FROM the 13th century onwards, as Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt observed in his 1860 book The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, the vast accumulation of injustices, the growing doubt as to the soul’s immortality and the waning confidence in the ecclesiastical institution undermined faith in the divine governance of the world, creating the conditions for Antiquity to impart to the Renaissance its own forms of superstition.
‘Soon all scruples about consulting the stars ceased,’ writes Burckhardt. ‘Not only princes, but free cities had their regular astrologers, and at the universities, from the 14th to the 16th century, professors of this pseudo-science were appointed, and lectured side by side with the astronomers.
‘It was well known that Augustine and other Fathers of the Church had combated astrology, but their old-fashioned notions were dismissed with easy contempt.
‘The Popes commonly made no secret of their star-gazing. Julius II had the day for his coronation and the day for his return from Bologna calculated by the astrologers. Even Leo X seems to have thought the flourishing condition of astrology a credit to his pontificate, and Paul III never held a Consistory till the star-gazers had fixed the hour. In 1529, Francesco Guicciardini notes how happy are the astrologers, who are believed if they tell one truth to a hundred lies, while learned men lose all credit if they tell one lie to a hundred truths.’
The modern bureaucrat mirrors the Renaissance despot: he performs feats of conjuring before an audience determined to be deceived. His craft lies in transporting the public into a realm where the impossible is possible while common sense and reason are regarded as the dull contrivance of those unfit to enjoy the spectacle.
Who, being in his right mind, they imply, would demand transparency when magic is offered at every hour? What sort of creatures would content themselves with mere prose when a quill-pusher patronises them with opaque lines of esoteric poetry?
State bureaucrats are like anti-alchemists: they transmute gold into excrement and sound forms of government into a burlesque number. With impunity assured, and the prospect of living their entire lives at the expense of another’s larder, nothing terrifies them more than the loss of their monumental privileges.
The public servant of the imaginary democracy may be defined as one who watches with indifference as the subjects struggle to stay afloat at sea, only to drown them with ‘assistances’ the moment they reach the shore.
The reverse of the picture shows vast majorities revering the members of the elected oligarchy as though they were the choral incarnation of the Messiah, and fearing the totalitarian State – a flagrant redundancy – as Satan resurrected.
Trapped within the labyrinth of a willingly flattened life, they demand protection from perfect strangers whom they blindly believe when they promise to bring fairness, dignity and solidarity to this earth. What has always made the State a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven, Hölderlin reminds us. Supreme leaders, rendered with unnerving accuracy in Francis Bacon’s portraits, stand safely beyond every worldly contingency.
For most people – even the ostensibly intelligent – the leader is a father: someone who may be loved or detested but must always be feared.
‘What a figure do all highly gifted, many-sided, original characters play, when the blind passion for knowing and determining the future dethrones their powerful will and resolution!’ wrote Burckhardt.
During the ‘pandemic’, the dictatorship of the bureaucratariat celebrated the apex of its existence, and entire populations endured the nadir of their lives. Overnight, mass house arrest was decreed and persecutory regulations worthy of the most pitiless tyrannies came into force. Yet from balconies and rooftops the confined applauded with inflamed enthusiasm. The vile mask – most often a wholly useless rag worn with ostentatious pride – rose as a universal emblem of shame, submission, and bovine obedience.
In a collectivist system the value of the vassals equals zero, even when they imagine their opinions matter just because they are permitted to ruminate at will and, on occasion, to vent their frustrations in controlled street stampedes.
Toward the end of the 19th century, Nietzsche – a disciple of Burckhardt at the University of Basel – observed that humanity would regain its lost individuality without the mediation of a superior entity keeping watch from a celestial outpost. The disappearance of the Almighty, he conjectured, would lead to the rejection of any other edifice of universal values at odds with physical reality.
The change of epoch, however, did not prevent the ethereal vacancy from being occupied by new objects of veneration and by a highly effective device for restraining crowds ravenous for certainty: social contracts neither seen nor signed by anyone, yet more intimidating than witches or demons, for their nature is as earthly as a pistol pressed against the skull.
Nietzsche’s contempt for religious values as the source of resentment, and his obsession with forcing material reality into the mould of his visions, turned him into another fatal victim of the spell of ideas.
During his formative years, the poets of the Romantic Revolution had nourished his epic instinct, his propensity to embark upon glorious ventures and to conquer the most inaccessible heights. Thus, he imagined a formidable reality and then believed himself witness to the birth of his own creation. The implacable critic of Platonism and its celestial derivative, Christianity, fell prey to his own fantasies.
The cornerstone of the new legitimacy expressed itself in the formula one man, one vote – a charm steeped in glamour in its most literal sense: grammar, the power of writing that captivates the unlettered.
After a brief interregnum and by way of metamorphosis, astrology recovered its ancient supremacy wearing new robes. In a few years, entire populations began to venerate democracy – a noble word devastated by indolence and superstition.
A genuinely democratic community is not a promiscuous participatory agglomeration in which faith and sentimentality exercise overwhelming superiority over reason – an asset transmuted these days into an irrelevant extravagance by the paranormal powers of the mobile phone.
Is it rash to suggest that digital industrial society consecrates Nietzsche’s Last Man?
The new arrivals at the zoological reserve display an acid disdain for astrologers and chiromancers fattened on funds snatched from taxpayers. Perhaps the mounting incredulity toward the State as a quintessential depraved organisation anticipate an era marked by a general disintegration of belief.
‘In the hour of death many doubtless called for the sacraments, but multitudes during their whole lives, and especially during their most vigorous years, lived and acted on the negative supposition. That unbelief on this particular point must often have led to a general scepticism is evident of itself, and is attested by abundant historical proof. These are the men of whom Ariosto says: “Their faith goes no higher than the roof”,’ wrote Burckhardt.
Vir sapiens dominabitur astris – the wise man shall master the stars – might well be the inscription marking the long-delayed emergence of individualism, that realisation of potential perpetually blocked by the tenacity of blind subordination and suicidal comfort.
