The Great Divide

The big split today isn’t between Left and Right. So what is it?

I often say: we’re orphans of modernity. In this short essay, I want to explain why. I’m going to suggest that the big split in the world today isn’t between Left and Right: it is a rift that is deeper, cut by a blade that was sharper, yawning across a chasm darker and wider. And further, that unless we begin to see beyond “left” and “right”, we can’t even see that rift — let alone fix it.

LOL. I know. That’s a mouthful only Nerdzilla could love. Let me try and make all that a little more intuitive.

Modernity was founded on a truly radical set of freedoms. I will call these the freedoms of self. Just a few short decades ago, people didn’t have these freedoms. You had to wear (often by law) the clothes of the social stratum you were born into, express yourself in severely restricted ways, have intimate relationships only in narrowly legally approved ways, speak in acceptable ways. You were not free to be yourself. Until modernity happened.

Let me paint you a picture of the golden age of modernity. Pierre Cardin’s dramatic, severe, linear fashion held a bigger promise than merely looking futuristic: it let everyone challenge their assigned place, caste, stratum in society. Self-expression as social revolution. Rothko’s art promised that the everyman could have a glimmer of the experience of spiritual transcendence — that one did not need to be a long-suffering religious acolyte to know it: you might call that spiritual freedom. Sexual freedom, of course, which exploded in the 1960s, liberated people from the stifling restrictions of bourgeois morality. The sudden freedom to choose, consumer society, a thousand flavors of toothpaste at every store, promised us an endless cornucopia, instant convenience, a touch of glamour.

What was the point of the freedoms of the self? Human potential. The entire point of the modern project was to liberate people’s potential. To give them the power to become themselves. And in that regard, modernity was the most radical and dangerous project in human history. For nearly every other current of social thought in history has failed to imagine that people might even hold potential. Whether feudalism or fascism or mercantile slavery, all systems before modernity relegated people to being serfs, vassals, peasants, servants. Not agents who had to create the world — merely those who knew their place in it. Not human beings in the true sense of the word, with the need and obligation to create lives seared with meaning, happiness, and purpose.

Modernity held a great and noble promise. In my eyes, history’s greatest. Not the revolution of the proletariat, or the masses, or the people, or the slaves. The revolution of the self.

But the central problem in the world today is this: modernity’s quiet revolution did not live up to its promise. Consider a portrait of those same freedoms today. Freedom of speech today means something more like getting endless abuse and violent threats on Twitter…while spy agencies quietly record everything you say. Art today isn’t Rothko’s incendiary search for spiritual meaning…it’s Jeff Koons’ factory assistants making gigantic toys for oligarchs to launder their money with. Sexual freedom has degenerated into an ritual of Kafkaesque identity trials…or Spring Break, take your pick. It means endlessly dissecting and memorizing mind-numbing jargon like “androgynosexual” on tumblr…or frat parties…and in all that what is lost is discovering the shattering power of intimacy. Freedom of expression today isn’t the fundamentally revolutionary act of challenging your place in society…it’s liking Kardashian butts on Instagram. It is an act of support for dynastic neofeudalism, that enforces plastic conformity to the cult of celebrity. And underlying all the above is the freedom to choose: we’re free to choose a thousand flavours of toothpaste…but only from the same three corporations…at the same two big box stores…that are sucking the life, hope, and prosperity out of the economy.

Modernity failed us. Or maybe we failed modernity. It doesn’t really matter. What does is this: modernity broke. It’s glittering promise, it’s great revolution of the self, shattered into a million pieces. And in that sudden fracture lies the great problem in the world today. Not what we are doing to it — but how we think about it, or fail to.

Here’s the problem. Instead of exploring ways through the breakdown of modernity, we are largely doing precisely the opposite: recapitulating the failed ideologies of the past.

To explain what I mean, consider a very crude portrait of thought today.

Techno utopians insist that technology will save us from modernity’s breakdown. Robots, drones, algorithms will deliver us. Yet they seem oblivious to the fact that techno utopianism is a flawed — and failed — system of belief, invalidated at every turn by history. Nuclear fission did not just create power plants — it also created the bomb. The internet didn’t just give us free speech — it also gave spy agencies the power to record everything we say. The most transformative technology of the second millennium wasn’t the book — it was the gun. And so on, as Orwell, Huxley, Gibson, Sterling, Ballard, and numerous others have recognized. Techno-utopianism is an ideology that has failed to such a degree that to be a part of it is to have surrendered critical thought entirely.

An entire generation of college students, it seems, has reverted to Cultural Marxism. Ask them about their guiding social beliefs, and they will insist on abstruse theories of privilege and the cultural reproduction of power relations (think: bad words hurt my feelings, ergo, they are the most important things in my moral world), taught to them largely by culture studies professors divorced from the more rigorous demands of either social or hard science. But the simple fact is that Cultural Marxism, even in its heyday, did not produce a single great book, film, painting, scientific theory, technological breakthrough, or anything else of enduring value. It, too, is a catastrophically failed ideology.

Then there are the Primitivists. Consider the idea that British Muslims, to a significant degree, idealize an imaginary past of religious unity and cultural accomplishment which they were never a part of because it never existed in the first place. For example, they might imagine that “life” in Pakistan or Syria or wheverer is purer, better, holier, and used to be more so — never mind the fact that they have never really lived there. I don’t mean to single out Muslims: there are many kinds of Primitivists, from home-schooling survivalists in rural America to hipsters creating island societies within societies that fetishize craft beer and the authenticity of beards. Primitivists create archipelagos within societies, modelled on fictitious ideas of imaginary pasts. Their belief system is nostalgia as catharsis. They are not just conservatives — they are fabulists, who believe in myths of their own creation, not those of their ancestors.

Then there are the New Fascists, the New Atheists, the New Leftists. All these ideologies might seem superficially different. But the simple fact they are not. What do all they share in common? They are all recapitulations of failed ideologies. They’re “New” versions of old things — not truly new at all.

So here is the problem of thought today, in a nutshell.

Instead of pioneering paths through the breakdown of modernity, we are stuck in yesterday’s cul-de-sacs and dead ends. Dead ends of thought, being, organizing, knowing. Today we are not creating the future — we are merely recapitulating history.

And who can blame us? To be orphaned is not just painful — it is deeply traumatic. It is not just the suffering of a flesh wound — it is the breaking of a invisible bone, which may never heal straight and true. The bone of the spirit. The traumatized being will defend itself viciously, for it must place safety above all. It has been taught that to do otherwise is to risk great harm, hurt, irreversible misfortune. And there is safety in the past. There is security in failure. For failure is pain, but it is not trauma. So perhaps we are recapitulating history because we are clinging, numbed by trauma, to what is safe, secure — even though we know it cannot liberate us.

And yet. That is precisely what it means to have a broken spirit. To place the safety of numbness above the possibility of suffering. To heal our very broken spirits needs a higher purpose. The need to create the future — whether or not the fates damn us for it, and the gods punish us for it. For in the safety of failure lies only stagnation, decay, and futility.

We are nihilists with broken spirits, orphaned by modernity. And in this regard, both left and right — or the million fragments they are breaking up into, fractured by the breakdown of modernity — are the same. Both left and right believe in largely the same things. Growth over prosperity, “data” over meaning, success before social worth, profit before wealth, identity before humanity. But these fragments of the fracture of modernity are simply little nihilisms, one and all. None believe now in the primacy and power, the urgency and necessity, the worth or weight of human potential itself.

I said that I would end this series of essays with a new political typology. So here it is. I do not think the old, post-French-revolution distinctions of “left” and “right” carry much water anymore. To think, we must reorient our approaches to politics entirely — beyond left and right, to up and down.

I will simply propose two different approaches to political thought today. The first I will call “Uppers”. Uppers don’t believe in yesterday’s “isms” — whether they are Techno-utopianism, Marxism, Primitivism — for the simple reason that they believe instead that those ”isms” have failed. They believe, instead, that the central challenge that the breakdown of modernity presents us with is creating new “isms” that can reignite human potential. In the form of new institutions, careers, jobs, roles, ideas, theories, models. Whether those “isms” are Holacracy, or Quantum Consciousness, or Post-capitalism; whether those institutions are basic income, social progress measures, or universal global education.

In opposition to “Uppers” stand “Downers”. Downers believe that the safety of approaches to human organization that are known to have failed, can, somehow, put modernity back together again. Simply put, they believe in yesterday’s “isms”, whatever those may be. Hence, Downers can be Marxists, Primitivists, Techno-utopians — it doesn’t really matter what they believe: their true underlying belief is in yesterday.

Why do I call them “Downers”? Here is the crucial point. By believing in failed “isms” they are also admitting that human potential is probably not capable of greater things than in the past. Hence, they believe maybe in “flat”, or “down” — but certainly not “up”.

The big difference in the world today isn’t between Left and Right. It’s between Up and Down. It is between those who believe in yesterday’s failed “isms” — and want to cling to them, forever safe in the cul-de-sacs and dead ends of history. And those who do not believe in yesterday’s isms — and recognize, instead, that the great challenge is creating them .We see this battle replayed everywhere, if we look carefully: between religious fundamentalists and moderates, between politicians and populations, between scientists and lobbyists, between college protestors and speakers.

I am sure by now you know where I myself stand. I am a conservative in yesterday’s terms. I believe in conserving the environment, the family, the academy, a social contract — but long before that, in conserving the history-defining idea of the human good. But I am not a “Downer”. I don’t believe that we can in fact enlarge the good by clinging to yesterday’s isms. We must instead pioneer new paths to it. New institutions, whether careers, roles, organizations, measures, models, that can ignite human potential.

Perhaps you think my typology is naive, simplistic, or shallow. It surely is. And yet we must seek both causes for now seemingly incurable stagnation — and prescriptions to heal it.

Modernity’s great heresy was to believe in the self, man standing free against church, state, tradition, culture. For only through the freedom of self could each being find what is greater than salvation, and more necessary than immortality: meaning, happiness, purpose, life. And so it was the greatest act of apostasy in human history. Yet. Today’s necessary heresy is greater still. Not just to believe in the self, but of the possibility of potential. Of invention, revolution, creativity, a higher horizon. That is what separates Uppers from Downers.

And perhaps that is modernity broke in the first place. Not because it didn’t believe in us, or we didn’t believe in it. But because, dazzled by the glittering seduction of a million perfect selves, we forgot the purpose of selfhood. Neither narcissism, nor perfection, nor perfection. But the hidden meaning the veil of self may, if and only if a life is lived fully, reveal: redemption, grace, love. That is the truest miracle of all.

Umair
London
December 2015