Rob Riemen is a philosopher in philosophy’s original sense. He’s a thinker reflecting on what it means to lead a good life, which inevitably entails obligations to society, perhaps even imagining a better one than what currently exists. The Dutch philosopher argues in To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism (W.W. Norton) that our world is confronted at present with the gravest danger since Hitler. The wind of fascism is felt again and the threat is more than the hot air blowing from Mar-a-Lago.
Although Riemen never drops the name, Donald Trump is clearly on his mind. “It is no coincidence that the return of a fascist movement is accompanied by the call to make country x, y or z ‘great again’,” he writes. But Trump isn’t alone in harnessing nostalgia and discontent to the will for power. And at least in the West, he isn’t the cause but an outrageous symptom of the deeper malaise Riemen identifies and articulates with forceful eloquence.
The problem of “mass democracy,” the unthinking populism of resentment and the tyranny of the majority, has been aggravated in his view by two parallel developments: the blindness of many liberals toward the prevalence of naked self-interest and the lust for power in a society lacking firm ethics; and the quantitative scientism, the worship of data, that diminishes the role of the arts, which offer “true understanding of the human heart, the perennial complexities of societies with their conflicting interests.” Every postmodern sophist, prattling about the construction of truth, prepared the ground where fake news flourishes. Many people no longer recognize truth unless it conforms to their prejudices.
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Riemen has no difficulty finding parallels between the present political situation and the rise of Hitler. Feckless conservatives abetted his ascent, imagining they could control him, realizing only too late that they faced a will more powerful than theirs. Riemen spells out the formula: “Put demagogues and charlatans in charge, use the mass media to cultivate the belief that this leader, the apolitical politician, is the only person who can save the country.” Such leaders usually channel the grievances of the left-behind or the dismayed toward some particular group, Jews, immigrants and so on.
To Fight Against This Age is pessimistic over “the nihilist kitsch society” endemic throughout the world, enabling, through promoting willful ignorance and stupidity, the rise of chauvinists and charlatans. Riemen offers no prescription but only rays of hope that human dignity can still be recognized through the fog of distraction and that history’s lessons can still be relearned.
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