Religious authoritarianism and social control

While reading Henry Giroux’s book, Against the New Authoritarianism (2005), I recalled Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), a riveting narrative of a post-nuclear war regression to a supposedly biblically founded Republic of Gilead in what is now the United States of America. This futuristic dystopia is hierarchically structured and ruthlessly authoritarian, with women and men strictly divided into groups or classes, each with its assigned function within the religiously totalitarian state. All of this is justified by the régime in the name of the kind of biblical ‘truth’ that surpasses individual dissent (or consent, for that matter).

In this society the men are either Commanders, Guardians, ‘Eyes’ (spies) or doctors (in order of seniority), and the women either Aunts, Wives, Econowives, Marthas, ‘Jezebels’ or Handmaids. The heroine of the story belongs to the latter, red-clad class, the members of which have only one function, namely to breed. For this purpose they are assigned, one at a time, to a Commander, who has sex with them regularly, in the presence of his wife — a practice legitimated by a story in Genesis, where Rachel, not being able to bear children herself, entreats Jacob to have one with her maid, Bilhah, to be given to Rachel after being born.

In the course of the narrative one witnesses the irrepressible human spirit on the part, not only of Offred (handmaid ‘Of Fred’, the Commander, just as Ofglen is the handmaid assigned to Commander Glen, and so on), but also in the actions of the individuals (such as Ofglen) who surreptitiously work in a kind of resistance movement.

Another way to put this is in psychoanalytical terms, namely to say that the narrative bears witness to the fact that desire cannot be extinguished on the part of humans, even when they are controlled with an iron fist. ‘Desire’ here includes sexual desire, but encompasses infinitely more: the desire for rebellion, for instance, in even the most minute, ostensibly trivial things such as Offred wanting desperately to steal something — anything — from the kitchen in the Commander’s house, and hiding it in her room, just to give herself the feeling of having a modicum of power.

Sometimes, however, this desire fuses with the desire for rebellion, as when she decides to hide a match in her mattress, in case she should have the guts to set the house on fire one day. Behind this desire, as well as behind that on the part of the members (including, improbably, Ofglen, Offred’s shopping partner) of the underground resistance movement simply known through the code word, ‘Mayday’, is the desire for freedom — since time immemorial a driving force behind the actions of people in the most diverse situations of bondage and oppression.

That there should be such a resistance movement in ‘Gilead’ rings true, in so far as any totalitarian state always spawns its own counter-force; as Foucault so cannily reminds one, the fact that a discursive régime exists (for example patriarchy), calls into being its own counter-discourse (in this case feminism). Power begets counter-power. Another thing that is persuasive about Gilead is the existence of Jezebel’s, where costumed, expendable women (like Offred’s friend, Moira, who had escaped from the Centre where the handmaids are trained, before she was apprehended again) are kept to entertain Commanders and male trade delegations in various ways, ranging from hostess-type company to sex — the creation of oldish men who knew that their obligatory intermittent copulation, for reproductive purposes, with their current handmaid, would not satisfy their need for variety and excitement.

This, too, is characteristic of a religiously puritanical society — recall the Victorian age, where wives are put on a pedestal of putative purity, while sexual satisfaction is sought with ‘expendable’ women such as prostitutes. This — the availability of a ‘club’ like Jezebel’s in a veritable theocracy — is therefore symptomatic of the futility of religiously inspired political repression in such a paranoid fashion. Because Gileadean society does not cater for some of the most ineradicable human needs and desires, space has to be created for a place such as Jezebel’s on the periphery of the ‘officially’ recognized society.

It is an instance of what Julia Kristeva calls the ‘abject’, which is always kept at arm’s length, because one cannot disavow it altogether, but cannot really affirm it openly either, lest it overwhelm one with its repulsiveness (for most people, cockroaches would occupy the position of the abject, or a corpse would — the paradigmatic ‘abject’, as Kristeva points out.)

Given its title, when one first starts reading it, you don’t expect it to be the mesmerizing novel it turns out to be, not least because of the resonance between the ‘fictional’ future dystopian society it constructs and current developments in certain parts of the world.

It seems fairly clear to me that Atwood conceived of the narrative of this award-winning novel on the basis of a projection of what she perceived in the 1980s already to be the potential threat of such a totalitarian theocratic state. It is one of the ironies of history and literary fiction that Atwood set her tale of authoritarianism in what was then and is today the United States of America; given the balance of worldviews in the 1980s between the USA and the USSR, one might have expected it to have had the latter as its fictional context. Didn’t Ronald Reagan glorify the liberties of ‘minimal government’ American democracy in his speeches of the 1980s — including his first inaugural speech of 1981 and his well-known ‘Evil Empire’ speech of June 1982, where he eulogized the freedoms of American democracy, in contrast to the oppressive totalitarianism of the Soviet Union? Who could have anticipated that Reagan’s political conservatism, coupled with its religious counterpart (neither of which seems very prominent in the speeches referred to earlier; in fact, they are downplayed) would, by the early 21st century, have burgeoned to such an extent in the USA that one of its leading intellectuals, Henry Giroux, could describe it as ’the new authoritarianism’? Among Giroux’s trenchant descriptions of the US under the Bush administration is the following (Against the New Authoritarianism; 2005: 1):

‘Embracing a policy moulded largely by fear and bristling with partisan, right-wing ideological interests, the Bush administration took advantage of the tragedy of 9/11 by adopting and justifying a domestic and foreign policy that blatantly privileged security over freedom, the rule of the market over social needs, and militarisation over human rights and social justice.’

Of particular relevance for Atwood’s futuristic vision of an America under totalitarian religious rule is the following excerpt from Giroux’s book (pp. 6-7):

‘President Bush sees no irony in proclaiming in one speech after another, largely to selected groups of conservatives, that he is a ‘born again’ Christian, all the while passing legislation that: weakens environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act; opposes a United Nations resolution to fund global Aids education and prevention; undermines the stability of Medicare; wages a budget war against disadvantaged children; denies millions of poor working adults a child tax credit; squanders the federal surplus on tax cuts for the rich; and increases corporate welfare to the tune of $125 billion, just as he decreases social benefits for millions of Americans, especially those who are poverty-stricken, old, young, and disabled.

Religious fundamentalism appears to be growing in the United States and the movement has received an enormous boost from those in power who think of themselves as ‘chosen’. At the same time, this mounting religious fervour, with its Manichean division of the world into the modalities of good and evil, remains inhospitable to dissent and reinforces a distinctly undemocratic view of patriotism. The slide into self-righteousness and intolerance appears to be on the rise in American life as politicians and moralists lay claim to an alleged monopoly on the truth, based on their religious convictions — an outlandish presumption matched only by disdain for those who do not share their worldview.’

What one could easily overlook, however, no matter how unlikely the link between Reagan’s ostensibly democratic, freedom-promoting policies and the new authoritarianism referred to by Giroux may be, is the economic factor. The reason why conservatives like Reagan and his contemporary in Britain, Maggie Thatcher, scaled down government, was to ‘free’ the market (that is, neo-liberal economics) from what they saw as restrictive government interference.

Religious authoritarianism and neo-liberal market economics may seem to make strange bedfellows, but the match is not really that surprising if one remembers that, as Giroux points out, these wealthy conservatives tend to think of themselves as ‘chosen’ anyway, in religious terms, and it is but a short step from there to the belief that they are also destined to be at the top of the economic food chain.

The development from Reagan’s America to that of George ‘Dub’ya’ Bush is therefore quite intelligible; the event of 9/11 merely hastened the emergence of a new America where the connections between religious conservatism, authoritarian government and a ruthless market economy are increasingly obvious. If this is kept in mind, Atwood’s Gileadean society in a future dystopian America does not appear to be all that impossible, let alone improbable.

Atwood gives one hope, however, with the (fictional) ‘historical notes’ that she appends after the end of the narrative events in Offred’s life. These historical notes recount events set in the late 22nd century, at a meeting of an historical association convention’s symposium on ‘Gileadean studies’, where the ‘discovery’ of an artifact known as ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is the subject of a lecture by one of its members. This artifact is not in written form; the novel by Atwood is supposed to be the transcript of the artifact(s), comprising a collection of audiotape-recordings on which ‘Offred’ (whose ‘real’ name one never learns) appears to have recorded her story after she had managed to escape from the Commander and his household.

From the perspective of the ‘historical’ study of the tapes’ narrative, therefore, the Republic of Gilead no longer exists, and extant society appears to be looking back at a time of authoritarian, political oppression beyond the need for which humanity has developed. Rather than ending on a pessimistic note, then, this clever literary device (the ‘notes’) induces optimism about the prospects of society outgrowing the apparently deep-seated need for some form of ‘absolute’ societal control. Whether Atwood’s optimism is justified, only time will tell, but Giroux and others’ assessment of existing global political and economic conditions is not reassuring.