What would Del Noce make of the new totalitarianism?

One of the themes of this blog has been the appearance of totalitarian tendencies in contemporary American life, especially in academia. Therefore, it seems appropriate to offer a post on Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989), one of the foremost philosophical critics of 20^th century European totalitarianism. In recent years, I have translated three volumes of essays (starting with The Crisis of Modernity in 2014, followed by The Age of Secularization in 2017 and  The Problem of Atheism in 2021, all published by McGill-Qeen’s University Press), in which the theme of totalitarianism appears repeatedly. I also wrote a journal article on the subject (https://www.communio-icr.com/articles/view/augusto-del-noce-on-the-new-totalitarianism) which provides more precise references.

Like other thinkers of his generation, Del Noce was led to study totalitarianism by the tragic events that followed the first World War and led to the second: the Leninist revolution (which later led to Stalinism), Italian Fascism, and finally German Nazism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Del Noce did not think that these phenomena could be understood in terms of a mere opposition of “totalitarianism vs. democracy” or “totalitarianism vs. liberalism,” nor did he accept the fashionable psychological or sociological explanations of the post-World War II period, like the notion that totalitarianism is somehow associated with  “authoritarian personalities.” 

Del Noce maintained that totalitarianism is a distinctly modern phenomenon with deep philosophical roots in the history of modern Western culture. It can take many forms and is even formally compatible with democracy and with some interpretations of “liberalism.” To describe it, he offers several equivalent and interconnected definitions. The most straightforward is that totalitarianism is the absolutization of politics. By this he means a situation in which politics frees itself from all external constraints and becomes the all-determining factor of social life. Thus, instead of, say, philosophy or religion or morality or science or art conditioning politics, it is politics that invades all aspects of culture, and absorbs them into itself, so to speak.

Of course, in order to justify this absorption, totalitarianism needs to develop some sort of “theory,” some conceptual framework, which, however, is not primarily concerned with expressing the truth, but rather with advancing a political project. The proper name of this kind of “politically instrumental discourse” is ideology. In principle, ideology could use all types of materials (e.g. religious or metaphysical concepts) in order to support a totalitarian program, but in the modern world it typically claims the mantle of “science.” For example, classical Marxism presented itself as a “science of history” (hence Soviet “scientific Socialism”), while the Nazis claimed that there was a biological basis for racism and eugenics. Starting in the 1960s, sexual liberation movements have justified themselves in terms of of psychoanalytical or anthropological concepts (like “repression”, “taboo” etc) till the recent attempts to find scientific foundations for the “gender revolution.” 

It does not matter much whether these political invocations of “science” have any basis in reality or, as is more often the case, they just deal in pseudo-science. The important point is that totalitarianism is often linked with scientism, the claim that “science” is the supreme form of rationality and must trump all other philosophical or moral considerations. Scientism allows a totalitarian thinker to disqualify its opponents by revealing their sociological or psychological motivations (their being bourgeois, or Jewish, or repressed, or “phobic” and so on) and thus excluding them from the very sphere of rational discourse. Del Noce defines totalitarianism also as the denial that there is a universal rationality, in which all people participate, because rationality is always  the “rationality of a group” where that group is defined pseudo-scientifically.  The psychiatric hospitalization of political dissidents in the Soviet Union was quite symbolic of this “exclusion from the realm of rationality.”

Regarding this link between totalitarianism and scientism, Del Noce agrees with Eric Voegelin, a distinguished Austrian-American political thinker who characterized totalitarianism as a political regime that “forbids asking certain questions.” This “prohibition of questions” of course must harm science itself, because true science relies on a larger philosophical and moral “echo-system” so to speak. If it loses the regulatory support of philosophy, and is left at the mercy of politics, it can only suffer. A classic example, also from Soviet history, is Lysenkoism, but in the last few years we have seen many cases in which politicization has hurt science, some of them documented on this blog.

Now, this brief summary of Del Noce’s “phenomenology of totalitarianism” begs the question: what motivates the totalitarian absolutization of politics? Why is it so appealing to so many people? And why is it a distinctly modern phenomenon, different from the many tyrannies of history, which generally aimed at monopolizing political power, but not at politicizing every aspect of life? 

In Del Noce’s view, the motivations for the totalitarian mindset go beyond politics per se. and can only be described as metaphysical or even religious. It is not just a matter of recognizing that some totalitarian movements, like for example Communism, can be reasonably described as “secular religions,” because they have a messianic dimension, and involve a pseudo-religious faith in the coming of a “new world” after the revolution. Rather, Del Noce maintains that all totalitarian movements, even when they present themselves in very secular terms, express certain “theological” assumptions which are very commonly held by modern people. 

Most “traditional” civilizations knew the notion of an “original fall,” and regarded evil as an ineliminable aspect of human life, both individually and collectively. Modern thought, starting famously with Rousseau, moved the source of evil from the human heart to unjust social structures, and postulated that it can be removed by “changing the system.” The world’s great religions believed in the existence of transcendent and unchangeable moral laws, which constrain political action. The modern West regards laws as pure human creations, conventional rules that can be bent to our goals. Most cultures used to identify happiness in terms of relationship with the divine. Modern culture views happiness as psycho-physical well-being, and expects it from social and economic organization. 

Putting all these factors together, it is not surprising that modern people look for “political salvation.” If evil resides in the “system,” and if there is no intrinsic limitation that can stop us from changing it, and if a better system is all we need to be happy, then political action is the highest human calling and the road to individual and collective fulfillment. Politics becomes the principal source of meaning and the criterion by which everything else should be measured. 

For this reason, Del Noce (who was himself Catholic) thought that totalitarianism could even be defined as  “political atheism,” as long as the word atheism is carefully qualified. He did not have in mind a generic lack of belief in God, or even a philosophical thesis about the non-existence of the divine. What he called “positive atheism” is the world view that affirms the radical self-sufficiency and unlimited perfectibility of humanity, to the point that the very  question of the existence of God becomes irrelevant, because we are our own creators, and the authors of our own happiness.

With this definition, it becomes clear why a positive atheist will be naturally inclined to be a political revolutionary. He or she will tend to believe that history has a direction towards greater and greater human fulfillment (a belief which is another one of Del Noce’s definitions of totalitarianism). And he or she will not be willing to tolerate anybody who stands in the way of the march of humanity towards liberation. Hence the absolutization of politics, the denial of the universality of reason, and the prohibition to ask certain questions. All these are different aspects of the same phenomenon.

If Del Noce’s analysis is correct, some rather unconventional conclusions follow. First of all, far from being a throw-back to “medieval theocracy” or “authoritarianism,” totalitarianism is a very modern phenomenon, tied to secularization, or at least to certain strains of secular thought. Secondly, it is not just a political phenomenon, but a “religious” one albeit in a very peculiar sense, as it entails the claim that politics can replace religion for the sake of human liberation. Thirdly, and here I express my personal opinion, it cannot be defeated just by reaffirming liberal values in the abstract (universality of reason, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience etc), because in order to be politically viable those values need to be supported by larger visions of human flourishing. 

Already in Marx’s time, in the wake of the industrial revolution, it became clear that the abstract affirmation of equality in front of the law is not, by itself, an adequate response to the problem of poverty and social disintegration, and will not stop ideologues from manipulating the destitute masses with the promise of a better life. Likewise, I would argue that today, in the wake of the sexual revolution, we live in a situation of widespread “affective destitution,” in which people’s experiences of sexuality, family life, romantic relationships, etc., are often problematic, if not outright scary and painful. If all liberalism can offer is a generic right to self-determination, it is not surprising that people will be tempted by totalitarian “eroticism” – to use Del Noce’s expression to indicate the ideology that regards “sexual happiness” as the supreme goal, and is willing to trample on freedom of speech and freedom of religion in order to achieve it. 

In fact, liberalism bears much responsibility for creating a situation in which an individualistically-understood right to happiness and self-expression is used against other rights. The appeal of totalitarian politics is always that it fills a void of meaning, purpose and community created by the more abstract interpretations of liberalism. To the extent that a society is rich with forms of religious and cultural life, and that such forms are welcome in the public arena within the bounds of mutual civility and in a spirit of dialogue, that society will be resistant to the sirens of hyper-politicization. Nature abhors a vacuum, and excessive laïcité (to use the French word) contributes to opening the vacuum in which totalitarian ideologies flourish.