DURING THE lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Washington told the world that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Although the Bush administration had no real evidence to back up this claim, this presented no impediment to pursuing the desired course of action. The necessary evidence was invented, and contradictory evidence was firmly suppressed. The following example is instructive. José Bustani, founding director of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (opcw), was at the time making persistent efforts to get Iraq accepted as a member of the opcw, as this would have allowed thorough inspections, and Bustani fully expected that such inspections would confirm what his own chemical weapons experts had already told him—that all of Iraq’s chemical weapons had already been destroyed in the 1990s after the Persian Gulf War. The Bush administration’s response to Bustani was swift: then-Under Secretary of State John Bolton gave him twenty-four hours to resign or face the consequences. For the Bush administration, overthrowing Iraq was far too important a matter to let the truth get in the way. 

CONSIDER THE contrasting course taken by John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile crisis. The crisis itself was initiated when U.S. spy planes photographed Soviet nuclear-capable SS-4 missile sites being installed on Cuban soil. In obvious contrast to Iraqi chemical weapons, these weapons of mass destruction were real, not invented. Despite this factual evidence, and even though this went against the insistent advice of his military, Kennedy refused to go to war. He refused to invade Cuba, thereby, in all likelihood, saving the world from Armageddon. 

But there is an even more instructive point of comparison between the two cases: Kennedy’s evolving efforts, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to understand the Soviet Union. His June 1963 American University speech demonstrated the president’s effort to understand both the motivations and the complex reality of the Soviet adversary. Kennedy’s description of both sides as equally trapped in “a vicious and dangerous cycle, with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other,” suggests a mind influenced by Homer’s Iliad. He praised the Russian people “for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.” He acknowledged the Soviet Union’s massive losses during World War II. Instead of dehumanizing America’s adversary, he did the opposite; he emphasized our shared humanity: “We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.” 

The contrast between the level of thought reached by Kennedy during his American University speech and the banalities and lies so regularly uttered by American presidents ever since could hardly be more dramatic. What has happened? How did the quality of American thought and leadership decline in such precipitous fashion? 

Page Smith, in his eight-volume history of the United States, repeatedly returns to the competition, throughout most of American history, between what he terms a Classical Christian and a Democratic Secular consciousness. Almost from the very beginning, according to Smith, the second had already outweighed the first. Although the historian’s multi-volume study concludes with the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, I would argue that it was Kennedy who briefly re-opened the possibility of an America incorporating at least some important elements of the Classical Christian perspective. With Kennedy’s assassination, that possibility closed. By the time George W. Bush and Dick Cheney became occupants of the White House, the Classical Christian consciousness, some unconvincing rhetorical flourishes aside, was already nothing more than a distant memory. American politics, culture, and society had become thoroughly technocratic. A secular consciousness, present from the very beginning, had undergone a transformation; or, perhaps it is better to say, had come to fruition as the technocracy always already implicit in the secular idea. 

Under technocracy, reason, even rationality, are no longer recognized as having an intrinsic value. They no longer oblige our agreement. To the contrary, they are now themselves subservient to our autonomous will. Nature is like putty in the hands of technological man: indeed, it is no longer possible to speak of “man.” The actors who act within technological society reject any such imposition. They themselves will henceforth technologically decide what and who we “are,” right down to the very core of our biological existence. 

America’s cultural milieu has two aspects, two scales of operation. On the one hand, we have the “Left” revolutionaries and crash-course quoters of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault who, in surprising numbers, have recently burst forth from American college campuses. And then we have, on the other hand, the surprisingly large number of global corporations and, in particular, all the big social media giants who as a group have embraced this “revolution.” The latter in particular help discipline public speech so as to keep it in line with the new ideology.  

Rod Dreher’s latest book, Live Not By Lies, provides a useful introduction to this woke new world. Dreher’s methodology depends on a wide-ranging comparison of the United States and the USSR/Russia. In the course of these comparisons Dreher, to be sure, himself occasionally falls into the trap of technological reasoning, however inadvertently. Nonetheless, his analysis is revealing. It points to how these woke corporations and woke foot soldiers express one and the same thoroughly technocratic “civilization.” 

DREHER TAKES the Soviet Union and its East European satellites as the paradigmatic case of a political order based on lies. What kind of “lies” does he have in mind? 

First of all, atheism. For Dreher, the Soviet system’s denial of the truth of Christian faith, a denial necessitated by its founding Marxist-Leninist creed of dialectical materialism, is key. The central point, for Dreher, is that a system based on atheism is itself for just that reason already based on a lie. 

He pays considerable attention, however, to the moral challenges faced by believers living within a society which considers faith itself to be dangerous, or at any rate something wholly belonging to the past. In such a society it is difficult, and at times altogether hazardous, to openly live out one’s faith. In the 1920s and 1930s, when many thousands of Orthodox priests and believers were swept up and perished in Josef Stalin’s Gulag, it was deadly. Although after WWII and Stalin’s death in 1953 the situation in Russia gradually underwent important changes that made life considerably easier for believers, it is true that for most of the Soviet period open expressions of religious faith were at minimum a career killer.  

Dreher’s second example of “living by lies” relates to the Soviet system’s demand for ideological conformity. Dialectical materialism was the reigning ideology, and the Communist Party apparatus made known which interpretation of that ideology at any given point was to be considered authoritative. Under such a system, writes Dreher, the Party itself became “the sole source of truth.” School children had to mouth what the ideology demanded of them instead of reflecting in their papers what they honestly thought.  

Building on these two themes, Dreher draws a series of parallels between what he terms the totalitarian Soviet empire and the “soft totalitarianism” currently being installed by “woke” revolutionaries. The latter share with the early Bolsheviks what might be termed a sociological fallacy. Both divide people into categories of oppressor and oppressed. For the Bolsheviks, the oppressors were the property-owning bourgeoisie, and the oppressed were the property-less poor, the peasants, and the factory workers. For America’s woke revolutionaries, the oppressors are now white, male, heterosexual Christians, while the oppressed are sexual minorities and people of color. 

Such thinking by sociological categories entails a failure of reason. Although Dreher doesn’t make use of the term, it also entails the embrace of moralism. Dreher notes how, for a generation nurtured on Marx as filtered through Foucault, there is no such thing as objective reason. Rationality is no longer viewed as equally available to all. Reason is no longer authoritative. What matters is one’s power position, and power is viewed as a function of the category (oppressors or oppressed) to which someone belongs. The similarity here with the early Bolsheviks is indeed very striking. From the perspective of today’s practitioners of social justice and other woke ideologies, Dreher notes, the enemy cannot be reasoned with. The enemy can only be defeated. Those who resist the revolutionaries’ imposition of new doctrines are, allegedly, “practicing ‘hate.’”  

On the other hand, whereas Soviet ideological conformity was for the most part top-down, in the American case, it is more distributed. Evoking themes reminiscent of Russian theater director Konstantin Bogomolov’s controversial essay “The Rape of Europe 2.0,” Dreher writes: 

Today’s [Western] totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic – and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit. 

Silicon Valley social media giants further intensify the totalitarian threat. Citing Edward Snowden, Dreher notes that the state now has access, in perpetuity, to everyone’s communications, and if the government wants to target someone, there is no longer any reason to expect that the law will be a refuge. The result is the spread of a “surveillance capitalism into areas that the Orwellian tyrants of the communist bloc could only have aspired to,” and the emergence of what he terms a soft totalitarianism. 

It is significant that Dreher repeatedly cites Hannah Arendt as the authority on totalitarianism. He cites her well-known thesis that totalitarianism tends to take root in a society of uprooted, lonely, and isolated individuals. Such atomized selves make easy marks for an ideology that offers meaning, the opportunity to be part of a cause. Another key Arendtian theme is the reduction of reason to mere self-consistency. An ideology, for Arendt, is by definition a closed system lacking in the openness to mystery that is the hallmark of classical reason. According to Dreher, to the extent America’s mainstream and social media giants foster constant repetition of memes and phraseology borrowed from critical race theory and other sources of progressive jargon, they encourage precisely ideological thinking. Citing Arendt, Dreher notes that what convinces the masses, at the point where they become susceptible to totalitarianism, “…are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.” 

IN THE United States, Dreher writes at one point, it is difficult for the ordinary person to even imagine a world where one must lie constantly simply to exist. At regular intervals, he contrasts the “totalitarian” USSR and a “free and prosperous” United States. By this he means, of course, the United States as it was until it came under attack from what he terms the Social Justice Warriors (sjws, the above-noted “woke” revolutionaries). 

It is here, however, that Dreher himself slips into a certain technological style of thinking. Instead of first understanding the whole phenomenon before him, he makes use of it to score points and to better sell his narrative. His missionary stance overwhelms his concern for truth. 

Dreher’s treatment of the phenomenon of Russia and the USSR throughout the twentieth century lacks nuance, at times is altogether reductionistic. For Dreher, the entirety of the Soviet experience was uniformly “totalitarian”—as if there were no important differences between 1937 and 1967. For Dreher, throughout its existence, one found in the Soviet empire nothing but lies, suffering, and material want. 

It is indeed true that the actually existing USSR, even after Stalin’s death in 1953, was, in many ways, gray: it had chronic consumer shortages, service in stores and restaurants was rude. There was, especially in the earlier period, religious persecution. The great works of Russian religious philosophy (by the likes of V. Solovyov, S. Frank, N. Berdyaev, P. Florensky, etc.) were disappeared into secret archives. Soviet Russia had a great deal that deserves condemnation in just such terms as can be found in abundance in Dreher’s volume. 

And yet, the reader is given little reason to suspect that a number of monasteries and churches were allowed to reopen in the post-WWII Soviet Union, or that ordinary Russians were baptized, and those who were not communists and concerned about career could attend church services. The majority, to be sure, no longer wished to do so. The state’s materialist ideology and anti-religious propaganda had its impact. 

If it is undoubtedly true that the Soviet Union lacked several of the real virtues of Cold War America, it is equally true that it lacked some of America’s real flaws. The USSR was not a money-centered world. It was easier to build enduring friendships, and not only because one had more time for them. People could choose to devote their lives to such useless—and quintessentially human—activities as the study of poetry or piano playing. Russia’s nineteenth-century literary classics were still taught, read, and revered. And then there is Soviet cinema. A few examples will have to suffice. Eldar Ryazanov’s Carnival Night (1956) and The Irony of Fate (1976) are masterpieces of humanness and even joy. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, released in 1971 (albeit with edits), was imbued with a tragic sense and spiritual beauty. Throughout much of the Soviet period, radio, television, and theater programming for children was remarkable for its warmth and good taste. Dreher’s binary contrast embodies precisely a technocratic logic of over-simplification. 

Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce noted that, from the perspective of Western-led technological civilization, the Marxist revolution in Russia was viewed overall as a positive thing, infinitely preferable to the earlier Tsarist order, with its embarrassing Christian faith and lack of democracy. Marxist materialism would allow Russia to gradually “evolve” in the necessary direction. Ultimately, the West, through its superior attractions, would overcome Marxism by appropriating Marxism’s negations while at the same time abandoning Marxism’s residual humanism. Already in 1969, Del Noce wrote of Western technological society imitating the Marxian method in the sense that it rejected what Marx had rejected—in the first instance Christianity and Plato. On the other hand, technological society turned Marxism on its head by instituting an absolute individualism. Such an inversion would give “the technological civilization the false appearance of being ‘a democracy’ and the continuation of the spirit of liberalism.” 

DREHER’S LIVE Not By Lies offers the tried and true Cold War theme of an essentially good and free West against an essentially bad and unfree East. This makes it all the more jarring when one of Dreher’s Hungarian interlocutors observes that thirty years of freedom had destroyed more cultural memory in Hungary than any previous era. “What neither Nazism nor Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done,” a Hungarian teacher tells him. The Western liberal idea resulted in a more complete uprooting of the person from “the past and its traditions, including religion” than even the Communist era had managed. 

Similarly, Timo Krizka, a Slovak filmmaker and chronicler of Communist-era persecution of the faithful, declared that Western prosperity and freedom—freedom as the West defined it—had little to do with the aspirations of those Christians whom he had come to so admire. They had found meaning even in their sufferings, and lived joyfully despite having little. What Krizka discovered, Dreher writes, is that “the secular liberal idea of freedom so popular in the West … is a lie.” Freeing the self from all binding commitments (to God, marriage, family), it turned out, “is a road to hell.” 

This turns upside down Dreher’s earlier narrative theme. The movement away from “the lie,” which, we had been led to expect, was spatial in character—a movement away from the East (away from “the long hand of Moscow,” Communism, Russia, etc.) and toward the West, ideally toward the United States—turns out, instead, to be civilizational in character. To be sure, Dreher has earlier told us that the West itself is moving in directions analogous to the old communist order. That is all well and good. But now we see a very different point emerging. The very heart of the liberal civilizational ideal itself, an ideal, furthermore, of very long standing in the West, turns out, in Dreher’s estimation, to be a lie. 

Dreher cites the work of Catholic philosopher Michael Hanby, one of our most perceptive critics of liberal modernity. Hanby describes what might turn out to be the unifying thread connecting the revolutionary West’s present turn away from biological nature, and away from every other traditional form, and its apparent embrace of a new technological “utopia” with obvious dystopian qualities. Both movements find their ultimate source in that habit of thought that has defined liberal modernity for centuries: the myth of progress—and science conceived as the engine of that progress. For Hanby, the ever-evolving sexual revolution “is at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body and internally to our self-understanding.” 

THE CHALLENGE technological thought presents to the notion of truth and lying is fundamental. The technological perspective grows out of the positivism implicitly or explicitly embraced if not by all Western “science” as such (certainly not all Western physics or cognitive science), then at least by the scientism that has been fashionable in the educated Western world since at least the early nineteenth century. 

For science so understood, knowledge can have value only to the extent that it serves practical ends. But if only what is given by material reality is acknowledged as real, then what is privileged over everything else is the transformation of matter, a transformation oriented to ever-increasing control. 

A further consequence is the negation of metaphysics and the undermining of tradition. Del Noce helps clarify why this must be the case. If the Platonic notion of truth (being merely “metaphysical”) is no longer authoritative, and if, as a result, truth can no longer be viewed as above us, then why should we revere it, why consider it something sacred? Technological society dismisses any such reverence. Note, though, what happens next. Such a trivialized truth quickly becomes boring. Hence the worship of the new, hence that gleeful undermining of every tradition which is by itself the only remaining “tradition” still dutifully honored by technocratic man. 

To be sure, long before the early nineteenth century, Western thought (Francis Bacon, Niccolo Machiavelli, John Locke, and their heirs) had already rejected nature as it had been understood by the traditions of Aristotelian and Platonic thought and those forms of Christianity of both East and West influenced by them. In that earlier, non-technocratic understanding of nature, all created things have a meaningful orientation to their ideal form, or telos. This is their nature. In the absence of a right form to anything, in the absence of nature, as Martin Heidegger also acknowledged, all that is left is bare matter in the sense of a “resource” waiting to be molded by an external will. Technological order is thoroughly voluntarist. 

If what we know about the world is not conditioned or limited by what things are, in their very nature, then what is to prevent us from replacing what used to be called nature with what we ourselves make? What is to discourage us from assuming that “what most fundamentally actually exists” is what we ourselves make? From the perspective of the technological way of knowing, as the Canadian philosopher George Grant emphasized, the processes of “knowing” and “making” begin to merge. Under technocracy, the technological mindset reaches an apogee: now the very meaning of truth changes and so does the notion of lie. Truth is what we make. What used to be known as a lie may be seen simply as a step within the process of that making. 

Technological knowing leaves us with only two ways of being in the world: conflict or control. It is no longer possible to simply “let be” what is not fully under our control. Just as truth elicits no reverence, neither do “things,” whatever they may be—trees, nations, rocks, human faces. As Grant put it, anything we might owe, in the sense of a duty or a necessary obligation to another being, “is always provisional upon what we desire to create.” In other words, what is “owed” to anything is always first of all subject to our own will. Technocratic will is autonomous and “free” specifically in the sense of being unimpeded by any antecedent order, telos, or obligation. 

Kantian-style rationalism would, of course, counter that the boundary lines, the limiting principles, are, after all, set here by the a priori autonomy and dignity of every subject, or person. What is the source of that dignity, however? It is that we are creatures capable of designing our own law. But for law so understood, is anything required other than consistency? In its vulgarized, modern form, Immanuel Kant’s grandeur of thought produces the so-called “rules-based order” on which the United States lays its claim to the legitimacy of its vision of international order. Such an “order” dispenses with law, and in several senses. As I have argued elsewhere, an order grounded in law requires precisely the permanence and availability of truth—at minimum a capacity for reliably determining what is non-true. 

It is precisely this capacity that no longer obtains under technocratic order. If reality and truth can be created, manufactured, then waterboarding can serve as a sufficiently reliable means of legal discovery. Waterboarding, as a means of interrogating America’s prisoners, became popular well before any appearance of the “woke” Left in American life. 

This leads us to a noteworthy omission in Dreher’s account of what it means to “not live by lies.” The instrumentalization of reason is indeed a widespread practice among those whom Dreher refers to as the aforementioned Social Justice Warriors. The use, or rather, abuse of reason was not an original invention of the sjws, however. It has long been a characteristic feature of liberal modernity as such. At the same time, in the actual historical development of voluntarist technologism, it was the U.S. national security state that honed this approach by making just such an instrumentalization of reason the most vital tool in its arsenal. The result has been those “information wars” that have replaced what used to be called “news.” Indeed, no longer the province of a single agency, such information wars are now waged on a whole of government and even whole of political bloc basis. 

So why blame Black Lives Matter? If the “majesty of the law”—represented by the state itself, even if the state, without acknowledging it, has corrupted the very meaning of law—models to the rest of society a voluntarist imposition of its will, why be surprised when citizens of such a governing order enterprisingly imitate what the state itself has already blessed? If law models voluntarism as the (now technologically understood) ideal form of modern “reason,” why be surprised when “reason” among the citizenry is equally corrupted? 

This is by no means to take the side of the “woke.” Their moralistic defense of ever-new categories of the oppressed is in any case self-undermining. On the one hand, Dreher accurately describes their revolutionary cynicism about “truth,” their rejection of “reason.” On the other hand, the revolutionaries may sometimes even be correct in seeing through the deceptions of a power cloaked in an ersatz “reason”—Foucault, after all, was not entirely wrong. The problem is this: even those real goods that the sjws may occasionally defend become ultimately defenseless as soon as their own logic is embraced. As D.C. Schindler put it: 

Human dignity rests on the fact that, when the social order breaks down, in the face of oppression and the blind force of power, one can always take a stand on truth. But if the ultimate ground of truth is itself suspended … then there is no place to stand. 

ARENDT, WELL known for her studies of totalitarianism, is less often seen as someone concerned about the transformation of the United States into an analogous ideological system. Although she may not have used the term “technocracy,” Arendt was very concerned about a trend within American high politics that was abandoning its concern for reality, and therefore abandoning a commitment to the factual order that exists independently of our will. In, for example, Arendt’s commentary on the Pentagon Papers, she notes that high officials in the executive branch were routinely substituting for the factual world, a world that they simply manufactured, a world based on appearances. 

Arendt alluded to similar concerns when she wrote, in her earlier essay “Truth and Politics,” that: 

...finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, if the modern political lies are so big that they require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture – the making of another reality, as it were, into which they will fit without seam, crack or fissure, exactly as the facts fitted into their own original context – what prevents these new stories, images, and non-facts from becoming an adequate substitute for reality and factuality? 

Are there sufficient grounds for a supposition that already here, Arendt was thinking not only of the infamous regimes of the 1930s in Germany and the USSR, but also of the United States as it was already in her time evolving? At the time of her writing this essay, in 1967, two major lies had already become institutionalized in the United States, albeit the one would prove more successful than the other. One relates to the Vietnam War. The many lies that made that war possible were finally made public when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Arendt devoted considerable attention to that report, and to the Executive Branch’s unhealthy obsession with “image making.” On the other hand, the lies surrounding the assassinations of the 1960s had not, at that time, yet been made fully public, and indeed they still have not.  

Regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Arendt, in her final interview, in October 1973, noted: 

I think the true turning point in this whole business was indeed the assassination of the president. No matter how you explain it and no matter what you know or don’t know about it, it was quite clear that now, really for the first time in a very long time in American history, a direct crime had interfered with the political process. And this somehow has changed the political process. 

Her statement “this has somehow changed the political process” is noteworthy. It refers to the birth of the systematic use of the reality-changing “lie” in American politics, the use of a technology capable of assuring the successful creation of a new reality that can, as Arendt put it, substitute for “reality and factuality.” In this same interview, when asked what motivates the executive branch’s “arrogance of power,” she replied: “It is really the will to dominate, for heaven’s sake. And up to now it has not succeeded, because I still sit with you at this table and talk pretty freely … somehow, I am not afraid.” 

In the wake of the assassination—I should say the assassinations, because the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were of course all part of the same series—the spiritual and intellectual atmosphere of the United States underwent a sea-change. The classically educated humanist, long a rarity, simply disappeared from American politics. “Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll”; mysticism; J.R.R. Tolkien—though of widely varying value in themselves, served equally to distract many others from contact with the truly political. Those still drawn to politics could only be one of two types. One was the Ronald Reagan-style “idealist” who embraced a fantasy version of America and of the world more generally. The other was the self-styled realist, the technocrat. Arendt, in her reflections on the Pentagon Papers, described these technocrats and “problem solvers” as intelligent men who “to a rather frightening degree” were above sentimentality. They systematically lied not because they lacked all integrity, but simply “because this gave them a framework within which they could work.” The complete alienation of action from genuine understanding indeed creates the ideal framework for endless work. 

This same psychological type gradually came to occupy every desk of every well-appointed think tank office tower in Washington and Crystal City. They are the ones who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, drew up the plans to decimate half a dozen countries across the Middle East and Central Asia, after already having done so in East Asia and Central America from the 1960s to the 1980s. It was they who peppered their dinner speeches with such bon mots as “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Nothing provides a more vigorous basis for action and control than fear, and so the technocrats gladly set about creating those threats that elicit the ever-so-useful fear. 

One could go on. Speaking in general terms, the impact of the assassination has been this: it helped foster an American culture which, if not literally terrified of thinking, at the very least avoids thought as much as humanly possible. It is safer to stick to the pre-approved script. 

NOW THAT the world as a whole, or at any rate all of the great powers, are embracing technocracy, the problem of lying in politics, along with the meaning of “truth” and “reality,” must be reevaluated. It is no longer sufficient to critique lying in moral terms alone. Only a philosophical and theological critique can have any hope of adequacy to the challenge presented by technocracy, our new global (anti) civilization. 

Once technological knowing becomes pervasive, “reality” can no longer act as a limit or discipline on the telling of lies. Between the assassination of Kennedy and today, mid-2021, there have been many instances of the technocratic creation of all-encompassing new “realities” accomplished through the use of what were formerly termed “lies.” Certainly, Russiagate comes to mind. As does the Timber Sycamore operation in Syria. As does that famous suicide in a New York prison, in August 2019, of someone also apparently tied to intelligence circles. There is neither time nor space to elaborate on all such examples here, and in any event, it would be pointless to do so, except, perhaps, in a new iteration of Samizdat. 

The Roman Empire persisted for centuries without any noteworthy devotion to truth. Such, at any rate, was Simone Weil’s assessment. Ancient Rome demonstrated the efficacy of the combination of absolute power, on the one hand, and the maintenance of a reputation for greatness, on the other. This method of human domination depended on ample self-praise supplemented by a pervasive system of propaganda. That same propaganda was made all the more convincing because of the awe invoked by the overwhelming use of force deployed against anyone who resisted it. In her Reflections sur les origins de l’Hitlerisme, Weil found in ancient Rome the original inspiration for that power which, at the very time of her writing, was terrorizing France and most of the rest of the European continent. 

Ancient Rome was first of all a voluntarist order, even if not, at least in the sense of that term we have explored above, a technological one. To be sure, its views of nature and of science differed greatly from those of ancient Greece. What concerned Rome first of all, according to Weil, was its prestige. “All these cruelties [Rome’s treatment of Carthage, among other massacres] constituted the means of elevating its prestige. The central principle of Roman politics … was to maintain its own prestige to the greatest extent possible, and at no matter what price.” Later in the essay, she adds “nothing is more essential to a politics based on prestige than propaganda.” 

I often wonder whether, were Simone Weil writing today, she would have seen in the United States the worthy successor of ancient Rome. There are intimations sprinkled about her writings that she may well have been inclined in this direction. In “A Propos de la question coloniale,” she writes:  

We are well aware that there is a grave danger of Europe’s being Americanized after the War, and we know what we should lose if that were to happen. What we should lose would be that part of ourselves which is akin to the East. … it seems that Europe periodically requires genuine contacts with the East in order to remain spiritually alive … the Americanization of Europe would lead to the Americanization of the whole world. 

Weil worries that America’s domination after the war will mean that “humanity as a whole will lose its past.” 

What Weil feared has very nearly already happened. To be sure, whether it is America or somewhere else that acts as the engine of technocratic order is, in the end, of small importance. So long as any great power—the United States, China, Russia, Germany, and so on—embraces technocracy, this sets in motion a feedback mechanism that makes it almost impossible for any other nation to make a civilized choice. Russia today clearly fears that rejecting the technological approach will make it fair game for outside predators, and its growing alliance with China is hardly conducive to a movement away from technocracy. And yet, of all the great powers, only Russia has the historical wherewithal to move decisively in another direction. 

There was a time, which appears to have drawn to a close mid-way through the Trump administration, during which advisors to the Kremlin counseled the embrace of Russia’s Byzantine Christianity-influenced tradition of a rationality grounded in metaphysics. It was urged that such a traditionalism would set an attractive example, both within Russia and without, and would have the further advantage of connecting Russian politics with something that many ordinary Russians could respect and feel affection for. (The problem of reconciling politics—particularly a politics that embraces truth—and the necessity that a public feel genuine affection for its own country and past, has come to the fore in many countries; in the United States, it is at the very heart of a national crisis.) Meanwhile, the upshot of those efforts by the Kremlin advisors remains, at best, quite ambiguous. Politicians are pragmatists. What does not bring results is generally rejected, and overtures to the outside world based on “tradition” have brought Russia nothing at all. 

Is it possible to end on a note of hope? I cannot speak for China. For that matter, neither can I speak for England, Germany, nor France. Be that as it may, what I have seen of modern-day Russia suffices to sustain a hope that, were the United States or any other great power to unexpectedly initiate a break with the technocratic project, to instead embrace the tradition of rationality which considers the truth sacred—that even now there is a good chance it would be met by reciprocity from Russia, and, where necessary, by forgiveness. 

We need, of course, to set aside romantic notions about Russians. Some are materialists. Some are technologists. Some are cheaters. Like every other people, Russians have a great many faults. Still, there remains in Russia a sizable contingent of people who have not yet forgotten their thousand-year-old tradition, and who occasionally whisper, with feeling, the phrase: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Such people, known as Christians, still have at least some solid ground to stand on in Russia. Can we say the same in the West? 

Paul R. Grenier is the president and founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. 

 Image: Unsplash