Iran and the Left: They’re the Same Picture
Iran and the Left:
The Left and Iran share a centuries-old obsession with millenarian utopias, projecting a perfect world while embracing chaos to achieve it.
One of the most important yet frequently overlooked books of the 20th century is The Pursuit of the Millennium, written by the great British historian Norman Cohn and first published in 1952. Part of the reason The Pursuit’ssignificance is overlooked is that its subtitle—Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages—belies its real scope and relevance. In truth, Cohn’s book is about a great deal more than the Middle Ages. It is, indeed, about the entire history of post-Roman Western Civilization, about the perpetually recurring urge in the West to fantasize about ending the unfairness and suffering of human existence through the temporal redemption of society, through a supernaturally induced revolution against the existing order and the establishment of “heaven on earth.” Cohn himself recognized this widespread Western urge and understood full well that its recurrences were not confined to the Middle Ages and that they did not end with the Renaissance, the Reformation, or even the Enlightenment. If anything, these events added an even greater sense of urgency and a more widespread and, thus, enduring character to man’s endeavors to establish an earthly utopia. Cohn put it this way in his conclusion(emphasis added):
One may also reflect on the left-wing revolutions and revolutionary movements of this century . . . during the half-century since 1917 there has been a constant repetition, and on an ever-increasing scale, of the socio-psychological process which once joined the Taborite priests or Thomas Müntzer with the most disoriented and desperate of the poor, in phantasies of a final, exterminatory struggle against “the great ones”; and of a perfect world from which self-seeking would be for ever banished. . . . The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.
As Cohn meticulously details, all of the pathologies of contemporary leftist utopianism were present at various points, in varying degrees, in the heretical millenarianism of the Middle Ages. For example, Cohn details the Heresy of the Free Spirit, what he calls “an elite of amoral superman,” who celebrated and advocated sexual antinomianism as the means to achieve redemption. The Brethren of the Free Spirit were a constant public nuisance throughout the German states, the Low Countries, and much of France from the late 13th century to the 15th century, preaching their gospel of sexual liberation. Their antinomianism, Cohn noted, “most commonly took the form of promiscuity on principle,” fostering an “entirely convincing picture of an eroticism which, far from springing from a carefree sensuality, possessed above all a symbolic value as a sign of spiritual emancipation, which incidentally is the value which ‘free love’ has often possessed in our own times.” In other words, for all his pretensions to intellectual ingenuity, Herbert Marcuse was a tired retread, a relic who repackaged 700-year-old fantasies for a hopelessly naïve modern audience.
Similarly, the Left’s obsession with egalitarianism was presaged by medieval millenarians for centuries, in every part of Europe. The Taborites, the Anabaptists, and Thomas Müntzer’s Peasant Warriors factor heavily into Cohn’s analysis. The repeated appeals to egalitarianism, Cohn wrote, were not “typical expressions of religious dissent; on the contrary, in many respects—in their atmosphere, their aims, their behavior, and their social composition—they differed profoundly from the mainstream of medieval heresy.” Nevertheless, “they formed an apparently unbroken tradition of revolutionary millenarianism which, originating in the Rhineland and southern Low Countries in the late eleventh century, persisted in Germany down to the Reformation and even beyond.” As H. H. Munro quipped, turning Jesus’s truism on its head, “How painfully true it is that the poor have us always with them.”
As I have noted in these pages (and elsewhere), many of the other defining derangements of the contemporary Left were also present in the Millenarians of the Middle Ages and were also identified by Cohn. Climate alarmism and environmental hysteria more generally reflect the medieval obsession with the “state of nature.” “As Cohn put it, the social myth became a revolutionary myth over time as the ‘Golden Age irrecoverably lost in the distant past’ was replaced by a Golden Age ‘preordained for the immediate future.’”
Likewise, the Left’s repeated and increasingly virulent bouts of antisemitism reflect its heretical religious past: the “phantasy of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy of destruction is related to the phantasies that inspired Emico of Leningrad and the Master of Hungary; and . . . disorientation and insecurity have fostered the demonization of the Jew in this as in much earlier centuries. The parallels and indeed the continuity are incontestable.”
For our purposes today, it is not only worth remembering the Left’s quasi-religious millenarian foundations but also worth pointing out that this is, in large part, what explains its constant, repeated, unfailing instinct to side with the West’s enemies whenever and wherever conflict erupts. This is especially the case, at least in the last several years, with the Left’s ongoing and otherwise inexplicable affinity for the totalitarian Islamist regime in Iran and its client states of Gaza and the Hezbollah-dominated parts of Lebanon. Yes, the Left (broadly constituted) hates what Western Civilization represents and hates the American application of it in particular. But that’s not the whole story. The Left hates our civilization—or at least what it perceives our civilization to be—in large part because the Left is a quasi-religious millenarian movement that demands the immediate and total reform of society in accordance with its quasi-spiritual dictates. And the Left feels affinity for the Iranian regime and Hamas and Hezbollah because they, too, represent radical, heretical, millenarian rebellions against modernity. Cohn’s description of the 20th-century Left could, in another context, be easily assumed to be about the Mullahs and their Twelver Shi’ism:
Beneath the pseudo-scientific terminology one can in each case recognize a phantasy of which almost every element is to be found in the apocalyptic tradition: the notion of the Elect, wholly good, on to whom all evil is projected, the attribution to the Elect of a final decisive struggle against the hosts of evil, the chiliastic notion of a perfect age which is to come after that struggle.
Interestingly, this contemporary kinship between the Left and Islamism was forecast a century ago by the Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc. In his powerful little book, The Great Heresies, Belloc describes those “great” heresies not merely as religious disagreements but as potent and irresistible global movements that profoundly influenced and, in some cases, continue to influence the contemporary world. Among the five such dominant unorthodoxies, he included both “The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed” and “The Modern Phase,” which, more or less, describes the post-Enlightenment rise of the Left.
Obviously, Belloc’s book was controversial for its depiction of Muslims as heretics. And to be clear, I have neither the religious studies background nor the comparative religious insights to evaluate his blanket denunciation of Islam. I suspect, in fact, that his picture of Islam was painted with far too broad a brush. That said, the form of Islam that animates the “Islamic Republic” of Iran is very much in the same category of religious/quasi-religious millenarianism as the Western Left, as many Muslims and even many Shi’ites concede.
In short, the United States is not merely fighting a war against another country. It is fighting a war against Millenarian heretics at home and abroad. And in the future, it will have to do so again. And again. And again.
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