Lilla has written an important book in these days of political upheaval and populist nostalgia. This is a collection of essays originally published in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, but taken en masse they encapsulate the ideological framework of political reaction over the past century. Lilla distinguishes between reactionaries and conservatives. Reactionaries “are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings.” The reactionary does not aim to preserve the current order, but seeks to return to a mythical time of bliss, by any means necessary. “The militancy of his nostalgia is what makes the reactionary a distinctly modern figure, not a traditional one.” Like the revolutionary, the reactionary believes he is part of the vanguard of the elect, who will help usher in a new age that will actually be a return to the glorious past. Or better yet, he will push mankind down an alternate path, forsaken in the past, that will lead to ever-greater ensuing bliss. The reactionary “believes that a discrete Golden Age existed and that he possesses esoteric knowledge of why it ended.”
Lilla’s first essay is on Franz Rosenzweig, a turn of the 20th century German Jew who, literally on the doorstep of a Christian conversion, instead reverted back to his Orthodox faith. Influenced by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Rosenzweig eschewed metaphysics for a commonsense philosophy of how to live “the everyday of life.” Rosenzweig decried modern philosophy and reform religion, preferring a return to Biblical sources without mediation. “The notion of return is what links Rosenzweig’s two-front battle, against history and for religion…. If man was to return to himself and his God, if he was to learn to live fully again, he would have to undergo some sort of therapy: not by moving back in time but by learning to escape it.” Reactionaries often speak of transcending history and time itself. For Rosenzweig, “the manner in which Christians understand their revelation and await redemption turns their individual and collective lives into a journey…. [On the other hand,] Jews, as the sole people of revelation, lived in a timeless, face-to-face relationship with their God…. They were given no historical task because they were already what they were destined to be.” For Rosenzweig, the Jews were a community eternally bound by blood. “The Jews did not strike root in land, as the pagans did, or in history, as the Christians would; they struck root in themselves as a way of vouchsafing their eternal relationship with God.” For Rosenzweig, it was a return to faith and their destiny that was the only Jewish calling. He wrote, “The Jewish people has already reached the goal toward which the [other] nations are still moving.” The Jewish and Christian conceptions of revelation and redemption were both incomplete, as both were merely human, but both were also fundamentally incompatible with each other. Boldly, he intoned, “we have crucified Christ and, believe me, we would do it again, we alone in the whole world.”
Lilla’s second biographical essay is about Eric Voegelin, a German Christian who nonetheless, in 1938, had to escape the Nazi’s clutches in Austria, after publishing two books that debunked Hitler’s biological racist pseudo-science. In many ways he seemed a moderate. Voegelin complained he was stuck “between the staid dummies of tradition and the apocalyptic dummies of revolution.” However, he placed himself squarely in the camp of the Counter-Enlightenment. He even feared that the Augustinian conception of a City of God and a City of Man “opened up paths to God that did not have to pass through the royal palace…. It raised the prospect of human beings governing themselves without direct divine guidance,” as they had in ancient times when the king was viewed as either divine himself or having a unique pathway to the gods. This separation of the secular and the spiritual was followed by the Reformation and finally the Enlightenment, which finished the job that “decapitated God.” In Voegelin’s view, “modern man became a Prometheus, believing himself a god capable of transforming anything and everything at will.” With Marxism, fascism, historicism, and scientism, Voegelin feared the secularization of a new faith. He warned, “When God has become invisible behind the world, the things of the world become new gods.” Instead of an ordained historicism, Voegelin thought “history is “a mystery in the process of revelation,” an open field where the divine and human meet, not a highway without exits.”
Lilla’s final biography is on Leo Strauss, a German Jew who left for America before the horrors of WWII. He was a student of Heidegger, who took up his challenge, and defended Socratic philosophy, or at least “the possibility of philosophy.” For Strauss, philosophy was diametrically opposed to revelation- his idea of Athens and Jerusalem. “Strauss held, all societies require an authoritative account of ultimate means- morality and mortality, essentially- if they are to legitimate their political institutions and educate citizens. Theology has traditionally done that by convincing people to obey the laws because they are sacred. The philosophical alternative to obedience was Socrates’ life of perpetual questioning beholden to no theological or political authority.” The question is whether the masses are equipped to follow a philosophical life. Do they need tradition, custom, and the sacred, lest they lose their way? “Philosophers can serve as gadflies to the city, calling it to account in the name of truth and justice; and the city reminds philosophers that they live in a world that can never be fully rationalized, with ordinary people who cling to their beliefs and need assurance.” Strauss strongly defended natural law and inalienable rights derived from reason, but wondered if American society had devolved into a culture where “all men are endowed by the evolutionary process or by a mysterious fate with many kinds of urges and aspirations, but certainly with no natural right?” He would later answer himself, “the contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism, nay, it is identical with nihilism.” Lilla convincingly makes the case that it was not so much Strauss as his students, the so-called Straussian followers who became the intellectual vanguard for reaction in America. Strauss, himself, was unconcerned with contemporary politics or popular cultural debates. His was a life consumed by deep reading of primary texts, which taught timeless esoteric nuggets. Still, it would be fair to say that “from Strauss [his American disciples] had learned to see genuine education as a necessarily elite enterprise that is difficult in a leveling, democratic society.” Lilla concludes with the most damning of ironies, “where but in America could a European thinker convinced of the elite nature of genuine education produce pupils who would go on to make common cause with populist politicians? Where but in America could a teacher of esotericism, concerned about protecting philosophical inquiry from political harm, find his books used to train young people to become guardians of an ephemeral ideology? Where but in America could the Socratic practice of skeptical questioning inspire professions of faith in a national ideal?” Lilla suggests that perhaps, it was really the Straussians, and not Leo Strauss, who became the true American reactionaries.
The rest of Lilla’s essays revolve around various contemporary currents prominent in reactionary politics today. Most rebel against the present wave of subjectivism, secularism, and modernity in general. One current warns that in destroying Christian morality, “the Enlightenment unwittingly prepared the way for acquisitive capitalism, Nietzscheanism, and the relativistic liberal emotivism we live with today, in a society that “cannot hope to achieve moral consensus.”…. Modern liberalism was born to cope with these conflicts, which it did. But the price was high: it required the institutionalization of toleration as the highest moral virtue.” To liberals these are features and not bugs, but to the reactionary these are signs of moral rot and regression. Lilla makes the case that reaction does not want to appeal to reason at all, but “the connections are meant to be felt.” Its success has been to inspire by a sense of rightness, rather than a specific program. It appeals to the heart and not the head. “For an ideology to really reshape politics it must cease being a set of principles and become instead a vaguer general outlook that new information and events only strengthen. You really know when an ideology has matured when every event, present and past, is taken as confirmation of it.” At some point, according to reactionaries, history itself took the wrong path and that is what has led to this world of despair. “For the apocalyptic imagination, the present, not the past, is a foreign country.” Their path is to right the ship by destroying the present and returning to firmer ground. Lilla concludes with the chilling realization, “we are only too aware that the most powerful revolutionary slogans of our age begin: Once upon a time…”
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