As I was reading through the material, I came across this paragraph, for which I should have been prepared:
If you try to get rid of religion, you aren't going to get rid of religion. Instead, you'll get some scheme of attitude and belief that functions like a religion but pretends to be something else and will probably go off in strange directions because nobody's allowed to think about what it really is. In short, you'll get something rather like the Antichrist.I lazily read ahead of the very last sentence, substituting liberalism for "the Antichrist." I laughed out loud as I finished reading the sentence. Yes, we have to call things by their name. Kalb is making a case for the evil, or perhaps to be less fanatic, the inhuman nature of liberalism.
It gets better. I've been trying to get fascists and liberals together in my mind for a while now. Kalb writes this, as though in answer to my (silent) quest.
There are two basic solutions to those problems within modernity, the fascist one and the liberal one. The fascist solution is to say that purposes are objectively binding and therefore provide a standard of what's right if you get beaten up when you don't go along with them. On that view the purposes that count are the purposes of whoever's in a position to do the beating--that is, whoever is the top guy on the top team. So the basic principles of government are "we're number one" and "the will of the leader is the highest law."It sounds like Triumph of the Will, the film produced by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's visual and artistic spokesman/handmaiden. The film, which every film student watches because it really is a feat in cinematography, begins with Hitler descending the heavens down to Nurenmberg, a divine creature (god himself) come to save the decadent Germans. Little did these common folk know that his project was their annihilation, and to raise something better from their ashes. The great Götterdämmerung. It almost worked, the annihilation part, anyway.
But as Kalb writes, fascism, whether in governments or in day-to-day interactions, loses because how much beating (metaphoric or literal) are people going to take? It seems that liberals are the high I.Q.ers of fascists, and are careful where and how they land their punches.
Kalb writes:
[Facism]'s a nice clear system, and it's got some logic behind it, but it doesn't work very well. It was tried and it lost. For that reason, the liberal solution won out.So how do liberal leaders get all these equally stationed demi-gods to follow them? It is still sheer will, I would think, of maintaining a semblance of liberal equality, but working with (and secretly ruling with) brute fascistic superiority, through a lot of lying and deceiving.
That solution is a bit more complicated. It starts by noting that all our purposes are equally purposes, and infers that everybody's purposes equally confer value. Each of us is equally able to make things good or bad just by thinking of them as good or bad. That makes each of us in a sense divine. Our will creates moral reality. Instead of the wonder-working leader of fascism you get the divine me of liberalism. It's every man his own Jesus.
Below is a video of the opening scenes of Triumph of the Will, with a synopsis.
Day 1: The film opens with shots of the clouds above the city, and then moves through the clouds to float above the assembling masses below, with the intention of portraying beauty and majesty of the scene. The cruciform shadow of Hitler's plane is visible as it passes over the tiny figures marching below, accompanied by music from Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which slowly turns into the Horst-Wessel-Lied. Upon arriving at the Nuremberg airport, Hitler emerges from his plane to thunderous applause and a cheering crowd. He is then driven into Nuremberg, through equally enthusiastic people, to his hotel where a night rally is later held.