Why America Doesn’t Know How to Think Anymore

By now, you’ve seen the debacle — the New Yorker asked Steve Bannon to headline its Ideas Festival, and the internet exploded with rage and scorn. Good job, internet. It struck me, though, watching all this, that American thought is in something like a Dark Age. It doesn’t seem to know how to think anymore. What an idea is — or isn’t. Why ideas matter. What their purpose is. Bang! The mind of a nation winking out.

Does that seem like a strange thing to say? Like navel-gazing wankery? Perhaps, perhaps. Or maybe America’s proud, stubborn, age-old anti-intellectualism has culminated in a giant wave of imbecility proudly disguising itself as cleverness, folly masquerading as wisdom, which is one big reason why America’s in this mess. Let me explain, using the example of fascism.

Is fascism an “idea” that the world needs to be “exposed” to (as Malcolm Gladwell thinks)? The implication: that we must somehow debunk and “disprove” it, with the equivalent of rhetorical parlour games?

Fascism isn’t an idea. The most we can say is that is a failed ideology — easily history’s most catastrophic and ruinously failed one. And if we can’t say that much, we don’t know how to think at all. But if we are thinking well, it’s truer to say that fascism was never an idea at all — it is the destruction of the greatest ideas of all — and so to call it an “idea” devalues the idea of ideas. And that is ignorance of a laughable and dangerous kind. That’s subtle, maybe complex, so let me prove those points one by one.

An idea — in the genuine sense, not the casual, everyday one — is simply a theory that aspires to truth. It can be a theory about the natural world, the social world, people, or even things. But if I say “I want to break your legs”, that is not an idea. It is just an intention, a declaration, a threat, perhaps. Do you see the difference?

Now, let’s prove my definition of ideas. Einstein’s theory of relativity — a theory that aspires to truth: an idea. Newton’s gravity. True. But perhaps you think my definition is reductive. What about art, literature? Think of Rothko’s expressionism, those giant canvases with hazy rectangles. A theory that the ineffable experience of transcendence could be better had through abstraction than by painting halos and Buddhas and so on. It’s a great idea — millions have stood before those canvases — because it’s proven to be true. Do you see how an idea is a theory that aspires to truth?

Let’s think now about fascism. Instead of asking, like dummies, “What does Steve Bannon believe about it?!”, which is what the New Yorker and its ilk appear to want to do, let’s simply ask: what do we know about it?

Well, we know a very great deal. We know that fascism has been tested and tried in the real world many, many times — and it has always led to the same result. Not a glorious thousand years Reich. Never prosperity, peace, abundance, or plenty. But straight to atrocity and war, by way of demonization, exclusion, scapegoating, expropriation, disappearance, and violence. Whether in Germany, Argentina, Rwanda, or anywhere else — every single time that fascism has arisen, the results have been the same, so much so, that by now, every single educated human being on Planet Earth should be able to say this much: fascism is history’s greatest failure.

But in what sense, precisely? Well, if ideas are theories that test truths, then fascism tests the following truths. Some people are inherently superior, and some people are not people at all. The true and strong must therefore subjugate the weak, who are parasites and burdens upon them. They must eliminate them. That is the primary task of a society, and if it devotes itself to it, the result will be all that democracy couldn’t provide — prosperity, peace, and so on. It isn’t true, is it? It has been proven false, in the most ruinous, harmful, and poisoned ways. Fascism couldn’t be proven any more false, in fact.

(It is in this way that fascism is a failed ideology. We could go even further. The notion of “races” is a dubious one at best. So is the conceit that some people are weak and some are strong — we all are, in different ways, at different times. And of course the proposition that violence must be done to prove one’s moral worth is inherently absurd — it is immoral to begin with. The more that we examine it, the more of a failed ideology that fascism is.)

It isn’t just wrong to call fascism an “idea” — it is as foolish and strange to do that as it is backwards . If we wish to be accurate, we must say that it is a ruinously failed ideology, to begin with. It is a theory which has been disproven by history, time and again, in the most extreme ways imaginable.

So there’s no need to “debate” fascism intellectually. The debates have all been had — in the forms of war, atrocity, holocaust, and ruin. To pretend that an idea which is such a total and absolute failure is something for us to relitigate, as an abstraction, which the world has never been exposed to is simply to reveal one’s own stunning, shattering ignorance. To say that “fascism is an idea!” to say that one does not know how to think at all — it reveals one is, to put it bluntly, an idiot.

But if we are really thinking well, we’d go further still. Is fascism a failed ideology — or is it even something less than that? Does fascism even really qualify as an idea at all?

The central ideas of modernity are these. Personhood — that all people are legal, social, and cultural persons, with inherent rights, dignities, and worth. Equality — that all are equal in the precise sense that they are people. And liberty — the idea that because personhood is equal, you cannot infringe on, alienate, or erase mine: personhood cannot be taken away, by anyone, at any time, for any reason.

Now, that might sound trivial to you. “So what?” Ah, but it took human beings millennia to create such ideas — some would say to discover them. What was human history before these three ideas, personhood, equality, and liberty? It was an endless cycle of kings declaring wars with knights and peasants and serfs in order to seize land, women, and gold, from other kinds, over and over again — forever. History went precisely nowhere for the vast majority of humankind’s dismal, grim existence — until the three great ideas of modernity were painstakingly pioneered, revealed, created, discovered.

It was not easy work. Those who proposed them, debated them, fought for them, were put to the sword and burned at the stake. Kings and lords fought against them for a solid thousand years, until, at last, around the 1800s, we saw the emergence of nation-states, in which these three formative ideas were finally formally recognized as “true” — in constitutions, which ordered democracies to be made. In those democracies, a new era began. Human progress raced forward as if lit by a supernova. People could finally realize themselves — as scientists, artists, novelists, entrepreneurs — instead of being serfs fighting wars over gold for kings. Bang! Humankind began to write a new chapter, finally, in its story.

Fast forward two hundred years. Today, our ancestors wouldn’t know what to make of our world. Antibiotics, chemotherapies, the internet. But a person from 200BC would have been right at home in the world of 1200AD. Do you see how transformative these three ideas really were?

Now, let’s come back to fascism. What is it, really? It’s the destruction of the three greatest ideas in human history. Personhood, equality, and liberty. Fascism says that some people aren’t people — there goes personhood. Because some people aren’t people, subhumans must be subjugated — there goes equality. Because subhumans must be subjugated, that’s the primary task of every real person, and society, their job, their work, their employment — there goes liberty, too.

So the more that we think about it, the more fascism is revealed not be an idea at all. It is the destruction of ideas. The eraser, the wrecking ball, the fire. It take the three greatest ideas human beings have ever had — and undoes them. It is an absence, not a presence. Fascism is the absence of personhood, liberty, and equality.

But it is not much of an idea to destroy, damage, and ruin — we’ve already established that. “I want to break your legs” isn’t an idea. In the same way, fascism isn’t really an idea, at all — a theory that aspires to truth. It is simply the denial of the truth of the greatest ideas of all.

What did personhood, liberty, and equality do? Remember? The greatest era of progress in humankind’s long and dismal history. They are ideas have been proven to be true. We are better off, each and every one of us, for them. Fascism is the denial of precisely these greatest of truths — that free, equal, and human, we are all better off. And in that way, it cannot be an idea at all — because it denies what is already self-evidently true. In that way, it is empty, hollow, and false.

To dignify ideas with their destruction and ruin is therefore to commit a terrible mistake — to equate foolishness with wisdom. Any fool can say “let’s rewind to the Stone Age!” That is essentially what fascism is, in a simple way. But that isn’t an idea. We should never consider it an idea. It is the destruction, absence, and denial of the greatest and truest ideas human beings have ever had. And to confuse these things make us fools, or reveals that we always were, my friends.

What is the absence of ideas? It is ignorance, isn’t it? A mind that does not know many ideas — real ones, whether Newton’s gravity, Einstein’s relativity, personhood, liberty, and so on — is an ignorant one. In the same way, when we can call regress an “idea”, we are doing something genuinely stupid. We are devaluing ideas by placing them on par with their absence. We have made fools of ourselves.

That is, if you ask me, where America’s thinkers are today. Fools pretending they are wise men. They don’t seem to know even the basics of how to think at all anymore. What ideas are, intellectually. What they are made of, philosophically. Why they matter, historically. And what the job of a thinker really is: to defend the greatest and truest ideas, from those who wish to destroy them, and take us all back to an uglier, dumber, darker age.

Umair
August 2018