Charles Murray, Allan Bloom, Nihilism, & Religion:

Reason has an interview with Charles Murray—in my opinion, one of the more interesting modern libertarian thinkers—about his book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C.-1950. This one is definitely on my reading list.

What I find particularly interesting is Murray’s view on religion and its role in human greatness. Murray is one of those non-believers (he’s an agnostic whose instincts weigh against belief in the supernatural) who not only supports religious belief, but sees it as central to human greatness. This makes Murray likeminded with another group of non-believers who laud traditional religious belief: the Straussians. In fact, based on this interview and other of his appearances that I have seen, I am struck on how similar are Murray’s thoughts on religion to theirs—notably to Allan Bloom’s, in The Closing of the American Mind (I wonder if Murray has read it, or credits Bloom or the other Straussians at all in shaping his views).

In many ways, Allan Bloom and Charles Murray represent very different strains of conservatism. Murray is a self-described libertarian (supports the legalization of drugs and is otherwise against all “morals legislation” that punishes consensual conduct). Bloom was (or at least, in Closing, came off as) a 1950s style social-conservative statist who dissed Ayn Rand and described libertarianism as “the rightwing form of the Left.” Further, Murray is a social scientist extraordinaire whose forte is citing statistics and constructing charts & graphs, while Bloom was a political philosopher who made a statement against social science in Closing by citing not a single statistic and otherwise including only such a small number of footnotes that you could count them on one hand.

However, they do share similarities: Both men have been described as “neoconservatives”; both are/were hawkish; and both are/were non-believers who support religion—particularly, traditional notions of orthodox Christianity—and see the Enlightenment as primarily to blame in the much weaker role that religion presently plays in modernity. Here is Murray on the Enlightenment:

With the Enlightenment, we started a whole series of major acquisitions of new knowledge about how the world works. These were important and real and had great amounts of truth to them. They also played hell with the old verities. I’m thinking of the rule of reason as against traditional religion. I’m thinking Darwinism. I’m thinking of Freud. And Einstein.

In all sorts of ways, you had body blows to the ways of looking at the world that gave concepts such as truth, beauty, and the good their meaning. Take the good as the obvious example. If we are bundles of chemicals and religion is irrelevant and we have no souls, etc., etc., etc. -- I can go through the whole litany -- the good is sort of stripped of texture and richness.

Bloom, following Nietzsche, came to the same basic conclusion. In Closing, Bloom points out that Nietzsche did not proclaim “God is dead” on a note of triumph, but on a lament:

Enlightenment killed God; but like Macbeth, the men of the Enlightenment did not know that the cosmos would rebel at the deed, and the world would become [quoting Nietzsche] “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Nietzsche replaces easygoing or self-satisfied atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences. Longing to believe, along with the intransigent refusal to satisfy that longing is, according to him, the profound response to our entire spiritual condition.” The Closing of the American Mind, at p. 196.

But the obvious question that is begged to both Bloom & Murray is: Was the Enlightenment factually correct in its description of the way the Universe works? Both of them, as materialist non-believers, do believe that the Enlightenment (probably) was factual in its debunking of God. But this debunking was at best an unlovable truth. Religion thus becomes a “noble lie.” Here is Murray’s response from the article:

Here’s the central dilemma. If the new wisdom is correct, then all of the anomie and the alienation and the nihilism and the rest of it make a lot of sense. As I note in the book, if that’s all true, then one novelist suggests that all we can do is maintain a considered boredom in the face of the abyss. There have been a wide variety of efforts in the 20th century to come up with a rationale for positive action, but I actually think that the only way to maintain one’s energy and sense of purpose is by being deliberately forgetful. That’s why Camus was so miserable. He couldn’t be forgetful enough.

Again, this perfectly parallels what Bloom wrote on the matter. Bloom was, (after Leo Strauss) at heart an atheist/nihilist imbibed in Nietzsche. But Bloom loathed the modern day left-wing nihilists ala Foucault. Why? They took the central tenant of nihilism—that there is no God, no objective truth, and that rights aren’t grounded in nature—and attempted to make it “fit” for mass consumption. But if there is anything that is not “fit” for public consumption, it is that insight. Moreover, this truth about the universe—if properly understood—is so unpleasant and horrific, that the masses would not be able to swallow it unadulterated, and undistorted. So in making nihilism “fit” for public consumption, the leftist philosophers had to distort it—give the people only part of the equation—the part that goes down easy, while ignoring another part—in fact, the most important part: the abyss.

Bloom lays this out in Part Two of Closing as well as in a chapter contained therein entitled, “The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa.” But this is really the central thesis of the entire book. The first sentence of the book begins with, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” This was his way of informing us that nihilism has been consumed by the American mass public. But it’s not real nihilism; it’s Nihilism, American Style (the original title of the book—instead changed to the title of Part Two), which is nihilism without the abyss. But the abyss is the only thing about nihilism that really matters. Bloom said that America had only “half-digested” these German insights, and (with the help of some German & French intermediaries) turned them into “nihilism with a happy ending.” Bloom thought that this was simply an idiotic, dangerous joke and that those that purveyed it were distorters of Nietzsche’s original teachings, and otherwise worthy of being despised.

Bloom was a nihilist, but had no pretensions about what this entailed. As a real philosopher—a lover of the truth—he could accept this absolutely horrific insight, because philosophers must accept the truth, even if it is unlovable (and this is probably the most unlovable truth out there). Bloom thought that if the public really understood the implications of nihilism and the abyss, they would reject it, not because it was untrue, but because, as Jack Nicholson said in that movie, they simply wouldn’t be able to “handle the truth.”

Bloom hinted in Closing that he would give his students some of the ugly implications about nihilism, precisely to scare them away from it and make them otherwise reject this lamentable reality. The others who didn't scare off, they were the ones who could become true philosophers—men who can look into the abyss without flinching.

Here Bloom uses the writer Celine to get students to appreciate what nihilism is really about:

There is one writer who does not appeal at all to Americans—who offers nothing for our Marxist, Freudian, feminist, deconstructionist, or structuralist circles to mangle, who provides no poses, sentimentalities or bromides that appeal to our young—is Louis—Ferdinand Celine, who best expresses how life looks to a man facing up to what we believe or don’t believe. He is a far more talented artist and penetrating observer than the much more popular Mann or Camus. Robinson, the hero he admires in Journey to the End of the Night, is an utterly selfish liar, cheat, murderer for pay. Why does Ferdinand admire him? Partly for his honesty, but mostly because he allows himself to be shot and killed by his girlfriend rather than tell her he loves her. He believes in something, which Ferdinand is unable to do. American students are repelled, horrified by this novel, and turn away from it in disgust. If it could be force-fed to them, it might motivate them to reconsider, to regard it as urgent to think through their premises, to make their implicit nihilism explicit and examine it seriously. Closing,at p. 239.

In short, nihilism tells us that nothing is objectively wrong, that good and evil don’t exist, and that the best we can offer against those things in which we disagree are “value judgments.” But these are ultimately impotent because no one value is any more objectively rational than any other. In other words, those things in history that horrify us the most—slavery, the holocaust, etc.—we cannot objectively call them “evil,” or even “wrong.” All we can do is proffer an impotent “value judgment” against them. But our "values" are no more intrinsically rational than any other “value,”—for instance, those of the Nazis & the slavers. Bloom is, in a sense, absolutely right: If nihilism is true, it certainly is not lovable.