Wouter J. Hanegraaff's Blog, page 3

Evola in Middle Earth

As part of my Western Culture & Counter Culture projectI’m studying the various “grand narratives” that have been told about the history, meaning, and direction of Western civilization – from optimistic stories of evolution and progress to their darker and more pessimistic counterparts. Perhaps the most uncompromising example of this latter category, and one of the most influential, was published in 1934 (and republished several times after, in expanded editions) by the controversial Italian esotericist Julius Evola (1898-1974) under the title Rivolto contro il mondo moderno (Revolt against the Modern World). I decided it might be time for me to finally read it, and so I did, in an excellent French translation by Philippe Baillet.
  Well, it proved to be quite a ride. Having read various discussions of Evola over the years, I was broadly familiar with the nature of his worldview and ideas (including, of course, his fascist sympathies and antisemitic tendencies) so I cannot say that I began with an empty slate. However, actually reading Revolt against the Modern World from cover to cover is an altogether different experience from just reading about it. Let me begin on the positive side. Impressive about Evola’s book is the remarkable degree of internal logic and consistency of vision with which he deconstructs every imaginable belief or assumption that modern people tend to take for granted, exposing the whole of it as one long series of errors and perversions of the universal metaphysical truth on which all Traditional societies were based. He manages to strike a tone of “academic” authority that gives the impression that he knows what he is talking about, and it is not so hard to understand that a book like this can make a deep impression on readers who feel alienated from contemporary global consumer culture and would like to see it destroyed. With a radicalism reminiscent of contemporary Islamic Jihadists, Evola tells his readers that modernity is the very negation of everything valid and true.

Antihistorical Consciousness
So what is his alternative? This is where it quickly gets problematic. First of all, while Evola’s modern Right-wing admirers like to claim “historical consciousness” for themselves while blaming their “Liberal” enemies for having no sense of history, Evola himself makes perfectly clear that any attempt to find evidence for his historical narrative will be an utter waste of time. He claims that “Traditional man” had a “supratemporal” sense of time, and therefore the reality in which he lived cannot be grasped by modern historical methods at all. In an absolutely crucial passage in the Introduction (poorly translated in the English standard edition, unfortunately, so my translation below is based on the Italian original while taking inspiration from the French version) he takes care to emphasize
… how little esteem we have for everything that, in recent years, has officially been considered under the label of “historical scholarship” in matters of ancient religions, institutions, and traditions. We want to make clear that we wish to have absolutely nothing to do with such an order of things, as with all that derives from the modern mentality; and as for the so-called “scientific” or “positive” perspective, with all its empty claims of competence and monopoly, in its best cases we consider it to be more or less the perspective of ignorance. … In general, the order of things with which we will be principally concerning ourselves is the one in which all materials that have a “historical” and “scientific” value are those that are the least important; whereas everything that, as myth, legend, and saga, is deprived of historical truth and demonstrative force, by that very fact acquires a superior validity and becomes the source of a more real and more certain knowledge. Precisely this is the boundary that separates traditional doctrine from profane culture. …The scientific anathemas in regard to this approach are well known: Arbitrary! Subjective! Fantastic! From our perspective it is neither arbitrary, subjective or fantastic, nor is it objective or scientific as understood by moderns. All of that does not exist. All of that stands outside of Tradition. Tradition begins at the point where one is able to place oneself above all that, by adopting a supra-individual and nonhuman perspective. That is why we have minimal concern for discussion and “demonstration.” The truths that the world of Tradition can make us understand are not of a kind that one can “learn” or “discuss.” They either are, or they are not. One can only remember them, and this happens when one is liberated from the obstacles represented by the various human constructs (beginning with all the results and methods of the “researchers” considered to be authorities), when one has evoked in oneself the capacity to see from the nonhuman perspective, which is the Traditional perspective itself.
Clearly this means that any critical objection, any disagreement, any reference to historical evidence that might possible undermine Evola’s narrative, and indeed any reference to historical sources at all, will have no impact whatsoever. And this fits perfectly with the extreme authoritarianism that is typical of Evola’s attitude: the reader is given to understand that it is not really Julius Evola who is speaking to us in these pages – no, he is speaking on behalf of the supreme source of superhuman metaphysical truth itself (the nature of which, by the way, remains very vague). Disagreement is therefore synonymous with spiritual ignorance: one is not supposed to ask questions but to listen and accept.
Doctrine and Storytelling

So what is this supreme Source of Truth telling us? Revolt agains the Modern World consists of two parts: the first is doctrinal and discusses the various elements of “the World of Tradition,” whereas the second should perhaps not be called historical – for how could it be that, on the foundations just outlined? – but does tell a grand story of spiritual decline and degeneration through the ages. Like Guénon, one of his major influences, Evola distinguishes between four stages of human and cultural development, from the Golden Age to the modern world (the kali yuga). The metaphysics of Tradition according to Evola are built upon the primacy of Being; on the notion of one absolute Spiritual Center that is the exclusive source of legitimate Authority, reflected in an ideology of Sacred Kingship; on the notion of a “natural” social hierarchy of four castes, with spiritual leaders at the top and servants (including slaves) at the bottom; on the primacy of masculine “virile” qualities over their feminine counterparts; and on an ascetic warrior ethics grounded in honour and heroic values. If anything stands out as central in this overview, it is Evola’s obsession with power.             The second part is built upon the doctrine of “four ages,” with reference to Hesiod (the ages of gold, silver, bronze, and iron) and Hindu scriptures. Evola tells us that during the Golden Age, the region that is now the North Pole was inhabited by a pure race of superior beings who exemplified a “non-humain spirituality.” Due to some primal catastrophe, the representatives of this Hyperborean race began migrating southward towards what is now North America and the continent of Atlantis. This was the beginning of the Silver Age and the first stage of degeneration. Basic to the story that follows is the idea of a basic hostility between the heaven-oriented, solar, heroic, and masculine people from the North and their earth-oriented, lunar, matriarchal counterparts from the South (as is well known, Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht[1861] had a huge influence on Evola in this regard). Cultural contact led to wars and interbreeding, so that the original purity of the Northern race got mixed and its culture began to decline. From there on it all goes downward. Things get ever more complex and messy during the Third Age, as the “heroic” descendants of the ancient superior culture progressively lose their vitality and the culture of the original spiritual elite slowly but certainly loses the battle against “anti-Traditional” forces. In spite of temporal revivals, notably during the the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, we steadily move foreward (or rather, downward) towards modern culture with its degenerate values of liberalism, humanism, egalitarianism, democracy, and so on. If Part I of Revolt is marked by Evola’s obsession with power, Part II is marked by an incredibly virulent hatred and supreme aristocratic contempt for modernity and everything it stands for.
The Deadly Sword of Philology
Of course it will be useless for me to apply the instruments of historical criticism in order to point out the utter absence of any credible evidence for Evola’s narrative: in making any such attempt, according to Evola’s admirers I will merely be demonstrating my own ignorance of the truth, and my naïve belief in such useless illusions as “critical discussion,” “historical thinking,” or “scholarly methods.” Trust in such merely human approaches betrays the false assumption that there exists such a thing as “progress in knowledge,” that is to say: it reflects the modernist delusion that it is possible to make advances in our understanding of the past, by learning important things about it that were not known before and by correcting earlier interpretations. No such progress is possible: it is excluded from the outset that I will ever discover anything important that Evola doesn’t already know. All I’m allowed to do is “remember” the eternal truth (obviously in terms of Plato's anamnesis), and if what I remember would turn out to conflict with anything that Evola is telling us, this could only mean that it’s not real memory: I must have made it up myself. Evola, of course, has made nothing up – how could he? It is not him who is saying all these things. He speaks for Tradition.
Still, although I know it’s pointless, I’ll make just one little attempt. Part II of Revoltis preceded by two mottos, one of which is taken from Jacob Boehme. Evola is quoting Louis-Claude de Martin’s French translation (1800) of Boehme’s first book, the Aurora:

Je vous dis un secret. Voici le temps où l’époux couronnera son épouse: mais où est la couronne? Vers le Nord … Mais d’où vient l’épouse? Du centre, où la chaleur engendre la lumière, et se porte vers le Nord … où la lumière devient brillante.[Translation: I tell you a secret. Behold the time when the bridegroom will crown his bride: but where is the crown? Toward the North … But from where does the bride come? From the centre, where the warmth brings forth the light, and is directed towards the North … where the light becomes brilliant]
Evola clearly saw this quote as a wonderful confirmation of his belief in a superior spiritual Light coming from the North. Of course it takes an unrepentant modernist like myself to be so deluded as to think it might be worth my while to check the source. Was Boehme really speaking about Evola’s North? You guessed it – I checked anyway. And what did I find? Sorry Julius, but this is what Boehme actually wrote:
Sihe Ich Sage dir ein geheimnis. Es ist Schon die zeit / das der Breutigam Seine Brautt kröntt / Raht fritz wo ligt die kron / Kegen Mitternacht. … Von wannen kömpt aber der Breutigam. Auß der mitten / wo die Hitze das licht gebüred / vnd ferdt kegen mitternacht … / da wird das licht Helle. [emphasis in original][Translation: Look. I am going to tell you a secret. The time has come for the bridegroom to crown his bride. Guess, dear fellow, where is the crown to be found? Toward midnight. … Whence issues the bridegroom? From the middle, where the heat gives birth to the light, shooting towards midnight … That is where the light is growing bright][German original & English translation: Jacob Boehme, Aurora (Morgen Röte imauffgang, 1612) …, transl. Andrew Weeks, Brill: Leiden / Boston 2013, 324-325]
It’s a very small example, but it demonstrates the problem. Boehme spoke about “midnight,” not the North: that translation came from Saint-Martin. Evola did not know this because he never bothered to check the original source. The point is simple: it is only on the basis of strict philological criticism along such lines that one can possibly evaluate the truth of any of the countless historical claims on which Evola builds his narrative. If one would take the (considerable) trouble of doing so, then the narrative would quickly start crumbling before one’s gaze. One would discover the enormous extent to which Evola was relying on dated, questionable, or wholly corrupt sources and on scholarly interpretations riddled with assumptions that often tell us more about the authors and their culture or personal preoccupations than about the texts and traditions they were studying.             So are we simply dealing here with the typical naïvety and credulity of an amateur historian? I don’t think so. I am convinced that Evola’s highhanded statements about the total irrelevance of historical scholarship reflect an acute awareness on his part that these methods and technical tools had the power to undermine and destroy everything he wanted to say. If he dismisses textual criticism or philological analysis ex cathedra, describing them as the feeble props of deluded ignorants, this is because he knows that in reality they are deadly weapons against which his claims would be utterly helpless. Better discredit your critics in advance so that your readers will not even bother taking their arguments seriously. Better make use of the popular and populist resentment of “academics” in their ivory tower, of all those “specialists” who are making everything so difficult instead of telling a clear and simple story that normal people can understand. We find a similar strategy in the current conservative and rightwing campaigns of denying climate change (Trump: “just look out the window!”), undermining the credibility of science and academic research, attempting to defund Humanities programs, and spreading the trope of “alternative facts”. Science and scholarship are inconvenient to these antimodernists because they hinder them in saying what they want to say and doing what they want to do. Never let evidence stand in the way of a good story. We find the same approach in Evola. In sum, I do not think he doesn’t take historians seriously, on the contrary: he is afraid of them. He knows that his weapons are no match for theirs, and so he seeks to avoid a direct confrontation.
Transpolitical Conservative Liberalism
If Evola’s grand narrative of historical decline is a fantasy, then does this leave us with anything worth salvaging? Even if one does not accept his specific understanding of “Tradition,” one might still be inclined to agree in general terms with the idea that premodern cultures were superior and modernization is therefore a process of decline instead of progress. Or instead of thinking in terms of either decline or progress, one might argue that traditional and modern societies both come at a price, so we need to strive for a healthy balance between the advantages and disadvantages of both, rather than making an either/or choice. This would be my position. Now it is very interesting to observe that, whatever the official ideologies might say, a deep longing for premodern conditions is by no means restricted to the Right wing of the political spectrum but is widespread among its “progressive” opponents as well. While reading Revolt, I was struck by the structural parallels with one of my own all-time favourite novels, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It is well known that Tolkien’s work became something close to Holy Scripture among the Hippies during the 1960s and remains a classic in the Pagan community that came out of that era.

Obviously the enemy Saruman, with his “mind of metal and wheels,” mirrors the spirit of the Industrial Revolution and its destructive effects on nature (the Ents) and traditional communities (the Shire). In other words, he stands for modernization as a negative force. All readers of Tolkien instinctively take the side of the Hobbits (that is to say, of traditional culture) and the Elves (that is to say, of an elite culture that embodies high spiritual values). Quite as instinctively, they embrace the notion of a sacred “bloodline” of Kings who are destined to rule: it would be ridiculous to imagine a democratic Middle Earth where Aragorn would have to stand for election and get his legislation through parliament. Middle Earth is a traditional hierarchical society where everybody seems to accept his or her appointed rank and station, where families are intact, where men are real men and women are real women. It is inhabited by a whole series of higher and lower races (Elves at the top, Men in the Middle, Orcs at the bottom), and although these may form coalitions of friendship, it is well understood that ultimately they are supposed to stay in their own homelands. Nor would they wish otherwise: they are all proud of who they are and determined to protect their own culture. All of this is very clearly Conservative rather than “Liberal,” and Traditionalist rather than Progressive. Nevertheless, few readers understand Lord of the Rings as a political manifesto, and the novel has been widely experienced as a source of deep inspiration among such typical “Lefties” as the Hippies or most Pagans since the 1960s and their descendants or sympathizers up to the present. Of course some important footnotes should be added here, about ideological critiques of Tolkien on the Marxist Left and a deliberate embrace of traditional community values in Right-wing paganism. I’m aware of those complications, but what interests me here is the very broad base of readers (including myself) who appear to be perfectly capable of loving Lord of the Rings while rejecting right-wing authoritarianism and embracing universal “Liberal” human values such as freedom, equality, or democracy. So this is where it all gets very complicated. How can Tolkien’s perspective be so compatible with “Liberalism” and “the Left” if his ideal society exemplifies “Traditionalist” values promoted by authors on the “Right” such as Evola? It’s not a new problem either. During the 1960s and the following decades, the new Liberal culture that flourished on the Left in California and elsewhere in the United States embraced the scholarship on myth and symbolism associated with Eranos luminaries such as Carl Gustav Jung, Mircea Eliade, or Joseph Campbell. All these authors were very clearly conservatives, and much has been written about their relation with fascism and antisemitism; but the fact is that their work was experienced as deeply inspiring by American “Liberals” from the 1960s to the 1980s at least, and had a big influence on them.In short, there seems to be such a thing as Transpolitical Conservative Liberalism. Transpoliticalbecause it does not fit the neat ideological straightjacket of Left versus Right as conventionally understood. Conservativebecause it seeks to protect traditional values that are being threatened by the forces of “modern progress.” Liberalbecause it also believes in freedom and equality as values that should be universal for all human beings.
Human and Non-Human Conservatism
Evola is clearly not on that side though. His vision is marked by a strong and perfectly explicit emphasis on human inequality and an obsession with power and authority. Both elements are grounded in his personal psychology: they follow logically, in his case, from his deep-seated desire for absolute autonomy, that is to say, of total freedom for himself. From an early age on, so he tells us in his autobiography Path of Cinnabar , his all-consuming wish was to be absolutely free and autonomous: he did not want to be dependent on anything or anyone whatsoever. In terms of the German Idealist philosophers he was reading at the time, the whole of reality had to be subject to his absolute “I” (das Ich), which had to transcend the physical world and all its contingencies. So extreme was this desire that it brought him close to suicide, until a Buddhist fragment convinced him that in extinguishing his personal existence he would not be achieving freedom but would in fact be demonstrating his failureto achieve it. This is not the place to discuss the “magical” philosophy that came out of this realization, fascinating though it is. Important for our present concerns is Evola’s obsession, throughout his life, with the absolute power and unquestionable authority of a spiritual elite imagined as standing at the very top of a hierarchy: far above the ignorant masses, the contingencies of history, the limitations of material existence, or anything else that could possibly trouble its “non-human” purity and spiritual independence. Needless to add, such dreams are dreamed only by those who imagine that they themselves are lucky enough to stand at the top of the hierarchy.            It is hardly surprising that such a man would be lacking in all human warmth and empathy for others. Evola was known as a cold fish who did not care about anyone but himself, and this is not the critique of a hostile outsider. Evola himself described his character in these terms:
A spontaneous detachment from what is merely human, from what is generally regarded as normal, particularly in the sphere of affection, emerged as one of my distinctive traits when I was still in my early youth … [S]uch a detached disposition  … was the cause of a certain insensitivity and cold-heartedness on my part. But in the most important of all fields, his very trait is what allowed me to recognize those unconditioned values which are far removed from the perspective of ordinary men of my time (Path of Cinnabar, 6-7).
One has to agree, Evola was not an ordinary man. But much more important, given his current influence in Right-wing circles, is his utter contempt for human beings qua human beings. His commitment was explicitly to what he called the non-human. Any true spiritual values, as he understood them, had to be the exclusive preserve of a spiritual elite far above the common run of humanity. Whatever might happen to the masses of “ordinary” human beings was none of his concern: in his ideal world, they simply have to obey, and will be forced into submission if they dare to resist the dictates of “legitimate authority.” It is precisely in this regard that Evola’s Rightwing conservatism is utterly incompatible with the perspective of its “Liberal” counterparts – including those that share a deep concern with “Conservative” values. If Middle Earth is a Traditional society threatened by Saruman’s modernism, then Evola is much closer to the mindset of Sauron than that of Gandalf, Aragorn, the Hobbits, or the Elves. They are fighting against Mordor because it seeks to destroy everything that makes life worth living: freedom, peace, friendship, love, happiness, beauty, brotherhood, tolerance, mutual understanding, and the willingness to transcend boundaries of race and culture (exemplified, of course, by the friendship that develops between Legolas and Gimli). The traditional society they want to conserve and protect exemplifies precisely those values. Sauron, on the other hand, is obsessed with one thing only: power. He demands absolute authority, submission to his will.
The Faultline
Evola’s case has exemplary significance in the current political debate. What ultimately divides the “New Right” from its “Liberal” opponents is not the dilemma of Tradition versus Modernity, or Conservatism versus Progress: about those issues, difficult as they may be, it is possible to find common ground. Only one principle is not negotiable: that power and authority must be at the service of humanity, and not the other way around.

The European New Right Doesn't Get It Right: The Danger of Manichaean Historiography

In an attempt to educate myself a bit about the European New Right, I’ve been reading two books about the movement: Tomislav Sunic’s 1988 dissertation Against Democracy and Equality and Michael O’Meara’s New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (2013). I learned a lot, although perhaps not what the authors hoped I would.
Tomislav Sunic
Sunic’s book was republished by Arktos and has received much praise in rightwing milieus as a reliable introduction. Ironically though, the ENR's central representative Alain de Benoist in his Preface (p. 18) points out that the very title of the book is completely wrong: it shouldn't be about equality but egalitarianism! Unfortunately, Sunic doesn't seem to understand such basic distinctions and makes an utter mess of it. First, on pp. 132-135 he gives a quite adequate summary of what the liberal concept of equality actually means, with reference to the Declaration of Independence: "At bottom the democratic faith is a moral affirmation: men are not to be used merely as means to an end, as tools [etc.]" Each human being "has an equal right to pursue happiness; life liberty and the pursuit of happiness are his simply by virtue of the fact that he is a human being" (Milton Konvitz, quoted on p. 132). Clear enough, isn't it? One might think that Sunic understands it too: "When liberal authors maintain that all men are equal, it is not to say that men must be identical ... and liberalism has nothing to do with uniformity. To assert that all men are equal, in liberal theory, means that all men should be first and foremost treated fairly and their differences acknowledged" (p. 135). 
Bravo, well said - it would seem that Sunic gets it. But no. He then launches into a chapter (pp. 141) riddled with so many non sequiturs and sheer nonsense that it made my head spin. Instead of attacking the actual liberal notion of equality that he has just been describing, conservative authors and ENR sympathizers such as Hans J. Eysenck, Konrad Lorenz, Pierre Krebs and others are endorsed for attacking a bizarre straw man that is actually the opposite of what equality means. Suddenly the Declaration of Independence is supposed to say "that all human beings are absolutely identical" (Lorenz, quoted on p. 145), i.e. "that all people at birth are endowed with the same talents, and that all peoples possess the same energies" (Krebs, quoted on p. 146). What is so hard about seeing the difference between human rights (which should be equal) and human talents, abilities, or cultures (which obviously aren't all the same)? Why not have the honesty of acknowledging what was actually meant, i.e. that all human beings should have equal rights to life, liberty & happiness, regardless of whether they are smart or dumb, talented or untalented, educated or uneducated, and of course regardless of their race, gender, culture, beliefs and so on? But no, that's clearly not what Sunic wants to say, so to hell with logic. From here on the argument degenerates into a claim that defending the equal right of all human beings to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Decl. of Ind.) means justifying "genocidal crusades" (Bérard, quoted on p. 150) and ultimately leads to "state terror, deportations, and the imprisonment of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals in the name of higher goals, democracy, and human rights" (p. 157). Ehm, am I missing something here?? Did it ever occur to Sunic and his sympathizers that these horrors mean what they obviously mean, i.e. that - far from exemplifying an ideology of "human rights" - the sad realities of (neo)"liberal" politics and global domination keep betraying and making a mockery of the basic human values that they should in fact be defending? In other words, it seems to me that Sunic should be attacking the practices of (neo)liberalism in the name of equality and human rights instead of conflating the two. But I'm afraid all of this is not about logic or clear thinking. It's about pursuing an agenda inspired by emotional resentment, regardless of arguments or evidence. If this is the intellectual level on which the ENR is attacking "liberalism" and equality, then I’m afraid they have a long way to go.
Michael O’Meara
But is Sunic’s book representative? When I posted these reflections on Facebook, several friends mentioned Michael O’Meara’s New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Arktos 2013) as a more solid and reliable introduction to the topic, so I ordered and read it. But unfortunately I cannot say I’m impressed with this book either, to say the least. It looks a bit more solid, it’s better written, and it has an extensive apparatus of footnotes that gives it an “academic look and feel”. There’s certainly a lot of research behind it, and the apparatus is a treasure trove of references to relevant primary and secondary sources. Nevertheless, it quickly became evident that I was reading not a historical analysis of the ENR interested in balance and nuance, but a political pamphlet grounded in ideological tunnel vision. The very first pages already set the tone, when O’Meara discusses the aftermath of what he calls the “Second European Civil War” and makes clear that for him the “liberation” of France was in fact an “occupation” by the hostile forces of American Liberalism, which proceeded immediately to “decimate” what he calls the Old Right in “a murderous purge”. Never mind the murderous Nazi regime that went before, which seems not worth mentioning in this context and is clearly not much of a problem for O’Meara (in providing figures of the number of casualties in this so-called épuration, he relies primarily on the neo-fascist “negationist” and explicit defender of National Socialism Maurice Bardèche). Of course it’s well known that after years of Nazi occupation, the reaction of revenge and “payback” after the liberation produced fresh horrors and tragedies; but O’Meara wants to speak of “murder” only when the victims are on the right. I find it illustrative that whenever he mentions Jews and Judaism we immediately encounter standard antisemitic stereotypes such as the image of the “rootless” cosmopolitan Jew with his “revolutionary” (read: anti-traditional) mentality and obsession with money and materialism. Most important is that, throughout his discussions, O’Meara never makes even the slightest attempt to understand his opponents’ point of view. Why be fair to those “Liberals” and their ideas? They are the enemy, so their perspectives are wrong and without any validity. No need to spend any time taking them seriously. Should one even bother to read such books? I think one should. Firstly because it’s important to do what O’Meara does not, that is to say, make a serious attempt at listening and understanding how your opponents look at the world and why. If we aren’t willing to make that effort we have no right to expect them to do any better. And secondly because O’Meara’s book is an excellent example of how historical narrative can be used for purposes of manipulation – or in other words, of the power of storytelling in historical writing. This is in fact an issue of enormous importance, and its relevance goes far beyond this one specific example. Whether we realize it or not, all of us are constantly exposed to such narratives, and they determine how we perceive what happens in the world around us. So we’d better be aware of how they work.
Manichaean Historiography
O’Meara’s book reflects a Manichaean style of historiography based upon the reification and essentialization of (in this particular case) “Liberalism” and “Tradition” as two hostile movements or forces that are supposed to have been battling one another since antiquity. If you trace the components of the narrative, which can be found in many variations elsewhere in the literature of the New Right, then it looks somewhat like this.
The story of “Liberalism” begins with the “revolutionary spirit” of Judaism and its monotheist revolt against the stable traditionality of “pagan” culture, which used to ensure that people knew who they were and where they belonged. It continues in the universalizing tendency of Pauline Christianity, which no longer seeks to address just one people (the Jews) but sets its sight on the whole of humanity, understood as one homogeneous collection of individual souls that are equal before God and all need to find salvation. This approach is taken up by the Christian Church, which proceeds to conquer the pagan peoples of Europe and convert them to the new faith: the result is that local communities lose their autonomy and are expected to become parts of one Holy Roman Empire. While Roman Catholicism had a policy of absorbing “pagan superstitions” into its own framework, the fatal process of liberalization moves to its next level with the Protestant Reformation: now we have a situation of total war against paganism, in favour of an interpretation of the Christian faith that puts all emphasis on the isolated individual and its personal relation to God, thereby further eroding the traditional sense of community. Next we get to Descartes, whose emphasis on pure rationality creates the intellectual foundation for modern science and its “reign of quantity” at the expense of all qualitative features, which now become totally irrelevant, thus paving the way for the commodification of everything under capitalism. From there we get to the famous disenchantment of the world under the reign of industrialization, which proceeds to further tear traditional communities apart, resulting in an urban mass society of alienated individuals. In the wake of Protestantism and the scientific revolution, the next victim of Liberalism is the traditional notion of social and political hierarchy. The revolt of the “third estate” during the French Revolution leads finally to an ideology of social egalitarianism and hence to modern mass democracy, thereby legitimating a whole series of “emancipatory” movements: for instance, women or homosexuals begin to claim equal rights, non-white peoples (black slaves, the colonized) start doing the same, and so on. Due to their success, we no longer have a traditional European society with a “natural” hierarchy dominated by white males but a multicultural society based on the principle that “all men (and women) are equal”. This process moves into its logical end phase with the economization and commodification of everything, known as neoliberalism, and its ambition of a global egalitarian society of consumers.
So what is wrong with such a narrative? Perhaps even this short summary shows how plausible it can be made to look at first sight. I do not think the problem lies so much in the basic historical “facts” as such (although of course one may quibble about many details and especially with how they are framed), in O’Meara’s attempt at a critical analysis of the problems and dilemmas caused by modernization (a perfectly legitimate pursuit), in the fact that he tries to understand them from a broad historical perspective (equally legitimate), or in his radical rejection of modernity and his heartfelt wish for a return to “traditional” values (realistic or not, such wishes are understandable enough). 
Rather, the core problem is quite simply that this polemical manifesto, like so many similar ones, derives it plausibility and persuasive power from a very common type of bad historiography. A first objection concerns the “presentist” approach to history: you begin with what worries you in the contemporary situation and then start cherry-picking for its causes back into the past to create a narrative that, predictably, culminates in the very phenomena you were trying to "explain" in the first place. A second and even more serious objection, on which I will be concentrating, is that the entire enterprise is built upon an essentialist approach to historical writing grounded in a very common type of mental delusion (see below) but that can be used to great rhetorical effect and has tremendous potential for political propaganda. Let me emphasize right away that O’Meara is not alone in this regard. The same structural problem is basic to countless other grand narratives of modernity, with Hegel as the classic example.
The Power of Reification
So why is this bad historiography? To put it as sharply as possible: because there is no such thing as a “historical process” – there are only historical events. This might sound like an exaggerated or hyper-theoretical claim, so allow me to explain. Egil Asprem has nicely made the basic point in his deconstruction of another so-called “historical process”, that of disenchantment:
Conceptualizations of disenchantment as a socio-historical process affecting modern societies imply rather abstract, top-down explanations of individual beliefs and actions: in these accounts, it is not so much individuals that define their reality, build societies, make choices, create and negotiate culture and meaning, as it is the overarching “systems”, “structures”, “worldviews” or “ideologies” that determine what individuals do and say (The Problem of Disenchantment, 47).
The same argument applies to “Liberalism”. O’Meara’s story derives its seductive power from the fact that it lends agency not to human beings but to abstract “forces” of which they are supposed to be the puppets. Hence readers are led to imagine the history of Western culture notas a series of events based on human actions, which could all have happened differently, but as one momentous battle that has been unfolding over time between two hostile forces (Tradition and Liberalism), each sticking to their own internal logic and dynamics until the bitter end. Within the economy of this dualism, Tradition is clearly on the side of Being, while Liberalism is on the side of Becoming: the former is imagined to exist in some kind of nonhistorical space (hence its supposed “naturalness” or “universality”, its association with “eternal values”, and so on) while the latter unfolds in historical time (and is therefore seen as unstable, contingent, und ultimately less “real”). The narrative makes them appear like spiritual or metaphysical entities that are invisibly at work, as the hidden secret of “external events” that we can observe with our senses. Thus we are told that history has been influenced by the “Jewish Spirit”, the “Spirit of Christianity”, the “Spirit of Capitalism”, the “Spirit of Liberalism”, and so on and so forth.
Spirits...
Entities you can't see...
John Gast, "American Progress" (1872)There is a good reason why we cannot see them, except in our imagination: they do not actually exist. What we need to get is that “Tradition” and “Liberalism” are not entities, forces, spirits, or realities at all. They are words, labels – no more, no less. The function of this particular type of words consists in highlighting and calling attention to structural similarities of an ideal or abstract nature. In themselves there is nothing wrong with such operations of mental comparison and abstraction: they are not just useful, but often indispensable in our continuous attempts at bringing some order to the world that surrounds us in time and space. However, that does not diminish the fact that they exist nowhere else but in our minds: they are mental tools that operate in our imagination. The problem is that our minds have learned to neglect this and hence misperceive the true nature of such concepts. Instead of seeing them for what they are, we imagine them to be somehow real, and this happens through a cognitive process that is known as reification or, in its strongest form, essentialization. It causes us to imagine, more or less vaguely, that there aresuch things as “Liberalism” or “Tradition” and that history can be seen as the story of their encounter. Sometimes we say that this story unfolds “on the stage of world history” – another nice example of how we imagine things that are not there. For where is that “stage”? Where are those “actors”? These are metaphors, but we tend to confuse them with realities.Why is all this a problem? Because once we start thinking along these lines – and it is perfectly natural for us to do so – we feel that we need to get involved and take sides. Do we identify with the hero on that stage or with the villain? And so we start glorifying one of those spirits or entities while demonizing everybody that we imagine to be standing on the other side. This is how we get Rightwingers depicting “Liberals” as enemies of humanity in league with the Forces of Evil, and Leftwingers depicting “Traditionalists” as – well, exactly the same.
Reification can be defined as the process of making mental abstractions real by projecting them onto the world, and then allowing our actions to be guided by them (for a theoretical discussion, see pp. 579-582 here). Enormous simplifications are the inevitable result, and in the real world these can often be destructive in the extreme. Manichaean historiography based on reification (whether from the Left or from the Right) leads to false but seductive narratives that sacrifice historical complexity to the requirements of ideology – that is to say, to power. We are told that we need to make a choice and show what side we are on: “you are either with us or with the terrorists – choose!” Although I disagree with Eric Eric VoegelinVoegelin’s notion of “gnostic politics” (tragically, his Cold-War imagination fell prey to the very same pathology he believed to be fighting), his description of what happens next is perfectly correct:
[At issue is] the legitimation of violence as a spiritual act of punishment against the Powers which threaten the Light. The situation of the underlying party is terrible, because he is not merely a political opponent in the battle for power but, in the dream fantasy of the gnostic, a cosmic enemy in the war between Light and Darkness ("Gnostische Politik", 308; see discussion on pp. 29-36 here).
That is what happens, all the time (for some of the most influential cases, see discussion here). Instead of seeing people you start imagining Powers – forces of darkness at work in the world that are destroying everything you care about. You feel you must fight them. You tell yourself that your eyes are wide open and you see the truth. They cannot fool you anymore, you are seeing through the delusion! Your opponents, on the other hand, are clearly under the sway of evil. They are living in ignorance, hypnotized, they act like automata, unable to see how they are being manipulated by the powers that are running the show. So if you cannot convince them, you will have to fight them. Perhaps they are looking at you in exactly the same way? Well, that might be, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that they are wrong and you are right. You cannot allow yourself to try understanding their point of view. That would only weaken your resolve, and anyway, you already know all you need to know about them.
Contingency and Human Values
What does it mean to look at history in terms of contingency instead? It means taking a step back and focusing our attention, first of all, on what is really and undoubtedly there: human beings of flesh and blood like ourselves, and their actions in the world. Take the case of Paul the apostle. It is nonsense to see him as some kind of instrument through which Liberalism (or, for that matter, Christianity) was beginning its long campaign of conquering the world, en route towards its telos of a neoliberal world filled with McDonalds and Coca Cola. That is not what was happening in the first century CE. Something much more human and down-to-earth was happening. We are dealing with a Greek-speaking Jewish guy who, for reasons best known to himself (possibly the guilty trauma of having been a witness and accomplice, as argued by A.N. Wilson), got quite obsessed with the death by crucifixion of an obscure teacher from Nazareth called Jesus. He came up with some new and quite idiosyncratic ideas about its true cosmic significance for the world at large, and felt strongly that everybody should know. So he went on a mission to spread the word, and turned out to be really good at it. The rest, as one says, is history. The point is that none of it needed to have happened the way it did happen. If for some reason Paul’s (or rather, Saul’s) parents had not met, then he would never have been born – and it is absolutely impossible to say in what kind of world we would be living today. We can be sure though that it would look very different. However, his parents did meet; he was born; and he did what he did. What came out of it is what came out of it – not because it was meant to be, as if there were some great plan, but simply because this is what happened and not something else. What goes for Paul goes for Plato, Jesus, Muhammad, Constantine the Great, Luther, Descartes, Voltaire, Napoleon, Hitler, and all the rest. Human beings who happened to do what they happened to do.

All of which might sound almost trivial. But it is not: the implications reach very far, much farther than we commonly recognize. One often hears the objection that pure and utter contingency “empties history of any meaning”, beause it implies that history is just a string of random events, “one damn thing after another”. I disagree. Grand narratives based on reification do not discoverany true meaning in history. What they do is impute meanings on history, and while it is true that this can bestow a sense of purpose and personal fulfilment, the results can be utterly destructive too. Does this mean then that in fact there is no meaning or value to be found in the world? On the contrary! All it means is that if you look for it in “the historical process”, in some kind of political ideology or theology of salvation, then you’re looking in the wrong place. You find it in a meaningful life. And here, I think, lies the real tragedy of political ideologies, whether from the “Left” or from the “Right”. Although their very power and motivation comes from a deep and genuine concern with protecting important human values (how can we lead a meaningful life under conditions of modernity?), those who take it upon themselves to impose such values infailingly end up sacrificing real human beings on the altar of “the greater good”. In the end, they care more about ideas than they care about people.
Getting Real
As formulated by Mark Lilla in a wise and perceptive discussion of reactionary thinking, “when it comes to understanding history we are still incorrigibly reifying creatures” (The Shipwrecked Mind, 134):
One needs not have read Kierkegaard or Heidegger to know the anxiety that accompanies historical consciousness, that inner cramp that comes when time lurches forward and we feel ourselves catapulted into the future. To relax that cramp we tell ourselves we actually know how one age has followed another since the beginning. This white lie gives us hope of altering the future course of events, or at least of learning how to adapt to them. There even seems to be solace in thinking that we are caught in a fated history of decline, so long as we can expect a new turn of the wheel, or an eschatological event that will carry us beyond time itself. … [T]throughout history [this apocalyptic imagination] has … provoked extravagant hopes that were inevitably disappointed, leaving those who held them even more desolate. The doors to the Kingdom remained shut, and all that was left was memory of defeat, destruction, and exile. And fantasies of the world we have lost. (Ibid., p. 135, 137).
What makes New Right narratives so seductive is the fact that they respond to problems that are perfectly real and important. The ideology of neoliberalism has created a terrible mess, and many of its basic assumptions need to be reconsidered. But to address the enormous problems that we are facing and not make matters worse, we need to stop fooling ourselves and get real about what really counts: not the purity of some “Traditional” or “Liberal” ideal that exists nowhere but in our imagination and has never existed anywhere else, but the suffering of people and the damage done to the world. Both Traditional andLiberal ideals can be excellent guidelines, and they are by no means so mutually exclusive as their fanatical apologists would like to suggest. But the point is that they are not realities. They are ideals, and as such they will always be hovering on the far horizon, at the edge of our vision or just beyond. We cannot reach them, and that is good, for absolute purity is a deadly thing. But they can be sources of inspiration, beacons of hope, and we can try to move into their general direction. 
In the words of Annie Dillard, we are all in the same boat (or rather, in her story it is an ice floe), on our way towards the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility. Let's face it: we shouldn't expect to arrive there anytime soon. It's total chaos on that floe, but we're all on it together. So while we're all there and have nowhere else to go, we’d better learn to get over ourselves and try treating our fellow-travelers the way we’d like to be treated ourselves. Listening to what they have to say would not be a bad beginning.

The European New Right Doesn't Get It Right

I've been making an attempt to educate myself a bit about the European New Right, and decided to read Tomislav Sunic's 1988 dissertation Against Democracy and Equality republished by Arktos and much praised in rightwing milieus as a reliable introduction. Ironically though, the ENR's central representative Alain de Benoist in his Preface (p. 18) points out that the very title of that book is completely wrong: it shouldn't be about equality but egalitarianism. But Sunic doesn't seem to understand such basic distinctions and make an utter mess of it. First, on pp. 132-135 he gives a quite adequate summary of what the liberal concept of equality actually means, with reference to the Declaration of Independence: ""At bottom the democratic faith is a moral affirmation: men are not to be used merely as means to an end, as tools [etc.]" Each human being "has an equal right to pursue happiness; life liberty and the pursuit of happiness are his simply by virtue of the fact that he is a human being" (Milton Konvitz, quoted on p. 132). Clear enough, isn't it? One might think that Sunic understands it too: "When liberal authors maintain that all men are equal, it is not to say that men must be identical ... and liberalism has nothing to do with uniformity. To assert that all men are equal, in liberal theory, means that all men should be first and foremost treated fairly and their differences acknowledged" (p. 135). Bravo, well said. So it would seem that Sunic gets it. But then he launches into a chapter (pp. 141) riddled with so many non sequiturs and sheer nonsense that it made my head spin. Instead of attacking the actual liberal notion of equality that he has just been describing, conservative authors and ENR sympathizers such as Hans J. Eysenck, Konrad Lorenz, Pierre Krebs and others are endorsed for attacking a bizarre straw man that is actually the opposite of what equality means. Suddenly the Declaration of Independence is supposed to say "that all human beings are absolutely identical" (Lorenz, quoted on p. 145), i.e. "that all people at birth are endowed with the same talents, and that all peoples possess the same energies" (Krebs, quoted on p. 146). What is so hard about seeing the difference between human rights (which should be equal) and human talents, abilities, or cultures (which obviously aren't all the same)? Why not have the honesty of acknowledging what was actually meant, i.e. that all human beings should have equal rights to life, liberty & happiness, regardless of whether they are smart or dumb, talented or untalented, and of course regardless of their race, gender, culture, beliefs and so on? But no, that's clearly not what Sunic wants to say, so to hell with logic: from here on the argument degenerates into a claim that defending the equal right of all human beings to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Decl. of Ind.) means justifying "genocidal crusades" (Bérard, quoted on p. 150) and ultimately "state terror, deportations, and the imprisonment of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals in the name of higher goals, democracy, and human rights" (p. 157). Ehm, am I missing something here?? Did it ever occur to Sunic and his sympathizers that these horrors mean what they obviously mean, i.e. that - far from exemplifying an ideology of "human rights" - the sad realities of (neo)"liberal" politics and global domination keep betraying and making a mockery of the basic human values that they should be defending? In other words, Sunic should be attacking the practices of (neo)liberalism in the name of equality and human rights instead of conflating the two. But I'm afraid all of this is not about logic or clear thinking; it's about pursuing an agenda inspired by emotional resentment, regardless of arguments or evidence. If this is the intellectual level on which the ENR is attacking "liberalism" and equality, then they have a long way to go.

The Cure (or: Confessions of a Liberal Anti-Neoliberal, with Recommendations)

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</span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4m87Yi15j1..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4m87Yi15j1..." width="400" /></a></span></div><br /><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Who am I?</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">What do I stand for?</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">What is it that unites me with those who are like me?</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">What is it that divides me from those who are unlike me?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span></i> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">The current wave of rightwing populism answers these questions along lines of nationality and ethnicity, often with strong racial connotations. The slogan “Make America Great Again” really means “I want to be proud again of being an American.” Likewise, in my own country, followers of Geert Wilders want to be proud again to be Dutch. The French want to be proud again to be French, the English to be English, and so on. Only in Germany such sentiments of national pride have long been taboo, for obvious historical reasons: if Germans should be proud of anything, it had to be of being exemplary Europeans. They still are, but even in Germany the tide is beginning to turn. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">I understand these sentiments very well, for once upon a time I used to be proud of being Dutch. This was in the mid-1990s, when I was living in Paris and began seeing my own native culture and mentality in a new light. Not that I disliked the French – on the contrary, there was much that I admired about them – but I liked the values of my own little country even more. I felt that in the Netherlands, small as we might be, we had excellent reasons to be proud of our long and thoroughly sympathetic tradition of openness and pragmatic tolerance in dealing with the facts of cultural or religious diversity. Those values of Dutchness went at least as far back as the seventeenth century, when my country was a relatively safe haven for refugees persecuted for their beliefs elsewhere in Europe. And for a Dutchman of my generation, such values were connected on a deep emotional level to the stories my parents had passed on to me, about Dutch resistance against totalitarian oppression during World War II. True: today we know that these heroic stories were partly idealized and romanticized. Still, there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> an important movement of resistance. Many ordinary people did risk their lives to stand up for those who were being persecuted. These stories helped define my way of looking at the world. I am grateful to my parents for passing them on.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">And then everything changed. While I used to be proud of being Dutch, during the years after 9/11 I have grown to be deeply ashamed of how my country abandoned and betrayed its core values. With surprising speed, we descended downwards along a negative spiral ending up in a poisonous climate of intolerance, suspicion, xenophobia, egoism, hatred, and verbal and sometimes even physical violence against minorities of all kinds. This development began with Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant figure on the right, a political outsider who began saying things that many people were thinking but did not dare to admit. With hindsight, I still look at him with some sympathy. I did not share his political stance, but I respected his attitude of </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">“</span>saying what I think and doing what I say” and his disregard of bourgeois morality (for example, even while running an election campaign for becoming Prime Minister, he was perfectly open about his homosexuality). However, Fortuyn opened the gate for a whole second wave of much more vicious rightwingers, demagogues, and opportunists such as Theo van Gogh, Rita Verdonk, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others. Finally we ended up with Geert Wilders. Fortuyn was murdered by an animal rights activist, and van Gogh was butchered in the street by a radical Islamist. Those were deeply shocking events, and my country has never recovered. We have not been able or willing to find our way back to what used to “make Holland great”: our traditions of tolerance and acceptance, of “live and let live,” our openness towards others, our nondogmatic mentality, our way of dealing in a low-key and pragmatic manner with the facts of cultural or religious diversity – ideally with a sense of self-relativizing humor that befitted such a small country, and that somehow seemed to capture what it meant to be Dutch.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">All of that vanished almost overnight. Today I feel that my country has betrayed me – or rather, that it has betrayed itself and what it once stood for. Dutch “identity” seems to have become an empty shell, a vacuum ready to be filled with depressing debates about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">zwarte Piet</i> and groundless paranoia about refugees and what they might be up to. Refugees from countries such as Syria – normal people, ordinary people like ourselves who have lost everything and had to run for their lives to escape from murderers, torturers and rapists – are routinely portrayed as though they are dangerous criminals themselves. What happened to common decency? What happened to our willingness to empathize with other human beings? Watching the public debate, I cannot but look with feelings of deep shame at what the Netherlands have become. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">“Make Holland great again”? Never before have we been so small.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The Takeover</span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zHEg_AP5a_..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="427" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zHEg_AP5a_..." width="640" /></a></i></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Now does all this imply that I embrace “Europe”? Isn’t that what stereotypical “liberals” or “lefties” like myself are supposed to do? Well, no! Around the same time, during the mid-1990s when I began discovering my positive Dutch identity, I also became aware of a very different phenomenon. People all around me seemed to be getting quite obsessed with “the economy.” Why was that? With hindsight it is clear to me that I was perfectly naïve and ignorant about what was going on at the time. For instance, it puzzled me that we suddenly needed to have a separate block for “economic news” on the evening news. Why make such a big fuss about money, I wondered, we had been doing just fine without that – thank you very much! At the time, I did not grasp why politicians on the Social-Democrat left, such as our Prime Minister Wim Kok or Tony Blair in the UK, were so proud to “shed their ideological feathers” and began looking and behaving exactly like the capitalist rightwingers that I had always disliked. And I did not understand why, all of a sudden, public services such as transport, health care, or education needed to be “privatized” and turned into commercial enterprises. They had served us quite well, hadn’t they? We were being told that those measures would “reduce prices and increase quality,” but it was clear for all to see that the opposite was true. Prices went up, quality decreased, and worst of all, everything became infected by the slick dishonest language of commerce. Hospitals once used to exist to cure the sick – but now patients became “consumers,” health care became a “product,” and the bottom line became financial profit rather than making people well. Was I naïve? I certainly was, and I was ignorant too. Like so many others, I simply could not see what was causing these changes.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Very similar developments were taking place everywhere else around me, and it all became wrapped up with another New Thing called “European integration.” It wasn’t just that politicians, across the spectrum from “left” to “right,” all began spouting the same economic newspeak about privatization and deregulation, so that if you didn’t like the economization of everything you were left pretty much without a credible candidate to vote for. But on top of that, it became clear that those politicians who were supposed to be in charge had less and less control over what was happening in my country. They kept handing big chunks of national sovereignty over to Europe, without <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ever</i> asking their own citizens for permission to do so. They had no respect for the truth: to give just one small example, after the introduction of the Euro everybody could see that a glass of beer in downtown Amsterdam was suddenly more than twice as expensive, but I stil remember well-known politicians simply denying it. “No no, you’re mistaken, the price has not gone up.” Everybody could see that the sky had turned green, but they insisted it was still blue. Such dishonesty was shocking, but we learned to get used to it. Eventually, it became perfectly clear to me what this thing called “Europe” really meant. Of course: it was “the economy” again – what else? The slogans are well known: “It’s the economy, stupid!” (Bill Clinton) “There Is No Alternative” (Margaret Thatcher). </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qTlNIzcSSY..." imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qTlNIzcSSY..." width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">No alternative indeed. We pretty much ended up with no credible politicians to vote for because they were all saying more or less the same thing. Hence we ended up with no opportunity for citizens to influence what happened to their own country. And we lost our opportunity to choose for anything that actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">meant</i> something real to human beings unless it had first been quantified and converted into economic terms. In short, it was not enough that the Netherlands had forgotten and betrayed their identity: the very country itself seemed to be taken away from us and handed over to some remote, abstract, democratically deficient economic entity called “Europe”. Did anybody ever ask me, or my fellow citizens, whether we agreed with all of this? No, our politicians felt sure they knew best what was good for us all. Even at those rare moments when European citizens managed to get a word in, and used it to say “no!” (as in the case of the European “Constitution,” rejected in 2005 by the Dutch and the French), those leaders found a way to work around the problem and end up doing what they wanted anyway (the Lisbon treaty of 2007). They had learned their lesson though: better not ask your citizens for permission again, just do it. This type of arrogance became typical of the managerial “elites”. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">I repeat: I was perfectly clueless at the time. It was only much later that I began to understand a bit better what was happening, and why. The story is well known by now: the move from Keynesian “embedded liberalism” to the triumph of Hayek’s and Friedman’s ideology of Neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan, leading to the “Washington Consensus” after the end of the Cold War, and so on and so forth. After the Wall had come down, Neoliberalism would deliver “the End of History.” American-style capitalism would spread all over the world, bringing the blessings of freedom and democracy wherever it went. The global free market would make us all into one big happy family.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Of course it didn’t work out that way. How is it possible that so many people even believed in such a story – and some still do? The problem with any dominant ideology is that it is blind to whatever does not fit its own narrative. In this particular case, the grand narrative is incapable of perceiving any dimensions of reality that do not fit the particular logic that governs neoliberal economics or cannot be translated into its language. From the outset, the whole thing was based on wholly unrealistic and perfectly utopian dreams unchecked by historical awareness. And perhaps most of all, it reflected a shocking disregard of basic human psychology. Which brings me full circle: human beings need more than money and security. They need identity too. We need to know who we are, what we stand for, what unites us with others like ourselves, and what divides us from others unlike ourselves. That is the bottom line. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Human vs Neoliberal</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ghg4S8sz-y..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="303" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ghg4S8sz-y..." width="400" /></a></i></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Finally then, after several decades of neoliberal brainwashing, the chickens have come home to roost. The populist revolt is telling us what those who have been dreaming of a neoliberal world order refused to see, or were incapable of seeing. It is not a pretty sight. As regards identity, this is how I imagine the conversation between an average Human Being and a neoliberal ideologue:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Human: “Who am I?” </span></div><div class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Neoliberal: “You are a consumer. Or let me be more specific, you are an individual. That is to say: you are a rational agent who is driven exclusively by your own self-interest.” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Human: “What do I stand for?”</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Neoliberal: “Well, ehm, didn’t I just tell you? You are a consumer on a market. So you stand for yourself. For maximizing your own interest!”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Human: “But what unites me with others like myself?” </span></div><div class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Neoliberal: “Ehm… nothing really, to be quite honest. Except that all those others are self-interested individuals too! You have that in common.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Human: “What then divides me from others unlike myself?” </span></div><div class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Neoliberal: “They hate your freedom!”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Human: “Excuse me? How so? Can you please explain?”</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Neoliberal: “Isn’t it clear? Your freedom as a consumer is your freedom to choose, and it is the market that gives you that freedom. Make sure that you remain a consumer! Make sure you value nothing higher than your own personal interest: make sure that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i> get what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i> want. And for God’s sake, don’t act irrationally! I mean, don’t be so stupid to ever think of others first, or imagine that you should share what you have. Never put <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">their</i> interest above <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">your</i> own interest. If they win, you lose. Think of yourself first, for that is what everybody else is doing.”</span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">The problem is that the neoliberal, in this conversation, is in fact not much of a human being – at least he doesn’t behave like one. And this is what makes it so easy and natural for our generic Human to morph into a populist. See how that goes:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Human: “OK, OK, you made your point. But now shut up, for I have something to tell you. Yes, I will put my own interest first – all right. But here’s the thing: I am not ‘interested’ in being just a consumer! I do not want to be just some disconnected atom in some impersonal machine that is just trying to manipulate me to squeeze money out of me. That is not my ‘interest.’ And don’t you tell me that I’m all about making ‘rational choices.’ No, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I care</i>! I care deeply, you idiot, that’s why I’m so fucking angry! Don’t you get it? I’m a human being. I have feelings. I care about people. I care about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my</i> people. I want to be with people who are like me. I want our leaders to be people like me: I want them to be people who care about me and who care about people who are like me. And you know what? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You</i> are not like me at all! Just now, you were trying to tell me that those who are unlike me ‘hate our freedom’. Well, I have news for you buddy: it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i>who hates my freedom! You just want me to follow your rules. You want to turn me into a ‘consumer’ who does what he’s being told so that you can take advantage of me. I suppose that’s how you ‘maximize your own interest’. Well, I’m not interested in what you want, or what anyone else wants. I’m interested in what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> want, and I sure do not want that F$%^&*@#$%! system of yours! And by the way, don’t you dare lecture me about ‘democracy’ or ‘equality’ or ‘human rights’. You least of all! You’re so full of shit, you don’t even believe in that stuff yourself – look at how you behave! So how do you expect <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">me</i>to believe in those things? You have no decency. You talk about ‘democracy’ but you don’t listen to people. You talk about ‘equality’ but you look at folks like us as deplorables. You talk about ‘human rights’ but you don’t believe in any ‘rights’ except your own god-given right to pursue your own individual interests at the expense of others. How could I possibly have any respect for you and your so-called humanitarian ‘values’? Get out of my face! I’d trust anyone rather than trust you – I’d even rather vote for some idiot with funny blond hair, just to piss you off.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">What a dilemma! </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">I recently discovered that some of my friends hate the “neoliberal world order” so much that they even seemed willing to welcome Donald Trump and keep trying to defend him as “the lesser evil.” Anything but Hillary! Anything at all, as long as it blows up the system! Then again, some of my friends are so scared of Trump (as they should), and of people like him, that they are tempted to forgive the neoliberal world order. By comparison, its defenders now look almost benevolent. Anything but Trump, anything but Le Pen, and so on. As should be perfectly obvious by now, I see the choice between neoliberalism and rightwing populism as a choice between the Devil and Beëlzebub. They are both enemies of humanity. I perfectly understand the fury of my “Human” against the “Neoliberal” and his system, for it is my own fury, and I even understand quite well how s/he turns into a populist. But here’s the thing: the Human revolts against neoliberalism <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">because s/he is Human</i>. Human beings are not made to live in an inhuman world, they cannot stand it. It is for that very reason that the politics of hate, intolerance, egoism and xenophobia do not offer any real alternative, and never will – not even to the rightwing populists who think they will. They are the symptoms of a disease, not the cure.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">So What is the Cure?</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lBR-7QgN_F..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="534" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lBR-7QgN_F..." width="640" /></a></i></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">The cure is that we care. The cure is that we care about what is happening to the world around us, that we care about human beings and what is happening to them right now and everywhere around us. Not just what is happening to ourselves, to “our own,” to “people like us” – no, the cure is that we care about what is happening to people, period. Please note that I'm not talking about some kind of generic </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">“</span>love for humanity</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">” in the abstract</span>: no, I mean caring for human beings because they are human beings, people like us.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;"> Why do we care? We care because we empathize. We happen to know very well what it is to be a human being – after all, we are human beings ourselves. We know what it’s all about. Underneath the anger there is fear, and underneath the fear there is suffering. Unvariably, that is what you find when you get past all the bullshit. </span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">The cure lies in rediscovering what it really was that those people used to mean, once upon a time a long while ago, when they were using such very big words: “freedom”, “democracy”, “equality”, or “human rights” – and used them wholeheartedly, with full conviction, without irony, and without apologies. These are big words for a reason: they refer to big ideals. They have absolutely nothing to do with the small stuff that neoliberalism has been selling us (!) under those names. In fact they are the very opposites of what they have been made out to be. They need to be rediscovered.</span><br /><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">The cure lies in rediscovering our common humanity, because that is what really unites us. Make no mistake: it unites us not just with our friends or our facebook buddies in our facebook bubble. It unites us even with those who oppose us, even with those who hate us, even with those who seem to have forgotten what it means to be human because they have forgotten themselves.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;"> The cure is to go - not halfheartedly but with full force and full conviction - for values that cannot be quantified and converted into money, statistics, or other tools of power and domination. Not by any coincidence, such values are basic (or should be basic) to what is called the “Humanities.” In the most profound sense, they are what still remains when all else vanishes, for unlike their opposites they cannot be destroyed. What are those values? The big ones, of course, the classics – what else? Goodness, beauty, truth. There’s no room for irony or cynicism here: if we are afraid to be serious even about these things, then we might as well give up, for we have already lost.</span><br /><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">So that is the cure: that we try doing what we can to care for whatever is good, whatever is beautiful, and whatever is true. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.0pt;">All else is secondary. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><br /></div>

Horizon 2020: Walking the Road with Robert Musil

Last year, during these dark days before Christmas, I posted an even darker text with the title “Profile 2016”. I made an attempt to highlight and analyze the main structural problems with which Western society is struggling, especially the Reign of Neoliberalism combined with Information Overkill. Insiders from the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam will have noted that my title alluded to the notorious Profile 2016 document that had been one of the triggers for the occupation of the administrative centers first of the Faculty of Humanities (the Bungehuis) and then of the whole university (the Maagdenhuis), in a large and inspiring revolt against the neoliberal takeover of academia. This time I have taken inspiration from another typical product of neoliberalism in academia, the “EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation”. 

However, my true reason for choosing this particular title “Horizon 2020” has less to do with either neoliberalism or the reign of information as such than with the child that was born from those two parents last November. 2016 will be remembered as the year when fascism (or at least the kind of populism traditionally known by its literal German equivalent, referred to as völkisch) announced its return to the center stage of American society. It is all set to become the most powerful force in the world. One night in February 2016 I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, my heart booming, in a sudden surge of panic at the idea that Donald Trump could win the election. But when he actually did “win” (I know, he lost the popular vote, and about half of the US population didn't bother to vote at all), this still came as an utter shock, a sudden nightmare from which quite honestly I may not yet have woken up and have certainly not recovered. Profile 2017 looks even darker than its predecessor; so on the screen of my imagination, “Horizon 2020” has now become the closest horizon of hope. Barring impeachments or other extreme events (which might well happen, of course: see below), it seems that Sauron alias Voldemort will be running the show for the next four years at least.
Looking at the sudden rise to prominence of forums such as Alt Right, including a new breed of right-wing intellectuals who take inspiration from Traditionalism and certain other forms of esotericism in their assault on “the evils of the modern world” (liberalism, democracy, cultural and religious plurality, human rights, gay marriage, LGBT rights, and so on), I couldn’t help being reminded of a speech I gave at the opening of the 2nd biannual conference of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism. I now realize that at that time, in 2009, I hadn’t yet grasped the true nature of neoliberalism, and did not yet fully understand its centrality to how the European Union had worked out in practice; but with that minor reservation, I still stand behind every word I said. The lecture was never published and was not made generally available at the time, but because of what I see as its relevance to the present situation in Europe and the United States, especially for scholars of Western esotericism, I just put it online for whoever might be interested.
It seems to me that the new völkisch movement is the child of two parents who have been running the show for quite a while now. One of them, neoliberalism, has made it possible for an international power elite of multinational corporations and financial institutions to gain far more power than has ever been enjoyed by any democratically elected government. As a result, regular or mainstream politicians have become puppets of the true powers that are running the world: if your prime minister wants to have influence at all, s/he will need to make deals with the international corporations and financial institutions, on terms that are dictated or are at least acceptable to the latter. No surprise then that the general electorate feels disempowered. Most of us have come to realize that the politicians that we “vote into power” do not actually have that power anymore: it is the international corporate and financial system that is pushing the buttons. This system functions not as a top-down hierarchy but as a non-hierarchical self-governing network (for the emergence of the “network mode” out of the 1960s Counterculture and its relation to both cyberculture and neoliberal economics, see this fascinating study); but any strings that are still there to be pulled are in the hands of unelected leaders whose business interests decide what is done or left undone. As regards the economic system as a whole, it functions very much like an airplane on autopilot with an empty cockpit and no licensed pilot on board.For the general electorate, the penny has dropped a long time ago. Voters understand that it doesn’t matter whether you vote “left” or “right”: surely there are some differences in emphasis between the various political parties, but these are marginal and largely cosmetic. Basically all political parties are dancing to the same tune of the international market, which is presented as “the only option”, so what the voter thinks of it does not really matter. Therefore what happens? The “common people” play the only card that is left to them: their vote. They are using the only tool they still have to fight against the educated “elites”: those guys (and girls) who keep claiming they represent the people’s best interests while clearly they are serving their own.That is one part of the story. The other part has to do with knowledge and information: increasingly, over the last decade or so, we have been losing sight of the difference between those two. The important thing about knowledge is that it is true by definition: if it isn’t, then it isn’t knowledge but something else (delusion, falsehood, misperception, misunderstanding, ignorance, and so on). Information, by contrast, is just data: it doesn’t matter to the system whether it is true or false. Computers or information networks do not differentiate between statements such as “Hillary is an advocate of human rights” or “Hillary is a reptile in disguise”. Both are just pieces of information; to decide whether they are true or false you need a human being. However, as human beings we have grown remarkably reluctant to accept that responsibility. Intellectuals have grown suspicious of anyone who dares to make claims of “truth”: we have learned how often such claims are just masks of power and domination, we have come to appreciate that there are “different kinds of truth”, we know that people may disagree about almost everything, and so we have sort of given up and decided that it’s all just a matter of personal opinion. Who is to judge? But if the educated have lost their faith in searching for truth, and hence in the value (or even the very possibility) of knowledge, inevitably this realization trickles down to the broader population: “Even those educated elites no longer know what is true. Look at them: they no longer speak with any confidence. Their so-called ‘knowledge’ is really just another opinion. If so, then why should we keep funding those guys with taxpayers’ money? No, we will make up our own minds, thank you very much. We can very well find out for ourselves: it’s all on the Internet!”The reign of Neoliberalism has created an ever-growing reservoir of pent-up resentment and anger: the pressure has been building up for a long time, and is now breaking through to the surface. Simultaneously, as knowledge has tacitly been replaced by information, intellectuals (who have been very much complicit in this phenomenon) have lost their ability to question power by appealing to standards of truth: welcome to the “post-truth society”. So that is what we are up against: fury and ignorance. A deadly combination.
I will try to resist the temptation of predicting what will happen between now and the 2020 horizon. It's depressing and pointless. Why repeat the well-known litany of dangers and destructive trends that will certainly continue into the New Year? We know that they are very real, but if we allow our imagination to be colonized by fear and depression, we endanger the most important source of hope: the simple fact that while we are perfectly capable of imagining what might happen, we simply do not know the future. Hope lies precisely in that realization. What we can know is the nature of the evil that we are facing. We can learn to recognize it when we encounter it, and we can learn how best to deal with it. Last week I have been re-reading Robert Musil’s great novel of modernity, The Man without Qualities , and came across a long passage that impressed me so much that I decided to translate it. Beware, this is no food for hasty readers! 

Musil has just been describing how a carefully selected group of writers and other literary figures has been invited to the home of a highminded patroness of culture, Diotima, together with a selection of scientists. The writers have been giving speeches, and the scientists have been listening. Here we go.

Science smiles in its beard; or, first extensive encounter with evil Now some words must be added about a smile, and what is more: a masculine smile – one that involved a beard (indispensable to the masculine practice of smiling in it). It is about the smile of the scientists who had accepted Diotima’s invitation and were listening to those famous fine spirits. Although they were smiling, one should certainly not think that they did this ironically. On the contrary, it was their way of showing their feelings of respect and incompetence ... But this, too, should not delude us. It is correct according to their conscious opinion, but in their unconscious – to use that fashionable term, or better, in their totality – these were people in whom a tendency towards Evil was crackling like fire under a cauldron. Of course, at first sight that might seem a paradoxical statement. If an ordinary professor would be told this to his face, he would probably respond that he was simply serving the cause of Truth and Progress and for the rest didn’t know of any such thing; for that is his professional ideology. But all professional ideologies are noble. It never occurs to hunters to call themselves the butchers of the woods, they rather call themselves the friends of animal and natural sustainability, just as merchants uphold the principle of fair profit, and thieves in turn appeal to the god of merchants, that is to say, to the distinguished international god Mercury, who brings nations together. Therefore one should better not attach too much value to what an activity looks like in the mind of those who practice it. If we ask ourselves frankly how science came to assume its present shape – and this is important because, after all, we are ruled by her, and even an illiterate person is not safe from her, since he must learn to live with countless things that were born in learning – then a different image emerges. According to credible tradition it is in the sixteenth century, a period of intense spiritual excitement, that science gave up on trying to penetrate the secrets of nature (as had been the custom for twenty centuries of religious and philosophical speculation), henceforth to be satisfied, in a manner that can only be described as superficial, with studying its surface. For instance, the great Galileo Galilei (who is always mentioned first here) did away with the problem of what is the reason lying in Nature’s essence that causes her to abhor a vacuum, so that she makes a falling body enter and occupy space after space until it finally hits solid ground, and contented himself with something much more trivial: he simply established the speed at which such a body falls, the course it takes, the time it takes, and its rate of acceleration. The Catholic Church made a grave mistake in threatening this man with death and forcing him to recant, instead of just killing him without much further ado; for from the way he and people like him were looking at things, there sprang – in almost no time at all, if we think in terms of historical periods – railway time-tables, factory machines, physiological psychology, and the moral corruption of our time, against which she (the Church) no longer stands a chance. This mistake she probably made out of an excess of shrewdness – after all, Galileo was not just the discoverer of the law of gravitation and of the earth’s motion, but also an inventor in whom, as one would put it today, the commercial world took an interest; and moreover, he was not the only one seized by the new spirit. On the contrary, the historical record shows that the matter-of-factness which inspired him spread far and wide like an infectious disease; and although today it may sound offensive to speak of somebody as being “inspired” by matter-of-factness, of which we already think we have too much, at the time (according to witnesses of all kinds) the awakening from metaphysics to the sharp observation of things must truly have been a frenzy and a blazing fire of matter-of-factness! But if we ask ourselves how humanity got it into her head to change herself in this manner, then the answer is that she did what every sensible child does when it has tried walking too soon; it sat down on the ground, making contact through a dependable but not very dignified part of the body. It must be said: she did it simply with that part on which one sits. For the remarkable thing is that the earth has shown itself so extraordinarily receptive to this, and, ever since this touchdown, has offered up such a wealth of inventions, conveniences, and discoveries that it can almost be called a miracle.After this bit of prehistory, one could be forgiven for thinking that it is the wonder of the Anti-Christ in the midst of which we find ourselves; for the simile of sitting down that was just used can be understood not only in the direction of reliability, but also in the direction of the indecent and forbidden. And indeed, before intellectuals discovered their passion for the facts, only soldiers, hunters and merchants had it – that is to say, only shrewd and violent types. In the battle for survival there is no room for philosophical sentimentalities: all that counts is the wish to dispose of one’s opponent as quickly and efficiently as possible – here, everybody is a positivist. Nor would it count as a virtue in business to allow oneself to be bamboozled instead of staying with the established facts – profit boiling down, in the end, to a psychological process that makes use of circumstance to overpower the other. On the other hand, if we consider the qualities that lead to discoveries, we find an absence of all traditional scruples and inhibitions, courage, a spirit of enterprise as much as of destruction, annihilation of moral considerations, patient bargaining for the tiniest advantage, dogged endurance on the way towards the goal, if necessary, and a respect for measure and number that is the sharpest expression of distrust towards all that is uncertain. In other words, we observe nothing but those old sins of hunters, soldiers, and merchants; only now they are translated into intellectual terms and explained as virtues. And although this may have placed them at a distance from the quest for personal and relatively lowly profit, the element of primal Evil, as one could call it, has not vanished after this transformation. For it seems to be indestructible and eternal, at least as eternal as everything humanly sublime, because it consists of nothing more, nor less, than the pleasure of tripping that sublimity up and watching it fall flat on its face. Who does not know the malicious temptation, while watching a beautifully voluptuous glazed vase, that lies in the thought that one could smash it to smithereens with one single blow of one’s stick? Intensified up to the heroism of bitter realization that in one’s life one can rely on nothing but what can be nailed down with iron certainty, that temptation is a basic feeling engrained in the matter-of-factness of science – and if for reasons of reverence one does not want to call it the devil, there is at least a faint smell of sulfur about it.We can start right away with the remarkable preference that scientific thinking has for mechanical, statistic, and material explanations from which, as it were, the heart has been cut out. Considering goodness only a special form of egoism; relating emotions to internal secretions; establishing that a human being consists for eighty or ninety percent of water; explaining the famous moral freedom of human character as an automatic side-product of free trade; reducing beauty to good digestion and well-developed fat-tissue; reducing procreation and suicide to annual curves that unmask what seems to be the most free of all decisions as a matter of compulsion; experiencing ecstasy and insanity as akin; identifying anus and mouth as the rectal and oral extremity of one and the same thing – : ideas like those, which to some extent expose the trick in the magical act of human illusions, always encounter a kind of positive prejudice and are then considered to be particularly scientific. In this, undoubtedly, it is the truth that one loves; but all around this blank love lies a preference for disillusion, compulsion, implacability, cold intimidation and dry rebuke, a malicious preference or at least an unintentional energy that comes from such feelings.                                 (Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. vol. 1 [1930], ch. 72; transl. W.J. Hanegraaff)
Please note: if you think that Musil is just blaming science for the evils of the modern world, you need to read again. “It is the truth that one loves”, and yes, the truth can be hard. The fact that knowledge can be bitter is no reason at all to prefer illusions: what we are reading here is not an argument against science and rationality, but against cynicism and despair.There are many reasons why I love this passage. Of course, the image of science as a toddler that sits down on its bottom because it has failed in its attempt to walk is unforgettable. But most of all, this passage is a reminder of what it is that makes us human; that is to say, of the unique and amazing faculty that distinguishes us from all other animals, and the denial of which (or so we can learn from Musil) is what we refer to as “evil”. What is this faculty? It is the ability - not just of our intellect, but of our heart and soul - to be deeply concerned with what traditional metaphysics used to refer to as the three “transcendentals”: the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. About at least the first two of those, and to a larger extent than we might realize even about the third, it just so happens that neither the natural nor the social sciences have much to tell us: it is here, more than anywhere else, that we need those arts and disciplines that are – appropriately – known as the Humanities. When all is said and done, their true concern is and should be - do we need to be reminded? - with what it is that makes us human. There are those who find pleasure in “tripping such values up” and watching them fall flat on their face. And there are those who love those beautifully voluptuous glazed vases (vessels of goodness, beauty, and truth) for what they are: inherently fragile expressions of “all that is uncertain” and therefore worthy of protection and care. So that's the choice: two mentalities. As formulated by David Foster Wallace in this luminous speech of 2005, “there is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship”.
Let's try to keep that in mind as we start walking the path towards horizon 2020. 

Profile 2016

The world is changing. At this end of the year, with Christmas coming up and a New Year just around the corner, I feel a need to gain some perspective on what is happening all around us, and how it is affecting our very ways of thinking, our very ways of living, our very conceptions of what is possible, our very expectations of where we are going, and most importantly, our very ways of imagining where we should be going.The reflections that follow have had a long gestation period. For years now, the realization has been slowly dawning upon me that we are living in extraordinary times of irreversible transformation for which there is no historical precedent. We are entering uncharted territory and have no script to predict, or even begin to understand, what might be ahead of us. Of course, as a historian I know very well that the world has always been changing: creative innovation is the rule, stasis is an illusion, and unheard-of events may happen any time. That’s how it has always been. But something larger is happening now. Until rather recently I still felt that as an academic and intellectual, I was playing my little part in a great story that might be described (for better or worse) as the story of “Western Culture” – and I saw no reason why it wouldn’t last. Let me hasten to add that I don’t mean this in a provincial manner: I’ve always been extremely interested in the rest of the world, in different cultures and different ways of life, because I’m a curious person who likes to look beyond the boundaries of his familiar world. Nevertheless, my identity and guiding values have been formed by the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual history of Europe. That has always been my world. And now it is changing. In my darker moods I fear that very soon – sooner than I used to consider possible – a time may come when (to paraphrase Galadriel at the opening of the Lord of the Rings movie) much that is of great value will be lost forever, because “no one will live who still remembers it”. Yes, I feel a bit like the Elves… Increasingly, I fear that the culture that I love and care for is disintegrating and vanishing around me, and the leaves are falling. Winter is coming.

I don’t mean to stay with such a dark and pessimistic mood. Towards the end of this text I will be looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. But first I want to take a few steps back to try and gain some perspective. What are the essential changes happening around us, that might explain my feelings of decline and loss?

1. The Reign of Neoliberalism
Firstly we have seen the global ascendency of what, for lack of a better word, I will call neoliberal capitalism. I don’t mean to go into any deep analysis here, because I think most of us have a pretty good idea of what it is. Since the Thatcher/Reagan era of the 1980s, slowly but surely our minds have been taken over by the idea that everything in the world can be described in terms of “markets”, and that the only ultimate values are economic values. The result is a systematic reversal of the normal relation between means and ends. We used to think that money was the means to achieve desirable ends: you obviously needed money to create good systems of healthcare, you needed money to create good institutions of learning, and so on. Money was a means that served non-economic ends that we valued in and for themselves. That logic has been reversed. Healthcare and education (to stay with those examples) are now defined as products on a market. As such, they are no longer desirable ends that are considered intrinsically valuable, just for what they are, but have become the means to achieve a new and different end: that of maximizing profit. Healthcare and education are now sold for money. The internal logic of this system says that we do not really care that much whether people are actually healthy or well educated: what counts is whether they are buying healthcare or education, at minimal costs and for maximum profit. In short, health and knowledge are no longer basic values. The only true value left is monetary or economic value. We are seeing this dynamic everywhere, including, of course, the universities. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, and kick-started by the most extreme right-wing government in Dutch history (Rutte I), I watched it spiraling wholly out of control. Like many of my colleagues, I began to feel that if I was still doing my work (trying to teach my students something real, trying to focus on content, trying to keep my eye on the ball), I was doing so not thanks to the University system but in spite of it. The institution had been turned into a factory, designed to produce a product for profit: although administrators and politicians keep invoking “excellence” and emphasizing the need for “quality” in education, the truth is that (like everywhere else in the neoliberal economy) quality has become irrelevant to how the system works. It recognizes only quantifiable data that lend themselves to statistical analysis and can be translated into economic and financial terms. As a result, universities are no longer institutions devoted to “higher learning”: they are now running on an operating system that subverts the very ends (goals, objectives) they were once supposed to be promoting. Last year, at the University of Amsterdam, students and staff revolted against the systemic financialization and corporatization of the academy. They occupied the administrative center of the Faculty of Humanities, and after they got expelled, they occupied the Maagdenhuis, the University’s administrative center. Similar protests are happening at other universities around the world, and I very much hope that these grassroots revolutions will have a positive effect. However, I’m afraid that real and lasting change will prove to be impossible as long as neoliberal capitalism remains in place as the operating system of higher learning in Europe. An upgrade of that system is not enough. On the contrary: by perfecting its functionality even further, we will only make matters worse. We need a new operating system grounded in the very principle that is anathema to the current one: that quality in education and research cannot be quantified and translated into financial terms, but is an irreducible core value entirely independent of (and incommensurable with) the logic of economic calculation.

 2. Information Overkill
The second major change I observe in our world is information overkill. The information revolution has been gathering steam roughly since the early 1990s, in perfect parallel with the ascendency of neoliberal capitalism. Of course, the basic facts hardly need to be stated here: we all know how incredibly powerful the new information technologies are, how much we are benefiting from the miracles they accomplish, and how utterly dependent we have become on them. But while the benefits are very real (of course, like everybody else, I’m profiting from them every day and would hate to miss them) they come at a heavy price. In this case the problem is not the reversal of means and ends, but the ever-increasing impossibility of distinguishing between reliable, less reliable, and unreliable information. There is another way of saying this: it gets harder and harder for all of us to draw the crucial distinction between information and knowledge(in fact, I have found that more and more people respond with profound puzzlement to the very idea that there is a difference at all). We have unlimited amounts of information at our fingertips, but just cannot tell anymore what is true and what is not. This goes even for highly specialized fields of knowledge. There was a time when I could gain a reasonably complete and accurate overview of the scholarly literature on a given topic; but nowadays I am overwhelmed, even in areas that I know very well, by a daily tsunami of publications online (which, by the way, almost inevitably tend to be given preference over offline materials, simply because it’s already far too much to handle anyway). Nobody can keep up anymore, and the situation is aggravated by the fact that traditional selection criteria no longer have much of a bearing on the actual quality of publications: truly excellent stuff appears online for free, while too much that makes it into peer-reviewed “top journals” is of unremarkable or even mediocre quality. This in itself can be explained largely through the two developments under discussion here. The impact of neoliberal capitalism on academic publishing means that selling the product (in this case: getting your stuff published in a peer-reviewed journal) has become much more important than the actual quality of that product. And moreover, authors need to anticipate what the market seems to want from them: if your work is too daring, original, or creative, too “out of the box”, that may lessen your chance of acceptance. As for the dynamics of information overkill, it results in journal editors and anonymous peer reviewers receiving far too many requests, resulting in hasty and superficial reviews, processed hastily and superficially by journal editors, who do not have the time either – all in the context of an increasingly impersonal bureaucratic machinery of editorial decision-making. As a result of all this, scholars are no longer working the way they used to work. The really good ones among us used to be studying a given topic thoroughly and systematically, attempting to get to the very bottom of things because we still felt there was a bottom to be reached. But that illusion is gone, and so we find ourselves “mining data” instead, or just cherry-picking more or less at random. Too often we feel we just don’t have the time for deep and concentrated study of just one particular source, or one particular scholar’s work. For what about all those countless other sources? What about all those other scholars whose work is still waiting in line to be read too? Are we sure we are reading the right article at this moment? Perhaps we should be reading one of all those countless others out there… But how should we choose? How can we possibly know which ones deserve our attention and which ones are just a waste of time, if we haven’t at least “scanned” them first? And so we keep “mining”, hastily and superficially; or otherwise we resign ourselves to the inevitable and just start picking selectively, more or less at random.

It seems to me that these two core developments are intimately related to four further new developments. These, too, are irreversibly changing our world at present. They might be seen as a second level built upon the first.
 a. Disempowerment
To begin with, we are witnessing a systematic disempowerment of citizens, resulting in a huge democratic deficit. Neoliberal capitalism has created a situation where international banks and corporations run by unelected CEOs and managers are much more powerful than national states, so that the results of democratic elections lose most of their relevance. Ordinary citizens feel in their guts that it doesn’t matter anymore what political party they vote for, because politicians have no other choice than pursuing “business as usual” anyway (see, for instance, the recent Greek Drama): what little power we used to have to determine our fate has been taken away from us. Deep resentment and frustration over this fact is then channeled towards convenient scapegoats such as “the immigrants” or “the Muslims”, diverting attention away from those who are actually responsible (for instance, although it is evident that the financial crisis is product of neoliberal capitalism, the Dutch neoliberal capitalists won the next election and remain in the driving seat!). This dynamics has been analyzed endlessly, but perhaps there has been less attention to the disempowering effects of the second element highlighted above: that of information overkill. Even where we still have something to choose, we no longer know what to choose, because we no longer know how to select reliable information from the staggering amounts of online disinformation, mythmaking, fear-mongering, propaganda, “spin”, and sheer nonsense. 



 b. Brain Change
A second and very different development could be described as brain change. The rise of information technology and its omnipresence in our daily lives – the fact that all of us are spending more and more of our lives gazing at computer screens or portable devices – means that we are using our brains to do things that are very different from what they used to be doing. We are continually training them to excel in those kinds of tasks that we need to handle our computers efficiently, but the flip side is that we are no longer training those skills that are needed for different but equally important tasks. We are especially good at switching our attention quickly from one thing to another, but we are losing our ability to concentrate on one single thing and stay concentrated for a long time. We are very good at “scanning” information quickly, but we are losing the ability of deep thinking and the sustained reflection required for converting data into actual knowledge. Having a lot of information available says absolutely nothing about how well we understand what that information really means. But such understanding requires muscles in the brain that are being trained less and less.  
c. Historical Amnesia
A third development I would describe as historical amnesia. For me, as a scholar in the Humanities, this one is particularly painful, because it undermines the very foundations of what my own work has always been about. Over the last decades, education reforms have been dominated by the idea that students need to learn skills rather than acquire knowledge: what you know is not so important, as long as you can find the information you need at the moment you need it. This educational philosophy is based upon a fundamental mistake. We have overlooked the fact that in the absence of knowledge, information becomes meaningless, and data selection (informed choice) becomes impossible. Having placed the cart before the horse, we find ourselves helpless in the face of information overkill. As for my second element, the logic of neoliberal market capitalism: within that context, historical knowledge has no practical utility or economic value and is reduced essentially to the status of a “hobby” (more specifically: a left-wing hobby, as right-wing politicians in my country like to add). It is perceived as an object of mere private interest or leisure activities, like going to the Opera, so why should society support it with taxpayers’ money? The results of these ideas have become obvious in recent years. In so far as we are still learning history at all, we tend to focus on isolated episodes from the modern and contemporary period (with World War II as an all-time favorite) and on social, political, and economic history. Ancient and pre-modern history is becoming irrelevant (“it’s all over, isn’t it?”); and most importantly, we are losing sight of the general storylines of Western cultural and intellectual history (not to mention non-Western history, in spite of all the talk about globalization). Over the last ten years or so, I have seen my students become ever more clueless whenever I referred to such things as “Late Antiquity”, “the Middle Ages”, “the Renaissance”, “the Scientific Revolution”, “the Enlightenment”, “Romanticism”, and so on and so forth. Most of them have only the vaguest ideas about when that was, what it all meant, where it all came from, and why they should care. In short, we are rapidly losing our sense of orientation in historical time. But if we no longer know where we come from, this means we cannot tell where we are; and as a result, we will finally lose our sense of who we are. This is because human beings are wired to define their identity through memory: individual amnesia means we no longer know who we are and what we’re all about, and historical amnesia does the same for society as large. We become clueless, disoriented, directionless.
 d. Evaporation of Values
 Which brings me to my fourth point. At the risk of sounding a bit dramatic, there’s no better way to describe it than as a fundamental evaporation of values. In a way, this brings me full circle, for I began by highlighting the fact that neoliberal capitalism recognizes no other values than those that lend themselves to economic calculation. The notion that something has value in and for itself – intrinsic quality, not measurable in terms of quantity – is literally impossible to consider or even imagine within the neoliberal/capitalist paradigm. It’s like asking a mechanic to take account of the color of a machine: he won’t see the point. He will tell you that it runs just as well, regardless of whether the cogwheels are painted green or blue. And he is right, of course. But colors do have value for us as human beings, and so do values. Color doesn’t matter to the machine, but it matters to us: we attach value to it. Now where will we get our values under conditions of historical amnesia? This is not a matter that can be figured out by “finding the right data, getting the right information”. Beyond some very basic values grounded in animal biology (e.g. “pleasure = good / pain = bad” – but even those can be reprogrammed, as anyone knows who has studied the history of martyrdom), we basically get them not from information but from cultureand memory: values are literally “cultivated” from one generation to the next, on the basis of what is remembered. We used to pass on values derived from European culture, notably classical antiquity, Jewish and Christian religion, Enlightenment rationality, and modern science; but instead of living traditions, these have all become mere options of consumer choice, available to us as a bewildering mass of unassorted data that come without criteria or guidelines for selection and evaluation. Please note: none of this implies that values are necessarily good. For instance, Islamic State is currently cultivating a set of values that not just condone but actually advocate the murder, rape, and torture of “infidels”. But horrible as they may be, these are values, part of a much larger and functional valuation system for which these people are willing to sacrifice their lives. So we have no reason whatsoever to sentimentalize “values”; but we should recognize their incredible power of motivation, of bestowing a sense of meaning and direction, of telling people what things are worth living and dying for. What I’m claiming here is that our reigning paradigm of neoliberal capitalism combined with rampant information overkill and historical amnesia leaves us clueless in that regard. We are deeply insecure about our values, because neither “the market” nor “the data” can provide them. This makes us incredibly weak in the face of cultures or ideologies that know perfectly well why we are here and where we should be going.

Quality
So where should we be going, and why? I began by admitting that, these days, I often feel like the Elves. Winter is coming. But perhaps I’m too much wedded to the past. Perhaps I’m in a state of mourning, simply because I’m too much in love with European culture. In spite of all its horrors, crimes, and tragedies, I still love and admire it. I hold it dear for its incredible beauty, wisdom and – not in the last place – its profound ambivalences and never-ending struggles. At the end of the day, I prefer to see the history of Europe as a hero’s story, a story of how we have been trying to improve ourselves in spite of ourselves, setting ourselves goals that might be impossible to attain but that we tried to reach anyway - often at great cost to ourselves and to others. I don’t want to believe that this struggle has been pointless.  So where is the light at the end of the tunnel? I don’t presume to have the answer, and I surely cannot look into the future. I’m just trying to gain some perspective here. One thing seems clear to me: surely the only way forward is by setting our sails precisely towards what we are currently lacking. To discover what that is, we might ask ourselves what the two basic factors of neoliberal capitalism and information overkill share in common. It seems to me the answer is very simple: the absence of quality. Neoliberal capitalism is incapable of handling quality and therefore converts it into quantity; and the replacement of knowledge cultivation by information overkill requires that quality be sacrificed to data accumulation. So what we need to do is ask ourselves the question that Robert Pirsig asked in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance(1974): what is quality? Don’t be fooled by appearances or first impressions: this is not just an abstract or philosophical question, suitable for polite discussion with a glass of red wine in the evening. It’s an existential pursuit, inseparable from the search for true values. If taken with full seriousness, and if deeply understood (and I don't pretend that I'm so successful in doing either, for it’s very hard to do) it will claim the whole of our lives and determine all that we do. We might ask this question explicitly, or just implicitly, perhaps using different terms, or expressing it through action rather than through words. But it will still be the pursuit of quality.

So that is my suggestion for a light to guide us towards the exit of a long tunnel that, admittedly, I have been painting in very dark colors. Perhaps it’s not much, but it’s the best I have to offer. It is not an answer but a question – not a fixed goal to be reached, but an open path towards the future. If we stop asking this question – because we have lost interest or just don’t see the point – then I’m afraid it’s all over with us. But I don’t think that will happen. Even with “brain change” working against us, I have to believe that the search for quality is just too deeply ingrained in what it means to be human. Even with the daily attacks of hypnosis by the popular media, to which we are all exposed, human beings will keep looking for values and meaning – simply because we cannot help ourselves. So I guess that’s my message for the New Year: Stay awake! Let’s refuse to be fooled. Let’s not allow ourselves to be lulled into compliance with a meaningless world made of markets and data, for though it dominates the present, it literally has no future: nothing to strive or hope for. Let’s keep using our imagination to look for what’s real.

Theosophy in Secret Germany

Melchior Lechter, Panis angelorum (1906)

In my very first blogpost on Creative Reading (2012) I wrote about the German poet Stefan George and his "hidden church of the spirit." At first sight, this elite cult of refined esthetics and homo-erotic spirituality might seem to have pretty little in common with madame Blavatsky (ridiculed by George himself as “die dicke Madame”, “the fat madam”) and the popular movement of Theosophy that was making headlines in the same period. However, in his excellent recent monograph Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, mit einem Exkurs zum Swastika-Zeichen bei Helena Blavatsky, Alfred Schuler und Stefan George (The George Circle and Theosophy: with an Excursus about the Swastika symbol in Helena Blavatsky, Alfred Schuler and Stefan George) Jan Stottmeister shows that by making the comparison nevertheless, we can learn  much that has been forgotten about the cultural climate of the early twentieth century. The book begins with well-documented overviews of modern Theosophy and the esthetic milieu of the fin-de-siècle. What these networks had in common, in spite of all differences, was their counter-culturalism: “From 1889 ... to the turn of the century ... George moved in counter-cultural milieus that, by communicating knowledge about secrets, constituted themselves as the esoteric Other to the outside world. The outside world was the bourgeois society of the late 19th century, experienced as disenchanted, rationalized, dominated by mass culture, and hopelessly ugly. Estheticism and occultism, the esthetics and hermeneutics of secrecy, symbolist art programs and secret teachings, the intermingling roles of artist and visionary, artistic/religious and other alternative religious constructions of meaning – all belonged inseparably together within this milieu. Whether "the secret" meant the essence of a poetry that, following Mallarmé, should remain linguistically aloof and beyond the public gaze, so as to be revealed only to "âmes d'élite" (elite souls) capable of understanding it; or whether it meant the knowledge claimed by charismatic leaders of Orders that promised to initiate their pupils into the secrets of the world – such distinctions were subordinate to the general desire of demarcating oneself, socially, intellectually, and habitually, from the dominant culture of materialism (p. 91). Melchior Lechter, Shambhala (1925)However, as George began establishing his circle after 1900 – by demarcating his vision from that of competing groups such as the "Cosmic Circle" of Munich (dominated by Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages), staking his claim of ultimate and undisputable authority, and instituting his cult of the "divine boy" Maximin – it became intolerable to der Meister to think that his pupils might show allegiance to any other "Masters" (such as the Theosophical Mahatmas) or to any other boyish vehicle of divinity (such as Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian boy elected by the Theosophists as their future World Teacher). As Stottmeister shows, the central figure in George's competition with Theosophy was the nowadays forgotten artist Melchior Lechter (1865-1937; for the only collection with full-color prints of his paintings, glass-paintings, prints and designs, see the catalogue Melchior Lechters Gegen-Welten of 2006).Lechter turns out to be a fascinating character. He admired J.-K. Huysmans’ famous novel of extreme fin-de-siecle decadence, A rebours, and followed the example of its protagonist, Des Esseintes, by turning his house and atelier into a private artistic “Counter-World” (Gegen-Welt) against bourgeois society: a place where everything breathed a refined atmosphere of sacrality more reminiscent of a Catholic church than a living space. It became the favourite meeting place of George’s circle in Berlin; and among all George’s friends, only Lechter was recognized by Der Meister as a “Master” in his own right. Most notably, all George’s volumes of poetry first appeared in limited bibliophile editions designed by Lechter, who thereby dominated the visual imagination of George’s religion of art. However, Lechter was not just an extreme fin-de-siècle esthete, but also a great admirer of Madame Blavatsky. In his mind, these two perspectives seem to have gone perfectly together; and so it is not suprising that hidden references to his Theosophical beliefs are omnipresent in his artistic production, including his works commissioned by George. Stottmeister’s analyses of this discreet Theosphical presence in works of art are precise, detailed, full of interest, very well informed, and last but not least, written (like the whole book) in excellent prose with a fine sense of subtle humor whenever the occasion calls for it. Melchior Lechter, Sacred Tower in the Mountains with the Four Sources of the Streams of Life (1917)The fascination with Theosophy among members of his circle did become a problem for George. Sometimes he seems to have tried making opportunistic use of it for his own purposes, as in an intriguing conversation reported by Herbert Steiner (no relation of the founder of Anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner, discussed at length elsewhere in Stottmeister’s book), who claims that George described himself as a messenger sent by the Mahatmas (p. 199-200). But in the end, there could be only one Master in George’s universe. In October 1910, Melchior Lechter made a trip to India, together with another central member of the George circle, Karl Wolfskehl. Both had becomes members of the Theosophical Society briefly before (p. 254). They paid no less than five visits to Adyar, had a private meeting with Annie Besant, accompanied her and her followers on walks, listened to lectures, and met the young Hindu “vehicle of the world teacher” Jiddu Krishnamurti. Back home, Lechter published an account of his trip to India as Tagebuch der indischen Reise(Diary of the Indian Journey, 1912) and sent it to George as a Christmas present. This proved to be a fatal miscalculation. George refused to answer and cut all ties of friendship with Lechter. They had a few awkward meetings in later years; but as usual with George, the break was final and irreversible. Henceforth, George’s books were published without Lechter’s designs. For Lechter himself, the break was deeply painful. While Melchior Lechter is the central figure in Stottmeister’s analysis, separate chapters full of fascinating information are devoted to other figures relevant to the relation between George and Theosophy, notably the composer Cyrill Scott; the poet Karl Wolfskehl (the true “inventor of the George cult”, according to Stottmeister, p. 254); the writer, spiritualist, Theosophist, and alchemist Alexander von Bernus; and even the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. Finally, Stottmeister shows that Friedrich Gundolf’s deeply apologetic book George (1920) is permeated not only by an agenda of hero-worship premised on George’s unique spiritual superiority (he is described, in biblical terms, as “The Way, the Truth, and Life”, p. 287) but also, simultaneously, by an urgently felt need to demarcate him sharply from the competition of Theosophy, “the worst idea of modernity” (p. 290). Henceforth (and this is a familiar story in the study of Western esotericism) the dimension of Theosophy and occultism was written out of standard scholarly treatments devoted to Stefan George and his circle. Just as (to mention just one parallel) Swedenborg was reduced in academic Kant scholarship to no more than a ridiculous Spirit Seer without serious philosophical import, Theosophy got reduced to no more than the flaky brainchild of “die dicke Madame”. In a sharp and perfectly justified critique of the dominant academic trend in Germany after World War II, Stottmeister remarks (with obvious reference to Adorno’s famous definition of occultism as “the metaphysics of the stupid guys”) that “from an academic perspective, the occultist interests of the smart guys – Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, to mention just those closest to Adorno – are no longer noticed. In the decades after World War II, henceforth historians of modernity just know about one type of occultists: Nazis” (323). The deep irony is that such notions of “Nazi occultism” have been embraced as historically correct by generations of German academics, in blissful ignorance of the fact that they were thereby lending credence to occultist pseudo-histories themselves (largely originating from Pauwels & Bergier’s bestselling Morning of the Magicians, but given credence, as demonstrated by Stottmeister, by the authoritative work of George Mosse). These concluding remarks about the question of National Socialism – inevitable in a book like this, given the oft-debated question of how George’s “Secret Germany” is related to the Third Reich – prove to be the upbeat for a truly impressive Appendix of more than seventy pages, devoted to “Helena Blavatsky, Alfred Schuler, Stefan George, and the Western History of the Interpretation of the Swastika Sign” (pp. 327-398). This appendix should definitely be translated into English as soon as possible. The Swastika sign was not just adopted by the Nazis as their symbol, but also appears prominently in the seal of the Theosophical Society (as well as in Blavatsky’s private seal), on Melchior Lechter’s designs of books from the George Circle, as well as in the work of Alfred Schuler (the central figure of the Munich “Cosmic Circle” that originally overlapped with George’s circle). As such, it looks like a red thread among George and Theosophy that requires interpretation. Stottmeister has excellent things to say about what he calls the “Swastika effect”, which makes it psychologically impossible for us to see the swastika without being reminded of the Nazis. In fact, however, the sign became popular first “in apolitical contexts: as the sign of an occultist society that actually promoted the brotherhood of races and nations, as a favourite ornament in Jugendstil and Art Deco design, and as a profane business logo for products of all kinds (p 330). Ironically, from our present-day perspective, it was seen as a sign of good luck. Against the background of popular 19th century theories of race and evolution, including antisemitic argumentations for Aryan supremacy such as Emile Burnouf’s La Science des Religions (1870), Stottmeister provides a sterling analysis of how the swastika symbol adopted from India functioned in the context of Blavatsky’s “race-theoretical anti-racism”, followed by equally impressive discussions of Alfred Schuler’s obsession with the symbol and, of course, its appearance in the circle around Stefan George. Any further non-political use of the Swastika became impossible after World War II, of course, for as Stottmeister notes, “historical contextualizations were powerless against this reconditioned visual perception. The Good Luck sign had been transformed irreversibly into a sign of Horror” (p. 344). Still, powerless or not, what is the point of historical scholarship if we do not insist that fiction can be distinguished from fact and that it is important to do so? Like all good researchers in the modern study of Western esotericism, Stottmeister gives us a careful deconstruction of ingrained academic myths that have been taken for granted by scholars for generations and have obstructed and distorted our view of historical reality. This pars destruens is necessary in order to clear the ground for the pars construens that should follow in its wake: that of reconstructing our standard ways of imagining Western culture from the bottom up. Melchior Lechter, Orpheus (1896)

On the Death of Khaled Asaad

This week, IS tortured and killed Khaled Asaad, the antiquities chief of Palmyra. He was decapitated at a public square, and his body was hung from a Roman column in one of the ruins to the restoration of which he had devoted more than fifty years of his life. He was 81 years old.
After having neglected my blog for a year, this news hit me so hard that I felt I needed to write about it. But what is there to say? As with all the previous news about the atrocious horrors perpetrated by IS, my overwhelming feelings are grief and fury, combined with a debilitating sense of powerlessness. The Nazis have returned in our midst, only this time they do not do their torturing and killing behind barbed wire fences or prison doors but proudly display them on the internet. We are watching it on TV and reading about it in the newspapers, and then move on to our daily business. Because what can we do?
Just one thing. Speaking out about the values that we represent, or should represent, and mustering the courage to fight for them in word and deed, wherever we have a chance of doing so. This goes for everybody, anywhere in the world. But having been raised in a European country and devoting my life to studying, writing, and speaking about its cultural traditions, I may perhaps be excused for focusing on Western civilization. We are told that Khaled Asaad was murdered for the crime of "overseeing 'idols' in the ancient city" and "attending 'infidel' conferences as Syrian representative". This makes him one of the most recent casualties in a culture war that has been raging for thousands of years: that of exclusive monotheism against its mortal enemy, "pagan idolatry". We should not delude ourselves: historically, our "own" dominant Western culture has not been on Khaled Asaad's side but overwhelmingly on the side of his murderers. The idea that paganism and idolatry is the ultimate abomination that must be rooted out and destroyed, along with anybody who practices or sympathizes with it, goes to the heart of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic identity (though it should be added that while Christianity and Islam gained the power to put the idea into bloody action, post-biblical Judaism never had that chance and rather found itself on the receiving end of atrocities, as we know all too well). Moreover, (pace Peter Gay c.s.) it goes to the heart of Enlightenment rationalism as well, which inherited the Protestant view of paganism and idolatry. This story is not well known, precisely because our dominant cultural institutions are grounded in the very same bias and therefore prefer to tell the story differently. But the painful truth is that, culturally and historically, we are hardly in a position to mount our high horse and condemn IS for continuing our very own battle against the religious culture of the ancient world and everything it stood for. "We" have been every bit as brutal and cruel as they are being now, and until much more recent times than we care to remember.
But here is the paradox. In spite of everything, I deeply care about this same Western culture, for it has richly provided us with all those ultimate values that IS is trampling upon. In spite of all its horrors, a deep commitment to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True runs through the story of Western civilization as well - and this tradition is deeply indebted to the very culture of classical antiquity and Hellenistic civilization that IS would like to destroy. But I'm afraid that during the last couple of decades, we have rapidly been losing touch with these foundational values on which our very culture and civilization were built. Most of us no longer know who we are, what we are supposed to stand for, or why we should. The Good has been made subject to the laws of the marketplace (economic value trumps moral values: the question of what we should do is irrelevant if it cannot be paid for, right?). The Beautiful has been reduced to esthetics and leasure time activities (likewise for sale, of course). And as for the True - the province of science and scholarship, my own domain of activity - well, that is just a matter of opinion, isn't it? This is why the Humanities are declining, and too many of us (academics included) find it hard to see any difference between knowledge and information. This is why we have lost our ability to explain what we are all about. I don't mean to be cynical, but I'm afraid that this is the point of history at which we have now arrived as a culture and a society: we are in decline, and we know it. No wonder that we feel so vulnerable. No wonder that for so many people (not just "elsewhere" but at home as well) "Western civilization" no longer inspires admiration and respect but is becoming an object of hatred, contempt, or simple indifference. I hate to say it, but IS has a story. We don't.
Back to Khaled Asaad. From all that I can tell, I think that he was "one of us". By this I mean that he belonged to all of us who want to devote our lives to real values: knowledge, understanding, generosity, love, beauty, awe. It won't do to respond to his death only with some academic reflections on culture and civilization, although that must be done too (after all, those were the values he deeply cared about and that ultimately cost him his life). We must take our stand next to him, for his horrible death has made him a symbol of everything that is being threatened today and needs to be defended by us, at whatever cost.

On Reading Email (Once a Week)

I remember it very well. One day in the early 1990s I was reading the weekly journal of the University of Utrecht, where I was a student, and came across a small column that announced the invention and introduction of a brand-new way of communication. It was called “e-mail” (that stands for “electronic mail”, the note explained), and was extremely cheap because it used the telephone line to transmit entire text messages in just a fraction of a second. I was impressed. Could it really be true that instead of incurring expensive telephone bills for calling my friends at the other side of the Atlantic or of Europe, I could tell them everything I had to tell them for almost nothing? It seemed too good to be true. Surely there was a catch, and the telephone companies would find some other way to make us pay. That is now more than twenty years ago, and I have forgotten what those early emails even looked like. Email has become so normal and omnipresent that we find it hard to imagine how people got anything done before the nineties. What did you do if you were organizing an international conference, for instance, and needed to communicate with your colleagues about all kinds of tiny details, correct misunderstandings, create
consensus, and so on? Well, there is an answer. We sat down to write letters. And having finished them, we had to go out and put them in a physical mailbox, or find a fax machine somewhere, in cases of great hurry. Or we made a phone call, in spite of the costs, and it all took a lot of time. Didn’t we have anything else to do than wasting hours and hours on such laborious and time-consuming procedures? Well, there’s an answer to that too. We could find the time, for a very simple reason. We did not need to spend hours every day reading email and responding to it.

When email was first introduced, its benefits seemed a bit similar to those of voicemail. Instead of having to deal with phonecall interruptions all the time, you could quietly read your messages at a moment of your own convenience. If people wanted to speak with you right away, well, bad luck for them, they just had to wait. But as email took over as the dominant means of communication, along with the introduction of visual and auditory cues ("you got mail!" - nowadays abbreviated as "bleep" or "boink" or just a number, for of course you got mail!) this quickly proved to be an illusion. Nowadays, email looks more like a wide open door that gives direct access to your home, with a large invitation over it: 
WELCOME! Everybody, known or unknown, may enter here at any moment, day or night, twenty-four hours a day. Feel free to walk straight into my study whenever you feel like it, and start talking to me about anything that’s on your mind, important or unimportant. I might be busy trying to concentrate on something when you enter, but no need to worry about that. Just start talking anyway. I’ll do my best to interrupt everything I’m doing right away, I'll listen to whatever you have to say, and will do what I can to answer immediately.

How normal is it, really, that we now find this normal? Should we even be surprised when scientists find that email increases mental stress and decreases our ability to concentrate? Or that our continuous exposure to internet, twitter, or texting cues causes our brain to get addicted to them, for straightforward chemical reasons based upon dopamine? As a result of that mechanism, known as a dopamine loop, the stream of interruptions gets even bigger: for ifwe are left in peace for a little while, this very fact makes us so nervous that we start interrupting ourselves.   In his important and predictably controversial book The Shallows , Nicholas Carr begins with an observation that I trust will sound familiar to many of us:
I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in
the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. [...]I think I know what’s going on. For well over a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web’s been a godsend to me as a writer. [...] The boons are real. But they come at a price. [...] [W]hat the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it [...].
Carr provides hard neurological evidence. Our brain is very flexible: it quickly learns in response to whatever we ask it to do – and unlearns what we neglect to ask it. At present, we continuously train ourselves to get better and better at those skills that allow us to use the Internet quickly and effectively. And boy do we get good at it! But it goes at the expense of other skills that the Internet just doesn’t require, or even discourages. Notably those skills of deep and prolonged concentration on one single piece of text – without continuous hyperlinks that move us instantaneously to another text, full of other hyperlinks that again move us elsewhere, and so on. The fact is that we are systematically training our brain not to concentrate on a line of thought, an argument, a narrative. We are training it in the art of breaking our concentration.
Reading Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle (yes, that's a hyperlink! Please stay with me anyway) made me aware of another dimension of email: that of guilt and social pressure. It is already bad enough that my concentration gets shattered whenever a new visitor walks into my study and issues a beep to interrupt what I’m doing. And it is even worse that when nobody walks in for five minutes, my dopamine compels meto get up and walk to my door to check whether anyone is coming yet, and that when I’m back at my desk, I am distracted because my brain keeps wondering why nobody is there to disturb me. 
- When will the next beep come? 
- Have they forgotten me? 
But the process does not stop there. When new visitors come in, as they invariably do, they expect me to answer quasi-immediately and are likely to take offense if I don’t. 
- I havereceived the email, haven’t I? 
- I have the technical means to respond, don’t I? 
- So then why the f@#$%^&! do I not respond? What is it that’s keeping me? 
And even this can get worse. Similar to what happens in the dopamine loop (first you get interrupted by others, but eventually you don’t need them anymore: you’ve started doing it all by yourself), even if nobody is blaming me for being slow with my answers, I end up feeling guilty all by myself. I don't want them to think I’m impolite and egoistic. They might think I’m some arrogant ass (those professors, you know...) who finds his own stuff so important that he just can't be bothered to take an interest in others and respond to their needs. 
Too busy? What nonsense! They get as many emails as I do. No cause for me to complain, as if I’m in some special category. If they can answer their emails, so can I. 
I have been thinking about these problems for a long time and have come to a clear decision. I refuse to be manipulated and disciplined into conformity with the logic of The Circle, and most importantly: I reserve the right to protect my own brain. I don't want to expose it systematically to conditions that limit my ability to do what I do best: concentrate. From now on (July 2014) I will therefore be reading my email once a week, and will disable it entirely during the rest of the week. I know that many people will find this incredibly radical, or preposterous, and some will get angry with me - so let me explain. It is really very simple. My core business as a scholar in the Humanities requires the ability of deep “concentration and contemplation” (as formulated by Carr). That is what I need most when I'm studying books, articles, or primary sources. I have a responsibility, to myself and to society, to protect and cultivate those skills, for if they wither and decline then the quality of my work will suffer. I know very well that even this brief explanation sounds like a justification or even an excuse. Perhaps it is. But if so, it nicely illustrates the very point I've just been making: like everyone else, I'm by no means immune to the guilt-inducing magic of The Circle.Now I’m well aware that, even though these general problems of concentration/interruption, dopamine loops, or social pressure by the internalization of guilt are real and universal, something that doesn’t work for me might work better for others. Different people have different mental constitutions, not everybody responds in the same way to stress, and quite some friends and colleagues do not experience email as a problem the way I do. Some people are able to switch quickly from one task to another, and that's great for them, but I have never had that ability: I just happen to be a deep concentrator with a long and slow curve. Some people enjoy digital socializing, and that's great for them too, but I don’t: I find it empty and superficial and prefer meeting people face to face. Some people like to focus on information, and that's fine too, but my interest is in knowledge, which is not the same thing.Am I too naive or optimistic in thinking that this could actually work? I’ll have to see how it works out in practice, especially as the new academic year begins. But one thing is clear: reading email once a week means that once I sit down to do it, I will be concentrating on it. 100%.

Exterminate all the Idols

The Fall of the Hermetic Idols
I’ve been reading a lot of different things lately, and not everything will find its way into this blog. But I definitely need to write about my experiences with a somewhat older book by two French scholars that I bought second-hand and devoured from cover to cover: Carmen Bernand’s & Serge Gruzinski’s De l’idolâtrie: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Of idolatry: An Archeology of the Humanities, 1988). I have long been puzzled by the fact that whereas one can easily fill a library with academic books about “magic”, there are so few systematic studies of “paganism” as a category in the study of religion and even less that focus on what was traditionally seen as the core practice of pagan religion – “idolatry”. The rare exceptions to this rule, such as Moshe Halbertal’s & Avishai Margalit’s Idolatry(1992), focus mostly upon Judaism. One searches practically in vain for authoritative monographs about the notion of idolatry and its significance in monotheist religions generally. And yet, that significance is enormous. If Jan Assmann is right, as I think he is, then monotheism defines its very identity not so much by its focus on One God (after all, it shares the focus on one deity with many “pagan” religions, and normative Christianity believes in a triune deity, not to mention angelic hierarchies and so on) but by its radical and uncompromising rejection of pagan “idolatry” – the worship of gods incarnated in images or statues – as the unforgivable sin par excellence. The history of how idolatry has been discursively constructed as monotheism’s “other” in the history of the three “religions of the book”, and the real-life effects of that discourse, should be a major concern for scholars. Anybody who finds such a statement too radical will perhaps change his mind after reading Bernand’s & Gruzinski’s study of the 16th-century colonialization of Mexico and Peru. Garcilaso de la VegaOne learns from these authors that the Spanish conquerors used the “paganism” of late antiquity as their model for understanding the beliefs and practices they encountered in the New World. The cults of the Indians represented a phenomenon that seemed universal to them, since it appeared to exist in the Americas just as it had existed in the Roman Empire: that of a “natural religion” born from an inborn human desire for knowing and worshiping God (homo religiosus), but deprived of divine Revelation and hence an easy prey for infiltration by the devil and his legions of demons, who are always busy trying to convince human beings to worship them in lieu of the true God. The central reference for Bernand & Gruzinski is Bartolomé de Las Casas’ Apologética Historia sumaria (1550), but they discuss a range of other major authors as well. I was particularly fascinated by the cases of Garcilaso de la Vega(1539-1616), nicknamed “the Inca”, whose perspective on the Amerindian religions (in his Comentarios reales, 1609) appears to have been strongly influenced by the Renaissance Platonic Orientalist tradition of prisca theologia in the wake of Marsilio Ficino and Leone Ebreo; and by that of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1568/1580-1648), who seems to have taken a somewhat similar perspective, describing the philosopher, poet and ruler Nezahualcoyotl (1402-1472) as “a sage even wiser than the divine Plato, and who alone managed to raise himself up to the knowledge of a single ‘creator of visible and invisible things’” (p. 136). If I understand Bernand & Gruzinski correctly (I’m not always sure, for unfortunately their writing is sometimes less than clear), the relevance of the “ancient wisdom discourse” of the Renaissance – a major fascination of mine: see Esotericism and the Academy ch. 1 – reaches even much farther than European culture alone. The early modern European discourse about “paganism” seems extremely relevant for understanding the attempts by intellectuals to justify the brutal realities of colonialist expansion; and moreover, it is crucial for understanding the emergence, in early modern culture, of “religion” as a general and universal concept born from the encounter and hence the comparison between Christian and “native” cultures. Peter Paul Rubens, The Triumph of the Eucharist over IdolatryChapter 6 of De l’idolâtrie is titled “Extirpations” and discusses the systematic campaign of exterminating pagan idolatry in the New World. It starts with a reference to Peter Paul Rubens’ “Triumph of the Eucharist over Idolatry”, which once again shows that Europeans were incapable of thinking about Amerindian “idolatry” otherwise than through the prism of Hellenistic paganism. It is impossible to discuss the shocking effects of the conquests – by 1625, only 5% of the indigenous Mexican population had survived! (pp. 146-147) –  separately from the conquerors’ ideological conviction that idolatry in all its forms had to be destroyed by any means necessary, together with anyone suspected or potentially capable of practicing it. In the canon De Haereticis of the 3rd Mexican Council (1585), indigenous idolatry was discussed as equivalent with “apostasy” and “heresy” (p. 156): not as a rival form of religion, therefore, but as an intentional rejection of Christian truth. The penalty was death. Sven LindqvistIn parallel with De l’idolâtrie, I was reading Sven Lindqvist’s brilliant travelogue “‘Exterminate All the Brutes’”, an impressive attempt at understanding the origins and foundations of that famous sentence from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Lindqvist does not discuss idolatry, but he reveals in chilling detail how the doctrine that “primitive peoples” and their cultures must be exterminated was a necessary and integral part of the “progress of civilization” as understood by mainstream 19th-century popular and intellectual European culture. If anyone might think that “necessary and integral” is a bit of an exaggeration here, Lindqvist’s analysis may come as a shocking revelation. I will give just two examples, although Lindqvist gives many more, showing that such statements were not the exception but the rule. Herbert Spencer claimed that “imperialism ha[d] served civilization by clearing the inferior races off the earth” (Lindqvist, 162): “the forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way ... Be he human or be he brute – the hindrance must be got rid of” (Social Statistics (1850). Eduard von Hartmann’s formulations were even more brutal: “As little as a favor is done the dog whose tail is to be cut off, when one cuts it off gradually inch by inch, so little is their humanity in artificially prolonging the death struggles of savages who are on the verge of extinction. ... The true philantropist, if he has comprehended the natural law of anthropological evolution, cannot avoid desiring an acceleration of the last convulsion, and labor for that end” (Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol. II, 12). These theoretical convictions were taken quite literally by the conquerors who took it upon themselves to advance the noble cause of civilization by “exterminating the brutes” – with such thoroughness and cruelty that one cannot but assent to Lindquist’s controversial comparisons with the horrors of the Nazi genocide. We all know about the Holocaust, as we should. But how many of us are familiar with (to give one more example, not covered by Lindqvist) what happened during the “rubber boom” of the decades before and after 1900, when the Amazon Putumayo region was transformed into a “death space” (as formulated by Michael Taussig in his Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man ) of random torture and murder where the lives of “Indian savages” were worth less than nothing? Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us (1897)De l’idolâtrieends with a demonstration of how the religious campaign against idolatry was taken up and continued by the Enlightenment (rather similar to my argument in ch. 2 of Esotericism and the Academy), and one might say that Lindquist traces the same story of “extirpation” or “extermination” forward through the history of colonialism and far into the 20thcentury. Extirpation of idolatry in the name of Christianity, and extermination of savages in the name of progress and civilization: isn’t it obvious that the two are intimately related both conceptually and historically, as the former created the essential ideological foundations on which the latter could build its deadly mission of civilizing the globe? If there is just a grain of truth to this comparison, then isn’t it time for scholars to start taking a serious look - and I mean a very serious one - at the history of the Western campaign to “exterminate all the idols?