Maybe Nihilism Explains It?

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

Vladimir: I'm beginning to come round to that conclusion.

                      (Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett)

"I believed in nothin' since the day I was born."  Manley Pointer (Bible salesman) to

Hulga Hopewell (PhD. in philosophy)

    ("Good Country People,"  Flannery O'Connor)

"So Teddy, what's all this I hear about being and non-being?"  Max, the irascible father menacingly to Teddy, his son, a philosophy professor.

                      ("The Homecoming," Harold Pinter)

The following is prologue.  Please bear with me.

Having taught literature and drama for 43 years, I learned that literature probably doesn't yield much that can inform us about how to have a successful and satisfying life...or for that matter whether to live at all.  But I did learn that literature and drama give us fascinating collections of perspectives on what being human can do for us and to us.  Much of the literature from the beginning of the 20th century involved the exposition of nihilism as an ultimate human experience, deepening and widening the depictions of frustrations and despair into our times.

My understanding of nihilism as a moral concept or way of perceiving human experience suggests that human life, as a journey, has no intrinsic or extrinsic absolute or overriding meaning or value.  All human efforts to construct meaning, that is, to give meaning to what is perceived and experienced, are vain and, in the case of many plays and stories, pathetically comical.  By the way, if a person perceives these experiences as tragic rather than comical, that perception is that person's construction or "reality."  In other words, perception is reality, but that reality is not an a priori truth.  In a world of nihilism, all so-called truths are vain constructions, which attempt to give meaning to facts and result in delusional and illusory living.  That is to say, what one perceives as reality is a projection of what one is or thinks one is.

Generally, nihilism in the arts (such as in the schools of Dada and Surrealism) demonstrates the absurdity of life once the constructed overlays of meaning, those we impose to create meaning, are stripped away.  The artist (whether literary, visual or auditory) places the parts or particles of the perceived, constructed world into a deconstructed, unintelligible mass. The experience, then,  feels much like a dream or a nightmare, a patchwork of non-meaning.   (This is especially true in the non-verbal arts—music, painting and sculpture.  The verbal arts display the absurdity of the assurance of language.) The Bible salesman believes in nothing, Estrogon and Vladimir struggle to use language to construct a meaning for their treadmill life, and Max mocks his son's meaningless pursuit of meaning.

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I offer this post as a way of thinking about our current experience with the political process and its implications as a nihilistic experience that we in the United States are enduring.  As some commentators have suggested (most recently Roger Cohen), we have experienced times like these in our more stumbling developments as a society.  Of all the attempts to fathom whatever Donald Trump is and/or will be, I have not read or heard anyone suggest specifically what his ersatz style and appeal tell us about the society we Americans live in.  I read recently a piece about why debating or criticizing Trump is so difficult.  Because he represents no substance and because he has no apparent or consistent core of thought or belief and because his language offers pap and empty generalities, we cannot get a hold on him.  As Gertrude Stein said, "There is no there there."  This is the importance of his reality TV persona.  His followers want and need to believe in the constructed parts of that persona.  They seek the feeling of that persona, and don’t want to know anything beyond that, beyond the performance that generates that feeling.  The supporters typically say Trump “tells it like it is” because that "reality" of puff words and trigger images is something that they can believe in, because it overlays the actual dread and fears in their lives.

Trump's followers don't think or want to hear about nihilism; they feel nihilism.  But like so many of us, they seek a way out from that, a promise no matter how general, how vague, and they don't want to listen to any deniers, any facts...that is to say, they don't want to know.  Despite all that some of us have, many of us have an emptiness (witness the epidemics of opioid addiction and suicides).  As Trump's critics attempt to reach into what Trump is or thinks, they find nothing.  And how are they to articulate anything about nothing?  Trump is all surface couched in empty language like "tremendous," "great," "fantastic," “amazing,” “you wouldn’t believe” and so forth.  The closest his language gets to concreteness is in the repetition of such images as his "walls" and "Mexicans" shibboleths.  And because his language doesn't communicate, he never has to defend anything he says.  He says any of his statements are “suggestions”, yes, except when they are not, or when he needs the statement to be part of the persona to believe in.  And that’s the key.  Trump purposely wants not to be understood; he wants to be felt.

We are possibly on the cusp of cultural nihilism.  There's more to Trump's popularity and irritation than electoral politics—more to our fixation, whether positive or negative.  He is the itch we cannot scratch.  He is who we might possibly be, but we feel uncertain and anxious about what that might suggest.  He fascinates even his detractors, the same way we cannot resist the urge to look at a traffic accident as we pass.   Cultural nihilism, in fact, can get very real.  The 20th century experienced it on a global scale.

Trump's life is full of facades: the gauche casinos, the gold everywhere, the nameplates everywhere, the products that represent only his name.  He is all hyperbole, except that even hyperbole must have an antecedent, and Trump is an empty sui generis.  All this implies that much of the emptiness and façade, all that constructs the Trump persona tells much more about our society and culture than about Trump.  Our society and culture provided the petrie dish from which Trump sprang.  

My hope is that the apparent mood of acquiescence in Congress and elsewhere institutionally is not a harbinger of what occurred in Europe and the U.S. shortly after World War I, an explosion of nihilistic cultural manifestations.  Given our current status of anomie and dissociation, the consequences could be far more disruptive and destructive.  Nihilism can look and feel like an absurd joke, but it's not really funny.   Trump is not the clown we had hoped he would be; he’s the mysterious stranger, the Bible salesman, the man behind the curtain, the delusional father.