Utopia
Every grand scale Utopian idea has involved a militant desire to put an end to individuality, enterprise independent of the state and free will. The idea of Karl Marx, the founder of Communism when put into practice became a prolonged nightmare. It spread like a virus from Russia to China and Cambodia causing a death count of something around a staggering 160,000,000, excluding war deaths. The new version, Neo-Marxism is an ideology present in our time, partly hidden within the themes that determine Post Modern thought. If you have wondered what kind of society you live in then you need to know the following.
An ideology is a set of of beliefs or principles, especially one on which a political system, party, or organisation is based. Neo Marxism is alive and well today and masquerading under some surprisingly modern labels, embedding itself into the political and legal fabric of most modern democracies. This article is about how visions of the good life can be corrupted. Nazism from the perspective of Hitler and others was a Utopian ideal. To National Socialists it was a great idea! Get rid of all perceived lower forms of human life and fill the world with a fine well bred Aryan super race. In the decades leading up to these great dictatorships there had been great interest taken in the ideas of eugenics: a movement aimed at improving the genetic composition of the human race by sterilising unsuitable human stock, those with disabilities, mental or physical, and any other groups which it was thought threatened the good of society. A very nasty creed. Historically, eugenicists advocated selective breeding to achieve these goals. This was a fertile seedbed for those thinking in terms of a super-race. Thinkers of this period were fully conversant with the sub title of Charles Darwin’s book: On the Origin of Species. It reads: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. How to preserve the favoured races against degradation from the unfavoured races became a major issue in Nazi Germany. A brief glance at history gives an idea as to how solving this problem ended up as an example of one of the worst criminal atrocities ever to have scarred the face of our planet: most notably the extermination of six million Jews. Darwin cannot be altogether exonerated from what came to pass. In his writing he contemplated the extermination of what he called the anthropomorphic apes: by which he meant Negroes and aborigines. This seems incredible to us, but at that time such topics were discussed among intellectuals. Darwin was certainly not a monster, he was strongly opposed to slavery and there is good reason to think his ideas were thoroughly misused. However he undoubtedly made this statement.
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
If this needs any reinforcement then the comments of the world famous evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002) should wrap it up. He admitted: “Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1850, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.”
The German philosopher Nietzsche, commenting on English society over 100 years ago, wrote: “They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality…When one gives up Christian belief, one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality.”
Nietzsche is right, ridding yourself of the Christian God has consequences for society. This includes the decision to remove creation from God’s realm of creativity. God creates out of love and for a purpose; nature as Darwin perceived it was born out of the ground and without any higher purpose. From the roots up rather than as described in the book of Genesis. By God’s word all things were created mature with the inborn capacity to propagate through seeds according to each kind of plant and creature. Every kind of man came from the original couple. This means equal in value. Race, colour, lifestyle have no bearing on the integral God given dignity of humankind. In Genesis mankind was given the mandate to name, nurture and protect. For Darwin, progress was a simple matter of survival and advantage. The fittest did well, the unfit headed in the direction of extinction. By the time Darwin had published his two great books he no longer believed in God or biblical revelation. In fact he wanted to disconnect the Genesis account of creation from the realm of science altogether. There is a strange unity of thinking when God in Christ and the truth of the Bible are overthrown. The inhumanity which arose from that denial can be traced through the histories of politics and science. Darwinism had its perhaps unintended impact on that stain on the twentieth century known as the Holocaust. To doubt his ideas and writings, whether or not they were misapplied, did not influence the thinking of National Socialists is to deny the obvious.
Nazism is the most used example of an extreme right wing, fascist manifestation of all that is worst with humanity. Everybody knows this, but what is far less known are those regimes of the far left which have done similar things but on a greater scale and over a much longer period. Why is one evil so well known and hated while the other is given a free pass? The reason maybe is that Nazism is racist to its core, whereas Communism gave the impression of existing to benefit the oppressed poor with the intention of creating a level playing field. One where elites are brought down and the common people, the proletariat are raised up. So on the face of it Communism has the appearance of moral virtue, but ideologies give rise to dictators of the most malevolent kind, and Stalin in Russia, Pol Pot in Cambodia and Mao Tse Tung in China were the worst mankind have seen so far. What is to come in the future? Is something stirring which should give us cause to fear? Because if the Bible is correct, whatever is coming will be worse and give rise to a ruler more evil and powerful than any who have preceded him.
Over the last few decades we have been fed a type of Utopian ideal: a multi faith, multi-cultural society in which the religious and secular worlds are united. In order to be stable a society needs managing, and the easiest way is through some kind of consensus driven vision. Examples from history show that to build a longstanding political and social system you must first establish control, and to do that with the least resistance people must agree to be led. There is always opposition from those prepared to make a stand and these are usually the first to be eliminated. Those that survive, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, write histories that move and educate one generation, only to be forgotten by the next, which is why so few learn the lessons of history. These tyrannies develop a vision around which a vast intrusive bureaucracy is founded. Government officialdom in totalitarian regimes will employ large numbers of informers and make use of the state police, the law and if necessary the military. The society created is one in which its people are trained to follow the lead. I have no doubt we are being led; where is the question which concerns me.
The grand idea unfolding before us at first glance looks innocent enough. It has a manifesto: create equality for all, do away with conflict and giving offence, and encourage diversity. Give idealism a really good try, something that engages not just the solid centre, the old core of society but also the young. Give them a sense of engagement in a non religious mission. Once the idea has been seeded the results will appear, and indeed they have. But not everyone is happy, I along with many others have come to realise that what is being birthed in our day is intrusive; delving deeply into layers of society that no government in this country has attempted to do on this scale, not since the persecutions of the medieval age. Those attempts led to wars of religion and inquisitions. What is going on today appears to be a vision based on a general consensus, but it is not. No one that I am aware of has ever voted for political correctness, it just appeared in our midst. By the 1980’s and 1990’s it was being critiqued. The 1991 book ‘Illiberal Education’ condemned liberal efforts to advance self-victimisation and multiculturalism through language, affirmative action, and changes to the content of school and university curriculum’s. But nothing it seems can halt its progress. It rose to prominence from the liberal left in politics but sits equally well as part of the centre right. It acts as a politically correct bureaucracy which can remain intact through changes of political regime.
I grew up at a time when Germany was divided, East and West. East Germany was a communist regime whose rule was imposed by a vast bureaucracy of informers and secret police. I cannot help wondering whether or not we are heading in the same direction. I look around and see CCTV, the threats of hate legislation, the constraints imposed on free speech and actions through political correctness and at social media being policed by vicious mobs on keyboards looking to take offence and report the smallest misstep: the informers. Worse is that the CPS ( Crown Prosecution Service ) are involved in this, and avowedly very serious about taking social media offences to court. The College of Policing has said we are committed to embedding equality considerations into everything we do. The Law which was devised to be a menace to criminals and the police force which was created to enforce these laws, is now a menace to the unwary innocent. People who by sheer bad luck, or lack of a politically correct trained response, may say or do something perceived as anti-social. An increasingly politicised police force and associated bureaucracy is a sign which should be carefully monitored by those who favour free speech. This causes me to think something sinister is growing in our midst. In the video below Jordan Peterson speaks of Marxism and the kind of peevish mid levels of officialdom who seem to rule over us today. Political correctness, perhaps due to its pettiness and intrusive nature into everything however mundane has been likened to cultural Marxism. That last word should scare you. It is being presented as a solution to social disorders, it could however be the cause of creating a society few people want to live in, and if that is the case, then you and I and many others need to speak out. You can find your back pressed against a wall before you realise what has happened. Basically you have been outsmarted. I know the feeling; I used to play chess at a modest level, but was good enough to know what happens when faced by a greatly superior opponent. The game proceeds as usual until, with a sudden realisation, you find you have no good moves to make. You are forced into bad moves that will weaken your defensive position. Not moving is not an option, so you make an enforced weak move. When you see all possible options and your freedom of movement closed down, then you know the end is imminent. At that point you resign. That is how things appear to me as regards our society. A superior mind and more powerful force is becoming apparent to me. All over the Western world there are examples of this closure of options, and it is most obviously apparent in the realm of freedom of speech. If you are on the liberal left then this will not be a problem for you; but if you on the right and Christian you will be feeling the pressure to conform to principles you may well abhor.
G.K. Chesterton made this remark.” Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”
We have for decades being removing the fences, those checks and balances, freedoms and boundaries to those freedoms which ensured our society could deal with political and social tensions, and do so without fracturing or unbalancing the whole of society. Individuality was honoured and opposing opinions could be expressed under well understood terms of reasoned debate. This can no longer be assured. I recall a recent Question Time programme during which a white man expressed his view on a subject, the details of which sadly I cannot recall. His tone was moderate, his comments calm and far from extreme. He was immediately shouted down by a Muslim woman who claimed he had no right to speak on the subject, because he was a white man. Why she was never called out for making a racist comment I cannot imagine. Perhaps because every group in this country is safeguarded from racist accusations other than those of us from the indigenous population who are white. It sometime feels like an alien abduction, the old order simply evaporated, and it happened not through democratic vote but through decrees that passed through parliamentary procedures without the knowledge or vote of the huge silent majority. Multiculturalism being just one of them, hate legislation being another. There are no obvious boundaries to these concepts and laws, which have been enacted as if they were self evident truths.
We once had a well established view on our rights and responsibilities, but these have gone and what now exists is a concoction of mixed messages that leaves the political liberal left free to colonise and dictate every area of public and even semi-private conversation. The fences have been torn down and ideologues have been given freedom to occupy the resultant open spaces. We once had a political arena in which each person was guaranteed a safe place to grow in a community. One which did not permit others of a different mindset to trample over your rights and values. Cynicism of our historic faith has caused the Church to lose almost all its influence in the public sphere. We are encouraged to demonstrate shame over our past history rather than appreciate its many benefits to mankind. Good science has been overthrown in one area after another. Just one example: biology and genetics are scarce permitted to raise their voice in the debate about gender identity. That all nature. including human nature, in order to survive has to reproduce via the coming together of male and female in sexual union is a fixed and unalterable law. A law by which everything, from your new born baby to a goldfish exist. The binary nature of sex is the absolute requirement in order to propagate. And yet this truth is howled down as an affront to the extremists on the liberal left. These groups are responsible for influencing government policies, ideologies which reach so deep they are being used to indoctrinate young children. This of course they will accept as readily as a baby accepts breast milk. The reason being because they are hard wired to receive whatever doctrinal drivel is fed to them by those in authority. Truth itself is now just a matter of opinion; another supposed social construct imposed by a privileged white elite patriarchy in order to oppress every victimised minority. These comprise those of colour, all women, the disabled, Muslims, and on to gays and transgenders of every variety. To have a voice that will not be ridiculed and abused you must by anything other than the following: white, male, heterosexual, conservative to any degree, middle class, and finally to add a cream topping to the list, add the further taint of being an evangelical Christian. The fences that once gave position and protection to any of that last list have been uprooted and scattered to the wind.
In my opinion the new wired fences being erected will one day be recognised as being like those erected around the gulags and concentration camps. Way over the top you may think? Perhaps, but history has demonstrated time and again how fast a totalitarian idea can impose itself on a society and continent. Clearing the decks of the old order so as to create a society equal, diverse and free of oppression and criticism of every minority group is a bad idea. The reason being it is a Utopian idea, and as shown above these create vicious totalitarian states, and given the necessary conditions can impose themselves very quickly. In Iran a religious revolution did happen virtually overnight on Feb 1st 1979. A pro-Western country became a hater of Western values under Ayatollah Khomeini.
In Europe there were just fifteen years between the happy birth and tragic death of Anne Frank. She wrote her famous diary while in hiding from the Nazi occupiers. When caught she suffered the terrible consequences of being a Jew. Anne was sentenced to death in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. She was born in 1929, just 11 years after the end of the World War One. The war to end all Wars. Fifteen years measured out her life.
As for Communism under Stalin: he contrived the so called Ukrainian Genocide. This deliberate policy caused the death, largely by starvation, of 10 million people. From Stalin taking power to the completion of this terrifying enterprise took only ten years. His genocidal policies were enacted between 1932 and 1933. We sit safely in our homes thinking all is well while a Neo-Marxist world is forming like a web around us. Truth has gone, freedom of speech is going, language is being perverted for a perverted agenda, good well established science is being eroded and a pseudo science taking its place, our administrators are folding before lobbying groups which in former times would have been ridiculed and dismissed. Our youth are being turned inside out before choices which are sickening and perverse corruptions of commonsense and are to the detriment of their mental and physical welfare. We uphold and cherish a religion within our borders that is constitutionally opposed to everything we say we honour and aim to protect, while undermining the only stable religious foundation known to Western civilisation. Millennia old beliefs about ethics and morality have been largely discarded. We are mad and our governments whether to the right or the left now attempt to shut every mouth opened in protest.
” So justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey.”
Isaiah 59 v 14
Marxism is about power. Without power an ideology cannot be enforced. That power may be exercised with subtlety should not fool anyone. George Orwell made these comments.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
Freedoms can be snuffed out one by one as they were in the famous book Animal Farm. The oppressed farm animals got rid of one cruel human master and replaced him with another far worse: the leader of the pigs. He was called Napoleon and was cleverer than all the rest. He had a plan which was to slowly turn up the heat. The rhetoric changed, as did the propaganda notices around the farm. It was all done with a subtlety unnoticed by the animals. Their leader rose to supreme power gradually by diminishing the freedoms of the lower, more easily conned animals. He did this while taking all the reins of power to himself and to his loyal group: the pigs. What follows is a quote from the book, my point in using it is that something very similar may well be happening to us. Napoleon is Orwell’s caricature of Stalin. Orwell grew up with all the instincts of a socialist but gradually turned away from socialism; the reason being, he began to see that the avowed socialist care for the poor was secondary to their hatred of the rich.
“…out from the door of the farmhouse came a long file of pigs, all walking on their hind legs…out came Napoleon himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him.
He carried a whip in his trotter.
There was a deadly silence. Amazed, terrified, huddling together, the animals watched the long line of pigs march slowly round the yard. It was as though the world had turned upside-down. Then there came a moment when the first shock had worn off and when, in spite of everything, in spite of their terror of the dogs, and of the habit, developed through long years, of never complaining, never criticising, no matter what happened, they might have uttered some word of protest. But just at that moment, as though at a signal, all the sheep burst out into a tremendous bleating of-
“Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better!” ( this rule used to read four legs good two legs bad )
It went on for five minutes without stopping. And by the time the sheep had quieted down, the chance to utter any protest had passed, for the pigs had marched back into the farmhouse.”
There is a reason we hold on to the hope of a Utopia. It is because the vision is locked into the heart and mind and spirit of humankind: put there by our Creator God. He who has gone on before us to prepare our heavenly home. We can know because Jesus told us this is what he would do, and He is faithful and true. He has promised that in His kingdom every tear will be wiped away and all memory of hurt and loss will be taken away. We are offered a paradise without equal, one which will have no ending and in which the fullness of love will be fully realised. God is love and in Him there is no shadow of darkness. Only the Christian faith offers a vision of such life, overflowing, poured into our laps without either measure or end. The cost? Just to believe in Jesus, make him in your life what he is in reality: your Creator, your Lord and your God. Remember this, the world hated him without cause. This He knew, and yet still He came. Died for our sins and rose from death to assure us that His promise is true.
So, Utopian ideas have a long history of failure which will not end until the end of history. At that time Jesus will come to fulfil the promises he has made. But until then we will continue to suffer mankind’s attempts to build Utopian societies. One of the greatest writers of all time demonstrates what can happen when a people fall into the hands of an ideology, and does so from personal experience.
The video below is by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. He has become a global phenomenon with a huge following both on the media and wherever he is invited to speak. I recommend him for many reasons, all of them good, but feel the need to add a word of caution. It occurs to me that fame on the scale that is forming around him cannot fail to have its effect. He is astonishingly self contained, but can any single person resist forever the lure to use their fame in other ways. A trajectory such as he is on will produce opportunities to do more than just influence and educate. The world is a consumer, and feeding its needs in the way Peterson does cannot leave him unaffected. Fame, controversy, politics and religion have led people in every imaginable direction, including to the pit of hell. Peterson speaks of this phenomena. He also speaks of the almost limitless excesses to which we humans are attracted, both for good and ill. He recognises the capacity for evil in the human heart and mind. My question is, where is he headed? I think that an excess of fame and its demands could push even the best of us to a tipping point. When that point arrives, what next step will be taken? Peterson knows this better than most and recommends a book titled Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews. We may think we are normal decent people incapable of committing atrocities, but that is untrue. It just takes a decision, made under pressure which ignores our conscience telling us to continue to do good regardless of the circumstances. Even if it may cost us our life. I feel, maybe incorrectly, that Jordan Peterson may soon face a similar challenge. If he does I pray he will take the right path, because he seems to me a thoroughly decent man.
If you want to see the Post Modern Marxist agenda being spoken against by Peterson, while simultaneously being protested against by students complaining about Peterson’s speech, then please watch the following video. You might also ask yourself this question? If the people protesting against hate speech are from the same protest groups who are having their agendas implemented by the state and the law all over the globe, then God help us. Because these people are tyrannical. They do not engage in conversation or reasoned debate with opponents, instead they shout and scream and threaten and are imposing their agendas at every level. Peterson having had a brief and unpleasant close encounter with these students, described them as narcissists. You might like a definition of the word. A narcissist has a grandiose sense of self-importance, and exaggerates achievements and talents. They believe themselves special and unique and can only be understood by other special or high-status people or institutions. They think they deserve excessive admiration. They unreasonably expects special, favourable treatment or compliance. They exploit and take advantage of others to achieve personal ends. They lack empathy for the feelings and needs of others, they are envious and have arrogant behaviour and attitudes. All the attributes of a thoroughly spoilt child. If this is true then what are the great silent, largely cowered majority to do? Exactly what a good parent would do to such a child. Remove all privileges from them, ignore the screaming, do nothing for them until they calm down, apologise and accept the rules governing good behaviour. The sign of hope are the students who attended the lecture and Q&A session. Their questions were really good and their politeness a joy to behold. The contrast between students of the right and centre and those of the left was perhaps the biggest lesson I learned, good though Peterson was. There is hope, but those that can must speak out while free speech is still an option.
