It Is What It Is: The New Determinism

One of the most common expressions we find today is the phrase: “It is what it is”.  Perhaps a trivial statement reflecting our mundane lives, its prevalence reveals, however, a deeper sense of fatalism, or better yet, determinism, brought to the fore by the likes of Trump, and, of course, Covid-19.  It could also be considered a coping mechanism as ordinary people grapple with institutions, political drama, economic forces, tech giants, globalism – and (dis)ease beyond their control.  The sense of being ‘determined’ by outside forces has also contributed to the rise of widespread conspiracy theories, as people look to some sort of an explanation – or someone to blame - for their apparent powerlessness, the simpler the solution is the better, hence the more true it is to their thinking.

Trump’s motto “Make America Great Again” - and the populist nationalism he engendered – is at once an attempt to reassert authority (with Biden’s election it is considered an effort to subvert it) and an implicit acknowledgement that ‘special people’, that is (the ‘white’) family and race, epitomize the character and destiny of the United States of America.  However, it was the French nationalist Maurice Barrès who put it more precisely over a century ago when he announced: “Nationalism is the acceptance of a determinism”.[1]  Feeding into Barres’ anti-Dreyfusard formula are the theories of Gobineau, known as ‘the father of racism’, and Darwin’s Evolution of the Species (1859) which, when applied to society, appeared to justify class conflict – from above and below, as it was also an inspiration for Marx.[2] 

In other words, that species of ‘science’ which emerged in the second half of Europe’s nineteenth century – and which persists to this day – is essential to our understanding of determinism here.  Racism in its multiple forms and Herbert Spencer’s Darwinian phrase “the struggle for life” are notions which permeate many susceptible minds.  Put another way: it is not so much that Trump rejects science; it is rather a question of which so-called ‘science’ he accepts. Loosely-speaking there are, in effect, two distinct – and opposing - phases in the history of science prior to Einstein. One belongs to the Newtonian harmony of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, and is of daring criticism, self-determinism, and of social and political improvement – in other words, the “science of freedom” as Peter Gay puts it.[3] This form of science came to legitimate democracy.

The other phase is ‘the science of determinism’ which finds its antecedents in Auguste Comte’s positivism (which sought out the observable) but more pointedly in Darwinian disharmony, as well as its Bismarckian equivalent in the politics of Realism.[4]  With the exception of Marx’s ideology, this variety of science underpins reactionary thinking.  A good example in historical writing is Hippolyte Taine’s conservative re-interpretation of the French Revolution following the Paris Commune, whose work elucidates Trump – up until the attack on Capitol Hill (whereupon darker figures from the twentieth century become more representative).

Looking back on history, if the reader permits us to skip over the intervening ‘revolt against reason’ of the fin-de-siècle, the ‘science of determinism’ prepared minds for what was yet to come: the anti-individualism of full-scale industrial battle experience in the First World War.  Driven by the metaphor of the machine, muddied but uniformed soldiers went ‘over the top’ to meet their fate in a barrage of mechanized gun fire while trying to evade explosives, poison gas, and the eventual tank.  These men found ‘community’ at the Western Front on either side of the trenches. Sometimes they even found it in the midst of No Man’s Land, hence the term: ‘live and let live’. If soldiers did not die en masse, or alone on barbed wire, they emerged from war de-individuated, matériel for the Beer Hall Putsch and philosophical innovations of Heidegger (a meteorologist in war who predicted winds for gassing the enemy).[5] 

In the end, the First World War resulted in almost 20 million casualties, about half of which were soldiers, the other half being civilians.  A further 20 million were wounded.  To add to this human misery the conclusion of conflict brought with it at least 50 million deaths in the form of the Spanish Flu – largely forgotten until our own pandemic beginning in Wuhan in 2020, which at time of writing is the source of almost 2.5 million deaths world-wide.

Small wonder that people a century ago, or more, did not start saying “It is what it is”.  Instead they turned to the charm of the “bundle” (from the Italian fascio or Latin: fascis) - in other words, Fascism.  Fathead Trump might have conspired his way out of American ‘politics’ but Marine Le Pen – heir to the France’s National Front  (and Maurice Barrès) - is now considered a real threat to centrist Emmanuel Macron, while a host of other authoritarian pretenders continue to stoke the fires of prejudice and populism across the globe.  Does any of this not sound inevitably familiar?

 

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[1] Maurice Barrès, Scènes et Doctrines du Nationalisme (Paris: Félix Juven, 1902 [Elibron Classics Reprint, 2007]), p. 8.

[2] See Michael Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology. The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970).

[3] “The Science of Freedom” is the subtitle to the second volume of Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (W.W. Norton & Co., 1969).

[4] ‘The science of determinism’ is my phrase.

[5] Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wiittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy, tr. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin, 2020), p. 45.