Eco-fascism

I hadn't really come across Pentti Linkola or eco-fascism until the editor of an English-language magazine about Finnish literature sent me one of Linkola's articles to translate. In the end I decided to turn the assignment down, not so much because of the views expressed in the piece - though I find most of them abhorrent - as because of the attitude towards language that's visible in it. Linkola is the Finnish fisherman and philosopher who supports compulsory sterilization and abortion, dedicated one of his books to the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, and considers that "the US symbolizes the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom."

The article starts off innocuously enough, with a set of zoological reflections reminiscent of the manner of a Konrad Lorenz:

Man is not a rational creature, not in the slightest. A better name than the one he has given his own species – homo sapiens, the intelligent primate – might be homo insipiens, the crazy primate. Every zoologist and even animal lover knows and sees and observes how indescribably more efficiently and wisely the animals order their lives than does man, who is now preparing to live a new millennium of his strange chronology. He will get there narrowly, in the midst of his immense chaos and destructive horror – but not much longer.

Man is mad, not sapiens. But homo, the primate - that he is indeed, that is true. He is a genius with his hands, and with his technical genius he has, for a short while, become the bully who lords it over all living things. If only there were some other species of animal as good with its hands and also at least somewhat sensible in the way it lived the rest of its life. In the contest it would have wiped out thousands of years of the history of the human species and cast it into shame and oblivion.

But soon there begins an all-out attack on the principle of democracy, which Linkola calls "the seal of destruction". The problem is that human beings in Western society labour under the illusion "that they know what is good for them":

From this absurd assumption has developed the suicidal form of government that was born amidst the social tyrannies that are the countries of the West - parliamentary democracy.

And from there on, the author proceeds to berate most of humanity - and especially Finns, whom he calls "world champions of wastage", destroyers of their own forests - in the name of an environmental creed that bears a distinct resemblance not so much to a religion as to an ideology:

What is "the end of the world"? In human consciousness the end of the world does not mean the end of the world as a whole, not even the end of our own solar system or our own planet. The globe will continue to spin. And some sort of life will probably remain after man has gone, in the depths of the oceans at least, whose creatures take their energy from the earth's warmth, and not from the sun. "The end of the world" is understood to mean the extinction of our own species, of the last human being. In the century that has past and in the century that is to come there are several millions of such ends of the world. The mammoth's end of the world is the death of the last mammoth, the four-footed butterfly's end of the world is the death of the last four-footed butterfly.

Those who talk about the end of man's world as looming in the very near future, the people in their despair try to call disparagingly "prophets of the end of the world". But prophetic gifts are not required. All that is needed is the ability to distinguish empty optimism from a sense of reality. The end of the world is a mathematical axiom...

Linkola's use of language, the scenario he paints with a verbal style that is rhythmic, hypnotic and rhetorical (wasn't there a twentieth-century political leader who used similar devices in the composition of his speeches?), are so devoid of human feeling that when, at the end of the article, he asks: "is there anything good about man?" his answer, involving the praise of "individuals who are still doing their work of mercy with all their hearts", and those who work "in circles and associations" for the protection of the natural environment, begins to sound cynical. So much so, indeed, that when he reaches the final sentence - "At the dawning of the new century the greatest miracle is that there are still those who protect nature, that in them faith, hope and love still burn" - it's hard to overcome a sense of revulsion.

This, in a verbal context, is what the new fascism looks like. In some ways I was reminded of Heidegger - the solitariness, the fascination with nature, with destruction, with the void. But it also has a curiously Finnish edge - a Lutheran, Nordic, yet almost musical and poetic resonance that makes it even more sinister. There is also the same sense one has when reading Heidegger that what one is really reading is an over-compensation for the disillusion wrought by an ideology that has failed - in Heidegger's case, Hegelian doctrine, and in Linkola's - Marxist radicalism.

It's a sobering thought that figures like Linkola are taken seriously in academic and environmentalist circles, not only in Europe, but also in Canada and the United States. And now in scientific circles, books on "the end of the world" are published by eminent figures echoing in a more or less elaborate form the "hard" attitudes and sentiments Linkola expresses so directly and graphically. Fascism is re-emerging in the form of popular science.

But at any rate, I'm grateful to my editor colleague for sending me the article. At least I know something about Pentti Linkola now. And I don't want to translate him.