites believe on both the left and the right. Except they’re wrong and there’s both domestic and foreign revolts against neoliberalism, that is, against the American forms of capitalism and democracy which enrich the few at the expense of the many and which even play out as stage-managed hoaxes. A 2014 study showed that America is plutocratic, not democratic, because most voters’ interests never get translated into public policy; their representatives heed the directives only of their wealthy donors and patrons.

ADAM: Well, allow me to introduce an alternative interpretation. Again, it’s rich hearing this radical progressivism from an extreme right-winger. This looks to me rather like a cynical act of rebranding. After Obama was elected, the Republicans tried being friendlier to minorities, to address the demographic realities which must be unsettling to proponents of the trusty Southern Strategy. But that didn’t work, because the Tea Party took over the Republican Party, casting out the moderates and leaving Republicans with Trump whose crudities can’t be papered over. So there’s a new strategy: excuse alt-right radicalism by blaming it on the left, by pretending Trump is just like Bernie Sanders.

FRED: Your academic labels are unhelpful since they have you looking at the trees so you can’t see the whole forest. Progressives and the alt-right do have something in common: they’re both radical! They’ve both been shut out of the mainstream American discourse, so now the corporate media are scrambling to find labels to box us in, to normalize and co-opt us, to shut down the revolution and protect their privileged positions. Trump was elected precisely because of his vulgarity, because out of all the nominees and candidates, he was seen to have by far the greatest chance of being a genuine outsider who will destroy the establishment, who will drain the swamp, as he put it. That was the aim of the voters who mattered most this election, to subvert the neoliberal social order, to embarrass the power elites but also to rollback globalization, free trade, and the culture of stifling political correctness.

ADAM: Good luck with all that! The most likely outcome of this revolt will be its signaling that America has already declined past the point of easy retrieval. Cynics are lashing out but they have no idea how to solve our real problems, so the election of Trump is a symptom, not a cure for our disordered culture. Trump will probably succeed only in humiliating all Americans. At least he’ll entertain us, the way the violinists kept playing as the Titanic sank.

FRED: And when progressives are evidently so demoralized that they speak of the end of American greatness, you know you’ve got them beat.

ADAM: I’m just observing that this rightwing backlash against globalization is futile, because the heroes you’re electing, whether in Britain or here in the U.S., are actually bumbling imbeciles or charlatans who can’t govern a child’s birthday party let alone a superpowerful nation. What happens when a horde of troglodytes storms the battlements? Does it create a shining new world order or is nature using that manifest barbarism to wipe us all out? Sorry, but a businessman with the early advantages Trump had, who went bankrupt several times and is now hiding his true net worth by not releasing his tax returns doesn’t inspire much confidence that even if he could run the country the way he ran his businesses, our fate would be in good hands. But don’t worry: when Trump wrecks our economy the way he wrecked his businesses, it will be the Democrats who pick up the pieces. And bless the short memory of troglodytes, since that will prevent them from feeling the shame they ought to feel for having disgraced themselves with this reckless course of action. Indeed, they’ll have disgraced themselves before their white male forebears who were the classic liberals of early modernity, who were ingenious and highly creative renaissance men. Donald Trump is no renaissance man.

MODERATOR: That will have to be the last word for now. I’d like to thank our guests for their stimulating exchange on the meaning of Trumpism. Tune in next for a reading of the tea leaves of Trump’s latest tweet. 

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