Here’s a question. What connects an old Dr who story, Alexander the Great, a
Russian neo-fascist philosopher, and the doyen of Anglican spiritual directors?
You are, of course, about to find out, so bear with me as I know this is tortuous
and very possibly completely wide of any kind of mark.
We’ll start with
the philosopher, if one can call him that. Like everyone else I have spent
probably too much time reading around the Ukraine conflict trying to understand
where we all went
wrong in our assessment of the way Russia, or certain Russians, have been thinking
over the last few decades (when one of your congregation wants to talk to you about
the Russo-Finnish winter war of 1939-40 and its possible
relevance to current events, you know something unusual is happening). I had
heard of Alexander Dugin but hadn’t given him much thought until his name kept
cropping up as an influence on Mr Putin and his generation of Russian leaders. His
widest-read book is called The Foundations of Geopolitics: there is a lot of reason
to think even Mr Putin doesn’t buy into the wilder aspects of the Dugin programme
which involve ‘dismantling China as far as possible’ – one wonders what Mr Xi
makes of that if he’s aware of it – but at the heart of it is the interesting if
tendentious idea that power relationships between states are determined fundamentally
not by economics or ideas but simply by the position they occupy on the globe:
that conflicts between nations whose power is based on land and those whose power is sea-based
are bound to arise, and that Russia, occupying the centre of the Eurasian
landmass, must inevitably be a paramount state regardless of anything else that
might happen to it. In 1997 this was just what the Russian elite (and lots of
others) wanted to hear: the idea that the Russian state would ineluctably return
to dominance just when it had gone through several years of being close to a
basket-case had an understandable attraction.
That ‘geopolitical’ concept has something going for it and I
suspect that’s really what Mr Putin and those who surround him have taken on
board. We have to hope they aren’t much interested in ‘the Finlandization of
Europe’ which Dugin favours and so on, even if they have adopted many of
his suggestions about fomenting unrest in the USA and detaching the UK from
Europe. But why bother to rule the world - what’s the point, in Dugin’s thinking?
It is to roll back modernity. Dugin loathes the contamination of ‘liberalism’:
he can’t see any point to the internet and would like to abolish it, he bangs
on about traditional family units, he talks about Russia championing
collectivism over individualism – which leads him to his oddest suggestion, a combination of Orthodox Christianity and Russian neopaganism which he
sees as having a common interest in ‘intuition’ as opposed to the rationality
of the west. It all made me think
how fascist thinkers manage to gather such collections of ideas which to the
rest of us seem so weird. What underlying theme unites them? What’s really motivating them?
I considered how my own thinking over the course of my life so
far has developed in completely the opposite direction, and how very little I
really want to control anything, order anything, or tell anyone else what to do.
The things I am most interested in are the smallest and least ideological – my friends,
my family, beautiful things, a nice cup of coffee and a chat with someone I am well
disposed to, some music, or indeed watching a creaky old episode of Dr who. These things seem the real and
valuable ones, and everything else is irrelevant.
Kinda is a very uncharacteristic and highly weird Dr Who story. It sees Peter Davison’s Doctor and companions encounter a colonial
exploration unit on a jungle planet whose natives don’t speak but communicate telepathically.
Three of the mission have disappeared and the Security Officer, Mr Hindle, is
clearly becoming mentally affected by the strain. When the mission commander
Sanders goes off on a recce leaving Hindle in charge he has a complete breakdown,
obsessing about the threat to the base even though there doesn’t seem to be any
clear danger (it’s a very good performance by Simon Rouse). He threatens,
shouts, cries, rambles about ‘microbes’, and finally rigs up a system of
explosives which will obliterate the base itself and everything in a thirty-mile
radius: ‘and then we’ll be safe’, he says. When the Doctor asks him what
exactly he thinks the threat to the colonists is, he replies, ‘the plants’: there
is something about the lush, abundant landscape outside the base that unhinges
him. In the story’s Buddhist way of thinking, what Hindle cannot cope with is
life: the fact that life keeps changing, that it continually has to be renegotiated
with, never stops in one form. ‘Change and decay in all around I see’, he tells
the Doctor a little before descending into complete looniness.
Jesus says (I read it at a funeral only this Tuesday) ‘I
have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly’. Fascists, on the
other hand, generally seem to hate life, like Mr Hindle. If they gain power, they rarely use it
to indulge physical appetites particularly (except via architecture: they do
like their monumental buildings) and are usually on the puritanical side of the
scale. They tend to be misogynistic and want women to occupy traditional roles;
they obsess about the family and tradition, which is why you often find them
trying to rope in the support of the Church. They rail against the simple business
of people enjoying themselves in the differing ways they choose. Why would you
hate life so much? Because it involves constant change. Fascists are trying to
stop things changing, to freeze the world at a particular point, to conquer it;
the social or military conquest expresses a sort of existential conquest. And why
would you be afraid of change? Because, ultimately, you are afraid of the death
which change prefigures.
Of course most of us are afraid of death to some degree: one
of the two experiences that come the way of all human beings, and yet we know
nothing about it (beyond what our faith may tell us). We all want to ‘go home’;
we all want things to be under control, just enough to manage; to maintain our comforting routines; to tell ourselves
that we will wake up in the morning. But we don’t all experience these things as
a constant underlying scream pushing us to obliterate the signs of change and movement
that prove to us the fact that one day, we will die.
Perhaps Alexander the Great was the first expression of this futile
attempt to cheat death by establishing physical dominance over as much of the world
as he could. Whatever the point may have been to his conquests at the
beginning, pressing on to ‘the ends of the world and the great outer sea’ had no
rationale apart from getting there and planting a pillar with his name on it in the sands. Earth’s
farthest shore would been trodden by the Macedonian’s foot, imprinted by his
identity. It would be comprehended. Alexander was an oriental despot and of course
ideological authoritarians are very different, but they too are trying to reach
the shore of the farthest sea and claim it for their own.
Fr Somerset ward’s
great sequence of Spiritual Instructions spreads from 1919 to 1959, forty years
of reflection and the fruits of meditation: his very first was entitled ‘A
Sermon on Fear’. Fear of death only forms an incidental example of his theme,
but Somerset ward was convinced
that it lay at the root of much human sin. It brooded in the soul, hidden, and
emerged in morbid and disguised forms. I think we can see it wherever grandiose
schemes of political organisation turn away from what human beings actually want,
and chain them into someone else’s utopia.
