'Our immediate environment is not nature, as formerly, but organization.'
Are we organizing ourselves out of existence? If so, might our weakness possibly be our salvation?
Now, as we are all aware, an additional flag is being waved by the demonstrators who have become a common sight on our city streets.
The flag of a country that consistently shrieks ‘Death to Israel’, ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to the West’. The flag of a country that brutalizes and, even, executes women who dare to reject the hijab. The flag of a country that executes homosexuals. The flag of a country that provides money and resources for Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi in Yemen, and others, to wage war against Israel and the West.
Iran.
There is a reason why the U.S. intervened to assist not just Israel but the whole of the West by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. Because the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) argument for nuclear deterrence has zero meaning and power when you’re dealing with a death cult. If you truly believe, as appears to be the case with the Iranian regime, that annihilating Israel will increase the likelihood of the return of the Shi’a Hidden Imam, all bets are off. Quite simply, it would be mad in this instance to rely upon MAD.
I find myself referring back to circumstances and memories from childhood. Not in a rose-tinted spectacles, nostalgic, ‘Oh, wasn’t it lovely back then’ sort of way. But rather in a, ‘Hmm, those things I heard about when I was eight years old maybe make more sense now, don’t they?’ sort of way.
If you have read my early autobiographical ‘Fragments’ you may already know that I was brought up in a fairly religious household. I heard Christian doctrine from two directions. My Mum, a staunch Methodist, had a simple but unshakable belief. And my (unofficial) godfather, the Reverend Rupert Bliss (“Uncle Rupert”), a Church of England minister, and his wife, Kathleen Bliss, who was a theologian and member of the World Council of Churches, provided more philosophical and academic inputs.
It’s perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that, from an early age, I was aware of the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His name seemed to be quite frequently on these people’s lips, always mentioned with respect and reverence.
When the Nazi party came to power in Germany, German Christians found themselves in a quandary: could Christianity somehow be made compatible with Hitler’s Aryan philosophy?
Some Christians managed, it appears, to convince themselves that they had squared the circle, but not Pastor Bonhoeffer. Along with Martin Niemöller and others he set up the Confessing Church which openly and resolutely argued against the Nazi ideology.
Subsequently, Bonhoeffer was accused of being involved in the mid-1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. He was declared guilty and, in April 1945, at the age of just 39, he was hanged.
It must have been 1953 when I became aware of Bonhoeffer, so I would have been seven or eight years old. I’m sure of the year because it was the year that Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison1 was first published in English. We were given a copy by Uncle Rupert.
I tried to read it. At the time, in my estimation, it was not exactly a page-turner. In fact, much of it seemed incomprehensible. But there was something about it that fascinated me: I think it was the very first time that I actually got to even vaguely comprehend that there were these things called Good and Evil, and that there appeared to be an ongoing battle between them.
A few years later, in my mid teens, I turned my back on Christianity and on religion generally. It was all nonsense, I declared. All that sky-god stuff … Bonkers!
It caused my Mum great distress. She was in tears. But I stuck to my guns because … well … I was right, wasn’t I? It was obvious that my intelligent analysis beat her primitive beliefs hands down, wasn’t it?
And life went on.
And now, all these decades later, I wonder. I still cannot bring myself to embrace the idea of a sky-god, but I do wonder (in both senses of that word) about the power of narrative.
Across swathes of the West, we chucked our foundational narrative into the bin. It had been a long time in decline. After all, it was as long ago as the mid-nineteenth century that Matthew Arnold was able to write …
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.2
Now, in 2025, in the West, we have gone further. A lot further. Current news here in the UK includes the facts that the UK parliament has voted in favour of legalizing abortion right up until the full term of a pregnancy, and now supports the legalization of assisted dying,
At the same time that these ultra-liberal causes are being celebrated by many, our politicians seem reticent to talk about some other issues - particularly anything to do with Islam. So, since Islam could hardly be described as liberal, we end up with a complicated set of unwritten rules that manage to include both ultra-liberalism and deep conservatism.
Unlike the traditional Judeo-Christian narrative that gave the West the power to create the modern world but then fizzled out, the Islamic world rigorously maintains its narrative.
This was, perhaps, inevitable. The Christian narrative, particularly the Protestant version, led to astonishing successes by promoting the power of the individual. Larry Siedentop, a leading commentator on this topic, writes about “the democratizing of reason”3 during the period 1000 to 1300. This, he writes …
… gave thought and action a character they did not and could not possess in traditional societies. Translating a moral status into a social role created a a new image of society as an association of individuals rather than families, tribes or castes. 4
… and ultimately led to the creation of nation-states and the modern Western world.
However, the ultimate problem with individualism, it seems, is that it can lead, and has led, to the collapse of the narrative because, “Hey, we’ve become the gods, haven’t we?”
Meanwhile, ironically, a competing narrative, which is not based upon individualism but rather upon submission to and compliance with what is very much a non-individualistic philosophy (no “Give unto Caesar …” injunction here!) appears to be winning a lot of hearts and minds in the West.
That reference is, of course, to Islam, a combined religious/civic system that presents us with astonishingly contradictory signals. For instance, if it’s “the religion of peace” why does it top the UK’s MI5 list of terror threats? The UK’s MI5 website tells us that …
Islamist terrorism is the most significant terrorist threat to the UK by volume. 5
“Islamist.” Hmm. Generally, we are told to distinguish between Islam and Islamist, the idea being that Islam is ‘good’, whereas Islamist is ‘bad’.
Maybe somebody will provide us with comparative definitions to help us distinguish between the two forms? While they’re at it, perhaps they might tell us whether the Iranian regime is Islamic or Islamist?
Whatever, there seems no doubt that Islam in all of its forms is able to take advantage of the ‘narrative vacuum’ created by the evaporation of the Christian story, “The melancholy, long withdrawing roar” of which seems now to have ceased entirely.
Perhaps that’s why, throughout the current period when ultra-liberal legislation has been processed through our parliamentary system, I haven’t heard a single word in the news media from Christian leaders. Nothing. Nix. Not a goddam word.
So, I come back to Bonhoeffer and a fragment from his extraordinary Letters and Papers from Prison.
Included in his writings from July 1944 to February 1945 is an outline for “a book of not more than 100 pages”, to include what he termed “A Stocktaking of Christianity”.
This, he suggested, would be built upon the following concept …
Nature was formerly conquered by spiritual means, with us by technical organization of all kinds. Our immediate environment is not nature, as formerly, but organization. But with this protection from nature’s menace there arises a new one - through organization itself.
But the spiritual force is lacking. The question is: What protects us against the menace of organization? Man is again thrown back on himself. He has managed to deal with everything, only not with himself. (My emphases.)
Well, if that was true in the 1940s “the menace or organization” is surely a hundred- or a thousand or a million-fold greater now?
Over the years, our awareness of nature and its importance may well have increased, but the amount of ‘organization’ today is surely off the scale, increasingly imposed in a top-down manner through opaque bureaucratic means.
So, are we using technology to organize our way to a sort of oblivion? Is ‘organization’ our ‘soma’, or at least the carrier thereof? Or is that as idiosyncratic a notion as the belief that Shi’a Muslims have in The Hidden Imam?
Why, as an atheist, should I feel so irritated at the failure of our supposed spiritual guardians to maintain our local religion? I concede that this is extraordinarily unreasonable of me, but there it is.
It’s not so much about the demise of the religion, but rather of the long-standing narrative that underpins it. That’s the problem. Narratives have power, real power, to hold cultures together.
Take away the long-term cultural narrative and people lose their bearings. At which point, two particular outcomes seem to me to be most likely:
The situation gets ugly - civil strife, even.
Or, it all dissolves into a sad, distracted, hopeless nothingness.
I think it fair to say that there is evidence for nascent forms of both of these responses.
Which is where the ‘organization’ comes in: in Western democracies, the deployment of uni-party tactics so that, whichever party is chosen, the actual outcomes will be the same. That is, a great number of manifesto promises will NOT be acted on or delivered, but a number of other important issues, not mentioned in any manifesto, will be acted upon and delivered.
In turn, all of this necessitates the support of an ‘organization’ that is largely hidden from public view, achieved via various forms of non-governmental organizations, NGOs, able to ever more effectively exercise their powers via a wall of technologically-powered interfaces, fronted by masses of attention-distracting, infinite-scrolling ‘infotainment’.
Does this all sound like conspiracy theory? Well, maybe, but it is happening, isn’t it?
In fact, love ‘em or hate ‘em, the two most conspicuous opponents of the rigid, uni-party, ‘organization’ approach are Israel and the United States.
President Trump attracts a lot of hate … but for what? He is actually trying to deliver on his stated manifesto. That would seem to be closer to the spirit of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address - “government of the people, by the people, for the people” - than the party on the other side of the aisle.
And Israel, the sole democracy in its part of the world, with a population less than that of London, and few if any natural resources, is fighting a war against an aggressor who mounted an unprovoked attack, raped and slaughtered more than a thousand innocent people, and took two hundred and fifty hostages including three-year old twins and an 85-year old grandmother.
That aggressor is supported by Iran. In fact, Iran’s malign support has meant that Israel has had to defend itself on seven fronts! And, all the while, Iran has shouted (not whispered) its intent to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
Mind you, that intention has been echoed by Hamas since its founding. Here’s the actual quote from the original 1988 Hamas charter:
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).6
So, Israel is fighting an existential battle. That battle is not only for itself but also for the whole of the West and the Western narrative. We can say this because one of the messages of history is surely that a dominant narrative is capable of gaining power simply by being the dominant narrative.
And it seems to me that there is a lovely twist in the tale of Israel’s battle against the Iranian regime. Around two and a half thousand years ago, nearly a thousand years before Islam was even invented, the then ruler of Persia, as it then was, Cyrus the Great, allowed the Jewish people to return from Babylonian exile and rebuild their temple in Jerusalem.
It would, therefore, surely be rather fitting if Israel was able to return the favour by helping bring about the end of the imposed Iranian regime, and achieve freedom for the Persian people?
The current Iranian regime perhaps cannot be labelled fascist because fascism can only result, apparently, from the demise of a democratic dispensation7 but, in every other respect, it seems to fit the description.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood bravely against an unquestionably fascist regime and paid the ultimate price. But he left behind thoughts and analyses that have relevance now. So, to conclude, here is just one of those thoughts:
Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs Man to God’s powerless and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world’s coming of age … which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness. This will probably be the starting-point for our ‘secular interpretation’.8
What a fascinating conclusion! Even, or perhaps especially, for an atheist like me!
Thanks for reading.
Image at top, Shutterstock
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Letters and Papers from Prisonhttps://www.mi5.gov.uk/what-we-do/countering-terrorism (In English 1953)
Matthew Arnold. Dover Beach (1867)
Larry Siedentop. Inventing the Individual: the Origins of Western Liberalism (2014)
Ibid.
https://www.mi5.gov.uk/what-we-do/countering-terrorism
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/hamas.asp
As per Robert O. Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Ibid.