What's wrong with science as religion

Piercing a Communion wafer with a nail and throwing it in the garbage, as one crusading biologist recently did, does science no favors.

Jul. 31, 2008 | PZ Myers is a true believer, a science crusader with the singled-minded enthusiasm of a televangelist. A biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris and a columnist for Seed magazine, Myers has earned notoriety with his blog, Pharyngula, in which he reports on new developments in biology and indiscriminately excoriates those he views as hostile to science, a pantheon of straw men and women that includes theologians, journalists and churchgoers. He is Richard Dawkins without the fame or felicitous prose style.

Currently, Myers is under fire from his university and an army of righteous Catholics over his self-proclaimed "Great Desecration" caper. On July 24, he pierced a Communion wafer with a rusty nail ("I hope Jesus' tetanus shots are up to date," he quipped) and threw it in the trash with coffee grounds and a banana peel. The nail also cut through pages of the Quran and Dawkins' "The God Delusion." He featured a photo of the "desecration" on his blog, and wrote, "Nothing must be held sacred. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet."

Religion is dangerous, he wrote; it breeds hatred and idiocy. It is our job to advance humanity's knowledge "by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality." There is no wisdom in our dogmas, Myers warned, just "self-satisfied ignorance." We find truth only in science, looking at the world "with fresh eyes and a questioning mind."

As a fellow scientist (I have a Ph.D. in physics), I share Myers' enthusiasm for fresh eyes, questioning minds and the power of science. And I worry about dogmatism and the kind of zealotry that motivates the faithful to blow themselves up, shoot abortion doctors and persecute homosexuals. But I also worry about narrow exclusiveness that champions the scientific way of knowing to the exclusion of all else. I don't like to see science turned into a club to bash religious believers.

When Salon interviewed me about my new book, "Saving Darwin," I suggested that science doesn't know everything, that there might be a reality beyond science, and that religion might be about God and not merely about the human quest for a nonexistent God. These remarks got me condemned to whatever hell Myers believes in.

Myers accused me of having "fantastic personal delusions" that could actually lead people astray. "I will have no truck with the perpetuation of fallacious illusions, whether honeyed or bitter," Myers wrote, "and consider the Gibersons of this world to be corruptors of a better truth. That's harsh, I know ... but he is undermining the core of rationalism we ought to be building, and I find his beliefs pernicious."

Myers' confident condemnations put me in mind of that great American preacher, Jonathan Edwards, who waxed eloquent in his famous 1741 speech, "Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God," about the miserable delusions that lead humans to reject the truth and spend eternity in hell. We still have preachers like Edwards today, of course; they can be found on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. But now we also have a new type of preacher, the Rev. PZ Myers.

Impressive scientific progress has spawned these new preachers in the centuries since crowds sat spellbound under the judgmental voice of Edwards. Like their traditional counterpart, the new preachers speak with great confidence that their religion -- science -- contains all the truth we need to know and all the truth that can be known. They call us to worship at the altar of science, a summons of which I am skeptical, to say the least.

The best-known men of scientific cloth are Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, but Dawkins' Oxford colleague, chemist Peter Atkins, gets my vote for best preacher. Atkins' provocative sermon, aptly titled "The Creation," invites the reader on a journey back to the ultimate origins of everything. On this journey we learn that "there is nothing that cannot be explained, and that everything is extraordinarily simple." Like the religious journeys Atkins invokes, it is a journey of faith, but not too much, since faith is like a tumor -- the smaller the better. "The only faith we need for the journey is the belief that everything can be understood and, ultimately, that there is nothing to explain," he writes.

After summarizing what we know about origins in elegant but breathtakingly speculative prose, Atkins borrows biblical language to address the deep question implied by his title: "In the beginning there was nothing. Absolute void, not merely empty space. There was no space; nor was there time, for this was before time. The universe was without form and void."

Eventually, as we journey with Atkins, stuff happens -- stars, planets, life, people, music, art, magazines. But how did it start? How did the universe go from being "without form and void" to this fascinating place we see today? "By chance" says Atkins, "there was a fluctuation."

Excuse me, Rev. Atkins, but could you please be just a bit more specific? Can you tell me what you mean by "absolute void"? Is that an empirical, testable concept? It sounds suspiciously like a metaphor for something in which you want to believe. As a matter of fact, the suggestion that nothing can naturally fluctuate into everything sounds a lot like a faith statement on a par with belief in God.

Stories like those told by Atkins in "The Creation" are passed off as science, as if our best physics, chemistry and biology lead naturally to these conclusions. The new creation stories are reworded to make it clear that these new scientific stories are replacements for their religious predecessors. Rather than "In the beginning was the word," where word, from the Greek logos, meaning "underlying rational structure," is identified with God, Atkins gives us, "In the beginning there was nothing."

Don't get me wrong. Atkins tells a great story. And telling stories is the way we communicate meaning, whether it's oracles making pronouncements or Carl Sagan explaining how the cosmos came to be. Sometimes these stories are true and sometimes they are not; sometimes we can't tell. But our human tendency is to embed meaning in stories, and all great preachers have been great storytellers. Jesus spoke in parables, not theological discourses.

Our affinity for such stories, says evolutionary psychologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, is helped along by hard-wired religious impulses, created by millenniums of evolution. Wilson says our minds have "mythopoeic requirements" -- a need for stories that provide meaning and purpose.

Wilson's personal story testifies to the mythopoeic power of both religious and scientific stories. Raised Southern Baptist, he gave his heart to Jesus as a boy, and worshiped the biblical God -- until his studies at the University of Alabama convinced him that his religious faith was incompatible with his emerging new scientific faith.

Like the so-called new atheists, with their out-of-the-confessional aversion to traditional religion, Wilson now argues that if we are serious about the salvation of our race, we had better turn to science. "The mythopoeic requirements of the mind," he says in his Pulitzer Prize-winning "On Human Nature," "must somehow be met by scientific materialism." In "Three Scientists and Their Gods," Wilson told Robert Wright that we must learn to "worship the evolutionary epic."

Wilson, along with Atkins, Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others, persuades us that science has, for thinking people, discredited religion. Nevertheless, they are quick to borrow from a religion they reject and take delight in using biblical metaphors. And as their science evolves to meet the "mythopoeic requirements" of their minds, it increasingly resembles religion.

During Wilson's teenage crisis of faith, he didn't just shrug his shoulders and bid his childhood Christian beliefs farewell, as he had done some years earlier with his belief in Santa Claus. Instead, he reconstituted his faith. He replaced the Genesis story with a modern scientific creation story; he replaced Christian ethical directives with ones derived from ecology; and he replaced the worship of God with the worship of the grand story of evolution. It was a new package, informed by better evidence and logic, and it appears to have worked well for him. But it does require faith that the study of nature can provide ethical directives, and not just descriptions of natural phenomena. Showing that species are going extinct faster now than in the past does not automatically obligate us to any particular behavior.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, concludes "The First Three Minutes" with these cheery words: "The more the universe is comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." The universe that we optimistically call our "cosmic home" is nothing of the sort, says Weinberg. Our existence is a "more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents." The human story is a tale told by idiots suffering from delusions of both purpose and grandeur, and we are all actors in this grand farce.

Yet even as gravity pulls Weinberg into the black hole of bleakness, he suggests that there is, perhaps, a ray of hope -- a sliver of salvation -- in science, which "lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." Weinberg, like poor Job in the Old Testament, finds the world troubling. But his response, like Job's, suggests that the dreariness of the world has not completely extinguished his mythopoeic impulse.

Science, it would appear, has the raw material for a new religion. Trust traditionally placed in God can be relocated to science, which is reliable and faithful, as well as ennobling. Life can be oriented in a reverential way around the celebration and protection of the great diversity wrought by the evolutionary epic, a diversity that has produced creatures capable of reflecting on this grand mystery.

The grand creation story at the heart of this new religion of science inspires reverence among those invested in its exploration. The world disclosed in this story rests on a foundation of reliable and remarkable natural laws. These laws -- gravity tethering our planet to the sun, fusion reactions producing sunlight, chemistry enabling our metabolism -- possess the capacity to bring forth matter, galaxies, stars, planets and even life, all within a framework of natural processes that we can understand. And as we decipher these processes, their marvelous character only enlarges. No matter how well we understand them, they still evoke awe and surprise. The modern scientific creation story is so much more than a mere alternative to the traditional biblical myth of Adam and Eve; it is a genuinely religious myth with an astonishing depth and a proffered competence to meet the needs of the religious seeker -- the needs that draw millions of Americans to their houses of worship every Sunday morning.

The other pieces of the new religion also fall naturally into place. Our existence is a gigantic miracle, billions of years in the making, and way more interesting than any magical conversion of water into wine. The atoms in our bodies were forged in the furnaces of ancient stars that exploded, seeding our galaxy with rich chemistry. Our planet and its life-sustaining sun formed from this recycled stellar debris. "We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon."

The scientific creation story, unlike the parochial accounts in our religious texts, belongs to all of humanity; it is the story of the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Jews, the Christians, the Confucians, the readers of PZ Myers' blog. We share this story with otters, giraffes, hummingbirds and the stars overhead. Atheist theologian Loyal Rue sees in the universality of the scientific story hope that a fragmented and suspicious humanity might find common ground on which to build a global village of trust and cooperation. "We are, at the moment, in many different places, with many histories and hopes," he writes in "Everybody's Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution." "But we are now called together to one place, to a shared history and to a common vision of enduring promise. If there are saints enough among us, we shall survive."

So there it is -- a brand-new religion, courtesy of modern science. We have a creation myth, ethical directives and a meaningful place for humankind within the grand scheme of things. These are the ingredients that "constructive theologians" like Gordon Kaufman of Harvard Divinity School tell us are common to all religions. As a bonus, we have science to guide us into truth and assure us that we can find solutions to our problems. And we have inquisitors like Myers to ferret out heretics and martyr them on his Web site when they appear.

But is this going to work? Can a religion be built on nature and science, rather than God and sacred texts? And, if it could, would it be better than the old-fashioned religions it is replacing? If our present religions, like milk in our refrigerators, have all expired, we need a replacement to meet our mythopoeic needs. Can science do this for everyone, and not just the residents of ivory towers?

For starters, getting people to worship the new scientific creation story will be no easy task. A few dynamic speakers, like Brian Greene and, until recently, Stephen Hawking, can fill auditoriums with gee-whiz scientific stories of hidden dimensions and many universes. But most people prefer to watch sports and, perhaps not surprisingly, even more attend conventional religious services. Darwinism and big-bang cosmology have never been near and dear to human hearts, especially those filled with old-time religion. Sure, there are true believers who find these scientific ideas awesome in the most literal sense of that word. I am happy to place myself in this group. I can be moved to tears by the transcendent beauty of a math equation.

For science to become a true object of worship, it must elbow aside the reassuring and seductively simple belief that "God loves you." This deeply personal faith statement would have to be replaced with one that says something like: "The cosmos worked really long and hard to create you and you should be really appreciative."

But let's assume for the moment that this is possible -- that science can be canonized, moralized, transcendentalized and politicized into a replacement religion, with followers, codes of conduct, celebrated texts and sacred blogs, houses of worship, "saints" of some sort and inquisitors of another sort. And let's suppose that it's possible for this new religion to move out of the ivory towers of academia, where it lives now, to take its place alongside the other "world" religions, attracting hundreds of millions of adherents drawn from the main streets of the world and all walks of life. What would this new religion be like once it became institutionalized? After all, if religion fills a genuine human need, something has to fill the hole created by its passing -- something that appeals to billions of people.

Could we be sure, for example, that this new scientific religion would not give rise to the extremism and aberrant behavior that plague conventional religions? Would concern for the diversity of life, for example, inspire vegetarians to blow up slaughterhouses, and run the local butcher through his or her own meat grinder? Would reverence for the cosmos reinvigorate astrology? Would appreciation for natural selection bring eugenics back out of the closet? In other words, if science dismantles the traditional religious content that people use to satisfy their impulses -- many of which are quite passionate -- will we really be better off?

There is also no compelling way to get ethical directives from science. To be sure, religion has a version of the same problem, but that simply points up the challenges they both face, not the superiority of science over religion. Even Stephen Jay Gould, the peacemaking agnostic, suggested that religion should make the ethical calls.

On a practical level -- and I write as someone who works in the trenches at an evangelical college -- I am worried that attempts to treat science as if it is a religion will only drive the big, abrasive wedge currently between science and religion even further into the chasm of misunderstanding. What we should hope, instead, is that science can become a more congenial guest in the house -- church, temple, mosque -- of religion and not be so determined to proselytize or even evict all of the current occupants. There is much in religion that need not trouble the scientist and much that the scientist can value. Scientists must learn to live with that.

In order for many of us to truly feel at home in the universe so grandly described by science, that science needs to coexist as peacefully as possible with the creation stories of our religious traditions. I share with Myers, Dawkins and Weinberg the conviction that we are the product of cosmic and biological evolution, that Einstein and Darwin got it right. But I want to believe that, through the eyes of my faith, this is how God created the world and that God cares about that world. Does this belief, shared by so many of our species, make me dangerous?

I am incredibly impressed with the achievements of science. But I don't think science is omniscient and I am not convinced that science will ever know everything. I am not convinced that science is even capable of knowing everything. That we can know as much as we do seems rather miraculous, in fact. Is it so dangerous to believe that there is a bit more to the world than meets the scientific eye, that behind the blackboard filled with equations there is a rational, creative and even caring mind breathing fire into those equations?

A history lesson:

Fascism

Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, refers to the right-wing authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy 1922-1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. The name comes from fascio, which may mean, “bundle,” as in a political or militant group or a nation, but also from the fasces (rods bundled around an axe), which were an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of magistrates. The Italian ‘Fascisti’ were also known as Black Shirts for their style of uniform incorporating a black shirt (see; Political Colours).

Definition
In an article in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana, written by Giovanni Gentile and attributed to Benito Mussolini, fascism is described as a system in which “The State not only is authority which governs and molds individual wills with laws and values of spiritual life, but it is also power which makes its will prevail abroad. ...For the Fascist, everything is within the State and ... neither individuals or groups are outside the State. ...For Fascism, the State is an absolute, before which individuals or groups are only relative.”

Mussolini in a speech delivered on October 28, 1925 delivered the following maxim which encapsulates the fascist philosophy: “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato,” “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”.

The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini’s, that exalts nation and often race above the individual, and uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition, engages in severe economic and social regimentation, and espouses nationalism and sometimes racism (ethnic nationalism).

Nazism is usually considered as a kind of fascism, but it should be understood that Nazism sought the state’s purpose in serving an ideal to valuing what its content should be: its people, race, and the social engineering of these aspects of culture to the ends of the greatest possible prosperity for them at the expense of all else. In contrast, Mussolini’s fascism held to the ideology that all of these factors existed to serve the state and that it wasn’t necessarily in the state’s interest to serve or engineer any of these particulars within its sphere as any priority. The only purpose of the government under fascism proper was to value itself as the highest priority to its culture in just being the state in itself, the larger scope of which, the better, and for these reasons it can be said to have been a governmental statolatry. While Nazism was a metapolitical ideology, seeing itself only as a utility by which an allegorical condition of its people was its goal, fascism was a squarely anti-socialist form of statism that existed by virtue and as an ends in and of itself. The Nazi movement spoke of class based society as the enemy and wanted to unify the racial element above established classes, whereas the Fascist movement sought to preserve the class system and uphold it as the foundation of established and progressive culture. This underlying theorem made the contemporary Fascists and Nazis see themselves and their respective political labels as at least partially exclusive to one another. Today however this difference is not made often in terminology, even when used historically. That is due mostly because both politics have ceased to be a society driven ideology of their own anywhere in the world today. Outside of their internal reasoning their own opposing ideas have no part to play and could even be said to be arbitrarily alien to the liberal states currently dealing in defining political concerns.

As a political science, the philosophical pretext to the literal fascism of the historical Italian type believes the state’s nature is superior to that of the sum of the individual’s comprising it, and that they exist for the state rather than the state existing to serve them. The resources individuals provide from participating in the community are conceived as a productive duty of individual progress serving an entity greater than the sum of its parts. Therefore all individual’s business is the state’s business, the state’s existence is the sole duty of the individual. In its Corporativist model of totalitarian but private management the various functions of the state were trades conceived as individualized entities making that state, and that it is in the state’s interest to oversee them for that reason, but not direct them or make them public by the rationale that such functioning in government hands undermines the development of what the state is. Private activity is in a sense contracted to the state so that the state may suspend the infrastructure of any entity in accord to their usefulness and direction, or health to the state.

The social composition of Fascist movements have historically been small capitalists, low-level bureaucrats and the middle classes. Fascism also met with great success in rural areas, especially among farmers, peasants, and in the city, the lumpenproletariat. A key feature of fascism is that it uses it’s mass movement to attack the organizations of the working class - parties of the left and trades unions.

Unlike the pre–World War II period, when many groups openly and proudly proclaimed themselves fascist, in the post–World War II period the term has taken on an extremely pejorative meaning, largely in reaction to the crimes against humanity undertaken by the Nazis. Today, very few groups proclaim themselves as fascist, and the term almost universally is used for groups for whom the speaker has little regard, often with minimal understanding of what the term actually means. The term “fascist” or “Nazi” is often ascribed to individuals or groups who are perceived to behave in an authoritarian manner; by silencing opposition, judging personal behavior, or otherwise attempting to concentrate power. More particularly, “Fascist” is sometimes used by people of the Left to characterize some group or persons of the far-right or neo-far-right, or the far left activists as a description of any political or cultural influences perceived as “non-progressive,” or merely not sufficiently progressive. This usage receded much following the 1970s, but has enjoyed a strong resurgence in connection with Anti-globalization activism.

Fascism, in many respects, is an ideology of negativism: anti-liberal, anti-Communist, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, etc. As a political and economic system in Italy, it combined elements of corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, and anti-communism.

The Origin and Ideology of Fascism
In the 1920s, Sergio Panunzio was the major theoretician of Fascism.

The Doctrine of Fascism was written by Giovanni Gentile an idealist philosopher and who served as its official philosopher. Mussolini signed the article and it was officially attributed to him. In it, Frenchmen Georges Sorel, Charles Peguy, and Hubert Lagardelle were invoked as the sources of fascism. Sorel’s ideas concerning syndicalism and violence are much in evidence in this document. It also quotes from the Frenchman Joseph Renan who it says had “prefascist intuitions”. Both Sorel and Peguy were influenced by the Frenchman Henri Bergson. Bergson rejected the scientism, mechanical evolution and materialism of Marxist ideology. Also, Bergson promoted an elan vital as an evolutionary process. Both of these elements of Bergson appear in fascism. Mussolini states that fascism negates the doctrine of scientific and Marxian socialism and the doctrine of historic materialism. Hubert Lagardelle, an authoritative syndicalist writer, was influenced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who is the inspirer of anarchosyndicalism.

There were several strains of tradition influencing Mussolini. The fascist concept of corporatism and particularly its theories of class collaboration and economic and social relations are very similar to the model laid out by Pope Leo XII’s 1892 encyclical Rerum Novarum which addressed politics as it had been transformed by the Industrial Revolution and other changes in society that had occurred during the nineteenth century. The document criticized capitalism, complaining of the exploitation of the masses in industry. However, it also sharply criticized the socialist’s concept of class struggle, and their proposed solution to eliminate private property. It called for strong governments to undertake a mission to protect their people from exploitation, and asked Roman Catholics to apply principles of social justice in their own lives.

Seeking to find some principle to replace the Marxist doctrine of class struggle, Rerum Novarum urged social solidarity between the upper and lower classes, and endorsed nationalism as a way of preserving traditional morality, customs, and folkways. In doing so, Rerum Novarum proposed a kind of corporatism, the organization of political societies along industrial lines that resembled mediaeval guilds. A one-person, one-vote democracy was rejected in favor of representation by interest groups. This idea was to counteract the “subversive nature” of the doctrine of Karl Marx.

The themes and ideas developed in Rerum Novarum can also be found in the ideology of fascism as developed by Mussolini.

Fascism also borrowed from Gabriele D’Annunzio’s constitution for his ephemeral “regency” in Fiume. Syndicalism had an influence on fascism as well particularly as some syndicalists intersected with D’Annunzio’s ideas. Before the First World War, syndicalism had stood for a militant doctrine of working-class revolution. It distinguished itself from Marxism because it insisted that the best route for the working class to liberate itself was the trade union rather than the party. The Italian Socialist Party ejected the syndicalists in 1908. The syndicalist movement split between anarcho-syndicalists and a more moderate tendency. Some moderates began to advocate “mixed syndicates” of workers and employers. In this practice, they absorbed the teachings of Catholic theorists and expanded them to greater power of the state and diverted them by the influence of D’Annunzio to nationalist ends.

When Henri De Man’s Italian translation of Au-dela du marxisme emerged, Mussolini was excited and wrote the author that his criticism destroyed any “scientific” element left in Marxism. Mussolini was appreciative of the idea that a corporative organization and a new relationship between labor and capital would eliminate ‘the clash of economic interests” and thereby neutralise “the germ of class warfare.’”

Renegade socialist thinkers, Robert Michels, Sergio Panunzio, Ottavio Dinale, Agostino Lanzillo, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, Michele Bianchi, and Edmondo Rossoni furthered this attempt to reconcile socialism and nationalism. .

Italian fascism
Mussolini founded the fascist movement on March 23, 1919 at a meeting in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro. Among the founding members were the revolutionary syndicalist leaders Agostino Lanzillo and Michele Bianchi.

In 1921, the fascists developed a program that called for a republic, separation of church and state, a national army, as well as progressive taxation for inherited wealth and development of co-operatives.

Mussolini’s fascist state was established nearly a decade before Hitler’s rise to power. Both a movement and a historical phenomenon, Italian Fascism was, in many respects, an adverse reaction to both the apparent failure of laissez-faire and fear of the left, although trends in intellectual history, such as the breakdown of positivism and the general fatalism of postwar Europe should be of concern.

Fascism was, to an extent, a product of a general feeling of anxiety and fear among the middle class of postwar Italy arising because of a convergence of interrelated economic, political, and cultural pressures. Under the banner of this authoritarian and nationalistic ideology, Mussolini was able to exploit fears regarding the survival of capitalism in an era in which postwar depression, the rise of a more militant left, and a feeling of national shame and humiliation stemming from Italy’s ‘mutilated victory’ at the hands of the World War I postwar peace treaties seemed to converge. Such unfulfilled nationalistic aspirations tainted the reputation of liberalism and constitutionalism among many sectors of the Italian population. In addition, such democratic institutions had never grown to become firmly rooted in the young nation-state.

As the same postwar depression heightened the allure of Marxism among an urban proletariat even more disenfranchised than their continental counterparts, fear regarding the growing strength of trade unionism, Communism, and socialism proliferated among the elite and the middle class. In a way, Benito Mussolini filled a political vacuum. Fascism emerged as a “third way” — as Italy’s last hope to avoid imminent collapse of the ‘weak’ Italian liberalism, and Communist revolution. While failing to outline a coherent program, it evolved into new political and economic system that combined corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, and anti-Communism in a state designed to bind all classes together under a capitalist system, but a new capitalist system in which the state seized control of the organization of vital industries. Under the banners of nationalism and state power, Fascism seemed to synthesize the glorious Roman past with a futuristic utopia.

The appeal of this movement, the promise of a more orderly capitalism during an era of interwar depression, however, was not isolated to Italy, or even Europe. For example, a decade later, as the Great Depression led to a sharp economic downturn of the Brazilian economy, a sort of quasi-fascism would emerge there that would react to Brazil’s own socio-economic problems and nationalistic consciousness of its peripheral status in the global economy. The regime of Getulio Vargas adopted extensive fascist influence and entered into an alliance with Integralism, Brazil’s local fascist movement.

Founded as a nationalist association (the Fasci di Combattimento) of World War I veterans in Milan on March 23, 1919, Mussolini’s fascist movement converted itself into a national party (the Partito Nazionale Fascista) after winning 35 seats in the parliamentary elections of May 1921. Initially combining ideological elements of left and right, it aligned itself with the forces of conservatism by its opposition to the September 1920 factory occupations.

Despite the themes of social and economic reform in the initial Fascist manifesto of June 1919, the movement came to be supported by sections of the middle class fearful of socialism and communism, while industrialists and landowners saw it as a defence against labour militancy. Under threat of a fascist “March on Rome,” Mussolini in October 1922 assumed the premiership of a right-wing coalition Cabinet initially including members of the pro-church People’s Party.

The transition to outright dictatorship was more gradual than in Germany a decade later, though in July 1923 a new electoral law all but assured a Fascist parliamentary majority, and the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti eleven months later showed the limits of political opposition. By 1926 opposition movements had been outlawed, and in 1928 election to parliament was restricted to fascist-approved candidates.

The regime’s most lasting political achievement was perhaps the Lateran Treaty of February 1929 between the Italian state and the Holy See, by which the Papacy was granted temporal sovereignty over the Vatican City and guaranteed the free exercise of Catholicism as the sole state religion throughout Italy in return for its acceptance of Italian sovereignty over the Pope’s former dominions.

Trade unions and employers’ associations were reorganized by 1934 into 22 fascist corporations combining workers and employers by economic sector, whose representatives in 1938 replaced the parliament as the “Chamber of Corporations”: power continued to be vested in the Fascist Grand Council, the ruling body of the movement.

The 1930s saw some economic achievements as Italy recovered from the Great Depression: the draining of the malaria-infested Pontine Marshes south of Rome was one of the regime’s proudest boasts. But international sanctions following Italy’s invasion (October 1935) of Ethiopia (the Abyssinia crisis), followed by the government’s costly military support for Franco’s Nationalists in Spain, undermined growth despite successes in developing domestic substitutes for imports (Autarchia).

International isolation and their common involvement in Spain brought about increasing diplomatic collaboration between Italy and Nazi Germany, reflected also in the fascist regime’s domestic policies as the first anti-semitic laws were passed in 1938. But Italy’s intervention (June 10th 1940) as Germany’s ally in World War II brought military disaster, from the loss of her north and east African colonies to U.S. and British invasion of first Sicily (July 1943) and then southern Italy (September 1943).

Dismissed as prime minister by King Victor Emmanuel III on July 25th 1943, and subsequently arrested, Mussolini was freed in September by German paratroopers and installed as head of a puppet “Italian Social Republic” at Salo in German-occupied northern Italy. His association with the German occupation regime eroded much of what little support remained to him, and his summary execution (April 28th 1945) by northern partisans was widely seen as a fitting end against the backdrop of the war’s violent closing stages.

After the war, the remnants of Italian fascism largely regrouped under the banner of the neo-Fascist “Italian Social Movement” (MSI), merging in 1994 with conservative former Christian Democrats to form the “National Alliance” (AN), which proclaims its commitment to constitutionalism, parliamentary government and political pluralism.

Fascism vs. socialism
Fascism developed in opposition to socialism and communism although many early Fascists were themselves former Marxists. Thus, in 1923 Mussolini declared, in Doctrine of Fascism?:

...Fascism [is] the complete opposite of ... Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production....

Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

...”The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature’s plans.” “If classical liberalism spells individualism,” Mussolini continued, “Fascism spells government.”
—Benito Mussolini, from The Internet Modern History Sourcebook

While certain types of socialism may superficially appear to be similar to fascism, it should be noted that the two ideologies clash violently on many issues. The role of the state, for example: Socialism considers the state to be merely a “tool of the people,” sometimes calling it a “necessary evil,” which exists to serve the interests of the people and to protect the common good (in addition, certain forms of libertarian socialism reject the state altogether). Meanwhile, fascism holds the state to be an end in of itself, which the people should obey and serve (rather than the other way around).

Fascism rejects the central tenets of Marxism which are class struggle and the need to replace capitalism with a society run by the working class in which the workers own the means of production.

A fascist government is usually characterized as “extreme right-wing,” and a socialist government as “left-wing”. Others such as Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Hayek argue that the differences between fascism and totalitarian forms of socialism are more superficial than actual, since those self-proclaimed “socialist” governments did not live up to their claims of serving the people and respecting democratic principles. Many socialists and communists also reject those totalitarian governments, seeing them as fascism with a socialist mask.

Italian fascist leader Mussolini’s own origins on the left, as a leader of the more radical wing of the Italian Socialist Party, has frequently been noted. After his turn to the right, Mussolini continued to employ much of the rhetoric of socialism, but substituting the nation for social class as the basis of political loyalty. Many other fascist leaders, including Sir Oswald Mosley in Britain and Jacques Doriot and Marcel Déat in France, also began their careers on the political left before turning to fascism.

Socialists and other critics of Arendt and Hayek maintain that there is no ideological overlap between Fascism and Marxism; they regard the two as utterly distinct. Since Marxism is the ideological basis of Communism, they argue that the comparisons drawn by Arendt and others are invalid.

Mussolini completely rejected the Marxist concept of class struggle or the Marxist thesis that the working class must expropriate the means of production.

Mussolini wrote in his 1932 treatise, The Doctrine of Fascism (ghostwritten by Giovanni Gentile): “Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor groups (political parties, associations, syndicates, classes). Therefore Fascism is opposed to Socialism, which confines the movement of history within the class struggle and ignores the unity of classes established in one economic and moral reality in the State.” Source

Fascist Italy did not nationalize any industries or capitalist entities. Rather it established a corporatist structure influenced by the model for class relations put forward by the Catholic Church. Indeed, there is a lot of literature on the influence of Catholicism on fascism and the links between the clergy and fascist parties in Europe before and during World War II.

Critics point out that Marxists and trade unionists were the first targets, and the first victims of Adolf Hitler once he came to power. Also to the antagonistic relationship which resulted in street fights between fascists and socialists, including Trotskyists and members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, in London in the form of the 1936 Battle of Cable Street as well as street fights in Germany prior to Hitler’s coming to power. A more serious manifestation of the conflict between fascism and socialism was the Spanish Civil War mentioned earlier in this article.

Although Italian fascism proclaimed its to socialism, Mussolini’s own history in the socialist movement had some influence on him. Elements of the practice of socialist movements he retained were the need for a mass party; the importance of building support among the working class; and techniques relating to the dissemination of ideas, such as the use of propaganda. The original Fascist Manifesto contained within it a number of proposals for reforms that were also common among socialist movements and were designed to appeal to the working class though these promises were generally disregarded once the fascists took power.

Fascism and other totalitarian regimes
Some historians and theorists regard fascism and “Soviet” Communism or more specifically Stalinism as being similar lumping them together under the term “totalitarianism”. Others see them as being so dissimilar as to be utterly incomparable.

Hannah Arendt and other theorists of totalitarian rule argue that there are similarities between nations under Fascist and Stalinist rule. They condemn both groups as dictatorships and totalitarian police states. For example, both Hitler and Stalin committed mass murder on millions of their country’s civilians who did not fit in with their plans.

In 1947, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises published a short book entitled “Planned Chaos”. He asserted that fascism and Nazism were socialist dictatorships and that both had been committed to the Soviet principle of dictatorship and violent oppression of dissenters. He argued that Mussolini’s major heresy from Marxist orthodoxy had been his strong endorsement of Italian entry into World War I on the Allied side as a means to “liberate” Italian-speaking areas under Austrian control in the Alps.

Aside from criticisms of co-thinkers of von Mises such as Hayek discussed in the previous section of this article, critics of von Mises’ position point out that Marxists and trade unionists were the first targets, and the first victims of Adolf Hitler once he came to power. .

As well, Mussolini imprisoned Antonio Gramsci from 1926 until 1934 after Gramsci, a leader of the Italian Communist Party and leading Marxist intellectual, tried to create a common front among the left and workers to resist and overthrow fascism. Other Italian Communist leaders like Palmiro Togliatti went into exile and fought for the Republic in Spain.

The concept of dictatorship of the proletariat alluded to by Von Mises is not the same as the dictatorship concept employed by fascists. Dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to mean workers democracy or dictatorship by the working class rather than dictatorship by the capitalist class. This concept had been distorted under Stalin to mean dictatorship by the General Secretary over the party and the working class but that means that Stalin deviated from Marx rather than that the Stalinist form of government is Marxist.

Instead, the fascist economic model of corporatism promoted class collaboration by attempting to bring classes together under the unity of the state.

However, the fact that fascist states, on the one hand, and the USSR and the Soviet bloc, on the other, were police states does not mean that their commonality is a product of socialism. While all one-party states can be said to be police states, there is no correlation between socialism and police states as all one-party capitalist states, such as the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang or Afghanistan under the Taliban as well as monarchist police states such as Iran under the Shah have also been police states. Conversely, there have been multi-party socialist states that have not been police states.

Fascist Motto and Sayings
Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

Me ne frego, “I don’t care,” the Italian Fascist motto.

Libro e moschetto — fascista perfetto, “Book and musket — perfect Fascist.”

Links

The Doctrine of Fascism by Benito Mussolini (complete text)
Fascism Anyone?
Roger Griffin’s dissertations on the intellectual make-up of Fascism
Fascism and Zionism - From The Hagshama Department - World Zionist Organization

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