The Holy Week massacre
Well, the great virus war has drawn to a close... and I am not convinced that I won it. I have managed to blast all the more obvious nuisances, but I do not know enough about computers not to be sure that I have got rid of everything. I have otherwise been rather lazy, indulging rather too much in idle net-surfing.
Today's piece of writing is a reflection on the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate community a few years ago.
THE HOLY WEEK MASSACRE
In about 1928, Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote an essay titled The optimist as a suicide. I will quote some passages:
...there is another way in which the freethinker is not only thoughtful but useful. The man who rejects the Faith altogether is often very valuable as a critic of the man who... picks out some piece of Catholicism that happens to please him, or throws away some part that happens to puzzle him... his inconsistency can often be effectively exposed from the extreme negative as well as the extreme positive point of view... the atheist can illustrate how important it is to keep the Catholic system together, even if he rejects it altogether.
A curious and amusing instance comes from America, in connection with Mr. Clarence Darrow, the somewhat simple-minded sceptic of that land of simplicity. He seems to have been writing something about the impossibility of anybody having a soul: of which nothing need be said that (as usual) it seems to be the sceptic who really thinks of the soul superstitiously as a separate and secret animal with wings; who considers the soul quite apart form the self. But what interests me about him at the moment is this. One of his arguments against immortality is that people do not really believe in it. And one of his arguments is that if they did believe in certain happiness beyond the grave, they would all kill themselves. He says that nobody would endure... cancer, for instance, if [they] really believed (as he apparently assumes all Christians to believe) that in any case the mere fact of death would instantly introduce the soul to perfect felicity and the society of all its best friends...
...there we have the final flower and crown of all modern optimism... and humanitarianism in religion. Sentimentalists talk about love till the world is sick of the most glorious of all human words... They declare that all will be forgiven, because there is nothing to forgive... that 'passing over'... must immediately introduce us to... all conceivable comforts, without any reference to how we have got there. They are positive that there is no danger, no devil; even no death. All is hope, happiness and optimism. And, as the atheist very truly points out, the logical result of all that hope, happiness and optimism would be hundreds of people hanging from lamp-posts or thousands of people throwing themselves into wells or canals. We should find the rational result [underline mine] of the modern Religion of Joy and Love in one huge human stampede of suicide. Pessimism might have killed its thousands, but optimism its ten thousands. (From The Thing, page 222)
Yes, another Chestertonian paradox; another display of irritatingly frivolous cleverness in the service of blinkered Catholicism. Or at least so might a person out of sympathy with the great writer's views have said, up to six decades after this piece was written. But no further. The sixtieth year was not allowed to pass before the truth of Chesterton's diagnosis fell on us like a sword, for this was no paradox, and very little even of a joke. It was the forecast of a possibility, based on a perfectly rational analysis of facts.
On Maundy Thursday, March 27, 1997, in the shadow of the great Christian festival of redemption, the news swept the world that thirty-nine members of a New Ageish cult in California had killed themselves. We had seen mass cult suicides and murders before, but this obscenity was something new. It wasn't the paranoid hysteria of the horrible Reverend Jimmy Jones, fled to the jungles of Guyana in the expectation that the US government (which could not have cared less if he lived or died) would pursue him wherever he went, and whose most dedicated followers killed backsliders before doing away with themselves; it wasn't the sour metallic taste of paranoid, power-mad crankishness that haunted the Order of the Solar Temple, with the mystical medievalist militarism of many neo-Templar groups, in which many if not all the dead seem to have been murdered (though neither Switzerland, nor France, nor Canada seem to have made head or tail of the trail of dead bodies and burning buildings); it wasn't the Stone Age fanaticism of splinter Mormon bodies killing each other and anyone they deem right, in out-of-the-way parts of the United States, in the name of a misread Bible and a bad nineteenth-century historical novel.
No: these were gentle, vegetarian, cranky, sweet, left-wing New Age types whom nobody would have put down as likely to hurt a fly, led by a man who called himself Father Bo (his real name was Marshall Applewhite) after a joke on Bo Peep. They did not hang out in isolated camps in the middle of nowhere, nor did they live off money begged from passers-by, but carried out a profitable business designing websites on the Internet, and paid for a very expensive residence in San Diego from the proceeds. None of the supposed warning signs. Sure, they were cranks, but hey, this is Southern California, right?
And one day, these technologically up-to-date types found some garbled astronomical observation in their Internet stomping grounds, suggesting that some sort of spacecraft was sheltering behind the new Hailey-Bopp comet (in fact, the loonie who placed that message had misread the emissions of a fixed star) and had come to the conclusion that this was their own real people from the stars, come to take them home. And so, gently, lovingly, and with great self-discipline, they had carefully taken poison in relays, over a matter of days, the surviving ones putting the dead to rest in turn, till all the eighteen men and twenty-one women lay dead.
One thinks of how the days passed; of bright California sunlight streaming through large windows; of men and women, fewer every few hours, going back and forth in large rooms like thin shadows in the sun, looking at the growing number of dead forms carefully laid out each under his or her purple winding-sheet, all neat and hygienical in the best Southern California manner; of few or no words spoken, as these living ghosts floated by until they, too, faded away. It is rare that a journalistic cliche' should capture the absolute truth of something: but surely nobody has done more to describe the quality of this story than the lazy, cliche'-addled sub who first picked up the word "chilling". It is chilling. We have looked in the mirror, and death has looked back at us; death, and a delicate crawling madness.
Billions of TV spectators saw: the tragic creatures actually made their own apologiae for their deaths in videotaped messages (modern technology, always modern technology! - others would have left suicide notes), and their pathetically earnest faces, twisted into the most passionate expressions of loving sincerity, going into civilized ecstasies, made a strange impression. One of the women, in particular, used an epression we are used to hearing from all manner of people we lazily pigeon-hole as "well-meaning" or some such term of patronizing approval: "if only people would know". I wonder how many of us felt their hearts stop. We all know someone in the grip of that same rhetoric of sincerity, that earnestly pleading tone, that "if only they understood". They are so loving, so very concerned: they are trying, not to argue a point, but to save the world from some terrible delusion. They are the ones who know, the rest of us are the unenlightened.
They believed themselves to be a group of star-born aliens, unhappily caught in earth-bound bodies, waiting patiently for some sort of release. What this release was going to be, they don't seem to have been very clear on; from what I've heard, they felt that perhaps spaceships from another world - and what their leader called guardedly "another dimension, as some might say" - might come to Earth and take them bodily home, flesh bodies and all.
Their philosophy implies a sort of cosmic aristocracy, for it means either that we are all star-born, or that only some of us - the lucky, superior suicides - are. The second case seems more likely, since otherwise the spaceship to take us all home must be one heck of a craft; more to the point, the cult seems never to have done any proselitizing at all, to have made any effort to explain to mankind in general that it is star-born. The precious knowledge stayed within the magic circle while the rest of us just ambled off on our ignorant life-paths. And if so, then the cosmic aristocrats have a perfect right, if not indeed a duty, to disregard - however gently, however lovingly - the pleas and views of beings not born from the same star. If an earthly body is a sort of cosmic waste matter, a form of existence they themselves reject, how could creatures rooted in that inferior sort of existence ever understand the need of superior, unmaterial beings like them? We have seen them and heard them, speaking as from a loving yet lofty hauteur, pleading with us poor benighted creatures to try and understand them - to stretch our limited imagination so far. Any pleas, any reasoning, any attempt to stem the incipient group madness of the cult, would have been met, not with argument or even with anger, but with loving pity.
But even if they taught that all mankind is star-born, there still is a basic arrogance about such views. We are not really of Earth; nothing fundamental binds us to this beautiful, unhappy sphere, with its hunger and its cold, its heat and its danger; we come from cooler, finer, more restful regions, and the bondage of matter is in effect only a trap for a different kind of being. In case anyone thinks this has anything to do with the Christian idea of the soul, the truth is that, even if the notion of the trapped alien being were metaphysical rather than, as they describe it, defiantly and thoroughly physical - the origin of the trapped spirits is on another planet and perhaps on another dimension, but certainly not in Heaven - what we would be describing would be not Christianity but Manicheism; Christianity believes in the resurrection of the body, Manicheism rejects it as a trap for the immaterial light of the soul. To the Christian, or at least to the Catholic, the soul is not a separate ghost animating the body, but the metaphysical principle of the body itself: the thing that comes into existence, as Word of God, when God says: "let John Smith be". We don't conceive of eternal life without the (transfigured) body.
They were not stereotypes of the murderous crank, neither outsiders nor outwardly violent. (Whenever an unusual murder takes place, straightaway the police look for a "loner", which made trouble for the unfortunate Colin Stagg and other social misfits, and probably did as much as anything to keep the sociable extrovert Fred West from detection.) But they grew into a common dream, all thirty-nine of them, which led to each of them contemplating calmly, even joyfully, not only his own death agonies, but those of his friends and lovers - for one assumes that in a group of eighteen men and twenty-one women there must have been relationships. The last few, in particular, surrounded by dozen of bulks of flesh that had once been their friends, their lovers, the members of a group that was surely as much to them as their own family, must have had a resolve of steel. I know that I could not contemplate the death of someone dear to me; what kind of mind did these people have, that they could?
Make no mistake: death is never easy and never pleasant. The SS toilets in some Nazi death camps came with standard-issue gripping bars for any SS who, overcome by the horror of his duties, should need to vomit; and Hugh Trevor-Roper claims that many death camp attendants went insane. If mass murder has this effect on a criminal elite selected for the purpose of carrying it out, how can these gentle Californian hippie men and women have lived with it, and with the prospect of themselves becoming the same as those terrifying livid things, for days, without terror and physical revulsion?
Possibly they did; possibly they had to steel themselves. More likely, I would say, they would ascribe their revulsion not to the fact of death itself but to the materiality of those pathetic scattered bodies - the bulks of flesh they were making ready to discard. They hated them. One woman in the video referred to her desire to get rid of the whole miserable joke of existence. If they felt uneasy in the presence of this obscene caricature of living flesh, this final rebuttal to human life, what would be more natural (from their point of view) than to believe that they were seeing and experiencing the truth of material, bodily, earthbound existence at last? From that point of view, the very horror of death, misinterpreted as horror of material life, would have encouraged them to abandon this world of horror.
It is clear that they were primed for destruction for a long time, their group paralogic ticking away discreetly in the background as they went on programming computers and waiting for aliens to land. Their relationship with their selves can only be described as hatred: however veiled by a gentle, lofty and loving manner, their view of physical humanity was one of pure exasperation. For a very long time, they must have unhappily tolerated it, waiting for a way to leave it behind, and the patience with which they bore it only increased their longing to be rid of it. They needed extremely little provocation: only the possibility, the mere possibility that a spacecraft, any spacecraft, might be hiding behind Hailey-Bopp. At the first possible sighting of alien craft, without, it would seem, any doubts, without stopping to ask whether these were, after all, their aliens, without waiting or double-checking, they wildly leapt to the conclusion that their time had come. Their bodies were only prisons for their real selves; and now the aliens were coming to set them free.
This was, quite literally, Close encounters of the third kind come home to roost. If a more flagrant and devastating exposure of the mischievous nature of Spielberg's irresponsible optimism, so different from the solid moral worlds of Walt Disney or Frank Capra, could be conceived, I don't want to think of it. Aliens are superior beings (Applewhite spoke of their being evolved beyond humanity) and they would bring release, not only from the evils of our world, but even from material existence. This is directly reminiscent of the way Spielberg suggests that the kind of materiality his aliens have is not quite the same as that of common mankind: they are so luminous that, like the face of God, they cannot be seen. Craftily (and we remember that Spielberg is a Hollywood type) the movie did not actually say anything: it only surrounded the visitors with an air of inchoate benevolence and semi-divinity, and invited us to trust them. There is something of the Quisling about it.
The tragic Heavenly Gate community bought into this notion lock, stock and barrel. I am struck by the almost unfathomable ignorance of science that seems to have gone with a knowledge of technology. The stupidest comics writer would reject out hand the notion of a transdimensional craft having to travel through the Solar System before it could reach Earth: obviously, it could materialize wherever it pleased. The confusion of space travel with dimension travel is frankly extraordinary (it doesn't help that one of the dead was Thomas Taylor, brother of Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols). As for their belief that the aliens in question were "evolved far beyond us" and therefore better, the sentimental notion that evolution equals progress has been exploded so often and by so many people, it has a lot in common with a Mills bomb factory. Yet thirty-nine people familiar with computers were able to build a whole para-reality, a whole religious system, around this incredible trash; and they are dead.
It's just plain not good enough to put them down as nutters and let it go at that. Thirty-nine people do not develop individually the same kind of madness and just happen to drift into each other's company. A worse failure of common living took place here than just the sort of thing that drives a man to a tenth-floor ledge and to the pavement because he is hearing voices in his head. And we must remember that, until their death, they fitted into the contemporary world rather well. Their language was of the sort we hear every day, and they were especially concerned to tell us that they were not being "brainwashed" or forced, but had made their own choice - choice, that miserable incantatory word of the modern world, to justify abortion, privatization, and the degradation of the school and health systems. Choice; they were appealing to our own superstitions, in language that we too speak.
Well, for a start this tragedy exposes the nature of the lie of choice. The victims evidently protest too much. The fact that they all insist on their own choice gives the game away: they are justifying themselves. At some level in their minds there is a feeling that what they are doing is wrong, that others will be hurt or disgusted by it, and they feel the need for an apologia for it. And in a decision that was clearly a group decision, we are expected to believe that each of them reached it individually. Here we see the core of the lie: they are telling us that just the fact that thirty-nine adults took a certain choice is enough to justify them; and it bloody well is not. Choice of what? There can be no common measure between right and wrong, and therefore to use the word choice to justify a wrong choice is not good enough. The fact itself that we are allowed to choose does not justify us if we choose death; and there is nothing moral about choice - only about the results thereof. It is not even necessarily better to have a choice - as for instance with the choice of joining, or not joining, the SS. That's a choice we don't need.
In fact, they have all taken part in a game of mutual reinforcement. They have all wrestled each other's reason down, conspired into each other's madness, and then individually talked themselves into believing that group madness amounted to individual choice. Every time the word choice crops up, think of those pathetic faces on tape.
Nowhere do we have more choice than in the field of religion. We may, with no limitation whatsoever, join or start any cult however absurd; we may, with no challenge or limit, proclaim ourselves prophets and our views - or dreams - or nightmares - the New Truth. Nothing is more left to individual whim than the understanding of universal truth. It is a modern habit to give patronizing approval to all religious beliefs equally. We ourselves, we tell ourselvels, are of course too enlightened to fall for the sort of Thetan claptrap of the cults; however, everyone has a right to create his or her belief system, and as long as they mean well we shouldn't meddle.
The superiority complex implicit in this assumption went straight into the mentality of the Heavenly Gate group themselves. What I mean is that, however ignorant they may have been, they surely cannot have been so ignorant as not to realize that their notions of aliens coming to set them free from their bodies are the counterpart of a number of religious ideas which they may have regarded as Christian (but which are not so much Christian as part of a vague near-Christian penumbra of American sects and sentimental spiritualism). For every person who believes in alien abductions there is a Fundamentalist who is convinced that God will soon "rapture" the elect from Earth, taking them up directly to heaven. Applewhite and his lot must have known that they were putting a sci-fi spin on a theological (or sub-theological) view.
This implies that they must have felt they had reached the "scientific" truth behind what they took to be Christian "myth", and left the "myth" to their benighted, backward fellow-countrymen. Part of their pattern of mutual reinforcement was surely a shared sense of superiority over the "traditional" churches. They, and they alone, held the truth about what the rest of America only understood in hints, dreams, myths. This sense of superiority they rationalized in terms of science against religion (a completely false opposition which is unfortunately common media fodder). Aliens and spaceships are modern, scientific, credible; God and angels are outdated, superstitious, incredible. But the one may be explained in terms of the other, just as Erich von Daeniken explained ancient legends with spaceship visitations. (An interesting unconscious aspect of this is the unwillingness to abandon these more or less near-Christian views altogether: constant pseudo-scientific rewriting shows an itchy obsession with them that will not go away. They have to be rationalized somehow, anyhow: they cannot be simply forgotten.)
To anyone with an understanding of the intellectual issues involved in either science or theology, this sort of spiritual journey might well seem insane; but we are not talking about a structured form of knowledge. Despite their ability to manipulate computers and video cameras, these people were agonizingly ignorant. If anyone can see another explanation to their paralogical ideological construct, let me have it. My view is that they had never once in their lives, not even at school, been educated in science, in philosophy, or in theology. They may have had some facts thrown at them, but they had no inkling of the critical, constructive mentality on which science depends. Therefore they knew no science in any meaningful manner, and in my view no religion either - for good theology is no less critical and rational than good science.
The fact that Applewhite himself is said to be the son of a Presbyterian minister does not really contradict this, because it does nothing to prove that he was ever taught to think about religious issues; he may have been taught some religious notions - even a great deal of religious notions - but if he had no understanding of their inner logic, he was no more educated in it than an idiot child. And if he had, there is absolutely no chance he would have indulged in the childish delusions he did. Education is no safeguard against folly, but the follies of the educated are different from those of the uneducated. No educated person could have subscribed to, let alone developped, the Heavenly Gate superstitions. The view of Christianity that indubitably underlies their theology is one that ten minutes of debate with an intelligent layman would blow away like a cobweb; their view of science could be exploded by a fifteen-year-old with an O-level in physics.
These, bear in mind, were adults. There were no teen-agers among them. They had had all the opportunity that life affords to arrive at a sane, balanced view of the world; and all they had learned from it is that they were not suited to this Earth.
As such, this is not an unworthy thought, but rather the feeling or intuition behind many kinds of ascetic religious practice and idealistic philosophy, including much of the world's most respected intellectual heritage. It has no particular tendency to make people kill themselves; Plato and his followers, for instance, show no particular bent towards suicide. What made it, in this instance, lethal, was their complete lack of intellectual discipline, the belief that what feels nice to me is therefore right for me, that what I like must be my faith, that what feels comfortable to me must be my religion. Standards of proof and evidence, the capability of seeing things in terms of right and wrong, and (in Karl Popper's words) to distinguish a charlatan from an expert, were utterly lacking. It is clear that for the last years of their lives they were engaged in a constructive effort to unlearn, to discard as delusional, all the common sense notions and all the school-learned facts of science and (if they had any) religion.
Is it a chance that they lack this discipline? Oh no it's not. It is the result of modern manners and education. Deliberate avoidance of contentious issues has become a policy; discussion and argument are simply avoided. It is assumed that responsible adults will reach their own understanding of reality for themselves. But this rests upon a fundamental category mistake: that ideologies and visions of the world may be chosen like clothes off a peg. In fact, every child has one, however rudimentary; and if no sound elements are taught, then he will develop it upon error, and without the discipline of critical thought, since the very essence of critical thought is contention. If education shies away from philosophy, religion and science, it will not leave the child's head empty of notions on these subjects; it will leave it full of childish, ignorant, half-formed and never challenged ideas and chimeras, covered by that damned and God-cursed word choice!
Never taught to choose right from wrong, sense from nonsense, science from claptrap: never challenged, never set face to face with statements about ultimate issues of reality; they are let loose upon the world with so much of philosophy, science and religion, and such attitudes about religion and science as they garner from the mass media or absorb from home - attitudes, not thoughts. Their education had failed in the most valuable function any education should have - to serve as a corrective, as an alternative, path-opening introduction to ideas and facts not known at home and not easily absorbed from the TV screen.
The TV screen will also give them a particularly poisonous gift: they will learn the pose of virtually every media pundit and scribbler you can think of - the pose of jaded, weary understanding, of having simply seen through everything. Together with ignorance, that makes an explosive mixture. Anyone can learn to explain away the deepest mysteries of religion from two or three BBC or Channel 4 programs designed for that purpose, and these days, after the unfortunate success of The X-files, it is becoming even more profitable to "question" science. But it is the pose of superiority that is the TV pundit's deadliest gift to the ignorant, enabling them to smile with superior, pitying affection upon the unfortunate theology professor from the Gregorian University who is trying to explain to them why Christianity is more complex than their system allows, or on the unfortunate doctor in physics who is trying to explain why a spaceship wouldn't hide behind a comet. And so, having reinforced their ignorance by a perfect certainty of their own intelligence, they are ready to go off into total darkness.
And this, surely, must make us think. Is it not the case that we have shut off the problem of religion from our minds with a lazy assumption that most religions are valid one way or another, that all that matters is that no third party should be hurt? Religion is degraded to a consumer good: to those who like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like - so long as they don't scare other customers in the shop. And there's no doubt that Father Bo (Marshall Applewhite) and his little lot did not. They made so little a nuisance of themselves their neighbours hardly knew they existed. They were the ideal suburban cult, socially acceptable, untroublesome, and with just enough weirdness about it to make it an interesting talking point. After all, there are plenty of quiet, laborious American suburbanites who firmly hold that they have been abducted by aliens or come from outer space.
The fact is that this is a very convenient tack to take. To cling to reason, to insist on "testing everything and holding fast to what is good" like a scientist or a theologian, is a good way to lose friends and fail to influence people. We all know people who held to the strangest beliefs with single-minded fervour; and it is hard to know what to do, especially when we like them. I have known more than one such person: in particular a woman, a sweet-natured, loving, unselfish individual to whom my heart went out practically as soon as I met her. She was simply the nicest person you would ever want to meet; and she clung desperately to a most insane and untenable mixture of Christianity and reincarnation, as sound philosophically as a three-dollar bill. It was hard not to make her angry when discussing these things, and it was also unbearable, because she was such a sweet, defenceless, vulnerable creature, that to dismantle her castle of irrational illusions would have been literally like kicking a puppy dog or beating a little child. That I knew that she had very strong and tragic reasons to delude herself did not help, for if I had pointed them out to her I would have hurt her even more, and I knew it. There was a sort of unconscious moral blackmail involved, though I'm sure she never thought of it that way, that said: "if you challenge my beliefs, I might do anything. I might have a nervous breakdown. I might kill myself. And it would be your fault".
In situations like these, the view that all people are entitled to their own belief is much the easiest to take. It avoids the risk of painful ruptures with your friends; it removes the chance of hurting people you would not want to; and last but not least, it allows you to avoid debates in which you be ill at ease and find it hard to hold up your end. Most sane people today aren't used to thinking about ultimate issues, religion or philosophy; and when a normal, sane, but inarticulate person finds him or herself arguing on unfamiliar ground with an articulate and intelligent fanatic, well instructed in his or her views, who has made these things the centre of his or her intellectual life, it is the sane person and not the mad one who is in trouble. It is so much more comfortable not to be drawn in. But just because it is more comfortable, we must suspect it may not be right; the right thing so very often is not.
Who knows how many people there are in America and elsewhere to whom the Heaven's Gate cult are heroes? And who knows how many more there are who entertain a similar hatred of mankind, but in more outward-bound, more destructive forms? When will the next massacre be? In the name of a misunderstood notion of toleration, these things are allowed to run unchecked, unchallenged, unlooked-at; and yet we know they are dangerous.
What to do about them is a good question. I am certainly not in favour of suppression or persecution; besides being counterproductive, it is immoral. But at the same time, I don't think everyone should be allowed to found a religion without control. The person who creates a religion makes a claim about the nature of truth, which the rest of society ignores at its peril; because NO such claim about is ever confined only to those who hold it. Our society is to some extent protected from the worst effects of irrationalism, being so heavily dependent on science and its structural demand for rational debate and opposition; but the bodies of many dead warn us that we cannot be complacent.
Religions should not exist without necessity, nor only for the pleasure of their members. It is incumbent upon those who preach them to have very good reason for their views. It is not good enough to defend them on the grounds that they make them feel good: that is not what statements of truth are meant to be about. There is a great deal too much talk about "healing" these days, but before healing, we need truth, which perhaps might give us healing.
I would suggest that new religions, and indeed all religious bodies, should be compelled by law to frequent public debates with all comers. A special hall should be used for this full-time (there are enough religions to keep it busy 365 days a year) and be open to the public and accessible to TV, radio and newspapers. This would open the views of exclusive little bodies to the world, warn us of possible danger, and, by exposing the sweltering inbred atmosphere of most sects to blasts of cold outside air, might induce them to look at themselves critically. This is not a panacea: most sects would quite likely continue in their hothouse intimacy, and some of them would probably adopt a strategy of outright lying in public, as groups such as the Family (formerly The Children Of God, one of the most nasty and damaging of cults) already do. But in view of the importance of the subject, as well as that it is quite unacceptable to persecute or forbid religious bodies except upon the most extreme grounds (having seen what they can do to a man's mind, I am almost for disbanding the Scientologists by law, but that is an exception), this is the only way that might, at least, make them known to society at large, and not allow the damaging secrecy and ignorance which wraps them today.
Today's piece of writing is a reflection on the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate community a few years ago.
THE HOLY WEEK MASSACRE
In about 1928, Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote an essay titled The optimist as a suicide. I will quote some passages:
...there is another way in which the freethinker is not only thoughtful but useful. The man who rejects the Faith altogether is often very valuable as a critic of the man who... picks out some piece of Catholicism that happens to please him, or throws away some part that happens to puzzle him... his inconsistency can often be effectively exposed from the extreme negative as well as the extreme positive point of view... the atheist can illustrate how important it is to keep the Catholic system together, even if he rejects it altogether.
A curious and amusing instance comes from America, in connection with Mr. Clarence Darrow, the somewhat simple-minded sceptic of that land of simplicity. He seems to have been writing something about the impossibility of anybody having a soul: of which nothing need be said that (as usual) it seems to be the sceptic who really thinks of the soul superstitiously as a separate and secret animal with wings; who considers the soul quite apart form the self. But what interests me about him at the moment is this. One of his arguments against immortality is that people do not really believe in it. And one of his arguments is that if they did believe in certain happiness beyond the grave, they would all kill themselves. He says that nobody would endure... cancer, for instance, if [they] really believed (as he apparently assumes all Christians to believe) that in any case the mere fact of death would instantly introduce the soul to perfect felicity and the society of all its best friends...
...there we have the final flower and crown of all modern optimism... and humanitarianism in religion. Sentimentalists talk about love till the world is sick of the most glorious of all human words... They declare that all will be forgiven, because there is nothing to forgive... that 'passing over'... must immediately introduce us to... all conceivable comforts, without any reference to how we have got there. They are positive that there is no danger, no devil; even no death. All is hope, happiness and optimism. And, as the atheist very truly points out, the logical result of all that hope, happiness and optimism would be hundreds of people hanging from lamp-posts or thousands of people throwing themselves into wells or canals. We should find the rational result [underline mine] of the modern Religion of Joy and Love in one huge human stampede of suicide. Pessimism might have killed its thousands, but optimism its ten thousands. (From The Thing, page 222)
Yes, another Chestertonian paradox; another display of irritatingly frivolous cleverness in the service of blinkered Catholicism. Or at least so might a person out of sympathy with the great writer's views have said, up to six decades after this piece was written. But no further. The sixtieth year was not allowed to pass before the truth of Chesterton's diagnosis fell on us like a sword, for this was no paradox, and very little even of a joke. It was the forecast of a possibility, based on a perfectly rational analysis of facts.
On Maundy Thursday, March 27, 1997, in the shadow of the great Christian festival of redemption, the news swept the world that thirty-nine members of a New Ageish cult in California had killed themselves. We had seen mass cult suicides and murders before, but this obscenity was something new. It wasn't the paranoid hysteria of the horrible Reverend Jimmy Jones, fled to the jungles of Guyana in the expectation that the US government (which could not have cared less if he lived or died) would pursue him wherever he went, and whose most dedicated followers killed backsliders before doing away with themselves; it wasn't the sour metallic taste of paranoid, power-mad crankishness that haunted the Order of the Solar Temple, with the mystical medievalist militarism of many neo-Templar groups, in which many if not all the dead seem to have been murdered (though neither Switzerland, nor France, nor Canada seem to have made head or tail of the trail of dead bodies and burning buildings); it wasn't the Stone Age fanaticism of splinter Mormon bodies killing each other and anyone they deem right, in out-of-the-way parts of the United States, in the name of a misread Bible and a bad nineteenth-century historical novel.
No: these were gentle, vegetarian, cranky, sweet, left-wing New Age types whom nobody would have put down as likely to hurt a fly, led by a man who called himself Father Bo (his real name was Marshall Applewhite) after a joke on Bo Peep. They did not hang out in isolated camps in the middle of nowhere, nor did they live off money begged from passers-by, but carried out a profitable business designing websites on the Internet, and paid for a very expensive residence in San Diego from the proceeds. None of the supposed warning signs. Sure, they were cranks, but hey, this is Southern California, right?
And one day, these technologically up-to-date types found some garbled astronomical observation in their Internet stomping grounds, suggesting that some sort of spacecraft was sheltering behind the new Hailey-Bopp comet (in fact, the loonie who placed that message had misread the emissions of a fixed star) and had come to the conclusion that this was their own real people from the stars, come to take them home. And so, gently, lovingly, and with great self-discipline, they had carefully taken poison in relays, over a matter of days, the surviving ones putting the dead to rest in turn, till all the eighteen men and twenty-one women lay dead.
One thinks of how the days passed; of bright California sunlight streaming through large windows; of men and women, fewer every few hours, going back and forth in large rooms like thin shadows in the sun, looking at the growing number of dead forms carefully laid out each under his or her purple winding-sheet, all neat and hygienical in the best Southern California manner; of few or no words spoken, as these living ghosts floated by until they, too, faded away. It is rare that a journalistic cliche' should capture the absolute truth of something: but surely nobody has done more to describe the quality of this story than the lazy, cliche'-addled sub who first picked up the word "chilling". It is chilling. We have looked in the mirror, and death has looked back at us; death, and a delicate crawling madness.
Billions of TV spectators saw: the tragic creatures actually made their own apologiae for their deaths in videotaped messages (modern technology, always modern technology! - others would have left suicide notes), and their pathetically earnest faces, twisted into the most passionate expressions of loving sincerity, going into civilized ecstasies, made a strange impression. One of the women, in particular, used an epression we are used to hearing from all manner of people we lazily pigeon-hole as "well-meaning" or some such term of patronizing approval: "if only people would know". I wonder how many of us felt their hearts stop. We all know someone in the grip of that same rhetoric of sincerity, that earnestly pleading tone, that "if only they understood". They are so loving, so very concerned: they are trying, not to argue a point, but to save the world from some terrible delusion. They are the ones who know, the rest of us are the unenlightened.
They believed themselves to be a group of star-born aliens, unhappily caught in earth-bound bodies, waiting patiently for some sort of release. What this release was going to be, they don't seem to have been very clear on; from what I've heard, they felt that perhaps spaceships from another world - and what their leader called guardedly "another dimension, as some might say" - might come to Earth and take them bodily home, flesh bodies and all.
Their philosophy implies a sort of cosmic aristocracy, for it means either that we are all star-born, or that only some of us - the lucky, superior suicides - are. The second case seems more likely, since otherwise the spaceship to take us all home must be one heck of a craft; more to the point, the cult seems never to have done any proselitizing at all, to have made any effort to explain to mankind in general that it is star-born. The precious knowledge stayed within the magic circle while the rest of us just ambled off on our ignorant life-paths. And if so, then the cosmic aristocrats have a perfect right, if not indeed a duty, to disregard - however gently, however lovingly - the pleas and views of beings not born from the same star. If an earthly body is a sort of cosmic waste matter, a form of existence they themselves reject, how could creatures rooted in that inferior sort of existence ever understand the need of superior, unmaterial beings like them? We have seen them and heard them, speaking as from a loving yet lofty hauteur, pleading with us poor benighted creatures to try and understand them - to stretch our limited imagination so far. Any pleas, any reasoning, any attempt to stem the incipient group madness of the cult, would have been met, not with argument or even with anger, but with loving pity.
But even if they taught that all mankind is star-born, there still is a basic arrogance about such views. We are not really of Earth; nothing fundamental binds us to this beautiful, unhappy sphere, with its hunger and its cold, its heat and its danger; we come from cooler, finer, more restful regions, and the bondage of matter is in effect only a trap for a different kind of being. In case anyone thinks this has anything to do with the Christian idea of the soul, the truth is that, even if the notion of the trapped alien being were metaphysical rather than, as they describe it, defiantly and thoroughly physical - the origin of the trapped spirits is on another planet and perhaps on another dimension, but certainly not in Heaven - what we would be describing would be not Christianity but Manicheism; Christianity believes in the resurrection of the body, Manicheism rejects it as a trap for the immaterial light of the soul. To the Christian, or at least to the Catholic, the soul is not a separate ghost animating the body, but the metaphysical principle of the body itself: the thing that comes into existence, as Word of God, when God says: "let John Smith be". We don't conceive of eternal life without the (transfigured) body.
They were not stereotypes of the murderous crank, neither outsiders nor outwardly violent. (Whenever an unusual murder takes place, straightaway the police look for a "loner", which made trouble for the unfortunate Colin Stagg and other social misfits, and probably did as much as anything to keep the sociable extrovert Fred West from detection.) But they grew into a common dream, all thirty-nine of them, which led to each of them contemplating calmly, even joyfully, not only his own death agonies, but those of his friends and lovers - for one assumes that in a group of eighteen men and twenty-one women there must have been relationships. The last few, in particular, surrounded by dozen of bulks of flesh that had once been their friends, their lovers, the members of a group that was surely as much to them as their own family, must have had a resolve of steel. I know that I could not contemplate the death of someone dear to me; what kind of mind did these people have, that they could?
Make no mistake: death is never easy and never pleasant. The SS toilets in some Nazi death camps came with standard-issue gripping bars for any SS who, overcome by the horror of his duties, should need to vomit; and Hugh Trevor-Roper claims that many death camp attendants went insane. If mass murder has this effect on a criminal elite selected for the purpose of carrying it out, how can these gentle Californian hippie men and women have lived with it, and with the prospect of themselves becoming the same as those terrifying livid things, for days, without terror and physical revulsion?
Possibly they did; possibly they had to steel themselves. More likely, I would say, they would ascribe their revulsion not to the fact of death itself but to the materiality of those pathetic scattered bodies - the bulks of flesh they were making ready to discard. They hated them. One woman in the video referred to her desire to get rid of the whole miserable joke of existence. If they felt uneasy in the presence of this obscene caricature of living flesh, this final rebuttal to human life, what would be more natural (from their point of view) than to believe that they were seeing and experiencing the truth of material, bodily, earthbound existence at last? From that point of view, the very horror of death, misinterpreted as horror of material life, would have encouraged them to abandon this world of horror.
It is clear that they were primed for destruction for a long time, their group paralogic ticking away discreetly in the background as they went on programming computers and waiting for aliens to land. Their relationship with their selves can only be described as hatred: however veiled by a gentle, lofty and loving manner, their view of physical humanity was one of pure exasperation. For a very long time, they must have unhappily tolerated it, waiting for a way to leave it behind, and the patience with which they bore it only increased their longing to be rid of it. They needed extremely little provocation: only the possibility, the mere possibility that a spacecraft, any spacecraft, might be hiding behind Hailey-Bopp. At the first possible sighting of alien craft, without, it would seem, any doubts, without stopping to ask whether these were, after all, their aliens, without waiting or double-checking, they wildly leapt to the conclusion that their time had come. Their bodies were only prisons for their real selves; and now the aliens were coming to set them free.
This was, quite literally, Close encounters of the third kind come home to roost. If a more flagrant and devastating exposure of the mischievous nature of Spielberg's irresponsible optimism, so different from the solid moral worlds of Walt Disney or Frank Capra, could be conceived, I don't want to think of it. Aliens are superior beings (Applewhite spoke of their being evolved beyond humanity) and they would bring release, not only from the evils of our world, but even from material existence. This is directly reminiscent of the way Spielberg suggests that the kind of materiality his aliens have is not quite the same as that of common mankind: they are so luminous that, like the face of God, they cannot be seen. Craftily (and we remember that Spielberg is a Hollywood type) the movie did not actually say anything: it only surrounded the visitors with an air of inchoate benevolence and semi-divinity, and invited us to trust them. There is something of the Quisling about it.
The tragic Heavenly Gate community bought into this notion lock, stock and barrel. I am struck by the almost unfathomable ignorance of science that seems to have gone with a knowledge of technology. The stupidest comics writer would reject out hand the notion of a transdimensional craft having to travel through the Solar System before it could reach Earth: obviously, it could materialize wherever it pleased. The confusion of space travel with dimension travel is frankly extraordinary (it doesn't help that one of the dead was Thomas Taylor, brother of Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols). As for their belief that the aliens in question were "evolved far beyond us" and therefore better, the sentimental notion that evolution equals progress has been exploded so often and by so many people, it has a lot in common with a Mills bomb factory. Yet thirty-nine people familiar with computers were able to build a whole para-reality, a whole religious system, around this incredible trash; and they are dead.
It's just plain not good enough to put them down as nutters and let it go at that. Thirty-nine people do not develop individually the same kind of madness and just happen to drift into each other's company. A worse failure of common living took place here than just the sort of thing that drives a man to a tenth-floor ledge and to the pavement because he is hearing voices in his head. And we must remember that, until their death, they fitted into the contemporary world rather well. Their language was of the sort we hear every day, and they were especially concerned to tell us that they were not being "brainwashed" or forced, but had made their own choice - choice, that miserable incantatory word of the modern world, to justify abortion, privatization, and the degradation of the school and health systems. Choice; they were appealing to our own superstitions, in language that we too speak.
Well, for a start this tragedy exposes the nature of the lie of choice. The victims evidently protest too much. The fact that they all insist on their own choice gives the game away: they are justifying themselves. At some level in their minds there is a feeling that what they are doing is wrong, that others will be hurt or disgusted by it, and they feel the need for an apologia for it. And in a decision that was clearly a group decision, we are expected to believe that each of them reached it individually. Here we see the core of the lie: they are telling us that just the fact that thirty-nine adults took a certain choice is enough to justify them; and it bloody well is not. Choice of what? There can be no common measure between right and wrong, and therefore to use the word choice to justify a wrong choice is not good enough. The fact itself that we are allowed to choose does not justify us if we choose death; and there is nothing moral about choice - only about the results thereof. It is not even necessarily better to have a choice - as for instance with the choice of joining, or not joining, the SS. That's a choice we don't need.
In fact, they have all taken part in a game of mutual reinforcement. They have all wrestled each other's reason down, conspired into each other's madness, and then individually talked themselves into believing that group madness amounted to individual choice. Every time the word choice crops up, think of those pathetic faces on tape.
Nowhere do we have more choice than in the field of religion. We may, with no limitation whatsoever, join or start any cult however absurd; we may, with no challenge or limit, proclaim ourselves prophets and our views - or dreams - or nightmares - the New Truth. Nothing is more left to individual whim than the understanding of universal truth. It is a modern habit to give patronizing approval to all religious beliefs equally. We ourselves, we tell ourselvels, are of course too enlightened to fall for the sort of Thetan claptrap of the cults; however, everyone has a right to create his or her belief system, and as long as they mean well we shouldn't meddle.
The superiority complex implicit in this assumption went straight into the mentality of the Heavenly Gate group themselves. What I mean is that, however ignorant they may have been, they surely cannot have been so ignorant as not to realize that their notions of aliens coming to set them free from their bodies are the counterpart of a number of religious ideas which they may have regarded as Christian (but which are not so much Christian as part of a vague near-Christian penumbra of American sects and sentimental spiritualism). For every person who believes in alien abductions there is a Fundamentalist who is convinced that God will soon "rapture" the elect from Earth, taking them up directly to heaven. Applewhite and his lot must have known that they were putting a sci-fi spin on a theological (or sub-theological) view.
This implies that they must have felt they had reached the "scientific" truth behind what they took to be Christian "myth", and left the "myth" to their benighted, backward fellow-countrymen. Part of their pattern of mutual reinforcement was surely a shared sense of superiority over the "traditional" churches. They, and they alone, held the truth about what the rest of America only understood in hints, dreams, myths. This sense of superiority they rationalized in terms of science against religion (a completely false opposition which is unfortunately common media fodder). Aliens and spaceships are modern, scientific, credible; God and angels are outdated, superstitious, incredible. But the one may be explained in terms of the other, just as Erich von Daeniken explained ancient legends with spaceship visitations. (An interesting unconscious aspect of this is the unwillingness to abandon these more or less near-Christian views altogether: constant pseudo-scientific rewriting shows an itchy obsession with them that will not go away. They have to be rationalized somehow, anyhow: they cannot be simply forgotten.)
To anyone with an understanding of the intellectual issues involved in either science or theology, this sort of spiritual journey might well seem insane; but we are not talking about a structured form of knowledge. Despite their ability to manipulate computers and video cameras, these people were agonizingly ignorant. If anyone can see another explanation to their paralogical ideological construct, let me have it. My view is that they had never once in their lives, not even at school, been educated in science, in philosophy, or in theology. They may have had some facts thrown at them, but they had no inkling of the critical, constructive mentality on which science depends. Therefore they knew no science in any meaningful manner, and in my view no religion either - for good theology is no less critical and rational than good science.
The fact that Applewhite himself is said to be the son of a Presbyterian minister does not really contradict this, because it does nothing to prove that he was ever taught to think about religious issues; he may have been taught some religious notions - even a great deal of religious notions - but if he had no understanding of their inner logic, he was no more educated in it than an idiot child. And if he had, there is absolutely no chance he would have indulged in the childish delusions he did. Education is no safeguard against folly, but the follies of the educated are different from those of the uneducated. No educated person could have subscribed to, let alone developped, the Heavenly Gate superstitions. The view of Christianity that indubitably underlies their theology is one that ten minutes of debate with an intelligent layman would blow away like a cobweb; their view of science could be exploded by a fifteen-year-old with an O-level in physics.
These, bear in mind, were adults. There were no teen-agers among them. They had had all the opportunity that life affords to arrive at a sane, balanced view of the world; and all they had learned from it is that they were not suited to this Earth.
As such, this is not an unworthy thought, but rather the feeling or intuition behind many kinds of ascetic religious practice and idealistic philosophy, including much of the world's most respected intellectual heritage. It has no particular tendency to make people kill themselves; Plato and his followers, for instance, show no particular bent towards suicide. What made it, in this instance, lethal, was their complete lack of intellectual discipline, the belief that what feels nice to me is therefore right for me, that what I like must be my faith, that what feels comfortable to me must be my religion. Standards of proof and evidence, the capability of seeing things in terms of right and wrong, and (in Karl Popper's words) to distinguish a charlatan from an expert, were utterly lacking. It is clear that for the last years of their lives they were engaged in a constructive effort to unlearn, to discard as delusional, all the common sense notions and all the school-learned facts of science and (if they had any) religion.
Is it a chance that they lack this discipline? Oh no it's not. It is the result of modern manners and education. Deliberate avoidance of contentious issues has become a policy; discussion and argument are simply avoided. It is assumed that responsible adults will reach their own understanding of reality for themselves. But this rests upon a fundamental category mistake: that ideologies and visions of the world may be chosen like clothes off a peg. In fact, every child has one, however rudimentary; and if no sound elements are taught, then he will develop it upon error, and without the discipline of critical thought, since the very essence of critical thought is contention. If education shies away from philosophy, religion and science, it will not leave the child's head empty of notions on these subjects; it will leave it full of childish, ignorant, half-formed and never challenged ideas and chimeras, covered by that damned and God-cursed word choice!
Never taught to choose right from wrong, sense from nonsense, science from claptrap: never challenged, never set face to face with statements about ultimate issues of reality; they are let loose upon the world with so much of philosophy, science and religion, and such attitudes about religion and science as they garner from the mass media or absorb from home - attitudes, not thoughts. Their education had failed in the most valuable function any education should have - to serve as a corrective, as an alternative, path-opening introduction to ideas and facts not known at home and not easily absorbed from the TV screen.
The TV screen will also give them a particularly poisonous gift: they will learn the pose of virtually every media pundit and scribbler you can think of - the pose of jaded, weary understanding, of having simply seen through everything. Together with ignorance, that makes an explosive mixture. Anyone can learn to explain away the deepest mysteries of religion from two or three BBC or Channel 4 programs designed for that purpose, and these days, after the unfortunate success of The X-files, it is becoming even more profitable to "question" science. But it is the pose of superiority that is the TV pundit's deadliest gift to the ignorant, enabling them to smile with superior, pitying affection upon the unfortunate theology professor from the Gregorian University who is trying to explain to them why Christianity is more complex than their system allows, or on the unfortunate doctor in physics who is trying to explain why a spaceship wouldn't hide behind a comet. And so, having reinforced their ignorance by a perfect certainty of their own intelligence, they are ready to go off into total darkness.
And this, surely, must make us think. Is it not the case that we have shut off the problem of religion from our minds with a lazy assumption that most religions are valid one way or another, that all that matters is that no third party should be hurt? Religion is degraded to a consumer good: to those who like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like - so long as they don't scare other customers in the shop. And there's no doubt that Father Bo (Marshall Applewhite) and his little lot did not. They made so little a nuisance of themselves their neighbours hardly knew they existed. They were the ideal suburban cult, socially acceptable, untroublesome, and with just enough weirdness about it to make it an interesting talking point. After all, there are plenty of quiet, laborious American suburbanites who firmly hold that they have been abducted by aliens or come from outer space.
The fact is that this is a very convenient tack to take. To cling to reason, to insist on "testing everything and holding fast to what is good" like a scientist or a theologian, is a good way to lose friends and fail to influence people. We all know people who held to the strangest beliefs with single-minded fervour; and it is hard to know what to do, especially when we like them. I have known more than one such person: in particular a woman, a sweet-natured, loving, unselfish individual to whom my heart went out practically as soon as I met her. She was simply the nicest person you would ever want to meet; and she clung desperately to a most insane and untenable mixture of Christianity and reincarnation, as sound philosophically as a three-dollar bill. It was hard not to make her angry when discussing these things, and it was also unbearable, because she was such a sweet, defenceless, vulnerable creature, that to dismantle her castle of irrational illusions would have been literally like kicking a puppy dog or beating a little child. That I knew that she had very strong and tragic reasons to delude herself did not help, for if I had pointed them out to her I would have hurt her even more, and I knew it. There was a sort of unconscious moral blackmail involved, though I'm sure she never thought of it that way, that said: "if you challenge my beliefs, I might do anything. I might have a nervous breakdown. I might kill myself. And it would be your fault".
In situations like these, the view that all people are entitled to their own belief is much the easiest to take. It avoids the risk of painful ruptures with your friends; it removes the chance of hurting people you would not want to; and last but not least, it allows you to avoid debates in which you be ill at ease and find it hard to hold up your end. Most sane people today aren't used to thinking about ultimate issues, religion or philosophy; and when a normal, sane, but inarticulate person finds him or herself arguing on unfamiliar ground with an articulate and intelligent fanatic, well instructed in his or her views, who has made these things the centre of his or her intellectual life, it is the sane person and not the mad one who is in trouble. It is so much more comfortable not to be drawn in. But just because it is more comfortable, we must suspect it may not be right; the right thing so very often is not.
Who knows how many people there are in America and elsewhere to whom the Heaven's Gate cult are heroes? And who knows how many more there are who entertain a similar hatred of mankind, but in more outward-bound, more destructive forms? When will the next massacre be? In the name of a misunderstood notion of toleration, these things are allowed to run unchecked, unchallenged, unlooked-at; and yet we know they are dangerous.
What to do about them is a good question. I am certainly not in favour of suppression or persecution; besides being counterproductive, it is immoral. But at the same time, I don't think everyone should be allowed to found a religion without control. The person who creates a religion makes a claim about the nature of truth, which the rest of society ignores at its peril; because NO such claim about is ever confined only to those who hold it. Our society is to some extent protected from the worst effects of irrationalism, being so heavily dependent on science and its structural demand for rational debate and opposition; but the bodies of many dead warn us that we cannot be complacent.
Religions should not exist without necessity, nor only for the pleasure of their members. It is incumbent upon those who preach them to have very good reason for their views. It is not good enough to defend them on the grounds that they make them feel good: that is not what statements of truth are meant to be about. There is a great deal too much talk about "healing" these days, but before healing, we need truth, which perhaps might give us healing.
I would suggest that new religions, and indeed all religious bodies, should be compelled by law to frequent public debates with all comers. A special hall should be used for this full-time (there are enough religions to keep it busy 365 days a year) and be open to the public and accessible to TV, radio and newspapers. This would open the views of exclusive little bodies to the world, warn us of possible danger, and, by exposing the sweltering inbred atmosphere of most sects to blasts of cold outside air, might induce them to look at themselves critically. This is not a panacea: most sects would quite likely continue in their hothouse intimacy, and some of them would probably adopt a strategy of outright lying in public, as groups such as the Family (formerly The Children Of God, one of the most nasty and damaging of cults) already do. But in view of the importance of the subject, as well as that it is quite unacceptable to persecute or forbid religious bodies except upon the most extreme grounds (having seen what they can do to a man's mind, I am almost for disbanding the Scientologists by law, but that is an exception), this is the only way that might, at least, make them known to society at large, and not allow the damaging secrecy and ignorance which wraps them today.