Ominous Parallels (34 page)

The Nazis preached a certain philosophy—and they carried it out in action.

They preached authority above rights, the group above the individual, sacrifice above happiness, nihilism above morality, feelings above facts, pliability above absolutes, obedience above logic, the Führer above the self—and they applied it.

They waged a campaign against all the principles that keep man free, which is what enabled them to rise to power. Then they put the campaign into practice, transposing every essential of their viewpoint from the realm of ideology to that of bloody, daily, moment-by-moment existence.

To the extent possible, they did it first outside the camps, creating a society of rightless creatures plunged in a flux made of shifting party lines, switching Big Lies, nonobjective laws, contradictory policies, and incomprehensible arrests.

In the outside world, however, there were limits to the process. Some degree of intelligibility and of individual self-sufficiency was necessary to the continued functioning of the nation. In the camps, there was no need to limit human destruction, and no need for any cooperation from the victim.

The essence of the camp method was the attempt to achieve the effects of a certain theoretical viewpoint without mentioning the viewpoint or any other abstraction. It was the attempt to bypass the process of persuasion: not to urge men to suspend their faculties and have to depend on the victims’ voluntary agreement, but to suspend their faculties by oneself, by one’s own action. The action was: not to preach the ideology of irrationalism, but to make it come true in real life, and thus to paralyze men at the root, no matter what their choice or the content of their thought.

The camp rulers no longer needed to batter men with denials of the physical world. The rulers made reality unintelligible, and thereby annulled the concept as a guiding factor in human life. They no longer derogated human intelligence in words. They made it helpless in fact and thereby choked it off. They did not condemn self-concern or self-esteem as a moral betrayal. They degraded the prisoner so profoundly that in the end any vestige of either was to become impossible to him.

The specific element in man which the camps attacked was
the conditions of the mind’s ability to function.
The target was not primarily the physical conditions, but the root of man’s capacity of independence, i.e., the mind’s essential
inner
conditions: its grasp of existence, its confidence in reason, its commitment to values and to its
own
value.

The Nazis in the camps were not attacking ideas explicitly, but they
were
attacking ideas. They were attacking the essence of what men need and get from three sciences, as these had developed in a more rational age: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics. They were using fists, guns, and the instruments of brute physical torture in order to frustrate man’s most abstract, delicate, spiritual requirements: his
philosophical
requirements.

The concentration camps are an unprecedented testament to the need of theory, a certain kind of theory, in human life. They are a testament that works in reverse; they reveal the need by means of starving it.

The experimental findings of the Nazi “laboratories” can be reduced to a single statement: total domination over man requires philosophical disarmament—after which, nothing much, and little human, is left of the victim.

In the ultimate stage of the lust for power, domination must really be total, i.e., it must seem to be metaphysical. No entity or law of any kind can be allowed to stand in the way of any of the ruler’s whims, however casual or contradictory. The prisoner’s absolute obedience is used to satisfy this wider demand, also. The victim’s fawning compliance with orders which defy every conceivable fact of nature is taken as the defeat not only of human independence, but also of nature as such. The victim’s submission to utter senselessness becomes the defeat of sense. His obeisance to absurdity becomes the refutation of logic. His acceptance of lies becomes the overthrow of truth. His surrender of all his values, including his life, becomes the smashing of values and of life itself.

In essence, what the Nazis wanted for themselves from the camps was the same unlimited unreason that they imposed on the prisoners. They expected it to wreck the prisoners, while making the rulers omnipotent. For both purposes, what they needed was a certain kind of universe: a universe of non-fact, non-thing,
non-identity.

It was the universe that had been hinted at, elaborated, cherished, fought for, and made respectable by a long line of champions. It was the theory and the dream created by all the anti-Aristotelians of Western history.

The philosophers had only been fantasizing their noumenal dimension. The Nazis took it straight and tried to make it come true, here, in Europe, on earth.

Hitler’s philosophical experiment failed. Nature could not be defeated. Human nature could not be changed.

Man is a rational being. He cannot survive without a mind and without values. He can be tortured, mutilated, paralyzed, destroyed, but, so long as he exists and acts at all, his identity, including the requirements of his survival, is an absolute. The Nazis did not want man to exist. They wanted men-as-robots, men without thought, purpose, passion, or self.

The robots could not be created, no matter what the Nazi struggle. The moment the victim reached a condition of perfect obedience was the moment he collapsed and started to die.

The fundamental enemy of Nazism is a fact: that man is man—and a wider fact, the one which makes the first an absolute: the fact that facts are what they are, that reality is not malleable to human whim, that A is A, no matter what the dictator’s screams, guns, or squads of killers.

This is the actual answer to Auschwitz.

We are told insistently to remember the Holocaust Eloquent, horrifying books describe the facts to us in every detail. The truth about a monstrous, historic evil virtually screams out from hundreds of thousands of pages. But few, including the authors, seem to hear the scream.

The commentators do not say that the camps are the final, perfect embodiment of all the fundamental ideas which made Hitler possible, and that the way to avenge the victims is to fight those ideas. Most commentators do not know the category of issues necessary to reach or even consider such a conclusion.

One writer (Terrence Des Pres) accounts for the camp survivors by postulating an undefined “biosocial instinct” which guided their actions, but does not discuss why this instinct failed to work for the nonsurvivors. Bruno Bettelheim, despite many brilliant insights, interprets the camps from the perspective of the standard Freudian categories, which explain nothing (the inmates’ preoccupation with food and elimination indicates regression; the marchers to the crematoria “had permitted their death tendencies to flood them”; ete.).
²⁷

Hannah Arendt, the best and most philosophically inclined of the commentators, is also, in regard to her ultimate conclusions, the worst, i.e., the most perversely wrong-headed. In a final warning, she singles out for special attack the attitude which she regards as a major source of the Nazis’ evil and of their success: an unswerving commitment to logic. The Nazis, she says, and the masses attracted to them, were “too consistent” in pursuing the implications of a basic premise (which she identifies as racism); they gave up the freedom of thought for “the strait jacket of logic” or “the tyranny of logicality”; they did not admit that complete consistency “exists nowhere in the realm of reality,” which is pervaded instead by “fortuitousness.”
²⁸

Like the other commentators but even more so, Miss Arendt moves in the modern intellectual mainstream, accepting without challenge all its basic ideas, including the conventional derogation of logic. Thus she can fail to see what her own book makes all but inescapable: that the essence of Hitler’s theories was not consistency, but unreason; that “fortuitousness” is a property not of reality, but of Nazism; and that “logicality” is not tyranny, but the weapon against it.

It is a sin to study the agony of a continent of victims and end up offering as explanation the intellectual equivalent of a drugstore nostrum, or worse: end up preaching, as antidote, an essential tenet of the murderers. It is a sin and a portent. The battle against Nazism has not yet been won.

It is true that we must remember the Holocaust. But what we must remember above everything else, and eradicate, is its cause.

We owe this to the past, to the memory of those men, women, and children who died in a German nightmare, with no answer to the “Why?” burning and fading out in their eyes. We owe it to the present, to those who are suffering a similar fate today in the Communist world. And we owe it to the future.

14

America Reverses Direction

“He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot.” (Charles R. Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin and a spokesman of the Progressive movement, 1910)

“We are turning away from the entrusting of crucial decisions ... to individuals who are motivated by private interests.” (Rexford G. Tugwell, New Deal Brain Truster, 1935)

“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” (President John F. Kennedy, 1961)

“We think that ... the duties of a revolutionary transcend his individual wants. That’s why in our collectives we fight individualism at every point.” (Mark Rudd, New Left student leader, 1970)

“Self-government, the basic principle of this republic, is inexorably being eroded in favor of self-seeking, self-indulgence, and just plain aggressive selfishness.” (Irving Kristol, neo-conservative intellectual, 1972)
¹

America, as conceived by the Founding Fathers, lasted about a century.

There were contradictions—government controls of various kinds—from the beginning; but for a century the controls were a marginal element. The dominant policy, endorsed by most of the country’s thinkers, was individualism and economic laissez-faire.

The turning point was the massive importation of German philosophy in the period after the Civil War. The first consequence, increasingly manifest in the postwar decades, was the proliferation of statist movements in this country. The new statists included economists who adopted the “organic” collectivism of the German historical school, sociologists and historians who interpreted Darwin according to the social ideas of Hegel (the “reform” Darwinists), clergymen who interpreted Jesus according to the moral ideas of Kant (the Social Gospelers), single-taxers who followed Henry George, Utopians who followed Edward Bellamy, revolutionaries who followed Marx and Engels, “humanitarians” who followed Comte and the later John Stuart Mill, pragmatists who followed William James and the early John Dewey.

In essence, it was a single, growing trend, which by the turn of the century had mushroomed into a national crusade of the avant-garde intellectuals. The American system, the crusaders said, is morally wrong; it must be “reformed” in accordance with a nobler vision of life. Novelist William Dean Howells offered a name for the new vision. “Altruria,” he called the ideal society in his Utopian novel of 1894—the land of altruism.

The first target of the reformists’ campaign was business, which, it was claimed, had too much power. The authors of this claim made no attempt to discover what part of such power derived from the operation of free-market factors, and what part from the growing policy of special government favors to certain business interests (favors such as subsidies, protective tariffs, and monopolistic franchises). The reformists did not believe that any such analysis was necessary. They knew what was right and wrong, and that business by its nature was wrong; they knew it from God or from feeling. “Christianity means co-operation and the uplifting of the lowliest,” stated one Social Gospeler; “business means competition and the survival of the strongest.” The reformists also knew that there was only one sure method by which to implement their code of right and wrong. “Private self-interest,” explained the new economists, “is too powerful, or too ignorant, or too immoral to promote the common good without compulsion.”
²

The philosophical pragmatists in the 1880s and ’90s were pioneering the method of eroding the nation’s founding ideas under cover of verbal fealty to them. The reformists followed this lead. Legislation controlling big business, they told the public, would represent not an attack on the American system, but a means of preserving individualism, freedom, and real competition. It is true, economist Richard Ely admitted, that more state action might “lessen the amount of theoretical liberty”; but, he added, it would “promote the growth of practical liberty.” As this remark suggests, Richard Ely was a follower of Hegel. He was also a teacher of Woodrow Wilson.
³

The businessmen and their intellectual defenders tried to stave off the assault. Businessmen, they declared, must be left free of government controls in order to be able to function successfully, and thus achieve their proper end: serving the public welfare. The view that unrestricted freedom is necessary to business functioning provoked heated debate among economists; the debate was technical and largely unheeded by the public. The view that businessmen are social servants provoked no debate; on this point, everyone was in agreement. The rich man should administer his “surplus revenues” so as “to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren,” declared multimillionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie, an enthusiastic follower of Herbert Spencer, in 1889. Someday, Carnegie said in a subsequent letter, an “ideal Commonwealth” may emerge and “deal with the
prevention
of immense fortunes ... when the masses become truly educated and the few become less selfish .... ”
⁴

Contrary to the Marxist theory, big business has been one of the least influential groups in American history. Most businessmen brushed aside the realm of ideas or echoed passively the ideas of their own worst enemies. Carnegie and his fellow industrialists were struggling to save a political system opposed to the West’s new ideological trend, while part-evading, part-appeasing that trend. With each moral pronouncement they issued, these men were strengthening the power of their adversaries.

From the outset, the result of this kind of contest between reformists and conservatives was no contest. In 1887, the Interstate Commerce Commission Act established the first Federal regulatory body (to supervise railroad rates). This was the prelude to the top legislative triumph of the nineteenth-century reformists: the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The latter made a sweeping grant of power to the national authorities to punish a newly proclaimed economic crime indicated only in vague, undefined language (“restraint of trade”). In principle, the Sherman Act represents the landmark beginning of government control over the economy in America (in practice, such control was minimal until after the turn of the century).

Henry Demarest Lloyd, a leader of the antitrust movement, named the base of the new approach to government. The principle of self-interest, he said, is “one of the historic mistakes of humanity”; what America needs, he said, is a system “in which no man will have a right to do with his own what he will, but only a right to do what is right.” A century earlier, the country’s leaders had fought a war against England on the premise that individual rights are “what is right.” In 1883, sociologist Lester F. Ward, a reform Darwinist, gave the modem intellectuals’ answer to Thomas Jefferson. “The individual,” Ward said, “has reigned long enough.”
⁵

The antitrust act was passed by a conservative Republican Congress. Many members supported the measure as a political gesture, a device to quiet popular concern (which had been aroused by the reformist campaign). Congress must pass the law, Sherman predicted direly (and without foundation), “or be ready for the socialist, the communist, and the nihilist.” “[N]othing in the debates on the Sherman Act,” observes one historian, “suggests that Congress anticipated its vigorous enforcement.”
⁶

The factors involved in the passage of the early regulatory acts indicate the pattern operative in all the turning points of the subsequent decades. Insistent, philosophically generated pressure from the left inaugurates each new development. Popular confusion permits the antistatist nation of the Enlightenment to accept new increments of state power, one at a time, without any idea of the trend’s intellectual sources or meaning. Conservative default, moral and political, leaves the public permanently disarmed.

In the 1890s the main source of the pressure on a national scale was the Populist party, a group of discontented farmers who took up the ideas of several radical reformists. The party, which demanded such policies as deliberate inflation, a graduated income tax, and full government control of the railroads and trusts, was only slightly ahead of its time. From 1900 to 1917, its heir and successor dominated the nation’s top leadership, intellectual and political, Democratic and Republican. The heir was the Progressive movement.

For the most part, the leading spirits of the Progressive era were men who had been students here or abroad in the 1880s or ’90s. They were the voices of the first American generation to be reared in college on the new collectivist theories; they were men trained to the conviction that an increase in the power of the state is the solution to most of mankind’s problems. These men turned the ideas of their avant-garde professors into an enduring American orthodoxy. In this endeavor, jurists, historians, economists, and bestselling novelists fought side by side, along with Settlement House social workers who deplored mass “poverty,” muckraking journalists who denounced the profit motive, Presidents who denounced “malefactors of great wealth” (Theodore Roosevelt), and Progressive educators who denounced the mind.

All these men and movements preached the prerogatives of the poor and the weak, whom they described as the victims of big business; they demanded a new approach to social questions, an approach eloquently characterized by Herbert Croly. Croly was an editor and co-founder of
The New Republic
and an adviser to Theodore Roosevelt.

The Promise of American Life [Croly wrote in an influential work] is to be fulfilled—not merely by a maximum amount of economic freedom, but by a certain measure of discipline; not merely by the abundant satisfaction of individual desires, but by a large measure of individual subordination and self-denial.

Herbert Croly was the son of a leading American disciple of Auguste Comte’s positivism; he was also a philosophy student at Harvard under the Hegelian Josiah Royce. Positivism, Comte had explained, places itself “at the social point of view,” and therefore “cannot tolerate the notion of
rights,
for such notion rests on individualism.” Individualism, Royce was teaching his students, is “the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

“The National Government must step in and discriminate,” Croly wrote; “but it must discriminate, not on behalf of liberty and the special individual, but on behalf of equality and the average man.”
⁷

The average man at the time was struggling to enter this country in order to find sanctuary from governments around the globe eager to “step in and discriminate”; he was struggling to enter the fabled land of abundance, where all men, including the poorest, were enjoying a standard of living surpassing that of their counterparts anywhere in the world. But the Progressives were not a movement of average men; they had a different view of life. By himself—declared Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser and the other Naturalists of the period—man has no choice and no chance; he is a helpless social product doomed to poverty and despair; his only hope is the government.

Organized labor was not making radical demands. In contrast to European workers, who were in the vanguard of a class struggle and of the socialist movement, American workers, like the American people, continued to reflect the influence of the Enlightenment. American labor leaders upheld labor’s independence and resisted any form of paternalism. The Progressives were undeterred. “The program of a government of freedom,” said President Woodrow Wilson, “must in these days be positive, not negative merely.” “Freedom to-day,” he said, “is something more than being let alone.”
⁸

Laissez-faire is not an absolute, explained Oliver Wendell Holmes, and it is not inherent in the Constitution; “social needs” must be supreme over all laws and abstract principles, however venerable. The Constitution is not sacrosanct anyway, added historian Charles Beard; it merely reflects the selfish desire of the Founding Fathers to protect their own property holdings. Reality is a social product, said the pragmatists; logic itself is in continual flux; why should politics be any different?

Let us not hesitate, but “experiment” now, said all these voices; the essence of man is not primarily intellect, but action.

The Progressives did not hesitate to name the model of their action. The model was the mother country of the leading Progressive state, Wisconsin. Wisconsin was described at the time as being “fundamentally a German state,” which was “doing for America what Germany is doing for the world.” “In Germany, perhaps more than anywhere else,” said the New England humanitarian Jane Addams, “the government has come to concern itself with the primitive essential needs of its working people.” “Shall a democracy,” she asked, “be slower... ?”
⁹