The Root of All Fears

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.