Lumen Gentium 37

At times of unease, of climate change and mass migration, could the normalisation of political lying have consequences no one foresees?

“That is not who we are,” said Simon Harris in August 2024, battling instigators of hatred and racism, and even riot, in Ireland.

“That is not who we are,” said Kamala Harris in October 2024, recalling the mayhem at the Capitol building on Jan 6th 2020 – as she battled Donald Trump in Washington DC.

Common to these assertions seems to be the ‘pitch’ that ‘we the nation’ can only ever be just one thing – that a personal or a national identity is truly a stable singularity – either fixed and ‘good’ or fixed and ‘bad’ – and if ‘we’ can agree to be good now we will be good forever.

Doppelganger

Naomi Klein’s 2023 book Doppelganger ¹ – a Christmas present – is for me a timely warning against overconfidence about that. Media confusion of herself with her politically opposed lookalike – the feminist Naomi Wolf – led this leftist Jewish author to become fascinated (even for a time maybe obsessed) with the rightward ‘flipping’ of that also-Jewish ‘doppelganger’.

Following Naomi Wolf’s rightward ‘transition’ closely – into fervent anti-vaccination conspiracy fiction and activism during the Covid pandemic, the author Naomi Klein became acutely aware of her own anxious attachment to a personal ‘brand’ – that of crusader against the corporate capitalism she sees as the primary source of all Internet conspiracy fiction. To become confused regularly with Wolf the conspiracy monger was for Klein to be threatened with a loss of that ‘identity’, that ‘brand’ – and those causes also maybe – but was she utterly powerless to prevent that? The deftness of the US ‘right’ – e.g. in claiming to be victims of the ‘leftist’ anti-white ‘racism’ of the New York Times, and even of climate activism – left her boggled.

However, Doppelganger is about far more than this personal problem. It is also a sustained reflection on the fragility and instability of human identity and ‘self’ – at a time when people such as Steve Bannon, and now the multi-billionaire Elon Musk, work daily and passionately at misdirecting millions. As parent of a neurodivergent child Klein’s account of the transition of the paediatrician Asperger (of ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’) from kindly doctor who cared for all children indiscriminately in pre-Nazi Vienna – into (allegedly) a willing collaborator in the ‘euthanasia’ of children deemed ‘unworthy of life’, after 1938 – is especially chilling. We realise that, swallowing up that one gifted intellectual then, an entire culture was ‘shape-shifting’. The dreams of millions – and the lives of millions of Jews too – were swallowed up in the same Nazi zeitgeist.

With an extended family that is, like many, divided on the questions of Israel and Palestine, Naomi Klein is herself anti-Zionist, sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinians and based usually in Canada. She cannot help but reflect and write on these questions, however. Towards the end of Doppelganger she recounts a 2009 visit to Gaza as an author and researcher. She was, she writes, kept waiting unnecessarily for hours at the return checkpoint into Israel by the IDF – to punish her temerity in allegedly risking kidnapping by Hamas and thereby obliging Israeli soldiers to come to her rescue. That so many of her own people could become this ‘very different version of themselves’ – by turning Gaza into ‘the world’s largest open prison’ – is her concluding conundrum in the book – and who now can look away?

Ireland

So what of ‘home’ in Ireland and its troubles in 2025 – and that question of ‘who we are’? How sure can we be, in a deepening geopolitical and climate crisis, that we will be forever welcoming and anti-racist – and multiculturally at peace? Have some not already ‘flipped’?

For me it was alarming enough to follow Klein’s up-close account of a once fervently anti-Trump JD Vance ‘flipping’ into Trumpist vice-presidential candidate – and now busy ‘disruptor’ and tormentor and vilifier of desperate immigrants – e.g. by endorsing Trump’s ‘they’re eating the dogs’.

René Girard

What alarms me even more is that Doppelganger underscores the instability of so many societies at this time, faced with so many problems – and that Naomi Klein’s account of ‘shape shifting’ at the level of the individual mirrors the very patterns that René Girard saw on the historical scale – in all pogroms and scapegoatings and lynchings, and also in the Gospels. That pattern of ‘flipping’ – into lies, accusation, vilification and ‘throwing out’ – is what Girard identifies with ‘the accuser’ of scripture, the adversary, Satan ².

In the Gospel, as today, there is no pantomime Satan, no physical visible apparition in horns and scarlet jumpsuit. Instead there was then, as told in the Gospels and in history – and ready to happen again today – a flipping of the crowd – from welcomers of a strange and maybe unfashionable ‘king’ from Galilee into crucifiers of innocence. Whatever that mysterious force is that can ‘flip’ us – to make us liars and entertainers of lies – and then unite us in accusation and even murder of the innocent – even when the holocaust is still in living memory – that force is, for René Girard, what Satan truly is.

Easter

So is it important now, especially at our Easter liturgies – in the renewal of baptismal promises – to become fully conscious of what we mean when we say that we renounce Satan – and ‘all his works, and all his empty show’? Are we simply then renouncing all lies against – and all hatred and dehumanisation of – anyone?

And should we pray fervently also for all who lie against the innocent, and even those who devastate and kill – because they may not truly know what they are doing?

10th February 2025

NOTES

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World : Naomi Klein, Penguin, 2023
I See Satan Fall like Lightning : René Girard, Orbis Books, New York, 2001