Light On Dark Water

Politics and Anti-Christ (2)

As I said in a sort of disclaimer about
last week’s post, the subject was really too big for the work
of a few hours. Toward the end I touched on some things that need elaboration, so I’m doing that now. The subject is still too big, but I've covered the main elements of what I’d been thinking about it.

I said the ground had been well-prepared for the
anti-Christ. And although one of my main points was that I think the
anti-Christ more likely to be a thing of the left than the
right—using the terms broadly, to include not just political
but social and cultural movements—the right has had at least as
much to do with that preparation.

I’m using “the right”
here as broadly as possible, and in the American context: the mixture
of something that can reasonably be called conservatism with
decidedly un-conservative forces like libertarianism, utilitarianism,
capitalism, consumerism, and militarism. Though many Christians are
part of this “right,” it is not in itself a Christian
thing. In recent years many Christians have looked upon it as a
defense against secular progressivism, not to mention sharing some of
its bad ideas, but the alliance is uneasy and full of contradictions.

I don’t particularly like the
term “consumerism”: its meaning is vague, and it’s
impossible really to say where a sensible concern for material needs
becomes destructive and obsessive grasping for ever more: indoor
plumbing and hot water are hardly necessities in any literal sense,
but no one in the developed nations views them as luxuries. And if
the term does refer to that sort of grasping, it is not a set of
ideas but a vice, and no one is advocating it as a principle.
Moreover, it’s at best a debatable assertion that modern
industrialized societies are any more acquisitive than most in the
past have been. What is different is that the combination of
industrialism and capitalism has presented us with so much more to
acquire, including a sort of feedback system in which the activity of
acquiring results in the production of more and better, or at least
more desirable. things to acquire.

But yet there is a pathology which has
developed in the industrialized world, especially in the United
States, and it has no definite name, so consumerism will serve. It
tends to take the relationship of the buyer to the seller as a
pattern for everything in life. The buyer wants something; the seller
wants to provide it, and is in a practical sense obliged to provide
it if he wants to stay in business. It’s not in the seller’s
interest to think about whether the buyer needs the thing purchased,
or what he intends to do with it, or whether it’s good for him:
in capitalism at the ideological level the question of the intrinsic
worth of what is bought and sold is not to be asked. The buyer’s
desire, and the purchaser’s willingness and ability to satisfy
it, are the only things to be considered. At the extreme, there is no
such thing as “intrinsic worth,” only price. And so we
have a huge and entirely legal pornography industry.

This is the point (or one of them) at
which right and left impulses converge. Or perhaps one should say it
is a common point of origin. At any rate, what we’ve seen
emerging over the past 50 years or so in capitalist societies is a
view of the person as first and foremost a complex of needs and
desires, the satisfaction of which he views as something to which he
has a right, as a customer has a right to expect that the buyer offer
what he wants. Deep and genuinely human needs, desires which in
reality cannot be satisfied in this world, are mixed with mere
wishes, whims, and pleasures by what has been called the imperial
self. As the imperial self sees things, what it wants is also what it
deserves, and has lately become not just what it hopes for but what
it expects, and what the world and circumstance are expected to
provide. Soon there arises the sense that if these are not provided,
someone must be to blame, and something must be done.

I think I’ve mentioned before
that I’m an habitual reader of “Dear Abby.” Just
the other day there was a letter from a widow with four teen-aged
children. She was considering re-marrying, but her children were very
opposed to the idea. Should she or shouldn’t she do it anyway?
Well, I don’t know, and I don’t necessarily say she
shouldn’t, but she intended to go ahead, and I was struck by
her justification for it: “I know I deserve to be happy.”
This, I think, is not something that would have been said fifty years
ago. It bears the stamp of the combination of popular psychology and
new-age spirituality which since 1970 or so has rivaled and
infiltrated Christianity in the U.S. Years ago someone writing in the
National Catholic Register
described it as “America’s evolving religion of
self-worship.”

The right may deplore the rise of this
sensibility, but it cannot be divorced from the sense of
self-indulgence and entitlement produced by capitalism, in which the
desire of the consumer is the supreme value.

Simultaneous with this has been the
expansion of the reach and power of government, especially the
national government. The right has objected to some of this, but
makes a notable exception for the military. In the name of defense it
has supported placing any amount of money and quite a bit of power in
the hands of the military and various security and intelligence
agencies. Over the past ten years, with the appearance of the
scarily-named Department of Homeland Security and various other
anti-terrorism measures, many on the right have begun to have second
thoughts about this. The futile “war on drugs” also has a
great deal to do with it, especially with the militarization of local
police, and I should note that some on the right have been sounding
the alarm about that for many years.

For many years most of the right in
general assumed that all this military power was truly there only to
protect us, and would be used only against our enemies. By the time
they begin to consider that its apparatus might one day be used
against them by a left-wing government, it was far too late to begin
reigning it in.

So. The “prepared ground” I
referred to above involves at least two important developments in
which the right has been as complicit as the left: a growing number
of people who expect to have everything they want as a matter of
entitlement, and an extremely powerful central government. (At least
some on the right can say that they have opposed other threatening
developments: the rise of technology for the direct manipulation of
human life, and the tendency for the Constitution to become a dead
letter, reinterpreted as meaning whatever a majority of the Supreme
Court says it means. And opposition to abortion has been almost
entirely a phenomenon of the right.) What remains is for the
government to pass into the hands of people who believe they know
what’s best for everyone and are willing to use the
government’s power, untethered by Constitution, religion, or
traditional notions about the character of the nation, to give it to
them, whether they want it or not. This last step is one that the
right does not aspire to take. But the left is eager for it. They
assume that most will want what they promise, which is nothing less
than peace, justice, and comfort for all—and that those who
don’t—those who cling to outmoded religions, for
instance—will have to be pushed aside. And it’s when I
come to that thought that I begin to wonder about the anti-Christ.

I feel somewhat embarrassed about even
talking about this subject because it attracts so many nuts and
fanatics, so many that I think of it as being primarily their
territory. But although it has always been a subject of controversy,
consisting as it does of little more than hints, it has been a
constant presence in Christian thinking from the beginning, and we’re
told to watch the signs of the times. I do want to make it clear that
I don’t at all claim to have this thing figured out; I’m
only voicing suspicions and speculations.

Whether or not any of this has anything
to do with the anti-Christ, it is the situation we find ourselves in:
on the brink of social and technological transitions which, if
carried through as their proponents hope, will lead to a condition
for Christians which we can only hope is benign enough to be called
marginalization, and not outright persecution.