Category Archives: Nihilism

Plenty of games can impress me in their first hour. NieR: Automata impressed me through philosophical trolling, and thats a completely new one to me. Square-Enix just sent me a code for the game, which I started downloading to my PlayStation 4 when I got home from work. Its a 48 GB installation, and as I write this, it isnt half done. However, it let me start playing early.

This is only a spoiler for the beginning of the game, and if you played the NieR: Automata demo it isnt even a spoiler. Still, I offer a line break or two so you can avoid any spoilers you might fear.

The opening of NieR: Automata is the demo Square-Enix put out a few months ago. Thats it. Its the entire opening section, where you play as 2B fighting through a robot factory and then fight a giant robot both on foot and using 9S flight unit.

Its a pretty good section that shows off what will likely be NieR: Automatas various combat mechanics, using both melee and ranged attacks along with timed dodges. In other words, it feels like Platinum Games developed it because Platinum Games developed it.

The opening section ends with 2B and 9S, exhausted and injured, surrounded by three Goliath units. One Goliath unit was the entire level I just played through, an oil refinery platform with giant excavator arms that took several minutes of straight combat and three cutscenes to destroy. 2B and 9S appear to sacrifice themselves and destroy the three other Goliath units using Black Box reaction, taking mysterious black cubes out of their chests and touching them together to make a huge explosion.

Then NieR: Automata jumps into an in-universe system check menu. And it starts asking me questions. Heres a clip of the menu, so you can appreciate the choices.

Its exactly what it looks like. While NieR: Automata installs, it puts you in a question loop where the answers can be God, nothingness, randomness, and will. And if you give up, it lets you go back to the title screen and eliminates all of your progress from the opening section.

In other words, it is the most Yoko Tara installation screen ever. Nihilism and futility, and false divinity all wrapped up in a way to not spend time while waiting for the other 24 GB of the game to install.

You better believe its going to be thematically consistent with the rest of NieR: Automata. I havent played the rest of the game, and I know its going to be thematically consistent with the rest of NieR: Automata.

Because NieR: Automata is a sequel to a game where, after you get the secret final ending, it completely deletes your save file.

Because NieR: Automata is part of a spin-off series based on the joke ending of Darkengard where the protagonist, his dragon ally, and a giant cosmic abomination are shot down by jets over Tokyo.

Because NieR: Automata is the fifth game based around a universe where everything and everyone is terrible, and nihilism is the closest thing you can have to a philosophy because reality is built around horrible things that want to eat you, including huge demon babies with shark teeth.

Because NieR: Automata is developed by Yoko freaking Taro.

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NieR: Automata Starts With Nihilism and Futility at the Installation Screen - Geek

Eye in the Sky (2015) is the first feature-length film about drone warfare to have received a decent amount of mainstream attention. This no doubt has something to do with the high-caliber cast, including lead roles by Helen Mirren as Colonel Katherine Powell, and Alan Rickman as Lieutenant General Frank Benson. Big names imply big budgets. But theres another reason why this movie, directed by Gavin Hood, has been discussed more than National Bird (2016), Good Kill (2015), Drone (2014), Drones (2013), Unmanned: Americas Drone Wars (2013), or Dirty Wars (2013).

None of these films is entertaining. Eye in the Sky, like some of the others in this growing genre, presents itself as a work of historical fiction, grounded in what is supposed to be a realistic portrayal of the contemporary practice of drone warfare against persons suspected of association with radical jihadist groups. But rather than condemning the remote-control killers, as the other films unequivocally do, Eye in the Sky portrays the protagonists wrestling with the complexities of morality before launching missiles and then congratulating one another on their success.

The evil enemy here, in Nairobi, Kenya, is Al Shabaab, and the fate of one of their cells is the subject of lengthy and sophistic just war debate among the drone warriors. A contingent of US and British military and civilian officials communicate with one another from different parts of the world over Skype-like video feed, and after arguing over the course of the workday, they ultimately decide to execute the suspects, who appear to be preparing to carry out a suicide attack in the proximate future or, as the drone warriors would say, imminently.

One of the suspects is a US citizen, recently recruited from Minnesota, and two are British nationals. The white woman, Susan Danford nom de guerre Ayesha Al Hady has been tracked by Colonel Powell for a remarkable six years. Powell is keen to kill Danford, even after having summarized her lifes story as that of a person who came from a troubled household, married a terrorist, and was converted to the jihadist cause as a result of her vulnerability.

The mission is supposed to culminate in capture, not killing, but when the group of suspects convenes at a house where a suicide vest is being assembled and a video message filmed, the military officials immediately call for a missile strike, to the initial protests of the civilian political officials in attendance, who insist that they are there to witness a capture, not a targeted assassination.

The rest of the film is essentially an extended consideration of a version of what professional analytic philosophers call The Trolley Problem, a thought experiment wherein people are persuaded that they must kill some people in order to save others. Such hypothetical scenarios like the proverbial ticking bomb, which is said by some to illustrate the necessity of torture under certain circumstances involve an eerie desire on the part of some thinkers to persuade others to condone what, left to their own devices, they would never have agreed to do. As David Swanson has correctly observed, there is no known case in reality of drone warriors who kill a person and his entourage as they strap a suicide vest onto the martyrs chest. That is why singling out this wildly implausible and entirely hypothetical scenario as representative of drone warfare in general is a consummate expression of pro-military propaganda.

Eye in the Sky attempts to portray the dilemmas involved in drone warfare but ultimately serves to promote the drone warriors all-too-sophistic modes of reasoning. Rather than ask deep and important questions such as how Al-Shabaab became such a powerful force in, first, Somalia and, later, places such as Kenya, the film allows the viewer steeped in New York Times headlines touting Six Suspected Militants Slain to float along blissfully in his or her state of ignorance regarding what precisely the US and British governments have been doing in the Middle East for the past sixteen years.

No indication is made of the fact and frankly Id be surprised if Director Hood himself were aware that the US-backed 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia led directly to a massive increase in local support for Al-Shabaab. Its all-too-easy and comforting to swallow the official line that the members of local militias being targeted by drone strikes are bad guys who need to be extirpated from the face of the earth, even when it is likely that many of the people intentionally destroyed have been dissidents (or their associates) seeking to challenge the central government authority. (See Yemen for another example.)

It is abundantly clear from the very fact that new recruits from the United States and Britain indeed, the very targets of the mission in this story have been primarily either troubled youths or persons outraged at the Western devastation of the Middle East, and now Africa. Yet the film blithely allows the viewer to persist in puzzlement over the perennial question: Why do they hate us?

Colonel Powell wants to kill people, as is obvious by her calling for a missile strike even before explosives are seen at the meeting place. (Do the director and screenwriter win points from feminists for making the most ruthless military killer and her radical jihadist quarry both women? Or from progressives for making them white?)

Both Colonel Powell and General Benson consider Susan Danfords allegiance with Al-Shabaab to be, essentially, a capital offense. They dont bother with niceties such as the fact that capital punishment has been outlawed in the United Kingdom. Instead, the military personnel seek refuge in and parrot the simpleminded terms of just war theory which they learned in first-year ethics class at the military academy.

The missile strike is said to be a military necessity, proportional, and a last resort. It has furthermore been authorized by the legitimate authority, aka the US president, to whom the British continue to defer, even after the scathing Chilcot report in which Prime Minister Tony Blair was taken to task for embroiling Britain in the ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq. As though none of that ever happened, when President Barack Obama normalized the targeted assassination of anyone in any place on the planet where radical jihadist terrorists are said by some anonymous analyst to reside, Prime Minister David Cameron, too, followed suit. In August 2015, he authorized missile strikes from drones against British nationals in Syria, despite the Parliaments having voted down his call for war in 2013.

Perhaps Cameron was impressed by Barack Obama and drone killing czar John Brennans oft-flaunted fluency in just war rhetoric. Unfortunately, in Eye in the Sky, the sophomoric facility of the assassins with the terms of just war theory may, too, be taken as evidence to ignorant viewers that these people in uniform know what they are talking about and should be trusted with the delicate decision of where, when, and why to summarily execute human beings who have not been charged with crimes, much less permitted to stand trial.

The question how a missile strike in a country not at war can be conceived of as a military necessity is altogether ignored in this film, as though it were already a settled matter. Someone in the US government (President Obama under the advisement of John Brennan, former president and CEO of The Analysis Corporation, the business of which is terrorist targeting analysis) decreed that the entire world was a battlefield, and this opened up every place and other governments to the delusive casuistry of just war theorists, including their most strident advocates for war, the self-styled humanitarian hawks.

No matter that in this case there are no military soldiers from either the United States or Britain on the ground to be harmed. No matter that their collaborators are local spies who do in fact commit acts of treachery against their compatriots and are indeed brutally executed when this is discovered. Despite the complete absence of any of the aspects of a war which might warrant a missile strike as a military necessity above all, that soldiers on the ground will otherwise die the itchy trigger drone warriors point to their version of the dreaded Trolley Problem and a false and misleading application of utilitarianism to convince the naysayers that they must approve the launch of a missile in order to avert an even worse tragedy.

The military personnel are more persuasive than the sole civilian dissenter, and no one seems to be bothered in the least by questions of strategy. The word blowback is never even mentioned in this film. But judging by the growth of ISIS and Al-Shabaab over the past decade, and the testimony of suicide bombers such as Humam Al-Balawi (the Jordanian doctor who blew up a group of CIA personnel at Camp Chapman in 2009 in direct retaliation to US missile strikes on Pakistan), the tactic of drone assassination can reasonably be expected to cause the ranks of jihadists to continue to swell. No one denies that during the occupation of Iraq, an effective recruiting tactic of factional groups was to point to the civilians harmed by the Western infidels as confirmation that they were indeed the evil enemy. Knowing all of this, it does not seem unfair to ask: Is military necessity now conceived by the remote-control killers as whatever will ensure the continuation of a war?

In Eye in the Sky, the drone warriors are more than willing to risk the life of a little girl who has set up a table where she is selling loaves of bread because, they say, if they do not act immediately then perhaps eighty little children just like her will be killed instead. No mention is made of the psychological trauma suffered by the people who do not die in drone strikes, but witness what has transpired. (When was the last time one of your neighbors houses was cratered by a Hellfire missile?) Instead, the collateral damage estimate (CDE) so conscientiously calculated by a hapless soldier pressured by Colonel Powell to produce an estimated likelihood of the girls death at less than 50% altogether ignores the 100% probability that she and everyone in the neighborhood will be terrorized.

But even focusing solely on the likely lethality of the strike, the drone warriors in Eye in the Sky display what is in reality a lethal lack of imagination, an utter failure to conceive of counter measures such as warning the people in nearby markets and public places of the impending danger. That is because, in the minds of the drone warriors, if one terrorist attack is thwarted, then another will surely be carried out later on down the line. By this mode of reasoning, they have arrived at the depressing and nihilistic conclusion that they must kill all of the suspects. What would be the point of doing anything else?

Recruits from Western societies, young people such as Junaid Hussain, Reyaad Khan, and Ruhul Amin, are assumed to be beyond the reach of reason, despite the glaring fact that their recent conversion to the jihadist cause itself reveals that they have changed their view before and could, in principle, change it again. Nonetheless, the drone warriors persist in their worship of death as the be-all and end-all of foreign policy. They are literally trapped in the lethality box, because they cannot conceive of any other way of dealing with factional terrorism than by killing people. When obviously innocent persons are destroyed, maimed, terrorized and left bereft by Western missiles, these acts of so-called military necessity end by galvanizing support for the Anti-Western jihadist cause, both near the strike site and in lands far away.

Realistically, what self-respecting father would not wish to avenge the death of his young child at the hands of the murderous drone warriors who are so despicable as to kill without risking any danger to themselves? Instead of thinking through the likely implications of what they are doing, the drone warriors persist in invoking delusive just war rhetoric to promote what they want to do: kill the evil enemy. But the use of lethal drones in what has been successfully marketed to taxpayers as smart war, eliminates soldierly risk only by transferring it to civilians on the ground. No matter that new recruits continue to flock to the jihadist cause, seems to be the thinking of our great military minds, missiles are in ample supply.

It is a depressing view of humanity indeed which sees homicide as the solution to conflict when in fact it is its primary cause. But the delusion of the drone assassins is even worse than the corruption of criminal contract killers because they emetically congratulate each other, as in this film, for pushing buttons to eliminate their fellow human beings from the face of the earth, as though this were some kind of accomplishment, rather than the worst of all possible crimes.

New recruits such as Susan Danford will never stop arising from the ashes of drone strike sites until the drone strikes have come to a halt. Indulging in a false and Manichean division of people into black and white categories of good and evil, the killers corrupt more and more young people to collaborate with them, both informants and drone operators. Those who perform well in their jobs rise in the ranks to become the commanders of future killers, until at last the entire society is filled with people who upon watching a film such as Eye in the Sky end by sympathizing not with the victims but with those who destroyed them.

Focused as they will be upon this simpleminded Trolley Problem portrayal of drone warfare, Western viewers will likely miss altogether the obscene hegemonic presumptions of the killers who use beetle- and bird-sized drones to penetrate the private homes of people in order to stop them from wreaking havoc in countries where there are no US or British soldiers on the ground to harm. To pretend that all of this killing is for the benefit of the locals is delusional to the point of insanity.

If serial Western military interventions had not destroyed country after country across the Middle East, beginning with Iraq in 1991, then there would be no evil enemy to confront in the first place. To continue to ignore the words of jihadists themselves when they rail against the savage butchery of millions of Muslim people by the US military and its poodles is but the most flagrant expression of this smug hegemony. No, I am afraid, they do not hate us for our freedom.

In Eye in the Sky, anyone who opposes the use of military weapons against people living in their own civil society thousands of miles away is painted as a coward and a fool, as though there were some sort of moral obligation to launch missiles to save a hypothetical group of eighty people. The very same killers do not feel any obligation whatsoever to provide food, shelter, and potable water to the people living in such societies, even when the $70K cost of a single missile could be repurposed to save many more than eighty lives, in addition to winning over hearts and minds.

Here is the ugly truth shining through the willingness to kill but not to save lives in nonhomicidal ways: Peace does not pay. The drone killing machine is the latest and most lucrative instantiation of the military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics complex. That Westerners continue to be taken in by this hoax is tragic for the people of Africa and the Middle East mercilessly terrorized (when they are not maimed or incinerated) while the killers gloat over what they take to be their moral courage.

Near the end of the film, Lieutenant Colonel Benson sanctimoniously admonishes the sole remaining dissenter among the witnesses to the mission, which she has denounced as disgraceful. He smugly retorts to her suggestion that he is a coward: Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war. But the cost of the remote-control elimination of persons suspected of complicity in terrorism is not merely the tragic loss of human life. It is the destruction of such killers souls and the concomitant creation of even more killers who feel the need to retaliate in turn. It is the fact that they have rolled back all of the moral progress in procedural justice made by human societies since the 1215 Magna Carta. It is the fact that their dogged insistence on perpetuating and spreading this practice to the darkest and least democratic corners of the planet represents a categorical denial of human rights.

Laurie Calhoun, a philosopher and cultural critic, is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age(Zed Books, September 2015; paperback forthcoming in 2016) and War and Delusion: A Critical Examination (Palgrave Macmillan 2013; paperback forthcoming in 2016). Visit her website.

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Eye in the Sky: Where Nihilism and Hegemony Coincide - Antiwar.com (blog)

Poor, poorNigel Farage. In any ordinary week, his consolation prize for missing out on a knighthood would be the Gerald Ratner Golden Knuckleduster (0.002 carat;touch it for a second, have a rash for a month) for Most Cataclysmic Instant Rebranding.

This is no ordinary week, however, and the Oscars finale robs him of another title he did more to deserve it than its actual recipients.When Woody Allen was asked how he would most want to be reincarnated, he said As Warren Beattys fingertips. Now those fingertips will be remembered less for gliding over Hollywoods most desirable women (check out the A-Z lists) than for grasping a card reading Best Actress, Emma Stone, La La Land while their owner gazed out sheepishly at the millions observing his bemusement around the world.

For all that, you wouldnt want to underplay the damage dealt to the Farage brand by the latest model to roll off the inexhaustible factory line of Ukip superfiasci. Nigel is furious with Douglas Carswell, the partys lone MP, over the latters efforts to stop him getting the knighthood Nigel deems his due reward for Brexit.

He has been furious with Carswell ever since that erstwhile Tory MP defected and won the Clacton by-election under the purple banner. He patently regards Carswell as an effete intellectual ponce, and his ambition to detoxify Ukip by moving the focus away from immigration as a treacherous affront to himself.That fury has boiled over with the leak of emails showing Carswell being mischievous when he was asked to help get Farage a knighthood by Malcolm Pearson. If that entrant on the capacious honours board of Ukip farceurs escapes you, it was Pearson who, when leader of Ukip,denied having read his own manifesto before the 2010 electionin a tone implying he wouldnt have the bloody thing in the house.

Nigel Farage says 'our real friends speak English'

This genius is so loyal to his predecessor andsuccessor on the Ukip iron throne that he originally hoped to wangle hima peerage. When that plan was abandoned for one of two reasons either 1) Nigel would have had to quit as an MEP, which he didnt care to do,or 2) The noble Baron Farage of Whiteseville in the County of Albinoshire? Are you pulling my bell end? his thoughts turned to a K.

In late December, Pearson asked Carswell to report on how his knighthood lobbying was going. As promised, I did speak to the government Chief Whip, emailed Carswell. Perhaps we might try angling to get Nigel an OBE next time round? For services to headline writers?The cheeky bleeder well knew how Farage would take the idea of an OBE. For guidance on this, we turn to a late expert on etiquette. An OBE is what you get, said Michael Winner on refusing one in 2006, if you clean the toilets well at Kings Cross Station.

But surely, you must be thinking, mainline termini toilet cleaners are the kind of people for whom Farage fights the good fight? Wouldnt an anti-establishment warrior,who in the US on the weekend cited the Brexit-Trump axis as the start of a global revolution, prefer a humble OBE to show solidarity with ordinary folk?Isnt a knighthood the emblem of how a self-serving political class rewards its cronies and donors? Could there be a tawdrier mascot for a decadent establishment than a K?

Apparently there could. And so Nigels man of the people schtick (never that convincing, but not as laughably exposed as now)can be seen spinning clockwise towards the reputationalU-bend.

The rotten luck here for dearNige is that there was no recent precedent of a populist icon who, after presenting his public work as wholly altruistic, was caught petulantly screeching about being denied a knighthood. Had there been, it would have warned him that rampant hypocrisy and a glaring sense of entitlement can incinerate any brand.Instead, the latest Ukip golden balls-up since Paul Nuttalls Walter Mitty tribute act finds Farage screaming in print that Ukip will collapse unless Carswell is expelled from the party.

This is a pretty useful working definition of politicalnihilism. Im no Stephen Hawking, but you neednt be Lucasian Professor of Mathematics to master this equation: if you have one MP, and you subtract one MP, what youre left with is nil MPs.

Advocating for a parliamentary strength of zero is an eccentric way to hammer home the message about Brexit restoring parliamentary supremacy. So if Carswell is kicked out, one hopes Nigel will have another crack at becoming an MP by standing against him in Clacton.

Eighth times a charm and if he does finally plant his bum on the green benches, it would only be the beginning of the rapid surge to Downing St that would end, as it does for all male ex-premiers, with the choice of knighthood or peerage.

Dont take my word for it. Farage will make a fine UK Prime Minister. Looking forward to that, tweets David Duke.

Lose a knighthood, gain the admiration of a formerImperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan Swings and roundabouts for plain Mister Nigel there as the crazy hurtling of the Ukip rollercoaster leaves it clinging to relevance by the tips of its fingers.

Originally posted here:

The fight between Nigel Farage and Douglas Carswell is the definition of political nihilism - The Independent

In a 2016 National Public Radio (NPR) article on his book on how to teach in America's mainly black urban schools, Christopher Emdin gave an anecdote of his own experience as a student.

One day in the 10th grade, the classroom door slammed. Young Emdin dived under his desk. His maths teacher marched him off to the principal. The boy, he believed, was being a class clown.

Emdin, however, had perceived real danger. He thought he had heard a gunshot. Days earlier, a shooting had happened outside his apartment building.

The point of the anecdote was of teacher-student (mis)communication, which Emdin addressed in his book White Folk Who Teach in the Hood ... And the Rest of Y'All Too. The essence of his argument was that young people in America's urban environments often have different cultural and linguistic experiences than their white teachers, which affects how they are taught and learn. "People who perceive themselves to be colour blind oftentimes have biases hidden in their colour-blindness," Emdin said in that NRP interview.

There aren't many white folks teaching in Jamaica's schools. But the issues raised by Emdin are not so alien to Jamaica. They manifest themselves sometimes in a social gulf between teachers and their students in inner-city communities. But it is usually more apparent in the ongoing debate over the use/acceptance of Jamaican Patois as a distinct language that ought be taught and used in the island's schools and whether the majority of Jamaicans understand English, the language of pedagogy. The consensus to the latter, among linguists, seems to be no.

Which brings us to two issues: One is the project launched last week in Jamaica by Christopher Emdin and the Jamaica National Foundation; and, second, the use of Patois in schools. Emdin, 39, is now an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics, Sciences and Technology at America's Columbia University. His speciality is urban education, with a focus on maths and science.

He worked with the American rapper GZA to develop a hip hop competition in New York, centred on lyrics about maths and science. It has been immensely popular.

Emdin and the JN Foundation have now brought the concept to Jamaica, under a project called Science Genius Jamaica (SCG), utilising Jamaican dancehall music, which, like hip hop, is often grounded in misogyny and nihilism.

But there is no doubt that dancehall is immensely popular. "Almost as soon as you put on a dancehall song, and it's catchy and creative, the young people grasp it," conceded Floyd Green, Jamaica's junior education minister. Promoters of the project hope that will happen in the case of the songs to be composed by the grade nine students. Without the nihilism.

The language of dancehall is mostly Jamaican Patois. Mr Green's, and implicitly the Government's, embrace of this dancehall-meets-education project should be music to the ears of people like Professor Hubert Devonish, who heads the Jamaican Language Unit at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, and is often a lonely voice, except for Carolyn Cooper's, pressing for acceptance of Jamaican Patois, the mother tongue, and for bilingual education in the island.

Given global realities, this newspaper insists on all Jamaicans being literate and functional in English. The majority of Jamaicans start at a deficit in this regard. If the bilingual education approach suggested by Devonish et al is a means to this end, so be it!

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Editorial | By any means necessary including dancehall - Jamaica Gleaner

Theres something endearing about a band of rust-belt punks (from Allenstown, Pennsylvania) fronted by a sometime insurance claims adjuster (name of Matt Korvette) whose stated aim is to bludgeon the listener with dull, monotonous droning rock music that just sucks the energy out of you. Like life, then!

Pissed Jeans fifth album catalogues Korvettes frustration at mainstream moeurs in the time-honoured Black Flag mode, only with a binding theme of masculine sexual despondency and a sound a bit like mud with shards of glass in it.

The opener, Waiting On My Horrible Warning, is a test of faith, but the ensuing The Bar Is Low casts an almost Houellebecqian eye on the 21st-century douchebag.

Elsewhere Korvette examines the despondent allure of the Ignorecam there are men whose peculiar fetish is to pay women to ignore them, did you know? while Im a Man, narrated by author Lindsay Hunter, is an everyday horror story of office predator (Lick that envelope Fill that stapler.)

Beneath the nihilism and cynicism and bile, one suspects Pissed Jeans are the last decent men in America.

(Sub Pop)

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Pissed Jeans Why Love Now review: 'nihilism and cynicism' - Evening Standard

Like many others, I was grieved to learn of Michael Novaks passing. Though I had never met him nor corresponded with him, I did feel in a very real way that he had been my teacher. My classroom with him had been his Templeton Prize address, Awakening From Nihilism. I was five years old in August 1994 when Novak delivered it, but his wisdom has not faded with time. Reading the address as a college student in the late 2000s, I found its prophetic witness every bit as true to the world I lived in as if it had been delivered that day.

What I found in Awakening From Nihilism was (at last) a coherent, fully-formed case for truth. In my evangelical education, every teacher I learned from cared about and loved truth, but few could explain why truth mattered to freedom. My evangelical teachers stressed, rightly, that without regard for the truth, Christ and his kingdom were inaccessible. But for many of my peers, the pursuit of truth wasand isdiametrically opposed to the pursuit of freedom. Truth is often received as a frozen, cerebral word; love, justice, and authenticity, by contrast, are the words of the artist and humanist. Even those in my life who knew that truth mattered seemed resigned to this mentality, appealing to truth over and against freedom in the name of religious obligation, not human flourishing.

In his lecture, Michael Novak destroyed this false dichotomy. He destroyed it with history, deftly observing that the horrors of the twentieth century were the fault not of theocrats (as the New Atheists repeatedly insist) but of relativists. Murderous authoritarianism, Novak said, assaulted the truth long before it assaulted the people. The gas chamber and the gulag were indeed monuments to a superstition, but not the superstition the postmodernists claimed.

What those learned who suffered in prison in our timewhat Dostoevsky learned in prison in the Tsars timeis that we human beings do not own the truth. Truth is not merely subjective, not something we make up, or choose, or cut to todays fashions or the morrows pragmatismwe obey the truth. We do not have the truth, truth owns us, truth possesses us. Truth is far larger and deeper than we are. Truth leads us where it will. It is not ours for mastering.

And yet, even in prison, truth is a master before whom a free man stands erect. In obeying the evidence of truth, no human being is humiliatedrather, he is in that way alone ennobled. In obeying truth, we find the way of liberty marked out as a lamp unto our feet. In obeying truth, a man becomes aware of participating in something greater than himself, which measures his inadequacies and weaknesses.

If in truth we find human dignity, then the reverse is also true: Where truth is cast aside, so also is human dignity. This is the paradox missed by the architects and missionaries of the sexual revolution. But not for much longer. Though vulgar relativism found a friend in moralistic therapeutic deism, the assault of the sexual revolution on both body and soul is becoming less obscured. Pornography consumes young men and spits them out, weak and withdrawn. Abortion, long laden with politically correct euphemisms like safe, legal, and rare, is taking off that mask, as Planned Parenthood contractors sift through human anatomy and murmur, Its a boy. Radical gender ideology is sexualizing even elementary school spaces, while cultural elites cheer the surgical self-mutilation of teens. This is tyranny, not freedom.

Nor is it still relativism. The authoritarians of whom Novak spoke exchanged the truth for a lie, and then mandated the lie. Isnt this precisely what we see in our supposedly tolerant age? Threatening freedom of conscience in the name of sexual freedom may seem to be a contradiction that any sane person would catch. But, as Novak reminded us, freedom is mere pretense for those who reject the claims of truth. Relativism was always meant to be deposed by New Morality. Relativism says, Hath God really said? New Morality says, I am god and I hath said. Those who advocated for a moral revolution against truth have no right to be shocked at the thuggish absolutism of New Moralists. Novak warned them: To surrender the claim of truth upon humans is to surrender the earth to thugsthugs, whether they run nations and prison camps, or school boards and circuit courts.

This was the light I had waited for. Truth was not opposed to human flourishing and happiness. In fact, only truth can foment it. To escape from truth is, as Francis Schaeffer wrote, to escape from reason itself, and into the waiting arms of strongmen.

Is there hope? Yes indeed. The title of Novaks address is important: Awakening From Nihilism. Awakening is possible. It is possible because virtue is not the creation of ideologues or the exclusive property of the state. Rather, virtue is real, objective, and available to all, because it is grounded in God. The free society is moral, or not at all, Novak said, and our hope for a moral and self-restrained culture is based not on humanistic self-worship, but on God himself: The human person alone is shaped to the image of God. This God loves humans with a love most powerful. It is this God who draws us, erect and free, toward Himself, this God Who, in Dantes words, is the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.

We can awake from nihilism because there is ever and always One who is never asleep. The promise of autonomous self-creation through the casting aside of truth is a lullaby, but the hope of forgiveness and resurrection and new creation is the morning dawn. For those of us who want our generation to wake up from nihilism, we must do more than grab the sleepers. We must shout, over the slumber, Awake, O sleeper, and Christ will shine on you.

Samuel D. James serves as communications specialist to the Office of the President at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

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Still Waking Up - First Things (blog)

In her After Writing, Catherine Pickstock argues that the Cartesian Cogito is grounded in a Cartesian ontology, which is in turn related to a Cartesian politics. According to Descartes' Regulae, she says, being is defined as that which is clear and distinct, available to absolute and certain intuitions, and perfectly known and incapable of being doubted.' Existence becomes a simple' or common notion, which, along with unity' and duration,' is univocally common to both corporeal things and to spirits. These distinct and clearly-known objects can be mapped in a comprehensive mathesis, modelled on the abstract and timeless certainty of arithmetic and geometry (623).

This is the background to Descartes's claim that material reality is extensio, an homogenous quantity divided into degrees of motion and mechanical causes, and fully grasped in its givenness.' Qualities like color - inevitable indistinct and hazy - are reduced to abstract spatial quantities (63). Gone in this ontology is any conception (whether Platonic or Christian or some combination of the two) of a depth to material reality, an ungraspable spiritual reality that is beyond our grasp. Descartes drains extension or corporeality itself of all its force and power. Immanentizing reality, or materializing reality, paradoxically end up with the erasure of matter and reality. The secular given' of the universal method is purely formal, articulated only in abstract structures which do not coincide with any actual embodied reality. But what is an immanentized ideal except the nihil, something which vanishes the moment it is posited? (67). Nihilism is a deviation from Cartesian ontology but inherent in it.

Pickstock recognizes here a primitive gesture of purification. Once the thinking thing thinks anything in particular, it is no longer graspable and simple, no longer certain. It gets lost in the uncertainties of actual thought. In its purity the Cartesian subject is modeled on the Cartesian city, a planned urban space with clear lines dividing inside from outside. Descartes commends the ideal of Sparta, since it was devised by a single man and hence all tended to the same end (quoted 58).

Sparta's military is set up for the defense of its own absolute interior, and is also a fitting sign of a metaphysics that, as Derrida realized, was the preservation of interiority, of reason as monadic self-presence, and of the city as a pristine enclosure which must resort to the expulsion of the impure. For in the case of the Cartesian city, the impure is represented as that which bears the traces of time, multiplicity, and difference, in the form of the emergent structures of ancient cities, organic legal systems, and philosophical and pedagogical traditions. To such instances of impurity, Descartes response with a violent gesture of demolition (59).

The Cartesian subject is a Spartan: He reasons best in solitude, according to a method that clears out anything impure that might contaminate his quest for certainty. The Spartan philosopher rejects the diverse books compounded and amassed little by little from the opinions of many different persons.' He relies instead on the simple reasoning which a man of good sense naturally makes. He thus reaches a pure knowledge, purified of history and the complications of language (60).

Whether or not Pickstock has Descartes right I cannot say. But she does show the inner connection between the self-enclosed, self-identical subject and the postmodern nihil-subject. And she implies that the former leads to the latter because of a stoicheic decision of purification that ends up clearing away the contaminants of time, history, language and relation that make the subject a subject in the first place.

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Descartes, Nihilist - First Things (blog)

Home Site Map Nihilism nihilism, n. 'nI-(h)&-"li-z&m, 'nE- (1817) 1 a : a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless b : a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths 2 a (1) : a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility (2) capitalized : the program of a 19th century Russian party advocating revolutionary reform and using terrorism and assassination b : TERRORISM [source]

A Bit of Metaphor

Lightning cracks across the night sky and reveals a mottled rock face towering above you, surrounding you on three sides over the space of several hundred acres. Rain lashes against you, wetting your eyes and drenching your clothing, as the wind flings you against the rock mottled with dirt, overgrowth and the strange distortions of time. You know there is a cave which takes you through this rock, to a space where the storm will be less baffling and perhaps you can weather it, but you cannot find the door. Using your eyes, you search time and time again until finally, in desperation, you run your fingers along the rock, trying to find a grip of any kind. After you struggle for some time, your brain becomes numb at the prospect of your imminent death, and thus you relax, and walk the path at the base of the mountain at random. On a whim, you think, you catch a hand on a seemingly flat surface and realize it curves inward. You've found your entrace.

Nihilism remains one of the most controversial topics of the modern era, for a good reason: science has supported a form of nihilism by steadily revealing more of the underpinning behind natural processes, making things that once seemed to be unique objects appear as a collaboration of different effects. Slowly the post-animist ideas of the things we refer to with nouns being unique and of a consistent content are being exposed as structures of granular objects intersecting according to natural laws and constraints. This process threatens many of the social and emotional constructs used commonly in human society with a destabilization based not in the threat to the concept in question, but to the concept archetype from which those concepts emerge.

Despite this recent condition, nihilism is an eternal question in the human experience. As the definition above illustrates, there is a split in the meaning of the word. The most common meaning in our current society is a conflation of the lack of inherent value with a fatalism and aimlessness in intellectual choice-making; the second meaning is one in which an epistemological sandblaster is applied to all new input to remove social, mental, moral, emotional and political conditioning from the meaning, perception and differentiation of objects. It is the second meaning in which the word is used here, since fatalism and passivity are so well known as separate phenomena there is no need to confuse them with what can be revealed as a separate phenomena.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we are products of our time and the inherent preconceptions its culture and social requirements place upon objects and events, through mechanisms as diverse as language, symbolism in art, and nostalgic associations of feelings and configurations. The simplest example of this is the good/pleasurable - bad/hurtful axis with which we communicate the nature of events to children from their earliest days; it arises from a pragmatism of identifying behavioral constraints, but leaves impressions lasting in the mind of the individual. Another common example is sexual conditioning, by which early objects of reproductive stimulus can be used to condition an individual throughout his or her life. Since much of the human intellectual faculty is designed to classify objects and quickly respond to them, meta-classification ("good"/"evil" and the like) afflicts perception at the level of pre-processing of stimulus, before information is tokenized into language and conclusions, usually in a visual or verbal form representing a sentential structure in which causality or coincidence are expressed.

As research probes further into the complexities of the human mind, it becomes clear that the mind is far from being a composite thing which is an actor upon its world through thoughts; rather, thoughts compose the mind, in the form of connections and associations wired into the tissue of the brain, creating circuitry for future associations of like stimulus. The schematic of this intellectual machine builds separate routing for situations it is likely to encounter, based on grouped similarities in events or objects. In this view of our computing resources, it is foolish to allow pre-processing to intervene, as it creates vast amounts of wiring which serve extremely similar purposes, thus restricting the range of passive association (broad-mindedness) or active association (creativity) possible within the switching mechanism of the brain as a whole. As here we are devout materialists, the brain and mind are seen as equatable terms.

The "positive" effects of nihilism on the mind of a human being are many. Like the quieting of distraction and distortion within the mind brought about by meditative focus, nihilism pushes aside preconception and brings the mind to focus within the time of the present. Influences which could radically skew our perceptions - emotions, nervousness, paranoia, or upset, to name a few - fade into the background and the mind becomes more open to the task at hand without becoming spread across contemplations of potential actions occurring at different levels of scale regarding the current task. Many human errors originate in perceiving an event to be either more important than it is, or to be "symbolically" indicative of relevance on a greater scale than the localized context which it affects, usually because of a conditioned preference for the scale of eventiture existing before the symbolic event.

Nihilism as a philosophical doctrine must not be confused with a political doctrine such as anarchism; political doctrines (as religions are) remain fundamentally teleological in their natures and thus deal with conclusions derived from evidence, where nihilism as a deontological process functions at the level of the start of perception, causing less of a focus on abstracting a token ruleset defining the implications of events than a rigorous concentration on the significance of the events as they are immediately effecting the situation surrounding them. For example, a nihilistic fighter does not bother to assess whether his opponent is a better fighter or not that the perceiving agency, but fights to his best ability (something evolution would reward, as the best fighter does not win every fight, only most of them). As a result of this conditioning, nihilism separates the incidence of events/perceptions from causal understanding by removing expectations of causal origins and implications to ongoing eventiture.

This may seem like a minor detail; it is. However, it remains a detail overlooked by the Judeo-Christian "Western" nations, and as a result, our cognitive systems are bound up in conditioned preconception and moral preprocessing, separating us all too often from a pragmatic recognition of the course of change brought about by events, and thus hamstringing our ability to give these events context in processing. Consequently, forms of social and political manipulation remain unchecked because to people conditioned in this form of perceptual preprocessing, the error of this poor mental hygiene is not only invisible but essential for cognitive process. From this error, many more flow, including the heads of the hydra that we are mostly likely to desire fighting when we consider our views as a linear set of political decisions, a.k.a. a "platform."

Understanding nihilism requires one drop the pretense of nihilistic philosophy being an endpoint, and acceptance of it being a doorway. Nihilism self-reduces; the instant one proclaims "There is no value!" a value has been created. Nihilism strips away conditiong at the unconscious and anticipatory levels of structure in the mind, allowing for a greater range of possiblity and quicker action. Further, it creates a powerful tool to use against depression or anxiety, neurosis and social stigma. Since it is a concept necessarily in flux, as it provides a starting point for analysis in any situation but no preconditioned conclusions, it is post-deconstructive in that it both removes the unnecessary and creates new space for intellectual development at the same time.

While thinkers like F.W. Nietzsche railed against the "nihilism" of older times, this nihilism existed before social thinking made humans as neurotic as they are now, and thus was used to refer to feelings of futility, fatalism and meaninglessness found in people who had rejected the static objectivist framework of "God" but who retained the imprint of that expectation from life, namely the desire to find some absolutist view upon which all else hinges. Nihilism does not refute objectivism but it does refute certain forms of symbolic categorization, including "God," which provide a static organizational system upon which people are supposed to base their lives and value systems. While for many the idea of "God" is comforting, it is an insidious virus in that its users presuppose a common causality to any existential events, thus by finding any eventiture they attribute it to "God" and from it prove the existence of God. These closed-circuit mental processes contribute to confusion and sentimental attitudes toward mortality, programming people for intellectual failure before they're even aware of their mental potential.

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Nihilism @ American Nihilist Underground Society (ANUS)

In an atmosphere where political activism is an expectation, social pressure is working counter-productively, instilling apathy instead of passion.

By Kayla Kibbe, Connecticut College

In the days (and weeks) following the election, How are you holding up? became the standard form of greeting on my campus, and it quickly became clear that Fine, was not an acceptable answer.

Like many colleges, mine had declared a campus-wide state of mourning, complete with walkouts, candlelit vigils and round-the-clock opportunities to stand in solidarity. In the days following Decision 2016, How are you? became more rhetorical than ever. Freshman to senior, dorm to dorm, humanities to sciences, a state of utter despair was the new expected norm.

Universal post-election bereavement was a safe enough assumption to make on a small, private liberal arts campus in New England. And while Im usually pretty deft at blending in with the schools tacit political expectations, I consistently missed my cue throughout the unofficially official mourning period.

Image via Time

Every time I unthinkingly admitted to being fine, I was met with the astonished glare usually reserved for an uncouth uncle who just made a joke at funeral. Trying to save face after again making this error during a conversation with my advisor, I offered for an excuse, Im just not very politically minded.

I know youre not, she replied. Ive read your writing.

This was not a compliment.

The main sin I had committed was not in having betrayed signs of Republicanism. That, I imagine, remained unthinkable. The guilt lay entirely in my political apathy. In the turbulent post-election climate on campus, not caring was not an option. If you werent in mourning, you were part of the problem, regardless of whether or not you thought there was a problem.

In 2017, declining to voice a political opinion in polite conversation is no longer a sign of good manners. In fact, being politically vocal has become a staple of every day interaction. If you dont have an opinion, youre being rude. And it better be the right opinion. In todays unwritten rules of social decorum, talking politics is like apologizing as a kid. You dont have to mean it, you just have to say it so your mom will leave you alone.

This new spirit of obligatory political fervor, however, may be doing more harm than good on the political playground. Mandating political zeal from the otherwise indifferent does little to actually advance the causes on either side of the spectrum. Rather, this push for universal political enthusiasm only subverts its own efforts by giving rise to political nihilism, which critics blame for the current state of Western politics.

Forcing people to take a side just to save face in everyday conversation doesnt actually make them devoted activists. Rather, it merely results in half-hearted political opportunism, devoid of any real convictions. Faking political fervor is like faking an orgasm. Done right, its a quick and easy way to get out of an undesirable social situation, but it still doesnt make the sex good.

This new emphasis on obligatory political activism isnt just an unwritten rule on college campuses or in break room conversation. For better or worse, politics are increasingly blending into pop culture, and from Leonardo DiCaprio to Madonna, political activism has taken center stage in Hollywood. Meanwhile, like college students who were accidentally fine post-election, celebrities who arent making a big enough splash politically are taking a hit for their reticence.

Image via CMA

Take, for example, Taylor Swift. Between securing another two breakups under her belt and the infamous Kim-Exposed-Taylor debacle, Taylor Swift had just about as bad a 2016 as anyone elsefor the years highest paid woman in music, that is. 2017 has also seen Swift off to a rocky start, as her failure to make an appearance at the Womens March was met with considerable social-media backlash.

No stranger to the political demands of Hollywood, Swift attempted to do her part by offering a now infamous tweet:

So much pride, love, and respect for those who marched. Im proud to be a woman today, and every day.

As replies were quick to point out, however, it was a classic case of too little too late. Swift was slammed for being a political opportunist, accused of picking and choosing when to use feminism to her benefit. Though not even guilty of pure political reticence, Swifts attempts to fulfill the political demands of Hollywood simply werent enough to stave off the witch-hunt.

Essentially, Taylor Swift got caught faking it, and was burned at the social-media stake for falling into the opportunistic political nihilism that the new rules of modern society have pushed on everyone. Thats the thing about faking orgasms: If you get caught, things only get more complicated. At the end of the day, Taylor Swifts performance just wasnt convincing enough.

The Taylor Swift Womens March debacle highlights exactly the kind of self-destructive dangers lurking within the new politically-charged rules of society. Making vocal political activism all but mandatory inevitably pushes individuals into a state of political nihilism that is opportunistic by default. When you have to feign political fervor just to get by, your political efforts obviously have ulterior motivations.

A recent Cosmopolitan article addresses this issue of increasingly empty celebrity activism. Pinning Taylor Swift as the figurehead of the tiresome trend, the article follows in the footsteps of other critics who accused Swift of political opportunism.

While the article raises an important critique of the increasing intersection of pop culture and politics, its main complaint is not that celebrities are being forced to engage in political dialogue, but rather that their engagement is not convincing enough. Essentially, the article condemns the effects of obligatory political engagement while still promoting the cause.

While the article notes that At this point, remaining silent seems just as likely to cause your fans to abandon you as saying something political does anyway, it simultaneously fails to recognize this very trend as the source of the problem it attempts to critique. Rather, the article presents this logic as all the more reason for celebrities to get politically active, as long as they make it convincing.

Meanwhile, the article ignores the very injustice it has just highlighted: Celebrities must be politically vocal at the risk of losing their fans.

Amidst the increased demands of todays politically charged society, fame comes at a greater price than ever.

What all of these critics, from college professors to Taylor Swift fans, fail to see, is that forced political activism inevitably gives way to opportunistic political nihilism. Whether its a college student or a pop star, if youre forcing someone to voice a particular political opinion, it is inevitably going to be an empty, self-serving one.

Unfortunately, the increasing trend of obligatory political engagement has left the politically indifferent with no choice but to play along and use politics to their advantage. Liberal when in need of an A on a paper, conservative when home for Thanksgiving dinner, and only free to return to your regularly-scheduled indifference in private, the politically neutral have become political opportunists.

political apathypolitical nihilismpolitics

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Faking It: The Rise of Political Nihilism - Study Breaks Magazine - Study Breaks

What happens when kids have the world at their feet, and its weight on their shoulders? Odyssey Theatre Ensemble presents the Los Angeles premiere of Punk Rock, a ferociously funny, complex and unnerving play by Tony Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) that peels back the layers of teen angst for a deeper look at what might make one of them snap. Lisa James directs for a March 25 opening at the Odyssey Theatre.

As seven teens at an English prep school tangle with the pressures of love, sex, bullying and college entrance exams, the confusion, disconnect and latent savagery simmering beneath the surface is revealed. They are intelligent, articulate and accomplished - the cream of the crop turning sour.

"The play's pulsing, driving rhythm, like the music of the title, is what makes it so exciting" says James. "The characters are incredibly complex. Each one is hateful and cruel, but also loving and kind. Their hormones are raging, so they're out of control. It's a cacophony of emotion."

Punk Rock's electrifying cast of young newcomers features Jacob B. Gibson, Zachary Grant, Nick Marini, Raven Scott, Kenney Selvey, Story Slaughter and Miranda Wynne.

The creative team includes set designer John Iacovelli; lighting designer Brian Gale; Sound Designer Christopher Moscatiello; costume designer Halei Parker; fight choreographer MATTHEW GLAVE; and dialect coach Anne Burk. Sally Essex-Lopresti and Ron Sossi produce for Odyssey Theatre Ensemble.

Based on Stephens' experiences as a teacher and inspired by the 1999 Columbine shooting, Punk Rock premiered at London's Royal Exchange in 2009, then transferred to the Lyric Hammersmith. The play opened off-Broadway in 2014 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in an MCC Theater production that Ben Brantley of The New York Times called "tender, ferocious and frightening."

Simon Stephens is an associate artist of the Lyric Hammersmith and The Royal Court Theatre. His many other plays include Carmen Disruption; Heisenberg; Birdland; Blindsided; Three Kingdoms; Wastwater; Seawall; Pornography; Country Music; Christmas; Herons; A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky (co-written with Robert Holman and David Eldridge); an adaptation of Jon Fosse's I Am the Wind; and Motortown. His version of A Doll's House for the Young Vic transferred to the West End and then New York. His new translation of The Threepenny Opera ran last fall at the National Theatre. His other plays for the NT include Port, Harper Regan and On the Shore of the Wide World, which received the Olivier Award for Best New Play. His stage adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time received both the Olivier Award and the Tony Award for Best Play.

Director Lisa James is a multi-award winner for her work on Heartstopper (LA Weekly Award), Palladium is Moving (Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award), Lynn Siefert's Little Egypt, Wendy MacLeod's The Water Children (LADCC and Garland Awards), Justin Tanner's Bitter Women (LADCC Award) and The Visible Horse (LADCC and Garland Awards). World premieres include Beth Henley's Tight Pants, Billy Aaronson's The News, Justin Tanner's Oklahomo! and Little Egypt-The Musical (music/lyrics by Gregg Lee Henry) at both the Matrix Theater in L.A. and Acorn Theatre in NYC. She most recently directed the West Coast premiere of Smoke by Kim Davies at Rogue Machine and End Days at the Odyssey Theatre, and is currently developing the new musical That Was Then.

Performances of Punk Rock take place March 25 through May 14 on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m.Additional weeknight performances are scheduled on Wednesday, April 12; Thursday, April 27 and Wednesday, May 3, all at 8 p.m. Tickets are $34 on Saturdays and Sundays; $30 on Fridays; and $25 on Wednesdays and Thursdays, with discounted tickets available for students and members of SAG/AFTRA/AEA. There will be three "Tix for $10" performances on Friday, March 31; Friday, April 28; and Wednesday, May 3. Post-performance discussions are scheduled on Wednesday, April 12 and Friday, April 28. The third Friday of every month is wine night at the Odyssey: enjoy complimentary wine and snacks and mingle with the cast after the show.

The Odyssey Theatre is located at 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles, 90025. For reservations and information, call (310) 477-2055 or go to OdysseyTheatre.com.

Recommended for mature audiences: graphic language and violence.

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Teen Nihilism Erupts in LA Premiere of Fierce, Funny PUNK ROCK by Simon Stephens - Broadway World