Re: <nettime> Fw: Has the right gone full Alt

On Sun, Dec 6, 2020 at 5:23 PM Kurtz, Steven <sjkurtz@buffalo.edu> wrote:

The reason knowledge is so important is that it can function as a virtual glue to build community and a way for many members to say I may not be educated like the members of the demiurge, but I am more intelligent and better informed, but most importantly, the goal is transformation—to be a part of a constellation that gives you the power to transcend the limits of a false given. Take the red pill and emerge anew.

This is the heart of it. The quest to overcome alienation is the spiritual mainspring that calculating politicians have learned to bend and release at will.

At the level of common people, the alienation is easily understandable and has many identifiable causes. On the one hand, every aspect of the communitarians' symbolic order - and by order I mean hierarchy in the sacred sense, the order of human relationships in the great chain that extends from creaturely Earth to the Divine - every aspect of this order is threatened by rapid change, whether you're talking gender roles, institutional authority, inclusion/exclusion boundaries, even property ownership (perceived as "under attack" when government regulators come in). To this you can add a materialist perspective: it's obvious that a large amount of working-class people are losing the opportunities and advantages of the old Fordist-extractivist economy, without any replacement that can be seen. Elite knowledge says all this change is inevitable - so if you don't want it or couldn't survive it, you had better find new knowledge, otherwise you are simply invalidated and left for dead. This is why more and more people on the right are finding new knowledge somewhere outside the mainstream, and sharing it with others who recognize it as the truth. Trump won by a landslide - do you know?

What Steve says is spot on and matches all the testimony I've read. What's important is not the quality of the gnosis, its internal coherence, its validation by outside sources, its verifiability - but instead, what's important is that others recognize it. That recognition restores the old hierarchical order and defends it from caustic sophistry. It makes America great again, in the flesh, as a unified community.

Religion is the central theater for this reaffirmation of identity. It always has been, since the days of the Roman empire when the church taught the faithful to be "in, but not of this world." For sure it did not take long for the Christian community, educated in this way, to go back outside and take over the empire. Which they may well end up doing again, in short order.

No one wants to hear about this stuff because it's too banal on the surface - and too threatening underneath. Rightwing churches are like Rotary Clubs, but with a lot more emotional range because you've got women, children, elders and the Sermon on the Mount involved, in addition to the dudes talking politics and making deals. Variations on the basic pattern extend throughout the different social classes, of course it can get much more sophisticated. What we should understand at the heart of it is the intensity of the alienation, and the corresponding need for new, secret knowledge that can rebuild the threatened community. When apocalyptic political knowledge comes in the door, the boring Sunday service becomes a petrol bomb. Bannon and Trump threw it into downtown Washington and set the world on fire.

The thing is, alienation is coming for everybody. Imperial breakdown combined with climate change is going to destroy the old middle class privileges. The twenty-somethings are seeking secret knowledge in a big way right now, because liberalism has nothing to offer them but a scorched future. In the past, capitalist progress had its cosmological symbols: atomic energy, the moon shot, the World Wide Web. All of that tastes like ashes for the younger post-left generations who see climate change on the horizon. But the cosmological knowledge that is sought by these younger people has no unity, no connection to power of any kind, and therefore no politics. Which means we're sitting ducks. The next incarnation of Trump will come to office with clear doctrines, organized forces, and an effective strategy. At that point, "secret knowledge" for right-wing America will mean being in on the plan.

I think that the only way to turn this story around is to come up with an industrial program that serves cosmological ends. Something like "Rebuild the energy system for Gaia." It has to be an industrial plan because it has to offer people a chance, not to preserve the old world, but to build a new one, with work and money and material progress involved. It has to be practical and logical and feasible, but above all, egalitarian enough to bring in new people. At the same time it has to be cosmological because only those who can see a further star will find the courage and energy to fight against the bitter realities that are staring them in their face.

It's true that the Christian right can be subverted in many different ways, as Steve suggests, and it would be urgent for the government itself - acting through the media, the educational institutions, the police etc - to carry out this subversion. Such battles between Church and State were fought out in France for over a century, and it is well known that Durkheim advised the transformation of the Republic into a kind of secular religion (which was done - go check out the Pantheon in the 5th arrondissement for instance). Durkheim and his contemporaries saw that you could not simply dismantle the old gods - you have to raise new ones in their place. It's very clear that we need to pull down all the Columbus statues, and create new ones in which the most advanced scientific ideas about symbiosis and biogeochemical cycles are but graven ornaments for tellurian deities.

OK, most of you surely think I've gone off the deep end. You don't come from Australia or California, where the Pyrocene has already begun. You haven't yet seen - or indeed, experienced - what the damaged Goddess is getting ready to do to us. You don't yet realize the vulnerability of the capitalist world, the elite world, your world. You have not sought new knowledge. You think the system works. You're sitting ducks.

I don’t want to play down the former two reasons for becoming a part of the Gnostic front. They are significant. For Evangelicals and other conservative Christians the breaking of the spiritual consensus in the West in the 60s was traumatic, and the erosion of a national spiritual life has continued ever since. From their perspective, Gnostic revelation could bring back the consensus. The fact that yoga and wellness can commune with evangelicals through Qanon or anti-vax seems to be an indication of this possibility from a Gnostic point of view. For the greater Trump cult, being viewed as ignorant rubes by their educational superiors (now more than ever as Trump continues to loot and grift this class) has been a source of aggravation. Gnosticism proves their greater intelligence and their superior knowledge that in turn acts as a real power lift to their pride and well-being. The elite of the Republican Party understand this desire and are taking advantage of it. In part, this is why the Republican Party is becoming the working class party in the US.

We do need a new ecological aesthetic (CAE just did a book on that), and we do need a new political theology. I can’t help but think of the anti-vax motto—“You have data, but we have stories.” But none of that does any good if it is not accompanied by a massive intervention campaigns into the Gnostic networks of alternative reality. This is such a significant site in the lives of millions, and we ignore it at our own peril.

*I want to make clear that with the exceptions of Qanon and anti-vax I am not indicting every person who participates in these various groups—only a variable subsection is a part of the Gnostic front. Membership tends to happen in spiritually-oriented groups since they are most of the way there already.

From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> on behalf of Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, December 4, 2020 8:29 PM
To: Max Herman; a moderated mailing list for net criticism
Subject: Re: <nettime> Fw: Has the right gone full Alt_?

The new aesthetic for the conservative base can be reasonably well-understood as a cooptation of the alt_ or insurgent aesthetic. It offers something like the liberating euphoria which progressives felt about 20 years ago. Conservatives can like, tweet, dox, spam, hack, and everything else which formerly were chiefly the playground of the other side. The surge of dopamine delivered by these aesthetic behaviors can be understood as a delayed version of the 1996 internet, specially branded and targeted at those who were not part of the earlier phase and resent both its participants and their value system.

This is totally true for the alt_right, and the survivors of those heavily dopamined days of the 90s should know it better than anyone else (unless they're still doped out on Intel, or just stuck wherever they landed). In my case I felt this turnaround with all the bitterness of the culturally displaced, starting four years ago.

You're right Max, this kind of thing always happens and one has to move on, that's the personal lesson.

However, the alt-right is only a hipster suburb of ultra-conservatism, and I think its aesthetics are a detail. Just as the big mistake of the dopamine binge was to think that everyone was about to join your wild high (precarious cognitarians as the leading edge of class consciousness!), so in our day, the alt-right is just another bunch of nerds with attitude. It looks big when you stumble into one of their chat rooms, or cafés if they actually have such things (maybe in the Milwaukee suburbs?). It's not really so big though, just as the counter-globalization movement wasn't.

I've moved on to different questions.

Here's one of them. It turns out that on closer examination, what has really metastasized over the past 20 years is the corporate capitalist grip on the sprawling, palpitating world of religious communitarianism. This is the cancer you can see in Mitch McConnel's eyes, this is what Amy Coney Barret embodies to extremes of smug pathology, and this is the only explanation for the kinds of insanities that have come out of Donald Trump's mouth over the last few days in particular. Only people who judge their daily lives by what some pastor tells them concerning God and the Devil could possibly accept the concocted drivel of pro-life, pro-gun, leader-cult nationalism that is now served up, to overwhelming effect, by the cynical pols of the so-called evangelical movement. It's not really a movement, though, but an exactingly constructed motivational machine, by far the most dangerous political technology in the world. White supremacy, neonazism, extreme libertarianism and the alt_right are just feeder streams that swell this foaming current and give it the complexity and power to dominate a declining imperial order, which it is still doing in the US despite Joe Biden's win. I think the old liberal/progressive hegemony has been all but overwhelmed by religious nationalism. We better fight for our worlds, folks, because if not we are going to lose them all.

On the left, we have always wanted to believe that the rapaciousness of monopoly capital would drive the workers and peasants to our side. "The real enemy is the Koch brothers and their dark money," we'd say, "and the rest of the confusion will disappear once that becomes clear." Now it's urgent to identify, not just the leaders and their aims, but the entire cultural/political complex that is giving the present its twisted and disheartening character. Because as conditions get worse, the veil doesn't fall. No, the religious fervor grows. Katherine Stewart has written what seems to be the best book on this stuff, and she puts the growth dynamic in a nutshell:

"That’s the way inequality works. On the one hand, it creates concentrations of wealth whose beneficiaries are determined to manipulate the political process to hold on to and enhance their privileges. On the other hand, it generates a sense of instability and anxiety among broad sectors of the wider public, which is then ripe for conversion to a religion that promises authority and order."

That's Karl Polanyi's double movement. The alienation of globalized capitalism grows by leaps but bounds - but the powers that emerge to stop it prove much worse than the disease they were supposed to cure.

On that basis, a gang of monopoly capitalists have created a national popular religion, and right now they hold the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Presidency of the United States. These folks have global reach, and anyone who was justifiably worried about Opus Dei a few years ago, has not seen anything yet. The cosmological battle is already three-quarters won, and we hyper-educated godless anarchists from the cities have barely even noticed it was happening. To fight back, we need something a lot more powerful than another tech-driven euphoria. Without a transcendent sense of cross-racial, multigendered community to match the horrid archaisms of the right - and without some new version of the Messiah, I'd say - we are cooked.

Walter Benjamin understood this kind of thing very well, but his categories are far too out of date to help us. It's time for the contemporary left to develop, not just a new ecological aesthetics, but even more, an updated version of political theology.

--> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: