Let the reader be prudent before going on. I am going to simply comment on a few passages from Bakunin that help us to see the nature of the trap, here; then I hope to move on to a few conclusions.

Jehovah, […] expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

[…] God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he bad induced them to commit

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

I cite this–the full passage is nauseating in its wrathful calumny–only to note two things. The first is the direct misrepresentation at the base of this retelling of the story: the “tree of knowledge” is not a tree of access to information, but precisely a marker of moral freedom. The misrepresentation is literal, in that “tree of knowledge of good and evil” becomes “tree of knowledge” in Bakunin’s revision.

The other–and this is crucial to grasp–is that Bakunin’s reading is not alien to the text, not a modern and secular questioning of a traditional text.  No, Bakunin is asserting that one position was always already embedded in the text, and that he and all right-thinking people have at last realized the correct perspective within the text.  That is to say, Bakunin has adopted Satan’s logic before he even introduces the name of Satan, just as the Hebrew Scriptures have always already known that God was present and active in the world, before proceeding to name Him and tell of His deeds.

Compare Bakunin’s language above with Satan’s language in the Hebrew Scriptures:  “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  The text presents this as a lie constructed of apparently true words, as God says, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.”  Bakunin assumes from the first the Satanic construction of this passage, that God has attempted to deprive Adam and Eve of some “knowledge” by forbidding them to eat the fruit.

It is important to realize this, because the interpenetration of secular nihilism, religious Satanism, anarchism, and other explicit philosophies of negation is easy to miss behind the camouflage; the Satanist will deny Satan’s existence, then hail him, while the secular nihilist will deny real human and religious foundations of authority, while insisting on the power of regimes to do good in the world; and the anarchist will die proclaiming the inappellable authority of his own rage.  At root, though, each has accepted the conflation of “to know authentically” with “to grasp, to keep and control.”  One cannot therefore have self-understanding without self-destruction, because only by “testing to destruction” can one be sure one has comprehensive and perpetual control of one’s potential being.  Bakunin explicitly acknowledges the link, and this is important.

The metaphysical realist offers the Satanist, the nihilist, the anarchist, and the devil himself a simple question.  

“What,” asks this most naive soul (ut ita dicam), “was the object of knowing in the ‘knowledge of good and evil’?  What good, true, beautiful being was there which was not named by, given to, and entrusted to the care of Adam and Eve?  Was there any res behind the hypothetical counterfactual of freedom to embrace the good as given–and if so, what was it?”  

Because in the narrative, everything except the merely nominal “evil” has been created and entrusted to humanity; nothing except the illusion of comprehensive and perpetual control remains to be grasped.

Even those who some trust to know better sometimes take Satan’s side in this way.

And how are we to believe we have succeeded in grasping the illusion?  (doesn’t seem right?  it’s your conscience, joker!)

Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science – that is, by rebellion and by thought.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

Again, it is worthwhile to note that the diabolical logic here is not a transient literary gesture or an ambiguous expression borne of narrow circumstances, like Milton’s conflicted representation of Satan (the regicide rebel‘s depiction of the ultimate rebel marking the difficulty with which any of us, even the most devout, struggle to reconcile our rebellious hearts to our duty).  

At the very foundation of Bakunin’s position is the understanding that humans are essentially animals except for a capacity to rebel–to assert the negation of whatever already seems to be true–and to describe this negation as “thought.”  It is vital to see that, in the final analysis, only this rebellion differentiates what Bakunin acknowledges as “thought” from what he calls “bestiality.”  As he puts it, the enlightened enshrine “conscience” and “love of truth at all hazards” and “that passion for logic which of itself alone constitutes a great power and outside of which there is no thought.”  

This rebellious “passion” thus acquires a transcendent character that goes beyond the capacity for inference, a character it acquires by treating all prior thought as “theoretical and practical bestialities” to be run down by the “unshakeable faith” of those who conjure from inference and rebellion “a social law as natural, as necessary, and as invariable as all the other laws which govern the world.”  This “passion” that is also a “faith” gives the enlightened a fanatical “confidence” because, notionally rejecting all prior thought, it treats its hypotheses as fatalistic necessities.  Rebellion, passion, and faith thus conjure an absolute authority parasitic upon the images of fidelity and charity which the enlightened rebels inherit, selectively discovering for themselves (so to speak) whatever their gurus do not designate as objects of “rebellion.”

This triangulation becomes clear when Bakunin misrepresents Christianity in order to mythologize materialism:

We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it – that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have taken away intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself, without which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces, properties, and manifestations to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging rules, they have called this product of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, “supreme Being” and, as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real being, matter, the world, is nothing. After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of setting itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

Of course, it would be not Christianity but a fairly radical dualism (call it Manichaean, Paulician, Marcionite, Cathar, neo-Platonic, or just plain Gnostic) that Bakunin–like other disaffected Young Hegelians–is here rejecting (and which Madame Blavatsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, and plenty of colorful characters continue to embrace).  

More important, though, Bakunin here exemplifies his own method–and that of many another such parasite–when he generates a positive mythology in which substance itself is “spontaneously and eternally” creative, susceptible of “intelligent” expression yet “chemically or organically determined,” solely by baldly asserting that both the dualist’s account of matter and the idea of God are strictly “fancy.”

Thought, for the nihilist, is whatever “intelligent” expression he is not currently rebelling against; whatever he attacks becomes, simply because he is attacking it, an “imaginary being” of “abstract fancy.”

Bakunin also helpfully pushes off against various merely tactical nihilisms–the dominant kind found in popular thought and philosophy, like the humane reasoning which characterizes existentialism and even Nietzsche–and the purer form of Satanic, anarchic rebellion he advocates:

There exists, finally, a somewhat numerous class of honest but timid souls who, too intelligent to take the Christian dogmas seriously, reject them in detail, but have neither the courage nor the strength nor the necessary resolution to summarily renounce them altogether. They abandon to your criticism all the special absurdities of religion, they turn up their noses at all the miracles, but they cling desperately to the principal absurdity; the source of all the others, to the miracle that explains and justifies all the other miracles, the existence of God. Their God is not the vigorous and powerful being, the brutally positive God of theology. It is a nebulous, diaphanous, illusory being that vanishes into nothing at the first attempt to grasp it; it is a mirage, an ignis fatugs; that neither warms nor illuminates. And yet they hold fast to it, and believe that, were it to disappear, all would disappear with it. They are uncertain, sickly souls, who have lost their reckoning in the present civilisation, belonging to neither the present nor the future, pale phantoms eternally suspended between heaven and earth, and occupying exactly the same position between the politics of the bourgeois and the Socialism of the proletariat. They have neither the power nor the wish nor the determination to follow out their thought, and they waste their time and pains in constantly endeavouring to reconcile the irreconcilable. In public life these are known as bourgeois Socialists.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

And, in doing so, Bakunin also identifies why the pure nihilist is never content with a liberal social order, whether classical liberalism or later democratic socialism, so long as these permit Christianity full expression in the public sphere:

Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.

God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church. This truth Christianity, better than all other religions that exist or have existed, understood, not excepting even the old Oriental religions, which included only distinct and privileged nations, while Christianity aspires to embrace entire humanity; and this truth Roman Catholicism, alone among all the Christian sects, has proclaimed and realized with rigorous logic. That is why Christianity is the absolute religion, the final religion; why the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent, legitimate, and divine church.

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And so Bakunin’s lofty rhetoric about human thought, evolution, science, psychology, materialism, or whatever else you have derives its passion and force, not from logic, but from a conception of liberty that turns on an axiom that is as simple as it is Satanic:

If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

Therefore there can be no liberalization of Christianity (or any theistic religion) which is acceptable to the true nihilist:

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: “God and the liberty of man,” “God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men” – regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty – by ceasing to exist.

A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And there is one reason for this; one reason that goes to the heart of the matter:

Perhaps, too, while speaking of liberty as something very respectable and very dear in their eyes, they give the term a meaning quite different from the conception entertained by us, materialists and Revolutionary Socialists. Indeed, they never speak of it without immediately adding another word, authority – a word and a thing which we detest with all our heart.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

…notice the recurrent insistence on the passionate character of a rebellion which nonetheless relentlessly declares itself to be about “logic.”  (Anyone who has ever debated a 14-year-old cut-and-paste skeptic online knows that there is no merely intellectual cure for this disease.)

But understand that there is no body of knowledge, however formed, that is immune to this intrinsically pointless strategy of self-assertion by parasitic negation.  No form of science can arrive at knowledge that must be believed by enlightened rebels:

Suppose a learned academy, composed of the most illustrious representatives of science; suppose this academy charged with legislation for and the organization of society, and that, inspired only by the purest love of truth, it frames none but laws in absolute harmony with the latest discoveries of science. Well, I maintain, for my part, that such legislation and such organization would be a monstrosity, and that for two reasons: first, that human science is always and necessarily imperfect, and that, comparing what it has discovered with what remains to be discovered, we may say that it is still in its cradle. So that were we to try to force the practical life of men, collective as well as individual, into strict and exclusive conformity with the latest data of science, we should condemn society as well as individuals to suffer martyrdom on a bed of Procrustes, which would soon end by dislocating and stifling them, life ever remaining an infinitely greater thing than science. The second reason is this: a society which should obey legislation emanating from a scientific academy, not because it understood itself the rational character of this legislation (in which case the existence of the academy would become useless), but because this legislation, emanating from the academy, was imposed in the name of a science which it venerated without comprehending – such a society would be a society, not of men, but of brutes. It would be a second edition of those missions in Paraguay which submitted so long to the government of the Jesuits. It would surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of idiocy. But there is still a third reason which would render such a government impossible – namely that a scientific academy invested with a sovereignty, so to speak, absolute, even if it were composed of the most illustrious men, would infallibly and soon end in its own moral and intellectual corruption. Even today, with the few privileges allowed them, such is the history of all academies. The greatest scientific genius, from the moment that he becomes an academician, an officially licensed savant, inevitably lapses into sluggishness. He loses his spontaneity, his revolutionary hardihood, and that troublesome and savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses, ever called to destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new. He undoubtedly gains in politeness, in utilitarian and practical wisdom, what he loses in power of thought. In a word, he becomes corrupted.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

But as long as the enlightened rebels can pick and choose their experts to suit their passions, they are all about science:

But, while rejecting the absolute, universal, and infallible authority of men of science, we willingly bow before the respectable, although relative, quite temporary, and very restricted authority of the representatives of special sciences, asking nothing better than to consult them by turns, and very grateful for such precious information as they may extend to us, on condition of their willingness to receive from us on occasions when, and concerning matters about which, we are more learned than they. In general, we ask nothing better than to see men endowed with great knowledge, great experience, great minds, and, above all, great hearts, exercise over us a natural and legitimate influence, freely accepted, and never imposed in the name of any official authority whatsoever, celestial or terrestrial. We accept all natural authorities and all influences of fact, but none of right; for every authority or every influence of right, officially imposed as such, becoming directly an oppression and a falsehood, would inevitably impose upon us, as I believe I have sufficiently shown, slavery and absurdity.

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them.

This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And nothing is worse than idealists, crusaders, religious do-gooders:

This is just the opposite of the work that we are doing. On behalf of human liberty, dignity and prosperity, we believe it our duty to recover from heaven the goods which it has stolen and return them to earth. They, on the contrary, endeavouring to commit a final religiously heroic larceny, would restore to heaven, that divine robber, finally unmasked, the grandest, finest and noblest of humanity’s possessions. It is now the freethinker’s turn to pillage heaven by their audacious piety and scientific analysis.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And so there must be a mythic history of anti-Christianity and irreligion to nourish the enlightened rebels in their faith:

In a word, it is not at all difficult to prove, history in hand, that the Church, that all the Churches, Christian and non-Christian, by the side of their spiritualistic propagandism, and probably to accelerate and consolidate the success thereof, have never neglected to organise themselves into great corporations for the economic exploitation of the masses under the protection and with the direct and special blessing of some divinity or other; that all the States, which originally, as we know, with all their political and judicial institutions and their dominant and privileged classes have been only temporal branches of these various Churches have likewise had principally in view this same exploitation for the benefit of lay minorities indirectly sanctioned by the Church; finally and in general, that the action of the good God and of all the divine idealities on earth has ended at last, always and everywhere, in founding the prosperous materialism of the few over the fanatical and constantly famishing idealism of the masses.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

But, again, any effort to translate learning–however irreligious, however materialist, however secular and radical–any such effort must fall short of the pure nihilist’s dream of unfettered rebellion:

Upon this nature are based the indisputable rights and grand mission of science, but also its vital impotence and even its mischievous action whenever, through its official licensed representatives, it arrogantly claims the right to govern life. The mission of science is, by observation of the general relations of passing and real facts, to establish the general laws inherent in the development of the phenomena of the physical and social world; it fixes, so to speak, the unchangeable landmarks of humanity’s progressive march by indicating the general conditions which it is necessary to rigorously observe and always fatal to ignore or forget. In a word, science is the compass of life; but it is not life itself. Science is unchangeable, impersonal, general, abstract, insensible, like the laws of which it is but the ideal reproduction, reflected or mental – that is cerebral (using this word to remind us that science itself is but a material product of a material organ, the brain). Life is wholly fugitive and temporary, but also wholly palpitating with reality and individuality, sensibility, sufferings, joys, aspirations, needs, and passions. It alone spontaneously creates real things and; beings. Science creates nothing; it establishes and recognises only the creations of life. And every time that scientific men, emerging from their abstract world, mingle with living creation in the real world, all that they propose or create is poor, ridiculously abstract, bloodless and lifeless, still-born, like the homunculus created by Wagner, the pedantic disciple of the immortal Doctor Faust. It follows that the only mission of science is to enlighten life, not to govern it.

The government of science and of men of science, even be they positivists, disciples of Auguste Comte, or, again, disciples of the doctrinaire; school of German Communism, cannot fail to be impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent. We may say of men of science, as such, what I have said of theologians and metaphysicians: they have neither sense nor heart for individual and living beings.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

Because in the end, Bakunin knows, any regime ultimately depends on a cultural and religious consensus (and here Bakunin seems to channel de Tocqueville):

There is not, there cannot be, a State without religion. Take the freest States in the world – the United States of America or the Swiss Confederation, for instance – and see what an important part is played in all official discourses by divine Providence, that supreme sanction of all States.

(source: God and the State – Chapter IV)

And thus we find, in the word of actual Satanists discussing Bakunin’s polemic, that Bakunin’s message has continued to resonate with enlightened rebels down to this day: 

Satan – whether defined as a symbol, an archetype or a literal
entity – is not God, but Anti-God.

What did Bakunin mean, with his allusion to the freeing of Adam
through disobedience? Turning to the Judaeo-Christians’ own
scriptures we find that it was Satan who offered humankind the choice
of free-will, or continued enslavement to the tyrant-god. The first
archetypical human couple chose freedom, and willfully disobeying the
godly-tyrant partook of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, gaining
self-consciousness and the ability for independent thought.
(Genesis 2-3).

Satan is representative of freedom from godly-tyranny and the worship
of ignorant superstition. Satanism and ‘devil worship’ are antithetical
rather than synonymous, for the latter simply substitutes Satan for
Jehovah/Jesus; the devil-worshipper is an inverse-Christian.

………………………………..

Satan is the embodiment of those forces which lead to progress and
human ascent by upsetting the static order. Thus we see the
rationale for Bakunin’s championing of Satan, for he is the
proto-Anarchist.

(source intentionally suppressed)

How, then, should we respond?

[ tune in next time…. ]

(continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

Bakunin’s most notable freethought essay is “God and the State” (1883). In it, Bakunin called Jehovah, of all gods, “certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty.” In this article, later published in English by Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth Publishing (1916), Bakunin wrote: “All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties.” Bakunin called the concept of Satan “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds.”

(source: Mikhail Bakunin – Freedom From Religion Foundation)

Neutral Is Not A Thing

When spiritually and metaphysically real conflict erupts in our community, many people persuade themselves that they can retreat into their private lives, distinguish their profession from their person, and appeal to only secular standards in public discourse. Provided that they don’t see any violence that affects them, many people–public officials especially–consider the situation on par with a dispute over the bar tab or an academic debate.

And, of course, when specific criminal acts–or conspiracies to commit criminal acts–or collusion with terrorism or espionage or racketeering–when something that registers with us as a breach of the peace or an actionable injury emerges, it is perfectly natural for us to see that situation as more immediate and urgent. Were I in Ferguson, Missouri, right now, I would likely not be writing this.

But failing to take the measure of a threat because it does not seem immediate does not protect us. Believing that Islamic terrorism was a fading problem did not protect the Twin Towers in 2001 or the Benghazi consulate in 2008; knowing that Titanic‘s compartmentalized hull made her harder to sink did not protect her officers from bad judgment about speed and icebergs. Moreover, in many cases, the threat is designed to set a trap for us.

[Take, for example, policies requiring “non-discrimination” in membership and leadership of student organizations. Such policies do not allow any group to thrive or fail based on its own organizing principles and their capacity to attract at least some number of people to make common cause on those principles, whatever their other differences may be. No, such policies ensure that a group’s very survival is wholly dependent on its most aggressive opponent’s whim. The second someone determined to eradicate any group’s principles can force the choice between abandoning those principles (and continuing to exist as a group) and disbanding the group (and continuing to hold those principles in isolation), the integrity of all groups and the legitimacy of the system that encourages or subsidizes their existence is seriously undermined. At this point, the conscientious participant in public discourse is placed in a dilemma that leaves no principled option except defiance or defeat. To make it worse, the exemption of certain egregiously arbitrary and exclusive groups makes it quite clear that many administrators are not compelled to adopt these policies, nor eager to ameliorate their impact.]

The case of nihilism is both more and less subtle than such blatant yet banal acts. As a corrosive subtext, the nihilism that operates in popular culture as well as some philosophy has the problem we saw in Part 2. It is trapped in a historicism it imagines itself free from, and therefore fatalistic in metaphysics; it continually “lapses” into humane ideals that, nonetheless, have their underpinnings in ways of thought and life which nihilism declares “unbelievable.” Moreover, even those who reluctantly assent to nihilism (even those who assent to its premises while attempting to resist its conclusions!) are transformed by their assent into vectors for infection; the meme goes on.

But nihilism breaks out in violence against civil society, as well. Often, of course, this is simply mindless violence that almost everyone intuitively reprehends; still other times, it is a distressing moment when an unknown evil and a poorly-governed mob meander into lawlessness and the circle of pointless violence that comes with lawlessness. And it is a trivial work of cultural criticism to link these mindless and mob-mentality acts to an obvious and repeatedly demonstrated disregard for the rule of law and the dignity of humanity at the highest levels of authority. When lawlessness rules over feeble opposition, and especially when nihilistic acts of provocation designed to delegitimize authority in favor of mere force of personality become commonplace, it is not at all surprising to see both overbearing abuse of power and pointless violence becoming common as well.

All of this, however, is simply pointing out the web of cultural decay that makes assent to nihilism thinkable, that lends it a plausibility it cannot intrinsically possess.

At Bakunin, however, it is surely possible to see more explicitly the character of the matter. Bakunin, at confluence of the many streams of Russian, Prussian, and English Romantic and post-Romantic thought, ties together a rejection of traditional accounts of authority with a rejection of emerging modernist and Marxist accounts. Associated with the Young Hegelians, he rejected Hegelianism (without losing his historicist assumptions); he rejected Marxist materialism as an inverted Hegelian Idealism, and Hegelian and other Romantic Idealism as simply denatured religion. In doing so, however, he embraced something that goes far beyond even radical individualism. His nihilism is explicitly tied to the “Satanic School” of Godwin and Shelley whose experiments in infernal and Promethean mythologizing take inspiration from Blake‘s assertion that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it!” Bakunin’s reasoning, and his life, is of a piece with that which inspired Dostoevsky’s portraits of Ivan Karamazov and Raskolnikov. And, of course, this is also what Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday pushed off against.

This post is getting quite long, so I am going to end for now with a couple of representative quotations from Bakunin, about which I shall have much more to say in a future post.

Let the reader be prudent before going on:

Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty – Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

We know what followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of the divine faculties, should have warned him of what would happen, flew into a terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed Satan, man, and the world created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation, as children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our ancestors themselves, he cursed them in all the generations to come, innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers. Our Catholic and Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just, precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then, remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood, he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he might be killed by men. That is called the mystery of the Redemption, the basis of all the Christian religions.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: “God and the liberty of man,” “God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men” – regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty – by ceasing to exist.

A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

Perhaps, too, while speaking of liberty as something very respectable and very dear in their eyes, they give the term a meaning quite different from the conception entertained by us, materialists and Revolutionary Socialists. Indeed, they never speak of it without immediately adding another word, authority – a word and a thing which we detest with all our heart.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.

“I see everything,” he cried, “everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, ‘We also have suffered.’

“It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom he has accused. At least—”

He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.

“Have you,” he cried in a dreadful voice, “have you ever suffered?”

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”

(source: The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton)

You Become What You Assent To

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

(source: Nihilism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy])

Of course, I had to cut my letter about the planned sacrilege at the Oklahoma City Civic Center to the bone to get it under the Letters to the Editor word count (any shorter and you’d have to chirp, er, whistle, er, tweet it). The original version, still only about 400 words, had a slightly clearer explanation of my objection to civic facilitation of this particular class of sacrilegious acts. In addition to the obvious spiritual consequences, there were important civic considerations that should concern even those who are not yet persuaded of the religious facts in the matter:

We understand, as all civic-minded people should, that public life involves a give-and-take of constructive and corrective expressions. This act, however, is an act of sheer nihilism, at best, and demonism, at worst.

Whether you believe it or deny it, there really are powers of good and evil that go far beyond human imagination and will. Even those who do not accept this reality, however, live in a world whose understanding of good and evil is wholly conditioned on this understanding. Civil society can profit by lively debate among different ways of accounting for these basic understandings; as an English professor, this lively exchange is precisely what I promote in the classroom daily. Civil society cannot, however, thrive in an environment where mere destruction of meaningful distinctions and cultural institutions becomes mainstream.

Nihilistic outbursts and sacrilegious demonstrations are not part of civic discussion; they are an assault on the very possibility of civil society. They intend to exclude the faithful from public life without offering any social benefit in return.

If this event takes place, it will mar this wonderful city; and it will damage the souls of all who facilitate it.

To understand the difference between the “sheer nihilism” which is, in the best case, what civic officials are facilitating here and the general give-and-take of culture-making social behavior and discourse, we will first need to understand nihilism a bit better.

As the IEP article cited above suggests, the “true nihilist” is a rare bird. Generally, discussions of nihilism quickly turn (as IEP does) to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.  Krzysztof Michalski helpfully distinguishes in what sense we might call Nietzsche a nihilist:  [.PDF]

what Nietzsche calls nihilism is not an outlook, or at least it is not principally an outlook. Specifically, the nihilism he speaks of is not the view that everything is meaningless, that there’s not really any point to anything we do, that what seems to us to be “every-thing” is really “nothing.” The nihilism that Nietzsche has in mind is first of all something that happens and not something that we, correctly or in-correctly, think about reality. Nihilism is therefore an event, or a chain of events, a historical process—and only secondarily, if at all, an attitude, outlook, or position.

Nietzsche’s view is that nihilism, as “a historical process,” is an inevitability that we must embrace. He takes it as granted that what previously made the world intelligible to us no longer makes sense to us, and that this is an inescapable fact of world history (not merely some variation in certain individuals or groups). As Michalski puts it, “the basic principles organizing our reality no longer organize or order our lives.” It is this same apparent condition which spurred Rudolf Bultmann to write that

It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. … We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.

(It is the word “irrevocably” that gives away the game, by the way.) Heidegger speaks of the “destitute time” that “does not know its own destitution,” in which “there fails to appear to the world the ground that grounds it” (handy reference here). H.P. Lovecraft, who devoted much of his career to inculcating a “cosmicist” viewpoint that rejected the notion that human concerns were of any significance in the cosmos at large, reflects the same view when he exclaims in a letter,

No level-headed modern either wants to be “immortal” himself (gawd, what boredom!) or to have his favourite characters immortal. Each appears for a second in the pattern and then disappears . . . . . and what of it? What more could anybody not filled up with infantile myth expect or even dream of? It is overwhelmingly true that no sane adult, confronted with the information of today, could possibly think up anything as grotesque, gratuitous, irrelevant, chimerical, and unmotivated as “immortality” unless bludgeoned into the ancient phantasy by the stultifying crime of childhood orthodox training.

If Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lovecraft, and Bultmann are reading history correctly–if their allegoresis of their own ideological journeys and recent cultural history proves to be the most accurate, useful, and compelling reading available–then some process not strictly subject to any particular human’s conscious control has made us unable to trust the evidences, employ the categories, or feel compunction about the obligations that moved our forebears. (One should always be suspicious of the necessitarian and historicist strains that underpin much modern thought; they may have rejected the idealism that Hegel perfected, but almost without exception they seem to have retained the historicism by which Hegel achieves his most profound effects.)

Heidegger provides some of the most powerful language for identifying the lack, what makes “the destitute time” a time during which many organizing ideas and inspiring goals seem irrelevant to daily life:

The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. The default of God forebodes something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default.

(clipped from a convenient blog post: The lack of god in the destitute times | thinking and thoughtlessness)

Of course, we must not miss the fact that these philosophers are making falsifiable claims of at least two kinds: claims about belief, and claims about historical fact. Moreover, it cannot wholly escape us that to some extent the matter of belief determines the matter of fact, here; for unless “gathers … visibly and unequivocally” means to gather with immediate, total, and irresistible force, then what we believe may well have everything to do with whether we see the gathering “visibly and unequivocally” taking place. There is also an interesting challenge where this interacts with Christian belief, insofar as even the period of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion was not possessed of the clarity and distinctness of the Parousia: that is, when Jesus preached the Kingdom, He preached it as something not yet “visibly and unequivocally” present in every respect:

“The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off. When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well. The slaves of the householder came to him and said, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where have the weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ His slaves said to him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ He replied, ‘No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest; then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters, “First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”

(source: Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time)

Nonetheless, if the era of the shopping mall could hardly have been better described than in George Romero’s brilliant depiction (which nonetheless oddly imbued it with a mysterious radiance that was “probably nuclear” so they could talk in hushed tones about an “important place for them”), then the era of Reality TV and the Like button is surely easy to recognize in the pages of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra:

Lo! I show you the last man.

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”- so asketh the last man and blinketh.
The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.
“We have discovered happiness”- say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one’s neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.
Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!
A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.
One still worketh, for work is a pastime.
…………………………………
People still fall out, but are soon reconciled- otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.
They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.
“We have discovered happiness,”- say the last men, and blink thereby.

(source: Internet History Sourcebooks)

All of these thinkers, of course, fall into one and the same trap: although they think of nihilism as a condition that requires a response, their conviction that anyone who does not agree with their diagnosis is confused about reality means that they must also become advocates of a nihilist view, as must their disciples. They must convince others (for their own good) to embrace the unbelievability of inherited understandings and to help them disrupt institutions that tend to make those understandings plausible. Like a virus–a true meme–the nihilistic vision remakes those who reluctantly assent to it into vectors for its propagation.

Therefore, we should carefully note that every one of the serious thinkers we have looked at (and here we must leave out Lovecraft), whatever their approach, have viewed this condition as cause for concern. All the most serious thought about nihilism views it as a problem.

Bultmann, as the marker of the radical edge of Christian liberalism, believed something important for human self-understanding was being lost if we could not find some essential, believable understanding in an otherwise unbelievable Christianity. Heidegger and Nietzsche, both atheists with religious training, took somewhat different tacks; Nietzsche basically urged humans to accelerate the evolution of the species, while Heidegger tried to conceive of life during this “default” in a way less determined by Hegel’s ideas of historical progression.

Following Heidegger, Sartre’s important essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” explains why even the thought of what he calls “atheistic existentialists” is not mere nihilism, even though it begins with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism as the modern condition (a diagnosis repeated in different forms throughout the past 150+ years–see, for example, Lyotard’s “The Post-Modern Condition,” which acknowledges what Sartre also acknowledges, that Marxism cannot be the replacement for orders which now seem unbelievable, any more than Hegelian historicism could).  Sartre defends existentialism from the charge that their subjectivism is so radical that it amounts to mere nihilism:

Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this decision proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.

(source: Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sarte 1946)

Sartre steals a lot of bases, here, but his concern is obvious: A school of thought which begins with the nihilist assessment of history and the believability of inherited understandings, and cannot then account for the responsibility each person bears for others, has essentially failed. More than that, it is actually destructive; it eliminates any basis, even of mere social convention or Rousseauian “social contract,” for peaceful social order.

In its pure form, which none of these thinkers dared embrace, mere nihilism is a declaration of war on humanity.

Next, then: Bakunin!

I am glad Volokh weighed in because I know his history of carefully considering the legal principles surrounding First Amendment issues–and because I think, at least up until The Volokh Conspiracy moved to the Washington Post website and became harder to follow, I had read pretty much every post he’d written on any related subject since about 2003. I am also pleased because I think that, as regards only the specific point of legal understanding he comments on, he is probably correct.  That correction will help us all to clarify the situation considerably.

In fact, when I wrote my letter, I imagined Volokh and his confreres in order to test my words–not because I expected Volokh to be wholly sympathetic to Archbishop Coakley’s objections, but because I was confident that Volokh’s response would be accurate, to-the-point, and respectful.  Here is his post, shortening his extract from the Archbishop’s remarks:

“I’m disappointed by their response,” Archbishop Paul Coakley of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City told FoxNews.com Friday. “If someone had come to them to rent the Civic Center to stage a burning of the Koran or to hold an event that was blatantly and clearly anti-Semitic, I think they might find a way to prevent it.

“Not all speech is protected if there is hate speech and it is intended to ridicule another religion,” he said. “I don’t believe it is a free speech matter.”

No, speech intended to ridicule or insult another religion is entirely constitutionally protected, as the Court has held since 1940. Under the First Amendment, people are free to criticize, ridicule, parody, and insult religious belief systems, no less than other belief systems — whether they are Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Satanism, atheism, capitalism, Communism, feminism, or fascism.

And this remains true even as to government-owned auditoriums that have been generally open for public rental. The government may not exclude speech from such places, whether they are called “designated public fora” or “limited public fora,” on the grounds that it’s blasphemous or “hateful” or “intended to ridicule another religion.” (It’s an open question whether the government may sometimes exclude all religious worship services from particular kinds of government property, but I’m unaware of any such across-the-board exclusion as to the Civic Center Music Hall, and indeed at least one church apparently regularly conducts services there.)

(source: The Volokh Conspiracy)

I want to take the opportunity presented by Volokh’s comment to expand on the very brief suggestion of an argument I made in my own letter, take up a few concerns I’ve seen in comments, disagree a tiny bit with some of my friends, and to also look at the very real problem–one that gets at metaphysical reality and points out the limits of our constitutional framework, at least as currently understood–in a few posts to follow this one.

For now, let me simply hint that my line of argument, where it touches on the laws, appeals to one of those principles that comes up from time to time when constitutional limitations require a change to standing precedents.  I’ll quote it in its native form:

The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

(source: TERMINIELLO v. CITY OF CHICAGO. | LII / Legal Information Institute)

That, of course, and the Miller test.

(Some may not know:  a small group of agitators led by a registered sex offender has, by means of carefully crafted equivocations, managed to arrange for the Oklahoma City Civic Center to not only rent space but also sell tickets for a “performance” which either is not the “religious” ritual it pretends to be or is obscene and criminal by any reasonable community standards. Archbishop Coakley made a point of speaking out about this escalation from past agitations that had flown under the radar.  Several sources immediately spoke out, including friends from the parish; I sent a letter, myself, to the newspapers and the Civic Centre.  The Archbishop issued another, more specific statement calling on all people of good will to stand together against this manifestation of ill-will, then with a letter to the Archdiocese instructing us to take appropriate countermeasures.  The Archdiocese has posted contact information for those who bear moral and civic responsibility for this abuse of the community’s trust; efforts have also been made to ascertain whether this will actually be the criminal and obscene act that the title advertises, or whether this is just a few maladjusted poseurs seeking attention.)

(For more on the criminality involved, start with incidents like this attempted theft and this crime wave.)