One of my favorite analysts of the world scene, David Goldman, aka Spengler, has just written an excellent piece on why liberals have so much difficulty these days (and many days) coming to terms with reality. As he succinctly puts it: “Liberal rationality is a pose. Knowledge is existential.” Read the whole piece, but here I reproduce his comment about my book.

Prof. Richard Landes’ new book Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience contains a marvelous discussion of the grandfather of all World Government schemes, Immanuel Kant’s “Universal Peace.” Kant, the supposed exemplar of Enlightenment rationality, wrote with cultish enthusiasm of “the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed.” Reading what Kant actually wrote, we confront not a rational philosopher but a deluded dreamer.  Scratch a liberal, bleed a millennial fanatic. My review of Richard’s book will appear in the next issue of First Things magazine.

With his extensive knowledge of ecclesiastical history (e.g., Augustine), and his wide-ranging analysis of the current world scene, I eagerly anticipate one of the more substantive reviews of my book.

I posted Gordon Haber’s review of my book and some readers asked for my response to his criticisms. So here they are.

Let me begin by saying that this is by far the most substantive review so far, and much of what Haber says in the first part of the review I have no complaints about. (Sorry about the complexity of the opening chapters; I hope a second reading, after reading the ten case studies, will be more rewarding.) I especially liked his treatment of my “secular millennialism” thesis. I begin my interlinear comments with his discussion of my treatment of contemporary apocalyptic manifestations.

Heaven on Earth is less illuminating of more recent movements. For Landes, UFO cults and movies about UFOs are interchangeable expressions of millennialism. I suggested earlier that we need to pay attention to the influence of apocalyptic fantasies on popular culture, but there’s a difference between belief and the suspension of disbelief, between the Raelians and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters, which sought only to capture our imaginations and some cash.

I never claimed that they’re interchangeable, just that UFOlogy is a rich terrain for millennial thinking. As for dismissing Spielberg’s close encounters as just for entertainment and cash demeans the effort. I quote in full Richard Dreyfus’ comment that not being afraid of the alien “other” was a “big idea” that everyone on the set shared:

We all felt that this particular project had a noble agenda.  This was a big idea that Steven was talking about. It wasn’t just a sci-fi movie, it wasn’t about monsters from the id.  It was that we are not only not alone, but that we have relatively little to fear. People don’t realize, or it’s hard for people to remember, that Close Encounters was truly the first cultural iconic moment that said, “Calm down we’re okay. They can be our friends.” That really was a huge statement that I and lots of other people wanted to participate in. (Special Features of 2001 DVD edition.)

Gordon continues to the key topic, global Jihad as the most dangerous form of apocalyptic millennialism – active cataclysmic.

Landes’ discussion of “enraged millennialism” or global jihad is problematic as well, focusing on Muslim shame, which, he contends, began when the unbelievers of Mohammed’s day mocked the prophet. The Modern Era, in Landes’ telling, brought the “four humiliations of modernity—Western superiority, Israel’s existence, women’s liberation, and globalization,” resulting in the bloody, triumphalist fantasies of apocalyptic jihad.
While apocalyptic jihad does indeed pose a serious threat, Landes’ narrative reads like warmed-over Bernard Lewis. While we can’t completely dismiss this narrative (Christian apocalyptic texts, from Revelations to Left Behind, can be read as revenge fantasies), it’s just a little too neat, and it reeks of Western triumphalism.