The Public Philosophy > Chapter VII. The Adversaries of Liberal Democracy > The Overpassing of the Bound
This is the root of the matter, and it is here that the ultimate issue lies. Can men, acting like gods, be appointed to establish heaven on earth? If we believe that they can be, then the rest follows. To fulfill their mission they must assume a godlike omnipotence. They must be jealous gods, monopolizing power, destroying all rivals, compelling exclusive loyalty. The family, the churches, the schools, the corporations, the labor unions and cooperative societies, the voluntary associations and all the arts and sciences, must be their servants. Dissent and deviation are treason and quietism is sacrilege.
But the monopoly of all power will not be enough. There remains the old Adam. Unless they can remake the fallen nature of a man, the self-elected gods cannot make a heaven of the earth. In the Jacobin gospel of the eighteenth century, and even in the Marxist gospel of the nineteenth century, the newman would be there when the artificial garments were removed--when once he was emancipated by the revolutionary act from the deformation imposed upon him by the clergy, the nobility and the bourgeoisie. A hundred years later the new man was nowhere in sight. So the early and softer gospel gave way to a later and infinitely harder one. The new man and the new heaven on earth demanded the remaking of pre-Leninist and pre-Hitlerian man. The decrees of history as revealed to Marx, and the decrees of nature as revealed to Hitler, had to be carried out.
But in order to do that, the human species had first to be transformed--or failing that, exterminated. Destiny called upon the mortal god to make surviving mankind "an active unfailing carrier," as Hannah Arendt says, "of a law to which human beings would otherwise only passively and reluctantly be subject."
In the eyes of its devotees, this is not an inhuman and satanic doctrine. It is above and beyond humanity. It is for the superman that its gospel announces. The ruthlessness, the arbitrariness, the cruelty are not monstrous wickedness. They are natural and necessary, predestined like the fall of a sparrow, in the sublime construction of the earthly paradise.
The issue is carried outside the realm of rational discourse. As Richard Hooker said of the Puritan revolutionaries three centuries ago, when men believe they are acting "under the absolute command of Almighty God," their discipline "must be received ...although the world by receiving it should be clean turned upside down.' There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation. This is the sovereign evil against which the traditions of civility are arrayed.
Here is "the mortal sin original," the forbidden fruit, which Satan tempts Eve to eat:
Taste this, and be henceforth among the Gods Thyself a Goddess.
This tasting of the tree, as Adam says to Dante, was "the overpassing of the bound."
Zeus, says Aeschylus
.. is a chastener of forward wills
And he correcteth with a heavy hand.
Wherefore be ye instructors of your Lord,
And with well-reasoned admonitions teach Him
To have a humbler heart and cast away
The sin of pride, for it oftendeth God?
The delusion of men that they are gods -- the pretension that they have a commission to act as if they were gods- is, says Aeschylus, "the blind arrogance of childish thought." It can become "the very madness of a mind diseased." Yet it is not a new and recent infection, but rather the disposition of our first natures, of our natural and uncivilized selves. Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.
Rousseau and the Jacobins, Marx and the nineteenth-century socialists, did not introduce new impulses and passions into men. They exploited and aggravated impulses and passions that are always there. In the traditions of civility, man's second and more rational nature must master his first and more elemental.
The Jacobins and their successors made a political religion founded upon the reversal of civility. Instead of ruling the elemental impulses, they stimulated and armed them. Instead of treating the pretension to being a god as the mortal sin original, they proclaimed it to be the glory and destiny of man. Upon this gospel they founded a popular religion of the rise of the masses to power. Lenin, Hitler and Stalin, the hard totalitarian Jacobins of the twentieth century, carried this movement and the logical implications of its gospel further and further towards the very bitter end.
And what is that bitter end? It is an everlasting war with the human condition: war with the finitude of man and with the moral ends of finite men, and, therefore, war against freedom, against t justice, against the laws and against the order of the good society--as they are conserved in the traditions of civility, as they are articulated in the public philosophy.