Youth Without God by Ödön von Horváth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Worst Case Scenario

Whenever a religion demonstrates its inadequacy to account for the contemporary facts of life, be sure that another religion is on the way to fill the vacuum. It too will fail but only after increasing the quantum of human misery significantly.

The impulse toward religion seems irresistible. Why? Comfort? Despair? A desire for justice or revenge? It seems that the evil which permeates the world demands a response. Religion is that response. Without religion there is no hope. Or so it might seem.

Religion rationalises evil as a temporary aberration, something to be endured for a higher achievement - heaven, nirvana, the respect of the gods, self-satisfaction. Ultimately justice will prevail and evil will be overcome, or at least relativised as the error religion claims injustice to be.

Since it is evil that necessitates God, he is automatically recruited to the cause of combatting the designated evil - the black man, the immigrant, the political opponent, the religious opponent, the opponent of any sort. These are unjust by definition and must be corrected by their elimination as God commands.*

Youth is never without religion, which it inherits from its parents, and therefore youth is never without God. Religion is strongest in youth, for whom the correcting of injustice is of obsessive concern since youth feels no other real responsibilities except obtaining justice for itself. Youth, fortunately, is constrained in its religious duties by a lack of power and so seeks out and combats evil primarily among its own ranks.

Some remain youthful throughout their lives, maintaining their religion as a guiding force as the scope of their adult power expands. They may redefine what constitutes evil, and consequently adapt their religion to the times as they advance in age. Unsurprisingly, religion tends to become increasingly conservative with age among those who cherish it. This adapted religion, more repressive from generation to generation, they in turn pass on to youth, with God as guide and constant ally.

Those who discover in adulthood that religion is mythical, that God is dead, may worry that evil will be consequently unconstrained. At least this is the story they hear from the religionists. They don’t realise that it is the existence of evil which has prompted the creation of God; and that the death of one’s God means the life of another God, fighting some other purported evil. This might provoke despair but shouldn’t be surprising. One God’s Mede is another God’s Persian.

As the translator says somewhat defensively in his introduction to Youth Without God: “A man does not need to be a fervent believer to sense the absence of God, or to detect the presence of darker agency.” He thinks we live in a godless age and suffer, or are at least confused, on account of it. But it is clear that Horváth knows that the racist, nationalist, militant Nazism which his protagonist experiences is anything but godless. The title represents a hope not a concern.

The new National Socialist God justifies justice of an entirely different sort than the old God; but there is justice nonetheless. So that it is incorrect to claim that “No divine justice will come: not before death, and not after it; not for the old, and not for the young.” This is not the “worst case scenario.” Far worse is the new theological regime which thrives on a divinely ordained justice of a different sort of human repression. Perhaps it’s time to realise that justice can’t be defined elsewhere than in human community.


*This is essentially an extrapolation of Alain Badiou’s thesis that the designation of the Good and Human Rights as the opposite of perceived Evil is a very dangerous business. I don’t know if Horváth’s story influenced Badiou, but it certainly demonstrates the importance of Badiou’s insight. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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