Perfecting Humanity by Destroying It
This challenging and intense book offers a road map to understanding the deep roots and structures of utopianism in our culture, and how, in modernity and in the post-modern era, these tenacious roots have attached themselves, like a cancer, of potent ideologies and hatreds that target political and economic freedom and demonize minorities, in particular the Jewish people.
Utopianism refers to the idea that perfection in society is possible. It is commonly mixed with the eschatological belief and expectation that an apocalyptic transformation of society and human life, delivered by a messiah, or the laws of history, is inevitable. A millenarian apocalypse is central to Christianity. “[T]he Western world is unique in the extraordinary profusion of ideal imagined worlds, and a particular obsession with a type of revolutionary utopia modeled on religious narratives,” Pilon writes.
While putatively seeking universal harmony, justice and peace, utopianism has left a tragic trail of death and devastation, self-consciously sacrificing individual freedom and well-being on the altar of collective purity. In the first 1500 years of the Christian era, utopias like that advocated by Thomas Müntzer in Germany were violent and hostile to private property, but localized. The French Revolution was a “millenarian conflagration [that] became the first real experiment in eutopia.” Powered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vision of a perfect state, it demonstrated utopianism’s existential threat in the modern world, when abstract ideas like the “General Will,” which Pilon calls “frankly meaningless,” were embraced by oppressed, frustrated and hungry mobs led by people with no experience in dealing with pluralism and political compromise. Robespierre believed that “the people is always worth more than individuals,” a phrase repeated almost verbatim by Adolf Hitler.
Marxist utopias are based on the theory that social problems and conflicts are the result of private property, and will be ended with its abolition. As the late Sir Roger Scruton observed, the violence of socialist utopias is necessary in order to force people to do what is impossible, and Marxist utopias force not only people, but facts to conform to theories believed infallible. The end of purity and utopia justifies any means, including violence. Marx identified the “capitalist/Jew” as Antichrist. Pilon goes so far as to state that Marxism itself, reflecting his own “aversion to the Jews,” originated in an antisemitic conspiracy theory. And it established a tradition of anti-capitalist antisemitism that has been embraced even by critics of communism like Bakunin, who claimed communism was a conspiracy of the “parasitical Jewish nation.”
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, utopianism gained political legitimacy in the form of what Pilon terms “progressive state utopias” – statist movements aimed at ending inequality, with anti-commercial, communitarian outlooks favoring a unitary Hegelian political synthesis. Progressives were, and still tend to be, intolerant of pluralism and compromise. Some, like President Wilson, whom Pilon excoriates for his “megalomania” and “naivete,” showed a “zeal for species-cleaning” (eugenics), and a degrading view of Judaism as a lower form of consciousness; all were collectivistic, and critical of the Enlightenment principle of natural and constitutional rights. Mussolini’s fascism took progressivism further toward a monolithic, “transformative, purifying, sanctifying” nation state, with mass media promoting a utopian myth of national rejuvenation, and the dream of a magnificent future, a Golden Age.
Pilon shows how in National Socialism under the Third Reich, a “ruthless cult of violence” inherited from the Jacobin tradition, took the form of “Heroic Totalitarianism,” superimposing nationalist and racial superiority myths upon an existing mental framework of Christian millennialism, to which a latent receptivity had been formed. Nazism became a form of religion itself, like Luther designating the Jews as the Antichrist, branding them as egoistic, money-grubbing parasites on the community; the apocalyptic war against the Jews was a war to protect a Volkish utopia that their modernist outlook allegedly threatened.
Pilon also takes up the core beliefs of a wide range of other political movements, showing how utopian and apocalyptic ideas and passions have furnished virtually all of modern history’s most destructive chapters.
The transformative political movements of the 1960s were based on romantic, apocalyptic fantasies, embraced by intellectuals imagining themselves as members of a vanguard. Extreme environmentalism is founded on a belief in a coming “Ecocalypse.” Quoting Pascal Bruckner, she says “ecological doomsday scenarios” are “recycling anti-capitalist clichés.” Few environmental utopians, Pilon notes, “recognize their movement’s roots in the racist pseudo-science that was Progressive-era eugenics,” and in National Socialism’s “hatred against technology, money, and greed … mixed with a romantic adoration of pristine Nature.”
Jihadism poses a virulent, contemporary threat based on Muhammad’s apocalyptic prophecies, and on political Islam’s affinities with both communism and fascism, sharing their “pseudo egalitarian,” “monistic” and authoritarian ideological qualities, as well as their global ambitions, and hostility to pluralist Anglo-Saxon democracy and capitalism. The denial of individual freedom is so extensive that radical Shiite Mullahs even dictate how one should cut one’s toenails. Islamist antisemitism was fomented by the importation of German and Russian conspiracy theories.
Eurasianism, an anti-Western and ethno-nationalist political religion promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church, is “Russia’s messianic mission.” Indeed, all around the world, and contrary to predictions about the inevitability of secularization (in themselves, an expression of utopianism), political religion is back, while divine principles like the sanctity of life are fading.
Today, the utopian conceit manifests itself in the stubborn insistence that solutions to national and global problems lie in the imposition of a one-world vision (“bringing people together”), a political utopianism (or “political revolution”) embracing top-down, command-and-control economic and social prescriptions cooked up by experts and administered by bureaucrats. Steeped in anxieties about social and environmental collapse instilled by the jeremiads of apocalyptic technocrats and internet hucksters, many embrace what sociologist Edwards Shils termed “the vibrant expectation of a total-and significant-transformation of the entire life of society … a total alleviation of life’s ills and conflicts,” a watered-down version of the socialist millennialism of figures like Georges Sorel. As studies by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation have shown, the millennials, largely without education about communism’s atrocities, and thus receptive to the traditions that have informed it, are themselves sympathetic to socialist millennialism.
Today, we face a resurgence of antisemitic prejudice and hate, major portions of which, in the tradition of Marx, flow from the political Left and merge with Islamist antisemitism. In France, antisemitism is growing on the extreme Left. There were well-founded fears that Britain’s Labour Party, led by Trotskyite Jeremy Corbyn, and investigated for its demonstrated “institutional antisemitism” by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, would win a recent national election. And today, there is also no denying the fascist undertones of some proponents of “National Populism,” and other new political tendencies, which may not be overtly utopian, but lean toward ethno-nationalism, ideological absolutism, unitary state power and conspiracy theories in ways that threaten constitutional and indeed moral safeguards of minority and individual rights, and thus tend to scapegoat and demonize the Jewish people in ways that echo the utopian tradition.
Warnings and Remedies
Pilon’s book is much more than a critical historical survey of utopianism; it also offers an erudite and wise moral and political response. To do so, she reviews warnings about the evils of utopianism that are as deeply embedded in our tradition as the phenomenon itself. The Greek gods punished hubris, as they “did not look kindly upon those who stole their secrets.” But it is in the Jewish tradition, which is also the source of our eschatological orientation, that we find the most forceful anti-utopian messages in the sparse prose of the Torah. The profound separation between mankind and the divine is among the most central principles of Judaism, and something that reinforced Jewish rejection of the Roman, and later Christian notion of the man-god. Perfection, as Pilon explains, is for God, and the faults of mankind are our own fault. The ambition to build a tower reaching heaven, and thus to breach the moral chasm between human life and the unknowable essence of God, provides what is perhaps the Torah’s strongest political lesson. Both the arrogant desire, and the technical capacity to build the Tower of Babel were seen as based on the unity of mankind, all speaking the same language and all mobilized on behalf of the same project. This resulted in frightening power, the power to join God in heaven, and the ability, as historian Michael Oakeshott observed, to thwart God’s power to punish us for our sins, as the Tower would protect mankind from future floods. As he wrote, the Tower was a project “to subjugate God and Nature to human ambitions.” To address this hubris, and keep our power divided, God divided mankind, creating linguistic and cultural pluralism.
The political point here seems clear: ambitions for global, or even national unity, are utopian, dangerous and at variance with nature, or God’s plan. If we all subscribe to the same truth, there will be no private identity, no possibility of error, no distinction between truth and error, and indeed, no truth. Pilon thus uncovers a profound paradox, and one infusing my own field of work, international human rights. International human rights are based on the principle that all people share a common human nature, and natural rights based on universal and trans-cultural reason. Don’t natural rights thus logically suggest, and indeed demand, a universal legal system protecting universal human rights, global governance institutions, even world government? Beginning in the Enlightenment, Western civilization has gone in this direction, interpreting its teachings in largely technocratic, legal-positivistic terms that are open to moral equivalence, while neglecting or forgetting altogether ancient warnings about hubris and utopianism. We reflexively look for solutions by building up, with ever larger and encompassing projects that give the state or intergovernmental organizations more and more power and moral authority, instead of looking down, into our societies, our communities and ourselves. The result is institutions like the United Nations Human Rights Council, today dominated by dictatorships, poisoning the idea and practice of human rights with hypocrisy that is, perhaps, a sign of God’s wrath.
Evil exists, must be understood and must be confronted for what it is, Pilon insists. Her political message is moral, but also practical, down to earth; “pluralism…is a prerequisite to fulfilling God’s plan,” and compromise is essential, while ideological absolutism and rigidity must be avoided. She agrees with philosopher Leszek Kołakowski’s jeremiad: utopians want to institutionalize fraternity, but that is the surest way to totalitarian despotism. Societies need reform on the basis of ideals and plans that respect human freedom and nature, not revolution. The liberal nation state, not hubristic globalism, offers the best protection for with moral freedom and individual natural rights with which we have been endowed. Post-modernity needs a dose of modesty.
Pilon’s book, finally, raises important questions in the realm of psychic health. Political utopianism degrades societies, insisting that they are so profoundly corrupt that a complete transformation is necessary. Utopias are based on degrading, negative images of human worth; they teach members of societies negative things about themselves, their potential and their morals. Perfectionism is utopianism’s self-negating and self-defeating psychological corollary. According to psychologist Edith Eger, a follower of Viktor Frankl, “Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken—you.” It is a prison of our own making. Not just societies, but people, must free themselves of utopian expectations, and accept mistakes that are a sign of the human capacity to choose; a sign that we are by nature free.
