Whenever I find myself wondering all over again why people so readily embrace fascism, as soon as it is served up to them, I only have to reflect for a moment before I recall that the major religions—at least in their most literal and least intellectualized forms—mostly still preach a species of cosmic fascism.
The God of the orthodox theologies is a kind of secret policeman, who spends his days in his heavenly kingdom sniffing out hints of heresy or dissent. Those who have the temerity to question his diktats and ukases, he banishes to an eternity in his fiery gulag beneath the crust. He is a dictator, but infinitely more vindictive than any earthly one, because his sentences are for all time, and irrevocable, whereas a merely planetary autocrat can kill only the body, not the soul. The God of Orthodoxy is a super-Stalin, an ultra-Chiang Kai-shek; worse than these mortal butchers because he burns people into ash not once, but eternally.
This is maybe not the version of religion that people would recognize as their own, if you confronted them with it. And yet, most (at least in this country) still officially believe in a creed that preaches some version of hellfire. The best that can be said, therefore, is that most seem not to think too much about it. They assume that there is limited salvation, but they don't think to themselves what this means for those left outside the circle of light, wailing in the outer darkness. Or, they simply don't take it all very seriously. They believe it, but they don't take it to heart.
Should it be any surprise to us, then, that they respond in the same way to political fascism, when it appears in their country? If you ask them if they want to live in an autocracy, if they want to persecute migrants or asylum-seekers or dissidents or religious minorities, most of them would say no. They'd even be offended that you asked; just as they'd be offended if you asked them if they support condemning nonbelievers to an eternity of fiery torment. "You make me sound like a bad person," they say; and they reject the allegation. But then, they feel no need to tell you exactly what they do want, instead. Or, if they say they don't agree with all this, they don't seem able to tell you why then they are going along with it and seem to support it.
The whole subject has only served to make them uncomfortable. They cabin it away. "I don't really follow politics," they say. "I'm not super political." "I just like some of the things Trump says, not all of it." They just don't think about it all that much, to be honest. They don't take it seriously. They don't take it to heart.
And so fascism in politics finds its way forward clear and unobstructed, just as it does in religion!
Since so many people have been presented their whole lives with a vision of God's judgment that resembles the petty mind of a supreme tyrant; since so many people have managed throughout the centuries to simply not think about what it means to believe in an eternity of torment for people who disagree with their religious views; why should it surprise us at all that they manage to not think about the fate of political dissidents in an autocracy? That they manage to shuffle into an era of dictatorship without even noticing it? That they could see freedom and rights and dignity stripped from thousands and not even care? They have been taught their whole lives that this is how the Supreme Power of the universe operates against his foes. Why should the state not resemble Him?
The real mystery, then, is not why so many people sleepwalk into fascism. The mystery is why so many more people do not support fascism much sooner. Why isn't everyone fascist already? The miracle is that liberalism took root anyplace in an Earth that had been raised in such creeds; the fact that fascism comes along every once in a while to try to rip it up again should come as no surprise.
The mystery is that in a society raised for centuries on ideologies of eternal punishment and infinite vindictiveness, that people managed to conceive a notion of mercy and relenting; that people might have concluded that there were moral rights that are inalienable and absolute, belonging even to heretics and dissenters; that amidst the endless terrors of a universe populated by visions of an unkind God, people dared to conceive a notion of human compassion. God "does not love," says a character in Archibald MacLeish's J.B. "But we do," rejoins his wife; "that's the wonder."
That people become fascists and despots and sadists in this world is no wonder, then. What's a wonder is that we ever manage to be anything else. The miracle is not in heaven or the cosmos. It is in man; in humankind; the goodness that we conceived in spite of all the odds; in spite, indeed of all our prior training.
"Beaten, corrupted, dying
In his own blood lying,"
wrote the poet Stevie Smith, speaking of the condition of "man." Yet, nevertheless, this tortured creature:
"heaves up an eye above
Cries, Love, love.
It is his virtue needs explaining,
Not his failing.
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