In a Thanksgiving Day piece, Michael Walsh accuses the Critical Theory chaps of "nihilism." If, by nihilism he means: "the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless," then I don't think so. The Critical Theorists do believe in something. They believe in the world-historical destiny of the creative individual -- the artist, the writer, the intellectual, the activist -- to change the world.
And crucially, as the Brit academics say, the Critical Theorists believe that the only way for a creative age to dawn is by destroying the bourgeois Christian European capitalist civilization of which we've heard tell.
Now I believe that this notion is worse than a blunder, worse than a crime, worse than a tragedy, worse than a disaster. It is, I would say, cosmically wrong; it leads to cultural extinction. This is because the creative individual stands on the shoulders of his former self, the middle-class responsible bourgeois. That is why, almost to a man, lefty Critical Theory intellectuals are children of the middle class. You have to be born middle-class to aspire to creative apotheosis.
So if your program is that to usher in a world of creative freedom you need to first destroy the responsible culture of the middle class I am here to tell you that you will destroy everything, because the creative culture is founded upon the rock of the middle-class culture.
I don't know when this creative cult got started. Was it with Descartes, and "I think, therefore I am?" Or Kant, who proposed that our minds are busy processing sense impressions into mental impressions and theories about the thing-in-itself? Or Hegel with his dialectic? Certainly by the time we get to Nietzsche we are definitely trying to understand who or what the creative individual is and how he should live. And Freud's Ego, das Ich, is clearly a creative ego trying to elbow its way past the unconscious Id and the cramping moral instincts of the Superego. In Jung we are trying to balance personal unconscious, collective unconscious with self-consciousness, and combining all the memes of cultural history into a meta-theory of existence, featuring a sacrificial hero exploring the boundary between order and chaos.
Now, it is my belief, drawing on my study of developmental psychology, that a good way to understand the world we humans live in today is with my reductive Three Peoples theory. Of course, the world isn't really that simple; but all theories of the world are simplifications of some kind or another. The question is: does the theory help me understand the world?
My Three Peoples theory begins with the idea that all peoples across the world are dealing with the challenge of living in the city, after millennia of "rural idiocy" as slaves or serfs in the agricultural age. When people arrive in the city as migrants from the countryside -- one of my great-grandfathers was a dairyman, another was a maltster -- we are People of the Subordinate Self, subordinate to some rural lord or squire. We are defined by our caste or rural role, and we are conservative in that we observe the traditional rules of farming, knowing that not to plant at the right time, not to rotate crops, not to preserve food with the traditional methods is to invite starvation and famine. But once we come to the city we have to learn personal responsibility and submission not to a lord but to the prices of the market, including the labor market. Then, after a struggle, we enter the world of the People of the Responsible Self; we become middle-class bourgeois, citizens rather than country folk.
The necessity of this journey, for every migrant to the city, is what the Marxist left denies, and they are wrong, cosmically wrong, and they have visited extinction upon the urban working class. That is why the white working class in the US is reportedly "dying of despair." Because the left led them into a cultural, economic, and political ditch.
But remember, for your average lefty sporting a #WeBelieve sign in the front yard, the question about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is no longer the question of adapting to the wrenching cultural challenge of making it in the city. Been there, done that, in your parents' or grandparents' generation. The challenge now is to find something creative, something original to do with your life.
Hey, I know! Champion the rights of women! The rights of minorities! Advocate for migrants! Fight the hate of xenophobes and Islamophobes! That was the genius of the Frankfurt School and the Critical Theorists: they adapted Marxism from advocating for the working class to advocating for every other victim class arriving at the gates of the city.
But the problem is that, as with the working class, the left is teaching these new migrants to the city culture and its public square not to adapt to bourgeois and middle-class norms but to maintain a separation; not to become Americans, but Feminist-Americans, African-Americans, Arab-Americans. And I believe that just as the left drove the white working class into the ditch of cultural despair, the left will do the same for its current clients.
In fact, I believe that the current female-driven movement of special snowflakes that object to microaggressions and insist on safe spaces and seeing sexual harassment everywhere are a harvest of the left's war on the bourgeoisie and the culture of the People of the Responsible Self. These women are saying that they do not want to become responsible individuals armed with the culture of the middle-class; they just want to be protected from scary things and scary people.
Right now I am reading Nietzsche, and what he is trying to do is to imagine what it means to be a creative individual and what it takes to become one. How do you make yourself into a person with the courage and the fortitude to do scary, original things? It is notable that Nietzsche was not very good at that. He had what we would now call "mental health issues." He could write about being a creative Übermensch -- just barely -- but lost his mind actually trying to be that sort of person. The truth is that being a true creative individual is a very hard thing to do, day to day, and most of us don't have the intestinal fortitude to do it, to live it day to day.
Really, when you think of it, this dreadful error of the left is nothing remarkable. You think that we humans would sally forth into the Creative Age without so much as a single glitch? I gotta bridge to sell you, for that is not the way of the world, which advances through the debris of disaster and failure.
The truth of the creative life is the truth demonstrated to us by Nietzsche, who said that the creative person needs to he hard, and Jung's hero whose personality only develops through struggle, suffering, and sacrifice. It is only after the creative hero descends into the underworld of his unconscious and confronts his personal demons and learns some wisdom from the encounter that he can return to the world of society and contribute to its welfare.
That is just to say that you don't get to be a creative hero and bend the arc of history towards justice and get your ticket to the People of the Creative Self until you have learned discipline and responsibility among the People of the Responsible Self.
And crucially, as the Brit academics say, the Critical Theorists believe that the only way for a creative age to dawn is by destroying the bourgeois Christian European capitalist civilization of which we've heard tell.
Now I believe that this notion is worse than a blunder, worse than a crime, worse than a tragedy, worse than a disaster. It is, I would say, cosmically wrong; it leads to cultural extinction. This is because the creative individual stands on the shoulders of his former self, the middle-class responsible bourgeois. That is why, almost to a man, lefty Critical Theory intellectuals are children of the middle class. You have to be born middle-class to aspire to creative apotheosis.
So if your program is that to usher in a world of creative freedom you need to first destroy the responsible culture of the middle class I am here to tell you that you will destroy everything, because the creative culture is founded upon the rock of the middle-class culture.
I don't know when this creative cult got started. Was it with Descartes, and "I think, therefore I am?" Or Kant, who proposed that our minds are busy processing sense impressions into mental impressions and theories about the thing-in-itself? Or Hegel with his dialectic? Certainly by the time we get to Nietzsche we are definitely trying to understand who or what the creative individual is and how he should live. And Freud's Ego, das Ich, is clearly a creative ego trying to elbow its way past the unconscious Id and the cramping moral instincts of the Superego. In Jung we are trying to balance personal unconscious, collective unconscious with self-consciousness, and combining all the memes of cultural history into a meta-theory of existence, featuring a sacrificial hero exploring the boundary between order and chaos.
Now, it is my belief, drawing on my study of developmental psychology, that a good way to understand the world we humans live in today is with my reductive Three Peoples theory. Of course, the world isn't really that simple; but all theories of the world are simplifications of some kind or another. The question is: does the theory help me understand the world?
My Three Peoples theory begins with the idea that all peoples across the world are dealing with the challenge of living in the city, after millennia of "rural idiocy" as slaves or serfs in the agricultural age. When people arrive in the city as migrants from the countryside -- one of my great-grandfathers was a dairyman, another was a maltster -- we are People of the Subordinate Self, subordinate to some rural lord or squire. We are defined by our caste or rural role, and we are conservative in that we observe the traditional rules of farming, knowing that not to plant at the right time, not to rotate crops, not to preserve food with the traditional methods is to invite starvation and famine. But once we come to the city we have to learn personal responsibility and submission not to a lord but to the prices of the market, including the labor market. Then, after a struggle, we enter the world of the People of the Responsible Self; we become middle-class bourgeois, citizens rather than country folk.
The necessity of this journey, for every migrant to the city, is what the Marxist left denies, and they are wrong, cosmically wrong, and they have visited extinction upon the urban working class. That is why the white working class in the US is reportedly "dying of despair." Because the left led them into a cultural, economic, and political ditch.
But remember, for your average lefty sporting a #WeBelieve sign in the front yard, the question about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is no longer the question of adapting to the wrenching cultural challenge of making it in the city. Been there, done that, in your parents' or grandparents' generation. The challenge now is to find something creative, something original to do with your life.
Hey, I know! Champion the rights of women! The rights of minorities! Advocate for migrants! Fight the hate of xenophobes and Islamophobes! That was the genius of the Frankfurt School and the Critical Theorists: they adapted Marxism from advocating for the working class to advocating for every other victim class arriving at the gates of the city.
But the problem is that, as with the working class, the left is teaching these new migrants to the city culture and its public square not to adapt to bourgeois and middle-class norms but to maintain a separation; not to become Americans, but Feminist-Americans, African-Americans, Arab-Americans. And I believe that just as the left drove the white working class into the ditch of cultural despair, the left will do the same for its current clients.
In fact, I believe that the current female-driven movement of special snowflakes that object to microaggressions and insist on safe spaces and seeing sexual harassment everywhere are a harvest of the left's war on the bourgeoisie and the culture of the People of the Responsible Self. These women are saying that they do not want to become responsible individuals armed with the culture of the middle-class; they just want to be protected from scary things and scary people.
Right now I am reading Nietzsche, and what he is trying to do is to imagine what it means to be a creative individual and what it takes to become one. How do you make yourself into a person with the courage and the fortitude to do scary, original things? It is notable that Nietzsche was not very good at that. He had what we would now call "mental health issues." He could write about being a creative Übermensch -- just barely -- but lost his mind actually trying to be that sort of person. The truth is that being a true creative individual is a very hard thing to do, day to day, and most of us don't have the intestinal fortitude to do it, to live it day to day.
Really, when you think of it, this dreadful error of the left is nothing remarkable. You think that we humans would sally forth into the Creative Age without so much as a single glitch? I gotta bridge to sell you, for that is not the way of the world, which advances through the debris of disaster and failure.
The truth of the creative life is the truth demonstrated to us by Nietzsche, who said that the creative person needs to he hard, and Jung's hero whose personality only develops through struggle, suffering, and sacrifice. It is only after the creative hero descends into the underworld of his unconscious and confronts his personal demons and learns some wisdom from the encounter that he can return to the world of society and contribute to its welfare.
That is just to say that you don't get to be a creative hero and bend the arc of history towards justice and get your ticket to the People of the Creative Self until you have learned discipline and responsibility among the People of the Responsible Self.
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