Poland as a symptom
This hidden complicity between the postmodern “atonal world” and the fundamentalist reaction to it explodes when a society enters a crisis of its symbolic identity. A scandal ripped Poland apart in March 2007, the so-called “Oleksy-gate,” when a tape of a private conversation was made public. Josef Oleksy, the former Prime Minister and one of the Democratic Left Alliance’s (SLD, ex-Communists) leading figures, was revealed to have made disparaging remarks about the SLD politicians, calling them “a bunch of losers and swindlers,” cynically boasting that the SLD had really introduced capitalism into Poland, and claiming that the SLD leaders cared nothing about Poland, but just about their own survival and wealth. The truly shocking feature of these tapes is a certain coincidence: Oleksy used exactly the same words as the rightist anti-Communist opponents of the SLD who refused to admit its legitimacy, claiming that it was a party without a proper program, just a network of ex-nomenklatura swindlers looking after their own business interests—this harsh external characterization was now confirmed as the inner cynical self-designation of the SLD itself . . . a sure sign that the first task of the new Left in post-Communist states is to reject all links with the ex-Communist “left” parties which, as a rule, are the parties of big capital.
The counterpart to this scandal is the fact that Poland has the distinction of being the first Western country in which the anti-modernist backlash has won, effectively emerging as a hegemonic force: calls for the total ban on abortion, anti-Communist “lustration,” the exclusion of Darwinism from primary and secondary education, up to the bizarre idea of abolishing the post of the President of the Republic and proclaiming Jesus Christ the Eternal King of Poland, and so forth, are coming together into an all-encompassing proposal to enact a clear break and constitute a new Polish republic unambiguously based on anti-modernist Christian values. Is, however, this backlash really so dangerous that the Left should accept the liberal blackmail: “the time has come for all of us to unite forces, thwart this threat and reassert liberal-secular modernization”? (Something, incidentally, which cannot but recall the memory of Social-Democratic evolutionists who claimed that, in not yet fully developed countries, the Left should first support the bourgeois project of the modern democratic state, and only in the “second phase” should it move on to radical politics proper, to the overcoming of capitalism and bourgeois democracy . . . It is good to remember that Lenin was thoroughly opposed to this “stageist” approach, reinstituted in later Stalinism with its scholastic distinction between the “lower” and the “higher” stages of Communism.)
The task of the Left is, on the contrary, more than ever to “subtract” itself from the entire field of the opposition between liberal modernization and the anti-modernist backlash.34 In spite of their zealous pursuit of a positive project of installing stable Christian values into social life, one should never forget that the anti-modernist fundamentalist backlash is a profoundly reactive phenomenon (in the Nietzschean sense): at its core, there is not a positive politics, actively pursuing a new social project, but a politics of fear whose motivating force is defense against a perceived threat. Here, reduced to its most elementary contours, is the conservative view of our predicament, whose central feature is that “secular-progressive culture has swept away traditional beliefs”:
To replace this loss of spirituality, millions of Europeans have embraced the secular concept of “relativism.” According to this way of thinking, there is no absolute truth, no certain right and wrong. Everything is “relative.” What is wrong in my eyes might not be wrong in your eyes. By this logic, even heinous acts can be explained, so they should not—in fact, they cannot—be condemned. In other words, no definite judgments about behavior should be made because there are always extenuating circumstances to justify not taking a stand.
The wide acceptance of relativism has rendered Europe weak, confused, and chaotic. Socialist or quasi-socialist governments now provide the necessities of life to their citizens, allowing many Europeans to live entirely within themselves. When that happens to a person, it is hard to rally him or her to a greater cause. Thus, nothing is worth fighting for outside of one’s immediate well-being. The only creed is a belief in personal gratification.35
How are we to unite this opposition (of traditionalism versus secular relativism) with the other great ideological opposition on which the entire legitimacy of the West and its “War on Terror” relies: the opposition between liberal-democratic individual rights and religious fundamentalism embodied primarily in “Islamo-fascism”? Therein resides the symptomatic inconsistency of the US neoconservatives: while, in domestic politics, they privilege the fight against liberal secularism (abortion, gay marriages, and so on), that is, their struggle is the so-called “culture of life” against the “culture of death,” in foreign affairs, they privilege the very opposite values of the liberal “culture of death.” One way to resolve this dilemma is the hardline Christian fundamentalist solution, articulated in the works of Tim LaHaye et consortes: to unambiguously subordinate the second opposition to the first one. The title of one of LaHaye’s latest novels points in this direction: The Europa Conspiracy. In this account, the true enemy of the US is not Muslim terrorism, the latter is merely a puppet secretly manipulated by European secularists, who are the true forces of the Antichrist intent on weakening the US and establishing the New World Order under the domination of the United Nations. Opposed to this minority view is the predominant liberal-democratic view which sees the principal enemy in all kinds of fundamentalisms, and perceives US Christian fundamentalism as a deplorable homegrown version of “Islamo-fascism.”
The reactive nature of religious fundamentalism is discernible in its hidden reflexive position. Let us take a look at this reflexivity at its (artistic) highest, in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky himself, and not only the heroes of his (late) films, stands for the regained immediacy of authentic belief, as opposed to the Western intellectual’s doubt and self-destructive distance. But what if the constellation is more complex? The ultimate figure of this direct belief is Stalker—to quote Tarkovsky himself:
I am often asked what this Zone stands for. There is only one possible answer: the Zone doesn’t exist. Stalker himself invented his Zone. He created it, so that he was able to bring there some very unhappy persons and impose on them the idea of hope. The room of desires is equally Stalker’s creation, yet another provocation in the face of the material world. This provocation, formed in Stalker’s mind, corresponds to an act of faith.36
What, however, if we take the claim that Stalker invented the Zone literally? What if Stalker, far from directly believing, manipulates, feigns belief, in order to fascinate the intellectuals he brings to the Zone, arousing in them the prospect of belief? What if, far from being a direct believer, he assumes the role of a subject supposed to believe for the eyes of the decadent intellectual observers? What if the truly naive position is that of the intellectual spectator, of his fascination with Stalker’s naive belief? And what if the same goes for Tarkovsky himself, who—far from being the authentic Orthodox believer in contrast to Western skepticism—acts out this role in order to fascinate the Western intellectual public?37 John Gray is therefore right to say that “Religious fundamentalists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality they are symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure.”38
To put it in Nietzsche’s terms: they are the ultimate nihilists, since the very form of their activity (spectacular mediatic mobilization, and so forth) undermines their message. One of the first exponents of early literary modernism, Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), followed his provocative Chants of Maldoror with Poésies, a weird reassertion of traditional morality. At the very beginning of artistic modernity, he thus stages its final paradoxical reversal: when all sources of transgression are exhausted, the only way to break out of the suffocating weariness of the Last Men is to propose traditional attitudes themselves as the ultimate transgression. And the same goes for our popular culture:
What will happen when we run out of new vices? How will satiety and idleness be staved