On "Casual Nihilism(s)"

The following is an attempt to respond to a question I posed to myself several years back in relation to Dr. Benway's ongoing project of critique of the reigning intellectual ambiance of the medical sciences. The dilemma is the following: "casual nihilism," the pithy lemma the aforementioned illustrious correspondent of Undefined Work coined some years back (private correspondence) to refer to the form of bowdlerized, fourth-hand positivism that, at the time of the term's coinage, appeared to him to have gained ascendancy in the hallowed halls of Her Majesty's schools of medicine, could all too persuasively be appropriated by myself to refer to precisely the set of premises whose assumption of hegemony in my own field of training and professional activity I have elsewhere floridly and farcically mythologized as the triumph of Saussure over Symbology. In other words, I would not be surprised to find the description "casual nihilism" applied by, say, a traditional humanist or a conservative cultural critic to the modes of inquiry prevalent in the humanities, informed as they tend to be by a conviction of the arbitrariness of the sign, an understanding of truth as a rhetorical effect and an at least nominal commitment to some relatively form of class or related struggles, even as none of these positions prevent most of those who espouse them from looking conventionally middle class on first estimation.
It may be worth pausing for a moment to consider the rather fraught, to say the least, geneaology and reception history of the term "nihilism" itself. The aforementioned lexeme was a moniker adopted with pride by the generation of openly and unabashedly philistine Russian youths devoted to pure, hard, unpoetic scientific knowledge immortalized so memorably by Turgenev in the figure of Bazarov. For these strapping lads, the "nassing" of "ve beleef een nassing" could be glossed as "nothing that people believed before the dawn of the positive sciences" – with the problematic but in all probability quite titillating addendum that in Tsarist Russia, instituting such a position as the basis of the new society had little hope of being realized without the violent and total liquidation of the existing order.
I suppose it is largely the inconvenience and simultaneous romance of the latter situation that separated these gaunt, haggard, pallid fanatics from, say, the smug, plump, serenely confident French "positivists" of the same period (as immortalized by Flaubert in the figure of Homais, whom we might see as a kind of grotesque cousin of Bazarov's) with whom they otherwise shared so much.
But what I am getting at here is how unlikely present-day proponents of the brand of positivism Benway has critiqued as "nihilistic" would be to adopt a posture comparable to that of the
Slavic "nihilists" of yore. That is to say, those who today adhere knowingly and enthusiastically, rather than casually, to the mythos he has labels "nihilist" would almost undoubtedly be loath to identify themselves as such, convinced as they are that they are pursuing true and authentic knowledge of something, viz. the empirical world, using the only reliable methodology available. Hence, persuading such people, who in a limited sense are probably fully justified in holding the beliefs I have just attempted to characterize, that the gesture of excluding from the sphere of possible knowledge those realms of experience that do not lend themselves to quantification contains the kernel of a quasi-religious iconoclastic violence that might be described without extreme inaccuracy as "nihilist" (this is my claim, rather than Benway's) would probably be an uphill battle. In fact, Daniel Dennett had the idea, either quaint in its smug cluelessness or alarming in its unabashed self-admiration, to propose "brights" as the collective self-identification for secular people with "a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist worldview"; that is to say, the difference between his position and that of his opponents (defined a priori as "supernaturalist") is simply that of the difference between light and darkness. There is also the claim, on the part of some of the militant atheist crowd, that, say, natural selection is a much more "inspiring," "life-affirming," or even ethically superior manner of conceiving of human origins and essence than any myth or scripture could ever provide, and even the idea of forging a new unifying species-mythos on the basis of the wondrous "drama" of the rise of homo sapiens sapiens – in other words, a will to the mythification of human origins as evolutionary biology understands them.
Now, this endeavor suggests to me two perhaps contradictory things. One is a general sense, even among many of the more vociferous would-be extirpators of non-scientific based modes of thought, that actually they also conceive of the modes of thought whose exclusive efficacy in the pursuit of knowledge they are eager to enshrine as purely in and of themselves insufficient, at least for inculcating the sacred truths of science into the minds of the vulgar masses. The other is a concession that what is at stake is not altering the mode of apprehending truth – which I would assume to be the central enabling claim of the scientific method, and indeed the basis of its appeal - but desire to replace a given set of doxa with another one, by any means necessary.
Hence Dawkins arguing for the need to create an "atheist lobby" equivalent to the Jewish lobby to find coercive ways to promote its agenda, principally via the various Ideological State Apparatuses. And, I suppose, here is where the "casual" comes in in the phrase "casual nihilism": Benway's point would be that most of the individuals who espouse some version of this ideology, even if they are practicing physicians, do not assume it as a set of beliefs in a manner distinguishable from the adherents of any eminently non-scientific belief system – they assume it as what Barthes called a "mythology," a complex of "falsely obvious" ideas taken for granted, naturalized, hardened into an unquestioned, knee-jerk orthodoxy. And so the agenda of the evangelists of this "casual nihilism" would be to universalize this mythology qua mythology rather than to instill scientific modes of thought in the general populace.
Here is where I come to a curious parallel with my own "humanistic" area of activity and the broader institutional sub-grouping within which it operates. There, conversely, it would be far easier to get someone to assume the self-identification "nihilist" than, say, "positivist." Or to put it differently, and reiterate a somewhat caricaturesque but by no means inaccurate earlier observation, it would be relatively easy to get someone to reject unequivocally the possibility of any truth claims that are not the function of the will to power of a particular hegemonic group (a position I would not be likely to disagree with entirely). Further, many if not most (again, myself included) would be almost guaranteed to understand the justifying claims under the rubric of which our discipline operates – the idea of literature and culture as "humanizing" entities crucial to instilling essential values in the youth, the program most eloquently summed up in Schiller's "Ästhetische Erziehung der Menschheit," some of Matthew Arnold's writings and later those of F.R. Leavis and the New Critics, in other words, traceable to the institutionalization of literature and the humanities in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, broadly understood – as a cluster of ideological masks convenient to the perpetuation of bourgeois hegemony. And again, those who do espouse such a position more often than not manage to combine a relatively casual, knee-jerk assumption that the latter is the case with a comfortable existence within institutions – i.e. humanities departments at elite universities - which rely precisely on a more traditional rhetoric of humanism in order to subsist, receive funding, attract students, get grants from the Mellon Foundation or NEH, etc. In other words, we assume as the basis of our scholarly work a set of anti-humanistic propositions – or, indeed, our own brand of "casual nihilism" – which, were we to truly desire the logical consequences of our assumptions to be realized, would presumably undercut the institutional basis of our continuing to practice the disciplines to which we are committed. And indeed, the right-wing attacks on the contemporary humanities – by Roger Kimball, David Horowitz, Dinesh D'Souza, and others – thrive on precisely this contradiction and this apparent hypocrisy, and despite the general loathsomeness of these people, I must concede that they have identified a blind spot which, although certainly on some level acknowledged, has come to constitute a kind of elephant in the living room, or rather, faculty lounge. A second question, then: what does it mean that professional academic humanists have to adopt as an argument for their continued existence and relevance arguments which they repudiate in their scholarly and pedagogical practice?
A further irony of the situation is that the conditions of late global capitalism appear to be far more effective at bringing about the abolition of the official cultural apparatus of the bourgeois state than the surviving remnants of soixante-huitard rhetoric which remain so resilient in our professional discourses – that is to say, if we desire to expose the institutionalized humanities as a cluster of ideological masks for the perpetuation of particular configurations of hegemony and, presumably, radically restructure or even abolish them, we had better hurry, because funding cuts and an increased perception of frivolity and irrelevance on the part of technocratic university trustees will likely accomplish these goals more effectively and with less liberating results. The irony becomes particularly acute when self-proclaimed radicals complain about funding cuts and marginalization of the humanities in the contemporary university, thus engaging de facto in a nostalgia for an earlier and quainter form of bourgeois capitalist hegemony, more or less coinciding with the postwar era of mass prosperity, suburbanization, the G.I. Bill, etc., when literature departments enjoyed enormous prestige and popularity and public literary intellectuals enjoyed a broad audience and a could boast a confidence in the social relevance of their interventions (on a related matter, Michael Bérubé has recently offered the helpful observation that, apart from a blip of unusually high enrollment in the 60s and 70s, the percentage of students majoring in the humanities has held steady at around 8% for most of the postwar era, and yet observers from all corners endlessly invoke the decline of enrollment as if it were breaking news; I would think the persistence of this theme suggests that a narrative of decline and fall has become in some way ideologically necessary within and more generally with regard to the humanities, irrespective of actual measurable trends).
Of course, Nietzsche already diagnosed the various "nihilisms" at stake here – scientific
materialism, radical socialism, moral relativism, skepticism, pessimism – as sibling symptoms of the same civilizational decadence, so we are not onto anything new here. But what exact kind of siblinghood are we talking about here - rival siblings, estranged siblings? How do the two "casual nihilisms," which we might just as well call "anti-humanisms," relate to each other? A few observations:
1) The prevalent operative ideology - essentially, a mechanistic worldview hostile and contemptuous to all but quantitative forms of knowledge - Benway has dubbed "casual nihilism" in the form it takes within the culture of the medical profession but which we could probably find manifesting itself similarly across the culture of the natural sciences (as evidenced by the work of people like Dawkins and Dennett, who have taken pains to position themselves as the organic intellectuals of their class) has not changed significantly in its basic assumptions and prescriptions since the eighteenth century. Further, it emerged and gained intellectual and institutional ascendancy at more or less the same historical moment that traditional humanism was enshrined (I am oversimplifying this story, but may attempt to return to it in a more nuanced manner at a later point). The two, positivism and humanism, were by no means always mutually antagonistic in the nineteenth century, that great era of armchair scholars who researched plant reproduction in the morning, studied Hindu mythology in the afternoon, read Virgil and Goethe in the evening, and gazed through their powerful telescopes at night, and could indeed be understood at the time to be involved in a collaborative effort on behalf of the universal progress of civilization, the natural sciences supplying the material basis for that progress and the humanities providing its concrete contents qua grand récit. When this partnership fell apart, or whether it ever fell apart in practice, is debatable, but various developments like C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" thesis suggest that it ceased to be particularly plausible in over the first half of the twentieth century for a number of reasons that need not occupy us now. The point is that while we now tend consider the tasks and modes of inquiry dominant in the sciences and the humanities to be at least somewhat at odds or in tension, this was clearly not always the case; an investment in quantitative modes of inquiry, for our average nineteenth century educated gentlemen, would by no means entail a lack of curiosity about or lack of conviction in the importance of studying, say, Milton's syntax.
2) The second "casual nihilism" that concerns us here, that of contemporary anti-foundationalist humanism, developed largely out of a critique of the complicity of the institutionalized humanities with white male bourgeois hegemony, a complicity already alluded to above; it should be evident from the preceding remarks that these same institutionalized humanities, should also be understood as functionally, economically, and ideologically complicit with, in the modern era, the U.S. military-industrial complex, albeit in a less direct manner than the "hard sciences." But in any case, in the postwar era that saw both the explosion of technoscience in direct or indirect service of the burgeoning military industrial complex and a significant rise in enrollments in the humanities (the subsequent reduction of which accounts for the emergence of the narrative of decline mentioned above), the various disciplines under consideration here all operated to some degree as fellow "handmaidens of empire," to recall Nebrija's phrase.
3) The institutional critique of this partnership, which emerged as a cause célèbre in the 1960s, was itself subsequently absorbed and institutionalized within the humanistic disciplines, resulting in the current configuration described above, in which a displaced anti-institutional radicalism has paradoxically become the operative ideology of the humanistic institution itself. The sciences, meanwhile, have remained comparatively impervious to the critiques leveled at them in this same period, be they epistemological (Kuhn, Feyerabend) or ethical-political (Chomsky, Foucault, Illich). In fact, my admittedly somewhat anecdotal impression is that the traditional "positivist" account scientists give themselves of the basis and value of their work has become somewhat more hardened and less nuanced, even as the traditional "humanist" framework which we saw to be its historical contemporary has come to be seen as somewhat embarrassing by those obliged to rely on it duplicitously when challenged to justify their continued employment at institutions of higher learning (the "science wars" of the 80s and 90s, of course, pitted the unapologetic positivism of advocates of the natural sciences against the anti-foundationalism and relativism of anti-humanist humanists). Nevertheless, and somewhat paradoxically, one of the notable trends to emerge out of the institutional critiques of the 60s has been the growth of areas such as "medical humanism," understood as an attempt to move beyond mechanistic scientism and situate medical practice within its social and cultural contexts, under the rubric of a traditionally humanist ideology of the integrated, self-contained individual (hence the invocation of "understanding the whole person," etc.). To summarize my point, in the past several decades, curiously, institutional critique in the humanities has generally taken the form of "anti-humanism," while institutional critique in the sciences has generally taken the form of "humanism."
4) With all this in mind, it is possible to observe a certain parallel in the insufficiency of both critical anti-humanism in the humanities and critical humanism in the sciences as forms of struggle against power. On one hand, the capitalist hegemony that traditional humanism collaborated with, propped up, supplied grand narratives to, always contained within itself forces powerfully antagonistic to humanism, viz. the instrumental rationality at the core of its agenda, for which such grand narratives are mere window dressing, a position now openly adopted by the university administrators abolishing humanities departments for budgetary reasons or the current U.K. government, which intends to essentially defund the humanities; therefore, the institutionalization of the critique of traditional humanism, although initially directed at the complicity of the latter with bourgeois hegemony, has indirectly and unwittingly aided the more blatantly leveling agenda of instrumental rationality at the core of the project of capitalist modernity in its effort to phase out obsolete relics of a now-quaint "high capitalism" to the benefit of a more ruthlessly totalizing order. In the meantime, the introduction of a more "humanistic" outlook into the sciences, by itself, simply incorporates into the sciences themselves a set of ideological frameworks which always accompanied the sciences throughout their modern existence as a kind of supplement, supplying the contents and rhetorical frames of the grand narrative of material progress that emerged along with modern scientific institutions.
5) The foregoing may account in part for a curious symmetry in the relationship between ideology and praxis in the contemporary humanities and the sciences, respectively: whereas humanists have trouble taking seriously the traditional account of the value of their vocation (character-building, the development of humane sensibilities, critical nuance, and the capacity for aesthetic judgment) which nevertheless remains the only cogent pragmatic rationale for their activity, as revealed by their strategic reliance on it when threatened with defunding, natural scientists are adamant in their defense of the traditional version of their activity (the disinterested pursuit of objective truth) even as the material incentives symptomatic of the incorporation of most areas of scientific inquiry into the networks of global capitalist technoscience render that account spectacularly implausible even on a superficial level.
I will leave this final observation as a starting point for the continuation of this discussion, which I fear has been hazardously unspecific and speculative thus far.