(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:

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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)

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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)

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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)