The atavism of totalitarianism

The term ‘totalitarian’ was originally coined by Mussolini: ironic, since Fascist Italy was not a totalitarian state. Most land, industry and commerce was privately owned; the monarchy persisted; the army remained very much the Royal Army; the Catholic Church retained its schools: the alleged totalitarianism was, like so much of Fascist Italy, surface bravado with considerably less substance behind it. The Fascist project was ultimately a limited one of Italian “national greatness”, however usefully defined. Without a truly transformational project to direct it, the Fascist Party-State ruled what it surveyed but its control extended only as far as the project required, which was not all that far into the enduring structures of society.

The Nazi project—of a racially-purified Greater Deutschland ruling, as the Reich of the master race, over a vast lebensraum empire—was far more transformational, so the Nazi Party-State was far more totalitarian than its Italian Fascist precursor. The title of Thousand Year Reich was itself millenarian. Even so, German capitalism was dominated and directed, but not abolished. The Nazi project did not require the complete transformation of society, so the totalitarian urge did not go all the way.

The Leninist project of an absolutely “equal” society free of “exploitation” did require the complete transformation of society. The more absolute the commitment to equality of outcome, the more thorough the social transformation required, the more totalitarian was the result: hence North Korea under the Kim Family Regime and Enver Hoxha’s Albania being the most totalitarian of societies.

Italian Fascism and Nazism both used Lenin’s model of total politics: politics that acknowledged no limits in ambit and means. Mussolini’s great operational insight was to so quickly perceive that Lenin’s model of politics could be harnessed to other political projects: though Lenin's own project was a failure:

Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.

Mussolini's strategic insight was that the collectivism of nation was much more socially resonant than that of class. As he stated:

We deny the existence of two classes, because there are many more than two classes. We deny that human history can be explained in terms of economics. We deny your internationalism. That is a luxury article which only the elevated can practise, because peoples are passionately bound to their native soil.

As Lenin’s model of total politics was politics acknowledging no limits, the only limit was set by the nature of the project it was harnessed to. Hence, the animating project determined the level of totalitarianism of the various regimes.

What is striking is the atavism of all three projects. The atavism of Fascism and (even more so) Nazism was obvious. Both extolled heroic virtues in revolt against the bourgeois virtues of capitalist modernity, so looked back to previous ages—the Roman Empire in the case of Fascism; mythic Teutonic history in the case of Nazism. Ironically, both were modernising revolts against modernity. Both used cutting edge political and propaganda techniques for their atavistic projects.* Since the Nazi project was so much grander, it was far more modernising in its effects than Fascism.

But the equalitarian urge is also an atavistic one. It is a revolt against the dynamism, the complexity, the uncertainty of modernity. A society of equality of outcome is a much simpler society than one where the discovery processes of commerce—seeking new things to sell, seeking new people to sell them to—operate far more freely. This simplicity is no accident. Given the multi-dimensional nature of equality, the more thorough the equality sought, the more social dimensions have to controlled or blocked. This is a process of eliminating complexity; so freedom, dynamism and other drivers of modernity.

But it is also a process of massive centralisation of power, so a process of profound inequality. Not merely the massive power inequality between those being equalised and those doing the equalising but also the profound status inequality between those with the moral and cognitive insight to determine the supreme purpose, and to know how to carry it out, and those upon whom that insight is inflicted.

Which creates an elite whose profound insight sets it apart from the ordinary run of humanity. (The ardent partisans of “equality” in other societies often have a profound sense of their own moral and cognitive superiority.) The logic of greater insight and profound centralisation of power inherently tends to anointing a Great Leader of more than ordinary human insight: the Great Intermediary between society and the underlying true drivers of History and Society. Which is profoundly atavistic: a ruler who directs and controls the social surplus while acting on behalf of (a substitute for) the divine. The over-the-top praise offered up to Pharaoh, or a Khmer Universal King or similar has its exact analogue to that offered up to the Great Leader of Leninist (and particularly Stalinist) societies. In the case of the Hereditary Stalinism of North Korea under the Kim Family Regime, this extends to hagiographic stories of their supernatural birth.

It is an indicator of the power of such atavisms, of the appeal of a sense of profoundly greater moral and cognitive perspicacity and how intellectuals often understand so much less than they think, that such profoundly atavistic projects have been so often passed off (though, thankfully, much less as time goes on as their failure becomes ever more obvious) as the cutting edge of history.

* The similar atavism of the jihadis, with their violent extolling of C7th Arabia as the pinnacle of human social and political understanding is equally obvious. The term 'Islamofascism' captures some important similarities between Nazism, Fascism and the salafists--such as the atavism, the extolling of violence and heroic virtues, the unlimited ambit of politics, being a modernising revolt against modernity.

[Cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied.]

ADDENDA: This post has been adjusted somewhat for style without any change in the argument. I also added the footnote about the jihadis.

FURTHER The "human shield" rhetoric of the North Korean regime reinforces its atavism.

The consequences of equalitarianism

Equality involves considerable complexity under apparent simplicity. The US Declaration of Independence famously declared that:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Who was equal and in what respect did not turn out to be a remotely simple question. Women were obviously excluded (the US has Founding Fathers but no Founding Mothers) as were slaves: slaveowners being prominent among its signers and protection of slavery being, fairly obviously, a significant motive for the Declaration (given the outcome of Somersett's Case a few years previously). As was settler land hunger clashing with the British Crown's public commitment to its treaties with the Amerindians. (The American Republic's appalling history of breaking treaties with Amerindians was somewhat encoded into its founding "DNA".)

But that multi-dimensionality can make equality a very useful banner: since there are so many dimensions along which equality can be considered, there are always new realms for the partisans of equality to conquer. And, while the slogan "no taxation without representation" was fairly clearly brilliant political shorthand for a range of public policy issues, it was brilliantly effective because it was true: British subjects in North America were denied any say in public policy decisions that affected them deeply. There was a profound inequality at work.

But we can differentiate the egalitarian urge--concerns with legal status, opportunities, having a say--from the equalitarian urge--trying to create a society equal in outcomes. What distinguishes the equalitarian urge is that it creates a profound inequality: the inequality between those who are to be equalised and those who do the equalising. The more complete the equality to be sought, the more complete the control, and so the power, flowing to those doing the equalising over the lives of those being equalised.

In this equalitarian drive, private property gets in the way: variations in luck, skill and past legacies mean private property precludes equality of outcome. Yet no complex society can abolish property since property is just the right to control a specified resource. So, in an equalitarian society, property clearly needs to be controlled by the equalising authority. Which is just a specific manifestation of the logic already set out in the previous paragraph.

Which is why the societies most ostentatiously committed to equality--Enver Hoxha's Albania, North Korea under the Kim Family Regime--have also been the most totalitarian societies. The absolute drive for equality creates an absolute centralisation of power. In the case of North Korea, that has been taken to the stage of creating hereditary Stalinism. The ruling tyrant becomes effectively the owner of the entire country (including its people) since all are under his control (in a very direct and practical sense) so he can choose to pass that ownership onto his son.

Which is a grotesque negation of the stated original intent of creating a profoundly equal society. But a straightforward manifestation of equalitarian logic as a political program. For it is not airy intent which matters, but how the intent's logic works out when implemented. Bob Carr's claim that North Korea is the logical working out of Marxism possibly goes a little far. But that Albania under Hoxha and North Korea under the Kim's represent the working out of the equalitarian urge is clearly true.

Though the equalitarian urge is not the only form where ostentatious equality undermines itself. Even in more limited versions, that partisans of equality so often, so clearly, regard their commitment to equality as a manifestation of moral superiority is another way ostentatious equality undermines itself. The forms of equality worth having typically involve some strong sense of reciprocity. Where that is lacking, the equality on offer is probably not worth having: or, worse still, will make things much worse.

There are forms of equality which matter deeply: and there are others which are disastrous to seek. The apparent simplicity (even "self-evidence") of equality can be treacherously misleading.

[Cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Why Anarchism fails

A recent guest post On the [US] Constitution as a “Counter-Revolutionary” Act by John Venlet (who blogs at improved clinch), and the subsequent discussion, has helped crystallize my objection to anarchism.

This can be summarized as: you cannot get there from here and, even if you could, you could not stay there. When states and rulerships collapse, we do not see anything resembling the stable anarchic orders of anarchist (including anarcho-capitalist) theory. Instead, we see highly chaotic situations marked by rulerships of varying size and stability where economic activity (and thus social possibilities) drop to a much lower level. (This drop often including serious population collapses.)

When we look a periods of sustained economic growth, one of their basic features is stable legal orders. Not necessarily a single legal order but, nevertheless, stable legal orders enforced by one or more effective states or rulerships.

To understand why this is so, and where anarchist theory goes wrong, one of the comments on the above post responding to an “how would it work?” query is an excellent starting point:

An anarchist working from moral principles might say: I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. If the individual is sovereign, then he is sovereign. He isn’t merely sovereign-except-when-it-comes-to-stuff-like-strips-of-asphalt. He has the right to live free from coercion, full stop. Everything else is superfluous detail.

Anarchism is generally based on some sort of natural law concept, since it is based on a notion of rights and liberties that do not require a state to create or enforce them. The above comment makes the classic mistake of natural law theory: it reads a particular set of values into the universe by the process of definition.

Rights do not exist in themselves: they are the creations of human thought and action. The key aspect of a right is some sort of acknowledgment of that right by others. The point of a right, after all, is to restrain the actions of others so as to give the right-holder a specific realm of action. To simplify somewhat: you have the rights that are acknowledged by others.

This acknowledgment can come from a shared system of belief that translates into restraints on behaviour. Or it can come from some system of enforcement. Or both. Given that people vary in both their beliefs and adherence to moral norms, then an effective system of rights needs belief (accepted constraints on behaviour), signalling (telling what rights exist and what their boundaries are) and enforcement (including dispute resolution). An effective legal order provides all of these things. An anarchic order reliably provides none of them—hence the massive levels of rights infringement, or simple non-acknowledgment of rights, that occur when states or rulerships collapse.

How things started off for homo sapiens
Something is a living thing if it has (or is capable of) revealed preference. This what distinguishes living things from non-living things: that they have actions with intent. Both the actions and the intent might be extremely rudimentary, but even a virus acts in a way a rock does not because the virus seeks things while a rock does not.
(Read the rest at Critical Thinking Applied)

Nietzsche and the Nazis

Philosopher Stephen Hicks has written one of my favourite intellectual and philosophical histories, Explaining Postmodernism. His Nietzsche and the Nazis: A Personal View is the book of the documentary and is another, very clearly written, excursion into philosophical history.

It attempts to answer two questions. First, why did the Nazis and their specific ideas come to power in Germany, in what the historian Friedrich Meinecke called The German Catastrophe? Second, what was the connection between philosopher Frederich Nietzsche’s ideas and Nazism?

Before doing so, Hicks poses a series of questions indicating how fascinating history can be. Why are particular periods and places in history – Classical Greece, Renaissance Italy – marked by such startling creativity? Where did the Industrial Revolution come from? Why are some societies apparently unchanging for hundreds of generations?

We can examine particular such episodes in detail. We can also think more abstractly and broadly about causes in history treating various episodes and cultures as experiments in living: such as the Nazi experiment, one of the great disasters of human history.

Hicks dismisses as weak explanations for the Nazi success the German loss of World War I, Germany’s economic troubles, some specifically German failing, the neuroses and psychoses of the Nazi leadership and manipulation of mass media. For Hicks the interesting question is why this particular movement achieved the success it did. He points out that significant intellects (such as Nobel prize winners Phillip Lenard, Gerhart Hauptmann, Johannes Stark; public intellectuals Oswald Spengler, Moeller van der Bruck, Dr Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger) supported the Nazi movement and it garnered millions of votes: none of the above explanations lead from the alleged cause to the Nazis specifically (Pp6ff).

Power ideas
Hicks argues that the Nazis were selling idealism, a vision of life, a noble crusade. To explain the Nazi it is necessary to explain the appeal of their sets of ideas: tthat people needs structure and leadership; that life is fundamentally struggle and conflict; that such conflict brings out the best in people; that some cultures are superior than others. The Nazis were selling a heroic idea that resonated with some powerful streams in German intellectual life. That they were not merely after power is indicated by them setting up a fringe Party rather than just joining an established one: they wanted a vehicle for their specific ideals (Pp10ff).

Hicks then goes through the platform of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), setting out the ideas involved and connecting them to the writing and speeches of Hitler and Goebbels. This is a very intelligent and accessible analysis, which has the great advantage of taking Nazi ideas seriously (Pp15ff).

He then goes briefly through their electoral success, from fringe Party in 1928 to by far the largest in the Reichstag in 1933 (Pp24-5). The discrediting of other political Parties, the charisma and manoeuvrings of Hitler mattered. But what the Nazis were selling also had to have resonated with a lot of people. (Looking back on the period, it is striking how long the Weimar politicians were able to keep the largest Party in the Reichstag out of government, given that the total unacceptability and absolute rejectionism of the Communist Party [KPD] so narrowed their room to manoeuvre.)

Hicks then examines the Nazis in power, briefly covering their abolition or persuasive dissolving of the other political Parties, the Rohm purge and merging of Presidency and Chancellorship in the person of Hitler after the death of Hindenburg. Hicks starts the examination of the Nazis in power with education. The Nazi Party had 2.5 million members in 1933, of which the largest single professional group were elementary school teachers. They were able to establish domination of the education system and youth organisations fairly quickly with at least the passive acquiescence, or even enthusiastic support, of the vast majority of educators, particularly among academics (Pp27ff).
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The Nazis also assiduously took control over all forms of public culture. Not content with attempting to control minds, the Nazis also sought to control bodies through eugenics programs, a mass of economic controls and increasing militarization of economy and society (Pp33ff). Hicks covers these areas well, connecting actions with ideas with statements by leading Nazis.

All this leads up to the Holocaust, which Hicks points out followed from the logic developed over 20 years of political practice and advocacy and brought together techniques the Nazis had experimented with while in power. The Holocaust becomes not some aberration, but the apotheosis of the regime, its thought and practice. Certainly, the resources put into the processes of extermination when the regime was fighting a great war bespeak of its importance to the regime. Hicks conveys this succinctly, but powerfully (Pp46ff).

Which brings us back to the philosophical roots of Nazism. Hicks argues powerfully that we need to take these seriously: the philosopher who Nazis and supporters of the Nazis most associated their ideas with being Friedrich Nietzsche (Pp48ff).

Ideas of power
The second half of the book is an examination of Nietzsche. Starting with his life and influence, moving on to the elements of his thought that did not resonate with Nazi thinking, then the elements that did and finally bringing the themes together.

Nietzsche’s life is covered very briefly and we are reminded of just how widely Nietzsche’s influence on other thinkers extends and the power of his “sometimes scorching” prose. Key elements in Nietzsche’s thought and philosophical style are covered – the death of God, the symptoms of nihilism, masters and slaves, slave morality and the overman (Pp51ff). Hicks provides an excellent, vivid, introduction and summary of Nietzsche’s thought and influence.

Hicks then takes us through the ways in which Nazi thought diverged from Nietszche’s philosophy. For Nietszche:
(1) the superior man could manifest in any racial type;
(2) contemporary German culture was degenerate and infecting the rest of the world;
(3) anti-Semitism was a moral sickness;
(4) praised Jews for their toughness, intelligence and sheer ability at survival;
(5) believed Judaism and Christianity to be essentially similar, with Christianity being a worse and more dangerous version of Judaism (Pp77ff).

So, plenty for defenders of Nietzsche to claim that he was no sort of proto-Nazi at all since the Nazi believed the opposite on all these points. But, as Hicks points out, it is not that simple because there are plenty of aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that fed directly into Nazi belief systems. In particular, they shared:
(1) a strongly collectivist, anti-individualist view (with some qualifications in Nietzsche’s case);
(2) saw zero-sum conflict as inescapably fundamental to the human condition;
(3) were irrationalist in psychological theories, downplaying reason and exulting the power and glory of feelings and instincts;
(4) saw war as necessary, healthy and majestic;
(5) were anti-democratic, anti-capitalistic, anti-liberal (Pp87ff).

Nazi admiration for Nietzsche as providing support for their worldview was not irrational or unfounded.

The power of ideas
In his conclusion, Nazi and anti-Nazi philosophies, Hicks points out the enormous cost in stopping the Nazis, what a close-run thing it was and poses a choice: we can oppose such ideas in practice (with all the effort and destruction that may potentially cost again) or we can oppose them in theory before it gets to practice. That fighting the battle of ideas is much better than fighting actual battles. For the Nazis gained such power because their ideas had genuine power and appeal. Against the Nazi ideas and ideals of collectivism; instinct, passion, “blood”; war and zero-sum conflict; authoritarianism; socialism the polar opposites of Nazi philosophy are: individualism, reason, production and win/win trade; liberalism; capitalism (Pp10ff). (Or, to put it another way, Churchill was Hitler’s opposite, Stalin merely a competitor: hence the desperate, longstanding attempts to deny Nazism’s status as a form of socialism.)

Hicks ends on a provocative note:

The Nazis knew what they stood for. Do we? (p.107).

Good question.

The book concludes with various Appendices: the platform of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) (Pp109ff); quotations on Nazi socialism and fascism (Pp115ff); quotations on German anti-Semitism (Pp131ff); quotations on German militarism (Pp 135ff). The four Appendices alone make this book a very useful resource. For example, in displaying the connection between the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Nazi ideas.

Hicks is an excellent historian of ideas because he writes with clarity and succinctness while covering the key issues in a clear, evidence-based way. He does not merely cover, he understands and conveys that understanding in a highly accessible way: both the ideas and their historical context. I would imagine he is an excellent teacher.

Hicks takes the Nazis in their own terms and then puts them in context. That may seem an obvious thing to do, but it is truly amazing how many commentators on the Nazis and Nazism over the years have taken their own preconceptions as definitive and forced the Nazis and Nazism into them. They look for footnotes, they do not begin with the evidence.

A friend has argued to me that military history is a great defence against nonsense, because so much of it is to do with brute facts. It is a brute fact that Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, for example. The course of the battle can be traced and followed to their conclusion. A certain approach to economic history can have the same effect: the gains from trade are a reality – that is why trade happens; the massive expansion in productive capacity from the Industrial Revolution happened, and so on.

Hicks is the Director of the Centre for Ethics and Entrepreneurship: he has a longstanding interest in how business and commerce actually operates. It gives him some intellectual defence, I would suggest, against certain academic foibles – tendencies to pretentious jargon; to an underlying contempt for the commercial; to base worldviews on grandiose schemes; to see people as integers of theory, not beings with often good reasons for what they do; to have distinctive cognitive blind spots from too much association with people in too similar a social circumstance. (To take an example I am familiar with, it is striking how many academic medievalists fail to think through why so much of medieval resources were poured into castles, knights, etc and the implications thereof because such academics live in very safe milieus in very safe and stable societies and do not associate with police or military folk.)

Be that as it may, Nietzsche and the Nazis: A Personal View is not only an excellent treatment of a contentious intellectual topic, it is one of the better, and most accessible, books on Nazism itself. Both because of its wealth of quotations but also because it takes the power of their ideas seriously and, if you do not do that, you cannot understand the appeal, and thus the power, of Nazism.

[ADDENDA Great interview with the maker of a documentary on Heidegger and Nazism here.]

About monotheism

This is derived from a comment I made in an email discussion group.


That there is a considerable amount of tendentious Catholic scholarship around is not news to anyone moderately well-read in history. Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce held that religions were incomplete philosophies because they could not tell the truth about the past: leaving aside entirely the issue of revelations and miracles, the problem of maintaining some moral and epistemic authority down the twisted path of events seems to be enough to cause problems. My favourite spectacle of such is various Catholic writers who end up attempting to argue (or, at least, strongly imply) that Western civilisation has been in decline since the Reformation: even on the simple metric of the proportion of the human population raised within the Catholic faith that is a nonsense, let alone if one applies wider criteria. It is one of those positions that, if you are left arguing for it, the time has come to examine one’s premises and, if you cannot bring yourself to do that, well, then, clearly Croce had a point.

It does not work to tell the story of the Reformation as either the noble Catholic defence of Christian tradition or the noble triumph of Protestantism. It was a time of appalling hatred and brutality. Those ignorant and naïve souls who claim that “Islam needs a Reformation” understand neither Islam (which is the belief in the authority of scripture On Steroids, With Boosters) nor the Reformation (historians still argue what percentage of the population of central Europe was killed or starved during the wars of religion, estimates ranging from about 15% to about a third with some regions losing up to 75% of their population). Europeans decided to generally eschew killing each other over religion in revulsion against having done so much of it and the realisation that neither side could overwhelm the other.

Wholesale slaughter of civilians only became the pattern of European history again when new sources of Absolute Moral Authority were imported into politics. But most of the techniques of totalitarianism were pioneered by the Catholic Church because totalitarianism is all about Absolute Moral Authority: in totalitarian states, commissars or gauleiters replace Papal legates, agitprop function as did friars and other Christian preachers, show trials replace auto de fe. We see propaganda, heresy hunts, inquisition, censorship, informers, even population culls: both the Albigensian crusade (1209-1229) and St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) foreshadowed the repression of the Vendee and the September massacres of the French Revolution. The problem with modern totalitarianism is not that it is Godless, but that it has substitute Gods, substitute Absolute Moral Authorities.

In the end, monotheism only comes in two versions: that which uses the authority of God to protect and succour one’s fellow humans and that which uses the authority of God to strip people of their moral protections. Most believers play both games, they just vary in how intensively and to whom they do it.

Priests, alas, get authority from using God to strip people of moral protections. It is notable that Jesus spends very little time in the Gospels preaching about the actions of temporal government and a great deal preaching against priestly power and the use of priestly rules and interpretations to strip people of moral protections. It makes priests inherently somewhat dubious vehicles for preaching the Gospel message: indeed, that tension – the doctrine of love thy neighbour being propagated by priests who get power and authority from subverting love thy neighbour so as to become the “gatekeepers of righteousness” – is, in many ways, the central dynamic of Christian history.