Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

 
I must admit to finding it difficult not to want to quote all of this article from John Gray:

"The secular ideologies that had such power during the last century were deeply shaped by Christianity... Michael Burleigh argued that, from the Jacobins in the French Revolution to the anarchists of late 19th-century Russia, Europe produced a succession of political religions that had many of the features of the faith they aimed to replace. In imagining a perfected world at the end of history, Marx and Bakunin reproduced Christian eschatology: the belief that human life can be transformed in a vast revolutionary conflagration was apocalyptic myth rendered into secular terms. Christian concepts and values permeated many lesser-known ideologies such as positivism and the many varieties of utopianism... In a horrible way Nazism was a messianic movement, which offered the promise of a new life in a transfigured world to those who were allowed to survive the cataclysm that was to come.

Downplaying the role of the church in the crimes of the last century is part of a larger default in Burleigh's analysis. Medieval Christendom was hardly an oasis of peace. It was racked with savage wars and campaigns of systematic extermination that prefigure those of modern times. The crusade against the Cathars launched by Pope Innocent III at the start of the 13th century led to the deaths of around half a million people, many by mass hanging, drowning or torture. Violent millenarian movements repeatedly convulsed late-medieval and early-modern Europe. In the early 16th century, a communist New Jerusalem was established in the city of Munster in northwest Germany that had many of the features of later secular regimes, including the methodical use of terror. The extraordinary savagery of modern political religion does not come from giving up Christianity. It is a secular version of the faith-based violence that has been an integral part of Christianity throughout its history."


I've long taken the view that both fascism (or at least Nazism) and communism can be understood as sublimated christian sects as much as responses to economic conditions in the manner Polanyi suggested. In all cases, the principle of noncontradiction is regarded as sound. Induction is useless; the basic premise must be believed in, rather than known, and in either case, conclusions must follow by means of deduction from the basic premise, not induction from empirically obtained data. In both cases, the vision of the new realm is all that is of import, rather than considerations of individual autonomy and rights.

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posted by Richard 8:45 pm