The New York Times, upon his death, called Irving Kristol ‘the godfather of neo-conservatism.’ Conservatism conserves; it stands to reason that a short 1973 essay of his — entitled ‘Capitalism, Socialism and Nihilism’ — has not aged at all.

In 2018 — 45 years on, into the 400 ppm anthropocene, that devouring age of mass extinction, dawn of a newfound resurgence of populist conservatism — it remains of this political moment. Sensing nihilism in the air, Kristol vainly tries to identify the source, and decides the right’s old enemies must be at fault. They reject civilization, Kristol argues; they reject rationality; they threaten all of modernity.

Meanwhile, the anthropocene continues, slouching towards a reckoning — and in truth what other nihilism is there?

But to understand this requires a short digression into the essay.

Kristol begins with a paean to Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek — the first a Chicago School ideologue peddling a deregulation-first strand of libertarianism that even the IMF has now abandoned, the second a property-fetishist who had no qualms supporting authoritarian governments so long as they protected the peasant-imperiled rights of wealth.

In 1973, the very year Pinochet seized power, these two economists could stand-in for all of Modernity and the Liberal political order; even for reason itself: “indeed, thinking economically is the same thing as thinking rationally,” Kristol avers, extolling the intellectual virtues of the ‘dismal science’:

“Economics is the social science par excellence of modernity, and economists as a class find it close to impossible to detach themselves from the philosophical presuppositions of modernity.”

Kristol then continues:

“This would not be particularly significant — has until recently not been particularly significant — were it not for the fact that the New Left is in rebellion against these philosophical presuppositions themselves.”

Even almost a half-century ago, a ‘new’ sort of ‘leftism’ was threatening the very idea of ‘modernity’ and rationality. The examples Kristol gives are significant to my opening concern — the distended organs of civilization shambling towards ecological catastrophe, and if you think I’m dramatic, just wait a couple decades , or read the IPCC report — because one is, of course, the ‘environmental’ movement.

Kristol drips with condescension here, writing that

“I f people today are especially concerned about clean air and clean water, then economic analysis can show them different ways-with different costs and benefits-of getting varying degrees of clean air and clean water. But it turns out that your zealous environmentalists do not want to be shown anything of the sort.”

No, they do not wish to act ‘rationally’ — which, under the presuppositions already made, is the rationality of the Chicago School and the Road to Serfdom, which exclude, a priori, the possibility of anything but market forces reacting to individual choice.

In fact, ‘individual preferences’ expressed via the rationality of ‘economic man’ acting in the market expresses the entirety of the project of Modernity — to which the New Left is opposed, evidenced in its call for government regulation and rejection of ‘rational’ economic thinking. To call for any ‘collective’ action is to confess bad faith:

“They are not really interested in clean air or clean water at all. What does interest them is modern industrial society and modern technological civilization, toward which they have profoundly hostile sentiments … they are at bottom rejecting a liberal civilization which is given shape through the interaction of a countless sum of individual preferences.”

Environmentalism is not a concern for clean air or water. It is a rejection of the pillars of civilization and a call for tyranny:

“What environmentalists really want is very simple: They want the authority-the power-to create an ‘environment’ which pleases them; and this ‘environment’ will be a society where the rulers will not want to ‘think economically’ and the ruled will not be permitted to do so.”

Contemporary hysteria and moral panics about the left’s newfound and disturbing lack of rationality and resentment-fueled attempts to dismantle the freedoms of liberal society are as old as conservatism itself, older than Kristol’s essay; but evergreen in the imagination of the conservative — for whom challenge is not challenge, but insubordination, a mutiny against order and reason, a call from either the Hobbesian state of nature or for the Hobbesian totalitarian state.

Kristol, of course, thinks likewise of the “consumer’s protection movement,” which does not wish to protect the consumer at all, but “abolish his sovereignty,” and not out of well-intentioned but paternalistic concern for the well-being of others. Something more sinister is at work:

“The ‘consumers’ protection movement,’ like the ‘environmentalist’ movement, is a revulsion against the kind of civilization that common men create when they are given the power, which a market economy does uniquely give them, to shape the world in which they wish to live.”

Recall, in the early 1970s, ‘consumer protection’ meant such dangerous men as Ralph Nader, who pushed the car industry to adopt safety standards that have saved tens of thousands of lives — which, of course, car manufacturers resisted. What contemptible ‘revulsion,’ indeed, could spur such spiteful men to action!

That the specific argument is worthless here is inconsequential. Of course agitating for government regulation is not tantamount to rejecting ‘modernity’; nor is it right to identify civilization and modernity with the tendentious free-market ideology of a specific cabal of economists. The entire project of casting psychological aspersions on political opponents by divining their hidden motives (‘revulsion,’ ‘hostility’) on the basis of rejecting falsely constrained options is, itself, lazy and facile.

No, all this is a lead-up to the pivot that Kristol is about to make, and the real reason we are in this mess. Kristol is castigating environmentalists and consumer protection advocates for their civilization-destroying irrationality — just buy your preferences, he admonishes — because to do otherwise is to reject the true core of modernity and classical liberalism:

“Modern, liberal, secular society is based on the revolutionary premise that there is no superior, authoritative information available about the good life or the true nature of human happiness — that this information is implicit only in individual preferences, and that therefore the individual has to be free to develop and express these preferences.”

This ‘freedom’ to express individual preference through the market as the basis of modernity is, to re-iterate, a story fit to wash hogs; it has nothing to do with Locke’s conception of the common good, or even of Adam Smith’s own wide-ranging conception of government, which includes “erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works” that individuals cannot maintain themselves. Yet, for Kristol, this is the sum.

In practice, it is money spent that reveals preference; it ‘shapes the world,’ in Kristol’s sense; and those with more, shape more, those with less, shape less; it, of necessity, reveals certain preferences and obscures others. The 1% are preparing for the apocalypse, not trying to avoid it.

This well-monied, marked-tied freedom, which forbids the irrationality of dopey environmentalists and Nader-esque seat-belt fanatics, this foundational precept of civilization, then engages in one final revelation:“The enemy of liberal capitalism today,” Kristol writes, “is not so much socialism as nihilism.”

What does Kristol mean by this?

As it turns out, the ‘revolutionary premise’ of ‘individual freedom’ as the basis of the liberal order is quickly abandoned as Kristol castigates society for its moral and spiritual emptiness:

“Large corporations today happily publish books and magazines, or press and sell records, or make and distribute movies, or sponsor television shows which celebrate pornography, denounce the institution of the family, revile the ‘ethics of acquisitiveness’ …”

and worse still. How dare they! With the threat of collectivism defeated, thanks to Friedman and Hayek, we must turn to the ‘problem of nihilism’:

“…this is the question we now confront, as our society relentlessly breeds more and more such selves, whose private vices in no way provide public benefits to a bourgeois order.”

What public? Whose benefit? On what grounds can Kristol malign the liberty-trampling consumer advocates as well the liberty-exercising libertines? Kristol flounders here; he gesticulates to legitimacy, spirituality, and ‘order’ with no clear political agenda. Before, it was at least clear that GM and Ford should be left alone.

Now, we are simply told that “no society that fails to celebrate the union of order and liberty, in some specific and meaningful way, can ever hope to be accepted as legitimate.” This abstract proclamation can only be made particular in the moral provincialism and bigotries of those able to enact some unspecific ‘order’ when called upon to do it.

Consider that Kristol’s examples (books and records he considers pornography, or denouncing the family) are outright calls for censorship and oppression — we ‘denounce the family’ campaigning for the homosexual cause in 1973, and are thus subject to ‘order’ — but BP’s smoke-stacks can blacken the sky, lead-laden fuels can contaminate the soil, while the ‘liberty’ we can express is the freedom to refrain, as individuals, from buying oil.

Kristol’s own morality is a concern for the public, for ‘order’; he constrains liberty for the ‘collective’ benefit; the environmentalist’s morality is not a morality, it is bad faith, irrational, a threat to civilization. When the consumer advocate speaks, the public is erased, the collective good gone. Why? There is no why. Because his is his; and theirs is theirs.

The foundation is a lie and a great truth simultaneously: Kristol is shaping the world, as he would have it, and the shape of his precludes others. When it is time for Kristol to call for ‘order,’ he can claim that unrestrained individualism threatens and undermines civilization; but when environmentalists make the same claim, supported by science, and faced with the real and present urgency of rising waters, it is irrationality and chaos.

There is no principle here. It is a wearying conglomerate of meaningless words in service of himself: what is “nihilistic,” he writes, is the “insistence that, under capitalism, the individual must be free to create his own morality,” a nihilism that is nihilism when found in others but not in one self. There is nothing else there. The lofty distinction between ‘liberty’ and ‘order’ is mediated by self-interest, by the spending that shapes the world.

And this it the great and real nihilism of the neo-conservative: an ‘annihilism,’ because it is not merely a nothing; it is a nothing expanding, swallowing, re-creating more nothingness, disappearing men and women and whole species and places. It is rising waters consuming the shore; it is acid inhaling coral; it is a New Zealand bunker from which to watch a voracious carnage, so long as one can afford it, the final revealed preference: me.