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November 21, 2004
The following quote is a good statement of the consequences of nihilism, understood as the devaluation of our highest values. It was posted by Ali Muhammad Rizvi over at the excellent Stray Reflections.
The quote is from Terry Eagleton's After Theory. Eagleton says:
". . . the non-normative has become the norm. Nowadays, it is not just anarchists for whom anything goes, but starlets, newspaper editors, stockbrokers and corporation executives. The norm now is money; but since money has absolutely no principles or identity of its own, it is no kind of norm at all. It is utterly promiscuous, and will happily tag along with the highest bidder. It is infinitely adaptive to the most bizarre or extremist situations, and like the Queen has no opinions of its own about anything." pp. 16-17
A review of the book says that Eagleton traces the rise of cultural theory through its golden age (c. 1965-80), and bemoans its decline into a shallow, depoliticized preoccupation with sex and pop-culture ephemera. As grad students churn out "reverential essays on Friends," latter-day cultural theorists espouse a "dim-witted" postmodernism that dismisses as hegemonic claptrap all talk of common values, objective truth and coherent historical narratives.
Eagleton contends that the cultural studies postmodernists have turned away from the great socialist project of collective action in support of universal human liberation; and they have aligned themselves with the nihilistic thrust of a consumer capitalism they pretend to oppose.
This is fairly familar stuff by Eagleton and it borders on the cartoon thinking of Enlightenment blackmail that wilfully ignores the cultural norms of market capitalism.
However, the Eagleton quote does expresses the emptiness of a nihilistic culture of a market capitalist society. The cultural response to this nihilism?
Many have returned to, or stayed with, Christianity, or some other form of religion (eg., Islam), as this offers them some ethical bearing in a nihilistic world.
Liberals, by and large, remain content with individual rights or being utilitarian desiring machines. They are happy with a negative freedom (plus individual autonomy) so as to achieve their desires or self-interest. In practice it often means accumulation as it is understood by the capitalist market. Hence the cliche that happiness=accummulation of material possessions.
Bu these is a reaction to this (often called the rat race) in the form of a seachange, where many seek a better quality of life to the conventional stressed-filled work life, broken relationships and lots of money as compensation. That quality of life is understood in diverse ways, often without appealing to the grand narrative and objective truth of the Enlightenment that Eagleton says is the only option.
Honestly, what is happening in academia in various post modern cultural studies departments is not the same as what is happening in the lifeworld. By the lifeworld we understand the shared common understandings, including values, that develop through face to face contacts over time in various social groups, from families to communities. The lifeworld carries all sorts of assumptions about who we are as people and what we value about ourselves: what we believe, what shocks and offends us, what we aspire to, what we desire, what we are willing to sacrifice to which ends, and so forth.
There is a lot of diversity in the lifeword, as the rejection of the growth fetish by the seachange phenomenon in Australia attests.
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If we stop treating people as masses, and they stop treating themselves as such, then everyone would find his own meaning and purpose in this background of personal freedom.
We don't need a State or culture-sanctioned ideal. In fact, that's one of the worst things that could happen.
Capitalism, in its original form, is an Economics theory of personal freedom. Some people perverted the term to cover statist corporatism and mass marketing manipulation.
Nihilistic capitalism is a contradiction in terms: Economics doesn't tell you want to strive for, only how best you can achieve it. It is the absolute tool.