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

by R.R. Reno

It’s easy to make fun of Norman O. Brown. He followed up Life Against Death with Love’s Body in 1966, an even more urgent and utopian call for Dionysian ecstasies that he promised would deliver us from the arduous demands of culture. The later book became a cult classic for those who wanted to theorize the Summer of Love. In retrospect, however, Brown’s season of fame followed a general pattern. Michel Foucault published his study of the evolution of the social treatment of mental illness, Madness and Civilization, around the same time. It adopted an entirely different set of categories for social analysis but arrived at pretty much the same conclusions about the stultifying, constraining, and life-denying role of cultural norms. The work of both authors resonated with the postwar consensus that had come to regard the cultural traditions of the West as a problem, even a curse, not a welcome inheritance. By Popper’s reckoning, totalitarianism is in the DNA of Western philosophy. Mainstream educators did not take such a dire view, at least not at the outset of the postwar era. But they, too, were less than confident in the old traditions. It was not just an anxiety about suburban conformism that drove liberal elites in Brown’s direction. Death camps and atomic bombs hung over Western culture. In postwar Europe, colonialism became a source of moral embarrassment and shame. In America, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow sullied the nation’s shared inheritance.