We don’t live in an age of reason

When Tucker Carlson claimed to have been “physically mauled” by a demon in his sleep late last year, it was something of a bellwether: a sign that America’s cultural Right, now in the ascendancy, has persuaded itself to take a symbolic stand against the Enlightenment and the scientific worldview.

Looking back on the 2010s and early 2020s, much of the American right now sees an era of secular hubris. The problems of the previous 15 years were put down to a naive faith in human reason; which was then confronted by dark and atavistic forces it couldn’t assimilate. The result had been all sorts of premodern terrors come again: plague, war, popular mania, social order overthrown. 

The answer would have to be some sort of return of the spiritual. For some this has been about demons; for others it’s meant Eastern Orthodoxy or the Latin Mass. For others still it’s about homespun wisdom: the intuitive over the empirical. One of the most popular conservative ideas to emerge from the early 2020s was the “Lindy effect” – which describes the strange resilience of time-honored habits and institutions. “Tradition is smarter than you.”

All of this had a common thread: that we had been arrogant to believe that the universe could ever really be comprehended by mere humans, and that we should now look to folk heuristics and “emergent effects” as our guide. 

A more complete statement of this worldview came in Nosferatu – Robert Eggers’s new retelling of the Dracula legend. It is the first filmic expression of what one might call “Lindy Conservatism.” Nosferatu follows the doings and undoings of Mrs Ellen Hutter, a young woman living in 1830s Germany who has made a sinister love covenant with the scabrous vampire Count Orlok. Ellen belongs to a secular and modern society, and this society finds itself totally unequipped to deal with the preternatural terrors that Orlok unleashes in a bid to reclaim his beloved. The inhabitants of the town of Wisburg, people steeped in the values of the Enlightenment, cannot understand things like magic, rituals, prophecies, blood oaths, plague rats or Ellen’s desire for Orlok. Most of all they cannot understand Evil – particularly the mindless and irrational kind of evil that their vampire interlocutor represents; and so are unable to recognize or deal with it when it arises. As the vampire hunter Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz cries, “We have not become so much enlightened as we are blinded by the gaseous light of science!”

Eggers intended this as a parable for our own times. But whatever “Enlightenment values” really are, people such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow abandoned them long ago. Much has been said about the particular form of radicalized centrism that emerged after 2016, but what’s often overlooked is that it has no faith in the power of human reason – once the sine qua non of liberalism, and of the society that Ellen Hutter lives in. People such as Cooper and Maddow have an occulted view of the world in which fellow citizens are regularly convulsed by sinister external forces – social media, disinformation, Putin’s Dark Algorithms – that cause their thoughts and beliefs to turn on a dime, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers fashion. 

Mainstream pundits and pollsters have more or less given up on trying to understand voter behavior. They attribute everything in politics to a sort of mass psychosis, mysterious “vibe-shifts” – a phrase that’s now taken on decidedly supernatural connotations. The going theory for the defeats of Kamala Harris and Rishi Sunak in 2024 is that voters suddenly decided, for no real reason at all, that they hated all “incumbents,” independent of their record in office. Politicians are Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are explained away as products of childhood trauma; and knowledge is thought to be the preserve of chartered guilds of experts.  

Never has our faith in our own ability to understand the world been weaker. In previous versions of Nosferatu our heroes muddle through reasonably well, dealing with the supernatural terrors as best they can. In Eggers’s tale they’re totally helpless. When Ellen’s husband Thomas travels to Transylvania to seek out Orlok, he encounters a troupe of Romani (representing, I suppose, the mystic sense) – whose reaction is simply to laugh at him. To Eggers, the rational worldview is not just wrongheaded but ridiculous; we’re only here to be helplessly carried along hither and thither by the vibes. In Werner Herzog and F.W. Murnau’s earlier versions of the story, our heroes discover the secret to defeat Orlok by reading a book; in Eggers’s film they rely on the appointed expert von Franz to do everything for them. 

Significantly, Christianity appears in the 2024 version as simply another form of mysticism. Previously Christianity was defended as something that gave order to the universe – an antidote to figures like Orlok. Here they appear on the same side, both ranged against a generalized modernity. 

It’s strange that this view of the present comes at the moment when the American establishment has fully succumbed to runes, spells and incantations. It is also fraught with risk. Believing that we live in a world of complacency ready to be humbled by crises makes one vulnerable to establishment appeals – which are now made almost entirely on grounds of emergency: climate crisis, “democracy in peril,” AI apocalypse, airborne disease. 

Five years ago, in the early stages of the pandemic, much of the American right was giggling about “plague vibes” and about liberal society being brought low – right as Anthony Fauci and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus were busily engaged in locking up that liberal society. Everything from lockdowns to plans for the censorship of the internet has flown from this same brooding epistemological skepticism, this same feeling of extreme vulnerability in an unknowable universe. The values of the Enlightenment are one thing, but you should have at least some faith in your ability to make sense of the world around you. Otherwise, Anderson Cooper will have you looking under your bed forever.