The World’s Game review: A guide for the perplexed on countering the false certainties of totalitarianism

In common with Popper, Raphael identifies Plato as an early advocate of totalitarianism: “The Nazi fancy of innate Aryan supremacy, enforced by blond beasts all set to put their boots in, was of a piece with Plato’s ideal society ruled by pedigreed ‘Guardians’, top dogs backed by meta-Spartiate enforcers,” he writes.

He argues that Judaism emerges as the only one of the three major monotheisms to leave “middle ground... uncluttered by predetermined dogma”, comparable, in that respect, to ancient Greek polytheism. “If the advocates of faith, Christian and Muslim were as sure of their dogmas as they insist, would they not pity or laugh at those who ignore their invitations rather than pursue them, down the centuries, with murderous indignation?” he asks.

Raphael enlists a number of distinguished philosophers in his cause, among them Ludwig Wittgenstein and A.J. Ayer (both Jewish) and J.L. Austin. In his classic work Sense and Sensibilia, Austin claimed that we never directly perceive material objects but only sense-data (our own ideas, impressions and sense-perceptions.) If we cannot even be sure of the world we see in front of us, how can we claim “a priori” certainty for ethical systems, as totalitarian regimes do? “That the inconclusive is a vital element in civilisation threatens all ideological and dogmatic schemes,” Raphael asserts correctly.

“A decent society will not embrace, still less enforce, ideas without foundation in common sense and a certain civility,” claims Raphael. But “who will define unarguably what common sense is?” Writers, with their “facetious rescripts of canonical creeds”, might come as close as any.

Totalitarian regimes, prone neither to civility nor common sense, unsurprisingly abuse language as much as the people they seek to control. Hannah Pollin-Galay's Occupied Words, a study of the way Yiddish altered under the pressures of the Holocaust, and Viktor Klemperer's The Language of the Third Reich, an account of how Nazism impacted German, detail this process in action. Raphael calls as his own witness Vladimir Nabokov, who “forecast the fall of the Soviet regime on the grounds not of economic overreach or popular indignation, but because the great Russian language was sure to confound those who had abused it so sorely”.

Raphael's own prose is pithy and mordant, his mind still quicksilver and youthful, his book a timely modern guide for the perplexed.

The World's Game

By Frederic Raphael

Head of Zeus