Millenarians, Totalitarians, Utopians

...Had they refrained from their foolish actions the millennium might have been reached a few years earlier, since industrialization in Russia could then have been 71 advanced more rapidly...

...The millenarian expectation thus functions as a means of detachment from one's fellows, as a defense mechanism against the impulse to pity, against involvement with the human present...

...His is not the hubris of claiming to know the future, but only the humble awareness tha his conduct in the here and now is a determinant of the future...

...There remains no standard of moral discrimination, only a tense expectation together with a devaluation of the moral significance of present acts...

...Here again we note interesting parallels between certain modern forms of millenarianism and doctrines of "total sexual liberation" in which the common denominator is a nihilistic striving for total release from the bonds of the human condition...

...the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary...

...Revolutionary chiliastic movements thrive best, writes Cohn where history is imagined as having an inherent purpose which is preordained to be realized here on earth in a single, final consummation...

...hence there is no place for pity.** The striving toward the Liberation of Mankind leads to the death of emotion...

...One cannot feel a sense of brotherhood with reptiles...

...There is a sense in which all human strivings must remain only partly gratified: such is the human condition, the tragedy and irony of history...

...The medieval chiliasts were wont to compare their enemies to swine, frogs, toads, vipers—precisely the same terminology used by the Stalinists in Russia and abroad...

...And yet, as in the case of Hofstadter's book, that assent must remain partial, because his thesis is grounded in as selective a gathering of evidence as is the view which it strives to undermine...

...it restrains the exuberance of the political imagination...

...His study, he says, is concerned only with those movements which had messianic features...

...I still remember the young Communist who a few years ago told me in dead earnest: "One doesn't give a dime to a beggar, one gives him the Daily Worker...

...68 No historian can be reproached for choosing his topic of investigation in terms of his own values...

...Writes the 17th century "Ranter" Laurence Clarkson "till acted that so-called sin, thou art not delivered from the power of sin...

...they may regard men not so much as "things" as "sub-men" (Untermenschen) . A "sub-man" is worse than a thing...

...one is forcibly reminded of Stalinism when one reads in an early sixteenth century document, the Book of Hundred Chapters, that after all the clerics, usurers and lawyers have been hanged and burned alive, a regime of perfect virtue will be set up and that in this regime people will be encouraged to inform on their neighbors or, even better, to confess of their own accord so that perfect virtue may thus be forever maintained...

...Callousness and insensitivity in interpersonal relations went together with the view that "the revolution is just around the corner...

...How deplorable that they tried to unmask the "ruse of reason...

...Finally, is our author not just as one-sided as his predecessors when he attempts to discredit, for example, the writings of the Calabrian abhot Joachim of Flores (1145-1202) , who originated the theory of the Three Ages (the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son—about to be completed—and the Age of the Spirit—which is to come soon) by linking it to the paranoid phantasies that he discusses later in the book as well as to the Third Reich...

...The Utopian radical does not strive for "total liberation...

...What Richard Hofstadter recently did for Populism and the Progressive movement in his The Age of Reform, Norman Cohn, an English historian, has done in his The Pursuit of the Millennium* for the chiliastic and messianic movements which arose in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century and which played so crucial a part in the peasant and artisan revolts in Germany, France, Bohemia and the Lowlands...

...these obsessions with inerrable prophecies...

...How could the Hungarians fail to see that "total abundance in the future" justifies every privation in the present...

...In fact it is pleasing to God, or to History, to be among the exterminators...

...The perfectibility of man is an unending enterprise...

...While secular intellectuals of the past focused attention on the offi cial and institutionalized cruelties of Church and State, the new anti ideological ideologists specialize in pointing to the cruelty and sickness of those who opposed the official powers...

...Much of what Professor Cohn has to say commands assent...

...For such enterprises men need a maximum of rational awareness, and they need therefore to reject the secularized theodicies of the modern millenarians...

...In the effort to attain a Future that Sings it becomes permissible to destroy any present obstacle...

...Like many medicines, Mr...

...For an understanding of secularized messianism J. L. Talmeri's The Origin of Totalitarian Democracy, Boston, 1954, is essential...

...Such an approach may not have much glamour...

...Such situations encourage the emergence of collective phantasies which are closely related to those paranoid phantasies which the clinician observes in individual cases: * The Pursuit of the Millennium, by Norman Cohn...

...But whereas the orthodox mystic emerged from this experience—like a patient from a successful psychoanalysis—as a more integrated personality with a widened range of sympathy, the adept of the Free Spirit introjected the gigantic parental images in their most domineering, aggressive and wanton aspects and emerged as a nihilistic megalomaniac...

...Yet who would dare to say that the past struggles of mankind which failed to attain "total goals" were therefore in vain...

...Such Utopian thinking does not rely on the automatic working of the Laws of History, Logos or God...

...In as far as they make us aware of the extent to which a sense of identification with protest move ments of the past has often clouded the vision of radicals and liberals, men like Hofstadter and Cohn perform a vital task...

...How dared those Hungarians raise obstacles to the fated course of History...

...As it happens, however, there were large scale heretical movements, to mention only the Waldensi and the Cathars, which were quite devoid of chiliastic features...

...But there is a crucial difference between Utopian thinking as here understood and millenarian thinking...

...When reading the totalitarians or totalitarian liberals of our time, one is impressed by the fact that their concentration on the Kingdom Which Is To Come makes them inattentive to the horrors and inhumanity of those who will presumably bring it...

...But when Mr...

...But such "de-ideol ogical" debunking of the heroes of the radical past is also in itself an ideological enterprise...

...II "Chiliastically minded movements are ruthless not simply in order to safeguard or further specific interests but also—and above all— in an effort to clear the way for the Millennium...

...He tells us that in Joachim's interpretation "Christ stands no longer at the center of history and the Christian revelation is of only limited and temporary validity...

...Cohn mentions, but Vico, Condorcet, Fichte, Hegel, the whole German idealistic tradition in fact, partake to some extent of Joachim's vision...

...He is able to show convincingly that a great many features that mark the medieval movements of revolt also distinguish modern totalitarian doctrines...

...III Secularized millenarianism has informed most important parts of the modern radical tradition...

...If the goal was everything, then the means were too easily regarded as nothing...

...Not only Comte and Marx, whom Mr...

...and so it may be in social life...

...72...

...Radicals have never had a monopoly on madness...

...Cohn's bias...

...After having concentrated on the book's pitfalls, let me now turn to some reflections about the present which have been stimulated by what, I believe, is the valuable part of this study...

...There can be no doubt that Professor Cohn's impressive scholarship has succeeded in drawing together a tremendous amount of evidence to document his thesis...

...witness the medieval witch hunts, the Inquisition, the dancing manias of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries...

...once a major catastrophe strikes the lower and more vulnerable strata of the population, the way to revolutionary chiliasm is opened...

...it often took quietistic, humanitarian and pacifist forms...

...Generations of intellectuals since the days of the Enlightenment have written about those features of official church life which produced mass hysteria and mass paranoia among the orthodox believers...

...and that is why Joachim of Flores stands in a place of honor for all those who trace the gradual development of a secular philosophy of history 69 from the beginning of Joachite prophecy...

...the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence...

...On the contrary, the construction of pictures or models of what the good society could be like should today be among the main concerns of radicals...

...In both cases the result is to dehumanize man, to degrade him—and thus to make him ready for the executioner...

...Cohn chooses to focus on the psychological afflictions of those who revolted against Church domination...

...In science the progressive increase in our knowledge implies at the same time the increase of the not-yet-known...

...From the twelfth century on we meet the heretical sects of the Free Spirits who stress, as Professor Cohn informs us, that for the "subtle in spirit" sexual intercourse can under no circumstance be objectionable, that in fact total promiscuity is most pleasing to God...

...Cohn states here and there that not all of those who revolted against the medieval domination of Church and Manor were messianic paranoiacs...

...In fact there remains only an asymptotic reaching for an ideal, the "full realization" of which might always recede into the future just as we seem to approach it...

...One cannot but feel that those who talked of the millennium in which men would achieve a "painless gratification of all needs" were frequently led to an oblique justification of iniquities in the present— for example, Russia's action in Hungary...

...They are but things or, to vary the metaphor, noxious vermin that need to be exterminated...

...These obiter dicta, unsupported by any evidence concerning the alleged psychological health of the orthodox mystic, are indicative of Mr...

...Cohn calls attention...

...The Utopian constructs images of the good society, he believes that this society can be attained, but his commitment does not depend on knowing beforehand that it will in fact ever be attained...

...but to swallow it whole would be fatal...

...It is impossible to read his description of various anti-Semitic outbursts from the time of the crusades without drawing parallels to the horrors of the recent past...

...67 The megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted yet assured of ultimate triumph...

...Total power in the millennium is in subtle ways connected with total potency...

...See also The New American Right, edited by Daniel Bell (reviewed in DISSENT, Winter 1956) and The Torment of Secrecy, by Edward A. Shils (reviewed in DISSENT, Fall 1956...

...The Bohemian Adamites, a sect which participated in the Bohemian uprising of the Taborites but were later exterminated by Zizka, the leader of the uprising, declared that the chaste were unworthy of entering their messianic heaven and that salvation lay only in a return to Adam's nakedness and total promiscuity...

...How is one to attack the inhuman features of present society, if not by keeping before one's eyes images of a more humane society...

...Cohn distorts the picture...

...The final dislocation of the medieval world which ushered in the Age of the Reformation led, as Erich Fromm and others have shown, to the emergence of Calvinism, in many respects a most cruel and inhuman creed, but one devoid of those chiliastic features to which Mr...

...One may note that modern millenarians go one step further than their predecessors...

...and by the great totalitarian movements of our day...

...He seems to reason that those who remained at peace with the Church were integrated and normal, whereas those that stood without, the heretics, were deviant and hence sick...

...One might read much of the work of Berthold Brecht as an example...

...Often, of course, this leads only to private and rather innocuous attemps to reach solutions to life's problems through copulation, but at times in the past, and this gives food for thought, such private phantasies were acted out on the public scene...

...Cohn asserts that those among the mystics who stayed within the Church were normal and "well ad justed personalities" while the heretics tended to be paranoiacs, he dis torts the evidence to fit his ideological needs...

...To the extent that it prevailed, it desensitized the radical...

...it limits expectations...

...If there is no "final solution," there only remains the never ending quest for a better solution...

...Precisely...

...In these days of recoil from radical involvement it is hardly surprising that reinterpretations of just those phases of Western history in which the radical impulse was strongest have become a fashion...

...The creed is inhuman precisely to the extent that identification with glorious generations as yet to be born steels the True Believer against sympathy with his fellow sufferers...

...Dislocations in the social structure, the uprooting of masses of men from their accustomed moorings, may have been a necessary condition for the emergence of chiliastic movements, but it was plainly not a sufficient condition since some of the rebellious movements had few chiliastic features—vide the English Peasant Revolt of the 14th century...

...A misunderstood or misinterpreted Freud, more commonly perhaps a Reichian phantasy, may underlie such strivings, but the roots of this tendency go deeper...

...Hofstadter challenged the current liberal and radical interpretations of American Populism by focusing attention on the paranoid, distorted and irrational anti-Semitic elements in the motivations of its leaders and followers...

...If every move in this alienated world is an alienated move, then everything goes...

...He seeks to release man from the human condition, but in the pursuit of this goal he is all too ready to go on a rampage of destructive and nihilistic violence...

...There is much in man and in history that is fortuitous and capricious, human actions have but too often unanticipated consequences, and yet there is much that reasonable men can do in concert to make this a better world...

...Essential Books...

...It is such a view of history, at once teleological and cataclysmic, that has been presupposed and invoked alike by the medieval movements...

...70 The modern millenarian is in search of "a final solution...

...When the existing structure of society is undermined, the members of that society lose their capacity for facing crises...

...At the harvest-time one must pluck the weeds out of God's vineyard" writes Thomas Muenzer, and more than 4 centuries later Mao Tse-tung echoes him in almost the same words...

...He strives for total liberation from those social and existential conditions which have in the past hampered and degraded man...

...Indeed those who oppose the millennium can be denied human status altogether, for they are seen only as obstacles...

...This mysticism, he asserts, differs in crucial ways from orthodox mysticism: From the standpoint of depth-psychology it could be said that orthodox mystic and heretical adept both started their psychic venture by a profound introversion, in the course of which they lived through as adults a reactivation of the distorting phantasies of infancy...

...Professor Cohn's bias is perhaps best illustrated by his discussion of the mystical anarchism of the "Free Spirits...

...wittingly or not such authors discredit the idea of revolt by reference to the sickness of some of its practitioners...

...a thing is neutral, you feel no contempt for it...

...Cohn's book contains ingredients that can be most salutary...

...By stressing Joachim's influence in but one direction, Mr...

...Sometimes there follows an even more remarkable type of reasoning: since the world is corrupt and it is impossible to resist its corruption short of the millennium, one might as well relax and enjoy it .. . I have been arguing against millenarianism in radical politics, but not arguing against Utopias...

...The urge to violence is connected with the urge to violate...

...The Adamites claimed not only to return to the state of innocence of Adam and Eve before the Fall, they also regarded themselves as avenging angels wielding the sword until the unclean had been cut down...

...Yet the non-specialized reader will only too easily conclude that there exists some kind of one-to-one relation between revolt and madness...

...Cohn now contends that those very movements which Karl Kautsky discussed under the title of Precursors of Socialism should really be considered precursors of modern totalitarianism...

...How is one to criticize the shortcomings of the present if not by reference to a working model of the future...

...Furthermore, not all chiliasm was militant...

...These images serve as a guide to present conduct and as an incentive for action...

...Subject to the qualifications made above, this is an observation that may serve us well for understanding certain political tendencies in the modern world.* There exists indeed a correlation between modern secularized chiliastic beliefs and political cruelty...