A populist leader stages a peaceful demonstration in the capital city of his country. Hundreds march with him and thousands receive him. The leader espouses the same form of ethics as the managerial elite of good people who govern the country. The only difference is that he says that because the good people think they are right they have become hard-hearted. In certain respects, the elite’s application of these ethics causes harm rather than good. This managerial elite of good people engineer a plebiscite, and the people reject the popular leader in favour of another populist leader, a man of action.
Has this happened in the twenty-first century? No, this is the account given in the in the Bible in the gospels. The elite are the Pharisees. These people are members of the leading council of the nation. They are members of the missionary sect of their religion. They are earnest, competent, and responsible. They hold the highest ethics of the day. Like the most famous of their number, Saul of Tarsus, they lived morally unimpeachable lives.
In the first half of this book the author outlines the features of a totalitarian society and how to recognise one. He intersperses this with interviews he has held with people who lived under Soviet totalitarianism. In this narrative the author isn’t careful enough to make it clear that, while this totalitarianism had the same philosophical origins as the one he calls ‘soft’ that now exists in the West, it is not the same in terms of the immorality of the Soviet version.
The high ethics of the good people who form the managerial elite of the West is more like that of the Pharisees. They are earnest and tenacious but are not brutal and are not going to have people tortured. Saul of Tarsus didn’t harry the followers of the Way because he was bad but because he was good.
The author’s descriptions of the harrowing judicial murders under the Soviet regime sit uneasily in his narrative of the soft totalitarianism because he does not clearly acknowledge that the brutal form of utopia practised by the Soviet totalitarians was never going to recommend itself to the middle classes of the West. A different form had to be devised and has been.
Nor does he acknowledge the part that Christianity itself has played in the development of this ‘soft’ totalitarianism. Everything from the notion of equality, through the feminist demand that men curb their lusts and their power over women, individual freedom, to the birth of science itself, owe their existence to the outworking of Christian theology and practice over the centuries (see in particular, Dominion, by Tom Holland).
There is nothing in any of this that doesn’t have its antecedents in some part of scripture. (e.g. St Paul’s announcement of freedom from the law, and Jesus and the account of the woman caught in adultery).
Even Soviet iconoclasm is that of the Old Testament prophets, and atheism could only have developed in a society thoroughly permeated by Christianity as the final expression of the throwing down of idols. The positivism that the author describes as being the belief that only science embodies the truth could be regarded as that truth that the Holy Spirit is to lead people into. ‘Soft’ totalitarianism is a high ethical totalitarianism.
In short, Christianity is fighting its own legacy, one that is far more effective in works.
This is the deficiency of the first half of this book. The second half is offered by the author as a guide to living in truth. And the deficiency of it is much the same. How do you convince a good person that there is something wrong with what they are doing?
Just as the high ethics of the good people who were the Pharisees, when combined with the belief that they were right, resulted in them becoming hard hearted (note their disdain for the ‘scum outside the law’ is the same as that directed today to those described as the ‘basket of deplorables’), so can the good people of the present day become hard hearted. The maximalising of the freedom of the adult has resulted in the diminution of that of the child, especially the unborn child. It takes a journey on a road to Damascus for a good person who thinks that they are right to realise this.
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More Manichean than Manual.
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