The World Turned Upside Down

The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power

Melanie Phillips

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781594035753
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión, política y estado

In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving increasingly irrationally. An astonishing number of people subscribe to celebrity endorsed cults, Mayan armageddon prophecies, scientism, and other varieties of new age, anti-enlightenment philosophies. Millions more advance popular conspiracy theories: AIDS was created in a CIA laboratory, Princess Diana was assassinated, and the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.In The World Turned Upside Down, Melanie Phillips explains that the basic cause of this explosion of irrationality is the slow but steady marginalization of religion. We tell ourselves that faith and reason are incompatible, but the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible, Phillips asserts, that gave us our concepts of reason, progress, and an orderly world on which science and modernity are based.Without its religious traditions, the West has drifted into mass derangement where truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. Scientists skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts, Israel is demonized, and the US is vilified over the war on terror—all on the basis of blatant falsehoods and obscene propaganda.Worst of all, asserts Phillips, this abandonment of rationality leaves the West vulnerable to its legitimate threats. Faced with the very real challenges of spiraling demographics and violent, confrontational Islamism, the West is no longer willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it once brought into being.

1

CULTS AND CONSPIRACIES FROM DIANA TO OBAMA

The rock star Madonna is an icon of Western modernity. She is also the world’s most famous proponent of “Kabbalah,” a modern perversion of a branch of Jewish mysticism bearing that name. This pseudo-Kabbalah has been denounced by rabbinic authorities as a brainwashing cult that has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism and, indeed, stands in direct opposition to it, accused as it is of engaging in acts of extortion by threatening people with curses if they refuse to give it money and making ludicrous promises of physical health and wealth if they buy its publications.

Like punk rock, says Madonna, “Kabbalah” is a way of “thinking outside the box.” But in fact, “thinking” is hardly the word to express any activity associated with it. Devotees wear a red thread around the wrist as protection against the evil eye; by meditating on “stem cells” or drinking “holy water,” they are promised immortality of the body on the basis of a doctrine that teaches “Not to accept things as is” [sic].¹

Accepting things that are demonstrably not, however, is by no means confined to rock stars. Both the late Princess Diana and Cherie Blair, the wife of the former British prime minister Tony Blair, reportedly believed in the transcendent properties of stones; Mrs. Blair commonly sported a crystal pendant around her neck to ward off harmful rays from computers and mobile phones.² Mrs. Blair also reportedly consulted an octogenarian former market gardener named Jack Temple who ran a “healing center” from a barn next to his home in West Byfleet, Surrey. Temple told her that he was able to read her DNA by consulting rocks he kept in a room at the center and by swinging a pendulum over her body.

Shortly after the 1997 election, Mrs. Blair reportedly gave Mr. Temple a selection of small jars, each containing hair and toenail clippings obtained from both herself and the prime minister. Temple claimed that by “dowsing” the jars with his pendulum he was able to detect any signs of “poisons and blockages” in the first couple. The media reported: “It was not uncommon for her to fax several A4 pages of questions at a time to Temple so he could advise her which decisions should be taken immediately and which should be put off until the ‘vibes’ he was receiving from their hair and nail clippings were more positive.”³

If anything defines the modern age in the West, it is surely the worship of reason. To be modern, we tell ourselves, is to be rational. Anything that doesn’t carry the imprimatur of reason is deemed to be no more than dogma and mumbo-jumbo belonging to the unenlightened past. It is on this basis that science is held to have delivered a lethal blow to religion and given rise to a supposedly secular Western culture, which will have no truck with claims such as religious miracles or the existence of God. These are dismissed as the superstitious beliefs of a bygone primitive age of myth and bigotry.

Yet this central claim of the modern world is not borne out by its own behavior. Far from basking in an age of reason, Western society is characterized by a profound and widespread irrationality. While organized religion in many parts of the West is on the wane, with dwindling church attendance and a systematic erosion of Judeo-Christian principles by an intelligentsia for whom belief in God is evidence of deep stupidity or even insanity, Western society has filled the gap with a range of bizarre, irrational and premodern beliefs and behavior.

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Madonna, Cherie Blair and Princess Diana represent the rise of what Chris Partridge has termed “occulture.”⁴ While most people remain rooted in solid reality, a growing number of supposedly super-rational twenty-first-century men and women now subscribe to a range of New Age cults, paganism, witchcraft and belief in psychic phenomena such as reincarnation, astrology and parapsychology.

What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan have become mainstream treatments and therapies, including faith healers, psychic mediums, astrologers, “angel therapists” and “aura photographers.” “Wicca”—or witchcraft—and paganism constitute the fastest-growing religious category in America, with between 500,000 and 5 million adherents. If “New Age spirituality” is included, the number reaches 20 million and growing.

In 1990 there were five thousand practicing British pagans; nearly a decade later, the number had risen to a hundred thousand.⁵ Whereas paganism would once have been seen as inimical to religion, it is now viewed in Britain’s multicultural nirvana as just another faith. So hospital authorities in Tayside, Scotland, for example, have agreed to allow pagans to practice meditation, healing rituals and special prayers in health service hospitals, with patients permitted to keep a small model of a pagan “healing goddess” on their bedside tables.⁶ Britain’s prison authorities are equally hospitable to the occult: under instructions issued to every prison governor, pagan “priests” are allowed to use wine and wands during ceremonies in jails. Inmates practicing paganism are allowed a hoodless robe, incense and a piece of religious jewelry among their personal possessions. ⁷ And a Pagan Police Association has been set up to represent officers who “worship nature and believe in many gods,” with the Hertfordshire police force allowing officers eight days’ pagan holidays per year, including Halloween and the summer solstice.⁸

Along with such beliefs has grown the use of mediums, psychics, séances, telepathy and other aspects of the paranormal. Undoubtedly, for many people these practices amount to little more than playful whims or amusements rather than serious beliefs. Nevertheless, thousands of cults combine irrational beliefs with sinister programs to control people’s minds and behavior, which have made inroads into the religious and medical worlds and the prison system. In America, there are an estimated 2,500 cults involving between 3 and 10 million people. Their techniques of mind control are many and various. They include food and sleep deprivation; trance induction through hypnosis or prolonged rhythmical chanting; and “love bombing,” where cult members are bombarded with conditional love, which is removed whenever there is a deviation from the dictates of the leader.

Such cults often promote bizarre theories about conspiracies by agents of the modern world or by extraterrestrial forces. These theories cross political divides, linking neofascist, New Age, Islamist and green groups. Millions of people—including many who wouldn’t have anything to do with any cult—now appear only too eager to believe that the world is controlled by dark conspiracies of covert forces for which there is not one shred of evidence. Once, such theories would have been seen as indications of extreme eccentricity. Now, growing numbers of people treat them as legitimate subjects for debate, creating an infectious kind of public hysteria.

Examples of these conspiracy theories include the notion that AIDS was created in a CIA laboratory, that Princess Diana was murdered to prevent her from marrying a Muslim, and that the 9/11 attack on New York was orchestrated by the Bush administration, in some versions (particularly popular in the Muslim world) aided and abetted by the Israeli Mossad. These notions are all advanced in press articles or in television documentaries as hypotheses to be seriously entertained. The ninety-minute documentary Loose Change, which posits the 9/11 conspiracy theory, was shown on television in the United States and the UK, and was discussed as if it presented a reasonable hypothesis. Although the film was denounced in some quarters as risible, its thesis is believed by a significant number of people and has generated what is known as the “Truther” movement. According to opinion polls, more than a third of Americans suspect that federal officials either facilitated the 9/11 attacks or knew they were imminent but did nothing to stop them, so the government would have a pretext for going to war in the Middle East.⁹

Similarly, thousands of people apparently believe that Princess Diana was murdered at the hands of a conspiracy involving the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and MI₅. The overwhelming evidence that she died because she was not wearing a seat belt when her drunken chauffeur crashed while speeding through a Paris tunnel did not prevent British public opinion from forcing a three-year investigation followed by a long-drawn-out inquest at enormous public expense—all to test out a conspiracy theory that belongs to the realm of fantasy.

On a steadily enlarging fringe, fevered discussions of UFOs, aliens and mind control veer into allegations of conspiracies by hidden elites in the Bilderberg Group of foreign affairs specialists or the Rothschild banking firm, heavily laden with antisemitic paranoia about the alleged sinister power of the Jews.

Books by David Icke, the former soccer player and TV sports presenter who has announced that he is “the son of God,” are bestsellers advancing a mixture of New Age philosophy and apocalyptic conspiracy theory. In these, he argues that Britain will be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes, and that the world is ruled by a secret group called the “Global Elite” or “Illuminati,” which was responsible for the Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, and which he has linked to the iconic text of Jewish conspiracy theory, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—despite the fact that this was a hoax fabricated by the tsarist secret police at the turn of the twentieth century. Icke has said he is guided by beings on “higher levels” to make such information available to the public.¹⁰

Meanwhile the forces in the U.S. citizens’ militia movement that were indeed responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing are themselves fueled by similar paranoid conspiracy theories involving hidden elites, secret societies and international organizations and plots featuring everything from UFOs to gun control, Freemasonry to AIDS.

SUSPENSION OF POLITICAL JUDGMENT

The postreligious Western world is struggling to adjust to a profound loss of moral and philosophical moorings. A consequence of this radical discombobulation is widespread moral, emotional and intellectual chaos, resulting in shattered and lonely lives, emotional incontinence and gullibility to fraud and charlatanry. There is an increasing tendency to live in a fantasy world where irrational beliefs in myths are thought to restore order to chaotic lives, and where psychological projection creates the comforting illusion of control.

In the Western world, there have been two notable instances of this mythmaking in recent years. The first was the fantasy woven around the personality of the late Princess Diana, and the extraordinary passions unleashed by her untimely demise in the Alma tunnel in Paris. It was only with the death of the “People’s Princess” that the extent of Britain’s transformation—from a country of reason, intelligence, stoicism, self-restraint and responsibility into a land of credulousness, sentimentality, emotional excess, irresponsibility and self-obsession—became shatteringly apparent.

Princess Diana was an icon of the new Britain because she embodied the latter characteristics. In a country where epidemic family breakdown and mass fatherlessness testified to a society oblivious to the lethal downside of its culture of instant gratification, Princess Diana—herself the product of a family broken by divorce, a pattern she then replicated in her own marriage breakdown—became a symbol of dysfunctionality redeemed. Her bulimia and the story of her apparent unhappiness with a purportedly cold and unfaithful husband and an unfeeling and callous royal family confirmed her as the national emblem of victimhood. But she was also beautiful and rich, a fashion icon and a future Queen of England. And in her reported stand against the supposedly remote, rigid and repressed royals, she stood for “real” values such as love and kindness. So she became a mythic personality onto whom the public projected the fantasy that she was just like them in the chaos of her personal life but had transcended it all to become a near-sainted figure, laying her hands upon AIDS sufferers or campaigning emotionally against land mines.

It was all rubbish, of course. No one actually knew what she was really like; people just thought they did. Only later did her deeply disturbed, manipulative and selfish behavior become apparent. But since people were unable to distinguish between the true and the ersatz, her death unleashed an orgy of sentimentality. People sobbed in the streets and buried the gates of Kensington Palace, where the Princess had lived, under mountains of cellophane-wrapped bouquets. Indeed, reaction to the death took an explicitly religious form: the shrines of flowers, the praying, the hushed and reverent atmosphere.

This was all vicarious feeling, however. In postreligious Britain, it was devotion at a distance by people who no longer possessed what they still deeply longed for—belief in something beyond themselves, and emotional health and support. It was kitsch emotion over someone they had never known; grief for the death of an imagined personality, which sanctified the elevation of feeling, image and spontaneity over reason, reality and restraint.

Feelings were associated with being a nice and good person, while restraint was seen as evidence of callousness. But feelings were deemed to exist only if they were visible. Tears were good; stiff upper lips were bad. Accordingly, people carried their mourning bouquets like badges of moral worth. The Queen and the Prince of Wales, by contrast, were judged to be cold and heartless because they weren’t weeping or emoting. The scene threatened to become ugly when the public turned savagely against the Queen for failing to fly the Union Flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace and were mollified only when the monarch, alerted to the dangerous public mood, allowed the people to see how deeply the family had been affected by the tragedy.

This “Dianafication” of the culture is essentially empty, amoral, untruthful and manipulative; eventually people see through it and realize they have been played for suckers. But while the mood lasts—and it can last long enough to create presidents and prime ministers—reason doesn’t have a chance. Warm, fuzzy feelings win hands down because they anaesthetize us to reality and blank out those issues that require difficult decisions. This disorder raises up political icons who achieve instantaneous and unshakeable mass followings of adoring acolytes because they permit the public to suspend judgment and avoid making any hard choices, indulging instead in fantasies of turning swords into ploughshares.

The second conspicuous example of postreligious mythology was the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States—although buyers’ remorse and disillusionment appeared to set in within a few months of his inauguration and soon threatened to swamp his period of office altogether. Obama came to power as a mythic figure, like Princess Diana, who seemed to sublimate and transcend the public’s various cultural traumas. By virtue of the fact that he was half black, he allowed people to fantasize that he would both redeem America’s shameful history of slavery and racial prejudice and bring peace to the world. After all, did he not embody in his own history a fusion of black and white, Muslim and Christian?

Brushed aside were highly troubling details of his personal history: his ambivalence about his fractured identity, his efforts to conceal or misrepresent crucial details about his background, and a pattern of unsavory or radical associations. The fact that his pre-election statements were intellectually and politically incoherent, frighteningly naive or patently contradictory was of no consequence. In his personal story and troubled family background, people imagined they could see someone who had overcome adversity by force of character. Like Princess Diana, he appeared to have emerged from this troubled past committed to spreading peace, love and reconciliation. Instead of waging war, he would bring harmony simply through his personality, charisma and will.

Reason was suspended for the duration; emotion and sentimentality took over. People didn’t want to hear about the anti-white, anti-Western church to which he had belonged for twenty years, nor about his questionable associations with people in Chicago’s corrupt political machine, nor about his friendships with and tutelage by anti-Western radicals. The appeal of the myth he embodied, with its capacity to redeem America, was simply too strong.

After all, the American public had just endured the global ignominy of a president—the embodiment of their nation—who was reviled as a cretinous, bigoted, warmongering, inarticulate, gauche and incompetent cowboy. In Barack Obama, by contrast, they had a political rock star, a global icon and the epitome of cool by virtue of his handsomeness, elegance, laid-back thoughtfulness, apparent intelligence, blessed articulacy (they ignored the teleprompters) and charisma. And he was black to boot. And so by electing him to the presidency they were redeeming both America and themselves, upon whom his reflected glory would shine, illuminating the virtue of those who had the moral clarity and insight to vote for him. Aghast at ...