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Post-Apocalypse

The faith in Utopia, which killed so many in the centuries following the French Revolution, is dead. Like other faiths it may be resurrected in circumstances that cannot be foreseen; but it is unlikely to trouble us much further in the next few decades. The cycle in which world politics was dominated by secular versions of apocalyptic myth has come to an end, and, in an historic reversal, old-time religion has re-emerged at the heart of global conflict.

Iraq was the first utopian experiment of the new century and may be the last. Unending carnage in the country continues to be described in the secular language of the post-Enlightenment era, with western countries talking of defending human rights and Islamists using many of the ideas of western radical thought. Yet it has ceased to be a contest in which secular ideologies are at stake and has become instead a many-sided war of religion entwined with an ongoing resource war.

The political ideologies of the last two hundred years were vehicles for a myth of salvation in history that is Christianity’s most dubious gift to humanity. The faith-based violence to which this myth gave rise is a congenital western disorder. The early Christian belief in an End-Time that would bring about a new type of human life was transmitted via the medieval millenarians to become secular utopianism and, in another incarnation, the belief in progress. The age of utopias ended in Fallujah, a city razed by rival fundamentalists. The secular era is not in the future, as liberal humanists believe. It is in the past, which we have yet to understand.