Our Contemporary Nihilism
by Thomas S. Hibbs - November 14, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
Eduardo Velasquez, ISI Books, 200 pages, $22
Our contemporary culture reveals the "darkness the Enlightenment can no longer conceal." That's the thesis of Eduardo Velasquez's fascinating new book, A Consumer's Guide to the Apocalypse: Why There Is No Cultural War in America and Why We Will Perish Nonetheless. Criticisms of the degradation of our culture permeate conservative commentary; what is new and refreshing in Velasquez's book is his resistance of the claim that we ought to understand our culture in terms of a great ideological war that pits secular science against fundamentalist religion. There is, Velasquez asserts, "curious affinity between our secularism and our religiosity." Our theology and science are both results of the Enlightenment and thus share certain assumptions and foster certain conceptions of human persons as isolated, inexplicable centers of choice.
Now, one might want to question the characterizations of science or Protestant religion – or the purported connection between the two. What is impressive is the way these assumptions enable Velasquez to illuminate contemporary cultural phenomena and, conversely, the way his analysis of cultural artifacts supports this interpretation of modernity. Also welcome is the variety of cultural products Velasquez takes under his purview, including film (Fight Club), books (Tom Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons and Michael Frayn's award-winning play Copenhagen), and popular music (Coldplay, Dave Matthews, and Tori Amos).
Given that so many young persons now have their moral imaginations formed not by books or even films but by music, the analysis of popular music is especially welcome. Velasquez does a terrific job of showing the way substantive issues concerning personal identity, suffering, love, and meaning figure in these songs in relation to the grand narratives of modern science and Christianity. So, Coldplay's songs reflect on the loss of personal orientation in a scientific world void of clear direction or shape, even as they draw upon Christian symbols. Dave Matthews offers an anti-Christian set of reflections that are nonetheless framed in Christian terms. The latter theme also figures prominently in the music of Tori Amos, who is simultaneously repulsed and attracted to the image of the crucified God and who sees in our residually Christian culture a propensity to self-slaughter and murder-suicide.
There are striking thematic similarities in many of these songs to the narrative arc of Fight Club, a film that offers a marvelous send-up of our petty, hedonistic, consumer culture and strives to replace "painful pleasures with pleasurable pains." Fight Club, which indicts the legacy of God the Father even as it questions the legacy of the Crucifixion, aims to bring about a grand, liberating act of destruction. In each case, the flirtation with or active embrace of nothingness is about more than nihilism. It is about recreating something out of nothing, about imagining and bringing into being a new era. In Velasquez's telling, none of these attempts succeeds.
Velasquez nicely summarizes Tori Amos's solution and its problems. Amos's project of overcoming the oppression of morality and hierarchy "eradicates the past, embraces nihilism, locates demonic powers in the no-thing, and seeks salvation in the revelatory experience of song and performance." The difficulty is that, apart from the orgiastic experience of the music, "we grow contemptuous of the mundane present, and transgression by extremity becomes the norm." The result is "oblivion" and "annihilation" combined with a "hope for a Phoenix rising." But, Velasquez asks, "from whence, from what, from whom? Perhaps Amos gets the silence she seeks. That is the silence of despair."
