My collection

[DaZahroJaam.]

of short articles from the Internet.



Repeating the Original Sin


Even if you’re not religious, you should know your religious mythology.

As many of the great thinkers of the past recognized, the mythological stories offered (or expressed) important archetypes for understanding our present world. For instance, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche interprets human life as a struggle between the Apollonian (rational) and Dionysian (irrational) elements. And psychologists such as Carl Jung have used both pagan and Christian mythology to characterize human behavioral traits.

A particularly relevant one for me is Russian philosopher Vladimir Nesmelov’s (1863-1920) interpretation of the Fall of Man (a.k.a. the Original Sin) in the Hebrew Scriptures.

In his 1905 work The Science of Man (which has not been translated from the Russian into English), Nesmelov offers what Georges Florovsky has called a “brilliant interpretation of the Biblical story of the Fall.” No small compliment given that Florovsky is considered the greatest Eastern Orthodox theologian of the 20th century.

In the following paragraph, Florovsky offers an explanation of Nesmelov’s interpretation of the Fall:

“In striving towards the goal of the ‘cognition of good and evil’ there was not and could not be anything bad. The ‘fall’ consisted in the fact that people desired to attain this goal not through a creative act, through free searching, vital God-serving, but rather by a magical route, mechanically: ‘in essence, they wanted their life and fate to be determined not by themselves, but by outer material causes,’ and with this ‘they lowered themselves to the position of the simple things of the word,’ they ‘subjected their spiritual life to the physical law of mechanical causality, and therefore introduced their spirit into the general chain of worldly things.’ The essence of the ‘fall’ is not in the violation of a law but in superstition, in the conviction that cognition is passive reception and not a creative act.”

In other words, the great evil in the Fall was not that Adam and Eve sought knowledge or salvation in eating the fruit from the tree; it was that they sought it through a “magical route,” through something outside of themselves that required little struggle.

Is not Nesmelov's interpretation of the Fall a fitting description of our own times?!? Many people today seek fulfillment not through their own efforts but through systems, bureaucracies, and legislation into which they can be “plugged.” They desire a government that will feed them, a school system that will educate them, and a medical establishment that will keep them alive. In short, they want “their life and faith to be determined not by themselves, but by outer material causes.” Others, attempting to feed this desire, spend their time attempting to create “systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”

But as the story of the Fall teaches us, there is no shortcut to human fulfillment, and there is no system or formula that will accomplish it for you. There is only one path to becoming good, becoming educated, and becoming more human, and that is the path of, to use the Russian term, podvig—personal “ordeal” or “struggle.”

[Tamim]

This is it!

What was the first mistake, or the first sin, as they religious would like to call it?

Was there even a mistake, or was the "flaw" inherent in the seed of perfection? The moment you depart from perfection, is the seed of imperfection sown? Was the departure from the perfect seeking knowledge of why the perfect is perfect, or the endeavour to be sought instills imperfection in the emissaries, or was consciousness the seed of imperfection? Is consciousness the province of the protogods? Are we the way we are because we are conscious?

[Tamim]

Is not Nesmelov's interpretation of the Fall a fitting description of our own times?!?

Nesmelov's interpretation might be right. But, is this our fault?

Law and the rule of law have taken over every land that is available. Man is no longer able to live on his own accord; he has been forced to live according to the accord of those who rule. He has a hard time understanding the objectives. The only thing he is told is the utopian end of the visionaries. So, he lives in that utopian dream until he sees it manifest in front of his eyes, without even understanding the objectives of those ends. He is simply taking for granted what they are saying is true and is the truth.

It's like poor people who would eat dry bread whilst smelling the fresh burning of skewers of meat in order to fulfill their desires of the "good life."

[DaZahroJaam.]

Nesmelov's interpretation might be right. But, is this our fault?

Law and the rule of law have taken over every land that is available. Man is no longer able to live on his own accord; he has been forced to live according to the accord of those who rule. He has a hard time understanding the objectives. The only thing he is told is the utopian end of the visionaries. So, he lives in that utopian dream until he sees it manifest in front of his eyes, without even understanding the objectives of those ends. He is simply taking for granted what they are saying is true and is the truth.

It's like poor people who would eat dry bread whilst smelling the fresh burning of skewers of meat in order to fulfill their desires of the "good life."

"Man" is not as helpless and innocent as you make him appear. he is not alien to the society he lives in or is not happy about. he was not snatched out of a different society and forcefully brought here. he is partially responsible if not completely for the conditions that rules over him. sometimes as the consequence of having a direct hand at having created those conditions and sometimes by his lack of ambition to take the initiative of bringing in the change he desires for. if you want it bad enough, you will make it happen regardless of the circumstances or the odds against you.

these articles are meant to spark your imagination, not be taken literally. alot of the theories or concepts mentioned are over generalizations that look good on paper, not so much in the real world out there. i read them for the entertainment value of it, not an educational one.

[DaZahroJaam.]

If 'Hell' Exists, What Does It Mean for God?


I don’t like the Christian doctrine of Hell.



I write this with a full awareness that the truth depends absolutely not at all on my personal preferences and sensibilities. What is, is, regardless of what I think or how I feel about it.

There are, of course, different interpretations of Hell. But unquestionably the most common is that Hell is an irrevocable state of eternal conscious punishment for the “unrighteous” and—I want to focus especially on this—an irreversible separation from God.

I think it’s significant that there is so much emphasis on what Hell means for humans, e.g., irreversible separation from God. After all, it stands to reason that, if Hell entails the human’s separation from God, it also entails God’s separation from that human. So, my question:

If there is a Hell, what does it mean for God?

Leaving aside those Christians who embrace double predestination (that God creates some people to be punished in Hell) alongside limited atonement (that Jesus’s sacrifice was not for those people predestined for Hell), a great many Christians believe that God desires that all people be saved (and indeed, by some strange logic even those who embrace double predestination and limited atonement might make this claim). The Roman Catholic Church strongly embraces this position. God’s plan is for the salvation of all.

But if such is the case, and Hell (understood as irreversible separation from God) is real, if even one person ends up in Hell, then God’s desire will go eternally unfulfilled. That is, God’s plan for salvation is not a complete success. And God must bear this burden forever. It seems to me that, in such a view, if Hell is real then God will be eternally dissatisfied on account of this failure.

Of course, some might respond by arguing that God’s satisfaction has nothing to do with humans. This claim strikes me as a rather strange one when it is coupled with claims like “God desires all to be saved” (let alone, “Jesus loves you and died to be with you”). If God isn’t affected at all by who does or does not participate in eternal life, evangelistic efforts are strange. We should tell people, “God desires that everyone, including you, be saved… but you know… what evs.” God is like that ironical person nonchalantly inviting people to the party but, to protect pride, says, “Come or don’t come. It doesn’t matter to me.” That could make for an interesting pamphlet, I suppose: “God gave his only Son to die for your sins so that you can share eternal life with Him. But if you’re not there, no biggie. God won’t even notice.”

The point I’m trying to make is this: If there is a Hell and it is an irreversible separation from God, that separation must be as real for God as it is for the “unrighteous”. God will be the eternally unfilled, the one whose desires are forever unrealized.

In this case, Hell must be as eternal for God as it is for anyone else.

I like to think of this point by appropriating a quip often (and I think mistakenly) attributed to Blaise Pascal: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God.” Reverse that quote: If God desires that all be saved, then there is a creation-shaped whole in the heart of God that only the creation in its totality can fill. If any part, even a single human being, faces eternal separation from God, then God’s heart will be eternally unfulfilled.

Given this claim, I’m left to wonder how, if Hell exists, anything like a “Heaven” of eternal and perfect bliss could. If there is a Hell, there is no “perfect bliss.” There’s only an acceptance of the failed divine intention—a still meaningful but perhaps ultimately lukewarm embrace of “good enough”. A joy eternally mixed with disappointment and sorrow.

Sounds like fun.

Ryan Patrick McLaughlin

[DaZahroJaam.]

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.

I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.

In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two days later they arrived in the small town where I was living at the time. It was a moment of joy. The main square was crowded with people singing and waving flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of that area. A former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the supporters of General Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, and lost a leg during one of the first clashes with Mussolini’s remaining forces. Mimo showed up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in school. Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said: “Citizens, friends. After so many painful sacrifices … here we are. Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.” And that was it. He went back inside. The crowd yelled, the partisans raised their guns and fired festive volleys. We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

A few days later I saw the first American soldiers. They were African Americans. The first Yankee I met was a black man, Joseph, who introduced me to the marvels of **** Tracy and Li’l Abner. His comic books were brightly colored and smelled good.

One of the officers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guest in the villa of a family whose two daughters were my schoolmates. I met him in their garden where some ladies, surrounding Captain Muddy, talked in tentative French. Captain Muddy knew some French, too. My first image of American liberators was thus—after so many palefaces in black shirts—that of a cultivated black man in a yellow-green uniform saying: “Oui, merci beaucoup, Madame, moi aussi j’aime le champagne…” Unfortunately there was no champagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my first piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint and I started chewing all day long. At night I put my wad in a water glass, so it would be fresh for the next day.

In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me a curious sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare was the normal condition for a young Italian. In the following months I discovered that the Resistance was not only a local phenomenon but a European one. I learned new, exciting words like réseau, maquis, armée secrète, Rote Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the first photographs of the Holocaust, thus understanding the meaning before knowing the word. I realized what we were liberated from.

In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.

In my country today there are those who are saying that the myth of the Resistance was a Communist lie. It is true that the Communists exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property, since they played a prime role in it; but I remember partisans with kerchiefs of different colors. Sticking close to the radio, I spent my nights—the windows closed, the blackout making the small space around the set a lone luminous halo—listening to the messages sent by the Voice of London to the partisans. They were cryptic and poetic at the same time (The sun also rises, The roses will bloom) and most of them were “messaggi per la Franchi.” Somebody whispered to me that Franchi was the leader of the most powerful clandestine network in northwestern Italy, a man of legendary courage. Franchi became my hero. Franchi (whose real name was Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged with collaborating in a project for a reactionary coup d’état. Who cares? Sogno still remains the dream hero of my childhood. Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.

In my country today there are some who say that the War of Liberation was a tragic period of division, and that all we need is national reconciliation. The memory of those terrible years should be repressed, refoulée, verdrängt. But Verdrängung causes neurosis. If reconciliation means compassion and respect for all those who fought their own war in good faith, to forgive does not mean to forget. I can even admit that Eichmann sincerely believed in his mission, but I cannot say, “OK, come back and do it again.” We are here to remember what happened and solemnly say that “They” must not do it again.

But who are They?

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Ionesco once said that “only words count and the rest is mere chattering.” Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of underlying feelings. Thus it is worth asking why not only the Resistance but the Second World War was generally defined throughout the world as a struggle against fascism. If you reread Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls you will discover that Robert Jordan identifies his enemies with Fascists, even when he thinks of the Spanish Falangists. And for FDR, “The victory of the American people and their allies will be a victory against fascism and the dead hand of despotism it represents.”

During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called “premature anti-fascists”—meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists. … Why was an expression like fascist pig used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits? Why didn’t they say: Cagoulard pig, Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?

Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes.

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.

Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.

There was only a single Nazi architecture and a single Nazi art. If the Nazi architect was Albert Speer, there was no more room for Mies van der Rohe. Similarly, under Stalin’s rule, if Lamarck was right there was no room for Darwin. In Italy there were certainly fascist architects but close to their pseudo-Coliseums were many new buildings inspired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.

There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line. In Italy there were two important art awards. The Premio Cremona was controlled by a fanatical and uncultivated Fascist, Roberto Farinacci, who encouraged art as propaganda. (I can remember paintings with such titles as Listening by Radio to the Duce’s Speech or States of Mind Created by Fascism.) The Premio Bergamo was sponsored by the cultivated and reasonably tolerant Fascist Giuseppe Bottai, who protected both the concept of art for art’s sake and the many kinds of avant-garde art that had been banned as corrupt and crypto-Communist in Germany.

The national poet was D’Annunzio, a dandy who in Germany or in Russia would have been sent to the firing squad. He was appointed as the bard of the regime because of his nationalism and his cult of heroism—which were in fact abundantly mixed up with influences of French fin de siècle decadence.

Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great respect.

Many of the future partisans and of the future intellectuals of the Communist Party were educated by the GUF, the fascist university students’ association, which was supposed to be the cradle of the new fascist culture. These clubs became a sort of intellectual melting pot where new ideas circulated without any real ideological control. It was not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.

During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.

All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).

The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.

So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. Consider the following sequence:

1 2 3 4

abc bcd cde def

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.

Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples”—“maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed by five or six political parties—among them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the Liberal Party.

Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations.

The message on the front celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of press, of political association. These words, “freedom,” “dictatorship,” “liberty,”—I now read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue of these new words.

We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini:

Sulla spalletta del ponte
Le teste degli impiccati
Nell’acqua della fonte
La bava degli impiccati.

Sul lastrico del mercato
Le unghie dei fucilati
Sull’erba secca del prato
I denti dei fucilati.

Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
La nostra carne non è più d’uomini
Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.

Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti
E sulla terra faremo libertà
Ma l’hanno stretta i pugni dei morti
La giustizia che si farà.

* * *

(On the bridge’s parapet
The heads of the hanged
In the flowing rivulet
The spittle of the hanged.
On the cobbles in the market- places
The fingernails of those lined up and shot
On the dry grass in the open spaces
The broken teeth of those lined up and shot.

Biting the air, biting the stones
Our flesh is no longer human
Biting the air, biting the stones
Our hearts are no longer human.

But we have read into the eyes of the dead
And shall bring freedom on the earth
But clenched tight in the fists of the dead
Lies the justice to be served.)
—poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Copyright © by Umberto Eco

[DaZahroJaam.]

We have this powerful sense that death is a transition, not an end. Why can’t we imagine a world without us?

Natalie Emmons is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University.

What happens to people after they die? Do the deceased live on eternally as spirits? Are loved ones reunited in heaven? Or do personal memories, feelings, thoughts, desires, goals and preferences cease forever, along with brain functioning, at the point of death?

Scholars from theology to biology have attempted to answer these questions by carefully examining different pieces of evidence: they have looked to religious texts, philosophical musings and, more recently, physical anatomy and the biology of death. But for most people in most cultures, the answers to these questions do not require such fierce scrutiny. Even though accepted scientific evidence denies the possibility of immortal life, people the world over seem compelled to think about death as a transition, not an end.

This widespread, uniquely human way of thinking – observed across cultures and religions – has recently caught the attention of cognitive developmental psychologists, including myself. What I have discovered by looking at children’s untaught intuitions is that, rather than intelligence, the part of the self that is most central to our ideas about eternal life is our capacity for feeling and desiring.

This recent discovery is noteworthy in light of findings from paleontology and archeology telling us that belief in eternal life goes back tens of thousands of years. Some of the oldest documented evidence shows that modern humans were intentionally burying their dead with animal bones and shell beads in the caves of ancient Israel 100,000 years ago, long before the dawn of civilisation. Archaeologists interpret ancient ritual burials as showing a concern for the dead that likely extended beyond the physical world.

Notably, when intentional burials were discovered among our Neanderthal cousins, the stereotype of them as brainless brutes incapable of complex symbolic thought was called into question. This is because showing such concern for the dead reveals the value placed on social-group members, as well as the cognitive ability to represent group members even after they have died. Intentional burials show a level of empathy that seems a core part of us: when found in other species, we cannot help but feel connected to them.


The first written evidence of afterlife beliefs appeared around 4,000 years ago in preserved texts from ancient Sumer and Egypt. As writing spread, so did the accumulation of religious texts documenting different cultural beliefs about the fate of individuals following death: the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead outlines funerary practices to ensure a smooth transition to the afterlife; the ancient Indian Bhagavad Gita describes the life-death-rebirth cycle and moral codes that, if followed, can eventually lead to liberation from the cycle. Although we often focus on details about the afterlife that vary by religion, it is the central notion that people continue to exist eternally in some form that unifies religions and suggests something unique and worth studying about the human mind.

Growing up in Arkansas, a heavily religious part of the United States, I was always aware of the prevalence and importance of afterlife beliefs. As a child and teenager, I was regularly exposed to religious rhetoric and practices revolving around being saved, following Jesus, and what that meant for one’s eternal salvation. Nevertheless, I came from a fairly secular household, and that, combined with being the skeptic that I am, meant I never fully bought into religion. Still, I confess that I remain sympathetic to some religious ideas, like the idea that we all have a purpose. As a teenager searching for my life purpose, I became intrigued by why so many people turn to religion for comfort and answers.

Once I began studying psychology at the University of Arkansas, I realised that religious beliefs and practices could be studied from a cognitive perspective, and I began to read the work of scientists looking for the roots of religion in everyday patterns of thought. For instance, Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University in New York, proposed that much of religion could be explained by our natural tendency to attribute human qualities to nonhuman things, a phenomenon known as anthropomorphism. We see faces in the clouds and we might just see Jesus in our toast: the fact that we see anyone at all tells us that the human mind is actively searching for agents, even in the most ambiguous of situations.

When it came to explaining why we possess afterlife beliefs, the prevailing psychological theory of the day was terror-management theory – the notion that a belief in immortality could alleviate psychological distress associated with one’s awareness of impending death. Although this argument has intuitive appeal and can account for why people are so committed to their afterlife beliefs, it couldn’t explain everything.

Research by my undergraduate advisor, the psychologist Jesse Bering, now at the University of Otago in New Zealand, helped to fill in some its gaps. In one study, published in The Journal of Cognition and Culture in 2002, he found that, contrary to what terror-management theory would predict, adults’ fear of death had no relation to their immortality beliefs: even adults claiming to have no fear of death tended to believe that certain aspects of a person, in particular their mental aspects, continued to exist after death.

This meant that there had to be another explanation for people’s belief in eternal existence in the first place. Bering and his colleagues set their sights on what psychologists call ‘intuitive mind-body dualism’ as an alternative. This cognitive tendency to treat the mind as separate from the body had been well-documented by developmental psychologists. To find out whether intuitive mind-body dualism could provide a better explanation for afterlife beliefs, Bering and his co-author David Bjorklund, a psychologist from Florida Atlantic University, conducted a study with children aged three to 12 to explore their intuitions about eternal life. The study deliberately included a cluster of children too young to have been exposed to much religious testimony at all, to see whether even they had an inkling that a part of an individual survives death.

Children reasoned about the mind differently from the body after death: it was only the mind that tended to be viewed as immortal

The experiment involved a puppet show with two personified characters: Brown Mouse and Mr Alligator. After hearing details about Brown Mouse’s life, like that he got lost and was having a very bad day, participants witnessed Brown Mouse being gobbled up and killed by Mr Alligator. Following the show, children were asked which of Brown Mouse’s mental and bodily capacities still worked now that he was dead. The researchers found that even from the youngest ages, children tended to respond that the dead mouse retained its mental faculties, such as the ability to experience sadness and know things, but that it no longer had bodily states, like the need to eat or drink. As the researchers reported in Developmental Psychology in 2004, this was consistent with intuitive mind-body dualism and confirmed that children reasoned about the mind differently from the body after death: it was only the mind that tended to be viewed as immortal. Notably, they found that younger children were more likely than older children to endorse the idea of eternal life.

Yet this last finding was called into question a year later by the psychologist Paul Harris of Harvard University and the researcher Marta Giménez of the National University of Distance Education in Spain. Reporting on a study with seven- to nine-year-olds in The Journal of Cognition and Culture, they found that belief in immortality grew stronger, not weaker, with age. Religious concepts such as ‘heaven’ and ‘the soul’ were prevalent in children’s responses at all ages, indicating that even the youngest children had been impacted by religious ideas.

The notion that children must learn to believe in eternal existence seemed plausible for several reasons. For one, it is hard to know exactly when children are first exposed to religious ideas about the afterlife because such ideas are widely discussed and permeate media directed towards children (think of Casper and Scooby-Doo). Additionally, decades of research have shown that parents are reluctant to talk to their children about the finality of death. Instead, they generally provide what they believe to be more comforting and appropriate explanations, which are often religious in nature.

Thinking back, I remember when I was about eight years old I asked my mother: ‘Where will I go when I die?’ Even though my mother was not affiliated with any religion, she assured me that all children go to heaven because all children are innocent. I have the sense that telling any child that people don’t go anywhere after they die – that they are just dead – would present a challenge for even the most seasoned parent.

Discrepancy between the studies meant that profound questions had yet to be resolved. Most especially: was cultural influence actually a necessary ingredient for eternal life beliefs, or is the sense that we are immortal so powerful and intuitive that it transcends culture and, instead, resides as a permanent fixture in the human brain and mind? This was the research I took on in 2007 as a PhD student at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University in Belfast, where Bering had taken the position as director.

To evaluate whether children possess a deep-rooted, unlearned sense that there is eternal life, I had to find a new experimental approach. My solution was to develop a way of examining children’s intuitions about the prospect of eternal life that avoided the topic of death entirely. After much contemplation and correspondence with Bering, I decided that asking children about the time before biological conception might resolve the issue. This period, known as ‘prelife’, is embraced by religions such as Hinduism that include the concept of reincarnation. However, elaborated religious beliefs about prelife are far from widespread. As such, the concept of prelife nicely represents the antithesis of afterlife without all the cultural baggage that could inform children’s reasoning.

After carefully considering different cultural settings to conduct my research, I decided on Ecuador because it afforded the opportunity to study two distinct cultural groups both lacking religious prelife beliefs: an urban group and a rural indigenous group. The two groups shared a common language – Spanish – but they were different in most other respects. For example, the urban Ecuadorian children came from a city near the capital of Quito and were predominantly of Spanish-Amerindian descent and Catholic. The Catholic faith outright rejects the possibility of existence before conception.

The rural children came from the Shuar indigenous community in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador. The Shuar have largely maintained their traditional way of life as hunter-horticulturalists who live in small groups in the Amazon rainforest. Like most indigenous groups in Ecuador, the community I worked with has been influenced by Christian proselytisation efforts. Their religion is best characterised as a mix of Evangelical Protestantism and traditional beliefs, including witchcraft. However, like urban Ecuadorians, the Shuar do not hold religious beliefs supporting the view that they existed before conception. Finding similarities in intuitive belief systems among such radically different cultures just might tell us something about universal features of the human mind.

Our deep-seated intuitions about what constitutes the core of a person – the capacity for emotions and desires – underlies the belief in eternal life

After I moved to Quito to begin my research, I learned the challenges of this work. These included adjusting to the local cuisines and cultural norms, including the fact that in Ecuador women are typically viewed as having a lower social status than men. I also had to become fluent in Spanish, requiring six months of intensive language classes five days a week. My early days in Ecuador were filled with a range of emotions, from the loneliness of missing my family and friends to awe at being in such a beautiful country.

Yet things became easier with time and I soon began data-collection. Not far from Quito, I had been working at local public schools and developed good relationships with the teachers and directors. After discussing my research goals, we developed a plan for carrying out the study at the schools.

The basic format followed the method used by Bering and Bjorklund. However, to make the task more concrete and easier to understand, children were asked questions about their own capacities during prelife rather than about another individual. Each child was shown three pictures depicting the child and the child’s mother in the past: the first picture depicted the child as a baby, the second depicted the child’s mother while pregnant with the child, and the third depicted the child’s mother before she was pregnant with the child (prelife).

Moving gradually backwards through each time period, children were told what each picture represented. When we got to the final image, we said: ‘This is your mother before she was pregnant with you, that is, before you were in your mom’s belly.’ It was while looking at this image that children answered a series of questions about mental and bodily state functions during prelife. During the course of several weeks, I interviewed more than 200 urban children between the ages of five and 12 years.

After I completed most of the interviews with urban children, I travelled to a remote Shuar village in the Amazon, staying with a family in their plank-wood structured home. I ate with them daily, sharing meals of boiled rice, plantains and yucca, and interacted with other villagers, including, of course, the children. With the help of community members, I was able to interview all of the village children, just under 80 of them, in the right age range.

Although the Shuar children were a bit more reserved than the urban children, they did not appear to have any difficulty understanding the questions. After the interviews were completed, I said my goodbyes and travelled back to Quito to finish a few remaining interviews with the urban children and to prepare for my return to Belfast. After spending nearly a year in Ecuador doing this work, meeting so many amazing people, and creating a life for myself, I found it difficult to leave.

It took a bit of time to readjust to life and social customs in Belfast, but I got down to work and spent the next several months transcribing, translating and coding children’s responses. Finally, the moment of truth arrived. Was it the case that children from these two radically different cultures who have never been exposed to any kind of religious prelife beliefs nevertheless hold the belief that some part of them existed eternally before birth?

Remarkably, the study showed that they did. Namely, children from both cultures had a persistent bias to judge that their emotions and desires – but not their intelligence or bodily states – remained intact during the time before pregnancy. What’s more, the intuition that one’s emotions and desires were eternal endured even as the children grew older, although older children judged they had fewer prelife capacities overall.

These results, which I published with the psychologist Deborah Kelemen of Boston University in Child Development last year, tell us that children struggle to imagine a time when they did not feel or desire. Finding this pattern from early in development and among both indigenous and urban children strongly supports the notion that our deep-seated intuitions about what constitutes the core of a person – the capacity for experiencing emotions and desires – underlies the belief in eternal life. While exposure to religion can elaborate these intuitions, as they certainly do in the case of afterlife beliefs, belief in eternal existence does not depend on being exposed to religious teachings that support these ideas.

In addition to showing that eternalist beliefs are not learned, another significant finding from this work is that children did not think that they had intelligence during the time before conception. This suggests that children are not simply relying on intuitive mind-body dualism to guide their judgments. Rather, from early on, they are sensitive to different aspects of the mind and view only emotionality and desires as the essential core of an individual; these traits, rather than pure intelligence, are what humans intuitively embrace as so elemental that they are thought to precede our existence on Earth.

Whether providing deceased loved ones with proper burial or visiting their gravesites, we feel connected to those who preceded us in death

The intuitive ideas that children hold about emotions and desires as being separate from intelligence have long functioned as cultural tropes. The Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that people have an ‘appetitive soul’ that involves feelings, desires and sensations as well as a ‘rational soul’ that involves reason and intelligence. He acknowledged that while the appetitive soul is present from early on, rationality emerges only later in development. More recently, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud similarly described two competing forces of the unconscious: the ‘id’, which comprises our primal self and urges, and is present from infancy, and the ‘superego’, which reflects our more controlled and rational abilities that derive from being part of a society.

Separating these divergent elements of the mind recurs across history and religion, and appeals to our underlying sense that what makes us human is more than just our intelligence. Indeed, the most fundamental, ever-present part of us is not our rationality but rather our capacity for feeling and desiring. As mightily as we try to separate our feelings from our more rational cognitions, psychologists have long known that this is impossible. So much of our reasoning and decision-making is determined by ‘gut instincts’. Not only are we aware of this, but we expect others to universally share and be guided by these qualities.

These expectations are part of what psychologists call social reasoning, which helps us navigate our social world. Social reasoning is such a robust part of our psychology that we find it nearly impossible to shut it off. It helps to explain why, when a loved one passes away, we are compelled to continue thinking about that person as persisting in some form. Whether by providing our deceased loved ones with a proper burial, visiting their gravesites or leaving offerings for them, we show that we still care about and feel connected to those who have preceded us in death.

While children’s prelife intuitions tell us that believing in eternal life is probably a largely unlearned part of our human psychology, engaging in religious practices can certainly strengthen and elaborate these beliefs. This is most obvious when looking at afterlife beliefs, which are pancultural. My recent work with the anthropologist Anikó Sebestény of the University of Paris in Nanterre shows that Balinese Hindus’ daily ancestor-worship rituals reinforces their belief that the dead have a range of mental capacities. In fact, Balinese Hindus’ afterlife beliefs are much stronger than what has been found in Western, East Asian (Chinese) and traditional small-scale societies. Immersion in religion also enhances prelife beliefs, something I found in a study of Mormons, whose Church teaches an elaborate origin story in which individuals live with the Heavenly Father before they are born on Earth.

Religion is an intricate human phenomenon, and we are just starting to understand how and why it occurs. New findings on eternalist beliefs shed light on the dynamic interaction between basic human psychology and culture in the formation of religious beliefs. It seems that while our intuitions provide the fodder for an underlying belief in eternal life, it is culture that shapes and maintains that belief in myriad forms, giving rise to the diversity of religious cosmologies observed worldwide.