Ex Nihilo?
LAST, JONATHAN V.
Ex Nihilo? A philosopher argues that modern pop culture has embraced Nihilism Lite. BY JONATHAN V. LAST The deepest, most fundamental problem of contemporary American culture can be summed up in...
...As for his thesis that liberal democracies breed nihilism through the abundance of comfort and safety, the only possible response is: Maybe...
...Several of them, such as American Beauty, The Talented Mr...
...Yet enough earnest films are made—Seven, Pulp Fiction, and Magnolia, for example— that it is wrong to declare the whole culture given over to nihilism...
...From L.A...
...But the real danger comes less from the attack on actual morals than from the attack on the very concept of morals...
...Yet," he notes, "the absence of any explicit influence of philosophical nihilism on popular culture highlights the significance of the unintended convergence...
...The everyday vices of the families in Ang Lee's stunning 1997 film The Ice Storm, Hibbs observes, allow the banality of evil to "find its finest contemporary expression...
...Hibbs also notes that the late twentieth century uniquely made meaning-lessness—"nothing," in the Seinfeld vernacular—a source for its comedies...
...For that matter, Shakespeare himself is being brought to the screen at a breakneck pace: The last five years have seen seventeen adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, with three more due this year...
...Hibbs is not that sort of critic...
...Filmmakers and television producers don't have nihilism on the brain, and most couldn't even pronounce the name of Nietzsche...
...Hibbs is too knowledgeable about the dynamics of American culture to claim that this descent is part of some grand plan by the moguls of Hollywood...
...And nowhere, says the philosopher Thomas Hibbs, is this diminished humanity found more clearly than on television...
...He suggests that the criticisms made by conservatives are as incomplete as those made by liberals...
...If only the German had been right—if only the shedding of all our old nineteenth-century hypocrisies and our embrace of nihilism had created the dark, dangerous world of constant excitement he imagined—then, bad as things would be, they surely wouldn't be this bad...
...Ripley, and The Beach, revel in their nihilism...
...It is the society-wide descent into soft nihilism...
...The problem isn't that Seinfeld is taking the wrong position in the abortion debate, but that it thinks all debate is stupid...
...The problem with most critics of pop culture, especially conservatives, is that they don't actually know much about pop culture...
...and showed the lead character of the television program Ally McBeal, Hibbs notes, "The real problem is not with the character Ally, but with the world of Ally McBeal, a world in which...
...They hunt and peck at a television show here, a movie there, and try to string together three examples, from which they can claim a trend—from three of which, in turn, they can claim the imminent collapse of Western civilization...
...Classical comedies likewise lured the audience into sympathizing with the characters and expecting things to end well...
...We might describe it as a vision not of the banality of evil, but of the banality of good: In such films as Forrest Gump, admirable characters are required to be profoundly childlike, profoundly stupid, or profoundly dead...
...Jonathan V. Last is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Nietzsche is the philosopher of our times, Harvey Mansfield once said...
...That argument parallels an exchange earlier in the episode over whether women should be allowed to have abortions...
...Popular culture may subvert traditional virtues, as the Right claims, and teach violent lessons, as the Left claims...
...Mass nihilism turns out to be the flattening of man, the reduction and simplification of what it means to be human...
...feminism] is no longer credible...
...In classical tragedies, man was largely defined by conflict and struggle, in which, as Hibbs writes, the audience located "the grandeur of human life in the gap between aspiration and achievement...
...But while he enjoys pop culture, Hibbs is also dismayed by it...
...The world of sitcoms is rife with this sentiment: "Seinfeld's world is populated by Nietzsche's last men, who, when faced with the great questions and ultimate issues of life, blink and giggle...
...But when everyone's a Nietzschean, the result is far from what Nietzsche hoped for (though not far from what he feared...
...But the popular dramas of our time subvert classical tragedy by simplifying the human capacity for good in a world that is complex and textured...
...But as the existence of certain other elements of popular culture suggests, it's not so clear that we absolutely must be nihilists, even in these late days...
...Compelling as it is, the argument in Shows about Nothing fails to encompass all of popular culture...
...What Hibbs seems to mean is that there is something about liberal democracy that pulls the culture— whether philosophically informed or not—toward a smooth and comfortable nihilism...
...Assessing the Time magazine cover that asked "Is Feminism Dead...
...There is no higher or lower...
...we are all now nihilists," James Edwards added in his 1997 The Plain Sense of Things...
...Describing a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry becomes terrified of becoming "an orgy guy," Hibbs deadpans, "He would have to get orgy clothes, buy special oils, and so forth...
...Hibbs is right about the sitcom, which is temporarily hostage to the Seinfeld model, but cycles in television are as sure as the tides...
...A quintessential Seinfeld episode featured a heated argument over whether people should be allowed to choose what toppings they put on their pizza...
...Hibbs's Shows about Nothing is an unexpected work—at least from a professor of medieval philosophy at Boston College whose last book was called Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa Contra Gentiles...
...On the surface, the exchange mocks both sides in the abortion debate," says Hibbs...
...Hibbs points out that the "subversive deployment of our democratic language of choice and consent indicates we are already beyond good and evil...
...Pizza, abortion—it's all the same...
...But the underlying motif is that of morality as farce...
...He has a resplendent knowledge of, and chagrined appreciation for, popular culture...
...Confidential and The Silence of the Lambs to The Simpsons and The X-Files, he shows a clear command of the culture's foibles...
...Yes, many contemporary tragedies lack the cathartic punch of even film noir, let alone Shakespeare or Euripedes...
...BY JONATHAN V. LAST The deepest, most fundamental problem of contemporary American culture can be summed up in three words: Nietzsche was wrong...
...And on some television dramas—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Law & Order—characters are shown working to be better than the culture apparently allows them to be...
...In the British film Trainspotting, Ewan McGregor's character explains his heroin addiction: "I chose not to choose life...
...Popular culture is an assault on both the Right and the Left, on every notion of reasonable politics and thought...
...Hibbs demonstrates that there's a clear logic in nihilism that leads from the mad, exciting drama of Nietzsche to the flat, inhuman comedy of Seinfeld...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 22
