Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy

by Jonah Goldberg

  The pre-modern mind was like an enormous iceberg entering new waters, and as it got closer to the modern period, huge chunks calved off. But here is the important point: The chunks don’t melt away, at least not completely. They just become smaller icebergs. The scientific revolution did not get rid of religion. The Age of Reason did not banish superstition. One need only look around to see that religion and superstition (not the same thing) endure. The triumph of reason didn’t mean turning us all into Vulcans from Star Trek, slaves to cold logic. (Indeed, even Vulcans have emotions; they just work very hard to keep them in check.) Rather, after the Enlightenment, priority was increasingly given to reason in law, public arguments, and most institutions, at least most of the time.

  That’s what is so funny about the at times visceral hatred for Isaac Newton among the early romantics (second only to their hatred for John Locke). To Blake and Coleridge and other romantics, Newton’s physics had demystified the cosmos and our place in it, thus paving the way for a mechanistic and soulless universe. But for all of Newton’s monumental contributions to science, he was, at heart, a mystic. He was more interested in alchemy than in gravity. He saw himself as an explorer of the occult, determined to rediscover the lost magical secrets of the ancients. As John Maynard Keynes once put it, Newton wasn’t the first scientist; he was the last of the magicians. Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell regularly attended séances. Edison tried to invent a phone to talk to ghosts. Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio, wanted to do the same thing using radio waves.

  Today, neuroscientists and psychologists fill their days documenting the ways the human mind acts irrationally.10 Our animal brains have programs and subroutines designed to keep us alive, not to determine the truth. The ability to reason is an important tool for survival. But is it more important than fear? Anger? Loyalty? Remember, for primitive man, survival was a collective enterprise, and the cognitive tools we developed were far more varied and complicated than simply rational. For instance, a superstition or taboo about the importance of cleanliness may be passed from one generation to another for a thousand years without a single shaman, priest, or parent making any reference to microbes or germs. But the group that follows prohibitions against eating unclean food has an evolutionary advantage all the same. Similarly, groups that adhere to notions of retributive justice—both internally for traitors and externally for strangers—will be more likely to pass on their genes. More broadly, groups that have a coherent vision of group meaning—religious, political, social, etc.—will likely be more successful at cooperating, and cooperation is the core evolutionary adaptation of humanity.

  The Enlightenment didn’t erase these apps from our brains. They’re running all the time, generating emotional, instinctual responses to events and ideas that we sometimes recognize as part of our baser natures, and that we sometimes mistake for some higher ideal. Romanticism’s emphasis on emotion and the irrational, the significance of that which cannot be seen or explained through science but can be felt intuitively, is the tribal mind’s way of fighting its way back into the centrality of our lives. My argument here is that popular culture gives us the clearest window into the romantic dimension that we all live in. To demonstrate this, I will focus on some of the classic hallmarks of romanticism. But it needs to be emphasized that popular culture isn’t romantic because of the lasting influence of some romantic writers and poets (though some influence is surely there). Popular culture is romantic because Enlightenment-based society naturally invites a romantic reaction; we crave the unity of meaning that we have lost, and we yearn for the enchantment purged from everyday life.

  IT’S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL (BUT I LIKE IT)

  I believe I could make this case almost entirely by looking at rock and roll—and rock and roll alone. My claim is not so much that there are elements of romanticism in rock and roll, but that rock and roll is romanticism. In fact, I suspect one could say something similar of popular music generally, so as to include hip hop and country music as well. What are the key themes of rock and roll and these other genres? Any list would include: defy authority and throw off the chains of “the Man,” true love, damn the consequences, nostalgia for an imagined better past, the superiority of youth, contempt for selling out, alienation, the superiority of authenticity, paganism and pantheism, and, like an umbrella over it all, the supremacy of personal feelings above all else.

  Rock and roll, from its most commercial forms to its most authentic, fancies itself as outside “the system.” It claims a higher or truer authority based in feelings that, like the poets of earlier generations, defy the tyranny of the slide rule and the calculator. Its more grandiose champions put rock on a par with all of the higher forces, like a Titan or a god in eternal battle with the tyrannical deities of the system. “Christianity will go,” John Lennon assured us. “It will vanish and shrink…We’re more popular than Jesus now—I don’t know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity.”11 “You see,” U2 guitarist The Edge tells us, “Rock and roll isn’t a career or hobby—it’s a life force. It’s something very essential.”12

  Robert Pattison, in his The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism, argues that rock and roll is vulgar both in the classic sense—“vulgar” is derived from the Latin vulgus meaning crowd or the common people—and in the snobbish sense of being crude. Because rock is democratic, it appeals to us all and makes no pretension to higher culture or higher ideals. It speaks to the gut, the pantheistic primitive in all of us. By now the reader should have a good sense of what the primitive is, but pantheism requires a bit of explication. Pantheism, from the Greek pan (all) and theos (god), is the belief that all of reality is divine, and that God (or gods) suffuses us and everything around us. Earth is heaven and heaven is earth.

  Is there any art form that is more successful at re-enchanting the world, to borrow Max Weber’s phrase, than music? Who hasn’t had that feeling of being elevated or transported from the mundane world by music? “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent,” observed Victor Hugo.13

  Put on your headphones and walk down a busy city street; the world seems set to music. Or watch people listening to music on their iPods as they walk past you, giving new literalism to the line widely—and falsely—attributed to Nietzsche: “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”14 This feeling is the conceit behind countless movies that use music to transport us to that feeling of isolated oneness with the world around us. (The recent film Baby Driver is a good example of the genre.)

  Think about how humans first enjoyed music. A primitive band sits around the fire pounding drums and singing its treasured folk songs and chants. No doubt this practice was entertaining, but it was also a way to commune with the gods or with fellow members of the troop, or a means to honor revered ancestors or mourn fallen warriors, or a method of warding off evil spirits—or some combination of the above. It was democratic and personal, divine and worldly, all at once.

  Rock and roll is the primitive’s drumbeat hooked up to killer amps. It ties together meanings we are taught to keep separate; it ratifies the instincts we are instructed to keep at bay. It tells us, in the words of Jethro Tull, “Let’s bungle in the jungle,” because “that’s all right with me.”

  Nowhere is the romantic mixture of pantheism, primitivism, and the primacy of feelings more evident than in rock’s appeal to inner authority and authenticity. Despite the fact that we may be surrounded by thousands of fellow fans dancing or head banging in syncopated unison, rock still tells us that we must move to the beat of our own drummer. For Hegel, romanticism could be summarized as “absolute inwardness.” This idea that the artist is a slave solely to his own irrational muse is no doubt ancient, but its obvious modern echoes can be found in the romantic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early writings. “Nietzsche,” writes music histo
rian Martha Bayles, “echoed the robust Romantic view that the only worthwhile use of reason in art is to confront, wrestle with, and finally incorporate the irrational.”15

  It is no accident that drugs and rock and roll are so linked in the popular imagination. Both promise to take us out of the realm of daily concerns and rational priorities. They are both forms of escapism from the workaday, from the shackles of the here and now. The ancients celebrated wine, women, and song. Today the mantra is “sex, drugs, and rock and roll”—and so long as we remain human, it will be ever thus.

  Nor is it a coincidence that rock appeals most directly to adolescents. Your teenage years are the time when the civilized order and your inner primitive are most at war. It is when glandular desires are most powerful and our faculties of reason are the most susceptible to all manner of seductions. Everyone who has experienced teenage angst—which is to say everyone who has lived long enough to legally buy booze and cigarettes—knows full well that the romantic revolution and the Enlightenment wage war in every teenage heart.

  It is also no coincidence that the post–World War II era of peace, prosperity, and conformity largely created the idea of the teenager. The buttoned-down 1950s gave adolescents something to rebel against. Similarly, the peace and prosperity of the post–Cold War world created the adolescent forty-year-old. The comfort of prosperity leads, in Schumpeterian fashion, to a cultural backlash against the established order and bourgeois values.

  Now let us move on from rock and look instead to popular culture more generally. For it is my contention that the same romantic impulses that define rock and roll also define much of the rest of our culture as well.

  HERE THERE BE MONSTERS

  The simplest place to start: monsters. Primitive man believed in all manner of monsters, broadly defined. The Dungeons & Dragons geek in me wants to distinguish between monsters qua monsters and, say, dragons, spirits, orcs, and the like. But we’ll stick with the broadest understanding of monster: unnatural creatures that terrify us. The primitive mind creates monsters to personify fears, and fear is one of the greatest defense mechanisms in the state of nature. The growl we hear from the back of a cave causes the mind to race to the worst possible scenario because the credo “Better safe than sorry” is written into nearly every animal’s DNA. Young children have to be taught that there are no monsters lurking under their beds because humans are born with an innate sense of their vulnerability. In adults, fear of monsters endures, usually to manifest our anxiety about the unknown. The frontiers of medieval mapmakers’ knowledge were marked off with the words “Here there be dragons.”

  From the late Medieval Period to the present day, we still worry that if we press the boundaries of the known or if we trespass on God’s authority, we will find—or create—monsters. Part of the romantic indictment of science and reason is hubris, which not only means arrogance but in the original Greek means prideful defiance of the gods and their plan. How dare we try to tame nature or disenchant the world? In this way, monsters serve as instruments of a revenge fantasy against “the system.” The monster that tears it all down is the ultimate radical.

  At the end of Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s screenplay of The Cabin in the Woods, two world-weary millennials, fed up with the hypocrisy of the world, willingly allow ancient evil Titans called “the Old Ones” to destroy the world rather than sacrifice their own lives. When told that five billion people will die, if they don’t kill themselves before the sun comes up in eight minutes, one of the youths replies, “Maybe that’s the way it should be. If you gotta kill all my friends to survive, maybe it’s time for a change.” In other words, for the millennial who plays by his own rules, planetary genocide is a just rebuke for not getting one’s way.

  The most influential monster story of all time is, of course, Frankenstein. Mary Shelley based Frankenstein’s monster on the ancient Jewish legend of the Golem, a creature brought to life from inanimate material by magic. Dr. Frankenstein wasn’t a magician but a man of science, but the morals of the story are largely the same: hubris, playing God, mucking about with nature, finding the divine spark in worldly things. It is not difficult to understand why Shelley’s story of the mad scientist dabbling with mighty forces beyond his ken captivated the imaginations of millions of readers in the early 1800s.

  Rousseau’s romantic indictment of progress mirrors the biblical story of man’s fall. Defying the natural law—i.e., God’s commandment—Adam and Eve partake of the forbidden fruit of knowledge and, ever since, man has been living in sin, cast out from Eden. In Rousseau’s version, when man embraced property and the division of labor, he left the happy life of the noble savage who lives in harmony with nature. The story of Frankenstein’s monster follows the same pattern.

  The original title of Shelley’s story is largely forgotten: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus creates man out of clay and water—just like the Golem. Prometheus also gives man fire, against the will of Zeus, who famously punishes him for it by chaining him to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, only to have it regenerate overnight.

  The similarities between Dr. Frankenstein and Prometheus are too obvious to explore further—which is why Shelley invokes the Titan in her title. But it is interesting to note that electricity, then still a magical and miraculous phenomenon, played much the same role that fire did for the ancient mind. Indeed, it was Søren Kierkegaard who coined the phrase “Modern Prometheus” to describe Benjamin Franklin and his experiments with electricity.16 For had not Franklin plucked the symbol of godly power—lightning—and yoked it to the reins of science?

  Was this not a great act of hubris?

  When news of Franklin’s experiments in the New World reached the Old World, the shock was akin to the news of the first detonation of an atomic bomb.17

  Since we’re on the topic, the atom bomb also unleashed its own wave of monster stories. The etymology of “monster” is relevant: warning, portent, demonstrate, show. Consider Godzilla, King of Monsters (and one of the most enduring pop culture icons in the world, not just in Japan). The first Godzilla movie was released in 1954, less than a decade after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and just two years after the formal end of the American occupation of Japan—amidst an enormous controversy over a Japanese fishing boat damaged during some American nuclear testing in the Bikini Atoll.

  But most important, Godzilla was also a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, created by the invisible, seemingly magical force of atomic radiation. Deformities and mutations—precisely the kinds of conditions that gave birth to the original meaning of the word “monster”—were a very real consequence and omnipresent concern after the bombings. The fear that the atomic age would unleash unimaginable horrors was common around the world, but understandably acute in Japan.

  “Godzilla has long mirrored public thinking in Japan,” writes Chieko Tsuneoka in the Wall Street Journal. “The monster’s origin as the mutant product of nuclear tests reflected Japan’s trauma from the atomic bombings of World War II and its anxieties over postwar American H-bomb testing in the Pacific. In the 1970s, as Japan choked with industrial pollution, Godzilla fought the Smog Monster. In the early 1990s, when U.S.-Japanese trade frictions intensified, Godzilla fought King Ghidorah, a three-headed monster sent by a foreign-looking group called the Futurians to prevent Japan from developing into an economic superpower.”18

  The most recent Godzilla movie, 2016’s Shin Godzilla, captures growing nationalist sentiments in Japan as the country is agonizing over whether to remilitarize in the face of Chinese and Russian aggression and perceived American unreliability. The idea is wrenching because Japan turned its back on nationalist militarism after World War II in favor of a market democracy and pacifism. (Indeed, the first Godzilla movie sixty-two years earlier was a pacifist allegory.) The twin fears facing Japan are, on the one hand, that brin
ging back nationalism and militarism will awaken old demons, and, on the other hand, that it may be necessary to do so for Japan to survive. In Shin Godzilla, the beast returns to his original role as villain, and the heroes of a Godzilla movie are the actual politicians and military, who are traditionally seen as well-intentioned but hapless fodder for monster feet. Once again, they play to type, but eventually rise to the challenge, finding the will to defeat the beast (for now—there will always be sequels).

  William Tsutsui, author of Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (2004), writes that “Shin Godzilla leaves no doubt that the greatest threat to Japan comes not from without but from within, from a geriatric, fossilized government bureaucracy unable to act decisively or to stand up resolutely to foreign pressure. Indeed, this movie could easily have been titled ‘Godzilla vs. the Establishment,’ as Tokyo’s smothering quicksand of cabinet meetings, political infighting, and interagency logjams make Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah seem like remarkably tame adversaries.”19

  Shin in Japanese can mean new, divine, or true, but the filmmakers refused to disclose which meaning they had in mind—which surely suggests they intended all three.20

  Of course, Godzilla and Frankenstein barely scratch the list of monsters that populate the popular culture and the warnings they foretell. Indeed, there’s a whole subliterature on what the villain-monsters in sci-fi movies really represent.

  For example, one of my favorite horror films—and I don’t like many—is The Exorcist, in part because it is not really a horror movie at all. The Exorcist tells the story of an innocent young girl who is possessed and befouled by a demon. It is a brilliant piece of theological and psychological commentary.

  In the early scenes, when the scientists and doctors are trying to figure out what is wrong with the little girl, Regan, we are made to feel the limits of modern, sterile technology. Later, when the priests try to expel the demon from the child, we are asked to grapple with the very existence of evil. The younger priest, Father Damien Karras—a psychologist who prior to these events had largely lost his faith to secularism—asks: Why this girl? Father Merrin responds, “I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly. To reject the possibility that God could love us.”21 Though I prefer Father Merrin’s fuller response in the original novel: