Are horrific means justified by utopia?

[R. A. Hettinga]

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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
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'