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Conclusion:
Disorder as Order
Without doubt, one
of the most important tasks for intellectual historians
is to investigate and come to understand the phenomenon
of ideocracy and its origins. As we have seen, Catholic Inquisitions
provided an archetypal predecessor for one of the fundamentally
new political developments of modernity: totalitarianism. But was
there a direct intellectual line to be traced from the Inquisitions to
the modern totalitarian state? Clearly, we can see how, by figures
such as Maistre and Donoso Cortes, the Inquisitions were tied in
with an authoritarian state and with the notion that order has to be
enforced when revolution becomes a real threat. And we can see
how, from these earlier figures, there is a line through Georges Sorel
and others directly into both fascism and communism. But I believe
that the archetypal dimensions of the Inquisition are more important
than the specific intellectual lines through which the
inquisitional mentality was transmitted into modernity.
When we look at the history of totalitarian states, we see that
they resemble one another in archetypal ways: secret police, propaganda,
requiring enemies, punishing dissent, and so forth. I believe
that is because there is an archetypal phenomenon here that manifests
itself according to different circumstances. Thus, we find some
modern Catholics defending the Inquisitions, even the murder of
Giordano Bruno, at the same time that we find a Catholic bishop
asserting that modern European secularism is in danger of turning
into an anti-Catholic Inquisition!! The point is that the inquisitional
148 THE NEW INQUISITIONS
phenomenon transcends ordinary political or religious distinctions: it
is an
archetype of its own, one that manifests in Protestant witch trials and
in the
McCarthy hearings in the United States during the 1950s, as well as in
the
Gestapo and in the Cheka.
Central to the dynamics of this phenomenon is an insider-outsider
dynamic
based on a constructed "orthodoxy." This "orthodoxy," be it political or
religious, is constructed around a literalist faith that requires
dissenters or
heretics in order to define itself. We see exactly this phenomenon in
Islamic
radicalism of the Takfiri or al-Qaeda varieties of Wahhabism: these
radical
groups, entirely a modern invention, enjoin jihad against all who do not
hold
their own rigid and literalist politicoreligious faith. They are the
insiders: everyone
else is outside, sometimes even Sufis [mystics] of the same religious
tradition.
Theirs is a this-worldly faith in the sense that their fury is trained
on
those whom they see as infidels and opponents in this world.
Under consideration here is fanaticism of a form with which we ought to
be familiar by now. Like communism, or fascism, it seeks to impose on
the
whole of society a single vision, ultimately a secular millennialist
view of society
that demands compliance. Rather than looking inward, as the Sufis
enjoin,
and seeking to reform oneself, the fanatic looks outward and believes
that if
only he were successful in reforming others, if only order could be
enforced
on all in society-then what? Here it becomes a bit hazy: then society
would
be molded into a millennialist unity in which the strictest moralism
would
rule. But all of this is external; it is in the end the objectified
society of the
inquisitor in which freedom is removed "for your own good."
In such a society, criminals seize power and impose institutionalized
disorder.
Imposing extreme order results, not in order but in the ultimate
disorder
in which the best are persecuted by the worst. A clinical psychologist
told me
of his long experience as a court psychologist in a major Midwestern
American
city, and of what many criminals told him during interviews. Over and
over,
they spoke of the rush of delusory power that they felt as they
committed a
crime: they felt a sense of invulnerability that derived from the
commission of
the crime, but that blinded them to the consequences of their acts. The
same
phenomenon is at work when totalitarians seize power: they commit crimes
on far greater scales than any petty criminal, and they no doubt also
feel the
rush of illicit power as they commit, not just crimes, but crimes
against humanity
itself.
Such crimes against humanity always are fortified by rationalizations
and
justifications: it is for the good of the people; it is for the
enforcement of the
doctrines of the state; it is so that we can establish the coming
secular or
religious millennium. Furthermore, such crimes are often even
regularized in
CONCLUSION 149
"handbooks," inquisitorial guidebooks that accompany "tribunals" and
"hearings"
that provide occasions for more or less elaborate self-justifications.
But
when we penetrate through to the core of these crimes, something else is
at
work. Just as the order of totalitarianism is always disorder, so, too,
the logic
of the state in these state crimes is always ultimately illogic. No,
there is something
else at work in the gas chambers of the Nazis and the mass murders of
Stalin or Pol Pot.
An "antimetaphysical" position became de rigeur in academic philosophy
during the late twentieth century: at least in part in reaction to the
horrors of
totalitarianism, many scholars sought false refuge in the notion that
one
should take no metaphysical or meta-narrative position at all, assuming
that
such positions were to blame for the lunatic meta-narratives of secular
millennialism.
But if one rejects all metaphysical assertions. one then has no
basis from which to critique totalitarianism or social criminality other
than a
strictly social one. Thus, one social position is placed against
another. and
the inhumanity of totalitarianism is relativized: there is no room for a
concept
of evil.
B6hme's Metaphysics of Evil
At this point, we might turn to the writings of Jacob B6hme (1575-1624).
whose
work may offer us some insight into how the inquisitorial mind operates.
During the most creative part of his life, B6hme had been persecuted by
a local
Protestant pastor, so he had witnessed the phenomenon firsthand. In his
Six
Theosophic Points, B6hme explains how every human being has an inner
choice
between wrath and love. If we "withdraw into the dark fire of the source
of
anguish," then we exist inwardly in "fear and enmity, each form of life
being
hostile to the other." By contrast, "God's kingdom is found only in the
bright
clear light in freedom, in love and gentleness, for that is the property
of the
white clear light."2 We can incarnate one or the other.
According to Bohme, both the dark world of wrath and the light world of
love are accessible to us on earth-indeed, they both can be seen
manifesting
in visible nature.' We are given the freedom to manifest either one.
When we
"burn with wrath, envy, falsehood, lying, and deceit," then we live in
or manifest
"the dark world's fire."4 And if so. then we are not really human but,
rather, are demonic beings in human form.' According to B6hme, "the more
evil and hostile a creature is in the dark world, the greater is its
might. As the
powerful tyrants of this world often exhibit their power in malignity,
that men
must fear them ... just so is this a characteristic of those in the dark
world."6
150 THE NEW INQUISITIONS
As a result, B6hme writes, tyrants and those who incarnate the dark
world
make this visible realm a "murderous den of the devil." For those who
incarnate
the dark world pretend to be human, but in fact are not. They "do the
butchery,
and increase God's wrath, and kindle the dark world in this outer
world."7
Thus there are two species of man on earth: there are those who serve
God in
humility and who, like Christ, are persecuted; and there is a species
that "calls
itself men, walks also in human form, but [in fact is] evil beasts."8
Those people
who incarnate the dark world might claim to be holy and even wear
clerical
garb, but this is only a disguise: what matters is what they are like
inwardly.
Full of suppressed fury, cold inhumanity, and arrogance, they vaunt
themselves
over others and like nothing better than to demonstrate their power over
others
by inspiring terror and spreading hell on earth.
It is no doubt easy for some readers to dismiss B6hme's perspective, but
it does offer an eschatological and metaphysical context for
understanding the
phenomenon of totalitarianism. Certainly when we look at the atrocities
perpetrated
by the various totalitarian states-the industrialized murders committed
by the Nazis, the horrific abuses of and murders of Tibetan Buddhists
under Chinese Communism, the butchery by Stalin's secret police, the
monstrous
regime of the Cambodian Pol Pot, whose minions actually acted out
hellish scenes with themselves cast as demons-is it really so hard to
believe
that human life really can be seen as a struggle between two sides, one
meek
and humble, the other tyrannical and grasping for the power over life
and
death? Perhaps such a view seems too dualistic, and yet one wonders
whether
it would seem so farfetched to the hundred million or hundred fifty
million
victims of these totalitarian regimes.
Ideocracy's Consequences
One thing we learn when we consider more broadly our authors here:
ideocracy
has consequences. In context, we can understand why Maistre or Donoso
Cortes
endorsed the imposition of order as exemplified in the authoritarian
state,
modeled partly on Catholicism and its inquisitions. Given the horrors of
the
French Revolution, and the likelihood of future revolutions, they
believed that
only an authoritarian enforcement of order could protect social and
individual
security and stability. What they did not, what they could not expect
were the
totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century that did enforce a kind of
centralized
state order-but at a terrible, nightmarish cost. Our nineteenthcentury
authors did provide an initial intellectual framework for the modem
ideocratic state, but they did not anticipate how extreme an ideocratic
state
CONCLUSION ISI
might become, nor, in the end, would they likely have countenanced what
such
states did in fact become.
The same cannot be said for all of our twentieth-century figures. Sorel
was
serially infatuated by the latest form of secular millennialism, and by
the idea
of revolutionary violence: endorsing violence, he was thus far more
culpable
when later communists and fascists indeed unleashed violence on their
victims.
Figures such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot: they unleashed
the madness of ideocratic violence in the name of secular millennialism,
and
they are utterly culpable; if we might find something redeeming in the
work
of their intellectual predecessors, ultimately we can find nothing
redeeming in
those directly responsible for so many millions of victims.
But what of twentieth-century authors such as Carl Schmitt, Eric
Voegelin,
or Theodor Adorno? Of course, Schmitt was somewhat culpable in the Nazi
regime, regardless of his occasional prescient politico social insights.
Yet
Adorno was a bitter opponent of Nazism, and detested Schmitt: why
include
a chapter on him? And Voegelin was a vigorous opponent of communism,
who certainly did not endorse ideocratic regimes: indeed, the
intellectual
framework that he provided served well to diagnose the ideocratic,
pathological
dimensions of the "political religions" inspiring twenty-first-century
terrorism.
9 But when we consider these authors together, we see how the dynamics
of heresiophobic victimization continues right through the modern
period,
even among authors who were horrified by the advent of totalitarianism
in its
various forms.
Heresy and History
All of these authors in various ways continued heretic-hunting
traditions that
can be traced back not only to the Catholic inquisitions but even
further to the
origins of institutional "orthodox" Christianity in late antiquity.
Voegelin's and
Voegelinians' sweeping condemnations of "Gnosticism" have their direct
antecedents
in the anti-heresiological rhetoric of Church Fathers such as
Tertullian-
as does the work of Carl Schmitt, who also provides a further link
between
the inquisitions and the fascist state. Even Adorno, with his vitriolic
attacks on American "occultism" and likening of occultists to fascists,
unwittingly
continued the kind of persecutory anti-occultist rhetoric that one finds
in Nazi Germany, and that reflects long-standing Western currents of
antioccultism.
It is not that these authors are responsible for totalitarian statesit
is that their writing reveals the same victimizing dynamics that are
clearly
at work in totalitarian states.
152 THE NEW INQUISITIONS
Behind all of these works and figures, stretching all the way back to
late
antiquity, is a long-standing Christian emphasis on time or history and
a rejection
of "heresy," conceived as timeless gnosis. The conflict between
"orthodoxy"
and Gnosticism was between those who insisted on a strictly historical
interpretation of religious doctrine, and those who insisted that
religious truth
has a transcendent, ahistorical dimension. Orthodoxy, as rooted in the
works
of Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Epiphanius, lays great emphasis on the
historical
birth and life of Christ, whereas Gnosticism laid more emphasis on
Christ's
transcendent, mystical, or gnostic significance beyond history or time.
The origins of totalitarianism are to be found in this rejection of
transcendence
and in an insistence that meaning is found only inside a historically
bounded horizon. Of course, even among the Church Fathers one finds a
Clement
of Alexandria, who insisted on the possibility, indeed, the necessity of
an
orthodox gnosis, and historically Catholicism (more or less uneasily)
included
gnostics like Meister Eckhart or Marguerite of Porete, even if its
inquisitions
sometimes burned them at the stake. But with the advent of what we could
call militant secularism in the twentieth century, religion itself
became the
enemy: in the secular ideocracy, religious faith is seen as a threat to
the total
hegemony of the state. Thus, Lenin said that when he heard the word
"religion,"
he reached for his revolver. And thus, too, Chinese Communists continued
to ceaselessly and bitterly persecute Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhist
religious
leaders, even half a century after Communism had achieved total
authority over occupied Tibet, and had almost totally extirpated Tibetan
culture
and religious tradition.
The phenomenon of the Catholic inquisitions could be seen as archetypal
for secular millennialism, in that underlying them was the belief that
the
Church had to eliminate its dissenters in this world, within history, in
order
to better achieve the unified church state. And when we look at the
phenomena
of fascism and communism in the twentieth century, we also see various
efforts
to achieve a kind of unified, totalized, quasi-religious church state in
this world,
within history. Driving the totalitarian state is a millennialist vision
that "justifies"
the elimination of dissenters or "heretics" today so as to achieve an
ideal
state tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow-but always within history,
here on
earth. And this ideopathology (a pathological insistence on a rigid
ideology that
results in many victims) is more broadly found than we might want to
acknowledge.
CONCLUSION 153
The Ubiquity of Ideopathology
It is alarming to realize how little has been written as an effort to
explain the
ideopathological origins and nature of totalitarianism. After all, the
pathological,
genocidal state is arguably the most distinctive contribution to history
of
the twentieth century. What I have argued here is that the modern
totalitarian
state emerges out of an intellectual lineage that is traceable directly
back to
early modern defenses of the Catholic Inquisitions, and that has
branches on
both the "left" and the "right." That this is so, however, ought not to
be read
as therefore asserting that modern totalitarianism can be blamed on
Roman
Catholicism. Rather, what we have seen is that a particular kind of
human
quasi-religious pathology-which we can see in Calvin's Geneva with the
burning
of Michael Servetus, just as in the Inquisition-imposed murder of the
Nolan genius Giordano Bruno-is visible in modern "secularity" in a wide
array of authors and movements on both the so-called left and right.
Those
who wish to assert a hegemonic ideocracy require heretics and
heresy-hunting,
whether their ideocracy is religious or secular. Secular
heretic-burning, projected
in a mass, industrialized way, is genocide.
In The Pathology of Man, Steven Bartlett extensively investigates the
phenomenon
of human aggression and genocide, focusing on the case of National
Socialist Germany, and working from a psychological perspective. He
concludes
from his research that very few people in a genocidal state will
resistonly
in the range of 0.5 percent.'O Bartlett notes that although various
participants
in genocide-including Nazi soldiers and physicians-could have refused
to participate without significant consequences to themselves, very few
did so. Only a very small number of people seem to have the intellectual
courage
and capacity to stand against genocidal social forces. Here I will cite
Bartlett
at length:
People capable of resisting human evil, as in the mass killings of the
Holocaust, are, to varying degrees, then, "marginal individuals:"
Their experience of the world allows for some measure of disengagement
from prevailing ideas and values; they are more able than
most to stand emotionally alone, without the crutch of group agreement;
they may feel a certain amount of repugnance toward violence
that harms innocent people and perhaps toward collectivism itself;
they are more resistant to the emotional attractions of conformity,
the gratifications of hatred, power over others, divisiveness,
destruc154
THE NEW INQUISITIONS
tiveness and its adrenaline-producing capacity; and the list could be
lengthened. II
The vast majority of people, Bartlett concluded, will go along with and
even
wholeheartedly participate in genocide, whereas very few will be capable
of the
intellectual independence that characterizes resistance. Very few people
will be
capable of this kind of haerein or heresy, that is to say, very few will
be capable
of the individual choice to separate from the genocidal state or
populace. But
Bartlett's pessimistic conclusions go much further.
Bartlett's thesis, in The Pathology of Man, is that genocide and ecocide
are
not deviations from normal human society, but rather are particular
expressions
of "normal" modern human society, which is inherently pathological.
His research demonstrates that "normal people engage in genocide [and
terrorism),
killing other normal people for a variety of reasons. Certainly the
human normality of genocide is a fact we would rather not acknowledge,
even
as psychologists."l2 He continues that "A historian once asked what
needed to
happen to the German people in order for them to accept a government
intent
upon mass murder. 'Unfortunately,' he concluded, 'nothing needed to
happen.
In nations across the world, people accept government crime.' " In other
words,
"Nothing needs to happen in order for psychologically normal, average,
everyday
people to accept and comply with a callous and cruel government intent
upon
a program of systematic dehumanization and murder of the members of
another
group or nation."13Thus, when psychiatrist Douglas Kelleyreturned from
the Nuremberg trials after World War II, he came back convinced that
even in
the "democratic conditions that prevail in the United States," one might
well
see "a re-enactment of genocidal atrocities perpetrated against a
dehumanized
enemy."l4 "I am convinced that there is little in America to-day which
could
prevent the establishment of a Nazi-like state," Kelley wrote morosely.
At the core of Bartlett's argument is this: that although contemporary
psychological
and sociocultural models more or less unquestioningly counterpose
"normal" and "pathological" as opposite categories, a careful and
unbiased
analysis reveals that in fact not only are "the perpetrators of human
evil" "often
psychologically normal people," but, what is more, to be "normal" is in
fact to
be pathological in the sense that, by and large, it is "normal" people
who are
inexorably destructive both to the natural world and to their own
species. IS
Seen from this very broad perspective, what we have been discussing in
this
book-the particular pathology represented by the Inquisitions of modern
totalitarianism-
is not something limited only to Nazi Germany or to Pol Pot's
Cambodia, nor even to the various intellectual lineages we have traced
but,
rather, strikingly exemplifies much more extensive and deeply rooted
basic
CONCLUSION 155
human pathology. Ours, he writes, is the tragedy of a species that has
become
pathogenic toward itself and toward other forms of life that share the
planet,
that is "able to become conscious of its own dysfunctions," but because
its
members are "so amply rewarded by those very dysfunctions, ignores and
denies them. "16 Thus, Bartlett is pessimistic even about the warning
represented
by his own conclusions, for he holds that not only is "normal" modem
society deeply pathological, but, what is more, this pathology itself
will keep
most people from heeding his analysis and warnings.
What then does he propose? Bartlett systematically lists and discards as
impractical
the various secular possibilities for overcoming mass human pathologies.
Argument won't work because most people won't listen; psychiatry
won't work on large populations (and its effects on individuals is at
best ambiguous);
social reform itself tends to be subverted and become pathological; and
public condemnation and ridicule of human pathological behavior-for
example,
ridicule of behavior including self-centeredness, glorification of
violence,
the "gratifications of hatred," "overweening desecration of the world's
ecology"-
is highly "unlikely." Yet, if none of these methods will work to
overcome
human pathogenicity, are we left with outright pessimism and nothing
else? So
it would seem. But we have not yet looked at the other side of the
fence.
Mysticism and Plato's Cave
Throughout this book, we have focused on the phenomenon of
heretic-hunting
and inquisitionalism in modem secular political philosophy and
institutions.
Along the way, we necessarily had to analyze, on occasion, how political
philosophers
on both the "left" and on the "right" have tended to denigrate mystics
or gnostics very much in the tradition of the Inquisitions. It even
became
somewhat fashionable in some circles, more or less following Eric
Voegelin,
to denounce all secular millennialist political movements and figures as
being
somehow "gnostic." As we have seen, such attempts derive from profound
confusion over what "gnostic" means, and from an almost total ignorance
of
the rapidly expanding scholarly understanding of gnosticism, mysticism,
and
Western esoteric traditions.'7 We have already discussed such confusions
in
detail, and there is no need to reconsider them here. Rather, I would
like to
conclude by at least alluding to a foray into exactly the opposite-that
is, into
the question of what gnosis might offer in the way of healing the kinds
of
pathologies discussed in this book.
After all, what might be the positive political ramifications of
mysticism
or gnosis? This is a subject totally unexplored in scholarship-not
unexpect156
THE NEW INQUISITIONS
edly, given the massive weight of centuries ofheresiophobia and
victimization.
Only a handful of authors in the past several centuries explored the
territory
on either side of this book's subject. On the one side is arrayed the
force of
the inquisitors, the heresy-hunters, religious and secular, who seek to
enforce
order and in fact generate what I have called the order of disorder, but
that
could just as well be called (after Dante) the order of Dis. But what
about the
other side? What are the political or psychological implications of
mysticism
or gnosticism? Surely there are some, after all. Here is much too vast a
territory
for us to begin to cover here, but we could at least begin to suggest
the lay of
the land.
For inquisitionalism is always based upon dualism-it requires an other
who can be blamed, attacked, killed. Bycontrast, mysticism is based upon
the
mystic's transcendence of dualism, on the union or reunion of the human
with
the human, natural, and divine. Here I am using the terms "mystic" and
"mysticism"
purely for convenience's sake, and by them am referring to those who
follow not an outward path that requires the domination of others or of
the
natural world but an inward path that culminates in a joyous
transcendence
of self-and-other, that is to say, in an overcoming of dualism.18 It is
at least
possible that convincing solutions to human pathology are invisible to
Bartlett
because he is looking in the wrong place. Perhaps the question of how to
heal
humanity of its pathologies is to be answered not by outward imposition
of
any ideology or ideocracy but only by inward reflection and
transformation. 19
In this regard, it may be revealing that even Bartlett, for all his
pessimism
about humanity, concludes his massive study by quoting the great
Christian
mystic Thomas Traherne, who urged his readers-in the face of all the
human
folly and brutality in the world-to become healers, physicians of
humanity.
There is a great deal more that we could write about this subject here,
but
it is better only to offer intimations of an almost wholly unexplored
inner
continent, outlines of which are already visible in some of my various
other
works.20 Even mentioning the existence of what we may call an inner,
hidden
continent or destination sometimes has been criminalized as heresy,
especially
in the West, but for all that, in each generation there seem to emerge
at least
a few more who tell us that they have made their way to it, and, like
the one
who escaped from the Cave in Plato's allegory, have come back to tell
their
stories to us disbelievers who still dwell in darkness. It is no doubt
"normal"
to disbelieve and even, as Plato tells us, to attack and even kill those
who claim
to have been outside the Cave. But the perennial question remains: what
if
those who say that they have been outside the Cave are right? What if
the
"heretic" was right all along?
With such questions in mind, we end our inquiry-at least for now.
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