We’re Living in the Dream World of George W. Bush

One of the chief frustrations I have repeatedly encountered of late, both on the Internet and in direct conversations, is that a multitude of people believe that George W. Bush is a conservative, that they are conservatives because they support his policies, and that anyone who criticizes Bush’s agenda must be "a leftist." Nothing could be further from the truth. George Bush has embarked on a radical program designed, in essence, to stop history in its tracks and reach a final resolution to geopolitics. (However, there have been recent indications that even Bush may be ready to face reality in Iraq.) On recently re-reading Eric Voegelin’s book, The New Science of Politics, I gained a far deeper appreciation of the nature of Bush’s crusade, which I’d like to share with you here. (Voegelin, by the way, was a member of the renowned "Mises circle" in Vienna, a group that also included F.A. Hayek, Alfred Schütz, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, Felix Kaufman, and Gottfried Haberler.)

Immanentizing the Eschaton

I suspect many people know of Voegelin by a single phrase: "immanentizing the eschaton." What Voegelin meant by this was that revolutionary social reformers typically have mistaken a spiritual symbol, the eschaton – the image of "the end of time" – for a depiction of something that will be realized in earthly history. Voegelin termed all such revolutionaries as "Gnostics."

For a traditional Christian like St. Augustine, the story of the "final days" as described in Revelation was a symbol of the supernatural perfection available to Man through God’s grace. He dismissed the belief that Revelation described coming historical events as a ridiculous fable. Christian maturity entailed accepting the fallen condition of Man as a fact of life, not indulging in childish fantasies that some impending revolution is going to fix everything and release all of the tension required by a life of faith.

But not everyone is capable of enduring that tension, tempting them to adopt the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. Instead of enduring the difficult life of the spirit in a fallen world, it is easier to dream that a fix for that fallen state will occur during one’s own life, perhaps even in the immediate future. Current events are interpreted so as to fit the poetical imagery of Revelation, something that is always possible, as demonstrated by the abundance of past circumstances that were proclaimed to offer unambiguous signs that the end was near. If salvation is understood not as a spiritual but as an earthly matter, then the need for an arduous struggle through the dark nights of one’s own soul can be denied. The Gnostic’s discomfort with his own imperfect state of being is alleviated by projecting the source of his unease outward, so that evil lives not in his own soul, but incarnated by "papists," "heathens," "reactionaries," "capitalists," "whim worshippers," or, perhaps, "Islamofascists."

The Gnostic temptation has been a major presence in European America from its inception. Notably, one of the paradigmatic cases of a Gnostic movement that Voegelin used to illustrate his thesis was the English Puritans. They conceived the City of God, which Augustine had employed as a spiritual symbol, as an earthly goal that they would realize, not through the grace of God, but through their own efforts. The image of "the shining city on the hill" made famous by Ronald Reagan’s speech, arises from the Puritan project of building the City of God in New England.

However, Voegelin argues, this relief from spiritual tension comes at a high price: "The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline."

Neoconservatives as Gnostics

Voegelin’s phrase "immanentizing the eschaton" was fairly popular with conservatives for a time, to the extent that members of the conservative youth group Young Americans for Freedom frequently wore buttons proclaiming "Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton." Those days are gone, but even now a neoconservative like Jonah Goldberg will toss the phrase out on occasion, but apparently without suspecting that it applies to his own political faction. Nevertheless, if one genuinely understands what Voegelin means by Gnosticism, it is clear that there is nothing conservative about "Neoconservatism"; that it is instead the currently most virulent strain of Gnosticism. (I am not the first writer to note the Gnostic character of Neoconservatism at LewRockwell.com, but I hope my analysis can offer a somewhat different perspective on the subject.)

Early Gnostics, Voegelin contends, had not moved so far from the more traditional Christian view of salvation that they imagined creating heaven on earth merely required transforming or abolishing one or more particular social institution. However, as Gnosticism’s connection to its Christian roots weakens, and "with increasing theoretical illiteracy, it may assume the form of various social idealisms, such as the abolition of war, of unequal distribution of property, of fear and want." And so today we find Neoconservatives exhorting Americans to make the "War on Terror" the focus of their lives, from now until we totally eradicate terrorism from the world. Even more grandiose in its aims, a recent book by two prominent neocons and Bush advisers, David Frum and Richard Perle, promises An End to Evil itself!

The Gnostic spirit has great difficulty accepting that the impermanence characterizing all temporal existence is inherent to its nature. Therefore, he seeks to freeze "history into an everlasting final realm on this earth." It would be hard to find a more severe case of this malady than the one we can diagnose from the title of a book by the neoconservative writer Francis Fukuyama, proclaiming the arrival of The End of History and the Last Man.

Many people are flabbergasted by the depths of deception that various members of the Bush administration were willing to plumb in their effort to sell the Iraq War to America. But Voegelin explains that "Gnostic propaganda is political action" rather than an attempt to state the truth. After all, if you are one of the prophets of the imminent redemption of this world, then you are surely justified in tricking people into cooperating in their own salvation, aren’t you? And you mustn’t flinch from launching whichever wars will help realize your vision, since "the Gnostic revolutionary… interprets the coming of the realm as an event that requires his military co-operation."

The cast of characters appearing in the Gnostic’s dream world can be divided, neatly and without remainder, into the adherents of the party of light and the demonic members of the party of darkness. The latter grouping, however much its various sub-groups might appear to work at cross-purposes to the unenlightened, actually represents a united force opposing the fulfillment of mankind’s destiny. In Voegelin’s words, "the Antichristian powers… will ‘combine against [the Saints] universally.’" The paranoid certitude that everyone who is not "with us" is joined in a single, hostile army arrayed "against us" finds expression in George Bush’s imaginary "Axis of Evil," a purported alliance uniting two habitual enemies, Iraq and Iran, and the non-Islamic, communist country of North Korea. Our foes in our present conflict, far from being limited to a small, fanatical band of Moslem terrorists, in fact include anyone, anywhere in the world, who does not fully embrace every goal and tactic of American foreign policy. Ann Coulter notoriously declared all of Islam to be the real enemy of the US, proposing that "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." (As I recall it, the original version also promoted "raping their women," but Coulter seems to have excised that bit. There’s nothing like a good rape to get you ready for Baptism, is there?) To overcome such a monstrous enemy, "the Saints… will have to combine ‘against the Antichristian powers of the world."

A number of neoconservative commentators have suggested that the "original sin" that set Moslems against our benevolent plans for the entire world was their failure to embrace "modernity." Seen in the light of Voegelin’s theory, neocons are indicting Islam for not having signed on to the most current set of Gnostic projects being energetically pursued by the West, such as the commercialization of all cultural practices and the wholesale replacement of traditional sexual morality with a rationally constructed, "new and improved" version. To some extent those critics of Islam are on the mark, as foreseen by Voegelin in asking what sort of explosion might follow from Islam’s "prolonged exposure to Gnostic devastation and repression." (My pointing out the role of this factor in generating tension between Moslem and western culture should not be read to imply my endorsement of every feature of traditional Moslem society, or that I deny the need for reform in important Moslem institutions, especially in regards to the status of women. But genuine, effective social reforms must be rooted in the historical experience and worldview of the society to be reformed. If an alien culture tries to impose its views about what some people ought to be doing to "shape up," the effort is likely both to produce results quite at odds with the outsiders’ intentions, and to create resentment of the outsiders on the part of the people being reprimanded. Nor am I suggesting that a moral tradition concerning an activity such as sex should be, or even can be, held immutable and forever beyond the reach of practical revision and rational critique. But to think that a society can simply abandon its existing traditions concerning sex and devise a new code of sexual conduct from scratch is to commit the opposite error.)

Since the Gnostic is, like the Blues Brothers, "on a mission from God," like Jake and Elwood he is not constrained by the moral rules that apply to the non-elect. Voegelin says, "Types of action which in the real world would be considered as morally insane because of the real effects which they have will be considered moral in the dream world because they intended an entirely different effect." The ongoing train wreck that Iraqi society has become was the predictable and often predicted result of the US-British invasion of the country. But the promoters of the disaster accept no guilt for their role in bringing about the present, horrible situation, because in their dream world they intended a quite different outcome. "No one," they protest, "could have foreseen the actual course of events," while ignoring the fact that many people did foresee it, at least in its broad outlines.

Today, at last, the force of reality is beginning to compel them to acknowledge that their grand adventure in Iraq has gone terribly astray. But many neocons are still not willing to concede that therefore launching the war was a mistake. A popular dodge is to ask their critics, "So, you’d prefer it if Hussein was still in power, still oppressing the Iraqi people?"

Well, if I could have magically ended Hussein’s tyranny in a way that wouldn’t have made life even worse for those I sought to help, I would have done so. Unfortunately, as the past three years demonstrate, it was quite possible to depose him in a way that makes the average Iraqi nostalgic for "the good old days" of Saddam’s reign of despicable but limited violence. Traditional western morality rejects the notion that an actor’s "good intentions" alone are enough to absolve him from blame for the consequences of his actions, insisting that he also has an obligation to prudently consider the probable effects of the options he is contemplating. But in the Gnostic dream world, it is morally irrelevant if the "beneficiaries" of your assistance wind up significantly and predictably in worse shape than they would have been had you simply left them alone. What matters is that in your dream everything was scheduled to come out fine, and you are righteous solely based on your admirable intentions.

An advisor to Bush famously explained the Gnostic dream world to Ron Suskind as follows:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

In that dream world, the Bush administration can "create its own reality," excusing it from having to pay any attention to the complex and messy nature of the actual situation perceived by "the reality-based community."

Once it could no longer be denied that the Iraq War was not proceeding exactly according to script, what was the typical neocon response? Voegelin described it several decades before the neocons deployed it: "The gap between intended and real effect will be imputed not to the Gnostic immorality of ignoring the structure of reality but to the immorality of some other person or society that does not behave as it should according to the dream conception of cause and effect." Over time, it became painfully obvious that the goal of fabricating a democratic Iraq per American blueprints, a showroom model to sell other Arab countries on the benefits of following the US "nation-state assembly manual," instead had ripped the previous structure to bits and then simply crashed about amidst the wreckage. Facing the ruin of their scheme, the Neoconservatives placed the blame not on the insanity of that scheme itself, but on the Iraqi people, who, it turned out, were just too boorish to appreciate that all of the death and destruction that the invaders had wrought was for their own good.

Anyone who has ventured intrepidly onto a neocon blog and tried to elicit some acknowledgement of what are now, to most people, these rather obvious truths about the Iraq War, can testify to the maddening veil of willful miscomprehension shielding the faithful from such heretical falsehoods. Once again, Voegelin explains that phenomenon in advance: "The interpretation of moral insanity as morality, and of the virtues of sophia and prudentia as immorality, is a confusion difficult to unravel. And the task is not facilitated by the readiness of the dreamers to stigmatize the attempt at critical clarification as an immoral enterprise."

Thus, we see neoconservatives demand that Americans must be religious in their devotion to "moral clarity," which for the neocons means never yielding to the temptation to engage in moral deliberation and cultivating a fanatical willingness to employ utterly barbaric means to bring about their utopia. Anyone who suggests that we might want to pause and try to critically understand the world of Islam, should we insist on trying to re-arrange it, is vilified as a morally degenerate terrorist sympathizer. For the Gnostic, "the critical exploration of cause and effect in history is prohibited; and consequently the rational co-ordination of means and ends in politics is impossible."

Before I conclude, I think it is worth stating that if you find that the above critique of Gnosticism largely on target, that does not imply that you must endorse its polar opposite, and recommend utter passivity towards threats posed by our genuine enemies. But those enemies ought to be evaluated soberly and realistically, placed in their proper perspective as one problem we face among many, instead of being fantastically transformed into the ultimate incarnation of evil, the heralds of the final, Apocalyptic battle in history, a fantasy devised to gratify the juvenile craving present in every ego to believe that its existence has some unique, cosmic significance setting it apart from the rest of humanity. Our actions should be aimed at successfully dealing with the particular enemies really at hand, in the least costly way possible, and not seduced by the hope that a nihilistic release can be achieved by burning clean the entire earth in the flames of one’s revolutionary ardor.

So how can the rest of us, caught up in the vortex created by this latest Gnostic crusade, hope to ride out the storm? I’m afraid that I don’t have any easy answers to offer. Perhaps we may take some heart from Voegelin’s belief that "Gnostic politics… is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare." Unfortunately, he continues, "no one… can predict what nightmares of violence it will take to break the dream…"