Nietzsche was no friend of fascists.

Earlier this month, the UCL student union passed a decision to ban the Nietzsche Club, who pitched themselves as a study group for hard-to-far-right students (as many of them as there may be) interested in Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Julius Evola. As someone who is interested in Nietzsche and Heidegger I couldn't help but take some interest in the story. There are two things that came to mind initially:

1. Regardless of how repugnant the society was it did not pose a threat of physical violence to the student body. The ban will not be effective as the Club could just be set up again under another name and there would have to be another ban and so on. This is the impotence of censorship. Censors always fail as they can only act in retrospect and by then there is no use in censorship. If it has already been said then it has little effect in imposing a restriction. The obvious exception is when speech is used to call for violence and that is a criminal matter. If we want to live in a society in which it is unlikely for such instances to arise then we want greater change than banning lists.
2. It is a travesty that Nietzsche is still, in this century, associated with the Third Reich, as if he were some kind of proto-Nazi philosopher. You only have to judge the man by his deeds, not least his written in its proper context and understanding. Nietzsche distanced himself from his own sister due to her anti-Semitism and marriage to a German proto-fascist. Likewise, Nietzsche broke off his friendship with Wagner because of his growing inclination towards Christianity, nationalism and anti-Jewish racism. He had nothing but contempt, scorn and mockery for anti-Semites and regarded himself as a man without a nation. If only Nietzsche had lived into old age and remained sane to the end we would no doubt have record of his disgust at the early rise of Fascism.

There is a third point to be made alongside these. Both the philosopher Heidegger and the composer Wagner were involved in German nationalism. In Heidegger's case, we're talking about the moves he made to try and become the philosopher of the Third Reich in a bid to oppose the technological logic of modern society. His affinity for National Socialism was cultural and intellectual. With Wagner, we have the case of a man who lived long before the rise of Hitler, but he was a nationalist and anti-Semite in his later years. He did not hide these facts. In both instances, we can praise the work of these men without condoning or excusing their prejudices. This is a point worth making, as we would be mistaken if we assumed we would have to discard Nietzsche even if the opposite were the case.

Myra Breckenridge on Circumcision.

In Myra Breckenridge (1968) Gore Vidal writes in the first person as ‘Woman Triumphant’. I've already written about the possibility of crossover between the author and the protagonist in this example. Some parts of the book naturally stood out to me. As I've written about the issue of genital cutting in the past, the twenty-second chapter certainly stood out to me. The brief chapter is entirely a comment on circumcision after the narrator attends an orgy.

Just as I expected, seventy-two per cent of the male students are circumcised. At Clem's party I had been reminded of the promiscuous way in which American doctors circumcise males in childhood, a practice I highly disapprove of, agreeing with that publisher who is forever advertising in the New York Times Book Review a work which proves that circumcision is necessary for only a very few men. For the rest, it constitutes, in the advertiser's phrase, “a rape of the penis.” Until the Forties, only the upper or educated classes were circumcised in America. The real people were spared this humiliation. But during the affluent postwar years the operation became standard procedure, making money for doctors as well as allowing the American mother to mutilate her son in order that he might never forget her early power over him. Today only the poor Boston Irish, the Midwestern Poles and the Appalachian Southerners can be counted upon to be complete.

Myron never forgave Gertrude for her circumcision of him. In fact, he once denounced her in my presence for it. She defended herself by saying that the doctor had recommended it on hygienic grounds - which of course does not hold water since most foreskins are easily manipulated and kept clean. What is truly sinister is the fact that with the foreskin's removal, up to fifty per cent of sensation in the glans penis is reduced... a condition no doubt as pleasing to the puritan American mother as it is to her co-conspirator, the puritan Jewish doctor who delights in being able to mutilate the goyim in the same vivid way that his religion (and mother!) mutilated him.

I once had the subject out with Dr. Montag, who granted me every single point and yet, finally, turned dentist and confessed, “Whenever I hear the word ‘smegma’, I become physically ill.” I am sure Moses is roasting in hell, along with Jesus, Saint Paul, and Gertrude Percy Breckenridge.[1]

We might read Myra as a partial satire of Vidal himself – the consummate gentleman-bitch. If we do so we’re faced with certain questions and in particular: what should we take away from this about the author? Some would describe Vidal as ‘anti-Semitic’ here. The section holds within it vulgar imagery, but that can be said of the entire novel. It’s a ‘masterpiece in bad taste’ after all. Breckenridge damns Moses to the same ranks as Jesus and St. Paul, as well as the “puritan American mother”. The grounds of the attacks are pro-hedonist. Vidal was an exponent of promiscuity, not of commitment and monogamy. He disapproved of marriage equality on this same basis.

We find this is the case, as he goes on to write “I prefer the penis intact... in order that it be raped not by impersonal survey but by me!”[2] This is tongue-in-cheek comedy. It’s a self-caricature. Going by the extent Vidal parodies his own fears of overpopulation in the book this is not an implausible reading. He was promiscuous, experimented with drugs in the Sixties, enjoyed cinema, and claimed the advertisement was the only American art form. These things (and more) are all present in the book and taken to their own extremities.

This isn’t the only extract in the book worthy of notation. At one point, Myra remarks on Dr Montag, one of the Jewish characters of the novel, in the context of their disagreement over sexuality and womanhood.

Being Jewish as well as neo-Freudian, he is not able to divest himself entirely of the Law of Moses. For the Jew, the family is everything; if it had not been, that religion which they so cherish (but happily do not practice) would have long since ended and with it their baleful sense of identity. As a result, the Jew finds literally demoralizing the normal human sexual drive toward promiscuity. Also, the Old Testament injunction not to look upon the father's nakedness is the core to a puritanism which finds unbearble the thought that the make in himself might possess an intrinsic attractiveness, either aesthetically or sensually. In fact, they hate the male body and ritually tear the penis in order to remind the man so damaged that his sex is unlovely. It is, all in all, a religion even more dreadful than Christianity.[3]

So what should we make of the crude stereotyping and vulgar language around Jews? If we exclude the possibility that Gore Vidal was anti-Semitic (and I do, as I have already written) then we can only understand these passages in a handful of ways. If Myra is a partial parody of Vidal then it seems that this writing is at the extreme end of exaggeration of what Vidal actually thinks. Alternatively, Myra isn’t based on Vidal and in which case it can’t be said that these views represent those of the novelist. To paraphrase Houellebecq, when asked if his protagonists are really him, “Perhaps the mistake is to think of me at all.” 

As tempting as the latter option would be, I think I’ve already clarified why I think it is too convenient an option. That isn’t to say that I accept the accusations of anti-Semitism levelled against Vidal in the Eighties. In a way we shouldn’t be too surprised by Gore Vidal’s views on religion. He was a man of the Enlightenment and he didn’t feel the need to hold his tongue. It’s not as if Vidal was known for resorting to gentle euphemisms. In his response to charges of prejudice, Gore Vidal was blunt “I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster to befall the human race.”[4] He had plenty of time to romanticise polytheism and pre-Christian religions and Eastern philosophies.

So Vidal took the side of Athens over Jerusalem. Does this convict him of any offence? Only of leaving religionists offended. His politics were a snob cocktail of libertarian strains, where populism and leftism crossover. He admired the tradition of William Jennings Bryan, while he took charge against its descendants in the Creationist Right. The aggressive secularism in Vidal’s politics has to be understood in its American context. He lived through the revival of political Christianity in the Fifties and the rise of the ‘Moral Majority’ in the Eighties. Ever the provocateur, Vidal would take a swipe at anyone to prove his points.

---

[1] Vidal, G; Myra Breckenridge & Myron (Abacus | 1968, 1972) pg.103-104

[2] Ibid.

[3] Vidal, G; Myra Breckenridge (Abacus | 1968, 1972) pg.78-79

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwc_M0KN2vU

How a Communist turned Graham Greene Catholic.

A drinking partner and compatriot of Graham Greene was the journalist Claud Cockburn. The same Claud Cockburn fought in Spain alongside rival George Orwell and operated The Week in the 1930s leading the charge against 'appeasement' of Nazi Germany. He took aim at the pro-Nazi elements within the Conservative establishment and dubbed them "the Cliveden set" as they gathered around Nancy Astor at her stately home in Buckinghamshire. By then Cockburn and Greene had been friends for many years as they had met as students in the incestuous halls of Oxford where the spawn of the elite rubbed shoulder with future radicals. It was at Oxford that the young Greene first decided to convert to Catholicism (in order to marry). This would later become a defining issue for future biographers. Claud Cockburn regarded Green’s conversion in a more mundane light:

“I knew him before Vivien. Quite early on, Graham said to me that he had fallen madly in love with this girl, but she wouldn’t go to bed with him unless he married her. So I said, ‘Well, there are lots of other girls in the world, but still if that’s the way you feel, well go ahead and marry her. What difference does it make?’ And then he came back and said (this went on over quite a number of weeks), ‘The trouble is that she won’t marry me unless I become a Catholic.’ I said, ‘Why not? I you’re really so obsessed with this girl, you’ve got to get it out of your system.’ He was rather shocked, because he said, ‘You of all people, a noted atheist.’ I said, ‘Yes, because you’re the one that’s superstitious, because I don’t think it matters. If you worry about becoming a Catholic, it means you take it seriously, and you think there is something there.’ I said, ‘Go right ahead – take instruction or whatever balderdash they want you to go through if you need this for your fuck, go ahead and do it, and as we both know the whole thing is a bloody nonsense. It’s like Central Africa – some witch doctor says you must do this before you can lay the girl.’ And then to my amazement the whole thing suddenly took off and became serious and he became a Catholic convert. So I felt perhaps I’d done the wrong thing.”

Claud Cockburn was later listed as the 84th most dangerous Communist on earth by Joe McCarthy. What an honour! Though by then Cockburn had left the Communist Party and moved to the Irish Republic where he wrote under an array of pseudonyms to support his growing family. When Cockburn came to adapt his book Beat the Devil (1951) for the silver screen - and a damn fine film it would become! - he was faced with the trouble of his politics. In the end Truman Capote was given the credit for the project. Meanwhile, Graham Greene had grown bored with Vivien, moved onto prostitutes, kept up the drinking pace, then married another woman, and then another.

A Land with a People.

Click on Image

In a discussion over the events in Gaza recently I had the following exchange with a friend of mine about the fundamentals of the conflict. Note that the questioner is coming from a Christian perspective on the conflict, while I'm coming from an atheistic perspective. The primary issue is raised is the claim to the land and the specifics of the Zionist project.

Q: I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. And I will enter into judgment with them there, on behalf of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations and have divided up MY land..."Does this land belong to Israel or Palestine? Well actually, according to bible scripture, God calls it His land, but the prophetic word from Joel, written 850BC is that it will in fact be divided.

 
"I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms." (Ezekiel 37:22)

 
Joshua (great name Joshua, means 'God is salvation' or 'God rescues') rightly calls this a 'miserable situation', it has a long history, Ezekiel was written sometime around 590BC, about 650 years before Israel and Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and the people scattered to 'the four corners of the earth'. We may ask the question was Israel returned there in 1948, fully in 1967 simply to fulfill prophecy, was it just a self-fulfilling prophecy or is there some authenticity to the prophecy. Will Jerusalem be divided? Certainly according to bible scripture it is not intended to be and if it is, will those responsible incur God's judgement?

A: Well, I don't think Jerusalem should be divided, that's merely the beginning of another problem. I take the position that is enshrined in international law: Jerusalem should be an international city, it's just too precious to belong to any state or religion. This is the same framework that would settle the conflict in a roughly 80:20 split of what used to be Palestine into Israel and Palestine. I won't comment on the scripture as I'm not a theologian, nor am I a religious man (in spite of my cool name! lol) and I think it's fair to say that the Bible is open to a lot of debate and theorisation - just look at the use of the recurring use of Gog and Magog by fundamentalists, from Reagan to Bush II, to explain foreign policy decisions.

We know from Israeli archaeology that there is considerable evidence that there has been a Jewish presence in Palestine for a very long time, this can be determined simply by the lack of pig bones in ancient communities. So there is a legitimate Jewish claim to live there. That's the case even if you don't buy the Bible, which most Israeli archaeologists don't by the way. There is also evidence that suggests the Palestinians are the descendents of the Jews who were living there thousands of years ago. Probably they were converted through conquest. This is all interesting, and somewhat ironic, but it doesn't provide any answer to the crisis in itself. The question of what the Zionist mission ought to be in its finer details is left completely open still. That could be part of the reason why there is opposition to peace from inside Israel, it remains unclear where the expansion should end - if 80% is too little how about 90% and so on? There are those who dream of a Greater Israel, and that will mean a perpetual war with the Arabs.

Example, should Israel be a Jewish state or a state for Jews? That's an important distinction which has never been fully clarified in Zionist circles. This matters because it relates to what kind of law there should be in Israel, as well as the demographic composition - if it's a state for Jews then it doesn't have to be a majority Jewish state for instance. By comparison, Pakistan was founded as a state for Muslims modeled on India but in the 1980s the dictatorship began to change this to the notion of Pakistan as an Islamic state (and even began to compare itself to Israel funnily enough). It impacts the internal politics of the nation-state, Pakistan has been dominated by authoritarian governments sometimes more irreligious at times. I think that Israel could've been founded in a better way than it has been, though in its foundation it was just like every other nation-state (e.g. born out of violence/theft). But we can't turn back time. The strongest claim of the Jews is perhaps based on their need for a safe haven. Again, that doesn't really deal with the details of what Israel should look like.

The important point to stress is that Israel (however defined) can exist with an independent and free Palestine as it's neighbour. To paraphrase Abba Eban, a free Palestine would pose the same threat to the existence of Israel as Luxembourg currently poses to Russia.

Socialism as a secular faith.

In God is not Great Christopher Hitchens writes “When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered.” He goes onto note that there is no supernatural or absolutist element in dialectical materialism, but it did have a ‘messianic’ aspect in its faith in the coming revolution. There are also martyrs and saints in the figures of Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin. With Stalinism there was the papacy complete with heresy hunts, miracles and inquisitions. He draws parallels between the leftist reverence for Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg and the elevation of particular figures in Christianity to the status of sainthood. No doubt Karl Marx is the founding Jewish prophet of this faith, while Luxemburg is a mixture of Cassandra and Jeremiah in Hitch’s mind.It has been acknowledged by Hitch’s former IS comrade Terry Eagleton that Karl Marx may have been an atheist there are Judaic themes in secular form to be found in his thinking.

This includes notions of justice, emancipation, the reign of peace and plenty, the day of reckoning, history as a narrative of liberation, the redemption not just of the individual but of a whole dispossessed people. You could draw a parallel between Marx’s avoidance of sketching out utopia of the future and the Jewish aversion to any speculation of the World to Come. Hitchens favours this side of the bearded dialectician because this is where we find the hostility to fetishism, idols and illusions. Again, all of this could be seen as Judaic. Yet it is the case that the tenets of dialectical materialism do not consistent of any set of claims about the cosmos. So the religious may subscribe to Marxist materialism, the curious blend of German philosophy, French politics and English economics. In fact Karl Marx once told his wife Jenny that if she wants to “satisfy” her metaphysical needs she’d do better to seek out the Jewish prophets than to attend the Secular Society. Perhaps if Marx is the founding prophet then Leninism serves as a Pauline ‘betrayal’ necessary for the establishment of a universal church.

Today it is no coincidence that the liberals have become increasingly obsessed with secularisation while the radicals have taken up theology as a pursuit. It’s nothing new. Nietzsche’s enmity for socialism came down to his view of the project as a radicalised kind of Christianity. There is an element of truth in this charge:just as the Christians live for the otherworldly the socialists seek to build, out of this world, the other world. It is no wonder then that the New Atheists fall back on liberal shibboleths as a presupposed Gnosticism – especially the notion of history as progress, to which any obstacle must be circumvented. It might be because liberalism really believes in nothing except that the individual should be free to believe that the last obstacle is totalitarian belief itself. The first step towards totalitarianism, in the liberal mind, is any attempt to reach beyond the confines of capitalist society. So for many it would seem the only political project, of any worth, is the fight to rid the world of faith.

In this sense the New Atheists are post-political in their anti-theism. It is apt then that Christopher Hitchens took on this projectafter he lost his ‘faith’ in socialism. Despite Hitch’s tirades against God, conveniently framed to provide a defence of the ‘War on Terror’, he admitted that if he could he would not rid the world of religious conviction. Apparently there is no third camp between Athens and Jerusalem, rationality in one corner and religiosity in another. Yet in his newfound ‘free-thinking’ Hitchens severed any responsible commitments he had before to take on the convictions needed to support the invasion of Iraq.The liberal tradition (which certainly includes the New Atheists) does not have the monopoly over democracy, civil liberties, human rights and notions of equality. The same goes for its claim to science, reason and unbelief. The Marxist project was originally pitched as scientific in its critique of capitalism, which went as far as to take the church as a superstructural institution that serves to legitimatise the economic system.

There is no contradiction here. The New Atheists may adhere to a strenuous conception of secularity, but it was the Catholic tradition which spawned secularism as an irreligious realm where there is space for religious conviction, influence and practice. John Gray traces absolutism and atheism to the advent of monotheism, in its fundamental claim to universal truth. Unbelief is just an extension of the Abrahamic passion for truth.Gray stresses that “Only with Christianity did the belief take root that one way of life could be lived by everyone.” Before monotheism it was taken for granted that the rejection of one god merely meant the embrace of another god and another cult. It was the first time that there was strictly one way to live and believe, which had to be taken above all others. He claims that “If the world had remained polytheist, it could not have produced communism or ‘global democratic capitalism’.”For polytheism is too ‘delicate’ for modern thinking Gray concludes “If we live in a world without gods, we have Christianity to thank for it.”

The Gentleman Bitch.

Requiescat in Pace.

The soixante-huitard turned chickenhawk Christopher Hitchens once said that he had a kind of "penis envy" for Gore Vidal. Indeed the young contrarian had based himself on Gore Vidal and the two met in 1970 at the New Statesman. Eventually the slender Hitchens became the dauphin to Vidal's contrarianism and would later become one of many porky opponents to be outlived by Gore. Over the years the gadfly had stung William F Buckley as a "crypto-Nazi" only to apologise on the grounds that the term "crypto-Fascist" is much more accurate. Truman Capote felt the sting when Vidal described him as a "filthy animal that has found its way into the house". Later Capote's passing prompted the infamous remark "That was a good career move." Then there was Norman Mailer whose positions on women's rights prompted Gore to criticise his old friend. It was at a Manhattan dinner party in 1977 that Mailer threw a whiskey in Gore Vidal's face before heat-butting and punching him. To this violence Vidal quipped "And, once again, words fail Norman Mailer."

On that note Gore Vidal once described himself as a 'gentleman bitch' in his role as a provocateur of historians and the political class. He showed no mercy in his scathing attacks against deserving enemies and reached into areas as seemingly varied as politics, religion, history and literature. As a polymath he tried his hand at novels first then plays and scripts for film as the commentariat turned against him over The City and the Pillar. The mainstream media, with The New York Times in the lead, waged a campaign against Gore Vidal refusing to review his work. Out of this relatively dark time in Vidal worked on Ben-Hur (uncredited) as well as Visit to a Small Planet and a political drama set on a fictional campaign trail The Best Man. History is not without irony as Ronald Reagan auditioned to play the lead in the film adaptation of The Best Man. Reagan was turned down on the grounds that he did not appear presidential. Eventually Vidalian fiction was rehabilitated in the eye of the Establishment, but he remained a controversial figure.

The essay was his preferred form, placing him in the line of great litterateurs, for it was the form which he felt he had mastered and he hoped he would be remembered as an essayist above all else. There is a degree of self-awareness, detachment and cool about Vidal that led Italo Calvino to conclude that he has no unconscious. In his own words Gore stated "I am exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water." He was as much a fixture of American life, its discourse, culture and narratives even in the capacity of opposition which he practiced. Even though Gore was a prominent commentator he remained out of the field for the most part. He could have been a politician with his family background and connections. Indeed he came close to becoming a player in the 1960s. After the disillusionment he experienced Vidal contented himself with the role of gadfly and cynic. In the words of Alexander Cockburn "Cynicism is the birth of opposition."

The contrarian tradition to which Gore Vidal belongs may properly be traced back to the Cynics of Ancient Greece. The taunting and mockery of all power by Diogenes, whether it be the waggling of a plucked rooster at Plato or telling Alexander the Great to get out of the light. It is the case that Gore was more than content to stand on the side-lines, for the most part, and attack both the Democrats and the Republicans. He deemed both parties to be just two right-wings of the Property Party. Vidal wasn't a perfect cynic, for he knew how to appeal to power at times and did so in support of George McGovern, then Jesse Jackson and later Barack Obama. But Gore Vidal remained much more of a cynic than his former dauphin Christopher Hitchens. He hadn't voted since 1964, when he did so to support Lyndon B Johnson, which severs him from the Democrats at the ballot box. Vidal explored the third party option in the form of the People's Party, a left-wing populist party looking to build on New Deal liberalism.

As a controversial figure, right up until the end, he outlived many old opponents and even the unseated dauphin only for Hitch to slander him a conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite. This is over Gore's provocative comments on the "War on Terrorism" waged by the Bush administration, let alone his long-time criticisms of neoconservatives and Israel. He first courted controversy as a proponent of gay rights, though he was strictly anti-essentialist in his insistence that there are only homosexual acts and no homosexual persons. Similarly Vidal maintained that the issue of race was a real one, even if just politically. He never bought into the language of liberal multiculturalism and political correctness. The reasoning here is that the issue is not cultural, the US is a case of a monoculture with plenty of room for hatred along racial lines. This was the same man who once rubbed shoulders with the Kennedys, Tennessee Williams and Paul Newman (he didn't mind name-dropping either). The irony of all this is that the ideal Vidalian narrator is a person who sees as much as possible, but is seen the least himself.

See also:
Proposals to Improve the US Government
Vidal looks back on his remarkable life
The Profile of a Writer
Documentary on Vidal
Hot Talk with Gore Vidal 
The Education of Gore Vidal 

Power, Faith & Unbelief.

"Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race." – Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal agreed with George Bernard Shaw that the subjects which interest civilised men can be narrowed down to politics and religion. Not just in Creation but in his 'inventions' Kalki and Messiah. The religious instinct in man fascinated Vidal, especially as he saw the late 20th Century as a period of the deterioration of the traditional religions. Meanwhile he had preempted the rise of the death cult in America in his 1954 novel Messiah. In the bourgeois fetish for the cultures of the past Vidal found great hopes for our civilisation in the Stoics of Rome and the Confucians of China. The great mistake of humanity, in his view, was monotheism in its claim to universal truth and he held Christianity in particular disdain. In his novel Julian the focus is the Roman Emperor Julian who sets out to undo the union of Christian dogma and state-power in order to revert back to the plurality of Paganism. This exemplifies the liberal side of Gore Vidal, his loyalty to secular humanism.

It is typical of Gore Vidal in his 'reflections' to blend history, religion and politics in fiction for the reason that the court historians are so awful that the novel is now the only medium that can redeem history. In Creation the protagonist is a member of the Zoroastrian faith, perhaps the earliest monotheism, and witnesses the murder of Zoroaster. Cyrus is on the side of monotheism in the book, as well as the established powers in Persia and holds the masses in contempt. This is in contrast to Vidal's own political views, which could be taken as a hybrid leftism. In the book the political leaders of the time, particularly Thucydides and Pericles, are juxtaposed against one another as conservatives and democrats. The chaos of China is presented as a land which may conceive of the totalitarian impulse, while at the same time Confucian politics are received in a very positive light. Cyrus Spitama identifies himself with the conservatism of Thucydides as well as of Confucian hierarchical order and practical moral values.

In Creation Gore Vidal takes us on a tour of the ancient world, from Persia to Cathay and back, with Cyrus Spitama as our guide. Spitama is embedded in the ruling class of the Persian Empire, whilst also being descendent of Zoroaster and a follower of the Wise Lord consequently. Many of the major philosophical and religious ideas of the time are explored in the book, in Ancient Greece Cyrus encounters many philosophers and delivers his tale to his nephew Democritus. It was appropriate given the affinity Vidal had with the atomist principles espoused by Lucretius and Democritus. The vision was of a cosmos as a kind of soup of atoms bumping up against one another. The book culminates in the exposition of the atomist philosophy by Democritus. In another sense the relationship between Cyrus Spitama and Democritus mirrors the relationship between Gore Vidal and his grandfather Thomas Gore. Specifically the passing of the elder's wisdom to the young man.

The focus on the Persian Empire rails against the Western vanity, the tendency to see itself as a great fusion of Hellenism and Judeo-Christian values. Creation begins with Cyrus leaving the Odeon as Herodotus goes over his own version of history. The portrayal of Ancient Greece is just as one of many great powers rather than the centre of the world. The warring forces of China in the days of Confucius as well as the rival kingdoms of India feature prominently. The relativity of Greek glory to the lessons of the Buddha and Confucius, Mahavira and Lao Tzu. It's more than a novel, it is a work of comparative religion and philosophy crafted to persuade the reader not to be so arrogant in his modern assumptions. This is not to say that Vidal isn't writing from a position beyond commitment. Vidal was a lifelong atheist and opponent of monotheism. If anything he wants to enlighten us of the possibilities beyond the desert God of Abraham. The novel was timed well with the rise of Reaganism and the emergence of the Christian Right.


For Gore Vidal the threat of the Christian Right is equivalent to the threat of Le Pen in France, in other words it is fascistic and anti-democratic in nature. The accumulation of obscene piles of wealth in a few private hands matches the concentration of power in American society. This creates a systemic need to block democracy at every turn. Vidal would remind us that the political system in the United States is not at all democratic. First of all, there is only one political party with two right-wings - the Democrats and the Republicans - which is the party of property. Chomsky has spoken in these terms too, except he called it the business party. There is a structural need within capitalism which can be differentiated in terms of a base and a superstructure. The economic base depends upon the ideological superstructure for its legitimacy. The relation of the base to the superstructure is not just dependency, there is a tension between the pluralism and relativism of the market against the sociality of institutions and tradition.


The management of this tension can found in the revival of political religion in the new world. The Christian Right was born out of the attempts made throughout the 70s by conservatives to regroup after the losses in the last decade. The Nixon administration left America disillusioned with politics, only for great hopes to arise with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. The failures of the Carter administration to achieve significant change cleared the way for Reagan in 1980. Nowadays it is almost compulsory for American Presidents to be Christian: No unbelievers allowed! But it wasn't always this way. Crucially it was Carter who had made religion an issue in his openness about the faith to which he subscribed. This could be taken as a long-time result of the Christian revival of the 1950s. Really it was the 1960s which convinced many Christians that the shared fabric of society - its traditions, institutions and moral values - was about to be destroyed in its entirety. This is less a story of a Christian Right than the story of the New Right.

The debacles of the early 60s such as the Cuban crisis and the assassination of JFK the Establishment was shaken to its foundations. Everywhere there seemed to be collapse as the issues of civil rights, racism and imperialism became the moral battleground in the American body politic. The obvious opponent for Gore Vidal was William F Buckley, l'enfant terrible of American conservatism, and they would cross swords repeatedly in debates at party conventions in the late 60s. Around this time Paul Weyrich infiltrated the student Left and was astonished by the level of planning and tactics that he witnessed. He realised that the conservatives were wrong in their assumption that the people would support them because they were right about the issues. In actuality what was needed was a movement capable of rolling back the achievements of the Left. It would be a counter to the counter-culture. The key was the mobilisation of the religious, who were largely apolitical.

As Adam Curtis notes "The fundamentalists were driven by pietism - the belief that a true Christian should not only devote their life to god, but also turn their back on the secular political world. They should live the good life through their own actions - and forget about politics." The New Left had actually laid the groundwork for the entrance of right-wing Christians into the political realm. The issues of gay rights, abortion and sexual discrimination mobilised the Christian Right because the liberalisation on these social issues threatened the way that they led their private lives. Then Jimmy Carter abolished the charity status of the religious schools. For many it was the last straw, enough was enough. Paul Weyrich reached out to Jerry Falwell, the product of this backroom deal was the Moral Majority. Falwell pulled some strings in order to pull together numerous right-wing preachers in America. The aim was now not just to convert, but to register the converted as Republican voters in what would later be known as the culture wars.

The network of preachers were soon spreading anti-Carter propaganda and then an obvious alternative revealed himself to the newly political Christians. It was Ronald Reagan, the old hero of libertarians, who had been trashed by Gore Vidal in a debate with Buckley. Vidal had condemned Reagan in 1967 as an aging actor with little knowledge of the world outside the United States. This is on top of viciously draconian policies were hardly friendly to blacks and the poor. Before a crowd of Christians, at a mass rally, Reagan said that if he were stranded on a desert island he would only want the Bible to read. The election could've been won without the Christian vote. It was about a movement that could be used to influence and shape the political discourse. The right-wing hegemony turned the debate towards social and cultural issues on which the liberal Left had to be marginalised. Meanwhile the Right could implement an economic agenda as the leading political issues were moral.

G-d and Phenomenology.

Perhaps as a consequence of the close ties between phenomenology and existentialism in the 20^th Century so it may be associated with atheism. This association of existentialism with atheism is not unfounded as existentialists such as Albert Camus subscribed to the view of life as totally meaningless. And indeed Jean-Paul Sartre was a vehement atheist. The same may be said of Nietzsche though in many respects it may be argued he remained firmly within Lutheranism.[1] Then there is Kierkegaard, a man who may even be deemed a Christian fundamentalist by some. The most significant reaction to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology came from Martin Heidegger was a student of theology before he moved onto philosophy and developed hermeneutical phenomenology. But it was the reactions to Heidegger which took the most overt stances on the question of God. It may safely be said from the outset that there is no reason phenomenology can be strictly either theistic or atheistic.

The reactions to Heidegger took both theistic and atheistic forms. In Sartre’s reaction to Heidegger he presented an existential phenomenology which was atheistic as it acknowledged the human desire for God. Then Emmanuel Levinas introduced an ethical element into phenomenology which went further than a mere acknowledgement of the desire for God. If we take phenomenology as the study of appearances, as Heidegger did, then it may seem as though it begins at a secular point and doesn’t necessarily rule out the existence of God. As it would seem that the study of appearances could well be agnostic on the question of God, as it is beyond appearances, phenomenology may be better described as non-theistic rather than atheistic in this sense. We might be able to maintain this stance on Husserl and Heidegger, but it is disputable and even more so when we move to the later phenomenologists.

The explicitly atheist phenomenology can be found in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, where God is a contradiction as God would have to exist at the modes of in-itself and for-itself. Being-in-itself is the mode of being held by inanimate objects, whereas being-for-itself is integral to human freedom – a human being is not a human being in the sense that a stone is a stone.[2] The for-itself arises once in-itself has been negated by it, then it rushes into the future as the human subject strives towards authenticity. In this process then the for-itself becomes what it isn’t – being-in-itself – and negates what it was. This is the exact condition of human freedom from which the desire for God emerges. There is a hypothetical being-in-itself-for-itself and that is God, it implies a coincidence of the self with the self and absence of the negation that it takes to form the self. But it is the instability of the subject, which Sartre described, that opens up a temptation to ‘flee from being’ and into bad faith. This is where the desire for God comes from and it is followed by the futile attempts to reach out to this impossible mode of being.

Of course, it may be said, it is the framework in which Sartre works that has closed off any space for God from the outset. So it is the framework which is to be questioned here. But not to revert to a non-existent ‘neutral’ space from which we can see whether there is or isn’t a God. Rather we should look assess the problems with Sartre’s framework and then look at a rival framework. The problem might be down to some of the vestments of Cartesianism that Sartre brings to the table. The conception of freedom that Sartre develops is predicated on a notion of consciousness as nothingness.[3] Because freedom is consciousness it is detached from the causal forces of the external world. There is literally nothing which traps the self ‘inside’ consciousness because there is nothing there. It boils down to a modified version of the mind-body distinction that Descartes drew. It’s precisely this aspect of the Cartesian tradition that Heidegger wanted to throw out completely.

It is this levelled plain of radically free individuals, with the subject as an unstable moral agent – lacking any objective moral values – whose relations with others is typified by feelings such as shame. Sartre was preoccupied with the ‘look’ which separates the subject off from the world and turns them into a thing. The Other raises the instability of our already fragile consciousness.[4] The existence of the Other is not problematic, though the Other is a potential threat to the freedom of the subject.[5] The subject exists as in-itself and for-itself but does not exist in isolation, to the contrary the subject must coexist with others and so the subject is not just for-itself it is being-for-others. The Other reduces the for-itself subject to a thing-like in-itself existence, the subject is deprived of its autonomy and freedom. The relationship with the Other is inevitably prone to conflict, the subject can only dominate or be dominated. As Garcin says famously at the end of Sartre’s No Exit “There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is – other people.”[6]

The important thing to remember about Sartre is that he was writing in reaction to Heidegger, who had thoroughly rejected the Cartesian tradition. To do this Heidegger had questioned the basic claim that the knowledge we have of ourselves differs from the knowledge we have of others at a fundamental level. Heidegger used the word Dasein to signify not just the subject, but the temporal unfolding of existence – we might think of it as experience. In this way we are embodied experiencers of a world that we are thoroughly wrapped up in and share with others who compose the They.[7] The mind-body distinction is something to be thrown aside, along with the notion that there is an external world from which we can retreat. Heidegger had conceived of being-in-the-world to signify the human existence as bound up with reality, both as constitutive and constituted by it. For Heideggerians then Sartre fails insofar as he doesn’t totally reject Cartesianism, even if it only survives in modified form.

This is where Emmanuel Levinas enters the picture with a take on the Other which is in opposition to the position that Sartre had carved out. Levinas shared Heidegger’s worries about the implications of a selfhood which is cut-off from the world in its autonomy. And at the same time Levinas was concerned about the absence of an ethics in Heidegger’s project. For Levinas the Other is not a threat to one’s freedom, that we can only dominate or be dominated by. Rather the face-to-face encounter with the Other is positive as it challenges the self-assurance and self-containment of the subject. It inaugurates the possibility of an ethical code.[8] The naked face of the Other appeals to the subject in a way that cannot be ignored or forgotten. It is an appeal for the subject to go towards, to welcome and to take responsibility for the Other. The identity of the subject is dependent on the Otherness that is always and already present before the subject is constituted, it is founded by the ethical demand to take responsibility for the Other. This is where a space for God is prised open.

Recall the words of Terry Eagleton that “To move from Husserl to Heidegger is to move from the terrain of pure intellect to a philosophy which meditates on what it feels like to be alive.”[9]  We might add that Levinas takes off from ‘what it feels like to be alive’ to the realm of the ethical. The encounter with the Other is a mere glimpse of the Infinite, or more bluntly God, from which the most we can receive is an imperative.[10] The only means of relation to God is through moral conduct and this is especially the case in regards to the Other. Levinas was one of a line of Jewish phenomenologists, which began with Husserl and included such unlikely bedfellows as Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. But Levinas may have been the first in this line to introduce a Judaic turn to phenomenology. The trace of the ever elusive Infinite which we detect in the face of the Other comes in the form of an obligation in the same way that all Moses received from God at Mount Sinai were the mitzvoth – the commandments.[11] The Infinite seems to hold no content for us, but what we can relate to and that is moral in character.

There is a moment in A Serious Man (2009) which holds some relevance as Rabbi Nachtner says “Hashem doesn’t owe us anything. The obligation runs the other way.” God has left us to our own devices, which is why we can and must do His work. We might even go to the end and conclude that God does not intervene because we are the intervention. For Sartre it is the Other which is presupposed, for Levinas it is the Infinite which is presupposed. But it is Levinas who grounds our moral obligations in theistic terms. In doing so, Levinas reformulated the Cartesian case for the existence of God by substituting the Infinite for the Other. And so we could charge him, as we would Sartre, with bringing back the old baggage as part of his bid to bring morality into phenomenology. Though it should be noted that Levinas called for a revision of intersubjectivity as developed in the Cartesian tradition and by Husserl. This means that the basic concept of the subject: a mind which grasps what it confronts in experience and turns it into its content. The troubling assumption being that everything is ‘given’ as representation, even though everything is ultimately other than the mind it can be possessed by the mind.[12]

There is a more direct way whereby the subject can stand in such relations, e.g. face-to-face with another person. For Levinas the relation to the Other is essential to what it means to be human, it is irreducible. It’s a negative theology of sorts as Levinas shirked from a theorisation of God. If you can theorise about him then he isn’t God, this view that we cannot theorise Him seems compatible with the Heideggerian view of phenomenology as a study of appearances. Deliberately Levinas avoided the game of providing an argument for the existence of God as that would be ‘bad theology’. So the idea of a practical atheism may have had its use in terms of coming to grips with what it means to be human. This differs with the early work of Heidegger which carries the panentheistic tones of Heidegger's Christian background. But it also differs sharply with Heidegger's later nostalgia for the Pagan plethora of Greek gods. By contrast Levinas refuses any compromise with polytheism and insists on a universalist approach tempered by particularism.

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[1] Jackson, R: Nietzsche the Key Ideas (Hachette UK, 2010) pg.118-124

[2] Macey, D: Dictionary of Critical Theory (Penguin Reference, 2001) pg.201-203

[3] Solomon, RC; Sartre’s Phenomenology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vGzpEqKK-Y

[4] Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.60-69

[5] Macey, D; Dictionary of Critical Theory (Penguin Reference, 2001) pg.284-286

[6] Sartre, JP; No Exit (Samuel French, Inc. 1958) pg.46-47

[7] Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.51-60

[8] Macey, D; Dictionary of Critical Theory (Penguin Reference, 2001) pg.284-286

[9] Eagleton, T; Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1983 | Second Edition, 1983) pg.47-57

[10] Putnam, H; Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to life (Indiana University Press, 2008) pg.68-82

[11] Putnam, H; Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to life (Indiana University Press, 2008) pg.87-94

[12] Mautner, T; Dictionary of Philosophy (Penguin Reference, 2001) pg.348-349