American Vacuum
You Can’t Have Good Politics When No One Knows Anything! Featuring David Lynch, Chateaubriand, Curtis Yarvin, Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin, Noam Chomsky, Bob Dylan, et al.
We at The Hinternet find ourselves becoming something we never wanted to be — Americans who move to Europe and, Gore Vidal-like, catty and scoffing, take to issuing brutal and categorical judgments from our elegant Amalfi Coast villa about the idiocy of the countrymen we left behind, except that our villa is something closer to an immigrant slum, and the skies are always grey here in Paris. We admit, still, to having mixed feelings. The Hinternet has a long record of celebrating at least certain dimensions of American naïveté. For example, we see Walt Whitman’s injunction to take from Old World book-learning only what is useful, and otherwise to “stand in my place with my own day here”, as a beautiful affirmation of the American spirit. We see this spirit perfectly distilled in the story of the St. Louis Hegelian Henry Clay Brockmeyer, who once found himself struggling through Spinoza’s Ethics one morning in a cabin somewhere in rural Missouri, when lo, a herd of buffalo comes rumbling by. He dropped his Spinoza and picked up his rifle. That’s how you “do philosophy” in America.
We have likewise often insisted that the broader anti-intellectual culture of the United States is, paradoxically, an ideal breeding-ground for great intellectuals. In our experience teaching French students, when we meet a 20-year-old who shows some signs of interest in, say, Pascal’s wager, or who knows who Arnold Geulincx is, our first thought is always: well of course, this young person is French, this is to be expected. If we meet an American of the same age with similar interests and knowledge, we know immediately that we’ve got someone rare and special on our hands, and we better do everything we can to help them along.
But the problem is that the forces of anti-intellectualism now have such a strong hold on the channels of education, communication, and artistic expression that even the rare and exceptional young person in that tragic country has little hope of finding opportunities to cultivate their native ingenium. If they dare to write a word like “ingenium”, their machines will change it automatically into “ingenious”. If they think they have a book in them, the trade-publishing industry will etiolate it down into a set of elevator-pitch-ready bullet-points so inane and flat-footed and obvious and first-degree that any intellectual with any integrity (unlike us) will simply withdraw from the process. If they go to get a humanities degree, they will come out the other end with little more than four years’ worth of decontextualized taste-samples, coated in a sweet syrup of relatability, rather than anything remotely resembling a proper humanistic education. If they land on TV, they will be expected not to reflect on the complexity of the issue for which they were called up, but only to take one or the other of the issue’s two possible sides — and there are only ever two possible sides. If they rise through the algorithmic ranks of social media, this will be in virtue of their excellence in takesmanship, not their willingness to model ambiguity or any other intellectual virtues more resistant to quantification or to plotting on a Cartesian axis.
This system is so comprehensive, so baked into the economy and to the technological infrastructure, that almost nobody in that country is even aware that there is anything missing in the culture. This is what we mean in speaking of an “American vacuum”, which, as we see it —let’s go full-American today and deliver a dumb-ass easy-to-swallow ordinal list after the manner of Everyday Feminism’s “4 Ways Your Loose-Fitting Pants Appropriate the Culture of Justice-Affected Individuals” or the like—, may be broken down under three principal sub-headings:
Presentism in the Interpretation of Social and Political Problems
Philistinism in The Interpretation of Art and Culture
Positivism in the Search for Meaning
Let us look at each of these in turn — giving names, yea, and showing receipts.