“What is left to a people who have believed only in politics after they lose their faith is ‘nothing,’ or perhaps ‘The Nothing.’ And what follows the failure of politics is not another form of political order but most likely the end of political community as such and therefore of properly human self-government. We are on the cusp of a new age that is at once post-political and post-human….”
The quote is from the opening paragraphs of Michael Hanby’s article, “Nothingness Rules,” in the latest Touchstone magazine. Hanby writes about the modern mind, especially its expression in the American vision, and how it sees the world from the standpoint of pragmatism. As an example he quotes John Dewey saying, “things are what they can do, and what can be done with them.” Any consideration of what things are in themselves, what their nature is, is unnecessary; more likely, it is a bothersome hindrance to getting on with controlling and changing what is.
“At the core of this metaphysical vision is the elevation of possibility or power over the givenness of the actual world. The celebration of possibility takes on mythic tones in American romanticism about the ‘frontier,’ in our political homage to the ‘American dream,’ and in a thousand mind-numbing commercials. But it is also deeply inscribed into our public philosophy, both political and natural.
“Liberalism elevates possibility over actuality in the political sphere by identifying freedom with rights. Rights create what D. C. Schindler calls an ‘enclosure of a field of power’ around each citizen, transforming every given reality that would define me prior to my choosing—God, the moral order, and, now we discover, even my own nature—into a possible object of choice. Liberal order thereby undermines these basic realities while appearing to uphold them.”
Hanby goes on to discuss the difference between Marxist atheism and previous versions, why authority and not power is the “true source of the law’s efficaciousness,” and how “technocracy is not the rule of technocrats, but the rule of nobody.” He points out that the seeds of the new vision of nature are right there in our U.S. Constitution:
“The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to ‘promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts,’ prompting Leon Kass to comment that ‘the American Republic is . . . the first regime explicitly to embrace scientific and technical progress and officially to claim its importance for the public good.'”
It’s a thought-provoking read which you can access online: “Nothingness Rules.”
