Virtue Signalling and Binarity - New English Review

by Friedrich Hansen (April 2018)

Self-Portrait, Chuck Close, 2002-03

n fairness to the Millennials and their obvious problem with maturation or growing up: it certainly is not their fault that the sexual revolution of 1968 has turned the world upside down, namely by opening up the Protestant bottleneck of pent up emotions and thus ushering in the present era of emotional incontinence. Today, all feelings are thrown on the marketplace of public opinon. As a result, the Millennials, as the true heirs of the Baby boomers, seem to have lost the inner tensions of moral dualism—productive tensions to be sure which, for a millennium, had been the motor of innovation in the monotheist West. Athens only provided the tools of science but Jerusalem gave us inner dualism and the enquiring mind. The decline of western universities and also industrial innovation leaves us in little doubt that the death of religion is being followed by the death of science.[1] Instead, barren binary logic has taken over not only Western technology and ideas but also the sexual discourse.

It was in the Renaissance that the shift from inner, moral Adam II to the outer, cognitive Adam I came into being. This eventually culminated for the first time in the fin de siècle and again in the 1968 revolt resulting in huge epistemological losses. This is behind the present split in public opinion and the rule of contrarianism and irreconcilable antagonisms over curiousity and civil conversation in the West. To be absoultely clear: Adam here denotes the gender neutral person of the Hebrew Bible,[2] presciently exposed by Joseph B. Soloveitchick long before the discourse about gender fluidity emerged.[3] Today, the deplorable state of public discourse can be explained with the loss of religion and neutral transcendence which, in 2,000 years of Western growth, did most of the clearance of intellectual controversies and political conflicts: the work of public reconciliation through divine grace.[4]

By contrast, the new West—with neighbourhoods such as San Francisco and Silicon Valley—is enigmatic for the age of barren bodies and minds. Both the gay hub of externalized binary sex codes and the Temple of petrified binary mechanics are united by a veritable elective affinity. But don’t expect new scientific concepts to pour out of Silicon Valley other than vicious technologies of mind control and oppression of spiritual diversity. The Western mind was marked by inner moral dualism until the Great War. In the run up to this, the cultural turn of Protestantism externalized the moral dualism setting off the religious wars of the Belle Epoque in Europe. Inner religious dualism, as Soloveitchik explained it, came with the personal responsibility of dealing with conflicts intelligently by sublimating, rather than “acting out” crude instincts and emotions.

Apple headquarters, Silicon Valley, 2017.

Yet, soon enough, in the postwar period, life resumed its course that had been interrupted by the Great War in the Fin de Siècle. As if nothing had been learned from decadence after WWII, the parents of the Millennials drugged themselves brim-full in order to shift quickly from Adam II to Adam I, meaning to manage guilt by enhancing feelings of the ego, or what the baby boomers worshipped as self-realization. Now, their offspring, the Millennials, have to pick up the pieces and live with the disastrous cultural and economic consequences. Still influenced by the hippies, the problem with the Millennials is that they overvalue expressionism and authenticity and undervalue relationships and family. This is the result of thinkers like Hobbes, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Ernst Cassirer, Susanne K. Langer,[5] Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger all of whom cherished aesthetic Adam I or the cognitive, outer self over the covenantal (moral) inner self of religion. Historically, relationships have been managed by the inner Adam II, who is closer to our conscience and always superior to Adam I in mastering the language of the soul.

[6]

Protestant Pride: Authenticity

Auschwitz survivor Victor Frankl

After five hundred years of Protestant centrifugal “expressionism” and the politics of authenticity at the cost of relationship and the centripetal family, the habit of “posturing” for claiming the moral high ground is coming to an end. After the postwar Sturm und Drang of identity politics in the name of authentic-being-the-new-politics-of-networking show that the future depends pretty much on “relations” and coherence. We can also see that the rainbow coalition, infatuated with Adam I and mere “intersectionality” cannot deliver leadership, which is why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. With LGBT..X there is too much authenticity and diversity and too little unity. Leadership, however, is a centripetal challenge and therefore depends on Adam II—with language being absolutely critical.

Nevertheless, what we are seeing under President Trump is a discourse gradually upending the visual turn of the Renaissance. Populism is driving the inversion of the “centrifugal” axis of modernity toward “centripetal” values such as family and nation (with religion to follow in due course). This is where the historical role of the post-narcissist, millennial culture comes in, which is set to push the baby boomers into oblivion. The Millennials are the first generation who are forced by the mirror technology and social media to reflect on their own narcissism.

Language-wise, the overall motive of the digital revolution bids a farewell to static pride, reflecting the industrial age of production and outcomes, “ready mades” in the arts, settled public roles and professions, all dominated by binary hardware and the GDP. It is being substituted by the dynamic verbiage, reflecting the breaking of digital binary codes with an emphasis on process, the dissolution of fixed roles, perhaps also gender fluidity as well as worldwide mass migrations. Yet, the centripetal anti-globalist counter-movement is well underway and any transition is going to be protracted—just as it was with the parallelism, observed by the art historian Aby Warburg, of medieval Christian and secular Renaissance culture.[7]

[8] All that counts for him seems to be trustworthiness, reliable human relations, and physical, not digital, dialogue protected by safe geographical and moral borders.

All the unifying aspects of populism are denounced by liberals at their own peril.

Already, the yearning for meaningful dialogue is resurfacing giving us this rare moment of a brilliant dialogue between Jordan Petersen and Cathy Newman on BBC 4. Entirely contrary to the media put downs of supposedly vulgar Trumpism, it was his populism that shifted attention away from the language of the tangibles of consumer porn to the intangibles of American values, recovering the sound of the human voice and dynamic verbs which make up Trump’s Twitter “discourse”. All of this reveals his penchant for dialogue with the common man, bypassing the corrupt PC media filters of self-serving and corrupt elite institutions. Together with the other essentials of populism, the values of religion and the traditional family Trump’s language draws on centripetal powers. Whatever the pitfalls of Trump’s art of communication, it has recovered dialogue with a vengeance.

This is the economic side of the gender revolution and the Millennals have to put up with it. And in Harris’ account, this pressure on the Millennials as “breathing vessels for the accumulation of human capital” is making them crack or turns them into snowflakes. Smartphones are sucking their resilience off since they prevent them from using their own brain power. The hollowing out of authenticity and posturing also explains why centripetal relations, close to one’s heart, are fast getting currency over everything else in the West. After all, social networks are anything but family-like being in fact utterly centrifugal. To sum it up: if the smart phone has any positive effect for the Millennials, it is a wakeup call from collective slumber at the end of the Protestant “Age of Feeling.”

Relation or communication?

In addition, it is only for the Millennials that wage labor—this mute sister of the depreciated Lutheran “charitable deed”—is becoming really precarious. We are talking about the post-Christian aspect of it all and the appreciation of labor is back. How else could Millennials fight the huge debt already on the books for them—300 percent more than their parents, according to Michael Hobbes from Huffington Post. Since student loans cannot legally be discharged through bankruptcy, the Obama administration bailed out student loans to the tune of $880 billion, generating about ten percent of annual profits from them. Surely, exorbitant consumerism starting in early childhood and encouraged by the corporate world has many of today’s twenty-somethings already pushed with their back to the wall with very little chance of ever financially comfortably starting a family. The language of this sets the Anglosphere against the Germanosphere, Trumpism and Brexit against Germanized Europe. Even the new trade wars are signalling English trade relations proper are back opposing the German-European autochthone credentials and its pride in mercantilist, positive trade balances.

We also need to remind ourselves that it was historically Adam II who commands the deed, based on his personal judgement and conscience. History taught us through the Nazis that the frequency of static nouns, revealing closemindedness including name-calling and propaganda, is the mark of pride-and shame cultures of “authenticity” like fascism which continues in today’s merely commercialized identity politics of capitalized gender acronyms. Authenticity is about BBC as it is about LGBT—simple as that. By contrast, the frequency of dynamic verbs is the mark of open-mindedness, non-identity, learning from mistakes, with emphasis on “relations,” change and relational thinking as in humanistic, communitarian, and religious cultures. Only through openness to sacrifice and process yet avoiding consumerist reification can a meaningful life be created. The way forward is transcending the visible culture and abandoning its trappings by ascending to the auditive paradigm of language, relations, and viable dialogue. This is called self-transcendence.

[10] and Tocqueville saw this coming.

[11] and others to argue that school (especially college) is not primarily about enriching yourself with human capital but about ‘signaling’—securing credentials that show you are intelligent, motivated, and compliant enough to jump through whatever hoops are set in front of you.”

This is just part of the general infantilization of our society (Frank Furedi) which puts pressure towards our reliance on centrifugal posturing rather than committed real action. Curiously, posturing has a pantheist source, namely “its close kinship with Calvinism in their common denial of human agency and will.” William Ellery Channing argued that, for a Calvinist, “man acts only in show. He is a phenomenal existence, under which the One Infinite Power is manifested.“[12] Virtue signalling has also to do with “liberal tumescence,” the inevitable show of pride in a shame culture.

[13] Equally, American Catholicism is often said to become like Protestantism. Already Tocqueville believed American Catholicism to be less dogmatic and less ritualized than French Catholicism. Tocqueville also predicted the process of dissolution would occur in two phases: firstly, Calvinism would take the form of “natural religion,” such as Unitarianism, yet this happened among American elites. Working class American Protestants, Tocqueville believed, would be increasingly drawn to Catholicism. Secondly, Unitarianism would take the form of pantheism, which duly happened in the sexual revolt. All this he described in fairly schematic form in Democracy in America,[14] dealing, respectively, with Catholicism and pantheism.

The City Journal published an interesting exchange about the disintegration of adult authority, between Heather MacDonald and Frank Furedi. While Furedi blamed this on the lifestyle of self-victimization as the new universalistic psychology, MacDonald put it down to the culture of protest identity or the race card, both particularistic ideologies.[15] Furedi argued “Our older approach to socializing students rested on morality—the idea that certain beliefs and standards of conduct exist that everyone should strive for. But psychology has wiped away the notion of shared beliefs, which means that people determine whether a given action or belief is moral based on how it makes them feel. If you appeal to normative ideals, you are attacked for trying to impose your values on others.”

Millennials are most likely to finally become fed up with self-victimization. Furedi, for the time being, recommends: “Unfortunately, most people who buy into this philosophy can’t be reasoned out of it. Our job is to dissuade people who might be considering that way of thinking.” Millennials are less prone to addiction, psychic infirmities or drop out than their predecessors the Baby Boomers, they seem less fragile at the price of many carrying through life the comfortable fiction of victim ideology. They actually seem to mistake the inevitable everyday portion of self-suppression as being state-enforced, which means they cannot discern between the inner and outer person. In the same vein, black Princeton Millennials recently announced, self-pityingly: “We’re sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Well let’s skip the concept of student victimology altogether and hand it back to the really disadvantaged and downtrodden. This is the challenge for enhancing resilience with Millennials: teaching them self-transcendence.

[1] Charles Murrey: Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, HarperCollins, 2003.

[2] David Brooks: The Road to Character, New York: 2015.

[3] Joseph B. Soloveitchik: The Halakhic Mind, 1986.

[4] Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell: American Grace – How Religion Divides and Unites US, New York, 2010.

[6]Park MacDougald in American Affairs Volume II, Number 1 (Spring 2018): 214–24.

[7]Hofmann, Syamken, Warnke: Das Menschenrecht des Auges – Über Aby Warburg, EVA, 1980, S. 30.

[8] “Why Liberalism Failed”, 2018.

[10] Jakob Benignus Bossuet: Geschichte von den Veränderungen der Protestantischen Kirchen, Prag: 1785.

[11] Bryan Caplan‘s 2017 book The Case against Education.

[12] Ibid. p. 610.

[13] http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/07/02/3794561.htm.

[14] Vol. II, Part. I, chapter. 6-7.

[15] https://www.city-journal.org/html/campus-victim-cult-15644.html.

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Dr. Friedrich Hansen is a physician and writer. He has researched Islamic Enlightenment in Jerusalem and has networked on behalf of the Maimonides Prize. Previous journalistic and academic historical work in Germany, Britain and Australia. He is currently working in Germany and Australia.