To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism

by Rob Riemen

Overview

"We are sleepwalking into catastrophe; Riemen wants to wake us up and he does with passion, wisdom, and eloquence." —Simon Schama

An international bestseller, To Fight Against This Age consists of two beautifully written, cogent, and urgent essays about the rise of fascism and the ways in which we can combat it.

In “The Eternal Return of Fascism,” Rob Riemen explores the theoretical weakness of fascism, which depends on a politics of resentment, the incitement of anger and fear, xenophobia, the need for scapegoats, and its hatred of the life of the mind. He draws on history and philosophy as well as the essays and novels of Thomas Mann and Albert Camus to explain the global resurgence of fascism, often disguised by its false promises of ushering in freedom and greatness.

Riemen’s own response to what he sees as the spiritual crisis of our age is articulated in “The Return of Europa,” a moving story about the meaning of European humanism with its universal values of truth, beauty, justice, and love for life—values that are the origin and basis of a democratic civilization.

To Fight Against This Age is as timely as it is timeless, to be read by those who want to understand and change the world in which they live.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393635867
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/23/2018
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Rob Riemen is the author of Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal (2008), which has been translated into eighteen languages. A writer and cultural philosopher, he is the founder of the Nexus Institute, an international center devoted to intellectual reflection and to inspiring Western cultural and philosophical debate. He lives in the Netherlands.

Editorial Reviews

In Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, the naive protagonist, Hans Castorp, serves as the rope in a tug-of-war between two ideologues, Naphtha and Settembrini, each of whom wants to shape the young man in his own image. Settembrini is a well-meaning humanist and cosmopolitan, an heir to the nineteenth-century tradition of liberal rationalism; everything he says is morally admirable. Naphtha, on the other hand, is a proto- fascist, an irrationalist and totalitarian who claims that the future belongs to mass movements and their cruel leaders; everything he says is dire and ominous. The problem is that Settembrini is a weak man spouting tired platitudes, while Naphtha has the ferocious charisma of a true believer. What is a liberal to do, Mann asks, when the devil has all the good tunes?

This question was prophetic when Mann posed it in 1924; now, almost a hundred years later, it feels frighteningly relevant once again. Liberals in Europe and America are in a justified panic. Writers like Timothy Snyder, Masha Gessen, and Yascha Mounk are issuing urgent warnings about the return of populism and nationalism, the decay of international institutions, the pollution of the public sphere by lies and propaganda. They are completely right; meanwhile, the public continues to vote for Brexit in the UK, Victor Orban in Hungary, the Law and Justice Party in Poland -- and, of course, Trump in the United States. As in the 1930s, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Rob Riemen, author of the earnest To Fight Against This Age, undoubtedly belongs on the right side of this political and cultural battle. As the founder of the Netherlands' Nexus Institute, he has spent his life bringing liberal intellectuals together to talk about the great problems of the day. His previous book, also a short tract, had the unimpeachable title Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal. Alas, To Fight Against This Age suggests that Riemen has not found a way to overcome Settembrini-ism: for all his rectitude, he leaves the reader feeling depressed and discouraged. One even begins to wonder if this is how all liberals and cosmopolitans sound to their enemies -- rhetorical, simplistic, and self-righteous.

To Fight Against This Age is a pamphlet-length volume made up of two parts. The first is an essay, originally published in 2010, titled "The Eternal Return of Fascism"; the second is a parable or fable titled "The Return of Europa," in which we overhear a kind of idealized Nexus symposium, where a group of wise men debate the future of Europe. Both pieces were written by a European for a European audience, and take for granted a set of beliefs about the value and nobility of the European idea that outsiders, including Americans, might greet with a certain amount of skepticism. Essentially, Riemen believes there is nothing wrong with Europe that the best traditions of Europe can't cure; and his book is a tract or sermon recalling Europeans to the "Judeo- Christian tradition" and "spiritual, universal values" that alone can save them from creeping fascism and/or the dominion of technology.

Riemen knows that, in today's Europe, anyone who invokes the Judeo-Christian tradition is likely to be seen as a conservative, and specifically as an Islamophobe. That is why he takes pains to distance himself from figures like the Netherlands' Geert Wilders, for whom European values are best expressed by hating Muslim immigrants. "In the Netherlands," Riemen writes, "what the Party for Freedom [Wilders's party] actually offers is the shameless opposite of the Judeo-Christian and humanist traditions: vulgar materialism, oppressive nationalism, xenophobia, ammunition for resentment, a deep aversion to the arts and the exercise of spiritual values, a suffocating spiritual bigotry, a fierce resistance to the European spirit, and continuous lies as politics."

Western values, Riemen believes, need to be defended against their defenders. After all, Hitler came to power promising to protect European values against the menace of Bolshevism. But if fascism is on the march in Europe today, as Riemen believed in 2010, and as there is even better reason to fear today, the question is what makes it so attractive. What can liberals offer the public to defuse fascism's appeal? One obvious answer to this question might be economic: fascism is a version of plutocracy, while social democracy aims to empower individual citizens. Perhaps there is a connection between the erosion of social-democratic rights over the last two generations and the rise of desperate, angry people eager to find a scapegoat for their problems.

Riemen is probably in sympathy with this view -- he writes acidly about the "business elite" that has "poisoned society with the idea that earning a lot of money is the most important thing in life." But even this suggests that it is ideas, not money or power, that really concerns him. Fittingly, for an intellectual, he believes that the cure to Europe's problems is intellectual. It involves such things as "spiritual and moral training," "moral and cultural foundations," "living in truth, doing what is right, creating beauty, and other such radiantly vague phrases.

None of this is politically reactionary, but you don't have to read too far before you realize that it is culturally reactionary, in the strict sense. Riemen believes that Europe once had a rich and ennobling culture, under the tutelage of great thinkers and artists, and that it can only survive by returning to that elite cultural regime. The real source of fascism, he believes, is what he calls "a kitsch society," one in which "nothing is absolute, nothing is eternal either: everything is finite and transitory." In general, he thinks, people are content with pleasure where they should be striving for nobility of spirit. Europe needs to go back to "the humanistic teachings of Socrates and Spinoza."

These are fascinating examples, almost Freudian slips in the context of Riemen's argument; what they actually signify is the opposite of what he thinks they prove. For Socrates, of course, was put to death by the people of Athens, and Spinoza, after being excommunicated by the Jews of Amsterdam, saw his writing banned and censored by the Christian authorities. Far from being the founders of European culture, they were outsiders, marginal figures, even saboteurs of European culture, which was -- then as now -- dominated by the values Riemen derides as "kitsch." Tellingly, Riemen never gives an actual date for the era when Europe was ostensibly guided by "spiritual values."

In the second section of the book, Riemen personifies what he thinks of as the true, lost Europe in the figure of Europa, from Greek mythology. If "Princess Europa" returned to her namesake today, she would find that "from this Europe, the European spirit has gone." The only way to woo her back, Riemen goes on to suggest, is to refuse to bow down to the false idol of science and go back to worshipping "spiritual values," such as "truth, goodness, beauty, love, and patience." Who could argue with this? But precisely because they are inarguable, such calls to virtue constitute an ideological mystification of the most naive kind. To really understand where we are and where we're headed, we need actual thinking, which is usually uncomfortable (as Socrates loved to point out). To Fight Against This Age, despite its title, is more lullaby than call to arms.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Nextbook.org. He is the author of Why Trilling Matters, Benjamin Disraeli, and The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry.

Reviewer: Adam Kirsch

The Barnes & Noble Review

…[To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism] establishes Riemen as an erudite, well-meaning and inspiring ally in the struggle to combat anti-liberal political trends.

The New York Times Book Review - Damon Linker

10/16/2017
In a book composed of two timely and lengthy essays, “The Eternal Return of Fascism” and “The Return of Europa,” Riemen draws on works of great thinkers to issue a ringing humanist appeal for a return to Enlightenment values. He posits this restoration as the cure for resurgent fascism, defined as “the political cultivation of our worst irrational sentiments: resentment, hatred, xenophobia, lust for power, and fear!” Among others, he cites Marcel Camus, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Baruch Spinoza. Riemen’s enthusiasm for those whom Paul Valéry calls the “irreplaceable intellectuals” of the past is, at times, stronger than his analysis of contemporary political reality. For instance, his citation of Mann’s critique of younger people as “collectivist” but politically apathetic doesn’t square with the experience of Trump-era America. Riemen’s insights into how fascism manifests in different societies, though, are piercing. Notably, he echoes Mann in arguing that xenophobia will become more prevalent in America “in the name of freedom.” His erudite essays add an enriching element to the ongoing conversation of a contentious political moment. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"I am on Riemen's side....I find that his case for considering today's developments 'fascist' is, in fact, useful in thinking about responses."

The Atlantic - James Fallows

"Riemen’s dire warnings cannot help appearing prescient. American readers who are rightly worried about similarly distressing developments in the United States will feel fortified by the publication of To Fight Against This Age…establishes Riemen as an erudite, well-meaning and inspiring ally in the struggle to combat anti-liberal political trends."

Damon Linker

"From Thomas Mann’s warning, ‘If ever Fascism should come to America, it will come in the name of freedom,’ to an elderly Czech poet’s cautious optimism about the future of Europe, these essays make a passionate case for values that are not so much ancient as ageless."

Ingrid Rowland

"This is a book for people who want the West to regain its moral high ground, and who want to think hard about how to help achieve that."

Anne Applebaum

"Rob Riemen is one of the great modern champions of the Enlightenment and the best of its legacy."

Sean Wilentz

"This is a bold, courageous, original, and provocative meditation. It challenges many trendy diagnoses of the present crisis of western civilization by offering some very surprising and unexpected perspectives."

Amos Oz

2017-10-02
Essayist Riemen (Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal, 2008), founder of the Nexus Institute, an organization devoted to fostering philosophical inquiry and debate, mounts an impassioned argument for resistance to fascism, which he sees spreading globally."We are just at the beginning of contemporary fascism," writes the author, comparing the current political atmosphere to those of Italy and Germany before World War II, when "demagogues and charlatans" rose to power, each seen as "the antipolitical politician" promising to make his country great again. Fascist techniques, he asserts, "are identical everywhere: the presence of a charismatic leader; the use of populism to mobilize the masses; the designation of the base group as victims (of crises, of elites, or of foreigners); and the direction of all resentment toward an ‘enemy.' " The real enemy of Western culture, he maintains, is not an influx of foreign immigrants, nor Islamic fundamentalism, but "the ever-increasing trivialization and dumbing-down of our society." A society that values "technology, speed, money, fame," and superficial pleasure—which he calls "kitsch"—is a society in moral crisis. Mass democracy, writes the author, has degenerated into "stupidity, propaganda, claptrap, [and] vulgarity." It no longer carries out its mission to educate, "to elevate human beings, to enable them to think and to be free." Riemen draws on many writers who have offered similar critiques of the erosion of values, including the poet Paul Celan, who struggled to make poetry "true again" after the horror of the Holocaust; Primo Levi (an entire civilized people, he wrote, "followed a buffoon whose figure today inspires laughter"); Theodor Adorno, who urged spiritual independence; Winston Churchill, who championed "a kind of United States of Europe"; and Albert Camus, who exalted both the idea of beauty and "the common dignity of man." Thomas Mann, too, is repeatedly invoked to defend democracy and rail against "egotism, cruelty, cowardice, and stupidity."An extremely relevant, urgent call to revive true democracy and acknowledge the perils of fascist ideology.

Kirkus Reviews