<http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/printFlynn20040929.shtml> Townhall.com Are horrific means justified by utopia? Daniel J. Flynn (back to web version) | Send September 29, 2004 If you believe the fulfillment of your cause will create Heaven on Earth, anything done in its name is justified. Grasping this basic concept helps one to better understand the present-day beheadings by backward fundamentalists hoping to create Allah's Kingdom in the temporal world. It also helps one understand the mass killings of the past in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union supported by cultured intellectuals promising to make men perfect. This is why utopianism is so dangerous. It rationalizes horrible crimes done to attain the unattainable. The intellectual morons discussed in my book by the same name get blinded to reality by the causes that they serve. The loftier the ideal, the baser their actions become in its name. Examples abound. Idealism unchecked by reality fueled the worldwide eugenics movement of the first half of the twentieth century. English intellectual Herbert Spencer articulated the lofty goal of eugenics by announcing that "all imperfection must disappear." Toward this end, Margaret Sanger called for forced sterilization, concentration camps, and birth control for the "creation of a new race." In America, the ideals of Planned Parenthood's founder were partially realized through the sterilization by state governments of nearly 70,000 people. In Germany, these same ideals-"a new race"-resulted in something far more horrible. W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP, believed Karl Marx a "colossal genius." Du Bois's fanatical devotion to Communism's triumph made a liar out of him. To the esteemed professor, Stalin was a "great" and "courageous" man, while the "sinister" Churchhill was the primary leader bringing the "death and destruction of human civilization." Amidst the mass killings of Maoist China, Du Bois detected "a sense of human nature free of its most hurtful and terrible meanness." America, fresh from victory over Nazism and immersed in a cold war against the Soviet Union, was to him "the greatest warmonger of all history." Deluded by an ideology that promised utopia, Du Bois confused statesmen for murderers and murderers for statesmen; free nations for totalitarian ones and totalitarian nations for free ones. Novelist Ayn Rand hated Nazism and Communism, but this didn't stop her from imitating many of the unattractive aspects of those ideologies in both her fiction and in her real life. The high priestess of Objectivism established a cult of personality, held show trials against followers, denied reality (such as the success of Sputnik) when it didn't conform to her theories, and demanded the submission of individual judgment to her own. In Rand's books, she fantasized about the destruction of the portion of humanity standing in the way of her ideals. Examples of this include the holocaust that concludes Atlas Shrugged and the words of We the Living's heroine: "What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?" The damage done by Objectivism, thankfully, rarely went beyond the movement's ranks. Ideologies promise to save the world. They fail. Instead, they breed fanaticism, justify dishonesty, and cloud reality. They do this by keeping adherents transfixed on the unreachable goal: human perfectibility. The focus on the impossible keeps the actual out of sight. Thus, crimes, lies, and even murders committed on the ideology's behalf are ignored, excused, and denied. Rather than demonstrating that men can be made perfect, ideologues show us how fallen man can be. This is as true today among al Qaeda's followers as it was eighty-five years ago among the Bolsheviks. Most of the evil committed is done in the name of the good. Aristotle, for instance, observed in the Nicomachean Ethics that "every action and decision, seems to seek some good." Crucially, he added, "But the ends appear to differ." Do they ever. When you're providing earthly deliverance, all is permitted-the gulag, the gas chamber, beheadings, etc. After all, ends that glorious will always justify means that horrific. Unfortunately, utopian ideologies never succeed in their ends or spare in their means. The road to heaven on earth invariably detours to a dead end more closely resembling a much hotter place. Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'