Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (7 page)

There is more than a hint of racism in this way of thinking. During the last century mass repression was practised in countries with vastly different histories and traditions whose only common feature was the fact that they were subjects of a utopian experiment. The machinery of terror – show trials, mass imprisonment and state control of political and cultural life through a ubiquitous secret police – existed in every communist regime. Mongolia and East Germany, Cuba and Bulgaria, Romania and North Korea, Eastern Germany and Soviet Central Asia all suffered similar types of repression. The type of government these countries had before they became subject to communist rule – democratic or otherwise – made very little difference. Czechoslovakia was a model democracy before the Second World War but that did not prevent it becoming a totalitarian dictatorship after the communist takeover. The strength of the Church in Poland may have prevented the imposition of full-scale totalitarianism, but like every other communist country it suffered periods of intense repression. If communist regimes had been established in France or Italy, Britain or Scandinavia the result would have been no different.

The apparent similarities between countries with communist regimes imposed on them stem from their shared fates rather than their earlier histories. While some communist regimes made advances in social welfare, all experienced mass repression along with endemic corruption and environmental devastation. Terror in these and other communist countries was partly a response to these failures and the resulting lack of popular legitimacy of the regimes, but it was also a continuation of a European revolutionary tradition. The communist regimes were established in pursuit of a utopian ideal whose origins lie in the heart of the Enlightenment. Though the fact is less widely recognized, the Nazis were also in some ways children of the Enlightenment. They had only scorn for Enlightenment ideals of human freedom and equality, but they continued a powerful illiberal strand in
Enlightenment thinking and made use of an influential Enlightenment ideology of ‘scientific racism’.

The last century witnessed many atrocities that owed nothing to Enlightenment thinking. Though it was facilitated by the history of colonialism in the country and by the policies of France – the chief former colonial power – the genocide that claimed a million lives in Rwanda in 1994 was also a struggle for land and water. Rivalry for resources has often been a factor in genocide, as have national and tribal enmities. So has sheer predatory greed. The genocide committed in the Belgian Congo by agents of King Leopold II when he ruled it as his personal fiefdom between 1885 and 1908 eventually claimed somewhere between eight and ten million people, who perished from murder, exhaustion, starvation, disease and a collapsing birth rate. Though he justified his enterprise in terms of spreading progress and Christianity, Leopold’s goal was not ideological. It was his personal enrichment and that of his business associates.
²

It is not terror of this kind that marks off the twentieth century from earlier times. At its worst, twentieth-century terror was used with the aim of transforming human life. The peculiar quality of twentieth-century terror is not its scale – unprecedented though that was. It is that its goal was to perfect human life – an objective integral to totalitarianism.

There is a school of thought that mistrusts the concept of totalitarianism, and it is true that the picture of it propagated by thinkers after the Second World War was over-simple. Hannah Arendt blurred important differences between Nazism and communism. Communism was a radical version of an ideal of equality in which all humankind could share, while Nazism excluded most of humanity and condemned a section of it to death. The Stalinist regime murdered many more people than the Nazis. Entire peoples such as the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tatars were subject to deportations that were genocidal in their effects, and there were sections of the Gulag from which it was practically impossible to emerge alive. Even so, there were no extermination camps in the former USSR. Arendt also portrayed totalitarian states as impersonal machines in which individual responsibility was practically non-existent.
³
In fact, life in totalitarian regimes was endemic chaos. Terror was an integral part
of the system but it did not happen without personal decisions. People became accomplices in Nazi crimes for the pettiest reasons – in the case of Eichmann, careerism. It would have been better to speak of the banality of the evildoers than of the banality of evil. The crimes they committed were not banal and flowed from beliefs that were integral to the regime in which they occurred.
⁴

The pursuit of Utopia need not end in totalitarianism. So long as it is confined to voluntary communities it tends to be self-limiting –though when combined with apocalyptic beliefs, as in the Jonestown Massacre in which around a thousand people committed mass suicide in Guyana in 1978, the end can be violent. It is when state power is used to remake society that the slide to totalitarianism begins. The fact that the utopian project can only be promoted by dismantling existing social institutions leads to a programme that goes well beyond anything attempted by traditional tyrannies. If totalitarianism does not result it is because the regime is overthrown or breaks down, or else utopian commitment wanes and the system lapses into authoritarianism. When a utopian ideology captures power in a democracy, as happened for a time during the Bush administration, there is a loss of freedom as the power of government is used to mask the failings of the utopian project. Unless a determined attempt is made to reverse the trend, some type of illiberal democracy is the result.

Many criteria have been used to mark off totalitarianism from other kinds of repressive regime. One test is the extent of state control of the whole of society, which is a by-product of the attempt to remake human life. Bolshevism and Nazism were vehicles for such a project, while – despite the fact that the term ‘totalitarian’ first came into use in Italy during the Mussolini era – Italian fascism was not. Nor – despite being at times extremely violent – was the clerical fascism of central and eastern Europe between the two world wars. There are plenty of very nasty regimes that cannot be described as totalitarian. Pre-modern theocracies used fear to enforce religious orthodoxy, but they did not aim to remodel humanity any more than did traditional tyrannies. Leninism and Nazism aimed to achieve such a transformation. Describing these regimes as totalitarian reflects this fact.

In the last pages of his pamphlet ‘Literature and Revolution’, published in 1923, Leon Trotsky gives a glimpse of the transformation in human life he believed was within reach. He writes not about changes in society but an alteration in human nature. The change he anticipates will be in the biology of the human species. In the future, he writes,

Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training … It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest level. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.
⁶

In Trotsky’s view history is the process in which humanity gains control of itself and the world. Just as there are no limits to the growth of human knowledge so there is no limit to human advance in ethics and politics. If there are flaws in human nature science can
correct them. This is the true meaning of perfectibility in radical Enlightenment thought: not so much a condition of static perfection as a vision of unbounded human possibility. Trotsky’s vision in which science is used to perfect humanity expresses a recurrent modern fantasy. The belief that science can free humankind from its natural limitations, perhaps even make it immortal, thrives today in cults such as cryogenics, transhumanism and Extropianism that acknowledge their debts to the Enlightenment.
⁷

From the start the Bolsheviks aimed to create a new type of human being. Unlike the Nazis they did not see this new humanity in racial terms, but like the Nazis they were ready to employ science and pseudo-science in an attempt to achieve their goal. Human nature was to be altered so that ‘socialist man’ could come into being. Such a project was impossible with the scientific knowledge that was available at the time, but the Bolsheviks were ready to use any method, no matter how inhuman, and adopt any theory however dubious that promised to deliver the transformation of which they dreamt. From the early twenties onwards the Soviet regime harassed genuine scientists. Later, as in Nazi Germany, science was perverted for the purposes of terror. By the late thirties human subjects – German and Japanese prisoners of war, soldiers and diplomats, Poles, Koreans and Chinese, political prisoners and ‘nationalists’ of all kinds (including Jews) – were being used in medical experiments in the Lubyanka prison in the centre of Moscow. Despite attempts to resist the process, science became an integral part of the totalitarian state.
⁸

The role of Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976) is well known. Lysenko propagated a version of the Lamarckian theory of evolution, which differed from the Darwinian theory that was accepted by most scientists at the time in claiming that acquired characteristics could be inherited. Lamarck’s theory seemed to open up the possibility that human nature could be progressively improved. Inasmuch as it appeared to extend human power over the natural world, Lamarckism chimed with Marxism, and with Stalin’s support Lysenko was made head of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He was also given free rein in farming, where he claimed to be able to breed new high-yielding strains of wheat. Lysenko’s experiments in agriculture were disastrous, adding to the collapse in food production that
accompanied collectivization. His hare-brained ideas retarded the development of biology in the USSR until well into the 1960s and had an even longer influence in Maoist China.

Less well known is the work of Ilya Ivanov, who in the mid-twenties was charged by Stalin with the task of crossbreeding apes with humans. Stalin was not interested in filling the world with replicas of Aristotle and Goethe. He wanted a new breed of soldier – ‘a new invincible human being’, highly resistant to pain, that needed little food or sleep. Ivanov was a horse-breeder who made his reputation in Tsarist times by pioneering the artificial insemination of racehorses, but acting on Stalin’s instructions he turned his attention to primate research. He travelled to West Africa to conduct trials impregnating chimpanzees and set up a research institute in Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace, where humans were impregnated with ape sperm. A number of experiments were attempted, but unsurprisingly all of them failed. Ivanov was arrested, sentenced to a term of imprisonment that was commuted and then exiled to Kazakhstan, where he died in 1931. An obituary appeared by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, who achieved worldwide fame via a series of experiments applying methods of behavioural conditioning to dogs, praising Ivanov’s life and work.
⁹

Stalin’s requirements for the new human being were coarsely practical. Yet they embody a project of developing a superior type of human being that recurs time and again in Enlightenment thinkers. It is sometimes questioned whether there ever was such a thing as ‘the Enlightenment project’.
¹⁰
Certainly the Enlightenment was a heterogeneous and often contradictory movement. A wide range of beliefs can be found amongst Enlightenment thinkers – atheist and Deist, liberal and anti-liberal, communist and pro-market, egalitarian and racist. Much of the Enlightenment’s history consists of rabid disputes among rival doctrinaires. Yet it cannot be denied that a radical version of Enlightenment thinking came to power with the Bolsheviks, which aimed to alter human life irrevocably.

In Russia there have always been many who looked to Europe to redeem the country from backwardness. When the great Counter-Enlightenment thinker Joseph de Maistre went to live in Russia he declared that he wanted to live among people who had not been
‘scribbled on by philosophers’. To his disappointment he found in St Petersburg an elite that spoke French, revered Voltaire and looked to the
philosophes
for inspiration. Throughout the nineteenth century Russian thinkers continued to look to Europe. Bakunin the anarchist, Plekhanov the orthodox Marxist, Turgenev the Anglophile liberal –all were convinced that Russia’s future lay in merging into the universal civilization they saw emerging in Europe. So were the Bolsheviks who created the Soviet state. When they talked of turning Russia into a modern state, Lenin and Trotsky spoke in a European voice.