Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

by R.R. Reno

Belief in a new, post-ideological way of life was widespread after World War II. Social scientists and psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Karen Horney, Rollo May, and others may not have read Popper, but his ideas were in the air, and they developed his themes, casting them as timeless, empirical truths rather than historically conditioned responses to the crisis of the West in the first half of the twentieth century. They did not have the dangers of fascism directly in view. Instead, they were concerned about the bourgeois culture of middle-class America, which was thought to constrict the full expression of individuality. The middle-class milieu of the 1950s was defined as “conventionality”—the pyschosocial analogue to Popper’s “closed society”—and deemed an impediment to personal growth and authenticity. To counter these consolidating pressures, the influential psychologists of the era articulated the therapeutic forms of an “open society.” At the same time, the new pop psychology of “growth” and self-realization, following Popper, remained scrupulously anti-metaphysical, not explicitly but as part of the larger and increasingly powerful postwar consensus. In the postwar explosion of the literature of personal growth and self-discovery, a new therapeutic search for meaning supplanted the classical search for truth.