by John Gray
Late eighteenth-century religious movements such as Methodism displayed many millenarian features. Whole villages in Yorkshire proclaimed they were ‘saved’. At the start of the nineteenth century Joanna Southcott led a mass movement in which tens of thousands of people received from her a special seal, which ensured they would join the company of the Elect after the Millennium.24
Around the end of the eighteenth century apocalyptic movements existed side by side with dissenting sects that prepared the way for the secular belief in progress. William Godwin – the novelist and anarchist who promoted a belief in human perfectibility – was born in a family of Sandemanians, a small Christian sect, while Thomas Paine – who achieved fame as an ideologue of the American Revolution – began as a Quaker. Dissenting religious traditions interacted with English Jacobinism – some of Joanna Southcott’s followers were former Jacobins, for example – until the Jacobin movement in England was destroyed in the wave of repression after the French Revolution.
Post-millennial beliefs were widely current by the start of the nineteenth century. Christian thinkers who propagated these beliefs insisted that humanity served only as God’s helper. Advancing scientific knowledge was welcomed as a means of realizing the divine plan. But the idea that human action can initiate a radical shift in history had been injected into western life. It was not long before post-millennialism mutated into the Enlightenment belief that humanity is an inherently progressive species.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment aimed to supplant Christianity, but they could do so only if they were able to satisfy the hopes it had implanted. As a result they could not admit – what pre-Christian thinkers took for granted – that human history has no overall meaning. Carl Becker – the American scholar whose book The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) showed how much Christianity shaped the Enlightenment – described the problem they faced:
In order to defeat Christian philosophy the Philosophers had to meet it on the level of certain common preconceptions. They could never rout the enemy by denying that human life is a significant drama – the notion was too widely, too unconsciously held, even by the Philosophers themselves, for that; but, admitting that human life is a significant drama, the Philosophers could claim that the Christian version of the drama was a false and pernicious one; and their best hope of displacing the Christian version lay in recasting it, and bringing it up to date.25
Many modern thinkers have tried to avoid a view of history as a battle of good and evil and instead presented it as a series of stages. In this view human knowledge advances in cumulative fashion, and so do improvements in ethics and politics: progress in science will be matched by progress in society, and history is a march to a better world. There is no mention here of any final battle, but it has proved impossible to avoid apocalyptic thinking. By maintaining that the crimes of history are the result of error, Enlightenment philosophers create a problem of evil as insoluble as any that confronts Christian theologians. Why are humans so fond of error? Why has growing knowledge been used to establish new kinds of tyranny and wage ever more destructive wars? In struggling to answer these questions Enlightenment thinkers cannot help falling back into a view of history as a battle between light and dark. The light may be that of knowledge and the darkness that of ignorance, but the view of the world is the same.
Modern political religions may reject Christianity, but they cannot do without demonology. The Jacobins, the Bolsheviks and the Nazis all believed vast conspiracies were mounted against them, as do radical Islamists today. It is never the flaws of human nature that stand in the way of Utopia. It is the workings of evil forces. Ultimately these dark forces will fail, but only after they have tried to block human advance by every kind of nefarious device. This is the classic millenarian syndrome, and in the forms in which they have shaped modern politics the millenarian and the utopian mentality are one and the same.26
During much of the nineteenth century, utopianism was embodied in voluntary communities that were often ridiculous but usually harmless. These communities lived in hopes of a fundamental alteration in human affairs, but they did not try to bring it about by force. Twentieth-century revolutionary movements were shaped by a different utopian tradition. It was the Jacobins who first conceived of terror as an instrument for perfecting humanity. Medieval Europe was no oasis of peace – it was wracked by almost continuous wars. Yet no one believed violence could perfect humanity. Belief in original sin stood immovably in the way. Millenarians were ready to use force to overthrow the power of the Church but none of them imagined that violence could bring about the Millennium – only God could do that. It was only with the Jacobins that it came to be believed that humanly initiated terror could create a new world.
The Jacobins began as a radical club, which soon exercised a powerful influence on the course of the French Revolution. Through leaders such as Maximilien Robespierre – himself a casualty of the Terror who was guillotined in 1794, and who in 1792 delivered a prophetic warning against the dangers of trying to export freedom by force of arms – they made terror an integral part of the revolutionary programme. Influenced by Rousseau’s belief in innate human goodness, the Jacobins believed society had become corrupt as a result of repression but could be transformed by the methodical use of force. The Terror was necessary in order to defend the Revolution against internal and external enemies; but it was also a technique of civic education and an instrument of social engineering. To reject terror on moral grounds was unforgivable. As Robespierre put it in a speech to the National Convention in Paris on 26 February 1794, ‘Pity is treason.’ A higher form of human life was within reach – even a higher type of human being – but only once humanity had been purified by violence.
This faith in violence flowed into many later revolutionary currents. Nineteenth-century anarchists such as Nechayev and Bakunin, the Bolsheviks Lenin and Trotsky, anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, the regimes of Mao and Pol Pot, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Guard in the 1980s, radical Islamic movements and neo-conservative groups mesmerized by fantasies of creative destruction – these highly disparate elements are at one in their faith in the liberating power of violence. In this they are all disciples of the Jacobins.27
The French Terror of 1792–4 is the prototype for every subsequent millenarian revolution. Tens of thousands lost their lives through execution by revolutionary tribunals and death in prison. Once we include the deaths resulting from quashing the counter-revolutionary insurgency in the Vendée (a region of western France where counterrevolutionaries were killed by methods that included mass drowning) the human casualties of the Terror run far higher. In all, up to a third of the population of that region may have been slaughtered – a level of mass killing that can be compared with that which occurred in Pol Pot’s Cambodia.28 Like many revolutionaries after them the Jacobins introduced a new calendar to mark the new era they had begun. They were not mistaken in believing it marked a turning point in history. The era of political mass murder had arrived.
An Enlightenment thinker such as the Marquis de Condorcet – who died in prison a day after his arrest by Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety – may have been horrified by the manner in which his belief in human progress came to fuel political terror. Yet the fact that terror came to be used to promote Enlightenment ideals was not surprising. It followed from the belief that human life could be transformed by a human act of will. Why shrink from violence? Throughout history it had been used to sustain tyranny. In the hands of revolutionaries it could be used to liberate humanity.
From one point of view the Jacobins made a decisive break with Christianity. From another they offered, in a radically altered form, the Christian promise of universal salvation. Christianity implanted vast new moral hopes in the ancient world. Paganism was distinguished by its extreme moral modesty: it took as given that only a few people would ever live the good life. Socrates might argue that the wise person cannot be ha
rmed; but Greek tragedy mocked the philosopher’s reasoning and in any case Socrates never supposed most people could be wise. Again, Judaism is a historical religion; but it does not narrate the history of all humankind as a single story with an apocalyptic end. Christianity alone offered the prospect of salvation in a transfigured world – and offered it to everyone.
If Christianity sparked a hope of world-renewal that had not existed in the ancient world it also spawned a new type of violence. The Christian promise of universal salvation was inherited by its secular successors. But whereas in Christianity salvation was promised only in the life hereafter, modern political religions offer the prospect of salvation in the future – even, disastrously, the near future. In a seeming paradox, modern revolutionary movements renew the apocalyptic myths of early Christianity.
With the Jacobins, that utopianism became a revolutionary movement and modern secular religion a political force. Post-millennialist Christians propagated beliefs that mutated into the secular faith in progress; but so long as history was believed to be governed by providence there was no attempt to direct it by violence. While Christianity was unchallenged, Utopia was a dream pursued by marginal cults. The decline of Christianity and the rise of revolutionary utopianism go together. When Christianity was rejected, its eschatological hopes did not disappear. They were repressed, only to return as projects of universal emancipation.
THE UTOPIAN RIGHT AS A MODERN MILLENARIAN MOVEMENT
The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. And we’re going to destroy him.
Lt Colonel Gareth Brandl of the US Marines on leading his troops into the assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja29
In the last century utopianism was found mainly on the far Left. The Nazis attempted to realize a utopian vision that condemned much of humanity to enslavement or extermination, but for the most part the utopias that shaped politics were visions of human emancipation. Towards the end of the last century the pursuit of Utopia entered the political mainstream. In future only one kind of regime would be legitimate: American-style democratic capitalism – the final form of human government, as it was termed in the fleeting and now forgotten mood of hubris that followed the Soviet collapse. Led by the United States, western governments committed themselves to installing democracy throughout the world – an impossible dream that in many countries could only produce chaos. At the same time they launched a ‘war against terror’ that failed to distinguish between new threats and the normal conflicts of history. The Right was possessed by fantasies, and like the utopian visions of the last century – but far more quickly – its grandiose projects have crumbled into dust.
In the twentieth century it seemed utopian movements could come to power only in dictatorial regimes. Yet after 9/11 utopian thinking came to shape foreign policy in the world’s pre-eminent democracy. In many ways the Bush administration behaved like a revolutionary regime. It was prepared to engage in pre-emptive attacks on sovereign states in order to achieve its goals, while at the same time it has been ready to erode long-established American freedoms. It established a concentration camp in Guantanamo whose inmates are beyond the reach of normal legal protection, denied the protection of habeas corpus to terrorist suspects, set up an apparatus of surveillance to monitor the population and authorized American officials to practise what in any other country would be defined as torture. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, Britain suffered, in a more limited way, a similar transformation.
Universal democracy and the ‘war on terror’ have proved to be dangerous delusions. Like utopian regimes in the past, governments will not admit they are attempting the impossible. They demand freedom from the constraints that have developed over many centuries to curb the exercise of power. In the twentieth century the result was totalitarianism – a system in which nearly every aspect of society was controlled by government. Today the result is a type of illiberal democracy in which elections take place against a background of diminished freedoms. As in earlier outbreaks of utopianism the achievements of the past have been damaged in the pursuit of an imaginary future.
Though its origins are in trends in thought and policy that developed earlier, rightwing utopianism was massively boosted by the collapse of communism. The communist regimes were meant to be the advance guard of a new type of society that would replace all earlier models. The western states that emerged as victors in the Cold War embarked on a similar project. With a triumphal America in the lead they committed themselves to building a worldwide economic system. Having rendered every other economic system obsolete, global capitalism would bring about the end of history.
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 – co
me 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.