Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  If we see the apocalyptic-utopian-millenarian idea everywhere we look in the modern and post-­modern world, that’s probably because it is everywhere. As the English philosopher, John Gray, puts it, “if a simple definition of western civilization could be formulated it would have to be framed in terms of the central role of millenarian thinking.”2 From this millenarian foundation come ideas of progress, revolutionary ideologies, even the idea of self-­improvement so popular in the West: everything is rooted in the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic.

  While apocalypse (Greek: apocalypsis, “revelation”) and millennium (Latin: mille + ennium, “thousand years”) and utopia (Greek: u+topos, “no place”) all have different meanings, in a sense they emerge from a common matrix. Apocalyptic and millenarian movements are related and often indistinguishable, although believers in an apocalypse (calamity) don’t always have faith that a “millennium” (or thousand-year kingdom) or utopian state will emerge from disaster. Conversely, utopias, and the rupture with present reality that they imply, aren’t always conceived as necessarily being preceded by apocalyptic disaster. But all three words express the same sharp departure from reality, either by divine intervention or great human will, and the institution of a new social and political order. Through this book I will consider the three phenomena together and often refer to them collectively by the acronym “AUM” (apocalyptic utopian millenarian).

  Millenarian thinking goes back to explanations for the failed first century apocalyptic prophet known as Jesus “Christ,”3 although apocalyptic thinking in general goes back much farther, with some tracing it to Zoroaster, or “Zarathustra” who lived in what is today known as Afghanistan, around 1500 B.C.4 Millenarianism, then, emerged out of the apocalyptic faith of Jesus and his disciples as a response to the “cognitive dissonance” of “belief disconfirmation” resulting from Jesus’s execution for the political crime of treason or subversion. Both “cognitive dissonance” and “belief disconfirmation” were ideas that sociologist Leon Festinger arrived at through his study of a flying saucer cult in the mid 1950s. In his study, when the flying saucers failed to arrive (belief disconfirmation) believers had to deal with the “cognitive dissonance” or the gap between their beliefs and the reality.

  Similarly, when Jesus failed to overthrow Roman imperial rule and become the new king of Israel, and the disciples had to deal with the belief disconfirmation and cognitive dissonance of his failure and death, they did so by, in a sense, rewriting the story. In the new narrative the gospel writers (and later Christians) had Jesus ascending to heaven and promising to return in the near future to set up a kingdom and rule over the entire earth. In the Revelation or Apocalypse, the final book of the Christian Bible,5 there are references to a “great tribulation” and a “thousand year reign” (millennium) of Jesus that Christians understood in various ways. The early Church believers were convinced, based on Jesus’s own words in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 13 that he would be returning within the lifetime of his disciples. When that didn’t happen Christians began to develop doctrines as a coping mechanism for the cognitive dissonance of yet another failed expectation.

  The “Book of the Revelation of John” (Revelation) was one such response, which portrayed a second coming of Jesus as a cosmic event in which even stars fell from heaven, evil was vanquished, and the “Heavenly” Jerusalem descended to the earth, with streets of gold and walls of jewels. The Revelation was to become the basis of Christian millenarian tradition and the numerous conflicting understandings of the future reign of Jesus on the earth. The emerging church tended to downplay the importance of Revelation and leave the entire second coming of Jesus and the final judgment as vague future events. This became known as the “amillennial” view, and one that St. Augustine and much of the historical Christian Church adopted and taught. But there were other currents within the Church that were excited and inspired by the apocalyptic passages of the Bible, most notably the 13th century theologian Joachim di Fiores, whose apocalyptic and millenarian ideas continue to influence movements to this day.6

  The millenarian tradition split between the “pre-­millennialists” and the “post-millennialists,” the former believing Jesus return would initiate his millennial reign on earth, and the latter believing his return would come after a peaceful millennium. The two millennialist traditions had very dramatic, and also very different, effects on Western religious and secular culture.

  According to pre-millennialists, the return of Jesus would be sudden and chaotic and represent a dramatic rupture with the present order of the world, and then the thousand-year earthly reign of Jesus (the millennium) would begin. It could be argued that this view was more in keeping with the apocalyptic, messianic tradition of “Second Temple Judaism” (the “apocalyptic” era that ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.). This apocalyptic view inspired the revolutionary excitement of the radical medieval sects, and it also left its mark on modern revolutionary currents.

  The post-millennial view emerged in the 17th century among the Protestants, particularly the restorationist Calvinists, Unitarians, and Puritans. This view held that humanity would progressively improve as a result of the first arrival of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and then gradually the earth would enter into a great millennium of peace, followed by the final judgment. This was the view of many early social reformers, heavily influencing the Abolitionist movement, and even may have contributed to the theory of evolution as conceived by Charles Darwin.7 Post-millennialism certainly was the foundation for the Western belief in “progress” since, according to the early Puritan thinkers, “the earthly paradise is to be merely the last, culminating state in the series of progressive stages which can be discerned in history.”8

  This post-millennial view was certainly a major part of the foundational structure or ordering principle of North American religious and secular thought as it emerged, but there were also strong pre-millennial elements. Either way, the American Revolution was an expression of what came to be known as “civil millennialism.”9 Millenarian prophecies, drawn primarily from the books of Daniel and Revelation in the Bible, were “basic to the formation of American revolutionary ideology in the late eighteenth century” and among the primary incitements to the American Revolutionary War.10 And the focus of all human history, according to this perspective, was the beautiful, magical “New World” that, among other things, inspired Thomas More’s Utopia, and awakened other millennial dreams, especially among English Protestants. “God, it began to be thought, is redeeming both individual souls and society in parallel course; and, in the next century, a new nation in a recently discovered part of the world seemed suddenly to be illuminated by a ray of heavenly light, to be at the western end of the rainbow that arched over the civilized world.”11

  Obviously, that land was the United States of America. “More than almost any other modern nation, the United States was a product of the Protestant Reformation, seeking an earthly paradise in which to perfect a reformation of the Church,” Charles L. Sanford wrote.12 And it’s clear that the apocalyptic, millennial ideal continues to be very much alive in the US today in both its religious and secular forms13 and even, as John Gray argues, the cornerstone of the Western world itself.14

  Within this civil religious framework, especially as it was conceived in mid-twentieth century North America, the world was a battlefield for the war between the Children of God and the Children of Satan. And, during the years of the Cold War, if “we” were the Children of God, it was clear who the Children of Satan were. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the system of “Godless communism,” which our “Western Christian Civilization” was opposing, was as much an outgrowth of the apocalyptic as our own system.

  If the dominant thread of apocalyptic thought in the US was post-millennial, the pre-millennial apocalyptic was dominant in the USSR. Frederick Engels saw the “chiliastic dream-visions of ancient Christianity” as “a very serviceable starting-point�
�� for a movement that eventually “merged with the modern proletarian movement.”15 Karl Marx’s first published writings included such mystical texts as “On the Union of Christ with the Faithful” and the apocalyptic vision for the impending Revolution in which he and Engels shared a faith had roots in Judeo-Christian millenarianism. Modern utopianism and other currents of socialist, communist, and much other Left wing traditions were all, to varying degrees, modern products of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought, or showed at least some tinge of the apocalyptic worldview. The Revolution of Marxism and Leninism that would lead eventually to “communism” follows the same mythic structure of sudden and complete transformations into an idealized world that we find in the Apocalypse of John. Both Marxism-Leninism and apocalyptic Christians assume the struggle of a noble class of people (workers, believers, respectively) against diabolical evil (capitalism, or the “World, the flesh and the Devil” respectively), which the noble class wins. After the consummation and victory of the struggle both see an utterly transformed world, some version (a secular version in one) of a “heavenly city descending to earth,” the scene that ends the Book of Revelation.

  And then there are all the other apocalyptic, utopian, and millenarian movements organized in the shadows of these two Goliath utopias of the twentieth century. Anarchism is a very diverse tradition that defies most categories, by definition. Still, the utopian and millenarian spirit clearly imbues much of this segment of the Left. Bakunin’s destructive impulses, for instance, had something deeply apocalyptic about them, and a millenarian spirit was also quite evident in the Spanish anarchists he influenced.16 In an account of one dramatic moment of the Spanish Civil War as the city of Málaga went down in flames, Gerald Brenan heard an anarchist echo the apocalyptic sayings of Jesus as he said, “And I tell you—not one stone will be left on another stone—no, not a plant nor even a cabbage will grow there, so that there may be no more wickedness in the world.”17

  On the extreme margins of the US empire the apocalyptic idea plays a major role among the Christian Identity movement, Survivalists and many other far right organizations and movements. And of course there is ISIS in the Middle East,18 and the apocalypticism of Al Qaeda and other Islamic fringe groups, all of whom inherited their apocalyptic sensibilities from Christianity and presumably from the Prophet himself.19

  Like everyone of my generation born mid-20th century, my worldview was formed between the millennialism of the American empire, and the apocalypticism of the Soviet. This dichotomous consciousness became the “motor force” of the 1960s and the shadowy reality that came to be known as the Cold War. Both sides of the binary were secular ideologies with deep roots in a Judeo-Christian apocalyptic ethos that would remain foundational, despite polite denials (in the “Western” countries) or even violent attempts to extirpate it (most notably in the Soviet Union). In the same way the Catholic Conquistadors built their churches on top of the indigenous temples, and often of the same stones, the modern world has been erected on the foundations of an apocalyptic faith, utterly transforming it in the process.

  Chapter One: From Mid-Century to the Sixties

  My father, William “Harmon” Ross, was a farm boy who grew up in Depression and Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma. As a desperate teenager he’d hitchhiked to California and gone to work in the Oakland shipyards at the beginning of the Second World War. He’d lied about his age to join the Navy during that war, and then reenlisted in the Air Force. When I knew him he was loud (due to having gone mostly deaf from working around jet engines) and he had an accent so thick he could have wiped it on his jeans. He had what one relative called “a meanness” to him, which I could have attested to even before I could speak. He terrified me until I got old enough to fight back, but even then he could make me shake in my boots.

  While moonlighting as a bartender when he was stationed in Seattle, Washington Harmon met my mother, Mary Carol Crane, an ex-Marine who’d been raised in the Hoovervilles of Seattle. She could match wits with Harmon, which she often did, but he had the louder voice and that alone commanded submission from the whole family. She’d had a wild youth, but after the marriage she’d settled down, eventually converting to Billy Graham’s particular brand of millenarian dispensationalist Christianity.1

  Besides poverty, the two sides of my family had something else in common: their diverse ancient lineages had only recently been homogenized into white Protestantism. My maternal grandmother had neglected to tell her anti-­Semitic spouse that she was Jewish, and neither my mother nor the grandchildren (like me) knew that we weren’t really Protestants, nor therefore, in those days, qualified as “white.” On my father’s side a not-too distant ancestor also took advantage of a hole in the American apartheid wall that separated WASPs out from all others to leave the Cherokee tribe and join the dominant nest. Miscegenation had already lightened her complexion, making the defection from the tribe relatively easy, and leaving her people behind probably seemed a small price for my great-great grandmother to be able to manage her own life, far from the control of the Indian agent and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And so it was that both branches of my family became white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, and generations of ancestors with their non-white and non-Christian traditions were disappeared or shunted off into the underbrush around the family tree.

  Other than these similarities, the two branches of my family bore little resemblance to each other. Despite my mother’s recent conversion to a rather conservative Evangelical Christianity, she was still a liberal compared to my father’s side of the family: they were Pentecostal Holiness of the Assembly of God variety, with a moderate sprinkling of, what by comparison were “moderate,” Southern Baptists. Most of my aunts and uncles on the Ross side, then, spoke two languages: An Oklahoma dialect of English and the “unknown tongue” of the Holy Spirit. I grew up with a personal understanding of the term “holy rollers” those summers I went to visit relatives in Oklahoma before we eventually moved there. I watched grown adults, who were the most unemotional, reserved, and opaque of people all week long, transformed on Sunday mornings. They would enter and take their seats at the pews and tap their feet to the music of the electric guitar, drums, and choir as it sang the old favorites like, “I’ll Fly Away,” and “I’ll see you in the Rapture.” The temperature would rise until the first few would be “touched by the Spirit” and soon begin dancing out from the pews to babble, shriek, moan, wail, groan, cry, and roll in the aisles of Tyler, Oklahoma Assembly of God Church, the old one-room school house built early the previous century by none other than my great grandfather.

  My father never quite readjusted to that culture when he returned to Oklahoma in his mid-forties. The military and service overseas had changed him, so while his family “danced in the Spirit” and spoke in unknown tongues, he sat quietly with my mother in the pew, both of them with their heads bowed.

  Because my father had made the US Air Force a career, my first memories of religious instruction took place in a more regimented and rationalized context than the rollicking holiness world he’d grown up in. My earliest memories of church took place in the US military chapel. Here God’s representative, dressed in an awe-inspiring officer’s uniform, led our Sunday school assembly in choruses of “Climb, climb up Sunshine Mountain” and “Onward Christian soldiers.” This latter was among my favorites as I was able to march in place along with the rest of the assembly as we sang this hymn, our hearts welling up with pride as we looked forward at the Chaplain, himself marching in place at the front of the assembly flanked on one side by the Christian white flag with the blue square containing the red cross and on the other side, mirroring it, the Star Spangled Banner.

  My mystical civil religious instruction was complemented and reinforced by my love of magical fairy tales and the stories of comic book superheroes. I lived in those worlds and in my own imaginary land because the outside world was full of violence, sudden dislocations, and monsters, like my father, and the other kids, many of t
hem bullies, at the (military) base schools. I understand now that my father was just trying to toughen me up to survive in an uncertain world and life among the other children of the warriors, and for that, he thought, my sensitivity and dislike of sports, and fighting, would have to change. As he saw it, the best way to change his son was by the use of fear or force, the latter of which involved beating, verbal abuse, slapping, and an array of techniques he’d probably been subjected to when he grew up on the farm in Oklahoma or during his years in the Air Force. It was, alas, a losing strategy.

  On the other hand, my mother was moved by my sensitivity, creative hunger, and curiosity, so she encouraged me to follow my passions, and she was always eager to hear and read the stories and little books I wrote. She was an eternal child, playful, with an insatiable curiosity, a passion for learning, and a rebellious nature that even more than fifty years of marriage to my father never managed to destroy.

  We lived a fairly settled life on bases in Germany and then in the “Economy” on a farm near Alconbury, England. It was at this latter base where Master Sergeant Ross was prematurely delivered from his life as a jet engine mechanics instructor by a heart attack at the ripe old age of thirty-four. Certainly the fact that he was NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) with a great amount of responsibility and therefore pressure, and that he was drinking and smoking too much, and eating a very poor diet, all contributed to the condition. But the heart attack itself had been precipitated on Christmas Eve by his commanding officer who had, six months before, ordered him to work out a lesson plan on his office blackboard. As Santa Claus was preparing to deliver presents to all the good little boys and girls (and, no doubt, lumps of coal to the communist children), my father’s commanding officer came into the office as Master Sergeant Ross put the period on the final sentence. He looked it over silently, nodded, and then said, “Sergeant Ross, erase the board.” Incredulous, my father began to reply, “but sir, this is six months…” but the officer cut him off. “Sergeant Ross, I think you know what an order is.”