by John Gray
Rightwing utopianism started as a secular movement. The neo-liberals who shaped western policies in the 1990s were mostly bien-pensant economists with a naive faith in their version of reason. The advance of the free market might need to be helped on its way –by the structural adjustment programmes that were imposed by the International Monetary Fund on many emerging countries, for example; but it would spread and be accepted on account of the growing prosperity it brought. This innocent creed was ill-suited to the harsh realities of the post-Cold War world, and it was not long before it was replaced by the more militant faith of neo-conservatism. Neo-conservatives understood that free markets would not spread throughout the world in a peaceful process – it would have to be assisted by the intensive application of military force. The post-Cold War world would be an era of blood and iron, not peace.
As an intellectual movement neo-conservatism originated on the Left, and in some ways it is a reversion to a radical kind of Enlightenment thinking that has disappeared in Europe. Europe is not without its own illusions – such as the idea that the diverse countries that compose it can somehow be welded into a federal super-state capable of acting as a rival power to the United States – but it has abandoned the belief that human life can be remade by force. Even in France –the home of the Jacobins – faith in revolution was killed off by the history of the twentieth century, but when it died in Europe it did not vanish from the world. In a flight that would have delighted Hegel it migrated to America where it settled on the neo-conservative Right. Neo-conservatives are noted for their disdain for Europe but one of their achievements is to have injected a defunct European revolutionary tradition into the heart of American political life.30
In Europe conservatism arose as a reaction against the Enlightenment project of remaking society on an ideal model – a reaction that was continued by the American authors of the Federalist Papers, who viewed government as a means of coping with human imperfection rather than as an instrument for re-creating society. In contrast, neo-conservatives have been distinguished by their belligerent optimism, which links them with a powerful utopian current in Enlightenment thinking and with the Christian fundamentalist faith that evil can be defeated. In the US the Utopian Right has been able to draw both on religious traditions that expect imminent catastrophe and on secular hopes of continuing progress. One reason for its rise was its ability to mobilize these conflicting systems of belief. Beyond the political shifts of the past generation and the traumatic events of the last few years the Utopian Right achieved ascendancy by remobilizing some of humanity’s most ancient – and most dangerous – myths.
As the Utopian Right became more militant it became less secular, and at its height in America it had many of the features of a millenarian movement. In the early 1990s neo-conservatives joined forces in a strategic alliance with Christian fundamentalists, and in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks American politics acquired an unmistakably apocalyptic tone. Declaring that the United States was at risk from the forces of evil, Bush launched a campaign to eradicate terrorism throughout the world. Two years later he declared his intention of exporting American democracy to the Middle East and other parts of the world. Each of these projects was unrealizable. When pursued together they were a recipe for disaster. This fact was well understood in the major branches of American government. The State Department, the uniformed military in the Pentagon and the CIA all resisted these policies or tried to temper them with a dose of realism. For the most part they failed and the juggernaut rolled on.
The belief that evil can be removed from human life has assumed many shapes, of which post-millennialism is only one. Many of the theo-conservatives who have been George W. Bush’s power base expect an End to come about by divine intervention. They view the world’s conflicts – especially those in biblical lands – as preludes to Armageddon, a final battle in which the struggle of light and dark will be concluded. Others expect to be delivered from these trials in a Rapture in which they ascend into heaven. In both cases the imperfect world in which humanity has lived will soon pass away.
The peculiar quality of the view of the world that came to power in the Bush administration is not that it is obsessed with evil. It is that it does not finally believe in evil. Referring to the 9/11 terrorist attacks president Bush announced: ‘Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.’31 In terms of established Christian doctrine this is a thoroughly heterodox declaration. Since Augustine the mainstream of Christian thought has rejected the temptation of moral absolutism in politics: the kingdom of heaven is not of this earth; no human institution can claim to embody good.
A venerable cliché has it that Bush’s view of things is Manichean; but the followers of Mani were subtle thinkers who accepted that evil could never be eliminated. Talk of ending evil is no more Manichean than it is Augustinian. It is an expression of Christian post-millennialism, which harks back to the belief of the first Christians that the blemishes of human life can be wiped away in a benign catastrophe.
The political violence of the modern West can only be understood as an eschatological phenomenon. Western civilization contains many traditions that are not implicated in this way. In the ancient world pagan philosophers did not aim to convert humanity by force any more than the Hebrew prophets did. Throughout western history there have been sceptics such as Michel de Montaigne who viewed doubt as the essence of civilization. Within the Enlightenment there have been thinkers who rejected any idea of a permanent transformation in human affairs. But these strands have rarely been dominant –the world has never been dotted with statues of Thomas Hobbes or Benedict Spinoza, for example. The most powerful western traditions have been those that looked to alter the very nature of human life –a project that has always been given to violence.
Contemporary liberal thinkers tend to view the totalitarian movements of the last century as anomalies in western history, and there is a similar tendency among conservatives regarding the millenarian frenzies of the Middle Ages. These outbreaks of mass killing are seen as departures from the peaceful norms of a civilization that is good, healthy and harmonious. Not all the world’s evils come from ‘the West’ – however that amorphous concept is defined. Humans are an extremely violent species; there are plenty of examples of mass killing in non-western societies. Where the West is distinctive is in using force and terror to alter history and perfect humanity. The chiliastic passions that convulsed late medieval Europe and which reappeared in the twentieth century are not aberrations from a pristine western tradition. They go back all the way, and they continue today. In the twentieth century they were embodied in secular regimes that aimed to remake humanity by force.
2
Enlightenment and Terror in the Twentieth Century
To destroy a city, a state, an empire even, is an essentially finite act; but to attempt the total annihilation – the liquidation – of so ubiquitous but so theoretically or ideologically defined an entity as a social class or racial abstraction is quite another, and one impossible even in conception to a mind not conditioned by western habits of thought.
Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff1
The twenty-first century has been a time of terror, and it is easy to imagine that in this it is different from the one that has just ended. In fact terror was practised during the last century on a scale unequalled at any other time in history, but unlike the terror that is most feared today much of it was done in the service of secular hopes. The totalitarian regimes of the last century embodied some of the Enlightenment’s boldest dreams. Some of their worst crimes were done in the service of progressive ideals, while even regimes that viewed themselves as enemies of Enlightenment values attempted a project of transforming humanity by using the power of science, whose origins are in Enlightenment thinking.
The role of the Enlightenment in twentieth-century terror remains a blind spot in western perception. Libraries are stocked with books insisting that
mass repression in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China was a by-product of traditions of despotism. The implication is that it is the people of the countries that were subject to communist rule that are to blame, while the communist ideology is innocent of any role in the crimes these regimes committed. A similar lesson has been drawn from the catastrophe that has ensued as a result of the Bush administration’s project of regime change in Iraq: it is not the responsibility of those who conceived and implemented the project, whose goals and intentions remain irreproachable. The fault lies with the Iraqis, a lesser breed that has spurned the freedom it was nobly offered.
There is more than a hint of racism in this way of thinking. During the last century mass repression was practised in countries with vastly different histories and traditions whose only common feature was the fact that they were subjects of a utopian experiment. The machinery of terror – show trials, mass imprisonment and state control of political and cultural life through a ubiquitous secret police – existed in every communist regime. Mongolia and East Germany, Cuba and Bulgaria, Romania and North Korea, Eastern Germany and Soviet Central Asia all suffered similar types of repression. The type of government these countries had before they became subject to communist rule – democratic or otherwise – made very little difference. Czechoslovakia was a model democracy before the Second World War but that did not prevent it becoming a totalitarian dictatorship after the communist takeover. The strength of the Church in Poland may have prevented the imposition of full-scale totalitarianism, but like every other communist country it suffered periods of intense repression. If communist regimes had been established in France or Italy, Britain or Scandinavia the result would have been no different.
The apparent similarities between countries with communist regimes imposed on them stem from their shared fates rather than their earlier histories. While some communist regimes made advances in social welfare, all experienced mass repression along with endemic corruption and environmental devastation. Terror in these and other communist countries was partly a response to these failures and the resulting lack of popular legitimacy of the regimes, but it was also a continuation of a European revolutionary tradition. The communist regimes were established in pursuit of a utopian ideal whose origins lie in the heart of the Enlightenment. Though the fact is less widely recognized, the Nazis were also in some ways children of the Enlightenment. They had only scorn for Enlightenment ideals of human freedom and equality, but they continued a powerful illiberal strand in Enlightenment thinking and made use of an influential Enlightenment ideology of ‘scientific racism’.
The last century witnessed many atrocities that owed nothing to Enlightenment thinking. Though it was facilitated by the history of colonialism in the country and by the policies of France – the chief former colonial power – the genocide that claimed a million lives in Rwanda in 1994 was also a struggle for land and water. Rivalry for resources has often been a factor in genocide, as have national and tribal enmities. So has sheer predatory greed. The genocide committed in the Belgian Congo by agents of King Leopold II when he ruled it as his personal fiefdom between 1885 and 1908 eventually claimed somewhere between eight and ten million people, who perished from murder, exhaustion, starvation, disease and a collapsing birth rate. Though he justified his enterprise in terms of spreading progress and Christianity, Leopold’s goal was not ideological. It was his personal enrichment and that of his business associates.2
It is not terror of this kind that marks off the twentieth century from earlier times. At its worst, twentieth-century terror was used with the aim of transforming human life. The peculiar quality of twentieth-century terror is not its scale – unprecedented though that was. It is that its goal was to perfect human life – an objective integral to totalitarianism.
There is a school of thought that mistrusts the concept of totalitarianism, and it is true that the picture of it propagated by thinkers after the Second World War was over-simple. Hannah Arendt blurred important differences between Nazism and communism. Communism was a radical version of an ideal of equality in which all humankind could share, while Nazism excluded most of humanity and condemned a section of it to death. The Stalinist regime murdered many more people than the Nazis. Entire peoples such as the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tatars were subject to deportations that were genocidal in their effects, and there were sections of the Gulag from which it was practically impossible to emerge alive. Even so, there were no extermination camps in the former USSR. Arendt also portrayed totalitarian states as impersonal machines in which individual responsibility was practically non-existent.3 In fact, life in totalitarian regimes was endemic chaos. Terror was an integral part of the system but it did not happen without personal decisions. People became accomplices in Nazi crimes for the pettiest reasons – in the case of Eichmann, careerism. It would have been better to speak of the banality of the evildoers than of the banality of evil. The crimes they committed were not banal and flowed from beliefs that were integral to the regime in which they occurred.4
The pursuit of Utopia need not end in totalitarianism. So long as it is confined to voluntary communities it tends to be self-limiting –though when combined with apocalyptic beliefs, as in the Jonestown Massacre in which around a thousand people committed mass suicide in Guyana in 1978, the end can be violent. It is when state power is used to remake society that the slide to totalitarianism begins. The fact that the utopian project can only be promoted by dismantling existing social institutions leads to a programme that goes well beyond anything attempted by traditional tyrannies. If totalitarianism does not result it is because the regime is overthrown or breaks down, or else utopian commitment wanes and the system lapses into authoritarianism. When a utopian ideology captures power in a democracy, as happened for a time during the Bush administration, there is a loss of freedom as the power of government is used to mask the failings of the utopian project. Unless a determined attempt is made to reverse the trend, some type of illiberal democracy is the result.
Many criteria have been used to mark off totalitarianism from other kinds of repressive regime. One test is the extent of state control of the whole of society, which is a by-product of the attempt to remake human life. Bolshevism and Nazism were vehicles for such a project, while – despite the fact that the term ‘totalitarian’ first came into use in Italy during the Mussolini era – Italian fascism was not. Nor – despite being at times extremely violent – was the clerical fascism of central and eastern Europe between the two world wars. There are plenty of very nasty regimes that cannot be described as totalitarian. Pre-modern theocracies used fear to enforce religious orthodoxy, but they did not aim to remodel humanity any more than did traditional tyrannies. Leninism and Nazism aimed to achieve such a transformation. Describing these regimes as totalitarian reflects this fact.
SOVIET COMMUNISM: A MODERN MILLENARIAN REVOLUTION
Bolshevismas a social phenomenon is to be reckoned as a religion, not as an ordinary political movement.
Bertrand Russell5
In the last pages of his pamphlet ‘Literature and Revolution’, published in 1923, Leon Trotsky gives a glimpse of the transformation in human life he believed was within reach. He writes not about changes in society but an alteration in human nature. The change he anticipates will be in the biology of the human species. In the future, he writes,
Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training … It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correc
tly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest level. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.6
In Trotsky’s view history is the process in which humanity gains control of itself and the world. Just as there are no limits to the growth of human knowledge so there is no limit to human advance in ethics and politics. If there are flaws in human nature science can correct them. This is the true meaning of perfectibility in radical Enlightenment thought: not so much a condition of static perfection as a vision of unbounded human possibility. Trotsky’s vision in which science is used to perfect humanity expresses a recurrent modern fantasy. The belief that science can free humankind from its natural limitations, perhaps even make it immortal, thrives today in cults such as cryogenics, transhumanism and Extropianism that acknowledge their debts to the Enlightenment.7
From the start the Bolsheviks aimed to create a new type of human being. Unlike the Nazis they did not see this new humanity in racial terms, but like the Nazis they were ready to employ science and pseudo-science in an attempt to achieve their goal. Human nature was to be altered so that ‘socialist man’ could come into being. Such a project was impossible with the scientific knowledge that was available at the time, but the Bolsheviks were ready to use any method, no matter how inhuman, and adopt any theory however dubious that promised to deliver the transformation of which they dreamt. From the early twenties onwards the Soviet regime harassed genuine scientists. Later, as in Nazi Germany, science was perverted for the purposes of terror. By the late thirties human subjects – German and Japanese prisoners of war, soldiers and diplomats, Poles, Koreans and Chinese, political prisoners and ‘nationalists’ of all kinds (including Jews) – were being used in medical experiments in the Lubyanka prison in the centre of Moscow. Despite attempts to resist the process, science became an integral part of the totalitarian state.8
