When we were brought face to face with tyranny—with a kind of tyranny [Communism, Fascism and Nazism] that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most
\n\tpowerful thinkers of the past,\u201d wrote Leo Strauss, one of the twentieth century\u2019s leading political philosophers, \u201cour political science failed to
\n\trecognize it.\u201d1 Actually many leading intellectuals of the twentieth century acclaimed and supported its emergence: Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt come
\n\tto mind. But why did political science fail to recognize it? Why were \u201clights\u201d like Heidegger seduced by the darkness of Nazism? Indeed, why were those
\n\tsupposed to see blind to the palpable diabolical evil of totalitarianism?<\/p>\n
This question must be reasked. Primal passions: fear, egoism, anger, and hatred, the kind that Mussolini and Hitler exploited and mobilized, are once again
\n\tpotent factors in the politics of Western democracies. Driving these passions is the same disillusionment with liberal democracy, the same gnawing sense of
\n\toverwhelming crisis that things are falling apart and the center cannot hold. The parallels with Europe in the 1920s are ominously striking.<\/p>\n
\n\tJust as the post-World War I chaos, economic insecurity, the spread of Bolshevism and the political ineptness of liberal democratic regimes in the face of
\n\tthese challenges opened the way for Fascism and Nazism; similarly today, the post-cold war chaos, economic insecurity, the spread of jihadist Islam, and
\n\tthe political paralysis of liberal democracies have opened the way for the extreme politics of the Radical Right. Again just as Bolsheviks and
\n\tFascists\/Nazis symbiotically reinforced each other\u2019s extremism, the Radical Right and jihadist Islam are also inadvertently reinforcing each other\u2019s
\n\tpolarizing agendas.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat does this Radical Right\/jihadist Islam symbiosis mean? Does it pose an existential threat to liberal democracy and global stability, as Communism and
\n\tNazism did in the past century? Or, to put it directly, could it morph into or generate a new totalitarianism, which could even coalesce into a global
\n\ttotalitarian order? I believe, and strongly, that such an outcome is not implausible.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tFirst of all, not only do we have a thoroughly interconnected and interdependent global economy—social media connects people globally, which allows them to
\n\tspeak with one voice. Now imagine a catastrophic global economic collapse against a background of social unrest, radical jihadist and anarchist violence,
\n\thordes of extremists inflaming passions and speeches, blogs or tweets of demagogues going viral; and new totalitarianisms become conceivable. As a matter
\n\tof fact, democracy has been in retreat worldwide. This drift toward authoritarianism brings to mind Christ\u2019s words, \u201cIf people do these things when the
\n\ttree is green, what will happen when it is dry?\u201d (Luke 23:31, NIV).*\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tIndeed, what will happen if the economic springs run dry? Social and political stability, as we know, are inseparably linked to economic prosperity.
\n\tSubtract them, and \u201cmere anarchy is loosed upon the world,\u201d to cite the famous line from William Butler Yeats\u2019s poem \u201cThe Second Coming.\u201d In such anarchy,
\n\t\u201cthe best lack all conviction, while the worst\/Are full of passionate intensity.\u201d2 From this passionate intensity emerges the totalitarian impulse. By
\n\ttheir very nature, passions are deaf to reason and blind to limits or distinctions. They overwhelm everything in a frenetic yet futile endeavor to piece
\n\ttogether fragments of shattered life.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThis is what happened in Germany in the 1920s. Following World War I and in the wake of the Great Depression, as their lives were battered by inflation and
\n\tscared by the unprecedented unemployment that began in 1930, and by a political system that appeared to have failed, Germans were seduced by Hitler\u2019s
\n\tpromise of charismatic liberation, of national rebirth and unity. He \u201cappeared to many as some kind of redeemer. He himself used Christian rhetoric
\n\tunceasingly.\u201d3 His appeal was chiefly aimed at the emotions, to forge people into a mass. Describing one of his mass rallies in Mein Kampf, he wrote,
\n\t\u201cAfter my speech lasting three hours adherents and adversaries fused into a single enthusiastic mass.\u201d4\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe ideas of Mein Kampf, as George L. Mosse noted, were translated into liturgical forms to become mass rites of national, Aryan worship. And he added that
\n\t\u201cto term such dissemination \u2018propaganda\u2019 is singularly inappropriate here, for it denotes something artificially created. . . . This is to misunderstand
\n\tthe organic development of the Nazi cult and its essentially religious nature.\u201d5 This applies likewise to Fascism, which, as Mussolini explicitly put it,
\n\t\u201cis a religious conception of life . . . which transcends any individual and raises him to the status of an initiated member of a spiritual society.\u201d6\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tCuriously, notwithstanding these religious avowals and not to mention the documented occult roots of Nazism, historians have tended to ignore the religious
\n\tessence of Nazism and Fascism. Even those who appreciate the religious essence do not pursue their analysis to the point where the \u201creality\u201d behind the
\n\tNazi\/Fascist religious proclamations, symbols, and rituals becomes visible. And they are restricted by the assumptions of scientism, the materialistic
\n\tdogma that all \u201creality\u201d that is not accessible by methods of natural sciences does not exist or it\u2019s \u201can illusion,\u201d as Freud famously put it.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThis denial of spiritual reality and reduction of the field of human experience to observable phenomena has its origin in the French Enlightenment. Its
\n\tmain thrust was hostility to Christianity and belief in the sovereignty of reason over all spheres of life. Although this rationalism, buttressed by
\n\tDarwinism, is still the basis of Western secularism, it spawned a deeply spiritual countermovement—Romanticism—that was sharply opposed to scientific
\n\trationalism and whose goal was nothing less than reenchantment of the Newtonian mechanical universe, filling it with magic, spirits, gods, and mystery.
\n\tSignificantly, Romanticism set all the key themes of modern literature, music, art, drama, pornography, secular theology, and also of Idealism,
\n\tHegelianism, Marxism, Nietzscheanism, and Nazism.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Romantic reaction, its pungent spiritualism, is a compelling disproof of the materialistic assumptions of scientism. Even more compelling is the
\n\ttransformation of scientism into a religion by the Positivists: Saint Simon and his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Auguste Comte. \u201cIn many of his writings, Saint Simon demanded
\n\tthat the scientists organize themselves along the lines of the Catholic clergy. . . . He even suggested that they elect a scientific pope, employ
\n\texcommunication for the crimes against the ideology and institute a \u201cNewtonian\u201d form of baptism.\u201d7 Taking also Catholicism as his model, Comte, who
\n\tinvented sociology as a discipline, devised the \u201cReligion of Humanity,\u201d complete with detailed daily ritual observances.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThese religious parodies or more precisely secularization of Christian doctrines by modern ideology tend to be ignored or depreciated by secularists. But
\n\tthey involuntarily testify to the survival of the spiritual in secular modernity. In other words, the modern world is not as secularized or disenchanted as
\n\tcommonly believed. And Max Weber, the great sociologist of modernization, was keenly aware of the vulnerability of our rationalized-disenchanted world. He
\n\tdreaded the old pagan gods, feared their reappearance in new forms. In an unremarked passage in his famous essay \u201cScience as Vocation\u201d he wrote, \u201cWe live
\n\tas did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different sense. As the Hellenic person at times
\n\tsacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times
\n\t
\n\tto Apollo, and . . . as everybody sacrificed to the gods of the city, so do we still nowadays, only our bearing has been disenchanted.\u201d\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe crux here is that Weber did not deny spiritual reality. For him, gods and demons still existed; the difference is that \u201cour bearing,\u201d or consciousness,
\n\thas been disenchanted. Or, in Charles Taylor\u2019s words, our sense of self is no longer \u201copen and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers.\u201d8
\n\tSince \u201cdisenchantment\u201d is not a characteristic of the world, but a description of our subjective-rationalized stance toward it, Weber stated that \u201cfate,
\n\tand certainly not \u2018science,\u2019 holds sway over these gods and their struggles\u201d; and added: \u201cthe great and vital problem that is contained therein is . . .
\n\tvery far from being concluded.\u201d\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd then he gave this bleak warning: \u201cMany old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They
\n\tstrive to gain power over our lives.\u201d9 That is why he emphasized the \u201climits of science\u201d and excoriated \u201cacademic prophets\u201d who claimed natural sciences
\n\tcould \u201cteach us anything about the meaning of the world,\u201d and sought \u201cintellectually to construe new religions without a new and genuine prophecy.\u201d That,
\n\the warned, \u201cwill create only fanatical sects.\u201d Significantly, Weber concluded \u201cScience as Vocation\u201d by quoting Isaiah 21:11, 12, as counsel \u201cfor the many
\n\twho today tarry for new prophets and saviors.\u201d10\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe warning recalls Jesus\u2019 prophetic discourse in Matthew 24; and it\u2019s particularly significant because it runs against the German philosophical tradition,
\n\twhich rejected Christianity, even as it secularized its narratives, especially the Apocalypse, substituting God and the devil with abstract concepts and
\n\thuman agency. Tellingly, as Nietzsche remarked with his characteristic candor, \u201cIn the Christian terms, the devil is the prince of the world, and the lord
\n\tof progress and consequence. . . . And so will it remain, however ill it may sound today in ears accustomed to canonise such power. . . . The world has
\n\tbecome skilled at giving new names to things and even baptizing the devil. It is truly an hour of great danger.\u201d11\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tIndeed, because \u201cgiving new names to things\u201d does not change their essence, reality remains what it is. Yet, to be sure, when names and symbols are
\n\tchanged, not only is the reality behind them obscured—a counterfeit one is generated. To be precise, Romanticism\u2019s secularization of the Apocalypse
\n\treversed its symbols to produce \u201ca demonically driven apocalypse.\u201d12 This reversal is explicit in Hitler\u2019s declaration in Mein Kampf: \u201cI am acting in
\n\taccordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.\u201d And again: \u201cTwo worlds face
\n\tone another—the men of God and men of Satan! The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god.\u201d13\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tRon Rosenbaum, interviewing prominent Hitler\u2019s biographers for his best-selling book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of Evil, was very
\n\tsurprised by \u201cthe pronounced reluctance of so many of them to call Adolf Hitler evil.\u201d The reluctance, he said, \u201cexposes the imprecision of our thinking on
\n\tthe subject of evil.\u201d14 The imprecision, I would retort, exposes the abject failure of modern philosophy and the social sciences to furnish a new moral
\n\tframework in place of the rejected Christian one. This abject failure and resultant moral blindness is what prevented political science from recognizing
\n\tthe \u201ckind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination.\u201d\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tBut are we not also blind? As the vast majority enjoys less and less the material benefits of globalization its fears, paranoia and hatreds are congealing
\n\tinto irrational worlds that are completely detached from reality, impervious to reason and downright mythical, in the deepest sense of the word. Yet
\n\tscientism still controls the Western worldview, still obstructs our view of the spiritual freight behind the pungent passions of jihadist Islam and the
\n\tRadical Right. Indeed, if all global problems intimate total catastrophe, totalitarian solutions are likely.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tTellingly, the word \u201capocalyptic\u201d is now omnipresent in our political and cultural discourse, yet its biblical origin is largely unknown. \u201cIt is truly an
\n\thour of great danger,\u201d to use Nietzsche\u2019s words again. For what the Apocalypse reveals, as Weber warned, are demonic forces striving to \u201cgain power over
\n\tour lives.\u201d Or put precisely, beneath current global crises, \u201cagencies of evil are combing their forces and consolidating. They are strengthening for the
\n\tlast great crisis.\u201d15 Unless we avail ourselves of the \u201crevelation\u201d of the Apocalypse, we are slouching toward demonic totalitarianism.\n\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When we were brought face to face with tyranny—with a kind of tyranny [Communism, Fascism and Nazism] that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past,\u201d wrote Leo Strauss, one of the twentieth century\u2019s leading political philosophers, \u201cour political science failed to recognize it.\u201d1 Actually many leading intellectuals of the twentieth<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[312],"tags":[144],"class_list":["post-6351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-may-june-2016","tag-may-june-2016"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}