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

by R.R. Reno

Today, nobody remembers Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death or speaks of his “body mysticism.” Freud has been discredited as a social scientist. The Marxist utopianism that Brown reframed as a vision of the triumph of instinct (life) over cultural norms (death) holds little sway over our imaginations. Nevertheless, Brown outlined the basic program that still dominates culture in the West. We see it at work in postmodern academic theory, which reigns in universities and provides the intellectual underpinnings for multiculturalism. This theory teaches that social norms and cultural ideals are manifestations of primitive impulses and instinctual urges: sexual desires, will to power, self-interest, lust for domination, class oppression, and so forth. Even our selfish goals—to look thin or to dress for success—get analyzed as social constructs, serving, perhaps, to sustain patriarchy, “late capitalism,” or cisgender dominance. At every turn, we analyze “down,” beginning our critique of social reality with things that might attract our loyalty and devotion and analyzing downward to the low, the ugly, and the base. What is today called “critical thinking” amounts to a thoroughgoing therapy of disenchantment.