Book Review: The Shipwrecked Mind by Mark Lilla

We are arguably living in an age of rising political reaction. Why then, asks Mark Lilla, is the reactionary mind so poorly understood? There is a surfeit of books on political revolution — why they happen, what makes them so seductive, and why, eventually, they consume themselves — but a dearth of good analysis on political reactions, “just the self-satisfied conviction that it is rooted in ignorance and intransigence, if not darker motives.” Outside observers have tried to explain the apotheosis of reactionary movements in terms of narrow materialistic forces such as colonialism, inequality, and demographic change. These explanations are not wrong at all — the rise of western reactionaries, for instance, is clearly a response to recent demographic and immigration tends — but they are incomplete. Reaction is both a universal response to the anxieties of modernization and a local phenomenon that laments the fall of an imagined past or a golden age. Turkish politicians romanticize the glorious apotheosis of a hazy Ottoman past. Russians are transfixed by the dreams of restored national greatness. And Islamic fundamentalism preys on the historical grievances and insecurities of its adherents, who dream of restoring a more sacred and pure form of political Islam.

The Shipwrecked Mind by Mark Lilla is a book of philosophical history, not just a polemic or treatise. Yet this history contains the seeds of an argument, and an important one at that. “The reactionary mind is a shipwrecked mind,” Lilla writes. “Where others see the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes.” He or she is motivated by a fear that modern life has been cast adrift on the icy floes of history. The reactionary is “time’s exile” — convinced they are living in a fallen age amidst a decadent and morally exhausted society that blithely heads toward its own destruction. The “betrayal of the elites” is the linchpin of every reactionary story. Relativism, nihilism, secularism, materialism, individualism, and political correctness (whether real or imagined) are their enemies. But the reactionary is no mere conservative, nor simply a cultural pessimist. Their pure belief in a just and righteous cause elides the boundaries between any rigid political orientation. “They are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings.” As Lilla writes, “The revolutionary sees the radiant future invisible to others and it electrifies him. The reactionary, immune to modern lies, sees the past in all its splendor and he too is electrified. He feels himself in a stronger position than his adversary because he believes he is the guardian of what actually happened, not the prophet of what might be.” Whether the society reverses direction or rushes toward its doom “depends entirely on their resistance.” The militancy of this historical nostalgia, which is the characteristic of a true reactionary spirit, is what makes him or her “a distinctly modern figure, not a traditional one.”

The Shipwrecked Mind opens with essays on three prominent 20th century thinkers: Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. It ends with profiles on several other reactionary figures, including Brad Gregory, Jacob Taubes, Alan Badiou, Eric Zemmour, and Michel Houellebec. Each philosopher identified a different point at which history diverged. For the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, the culprit was modern liberal theology, which had alienated man from God and reimagined his divine commandments to be compatible with the bourgeois desire to accumulate property and act as a good citizen. But he did not believe that a return to a simple pre-modern Orthodoxy was “possible or even desirable.” Instead, he proposed a new thinking that would “recapture the vital transcendence of Judaism.”

Eric Voegelin’s theory also revolved around a supposed break in history from the old order of transcendental and divine thought. But in his own esoteric way, he developed an entirely new philosophical vocabulary to encompass fields as diverse as medieval theology, gestalt psychology, Paleolithic and Neolithic visual symbols, Greek philosophy, American constitutional development, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. From these obscure disciplines Voegelin argued that modern humanity’s fixation on “creating a world without religion” led inexorably to Marxism, fascism, and nationalism. His story began in the ancient world, when human and divine orders existed in harmony. Kings were upheld as representatives of a divine order, serving either as “an intercessor with the gods or as a god himself.” But once our political order became decoupled from a divine or spiritual order (a process begun under Christianity and eventually concluded with the Enlightenment), “human beings began to conceive in sacred terms their own activities, in particular their creation of new political orders free from traditional sources of authority.” Modern political revolutions were born, in Voegelin’s famously byzantine worlds, through an “immanentization of the Christian eschaton” — in other words, the pursuit of the millennium in the political here and now. Voegelin expressed no particular ideology or doctrinal faith — and in fact he later repudiated much of what he had written — but his theories offered succor to American theoconservatives, who conveniently elided his broader criticism of Christianity, which “he blamed for preparing the advent of modern politics” with its emphasis on personal salvation rather than a divine social order. (This argument is not entirely without merit; author Tom Holland argues that the Investiture Controversy in the 12th century between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor set the stage for the division of society into church and state.)

Strauss is perhaps the most interesting of the three philosophers. He posited that there was a tension between two incompatible ways of addressing the human condition: divine revelation and human reason. He argued that this tension was necessary and inevitable in human society. “Without authoritative assumptions regarding morality and mortality, which religion could provide, no society can hold itself together. Yet without freedom from authority, philosophers cannot pursue truth wherever it might lead them.” According to Strauss, the descent from classical philosophy to the quicksand of relativism and nihilism began with Machiavelli, who rejected his predecessor’s ideas of pure contemplation and political prudence and embraced the willful mastery of nature. Modern man wanted to create a new kind of society that would be free of both religion and classical philosophy, leaving the world worse off. Strauss believed that the “problems in Western civilization could be traced to the abandonment of a healthier, ur-mode of thought from the past.” This “ur-mode of thought” was best expressed by Plato, but a Plato reinterpreted through the prism of esotericism. Strauss believed that this esoteric tradition teaches the reader how “genuine philosophy can and should be kept free from all theological and political commitments.” (A lesson his disciplines never quite heeded.)

The Shipwrecked Mind tells an interesting story about how reactionary European philosophers eventually spread their theories to America, which, “despite the apocalyptic streak in its native religious imagination,” had never been entirely susceptible to reactionary politics. When German scholars arrived in the United States in the 1930s, they imported some “very large and very dark ideas” about the impending crisis of modern life. Ever vigilant for signs of cultural decline, these philosophers saw a potential Weimar lurking around every corner (the Weimar comparison, just as much as Munich or Vietnam, still haunts our discourse today). They blamed a “transformation of Western thinking” for the calamities of the modern age and advocated for a return to a more classical mode of thought. Although few of them were engaged in politics directly, their works were inevitably co-opted by political thinkers on the right and the left who had their own axes to grind against modern society. Lilla has a particularly good section about how Strauss’s followers began to cultivate ideas that slipped subtly into the currents of “vulgar right-wing populism,” the belief that “America has a redemptive historical mission — an idea nowhere articulated by Strauss himself.”

The reactionary’s greatest weakness, Lilla argues, is a tendency to “impose a rough-and-ready order on the past.” Their apocalyptic imagination perceives familiar patterns in historical events, a teleology of cultural decline. They see a rip in time that widens with every passing year, “distancing us from an age that was golden or heroic or simply normal.” Once they have formulated a mechanism by which historical change happens, every event since then is interpreted through the lens of decay and decline. This leads the reactionary mind to be satisfied very quickly with assumptions and ideas that “feel true.” It is basically taken as an article of faith, for example, that the world is worse off now than it previously was. Rather than attempting to quantify their beliefs with facts and figures, they succumb to magical thinking about the power of the past. “The nostalgic quest already presumed the existence of what it then claims to discover: El Dorado.”

The Shipwrecked Mind is by no means the first or last word on this subject, and by Lilla’s own admission, the book makes only a very modest start toward understanding the psychological power of political nostalgia. The problem arises from the elliptical nature of the book. At a slim 144 pages, it is as much a collection of essays as a cohesive academic work, so some parts don’t get as much sustained attention as they deserve, and the basic thesis is woefully underdeveloped. As Lilla writes, “There is a book to be done on Western mytho-histories in relation to the times in which they were written, and the social-psychological work they accomplished in different epochs. Such a book would trace how, beginning in the early nineteenth century, archaic theological narratives about the past were modernized and substituted for argument in intellectual proxy wars over the present.” I wish Lilla had written that kind of book, but hopefully other writers and intellectuals will build on his work.

Nevertheless, as a useful tool of intellectual forensics, The Shipwrecked Mind is an invaluable contribution to the conversation. It makes an honest attempt to explain the ideas and beliefs that animate his subjects. As Lilla writes in the afterword, the reactionary’s closest companion is Don Quixote, who labors under the illusion that the “gap he perceives was caused by a historical catastrophe, not that it is simply rooted in life.” He is rebelling against the nature of time. If Lilla is correct, then apocalyptic thinking is doomed to fail. The doors to the Kingdom will remain shut, he says, and the extravagant hopes must eventually be disappointed. But that is not an excuse for complacency. Reaction is a dangerous force, because the more we wallow in solipsistic and abstract questions about religion, identity, and “natural order” (which have always been malleable and mutable, despite what the reactionaries say), we ignore pressing issues such as economic inequality, climate change, and artificial intelligence. So why then do people still feel the need to embrace such myths? As Lilla argues, “We want the comfort, however cold, of thinking that we understand the present, while at the same time escaping full responsibility for the future. Life does not work that way; history does not work that way… Such myths do nothing but feed a more insidious dream: that political action might help us find our way back to the Road Not Taken.” If we want to avoid succumbing to such illusory narratives, then we must look clear-eyed at the past and all its limitations without lapsing into nostalgia or cynicism.