I have suspected that as does the Atlantic ruling class’ Anglo-American empire, China, as a large country complementing US capitalist empire with mass labor, mass resources, and a mass consumption market, contributes to the Antienlightenment restoration. The IR (International Relations) political science community’s embrace of Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem story has illuminated how the Chinese adoption of IR ideology helps drive the Antienlightenment restoration.
Cixin’s fiction is built upon the simple IR Realist framework, which poses an idealized symbolic binary: Masculine “reason” versus feminine “morality”, subjecting that cultural binary to a simple game theory calculation. In Cixin’s story and the IR framework, masculine Reason is a brand, which is credibly carried by men, who are ideally disposed to value destruction for brute survival. Amazingly labeled “reason,” this brand value allows men to serve as the proper guardians of the one true, IR game, threat of mutual destruction.
In IR game theory, only the credible threat of mutual destruction prevents a society from being annihilated by an imperial Other. The credible threat of mutual destruction is the one way that societies survive in a world with one or more imperial powers. What makes the threat of mutual destruction credible is men, who are presumed to “reason,” that is to embody one capacity, destruction, requiring one value, brute survival. This is imagined as reason because it is supposed to be the indisputable ace in the hand of international relations. Everything is imagined as a simple game. The human agential capacities that evolved for thriving on a changing Earth are stripped out of this IR imaginary of stupid, algorithmic, inhuman empires.
In Cixin’s story it is shown that feminine “Morality” is code read by the imperial machine as the lack of will to survive. Thus governance according to Morality, democracy, presents a clear go-signal to an imperial power, to annihilate and replace a society. But we have already seen in this IR model that the idealistic labels, supplemented with a host of imperial gendered associations, are doing some work in lieu of logic: Associated with the imperial version of masculinity, the label “reason” we have already seen attempts to distract us from the idealized value of brute survival; it is a morality. It’s clear that “reason” and “morality” are oddly conceptualized in this ideology; to specify, this is an Antienlightenment revision of the reason concept, evident from both male and female societal agents’ total lack of human communication capacity. There is only the rough 1-0 binary of gender replacing human communicative capacity.
What is IR’s feminine “Morality” then? Deploying the IR imaginary, Cixin specifies that it is feminine Morality’s valuation (optimization) of developmental life, thriving, that absolutely opposes and prevents will to survive! Just re-read that for a while. No, you’re not imagining something in your brain breaking. Fucking patriarchy, what a load of gasbags. OK, let’s pop back an Ibuprofen, hear the douches out, follow their logic, such as it is.
Feminine Morality optimizes democracy as a means of supporting developmental life, thriving. Cixin’s story shows that democracy, as feminine policy, signals to the alien, imperial Other that a society is diverted from the one true game of mutual destruction.
Cixin’s tale clarifies that from the perspective of Chinese governance, IR theory provides a simple, self-serving explanation for why imperialism–any imperialism in the world–compels the death of democracy, cast as mere feminine morality. In IR theory, as in Cixin’s story, the choice is stark: On the global stage, it’s democratic annihilation or brute survival. Thus not only do neocon Anglo-American empire IR political scientists celebrate Cixin’s story, but in Chinese public debates, The Three Body Problem series’ Social Darwinist, misogynistic, and totalitarian morality has been identified as a cultural resource for authoritarian techno-nationalists—known as the ‘industrial party’ (工业党, gongye dang)—to delegitimate progressive social change (Zheng 2023).
However its presumption to governance (the replacement of masculine Reason, embodied in a male character, with feminine Morality, embodied in a female character) causes the annihilation of humanity (The imperial power correctly believes that feminine Morality, democratic governance, means the mutual destruction threat is over.), feminine morality is not completely abject in Cixin’s story. Continuing in a thorough-going Antienlightenment ideology, masculine Reason–simple game strategy premised on trigger-happy survivalism–is in the end portrayed not as an all-purpose strategy but as a culture inappropriate to micro-relations (such as clan and family relations). Cixin’s ending shows that the simple IR game does not translate into micro-social rationality, as the few human survivors can only relate to each other as imperial Others, scanning for tells of feminine unreason in each other, and consequently, tactically annihilating each other, leaving but one small, pathetic human ship in the galaxy. As on a playground full of sexist children (see M. Kimmel 2011, 2015, 2018), scanning for telltale signs of femininity is the diligent labor of the masculine winner of an imperial annihilation standoff. Add a scale limit to the moral economy algorithm!: If N < 1 billion.
This attempt to assert Antienlightenment moral scale, suggesting that feminine Morality might ought to be preserved in a confined, rump social role (the last instance), is not convincing within The Three Body Problem IR morality tale, wherein optimizing human thriving is portrayed as unreason, identified as the “moral,” the crass symbolic embodiment of an indisposition to annihilate, and where disposition to annihilate is portrayed as the governing reason. This strikes me as Antienlightenment’s fake appeal. If we accept the premise that societies are governed by this simple, supposedly eternal, symbolic, value game rule (flattered qua “reason”), to annihilate–if therefore the credible threat of masculine destruction is the only way a society survives, it’s not evident why this simple algorithm would apply on any particular scale. Why do we presume we cannot communicate or build trust internationally, but we can within families? That’s an unreasonable assumption based on nothing but untenable gender idealization. Or is that just an assumption tucked in from an old Chinese and English anxiety about relating across languages? The Antienlightenment thesis that annihilation-prone masculinity secures survival on a governing macro social scale, where feminine morality enables survival on a rump, micro scale distinguished by natural communication and trust, is, as it has always been, not necessary, strategic genius, but merely a traditional ideological tool of inegalitarian rule and consequent dissolution. We’ve been here before. The Antienlightenment has never been the answer.
The Antienlightenment ideology argues that eschewing human capacities for communication, organization, science–that is, for development, the one true path to minimalist reason, societal survival (distinguished from human thriving), is to prioritize showing the imperial enemy masculinity–!das penis presente!–as the credible symbol of disregard for life. People sure are easy in this basic game theory scenario. Everything else in human societies is maybe (we’re not sure) a whole lot of inessential work to preserve an afterthought of feminine micro-relations, though it’s not really clear why we would preserve what is conceptualized in this ideology as nothing more than unstrategic weakness. Wouldn’t you (because you are AI, right? Or a defense intellectual.) just annihilate humans, with their complex, agential, innovative lives, so that some tech dudes’ apps can grind away unimpeded until they run down? And so Antienlightenment ideology, with its creaky old, invalid, unscientific assumptions in service of inequality and inegalitarianism, delivers us to the door of senseless antihumanism and Terrestrian destruction, not in the final instance, but very efficiently. Now in fact.
TBD: Compare Cixin’s Antienlightenment thesis to Cormac McCarthy/Coen Bros’ All-American Antienlightenment film No Country for Old Men.
In the spare, atmospheric Eldrich Western No Country for Old Men, Ed Tom (Adam) is one of the Old Men, the dying law-bringer old gods, an angel. Like the regretful, fatalist Cold War liberals, Ed Tom feels after all his policing work, he is outmatched by the combination of evil, his own fatalistic projection Anton Chigurh, and man’s compulsive, petty-minded, self-abasing attraction to “money and drugs.” Understand that the women characters in the movie are simply Greek chorus, as where Carla Jean (appearing to talk to Chigurh in the privacy of her home) ultimately looks into the camera and tells the audience that as humans, they decide to do evil. Structure; institutions; long-range, delegated intention; tendency and trend; reason, interest and planning–none of that truly matters, and all that background context is reduced to nebulous, inhuman “fate” in McCarthy’s anti-sociological, Antienlightenment imagination.
Ed Tom’s devil, Chigurh constantly insists he operates on fate alone. That denial of responsibility is the basis of his antihuman inhumanity. Capital’s Accountant asks if Chigurh will kill him too; Chigurh repeats, “You never saw me.” With the flip of a quarter, the devil encourages humans to forfeit their one purported distinction, their ability to make moral choice, and instead accept his fate construct. The beyond-morality capitalist hitman Carson Wells, who knows the devil well and knows the devil does not care about money, is ultimately a pathetic one-trick pony, easily dispatched, uselessly bound to beg Chigurh to take money in exchange for his life.
As they are senselessly slaughtered, humans stay human (save their souls) by refusing “fate,” instead calling out their killer’s moral choice. Call-out culture is rooted in the police-minded Right, girded by Cold War liberalism’s monomaniacal, fundamentalist Holocaust trauma haunting (See Moyn 2023). By now it has metastasized into an unmoderated culture of hysterical intolerance for the entire range of human failures, in which self-annointed police reflexively levy damning, crippling shame on every human failure, or even every Other’s values (Smith 2022: 173-174).
At the story’s finale, as evil limps away having been struck by fate, neighborhood boys who had volunteered to help him pettily quibble over the money he insisted one take.
McCarthy is a great author. Written with a bold, broad brush at dizzying distance from reality, Antienlightenment stories can be told in epic, mythological proportions, romantically promising that human development is impossible, but inequality and patriarchal inegalitarianism protect human creativity. Most Antienlightenment narratives are drivel, though, compulsively unable to tuck their shaming accusations into their narrative structure.
Whether starkly gorgeous and engaging or inane and tedious, Antienlightenment stories have their unifying, characteristic tics and tells. The easy reduction of women characters is an obvious, consistent one. The tender romanticization of the law-bringing police fathers (“old men”) is its complement. Virtue is shrouded in the shifting mists of time, as if it were separate from the struggles for egaliberte, distributed agential sovereignty. Salvation and creative expression is reserved for the chosen dead who reject Enlightenment knowledge. Of course Antienlightenment stories are forever illustrating why humans need policing not valorized care, and how the middle mass is the problem facing exceptional humanity at the margins. Upon skewed misanthropic foundations, churning out crippling shame and manipulative myth, their moral arc is the society of inequality and inegalitarianism.
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We can further clarify by contrasting today’s Antienlightenment art to Deleuze’s exploratory retrospective on Enlightenment art, in the essential litcrit essay “Bartleby; or The Formula,” analyzing Melville’s literary “Original” characters constituting Primary Nature beyond and before conscience, choosing and not choosing.
Deleuze is classifying the great Enlightenment author Melville’s characters, but he could be describing the bifurcation of Cold War liberalism into two parties: “We are now in a position to classify Melville’s great characters. At one pole, there are those monomaniacs or demons who, driven by the will to nothingness, make a monstrous choice: Ahab, Claggart, Babo …Melville defines monomaniacs as the Masters of reason, which is why they are so difficult to surprise; but this is because theirs is a delirium of action, because they make use of reason, make it serve their own sovereign ends, which in truth are highly unreasonable.”
“But at the other pole are those angels or saintly hypochondriacs,” like modern liberal parties, “almost stupid, creatures of innocence and purity, stricken with a constitutive weakness but also with a strange beauty. Petrified by nature, they prefer … no will at all, a nothingness of the will rather than a will to nothingness (hypochondriacal “negativism”). They can only survive by becoming stone, by denying the will and sanctifying themselves in this suspension [13] Such are Cereno, Billy Budd, and above all Bartleby. And although the two types are opposed in every way––the former innate traitors and the latter betrayed in their very essence; the former monstrous fathers who devour their children, the latter abandoned sons without fathers” they both constitute Primary Nature.
Melville accomplishes something with his secondary nature, legal witness characters, that McCarthy does not with Ed Tom. They are not just witnesses but agents: “There exists, finally, a third type of character in Melville, the one on the side of the Law, the guardian of the divine and human laws of secondary nature: the prophet…Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Captain Vere in Billy Budd, and the attorney in Bartleby all have this power to ‘See’: they are capable of grasping and understanding, as much as is possible, the beings of Primary Nature, the great monomaniacal demons or the saintly innocents, and sometimes both…But they cannot ward off the demons, because the latter are too quick for the law, too surprising. Nor can they save the innocent, the irresponsible: they immolate them in the name of the Law, they make the sacrifice of Abraham. Behind their paternal mask, they have a kind of double identification: with the innocent, toward whom they feel a genuine love, but also with the demon, since they break their pact with the innocent they love, each in his own manner.”
Contra the Antienlightenment’s authors, for Melville, “If humanity can be saved, and the originals reconciled, it will only be through the dissolution or decomposition of the paternal function. Melville will never cease to elaborate on the radical opposition between fraternity and Christian “charity” or paternal “philanthropy.” To liberate man from the father function, to give birth to a new man or the man without particularities, to reunite the original and humanity by constituting a society of brothers as a new universality. In the society of brothers, alliance replaces filiation and the blood pact replaces consanguinity. Man is indeed the blood brother of his fellow man, and woman, his blood sister…A brother, a sister all the more true for no longer being “his” or “hers,” since all “property,” all “proprietorship,” has disappeared. A burning passion deeper than love, since it no longer has either substance or qualities, but traces a zone of indiscernibility in which it passes through all intensities in every direction…”
“How can this community be realized? How can the biggest problem be resolved?…It is not an individual or particular affair, but a collective one, the affair of a people, or rather, of all peoples. It is not an Oedipal phantasm but a political program…Such is the declaration in Moby-Dick (chapter 26): if man is the brother of his fellow man, if he is worthy of trust or “confidence,” it is not because he belongs to a nation or because he is a proprietor or shareholder, but only insofar as he is Man…
Pragmatism is misunderstood when it is seen as a summary philosophical theory fabricated by Americans. On the other hand, we understand the novelty of American thought when we see pragmatism as an attempt to transform the world, to think a new world or new man insofar as they create themselves…A contemporary of American transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau), Melville is already sketching out the traits of the pragmatism that will be its continuation. It is first of all the affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago… But to reach this point, it was also necessary for the knowing subject, the sole proprietor, to give way to a community of explorers, the brothers of the archipelago, who replace knowledge with belief, or rather with “confidence”––not belief in another world, but confidence in this one, and in man as much as in God.”
“Like Melville before it, pragmatism will fight ceaselessly on two fronts: against the particularities that pit man against man and nourish an irremediable mistrust; but also against the Universal or the Whole, the fusion of souls in the name of great love or charity. Yet, what remains of souls once they are no longer attached to particularities, what keeps them from melting into a whole?
What remains is precisely their “originality,” that is, a sound that each one produces, like a ritornello at the limit of language, but that it produces only when it takes to the open road (or to the open sea) with its body, when it leads its life without seeking salvation, when it embarks upon its incarnate voyage, without any particular aim, and then encounters other voyagers, whom it recognizes by their sound. It requires an acute perception, both visual and auditory, as Benito Cereno shows, and must replace the concept with the “percept,” that is, with a perception in becoming. It requires a new community, whose members are capable of trust or “confidence,” that is, of a belief in themselves, in the world, and in becoming.”
“The dangers of a “society without fathers” have often been pointed out, but the only real danger is the return of the father. [25] In this respect, it is difficult to separate the failure of the two revolutions, the American and the Soviet, the pragmatic and the dialectical. Universal emigration was no more successful than universal proletarization. The Civil War already sounded the knell, as would the liquidation of the Soviets later on. The birth of a nation, the restoration of the nation-state––and the monstrous fathers come galloping back in, while the sons without fathers start dying off again…Long before Lawrence, Melville and Thoreau were diagnosing the American evil, the new cement that would rebuild the wall: paternal authority and filthy charity…The American confidence-man appears everywhere in Melville’s work.” — Gilles Deleuze, 1997.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. “Bartleby; or The Formula,” pp. 68-90 in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McCarthy, Cormac. 2005. No Country for Old Men.
Smith, Julie. 2022. Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? HarperOne.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 