The Pursuit of the Millennium

"This celebrated book has been in print for over half a century. It’s a historical account of the fanatical millenarian sects that swept across Europe from the 11th to 15th centuries: sects that were driven by certainty of the world coming to an end. Clearly, it has relevance for our times. And when the world ended there would be deliverance for the elect. Your enemies would be damned just as you would be saved. These sects were extremely violent, and they came from the poorest, most deprived, marginal sections of society. They surged across Northern Germany, killing Jews, priests, the bourgeois. Frank Kermode, in his famous book The Sense of an Ending , elaborated on Cohn’s masterwork by suggesting that actually it’s very common for all of us – especially artists – to feel that we live at the end of times, and that our own demise means all the more to us because we’re not simply dying in the middle of the plot, in medias res . Our lives take on significance because as we decline we notice our society is declining all around us. It’s part of a yearning for narrative significance. As Kermode said, no one can hear a clock saying, as it does, tick tick . What we hear is tick tock . A beginning and an end. We impose this order. Cohn’s book found its way into conversations in On Chesil Beach , and it’s present in Solar , when Beard reflects sceptically on the environmental movement. The epigraph to Solar is a quote from Rabbit is Rich , in which Rabbit is pleased to note that the Earth is decaying, just as he himself is. We’re bound to ask ourselves, if we’re thinking of matters like climate change, whether we are indulging our time-honoured tendency for end-time thinking. Of course, even if we are, that doesn’t make climate change any less real. In On Chesil Beach it’s raised within the context of a discussion of the nuclear arms race: the fear that the Earth could be obliterated in a matter of hours. And again, we do now have the technological capability to destroy ourselves – whereas in medieval times the imagined destruction had supernatural causes. It was God’s revenge. The other reason I mention this book is because in its final section, in what I think are rather resounding pages, Cohn notes that this European tradition of end-time thought fades after the 15th century, or at least becomes less bloody, then re-emerges in the 20th century in secular form, in two great totalitarian movements which derive their momentum from the millennial of the Middle Ages . One of these was Nazism, with its deliberate echoes of the Book of Revelation – the thousand year Reich. The Aryan master race will be the elect, the saved, while the Jews would be damned. And again in Soviet communism: the State will wither away, the proletariat will be the elect, the enemies – the bourgeois, the kulaks – will be destroyed. Again there is a sense of deliverance through blood and fire. We now live in a kind of dazed, post-totalitarian world. You see little reawakenings, in the more extravagant and radical forms of Islam, and in even tinier groups within Christianity. But basically those two great movements consumed so many in the fire that we’re still recovering – the smoke still hangs in the air. So we have nothing, and we are lucky to have nothing. Those grim utopian movements defined the 20th century in its first half. Whatever progress we make now, we’ll have to achieve it in small steps. Well, I see it through the sceptical eyes of Isaiah Berlin . Always distrust utopian thinkers. People who believe they can deliver us to happiness for ever are bound to think, rationally enough, that the means will justify the ends. If it will bring the peaceable kingdom to pass, then break the eggs to make that everlasting omelette! And I think utopian radical Islamism or jihadism is a smaller and more scattered version of what so powerfully dominated the 20th century. The jihadi preference for instant rage, slaughter and martyrdom repels everyone, including nearly all Muslims. And the list of radical Islamist dislikes is too long, too much against the grain of human aspiration for their cause to have much appeal in the long run – sexuality, free thought, music, gays, evolutionary biology, unveiled independent women, pluralism, democracy, curiosity, fun, tolerance, fashion, humour… Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I saw a demonstration along the Euston Road in London the other day – about a hundred chanting fellows in beards, with the women well to the rear, as you’d expect, head to toe in burqas, and many carrying banners demanding ‘Sharia law now’. The rush-hour traffic was edging round them; no one was paying much attention. They were a minor nuisance, like a failed traffic light. They didn’t look threatening so much as comically hopeless. How marvellous: no one was shouting or throwing stones at them, no one was much bothered. They were exercising their well-protected (I hope) right to demonstrate. A right they would surely never grant to others, if they had their way. They seemed not only puny but politically illiterate – some of their banners said ‘Hands off Gaddafi’. Well, he’s been a scourge to Islamists in his own country, so how on earth they thought he was someone they would want to support, I don’t know. Politics belong in novels when novelists want it. If you were, let’s say, a Polish dissident writer in the 70s and 80s, you wouldn’t feel you had much freedom not to address your situation. But in our relatively settled polis in England there are people writing every conceivable kind of novel. No one is criticised for not writing about the banking crisis or cuts to the Arts Council. It’s a luxury and a freedom to let your mind go wherever it wants. Israeli and Palestinian writers do not have this freedom. It’s a conscious and hard choice to ignore the ‘situation’."

"I first read Norman Cohn back in the sixties, an awful long time ago. It stayed with me and had a profound effect on me, and emerged in my work in a clear way in the book Black Mass . My own copy is inscribed to me by Norman Cohn, which I’m quite proud of. The idea for the book came to him during the Second World War , when he participated in the debriefing of some senior Nazis who displayed aspects of what he recognised even then to be an apocalyptic mentality. Some of them said that although they lost, they were happy that they had destroyed so much and brought an end to a certain type of civilisation. As you say, the book is an examination of millenarian movements in the late medieval and early modern period – that is, movements that expected a radical transformation in human affairs, as a result of divine intervention with the emergence of a new messiah. Examples in central Europe include John of Leiden of the [1534] Münster rebellion. These were leaders who took control of an area or city, abolished private property and set up a form of theocratic communism. They believed that the church, society and the world itself had become completely corrupt, and that change could only be achieved through divine intervention. Absolutely. There was an awful lot of violence, and the theocratic experiments were very harsh when they were brought in. People were forced to give up any wealth or gold they owned, some of them were forbidden to close their windows and had to be under public supervision all the time, and some of the women were required to be the sexual property of men. They were almost parodies of the dystopian results that utopias very often have in practice. One of the reasons why I reject the idea of utopias is precisely because I find that many of the ends that they wish to realise would be horrific. Well, if you have a world with no religion at all, in which private property has been removed and replaced by communal arrangements, or in which families have ceased to exist because we are communists – rather like the early Bolsheviks were very hostile to the family – then some cost to civilisation might be removed, but so too would a great deal of what civilisation values. People often take up these movements in periods where they are dislocated by economic and other types of change. If you look at some of the discussions of the Tea Party in America today, it has become almost commonplace to say that they contain apocalyptic elements. Yes, there’s that. Also the idea that there needs to be a radical or total change in American institutions, otherwise they will collapse or disintegrate. There have always been such crazy ideas in American politics, but they have been at or near the fringes. They have never gotten close to the centre of political power, and probably never will. But they are much closer now. Why? Because of the dislocation of the financial crisis and its economic side effects. Many millions of Americans have lost equity on their homes, lost their jobs or are afraid of losing them, found their pensions depleted, and have children who are unemployed. In other words, the reason why these ideas have become more compelling in America is economic. One hopes very much he is not! It’s hard to know what is going to happen now in US politics. What is significant about Obama , whatever his failures, is his palpable sanity. He is an immensely sane leader. And it’s an odd question to ask, but I wonder if sanity is a political advantage or disadvantage in these circumstances in America? Indeed. Cohn applies his analysis of medieval and early modern millenarian movements to 20th century totalitarian movements, in particular to Leninism and Stalinism on the one hand and Nazism on the other. He is able to demonstrate that although the belief systems were different – in the case of Leninism and Stalinism it was grounded in dialectical materialism, in the case of Nazism in a pseudo-science founded on racism – and different from the belief systems that animated the medieval and early modern millenarians, the categories of thinking were strikingly similar. For instance, the idea of history as moving towards a cataclysmic conflict between dark and good forces which would shake the foundations of the world. That is just one example of the type of thinking that was preserved and reproduced in 20th century totalitarianism, despite the rejection of the specific religious beliefs with which it was associated. Utopianism first existed in religious and apocalyptic forms in the context that Cohn analyses. It then existed, for much of the 20th century, at the extremes of politics – the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. That was destroyed for a while, but now we may be seeing some of the toxins of the far right re-emerging. I think it’s already evident that the classical poisons of European politics – anti-semitism, and hatred of internal and external minorities such as gypsies and gays – are re-emerging in politically significant forms as a response to the economic crisis. It’s not like 1930s Nazi Germany, thank God – there aren’t mass parties like the Nazis – but I think there’s a paranoid vision of the world of the same kind that Cohn explores that is re-emerging at the present time."