From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
In Today's Terror,
An Old Allegory
Gets a New Life
Has Abu Musab al-Zarqawi been reading Thomas Mann?
Shortly before Iraq's January election, an audiocassette apparently from arch-terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was released to the press, declaring "fierce war on the evil principle of democracy." On it, Zarqawi lays out what he sees as the tenets of democracy--and why they are contrary to the tenets of Islam. In a democracy, Zarqawi explains, "the one who is worshipped and obeyed and deified, from the point of view of legislating and prohibiting, is man, the created, and not Allah." This, he adds, "is the very essence of heresy and polytheism and error."
Reading Zarqawi's text, two thoughts occurred to me. First: Here was a philosophically sophisticated argument--detestable, for sure, but one that troubled to grapple seriously with the core democratic idea. And second: This was pure Naphta.
By Naphta, I mean Leo Naphta, one of the great characters in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain." The first time I read the novel I was right out of college, drawn to it because it told the story of someone like me--a "perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man" named Hans Castorp who goes on what is supposed to be a three-week visit to a sanatorium in the high Alpine village of Davos, Switzerland. As anyone acquainted with the novel knows, Castorp's "holiday" lasts seven years, ending only when he comes down from the mountains to fight for Germany in World War I.
Yet reading a novel for the second time is not like reading it for the first, at least if it is a classic and the readings take place years apart. "The Magic Mountain" initially attracted me as a coming-of-age book. This time around, partly because I'm older and partly because of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, I read it as a work of allegory, philosophy and above all politics.
At the heart of Mann's book is a conversation--actually, an intellectual brawl--between Naphta and a character named Lodovico Settembrini. Settembrini is a self-described free-thinker and humanist who is convinced that improvements in technology and the refinement of our moral senses are leading inexorably to the "universal brotherhood of nations." He is a member of "The International League for the Organization of Progress" and believes that, "for each and every instance of suffering" men of good will can devise a means of redress. He believes in socialism and the necessity of legal conventions to abolish arms and war. "Nature is itself spirit," he says, and nature is itself good--an unintentionally ironic view, since Settembrini, like everyone on the Magic Mountain except Castorp, is dying of tuberculosis.
Settembrini, in other words, is what today we would call a "progressive" (think Kofi Annan), and his speeches dazzle with their brilliant earnestness. As for Naphta, he is an intellectually caustic Jesuit, who admires the Christian orders of the Middle Ages for their "pure, unadulterated religious egoism." He faults bourgeois democracy for the moral degradation of man and has no patience for liberals: "It is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart's desire in freedom," he says. "Its deepest desire is to obey."
He also believes the "world is divided into hostile camps," with nature on the one side and spirit on the other. For the latter to triumph, "the dualism between good and evil, between power and the Spirit, must be temporarily abrogated and transformed in a principle that unites asceticism and dominion. That is what I call the necessity of terror."
Could one ask for a better explanation for Zarqawi's motives--particularly the indiscriminate killing of fellow Muslims--than this? It is the will to power in the name of spirit, the rejection of democracy as the political outgrowth of soul-less nature. And yet (when given voice by Naphta) Zarqawi's creed is both more compelling and more persuasive than Settembrini's kindly and self-deluded idealism. Writing in the 1920s, Mann saw Soviet Communism as Naphta's avatar. But Zarqawi comes much closer, because his politics, unlike those of the atheist Lenin, are wedded to a belief in a real and living God.
As "The Magic Mountain" ends, Settembrini and Naphta fight a duel. The Italian gets to take the first shot, but he isn't willing to kill his foe. Instead, he impotently fires his gun in the air and leaves himself exposed. Naphta, however, can't do it either; he puts the gun to his head and commits suicide. In my reading, at least, it is a parable of the surrendering West saved from its own destruction by the self-devouring East.
This month is the 50th anniversary of Mann's death. Meanwhile, pressure is mounting on the administration to get out of Iraq. If it does, it will show the Zarqawis of the world that we are a nation of Settembrinis, who cannot muster the moral self-confidence to save ourselves by killing them. The only question then will be whether the Zarqawis are themselves the heirs of Naphta, who will do us the favor of self-destructing. Let's hope truth is as good as fiction.
Mr. Stephens is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
