Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  In works mainly of the 1880s, he called for the reclassification of revenge, anger, and lust as virtues; among his recommendations were slavery, the subjection of women to ‘the whip’, the refinement of the human race by gloriously bloody wars, the extermination of millions of inferior people, the eradication of Christianity with its contemptible bias to the weak, and an ethic of ‘might makes right’. He claimed scientific justification, on the grounds that conquerors are necessarily superior to their victims. ‘I … entertain’, he wrote, ‘the hope that life may one day become more full of evil and suffering than it has ever been.’41 All this made Nietzsche Hitler’s favourite philosopher. Yet Hitler misunderstood him. Nietzsche’s hatreds were broad enough to encompass the state; individual strength was what he admired and state-imposed morality the kind he most detested. Like that of so many great thinkers misread by Hitler, his work became twisted and pressed into the service of Nazism.42

  In the mid-nineteenth century a further contribution from moral philosophy fuelled the superman cult: the notion of the autonomy and primacy of the ‘will’ – a suprarational zone of the mind, where urgings coalesced that were morally superior to those of reason or conscience. The spokesman for this savagery hardly embodied it. Arthur Schopenhauer was reclusive, self-indulgent, and inclined to mysticism. Like so many other philosophers, he wanted to isolate something – anything – that was indisputably real: matter, spirit, the self, the soul, thought, God. Schopenhauer hit on ‘the will’. The meaning of the term was elusive, perhaps even to him, but he obviously thought he could tell it apart from reason or morals. By ‘subterranean passage and secret complicity akin to treachery’ it led him to self-knowledge so distinct as to be convincing. The purpose he identified for life, the destiny the will sought, was, to most tastes, unencouraging: the extinction of everything – which, Schopenhauer claimed, was what the Buddha meant by nirvana. Usually only the alienated, the resentful, and the failed advocate unqualified nihilism. Schopenhauer did not mean it literally: his aim was mystical ascent akin to that of other mystics, starting with the abnegation of the external world, toward ecstatic self-realization (which, of course, eluded his sour, curmudgeonly soul); some readers, however, responded with lust for destruction, like the amoral nihilist in G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Wrong Shape’. ‘I want nothing’, he declares. ‘I want nothing. I want nothing.’ The shifts of emphasis signpost the route from egotism, to will, to nihilism.

  Nietzsche mediated Schopenhauer’s message to the would-be supermen who rose to power in the twentieth century. He also mutated it along the way, suggesting that will included the urge to struggle. Resolution could come only through the victory and domination of some over others. ‘The world is the will to power’, Nietzsche cried, addressing potential supermen, ‘and nothing beside! And you are also this will to power – and nothing beside!’43 To minds like Hitler’s or Benito Mussolini’s, this was a justification for imperialism and wars of aggression. Triumph of the Will, the name Leni Riefenstahl gave to a notorious propaganda film she made for Hitler, was her tribute to the nineteenth-century genealogy of the Führer’s self-image.44

  ‌Public Enemies: Beyond and Against the State

  Neither Nietzsche nor Schopenhauer intended – nor even foresaw – the way their doctrines would be manipulated to bolster state power. Every change that hoisted states and supermen above the law multiplied the prospects of injustice. This outcome often occurred in democracies; in dictatorships it was normal. Understandably, therefore, with varying degrees of rejection, some nineteenth-century thinkers reacted against doctrines that idolized or idealized the state.

  Anarchism, for instance, was an uncomputably ancient ideal, which began, like all political thought, with assumptions about human nature. If humans are naturally moral and reasonable, they should be able to get along together without the state. From the moment when Aristotle first exalted the state as an agent of virtue, anarchy had a bad name in the Western tradition. In eighteenth-century Europe, however, belief in progress and improvement made a stateless world seem realizable. In 1793, Mary Wollstonecraft’s future husband, William Godwin, proposed to abolish all laws, on the grounds that they derived from ancient compromises botched in a state of savagery, which progress rendered obsolete. Small, autonomous communities could resolve all conflicts by face-to-face discussion. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose job as a printer fed his inordinate appetite for books, took the next step. In 1840 he invented the term ‘anarchism’ to mean a society run on principles of reciprocity, like a mutual or co-operative society. Many experimental communities of this sort followed, but none on a scale to rival the conventional state. Meanwhile, advocates of state power captured the socialist mainstream: social democrats, who proposed to capture the state by mobilizing the masses; and followers of Louis Blanc, a bourgeois intellectual, with bureaucrats in his ancestry, who put his faith in a strong, regulatory state to realize revolutionary ambitions. Anarchists became marginalized as leftist heretics; under the influence of the writings of Mikhail Bakunin, who crisscrossed Europe animating anarchist movements from the 1840s to the 1870s, they turned increasingly to what seemed the only practical alternative revolutionary programme: violence by terrorist cells.

  Among revolutionary advocates of partisan warfare in the early nineteenth century, Carlo Bianco stands out, advocating ‘cold terrorism of the brain, not the heart’,45 in defence of the victims of oppression. But most revolutionaries of his day were idealists whom terror repelled. They wanted insurrection to be ethical: targeting the armed forces of the enemy, sparing indifferent or innocent civilians. Johann Most, the apostle of ‘propaganda of the deed’, demurred. The entire elite – the ‘reptile brood’ of aristocrats, priests, and capitalists – with their families, servants, and all who did business with them, were, for him, legitimate victims, to be killed without compunction. Anyone caught in the crossfire was a sacrifice in a good cause. In 1884 Most published a handbook on how to make bombs explode in churches, ballrooms, and public places. He also advocated exterminating policemen on the grounds that these ‘pigs’ were not fully human. Cop haters and cop killers too dumb to read Most, and too ill-educated to have heard of him, have gone on using his lexicon ever since.46

  Most called himself a socialist, but chiefly nationalist terrorists adopted his methods. The first movement to make terror its main tactic (the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, as it eventually came to be known) started in 1893. Damjan Gruev, one of its founders, summed up the justification: ‘For great effect’, he wrote, ‘great force is necessary. Liberty is a great thing: it requires great sacrifices.’ Gruev’s weasel words masked the main fact: a lot of innocent people would be bombed to death. His slogan was, ‘Better a horrible end than endless horror.’47 The Macedonian revolutionaries anticipated and exemplified the methods of subsequent terrorists: murder, looting, and rapine intimidated communities into bankrolling, sheltering, and supplying them.48

  The idea of terrorism has continued to reverberate. ‘Liberation struggles’ routinely morph into ill-targeted violence. Criminals – drug-traffickers and extortionists, especially – emulate terrorists, affecting political postures and masquerading as revolutionaries. In the late-twentieth-century drug wars of Colombia and Northern Ireland it was hard to distinguish criminal from political motives. The ideological posture of the team that destroyed New York’s World Trade Center in 2001 seemed confused, at best: some of the supposed martyrs against Westernization led consumerist lives and prepared for their feat by heavy drinking. Nihilism is not a political creed but a psychological aberration; suicide bombers seem the prey, not the protagonists, of the causes they represent. For practitioners, terrorism seems to satisfy psychic cravings for violence, secrecy, self-importance, and defiance, rather than intellectual or practical needs.

  After contributing reckless idealism and, sometimes, frenzied violence to the ideological struggles of the earlier twentieth century, anarchism seceded from the political forefront. Pet
er Kropotkin was its last great theorist. His Mutual Aid (1902) was a cogent riposte to social Darwinism, arguing that collaboration, not competition, is natural to humankind, and that the evolutionary advantage of our species consists in our collaborative nature. ‘As the human mind frees itself’, Kropotkin explained, ‘from ideas inculcated by minorities of priests, military chiefs and judges, striving to establish their domination, and of scientists paid to perpetuate it, a conception of society arises, in which there is no longer room for those dominating minorities.’49 Social coercion is unnecessary and counterproductive.

  Anarchism’s last great battles were defensive, fought against authoritarianism of left and right alike, in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9. They ended in defeat. The anarchists’ legacy to the student revolutionary movements of 1968 involved much rhetoric with little result. Nevertheless it is possible – though unproved – that lingering anarchist tradition helps to account for a conspicuous development of the late twentieth century: the growing strength of concern for freedom on the political left in Europe. Most analysts have credited the influence of the libertarian right on leftist thinking, but anarchism may have contributed at least as much. Certainly a preference for human-scale, ‘communitarian’ solutions to social problems, rather than the grand planning advocated by communists and socialists of the past, has become a major theme of the modern left.50

  In any case, nonviolent challenges to the power of the state seem, in the long run, to be more practical and perhaps more effective. The idea of civil disobedience arose in the 1840s in the mind of Henry David Thoreau. He was an utterly impractical man, an incurable romantic who advocated and, for a long time, practised economic self-sufficiency ‘in the woods’; yet his thought reshaped the world. His disciples included some of the dynamic figures of the twentieth century: Mohandas Gandhi, Emma Goldman, Martin Luther King. Thoreau wrote his most important essay on politics in revulsion from the two great injustices of the antebellum United States: slavery, which belaboured blacks, and warmongering, which dismembered Mexico. Thoreau decided that he would ‘quietly declare war with the state’, renounce allegiance, and refuse to pay for the oppression or dispossession of innocent people. If all just men did likewise, he reasoned, the state would be compelled to change. ‘If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.’51 Thoreau went to gaol for withholding taxes, but ‘someone interfered, and paid’. He was let out after a single night of incarceration.

  He commended what was good in the US system: ‘Even this state and this American government are in many respects very admirable and rare things, to be thankful for.’ He recognized, moreover, that the citizen was under an obligation to do ‘the good the state demands of me’. But he had identified a limitation of democracy: the citizen alienates power to the state. Conscience, however, remains his or her individual responsibility, which cannot be delegated to an elected representative. It was better, Thoreau thought, to dissolve the state than to preserve it in injustice. ‘This people must cease to hold slaves and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.’

  Thoreau insisted on assent to two propositions. The first, that, in case of injustice, civil disobedience was a duty, reflecting the long Christian tradition of just resistance to tyrants. Under evil and oppressive rulers, Aquinas approved the people’s right to rebellion and the individual’s right to tyrannicide. The seventeenth-century English judge John Bradshaw had invoked the maxim ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God’ in vindication of the revolt that launched the English Civil War. Benjamin Franklin appropriated the phrase for the Great Seal of the United States, and Thomas Jefferson adopted it as his own motto. Thoreau’s second proposition, however, was new. Political disobedience, he insisted, had to be nonviolent and prejudicial only to those who opt for resistance. Thoreau’s stipulations were the basis of Gandhi’s campaign of ‘moral resistance’ to British rule in India and Martin Luther King’s civil-rights activism of ‘nonviolent noncooperation’ in the United States. Both succeeded without recourse to violence. John Rawls, one of the world’s most respected political philosophers of the early twenty-first century, endorsed and extended the doctrine. Civil disobedience of the kind Thoreau urged is justified in a democracy, he said, if a majority denies equal rights to a minority.52

  Anarchism and civil disobedience could succeed only against states insufficiently ruthless to repress them. Nor has it proved possible to create institutions within the state that can be relied on to guarantee liberty without violence. Judicatures, for instance, can be suborned, overruled, or sacked, as in the Venezuela of Nicolás Maduro. Unelected elites or heads of state can be as abusive as any disproportionately empowered minority. Where armed forces guarantee constitutions, countries often topple into the power of military dictators. Political parties often engage in cosy conspiracies to outflank their electorates by sharing power in turn or in coalition. Trade unions typically start by being independent or even defiant, if they amass sufficient support and wealth to challenge incumbent elites, but most states have dealt with them by incorporation, emasculation, or abolition. Some constitutions forestall tyranny by devolving and diffusing power among federal, regional, and local authorities. But devolved regional administrators can become tyrannous in turn. The dangers became apparent, for instance, in Catalonia in 2015, when a minority government defied the majority of voters in the province in an attempt to suspend the constitution, appropriate taxes, and arrogate the sole right to make and unmake law in the territory. In 2017 a Catalan regional government, elected by a minority of votes, tried to transfer sovereignty into its own hands by mobilizing its supporters in a referendum, mounting, in effect, a civil coup d’état. To counter the danger of merely multiplying tyranny and creating lots of little tin-pot despotisms, Catholic political tradition invented the notion of ‘subsidiarity’, according to which the only legitimate political decisions are those taken as close as practically possible to the communities affected. In practice, however, the disparity of resources means that rich and well-armed institutions will almost always triumph in cases of conflict.

  ‌Christian Politics

  When all other checks on tyranny have been discounted, the Church remains. The Church did restrain rulers in the Middle Ages. But the Reformation created churches collusive with or run by states, and thereafter, even in Catholic countries, almost every confrontation ended with restrictions and compromises that transferred authority to secular hands. In the late twentieth century, the exceptional charisma and personal moral authority of Pope John Paul II gave him the opportunity to play a part in toppling communism in his native Poland and challenging authoritarian rule generally. But it is doubtful whether his achievement is repeatable. Today, even in countries with large congregations, the Church can no longer command sufficient obedience to prevail in conflicts over matters of supreme value to Christian consciences, including the protection of inviolable life and sacred matrimony.

  In the nineteenth century, however, Catholic thinkers persisted in the search for new ways of conceptualizing the Church’s aspirations for influence in the world. The result was a great deal of new thinking, involving radical reformulation of the Church’s place in increasingly secular, increasingly plural societies. Leo XIII came to the papacy in 1878 with prestige immensely advanced by his predecessor’s defiance of the world. Pius IX would neither submit to force nor defer to change. He had condemned almost every social and political innovation of his day. In retreat from the armies of the secular Italian state he made a virtual bunker of the Vatican. For his admirers and for many uncommitted onlookers, his intransigence resembled a godly vocation unprofaned by compromise. His fellow bishops rewarded him by proclaiming papal infallibility. Leo inherited this unique advantage and exploited it to manoeuvre into a position from which he could work with governments to minimize damage from the dangers Pius had condemned. Leo wanted, he said, ‘to carry through a great p
olicy’ – in effect, updating apostleship in what came to be called Aggiornamento. He triumphed in spite of himself: he promoted modernization without understanding it or even liking it very much. He seems, however, to have realized that the vast Catholic laity was the Church’s most valuable ally in an increasingly democratic age. He disliked republicanism, but made the clergy co-operate with it. He could not deny the validity of slavery in past centuries when the Church had allowed it, but he proscribed it for the future. He feared the power of trade unions, but he authorized them and encouraged Catholics to found their own. He could not abjure property – the Church had too much of it for that – but he could remind socialists that Christians, too, were called to social responsibility. He would not endorse socialism, but he did condemn naked individualism. Leo’s was a church of practical charity without moral cowardice. After his death, the political fashion changed in Rome, and there were always clergy who sensed that they could not control change and so tried to frustrate it. Some of them, in the twentieth century, were willing to collaborate with repression and authoritarianism on the political right. Aggiornamento, however, was inextinguishable. The tradition Leo launched prevailed in the long run. The Church has gone on adjusting to worldly changes, and adhering to eternal verities.53

  As usual in the history of the Church, Catholic thinkers outpaced the pope, christianizing socialism and producing, along with Protestant advocates of the so-called social gospel, a politically unsettling Christian social doctrine. They challenged the state to embody justice and follow the God whom the Virgin Mary praised because He ‘hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich He hath sent empty away’. Early Christianity abjured the state. Medieval Christianity erected an alternative church-state. The challenge for modern Christianity in a secularizing age has been to find a way of influencing politics without getting engaged and perhaps corrupted. Potentially, Christians have something to contribute to all the major political tendencies represented in modern industrial democracies. Christianity is conservative, because it preaches absolute morality. It is liberal, in the true sense of the word, because it stresses the supreme value of the individual and affirms the sovereignty of conscience. It is socialist, because it demands service to the community, displays ‘bias to the poor’, and recommends the shared life of the apostles and early Church. It is therefore a possible source of the ‘third way’ eagerly sought nowadays in a world that has rejected communism but finds capitalism uncongenial.