Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (10 page)

Like Bolshevism, Nazism was a European phenomenon. This may seem obvious, but the implication – that the origins of Nazism are in western civilization – is still resisted. Yet the Nazis did not come from a faraway land. Developing in the chaos of the interwar years, they were driven by beliefs that had been circulating in Europe for many centuries. The crimes of Nazism cannot be explained (as some have tried to explain the crimes of communism) as products of backwardness.
They emanated from some of Europe’s most cherished traditions and implemented some of its most advanced ideas.

The Enlightenment played an indispensable role in the development of Nazism. Nazism is often presented as a movement that was opposed to the Enlightenment, and it is true that many Nazis thought of themselves as its enemies. They claimed to have learnt lessons from a body of thinkers belonging to a movement Isaiah Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment – a diverse group that included reactionaries such as Joseph de Maistre and Romantics such as J. G. Herder.
³⁸
Nazi ideologues picked from these and other Counter-Enlightenment thinkers whatever they found useful – as they did with the thinkers of the Enlightenment. In both cases they were able to draw on powerful currents of anti-liberal thought. The argument advanced by some members of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, which says that Nazism was a logical development of Enlightenment thinking, is much overstated; but there is more than a grain of truth in it.
³⁹

An academic cliché has it that the Nazis were extreme Romantics who exalted emotion over reason. However, the idea that Nazism was a hyperbolic version of the Romantic Movement is at best an oversimplification. What the Nazis owed to the Romantics was a belief also shared by many Enlightenment thinkers – the idea that society had once been an organic whole and could be so again at some time in the future. Romantic thinkers had different ideas about where this organic society existed – some looked to medieval Christendom, others to ancient Greece, still others to faraway countries of which they knew nothing. Wherever they thought they had found it, their vision of society was a chimera. No society has ever been a harmonious whole, and with its suspicion of conflict and diversity the idea of organic community is always liable to be used against minorities. There is a clear link between integral nationalism of this Romantic kind and Nazism. While the Nazis celebrated conflict, they believed that the
Volk
– the people – was a seamless whole that fell from unity only when corrupted by alien minorities. The peoples of the world were not equals, and the hierarchy that should exist among them could be secured only by force. But within the German
Volk
there would be a condition of perfect harmony.
⁴⁰

The belief that society should be an organic whole is far from being
only a Romantic idea, however. The fantasy of seamless community is as much a feature of Enlightenment thinking as of the Counter-Enlightenment. Like Fichte and other German thinkers of the nationalist Right, Marx condemned trade and disparaged individualism. Like the Romantics he condemned the division of labour as inhuman. Like them he looked to the remote past for a society in which humanity was not alienated or repressed. He found it in a prehistoric condition of ‘primitive communism’, which he believed had once been universal (but of which no trace has ever been found). No less than the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment, Marx promoted a myth of organic community.

If Enlightenment thinkers shared some of the worst ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment, the Counter-Enlightenment contained much that was at odds with Nazi ideology. Consider Herder and de Maistre. Each rejected the Enlightenment project but neither was in any sense a proto-Nazi. Herder never accepted any kind of hierarchy among cultures or races (as some key Enlightenment thinkers did). On the contrary he affirmed that there are many cultures, each in some way unique, which cannot be ranked on a single scale of value. De Maistre would have been horrified by the Nazis’ atheism and by their doctrines of racial superiority. At the most important points, Nazi ideology and Counter-Enlightenment thought are opposed.

A connection can be traced between Nazi ideology and Nietzsche, but it is with Nietzsche in his role as an Enlightenment thinker. The genealogy that traces Nazism back to Nietzsche is suspect, if only because it was promoted by his Nazi sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche (1846–1935) – who looked after Nietzsche in his last years and whose funeral Hitler attended. Even so there are points of affinity, and they are found in the areas where Nietzsche is closest to the Enlightenment. Nietzsche was a lifelong admirer of Voltaire – the celebrated Enlightenment rationalist – and like Voltaire he despised Rousseau’s exaltation of emotion over reason. While Nietzsche appears as a Romantic in a popular stereotype, he was in fact a thinker who took a radical version of the Enlightenment project to its conclusion.
⁴¹

Unlike his early intellectual idol Arthur Schopenhauer, who turned his back on Christianity and mounted a devastating criticism of modern humanism, Nietzsche never escaped from the Christian-humanist
world-view he attacked. His idea of the Superman shows him trying to construct a new redemptive myth that would give meaning to history in much the same way that other Enlightenment thinkers did. But as the
fin de siècle
Viennese wit Karl Kraus observed, ‘The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes man.’
⁴²
The idea of the
Übermensch
is an exaggerated version of modern humanism and shows what Nietzsche had in common not only with the Nazis but also with Lenin and Trotsky.

The links between liberal values and the Enlightenment that many people today are keen to stress are more tenuous than they believe. Voltaire may be the exemplary Enlightenment thinker.
⁴³
Yet he saw the liberal state as only one of the vehicles through which human progress could be achieved; in many circumstances, he believed, enlightened despotism was more effective. For Voltaire as for many other Enlightenment thinkers, liberal values are useful when they promote progress, irrelevant or obstructive when they do not. Of course there are many conceptions of progress. Among Enlightenment thinkers of the Left, liberal society was seen as a valuable stage on the way to a higher phase of human development, while among Enlightenment thinkers of the Right it was viewed as a condition of chaos that at best served as a transition point from one social order to another. For Marx, progress was conceived in terms that applied to humankind as a whole, while for those Enlightenment thinkers who subscribed to ‘scientific racism’ it excluded most of the species. Either way, liberal values were destined for the rubbish heap.

The French Positivists were among the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, and they were thoroughgoing anti-liberals.
⁴⁴
The founders of Positivism, Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, looked forward to a society akin to that which existed (they imagined) in the Middle Ages, but based on science rather than revealed religion. Saint-Simon and Comte viewed history as a process in which humanity passed through successive stages – from the religious to the metaphysical, and then on to the scientific or ‘positive’. In this process there were ‘organic’ and ‘critical’ phases – times when well-ordered societies existed and times when society was in chaos and disarray. The liberal era belonged in the latter category. Saint-Simon and Comte were bitterly hostile to liberalism, and they transmitted this animus
to generations of radical thinkers on the Right and the Left. The society of the future would be technocratic and hierarchical. It would be held together by a new religion – the Religion of Humanity, in which the human species would be worshipped as the Supreme Being.

It may seem that the Positivists diverged from the mainstream of Enlightenment thinking – for example, in their admiration for the medieval Church.
⁴⁵
But what they admired in the Church was not the faith it embodied. It was the Church’s power in unifying society, which the Religion of Humanity tried (without success) to emulate. They believed the growth of knowledge was the driving force of ethical and political progress and celebrated science and technology for expanding human power. Rejecting traditional religions they founded a humanist cult of reason. This was the creed of the eighteenth-century
philosophes
restated for the nineteenth century. If the Positivists were distinctive it was not in their attitude to religion –many Enlightenment savants including Voltaire cherished the absurd project of a ‘rational religion’ – but in their belief that, as human knowledge advanced, human conflict would wither away. Science would reveal the true ends of human action, and – though why this was so was never explained – they would be found to be harmonious. This was the archetypal utopian idea in a modern guise, and it was vastly influential. In the late nineteenth century it shaped Marx’s view that under communism the government of men would be replaced by the administration of things. It inspired Herbert Spencer’s dream of a future society based on
laissez-faire
industrialism, and in a later version it inspired Hayek’s delusive vision of a spontaneous social order created by the free market.

In the early twentieth century Positivist ideas were embraced by the far Right. Charles Maurras, the anti-Semitic ideologue of the Vichy regime, was a lifelong admirer of Comte. The Positivists were committed to developing a science of society and invented the term ‘sociology’; but they were insistent that such a science must be based in human physiology. Like many Enlightenment thinkers at the time, Comte was a devotee of phrenology – the nineteenth-century pseudo-science that claimed to be able to identify the mental and moral faculties of people and their tendency to criminality by studying the shape of their skulls – and believed that physiological characteristics
can explain much of human behaviour. This was also the view of the founder of modern psychology, Francis Galton, who was a strong supporter of positive eugenics. In criminology, similar views were advanced by Cesare Lombroso, who developed a pseudo-science of ‘craniometry’ based on skull and facial contours to assist courts in their deliberations about guilt and innocence At this point we are not far from Nazi ‘racial science’.

Ideas of natural human inequality are not aberrations in the western tradition. A general, though not specifically racist, belief that humans are divided into distinct groups with innately unequal abilities goes back to Aristotle, who defended slavery on the ground that some humans are born natural slaves. For Aristotle hierarchy in society was not – as the ancient Greek Sophists argued – a product of power and convention. Every living thing had a natural purpose that dictated what it needed to flourish. The natural end of humanity was philosophical inquiry, but only a very few humans – male property-owning Greeks – were suited to this activity, and the mass of humanity –women, slaves and barbarians – would flourish as their instruments. The best life was for the few and the rest were ‘living tools’.

If the belief in innate human inequality reaches back to classical Greek philosophy, it was revived in the Enlightenment, when it began to take on some of the qualities of racism. John Locke was a Christian committed to the idea that humans are created equal, but he devoted a good deal of intellectual energy to justifying the seizure of the lands of indigenous people in America. Richard Popkin writes:

Locke, who was one of the architects of English colonial policy – he drafted the Constitution of the Carolinas, for example – saw Indians and Africans as failing to mix their labours with the land. As a result of this failing they had no right to property. They had lost their liberty ‘by some Act that deserves Death’ (opposing the Europeans) and hence could be enslaved.
⁴⁶

A number of Enlightenment luminaries were explicit in expressing their belief in natural inequality, with some claiming that humanity actually comprised several different species. Voltaire subscribed to a secular version of the pre-Adamite theory advanced by some Christian theologians that suggested that Jews were pre-Adamites, remnants of an older species that existed before Adam was created. It was
Immanuel Kant – after Voltaire the supreme Enlightenment figure and, unlike Voltaire, a great philosopher – who more than any other thinker gave intellectual legitimacy to the concept of race. Kant was in the forefront of the science of anthropology that was emerging in Europe and maintained that there are innate differences between the races. While he judged whites to have all the attributes required for progress towards perfection, he represents Africans as being predisposed to slavery, observing in his
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime
(1764), ‘The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.’
⁴⁷
Asians, on the other hand, he viewed as civilized but static – a view that John Stuart Mill endorsed when in
On Liberty
(1859) he referred to China as a stagnant civilization, declaring: ‘… they have become stationary – have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be improved it must be by foreigners’.
⁴⁸
Here Mill echoed the view of India held by his father, James Mill, who argued in his
History of British India
that the inhabitants of the sub-continent could only achieve progress by abandoning their languages and religions. A similar picture of India was presented by Marx, who defended colonial rule as a means of overcoming the torpor of village life. Whether the disabilities of other peoples were innate (as was believed in the case of Africans) or due to cultural backwardness (as was supposed to be true of Asians), the remedy was the same. All had to be turned into Europeans, if necessary by force.