In conversation with Pope Benedict XVI, Peter Seewald points to Aldous Huxley’s prediction in Brave New World (1932) that the decisive element of the modern world would turn out to be its increasing obsession with falsification. The modern world loves attacking and nullifying big truths to the point of rendering the distinction between the fake and the real obsolete. With no truth, there can be no point of view, and also no standard by which to consider anything. Pope Benedict calls this sign of our times the dictatorship of relativism.
This is not a philosophical position as much as it is a societal trend. The trend means that we must always be moving away from Something in the name of some nebulous Something Else. The modern world, on rails designed by the myth of progress, must always be on the way to nowhere, always transgressing boundaries in the name of expanding openness. Things must evolve, of course, even if we do not know what they should evolve into. Evolution is inevitable, apparently, although this is probably only believed because too many people have forgotten that we are not merely passive bits of driftwood caught in an entropic torrent. We do not have to be at the mercy of our metaphors—although we often are.
Already in 1905, in Heretics, Chesterton referred to this relativising drift as the negative spirit. He writes in reference to this negative spirit that a modern morality “can only point with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of law; its only certainty is a certainty of ill. It can only point to imperfection.” As this suggests, the grip of openness was already endemic before the two World Wars. But in the wake of those catastrophic conflicts, a once-optional openness soon became an imperative. Near the start of the Great War, the Dadaists were among the first to seriously follow this imperative. These artists were spellbound by the destruction of judgment, the reign of free association, anarchist politics, anti-establishment rhetoric, and even the destruction of meaning and linguistic sense. Chaos and Spontaneity were their gods. And while there was much that was fun and funny in Dadaism, it had a severe side too. The Dadaists were anti-capitalists and anti-war and anti-art and anti-bourgeois.
After the Second World War, the openness-imperative gained even more traction. It became almost absurdly self-evident to many that strong convictions and loyalties were at the heart of all the abysmal horrors of the first half of the century. Nationalism was a problem, it seemed, but so was any inflexible religious dogma. Many came to believe that any strong metaphysical assertions were as much the source of violence as national pride. A post-War consensus grew around a perception that what people really need is a softening of the heart. Unfortunately, what actually happened has turned out to be a ceaseless softening of the head. We are now caught in a perpetual flight from global War, always fearful of the return of Big Power. But this is precisely why we find ourselves walking utterly blindfolded into a series of other catastrophes. If the smell of decline is in the air, it is because so many people have spent so many years setting fire to all the old walls of the world.
Instead of openness being thought of as one important possibility among others, we now know that it has become a command that we must unquestioningly obey under all circumstances. The command sticks to the rule of the negative spirit. The West is an open society, driven by imperatives to always be anti-this or anti-that: anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian, anti-totalitarian, anti-colonialist, and anti-racist. If there is some intuitive sense to fleeing the old demons, though, it is not in the name of any clear telos. As Philip Rieff points out, we now live in an anti-culture. Taboos, which would normally be taken to define a culture, have been abolished in the name of endless permissiveness. The 1968 slogan—It is forbidden to forbid!—captures the strong push for an open society rather well. The idea of being open has taken on a life of its own and infiltrated everything.
On the liberal left, the trend was and remains to advance an open culture. In general, this has meant condemning any sense of family, tradition, nationhood, and the like. Such things had, after all, become associated with fascism. On the liberal right, in contrast, the trend was and remains to concentrate energy on encouraging an open view of economics, with as little structuring and planning as possible. In the wake of economic theories offered by thinkers like Hayek and Friedman, the free market became essentially anarchic, founded on spontaneity and emergent mimetic market forces, and no unified goal. People should, as this model suggests, be uninhibited by regulations in their pursuit of wealth. While there are differences between leftist openness and rightist openness, if only in where each puts their attention, the foundation remains identical. The two sides are rooted in liberalism and embracing a negative view of freedom. They are, in fact, in cahoots. Openness has ossified. The dictatorship of relativism is now the status quo. Anyone who argues for a return to definite loyalties—to God, nation, and family, for instance—is always at risk of being branded a fascist. But, well, what isn’t fascist these days?
Going against this openness-imperative is far from easy nowadays. One reason for this has to do with the very rhetoric of openness. Just consider how the phrase open-minded is always a compliment. Being open-minded is something you can be proud of. It denotes, and does not merely connote, being “willing to consider new ideas” and being “unprejudiced.” The open-minded person, we are also led to believe, is willing to consider other points of view without being bigoted. The open-minded person has no firm convictions because he is, apparently, the one with the moral high ground. How welcoming all of this sounds. In contrast, to call someone close-minded is to say that they have “rigid opinions or a narrow outlook.” How awful! How immoral! The close-minded person unjustly condemns others on the basis of narrow prejudices. Almost as if following a script, therefore, we are likely to want to think of ourselves as open-minded and of others as close-minded. We naturally project rigidity and recalcitrance onto others, while we take happy ownership of our own agreeableness and equanimity.
To be clear, I am not here to merely defend being either open or closed, as if these two options are trapped in a zero-sum game. I can just easily imagine the benefits of being open and closed, depending on the circumstance. Openness and closedness are aspects of all of us, evident in different degrees. And being thoughtfully discerning about when to be open and closed is a mark of true reasonableness. It’s good, for instance, to have an open mouth to put nutritious food into. It’s also good to keep your mouth closed to food that is laced with poison. What we are open and closed to is of immense importance and not the mere fact of our openness and closedness. To turn either openness or closedness into an absolute would be a kind of insanity. But, especially with regard to the former, such insanity has already gotten out of hand.
No area of life in the West has been left unaffected by the openness-imperative. What is surprising, though, is how this openness is thought of as daring and adventurous even while it is often the very opposite. When Jacques Derrida showed up on the world’s stage with his viral anti-hermeneutics, demonstrating through hyper-rationalist critique that any text’s authority is ultimately tenuous at best, his deconstruction sounded bold and rebellious. In truth, his thought is rather boringly submissive to the openness-imperative, as anyone can see by how easily it was adopted by academics in the 1970s. Academics are the first to think themselves bold in their non-conformity and the last to perceive that they are generally more conformist than most. Similarly, on the theological front with so-called death-of-God theologians like Thomas Altizer, many have been duped into thinking how adventurous such theological anti-establishment types were to undo theological dogmas. But they were also simply getting in line with the liberal values of the liberal establishment. It is bold to declare that Jesus is God-crucified, who was raised from the dead. But it is fairly prosaic to say, like every regular secularist in a totally secularised society so self-assured in its secularity, that he was just a regular human being like you or me who died and stayed dead. In another field, in writing about art, Nicholas Bourriaud fairly recently tried to sound edgy when he suggested that “the recycling of forms and images constitutes the basis of an ethics: we must invent ways of inhabiting the world. In the political sphere, submission to form has a name: dictatorship. A democracy, on the other hand, calls for constant role play, endless discussion, and negotiation.” Oh, please. In more recent years, academic jargon in the humanities especially has become obsessed with the language of overturning, dismantling, challenging, questioning, transgressing, and general criticality. Such rhetoric is now so totalising that it, too, sounds very much like a dictatorship. Every border is porous. Everything is about transdisciplinarity. But these are mere signals of rebellion at best, usually accompanied by a cringeworthy obeisance to open-endedness. All this really means is that the world has been transformed into a system of interchangeable parts, in which no one thing is necessarily better or worse than another. This is a recipe for intellectual cowardice. It takes courage to have convictions, after all, especially when such convictions go against the dominant fashions of the time.
Turns out, the result of this intellectual cowardice is not at all the thrill that people attribute, for instance, to deconstruction. It is truly thrilling to see things in their distinctness and specialness. It is dull when the world becomes only a sludge or mishmash of formlessness and randomness. “Whenever you hear of things being unutterable and indefinable and impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable,” writes Chesterton, “then elevate your nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay.” The ossification of openness has become as terribly, boringly predictable as it has become bothersome in its pervasiveness. The West has succumbed to constant contraventions of taboos in entertainment, for example. It has welcomed the mockery of traditions, or the reduction of all traditions to fascism, in the name of diversity and inclusion. It has opened its arms to decriminalising so-called victimless crimes like prostitution and illegal substance abuse—with the result that the worst conditions that people live in have gained an aura of romance. It aborts babies and subjects adolescents with identity crises to painful and even life-threatening medical procedures in the name of openness. This is good for the medical-industrial complex, though! The West encourages slavery to neoliberalism in the name of openness. On closer inspection, none of this sounds ideal but, of course, the openness-imperative does not believe in ideals. It does not believe in anything.
Slavoj Žižek has argued that even human rights, the pathetic basis of Western ethics, seem to be more concerned with permissiveness than prohibition:
“... are [human rights] not simply, ultimately, the way they actually function, the rights to violate the Ten Commandments? The right to privacy, what does it mean? Basically, the right to adultery done in secret when no one sees me or has the right to probe into my life. The right to pursue happiness and to possess private property, what does it mean? Basically, the right to steal, to exploit others. Freedom of the press and of the expression of opinion, basically what does it mean? The right to lie. The right of the free citizens to possess weapons—it is of course the right to kill. And ultimately freedom of religious belief: the right to celebrate false gods. Of course human rights do not directly condone the violation of the Commandments. The point is just that they keep open a marginal grey zone which should remain out of reach of religious or secular power. In this shady zone I can violate the Commandments, and if the power probes into it, catching me with my pants down, trying to prevent my violations, I can cry assault on my basic human rights.”
It is becoming clearer by the day that the openness-imperative, having emerged as a response to the totalitarian temptations of the early twentieth century, has had a somewhat unexpected consequence. Being concerned with smallness rather than largeness, in being preoccupied with emergent properties and organic evolutions and the like rather than with the essential forms of things, has generated an insane degree of micromanaging. It is telling that in recent times, the completely nonsensical idea of microaggressions was coined to refer to indirect, subtle, and even unintentional discrimination against members of any marginalised group. But as with so many terms resulting from openness-imperative, the idea of microaggressions is absolutely mainstream. Marginal concerns are central to everything. The exception disproves the rule and thus becomes the new rule.
The result of the turn towards micromanaging, which is a fairly natural consequence of having no sense of form and pattern and larger meaning, is that we end up making things up as we go along. Ontology is all ad hoc. The consequences of certain choices, which any diligent student of culture and religion can see a mile away, often appear shocking to those who are the most entrenched in the openness-imperative. It is not surprising to conservatives, for instance, that Handmaid’s Tale style surrogacies are becoming something of a phenomenon among openness-imperative adherents on the left. Just as the result of Asimov’s iRobot laws is the subservience of human beings to machines, the reak result of the openness-imperative is a new totalitarianism. I see this especially in the tyranny of small choices that possesses every corner of the educational sphere I work in. Every five minutes in the world, just as a leftist wants an immigrant to live in someone else’s house, a new modification to a university policy comes out to insist that the latest minor infringement is accounted for. Every three minutes in the world, someone is cancelled for having overstepped a line they didn’t even know was there. No one knows what education is anymore, but, my goodness, is everyone being educated!
A further result of the openness-imperative, apart from how it assists a slide into totalising micromanagement, is disenchantment. One example of this is found in the deconstructionist assertion that often just providing a history of an idea is sufficient to undo its authority. Proving that something is historically contingent is enough to expose its flimsiness—because, of course, the aim is to resist any big story, to expose every sinister undercurrent to every structure, to prove that there is no foundation. Deconstruction is micromanagement by other memes. A body is quickly disenchanted, for instance, when it is reduced to being a mere corpse composed of mere parts to be autopsied. The magic is taken out of things by nothing-buttery.
Disenchantment should be especially obvious to any student of symbolism. Where meaning is constructed on the fly, and the openness-advocates insist that this is always the case, we end up with a world of pastiches, mixtures, remixes, remakes, and mashups. Intertextual cross-pollination becomes the standard and only mode of creativity, as if creating new things must always involve artificially piecing together fragments from other universes. In this way, ideology becomes susceptible to the IKEA effect. Retcons that force older texts to fit narrow ideological are a normal feature of the world now. The result may be fun and entertaining at times but, in the process, all symbolic meanings get drained of their significance. Everything is made of parts that can be arranged however your will-to-power wants it to be. This is superb for the economic dimension of the openness-imperative, but a tragedy for truth. If there’s no ultimate meaning, you might as well just get on with it to pass the time. The more options are available, the more likely you are to make a sale.
As I’ve already suggested, though, the openness-imperative is absurd. We should see this fairly easily because it is also rooted in a lie. This is particularly evident in how radicalising openness results not in the expected obliteration of totalitarianism but rather in the transformation of the totalitarian impulse into an unceasing tyranny against any big metaphysics and anyone who subscribes to a big metaphysics. Cancel culture is the result of openness. Vaccine mandates are the result of openness. Endless procedurality and bureaucratic nit-picking are consequences of the openness-imperative.
It turns out, the connection between metaphysics and tyranny is a Nietzschean fabrication that has no basis in reality. In fact, when you look at all the worst tyrannies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, evils and errors are not found in big metaphysical commitments—like adhering to the goodness of being, for instance, or to the intelligibility of the world—but in a refusal to adhere to clear metaphysical commitments. It is a metaphysical commitment that we should love our neighbours and love our enemies, just as it is a metaphysical commitment to regard people as having an ontological priority over any intellectual system. If we love truth and want to find ways to uphold the common good, we will figure out ways to make that happen. Against this, the great and terrible irony of an ossified openness-imperative is that abolishing metaphysics, far from protecting us from any future tyrannies, does nothing more than rid us of our last defences against all arbitrary laws.
In the story of Hansel and Gretel, two small children are able to find their way home when the boy Hansel drops solid stones on a path. But it is far from insignificant that they get lost in the woods, and almost devoured by a witch later on, when Hansel has only soft bread to leave behind as they are lead away from home—bread that does not stay put but gets eaten by birds. That bread, I think, is a perfect symbol of the modern world possessed by the openness-imperative. In our haste to replace solid guides with weak suggestions and an ever-weakening commitment to reality, in our haste to replace truth with preference, we have ended up lost in the woods of the world. It is an adolescent impulse to believe that all laws are tyrannical and that all boundaries are there to kill our joy. It is maturity that recognises that some boundaries are desirable if we want things to go well with us. It is the ideologues of ossified openness who thrill at the thought of trying out all sorts of new things—always expanding the range of their openness. It is wisdom that knows that perhaps we should be at the very least a little more cautious about what we are open to. After all, some things, while tasting sweet in the moment like the house of the witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel, may end up spelling our doom.