LIBRARY

Globalization and the Devil

Apocalyptic Perspectives on International Integration

An essay by John J. Reilly

Well, it's 1999, ten years since the end of history. At any rate, it is ten years since the publication of Francis Fukuyama's famous essay, The End of History, which proposed a Hegelian interpretation of the end of the Cold War. The anniversary has inspired The National Interest, the quarterly in which the essay first appeared, to publish another article by the same author entitled Second Thoughts, along with responses from a gaggle of prestigious commentators. Doubtless we will be seeing many more deep-think reassessments in the months to come.

For what it's worth, it seems to me that Fukuyama's thesis has held up pretty well -- at least on its own terms. His chief argument was that the consensus-ideology of the West, which he called "liberal democracy," has decisively defeated its Marxist, fascist and theocratic rivals. He predicted that no new ideological challengers would arise in the future, and ten years later, despite the turmoil generated by resurgent nationalism and the instability of the international financial system, liberal democracy is still the only game in town. Serious political theory these days is almost as cut-and-dried as plane geometry.

The fact that liberal democracy has triumphed in policy and academic circles, however, is a long way from saying that it will triumph culturally and historically. Although liberal democracy may have no peer in the intellectual universe of bureaucrats and businessmen, that does not mean it has no competitors in the larger world.

What Fukuyama produced in The End of History was an "eschatology," a vision of the "last things." The essay (later expanded into a book) is an account of how the old world of historical change passed, after many vicissitudes, into a perfect state that is beyond history, though not beyond time.

The problem for universal liberal democracy is that there are several other quite vital eschatologies in the world today, most though not all of them religious. In fact, today we see a common historical pattern reemerging: the prominence given to one eschatology is invigorating others that are not just different from it but hostile to it. For a significant and perhaps growing number of people, Fukuyama's millennium of internationalism, secularism and market economics is not just ill-advised but spiritually evil.

THREE EASY STEPS

To take a moderate example of the opposition to McWorld (as the globalist ideal is sometimes called), consider the book Ecumenical Jihad (1996) by Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College. Despite the alarming title, Kreeft is not calling for a shooting war. Rather, the author calls for an alliance of Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, even ethical pagans and agnostics, to conduct the Culture War on a more equal footing against a (not altogether figuratively) demoniacal Western cultural elite.

Kreeft's thesis is that the real division in the world today is between those who accept some form of natural law and those who do not. People on either side of this divide can be found in every society, but overwhelmingly today the opponents of natural law are to be found in the West, particularly in the United States (and even, one suspects, in no small part in the neighborhood of Boston). His analysis is explicitly eschatological. What we are seeing, he says, is the tangible incarnation of the City of God and of the City of the World as described by St. Augustine. While he carefully distances himself from the proposition that the Battle of Armageddon is necessarily imminent, he does suggest a three-stage model of Christian history in which the first millennium was one of unity, the second is one of division, and the third will be one of unity restored. Such a schema is suggestive of the three-stage model of history proposed by the 12th-century abbot, Joachim of Fiore, which has more or less directly shaped Western macro-historical speculation ever since. Joachim anticipated that the Second Age, the Age of the Son of God and of the imperfect Church, would end with the brief reign of Antichrist, followed by the Third Age of the Holy Ghost. Kreeft's expectations for the third millennium AD are not so different.

As Paul Boyer noted in When Time Shall Be No More (1992), if you compare what evangelicals around the time of the First World War expected the rest of the 20th Century to be like with what their Wilsonian counterparts expected, the evangelicals were far more accurate. Evangelicals (a blanket term that in America means roughly those denominations derived from the Calvinist tradition) have normally been skeptical of political institutions in general and of international institutions in particular. This attitude is based on the assumption that the world would only grow darker and darker before the Second Coming, thus making secular reform a waste of time. Evangelicals have somewhat retreated in recent years from this extreme degree of pessimism. However, this may be about to change.

RELIGIOUS VISIONS

Arguably, some religious eschatologies have done conspicuously better than their secular counterparts in forecasting the future. The most notable example of a failed secular eschatology is Marxism, whose predictions for the 20th century have perhaps done worse than chance. In contrast, religious eschatologies made predictions that seemed to fit the state of the world at least some of the time. For over 150 years, there has been a widespread expectation among evangelical pre-millennialists (people who believe that the Second Coming will precede the reign of the Saints during the Millennium) that Israel would be re-established and that Europe would be united by the Antichrist, who would make a false peace with Israel. Though devised by Americans (based in New York City) in the 1830s, this scenario nevertheless implied an increasingly muted role for the United States as the endtimes approached. The Roman Church, or Europe as a whole, was pictured as the Scarlet Woman of Revelation, destined for destruction, while the US was seen as either a bystander or one of Antichrist's deluded allies. During the 1970s and 80s, therefore, American pre-millennialists were rather gratified by the relative decline of the United States. It was just the kind of thing they expected.

In more recent years, history has seemed to do yet another flip-flop. Even less than ten years ago, people were expressing concern that Japan might buy up the whole world. At the very least, there was a general expectation that the bipolar world of the Cold War would soon be replaced by a multipolar one. What has happened so far, however, as Salman Rushdie recently noted, is that "'International' is becoming a euphemism for 'American.'" The eschatological imagination is more than equal to accommodating this challenge. A new interpretation is starting to arise, one that is, in certain ways, more consistent with the apolitical tradition of evangelicals than their much-noted foray into politics during the past 20 years. In this scenario, America becomes Babylon, destined to be ruled by an Antichrist of wholly Gentile origins.

The identification of the US with Babylon can be made in large part through a conventional critique of economic globalization. For instance, in The Antipas Papers (available online at http://www.endtimesnetwork.com) there are extensive quotes from William Greider and Alexander Cockburn. This is just an example of the degree to which religious, "conservative" premillennialism shows a surprising willingness to avail itself of what are essentially fundamental critiques of capitalism. As is so often the case in periods of eschatological excitement, secular and religious apocalypse are distinguished only in the mechanism by which the rich and wicked will be cast from their thrones. The structure of the future imagined by religious antiglobalists is not appreciably different from that of the contemporary Marxist variety. Instead of the reign of Antichrist and seven years of Tribulation, the latter look for a total economic collapse on the order of the Great Depression of the 1930s, followed by Second Wave Socialism throughout the world. The end of history is remarkably robust.

Still, religious eschatology is not conventional populism or conventional radicalism of any description. Far from having a plan to use the power of the state to remake society in a Christian image, this kind of analysis can evince a root and branch rejection of every link between the church and politics. This can be very startling to secularists who think that they know all about "the Religious Right." There are indeed genuine would-be theocrats in the US. The most famous ones are Gary North and Rousas Rushdoony, and their doctrine is called Theonomy or Dominion Theology. They really do want to enact the Book of Leviticus into statutory law. However, this is not what religious radicalism means in the United States. Traditionally, the radical posture was one of withdrawal.

For the most politically puritan of evangelicals, the Theonomists are not the only ones ruled out of court. The condemnation also extends to the whole generation of political engagement that began with evangelical backing of the Reagan Administration, and which now may end in the frustration created by the failure to remove President Clinton from office. The Christian Coalition -- the conventional politicking of Ralph Reed, not to mention the attempts to coordinate the public policy agendas of Catholics and evangelicals -- is now being re-evaluated. Once again there is talk of "parallel institutions," since the people who give President Clinton such high approval ratings are obviously too corrupt to embrace a program of real moral reform. Real evangelicals, in this view, don't have public policy agendas. This world is wholly under the dominion of Satan. It is not just futile to attempt to save it, but actually dangerous.

In the eschatology of Antipas Ministries, for instance, the Theonomists and the Christian Coalition become part of the forces of evil in this endtime scenario. The program to create a culturally conservative theocracy will succeed, but its leader will be Antichrist.

GREEN APOCALYPSE

The expectation that the modern world will evolve into the universal Kingdom of Antichrist is older than this century. The scenario by which this is supposed to occur usually incorporates large elements of conspiracy theory. The particular participants in the conspiracy can change over the decades. Around the last turn of the century, for instance, the participants were most likely to have been described as Jews and Masons. Latterly, though, partly in response to the New Age Movement and the transformation of ecology into an ideology, the personnel and even the aims of the conspiracy have undergone some revision. This new configuration is what is usually meant when apocalypse-minded people use George Bush's unhappy phrase, "The New World Order."

In Michael O'Brien's endtime novel, Eclipse of the Sun (1998), we get a fairly detailed account of this immemorial conspiracy. They want to do three things: first create a global economy, then a global government, and finally a world church. The innermost circle of conspirators is fairly small, only around 300 financiers and public officials. There is an inner and an outer dimension. For the inner ring, the conspiracy is a religious movement. Its leaders believe themselves to be in contact with "ascended masters," though in reality the entities with which they commune are demons. The less esoteric aspect of the conspiracy is "ecological." This aspect sometimes appears in public, even though it is frightening enough in its own right. It is dogma for these people that the human race is an insupportable burden to the planet, one that must be reduced in numbers by at least 25%. Since attrition will not do this quickly enough, the darkest features of the conspiracy concern steps to accelerate the process.

Now, ecologists and public officials do occasionally say things somewhat like this in public. Even politicians sometimes give ecology a religious spin. (Vice President Al Gore is going to pay dearly for the pantheistic passages in his book, Earth in the Balance (1992), when he runs for president in 2000.) For that matter, some international bureaucrats concerned with population questions occasionally give the impression that human populations, particularly in the Third World, are a sort of planetary infection. Such anecdotes, clipped and treasured and e-mailed around the world, provide more than enough "empirical support" to keep the tradition in play.

EVIL EMPIRE

Then, of course, there are in fact conscious advocates of evil (or at least admirers of the devil) who have high hopes for a politically and economically united world. There is a strain on the darker side of the occult that is also concerned with what might broadly be called "globalization issues."

Satanists (and others) who address this kind of question usually have a grasp of the cyclical historical models of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Both these historians suggested that the West had exhausted its basic stock of ideas, and that politically it was headed toward the final stage of a civilization's evolution, what Toynbee called a "Universal State." They combine these notions, however, with an occult form of "dispensationalism." In the most popular form of Christian eschatology in the United States today, dispensationalism means that salvation history is divided into ages, known as "dispensations," in which somewhat different divine ordinances apply. (For instance, in Christian belief, the Law of Moses was binding during part of Old Testament times, but not in the era of the New Testament.)

Some such model also applies in Traditionalist Satanism, which divides history into Aeons, and the Aeons into civilizations. These Aeons, like the civilizations that occur within them, are organisms with their own lifecycles. By controlling the intersections of the causal and acausal planes, Satanists can influence the course of an existing Aeon and determine the nature of a future one. Their plan, in fact, is to take control of the coming Universal State and turn it into a Satanic empire. From that base, they hope to be able to control the new form of humanity that will arise after the current Aeon runs its course.

These occult ideas are held by a very small number of extraordinarily marginal people. If there is a secret global elite that believes it is serving 'ascended masters', they must be so secret as to be unable to exert any actual influence. However, the very fact that opinions like this exist in the world helps to support any number of historical scenarios that require a diabolical element. It does not hurt that today such opinions are available to anyone who can formulate the proper query for a search engine.

PREPARE FOR THE END

Talk about the future of global institutions and the international system was tagged "globoloney" a few years ago, and with some reason. Still, globalization is a real issue. We may ask whether the sort of speculation we have just reviewed can tell us anything about the real future, in the sense that evangelicals 80 years ago might have been able to tell us something about the rest of the 20th Century. To that I would say "yes," but through a glass darkly.

In the 19th Century, for instance, socialism was an eschatological idea. (As we have seen, it still is in some circles.) Its realization was widely expected to take place sometime between 1900 and 2000. In its Marxist variant, eschatological socialism included a Battle of Armageddon in the coming Revolution, followed by the Millennium of the classless society. Every kind of hope, from universal peace to free love, was projected onto the socialist future.

Socialism was in fact realized in the 20th Century, partly because the idea had become eschatological. Eschatology is a road map people have of the future, and the future is what they plan for, whether they like it or not. But all this particular future amounted to, in essence, was the continuation in peacetime of the government economic controls that Germany and England devised to fight the First World War. By 19th-century standards, as John Lukacs has observed, all advanced 20th Century states became "socialist." One suspects that someday globalization, too, will be just part of the furniture of ordinary life.

On the other hand, maybe not. Francis Fukuyama now suggests, in the "Second Thoughts" article mentioned above, that history might not be going to end after all. The reason is that the logic of his earlier essay assumed that human nature would remain constant, something that we can no longer be sure of in the age of genetic engineering. The expectation of a change in the species is, one may note, pretty much what the Traditionalist Satanists are talking about. There is a difference between genetic engineering and aeonic magic, but in the study of eschatology, the form of a prediction is often more important than its specific content.