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Let’s start with Karl Popper and the Paradox of Tolerance (Popper, Ryan, & Gombrich, 2013).
This is something that has vexed me ever since I found out about it. The idea is this: think of society as having a sliding scale between tolerance and intolerance, with regard to people, with regard to ideas, politics, religion, race, sexual and gender identity, and so forth. The more the scale tips toward tolerance, the more intolerant ideas are sanctioned, so both tolerance and intolerance result in intolerance. Intolerance prevails either way. And the only way around this is to embrace intolerance, and then the question becomes, what kind of intolerance do we truly wish to prevail?
A few years ago, an old friend from my childhood contacted me by way of attempting to reinstate relations. For context, I’m 39 and he perhaps a year younger, and while it’s difficult to estimate exactly when we were friends before—at the time, I kept notes somewhat more sporadically than I do now—I believe it was from about when I was 10 to about when I was 15. He was, at the time, a devout Mormon, and I think that I had moved through about three different faiths during that time period, none of them backed by my family or some religious organization in the same way that his faith was backed by his family and the Mormon Church.
He’s not a Mormon anymore, having had a break with the church sometime during the interim. When he got back in touch with me, I think I was still formulating myself as a Satanist. It’s not something I remember speaking to him about. But we did have some conversations about his break with the Church and about what he now believed, and to a large degree I found myself in agreement. I’m a pantheist, when it comes down to it, but I don’t think that any personal god exists the way that I think most people do. So it’s a bit strange to me that our subsequent fall out turned out to be largely political in nature. I would very much like to do this without insulting this person or diminishing him in any way. He’s one of the most directly honest people I’ve ever met and I respect that. But I could not abide by his seeming tolerance for certain political ideologies, and for the current U.S. presidency. To be clear, he was politically liberal and no supporter of the President, but was unwilling to call out President Trump and his most loyal supporters as being what I believe them to be: implicit racists at the minimum, and often explicit fascists or neo-fascists.
“Fascism” is a loaded word, so I think it’s especially important to be absolutely and abundantly clear about what I mean by it. I think fascism can be taken a couple of different ways, first as the pure political philosophy espoused primarily by Benito Mussolini (The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf, 1932) and Carl Schmitt (2005) that predates its manifestation in the horrors of the mid-20th century, and second, as a description of certain contemporary political attitudes that at least lean in the direction of historical fascism, often idealizing historical fascist governments, and which also demonstrate certain traits that were also associated with said governments: authoritarianism, toxic nationalism, and racism. I’ll call that neo-fascism, and that will be the form of fascism that I’ll be focusing on for the remainder of this essay.
So now let’s examine those traits. For authoritarianism, I feel safe going with the dictionary definition provided by Google: “The enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.” To define toxic nationalism we first have to define nationalism. Returning to the Google definition: “Identification with one’s own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations.” The political analyst John Judis argues, in The Nationalist Revival (2018), that nationalism can be a positive or a negative force—though, to be clear, the terms “positive nationalism” and “toxic nationalism” are my own—and that some degree of positive nationalism is necessary for social cohesion and a functional society within the context of a nation-state. Using my own nation-state as an example, toxic nationalism is a nationalism that relies on demagoguery and often highly bigoted rhetoric and very narrowly defines American national identity as being exclusively American-born, white (or even more narrowly as Anglo-Saxon or Germanic), Christian (or even more narrowly as Protestant), English-speaking, heterosexual, cisgendered, and associated with certain social and political institutions and ideologies.
To be clear, I am myself an American nationalist—though, I hope, a positive one—and may or may not be a multiculturalist depending on how one defines the term. I take my cues on multiculturalism from a 1994 essay by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor called “The Politics of Recognition” (Farrelly, 2004). All cultures are worthy of equal recognition and equal respect, but do not have equal value, because to have a culture in the first place is to have a value system. To take an example, as Samuel Huntington describes in The Clash of Civilizations (2011, pp. 69–70), one of the values of Western civilization is the Classical legacy of ancient Greek and Roman civilization, which emphasizes philosophy and rationalism. Being a philosopher of the Western tradition myself (though also heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy), I obviously value that aspect of my culture above those of other cultures, while still recognizing and respecting them.
For reference, historical fascism originated in the work of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and the German political theorist Carl Schmitt. Mussolini describes fascism thusly:
The Fascist conception of life is a religious one, in which man is viewed in his immanent relation to a higher law, endowed with an objective will transcending the individual and raising him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. Those who perceive nothing beyond opportunistic considerations in the religious policy of the Fascist regime fail to realize that Fascism is not only a system of government but also and above all a system of thought. ()
1932, pp. 1
And elsewhere:
The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people. ()
1932, pp. 2
This is to say that fascism espouses a total, unwavering, and even religious devotion to the state.
Fascism (neo or otherwise) and Satanism are not explicitly linked but rather tied together through the medium of black metal. Let me first get out of the way that I don’t at all think that black metal is necessarily fascistic in any way; indeed, I think that fascism is a corruption of the genre’s ideals and ethos and that fascist black metal artists are, for lack of a better word, posers. I’ll go into more detail on that in a bit. First, a quick primer on what black metal is.
Heavy metal music has had a penchant for Satan going back to its origins in the music of Black Sabbath. In the early 80’s, various speed, thrash, and traditional heavy metal bands ratcheted up the Satanism considerably and also adopted a raw production aesthetic. This era of music has come to be known as the first wave of black metal. Landmark bands include Venom, Bathory, Mercyful Fate, Hellhammer, and Celtic Frost, though there are others as well. King Diamond, the vocalist for Mercyful Fate, is himself an avowed LaVeyan Satanist, and the other bands at least made Satan a core part of the concept. These bands were a major influence on other underground metal bands in the late 80’s and 90’s, especially in Norway, who built on that sound with a raw, fast, aggressive, and often very minimalist approach. That would come to be known as the second wave of black metal, and bands from that wave include Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone, Immortal, Gorgoroth, Satyricon, and many others. There’s a great deal of criminal activity that went on among the second wave black metal bands, including church burnings and a few murders, but the important point for our purposes is that a few of the early black metal bands, such as Burzum and Graveland, associated themselves explicitly with fascist political stances, and that influence seems to have carried forward into the genre as it stands today.
To be clear, black metal, by its very nature, attracts some shady characters, but the vast majority of black metal musicians have no association whatsoever with racism or fascism. That said, there are some bands that have taken some questionable actions, maintain some questionable personal associations, or whose members are explicit Nazis. I’ll walk through some examples of each.
First of all, let’s consider the Norwegian musician Ørjan Stedjeberg, who goes by the stage name Hoest and leads the band Taake. In March of 2007, at a concert in Essen, Germany, Hoest appeared on stage with a swastika painted on his chest. Reacting to the controversy, Hoest stated:
Taake is not a political nazi band, etc… We certainly didn’t expect the current threat reactions, as everyone should know by now that our whole concept is built upon provocation and anything evil- and death-related.
“The Official Taake Website,” 2007
And elsewhere:
I do realize that it is rather unforgivable to display a swastika in Germany, yes. On the other hand I strongly feel that Black Metal bands should allow themselves to use ANY kind of destructive/negative symbolism, as the basis of this expression is above all: EVIL(!)
“On Taake and Antifa,” n.d.
I’m willing to take Hoest at his word that he’s not actually a Nazi, because if you’re in a black metal band in the first place and are willing to use the Nazi swastika in a live performance, you’re probably not going to be shy about admitting that you’re a Nazi. Regardless, this is very stupid behavior and quite an infantile justification as well. The structure of the argument is as follows: one, black metal is transgressive; two, racist symbols are transgressive; therefore, the use of racist symbols in black metal is permissible. That argument is simply invalid. All of the premises are true, but the conclusion does not follow, and I can demonstrate this by constructing an argument with the same structure that is very obviously wrong: one, apples are round; two, baseballs are round; therefore, people should eat baseballs. True premises, false conclusion, invalid argument.
I think part of the underlying problem is that Hoest is conflating two entirely different notions of “evil.” This is a matter I’ve addressed in another essay, titled “Evil” (2019) which I will quote here.
…there is another sense in discourse in which “evil” is used, and that is the sense that is used by the doctrinal authorities of religion: the Catholic Church, ultraconservative Protestant church organizations in the southern United States, the ulema of the Saudi Arabian theocracy… the list is extensive, and I only have room to provide a few examples. Under their proclamation, “good” is obedience to presumed authority, subservience to ignorance, abasement of humanity, acceptance of weakness, sexual repression, moral hypocrisy, tyranny, and passive acceptance of oppression. These are the values of the Hegemon, or at least the values that they hold for others; they would not have come so far and risen so high if they did not hold different values for themselves. This is the very reason that I have chosen the Satanic as the iconography of my religion: the values that I hold — that I have created — stand opposed to the values of these institutions. It is only fitting, then, that the religion and religious symbolism that have arisen from my values stand opposed as well.
This is to say that Hoest using the swastika doesn’t reference evil the same way that Satanism or metal music in general reference evil. Rather, given the symbol’s association with authoritarianism and catastrophic stupidity, Hoest’s usage is actually quite antithetical to the “evil” of metal and Satanism and is thus entirely hypocritical. That kind of anti-humanism—by which I mean not opposition to the philosophy of humanism but to humanity itself—is simply incoherent, and inconsistent with being in any sort of band. By way of inimical hatred for humanity, these musicians would write, produce, and perform inspiring music at great personal cost to themselves? And Taake’s black metal is indeed quite excellent, I have to say, but the matter of the aesthetics of music made by questionable people will be addressed later on.
Then we have the Polish band Mgła, who display no overt signs of fascism in their own music but who have, in the past, associated themselves with the overtly fascist band Clandestine Blaze. And as well, in the year 2000, current Mgła member Mikołaj Żentara released, under the name of a dark ambient project called Leichenhalle, an album called Judenfrei, which is German for “free of Jews.” Here, we’ve moved beyond simple stupidity to something more nefarious, but which cannot directly be associated with the music of Mgła itself. I’ve found nothing in their lyrics—the English ones at least; some of their earlier albums are in Polish—to indicate that the band itself espouses any such politics.
Nevertheless, Mgła has, in the past, had venues cancel their concerts as a result of the band’s questionable past activities and associations. My stance on this is that these cancellations are not themselves a form of censorship. Venue owners are free owners of private property and can do with it what they wish. They have as much a right to say that Mgła cannot play in their venue as I do to say that you’re not allowed to break into my house and play it on my stereo. No one is preventing anyone from accessing their music in general; all of their albums are still easily accessible on Spotify and other platforms. I am an ardent supporter of free speech, even for views I disagree with, but the cancellations were in no way an affront to that, being instead a simple reflection of the reality that speech has consequences.
I’ll also note that these kinds of antics are actually entirely beneficial to the Christian hegemony. Black metal is inherently critical of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. By associating black metal with an ideology that is much more widely despised, (for very good reasons), these musicians are, in effect, poisoning the well of black metal’s often legitimate religious criticisms.
But getting down to the heart of the matter, why are these views incompatible with Satanism? The reason is that racism and fascism are stupid, bullshit ideologies claimed exclusively by the intellectually and spiritually weak. These are qualities that are incompatible with Satanism in any form. I’ve never seen a defense of any racist or fascist ideology that wasn’t deeply mired in logical fallacies and generally shoddy thinking, if such can even be called “thinking” in the first place. I’ve never seen a racist idea predicated on rigorous critical thought. Not once, not ever. For the LaVeyan Satanists, it’s an affront to the first Satanic sin, that of stupidity. And by way of support from a more general perspective, I’ll once again quote myself from my essay, “Evil:”
Satan, in the archetype of Lucifer, whom I call Satan the Adversary, represents the pursuit of knowledge, as it was Lucifer who (according to one narrative) persuaded the first humans to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and who has stood opposed to the Old Testament God who sought to frustrate and limit our knowledge and achievement (as in the story of The Tower of Babel). So in this sense, for me, the truest evils are stupidity and ignorance.
The thing is, though, I still spin Mgła on a fairly regular basis. For all their ideological idiocy, they’re creating some of the best and most important music being made today, regardless of genre. This may seem hypocritical, and perhaps it is to some degree, but I allow myself to listen to this kind of music because I believe that it is important not to shut myself off from the aspects of the world that I find disagreeable. The unavoidable reality is that the quality of a person’s character seems entirely unrelated to their artistic capacity. Objectionable and even reprehensible people can and do make great art, and this has always been the case. Howard Philips Lovecraft was racist even by the standards of his own day, and his ideas remain some of the most influential in the genre of horror fiction. Friedrich Nietzsche broke with Wagner—himself a brilliant composer—over his anti-Semitism, and Nietzsche himself was a horrible misogynist, as was Pablo Picasso. The founders of the American Republic were slave-owners, and the great thinkers of Classical Rome and Greece lived in and endorsed a society in which slavery was the norm.
I do not advocate, however, for separating the art from the artist, which I’ve seen offered as a means of reconciling great art with some of the reprehensible people who have made it. I don’t believe that Lovecraft partitioned off the non-racist parts of his character in order to write those stories that are absent explicit racism, so I don’t see why we should do anything of the sort in reading his works. The reality is that people are complex and even the worst of us may have some remarkable insight into the human condition or the nature of beauty.
Returning to the Paradox of Tolerance, I think our approach here should be what the infinitely brilliant John von Neumann, one of the inventors of game theory, called “minimaxing,” that is, minimizing the maximum possible downside and maximizing the minimum possible upside (Brandt, Brill, & Suksompong, 2016). I think that this can be accomplished with particular regard to the Paradox of Tolerance by incorporating second-order thinking. That is, first-order intolerance—of race, for example—is impermissible, while second-order intolerance—of racism, for example—is both permissible and necessary, morally upright and highly desirable. This kind of intolerance, however, does not mean censorship, which I consider to be a total non-starter because there’s no one whom I would trust to make proper decisions as to what ought to be censored, which is just the beginning of the problems with such an approach. What it does mean, just for a start, is publicly calling out the racists and the fascists for what they are, repudiating them, deplatforming them, and—to a certain degree that I will now specify—ostracizing them.
My former friend—the one whom I spoke of at the beginning of this episode—explicitly disagreed with this approach, concerned that socially isolating racists would only concentrate and amplify their racism. This is not a point to be casually dismissed; indeed, it’s one I’ve written of before. In my essay “Belief and Identity” (2019), I cited the movie Behind the Curve (Clark, 2018), a documentary investigating the lives of those who believe (or claim to believe) that the Earth is flat. A psychologist interviewed for the film, Dr. Per Espen Stoknes, comments on the problem of isolation reinforcing belief.
Say you lose faith in this thing. What then happens to my personal relationships?… Will the mainstream people welcome me back? No. They couldn’t care less. But have I now lost all my friends in this community? Yes. So, suddenly you’re doubly isolated.
I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that we wouldn’t see the same problem manifesting in communities that espouse racist ideologies, like the KKK. But again, it comes down to the Paradox of Tolerance. Intolerance of white supremacy may isolate and reinforce it, but tolerance of it will reinforce it as well. That phenomenon is clearly demonstrated by the correlation and likely causal relationship between the bigoted and racially inflammatory rhetoric of President Donald Trump and the rise in hate crime in the United States in recent years, which is documented in a paper by Rushin and Edwards (2018) published in the SSRN Electronic Journal titled “The Effect of President Trump’s Election on Hate Crimes.” So, again, the question is not whether we wish to be intolerant of anything, but what kind of intolerance we wish to prevail. While isolation and ostracization may play a role in intensifying racist sentiments, that has to be weighed against the benefits of establishing a kind of ideological quarantine.
Such a quarantine, if taken to extremes, would necessitate censorship and government intervention in the matter, which I think, for reasons I’ve already stated, is more problematic that the problem it would be attempting to remedy. So there’s a balance to be struck, and the benefits of at least keeping lines of dialogue open must be kept in mind. There is, for example, the case of Daryl Davis, a black man who has convinced over 200 members of the KKK to quit the organization and disavow their racist beliefs by talking to and befriending them (Brown, 2017). The actions of Mr. Davis are nothing less than heroic and I don’t want to discount that, but I also don’t think that individual actions, however beneficial, should necessarily form the basis for a normative model for the actions or attitudes of societies. In other words, while such an attitude may be laudable on an individual level, I don’t think that people are obligated to make friends with those who actively desire and work towards their extermination.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and to sign up for my mailing list (form on the sidebar) so you can stay current on my latest work. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. I also have a reading list, which contains links to the books I used to research this and all of my other stories. Clicking through and buying books is a great, easy way to support my work.
Works Cited
Belief and Identity. (2019, August 3). Retrieved December 26, 2019, from A Satanist Reads the Bible website: https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/belief-and-identity/
Brandt, F., Brill, M., & Suksompong, W. (2016). An ordinal minimax theorem. Games and Economic Behavior, 95, 107–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2015.12.010
Brown, D. (2017, August 20). How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes. Retrieved December 26, 2019, from NPR.org website: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes
Clark, D. J. (2018). Behind the Curve [Documentary].
Evil. (2019, June 8). Retrieved December 23, 2019, from A Satanist Reads the Bible website: https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/evil/
Farrelly, C. P. (Ed.). (2004). Contemporary political theory: A reader. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE.
Huntington, S. P. (2011). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order (Simon & Schuster hardcover ed). New York: Simon & Schuster.
Judis, J. B. (2018). The nationalist revival: Trade, immigration, and the revolt against globalization. New York, NY: Columbia Global Reports.
On Taake and Antifa. (n.d.). Retrieved December 23, 2019, from Metal Trenches website: https://metaltrenches.com/reviews/on-taake-and-antifa-1377
Popper, K. R., Ryan, A., & Gombrich, E. H. (2013). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rushin, S., & Edwards, G. S. (2018). The Effect of President Trump’s Election on Hate Crimes. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3102652
Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty (University of Chicago Press ed). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The Official Taake Website. (2007, March 29). Retrieved December 23, 2019, from https://web.archive.org/web/20070329042528/http://taake.theblacksun.org/