Hyper-politics and Orthodox Fanaticism

Extreme ideological polarization and hyper-politicization are amongst the more disturbing recent phenomena of our time. Many people blame the internet, whilst others point the finger at a ‘populist backlash’ against political elites. In this essay, I want to suggest it has a lot to do with a not-so-new phenomenon that’s been given renewed life in the context of our telematic social universe. I’m talking about political movements. The latter are often seen as being driven by progressive social agendas, but that’s not always the case. Indeed, in late 19th and early 20th century Europe, political movements covered the entire range of the ideological spectrum.

To understand what movements are about, it won’t be enough merely to invoke generic ideological categories (‘right or ‘left’) or dissect an array of particular examples. It’s necessary to dig down a bit deeper. What we must do is uncover the peculiar logic that drives them. But before this, I want to start the ball rolling, as it were, by briefly examining an influential contemporary political movement: environmentalism.

As a progressive social cause, the environmental agenda, like human rights, is now an obligatory ideology to the extent that anyone who questions it is likely to be regarded as either extremely stupid or wicked. Not since the Cold War and general public awareness of a looming threat of nuclear catastrophe has one single issue come to occupy so secure a place in the broader social consciousness.[1] Before the rise of identity politics and after the fall of the U.S.S.R. – the classical incarnation of perhaps the archetypical 20th century political movement – the environment was in a position to take over from communism as the most universal political investment. When the investment in politics becomes universal, it engenders a political commitment which is likewise universal and all-consuming. What this leads to is the transformation of political activity into a moral crusade.

The politics of the movement, which always demands from those who support it total commitment, is a politics of virtuous convictions. Not only does it overhaul the very meaning of the political; it abolishes the domain of ethics by totally politicizing morality. Effectively this means politics replaces morality. This is indeed a “common conviction of the modern age”, as Francois Furet put it, that morality can be “totally contained in politics”, and likewise, that the political order is “the sole and ultimate repository of good and evil”.[2] One finds this conviction operating everywhere today insofar as each and every moral or ethical question ends up being turned into a political issue and a political contest. This occurs even when, as is the case with many such questions, no political or social ‘solution’ is actually feasible or possible, the reason being that morality and ethics belong to that sphere of life which concerns human beings in their status as individuals.

Now, if morality is about individuals, the idea of ‘social morality’ is, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms. However, it’s a contradiction which, thanks in no small part to the discipline of sociology, people are inclined to overlook. Thereby they forget the only way morality can be socialized is to deny the concrete existence of personal beings, along with their interpersonal relations with other personal beings (and we should note such relationality is, in fact, the very ground of individual, personal existence). Sociology replaces individuals with abstractions, such as ‘society’, ‘community’, etc.. All such abstractions, which “rest on the assumption that men can be completely conditioned because they are only functions of some higher historical or natural forces”,[3] abolish the difference between public and private. Thereby they destroy the possibility of the inner life. The endpoint of the complete “socialisation of man”[4] is totalitarianism. Hence Emmanuel Levinas’s remark that a political system “in which the interpersonal relationship is impossible is a totalitarian state”.[5]

I’ve chosen to begin with the environmental movement (rather than any of the many other types of political movements nowadays, from new nationalisms, populism, to identity and gender politics) because here the make-over of politics into morality – arguably the first step on the road to totalitarianism – is relatively easy to discern. Indeed, most people are apt to think of environmentalism as the ‘ethical politics’ par-excellence. Certainly, we’ve been conditioned to think of it in these terms. After all, aren’t those who work on behalf of environmental issues among the few in politics nowadays motivated by genuinely ethical convictions? If the very future of our terrestrial home is what the environmental activist seeks to protect and safeguard through their involvement in politics, surely there couldn’t be a more self-less, non-partisan kind of political commitment. Saving the planet is presumably a goal which cuts across all ideological divisions, a goal that is relevant to every human being on the earth regardless of their political, cultural, personal or religious situation.

And so, environmentalism assumes the mantle of the summum bonum; all those who act politically in its name have, by definition, pledged themselves to working for the ‘greater good’ of all humankind. The environment is a “global humanitarian cause” that need not be “articulated with specific political programs”.[6] Moreover, as an existential politics, environmentalism betokens a politics of survival. In which case, those who oppose it become enemies of the human race, and can only deserve to be destroyed (on these terms, Jordan Peterson expresses concern about how environmentalism is liable to function as the cover for an “anti-human sentiment” that puts itself forward “under the guise of virtue on a planetary scale”[7]).

Proudhon once said that anyone who invokes humanity in the world of politics means to cheat. Indeed, one wonders what a notion like the ‘common good’ could possibly mean after a century of holocausts and genocides. Actually, I rather think the supposedly ethical commitment of environmental activists conceals an extreme self-righteousness. For to the extent that these people are “sure that they are right”,[8] the environmental political movement is less about ethics and more about orthodoxy – that is, a politics of ‘right belief’’.[9] This holds for political movements quite generally. The magnetic attraction they exert is largely a result, I would suggest, of the appeal of orthodoxy – that is, the notion that through supporting a particular cause, one stands on ‘the right side of being’.

Raymond Aron observes that the “spirit of orthodoxy . . . transforms intellectuals into propagandists”.[10] Propaganda is, by its very nature, one-sided and polarizing. Moreover, by discouraging reasoned discussion, it tends to encourage firm convictions in the form of attitudes which are “psychologically iron-clad and beyond shaking by argument”.[11] Thus we could say quite generally that political movements take the form of fanatical orthodoxies. This is perhaps also why the internet, which makes possible extreme selectivity in the dissemination and presentation of information and ideas, has been such a powerful impetus for acute polarization in the political arena lately. Let us now turn to looking in more detail at the mechanisms which underlie political movements.

Movements and their Logic

One should not forget that only a building can have a structure, but that a movement . . . can have only a direction (Hannah Arendt[12])

One of the striking features of late 19th century European culture is a radical transformation in the nature of political activity. We can characterize this development as a shift from parties to movements.

When a political party acquires a right to govern, it is aligned with the power of the state for a specific period. Thereby it has responsibilities and is assumed to hold to certain core values (the most important being “moderation in the pursuit of self-interest”, as Hannah Arendt put it[13]). In a constitutional-plural system of governance, political parties operate within a framework of legality in which the “law is above power”, whilst power is “only a means of [the law’s] enforcement”.[14] That each party appeals to the interests of a particular sector of the population creates a differentiation in the citizenry as a whole, whilst the existence of an opposition necessitates clear policies. The latter facilitate an understanding of what each party intends to achieve whilst in power, thereby making it possible for people to make reasoned choices on the basis of knowledge.[15]

A political movement, on the other hand, may well work within a constitutional-plural system of governance, yet as far as its motives and aims are concerned, have very little genuine commitment to such a system. One indication of this is the way political movements rarely show themselves willing to “organize their members (or educate their leaders) for the purpose of handling public affairs”.[16] Another is that ordinary processes of governance are regarded with disdain, which take second place to some nebulous, supra-political vision.[17] In this respect, rather than social classes and their specific interests, the focus of the movement is an idea. Driven by an ideological compulsion to provide “a philosophical justification of political rule”,[18] the rise of movements in the last part of the 19th century is related to two sociological phenomena characteristic of the modern age: the existence of social masses, and the notion of a ‘clean sweep’ or tabula rasa. Let us consider the latter first.

In the social field, the idea of tabula rasa is that one can begin again from scratch. This idea, perhaps the preeminent contribution of a revolutionary political tradition, is a symptom of “the spontaneous ‘constructivism’ of public opinion in the democratic era”.[19] Constructivism means social issues are regarded “merely as products of volition”.[20] No wonder, then, that modern political movements display an “exaggerated belief in the power of the will”[21] and a focus on “intentions rather than outcomes”.[22] It was only in the 20th century that those in politics began to feel “an overwhelming need to justify themselves intellectually, to establish the scope of their power in a comprehensive, ideological manner”.[23]

Intellectual justifications in the political sphere catapult the idea into the realm of social action. This ‘socialisation’ of the idea invariably transforms it. First of all, concepts will be streamlined to facilitate easy communication and dissemination. And since one presumes one’s ideas will encounter a certain amount of opposition and resistance, the inclination is to strengthen them to resist attack and weakening. But in a situation where a multiplicity of viewpoints compete for attention, it’s also possible that the idea is better served by qualities of openness and flexibility rather than a defensive posture of rigid strength. And this is, in fact, the assumption of pluralistic political systems.[24]

The basis of politics in the Western tradition is not the clash of ideas but rather a certain readiness and openness of those presenting these ideas to negotiate and discuss. This tradition presupposes, in other words, certain values, such as reasonableness and a capacity for compromise. In the absence of such values, ideas are liable to acquire the character of dogmatic statements. Such dogmatism, in its turn, fosters the false notion that to advance in the political arena, one’s intellectual standpoint can and must be constructed so as to be infallible. And that can only hasten the transformation of politics into a war-like struggle for ascendency and ideas into weapons of battle, where rather than countering reasonably the viewpoints of one’s opponent, the objective will be to disarm, neutralize, attack and then demolish completely not so much the viewpoints as the person advancing them.

In a pluralistic political system, the emphasis is on the capacity of political actors to engage in a process of negotiation and civil confrontation. Moreover, a system which encourages the existence of dissenting opinions, discussion and reasoned opposition must safeguard the possibility of a multitude of positions from which different ideas may be put forward. One realization, however imperfect, of such a pluralistic structure is multi-party politics. Most importantly, the presupposition of such a pluralistic system is that a process of discussion and confrontation is not merely more virtuous but actually beneficial for the quality of ideas. A climate of constructive dissent enables policies and policy proposals to be tested and progressively improved through a process of criticism.

In effect, then, rather than the substance of political ideas per se, what’s important is the existence of a social environment whose general spirit is critical and pluralistic. When people lose sight of this critical spirit, there will be a tendency to make the idea disproportionately important, to turn it an end-in-itself, an absolute principle, rather than a means-to-an-end (that is, a vehicle for the communication, criticism and critical improvement of political policies).

So if movements rely on the above-described anti-pluralistic elevation of the idea into an absolute principle, and if anti-pluralism culminates in the one-party state and, more generally, authoritarian ideologies which stifle dissent, are we justified in assuming that authoritarianism is somehow endemic to political movements? Not always, but predominantly it seems to be the case. Historically, it’s not difficult to show that anti-pluralistic political tendencies foster the growth of one-party states and, more broadly, authoritarian regimes.

Observing the character of 20th century European radical political movements during the inter-war period, Hannah Arendt noted that it was their tendency to be driven by ideas which decisively differentiated them from “the old parties” (by which Arendt meant the pre-1914 parties).[25] Even though the latter were “frequently were inspired by some political theory, [they] thought of their objectives as some end outside of themselves”.[26] Whereas insofar as movements are “charged with philosophy”[27] – that is, inspired by an ideational program that seeks to dominate everything else – it’s “only logical that the rise and functioning of all one-party systems follow the basic pattern of ‘movements”.[28] For the extremist ideologies and parties which emerged after the Great War, realizing the political theory itself was the objective, whilst the strategic components of political processes were degraded into a mere means to acquire power. For instance, the German National Socialist Party and the Russian Bolshevik Party both pursued the “functionalization and instrumentalization of ideas in the service of the politics of power and influence”.[29]

When the idea is “no longer recognized as an independent entity”[30], it can be “completely immersed into reality”.[31] Generally, the function of our mental constructs is to mediate between consciousness and the world. However, with this total immersion, such mediation must cease to exist. Then the idea may be transformed into an “absolute principle” – that is, into ideology. But the crucial point here is that the ease with which ideologies are able to turn ideas into the moving force of history is not a product of the ideational content, the ideos. Rather, it is the logos which is decisive. Mind you, the logos of ideology has little to do with the complex array of meanings characteristic of this concept in the history of Western philosophy. Not even a fraction of this complexity finds its way into the province of ideology, which reduces logos to an operational concept – that is, ‘logic’ in the strictly functional meaning of the term.

Because logical processes are abstract and completely devoid of content, they may be used to operate on any state of affairs whatsoever; one plus one will always equal two, no matter the circumstances.[32] And so, once the premise of a logic has been established, it operates faultlessly, just like a machine. The persuasiveness of an ideology is a function of this relentless invariance, not the substance of the ideas. This explains the surprising fact that whilst a person might passionately support a movement, they will often have little interest either in what it concretely seeks to achieve or the detail of how its social proposals are to be implemented. For this reason, too, leaders of movements rarely bother belabouring their acolytes with the intricacies of their own personal philosophy or world-view. Nor will they worry if people are not completely convinced about specifics. Hitler was quite correct in this respect when he remarked, in Mein Kampf, that those politicians who wanted to explain to their supporters the philosophical subtleties of their ideology were misguided; in fact, he recommends the leader of a movement should strenuously avoid trying to explain anything lest they get caught out by their own arguments (hence the importance of propaganda for National Socialism).

Since it is the inherent ‘logic’ of the ideology which makes everything so compelling, one can rest assured that as long the membership accepts certain premises, their support will be unwavering. The abstract logicalism of ideology, it’s imperviousness to verification through actual experience, also explains why most supporters of movements have scarcely any interest in how the cause to which they’ve committed themselves is actually faring in the political arena. Indeed, nothing which actually happens can affect their convictions. For instance, if the movement is successful, this does not require explanation, for it’s self-evident that it must succeed. Whereas if obstacles are encountered, or even if the movement fails miserably, this simply demonstrates that ‘outsiders’ (i.e., those who oppose or are hostile to its objectives) have yet to understand what it wants to achieve, or for malicious reasons, are working to undermine it. In effect, the movement can do no wrong, simply because it’s never subject to any test of real performance.[33]

It’s no accident, then, that most leaders of political movements shy away from proposing any “definite, closely determined [political] goals”.[34] Hannah Arendt points out such vagueness with regard to ideological content is less a sign of carelessness and more an acute recognition that “[t]otal loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise”.[35] Moreover, this vagueness has a tactical value, enabling the movement to adopt, modify and discard political programs and policies in accordance with the strategic needs of the moment without jeopardizing the allegiance of their followers. And insofar as the movement’s lack of certain fixed ideas or principles make it difficult for anyone to truly understand the basis for political decisions made by the leadership, criticism is effectively forestalled.

Finally, the overall sense of uncertainty fosters a conspiratorial atmosphere useful for undermining the arguments of the opposing side.[36] No wonder, then, that the foremost the totalitarian movements of the 20th century, Nazism and Stalinism, each in their own fashion, did their utmost “to get rid of the party programs which signified concrete content”.[37] Likewise, neither National Socialism nor Bolshevism “ever proclaimed a new form of government or asserted that its goals were reached with the seizure of power and the control of the state machinery”.[38]

Hannah Arendt observed that the source of the “identification of means and ends – so characteristic for modern ‘movements’ – lies in the structure of an assumed eternal dynamism”.[39] Indeed, the word itself suggests continual motion, a “constant going-ahead on the road to ever-new fields”.[40] Hence the absolute lack of ideological or political consistency characteristic of German National Socialism, and today, many radical activist movements on the left. Nazism’s remarkable ability to conform and adapt itself, chameleon-like, to whatever would secure for it the allegiance of the masses at any given moment is a clear demonstration of this dynamic character.

In the previous section, I quoted Arendt’s remark that the historical rise of one-party states in early 20th century Europe follows the pattern of movements. But isn’t the singularity of a one-party system at odds with the amorphous character of movements? Not in the least. In fact, they are quite complementary. Thus the absence of fixity characteristic of political movements should not be taken for a lack of resolve or vascilation. Quite the contrary, it serves a strategic purpose. Hence Lenin, architect of the Russian Revolution, remarks that “Social Democracy does not tie a man’s hands, is not limited to one plan or fixed method once and for all; it admits all means so long as they lie within the resources of the movement and permit maximum results under the given conditions”.[41]

 

Stop Thinking, Get Involved

Now, if the goal of the movement is to ‘set things in motion’, one might well ask: what precisely is to be set in motion? The answer is the masses. What are the characteristic features of social masses? Peter Baehr helpfully explains on the basis of Arendt’s treatment of this theme:

“Masses come in two complementary forms. First, they comprise individuals who live on the periphery of all social and political involvement. These people exist within the interstices of class society and party politics. Bereft of organizational affiliation, inexperienced in conventional politics, and lacking conviction . . . [m]asses in this first sense are testimony to the fact that modern government functions amid a population that tolerates it without enthusiasm . . . Alongside this first meaning of ‘masses’ . . . Arendt introduces another. On this reckoning, masses are the product of a specific conjunction. They constitute the detritus of all social strata that have lost their former social identity and emotional bearings as a result of abrupt domestic, geopolitical, and economic dislocation . . .”.[42]

Now, when I say that political movements set masses into motion, I don’t mean they literally shift people around in a geographical sense. The transport here is emotional rather than physical. Political movements are always demagogic. They aim to stir up emotional undercurrents, to arouse and excite, thereby eliciting from massified populations, the social object par-excellence of the movement, a twofold “dramatization and emotional mobilization”.[43]

What happens when social masses are gripped by an idea or a notion?[44] Rather than encouraging people to identify with a specific political goal, which might lead to a stabilization of their social identity, the appeal to emotion and drama creates in the individual a feeling of disorientation (ent-ortung).[45] But haven’t I just said the raison d’etre of any movement is an idea? In which case, a disoriented state of mind hardly seems likely to lead to cognitive engagement. Let us remember, however, that people don’t join political movements in order to get some thinking done. On the contrary, they want to be swept off their feet. In any case, the typical member of a movement is not usually the sort of person able to follow a complex argument, or weigh up alternatives in a reality which mostly resists reductive certainties.[46] Excitable and impulsive, for them intellectual activity is more a kind of divertissement – a source of distraction, stimulation and inspiration. Movements pander to this mentality. The continual manufacturing of drama and spectacle in the public realm keeps people in a permanent state of cognitive ferment, rendering them unable to really think anything through properly or clearly.[47]

At the same time, it would not do to have people merely running around with a whole lot of exciting thoughts and notions bumping around in their heads. They must also be compelled to implement the ideas they find so exciting. On this score, the watchword of the movement is ‘innovation’. Those who’ve given themselves over, heart-and-soul, for the cause long to create, often out of nothing – that is, on the basis of entirely fictitious circumstances – new social conditions and a new social reality. In this respect, communism was the exemplary political movement of modern times. Nowadays, in the face of growing disenchantment with conventional political processes, contemporary movements, whatever their particular cause, provide three things that are much sought-after – “a new dignity for politics, a new field for the imagination, and a more profound mooring for the revolutionary passion”.[48]

Like communism, political movements in the 21st century aim to set masses in motion, and this means organizing them. By the latter, I’m not talking about a process that makes the populace more orderly. Rather, organization works to re-configure the “entire texture of life according to an ideology”.[49] This comprehensiveness is crucial.[50] Movements construct an all-encompassing framework for making sense of reality, a framework which purports to supply “the key to history or the solution to the riddles of the universe”.[51] At the same time, people are discouraged from comparing what they are asked to believe with the evidence provided by their own experience. Movements destroy common-sense, just as they replace independent thinking with formulaic solutions to every possible question of life and meaning.[52]

Francois Furet observed that ideologies typically create a “compulsory and fictitious language insulated from reality”.[53] In this context, the ideology of the movement constitutes a true “manacle of the mind, an intellectual straightjacket that inhibits the natural thinking process”.[54] Indeed, in the case of the most extreme and ruthless political movement of modern times – Nazism – even language was entirely co-opted. Thus subtle linguistic cues reinforced adherence to the party line, whilst everyday turns of phrase were mined with clever traps specifically designed to ensnare unsuspecting individuals in the web of the ideology, making certain patterns of thinking seem logical and inescapable, and certain reprehensible behaviours appear both unavoidable and justified.[55]

“Democratic freedoms”, observed Hannah Arendt, “may be based on the equality of all citizens before the law, yet they [i.e., these freedoms] only acquire their meaning and function organically when the citizens belong to and are represented by groups or form a social and political hierarchy”.[56] By separating and atomizing individuals, the dynamism of the movement destroys concrete social ties, thereby creating a “completely heterogeneous uniformity”[57] – that is, a society where, despite the fact that every person is in exactly the same position as every other, such consanguinity never gives rise to any real solidarity.

Caught up in the restless ebb and flow of the movement, people are deprived of the ability to identify, in concert with others, their actual political interests,[58] even as they are manipulated to believe their isolation could somehow be politically effective.[59] As a consequence, people come to inhabit a day-dream world of imaginary commitments (here I’m thinking of that ‘anthem’ of 1960’s counter-culture politics, the song by John Lennon – ‘Imagine’). On the other hand, by playing upon both the “essentially futile feelings of self-importance” and the “hysterical” need for “security” that characterizes “individuals in an atomised society”,[60] movements encourage “isolated citizens to unite and recognise as their leader the one who knows how to translate imperatives into collective emotions”.[61] In effect, emotional energies that might have served as the basis for genuine political change are redirected into fruitless expressions of anger, resentment and cynicism.[62]

 

The Politics of Awareness

Finally, perhaps most importantly, movements work to flatter the pride of intellectual elites, making them believe their support for a ‘vanguard’ cause is evidence of their own superior intelligence. This is particularly true of environmental politics. Thus the environment is the credo of all ‘right-thinking’ people, whilst politics once more becomes a matter of a lofty philosophy that encourages individuals to identify in the most personal manner with values taken to be self-evident and beyond question. So whether it’s a letter to the editor of a large daily newspaper, or a personal profile on an internet dating site, just a few hints are enough to establish one’s credentials, as if the word environment were a synonym for intelligent and self-aware.

The politics of the movement, then, is a politics of awareness. The latter suggests a worldly kind of consciousness. Someone who is aware is up-to-date, ‘in the know’. They pride themselves on being able to see ‘what’s really going on’ (in effect, to see what others are unable to see).[63] And yet, this state of mind can also be understood in precisely the opposite terms. For if awareness means always holding in front of oneself one’s own ‘sense’ of things, it’s very easy for such person to become quite oblivious to everything around them. What I mean is that the attitudinal complex of awareness also brings with it an introspective element. But this element is problematic for political commitment.

Politics presupposes a person with a firm handle on the state of things around themselves, a willingness to look beyond their own perspective and feelings, a capacity not so much for empathy as clear-sighted perspicacity and sagacity. For this reason, no genuine politics can come of introspection per se. So in the measure that political movements cultivate awareness, they also potentially cultivate this reflexive element, inward-looking mentality which is apolitical, even anti-political.

Let us go further. Seeing that progressive politics nowadays mostly revolves around exercises in ‘consciousness raising’, I want to suggest that those who throw themselves into all-out activism for the sake of a cause like the environment are not really all that interested in political engagement. Lacking the patience required to engage in that laborious process of negotiation and compromise which is the metier of actual political work, and intoxicated by their precious ‘awareness’ – in the form of a feeling that they possess some kind of ‘special insight’ into the nature of reality – such a person has started out on the road to civic participation in an entirely illusory way.

As a self-preoccupied individual who does not wish, in Hegel’s provocative description of the bourgeois, “to leave the riskless private sphere”,[64] devotion to a cause provides them with a gratifying fulfilment of certain inchoate emotional needs. This should not come as any surprise. For doesn’t the politics of the movement place all the emphasis on ‘intentions’ rather than ‘outcomes’, on grandiose statements rather than concrete policies? Thus the politics of awareness encourages people to ‘feel good’ about themselves rather than actually analyse what is going on around them, or, for that matter, act in a manner which is politically responsible. But if one’s aim is to feel good about oneself, this is not so much a commitment to politics as a self-serving attempt to “save one’s soul through political action”.[65]

References

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harvest, 1976.

– The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2017.

– Essays in Understanding. 1930-1954. Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken, 1994.

Aron, Raymond. Democracy and Totalitarianism. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970.

– ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ (June 1939), Salmagundi, No. 65 (Fall 1984), pp. 27-39.

Baehr, Peter. Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences. Stanford, California: Stanford Univ. Press, 2010.

Bracher, Karl Dietrich. The Age of Ideologies. A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century. London: St. Martins, 1984.

Brecht, Bertolt. Bertolt Brecht’s Me-Ti. Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things. New York: Bloombury, 2017.

Epstein, Mikhael. ‘The Russian Philosophy of National Spirit: Conservatism and Traditionalism’, www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1994-807-21-Epstein:pdf (accessed 20/3/2019).

Furet, Francois. The Passing of an Illusion. The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999.

Harkabi, Yehoshofat. Israel’s Fateful Hour. New York: Harper & Row, 1998.

Lanzmann, Claude. The Last of the Unjust [film], 2013.

Levinas, Emmanuel. On Escape. Stanford, California: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003.

Mosbey, John C. ‘Political Theology: Aleksandr Dugin and the Fourth Political Theory’, Unpublished Working Paper, March 2017.

Peterson, Jordan. Interviewed by Helen Lewis, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZYQpge1W5s (accessed 12/1/2020).

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990.

Souvarine, Boris. Stalin. A Critical Survey of Bolshevism. New York: Octagon Books, 1972.

Swyngedouw, Erik. ‘Apocalypse Forever? Post-Political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change’. Theory, Culture and Society, 3, 2010, Vol. 27, 2-3, 213-232.

Veling, Terry. For You Alone. Emmanuel Levinas and the Answerable Life. Oregon: Cascade, 2014.

Voegelin, Eric. Modernity Without Restraint. Volume 5. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2000.

 

ENDNOTES

[1] Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. For some thirty years, environmental activists laboured to obtain recognition from the powers that rule this world. It was a long, hard road. They had to start right down at the very bottom. To begin with, the environmental idea was a marginal player at the very fringe of mainstream politics. Slowly and steadily, it inched its way up the ladder of political culture so that today, it is a major player alongside the traditional ideological blocs of left, liberal and conservative.

[2] The Passing of an Illusion. A History of the Communist Idea in the Twentieth Century, 417-8.

[3] Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 379.

[4] Ibid..

[5] Levinas, quoted in Terry Veling, For You Alone. Emmanuel Levinas and the Answerable Life, 76. In her review of a work by J. T. Delos, Hannah Arendt observes how in Totalitarian political regimes, “t]he identification of means and ends – so characteristic for modern ‘movements’ – lies in the structure of an assumed eternal dynamism. ‘The characteristic of totalitarianism is not only to absorb man within the group, but also to surrender him to becoming’. Against this seeming reality of the general and the universal, the particular reality of the individual person appears, indeed, as a quantite negligeable, submerged in the stream of public life which, since it is organized as a movement, is the universal itself” (Essays in Understanding, 210).

[6] Erik Swyngedouw, ‘Apocalypse Forever? Post-Political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change’, 219.

[7] Jordan Peterson, interviewed by Helen Lewis, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZYQpge1W5s

[8] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Peng. Ed.), 451.

[9] In this sense, the self-righteousness of environmental political activism corresponds more closely to the ancient idea of ethos rather than ethics.

[10] ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’ (June 1939), 35-6.

[11] Eric Voegelin, Modernity Without Restraint (Volume 5, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin), 199.

[12] The Origins of Totalitarianism (Peng. Ed.), 521.

[13] Essays in Understanding, 264.

[14] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 256.

[15] Raymond Aron notes that in constitutional-pluralist political regimes, “parties are in some ways the agents of political life; it is within the parties that the fight for the highest office takes place; it is through the parties that one arrives at power” (Democracy and Totalitarianism, 58).

[16] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 254.

[17] Perhaps I should clarify at this point. On a certain level, if environmentalists want to be more than an extra-political lobby group, they must at some point form a party, because this is the only way in a constitutional parliamentary system anyone can participate in government. But even though in this respect, environmental politics has come to be represented within the political-party system, this does not disprove my argument. For regardless of the existence of the Greens as an actually existing party, what I’m saying is that they essentially operate in the spirit of a movement rather than a party.

[18] Karl Dietrich Bracher, The Age of Ideologies, 1.

[19] Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 69

[20] Ibid..

[21] Yehoshofat Harkabi, Israel’s Fateful Hour, 85; with this statement, Harkabi summarizes the ethos and style of government of the .

[22] Bracher, The Age of Ideologies, 94. Bracher summarises the method of modern revolutionary-totalitarian political movements, which worked to fixate the public “ideologically and perpetually nourished it with declarations on society and the world, with political articles of faith and demands for endorsement, because this total unity was, above all, a notional figment without which a modern dictatorship’s claim to political unity – as distinct from earlier despotism through compulsion – was no longer conceivable. Ideological seduction and political compulsion had to interact with each other . . .” (ibid.).

[23] Ibid., 2. In this respect, the First World War played a decisive role. Its ultimate effect on politics was to normalize the manner in which political movements “mobilized everything, organized everything and propagandistically intensified everything: an increased (and ultimately absolute) involvement of the citizen, his participation in general elections and exciting plebiscites, his party-political and group-political ‘capture’ and persuasion, or indeed indoctrination, now became the prerequisites of all politics” (ibid., 93-4).

[24] Raymond Aron defines a pluralistic political system as a political regime in which “the peaceful rivalry for the exercise of power exists constitutionally. It is constitutional, whether written or not, and rules lay down the modalities of rivalry between individuals and groups for the exercise of power” (Democracy and Totalitarianism, 41; italics in original).

[25] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 249.

[26] Ibid..

[27] J. T. Delos, quoted in Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, ibid: “If the parties had been bodies for the organization of class interests, the movements become embodiments of ideologies. In other words, movements were ‘charged with philosophy’ and claimed to have set into motion ‘the individualization of the moral universal within the collective’” (the internal quotes in this passage of Arendt’s are from J. T. Delos, The Nation).

[28] Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 210

[29] Bracher, The Age of Ideologies, 3.

[30] Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 209; also The Origins of Totalitarianism, 249. In the context of political activity, this means that ideas take on a certain life of their own.

[31] Ibid..

[32] This might explain why the ideological content of most political movements is quite mutable, whilst the actual methods and principles of organization they use to pursue their goals are adhered to fanatical rigidly.

[33] This was Karl Popper’s objection to the scientific pretensions of Marxist political movements, but also Adlerian psychoanalysis: as ‘theories’, insofar as they were effectively ‘immune’ to falsification – no ‘clinical’ or socio-historical result could refute them – they were pseudo-science.

[34] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 259; “Mussolini was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal [party] program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone. Behind this act lay the notion that the actuality of the movement itself was the chief element of inspiration which would only be hampered by a party program (Ibid., Peng. Ed., 425, note 39). Lenin likewise pointed to the utility of maintaining a certain amount of vagueness about specific programs and ideological doctrines in his reflections on political and tactical realism.

[35] The Origins of Totalitarianism, 324.

[36] The necessity for such a conspiratorial component becomes clear when one recognizes that conspiracy is the only sure means for defending the infallibility of the movement. Rather than exposing faults or shortcomings on the part of the leadership, instances of failure are easily explained as the work of some secret ‘plot’ working to undermine the cause.

[37] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 324; “It is interesting that even in their beginnings the Nazi’s were prudent enough never to use slogans which, like democracy, republic, dictatorship, or monarchy, indicated a specific form of government” (ibid.).

[38] Ibid., 259, 326.

[39] Essays in Understanding, 210. The rest of the passage is worth quoting: “‘The characteristic of totalitarianism is not only to absorb man within the group, but also to surrender him to becoming’. Against this seeming reality of the general and the universal, the particular reality of the individual person appears, indeed, as a quantite negligeable, submerged in the stream of public life which, since it is organized as a movement, is the universal itself” (the quotations within this passage are from a book by J. T. Delos, The Nation, for which this essay of Arendt’s is a review).

[40] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, [Peng. Ed.], 515. “One should not forget that only a building can have a structure, but that a movement – if the word is to be taken seriously and as literally as the Nazi movement meant it – can have only a direction, and that any form of legal or governmental structure can be only a handicap to a movement which is being propelled with increasing speed in a certain direction” (ibid., Peng. Ed., 521). This means that for a political movement, potentially any course of action is possible, and once it has occurred, immediately becomes a fait accompli making extrinsic justification unnecessary.

[41] Lenin, quoted in Boris Souvarine, Stalin. A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 49.

[42] Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences, 171, note 33. Hannah Arendt observed that “masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interests, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions, neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls. It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and the communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all the other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 311). (Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences, 171, note 33).

[43] The Age of Ideologies, xii. A combination which is, according to Bracher, unique to modern ideological politics. Thus “[t]he practical goal of the movement is to organize as many people as possible within its framework and to set and keep them in motion” (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 326).

[44] In Marx’s words, “theory becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it makes a demonstration ad hominem [to the person], and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical” (Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction, quoted in editor’s note, Bertolt Brecht’s Me-Ti. Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things, 47).

[45] Karl Mannheim referred to this disorientation, perhaps the constituent feature of modern mass societies, as the ‘homelessness’ of modern thought. See Hannah Arendt’s essay on Mannheim in Essays in Understanding, in particular, 35. Of course, such a condition cannot be sustained for long. At some point, a countermanding desire for grounding will emerge.

[46] That’s not to say, of course, that movements don’t also attract some reasonably intelligent people. In fact, intellectuals are generally the mainstay of movements, at least initially. But it is also important to recognize that intellectuals are only tolerated so long as they do not display evidence of genuine originality or initiative. It’s symptomatic that the Nazi movement quickly discarded its brightest intellectual apologists at the very moment they showed any sign of a capacity for independent thought. Likewise, no movement has room for the thinker who attempts to remain outside its dynamical impetus.

[47] The instability of the grounding ideas of the movement is the exact complement of the chaotic social conditions which follow in their wake. However, it’s important to underline that such social instability is quite intentional. Commenting on the paradigmatic movement of modern times – Nazism – Hannah Arendt observed how it aimed to create a “permanent state of instability” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, [Peng. Ed.], 512. Likewise, as Benjamin Murmelstein, former Jewish Head of the Theresienstadt ‘model ghetto’, observed: “For all their fine talk of ‘organization’, their catch-all slogan, the Nazi’s never stopped creating its exact opposite: chaos, which ruled unrivalled throughout the [Theresienstadt] ghetto” (Murmelstein interviewed in Claude Lanzmann, The Last of the Unjust [film], 2013).

[48] Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 179.

[49] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Peng. Ed.), 474.

[50] In this connection, it’s no accident that most movements have a conspiratorial component. The key characteristic of conspiracies is the claim to explain everything without any need for factual evidence or verification. Indeed, most conspiratological forms of politics are entirely counter-factual. And yet, it’s precisely this counter-factual character that makes the ideology appealing in the eyes of those who adhere to it.

[51] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Harcourt. Ed.), 457.

[52] It’s no accident that section 5 of Volume Two of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, The National Socialist Movement, is titled ‘Organization and Philosophy’.

[53] The Passing of an Illusion, 193.

[54] Baehr, Hannah Arendt, 74.

[55] This phenomenon was studied by a German-Jewish humanities professor, Viktor Klemperer, who managed to survive in hiding during the war-time years of Nazi rule, and documented his findings and observations in a remarkable work, The Language of the Third Reich. The Nazi’s use of language to fabricate a completely independent reality exactly parallels Stalinism.

[56] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Harcourt. Ed.), 409.

[57] Ibid., 422.

[58] For this sense of organization, see the discussion in Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Three, Chapter Eleven, II, ‘Totalitarian Organization’.

[59] Such de-politicization is effected through a variety of methods – for instance, by channelling various personal and private resentments onto other social groups, or inspiring people to hanker after unrealizable goals.

[60] The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Peng. Ed.), 466-7.

[61] Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 186.

[62] Of course, such emotions only exacerbate each person’s isolation and social ineffectualness.

[63] Again, this kind of mentality is fertile ground for conspiratorial thinking. One reason for this is that “the urge to discover secrets is deeply ingrained in human nature . . . even the least curious mind is roused by the promise of sharing knowledge withheld from others” (Umberto Eco quoted in John C. Mosbey, ‘Political Theology: Alexandr Dugin and the Fourth Political Theory’, Unpublished Working Paper, March 2017). Discussing Eco’s remarks on conspiracy theories, John Mosbey notes that “Eco sees conspiracies gain traction ‘[b]ecause they purport to offer explanations in ways that appeal to people who feel they’ve been denied important information’” (ibid..). Likewise, Mikhail Epstein notes that “the notion of conspiracy presupposes history is signed according to some initial plan, so that all particular events – wars, revolutions, natural disasters – can be explained as part and parcel of a grand scheme” (‘The Russian Philosophy of National Spirit: Conservatism and Traditionalism’ (www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1994-807-21-Epstein:pdf). Karl Popper discussed what he called the ‘conspiracy theory of society’ in The Open Society and Its Enemies and Conjectures and Refutations.

[64] Quoted in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 62; Schmitt notes that “Hegel offers the first polemically political definition of the bourgeois. The bourgeois . . . rests in the possession of his private property, and under the justification of his possessive individualism he acts as an individual against the totality. He is the man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all in the total security of its use” (ibid., 62-63). We might also add Emmanuel Levinas’s brilliant portrait of the bourgeois: “The bourgeois admits no inner division and would be ashamed to lack confidence in himself, but he is concerned about reality and the future, for they threaten to break up the uncontested equilibrium of the present where he holds sway. He is essentially conservative but this is a worried conservatism. The bourgeois is concerned with business matters and science as a defence against things and all that is unforeseeable in them. His instinct for possession is an instinct for integration, and his imperialism is a search for security…He demands guarantees in the present against the future, which introduces unknowns into those solved problems from which he lives” (On Escape, 50).

[65] Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 440.