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Why would even sectarian members of Judaism and Christianity be tempted by an idea that is clearly incompatible with their faith in a single God? Dualism is what happens when cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable, when the world as it is, is simply too unlike the world as we believed it ought to be. In the words of historian Jeffrey Russell, dualism ‘denied the unity and omnipotence of God in order to preserve his perfect goodness’.3
The God of Abraham is, among other things, the Lord of history who redeemed his people from slavery in Egypt. Yet for the Jews of the second century BCE, the great prophetic visions had not come true. Israel had been defeated by Nebuchadnezzar. The Temple had been destroyed. The people had gone into exile in Babylon. Some had returned, but not all. The lost ten tribes for the most part stayed lost. The Second Temple was a pale shadow of Solomon’s. The nation was not truly independent. Persian rule was succeeded by the Alexandrian Empire, eventually to be followed by Rome. Many Jews had become Hellenised, including the Hasmonean kings and high priests. It was at this point, probably around 125 BCE, that a priestly group decided to leave Jerusalem, live in purity in the lonely wastes of the Dead Sea, and wait for the end of history, when God would fight a cosmic battle and defeat the forces of evil.
Among the early Christians, the cognitive dissonance was even greater. The first Christians were Jews who believed that the Messiah had come. But the Messiah in mainstream Judaism is not a supernatural being with the power to transform the human condition. He is simply an anointed king (the word messiah means ‘anointed’) in the line of David who will fight Israel’s battles, restore its independence, unite the people and usher in a reign of peace.
Manifestly that had not happened. After the death of Jesus the fate of the faithful became worse, not better. The Romans were ruthless. Religious liberty was curtailed. Jews rose in revolt but suffered devastating defeat. It became easier, particularly for some Gentile Christians, to think in dualistic terms borrowed from Greece. The physical arena with its wars and destruction was neither real nor the work of God. It was, as Plato said, a play of shadows cast on the wall of our senses by an artificial light. The real world is that of the forms, of eternity and the soul. This is where God lives. What the Messiah had done was not to change history. Rather, he had brought his disciples the truth about the other world, the realm of the spirit that lies within us if we only have the knowledge, the gnosis, the secret key that unlocks the door.
Dualism entered Judaism and Christianity when it became easier to attribute the sufferings of the world to an evil force rather than to the work of God.
The Qumran and Nag Hammadi sects disappeared. The mainstream in both Judaism and Christianity rejected dualism. Within Judaism, the group that survived were the rabbis. In some respects their teachings were close to those of the first Christians. They believed in the primacy of love and forgiveness. They subscribed to the morality taught in the Sermon on the Mount. They called it lifnim mi-shurat ha-din, going beyond the letter of the law. They saw themselves as heirs to the prophets, and believed, as did the early Christians, in the goodness of ordinary people.
They also discovered a powerful way of excluding heretical beliefs. They did not codify doctrine as the Church eventually did at the Council of Nicea in 325. Instead they fought the battle of ideas through the prayer book. The way they defeated dualism – they called it shtei reshuyot, ‘two domains’ – was elegant and effective. They chose the single most emphatic rejection of dualism in the Bible, Isaiah’s statement, ‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil’ (Isa. 45:7). Out of delicacy they substituted ‘all things’ for ‘evil’. They then set these words as the opening line of the communal daily Morning Prayer, where they stand to this day. So whoever prayed in the synagogue denied dualism. It soon disappeared from the Jewish mainstream, surfacing from time to time only in esoteric mystical texts.
Christianity likewise rejected the Gnostic Gospels. The most significant dualistic challenge came from Marcion of Sinope in the mid-second century. He believed that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New were two quite different deities. Like the Gnostics he believed that the Jewish God, Creator of the physical universe, was a different and lower being than the God of Christianity, who was spiritual, not physical, practising love and forgiveness rather than justice and retribution. The two religions had nothing to do with one another, so the Hebrew Bible, the ‘Old Testament’, had no place within the Christian canon. Marcion’s views were rejected as heresy. Dualism reappeared in the eleventh century in the form of the Cathars, against whom Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29). Some say that suspicion of lingering dualism was one of the reasons the Inquisition was started in 1234.
Unfortunately, a mild form of dualism has a habit of reappearing. Hardly a week goes by without someone in an article or book drawing a contrast between the Old Testament God of revenge and the New Testament God of forgiveness. The well-known atheist Richard Dawkins began the second chapter of The God Delusion with the words, ‘The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.’4 He was surprised and angry when, in conversation, I told him that those words showed that he was a Christian atheist, not a Jewish atheist. He could not understand this, but it is quite simple. The words ‘the God of the Old Testament’ are only spoken by Christians. Outside Christianity, there is no Old Testament. There is the Hebrew Bible.
It has become one of the taken-for-granted clichés of Western culture that the God of the Old Testament is the God of law, letter, justice, retribution, vengeance, anger, flesh and death. The God of the New Testament is the God of faith, spirit, forgiveness, grace, forbearance, love and life. But this is pure Marcionism and, in Christian terms, heresy. The essence of Christianity as articulated by Paul and the Gospels is that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New are the same God. His love is the same love. His justice is the same justice. His forgiveness is the same forgiveness. That is why the Old Testament is part of the Christian canon.
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Dualism comes in many forms, not all of them dangerous. There is the Platonic dualism that differentiates sharply between mind and body, the spiritual and the physical. There is the theological dualism that sees two different supernatural forces at work in the universe. There is the moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I will call pathological dualism that sees humanity itself as radically, ontologically divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other: either one of the saved, the redeemed, the chosen, or a child of Satan, the devil’s disciple. Pathological dualism is not Gnosticism or Manichaeism, both of which are about the gods, not humankind. But it is not difficult to see how the one could lead to the other, because our views of the natural are shaped by our ideas of the supernatural. To understand how this works we must move from theology to psychology.
A line of thinkers from Sigmund Freud to Melanie Klein have highlighted the processes of splitting and projection. The young child makes a sharp distinction between good objects and bad. Only after maturing is it capable of understanding that people – the mother, the self – can be both good and bad. But there are personality disorders and moments of stress in which this integrated understanding comes under strain or simply never develops. The child is unable to see people, including itself, as both. It may have desires that it is ashamed of and reluctant to acknowledge. What happens then is splitting – a sharp separation between good and bad – and projection, attributing the bad to someone else.
The same can happen to groups. We saw in the last chapter how identity involves dividing the world into two: Us and Them, in-group and out-group, the people like us and the people not like us. Much empirical research has shown that we have a natural tendency to in-group bias. We think more favourably of Us and less favourably of Them. When bad things happen to our group, splittin
g and projection can occur here as well. The preservation of self-respect may lead us to project the bad onto another group. We are innocent. They are guilty. Good things are failing to happen because someone is preventing them from happening: the devil, Satan, the Prince of Darkness, the evil one, Lucifer, the infidel, the antichrist. It is not theology that is at work here but rather a basic structure of thought that is a legacy of early childhood. We are good. They are bad. And bad things are happening to us because someone bad is doing them.
Consider theology again. Monotheism is not an easy faith. Recall the verse from Isaiah: ‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil.’ How can God, who is all-good, create evil? That is the question of questions for the monotheistic mind. Abraham asked: ‘Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?’ Moses asked, ‘Why have you done evil to this people?’
The simplest answer is that the bad God does is a response to the bad we do. It is justice, punishment, retribution. That is how Jews coped with the crisis of defeat and exile: ‘Because of our sins we were exiled from our land.’ The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism. Other ancient civilisations recorded their victories. The Israelites recorded their failures. It is what the Mosaic and prophetic books are about.
But it is not easy to see God as the source of bad as well as good, judgement as well as forgiveness, justice as well as love. The rabbis did this by understanding the two primary names of God in the Bible, Elokim (E) and Hashem (J), as referring respectively to God-as-justice and God-as-compassion. Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, said that he came to his Theory of Complementarity when his son stole something from a local shop. He found himself thinking of his son as a father would do, then as a judge would do, and realised that while he had to think both ways, he could not do both simultaneously. He had to ‘switch’ from one to the other. That is what monotheism asks of its followers: to think of God as both a father and a judge. A judge punishes, a parent forgives. A judge enforces the law, a parent embodies love. God is both, but it is hard to think of both at the same time.
That explains the human tendency to lapse into dualism even when you belong to a monotheistic faith. Dualism resolves complexity. In a recent research study, two American psychologists, Richard Beck and Sara Taylor, found that a belief in Satan as an evil force helps Christians feel more positively about God and less likely to blame him for the pain and suffering in the world. It resolves their ambivalence.5 But what if monotheism requires the ability to handle complexity?
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Dualism is a dangerous idea, and the mainstream Church and the Synagogue were right to reject it. Pathological dualism, though, is far more serious and appears as a social phenomenon only rarely and under extreme circumstances. It is a form of cognitive breakdown, an inability to face the complexities of the world, the ambivalences of human character, the caprices of history and the ultimate unknowability of God. It leads to regressive behaviour and has been responsible for some of the worst crimes in history: those committed during the Crusades, the pogroms, the witch-hunts, the mass murders in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. When confined to small sectarian groups, it may not pose a danger. But when it catches fire among larger populations, it is a prelude to tragedy of world historic proportions.
Pathological dualism does three things. It makes you dehumanise and demonise your enemies. It leads you to see yourself as a victim. And it allows you to commit altruistic evil, killing in the name of the God of life, hating in the name of the God of love and practising cruelty in the name of the God of compassion.
It is a virus that attacks the moral sense. Dehumanisation destroys empathy and sympathy. It shuts down the emotions that prevent us from doing harm. Victimhood deflects moral responsibility. It leads people to say: It wasn’t our fault, it was theirs. Altruistic evil recruits good people to a bad cause. It turns ordinary human beings into murderers in the name of high ideals.
To understand how it works, it is worth taking an extreme example – Germany from 1933 to 1945. The Nazi ideology was not religious. If anything, it was pagan. It was also based on ideas that were thought at the time to be scientific: the so-called ‘scientific study of race’ (a mixture of biology and anthropology) and ‘social Darwinism’, the theory that the same processes operating in nature operate in society also. The strong survive by eliminating the weak.
The point of using it as an example is to show how beliefs that seem from a distance infantile and absurd can be held by very intelligent people indeed. The people who gave Nazism its intellectual gravitas were among Germany’s outstanding thinkers: among them figures like Bible scholar Gerhard Kittel, philosopher Martin Heidegger and legal-political analyst Carl Schmitt.6 Joseph Goebbels, mastermind of Nazi propaganda, had a doctorate in German literature from the University of Heidelberg. Josef Mengele, the notorious medical superintendent at Auschwitz, had doctorates in anthropology and medicine and was an assistant professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genetics.
There was little or no resistance to the Nazi programme on the part of the German intelligentsia. Academics were among its most zealous supporters, dismissing Jewish colleagues and banning their books without demur. Judges implemented the Nuremberg Laws, depriving Jews of all human rights, without protest. According to Ingo Mueller, even the Supreme Court showed an ‘obsessive determination to prosecute all Jews’.7 Doctors ran the sterilisation and euthanasia programmes. In Auschwitz ‘the killing programme was led by doctors from beginning to end’.8 Half of all German physicians joined the Nazi Physicians’ League.9
More than half the participants in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference that decided on the ‘Final Solution’, the complete extermination of Europe’s Jews, carried the title ‘Doctor’, either as medical men or as academics with doctorates,10 and 41 per cent of the SS Officer Corps were university educated, as opposed to 2 per cent in the population as a whole.11 In 1927 Julian Benda, in a famous book, Le Trahison des Clercs, spoke of how public discourse had turned into ‘the intellectual organisation of political hatreds’. This will be, he said, ‘one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity’.12
Almost no one is immune to dualism once it takes hold of a culture.
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Nazism as constructed by Hitler was a perfect pathological dualism. The children of light were the German nation, more specifically the Aryan race. The children of darkness were the Jews. They were the force of evil, the destroyers of Germany, the defilers of its racial purity, corrupters of its culture and underminers of its morale. Despite the fact that they were less than 1 per cent of the population of Germany, they were said to control its banks, its media and its fate: to be in secret conspiracy to manipulate the world.
As part of the logic of human sociality, the internal cohesion of a group is in direct proportion to the degree of threat it perceives from the outside. It follows that anyone who wants to unite a nation, especially one that has been deeply fractured, must demonise an adversary or, if necessary, invent an enemy. For the Turks it was the Armenians. For the Serbs it was the Muslims. For Stalin it was the bourgeoisie or the counter-revolutionaries. For Pol Pot it was the capitalists and intellectuals. For Hitler it was Christian Europe’s eternal Other, the Jews.
To remoralise a nation, leaders often revive memories of former glory. Vamik Volkan, who has applied concepts of splitting and projection to international conflict, emphasises the corollary: the chosen trauma, an event that ‘has caused a large group to face drastic common losses, to feel helpless and victimized by another group and to share a humiliating injury’. In Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic revived memories of the defeat of the Serbs by the Muslims in the Battle of Kosovo six hundred years earlier, in 1389. More recently Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and ISIS focused on the Crusades and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire by the West. For Hitler it wa
s the defeat of Germany in the First World War and the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles. For all this – the war itself, Germany’s defeat and its subsequent economic travails – Hitler blamed the Jews.
Once you can identify an enemy, reactivate a chosen trauma and unite all factions in fear and hate of a common threat, you activate the most primitive part of the brain, the amygdala with its instant and overwhelming defensive reactions, and render a culture susceptible to a pure and powerful dualism in which you are the innocent party and violence becomes both a justified revenge and the necessary protection of your group. The threefold defeat of morality then follows.
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The first stage is dehumanisation. This is the prelude to genocide. The paradox in the phrase ‘crimes against humanity’ is that the great crimes are committed against those you do not see as sharing your humanity. To the Hutus, the Tutsis were inyenzi, cockroaches. For the Nazis, the Jews were vermin, lice, parasites, a cancer that had to be removed, a diseased limb that had to be amputated. Goebbels spoke of the elimination of the Jews as ‘social hygiene’, just as ‘a doctor takes a bacillus out of circulation’.13 ‘The Jews are the lice of civilised humanity’, he said in 1941. ‘They have to be exterminated somehow.’14 Hitler spoke of the Jewish ‘racial tuberculosis’ and called for Germany to be ‘immunised’. We must ‘exterminate the poison if we want to recover’.15 Jews were ‘a parasite in the body of other races’16 and an ‘infection of our national ethnic body by blood poisoning’.17
Konrad Lorenz, who would later receive the Nobel Prize for his work on animals, wrote in an article for the Nazi Office for Racial Politics that a nation with ‘defective members’ was like an individual who had a malignant tumour. Surgical removal was necessary in both cases.18 A Nazi doctor in an extermination camp, when asked how he could have done what he did in the light of his Hippocratic oath as a doctor, replied that ‘out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.’19
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