Читать книгу Home from the Dark Side of Utopia - Clifton Ross - Страница 6

This story would make very little sense to the reader without some context, which in my case was apocalyptic, utopian, millenarian, and military. Those were the constellating forces of my consciousness, almost like a blueprint for the way my thinking would be ordered for my whole life. Since they play such a pivotal role in my thinking, and hence my intellectual development, it seems appropriate to start there, with what those elements signify. If you think you’ve got it, and you already know what I mean by those gangling terms, you can skip to chapter one where the story starts. What follows for the next few pages is what you might call the cultural, intellectual background to my story.

I was born and raised in the Air Force, growing up, in that sense, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The bases were all designed according to the same ordered logic, and regimented down to the detail, even if the details changed from base to base.

The bases were conceived as a uniformly ubiquitous utopia (u+topia: “no where”) circumscribing the planet Earth. Even the lawns and shrubs had military haircuts, the traffic flowed at a precise pace, and the men all wore the same blue uniforms, with only slight differences to indicate rank.

Life on the base was directed and regulated with sirens, bells and a strict discipline from which no deviation was permitted. It was a Manichaean1 world that distinguished itself from the civilian world, demarcating its utopian territory with the fenced base perimeter. The fences, always topped by barbed wire and defended by regular patrols, also reflected a state of mind: within, the allies, those submitted entirely to the military code in utter and total obedience to the Nation and its Mission.

Outside, beyond the base, was, if not the enemy, at least the “other,” either the occupied, or the defended, civilian world: undisciplined, lazy, disordered, and aimless. It was always there, offering evidence of a “locale” outside the gates of the base: a medieval church tower, quaint village houses or possibly a long shopping strip, or series of bars, often with a few derelict women hoping to snag some hapless GI to buy them a drink. It all depended on the location of the base how the civilian world surrounding it took form, but it was always “the civilian world” or “the Economy,” populated by “civilians,” and it had none of the regularity and uniformity of the military base. The Economy was a strange and mostly foreign world but I adapted, as “brats” do, and grew up bicultural, able to adeptly move between the Base and the Economy with relative ease.

Central to the military was a sense of family, community, team, in short, the aim to be a single united force. The military was, as Lewis Mumford so aptly pointed out, the “first machine,” a human machine. And central to that unity was the idea of “The Mission,” which entailed an absolute faith in, and total obedience to, superior authority, especially those with superior rank. Although you might never truly understand what the Mission was, it was, nevertheless, everything. It defined your life. The military was, in short, a form of civil religion. Combined with Christian millennialism, it was a powerful, intoxicating, and apocalyptic faith.

Even though the military distinguished itself from the civ­ilian world, it defined itself against The Enemy. The enemy might change (for most of my life it was “Communism” and more recently it has become “Terrorism”) but the roles remained eternal: the military was Good, and what opposed it, the enemy, was Evil.

This was the Manichean basis for another element of this secular apocalyptic faith that had great symbolic significance: the nuclear mushroom cloud symbolized God’s wrath toward all unbelievers, be they Germans, Japanese, or the Godless communists, and HE (for this was also a Patriarchal faith, and God was male, presumably with all associated attributes) had given this weapon to us, the United States. As possessors of the atom bomb the US government, through its military, was proven to be the de facto agent of God’s justice, and [North] Americans, His Chosen People.

The US military accommodated this apocalyptic world­view without explicitly propagating it, quite possibly because of the Constitutional separation of Church and State. Nevertheless, the warrior and the priest have traditionally been seen as a single caste and, as such, often accompanied one another in war making and the construction of empires.

And so the military reinforced a civil-religious worldview based on the skeletal backbone of Judeo-Christian religion, stripped of all identifying symbols and doctrines, and it also heavily relied on the apocalyptic anxiety, terror, and enthusiasm to bind and unite its cadre in a dogmatic faith in the Commanding Officers. Indeed, whatever I later learned in “civilian Christianity” was reinforced by the airtight system of military thinking, and vice versa. The military utopia that we lived out on base was the perfect expression of US civil religion as it had developed from Colonial times right up through the twentieth century.

If we see the apocalyptic-utopian-millenarian idea everywhere we look in the modern and post-­modern world, that’s probably because it is everywhere. As the English philosopher, John Gray, puts it, “if a simple definition of western civilization could be formulated it would have to be framed in terms of the central role of millenarian thinking.”2 From this millenarian foundation come ideas of progress, revolutionary ideologies, even the idea of self-­improvement so popular in the West: everything is rooted in the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic.

While apocalypse (Greek: apocalypsis, “revelation”) and millennium (Latin: mille + ennium, “thousand years”) and utopia (Greek: u+topos, “no place”) all have different meanings, in a sense they emerge from a common matrix. Apocalyptic and millenarian movements are related and often indistinguishable, although believers in an apocalypse (calamity) don’t always have faith that a “millennium” (or thousand-year kingdom) or utopian state will emerge from disaster. Conversely, utopias, and the rupture with present reality that they imply, aren’t always conceived as necessarily being preceded by apocalyptic disaster. But all three words express the same sharp departure from reality, either by divine intervention or great human will, and the institution of a new social and political order. Through this book I will consider the three phenomena together and often refer to them collectively by the acronym “AUM” (apocalyptic utopian millenarian).

Millenarian thinking goes back to explanations for the failed first century apocalyptic prophet known as Jesus “Christ,”3 although apocalyptic thinking in general goes back much farther, with some tracing it to Zoroaster, or “Zarathustra” who lived in what is today known as Afghanistan, around 1500 B.C.4 Millenarianism, then, emerged out of the apocalyptic faith of Jesus and his disciples as a response to the “cognitive dissonance” of “belief disconfirmation” resulting from Jesus’s execution for the political crime of treason or subversion. Both “cognitive dissonance” and “belief disconfirmation” were ideas that sociologist Leon Festinger arrived at through his study of a flying saucer cult in the mid 1950s. In his study, when the flying saucers failed to arrive (belief disconfirmation) believers had to deal with the “cognitive dissonance” or the gap between their beliefs and the reality.

Similarly, when Jesus failed to overthrow Roman imperial rule and become the new king of Israel, and the disciples had to deal with the belief disconfirmation and cognitive dissonance of his failure and death, they did so by, in a sense, rewriting the story. In the new narrative the gospel writers (and later Christians) had Jesus ascending to heaven and promising to return in the near future to set up a kingdom and rule over the entire earth. In the Revelation or Apocalypse, the final book of the Christian Bible,5 there are references to a “great tribulation” and a “thousand year reign” (millennium) of Jesus that Christians understood in various ways. The early Church believers were convinced, based on Jesus’s own words in the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 13 that he would be returning within the lifetime of his disciples. When that didn’t happen Christians began to develop doctrines as a coping mechanism for the cognitive dissonance of yet another failed expectation.

The “Book of the Revelation of John” (Revelation) was one such response, which portrayed a second coming of Jesus as a cosmic event in which even stars fell from heaven, evil was vanquished, and the “Heavenly” Jerusalem descended to the earth, with streets of gold and walls of jewels. The Revelation was to become the basis of Christian millenarian tradition and the numerous conflicting understandings of the future reign of Jesus on the earth. The emerging church tended to downplay the importance of Revelation and leave the entire second coming of Jesus and the final judgment as vague future events. This became known as the “amillennial” view, and one that St. Augustine and much of the historical Christian Church adopted and taught. But there were other currents within the Church that were excited and inspired by the apocalyptic passages of the Bible, most notably the 13th century theologian Joachim di Fiores, whose apocalyptic and millenarian ideas continue to influence movements to this day.6

The millenarian tradition split between the “pre-­millennialists” and the “post-millennialists,” the former believing Jesus return would initiate his millennial reign on earth, and the latter believing his return would come after a peaceful millennium. The two millennialist traditions had very dramatic, and also very different, effects on Western religious and secular culture.

According to pre-millennialists, the return of Jesus would be sudden and chaotic and represent a dramatic rupture with the present order of the world, and then the thousand-year earthly reign of Jesus (the millennium) would begin. It could be argued that this view was more in keeping with the apocalyptic, messianic tradition of “Second Temple Judaism” (the “apocalyptic” era that ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.). This apocalyptic view inspired the revolutionary excitement of the radical medieval sects, and it also left its mark on modern revolutionary currents.

The post-millennial view emerged in the 17th century among the Protestants, particularly the restorationist Calvinists, Unitarians, and Puritans. This view held that humanity would progressively improve as a result of the first arrival of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and then gradually the earth would enter into a great millennium of peace, followed by the final judgment. This was the view of many early social reformers, heavily influencing the Abolitionist movement, and even may have contributed to the theory of evolution as conceived by Charles Darwin.7 Post-millennialism certainly was the foundation for the Western belief in “progress” since, according to the early Puritan thinkers, “the earthly paradise is to be merely the last, culminating state in the series of progressive stages which can be discerned in history.”8

This post-millennial view was certainly a major part of the foundational structure or ordering principle of North American religious and secular thought as it emerged, but there were also strong pre-millennial elements. Either way, the American Revolution was an expression of what came to be known as “civil millennialism.”9 Millenarian prophecies, drawn primarily from the books of Daniel and Revelation in the Bible, were “basic to the formation of American revolutionary ideology in the late eighteenth century” and among the primary incitements to the American Revolutionary War.10 And the focus of all human history, according to this perspective, was the beautiful, magical “New World” that, among other things, inspired Thomas More’s Utopia, and awakened other millennial dreams, especially among English Protestants. “God, it began to be thought, is redeeming both individual souls and society in parallel course; and, in the next century, a new nation in a recently discovered part of the world seemed suddenly to be illuminated by a ray of heavenly light, to be at the western end of the rainbow that arched over the civilized world.”11

Obviously, that land was the United States of America. “More than almost any other modern nation, the United States was a product of the Protestant Reformation, seeking an earthly paradise in which to perfect a reformation of the Church,” Charles L. Sanford wrote.12 And it’s clear that the apocalyptic, millennial ideal continues to be very much alive in the US today in both its religious and secular forms13 and even, as John Gray argues, the cornerstone of the Western world itself.14

Within this civil religious framework, especially as it was conceived in mid-twentieth century North America, the world was a battlefield for the war between the Children of God and the Children of Satan. And, during the years of the Cold War, if “we” were the Children of God, it was clear who the Children of Satan were. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the system of “Godless communism,” which our “Western Christian Civilization” was opposing, was as much an outgrowth of the apocalyptic as our own system.

If the dominant thread of apocalyptic thought in the US was post-millennial, the pre-millennial apocalyptic was dominant in the USSR. Frederick Engels saw the “chiliastic dream-visions of ancient Christianity” as “a very serviceable starting-point” for a movement that eventually “merged with the modern proletarian movement.”15 Karl Marx’s first published writings included such mystical texts as “On the Union of Christ with the Faithful” and the apocalyptic vision for the impending Revolution in which he and Engels shared a faith had roots in Judeo-Christian millenarianism. Modern utopianism and other currents of socialist, communist, and much other Left wing traditions were all, to varying degrees, modern products of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought, or showed at least some tinge of the apocalyptic worldview. The Revolution of Marxism and Leninism that would lead eventually to “communism” follows the same mythic structure of sudden and complete transformations into an idealized world that we find in the Apocalypse of John. Both Marxism-Leninism and apocalyptic Christians assume the struggle of a noble class of people (workers, believers, respectively) against diabolical evil (capitalism, or the “World, the flesh and the Devil” respectively), which the noble class wins. After the consummation and victory of the struggle both see an utterly transformed world, some version (a secular version in one) of a “heavenly city descending to earth,” the scene that ends the Book of Revelation.

And then there are all the other apocalyptic, utopian, and millenarian movements organized in the shadows of these two Goliath utopias of the twentieth century. Anarchism is a very diverse tradition that defies most categories, by definition. Still, the utopian and millenarian spirit clearly imbues much of this segment of the Left. Bakunin’s destructive impulses, for instance, had something deeply apocalyptic about them, and a millenarian spirit was also quite evident in the Spanish anarchists he influenced.16 In an account of one dramatic moment of the Spanish Civil War as the city of Málaga went down in flames, Gerald Brenan heard an anarchist echo the apocalyptic sayings of Jesus as he said, “And I tell you—not one stone will be left on another stone—no, not a plant nor even a cabbage will grow there, so that there may be no more wickedness in the world.”17

On the extreme margins of the US empire the apocalyptic idea plays a major role among the Christian Identity movement, Survivalists and many other far right organizations and movements. And of course there is ISIS in the Middle East,18 and the apocalypticism of Al Qaeda and other Islamic fringe groups, all of whom inherited their apocalyptic sensibilities from Christianity and presumably from the Prophet himself.19

Like everyone of my generation born mid-20th century, my worldview was formed between the millennialism of the American empire, and the apocalypticism of the Soviet. This dichotomous consciousness became the “motor force” of the 1960s and the shadowy reality that came to be known as the Cold War. Both sides of the binary were secular ideologies with deep roots in a Judeo-Christian apocalyptic ethos that would remain foundational, despite polite denials (in the “Western” countries) or even violent attempts to extirpate it (most notably in the Soviet Union). In the same way the Catholic Conquistadors built their churches on top of the indigenous temples, and often of the same stones, the modern world has been erected on the foundations of an apocalyptic faith, utterly transforming it in the process.