“The day the Enlightenment went out”, is how Gary Wills described the re-election of President George W. Bush in an op-ed column in the New York Times (November 4, 2004). Reflecting upon the conservative religious vote that put Bush back in the White House, Wills wondered if there was any connection between the fact that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin’s theory of evolution and that 75 percent of Bush supporters actually believed—without an iota of (...) credible evidence— that Iraq was directly responsible for the terrorist attack on 9/11. Wills asks if a people that have lost respect for evidence and critical reasoning can still be called an enlightened nation. “Belief that does not require proof or evidence” is how the Webster New World Dictionary defines the word “faith”. It also defines “faith” as “faith in God”. The American elections, then, turned out to be a massive faith-based initiative in both these senses of the word. Belief and policies backed not by evidence, but by religious values wedded to an aggressive nationalism are driving American politics. In this America is not alone. India, the subject matter of much of what follows, has had its own brush with faith-driven politics in which an aggressive Hindu nationalism came to color public policies, including science education.1 The question is: how do secular democracies like the United States and India (the world’s first and the world’s largest democracies, respectively), manage to square off their official commitment to enlightened values of openness and religion–state separation with the realities of faith-based politics? How do matters of fact—that is, questions that in principle can be decided by empirical evidence—end up getting decided on the basis of religious faith. This alchemy of turning secular matters of fact into religiouscivilizational matters holds the key to understanding the democratic-populist route to religious fundamentalism.. (shrink)

During the 1920s and 1930s the idea of transmutation, so essential to esotericism, was at the core of the Fascist agenda in Italy. Sharing with esotericism a repertoire of myths, symbols and rituals, Fascism aimed to create a new kind of man pushing the individuals to fuse into one radically transformed common consciousness. In order to create the new Italian man, to form and fashion the masses into a homogeneous and compliant collectivity, Fascism disqualified individualistic tendencies: subjects had to integrate (...) into collectivity and only thus attain consciousness of themselves as Italians and as Fascists. While these processes were taking place in society, Italian esotericists continued to elaborate the theme of the transmutation of consciousness. Two books published in Italy in those years significantly warned against the risks that such a transmutation could entail: Mario Manlio Rossi’s Spaccio dei maghi and Julius Evola’s Maschera e volto dello spiritualismo contemporaneo. Both these works were harsh critiques of esotericism written by esotericists, as they reviewed the main schools and personalities of the contemporary occult scene with the purpose of demolishing most of them. Starting from very different premises, both Rossi and Evola expressed a deep concern about the self-determination and distinctiveness of individual consciousness, and denounced the possibility that the ideal of the “new man,” shared by esotericism and Fascism, could lead to the flattening of the differences among otherwise unique human beings and to the erasure of individual specificity. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore how memory is constructed in Victor Klemperer’s diaries. In the diaries, Klemperer describes his fate as well as the fate of other Jews who did not emigrate during the years 1933–1945. The concrete details of everyday life in the Third Reich only serve to highlight the plight of the besieged poet writing at the end of the days, not knowing whether he will complete his masterpiece or whether he will be executed beforehand. (...) In Klemperer’s diaries normality and horror are continually juxtaposed with one another. The holocaust is thus transformed from a small repertoire of horrifying narratives to a seemingly countless number of actions and movements, some conforming to the principal narratives and others, curiously enough, defying the well known narratives of Auschwitz and extermination. These narratives constitute important source material describing the mentality of the Jewish identity in Germany. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the small but growing body of scholarship dedicated to a reappraisal of German occultism in the period prior to the Second World War. Moving beyond those analyses of the German occult movement which have viewed it solely in terms of its links--often tenuous--to National Socialism, this paper considers German occultism, specifically parapsychology, as a mode of cultural critique utilised by Germans from across the political spectrum. Concentrating on the experimental study of materialisation and its (...) theorisation as "supernormal biology," this paper argues for strong links, forged primarily by the biologist, philosopher, and neo-vitalist Hans Driesch, between parapsychology, as a way of understanding life and mind, and epistemological reforms within biology and psychology. It argues, furthermore, that for Driesch, as for a number of European scholars, parapsychology provided scientific validation of a belief in the naturalness of liberalism and pacifism. (shrink)