These supposedly empirically-arrived-at certitudes – seated now in the human ego – triggered a re-awakening precisely to those early Judeo-Christian, apocalyptic notions: That history, somehow, was on a convergent course towards some human transformation, and an ‘End’, with fearful retribution for the corrupt, and a radically, redeemed, new world, for the elect. No longer (in today’s world), triggered through an act of God, but ‘engineered’ by the act of Enlightenment man.
World redemption from its state of corruption was to be brought into being through Enlightenment principles of rationality and science. Peace was expected to ensue, after the End Time.
These millenarian revolutionaries – exponents of the new Scientism, who hoped to force a shattering discontinuity in history (through which the flaws of human society would be excised from the body politic) – were, in the last resort, nothing other than secular representatives of the apocalyptic Judaic and Christian myth.
The American millenarian ‘myth’, then and now, was (and is), rooted in the fervent belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States, ‘the New Jerusalem’, to represent humanity’s best hope for a utopian future. This belief in a special destiny has been reflected in a conviction that the United States must lead – or more properly, has the duty to coerce – mankind toward that future.
Some might argue, however, that early Enlightenment ‘liberal’ humanism, with its ‘good intentions’, has no connection to Jacobinism or Trotskyite Bolshevism. But, in practice, both are crucially similar: They are secular versions of progress towards a utopian, redemption of a flawed humanity: One strand aims to reclaim humanity through the revolutionary destruction of the irredeemable parts of society. And the other strand roots its redemption in a teleological process of ‘melting’ away cultural identity. It also seeks to weaken the sense of linkage through shared ‘blood’ and territory (place) – in order to create a tabula rasa on which a new homogenised non-national, cosmopolitan identity can be writ, that will be both peaceful and democratic.
The aim is a global, cosmopolitan society disembarrassed of religion, national culture and community, gender and social class. Processes of toleration that, formerly, were construed as essential to freedom have undergone an Orwellian metamorphosis to emerge as their antonyms: as instruments, rather, of repression. Any national leader standing against this project, any contrary national culture, or national pride displayed in a nation’s achievements, plainly constitutes an obstacle to this prospective universal realm – and must be destroyed. In other words, today’s millenarians may eschew the guillotine, but they are explicitly coercive – albeit, in a different manner – through the progressive ‘capture’ of narrative, and of state institutions.
In short, a global space is being sought that would recognise only an international global humanity — much as the Trotskyites wanted.
