People who have experienced liberty often require strong motivation to give it up. Those who wish to impose state power on them provide the strongest reason of all for doing so: salvation from disaster, named or unnamed. The word “survival” is never far from the lips of such theorists. B. F. Skinner, as we have seen, says repeatedly that we cannot be saved without turning ourselves over to controllers who will condition us to act in ways that are conducive to survival. Mannheim tells us that the only alternative to a planned society is chaos. Schlesinger’s Vital Center was a defense of the thesis that only a powerful central state had saved us from communism in the 1930s, with the unsubtle implication that the same would be true in the future. In 1980 he wrote that “affirmative government” was not only necessary, but inevitable, because such problems as energy shortages and inflation (the causes of which completely eluded him) make it “a technical imperative.” Heilbroner says that only obedience to the political powers can save us. The second Humanist Manifesto declares that we cannot survive without “bold and daring” measures, by which it means collectivist ones.
Those who can be convinced that survival is at stake are likely to agree. to almost any remedy, since extinction seems worse than all the alternatives. If placing extraordinary powers in the hands of political leaders will truly stave off the ultimate disaster, then those who demur can be made to appear as enemies of the human race. That is why arguments based on survival are so effective in persuading people to permit actions that violate their moral code.
A Moral Revolution
The constant exhortations to allow the state to relieve us of our difficulties run counter to older injunctions to beware the power of the state because it robs us of our liberties. This new dependence on the state reveals a dramatic change in the entire moral fabric. British historian E.H. Carr embraces this change and identifies it as one of realism, belonging to the tradition of Hegel and Marx. A realist, says Carr, “makes morality a function of politics” and “cannot logically accept any standard of value save that of fact.” Thus, the historicist confusion of fact and value is made to serve the omnipotent state and to justify whatever pragmatic measures will further the values of the authorities. Since this is the position Carr-along with many others-calls “realist,” those who disagree are burdened with the task of showing that they are not living in a dream world.
Equalitarianism uses a similar moral inversion. It once was considered immoral to take a person’s property for the benefit of others by threatening the use of force, but now inequality is advanced as a greater evil than theft. Since this is incontestably a fact, those who agree with Carr that value can proceed only from fact have no choice but to be equalitarians. Joseph Fletcher has proceeded in the same direction from a theological perspective. Someone who observes a person in need and
gives his property to help is practicing “microethics.” Much better, he says, to practice “macroethics,” which would support increased taxation in order to see that the needy are helped. This would have the advantage of insuring “a wholesome investment balance and socially sensitive social balance. ” This reversal of ethical thinking makes voluntary sacrifice for the good of others an example of “petty moralism,” while it advances state confiscation to the pinnacle of moral rectitude. As is his custom, Fletcher obscures the revolutionary nature of his position with meaningless phrases about wholesomeness, sensitivity, and balance. It was just this perspective that led Reinhold Niebuhr in the early 1930s to believe that because of its march toward collectivism, Germany was “where all the social and political forces of modem civilization have reached their most advanced form.”
It is ironic that Niebuhr (who wrote a great deal about irony) should have made such a remark, since he knew so much about the propensity of the professors of morality to do evil. (He often complained that his students misused his brand of realism to justify the abuse of power.) Solzhenitsyn has written that the villains of the classical literatures were pale versions of their counterparts in the real life of modernity. The reason for that is that the villains of literature were purposely and self-consciously evil. Today ideology provides the driving force for evil, convincing the malefactor that what he is doing is good, strengthening his determination. Not that this is strictly a modern phenomenon; Jesus told his followers that their persecutors would think they were serving God (John 16:2).
Idolatry also serves as a set of blinders. Solzhenitsyn tells of Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to the labor camp where he was incarcerated. She reported that it was a humane institution for curing criminals. At the very time Stalin was murdering millions of Soviet citizens, John MacMurray published the glad tidings that this regime presided over “the nearest approach to the realization of the Christian intention that the world has yet seen …. It expresses the continuity of the Christian intention in an explicit and practical form, and thus makes an immense human advance in the process that Jesus began.”
Some of those who have remained closest to the biblical tradition have been the most perceptive in explaining the affinity evil has with professions of good. In a play entitled Devil to Pay, Dorothy Sayers portrayed an anguished Faustus who allied himself with spiritual evil in order to destroy human suffering. That was the pattern, she believed, followed by the builders of earthly utopias. C. S. Lewis, in an essay he called “Lilies that Fester,” argued that the more pretentious the visions of rulers, the more defiling the rule is likely to be. In other words, “Lilies that fester smell worse than weeds. ” Such is the nature of the moral inversions that accompany ideologies professing to save humanity.
Hayek has written that in the last generation there has been a revolution in the way the political left understands its mission. He thinks that future historians will interpret the hundred years following 1848 as the century of socialism, and that it was terminated by the Soviet example and by the obvious losses of both liberty and productivity in Western countries. The welfare state then moved in to fill the vacuum left by socialism’s failure. Similarly, University of Rochester economist W. Allen Wallis interprets the Galbraithian arguments about “public squalor” as a major shift. It departs from the intellectual bankruptcy of calls for socializing the means of production to the still-respectable cry for socializing the results of production.
Our Father, the State
When Diocletian published his draconian Edict of 301, destroying the few remaining liberties of the old republic, he justified it by referring to himself and his associates as “the watchful parents of the whole human race.” Rulers have ever been tempted to play the role of father to their people. In his justification for state direction of the national economy, A. P. Lerner defended rationing “as a form of guardianship” that the state should exercise over the population in order “to prevent foolish spending.” The state that acts as a wise parent instead of a vindictive judge has been an attractive image to many people. They include ecclesiastical authorities who have completely missed the point of the gospel warning to “call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven” (Matt. 23:9). The father is the symbol not only of authority but also of provision. “Our Father who art in heaven …. Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:9, 11 ). Looking to the state for sustenance is a cultic act; we rightly learn to expect food from parents, and when we regard the state as the source of physical provision we render to it the obeisance of idolatry. The crowds who had fed on the multiplied loaves and fishes were ready to receive Christ as their ruler, not because of who he was but because of the provision. John Howard Yoder has rightly interpreted that scene: “The distribution of bread moved the crowd to acclaim Jesus as the New Moses, the provider, the Welfare King whom they had been waiting for. “
The paternal state not only feeds its children, but nurtures, educates, comforts, and disciplines them, providing all they need for their security. This appears to be a mildly insulting way to treat adults, but it is really a great crime because it transforms the state from being a gift of God, given to protect us against violence, into an idol. It supplies us with all blessings, and we look to it for all our needs. Once we sink to that level, as Lewis says, there is no point in telling state officials to mind their own business. “Our whole lives are their business.” The paternalism of the state is that of the bad parent who wants his children dependent on him forever. That is an evil impulse. The good parent prepares his children for independence, trains them to make responsible decisions, knows that he harms them by not helping them to break loose. The paternal state thrives on dependency. When the dependents free themselves, it loses power. It is, therefore, parasitic on the very persons whom it turns into parasites. Thus, the state and its dependents march symbiotically to destruction.
When the provision of paternal security replaces the provision of justice as the function of the state, the state stops providing justice. The ersatz parent ceases executing judgment against those who violate the law, and the nation begins losing the benefits of justice. Those who are concerned about the chaos into which the criminal justice system has fallen should consider what the state’s function has become. Because the state can only be a bad imitation of a father, as a dancing bear act is of a ballerina, the protection of this Leviathan of a father turns out to be a bear hug.
The State as Idol
Hegel’s idea that the state is God walking on earth is a frank statement of a belief with ancient roots that has never, perhaps, been more widespread than today. It is the conviction, as Ellul says, that the state “is the ultimate value which gives everything its meaning.”
It is a providence of which everything is expected, a supreme power which pronounces truth and justice and has the power of life and death over its members. It is an arbiter which . . . declares the law, the supreme objective code on which the whole game of society depends.
Deifying rulers has always been a means of legitimizing their rule. The imperial cult at Rome began as early as the first century and was intended to solidify the hold of the emperors and establish their legitimacy. At first the republican traditions died hard, and when Gaius (A.D. 37-41) spoke openly about being a god, there was considerable opposition. By the time of Domitian (81-96), it had become common to address him as dominus et deus, “my Lord and God.” The religious language of patriotism is a similar attempt to lend sacred aura to the mundane. Even officially atheist regimes speak about the sacredness of the motherland and of the cause of communism. So intent was Hobbes to elevate the prerogatives of even the infidel king, that he insisted that for the Christian to disobey him is to disobey the voice of God.
The idol state uses the language of compassion because its intention is a messianic one. It finds the masses harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd, needing a savior. Proponents of such a conception are as impatient with government inefficiency as any libertarian; more so, because the libertarian has no divine expectations from the state. Daniel Moynihan, social scientist and U.S. Senator, is furious about the “inexcusably sloppy work” done by federal officials working in the antipoverty program but is content with their efforts to play God.
Conde Pallen’s utopian novel only makes explicit the catechism that the deified state implies:
Q. By whom were you begotten?
A. By the Sovereign State.
Q. Why were you begotten?
A. That I might know, love, and serve the· Sovereign State always.
Q. What is the Sovereign State?
A. The Sovereign State is humanity in composite and perfect being.
Q. Why is the State supreme?
A. The State is supreme because it is my Creator and Conserver in which I am and move and have my being and without which I am nothing.
Q. What is the individual?
A. The individual is only a part of the whole, and made for the whole, and finds his complete and perfect expression in the Sovereign State. Individuals are made for cooperation only, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.
When Galbraith says that in the power of the state lies our only chance for salvation, he gives us a premier example of what Ellul calls “the new soteriology.” The Chinese once worshiped the same god, who was expected to save them from all problems. A common proverb was, “We must study the works of Chairman Mao each day. If we miss only one day the problems pile up. If we miss two days we fall back. If we miss three days we can no longer live.” Whether salvation is to be found in the chairman or in the phalanx of experts who direct the machinery, it is only through the application of state wisdom and power that we can be delivered.
Modern messianism resembles the millennial movements that were common in the Middle Ages and into the early modem period. But most of those movements were connected with traditional Christianity and thus never lost the bounded view of humanity that alone can prevent the deification of human institutions. They tended to form sects that were voluntary and communal. In the eighteenth century, however, messianism became revolutionary, seeking salvation in the complete overturn of society. Since the afterlife was considered a superstitious remnant of more primitive times, secular messianism required that all accounts be settled in the here and now. As Lenin said, the struggle of the proletariat is “to set up heaven on earth.” This return to a pagan conception is prefigured by the apocalyptic vision of the New Testament, which describes as satanic the totalitarian state claiming to bring salvation (Rev. 13).
The oft-quoted injunction to render unto Caesar the things of Caesar and unto God the things of God (Matt. 22:21) has lost its edge through repetition. The Pharisees to whom it was addressed were staggered by it because it contradicted one of the assumptions that was basic to the ancient world: the all-encompassing nature of state power. Even Athens at its height conceived of its people as appendages of the state. When the crowd urged the fearful Pilate to execute Jesus, they said: “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend.” That was perfectly true, for Caesar demanded all that a person had; but the belief that there were some things that belonged to God instead brought the sword to such pretensions. That is why the persecution of Christians was inevitable as long as the state was thought to be all-inclusive.
In the United States, federal tax policy illustrates the government’s unconscious rush to be the god of its citizens. When a provision in the tax laws permits the taxpayer to keep a portion of his money, the Internal Revenue Service calls this a “tax expenditure,” or an “implicit government grant.” This is not tax money that the state has collected and expended but money it has allowed the citizen to keep by not taking it. In other words any money the citizen is permitted to keep is regarded as if the state had graciously given it to him. Everything we have is from the state, to which we owe gratitude. In fact, we are the property of the state, which therefore has the right to the fruit of our labor.
Fletcher comes close to making this point explicitly. In saying that “taxation is stewardship,” he uses, but departs from, the biblical idea that God is the owner of all property, and the putative owners under statutory law are really stewards who have the responsibility to exercise control as the owner wishes. His position makes sense only if the state is the lord who is the real owner of everything. The offering formula prayer, “We give thee but thine own,” is a declaration that the steward is only rendering to God what he already possesses legally. The steward is declaring recognition of his stewardship and affirming that his relationship with God is as steward to lord. But to say that taxation is stewardship is to affirm that the state is the lord to which everything has the status of property. The citizen is transformed thus into servant, supplicant, worshiper.
Creating Utopia
The planning of grandiose schemes for the creation of ideal societies, as Toynbee observed, does not come in the flush of triumph but rather in the desperation that accompanies decline. It stems from a desire to peg society at the level to which it has been degraded rather than allowing it to decline further. There is, unfortunately, a widespread impression that utopias are the work of impractical dreamers and have little significance in the real world. Thomas More originated the use of the term utopia-which means “nowhere”-in the sixteenth century, and afterwards it came to be used generically for any imaginary society that illustrated and promoted a perfect form of social organization. Far from being harmless, utopias are drawn up and pursued by serious people erecting idols empowered by the state and impelled by intellectually and emotionally attractive ideologies.
Our own age propagates utopian ideologies in part because people have high expectations for technology. George Kateb, among the most honest and perceptive of utopia’s modem defenders, argues that technology now makes utopia both possible and inviting, whereas earlier it was unattractive.
The high-blown language of moral fervor that dominates modem justifications of utopia makes it clear that we are dealing with a religious phenomenon. Mumford’s “new world” civilization is to be a place where the ecological patterns constitute “moral atonement” for what people have done in the past. His title, The Transformations of Man, expresses that aspect of utopias which makes them so beguiling. Our principal task, he said, is “to create a new self.” Sir Richard Acland acknowledged that he was describing the new order in terms that showed a different kind of man than his readers were accustomed to. Why should we expect people to behave in such constructive ways? Because they will be new men, said Acland, transformed by the power of “many forms of education, preaching and propaganda.” Kateb, too, describes utopias as having a common cluster of characteristics that add up to a new kind of man. The social democrats who have molded Swedish society for the better part of two generations have taken it as an article of faith that they could create new people by manipulating the environment. Charles Reich’s Consciousness III is intended to produce “a ‘newhead’ -a new way of living-a new man.”
One of the most influential of utopias was portrayed in Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, published nearly a century ago. It was attractive enough to have inspired the formation of hundreds of Bellamy clubs, yet the society depicted was in many ways drab and uninviting. Diversity, for Bellamy, must have seemed something akin to original sin. The stores, the clothing, the residences, and the incomes were all the same, made uniform by the governance of bureaucrats. The real attraction in this society was the people, who were all educated, courteous, cultured, and loving. Strife was unknown in this land full of paragons. There was no crime, greed, laziness, or lying. Bellamy’s message was unmistakable, especially since he repeatedly interrupted the flow of the novel to preach: human nature is naturally good and people are “godlike in aspirations . . . with divinest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice.” Therefore, once external conditions are made acceptable, the Ten Commandments become “well-nigh obsolete,” bringing us a “second birth of the human race.”
In Karl Mannheim we have alternate displays of realism and phantasm, the latter manifestation appearing to be an updated version of Bellamy. Mannheim tells us first that social engineering schemes requiring a new kind of man for their functioning are utopian, by which he means they partake of fantasy and are unscientific. Sixty pages later he advocates the harnessing of “planned persuasion,” not to foment strife as the Nazis did, but to encourage constructive behavior. He goes on to say that education can so change human nature as to make for the reign of peace and decency. Even in the international realm, he writes, it should be possible to “coordinate education and propaganda” so as to extend decency and morality around the world. The naivete is breathtaking, but this is what Mannheim considers to be “scientific sociology.”
Kateb, with extraordinary honesty-although one might wish that he had been willing to pursue the matter more rigorously acknowledges the difficulty he has in common with all these utopians: the doctrine of sin. He thinks the realities of life in the twentieth century have made belief in that doctrine virtually a sign of maturity. How, then, can the problem of human nature be resolved by utopian planners? “We cannot answer this question; that is beyond us. We can only ask it, in perplexity and alarm.” But he goes on to “assume … that the difficulty we have just mentioned did not exist.” Kateb’s deliberate refusal to face the reality that would destroy his position is reminiscent of John Rawls’ s presumption that envy does not exist in society because it is irrational, and his admission that if this assumption is incorrect, his entire equalitarian argument is without foundation. Self-delusion about human nature is the reef waiting to make a wreck out of ideologies that wander out of a narrow channel. “It is because we rejected the doctrine of original sin,” C. E. M.Joad contended, “that we on the Left were always being disappointed.”
The obvious response to critiques of utopia is to differentiate between good and bad utopias. Kateb thinks Brave New World portrays a benevolent society and 1984 a malevolent one. But this is a false distinction, based in part on Kateb’s perception of the authors’ intentions, which he misconstrues. Orwell purposely gave the game away by having O’Brien reveal that the real motivation of the inner party is the exercise of power, while Huxley was more subtle in keeping the mask of benevolence intact. The message of both authors is the same: externally Big Brother (or the controller) is looking out for you, while, in the courts of power, destruction lurks. But the utopians fail to recognize these realities. Every society on the way to utopia has Big Brother up front with sweet talk and O’Brien in the back office pulling strings.
Although utopian thinking finds its way into the churches, as do the other idolatries, it is fundamentally hostile to Christian faith. It wishes to build a spurious kingdom of God on earth wholly out of manmade materials. Frazier says to Burris of Walden Two: “Turn your face on Heaven.” Later on, Burris, who by then has been converted to the utopian faith, describes the community as “essentially a religious movement freed of any dallying with the supernatural and inspired by a determination to build heaven on earth.”
Raymond Aron has seen clearly that ultimate lawlessness, the eradication of the boundaries of human power, not only make all actions morally permissible but also appear to open up all possibilities for accomplishment. “That God is dead means not just ‘Everything is permitted’ but also, and especially, ‘Everything is possible.’ ” Reinhold Niebuhr said much the same when he concluded that cynicism and nihilism have played less a role in the history of modern political disaster than has utopian thinking, which is incapable of recognizing the effect of sin on human action. Vladimir Bukovsky learned that lesson as he read the socialist utopias and discovered, to his amazement, that all of them had actually been realized in the Soviet Union.
The Rule of the Elite
Reminiscing about his youth as a socialist, Irving Kristol recalled that he and his friends never denounced anybody for being elitist. “The elite was us-the ‘happy few’ who had been chosen by History to guide our fellow creatures toward a secular redemption.” As with Kristol and his comrades, so with the legions of political saviors who have infested the West for nearly two centuries. The essence of revolutionary movements is the succession of elites through the process of violence. It is a mistake to think this is the product of a modern personality cult, as if before there were mass media the situation were fundamentally different. Political rivalry has always turned on the gaining and keeping of power.
Pursuing power would be pointless for many and futile for all in the absence of ideological spurs to action. People serve movements for which they feel loyalty. And they are able to win adherents only to the extent they are able to transmit that feeling. No matter how evil the movement, almost invariably it calls attention to its virtue and seeks to attract support on that basis. “Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak,” wrote John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, “and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.” The greater the pretensions to righteousness, it sometimes seems, the greater the potential for evil. Mircea Eliade has interpreted Marx’s work as a continuation of the mythic Asiatic redeemer stories. The proletariat are the innocents who suffer in order to redeem the world. Thus, Marx, hostile to the entire religious tradition in his conscious secularity, was also squarely within it.
People who attach themselves to ideologies often accept willingly the blinders that serve as a badge of membership. When Galbraith says that the “only reality is the right social purpose,” he tells us frankly that will is the only definer of reality. It does not matter what might be there objectively for the eyes to see, since the disciple determines his perception by means of an interior quality, much in the way the mind determines the configuration of the natural world in Kant’s philosophy. Only some such process can account for the naive assessments of totalitarian regimes that have come from intellectuals visiting them. Such regimes always preside over huge Potemkin villages, created to impress visitors, but how is it that the visitors so often fail to peer behind the building fronts and see that what is advertised is not there? During the 1930s large numbers of Western intellectuals visited the Soviet Union at a time when millions of Soviet citizens were starving and millions more were being killed and imprisoned by the regime. Yet many of them, especially those who used Marxist “science” as a tool of evaluation, reported that they had seen the future and that it worked! Especially gullible were the British Fabians such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw. They had the same “social purpose” as Galbraith, so we may assume that they apprehended the only reality that could exist for them. The same is true of recent visitors to China and Cuba.
[Editor’s Note: This excerpt is from Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture by Herb Schlossberg, Copyright © 1993, pp. 180–193. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.]
