The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (2)

This is the second part of my review of Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. The first part was in my previous post.


Believers in progress
Gimpel argues that a crucial difference between medievals and classicals is that the medievals believed in progress. As the medieval scholar and friar Gilbert de Tournai wrote:

Never will we find truth if we content ourselves with what is already known … Those things that have been written before us are not laws but guides. The truth is open to all, for it is not yet totally possessed (p.147).

While it was another medieval, Bernard, master of the Episcopal school at Chartres from 1114-9, who produced the much quoted:

We are as dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, so that although we perceive many more things than they, it is not because our vision is more piercing or our stature higher, but because we are carried and elevated higher thanks to their gigantic size (Pp147-8).

Medieval writers noted and marvelled at the invention, the creation of new things, they saw around them. The surgeon Theodoric, in a 1267 treatise, said of the extraction of arrows:

every day a new instrument and a new method is invented (Pp148-9).

While the Dominican Fra Giordano of Pisa held that:

Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them. Every day we could discover a new art … It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles which help one to see well, an art which is one of the best and most necessary in the world. And that is such a short time ago that a new art which never before existed was invented … I myself saw the man who discovered and practised it and I talked with him (p.149).

The good Fra, one suspects, personally experienced the benefits of this new marvel.

According to my general rule about invention—if something was invented before 500BC, it was first invented in the Fertile Crescent: if it was invented after 1500, it was first invented in the West but if it was invented between 500BC and 1500, it was first invented in China; unless it had something to do with horses, in which case it was invented in Central Eurasian steppes—the most complex mechanical clock was that developed by Su Sung in the Sung capital in the C11th. But prediction of astronomical events was a closely guarded secret of the Chinese imperial court, as it was used to buttress imperial power. When, in 1126, the Sung fled their former capital to a new Southern capital, they were unable to replicate the clock due to lack of required specialists. The conquering Jin, and their later supplanters Yuan Mongols, kept the clock going. When the Ming overthrew the Yuan in 1368, they had no interest in the clock and no more is heard of it. By 1600, Jesuits were introducing European mechanical clocks to a China that showed no sign of ever having created such a thing (Pp150ff).

Back in Europe, interest in creating a mechanical clock (primarily for astronomical purposes) had developed in the C13th, partly spurred by Hindu astronomer and mathematician Bhaskara’s perpetual-motion machine of about 1150, known through Arabic treatises. Indeed, Giovanni di Dondi’s C14th treatise treats a “common” or time-telling clock as presumed knowledge before reading his manuscript. It is likely that the weight-driven clock with mechanical escapement was invented in the late C13th. Gimpel traces the development of an effective mechanical clock through various treatises (including a reference in Dante’s Paradiso Canto X) peaking in Giovanni di Dondi’s complex and much-celebrated astronomical clock (Pp152ff).
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Keeping di Dondi’s clock going was also a trial for medieval Europe. But, in the meantime, “ordinary” mechanical clocks spread throughout Latin Christendom in the C14th. The Latin Church accepted the “mechanical” time of evenly spaced hours rather than the “eternal” time of 12 divisions of daylight: unlike the Orthodox Church, which banned installation of any mechanical clocks in Orthodox churches until the C20th. To Gimpel, the difference flowed from the power of the mercantile interest in Western Europe, who knew that “time is money” (Pp168ff).

Gimpel explores how the C12th Renaissance differed notably from The Renaissance:

There was, however, one fundamental difference between this earlier renaissance and the later, more famous, one. While the latter was primarily concerned with literature and art, the twelfth-century renaissance was primarily taken up with philosophy and science (p.174).

Of his representative figures:

Giovanni di Dondi, the horologist; Villard de Honnecourt, the architect-engineer; Walter of Henley, the agronomist—all had one thing in common: a rational outlook on life (p.171).

This did not mean they were not men of faith, but that they applied a reasoned, empirical practicality to the problems they confronted.

For:

From the first quarter of the twelfth century to the last quarter of the thirteenth century—until the year 1277 to be precise—there was a sustained effort to marry reason and faith (p.171).

An upsurge that started as early as Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II) “the first to set Europe on the path of science”, reviving the use of the abacus, developing Boethius’s treatises on arithmetic and music, writing a treatise on astronomy (p.172).

Figures such as Lanfranc and St Anselm—both C11th Archbishops of Canterbury—led the application of reason to faith. In Anselm’s words:

It seems to me negligent, if after we have been confirmed in the faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe (p.172).

But it is the career of Peter Abelard who Gimpel most warms to, quoting him at considerable length and celebrating his intellectual acumen and combativeness (Pp172ff).

It was a period where philosophical treatises (including those of natural philosophy, the study of the world—what became science) were sought out and translated. Gimpel tabulates some of the authors translated in the C12th and early C13th:

It was the work of these translators that made possible the rise of modern science, for it was they who made accessible this vast body of knowledge to the humanists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the schools and universities of Europe. They deserve our respect—quite as much as the over-praised humanists of the fifteenth century (p.175-8).

Take that Petrarch!

It was a period of both praise and appreciation of the value of classical antiquity and belief in the growth of knowledge. In the words of William of Conches, in opposition to the opponents of natural philosophy:

since they themselves are unacquainted with the forces of nature, in order that they may have all men as companions in their ignorance, wish them to investigate nothing but to believe like rustics. We, on the contrary, think that a reason should be sought in every case, if one can be found (p.179).

Shades of C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures”. William was avid in his support of natural philosophy, saying on the question of whether God could find a way of reconciling the element of fire and earth:

We do not place a limit on divine power, but we do say of existing things none can do it, nor in the nature of things can there be anything that would suffice.

Or, similarly:

God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so (p.179).

William of Conches was a doughty manifestation of the ultimate triumph of Aristotelian philosophy in Latin Christendom, at a time when it was being routed in Islam by al-Ghazali and his followers, despite the efforts of Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) and Abū 'l-Walīd Muḥammad bin Aḥmad bin Rushd (Averroes), who were very influential in Latin Christendom but whose tradition was to prove stillborn in Islam.

Gimpel sees some of the effects of Christianity as feeding into this triumph, as the works and efforts of these medieval natural philosophers:

furthered the demythologising of nature that Christianity had begun (p.180).

Gimpel quotes historian Lynn White who noted that:

In 1956 Robert Forbes of Leyden and Samuel Sambursky of Jerusalem simultaneously pointed out thatChristianity, by destroying classical animism, brought about a basic change in the attitude towards natural objects and opened the way for their rational and unabashed use for human ends. Saints, angels and demons were very real for the Christian, but the genius loci, the spirit inherent in a place or object, was no longer present to be placated if disturbed (p.180).

(The connection between the Judaeo-Christian world view and the rise of science is further discussed here.) The Cathedral school of Chartres put representative statues to represent (the mostly pagan) masters of each of seven arts: Priscian for Grammar, Aristotle for dialectic, Cicero for rhetoric, Boethius for arithmetic, Ptolemy for Astronomy, Euclid for Geometry while Music is apparently accompanied by Pythagoras. Gimpel quotes period scholars to convey the sense of intellectual excitement, particularly centred on the Paris and its University (Pp180ff).

Not that this intellectual ferment went without challenge. As Gimpel notes:

The teaching of Aristotle was prohibited in Paris in 1210 and 1215 and in Toulouse in 1245. In 1263, Urban reiterated condemnations directed at the Averroists. The Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, in 1270 condemned 13 propositions taught at the Faculty of Arts (p.182).

All this leading up to his 1277 condemnation of “219 execrable errors which certain students of the Faculty of Arts have the temerity to study and discuss in the schools” (Pp182-3). While Aristotelian thought—in the form of the Thomist synthesis—was to be embraced by the Church in ensuing decades, the condemnations did put a crimp on natural philosophy at Paris.

Gimpel places Roger Bacon in his time, particularly by looking at the work of his master Robert Grosseteste (c.1175-1253), a translator of Aristotle, a prolific writer who wrote on optics and held that:

the mathematical laws of geometrical optics were the foundation of physical reality, essential to the understanding of nature (p.186).

Bacon admired and continued the work of Grosseteste (who he probably never met). He also advocated reform of the calendar, though his work did not bear full fruit for some centuries. Gimpel describes him as:

the first man really to have undertaken planned experimental research (p.193).

Gimpel shows us a Bacon who was a man of his time, rather than some weird burst of light in medieval darkness. A time which included such people as Peter of Maricourt, whose work on magnets was not to be surpassed until William Gilbert published his De Magnete in 1600, acknowledging and incorporating the work of his C13th predecessor. Thanks to Peter, European compasses came to surpass in quality the Chinese originals (Pp183ff).

The peak of C13th exploratory confidence was the efforts of the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa who set out with two ships to find the Indies in 1291. After sailing down the coast of Africa to beyond Cape Non, all trace of them is lost (p.196). But one of Bacon’s works, according to Columbus’s own testimony in 1498, helped inspire the later Genoese adventurer on his own voyage two centuries later. Curiously, the two Franciscan brothers who sailed with the Vivaldis probably did not know about the work of Bacon, their fellow Franciscan, because the head of the order (the future Pope Nicholas IV) had placed restraints placed on some of his writings (p.197). Whatever the reason for the constraints, and the form of house arrest he suffered, Gimpel sees it as bringing to an end the surge in natural philosophy, and the effort of the Church to marry reason and faith, leading to the surge in mysticism in the C14th and C15th (p.198).

Various reactions
The C14th was a hard, even calamitous, century. The Great Famine of 1315-1317, the start of the Hundred Years War in 1337 and of the great trading house bankruptcies, the Black Death 1347-50, the revolutionary upheavals of 1378-82 (most famously, the Revolt of the Ciompi and the Peasant's Revolt).

Gimpel identifies two long-term effects from the 1277 condemnations:

by separating philosophy from theology it served to establish the intellectual climate in which science developed almost independently of liberal humanism; and, on the other, it caused Christianity to revert to mysticism (p.200).

Which he defines as:

Mysticism is the attempt to penetrate the riddle of the universe not by logic, but by sympathetic intuition (p.200).

Mystical monastic orders saw a major surge, as did interest in

superstitious arts and occult sciences – geomancy, hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, chiromancy, augury, and necromancy; for alchemy, for astrology, and for witchcraft (p.202).

We enter into Europe of the witch burnings. The Crusading impulse lost power, particularly after St Louis's disaster in Egypt. Islam was once again resurgent, with the Turks steadily advancing, while the climate turned colder and Europe experienced the re-appearance of regular famines. Gimpel takes us through the horrors of famine and plague, noting that Europe did not recover its medieval peak population until around 1600 (Pp202ff). (Edward I ruled over more subjects as monarch of England than did Elizabeth I.)

For the survivors, the great dying meant higher wages, while prices generally declined. Struggles over these shifts led to the uprisings of 1378-82, whose rhetoric prefigured that of socialists of later centuries (Pp213ff).

It was also a period of monetary upheaval. Philip the Fair devalued the coinage in 1294-5, 1306 and 1313, to considerable social angst and upheaval (p.221). The relative price of gold and silver shifted: early in the medieval period, in the Islamic Empire it was 14:1, in Europe 12 or 10:1. Predictably, gold moved eastward and silver westward. In the C13th, the relative values shifted and the flows went the other way. Financial crisis followed, with most of the major Florentine banking houses collapsing in the 1340s while overall economic activity declined (though generally not as sharply at population) (Pp222ff).

European inventiveness applied itself to war, inventing cannon in the early C14th, there being no record of Chinese cannon until three decades later (p.228). Gimpel chronicles various indicators of the late medieval period being one of decline from its C13th peak; with non-military technology basically reaching a plateau, though the improved navigational techniques and printing were the basis from which the Renaissance blossomed (Pp229ff).

In his Epilogue, Gimpel considers why the dynamism of the medieval period has been so ignored or forgotten. Dissing the medieval is a long, even venerable, historical tradition:

While the Renaissance viewed medieval society as scholastic and static, the Reformation saw it as hierarchical and corrupt, and the Age of Enlightenment considered it to be irrational and superstitious (p.238).

That is a lot of received hostile lenses to view the past through.

And neo-medievalist enthusiasts—such as those of the Romantic era—often just added in new myths (including horns on Viking helmets). Conservatives saw the medieval period as one of “natural” social order and stability, radicals as a period of a blessedly non-technological age of artisans and craftsmen (Pp238-9). In the mid-C20th, interest in the technological history began to grow and slowly rescued medieval achievement (Pp239-40).

The fatal urge to predict
Having done such a splendid effort in rescuing the past, Gimpel moves into giving a fine example of Why Historians Should Not Predict, proceeding to analyse the current era as one of technological stagnation, where the impetus of the Industrial Revolution was running out of puff (Pp240ff). He was, of course, writing his first edition as the information technology revolution was just beginning.

To be fair, from 1973 onwards there was a dramatic slowing in productivity growth in developed economies that economists are still trying to determine the reasons for. Still, anyone living in the age of the personal computer, mobile phones, multimedia and the internet is going to read the last few pages of The Medieval Machine in some puzzlement. Particularly as Gimpel updated and extended this section for the 1988 second edition.

Gimpel had caught the Grand Theory of History bug, developing a theory of technological dynamism as a pattern of rise, peak and ageing where psychological drive leads technological evolution. Since he compares France (the peak country of the medieval period) with the US, a lot of this seems typical European “our decline will happen to you!”. Paul Kennedy's infamous late 1980s prediction that the US was suffering worse “imperial overstretch” than the Soviet Union is an (even more unfortunate in timing) example of the same genre.

I have a lot of sympathy for Gimpel’s concern that regulation (for example, of pharmaceuticals) is choking off innovation. Not least because there is some truth to it—which is why biotech and related fields are now dominated by the US. But his fiscal and trade alarmism seems overdone (particularly as the US moved into fiscal surplus in the next decade). His final sentence is:

China is at the beginning of a cycle that could last a millennium, while Western civilisation stands at the end of a cycle that is already one thousand years old (p.271).

Maybe. And maybe China, for all its current economic vigour, will get old before it gets rich. I very much believe in learning about the past to get a sense of the present: but not in predicting the grand future. That is what history teaches me NOT to do: I will stick to those rather more specific “robust predictions of general tendency” that the better bits of social science can reveal to us.

But if I disagree with the last 30 pages of grand historical theorising (based, to be fair, on a range of empirical indicators), the rest of The Medieval Machine is a splendid corrective to much of the conventional un-wisdom on the medieval period.

The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1)

There is surely no period of European history that is loaded down with more misconceptions than the medieval period. It is regularly dismissed as centuries of social stagnation, fearful of change, an intellectual desert.

The history of philosophy, for example, has for many decades been typically taught as modern philosophy starts with Descartes, there are the Classical philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics etc) but nothing of continuing intellectual significance occurred in the intervening over thousand years between Plotinus (or maybe Boethius) and Descartes (though Aquinas—and perhaps Maimonedes—might be conceded to be great philosophers).

In reality, the medieval period was one of considerable intellectual activity, particularly after the Aristotelian revival from the C12th onwards. One of the besetting problems of modern philosophy is that modern philosophers (from Descartes, Locke, Hume onwards) are having an argument with Aristotle and Aristotelian thought but either do not admit it or, worse, do not know it. Even when they are allegedly engaging with Aristotle and Aristotelian thought—as with the First Cause/Unmoved Mover argument for the existence of God—they often do not actually engage with the argument, from failing to understand it. The First Cause/Unmoved Mover argument is not, as it is usually characterised, an argument about some chain of causes within time (a misconstruing that generates the “what caused the first cause”? response) but an argument about the ground of causation across (indeed outside) time.

But a much worse myth is that of the medieval period as one of social stagnation, fearful of change. On the contrary, the medieval period was one of institutional innovation and technological dynamism. Yes, the collapse of literacy (and population) after the fall of the Western Roman Empire meant much loss of knowledge and skills. But that also led to casting around for new ways to do things to deal with the new circumstances (notably a shortage of people in general, a shortage of literacy skills in particular and serious public order issues).

Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages is an excellent corrective to misconceptions about medieval stagnation. For example:

from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries more stone was quarried in France than had been mined in the whole history of Ancient Egypt (where the Great Pyramid alone was built to a volume of 40,500,000 cubit feet) (p.59).

The population of medieval Europe peaked much higher than that of Roman and Germanic Europe, for example.

Not that is was notably a period of inventiveness as such. Much of this technological dynamism was adaptation of ideas they got from elsewhere, but a feature of medieval Europe was precisely its willingness to adapt ideas from anywhere. A very useful trait for a civilisation to develop: particularly when it later broke out (after Columbus and Vasco da Gama) and became the first civilisation to be in contact with all parts of the globe, and so the full range of available human ideas and techniques.

The Medieval Machine begins with a chronology of the Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, starting with:

536 or 537 floating mils (on the Tiber)

and concluding with:

c.1445 movable type

Six pages and nine centuries of technological innovation which begin 60 years after the official fall of Western Roman Empire with the deposition of the last Western Emperor in 476 and conclude about 45 years before Columbus crosses the Atlantic.

The book proper starts with “The Energy Resources of Europe and Their Development”, moves on to “The Agricultural Revolution”, then “Mining the Mineral Wealth of Europe”, “Environment and Pollution”, “Labour Conditions in Three Medieval Industries”, examines the life and work of “Villard de Honnecourt: Architect and Engineer”, then “The Mechanical Clock: The Key Machine”, “Reason, Mathematics and Experimental Science” before concluding with a final chapter and an epilogue.

A machine society
Gimpel begins boldly:

The Middle Ages introduced machinery into Europe on a scale no civilisation had previously known. This was to be one of the main factors that led to the dominance of the Western hemisphere over the rest of the world (p.1).

The cogs and gears that had been in toys and curiosities in Classical antiquity became working, productive machinery in the medieval period. In other words, the medieval period was one where what economists would call ‘capital substitution’ occurred, substituting capital (machines) for labour.

What Gimpel wishes to convey to the modern reader is how pervasive machinery became in the medieval world. Particularly mills, which were used in:

grinding corn, crushing olives, fulling cloth, tanning leather, making paper, and so on. They were the factories of the Middle Ages (Pp1-2).

Major assets and products of investment, meeting places, social centres, mills were a medieval archetype. Some of Richard Posner’s original work on economic analysis of the common law had to do with the law regarding mills, for example.
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Mills had been developed in Roman times: but they were at least as often powered by slaves as by water power. Serfs were not slaves, however, and Dark Age Europe just did not have the available bonded labour for such purposes. So waterpower took over. Thus Belisarius’s engineers put mills on barges, to get around opponent’s attempts to cut off their water supply – hence the floating mills on the Tiber (Pp 6ff)

Monasteries, particularly Cistercian monasteries, were great spreaders of technology (Pp3ff). Which took off as slavery declined and disappeared, particularly from the middle of C9th (which is when the knightly order of labour-for-protection is getting underway and rapidly becoming a hereditary, thus long-term, deal). The number of water mills expanded spectacularly: one part of France had 14 mills mentioned in the C11th, 60 in the C12th and over 200 in the C14th. The Domesday Book records 5,624 water mills in England for a population estimated at about 1.4m: each water mill supplying an average of 50 households (Pp10ff).

Mills were a good investment, returning excellent rents from assets whose ownership and income were both generally well protected, hence the explosion in construction. The camshaft being the key invention that allowed this mechanisation of so many functions: a process that spread from grinding flour to many other functions from the end of the C10th onwards. Gimpel making the point that Chinese inventiveness did not result in social transformation in the same way that occurred in medieval Europe (Pp12ff). (Medieval Japan was a somewhat different matter: while Gimpel uses China as a comparison point, Japan does not figure in his text.)

The illustrative story of the mills and dams of La Bazacle, on the outskirts of Toulouse, traces the technological and institutional ingenuity of the medievals, the dams and mills being incorporated in a limited-liability company. By the time it was nationalised after 1945, the company had been operating for 8 centuries: likely the longest-running limited liability company in the world (Pp17ff).

In the C11th, medieval engineers began to harness wind power, apparently inventing the sail-using “post mill”—which turns in the wind—independently of the:

horizontal windmill (mounted on a vertical axis), which had been known to have existed from the seventh century onwards in the plateaus of Iran and Afghanistan (where the wind always blows from the one direction) (p.24).

The European version being designed to cope with variable wind direction: at the time of the Third Crusade, German engineers brought it to the Middle East. Mills were so lucrative, that there were many disputes over their construction (Pp25ff).

Innovating farming
The explosion in mill construction, interacting with the medieval warm period that Gimpel documents at some length (Gimpel published the first edition in 1976, before it became awkward to note the warmer weather of the medieval period), and much greater use of horsepower, kicked off something of an agricultural revolution. The horse collar was introduced into Europe from the steppes sometime in the C8th, allowing, for the first time, extensive use of horses in agriculture. The introduction of nailed horseshoes, also from the steppes, followed around the C10th. People then learnt how to hitch one horse behind the other, and European agriculture harnessing of horsepower really took off; Gimpel providing some very revealing statistics on the superiority of horses over oxen, mules, donkeys and men (Pp29ff).

Arguments over horses (which were more expensive to keep) against oxen were fought in various agricultural treatises that were published from the C13th onwards—such as the work of Walter of Henley, who thought the cost of horses outweighed their extra productivity. (The only thing the knightly class was apparently as interested in as reading about as tournament, war and related romances was estate management.) These treatises:

reveal a very modern approach to agricultural methods and economics. In general, they encouraged the adoption of experimental techniques and advised that a systematic effort be made to run the estates on a rational basis (p.38).

Moderns really should not be surprised by the pervasive practicality of the medieval period: if you made too many wrong decisions you, or people you were responsible for, starved. Yet, this harnessed practicality also generated enough security and surpluses for cautious experimentation to take place, while the competitive jurisdictions provided enough pressure for proven ideas and techniques to spread.

The slow spread of the three-field system from the C8th onwards, coupled with the introduction of the heavy-wheeled plough, greatly expanded the productive possibilities, with crop yields increasingly dramatically from the C11th to C13th (Pp39ff).

Manure was a prized product, being used assiduously to increase farm productivity. Sheep were prized for both manure and, especially, wool. In their attempt to flee the worldly life of cities and manor, the Cistercians cleared new lands and created a highly productive (and economically innovative) network of monasteries. Including vineyards and the production of wine (Pp44ff).

Medieval diets were often quite good, including from increased use of legumes—Gimpel quotes one historian famously describing the Middle Ages from the C10th onwards as “full of beans”: the three-field system encouraging more planting of vegetables. Gimpel goes into some detail into the available data on medieval diets (Pp51ff).

After the disappearance of the plague from Europe in the C7th, the decline of Norse and other excursions, and the settling in of the knightly system, the population of Europe shot up—even Pope Urban II preaching the First Crusade alluded to Latin Christendom being too small an area for the expanding population. The increase was particularly marked in England and France, with the Kingdom of France having perhaps a third of the population of all of Europe (Pp56ff).

The medievals were avid and extensive quarriers of stone and miners of metals. Water-powered stamping mills increased throughput of ore while water-powered bellows permitted much higher temperatures in furnaces. England and Central Europe were the main sources of metal (Pp59ff).

Factories, particularly water-powered factories, created pollution issues, while burgeoning populations cleared forests for both farming land and heating. Coal began to be burnt, with London first reporting atmospheric pollution problems in the 1280s. Regulation attempted to abate some of the worst nuisance, to limited effect (Pp75ff).

Dirt and prosperity encouraged the growth of public baths—Paris had no less than 32. Concern about sexual permissiveness put the public baths under increasing pressure, until they died out, with adverse effects on hygiene, which did not recover for many centuries (Pp91-2). That C13th Europe was more hygiene-conscious than C18th Europe is not exactly a modern expectation: but neither is that women in C9th England had greater social possibilities—and better property and other legal rights—than in C18th England.

Skills in demand
Gimpel then examines labour conditions in mining, textile and construction industries. Miners did well—being treated as free workers with status and privileges—urban textile workers, not so much—they were controlled urban proletariat with little say or rights. Construction workers—particularly masons—were much more like the miners. The Black Death killed people but not land, capital etc, so increased wages, particularly skilled wages, as labour became scarcer compared to capital. Comparing wages with food prices, Gimpel estimates that masons in the C14th—prior to the wage rises after the Black Death—had real incomes about twice that of masons in the C17th (Pp93ff).

At the peak of the construction industry were the architect-engineers, whose skills were eagerly sought after and well rewarded. They built castles, bridges, palaces and, especially, cathedrals. The heights reached by the medieval cathedrals were extraordinary—the record was reached by Strasbourg cathedral at 466 feet, the height of a forty-story building—being beaten only by iron and steel construction in the late C19th and C20th. There was a certain amount of trial and error involved—the collapse of the 156 feet high (the equivalent of 14 stories) vault of Beauvois cathedral in 1284 put a bit of a damper on the ever-upward enthusiasm (Pp114ff).

Gimpel uses the relatively well-documented life of Villard de Honnecourt (born around 1200, professionally active from about 1225-1250) to take us through the social milieu and activists of these much-admired architect-engineers. He conveys the restless energy, the interest in what works, of folk such as Villard very well:

It is probably through the Islamic world that western Europe got involved in perpetual motion, but with the difference that Europe, given its interest in mechanization, would try to use perpetual motion as a practical source of energy (p.129).

Villard’s writings are full of proposed machines, geometrical techniques and application of geometry to the study of nature and natural forms. Gimpel notes the similarity between the interests and education of Villard with Leonardo da Vinci. It was, in fact, very medieval to portray God the Creator as architect-engineer, measuring the universe (Pp130ff). (In contradiction to yet another misconception about medieval ignorance, the flat-earth myth.)

But it is the mechanical clock that Gimpel uses to zero in on the distinctive-machine mindedness of the medieval Europeans:

The men of the Middle Ages were so mechanically-minded they could believe that angels were in charge of the mechanisms of the universe: a fourteenth-century Provencal manuscript depicts two winged angels operating the revolving machine of the sky (p.147).

This review will be concluded in my next post.

About race

Commenter Fred, in response to my previous post, asked:

How would you respond to Steve Sailer's arguments about the existence (and relevance) of race (seen, for instance, here: http://www.vdare.com/sailer/presentation.htm).

Good question. Such a good question, I am repeating a slightly expanded version of my response as a new post.

As you would expect from Sailer, his presentation is the most intelligent presentation of the distinction I have seen. Except he makes no differentiation between race and ethnicity. Afghanistan, for example, is not a place of different races (in the modern sense) but of different ethnicities.

People form groups, but they then tend to seriously over-estimate the significance of the groups. Witness the ascription of characteristics to 'left' and 'right' or 'liberal' and 'conservative' by partisans of said groupings.

In some ways, the medievals were more clever about this. For them 'race' and 'tongue' meant much the same -- a person of my race was a person who spoke my language. Thus, I could communicate far more easily with, was likely to share a larger set of references, expectations, even preferences with them. (Afghanistan would be a place of different races to the medievals: but they had little experience with the continent-wide groupings we moderns call 'race'.) If one presumes differing capacity to communicate (i.e. takes a transaction cost analysis) one can explain most of the apparently "racial" patterns in modern societies, particularly in things like hiring and housing.

Skin colour and other physical features make easy "markers". But, as Sailer implies, not exactly precise ones. (Jew-haters have had terrible difficulty with that.) And ones which people have put widely different importance to over time. (The medievals put almost none at all, for example. They wanted to know your religion and your language: sensible folk, since they are likely to have real effects on behaviour.) The historical contingency of racial signification is something many of the "race does not exist" crowd are very aware of.

There are certainly genetic clumpings which have, for example, medical significance. (And sporting significance: folk of sub-Saharan African background rarely make champion swimmers because of natural buoyancy issues.) But race mainly matters because people think it matters and because language and culture do matter for interactions while language and culture have some (often, but not always, quite strong) association with ethnicity and thus race. But language and culture are a lot more plastic over time than ethnicity which is a lot more plastic over time than race. So, even conceding the sensible bits in Sailer, race is not what one should be concerned with for moral judgment, for public policy (outside some medical applications) and so on.

Defining race ignoring culture

This extends a comment I made here.


Attempts to get racial definitions in law are inherently fraught, since "race" is not inherently exclusive. All the "strains" of homo sapiens interbreed perfectly. Given that "race" is not inherently exclusive, attempts to define 'race' in law end up in similar spots – the definition of 'race' used in apartheid South Africa being much the same as attempts to define Aboriginality under Australian law.

Indeed, this inherent difficulty is a sign that you should Just Not Go There. The idea that "race" is a significant distinction is a highly historically contingent one: it is only important if people make it so. We shouldn't.

The well-known problem (among statisticians) with Aboriginal counts in the Australian Census is precisely because people can "blend in", for race is not inherently exclusive. Under the "protection" regimes – when Aborigines were effectively not legal adults, but wards of the Protector of Aborigines – there was a strong legal incentive to identify as "white", so as to be treated as a legal adult: this without considering any social stigmas.

But that people could and did just demonstrates how not inherently significant "race" is.

Once you get past not permitting discrimination based on "race", the real issue with Aborigines is culture. One of the ways the ABS justified the large increases in the Aboriginal population count from Census to Census was pointing out that the demographic profile remained consistent. This was deeply depressing – i.e. the add-on's had the same disastrously lower life expectancy as the previously counted population.

In other words, the ABS was saying: "the extra folk we have counted are indeed Aborigines, because they also die much younger than the rest of the Australian population". Trying to move from hunter-gatherers to industrial economy in less than two centuries (sometimes well less) when our European ancestors took about 7,000 years to make the same journey (with quite a few problems on the way) is A Big Ask. It is a Really Big Ask when their societies and cultures are disrupted by disease, dislocation, welfare etc: but that is not a racial issue, it is a cultural issue. When, for example, their understanding of law, rules and property is radically disconnected from that which works in an modern industrial (indeed, post-industrial) society.

And it is not a "have you preserved your original culture?" issue. It is a "have you fully adapted to industrial society?" cultural issue. Which can be an emphatic NO! even if they only have smashed remnants of their original culture left: perhaps particularly so.

Once you start looking at it in cultural terms – by which I mean patterns of behaviour, outlooks, preferences, etc – then a whole lot of things become clearer (which is not the same as easier).

Generally speaking, I have an antipathy to cultural explanations, regarding them as the last refuge of the analytically bereft. But evidence is evidence.

And nothing annoys me quicker in this field than folk who burble on about preserving Aboriginal culture and yet talk as if culture has no implications. Or talk of Aboriginal culture as if it there is a singular Aboriginal culture: 40,000 years is a long time to develop cultural differences.

I am reminded of an attempt to re-create the Tasmanian aboriginal language based on a Western Victorian language. The two languages had been separated longer than English has been separated from Iranian.

And if one thing is clear, it is what a disastrous failure so much of indigenous policy has been over the last few decades (via). Something I have posted on previously.

I have posted this passage before, but it is such a perfect indication of everything that has been wrong with indigenous policy in Australia – the ignoring of culture, the imposition of outside presumptions (including failed collectivism of property rights) – that it is worth posting again. In Richard Trudgen's must-read Why Warriors Lie Down and Die there is the illustrative tale of the Galiwin ’ku fishing industry.

The Galiwin ’ku fishing industry consisted of several small fishing boats made from local timbers at Galiwin ’ku by the Yolηnu and mission staff. The Yolηu named these boats with holy names from their clain or riηgitj nation alliance. The boats were owned by the mission but were skippered and crewed by different clans. Some small clans would come together in a riηgitj alliance to make up a crew. …
These clan groups would use the boats and sell their catch to the mission for processing and re-sale to other places. The people clearly understood that what they caught was theirs until they sold it to the mission and they benefited directly from their catch. From the point of sale on, it belonged to the mission. This arrangement satisfied the legal requirements of both the Yolηnu and Balanda systems of law.
When the mission at Galiwin ’ku handed the fishing industry over to the Yolηnu council in 1974, everything proceeded well for a while because the mission staff also transferred to the council. For most Yolηu nothing really changed. Then in 1975 it was decided to get a loan from the government to develop the industry. The Aboriginal Development Comission ‘decided’ to bring in a consultant to look at the viability of the loan and how it could increase the efficiency of the industry. Following the consultant’s recommendation, one big, modern fishing trawler replaced the small boats. In the dead of night, the small boats were burned on the beach and one was cut adrift, to ‘convince Yolηu of the need to move up to the big boat’. Within six months the whole fishing enterprise at Galiwin ’ku had collapsed and Galiwin ’ku became an importer rather than exporter of fish products.
… from a Yolηu perspective the collapse happened because the separate clans and nation alliances found it impossible to work under one Balanda boss on the trawler, as the trawler captain now had to be licensed. Moreover, Yolηu were insulted and grieving over the destroyed boats. With no clear lines of ownership the people could not see that any authority had passed to them. …
To expect all the clans at Galiwin ’ku to believe they collectively owned the fishing company was like telling twenty-six Balanda companies that they collectively owned an industry incorporated as an association. … But this is not how community structures were set up. … The Yolηu fisherman did not see themselves as working for their own gain anymore; in fact, many now thought that the captain of the new trawler would reap the dividends. They had just become wage earners, and the incentive to work and build the industry for their own benefit was gone.
On top of all this, people had become confused about where these wages came from. In the past they saw a clear trade with the mission—so much fish for so much money. This trade was what the Yolηu were used to. Now they got wages no matter how many fish were caught. The steps in the development of a cash economy, with its system of wages-for-labour, are many. The Yolηnu were catapulted into the cash economy with little preparation.
With all this confusion, only conflict could occur, and economic development through industries like fishing was lost. (Pp47-8).

Race has nothing to do with these problems: culture and policy arrogance a great deal.

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India is a highly readable, engaging, even enchanting, examination of religion in the Indian subcontinent through his encounters with nine different participants in religious traditions, encounters in which they tell him their life story.

So we have The Nun’s Tale, the story of a Jain nun; The Dancer of Kanmur, a prison warder and labourer who spends two months of the year as a neyyam, being worshipped as a dancing incarnation of a god; The Daughters of Yellamma, a woman who is a member of the repressed and increasingly marginalised but persistent tradition of the sacred prostitute; The Singer of Epics, one of the two remaining hereditary singers of the Epic of Pabuji, the full performance of which takes five, eight-hour, dusk to dawn, nights; The Red Fairy, a much-admired woman who is a devotee of a Sufi saint at his tomb in Sindh; The Monk’s Tale, a Tibetan monk who atones for his life of violence in the Tibetan resistance by making prayer flags; The Maker of Idols about a scion of a 700-year old family tradition of idol making whose son apparently wants a career in computing; Lady Twilight, a Tantric skull-drinking sorceress who lives in a burial ground; and The Song of the Blind Ministrel, a Baul or traveling mystic minstrel who has been blind since childhood.

What comes across very strongly is how much India is a preserver of sacred traditions and religious patterns that have largely died out (due to the impact of monotheism) in Western and Islamic civilisations. The notion that Hinduism is what the Vedic religion became in response to the challenge of Buddhism becomes very plausible. (The rough analogy would be if Neoplatonism had rescued classical paganism from the threat of Christianity.)
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On the way, we also get some highly revealing vignettes into contemporary India. Hari Das, the gaoler who is a part-time god, for example, explains how politically-based criminal gangs (either far right—the RSS—or far left—the CPM) control the prisons—even the prison officials are beholden to them: mobile phones making it easier for those in gaol to control life outside it (Pp32-3). Of the religious tradition he embodies, Dalrymple writes:

The word theyyam derives from daivam, the Sanskrit word for ‘god’. Some scholars maintain that they theyyams of northern Malabar are a rare survival of some pre-Aryan, non-Brahminical Dravidian religious tradition that was later absorbed into Hinduism’s capacious embrace. Others argue that the theyyams were tolerated as an acceptable safety valve to allow complaints against the misdeeds of the upper castes to be expressed in ritualised and non-violent manner. Either way, there is no doubt that today they are a stage on which the social norms of everyday life are inverted, and where for a short period of the year, position and power are almost miraculously transferred to the insignificant and powerless (p.36).

Gaoler to god in the course of each year is certainly quite an inversion.

Some of the theyyam parables are charming. Lord Shiva, manifesting with his wife and child as a landless Dalit family and teaching a Brahmin—close to enlightenment but blinded by his caste-pride—a lesson in shared humanity (Pp39ff). Or the guru giving two disciples a rupee each and asking them to use it to fill a room. One buys a huge pile of garbage, the only thing cheap enough to fill a room completely. The other meditated in his room, then bought a match-box, an incense stick and oil lamp and filled the room with light and a beautiful fragrance (p.48).

Hari Das the theyyam detects a religious revival going on, with rising interest in theyyam performances, but is worried that increasing education will give his children more opportunities which may preclude—since they will not be able to take the time off each year—following the tradition of being a part-time god (Pp49-50).

The histories of the traditions Dalrymple explores in Nine Lives show the effect of social and religious changes. The devadasis (sacred prostitutes) used to come from the grandest families and hold honoured positions in the temple hierarchies; now they come low-caste families and are generally simply sex-workers. The response of Hindu reformers to the taunts of Victorian-era Christian missionaries—a response continued in government policy which attempts to discourage sacred prostitution—has had much to do with the loss of status (Pp70-1). Monotheism’s issues with sex and gender are, alas, contagious since they became associated with “modernity” and “being civilised” (and, often, male power). The practice of dedicating girls to the Goddess continues, however, because poor families still see it as a path out of poverty and a way to get the Goddess’s blessings (p.72).

Dalrymple interweaves the efforts of scholars nicely into his narrative—at the end of the book is an extensive glossary as well as a bibliography for each chapter. So the efforts of Milman Parry (apparently “the Darwin of oral literature”) to demonstrate the oral origins of Homer via study of existing Balkan traditions of oral poetry revolutionising study of the Greek classics is a nice segue in the story of the narrator of epics (Pp89ff). The Mahabharata is fifteen times as long as the Bible—an epic singer explains that he remembers by imagining each stanza as written on a different pebble—and it remains part of the reference of a society whose level of cultural erudition exceeds that of more literate, but movie-obsessed, societies (Pp90-1). Parry’s studies found that a bard learning to read was the death-knell to the oral tradition: that the illiterate were capable of feats of memory that literacy destroyed (p.95).

Part of the continuing power of the epics is that their religious references, the religious life they invoke, still has power for the listeners: indeed, the minor local deities have more resonance than the great Gods of Hinduism. Though, even so, a singer of the epics notes that it is many years since he heard the hooves of the hero of whom he sings circling a village at night (Pp108ff): shades of the “retreat of the oracles” of late Antiquity.

Sufi syncretism
Due to its geography of narrow fertile strips, rocky hills and deserts, Sindh is a province that is hard to rule. It is still a place of landlord control—to the extent of private (“feudal”) armies, landlord prisons and bonded-labour—and dacoit highwaymen. (Bonded labour being both a way of extracting a surplus and paying for protective services.) It is also a place of religious syncretism, where heterodox religious notions take refuge from more orthodox religious hinterlands. (This despite being the first part of the Indian sub-continent conquered by Islam: Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad has some appalling descriptions of the brutality and violence of the Muslim conquest—but Hindus and Buddhists counted as pagans rather than “people of the book” so, until more lenient interpretations gained some acceptance, confronted the choice of convert or die; hence Muslim incursions and conquests in India tended to be particularly savage.)

Of this religious syncretism, Dalrymple writes that Sindh’s own geography and:

its geographical position as the bridge between Hindu India and the Islamic Middle East, has always made Sindh a centre of Hindu-Muslim syncretism, with every kind of strange cult, part-Hindu, part-Muslim, flourishing in its arid wastes.
Much of this intermixing took place in the Sufi shrines that are still the main focus of devotion in almost village here. For Sufism, with its holy saints and visions, healings and miracles, and its emphasis on the individual’s search for direct knowledge of the divine, has always borne remarkable similarities to certain currents in Hindu mysticism.
All religions were one, maintained the Sufi saints, merely different manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque or temple, but to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart – that we all have Paradise within us, if we know where to look (p.113).

Sufism is a very mixed religious phenomenon. Possibly because of influence of British rule in India, Western concepts of Sufism tend to be very much of the sort of Sufism that Dalrymple presents here. Other strains of Sufism (particularly in North Africa) have been avidly jihadist. Sufism has long been the way Islam has presented itself to tribal and local peoples: it is currently losing out to the book-based salafi surge that propagates more easily in an age of mass literacy, global migration and the confronting cultural medley of the “global village”.

The Sufism Dalrymple is describing is one deeply influence by the interaction with Hinduism (and, though not mentioned, Buddhism):

The Sufis believed that this search for God within and the quest for fana – the total immersion in the absolute – liberated the seeker from the restrictions of narrow orthodoxy, allowing the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its mystical essence. This allowed the Sufis for the first time to bring together Hindu and Muslim in an accessible and popular movement which spanned the apparently unbridgeable gulf separating the two religions. The teachings of Sufi poetry and song also provided a link between the devotions of the villagers and the high philosophical subtleties of the mystics (p.113).

For the Sufis wrote in the local languages and used metaphors and images familiar to everyday rural lives.

Influences went in both directions:

If the Sufi brought many Hindus into the Islamic fold, then they also succeeded in bringing an awareness of Hinduism to India’s Muslims. Many Sufis regarded the Hindu scriptures as divinely inspired, and took on the yogic practices of the Hindu sadhus: sitting meditating before a blazing fire in the heat of summer or hanging themselves by the feet to recite prayers – a practice that is still performer by South Asia Sufis, who sometimes use the hat racks or luggage rails of trains from which to hang (p.114),

Dalrymple then gives us a brief biography of C18th Sufi master Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit Shah, including an English translation of a poem by the Sufi master praising the wandering sadhus of Hinduism (Pp114ff). The Sufi saint continues to inspire devotion. A few years previously, Dalrymple had observed:

The wild and ecstatic night-long celebrations marking the anniversary of the saint’s death were almost a compendium of everything of which Islamic puritans most disapprove: loud Sufi music and love poetry was being sung in each courtyard, men were dancing with women, hashish was being smoked, huge numbers were venerating the tomb of a dead man and all were routing their petitions through the saint, rather than directly to God in the mosque (p.115).

“Corpse-worship” is what the salafis would call it.

And the contempt is returned:

But for the Sindhis attending the ’Urs [annual festival of commenoration], it was not they who were the heretics, so much as the stern Wahhabi mullahs who criticised the popular Islam of the Sufi as shirk, or heresy: ‘These mullahs are just hypocrites,’ said one old fakir I talked to in the shrine. ‘Without love, they distort the true meaning of the teaching of the Prophet. They are just interested in themselves. They should all be jailed for life.’ (p.116)

The old fakir urges Dalrymple not to miss meeting a famous lady fakir, Lal Peri Mastani, or the Ecstatic Red Fairy—described as being known by everyone, regarded as the most passionate of the saints devotees and as dressed in bright red, very fat and carrying a club (Pp116-7).

When he meets Lal Peri, he finds she has the same views on the mullahs as the old fakir:

‘Today in our Pakistan there are so many of these mullahs and Wahhabis and Tablighis who say that to pay respect to the saints in their shrines is shirk. Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the Prophet. Mullahs and Azazeel [Satan] are the same thing.’ (p.132).

(Which is, of course, not very far from Christ’s criticism of priestly and letter-of-the-law Judaism in the Gospels.)

Lal Peri quotes some couplets from Shah Abdul Latif:

Why call yourself a scholar, o mullah?
You are lost in words.

You keep on speaking nonsense,
They you worship yourself.

Despite seeing God with your own eyes,
You dive into the dirt.

We Sufis have taken the flesh from the holy Quran,
While you dogs are fighting with each other.

Always tearing each other apart,
For the privilege of gnawing at the bones. (Pp132-3)

Shah Abdul Latif was a contemporary of the founder of Wahhabism, but preached a very different Islam.

Dalrymple sees the parallels between contemporary Pakistan and C16th Reformation Europe, with text-based reformers and puritans attacking popular devotions to saints and shrines (p.133). People who say Islam “needs a Reformation” understand neither Islam nor the Reformation. What Islam missed out was the Aristotelian renaissance of the C12th and C13th (which it did not miss out on so much as deliberately rejected), the classicist Renaissance that never ended (due to the invention and spread of printing) and, above all, the Enlightenment response to the bitter religious strife of the Reformation.

Saudi money pouring into the madrassas is recruiting young devotees to an text-based puritanism, leading to demonstrations and destruction of shrines (as the Wahhabis did to the tombs of Muhammad’s Companions in Mecca). As Taliban control spreads, shrines are blown up or closed down: a common excuse being the shrines opening their doors to women for prayers and healing (Pp134-5).

As Dalrymple notes, this three-cornered contest of Hinduism, Sufi Islam and Islamic orthodoxy has a very long history (Pp135-6). Dalrymple’s interview with the head of a new madrassa which has opened up near the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif contains themes which are familiar to anyone aware of Reformation history. The madrassa head’s railing against “tomb worship”, “grave worship”, against the use of music, critiquing heretical departure from scripture could be that of any C16th or C17th Calvinist or Lutheran denouncing paganism-contaminated Catholicism (Pp137ff).

If one believes that one has texts which come directly from God—and that those are the only true guides to His absolutely trumping wishes—then anything which engages mere humans, and is not text-God-directed, is a diversion from God and thus sin and error. Given mainstream Islam’s adoption of occasionalism, contemplation of the created world as also being God’s work provides no counterbalance to this narrow textualism. But, even in Catholicism and Orthodoxy—where scripture is only indirect work of God while the created world is His direct work, so music and beauty can be utilised—priestly authority works to reproduce many of the patterns of the exclusory rigidity that monotheism is so prone to.

Insisting on the primacy of God’s compassion and love leads to a rather different perspective than does text-driven puritanism. For it is the authoritativeness of the text that is crucial: the content will remain open to interpretation; hence the real authority sits with the interpreters of the text. Thus Quakers are notoriously small ‘c’ Christian: they have no priests, so no religious intermediaries intent on using God to strip people of moral protections, as weapons for their own authority as “gatekeepers of righteousness”.

Lal Peri takes Dalrymple to meet her own teacher or pir Sain Fakir, a man in his eighties living at a small shrine. Sain Fakir tells Dalrymple:

‘The mullahs distort the Prophet’s message for their own purposes,’ said Sain Fakir. ‘Men are so blind as them cannot even see the shining sun. Their creed is extremely hard. It doesn’t understand human weakness.’
‘It excludes everyone,’ says Lal Peri, ‘Even other mullahs, at times.’
Sain Fakir shrugged his shoulders. ‘In this world, everyone commits sin. The Sufis always understood this. They understand human weakness. They offer forgiveness, and people will always love those who forgive.’ (p.143)

He is confident that the self-destructive nature of the Wahhabi teachings—as manifested in their internecine violence—and the enduring values of the Sindhis will block the spread of such teachings. The Red Fairy is brutal about the text-based puritans:

‘The Wahhabis are traders who sell their faith for profit,’ said Lal Peri angrily. ‘They are not true Muslims – just fuel for the fires of hell’

Her teacher responds:

‘A lot of it is about power … The Sufis are a threat to the mullahs because we command the loyalty and faith of the ordinary people. No one is excluded. You can be an outcaste, a fallen woman, and you can come and pray at the shrine and the Sufi will forgive you, and embrace you.’
‘You don’t even have to be a Muslim and you will be welcomed,’ said Lal Peri (p.144).

Dalrymple’s tale of the Red Fairy ends with a charming tale of a Sufi saint who decides to collect some of the fires of hell to warm himself and a friend, but returns empty-handed reporting that:

There is no fire in hell … Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, and their own pain, from this world (p.145).

I am reminded of a charming Vietnamese folk tale about the difference between Heaven and Hell. In Hell, people have all the rice they want but can only pick it up with 6-foot chopsticks, so everyone is starving, as they cannot bring the rice to their mouths. Heaven is exactly the same, except everyone is happy and well-fed, because they feed each other.

Divine eroticism
In telling the story of the maker of idols, Dalrymple explores the eroticism that pervades Hinduism’s polytheistic conception of the divine, contrasting it with the Judaeo-Christian tradition:

The Judaeo-Christian tradition, which tends to emphasise the sinfulness of the flesh, the dangers of sexuality and the idealisation of sexual renunciation and virginity, begins its myth of origin with the creation of light. In contrast, the oldest scripture of the Hindu tradition, the Rig Veda, begins its myth with the creation of kama – sexual desire: in the beginning was desire, and desire was with God, and desire was God. In the Hindu scheme of things, kama remains one of the fundamental goals of human existence, along with dharma, duty or religion and artha, the creation of wealth.
… the same erotic concerns found in the secular poetry of classical India are equally evident in the devotional and religious poetry of the period: Kalidasa’s poem The Birth of Kumara, for example, has an entire canto of ninety-one verses entitled ‘The Description of Uma’s Pleasure’ which describes in graphic detail the lovemaking of Lord Shiva and his divine consort. The poetry of the Tamil saints, who walked from temple to temple converting the local Jains and Buddhists, likewise dwell on the sensuous beauty of the deities they adore (p.187).

Such saints were perfectly happy to dwell on the erotic beauty of both Gods and Goddesses: Dalrymple quotes a poem of one such saint imagining himself as a dancing girl wanting to press her body against that of Shiva (Pp188-9).

This exploration of the eroticism within Hindu tradition continues in Dalrymple’s tale of the Tantric sorceress Manisha Ma. Tantra is a tradition that reaches into Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and aspects of Sufi Islam and connects back to some very ancient traditions such as shamanism. It overturns convention, seeking ecstatic direct connection with the divine, existing in both high philosophical and more oral and spontaneous popular forms, including aspirations to magical powers. Its rituals have often involved use of bodily fluids, notably blood and semen (Pp213ff).

Tantra has been in long decline:

These original esoteric medieval Tantric traditions nearly died out in India, sinking from view around the thirteenth century AD, probably partly as a result of the disruption that followed in the wake of the violence of the Islamic invasions, which broke many of the lines of guru-disciple relationships through which Tantric secrets were passed. Tantrics later became a particular target of European missionaries who made ‘the obscene ceremonies of the Hindoos’ central to their polemics. The nineteenth-century rise of the Hindu reform movements, many of which emanated from Bengal in reaction to British missionaries, nearly finished this process. For the reform movements championed what some scholars have called the ‘Rama-fiction’ of Hindu worship in the Ganges plains: the rise of the Vaishnavite bhakti cults of Lord Krishna and especially Lord Rama, to the extent that they eclipsed many other more traditional and popular forms of local devotion involving DeviLINk cults and blood sacrifices, which were judged primitive, superstitious and anti-modern by the urban and often Western-educated reformers (p.215).

The process Dalrymple describes parallels the way the original Vedic religion was renovated into Hinduism in response to the Buddhist challenge.

Tantra is generally a marginal phenomenon:

everywhere except in certain areas of Bengal, Kerala and Assam, as well as in Nepal and Bhutan, where Tantra still flourishes as a mainstream form of religion, in the latter case within a Buddhist rather than a Hindu context (p.215).

Tantrics seek to reach the divine by opposing conventions and breaking taboos. One can clearly see the animistic roots of much Tantrism, as well as the notion of sex as a path to divine that recurs in both animism and polytheism.

The Bauls of Bengal are saffron-clad wandering minstrels who date back at least 500 years. They seek the Enlightenment in the moment, refusing to follow the conventions of caste-conscious Bengali society:

Subversive and seductive, wild and abandoned, they have preserved a series of esoteric spiritual teachings on breathing techniques, sex, asceticism, philosophy and musical devotion. They have also amassed a treasury of beautifully melancholic and often enigmatic teaching songs which help map out their path to inner vision (p.235).

Shrines, temples, mosques are only signposts on a road to Enlightenment, never ends in themselves.

They come out of longstanding traditions in Indian society:

The near-atheism and humanism of these singing philosophers is not in any sense a new departure in Indian thought, and dates back at least to the sceptical and materialistic Charvaka school of the sixth century BC, which rejected the idea of God and professed that no living creature was immortal. Ancient India in fact has a larger atheistic and agnostic literature than any other classical civilisation. (Pp235-6).

An ambiguity in the face of the divine which can be traced back at least as far as the Rig-Veda (p.236).

All the nine lives that Dalrymple uses to explore the different religious traditions of the Indian sub-continent are appealing in themselves, and part of the joy of the book. But the final story, that of the blind minstrel, is in fact two stories. Because Kanai the blind minstrel—the son of day labourers, he was blinded by smallpox at an early age—has a great friend and travelling companion Debdas, a Brahmin brutally rejected (indeed beaten bloody) by his father (and older brother) for seeking to become a Baul. They talk to Dalrymple of their connection, during which Debdas says:

At times, I am Kanai’s guru ... and at time, Kanai is my guru. He reminds me even of my own songs (p.248).

Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India is perceptive and engaging travel writing: humane, informed, deeply observant. It is an excellent way to connect to other religious traditions outside the confines of monotheism and so enabling us to see those confines more clearly.

The Nazi Conscience (3)

This is the third part of my review of Claudia Koonz’s The Nazi Conscience, a study of the Nazi attempt to inculcate an ethnic and racial morality into Germans. The first part was in my previous two posts.


Race war
The history Koonz outlines up to this point is bad enough but, of course, it gets it true horror from its grim denouement:

Most of you know what it means when one hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time … to have remained decent fellows. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.
Heinrich Himmler, Poznan, Poland, October 4, 1943 (p.221).

The organisation of mass murder on racial grounds is where this all led to.

The Nazi ideology of race both needed and created “Racial Warriors”. German soldiers committed atrocities that violated the separation of soldier from murderer that, as Koonz puts it:

violates the warrior’s honour as it has been defined throughout Western history (p.221).

The question is how: how did it happen on such a scale?

Koonz touches briefly on the scholarly debate on whether the mass killings are to be explained either situationally or as the outcome of longstanding trends in German culture and society. Koonz holds that focusing on either battlefield circumstances or lonstanding trends:

obscures a crucial stage in the formation of a genocidal consensus. From 1933 through 1939—the so-called peaceful years—racial warriors underwent mental training that prepared them for their subsequent tasks (p.221).

Whatever state of mind these acts were committed in, before war even began, German soldiers:

had imbibed the core elements of Nazi ideology: respect for the Fuhrer, devotion to the Volk, a belief in the justice of conquest, and the existence of a Jewish peril (p.222).

Particularly the SA and SS, who were primed for racial war.

Koonz uses Elias Canetti’s analysis of the difference between packs and crowds to frame the Nazi use of male packs as the basis for prosecuting the racial war. Particularly the power of the rivalry between the SA and SS “packs”, which proved to be, in many ways, complementary (Pp222ff).

The fluctuations in unsanctioned violence could themselves be misleading:

Because they were accustomed to the rule of law, Germans, whether they were Jews or non-Jews, found it hard to grasp the reality that lawful, orderly persecution would turn out to be more deadly than
random cruelty (p.224).

While the SA-SS rivalry created a “competitive radicalisation” of Nazi policy towards the Jews. Koonz explores the dynamics of this rivalry with chilling realism (Pp223ff).
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Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer avidly sought and published letters about Jewish “outrages”. The use of ‘initials only published” letters encouraged libellous hate. (Shades of comments on the internet.) Der Sturmer portrayed anti-Semites as if they were an embattled minority, explicitly comparing them to early Christians (Pp231-2). Coarseness-and-vulgarity-as-authenticity, demotic-as-legitimacy, salaciousness-as-concern-for-decency; Streicher’s tabloid journalism of hate made the portrayal of Jews-as-evil, the malevolent identity of Jews, powerful and populist (Pp233ff):

In their coarse bombast, Sturmer authors popularized the moral reasoning of theological anitsemites like Gerhard Kittel (p.234).

The SS was a rather different operation to the SA. While Der Sturmer:

expressed the rough-and-ready ethos of old-fighter Nazis … Heinrich Himmler’s SS published Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps), which embodied the élan of a technocratic elite (Pp225-6).

And the SS was an elite organisation, both in its social origins and in its training and ethos:

Nearly 20 percent of SS generals belonged to the nobility, and aristocrats were over-represented among the lower ranks as well. At a time when 2 per cent of all Germans attended university, 41 percent of the SS officer corps had studied at universities (p.240).

As part of the this sense of being elite, and of appealing to the thoughtful, the SS weekly carried a wider range of opinion than any other publication in the Third Reich in the 1930s (P.241). But the Jewish question was covered in a way which made it clear that a judenfrei Reich was the ultimate aim. Emigration was happening—40 percent of the 568,000 Germans citizens defined as Jewish left, 138,000 Jews left Austria after the Anschluss—but not quickly enough (p.246).

The discussions in the SS weekly, like the rest of Nazi framing of the “Jewish problem”, prepared the ground for the Final Solution:

… the cerebral racism of the SS provided the mental armour for mass murderers (p.250).

Just as the Nazi euthanasia program trialled techniques and habituated technicians for industrial-methods mass murder. The entire rhetoric about the dangerous, subhuman Jews in which terms such as ‘extinction’ and ‘annihilation’ were used both set and spread the mindset:

When they received their orders on the eastern front, SA and SS militiamen may have been surprised, but they were not unprepared (p.252).

On the sixth anniversary of his appointment as Chancellor, Hitler broke his public reticence about his intentions for the Jews and launched into a now infamous anti-Jewish rant in the Reichstag. Hitler’s “prophetic” comments in his 30 January 1939 speech were barely noticed at the time (p.254). It is now seen as foreshadowing of the slaughter of the Jews:

Today I will be a prophet once again. If the international Jewish financial establishment in Europe and beyond succeeds in plunging the peoples of the world into yet another world war, then the result will not be Bolshevikization of the globe and thus a victory for Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Euope (Pp253-4).

Koonz notes that it as also enunciates the four themes of the Nazi conscience:
(1) Preserving the common destiny of the Volk from racial disaster.
(2) Self-denial in the service of the Volk as the cardinal virtue. In Hitler’s words:

What is unimportant or detrimental to the existence of the Volk can never be ethical

From which followed;
(3) The German’s right to claim the lebensraum they deserved.
(4) The denial of universal morality, something that Hitler derived from, in his words:

the laws and necessities of life, as they reveal themselves to man through reason and knowledge (Pp254-5)

The last is not far from the Thomist moral rhetoric that a Catholic school boy could have picked up from a Catholic Church whose formal commitment to universal morality has always had a lot of caveats. The Catholic Church has, after all, always been a bitter opponent of equality before the law—for pagans, Jews, other Christians, queers. In each case (apart from the Jews), it has been a bitter opponent of such groups even having an acknowledged existence within the community, while its theology of Genesis 19 is explicitly that of purifying extermination.

Nazism was a secularisation of aspects of Catholic theology: the utterly trumping moral authority against which no human claims had standing was the Aryan race rather than God; it was blood that was sacred and conveyed salvation, rather than God’s grace; but—with the exception of Slavs—the victims of the Holocaust (Jews, queers, Gypsies [who are pagans], “incorrect believers”) were all those whom the Catholic Church has spent centuries propagating malevolent identities against: Nazism was as much series of substitutions on Catholic patterns as a rejection of them—it is noticeable how many of the key organisers of the Holocaust were either born and raised Catholic or, if Protestant, raised in predominately Catholic milieus. Hence the special animus many senior Nazis had for the Catholic Church—it was in so many ways a competitor and an embarrassing mirror.

Koonz cites various observers at the time who could see where things were going. As one horrified German bystander observed:

What happened to the Armenians in Turkey … is, more slowly and efficiently being done to the Jews (p.255).

A grim observation, given Hitler’s infamous rhetorical question of "who remembers the Armenians?".

The series of stunning German victories in the early stages of the Eurasian War created both an opportunity—wartime control and mobilisation—and a problem. How could such a tiny Jewish remnant (less than one percent of the population) be any sort of threat to a strong, powerful, self-confident and triumphant Volk? The answer was to depict Jews as either a racial plague or agents of global conspiracy. Antisemitic think tanks and research institutes produced new “evidence” of Jewish malevolence and corrupting power:

Well in advance of the first feasibility study for mass extermination (commissioned in July 1941), a continuous flow of fraudulent research on the Jewish question shaped the moral context within which desk murderers and field commanders when about their work (p.258).

The process of extermination itself got underway using the “ordinary” processes of a modern bureaucratic state, thereby attracting less attention. Ordinary Germans were aware of the New Order having a dark side, but Jewish suffering was mainly met with apathy, though acts of kindness, even of protection, still occurred. The Nazi regime permitted fairly wide latitude of private conscience—indeed, treating acts of kindness or dissent as matters of private conscience minimised their political consequences—while ethnocrats who found the consequences of their efforts to create a new racial order hard to face were able to move to other positions (Pp258ff). But, as Koonz observes:

The everyday decency of a few magnifies the complicity of the man (p.264).

Walter Gross continued his tireless efforts of racial indoctrination throughout the war, though increasingly upstaged by Goebbels (Pp264ff).

Complicity
Kooonz strips away the postwar claims of Germans that they at most vaguely knew of bad things happened “in the East”. A map (p.268) of the concentration camp network displays vividly just how large—and all across Germany—the camp network was, while the process of identification and expulsion required the compliance of many thousands of ordinary Germans.

How was such active and passive compliance achieved?

Germans’ readiness to expel Jews from their universe of moral concern evolved as a consequence of their acceptance of knowledge disseminated by institutions they respected (p.272).

Nazi Germany was not a society of rigid control such as Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The creation of a broad ethnic consensus was thus crucial in creating the Nazi racial order (Pp272-3). Koonz offers the best one paragraph summary of Nazism and the Third Reich I have read:

Nazism offered all ethnic Germans, whether or not they joined the party, a comprehensive system of meaning that was transmitted through powerful symbols and renewed in communal celebrations. It told them how to differentiate between friend and enemy, true believer and heretic, non-Jew and Jew. In offering the faithful a vision of sanctified life in the Volk, it resembled a religion. Its condemnation of egotism and celebration of self-denial had much in common with ethical postulates elsewhere. But in contrast to the optimistic language of international covenants guaranteeing universal rights to all people, Nazi public culture was constructed on the mantra: “Not every being with a human face is human” (p.273).

Because Koonz has so immersed herself in the way Nazism worked as a system of thought, of virtue, of alternative morality, she can see how:

Hitler founded a consensual dictatorship that was “neither right nor left” on the political spectrum but occupied an entirely different political terrain. Like other fundamentalisms, it began with a powerful leader and drew on populist rage against corrupt elites who had betrayed the “common man” (p.273).

Nazism is something it is very important to understand in its own terms, according to its own nature, not placed into some convenient pre-conception. Which is why Koonz’s study is so revealing.

Nor has the appeal and pattern of ethnic fundamentalism died with Nazism but—as Koonz points out—kept recurring in the break-up of imperial orders. For ethnic fundamentalism is:

a creed that gathers force when modernizing societies are convulsed by dislocations which threaten conventional systems of meaning … Reforging bonds that may be religious, cultural, racial, or linguistic, ethnic fundamentalism merges politics and religion within a crusade to defend values and authentic traditions that appear to be endangered (p.274).

The recent history of the Balkans displays this very clearly.

We live in an age of moral flux (“what critics call moral meltdown”) which lets loose some grim possibilities, as Koonz warns in her final words:

Political leaders who appear to embody the communitarian virtues of a bygone age purport to stand as beacons of moral rectitude in a sea of sin. Although they incite hatred against anyone they deem to be ethnic outsiders—whether sexual degenerates, pacifists, defenders of human rights, or simply misfits—their devoted constituencies share a fear of moral and physical pollution so profound it transcends partisan politics. Long after the demise of Nazism, ethnic fundamentalism continues to draw its power from the vision of an exclusive community of “us”, without “them” (p.274).

Part of the art of political leadership being, of course, to not get so out of touch with popular concerns than such messages begin to gain resonance.

Koonz’s The Nazi Conscience is a profoundly sensible and perceptive study of Nazism as a system of virtue and persuasion. The patterns of moral exclusion are portrayed and dissected in a way that is very accessible and revelatory: one that both reveals patterns that have wider application while being thoroughly grounded in the specificities of the Nazi experience. It is a splendid work of history and moral perceptiveness.

The Nazi Conscience (2)

This is the second part of my review of Claudia Koonz’s The Nazi Conscience, a study of the Nazi attempt to inculcate an ethnic and racial morality into Germans. The first part was in my previous post.


Youth politics
Koonz then moves on to “The Swastika in the Heart of Youth”, starting with a pointed quote from Hitler:

When an opponent says “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already … You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community (p.131).”

Of course, standing on the other side of the failure of Nazi (and Soviet) totalitarianism, we can see the limits to what can be done. And yet, and yet. Compare this famous passage from a 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech by Hitler:

Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

with this more recent statement by a former member of the Hitler Youth:

The denial or even the restriction of the rights of the family, by obscuring the truth about man, threatens the very foundations of peace.
Consequently, whoever, even unknowingly, circumvents the institution of the family undermines peace in the entire community, national and international, since he weakens what is in effect the primary agency of peace. This point merits special reflection: everything that serves to weaken the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman, everything that directly or indirectly stands in the way of its openness to the responsible acceptance of a new life, everything that obstructs its right to be primarily responsible for the education of its children, constitutes an objective obstacle on the road to peace.

The tone of the Pope’s message (repeated in an abbreviated version in a homily) is much more elliptical than Hitler’s abusive rant, but the notion is the same—a vulnerable minority is castigated as a threat to the very basis of world peace. (The Catholic Church is in favour of the family in the way that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was in favour of the workers—it is in favour of the ones that do as they are told.) Messages directed at youth may have more resilience than one might expect.
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The Nazi regime put considerable effort into attempting to reach youth. Teachers and civil servants joined the Nazi Party at higher rates than did the general populace (p.133). Relatively few classroom teachers were sacked, but 15-20 percent of school supervisors and 60% professors in teacher education colleges were sacked (p.135), part of a fine sense of what matters in controlling education:

Nazi teachers, who themselves participated in subversive activities during the Weimar Republic, understood that expulsions and mandatory curricula could not control what teachers actually taught in their classrooms (p.136).

So active attempts were made to engage and convert teachers, to turn superficial, outward Gleichschaltung into deep, “inner” Gleichschaltung. This included providing a mass of materials to cover the interim period before new textbooks could be put together.

Various levels of resistance frustrated the ambitions of the Nazi activists. Catholic teachers defied instructions to remove crucifixes from classrooms. Some teachers were offended by incitement to ethnic hatred and racism, others lamented the loss of classroom autonomy, the replacement of female with male supervisory staff in girls schools, the anti-intellectualism of Nazi activists (and Hitler) with surveys finding very hostile attitudes to various Nazi figures such as ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. The ideological supervision also alienated teachers (Pp139-40).

When the rolls for new Party members re-opened in 1937, teachers were conspicuous by their absence, while the revival of the economy led to a severe shortage of teachers—Koonz suggests that teachers leaving the profession was likely a factor (p.140). The full racial hatred package faltered. The milder version of Nazi ideology celebrating ethnic revival was more palatable, spreading all the further for that reason: part of a shift in Nazi strategy to a more stealthy approach in selling the Nazi message. Thus, anti–Jewish messages would be slipped into texts framed in the sober language of science. Norse sagas linking honour to sacrifice and vengeance gradually displayed Christian morality tales. Examples and practice essays across the range of subjects would push Nazi ideas and preferred policies. As Koonz says of anti-Jewish messages in biological topics “its very lack of salience made it more effective than blatant racial hate” (p.144). It was the Volk rather than the Nazi Party which was celebrated. Self-sacrifice—for example, in charitable works—was extolled. The Golden Rule was re-interpreted in terms of being willing to sacrifice yourself for your racial comrades, to treat your racial comrades as you would want to be treated (Pp146-7). Gender separation of classes in educational institutions was used to reinforce the different roles in service of the Volk, while teachers were asked to identify students who might have “damaged genes” (p.147).

The sad reality was that the abolition of the ghetto and the integration of Jews into public institutions (such as public education) made them more vulnerable as individuals (in the way queer individuals always have been, though they have generally more capacity to hide). Personal contacts did provide an inconvenience for the preaching of hate (but not, in the end, a very effectual one).

Between emigration and concentration of Jewish students into Jewish schools, the number of Jewish students in public schools fell. In 1933, less than 60,000 Jewish students attended public schools (75% of all school-age Jewish children). By 1939, only 27% of the 27,500 Jewish children in Germany attended public schools (p.148). While many teachers displayed kindness or otherwise resisted the campaign of hatred, other teachers made the life of Jewish students miserable.

Nazi education experimented with experiential teaching and sought to foster (racial) egalitarianism (Pp151ff). Heidegger’s enthusiastic embrace of Nazi education efforts is dealt with quite matter-of-factly (Pp155-6). Retreats and re-education camps were organised for teachers: something like two-thirds of teachers attended at least one regional retreat. A “folksy populism” which “fostered ethnic solidarity” and an “egalitarian ethos” was the organising principle, with retreats displaying a mixture of order and spontaneity (Pp157ff). In the end, Nazi pedagogy was one where:

the moral mandate was clear: honor the Fuhrer, expel aliens, sacrifice for the Volk, and welcome challenges (p.162).

A moral mandate that prepared the ground for larger Nazi purposes.

A racial law
Koonz then considers “Law and the Racial Order”. While Hitler moved decisively in a wide range of areas, between the April 1933 laws that imposed occupational quotas and the September 1935 Nuremberg laws there was a mass of hostile regulations but no comprehensive anti-Jewish race law (p.163). This misleadingly entitled “grace period” saw the consolidation of a consensus among Nazi policy makers. The struggle of the ethnocrats to bring some legalistic order to racial thinking is presented in such a matter-of-fact way that the underlying madness (and the black humour of it) is, if anything, more salient. Particularly the endless wrestling with how you define ‘Jew’, given that racial thinking required a hard-edged category that could not properly cope with the chaos of human diversity.

The operation of the ethnocrats Koonz characterises as “incremental radicalisation” (p.168). This followed from the logic of the thing, for the issue was to distinguish and separate Jews. The effect over time was to make such separation the salient public policy issue and to find ways to effect that. The final separation being, of course, extermination: if a people’s interaction with others is defined as “the problem”, then it is a problem that can only be finally solved by getting rid of them. A religious Jew-hatred could rely on conversion or expulsion. A racial Jew-hatred was left with only expulsion or slaughter.

The madness is even more salient when one considers that even the most expansive definition (one Jewish grandparent) led to a total of 800,000 Jews in the entire Reich, a tiny percentage of the 65 million population of the Reich (p.169). But, of course, that huge disparity generates its own logic: Jews “had” to be some “great corrupting threat” otherwise it was a small minority being monstrously brutalised and bullied by a huge majority—hence exactly the same logic is demonstrated in contemporary society in the dynamics of queer-hatred where they are castigated as some great corrupting threat.

Which is why contemporary accusations against queers replicate those against Jews: that they (or their quest for equality) undermines world peace (see above), are the gravest threat to the nation, are engaged in a conspiracy against Christianity and corrupt and pervert individuals and institutions. Republican Oklahoma state legislator Sally Kerns declared homosexuals a graver threat to the nation than terrorism or Islam:

"The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation, OK, it's just a fact," Rep. Sally Kern said recently to a gathering of fellow Republicans outside the Capitol. "Studies show no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted, you know, more than a few decades. So it's the death knell in this country. " "I honestly think it's the biggest threat that our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat,"

In the same month, the Catholic Bishop of Motherwell declared homosexuals were engaged in a conspiracy to destroy Christian values. That same-sex marriage would corrupt and pervert marriage and the family is a staple claim of opponents. For example, the Rev. James Dobson opining that:

Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth.

In a 28 May 1999 article in The Age, Cardinal Pell wrote against:

”those who work to win recruits for homosexual practice” and told us that “a deep homosexual orientation often brings suffering, but acting this out generally brings greater suffering, particularly when accompanied by adult seduction”.

The recycling of the same accusations against a religious/ethnic minority and a sexual minority tells us that the accusations have nothing to do with the accused and everything to do with the world-view and logic of exclusion.

Indeed, the laws being pushed by Christian preachers and politicians in Nigeria and in Uganda are, in fact, more vicious towards queers than the Nurembourg Laws were to the Jews. Koonz’s grasp of the nature and patterns of Nazism as a moral order is precisely what makes her historical study so revelatory.

There is an underlying grimness to Koonz’s exploration of the issues and processes involved in directing the policy of a modern state to deal with the problem of:

How could life be made intolerable for Jews in ways that met radicals’ expectations without alienating ordinary citizens. From 1933 through 1935, hundreds of memos and dozens of meetings debated possible answers. While appearing moderate, bureaucratic persecution turned out to be more pernicious than pogroms. Not only did its calm façade mislead victims into believing that the situation was less malign than it was, but policies backed by the state were far more thorough than sporadic violence (p.168).

One that mobilised over a million civil servants, tens of thousands of Nazi functionaries plus educators, lawyers, health care professionals and social worker with varying degrees of commitment to the Nazi project. Logic wrestled with obedience, reason with blatant ethnic particularism, citizen aversion to open violence with acquiescence in acts with the legitimacy of legality all resulted in a mass of inconsistencies foreign observers noted (Pp168ff). The lack of depth of feeling against Jews amongst the general German populace was a constant frustration that Nazi officials both wrestled and compromised with while seeking to inspire into deeper “racial feeling” (Pp178ff).

The result was a familiar conundrum to Nazi leaders:

unsanctioned anti-Jewish violence offended public opinion but moderation spawned disaffection among zealots (p.182).

Hitler’s solution was to preside over drift then suddenly—just before a scheduled Reichstag speech—he summoned three key policy makers to Nurembourg, ordered them to draft a comprehensive race law. They worked frantically, cobbled together some key paragraphs and, unable to agree on a definition of ‘Jew’, drafted four and left the decision to Hitler. Hitler referred to the laws only at the end of a meandering speech, attributed them to (Interior Minister) Frick and colleagues and asked Goring to read them—at which point Goebbels turned the radio broadcast to a march, so only the 500 or so Reichstag delegates in the hall actually heard the laws. But Hitler’s rejection of violence and endorsement of bureaucratic tactics was clear (Pp183-4).

He was, however, still wrestling with the problem of definition—specifically the issue of “mixed breeds”:

Hitler, as an ideologically driven autodidact, had little patience with ambiguity (p.185)

In internal policy discussions, Hitler nominated three solutions of emigration, sterilisation and assimilation but elaborated only on the third. The issue of trying to placate international opinion (particularly commercial ties) without creating too much frustration among Nazi activists continue to lead to various PR circumlocuations (Pp186ff).

Meanwhile, the ethnocrats wrestled with problems of definition under the new laws having discovered that, not only would they not be punished for their opinions, their opinions could actually influence policy (p.188). The process of enforcing the policy of racial separation became one for the orderly bureaucratic processes of the modern state: so orderly they attracted little outside notice and most of its practitioners suffered no ill-effects on their lives or careers when the Third Reich went crashing down. In the meantime:

ethnocrats accommodated themselves to a Nazi conscience appropriate to the tasks ahead. Old fighters and Hitler Youth destroyed Jews’ property: bureaucrats liquidated it. Over the next four years ethnocrats met the challenge as the term “liquidate” itself migrated from commerce in material goods to traffic in people (p.189).

What Koonz calls ‘the cold pogrom’ could be sold as an improvement, since outright violence decreased, which was reassuring to the general German public: a sign of Hitler’s sensitivity to public opinion.

Seeking respectability
So we come to “The Quest for a Respectable Racism”. Koonz makes the excellent point that the Reich Citizenship Law—part of the Nuremberg laws—by banning Jews from citizenship, imposed a civic death on them (p.190). The reduction in unsanctioned violence was helpful to the domestic and international image of the regime. But legality was accompanied by increased publication of anti-Semitic writings, reports and themes injected into public culture, giving ordinary Germans a framing in which to justify their own actions:

Germans made their peace with regulations against their Jewish fellow citizens … criminal laws became part of a mirage of law and order, and the perception gradually took hold that Jews were strangers in their own homeland (p.192)

Again, a pattern that occurs elsewhere—as revealed in philosopher Richard Mohr’s comment that:

unenforced sodomy laws are the chief systematic way that society as a whole tells gays they are scum.

“Unnatural”, “against God”, “enemy of the Volk” are just different ways of saying that your existence is an offence against some absolutely trumping moral authority against which no human claims have standing. In our own societies, Catholic theorists such as Finnis, George and Feser continue to produce works based on a view of “human flourishing” utterly uninterested in inconvenient human experience except as manifestations of aberration to be rejected. But these patterns go deep: it was a Jewish philosopher who was the source of the notion of purifying extermination entering Christian civilisation while St Augustine—in his theology of the Jews—was the archetypal theorist of dhimmitude, of fellow monotheists as people who were permitted to survive, but not thrive, with the ultimate aim being conversion.

The German economy was aggressively “Aryanised”: partly through confiscation and boycotts and partly by the levers the new regulations gave to unscrupulous competitors. A steadily increasing acquiescence in Jews-as-irrevocable-others took hold of public and private life, leaving Jews more and more isolated.

Professors had been disproportionately supporters of the Nazi takeover and scholars stepped into the silences from Hitler to produce material “demonstrating” the danger than the Jews represented. The academics found that every discipline was being asked for what it could contribute:

Writing in 1951 about life in the Soviet sphere, Czeslaw Milosz described the moment at which intellectuals in a totalitarian regime realize that they must not merely offer generic praise but also swallow its nonsensical dogma … “in its entirety” (p.195).

A moment that came to the scholars of Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s when they realised that their research agendas were expected to conform to biological explanatory themes. The operation of Gleichschaltung in academe under the Nazis is much the same as pc-progressivism operates in much (though not all) of contemporary academe. As Koonz writes:

But denunciation meant exclusion from benefits, not prison (p.196).

Ironically, this was in the context of Heidegger’s thought being dismissed by Party apparatchiks as useless for National Socialism. Academic research included examination of the terrain (both human and physical) of the projected path of German lebensraum (p.199).

Koonz’s discussion of the spread of racial thinking in academe is reminiscent of the spread of postmodernist though in contemporary Western academe. The same mixture of genuine talent and careerist mediocrities, of scholarship producing jargon-despoiled nonsense that was nevertheless treating perfectly seriously by large numbers of people.

Much of what went on under the Nazi regime was much the same as under any Leninist regime, with the focus on ‘race’ rather than ‘class’ (so targeted at a much smaller percentage of the population). Since the Nazi regime was largely indifferent to ownership, the change was less dramatic, and the power of the regime less total, than in a Leninist takeover.

If the Jews were a danger due to their corrupting influence, then their social and physical isolation was not enough: their influence in the realm of ideas also had to be combated. Walter Frank expressed the dilemma:

The Jew is of alien blood and, as such, the enemy. There can be no German Jews. There are, however, millions of German Protestants and German Catholics living out the tradition of the Jewish people (p.207).

But if one was going to reject founding ideas—such as the liberal principles underpinning much law—then new principles had to be found, adopted and integrated. Scholars scoured archives for anti-Jewish ordinances and evidence of Jewish malfeasance while conferences and publications sought to “de-Judaizize” religious faith (Pp212ff).

This was not mere show: Nazi scholars and scholarship was taken seriously at the time. Alas, the facts did not turn out to be easily marshalled into racial “science” (Pp215-6). Koonz takes us through these empirical failures and their failure to derail the enterprise. One technique was simple ignorance—so Heidegger would lament the poor quality of Nazi scholarship in his own discipline, but laud it in others of which he knew little (p.216)—again, a pattern not unheard of in our own time. Another was faith what it was just “part of the process” of developing a new intellectual paradigm. Besides, as long as one did not contradict racial dogma or challenge Hitler’s authority, academics had considerable intellectual freedom. The rare purge victim generally involved sexual, not intellectual, pretexts (Pp216-7).

However much of an intellectual failure it was in the end, this scholarly industry nevertheless had its effects:

The apparently objective stereotypes about Jewish nature produced by antisemitic research contributed to Germans’ clear conscience as they decided not to return a Jewish friend’s greeting, not to shop at Jewish-owned stores, not to shelter a neighbor whose property was Aryanised, or not to comfort an ostracized Jewish pupil (p.218).

Again, anti-queer activism is assiduous in trying to generate “scientific” support for its claims for somewhat similar purposes (without anywhere near the same level of state support, however).

Koonz concludes with examples of how this “respectable” anti-Semitism produced alibis for Germans after the war—they had nothing to do with all the violence and killings—while its notions of a malevolent Jewish identity clearly persisted, as she demonstrates from quotes from “respectable” Germans decades after the end of the Nazi regime (Pp218ff).


This review will be oncluded in my next post.