Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism

Nick Land (Gargoyle Philosopher)

Immanuel Kant (Architect of the Cathedral)

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], the dominant faith of the modern world is Universalism ...

Which is ironic, because if you examine the idea closely - historically - you'll discover that it's a very particular way of looking at the world that merely "asserts its own universal significance whilst ascending to a state of general dominance that approaches the universal".

 

In other words, Universalism - which determines the direction and meaning of modernity - is revealed "as the minutely determined branch or sub-species of a cultic tradition, descended from 'ranters', 'levelers', and closely related variants of dissident, ultra-protestant fanaticism". 

 

It owes very little to philosophers and their model of reason, which is why the Enlightenment can be understood more as a religious event than a philosophical one. 

 

Or, as Land notes, the world's ruling creed - radically democratic and egalitarian in character - is something that emerged amongst a specific people at a particular time and then spread "along identifiable historical and geographical pathways, with an epidemic virulence that is disguised as progressive global enlightenment". 

 

Land finds this all very amusing: "The unmasking of the modern 'liberal' intellectual [...] as a pale, fervent, narrowly doctrinaire puritan, recognizably descended from the species of witch-burning zealots, is reliably - and irresistibly - entertaining."

 

Not that he sees many others laughing; in fact, as the Cathedral extends and tightens its grip upon everyone everywhere, the response it triggers is often anything but humorous:

 

"More commonly, when unable to exact humble compliance, it encounters inarticulate rage, or at least uncomprehending, smoldering resentment, as befits the imposition of parochial cultural dogmas, still wrapped in the trappings of a specific, alien pedigree, even as they earnestly confess to universal rationality."

 

The Muslim world, for example, doesn't often stop to appreciate the irony of the situation. For them, Universalism is Western imperialism and they don't like it; they don't find the truths being foistered on them to be as self-evident as we do. "How could anybody who was not already a believer be expected to consent to such assumptions?", asks Land.  

 

Of course, those sophisticated globalists of the Cathedral are embarrassed when obliged to admit that their progressive political agenda has a religious origin; they pride themselves on their secularism and desperately seek to direct attention away from "the ethnically specific, dogmatic creedal content at its core".

 

As Land writes in a brilliant line: "Paleo-puritanism must be derided in order for neo-puritanism to flourish ..." [2]

 

 

II.

 

Obviously, I'm sympathetic to Land's neo-reactionary nominalism directed against the Cathedral and its project of Universal Enlightenment. In a sense, that's what the phrase torpedo the ark might be understood to mean; i.e., a rejection of the ideal fantasy that the entire human race might be caught up in single becoming: One World, One People, One Law.   

 

I instinctively hate this line of thinking and always have. 

 

One of the reasons that the notion of a dark enlightenment attracts is because it rejects the myth of progress (or the internal teleology) at work in the philosophy of those such as Kant and Hegel and opposes any attempt to centralise into oneness, encouraging rather what D. H. Lawrence would describe as "a vivid recoil into separateness" [3].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nick Land, the Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the fourth and final part of this online version.

 

[2] Similarly, as Land goes on to note, neofascists of the New World Order can't be vocal enough in condemning white nationalism and other forms of what they call 'far-right extremism': 

      "Just as the ratchet progress of neo-puritan social democracy is radically facilitated by the orchestrated pillorying of its embryonic religious forms, so is its trend to consistently neo-fascist political economy smoothed by the concerted repudiation of a 'neo-nazi' (or paleo-fascist) threat. It is extremely convenient, when constructing ever more nakedly corporatist or 'third position' structures of state-directed pseudo-capitalism, to be able to divert attention to angry expressions of white racial paranoia ..."

[3] D. H. Lawrence, ‘Future States’, in The Poems, ed. Cristopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 526.

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse

 

'Democracy is as close to a precise negation of civilization 

as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into 

murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to).'

 

 

I. 

 

According to Nick Land [1], it's not only popular culture that ends up eating itself, but democracy too becomes self-devouring in what he refers to as the zombie apocalypse, which is why, as we saw in an earlier post, those who can are already searching for an exit and regard flight as a matter of imperative.

 

But what, exactly, does Land mean by this phrase; one that derives from a subgenre of horror fiction in which an overwhelming plague of undead zombies results in the total breakdown of society and leaves just a small group of individuals who have been unable to flee struggling to survive. 

 

That's what we are going to discuss here ...

 

 

II. 

 

If the idea of a zombie apocalypse entered the popular imagination thanks to George A. Romero's 1968 classic movie Night of the Living Dead, it's Land who places the idea within a neoreactionary political context [2] - although, it's true of course, that many other artists and theorists have used the phrase to metaphorically express various cultural anxieties and social tensions.   

 

Land - who, as a philosopher, is kind of a cross between Thomas Hobbes, Georges Bataille, and H. P. Lovecraft - conceives the dynamics of democratisation as fundamentally degenerative; "systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption". 

Bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, democratic governments and the people who elect them push one another further and further towards "ever more shameless extremities" including cannibalism. Idealists call this progress; neoreactionaries, however, see only voraciousness and fear that the authorities will ultimately be unable to "spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch" - i.e., the zombie apocalypse. 

 

As the democratic virus works its way through society, says Land, then concern with the past and long-term planning into the future both die away and are replaced by "a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a 'reality television' political circus". As we are trapped in a perpetual present at the end of history, it makes perfect sense to "eat it all now". 

 

III.

 

Finally, to help readers understand how we got where we are today, i.e., stuck in an age of relentless state expansion, spurious human rights, and mind control ensuring defence of a universalistic dogma, Land provides a convenient guide to the main sequence of modern political regimes, that I think it worth reproducing here [3]:

 

 

Regime 1: Communist Tyranny 

Typical Growth: -0% 

Voice / Exit: Low / Low 

Cultural climate: Pyschotic utopianism 

Life is … hard but ‘fair’ 

Transition mechanism: Re-discovers markets at economic degree-zero 

 

Regime 2: Authoritarian Capitalism 

Typical Growth: 5-10% 

Voice / Exit: Low / High 

Cultural climate: Flinty realism 

Life is … hard but productive 

Transition mechanism: Pressurized by the Cathedral to democratize 

 

Regime 3: Social Democracy 

Typical Growth: 0-3% 

Voice / Exit: High / High 

Cultural climate: Sanctimonious dishonesty 

Life is … soft and unsustainable 

Transition mechanism: Can-kicking runs out of road 

 

Regime 4: Zombie Apocalypse 

Typical Growth: N/A 

Voice / Exit: High (mostly useless screaming) / High (with fuel, ammo, dried food, precious metal coins) 

Cultural climate: Survivalism 

Life is … hard-to-impossible 

Transition mechanism: Unknown 

 

 

IV.

 

The question, I suppose, is: How seriously should we take Land's thoughts on these matters? 

 

Well, when I first encouraged readers of Torpedo the Ark to accept the challenge of his writings on dark enlightenment back in October 2015 - click here - I have to admit that I didn't take them as seriously as I do now. 

 

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade, however, and changed in a manner which, it seems to me, only lends credence to Land's analysis. One worries more now about the fate of the West than one worried ten years ago  and it seems to me that offensive strategies are required urgently if we are to avoid a zombie apocalypse (that defensive strategies, such as quarantine, just won't do the trick).

 

Although, if I'm honest, I suspect it's already too late and the election of Keir Starmer's Labour government with a huge majority here in the UK hardly fills me with hope for the future ...

 

Notes

 

[1] See Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting from the first and third parts of this online version.

 

[2] Having said that, one might recall the 1940 film The Ghost Breakers (dir. George Marshall, 1940), starring Bob Hope as Larry Lawrence who delivers a hilarious line concerning zombies and democrats: click here. 

 

[3] Note that by Voice / Exit Land refers to freedom of speech contra the far more substantial autonomy of the sovereign individual (i.e., the freedom to act without state interference and the freedom to leave when state interference in and control over one's life becomes intolerable). And note also that for all regimes, growth expectations assume moderately competent population.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here.  

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present

Nick Land contemplates taking an exit provided 

by the photographer Florian Reinhardt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

According to Foucault, Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way; as an exit, a way out, or an escape route from the past, which he thinks of as marked by darkness, barbarism, and man's immaturity [2].

Funny enough, although Nick Land thinks of his own neoreactionary philosophy as an intrinsic contradiction to the process of enlightenment, he too is looking for ein Ausgang - only he wants an exit from modernity and from the age of Enlightenment [3]. 

 

Realising, however, that there can be no turning back, Land says that any form of conservativism is thus pre-emptively (and ironically) condemned to paradox – i.e., destined to become a kind of retrofuturism; projecting something vital - but also something lost, or forgotten, or denied that existed in the past - into the future.

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence, who also sought an exit from the 20th-century and wished to step away from the light, understood this paradox better than most. His novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), for example, attempts to loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [4] and find some clue as to how we might live yesterday tomorrow.

 

Nietzsche too provides philosophical justification for taking what he calls a retrograde step once man has attained a certain level of enlightenment and emerged from superstitious fears and religious concepts. In other words, he has to recognise the importance that resided in old ideas and traditions and that "without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best mankind has hitherto produced" [5].    

 

Good people - the enlightened, who are afraid of the dark - will say this lapsing back into old life-modes that have been surpassed is a form of evil. Whilst that mightn't worry a Nietzschean, Lawrence was at pains to stress that this wasn't a "'helpless, panic reversal'", [6] but was, rather, something performed consciously and with care.

 

And, to reiterate: it's not a return so much as an exiting of the present into the past in order to enter the future.   

 

 

III.

 

Returning to Land, we find a contemporary thinker who is prepared to express his disillusionment with the "direction and possibilities" of the democratic political order born of the Enlightenment. For Land, as for many neoreactionaries and libertarians, freedom - in the classical liberal sense - is no longer compatible with democracy and the expansion of a voracious welfare state. 

 

And many of these people have ceased to care; for them, "democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself" and they are now searching for "something else entirely: an exit".  

 

When you risk being eaten alive in what Land thinks of as a coming zombie apocalypse, then flight becomes the ultimate imperative. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] During a period of almost ten years, German filmmaker and photographer Florian Reinhardt snapped over a 1000 pictures on his iPhone of exit signs all over the world. Readers who are interested can find them in a book entitled Exit published byHatje Cantz (2021). Click here for further information on Reinhardt and his work; or here to visit his exit.art website. 

 

[2] See Michel Foucault's essay 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32-50, in which he discusses Kant's 1784 essay 'Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?' (usually referred to in English simply as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’).   

 

[3] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting here from the first part of this online version.  

[4] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix. 

[5] Nietzsche, Human, all Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 1. 20, pp. 22-23. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 138.

 

 

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.  

Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate

Hate, as Nick Land rightly says, is a word worth considering: one which "testifies with special clarity to the religious orthodoxy" [1] of an age obsessed with hate speech and hate crime. 

 

With reference to the second of these things, Land writes: 

 

"Perhaps its most remarkable feature is its perfect redundancy, when evaluated from the perspective of any analysis of legal and cultural norms that is not enflamed by neo-puritan evangelical enthusiasm." 

 

That's true: for what is a hate crime - if any such thing exists - other than just an ordinary crime with the word 'hate' attached? 

 

And, one might also ask: "what is it exactly that aggravates a murder, or assault, if the motivation is attributed to 'hate'?" 

 

 

II. 

 

In response to these questions, Land says that, firstly, a hate crime "is augmented by a purely ideational, ideological, or even 'spiritual' element, attesting not only to a violation of civilized conduct, but also to a heretical intention."

 

Hate, in other words, is an offense against what Land and his fellow neoreactionaries term the Cathedral [2]; "a refusal of its spiritual guidance, and a mental act of defiance against the manifest religious destiny of the world".

 

Secondly, Land asserts that a hate crime is something that only those on the right can commit; the left is far too enlightened - or far too woke as we would say now - ever to hate; they are passionate about a cause, or morally outraged about an issue, or justifiably angry about some form of behaviour deemed offensive, but never hateful. 

 

For theirs is the politics of Universal Love; a decadent creed which "with its reflex identification of inequality with injustice, can conceive no alternative to the proposition that the lower one's situation or status, the more compelling is one's claim upon society, the purer and nobler one's cause". 

 

Being one of the wretched of this earth is thus a "sign of spiritual election [...] and to dispute any of this is clearly 'hate'". 

 

I think that's correct and I'd like to see Taylor Swift, or anyone else for that matter, just shake off the truth of Land's analysis of slave morality and the manner in which hate functions for some not merely as a form of political incorrectness or criminality, but as sin.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Press, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online - click here - from where I am quoting (see Part 3). 

 

[2] In brief, the Cathedral is an overarching body composed of universities, mainstream media outlets, and many other institutions.

Dark Enlightenment 2: On Exiting the Present (5 July 2024): click here. 

 

Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here. 

Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here. 

Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment

Old Nick himself

I knew Nick Land, briefly and not very well, in the mid-1990s, whilst I was in the Philosophy Department at Warwick as a Ph. D. student. In fact, Land was assigned to monitor my progress and act as someone to whom I could turn for guidance other than my official supervisor, Keith Ansell-Pearson.

Unlike many others, however, I failed to fall under his evil spell. In fact, if I'm honest, I found him somewhat unsympathisch and don't recall anything he ever told me that particularly amused or struck a chord, apart from the fact that it was, in his view, preferable to sell burgers from the back of a van than to build a conventional academic career. 

Having said that, and to be fair to Land, his Thirst for Annihilation (1992) is a book to which I often return and that's not something you can say of many other (if any) theoretical studies of Bataille and for a long time I characterized my own work as a form of libidinal materialism.

But it's not this text from long ago that I wish to comment on here; rather, I'm interested in his more recent (neoreactionary) writings and his provocative notion of a Dark Enlightenment which seems to involve people waking up to the fact that democracy is incompatible with liberty, equality is a theological conceit, human biodiversity something to be affirmed and capitalism something to be accelerated.

Now, to me, this sounds simply like a form of post-Nietzschean anti-modernism; for others, including Jamie Bartlett, it's a sophisticated neo-fascism spread online by over-educated, often angry white men worried about a coming zombie apocalypse and looking for an emergency exit.

Bartlett describes Land as an eccentric philosopher, which, obviously, he is; but then all genuine thinkers are eccentric, are they not? To be a conventional individual who upholds orthodox opinion and subscribes to moral common sense is to be a bien pensant, but never a truly perverse lover of wisdom.   

Bartlett also complains that Land's thinking is difficult to pin down. But again, I might suggest that it's not usually a sign of lively philosophical intelligence when one's ideas have all the vitality of dead butterflies.

As to the charge that Land is a racist (the worst form of heresy to those who subscribe to and enforce a universal humanism), well, if he is, it's certainly not in the ordinary or banal sense. Indeed, Land is at pains to demonstrate how the latter rests on a grotesquely poor understanding of reality and utter incomprehension of the future that is unfolding (a future in which genomic manipulation will dissolve biological identity in an as yet inconceivably radical manner making the concern over miscegenation and skin-colour seem laughably old-fashioned).

So, without wishing to defend Land from his critics - something he is perfectly capable of doing for himself - I would nevertheless like to encourage readers of Torpedo the Ark to invest the time and accept the challenge of reading Land's work on Dark Enlightenment by clicking here.


Note: Jamie Bartlett is a journalist and the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos (i.e. part of the Cathedral). He regularly writes about online extremism and the perils of the dark web. His blog post for the Telegraph on Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, and the Dark Enlightenment can be read by clicking here.