“When There’s No Future, How Can There Be Sin?”: A Response to David Dault on Nihilisms

[TW: I mention suicide in this piece.]


The Two Nihilisms
On his Substack, David Dault has written an important essay entitled The post-American Present, where he considers two nihilisms that are two sides of the same coin, omega nihilism and alpha nihilism. He asked his readers to help him think through these nihilisms, the former abandoning the present for the future, the latter abandoning the future for a permanent, sharper present that only looks to the past. Given the subject matter, I could not resist such an invitation to the dance. So I laced up my Doc Martens and gave it a whirl.

As I read the essay, I was surprised that I found Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and The Sickness Unto Death offered a solution. I know well that it is cliché for me to say that about Kierkegaard. But even if I wasn’t a Kierkegaardian, I would think “Oh. Kierkegaard actually says something about this.” But that’s not this response. Because I find that I have an escape, I can allow myself better awareness of our catastrophe and spend quality time with these nihilisms that Dault identifies.

Nihilism Omega
Dault starts with Nihilism Omega (NO), the conventional, traditionalist nihilism. NO is our palatable nihilism, because gets us out of the present for something better beyond our horizon. It is an “optimistic” nihilism, a hopeful nihilism. NO is not the postponement of present satisfaction for attaining it in the future. It is the development of personal discipline to abandon the present in expectation for something more desirable in the future. Dault cites evangelical finance guru Dave Ramsey as teaching this.

Yet the prosperity gospel also teaches this. The prosperity gospel, which comes from Pentecostal Word of Faith teachings, prooftexts Bible verses to create a promise of future material blessings beyond imagination for present faithfulness in God. Read your Bible. Pray without ceasing. Its safeguard is that if you don’t get those things, then you didn’t believe enough or the right way. The prosperity gospel is a kind of New Thought from the same well that Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking” (and whose Manhattan church Trump attended as a youth) and The Secret‘s “manifesting” come from. The present – YOUR present – is dead. It’s about the future at the expense of the now.

I found myself thinking of the Great Disappointment as another NO example. The Great Disappointment is one of the most significant religious events in American history. Adventist William Miller preached the imminent return (“advent”) of Jesus and gave a specific date: October 22, 1844. His followers sold all of their possessions in expectation of the Second Coming. The present was wholly abandoned for the future, for the advent. After the day came and went, the Millerites (as they were pejoratively called) were yanked back into the concrete now, laden with burden of living forward. They had to rework their understanding of themselves and what happened. One of these groups that refashioned itself is the Seventh Day Adventists. The SDA understands the consequences of such nihilism even as they still look forward to the Second Coming.

Nihilism Alpha (Johnny Rotten: Radical Theologian)
I was pleased to see Dault cite the Sex Pistols in his description of Nihilism Alpha (NA), the despairing, “pessimistic” nihilism. I can talk about the Pistols at length. He describes their unexpectedly final gig at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. They start with “God Save the Queen” (my favorite of theirs, btw) and Dault quotes the refrain: “No future! No future! No future for you! / No future! No future! No future for me!” In the world of the Sex Pistols, we share that eternal present that is no future for either of us.

Dault does not explicitly cite the following stanzas, but they’re theologically important, especially coming from the anarchic, “anti-Christian” Pistols:

God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God, have mercy
All crimes are paid

When there’s no future, how can there be sin?
We’re the flowers in the dustbin
We’re the poison in your human machine
We’re the future, your future

Here, Rotten sings his sarcastic, subjunctive plea for divine mercy and absolution. But he goes further: “When there’s no future, how can there be sin?” In Christianity, sin indicates a redemptive future for the possibility of and opportunity for its forgiveness. Even lapsed Irish Catholic Rotten gets this. If there is no sin, then everything is permissible. It is soiled beauty. It is poison in the organism. An eternal present is an amoral, anarchic now. The goodness and beauty of Creation dies because it cannot continue forward, poisoned by an ever-present present. There can be no Advent, no Eschaton, no Parousia. The hope of Christianity is wholly transformed into despair with not the telos, but the terminus of time. And Rotten proclaims that our future is not only that of the Pistols, but the Pistols, themselves, which ironically had less of a future than even the band expected.

Capitalist Realism
Letting the Pistols’ suicide resonate, Dault turns to English writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher. Fisher’s brilliant dissections of culture and capitalism made him into a philosophical authority for the underground beginning in the early aughts. He utilized Derrida’s “hauntology” (a pun on “ontology”) to describe how our contemporary culture experiences “lost futures.” Dault focuses on Fisher’s appraisal of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” and what it means to dwell in that space. It’s not good. Dault writes:

For Fisher, capitalism has brought us to the point where our imaginations have atrophied, in every possible sense. We have lost the ability to imagine a future different from the present in which we are living right now. More than this, however, the present itself has lost its ability to imagine a future, and so it simply begins to mine and reproduce the past, in ever-more-detailed repetitions. To paraphrase a line or two from Capitalist Realism, we find ourselves watching 1970s sitcoms on high-definition television screens.

(Dault does not note in his essay that Fisher committed suicide in 2017. Is it significant to mention this terrible tragedy? One can never truly understand a person’s decision to end their life. Fisher was not a nihilist. He did not believe in nothing. Far from it. But whatever it was that drove his hand, it overwhelmed him to the point of no return.)

Sharper and Brighter
NA is the collective nostalgia that perceives and experiences the future only in the memorialized past and then is aborted. Presently, we stream our pop cultural reboots and revivals all the while with fascism’s return and reinstatement of Confederate statues and draconian zombie laws, of manufactured propagandistic pasts. MAGA seeks to reinstate a past that never existed except in its projected racist, misogynistic, poly-phobic imagination. It is the worst of recycling and it is an excessively bright present – like how watching an atomic blast is bright, like the stopped watches in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are trapped in their eternal present after a brilliant, blinding brightness. Dault describes NA as a present “where nothing ever changes, only the images get sharper and sharper.” Brighter and brighter. Sharper and sharper. Until you simply can’t live with yourself… or others.

My favorite sentence of Dault’s essay is this:

The temptation of alpha-style nihilism is the oubliette of solipsism—a mass delusion in which we forget the possibility of a future, and only remember the past insofar as it becomes a wash of the perpetual present.

For those who don’t know (because I didn’t), an “oubliette” is a tiny prison where a person is effectively “forgotten.” It is a torture chamber of isolation wherein the prisoner is left by themselves with only their thoughts to consume them. The Alpha Nihilist proclaims their freedom from the future by containing themself in a present of their own making, gazing back at the past of their own recollective formation.

When There is No Sin in the Present
“When there’s no future, how can there be sin?” The Alpha Nihilist never sins, because there is no sin. The Alpha Nihilist never needs redemption because there is no need for redemption. They are already now Great as they once were great. Greatness needs no redemption. Fashioning themselves from their imagined past, they made themselves Great Again. “Again” is an adverb of the present. It is the repetition of the past into the now. The future exists only in the service of the past for the purpose of the present. It is a future of the past, which is the present. Past sins are absolved by the Greatness of the everpresent present. Sin no longer exists. “Sin is an artifact of the past,” proclaims the Alpha Nihilist, “when we were less than great, before we were and are now.”

Dault determines the climate crisis as the “metastasization of alpha-style nihilism.” In his observation that we are trapped in a position where we can imagine the end of the world, we delude ourselves that were are merely observers even when we are suffering along with our loved ones the collapse of our planet. It reminds me of Fisher’s observation in Capitalist Realism where he describes it as similar to “Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” We can imagine the end of the world, but we can’t imagine ourselves suffering while it happens to us.

“When there’s no future, how can there be sin?” In the NA of climate collapse, how can there be sin against our neighbor, against Nature, against ourselves, against our Creator? There is no future. There is only burning and the suffocation on noxious fumes of our planet as we repost memes on social media. Our attention is attuned, presently, to our screens. NA is a kind of incurvatus in se, a “turned inwardness toward the self.” It is a vile selfishness, consumed by its own desires, greed, and concern at the expense of all else, our neighbor, Nature, ourselves, our Creator. To steal a title from Neil Postman, we are emojiing ourselves to death through the glory and greatness of data centers and ChatGPT and LLMs, the collective amalgamation and regurgitation of stolen, tokenized data.

Dault understands these two nihilisms as two sides of the same coin: the macho alpha male and the sole survivor omegaman. And he sees these two archetypes as “empty shells” seeking the “promise of life,” but never living in this age. This is our post-American present.

The Present Greatness of MAGA Man
I will take his ideas a bit further. MAGA Man is the Omega and the Alpha of nihilism, but ends and begins nothing. He looks toward his future as he abandons the present. His future is the present that is found in the past fashioned in his own image. He sustains himself with the aesthetics of power. He feels great again. Living in the present, he has no regrets other than the time when he lost the feeling of greatness. More greatness is just over the horizon, as long as he believes in his own greatness. His greatness is at the expense of all else in the present and the past that he doesn’t fashion as his own. MAGA Man gets by by feeling he is getting by. He does it first, like America, and he does it alone, like America. MAGA Man is a great American. If he is told he is getting by by the right people who make him feel great, he will believe he is getting by. This will inevitably collapse, but until then, MAGA Man will need greater and greater amounts of greatness to feed his desire for a great present. As long as he can keep the threshold of despair at bay, at a distance from his permanent present, then he is doing just great. With no future and no sin, MAGA Man can do no wrong. He can only be great until the world engulfs him in the conflagration of his own self-deception and time moves on without him.

Survival After Punk
A few thoughts on the Sex Pistols in relation to nihilism. The Pistols died for a number of reasons. But with the death of Johnny Rotten, John Lydon was able to create Public Image Limited. Their first single, “Public Image,” rails against NA, explicitly against capitalism.

Two sides to every story
Somebody had to stop me
I’m not the same as when I began
I will not be treated as property

Public Image

Two sides to every story
Somebody had to stop me
I’m not the same as when I began
It’s not a game of monopoly

Public Image

Public image, you got what you wanted
The public image belongs to me
It’s my entrance, my own creation
My grand finale, my goodbye

Lydon seizes his own identity from those who would exploit him. He acknowledges those who would fight him. He acknowledges that he has a history and that he has changed. He seizes his own identity. He is not a nihilist, neither omega nor alpha.

What is important to realize is that Public Image Limited is not a punk band. It is post-punk. As romantic as UK punk can seem, it only lasted about eighteen months in the late seventies. Then the media had its fill and moved on. But the music and the subculture that punk had creatively inspired moved on its own direction: post-punk. Yes, that’s the name it was given. AFTER punk. It doesn’t have its own name.

There was a nihilism in punk, because it was nihilism toward the malaise and stagnation UK youth experienced in the seventies. But it also served as a spark of creativity for hundreds of youth who had long felt there was nothing for them. The Sex Pistols vocalized that nihilism and frustration and the fires of punk burned bright, hot, and fast. As music labels and fashion sought to cash in on punk, it couldn’t live with itself. Maintaining a permanent present is exhausting.

But the double-sided nihilism that Dault describes is more dangerous, more systemic, and more widespread in our country than punk ever was in the UK. The media created the moral panic of punk out its purposeful spectacle. We, however, are suffering a real cultural situation that has already mutated into a fascist stance and action. When “no future” passes beyond a lyric or mantra and becomes a socio-political stance, no one is safe.

After the Pistols played their standard cover of The Stooges’ “No Fun”, Johnny Rotten squatted on the Winterland stage, stared out at the crowd and said, “Ah ha ha! Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated. Good night!”

And that was it. The end of the Pistols. Nihilism cheats everyone out of not only a future, but a past and purposeful present. And when the backlash comes, nothing is safe.

Dault provides a useful rubric to help understand the kinds of nihilism that threaten us with abandonment and absolute selfishness. Further exploration and reflection is necessary, but nihilism is something for which we need collectively to raise the alarm.