Return of the Strong Gods

Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

R. R. Reno

• Publisher: Regnery Gateway
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781621579083
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"'Return of the Strong Gods, '...is a thoughtful contribution to American political debate. It is incisively written and full of modern observations. Mr. Reno explains, better than any book I can remember, the present-day progressive's paranoid fear of fascism and neurotic determination to ferret out racism where none exists." — The Wall Street Journal After the staggering slaughter of back-to-back world wars, the West embraced the ideal of the "open society." The promise: By liberating ourselves from the old attachments to nation, clan, and religion that had fueled centuries of violence, we could build a prosperous world without borders, freed from dogmas and managed by experts. But the populism and nationalism that are upending politics in America and Europe are a sign that after three generations, the postwar consensus is breaking down. With compelling insight, R. R. Reno argues that we are witnessing the return of the "strong gods"—the powerful loyalties that bind men to their homeland and to one another. Reacting to the calamitous first half of the twentieth century, our political, cultural, and financial elites promoted open borders, open markets, and open minds. But this never-ending project of openness has hardened into a set of anti-dogmatic dogmas which destroy the social solidarity rooted in family, faith, and nation. While they worry about the return of fascism, our societies are dissolving. But man will not tolerate social dissolution indefinitely. He longs to be part of a "we"—the fruit of shared loves—which gives his life meaning. The strong gods will return, Reno warns, in one form or another. Our task is to attend to those that, appealing to our reason as well as our hearts, inspire the best of our traditions. Otherwise, we shall invite the darker gods whose return our open society was intended to forestall.

CHAPTER ONE The Postwar Consensus

On October 1, 1990, George H. W. Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. A veteran of World War II, the American president recalled “the fires of an epic war” that “raged across two oceans and two continents.” For the men who led the Allied forces and those who fought under them, preventing a return of global conflict was an overriding imperative. The leaders of the triumphant forces gathered in San Francisco in June 1945 to adopt the charter of the United Nations. As Bush recalled, their goal was “to build a new kind of bridge: a bridge between nations, a bridge that might help carry humankind from its darkest hour to its brightest day.”

The Cold War dampened the promise of those hopeful early days after Germany and Japan had gone down to defeat. The long struggle to contain Soviet aggression required the postwar generation to defer its hopes for the inauguration of a new era of global cooperation and peace. But the wheel of history turned yet again. “The Revolution of ’89 swept the world almost with a life of its own, carried by a new breeze of freedom,” Bush told the delegates gathered from around the world. Some still resisted the spread of liberty. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had recently invaded Kuwait, annexing that sovereign nation in a manner reminiscent of Hitler’s aggression in the 1930s. Bush assured the world that the United States would not stand idly by. He promised to fight for “a new and different world.” Dictators would not be permitted to control the future. The president raised his eyes to take in a bright new horizon: “I see a world of open borders, open trade, and, most importantly, open minds.”

This charming formulation was not a novelty in 1990. It expressed the essence of the West’s postwar consensus. The history of the first half of the twentieth century seemed to speak for itself: German militarism and the seduction of aggressive nationalism caused World War I; in the social disorder that followed the armistice, Mussolini rose to power as the supreme leader of a paramilitary political party; Nazism combined anti-Semitic animus with a cruel ideology of strength; and, of course, communism governed in the Soviet Union for decades, feeding on the same totalitarian temptations. The inescapable lesson, most came to believe, was that war and destruction arose from close-minded modes of life and thought.

The consensus that Bush represented so ably at the United Nations held that to combat these evils and ensure that they never return, we must banish narrow-mindedness and cultivate a spirit of openness. Instead of dogmatic convictions and passionate loyalties, we need a spirit of critical questioning. Rather than reinforcing dominant social norms, society should loosen up and allow for greater freedom and experimentation. The “animal spirits” of the economy need to be freed from oppressive regulations; borders should be porous and open to commerce; and cultures need to expand their imaginative boundaries to welcome the contributions of new peoples. The world benefits from creative innovation, not conventional thinking. The spirit of openness, not dutiful obedience, is what we must cultivate.

The Open Society

George H. W. Bush was the quintessential establishment man. His views were moderate and conventional. When he praised open borders, open trade, and open minds, he was relying on an adjective that had acquired an entirely approbatory connotation in the postwar West. He could be confident that term would arouse warm feelings and evoke images of a peaceful and humane future.

The sources of Bush’s confidence ran deep. While World War II still raged, Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, worked to complete The Open Society and Its Enemies, a two-volume diagnosis of the civilizational madness that led to the global conflict.¹ By Popper’s reckoning, civilization faces a choice. We can live in a tribal or “closed society,” characterized by deference to authority and the subordination of the interests of the individual to those of society, or we can break free from this “collectivist” impulse and build an “open society,” one that “sets free the critical powers of man.”² The future of the West depends upon choosing the latter, Popper argues.

The enormous influence of The Open Society and Its Enemies in the decade following World War II seems, at first glance, improbable. The first volume is dominated by a detailed and highly critical, even abusive, interpretation of Plato, while the second volume treats Hegel and Marx with equal severity. Popper digresses into philosophy of science, metaphysics, and other abstract topics. His prose is full of “isms” and reads like a technical work of academic philosophy. But Popper structures his treatise to serve a clear political imperative, giving urgency to the twists and turns of his analysis.

The imperative is bracingly simple: Never again. Never again shall we allow totalitarian governments to emerge. Never again shall societies reach a fever pitch of ideological fanaticism. Never again shall the furnaces of Auschwitz consume their victims. This imperative—never again—places stringent demands upon us. It requires Western civilization to attain self-critical maturity with courage and determination, which Popper hoped to exemplify with his full-throated attack on Plato, the founder of our philosophical tradition. We must banish the strong gods of the closed society and create a truly open one.

One of the strong gods that the nations of the West must overcome is the nation itself. We are tempted to imagine our collective life as in some sense sacred, giving the community a rightful claim upon our loyalty. Popper regards this as “magical” thinking, a form of “anti-humanitarian propaganda.”³ Only the individual is sacred. The state has limited purposes. Its role is practical, not metaphysical and sacred. The job of government is “the protection of that freedom which does not harm other citizens.”⁴ This is not a simple task. Popper recognizes that harms are complex, and their prevention can be difficult, especially when one considers international affairs. But the challenge is technical and social-scientific, not cultural and political-philosophical. Good governance means allowing “the institutional technologists” to manage the machinery of the state so that it serves the interests of everyone impartially.⁵

Popper knows that there will always be “state-worshippers” and other proponents of “collectivism.” They are the cause of the world’s troubles. Such people must be dealt with firmly; anyone who relishes his homeland and its history is a “racialist,” according to Popper. The vice affects more than the German people. It is a present danger in every nation. One can see how Popper anticipates our own era and its paranoid rhetoric. If someone worries about the effects of immigration on his nation’s culture, he is xenophobic. If he organizes a political party that seeks to restrict immigration, he is a fascist.

But why would anyone become a “state-worshipper,” especially after witnessing the disastrous consequences of National Socialism? In The Open Society, Popper proposes a psychological explanation that has been widely adopted. Critical thinking is difficult to sustain, he observes. Intellectual adulthood can be painful. The same goes for the political maturity that embraces the duties of life in a culture of freedom. We feel a “strain,” Popper hypothesizes, when we live in a society governed by “democracy and individualism.”⁶ The “collectivist” proponents of a “closed society” promise something easier. They offer a more comfortable existence. Social authority, like paternal authority, is attractive to the insecure and fearful. Intimidated by the personal responsibilities freedom brings, we long for the security of obedience; we desire to “escape from freedom,” as the social psychologist Erich Fromm put it in the title of his influential explanation of the origins of Nazism published in 1941. The closed and tribal society is psychologically soothing and reassuring. It helps us avoid the tension of “an ever-widening field of personal decisions, with its problems and responsibilities.”⁷ We must strengthen ourselves against this temptation, Popper warns. We need to embrace our freedom with courage rather than deferring to authority out of cowardice. Only an open society can save us from the return of totalitarianism.

Popper appreciates the allure of the closed society. While Fromm focused on a psychological explanation, Popper sought to expose the intellectual sources of our tendency to give our loyalty to higher truths and greater powers. By his reckoning, the main streams of Western philosophy tempt us toward totalitarianism. The Greek tradition represented by Plato and Aristotle pursues what Popper calls an “oracular philosophy” that employs an “essentialist method.”⁸ The ambition of this kind of philosophy is metaphysical—to know the truth. And insofar as truth is known, it must be affirmed, which is to say obeyed.

Therein lies the danger. A metaphysically ambitious philosophy leads to “medieval authoritarianism,” with its hierarchical culture of command and submission.⁹ Popper sees any form of transcendence as implicitly totalitarian. The recognition of something higher than the individual sets up a suprapersonal authority. If I can know what it means to be human, then I have a standard by which to judge individual behavior, and it is just such a standard, Popper argues, that is characteristic of a closed society. Long before the invention of words such as “logocentrism,” Popper denounced strong truth-claims as threats to freedom and midwives of totalitarianism.

Against the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, Popper endorses the nominalism of William of Ockham, the fourteenth-century Franciscan who argued that concepts such as “human nature” are not essences but merely linguistic conventions (nomen, “name,” thus “nominalism”). By Popper’s way of thinking, a “methodological nominalism” must play an important role in the reconstruction of Europe.¹⁰ Its anti-metaphysical linguistic conventionalism, which prevents us from imagining we can grasp the truth with concepts, encourages modesty with respect to truth, a disposition we need if we are to develop an open society.

Popper theorized the progress of science in formal, procedural terms, trying to encapsulate it in the principle of falsification, which stipulates that beliefs, theories, and hypotheses can be held as true only if it is possible for evidence to come forth that can falsify them. In that sense, our theories are always tentative, never known as truth, strictly speaking, but only held as not-yet-falsified beliefs. Plato’s metaphysics does not rise to this standard, Popper argues, nor do Hegel and Marx’s theories of historical development. These seminal figures in the history of Western thought are “above” empirical testing, as are all other metaphysical or meta-historical theories.

The key to social progress is the restriction of truth-claims to those that are falsifiable, Popper insists, tossing out nearly all of what the West has regarded as religiously, culturally, and morally foundational. Thus he devotes a great deal of The Open Society to harsh criticisms of Plato and the metaphysical tradition more broadly. When informed social scientists are allowed to test their proposals in “free and open debate,” then and only then can we make social progress, improving the material conditions of our fellow citizens, perfecting democracy, and expanding freedom.

Although his framework is different, Popper anticipates John Rawls, whose political philosophy became influential toward the end of the twentieth century. Rawls insists that we should not govern society in accord with metaphysical claims (“comprehensive doctrines”). Justice as fairness rules out strong truths, he argues, differing from Popper, who rejects metaphysical claims because they are not open to empirical falsification. But the overall stance is largely the same. According to Popper, the strong truths are strong gods. They command our loyalty rather than being open to critical questioning and empirical falsification. As a consequence, they pose a threat to liberal norms. They are enemies of an open society. We need “public reason,” as Rawls would put it. This is an anti-metaphysical, procedural approach in which truth-claims are limited to what can be empirically assessed by those who have command of the relevant data. In Popper’s terms, we don’t need politics in the classical sense, which involves arguments about how we should live, for these arguments invariably outrun the domain of what can be subjected to social scientific analysis. Rather, our politics needs to “go small,” as it were. It should be scientific, not metaphysical. “A social technology is needed whose results can be tested by social engineering.”¹¹

This seems to raise an important question: What is freedom for in a liberal, open society? Historically, the West has appealed to metaphysics and religion for answers. Popper is aware of this question, and he gives an existentialist answer of the sort that Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others would make popular in the early 1950s. We must accept the “strain” of freedom, the existential tension that comes from knowing that we must decide for ourselves the ends our freedom is to serve. It is up to us to define the truths that we need. As Popper emphasizes in italics, “Although history has no meaning, we can give it meaning.”¹² This self-chosen path will require courage, but it is unavoidable, Popper argues. The very truth about reality itself depends upon us: “Facts as such have no meaning; they gain it only through our decisions.”¹³

Nietzsche thought it would take superhuman strength for someone self-consciously to give himself his own truth. Only a strong god—an Übermensch—can mint truths rather than discern and obey them. This is certainly not what Popper wants. His goal is modesty, not self-assertion. He therefore hedges, writing about “meaning” instead of “truth.” In this he is characteristic of the postwar era, which is deflationary when it comes to truth, not relativistic in a thoroughgoing way. Value-free facts alone constitute the domain of truth in Popper’s universe. Whatever we make of them amounts to “meaning.” We are the sources of our “value” terms, which are distinct from facts and truth. Knowing this to be the case should make us modest in asserting our “values,” which are only our opinions, after all. Popper thus neutralizes the strong god of truth, keeping it narrowly scientific. When we need a guiding and commanding language with which to govern our lives and set standards for society, we appeal to the weak god of “meaning.”

Like so much else in The Open Society and Its Enemies, the shift from truth to meaning is required by the Manichean political choice that the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century seemed to press upon the West: either an open society or Auschwitz. In the face of such a choice, the desire for transcendent truth, once considered healthy, becomes a dangerous temptation. According to Popper, the quest for a higher truth “is born of fear, for it shrinks from realizing that we bear the ultimate responsibility even for the standards we choose.”¹⁴ Since we often cannot endure the “strain” of freedom, we are tempted to invent truths and pledge our troth to them, setting ourselves on the road back to totalitarianism. The only way to avoid this trap is to adopt the double pattern of weakening—going small with a value-free, fact-based truth and satisfying the larger needs of the human heart with an ambiguous rhetoric of meaning.

Liberal and Progressive Adaptations

The two volumes of The Open Society and Its Enemies I have before me are a first edition, published in Great Britain in 1945 as Berlin lay in ruins and American soldiers liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. The copyright page assures readers that the collective obligations of the war effort were observed: “This book is produced in complete conformity with the authorized economy standards.” A signature on the flyleaf indicates that it was bought by James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University and one of the top civilian leaders of the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His discrete markings in the margins indicate that he read the book with interest, especially the passages in which Popper expounds his conviction that an “attitude of reasonableness” must be the basis for a democratic society.

Conant, like Popper, trusted in science and believed in the intellectual virtues of impartiality, vigorous debate, and close attention to empirical data. Both men were champions of democracy, which for them meant a liberal, open society. The authoritarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan had been defeated, but they both worried that a resurgence of authoritarianism posed the greatest threat to Western civilization and its moral achievements. They were not alone. The Soviet Union’s aggressive stance in the aftermath of the war dramatized the ongoing threat of totalitarianism. Their counsel was vigilance in defense of the open society and a thoroughgoing cultural reconstruction to forestall the return of the strong gods.

Popper, perhaps more than Conant, was aware of the self-contradiction of this counsel. The intellectual foundations of the open society must not go too deep or exercise too powerful a hold over our imaginations lest the intrinsically authoritarian metaphysical tradition be awakened. The open society must be intellectually circumspect and self-denying, even when it comes to defending the ...