How a poem shows the value of cherishing your doubts.
Have a read through this poem and think about what comes to mind as you read it:
The Anti-Christ
“He comes from the mountain, he stands in the grove!
Our own eyes have seen it: the wine that he wove
From water, the corpses he wakens.”
O could you but hear it, at midnight my laugh:
My hour is striking; come step in my trap;
Now into my net stream the fishes.
The masses mass madder, both numbskull and sage;
They root up the arbours, they trample the grain;
Make way for the new Resurrected.
I’ll do for you everything heaven can do.
A hair-breadth is lacking – your gape too confused
To sense that your senses are stricken.
I make it all facile, the rare and the earned;
Here’s something like gold (I create it from dirt)
And something like scent, sap, and spices –
And what the great prophet himself never dared:
The art without sowing to reap out of air
The powers still lying fallow.
The Lord of the Flies is expanding his realm;
All treasures, all blessings are swelling his might . . .
Down, down with the handful who doubt him!
Cheer louder, you dupes of the ambush of hell;
What’s left of life-essence, you squander its spells
And only on doomsday feel paupered.
You’ll hang out your tongues, but the trough has been drained;
You’ll panic like cattle whose farm is ablaze . . .
And dreadful the blast of the trumpet.
If you are anything like me, reading these lines conjured up black and white images of 20th century dictators holding speeches in front of hypnotised masses. What’s eerie about this poem is that Stefan George wrote it in 1907, before any of these dictators came to power (its original title is “Der Widerchrist”). In 1907 the world was, for the most part, ruled by colonial empires which were, for the most part, ruled by hereditary monarchs. Yet, the poet sensed something that all later generations relate to in their own way. This is a piece of poetry that felt prescient ever since it was written.
Inevitably, what you think about it will reflect what is going on in the world around you. The analogies you draw, the message you think it conveys, will be coloured by today’s headlines. Right after WW1 readers might have drawn parallels between the poem’s apocalyptic imagery and the senselessness of a conflict that had started with cheering crowds seeing off a generation of young men to their doom. A few decades later, and the rise of Communism in Russia and the ascendant Fascist movements might have come to mind. Throughout the Cold War and even today, there has never been a shortage of such analogies. The poem’s continuing relevance begs the question: what is this Anti-Christ, and why does it refuse to disappear?
George’s Anti-Christ, speaking personally, spells out his plan with striking candour, creating a sense of inevitability. Reading the poem feels like watching a thriller with shots alternating between the meticulous preparation of a terrorist attack by an evil genius, and the relatively incompetent reactions of the “good guys”. We know ahead of time that they will fail to prevent disaster, but cannot do anything about it. Intoxicated the people fail to see the abyss until it is too late. The images of bombed out cities and the stories of survivors inevitably come to mind. What is it that makes people shut their eyes and close their minds until their own backyard catches fire? We need to identify the driving forces of what we might call Fanaticism. They need to be identified so that the social equivalent of drunk-driving can be stopped in time. The great Italian author Umberto Eco in his famous essay on the origins of Fascism[1] noted a number of features that characterise Fanaticism in general. As he writes, the presence of one such feature suffices for others to coagulate around it. The seemingly pre-planned process by which Fanaticism takes over groups and societies in reality gathers momentum like a mindless avalanche. At its root we can identify a feature that functions as the fertile ground on which Fanaticism thrives with toxic ferocity: an irrational belief in an absolute truth.
We don’t need to consult history books to find confirmation of this. Switch on your TVs (or go on YouTube) and you’ll see everything from Islamist terrorists creating a real-life Kalifate to hasten the end of the world, to Neo-Nazis hoping to start a race war. Neither the Skinhead nor his fellow Fanatic, the Jihadist, has the shadow of a doubt that his beliefs are correct. Acting under the firmly held assumption that they have received an ultimate truth, they reject debate and critical thinking. When the National Socialist Party entered the Reichstag in 1928 Joseph Goebbels, with a revealing clarity that rivals George’s Anti-Christ, wrote: “We come as enemies. As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.” Why participate in a debate, if you know that there’s nothing to be learned from the get-go? A willingness to compromise or even to critically think are not merely frowned upon, but considered treasonous. Having a diversity of opinions and vibrant public discourse might seem beneficial if you accept the possibility of improving your knowledge. If, on the other hand, you believe yourself to be engaged in a struggle for power, a war of those knowing the truth against the sleazy purveyors of falsehood, diversity within your ranks starts to look like retreat, cowardice and defeat.
Looking at the world and all areas of human achievement through the lens of a war-like struggle is another feature of Fanatics and follows directly from their irrational belief in knowing the definitive truth. The world around them being deeply corrupt and hostile, they cannot but draw a sharp distinction between themselves and the rest. Either you are a believer, or you’ll go to hell. Either you are an Aryan, or you should leave “our” country. Purity within the group must be maintained at all costs, in order to succeed in fighting an enemy that enjoys a vast superiority in resources[2]. Violence against whoever stands in a Fanatic’s way can be justified if it is permitted or commanded by their absolutely held beliefs. Only fanatic conviction allows human beings to target defenceless civilians and claim to be in the right. The less doubt one harbours, the further up the hierarchy one rises. Just as their world-view follows from their irrationally held beliefs, so a kind of elitism follows from their world-view.
Using one criterion (e.g. faith, ideology, ethnicity or class) to determine peoples’ status, fanatic groups go about constructing social hierarchies. Their obsession with this criterion means that they cannot but continue the search for an ideal within their group. The tendency to construct social hierarchies seems to be near universal, but fanatics substitute compliance with their set of beliefs for virtues like merit and competence. Those who openly oppose their beliefs stand outside their hierarchy and need to be shut up. Everyone of indeterminate conviction and all positive fanatics however occupy some status on the in-group hierarchy. The elites within that hierarchy are simply those who most closely exemplify whichever value happens to be the group’s lode-star. Since that value is taken to be the definitive highest good, whoever comes closest to perfectly manifesting it deserves higher status. In the Third Reich, for example, party members were supposed to make up one-tenth of the total population. Membership of the party thereby functioned as a first step up the hierarchy. Further up, the SS was intended to be the racial vanguard of the Aryan Reich. Ongoing conflict being a necessary consequence of the irrational belief in having received the absolute truth, the purging of those deemed different enough takes on ever more extreme forms. Those who most diverge from the ideal will always be considered obstacles on the way towards the establishment of an earthly paradise. The moment they are removed, another set of people now occupies their spot on the lowest rung of the ladder and risks being swept aside. If this looks like a never-ending cycle, that’s because there really is no obvious end to it. There is no shortage of examples to illustrate this point, but consider the process of radicalization that followed the French Revolution or the shift of power towards the SS that began with its formation and lasted until the end of the war. It is difficult to grasp just how powerful the compulsive search for enemies can be, but reading about the fate of the kulaks (property-owning peasants) in the supposed farmers’ paradise[3] will give you a rough indication. The vicious cycles of purification, one might even say purging, that begin with an irrational conviction, and continue even within the groups themselves, function as an engine for the evils of Fanaticism. If it is not in power, it fights against the system from the outside. Once it has gained control of the system it supercharges the purging of those deemed different enough, until the entire edifice comes crushing down on the Fanatics’ (and more often than not, everyone else’s) heads.
It goes without saying, that Fanaticism is irreconcilable with liberal democracy. Where liberal democracy thrives on diversity of opinion and civic debate, Fanaticism relies on uniformity and single-minded loyalty. Where liberal democracy empowers citizens to speak for themselves, Fanaticism styles itself the interpreter of the Will of the People. Where liberal democracy provides rules to protect openness, Fanaticism attempts to undermine, abuse and ultimately abolish it. If this seems too abstract, go read “The Gulag Archipelago” or “Man’s Search for Meaning” – these books will make this point so relatable that your hair will stand up. The consequences of letting Fanaticism go unchallenged extend to all areas of our lives. We cannot wait for bands of brownshirts to rampage through the streets before we wake up to the threat. We need to open our eyes now. We need to become more aware of Fanaticism’s early signs and counter them with our own behaviour every day.
Fanaticism clouds our ability to see reality as it is. The harder we draw the line between “us” and “them”, the more unquestioning our obedience to a set of ideological tenets, the less charitable our view of others- the more likely we are to be sleepwalking into disaster. The Anti-Christ, although powerfully portrayed in our poem as a person, is not any single person or ideology (and definitely not a goat sitting on a throne in the ninth circle of hell. What leads us down to hell on earth is the kind of Fanaticism that has far too often since 1907 lead to unspeakable suffering. It does not have a will of its own, but its features are mutually reinforcing and attract each other. The longer one waits, the harder it gets to turn back the tide, and the more it feels like the whole process must be unfolding according to some evil master-plan. All this means that the early warning signs are key. Do you catch yourself thinking that there is nothing someone could do or say that would make you distrust them? Are you sometimes convinced that no matter what someone else says, it must be intended to harm you? When was the last time you’ve changed your mind on something you really care about? These are questions that we should be asking ourselves more frequently. Similarly, asking which public figures thrive on polarisation, do not tolerate dissent and cultivate an image of infallibility might be the best way to nib our own tendencies towards self-destruction in the bud. If we keep questioning ourselves and our leaders, if we work hard on finding common ground and if we learn to cherish our doubts, we might avoid rushing into that ambush after all.
[1] Eco, Ur-Fascism: https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf
[2] Al Quaeda, for example, uses questionnaires for prospective members: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/osama-bin-ladens-unusual-hr-style-revealed-in-al-qaeda-employee-questionnaire-10267498.html
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