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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
It has often been pointed out that the Messianic creeds and extremist ideologies of our century represent the displacement of traditional by radically new world views. Similar and no less dramatic reconstructions of reality, implicit and explicit, are reflected in modern man's movement, evidenced most clearly since the Second World War, toward secular humanism. The purpose of this article is to explore some of the implications, both secular and religious, of this trend, and to delineate what seem to be the most conspicuous characteristics held in common by the new world views that have emerged. In doing so I must acknowledge considerable indebtedness to the preliminary explorations of several contemporary writers, notably Eric Voegelin and J. L. Talmon.
1 Voegelin, , The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952)Google Scholar, and “Ersatz Religion: The Gnostic Mass Movements of Our Time,”, Politeia, I (Spring, 1964)Google Scholar; Talmon, , The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York, 1960)Google Scholar, and Political Messianism (London, 1960)Google Scholar.
2 Voegelin, , “Ersatz Religion,” p. 12Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., pp. 11–12. It should be noted here that, according to Voegelin, the “certain untruths” of religion to which men may resort are not, by necessity, rooted in Christian heresy, or “Gnosticism,” but may, “if, experientially, the cultural conditions permit it,” represent a return to a more primitive form of religion, such as polytheism. Because of cultural conditions, however, the latter alternative has not been a viable one since the Middle Ages.
4 Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1936), Chapter 2, sections 5 and 6Google Scholar.
5 These universal, but temporal, truths are what Voegelin, in The New Science of Politics, refers to as “civil theology.”
6 The Mind Alive (New York, 1954), p. 50Google Scholar.
7 Voegelin, , “Ersatz Religion,” p. 11Google Scholar.
8 From a speech delivered by Eric Voegelin at Duke University on December 2, 1960 (unpublished).
9 Milton Rokeach and others have since, quite appropriately, questioned the usefulness and validity of assuming that the characteristics of the “authoritarian personality” are limited to what is commonly regarded in the United States as the extreme right. See especially Rokeach, , The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems (New York, 1960), pp. 11–16Google Scholar.
10 Relating the responses of children to a story told to them, Else Frenkel-Brunswik observes: “In retelling the story, authoritarian children tended toward a restriction of scope by concentrating on certain single phrases and details; or else they tended to stray away from the original altogether so that in extreme cases there was almost no relation to the material presented. In other words, there was either a clinging to the original elements with little freedom and distance—a ‘stimulus-boundness’ in the sense of the psychiatrist, Kurt Goldstein—or else a farreaching neglect of the stimulus in favor of purely subjective fantasies. In this manner a rigid, cautious, segmentary approach seems to go well with one that is disintegrated and chaotic. One and the same child sometimes manifests both patterns in alternation or in all kinds of bizarre combinations. Both of these ways of responding result in an avoidance of uncertainty, one by fixation to, and the other by breaking away from, the given realities…. Totalitarian propaganda takes advantage of this syndrome [the intolerance of ambiguity] by the use of vague generalities combined with reference to unessential concrete detail. The opposite attitude, ‘tolerance of ambiguity’, embraces the many-sidedness, complexity, and differentiation which is an essential aspect of the creative process; it has nothing to do with confusion or inarticulate vagueness, in fact, it is in diametrical opposition to these latter features.” “Environmental Controls and the Impoverishment of Thought,” in Totalitarianism, edited by Friedrich, Carl J. (New York, 1954), pp. 184, 186CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Escape from Freedom (New York, 1941), Chapter 5Google Scholar.
12 Here I am suggesting an anthropological perspective inspired by Jonathan Edwards whose argument was that man, if he is to realize the integrity of self-fulfillment, must see himself in the context of integral relationship to his entire universe, physical and social.
13 Escape from Freedom, pp. 170–72Google Scholar.
14 Fromm, says: “In a psychological sense, the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of the inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.” Escape from Freedom, p. 162Google Scholar.
Later, speaking of the authoritarian personality, Fromm observes: “They look like persons who, on the basis of their inner strength and integrity, fight those forces that block their freedom and independence. The authoritarian character's fight against authority, however, is essentially defiance. It is an attempt to assert himself and to overcome his own feeling of powerlessness by fighting authority, although the longing for submission remains present, whether consciously or unconsciously. The authoritarian character is never a ‘revolutionary’; I should like to call him a ‘rebel.‘” Ibid., pp. 169–70.
15 “Ersatz Religion,” p. 11.
16 Talmon, , Totalitarian Democracy, p. 9Google Scholar.
17 Ibid.
18 Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski suggest that the twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorship has derived every one of its major characteristics from modern democracy and modern technology, thereby setting it off from pre-twentieth-century autocracies. Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2nd ed. (New York, 1961), pp. 10–13Google Scholar.
19 The Public Philosophy (New York, 1956), p. 49Google Scholar. Lippmann relates this development to what he views as the consequent popular insensitivity to “tradition, … veneration, prescription, prestige …,” upon which governmental authority must rest. Ibid.
20 The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, 1963), II, 271Google Scholar.
21 Voegelin, , New Science, p. 168Google Scholar.
22 Ibid, p. 124.
23 The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth Century Philosophers (Boston, 1957), p. 14Google Scholar.
24 Interestingly, Karl Barth's concern goes further and suggests (to paraphrase Berlin) that as man became fascinated with the rational pursuits of philosophy attempts were made to apply philosophical categories to problems that could be handled only by revelationai or biblical theology.
25 New Science, p. 167.
26 Open and Closed Mind, p. 374.
27 The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York, 1958), pp. 352, 353, 458Google Scholar.
28 Messianism, p. 24.
29 Totalitarian Democracy, p. 2.
30 Granfield, Patrick, “An Interview with Reinhold Niebuhr,” Commonweal, LXXXV (12 16, 1966), 321Google Scholar.
31 It is interesting that the “God-is-dead” theologians have recently endeavored to justify secular monism in terms of incarnational theology—which traditionally has been only partially secular and anything but monistic.
32 Hannah Arendt, in speaking of the modern, introspectively oriented philosopher, says: “What he discovers in the region of the inner self is … not an image whose permanence can be beheld and contemplated, but, on the contrary, the constant movement of sensual perceptions and the no less constantly moving activity of the mind. Since the seventeenth century, philosophy has produced the best and least disputed results when it has investigated, through a supreme effort of self-inspection, the processes of the senses and of the mind. In this aspect, most of modern philosophy is indeed theory of cognition and psychology …
“… The philosophers became either epistemologists … or they became … the organs of the Zeitgeist, the mouthpieces in which the general mood of the time was expressed with conceptual clarity.” The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man (Garden City, 1958), pp. 267–68Google Scholar.
Further on, in the same book, p. 274, Arendt says: “The political philosophy of the modern age, whose greatest representative is still Hobbes, founders on the perplexity that modern rationalism is unreal and modern realism is irrational—which is only another way of saying that reality and human reason have parted company.”
33 Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 240Google Scholar.
34 John H. Hallowell clearly delineates the political consequences of these simplistic interpretations of human nature in his The Moral Foundation of Democracy. See especially chapters 5 and 6.
35 It must be noted that Hobbes wrote in a time before the emergence of twentieth-century mechanisms of totalitarian terror and when it was easier to argue that a despotic form of government represented the lesser evil as contrasted with the inevitable disorder and conflict of anarchy.
36 Messianism, p. 23. Arendt makes essentially the same point when she says that the perspective of the totalitarian masses is characterized by (1) an aversion to empirical facts, (2) an affinity to process and change, and (3) an adherence to a self-contained a prioristic and deductive mode of thinking. Although the second characteristic, according to Arendt, gives totalitarian thoughta futuristic orientation, this observation does not contradict the “here and now” character we shall shortly ascribe to the “Messianic,” or totalitarian, world view; although the focus is upon the future, it is a future that is fully known in the present, the fulfillment of which is not far off.
37 Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 267.
38 Talmon, , Totalitarian Democracy, p. 3Google Scholar. In this respect, Talmon later comments: “Like the eighteenth-century rationalists, the Messianic creeds build on the rock of the essential goodness of man” (Messianism, p. 23). It seems to be suggested by Talmon that man, even in his unreformed state, is viewed by the Messianic thinkers as essentially good. Thus these thinkers “could not conceive of the possibility of a conflict between a universal revolutionary creed and national particularity” (ibid., p. 30). The same naive optimism, of course, is characteristic of present-day nationalistic communism. Talmon fails to reconcile political Messianism's acceptance of nationalism within the international arena with its rejection of subnational identifications within the national arena. Nor does he explicitly explain why the political Messianist tries so desperately to redefine and reshape man if he regards him as essentially good even in his unreformed state. It might be that the political Messianist sees unreformed man as lacking in intelligent direction but not in undirected good will, just as Marx sees the proletarian as latently well-motivated, but so alienated by capitalistic property relationships that he cannot know his own mind. These are only two examples of several major problems that Talmon evades.
39 Totalitarian Democracy, p. 2.
40 Running through Reinhold Niebuhr's numerous writings is his unrelenting and eloquent challenge particularly of the latter assumption: “The controversy between those who would ‘plan’ justice and order and those who trust in freedom to establish both is … an irresolvable one. Every healthy society will live in the tension of that controversy until the end of history; and will prove its health by preventing either side from gaining complete victory.” The Irony of American History (New York, 1952), p. 108Google Scholar.
41 Totalitarian Democracy, p. 10.
42 Public Philosophy, p. 110.
43 Hannah Arendt, in disputing the common assumption that totalitarian regimes merely replace nontotalitarian laws with a new set of laws, asserts that actually totalitarianism “claims to make mankind itself the embodiment of the law.” Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 462.
44 New Science, p. 129. According to Talmon: “It was the eighteenth-century idea of the natural order (or general will) as an attainable, indeed inevitable and all-solving, end that engendered … the sense of a continuous advance towards a denouement of the historical drama…. The Jacobin dictatorship aiming at the inauguration of a reign of virtue, and the Babeuvist scheme of an egalitarian communist society … were the two earliest versions of modern political Messianism.” Totalitarian Democracy, p. 249.
46 Messianism, p. 515.
46 See Arendt, , Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 462Google Scholar.
47 Public Philosophy, p. 109.
48 Totalitarian Democracy, p. 10. See footnote 36 above.
49 Quoted by Arendt, in Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 436Google Scholar. Talmon, says that what he calls “the Messianic Left cannot rest without striving for a new heaven and a new earth. All things must become new.” Messianism, p. 510Google Scholar.
50 Talmon seems to define all “Messianism,” at least in regard to its logical implications, in terms of this perspective. Another way of stating this view is that the only “given” is man's own power over his existence.
51 Hegelianism, with its determination to appropriate cognitively as “property of the ego” the created world, certainly represents a highly rationalistic form. Marxism, too, although rooted deterministically in the productive forces of a society, eventuates in a claim to a rationalistic omniscience.
52 When Berlin, Isaiah says in his The Age of Enlightenment (p. 14)Google Scholar that “the eighteenth century is perhaps the last period in the history of Western Europe when human omniscience was thought to be an attainable goal,” he seems to be speaking strictly of formal and rationalistic philosophy. The twentieth-century fascist world views, or ideologies, claimed a kind of omniscience, although quite mystical and volitional in form.
53 In representing the Gnostic position, Voegelin says that through the application of a formula (Talmon uses the term “meta-science”), human action in history can change the structure of the world and thereby, in spite of an originally evil world, create a new satisfying world, thus bringing salvation to mankind. “The variants of immanentization (rational, emotional, and activist), therefore, are the governing symbols.” “Ersatz Religion,” pp. 4, 8.
54 Sam Keen, in describing the philosophy of Norman O. Brown, observes: “Once the project of avoiding death is formed, the major amount of human energy is invested in the creation of reified-visible personality and political structures that foster the illusion that we are immune to change and death. Culture is a series of monuments inscribed with the motto ‘Death has no dominion.“” “Architect, Shaman, Pied Piper”, Psychology Today (August, 1970), p. 44.
55 Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 457.
56 Totalitarian Democracy, p. 253. Talmon, in another place says: “In its finest original form Messianism was a vital aspect of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a witness to the depth of its conscience.” Messianism, p. 514Google Scholar.
57 Totalitarian Democracy, p. 255.