Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (6 page)

In fact, as could be foreseen, history resumed on traditional lines. In intellectual terms the Cold War was a competition between two ideologies, Marxism and liberalism, that had a great deal in common. Though they saw one another as mortal enemies they differed chiefly on the question of which economic system was best suited to achieve goals they shared. Both were Enlightenment ideologies that looked forward to a universal civilization. Both interpreted history in reductive terms, viewing technological and economic development as primary and religion as a secondary factor of dwindling importance. Given these similarities it was only to be expected that the collapse of communism should be seen as a victory for western liberalism, but the actual effect was to render the ideological conflict that had dominated world politics throughout much of the second half of the twentieth century irrelevant.

With the world no longer divided by an obsolete controversy, the nations that were under communist rule returned to their diverse histories. Most eastern European countries became normal democratic states. In Russia a new type of authoritarianism has emerged under the aegis of a ruling elite drawn from the former Soviet intelligence services, which shows signs of being more enduring than the semi-liberal regime that emerged under western auspices immediately after the Soviet collapse. In the Balkans nationalism has reappeared, with war and ethnic cleansing in its wake. Central Asia has become the site of a new Great Game, with the world’s energy-thirsty powers vying for control of oil and natural gas against a background of dictatorial regimes and rising Islamic militancy.

Let us be clear: this is no return to stability. The post-Cold War world was one in which the geo-political patterns set in place after the Second World War were breaking up, and American defeat in Iraq has set in motion a further reconfiguration of global politics. The
result of the attempt to project American-style democracy worldwide has been a steep decline in American power. For the first time since the 1930s, undemocratic regimes are the rising stars in the international system, while the US has ceased to be the pivotal player in some of the system’s most important conflicts. It is China not the US that is central in the crisis in North Korea, and without the engagement of Iran and Syria there can be no peace in Iraq. America has become a great power like others in history, and like them faces dilemmas that are only partly soluble.

The Bush administration’s campaign for global democracy has been seen in much of the world as a self-serving rationale for American interests, and the two are clearly intertwined. Many of America’s military involvements have been moves in an ongoing resource war. One goal of the American invasion of Iraq was to control the country’s oil reserves, and an American attack on Iran would have control over the natural resources of the Gulf as one of its objectives. Side by side with its idealistic rhetoric, the United States has pursued geo-political strategies to secure control of energy supplies. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss Bush’s talk of universal democracy as mere hypocrisy. For a time American power became a vehicle for an attempt to remake the world. The disaster that continues to unfold in Iraq is not the result of policy being shaped by corporate interests, or of any conspiracy. It is a testimony to the power of faith.

Communism collapsed but utopianism did not disappear. It was given a new lease on life and came to power in the world’s most powerful state. How did this happen? How did Utopia – once found mainly on the Left – come to power through the Right? It was a development that signalled a fundamental shift in politics, and if we are to understand it we need to look beyond the past few years. Without the 9/11 attacks the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration could not have achieved their dominance and the war on Iraq could not have been launched, but lying behind these events are political changes that occurred over the past thirty years. During this period traditional conservatism ceased to exist. Like the far Left in the past the Right that developed from the 1980s onwards saw humanity advancing from darkness to light by way of the fires of war and revolution.

The transformation that overtook the Right was profound. Ever since the French Revolution it has defined itself by opposition to utopian schemes. Its philosophy was summarized by Britain’s greatest twentieth-century painter, Francis Bacon – also an acute observer of politics and culture – when he remarked that he voted for the Right because it made the best of a bad job. In the past the Right stood for a realistic acceptance of human frailty and a corresponding scepticism regarding the prospect of progress. Change was not always resisted, but any idea of history as a march towards the sunlit uplands was firmly rejected. Politics was seen as a way of coping with the fact of human imperfection. Often this view was grounded in the Christian doctrine of original sin, but a version of the same idea can be found in conservative thinkers with no such beliefs. Whether religious or not, the Right understood that the flaws of human nature could not be overcome.

During the past generation the Right abandoned this philosophy of imperfection and embraced the pursuit of Utopia. In its militant faith in progress, the Right accepted a radical strand of Enlightenment thinking that renewed, in altered forms, some of the core myths of Christianity. Like other modern revolutionary movements, the Utopian Right was a vehicle for beliefs that go back to medieval times and beyond.

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.
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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.’
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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.

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.