by John Gray
Unlike his early intellectual idol Arthur Schopenhauer, who turned his back on Christianity and mounted a devastating criticism of modern humanism, Nietzsche never escaped from the Christian-humanist world-view he attacked. His idea of the Superman shows him trying to construct a new redemptive myth that would give meaning to history in much the same way that other Enlightenment thinkers did. But as the fin de siècle Viennese wit Karl Kraus observed, ‘The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes man.’42 The idea of the Übermensch is an exaggerated version of modern humanism and shows what Nietzsche had in common not only with the Nazis but also with Lenin and Trotsky.
The links between liberal values and the Enlightenment that many people today are keen to stress are more tenuous than they believe. Voltaire may be the exemplary Enlightenment thinker.43 Yet he saw the liberal state as only one of the vehicles through which human progress could be achieved; in many circumstances, he believed, enlightened despotism was more effective. For Voltaire as for many other Enlightenment thinkers, liberal values are useful when they promote progress, irrelevant or obstructive when they do not. Of course there are many conceptions of progress. Among Enlightenment thinkers of the Left, liberal society was seen as a valuable stage on the way to a higher phase of human development, while among Enlightenment thinkers of the Right it was viewed as a condition of chaos that at best served as a transition point from one social order to another. For Marx, progress was conceived in terms that applied to humankind as a whole, while for those Enlightenment thinkers who subscribed to ‘scientific racism’ it excluded most of the species. Either way, liberal values were destined for the rubbish heap.
The French Positivists were among the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, and they were thoroughgoing anti-liberals.44 The founders of Positivism, Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, looked forward to a society akin to that which existed (they imagined) in the Middle Ages, but based on science rather than revealed religion. Saint-Simon and Comte viewed history as a process in which humanity passed through successive stages – from the religious to the metaphysical, and then on to the scientific or ‘positive’. In this process there were ‘organic’ and ‘critical’ phases – times when well-ordered societies existed and times when society was in chaos and disarray. The liberal era belonged in the latter category. Saint-Simon and Comte were bitterly hostile to liberalism, and they transmitted this animus to generations of radical thinkers on the Right and the Left. The society of the future would be technocratic and hierarchical. It would be held together by a new religion – the Religion of Humanity, in which the human species would be worshipped as the Supreme Being.
It may seem that the Positivists diverged from the mainstream of Enlightenment thinking – for example, in their admiration for the medieval Church.45 But what they admired in the Church was not the faith it embodied. It was the Church’s power in unifying society, which the Religion of Humanity tried (without success) to emulate. They believed the growth of knowledge was the driving force of ethical and political progress and celebrated science and technology for expanding human power. Rejecting traditional religions they founded a humanist cult of reason. This was the creed of the eighteenth-century philosophes restated for the nineteenth century. If the Positivists were distinctive it was not in their attitude to religion –many Enlightenment savants including Voltaire cherished the absurd project of a ‘rational religion’ – but in their belief that, as human knowledge advanced, human conflict would wither away. Science would reveal the true ends of human action, and – though why this was so was never explained – they would be found to be harmonious. This was the archetypal utopian idea in a modern guise, and it was vastly influential. In the late nineteenth century it shaped Marx’s view that under communism the government of men would be replaced by the administration of things. It inspired Herbert Spencer’s dream of a future society based on laissez-faire industrialism, and in a later version it inspired Hayek’s delusive vision of a spontaneous social order created by the free market.
In the early twentieth century Positivist ideas were embraced by the far Right. Charles Maurras, the anti-Semitic ideologue of the Vichy regime, was a lifelong admirer of Comte. The Positivists were committed to developing a science of society and invented the term ‘sociology’; but they were insistent that such a science must be based in human physiology. Like many Enlightenment thinkers at the time, Comte was a devotee of phrenology – the nineteenth-century pseudo-science that claimed to be able to identify the mental and moral faculties of people and their tendency to criminality by studying the shape of their skulls – and believed that physiological characteristics can explain much of human behaviour. This was also the view of the founder of modern psychology, Francis Galton, who was a strong supporter of positive eugenics. In criminology, similar views were advanced by Cesare Lombroso, who developed a pseudo-science of ‘craniometry’ based on skull and facial contours to assist courts in their deliberations about guilt and innocence At this point we are not far from Nazi ‘racial science’.
Ideas of natural human inequality are not aberrations in the western tradition. A general, though not specifically racist, belief that humans are divided into distinct groups with innately unequal abilities goes back to Aristotle, who defended slavery on the ground that some humans are born natural slaves. For Aristotle hierarchy in society was not – as the ancient Greek Sophists argued – a product of power and convention. Every living thing had a natural purpose that dictated what it needed to flourish. The natural end of humanity was philosophical inquiry, but only a very few humans – male property-owning Greeks – were suited to this activity, and the mass of humanity –women, slaves and barbarians – would flourish as their instruments. The best life was for the few and the rest were ‘living tools’.
If the belief in innate human inequality reaches back to classical Greek philosophy, it was revived in the Enlightenment, when it began to take on some of the qualities of racism. John Locke was a Christian committed to the idea that humans are created equal, but he devoted a good deal of intellectual energy to justifying the seizure of the lands of indigenous people in America. Richard Popkin writes:
Locke, who was one of the architects of English colonial policy – he drafted the Constitution of the Carolinas, for example – saw Indians and Africans as failing to mix their labours with the land. As a result of this failing they had no right to property. They had lost their liberty ‘by some Act that deserves Death’ (opposing the Europeans) and hence could be enslaved.46
A number of Enlightenment luminaries were explicit in expressing their belief in natural inequality, with some claiming that humanity actually comprised several different species. Voltaire subscribed to a secular version of the pre-Adamite theory advanced by some Christian theologians that suggested that Jews were pre-Adamites, remnants of an older species that existed before Adam was created. It was Immanuel Kant – after Voltaire the supreme Enlightenment figure and, unlike Voltaire, a great philosopher – who more than any other thinker gave intellectual legitimacy to the concept of race. Kant was in the forefront of the science of anthropology that was emerging in Europe and maintained that there are innate differences between the races. While he judged whites to have all the attributes required for progress towards perfection, he represents Africans as being predisposed to slavery, observing in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), ‘The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.’47 Asians, on the other hand, he viewed as civilized but static – a view that John Stuart Mill endorsed when in On Liberty (1859) he referred to China as a stagnant civilization, declaring: ‘… they have become stationary – have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be improved it must be by foreigners’.48 Here Mill echoed the view of India held by his father, James Mill, who argued in his History of British India that the inhabitants of the sub-continent could only achieve progress by abandoning their languages and
religions. A similar picture of India was presented by Marx, who defended colonial rule as a means of overcoming the torpor of village life. Whether the disabilities of other peoples were innate (as was believed in the case of Africans) or due to cultural backwardness (as was supposed to be true of Asians), the remedy was the same. All had to be turned into Europeans, if necessary by force.
Beliefs of this kind are found in many Enlightenment thinkers. It is frequently argued on their behalf that they were creatures of their time, but it is hardly a compelling defence. These Enlightenment thinkers not only voiced the prejudices of their age – a failing for which they might be forgiven were it not for the fact that they so often claimed to be much wiser than their contemporaries – they also claimed the authority of reason for them. Before the Enlightenment, racist attitudes rarely aspired to the dignity of theory. Even Aristotle, who defended slavery and the subordination of women as part of the natural order, did not develop a theory that maintained that humanity was composed of distinct and unequal racial groups. Racial prejudice may be immemorial, but racism is a product of the Enlightenment.
Many of those who subscribed to a belief in racial inequality believed that social reform could compensate for the innate disadvantages of inferior breeds. Ultimately all human beings could participate in the universal civilization of the future – but only by giving up their own ways of life and adopting European ways. This was ‘a form of liberal racism, making the best of European experience the model for everyone, and the eventual perfection of mankind consisting in everyone becoming creative Europeans’.49 Liberal racism left open the possibility of the forcible destruction of other cultures, and even – if all else failed – genocide. If any culture resisted it would be an obstacle to the coming universal civilization. In that case it would be an obstacle to progress and a candidate for elimination. When H. G. Wells asked himself what would be the fate in the World-State of the ‘swarms of black and yellow and brown people who do not come into the needs of efficiency’ he replied: ‘Well, the world is not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, I take it, is that they have to go.’50 Among progressive thinkers at the time, such ideas were commonplace. The peculiar achievement of Enlightenment racism was to give genocide the blessing of science and civilization. Mass murder could be justified by faux-Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest, and the destruction of entire peoples could be welcomed as a part of the advance of the species.
Nazi policies of extermination did not come from nowhere. They drew on powerful currents in the Enlightenment and used as models policies in operation in many countries, including the world’s leading liberal democracy. Programmes aiming to sterilize the unfit were underway the United States. Hitler admired these programmes and also admired America’s genocidal treatment of indigenous peoples: he ‘often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the “Red Savages” who could not be tamed by captivity’.51 The Nazi leader was not unusual in holding these views. Ideas of ‘racial hygiene’ were by no means confined to the far Right. A belief in positive eugenics as a means to progress was widely accepted. As Richard Evans has put it:
Seeing that Hitler offered them a unique opportunity to put their ideas into practice, leading racial hygienists began to bring their doctrines into line with those of the Nazis in areas where they had so far failed to conform. A sizeable majority, to be sure, were too closely associated with political ideas and organizations on the left to survive as members of the Racial Hygiene Society … Writing personally to Hitler in April 1933, Alfred Ploetz, the moving spirit of the eugenics movement for the past forty years, explained that since he was now in his seventies, he was too old to take a leading part in the practical implementation of the principles of racial hygiene in the new Reich, but he gave his backing to the Reich Chancellor’s policies all the same.52
There were many who shared the Nazi belief in ‘racial science’. The Nazis were distinctive chiefly in the extremity of their ambitions. They wanted an overhaul of society in which traditional values were destroyed. Whatever the conservative groups that initially supported Hitler may have hoped, Nazism never aimed to restore a traditional social order. Defeatist European intellectuals who saw it as a revolutionary movement – such as Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, the French collaborator who praised the Nazis for what they had in common with the Jacobins53 – were nearer the mark. The Nazis wanted a permanent revolution in which different social groups and branches of government competed with one another in a parody of Darwinian natural selection. But – as with the Bolsheviks – Nazi goals went beyond any political transformation. They included the use of science to produce a mutation in the species.
The eighty thousand inmates of mental hospitals who were killed by gassing were murdered in the name of science. The thousands of gay men who ended up in concentration camps (where around half of them perished54) were classified as incorrigible degenerates. ‘Criminal biologists’ had long categorized the quarter of a million Gypsies who perished during the Nazi period as belonging to a dangerous racial type. The belief that Slavs also belonged to an inferior racial group allowed the Nazis to view with equanimity the vast loss of life they inflicted in Poland, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
Without doubt ‘racial science’ opened the way for the Nazis’ supreme crime. The theory that humanity was divided into distinct racial groups that ought not to intermarry gave the imprimatur of reason to fantasies of pollution. The idea that these groups were innately unequal sanctioned the enslavement of those deemed to belong on the lower rungs of the hierarchy. Without the construction of race as a scientific category the project of annihilating European Jewry could scarcely have been formulated. Anti-Semitism is coeval with the appearance of Christianity as a distinct religion: Jews were persecuted from the time of Rome’s conversion from paganism and throughout the Christian Middle Ages, while medieval anti-Semitism was reproduced in the Reformation by Luther. However, while anti-Semitism has ancient Christian roots, the project of exterminating Jews is modern. If the Holocaust required modern technology and the modern state in order to be executed, it also required the modern idea of race to be conceived.
Hitler’s goal of exterminating the Jews could not have been formulated without using ideas derived from a modern pseudo-science. Even so, it is impossible to account for the Holocaust solely in terms of racist ideology. No other group was selected for complete extermination, and none was hunted down with such systematic intensity. Whether they were Yiddish poets or medical doctors, university professors or Hasidic teachers, scientists or artists, tradesmen and merchants, men, women or children, Jews were threatened and stigmatized, driven from civil life and their property stolen, beaten and murdered in state-inspired violence, consigned to concentration camps and finally singled out for a fate no other section of humanity has had to suffer.
If a historical comparison can be made, it is with the attribution of demonic power to Jews in medieval Europe. As Norman Cohn has put it, ‘the drive to exterminate the Jews sprang from a quasi-demonological superstition.’55 A belief in the diabolical powers of Jews was a major feature in the millenarian mass movements of the late Middle Ages. Jews were shown in pictures as devils with the horns of a goat, while attempts were made by the Church to force Jews to wear horns on their hats. Satan was given what were considered to be Jewish features and described as ‘the father of the Jews’. Synagogues were believed to be places where Satan was worshipped in the form of a cat or a toad. Jews were seen as agents of the Devil, whose goal was the destruction of Christendom, even of the world. Documents such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a hugely influential forgery that probably emanated from the foreign branch of the Tsarist secret service – reproduced these fantasies and turned them into a paranoid vision of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
The singularity of the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews comes not only f
rom the scale of the crime but also from the extremity of its goal. Jews were seen as the embodiment of evil and their extermination as a means of saving the world. Nazi anti-Semitism was a fusion of a modern racist ideology with a Christian tradition of demonology. Eschatological myth and perverted science came together to produce a crime without precedent in history.
Like the millenarian movements of medieval times, Nazism emerged against a background of social disruption. Mass unemployment, hyperinflation and the humiliating impact of the Great War produced a wrenching sense of insecurity and loss of identity among Germans. As Michael Burleigh has written, the 1914–18 conflict
… created the emotional effervescence which Emil Durkheim regarded as integral to religious experience. The Great War and its disturbed aftermath led to an intensified revival of this pseudo-religious strain in politics, which exerted its maximum appeal in times of extreme crisis, just as medieval millenarians, or the belief that the thousand-year interval before the Day of Judgement was at hand, had thrived before in times of sudden change and social dislocation.56
The similarities between Nazism and medieval millenarianism were recognized by a number of observers at the time. Eva Klemperer, the wife of the philologist and diarist Victor Klemperer, compared Hitler with John of Leyden, and so did Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, the aristocratic author of an anti-Nazi book entitled History of a Mass Lunacy, published in 1937.57 Around the same time the British foreign correspondent F. A. Voigt identified the central role of eschatology in Nazism:
