Ominous Parallels (11 page)

During the Weimar years, there were many opponents of Hitler eager to pit their version of the country’s ethics against his, men who demanded sacrifice not for the sake of the race, but of some other group. None of them challenged the basic premise of the German ethics: the duty of men to live for others, the right of those others to be lived for. From the outset, therefore, the opponents of Nazism were disarmed: since they equated selflessness with virtue, they could not avoid conceding that Nazism, however misguided, was a form of moral idealism.

The view that he was misguided did not cost Hitler many votes; it signaled merely a political dispute. The view that he was an idealist helped win him the country; it was a moral sanction which, in a different kind of era, he could never have hoped for.

Of all the Weimar groups invoking morality, the Nazis were the most fervent. Nazism, observes historian Koppel Pinson,

was, as a matter of fact, the only large political movement in Germany that gave evidence of genuine idealistic, even though perversely misguided, sacrifice.... All the idealistic will to sacrifice seemed to be concentrated on the Right. This not only gave the movement internal strength but also served to attract a wider and larger following.

“National Socialism,” writes Pinson, “with all its moral nihilism, also knew how to appeal to the idealistic impulse for sacrifice.” So it did.
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The Nazis do not merely issue generalized exhortations to self-sacrifice. They also accept every significant consequence or expression of the altruist ethics advanced by modem philosophers.

One such expression is the elevation of the group to the position of moral lawgiver, a doctrine whose primary source is Hegel.

Kant and Fichte had said that a man can discover the content of good and evil by his own judgment, independent of the views of society. Hegel rejects this approach as too individualistic. The principles of morality, he claims, are to be determined not by an individual’s mind but by his “real self,” the community or the state—whose traditions and laws, in Hegel’s opinion, constitute the real standard of good and evil. In the ethical man, Hegel tells us, the last vestiges of selfishness have disappeared: “the self-will of the individual has vanished together with his private conscience which had claimed independence....”
³⁸

Modern altruists took over from the medievals the principle of self-sacrifice, then dislodged God from the position of supreme collector, replacing him with “other men.” Hegel’s approach pushes this trend a step further, demanding not only service to others, but also obedience to them. Others (the group) become at once the highest value and the source of values, the recipient of the individual’s sacrifices and the definer of his duties, the ultimate beneficiary and the unchallengeable moral authority together, thus taking over fully the ethical role once reserved to the divine.

There had always been thinkers who advocated social conformity with a cynical or tired shrug, on the grounds that moral principles are impractical or unknowable. Only in the era of modern altruism, however, did philosophers begin to preach conformity with righteous fire—not because morality is unknowable, but because society is its source, not as a counsel of expediency, but as the virtue of self-subordination to others.

Since men do not agree in their moral feelings, according to Hegel, each group (each nation) properly legislates its own moral code, to which its own members must be obedient though that code is not binding on alien groups. This is the doctrine of social subjectivism applied to ethics. In the pre-Kantian era, ethical subjectivism was restricted to occasional skeptics; since Kant it has dominated the field of philosophy. The deepest roots of this modern shift are twofold: in epistemology, the romanticist advocacy of feeling as superior to reason; in ethics, the altruist advocacy of others as superior to self. The result is a view of morality in which the ruling standard is: the feelings of others.

On both grounds, the Nazis accept the modern view wholeheartedly, in a racialized version. Morality, they hold, is a product of racial instinct or national character: “[M]orals vary according to peoples, and so the national idea prevails in the domain of morals.” Ethical ideas, like all others, are devoid of objectivity; there is no such thing as
“the
truth” in ethics, they say, but only “our truth,” i.e., truth for a given race. The individual, therefore, cannot judge moral issues on his own; he must find out what his country’s “race soul” approves and then act accordingly. “Right,” declares Rosenberg, “is that which Aryan people find right; wrong is that which they reject.”
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By the same token, no “alien” can criticize any German action or submit it to the judgment of an impartial, universally applicable code of morality. Anything is right, right for Germans, if the Volk decrees it. As the source of right, the Volk antecedes moral principles and is not to be limited by them.

Nor is it to be limited by its own previous moral declarations. The main line of Greek and of Christian philosophy had held that basic moral principles are immutable. The post-Kantians generally swept any such viewpoint aside: society is eminently mutable—and a mutable authority cannot generate an immutable code. If it is the decrees of society that create morality, thinkers concluded, then morality is subject to continual change. There can be no moral principles outside the prerogative of society to modify, repeal, or replace.

The Nazis agree. They, too, repudiate any unchanging code of values, any fixed theory of the nature of good and evil, virtue and vice. No ethical principles, they hold, their own included, are permanently valid. There are no moral absolutes. As in everything else, so in ethics: truth is flexible, adaptable, relative.

The Nazis’ relativism in ethics is reinforced by another as· pect of their ideology: their pragmatism.

According to pragmatism, the standard of truth, in morality as in science, is expediency. Ethical ideas, like all others, are to be accepted only so long as they continue to “work.” Thus “Thou shalt not kill [or commit mass murder]” has the same status as “Twice two makes four”: both are valid only so long as they are useful. Ethics, therefore, is mutable; virtue and vice, like truth and falsehood, are not “rigid” but relative ; what counts is not abstract principles but “results.” Again, by a somewhat different route, there are no moral absolutes.

The Nazis accept the social version of pragmatism. The right, they hold, is that which “works” not for an individual but for society, that which achieves public purposes, not private ones, that which promotes the welfare of the community. In this interpretation, it is the duty of the pragmatic individual to subordinate his personal desires in order to serve his fellows; i.e., it is his duty to live just as altruist theory would have him live.

In its social version, pragmatism in ethics is a form of
altruism—
an avowedly relativist, “practical” form. Qua altruists, the Nazis declare: sacrifice yourself to serve the Volk. Qua pragmatists, they declare: the right is whatever works to achieve the ends of the Volk. Both viewpoints enjoin the Same basic code of conduct, and the Nazi slogan, “Right is what is good for the German people,” can be taken interchangeably as a statement of either.

The man who determines what is good for the German people (and what their race soul decrees) is the man who is their embodiment and leader. For Nazism, therefore, the right and the true are to be gauged by the same ultimate standard.
“I have no conscience,”
said Goering, discussing he Reichstag fire with Himmler, Frick, and others.
“My conscience is Adolf Hitler.”
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As to the men who do have a conscience, the men who refuse to carry out Hitler’s commands, there is, according to the Nazis, only one proper method by which to deal with them, whether they be German or non-German, anti-Nazi or uncommitted or apolitical. The advocacy of this method as a formal ethical theory is the capstone of the Nazi morality, the last of its central tenets, the most obvious (and least understood) expression of the Nazi ethical mentality.

The method is: compulsion, violence, ravishment, i.e., physical force, in any of its degrees from fist-backed threat to wholesale extermination.

When the Nazis glorify the Aryan as the exponent of “strength” or “power,” which they never tire of doing, they do not refer to intellectual strength or unyielding integrity (these are antisocial evils in their view); they mean literal, brute strength—the power of destruction, of muscles, armies, and guns—the power effectively to wield physical force, massive force against masses of men. “Only force rules,” said Hitler in 1926. “[O]n earth and in the universe force alone is decisive,” he said in 1928. “Whatever goal man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality.”
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As his practice testified, Hitler meant this kind of utterance; it did not express a temporary mood or a fluctuating policy, but a permanent view of human life. The roots of this view lie in the Nazi epistemology and ethics.

There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another: by reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent’s brain an argument—or a bullet. Since the Nazis dismiss reason out of hand, their only recourse is to embrace the second of these methods. The Nazi ethics completes the job of brute-worship: altruism gives to the use of force a
moral sanction,
making it not only an unavoidable practical recourse, but also a positive virtue, an expression of militant righteousness.

A man is morally the property of others—of those others it is his duty to serve—argue Fichte, Hegel, and the rest, explicitly or by implication. As such, a man has no moral right to refuse to make the requisite sacrifices for others. If he attempts it, he is depriving men of what is properly theirs, he is violating men’s rights, their right to his service—and it is, therefore, an assertion of morality if others intervene forcibly and compel him to fulfill his obligations. “Social justice” in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil. Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships. (The religious advocates of self-sacrifice accept the same viewpoint, but name God, not the group, as the entity whose wishes must be enforced.)

At root, it is a dual Nazi advocacy: of unreason and of human sacrifice, which unleashes the rule of brutality. It unleashes brutality at home and abroad, in dictatorship domestically and in war internationally.

The pattern is not distinctive to the Nazis. The same cause has produced the same effect throughout Western history, no matter how varied the forms of each—whether men call their particular brand of unreason “ecstatic union with the Good” or “Divine revelation” or “dialectic logic” or “Aryan instinct”; whether they demand sacrifice in the name of the Forms or of God or of the economic class or of the master nation; whether the tyrannized subjects submit to a philosopher king or a medieval inquisitor or the dictatorship of the proletariat or the gauleiters and the Gestapo; whether the subjects are commanded to emulate the militarist conditions of Sparta, or are commanded to launch a Crusade against the infidel, or the next war of “people’s liberation,” or the next war for lebensraum and racial purification.

Most of these men and movements claim that their advocacy of force is temporary. Violence, they say, is necessary now, but in another dimension—in a nonmaterial reality, in the millennium, at infinity, in the classless society—men will live freely, in harmonious peace, and coercion will wither away. None, however, explains how (apart from death) his Utopia is to be reached, or how its harmony will be possible, given the premises of unreason and human sacrifice which all endorse as a permanent (not temporary) feature of their philosophies. On this issue the Nazis are more explicit than the rest: they do not apologize for preaching openly what the others practice but attempt to evade, extenuate, or minimize. The Nazis take the skeleton in the closet of centuries and rattle it boastfully. Force, they declare, will
always
be necessary, since it is in the nature of human life (which is true, if one accepts their concept of human life).

If a man is moral, says Hitler, he will submit of his own choice to the edicts of those exponents of “strength” to whom he owes his service. Idealism, he writes, “alone leads men to voluntary recognition of the privilege of force and strength, and thus makes them into a dust particle of that order which shapes and forms the whole universe.” But when men, or nations, do not choose freely to become such dust particles, then: “what is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take.”
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It has been said that the essence of the Nazi ethical mentality is difficult to define. Some commentators, observing the intensity of the Nazi altruism, conclude that the Nazis are essentially a party of burning moral idealists, that they are fanatic apostles of duty to the community. Others, however, disagree; observing the subjectivist-pragmatist-relativist aspects of the Nazi ethics and its open reliance on force, they conclude that the Nazis are essentially a gang of ethical “realists,” i.e., of cynical, Machiavellian amoralists, who live by the gospel of unprincipled expediency and who are contemptuous of ideals or moral law.