"Nihilistic Times" Book Review
Political philosopher Wendy Brown has a new book out called Nihilistic Times, where she looks to one of the founders of sociology, Max Weber, for guidance on how to think about values and nihilism. Brown is one of the better prominent political philosophers, so I was excited about this book—she has always been pretty good at critiquing neoliberalism, including progressivism, and showing how elites use progressive fake values to enhance their own dominance. I have always loved Max Weber too. Weber was active in the pivotal years after Nietzsche, in the early 20th century, and he more deeply and clearly analyzed the crises that Nietzsche prophesized.
The book is pretty good, but it’s only around 100 pages, so it doesn’t fully spell things out in the way you might want from a book addressing the nihilism of our times. It is clearly written (as much as can be expected from a mainstream philosophy book at least). It mostly reframes Max Weber’s famous pair of essays about politics and academia for the current moment, where education is so politicized. The book doesn’t outright condemn woke academic discourse, but that is kind of lurking in the background—the whole reason Brown wrote the book is to emphasize the importance of that distinction. Education becoming politically charged and woke is both a cause of nihilism, and a result of it—politics has become dead as its own distinct sphere, so it has bled over into academia, where it does not belong. The results have, as we all know, been morbid.
In Brown’s view, a lack of limits or boundaries between spheres (politics, art, knowledge, public, private, etc etc), erodes values and creates confusion: “Thus does nihilism ramify as it corrodes boundaries between preaching and teaching, entertainment and information, personality and politics” (68).
Brown sees in Max Weber a potential guide for navigating the nihilism of today: “Weber’s way through nihilism in the intellectual sphere depends on fierce epistemological-ontological distinctions. More than establishing conceptual tidiness, these distinctions are sent into the field as police” (69).
Politics and academia/knowledge/education need to be strictly distinct. That was Weber’s point—which is very basic but so often ignored. The reverse of this is often the case today—politics has become a form of science, and education has become a form of politics. The result of this is that politics is filled with data nerds, empty, passionless neoliberal hacks and shills who don’t believe in anything—they have no values, no qualities, they’re just managers. Obama is the best example of this—the politician as middle manager without vision—but Hillary, Biden, Buttigieg, Kamala, etc are all examples too. The American people yearn for conviction and authenticity, and find nothing. We yearn for real politics, but we find none of it.
We do find radical, authentic politics in academia—the one place where it shouldn’t be. Academia (science, education, etc.), should be the one great domain of objectivity, of knowledge for its own sake, of guiding future citizens through conceptual analysis, critical thinking skills, etc. But today education is more about passion, personality, politics, and agendas—which is bad enough, but the fact that politics itself is largely devoid of these things, creates a truly nihilistic world.
So this is our situation—knowledge/education has become political, and politics has become scientific/managerial. In order to correct this, the two domains—politics and education—need to be separated. Education has to be evacuated of personality, politics, etc, and politics needs to be reinvested with it. This will be hard, obviously, because so much of education now is just big personalities on moral crusades, and so much of politics now is just cold calculating middle managers.
Education and entertainment and politics have also all become sort of merged over the last couple of decades. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is the prime example of this—politics, current events education, and entertainment, all combined into one thing. Infotainment. Others had done this kind of thing before, and it has become even more popular since, but that’s when it was really perfected and transmitted on a huge scale. (Maybe Bill Nye the Science Guy was the originator of this, but he was far surpassed). The idea was that people would retain information and concepts better if they were laughing while they learned—but clearly this has failed. We have had decades of the dominance of infotainment now, and I doubt anyone would claim that we have a more informed citizenry now than before. People are dumber than ever, and less informed than ever—infotainment doesn’t work. Learning and having fun are separate things. Mixing them together—just like mixing together politics and education—just leads to nihilism.
The result of this mixing together of spheres is that knowledge, culture, art, etc., are all dead. All you can do is create "influence" now. There is no audience that exists out there which is capable of learning, gaining, or receiving anything—there is just a spastic digital psychosphere that can be influenced in one direction or the other.
Educators are influencers, politicians are influencers—they seek to gain influence over their followers in digital space, who then flail around maniacally, and try to in turn become influencers themselves. That is what nihilism looks like today.