(This is an essay I wrote for The New Criterion. It was published as a feature article in the October, 2011 issue)
On The Rise of Microfascism in the Western Democracies
There has never been much agreement on the definition of fascism. Nevertheless, the impression that whatever its form, it always has to do with the triumph of the Will over nature, seems a penetrating truth about its early as well as more recent manifestations. The French saying, “Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop” (“banish the natural, and it comes galloping back”) is a truth of nature that, absent the help of massively oppressive State powers, no degree of Will could ever succeed in altering for long. And yet, despite this bald reality the recent history of the West has been a disturbing and repetitive narrative centered on the complexities and catastrophes that result from efforts to banish nature. In what follows I argue that all the modern unnatural, and therefore anti-human attempts to bend nature, and human nature to the Will, have been expressed in two basic forms, one Macro, the other Micro. By the end, we may want to ask to what peculiar quirk of nature we owe our apparently insatiable hunger to banish nature.
Preliminary to looking at the differences between these two forms, however, let us ask about the origin of the word “fascism,” for which it suffices to recall the imperial image of victorious Roman legions marching in triumph with the fasces borne aloft - bundles of bound sticks from the centre of which protruded a menacing axe. The symbolism could not be clearer: Roman power binds and controls all individuals as one. This ancient form of Macro-fascism, while originally an engine of military empire, eventually found its most coherent modern political and moral expression in the Social Contract (1762) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in which he insisted, not on a majority to be obtained by counting heads, but rather, on the complete absorption of all individual wills into a single national, or General Will. The plainest description of this template for what we now recognize as a uniquely European form of totalitarian democracy may be glimpsed in his novel Emile, where we read of his ambition “to transport the I into the common unity, with the result that each individual believes himself no longer one, but a part of the unity, and feels no longer except within the whole.” This was the first fully-articulated political formula for what may be called a democracy of the One, rather than of the Many (the latter, a form that found theoretical expression only a century later -- about which more below). It eventually served as a guide and moral justification for the murderous fanaticism of the Jacobins during the French revolution, and then for Hitler’s Nazi party as well as for Mussolini’s Italian fascism. Hitler often burbled publicly, “This revolution of ours is the exact counterpart of the French Revolution,” and Mussolini famously formalized his own philosophy in the slogan, “democrazia organizatta!”
These recent forms of Macro-fascism, whether French, Italian, German, or Russian, have always been collectivist, secular, and militant, striving through the fearsome top-down powers of the State to draw all things into the ambit of a single pattern of national -- or in the case of Communism, international -- Will, or centralized choosing, a Will always expressed by the subjugation and assimilation by force of things spontaneous, private, and natural, to artificial and unnatural public designs. For private religious belief? A secular and wholly materialist belief. For concepts of transcendent natural law? Man-made laws only. For the private family? An array of public programs and services from national daycare, to health care, to subsidized housing, to old-age homes. For private enterprise and free markets? Intensive regulation, ever-higher taxation, and the direction of the forces of production to State ends. For countless voluntary community organizations? Equivalent public organizations. In short, the Nanny State, cradle to grave. The German word that described this transformation of the private and natural into the public and artificial was “gleichschaltung,” which means “to bring everything into line.” Take note of the word “line,” for the variety of methods used to force all things natural, spontaneous, curved, and organic (think of all those charming European village laneways, a map of which looks like a biological or botanical growth) into geometrically rigid lines and grids, conceptual or actual, is truly astonishing. The fanatically linear-minded architect le Corbusier, in gloating upon his fantasies for the perfect Soviet city, could not resist sniffing that “curved lines constitute paralysis, and the winding path is the path of donkeys.”
On this general theme of regulation, however, our liberal-democratic regimes cannot afford to be smug, for although we have never had to pack machine-guns to enforce our softer, but no less pervasive brand of Statism it remains true that most of the policy specifics common to Macro-fascism are hauntingly recognizable in our own “progressive” regimes. To wit, more than three-quarters of the German and Italian programs (and a lot of the communist ones) are virtually indistinguishable from our own political fare, and this is true for all the Great Society, New Society, or Just Society programs (etc., etc.) of our modern “liberal” States. In short, into no matter which democracy we look, we find ever-increasing Statism, taxation, debt, and regulation; everywhere, the larger national or federal political units continue to absorb and subjugate (bring into line) the smaller states, provinces, regions, and municipalities; and so everywhere, we see more “democracy,” but less freedom. And what might be the reason?
Some say that all fascism is a reactionary response to a felt loss of natural community. But the deeper sources are likely rooted in despair over the glaring imperfections of human existence, most notably our anger at the apparent absence of justice on this earth (which is to say, at our perceived abandonment by God). From this has sprung the modern resolve to go it alone, so to speak: if there is no God to make earthly existence perfect, then we’ll do it by our own means, powered by the belief that human beings (at least of the planning type) are actually godlets (“made in the image of God” is the template) who have an obligation to impose a uniform design of perfection (whether national or international) on all natural but imperfect expressions of human life. This secular work began in real earnest with the rise of the modern State during the French Revolution (Rousseau’s Contract in hand) and what it entailed then and since may be seen in sobering detail in James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (Yale, 1998), where the militant effort to create “a single national society, legible from the center,” in which all things natural and non-conforming were to be “denaturalized” (a cure that operates more like a disease), is clearly displayed.
The standard recipe for spreading this disease requires only a few ingredients to create “a full-fledged disaster.” The first is a comprehensive aspiration to “the refashioning of social habits and of human nature itself.” The second is an ideology legitimizing the “unrestrained use of the power of the modern state” for the satisfaction of human needs according to a “rational” model. The third is “a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.” In a putatively democratic age ruled by a supposed “sovereignty of the people,” this is surely the saddest element.
From this ideological gestation has emerged the modern Statist dystopia, which relies on well-worn tools of regimentation. Examples are the imposition of official languages that enable internal colonization by means of which whole regions formerly illegible to central government may be linguistically-subdued and culturally incorporated. Another standard tool is the eradication of all local systems of weights and measures. The foot? The pound? The ounce? Such intimately natural human measures have been made illegal in most nations by metrication, the most zealous proponents of which always argue that a more “rational” unit will produce a more rational and rationalized (and therefore a more easily organized) citizenry. But the most menacing novelties of modern Statism are surely the highly precise and all-pervasive instruments of statecraft such as computerized data, myriad encrypted identity cards, statistical bureaus, modes of instant satellite communication, precise cadastral (tax) maps, intensive tax-harvesting (by instalments) on an unprecedented scale, pervasive State invasions of the private realm, sophisticated spying and security measures, and much more. Suffice it to say that none of these modern tools now common to our putatively free nations could have been imagined for a moment in even the most frenzied dreams of any absolutist king or despot in all prior human history. It is indisputable that we were much freer (less regulated, spied upon, and taxed), before the onset of modern democracy.
Personal examples of the loss of freedom to the macrofascist Will over nature are very close to many of us. For one of the purposes of modern property-codification and taxation regimes has been to incorporate into the State all of what Scott calls the “free gifts of nature” such as forests, game, wastelands, prairies, surface minerals, water, and air rights. And this has meant that most once-private natural property is now under the surveillance of the land, resources, and animal police. Recently, after two years of caring for a pair of swans on my pond that might otherwise have become a meal for coyotes, I was shocked to see two smartly-uniformed federal officers from Wildlife Canada pull up in a brand new Jeep Cherokee. They served me with a $240 dollar fine for “keeping swans without a licence” (a $10 dollar fee I had failed to renew). Protestations that it was costing me plenty in food and in bubblers to keep my pond open in winter were for naught. And then, this past spring, in an attempt to purchase a piece of vacant land for a new home and put in a driveway, I was informed by several layers of bureaucracy that work could not begin until July, “after the birds have left their nests,” and that the one thing that would “absolutely stop the driveway” would be the discovery by a government inspector of a butternut tree in its path. My question, asked, I am ashamed to admit, in a somewhat tremulous voice: “Why are my birds to be more protected than my snakes, beetles, turtles, or worms?” produced a kind of “just wait and see” look from a bureaucrat.
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By the close of World War II, the Macro form of violent fascism that had threatened to throw all of Europe under the jackboot was finally defeated, and one of its main lessons was that nature cannot be altered or extinguished by force from above for very long. In his bleak review of the various utopian carnages of the twentieth century, Professor Rudolph Rummel, in Death by Government (1996) verified about 50 million military deaths, but in addition an appalling 150 million legitimate citizens slaughtered by their own governments! In short, Macro-fascism, which started with a respectable reputation -- recall that Hitler was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938, and Mussolini was the hero of Western cocktail chatter -- ended with a very bad name. Despite these dark failures, however, the original manifestations of Macro-fascism as systems aiming to triumph over nature have continued in newer, more subtle and pervasive ways. No machine-guns required, so far. But places like Canada and Sweden are on the brink of becoming -- may already be -- Tripartite States in which one third of the people work to create wealth and jobs, one third works for government, and another third receives significant support from government. Anyone can see that the last two thirds will always gang up on the first – which is why no machine guns are required (all you need is democracy).
So it seems that in a pragmatic response to the dark failures of the Macro form, a softer Micro-fascism, also rooted in a much earlier intellectual tradition, has emerged slowly in the second half of the twentieth century, and is now in full bloom as our most pervasive and therefore most invisible political religion. It has produced an historically unprecedented type of polity characterized by a radically individualistic and autonomist ethic that nevertheless, and rather ironically seeks to organize itself as a national inventory of common public orthodoxies expressed, not as a collective triumph of the Will over nature, as in the past, but instead as the triumph of the Will of each and every individual over his or her own individual nature.
The most influential prophet of this revolutionary trend was the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who enunciated most clearly in his canonical booklet On Liberty (1859) the notion that liberty – and therefore morality - boils down to doing whatever you want to do as long as you do not harm someone else. It took a while, but Mill’s “harm principle,” although developed from a number of European ideas (most likely lifted from Article 4 of the French Revolution’s Declaration of 1789) slowly began to radiate outwards to infect all western nations, where it today operates as a corrosive solvent upon community morality by persuading millions of people that individual freedom of Will ought generally to be prior in importance to the common good. So powerful is the appeal of this new individual standard that it has been enshrined into the highest law by such as Canada’s Supreme Court (R. v. Labaye, 2005) as a replacement for community standards, and that Court specifically cited Mill’s harm principle as its authority. Just so, the myriad communities of the West seem to be fragmenting into a collection of millions of highly-regulated individuals who live within their own private moral bubbles. No need take notice of anyone else’s behaviour unless bubbles collide.
In retrospect, it seems as if the deeply revolutionary Christian insistence on the moral freedom of each individual human being has continued apace, but in a mutated secular form especially visible in our tortured skewings of law and social policy to grant legal priority to private Will, or “choice.” This is doubly ironic, of course, because whereas our spiritual progenitors exercised their free Will to escape a dreaded slavery to their own natural bodily appetites and temptations, we now cite the sanctity of choice as our authority for indulgence in those same appetites. This new war of the Will against constraints, especially those on one’s own biological nature, has taken many forms, and what follows is a kind of fugue on that theme.
Signs of the shift to radical individualism have been visible for a long time, especially in public disputes about “sovereignty,” which today has little to do with the admirable Western struggle to establish individual liberty within a politically and morally ordered polity. Rather, sovereignty, as we now conceive it has more to do with “rights” talk and with individual claims against the body politic; which is to say, with the demands of the imperial Self. To trace this path over past centuries is really to describe a halting line falling from heaven to earth: from God to Royalty, to Aristocracy (where it is still partly lodged in new and devious forms, such as on our judicial Benches), to “the people,” and finally ... to the solitary individual. The British historian George Gooch once observed that modern democracy is “a child of the Reformation,” because he had traced the rapid transformation of the original Protestant demand for individual spiritual autonomy, into a secular demand for political and personal autonomy. This went viral, as the saying goes, rather quickly, in quirky displays of antinomianism. During the English Revolution, for example, discontented soldiers in Cromwell’s army actually insisted that the Generals should be taking orders from the soldiers! But Gooch did not live to see the radical expression of this same trend in what may be called our “hyperdemocracies” -- political regimes in which, against even all democratic logic, sovereignty and rights are believed to inhere primarily in individuals, rather than in their communities. “One man, one vote,” is now a slogan emblematic of the egalitarian democratic faith, but it would have shocked our forbears (who wondered why the vote of an idiot should cancel the vote of a genius), and is an indication of the downward historical trend of sovereignty, which has only come to a halt in our prisons: voting rights are granted even to convicted criminals in places like Canada, where no one bothers to ask why those who have demonstrated a preference for breaking the laws ought to have the right to determine them.
Another hint of Micro-fascism at work is social atomization. Aristotle famously declared that we are all zoon politikon, or political animals who naturally affiliate in social groupings. And yet paralleling the descent of sovereignty has been a startling growth in the “atomization” of the natural social molecule. There are now millions of “administered” individuals, each an entry in bits and bytes on the lockstep computers of the all-seeing State as well as in the electronic files of any corporation that can afford such information-gathering (often purchased from or provided by the State). When I was young, we had a family health card; we each now have an individual one, a process of individuation repeated in all walks of life, public and private, and now considered a normal and rational informational requirement of human organization. Ironically, although we have never believed ourselves to be more free, we are individually under near-total surveillance. Consider the spread of the RFID or “spychip,” a tiny “radio-frequency identification device” so small it can easily be placed almost anywhere. It is activated by a radio receiver-transmitter such that when you walk into a government building or your favourite department store the spychip inserted in your shirt, tie, bra, eyeglasses, or blue-jeans during manufacture will reveal lots of details on your whereabouts and behaviours.
So much for the individuation of bodies. The real focus of the new Micro-war against nature is biology -- everything from the skin inward, especially sexual desires, reproductive matters and, for serious ideological reasons, the ultimate question of the existence or non-existence of human life. That is because in a regime of personal Will it is possible for an ideologically-inconvenient “other” to throw into jeopardy the elaborate moral and legal justifications of the regime itself. Whenever this looms as a real threat, the most urgent question then becomes: How can we make the threatening other disappear? For the truth is that in order to sustain ideological purity, many regimes in history -- we are no exception -- have been forced to make entire classes of humans disappear legally. Most Greeks and Romans, for example, simply took for granted that their empires -- especially their democracies -- were impossible to sustain without chattel slaves whose labours freed citizens to participate in political life. But as no free person can in good conscience enslave another free human being, they had to invent a special category of law that transformed slave-humans into slave-things. My point is that the most egregious ancient as well as modern example of the triumph of the Will over nature is human slavery. It is a triumph that simply cannot be sustained without making a target class of natural human beings disappear. Although the transatlantic slave trade was the most recent commercial employment of this dark art, it is an art still very much in service to the ideological maintenance of our own hyperdemocracies.
We see this slave-making technique in operation today where equality radicals have been forced to negate the natural and eternal biological differences between the genders. They have succeeded in arguing that in order to be equal citizens women have the right to triumph over the natural consequences of their own sexual behaviour by removing the natural burden of their own unwanted children. This could not be achieved, however, without first converting an entire class of human beings – the unborn -- into things, for which the legal weapon of the ancients was required. Accordingly, in order to attain to egalitarian purity, democratic nations have legally converted their unborn children into womb-slaves whom they declare to be non-human until born alive. A physician friend clarifies this technique by asking why, on one side of a one-inch thick hospital wall, physicians are spending a million dollars on high-tech professional skill to save and preserve the life of a premature baby, while on the other side more physicians are throwing an aborted baby of exactly the same weight and gestation into the garbage? Clearly, if at the right moment the two mothers were to make the opposing “choice”, the child to be saved would disappear, and the non-human child would suddenly become human. Clearly, the source of such existential prestidigitation is the naked Will of the mothers, whereby human life is created ex nihilo or extinguished, not via biology, but by Will alone. I am not judging this fact morally at the moment. I am simply trying to present the bald truth that as a political and moral extension of the Micro-fascist Will to triumph over nature, the western democracies, by ideological imperative, have adopted a legal technique for converting millions of human beings into things, and thus we have become slave-regimes of a new kind.
Another looming reality in our aging democracies is the growing clamour -- already achieved in some jurisdictions -- for the right to control natural death. Suicide means making yourself die. But other than the fact that to rest the ethos of a human society on a right of suicide would be to opt for something very dark indeed, we cannot object to nor very easily prevent this use of Will. Euthanasia, however, always means someone else has to make you die or help you die; someone living must be an instrument in the killing of another, regardless of how remotely. So here too, the Will, ever strident, is rising for mastery over nature. In the Netherlands there is now a group called “Out of Free Will” campaigning for the right of people over 70 who are “tired of life” to be euthanized. Clearly, this right implies a corresponding obligation upon another (usually an agent of the State) to do the killing required by such a law. The underlying logic is that just as we can create life, or make it disappear in the womb by Will alone, we ought to be able to end it by Will alone. Just so, the legal right to Will a kill, so to speak, is shaping up as the ultimate triumph over nature, because it means openly playing God. We do not want to play the God of the Good we grew up with, however. We have switched allegiance to a God of pure Will in whose image we shape the world as we please (on which more in the conclusion).
Wanting to be a godlet is not some modern trend, however, but rather an ever-present and once-heretical human desire. The freedom-loving Amaurians of the 13th century, for example, declared that God was incarnate in each one of them, and the Adamites of the 15th century believed themselves so pure and god-like they were incapable of sin. Their altered Lord’s Prayer began: “Our Father, who art in us, Thy will be done” (etc.), and their passion for adultery they considered a sacrament, good simply because freely-willed. In the 17th] century Jacob Bauthelmy declared that God is in everything, in “this dog, this tobacco pipe, he is me, and I am him” (no capital H for egalitarian Gods). Many such voluntarists recommended promiscuity and adultery for “the subtle in spirit” whom they encouraged to indulge in “a paradise of the senses” without shame (as in the Garden of Eden), thereby to become “as free as little children once again.” One such fellow, Abeizer Coppe, promised that due to the conscienceless purity of his motives, all women who fornicated with him would become virgins once again (perhaps the craftiest sexual self-promotion ever invented).
Of other biological aspects of nature over which we now seek a mastery of Will, there are too many to count. But one of them, “no-fault divorce” (“two to make it, one to break it”), considered purely as a social site for the expression of radical Will, has clean removed the natural contractual basis of marriage, thus returning us to the radicalism of the French Revolution during which the Jacobins argued that if the two spousal Wills are not in accord, then no marriage exists anyway. This has had the effect of subjecting both the union of marriage and the honest contractual intentions of observant spouses to the unilateral “choices” of disaffected spouses.
More of the determination to triumph over nature is apparent in our gender-constructing, gender-bending, and gender-merging discourse, too, not to mention our choose-conception, choose time of birth, and choose a womb, a sperm, and an egg options. The theme here is that there is actually no binding natural order, because nature can be altered by Will. Perhaps the most tiresome inebriations of anti-biology logic are produced in egalitarian campaigns calling for laws and public funding to impose androgyny upon us, the most devout exponents of which insist on forcing boys to play with dolls, and girls with trucks. On this score, my feminist neighbour finally surrendered in good humour when, after six months of attitude-correction of her children, nature came galloping back: she caught her daughter putting her little red fire-engine to bed with a bottle. In Sweden, where the campaign against natural biology has been in full swing for half a century, the tax-funded Egalia pre-school invented and now enforces the use of a “genderless” pronoun. An Egalia “gender pedagogue” said (notice again the emphasis on the child’s Will) that this change gives the children “a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be.” Once again, purity of one’s own existence is imagined springing from the purity of unencumbered Will. In Toronto recently there was an uproar because two parents insisted on raising their 5-month-old child “genderless.” Such children, they claimed (same theme) would grow up as “whoever they want to be.” And in a kind of double-header, the international “autonomy rights” movement aims to recognize self-sovereignty even in minor children, and so wants to invoke the agents of the State to enforce such rights against parents. This combines Macro and Micro fascism in a single initiative.
Another disturbing aspect of the war against nature is modern “multicultural” policy. In the early twentieth century Julian Freund opined that only three things matter in politics: command and obedience; the public and the private; and the insider-outsider distinction. Deep culture is a product of this latter frankly illiberal, but deeply natural human tendency to bond socially according to widely-shared values as insiders creating outsiders. This means that wherever a deep culture exists and is upheld, people will naturally tend to assimilate to it, and the modern nation-state is a natural expression of this tendency. Rather ironically, then, multicultural policy, which began as an earnest attempt to denaturalize this natural illiberal fact of life, has turned millions of citizens into cultural microfascists. For as the French critic Pascal Bruckner has observed, it has condemned hundreds of ethnicities to “house arrest in their own skins,” thus engendering an isolating “identity politics” that would have made the Nazis proud. In short, multiculturalism has mutated into multi-fascism, a trend that is creating mini-nations within nations, many of which, as in France, are now violent “no-go” zones for police. Nature has come galloping back again.
Just how far does this Micro-fascist trend of extending Will over nature go? As far as the entire cosmos, it seems. In 1971 the American astronaut Alan Shepard was sufficiently irreverent to drive a golf ball 800 yards on the moon -- a gestural transfiguration of the solar-system into a personal playground. But the extension of Will over nature extends even farther. In the notorious Casey decision of the US Supreme Court of 1992 we heard for the first time that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This oft-quoted declaration betrayed an utterly unself-conscious confidence and conceit, whereby even cosmic meaning was declared subject to, a creation of, personal liberty, and wherein there lurks a right not simply to search for ultimate truth outside ourselves, but in a kind of cosmic inversion, to create it within ourselves. It was a pro-godlet ruling that subjected the meaning of all of nature and the universe to individual Will, while at the same time pulverizing that meaning into demos-bits.
We may conclude by saying that our view of freedom and therefore of God have changed a lot. We used to say that because God is the ultimate Good and therefore can only do good things, we ought to follow suit. Freedom was obedience to the Good. But we have switched Gods to make life more convenient. We had to, because a regime resting on a foundational ideology of individual sovereignty requires a God of pure Will in whose image we can proceed to fashion ourselves with every personal choice. At such a point, with no external truth, the Good is absorbed into whatever is Willed. Will becomes truth, not in the body politic as Rousseau had hoped, but in each individual body, thus producing our millions of godlets. This switching of Gods constitutes a theological revolution in Western life with profound and as yet unforeseeable implications.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 12:30PM