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VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST

15. The Hero and the Politics of Immortality

On Easter morning one man became the envy of the human race. It was not so much the rising as his advance knowledge that he would rise which made all so envious. This underlying myth of Western civilization remains central, even in a largely post-Christian era when such questions have slipped increasingly into the subconscious. Time, after all, is the essential human condition, and the knowledge that it will one day cease to pass is the essential human fear. It is not dying which upsets the individual but ceasing to exist. We assume that accepting death on Calvary, while difficult, was made easier by the knowledge that it was, after all, only a three-day affair.

For other men and women, death remains unacceptable because of the surrounding uncertainty. If only this uncertainty were removed, says an. officer in War and Peace, his men would go into battle without fear. Even if the answer to the question were that after death there would be nothing, the fear would have lost its power. And this despite our uncertainty having been transformed into the certainty that we are, after all, in Martin Luther's words, "just so much excrement passing through the rectum of the world."

There is a general and pervasive pattern to the way men meet the problems of meaninglessness and uncertainty. They create ever-more intricate societies to soften the blow of death by simulating a physical and social eternity on earth. Fighting against death, Camus said, amounts to claiming that life has a meaning. Unfortunately, it also reveals a fear that life does not have a meaning.

Men who thrust themselves into the leadership of these societies betray an exaggerated determination to deal with that anxiety. Unlike normal citizens, who carry on this struggle in the bosom of their families or of their limited communities -- or within their own hearts -  the public figure deals with death out on the public stage. While our equipment for seeking immortality consists of our families, beliefs and careers, the public man's equipment consists of us. That he wishes to live in this way tells us something about that man, and therefore about the direction in which he might try to lead society.

The argument that religions and indeed societies are no more than calming devices for anxiety-ridden mortals is a little too easy. On the other hand, the promise by Christianity, Islam, even Buddhism of some sort of life after death, must have calmed the populace and thus made governing easier. While rebellion or revolution are the reactions of the cornered animal, belief in any sort of afterlife removes this need.

In the West, of course, God has been dead for some time. What remains is religion as social belief, which is at best a moral code and at worst social etiquette. A real belief feels to the believer to be a natural state and does not respond to questioning. That is one of the reasons we have so much difficulty dealing with the Islamic world. They don't want to discuss fundamentals. They are not interested in a rational analysis. They believe the way we once believed. Not only do we find this incomprehensible and frustrating, we also find it troubling, because their certainty is a reflection of our own past.

We and our leaders have been surviving for a while now in societies which do not have any escape routes through belief from anxiety. This may be one of the explanations for the childish hysteria of the last few decades over economic management theories such as nationalization, privatization and free markets. The death of God was supposed to release mankind from absolute obsessions, so that we could give ourselves to rational analysis. Instead the new structures have simply taken the old absolute obsessions which were tied to the soul and applied them to our economic lives. For example, the free market may be a good, bad or insufficient idea, but, in any case, it is just a crude commercial code. Now it is regularly equated with or given credit for or even precedence over the freedom of man. But the freedom of man is a moral statement on the human condition, both in the practical and in the humanist sense. To equate it with a school of business is to betray a certain confusion. An unconscious unease.

We have, in effect, replaced beliefs with systems, and this has created a new kind of calming device which proposes eternity on earth. The web of Western rational society offers the individual a fixed place as an expert in a self-fulfilling and apparently eternal structure. The very lack of clarity, the lack of clear goals and conclusions, the very ease with which the structure weaves endlessly about us is what makes it resemble the eternal bed of nirvana. While many complain that they feel trapped in the maze of modern civilization, their complaints rise out of the emotional comfort of that stability.

The leader is the one static element in society. He is the one who, whatever the civilization, must deal with his personal insecurity through interplay with the people he leads. If there is any difference between running our society and running another, it is precisely the formlessness of ours. The maze may offer the reassurance of the eternal, but unlike earlier societies, rational structures make it almost impossible to give a sustained direction to the civilization. Seen as a whole, Western society is profoundly inefficient. Those who lead it cannot help feeling that it lacks an inner tension. They want to push it about. To reorganize. To make it respond to needs. They wish to lead, and to do so they feel they must put tension into the organism.

The leader carries all of our confusion with him as he attempts to climb above society in search of a clear view which would indicate the right direction. There, on his imaginary mountain, he stands alone, suffering the personal anxiety of freedom. He watches us dancing aimlessly below, half struggling with mortality in our comforting maze. He can see we have a certain reassurance, lost in our earthly eternity. But how is he to get his own reassurance if he cannot make all of us and the structure itself respond to his efforts?

Leaders have always suffered from these anguishes. Hadrian, trying to make sense out of a tired Roman Empire, or Pope Paul III, faced by the confused interests of the Church during the Reformation, must have felt the same. Today's leader, operating in the late Age of Reason, has a particular problem. There has never before been anything as complex as our society. The leader quite naturally feels that he somehow hasn't climbed high enough -- a bit higher and he will finally be able to make out the pattern. But all the constraints on modern leadership, proper to the parliaments and the administration and the courts, are there precisely to prevent him from climbing too high.

The fear of failure will inevitably come over him, the fear that if society refuses to respond, his life will have no meaning. And the greater that fear, the more likely he is to mistake himself for a composer gazing down upon us as if we were random notes waiting to be composed. If he has great talent -- even a narrow genius for military affairs or histrionics -- he may create for a brief moment what he and the population believe is music -- a sort of mystical sound which seems to rise out of eternity. The deeper he can penetrate into the animistic roots of any society, the more he may convince its citizens that this music will capture as much of the future as it has released of the past. And in that moment there will be a fusion between the populace and the leader. That fusion is like a Zen moment -- instantaneous and eternal. Long after it is over, the individual will remember what it was like to be part of eternity. As for the particular -- Napoleon who composes the tune, he is -- given the impossibility of using the word god in the modern world -- a Hero.

But the individual, by giving himself to this moment and to the Hero, betrays himself utterly. These experiences of satisfaction through ecstasy seem inevitably to lead civilizations deep into a sea of injustice and often of blood. That is why justice is not about fulfillment or rising to heroic heights, but about restraint and careful attention.

The philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thought that the message of reason was precisely such restraint. But while they held back the satisfaction of the ego with one hand, they dealt out the explosion of egocentrism with the other in the form of the mythological Hero, the god of reason.

The Middle Ages had offered the leader and his subjects quite a different view of eternity, perhaps because of the plagues sweeping across Europe and the repeated breakdowns of order, with armies of mercenaries constantly on the move like human shadows of the black death." No other [age] has laid so much stress ... on the thought of death," Erik Erikson wrote." An ever expiring call to memento mori resounded through life." [1] Death was placed before each person's eyes in a sustained and graphic manner which we cannot imagine.

To die was to escape out of a violent world of sin and temptation into the hands of God; The methods ensuring escape were clearly laid out, including detailed remission procedures if a rule were broken. Even methods which would put a man farther on the credit side were carefully elaborated for the simplest of minds to follow. They were like riders on an insurance policy for entrance to paradise. The growth of Indulgences eventually destroyed the credibility of this whole process, even for the most credulous of men. But in the earlier stages, they had believed.

These medieval attitudes contrast sharply with our own. We have fewer plagues but more wars and of a far bloodier nature. Our approach is to hide death. It is another of our new secrets. There is absolutely no general conviction that death is something to be faced. Instead we place our quest for eternity on the material level. Life is devoted to working, preparing, saving, driving ourselves towards something undefined. The process of our movement through the system gives us the sense of being somehow here forever.

Since our age is technological, most people add to their material obsession a devotion to defeating disease. In the background lurks the idea of immortality. If five years can be added to a life, why not ten? And if ten, why not ... ?  The culture surrounding old age has been changed to the point where its vocabulary is filled with the promise of a new youth. Phrases such as "the golden age" have emerged to obscure the realities of physical decline. Charles de Gaulle, as always out of step with the conventions of his time, said old age was a shipwreck. Of course, the individual must attempt both to survive and to make use of that survival. It is the obscuring of the inevitable process which is so new and so peculiar. Not only, it seems, should we not prepare our minds for termination, we should, as the moment approaches, create a whole new set of illusions in order to avoid the relevant thoughts.

The modern Hero's power comes from this obscuring of our mortal destiny. We live a half lie and that opens even the most sophisticated among us to the kind of elementary emotional manipulation which would have been laughed off the stage in a more direct civilization.

When President Reagan stated in 1982: "We have never interfered in the internal government of a country and have no intention of doing so, nor have ever had any thought of that kind," people did not break into titters of embarrassed laughter and say out loud, "Hey, we've done it 48 times in Central and South America alone!" Instead, they said to themselves, Yes, we are a good and freedom-loving people. The Grenada operation came shortly after. When the Socialist President Mitterrand converted France's electoral system to proportional representation in order to divide the Right -- by enabling a neo-Fascist party to win seats in the Assembly -- while claiming that he was doing this to strengthen democracy, very few people were outraged. After two years of social disarray as a direct result, he was reelected, with a strong majority. When Brian Mulroney stated that President Reagan was his close and good friend and thus susceptible to his influence, people didn't howl with amusement and nudge him -- "Brian, he has trouble remembering your name."

What is going through the minds of these leaders and citizens? Clearly there is some collusion. Neither side is lying, because the element of deception is missing. Self- eception, then? But the actions in these episodes don't have the ring of self-deception. They are too open and guileless.

Is there a flaw, then, in their memory patterns? Certainly the manner in which the Western individual remembers does seem to have changed. There are now two kinds of memory. One is related to structures. Each structure is self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating. The memories they produce are therefore internal, logical and unattached to the outer world. The other sort is eclectic: one-off memories. People. Places. Events. This is the memory of a McLuhanesque world in which there is no sentence structure and no order. The mind soars and dives, like a gull over a vast municipal garbage dump.

What is missing is linear memory -- that is to say, the historical view. We may remember the event of two days ago, but cannot remember the passage of the two days. All words are neither true nor false without this linear pattern in the mind. They are merely words, well or badly said by people who are liked or disliked. Without an ordered memory, civilization is impossible. The weight of the words, their value and even the sentiments attached to them are lost.

The leader on the mountain, anguished by his own uncertainty, sees all of this. He feels the weightlessness of words. He notes the loss of memory. These two things together translate into a withering of the citizen's ability to judge clearly. This makes it more difficult than ever to govern well. On the other hand, it becomes far easier to compose dances of confusion and darkness. Dances of the Hero's ego.

The citizens are not without defences. Their common sense remains intact. They can simply refuse to respond to the worst forms of leadership. They can imprison the leader in a frustrated limbo by limiting their relationship to the level of parody. But in such an aura of confusion, society is always seconds away from not dancing at all or from dancing to the tune of a leader who has the full genius of the dark side.

***

As a child Adolf Hitler had wanted to be an architect. He carried a small museum of his adolescent architectural projects about with him -- all the way, in fact, to the besieged bunker where he committed suicide. He spread the idea of architectural grandeur throughout his Reich.

But from the very beginning of his political ambitions, there was a destructive drive which people couldn't make any sense of. They attempted to explain his characteristics analytically, as if they were dealing with a normal person who suffered from specific flaws: he was anti-Semitic; he wasn't a democrat; he frenetically flipped between charm and fury. Because this was the very first unleashing of a Hero both complete and false, they didn't think to look upon him as a wholly imaginary being. The manner in which he was conceived, as a single deformed reflection of the German people, designed to exploit their desperation, escaped the parameters of established political thinking.

His destructive. drive grew as the forties progressed, displacing his creative, "architectural" persona. Albert Speer, who had been in charge of the German war industry, tried some twenty years later to rehabilitate his own reputation by claiming that he himself had managed to delay the release of Hitler's destructiveness until the last days of the war." He was deliberately attempting to let the people perish with himself. He no longer knew any moral boundaries: a man to whom the end of his own life meant the end of everything." [2] Speer's analysis was almost perfect. It wasn't defeat, however, which pushed Hitler to an apocalyptic vision of himself. The Final Solution had been decided in January 1942, long before the tide of the war had turned. And the massacre of the Slavs, to make room for Teutons on the lands east of Germany, was already under way. It was Hitler's success which allowed him to give in to his own sense of his powers or, rather, of his rights. And when the tide did turn against him, that sense was simply aggravated.

To maintain the energy of the constructive Hero is a tiring business. Creativity is limited by time and by effort expended. It is constantly reliant on others. It is not so different from the Godlike act of creating children. This can be done, slowly, by animal methods involving nine months of natural development and a commitment to twenty years of training. The process is serial and limits the quantity. The satisfaction is greater for a woman than for a man, who contributes only a bit of liquid for a few seconds and can never even be certain that the drops involved were his own. For a dozen years Hitler harped on about the importance' of architecture and pored over ambitious drawings. He had absolute power over planning and spending as well as having an architect, Speer, as his chief economic adviser. And yet only one of his great building projects was completed -- a new Reichstag which was scarcely used.

Destruction is the other power of God, equal to creation in many ways. Above all, it is easier and faster. Between creating life and taking it away, the Hero invariably settles for the latter. It is, if nothing else, more immediately satisfying.

Hitler came to see himself as embodying all of the German civilization -- not just the government, but the race, culture, history and mythology. Therefore, when he ceased to exist, all would cease. There would be no eternity after his departure. Erikson said of Hitler that he had "an almost pitiful fear ... that he might be nothing. He had to challenge this possibility by being deliberately and totally anonymous (his actions in earlier life); and only out of this self-chosen nothingness could he become everything. Allness or nothingness, then, is the motto of such men." [3]

In this context, concepts of morality disappear. The Hero takes everything upon himself and removes any need for society's definitions of guilt or of the inviolable rights of individuals. Jean Genet, a convicted murderer-turned-existentialist philosopher and writer, carried this idea to its maniacal conclusion. In The Thief's Journal, he wrote: "Acts must be carried through to their completion. Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful. It is because an action has not been completed that it is vile." [4]

It follows that actions are the only possible expression of the self. There is nothing beyond the self. And the more intense the act, the greater its beauty. The most beautiful act, therefore, is murder. It is indeed the greatest act. Having killed God, man must replace him. And there is no easier way for a man to prove himself God than by taking another man's life. "If there is a God," Nietzsche cries, "how can one tolerate not being God oneself?" And if there isn't, the same assumption of divinity is even more necessary, In theory, the Hero may choose between creating and destroying. In practice, destruction is the only realizable choice.

In Genet's play The Balcony, men come to a brothel where they can pretend to have the function they have always wished to have. This is the ultimate statement on rational structure and man's reduction to a functionary role. Dressed as judges, generals and bishops, the brothel's clients talk of "mirrors that glorify;" of being "reflected ad infinitum." They are delighted to be the reflection of someone else's eternity. The main character in the play is the chief of police. He controls everything, but no one knows him. He is the rational man of power, operating efficiently behind the scenes with such tools as secrecy and manipulation. No one has ever come to the brothel asking to play him. His only desire is to be a source for other people's reflections, He lives for that day. And when it comes, he says, "I shall be not the hundred-thousandth-reflection-within a reflection in a mirror, but the One and Only, into whom a hundred thousand want to merge." He will then "go and rot in people's minds." While waiting for that day, he builds himself a fantastic tomb, hollowed out beneath a red marble mountain, with rooms and niches and, in the middle, a tiny diamond sentry box. He will bury himself there for eternity while the reflecting world revolves around him. [5]

Some seventeen hundred years ago, during the period which lasted from the loss of belief in Roman deities to the victory of Christianity, there was an explosion in the number of gods and spirits competing to fill the void. In the nineteenth century, while Christianity tried desperately to recover from the effective death of God, there was an explosion in the worship of an endless panoply of saints. The Hero has multiplied in our day with that same assurance disguising confusion. And our endless reaffirmations of individualism on closer examination reveal themselves to be little more than the terrible confusion of individuals seeking to find their reflections in role models. These political and military leaders, terrorists, capitalists, medal winners and stars are, arranged about us in an unconscious hierarchy of Heroes who dominate our imaginations and hopes to an extent that we can never admit.

Even Genet's fanciful idea of an eternally reflecting tomb has already been constructed wherever a Hero has survived long enough to be succeeded by reflections. Generalissimo Franco had a shaft dug to the exact centre of an inaccessible mountain. There a seventy- metre-long granite gallery of cathedral proportions was hollowed out. It took thousands of civil War prisoners ten years to fulfill his dream. The whole mountain was surmounted by a five-hundred-foot-high steel cross. Franco lies exactly below the shaft, in the centre of the tomb. His friends from the civil war -- his primary reflections -- lie buried around him.

Napoleon's tomb in the Invalides is based on the same principle. Mere humans stand in the Church of the Dome on the austere white floor, bare of all seating and decoration, and look up at the most beautiful dome in France. Around them in a circle are chapels containing the tombs of Napoleonic and more recent French marshals. Directly below the dome, a great marble well has been hollowed out and lined with a dozen enormous statues of Victories. In the centre a massive, curving tomb of red porphyry holds the body of the original Hero. Like Egyptian pharaohs.. who lived forever, he is encased by several coffins -- tin-sheeted iron inside mahogany inside two layers of lead inside ebony inside oak. And all those in the marble mass. He lies as if at the vortex of a cosmic cone ascending into heaven.

***

This is not so very different from the case of the twentieth century's three great stuffed men. The idea of publicly displaying these theoretically dead revolutionary leaders mayor may not have been their idea. The cooperation of their immediate successors -- that is to say, their immediate reflections -- was in any case required and they did indeed arrange for the embalming and enthronement of their Heroes.

Are there particular godhead characteristics to be noted in their appearances? Lenin's shedding beard and ever-more-waxy complexion are hardly impressive. Mao's obesity is a serious impediment to credible immortality. When he comes into view, there is a momentary pause while the Peking crowds are caught between a giggle at the thought of the taxidermy involved and a respectful gesture appropriate to the Buddha. He lies, after all, at the centre of a great mausoleum, whose floor plan is copied exactly from that of a Buddhist temple. He lies where the Buddha ought to be sitting or lying. As for Ho Chi Minh, his asceticism was an example to all Heroes hopeful of preservation. The moment he comes into view -- again, the layout is that of a temple -- the Hanoi crowds are awestruck. His skin lies like prosciutto upon his bones, as if he had not died but been hung and slowly dried. He appears to be napping. His specially built mausoleum is the most impressive building in the otherwise dilapidated city.

There is a fourth Communist leader on display; perhaps -the most evocative of the contemporary Heroes. Georgi Dimitrov mayor may not have put a match to the Reichstag in 1933. He was put on trial for doing so and, although acquitted, became Hitler's excuse for shutting down the pretend world of democracy and entering into the eternal void of his own ego. Dimitrov survived prison during World War II and went on to become Stalin's reflection in Bulgaria during the late 1940s. He did for Bulgaria what Hitler did for Germany -- he liquidated democracy. In 1949 he died.

Stalin offered the Bulgarians the use of his official embalmer, the one who had done Lenin. Mister Sbarsky, the taxidermist, was the first of a new priesthood, empowered to confer immortality. His work on Lenin was an historic act. His work in Sofia on Dimitrov confirmed a modern principle.

That principle first emerged late in the nineteenth century, when the well-preserved bodies of a number of early Catholic saints came to the attention of Rome's mythological machinery. Soon the bodies of other long-buried or even lost saints began popping up throughout Christendom, As if to counter the growing rumours of God's death, they were all put on display in churches. The sight of these demigods, miraculously preserved, as if ready for bodily assumption on the Day of Judgment, was intended to help win people back to the Christian idea of immortality. The Church didn't stop at that. It sensed that the technological twentieth century would turn upon concrete proofs and so set about stuffing and displaying newly dead saints.

There isn't much difference between Saint Vincent de Paul, suspended in glass over the altar of his church on the rue de Sevres in Paris, and Lenin, Mao, Ho or Dimitrov. All five must have known that, as Heroes, something like external exhibition awaited them. However, Saint Clare, the friend and supporter of Saint Francis of Assisi, would have been horrified to think that -- six hundred years after her death in modest simplicity and absolute acceptance of mortality -- she would be dug up and put on show in the crypt of her church. Marble steps have been laid on top of her rough stone so that the public may climb down in glory to a double-barred grille on the other side of which she lies. A nun, whose face is hidden by a thick veil, repeats endlessly: "E il corpo vero di Santa Chiara." ("This is the true body of Saint Clare.") Clare would probably say -- "So what!" -- and make them rebury her body. She would be doubly horrified to discover that the chanting nun feels that she herself exists in part because Saint Clare's body is there. The nun would be upset if someone pointed out to her that she was acting like a Communist.

As for the four embalmed revolutionary Heroes, the spectacle they have become might embarrass them on an intellectual level. But we can be almost certain that it would give them great subconscious satisfaction; at least as much satisfaction as Napoleon and Franco would get from their own idolatrous display as Christian altars. All of these men operated in the .age of the Hero and they are among the happy few to have become officially immortal. To become a Hero is to accept, if not desire, that the people will want your immortality. Of course, if they decide they no longer wish it, you may be abruptly mortalized and shoved underground forever; or for a time. Lenin is now entering that C1ubious phase. By all the historic standards of earthly deification, the citizens who pass before such altars can see that their great man is a god. The message which the authorities intended to send, by laying out these men exactly as they have, is perfectly clear.

Beyond that, the public mayor may not think that the Hero is a satisfactory guarantee of immortality. He is, however, a rare concrete indication of its possible existence. As a result the edge of death is theoretically softened for the millions of individuals who are exposed to these One-and-Only Heroes - on display or encased in marble -- whose reflections they might wish to become.

The democratic process offers no equivalent softness. Participation by the citizen in a democracy is a down-to-earth business which has very little to do with grandeur and Heroism. But our complex rational systems draw individuals into fixed positions as experts. The reassurance felt by belonging in this way contradicts the very idea of participatory democracy. Political initiative therefore shifts over to the leaders and they in turn encourage the ever-more-passive individual to dream. Heroic leaders always encourage the people to dream, as if the capacity to dream were a positive political attribute. In truth, it has more to do with unleashing our fears, which then swell into the limitless realms of fantasy.

And yet, when we look at our own leaders, they don't resemble the Hitlerian Hero. These are not Napoleons marching across Europe. But the methods they use and their assumptions are those of the Hero. False. Heroes, no doubt, but they manipulate the tools of power in a parody of greatness, Most of the time there are no public indications of this peculiarity. Then abruptly, during the 1991 Iraq war, they all slipped effortlessly into the bellicose overstatement of hard, bitter war leaders.

To dismiss this as inoffensive is to miss the point. Our rational structures are not carrying us slowly but surely towards balanced, open and straightforward leadership. Instead, they carry us ever deeper into a world where the assumptions of leadership may lean towards parody, but the parody in question is that of the Hero.

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