The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Russell went on, ‘I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value [Inge’s argument], this is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.’111 Again, there was no reference to Freud.

  A quite different line of attack on science came from Spain, from José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930. Ortega was professor of philosophy at the University of Madrid, and his main thesis was that society was degenerating, owing to the growth of mass-man, the anonymous, alienated individual of mass society, this growth itself of course due in no small measure to scientific advances. For Ortega, true democracy occurred only when power was voted to a ‘super minority.’ What in fact was happening, he said, was ‘hyper-democracy,’ where average man, mediocre man, wanted power, loathed everyone not like himself and so promoted a society of ‘homogenised … blanks.’ He blamed scientists in particular for the growth of specialisation, to the point where scientists were now ‘learned ignoramuses,’ who knew a lot about very little, focusing on their own small areas of interest at the expense of the wider picture. He said he had found such scientists ‘self-satisfied,’ examples of a very modern form of degeneration, which helped account for the growing absence of culture he saw encroaching all around him.

  Ortega y Gasset was a sort of cultural social Darwinist, or Nietzschean. In The Dehumanisation of Art, he argued that it was ‘the essential function of modern art to divide the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot.’112 He thought that art was a means by which the elite, ‘the privileged minority of the fine senses,’ could recognise themselves and distinguish themselves from the ‘drab mass of society,’ who are the ‘inert matter of the historical process.’ He believed that the vulgar masses always wanted the man behind the poet and were rarely interested in any purely aesthetic sense (Eliot would have been sympathetic here). For Ortega y Gasset, science and mass society were equally inimical to ‘fine’ things.

  With fascism on the rise in Germany and Italy, and the West in general beset by so many problems, people began to look to Soviet Russia to examine an alternative system of social organisation, to see whether the West could learn anything. Many Western intellectuals, such as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, paid visits to Russia in the 1920s and ‘30s, but the most celebrated at the time was the journey by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose account of their visit, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? was published in 1935.

  Well before the book appeared, the Webbs had a profound influence on British politics and society and were very well connected, with friends such as the Balfours, the Haldanes, the Dilkes, and the Shaws.113 Sidney Webb became a cabinet minister in both interwar Labour governments, and the couple formed one of the most formidable intellectual partnerships ever (Sidney was once called ‘the ablest man in England’).114 They founded the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1896, and the New Statesman in 1913, and were instrumental in the creation of the welfare state and in developing the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation that believed in the inevitability of gradual change. They were the authors, either singly or jointly, of nearly a hundred books and pamphlets, including The Eight Hours Day, The Reform of the Poor Law, Socialism and Individualism, The Wages of Men and Women: Should They Be Equal? and The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation. Committed socialists all their lives, the Webbs met when Beatrice wanted someone to help her study the co-op movement and a friend suggested Sidney. Lisanne Radice, the Webbs’ biographer, makes the point that, on the whole, Sidney and Beatrice were more successful together, as organisers and theoreticians, than he was as a practical politician, in the cabinet. Their prolific writings and their uncompromising socialist views meant that few people were indifferent to them. Leonard Woolf liked them, but Virginia did not.115

  The Webbs went to Russia in 1932, when they were both already in their mid-seventies. Beatrice instigated the visit, feeling that capitalism was in terminal decay and that Russia might just offer an alternative. In their books, the Webbs had always argued that, contrary to Marx, socialism could arrive gradually, without revolution; that through reason people could be convinced, and equality would evolve (this was the very essence of Fabianism). But with fascism on the rise, she and Sidney felt that if capitalism could be swept away, so too could Fabianism.116 In these circumstances, Russian collective planning became more viable. At the end of 1930 Beatrice began reading Russian literature, her choice being assisted by the Soviet ambassador to London and his wife. Almost immediately Beatrice made a note in her diary: ‘The Russian Communist government may still fail to attain its end in Russia, as it will certainly fail to conquer the world with a Russian brand of Communism, but its exploits exemplify the Mendelian view of sudden jumps in biological evolution as against the Spencerian vision of slow adjustment.’ (The social Darwinist Herbert Spencer had been a close friend of Beatrice’s father.) A year later, just before her trip, Beatrice wrote the words that were to be remembered by all her detractors: ‘In the course of a decade, we shall know whether American capitalism or Russian communism yields the better life for the bulk of the people … without doubt, we are on the side of Russia.’117

  The Russia the Webbs set foot in in 1932 was near the end of the first Five–Year Plan, which Stalin had introduced in 1929 to force through rapid industrialisation and rural collectivisation. (Such plans were popular just then: Roosevelt introduced his New Deal in 1933, and in 1936 Germany brought in the four-year Schacht plan for abolishing unemployment by expanding public works). Stalin’s ‘plan’ led directly to the extermination of a million kulaks, mass deportation and famine; it extended the grip of the OGPU, the secret police, a forerunner of the KGB, and vitiated the power of trade unions by the introduction of internal passports, which restricted people’s movement. There were achievements – education improved and was available to more children, there were more jobs for women – but, as Lisanne Radice describes it, the first Five-Year Plan, ‘stripped of its propaganda verbiage … foreshadowed a profound extension of the scope of totalitarian power.’118

  The Webbs, treated as important foreign guests, were kept well away from these aspects of Russia. They had a suite at the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad, so huge that Beatrice worried, ‘We seem to be a new kind of royalty.’ They saw a tractor plant at Stalingrad and a Komsomol conference. In Moscow they stayed in a guest house belonging to the Foreign Ministry, from where they were taken to schools, prisons, factories, and theatres. They went to Rostow, 150 miles northeast of Moscow, where they visited several collective farms. Dependent on interpreters for their interviews, the Webbs encountered only one failure, a motor plant that was not meeting its production targets, and the only statistics they managed to collect were provided by the government. Here were the founders of the LSE and the New Statesman accepting information from sources no self-respecting academic or journalist would dream of publishing without independent corroboration. They could have consulted Malcolm Muggeridge, the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in Moscow, who was married to Beatrice’s niece. But he was highly critical of the regime, and they took little notice of him. And yet, on their return, Beatrice wrote, ‘The Soviet government … represents a new civilisation … with a new outlook on life – involving a new pattern of behaviour in the individual and his relation to the community – all of which I believe is destined to spread to many other countries in the course of the next hundred years.’119

  In Lisanne Radice’s words, Soviet Communism: a new civilisation? was ‘monumental in conception, in scope, and in error of judgement.’120 The Webbs truly believed that Soviet communism was superior to the West because ordinary individuals had more opportunity to partake in the running of the country. Stalin was not a dictator to them, but the secretary of ‘a series of committees.’ The Communist Party, they said,
was dedicated to the removal of poverty, with party members enjoying ‘no statutory privileges.’ They thought OGPU did ‘constructive work.’ They changed the title of their book in later editions, first to Is Soviet Communism a New Civilisation? (1936), then Soviet Communism: Dictatorship or Democracy? (released later the same year) – suggesting a slight change of heart. But they were always reluctant to retract fully what they had written, even after the Stalinist show trials in the later 1930s. In 1937, the height of the terror, their book was republished as Soviet Communism: a new civilisation – i.e., without the question mark. On their forty-seventh wedding anniversary, in July 1939, Beatrice confided to her diary that Soviet Communism was ‘the crowning achievement of Our Partnership.’121 Dissatisfaction with the performance of capitalism led few people as far astray as it did the Webbs.

  Russian communism was one alternative to capitalism. Another was beginning to reveal itself in Germany, with the rising confidence of the Nazis. During the Weimar years, as we have seen, there was a continual battle between the rationalists – the scientists and the academics – and the nationalists – the pan-Germans, who remained convinced that there was something special about Germany, her history, the instinctive superiority of her heroes. Oswald Spengler had stressed in The Decline of the West how Germany was different from France, the United States and Britain, and this view, which appealed to Hitler, gained ground among the Nazis as they edged closer to power. In 1928 this growing confidence produced a book which, almost certainly, would never have found a publisher in Paris, London, or New York.

  The text was inflammatory enough, but the pictures were even more so. On one side of the page were reproductions of modern paintings by artists such as Amedeo Modigliani and Karl Schmidt-Rotduff, but on the other were photographs of deformed and diseased people – some with bulging eyes, others with Down’s syndrome, still others who had been born cretinous. The author of the book was a well-known architect, Paul Schultze-Naumburg; its title was Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race); and its thesis, though grotesque, had a profound effect on National Socialism.122 Schultze-Naumburg’s theory was that the deformed and diseased people shown in his book were the prototypes for many of the paintings produced by modern – and in particular, expressionist – artists. Schultze-Naumburg said this art was entartet — degenerate. His approach appears to have been stimulated by a scientific project carried out a few years earlier in the university town of Heidelberg, which had become a centre for the study of art produced by schizophrenics as a means of gaining access to the central problems of mental illness. In 1922 psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn had published his study Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Image-making by the Mentally 111), based on material he gathered by examining more than 5,000 works by 450 patients. The study, which demonstrated that the art of the insane exhibited certain qualities, received serious attention from critics well beyond the medical profession.123

  Art and Race caught Hitler’s attention because its brutal ‘theory’ suited his aims. From time to time he attacked modern art and modern artists, but like other leading Nazis, he was by temperament an anti-intellectual; for him, most great men of history had been doers, not thinkers. There was, however, one exception to this mould, a would-be intellectual who was even more of an outsider in German society than the other leading Nazis – Alfred Rosenberg.124 Rosenberg was born beyond the frontiers of the Reich. His family came from Estonia, which until 1918 was one of Russia’s Baltic provinces. There is some evidence (established after World War II) that Rosenberg’s mother was Jewish, but at the time no suspicion ever arose, and he remained close to Hitler for longer than many of their early colleagues. As a boy he was fascinated by history, especially after he encountered the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.125 Chamberlain was a renegade Englishman, an acolyte and relative by marriage of Wagner, who regarded European history ‘as the struggle of the German people against the debilitating influences of Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church’. When Rosenberg came across Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century on a family holiday in 1909, he was transformed. The book provided the intellectual underpinning of his German nationalistic feelings. He now had a reason to hate the Jews every bit as much as his experiences in Estonia gave him reason to hate the Russians. Moving to Munich after the Armistice in 1918, he quickly joined the NSDAP and began writing vicious anti-Semitic pamphlets. His ability to write, his knowledge of Russia, and his facility with Russian all helped to make him the party’s expert on the East; he also became editor of the Völkischer Beobachter (National Observer), the Nazi Party’s newspaper. As the 1920s passed, Rosenberg, together with Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler, began to see the need for a Nazi ideology that went beyond Mein Kampf. So in 1930 he published what he believed provided the intellectual basis for National Socialism. In German its tide was Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, usually translated into English as The Myth of the Twentieth Century.

  Mythus is a rambling and inconsistent book, and consequently hard to summarise. (One example of how obscure it was: a contemporary admirer published a glossary of 850 terms that needed explaining.) It conducts a massive assault on Roman Catholicism as the main threat to German civilisation. The text stretches to more than 700 pages, with the history of Germany and German art making up more than 60 percent of the book.126 The third section is entitled ‘The Coming Reich’; other parts deal with ‘racial hygiene,’ education, and religion, with international affairs at the end. Rosenberg argues that Jesus was not Jewish and that his message had been perverted by Paul, who was Jewish, and that it was the Pauline/Roman version that had forged Christianity into its familiar mould by ignoring ideas of aristocracy and race and creating fake doctrines of original sin, the afterlife, and hell as an inferno, all of which beliefs, Rosenberg thought, were ‘unhealthy.’

  Rosenberg’s aim – and at this distance his audacity is breathtaking – was to create a substitute faith for Germany. He advocated a ‘religion of the blood’ which, in effect, told Germans that they were members of a master race, with a ‘race-soul.’ Rosenberg appropriated famous German figures from the past, such as the painter Meister Eckhart and the religious leader Martin Luther, who had resisted Rome, though here again he only used those parts of the story that suited his purpose. He quoted the works of the Nazis’ chief academic racialist, H. F. K. Guenther, who ‘claimed to have established on a scientific basis the defining characteristics of the so-called Nordic-Aryan race’. As with Hitler and others before him, Rosenberg did his best to establish a connection to the ancient inhabitants of India, Greece, and Germany, and he brought in Rembrandt, Herder, Wagner, Frederick the Great, and Henry the Lion, to produce an entirely arbitrary but nonetheless heroic history specifically intended to root the NSDAP in the German past.

  For Rosenberg, race – the religion of the blood – was the only force that could combat what he saw as the main engines of disintegration – individualism and universalism. ‘The individualism of economic man,’ the American ideal, he dismissed as ‘a figment of the Jewish mind to lure men to their doom.’127 At the same time he had to counter the universalism of Rome, and in creating his own new religion certain Christian symbols had to go, including the crucifix. If Germans and Germany were to be renewed after the chaos of military defeat, ‘the Crucifix was too powerful a symbol to permit of change.’ By the same token, ‘The Holy Land for Germans,’ Rosenberg wrote, ‘is not Palestine…. Our holy places are certain castles on the Rhine, the good earth of Lower Saxony and the Prussian fortress of Marienburg.’ In some respects, the Mythus fell on fertile ground. The ‘religion of the blood’ fitted in well with new rituals, already developing among the faithful, whereby Nazis who had been killed early on in the ‘struggle’ were proclaimed ‘martyrs’ and were wrapped in flags that, once tainted with their blood, became ‘blood flags’ and were paraded as totems, used in ceremonies to dedicate other flags. (Another invented tradition was for party members to shout out ‘Here’ when the names of the dead were read out
during roll call.) Hitler, however, seems to have had mixed feelings about the Mythus. He held on to the manuscript for six months after Rosenberg submitted it to him, and publication was not sanctioned until 15 September 1930, after the Nazi Party’s sensational victory at the polls. Perhaps Hitler had put off approving the book until the party was strong enough to risk losing the support of Roman Catholics that would surely follow publication. The book sold 500,000 copies, but that means little, as all secondary schools and institutes of higher education were forced to buy copies.128

  If Hitler did delay publication because of the effect Mythus might have on Catholics, he was being no more than realistic. The Vatican was incensed by its argument and, in 1934, placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books. Cardinal Schulte, archbishop of Cologne, set up a ‘Defence Staff of seven young priests, who worked round the clock to list the many errors in the text. These were published in a series of anonymous pamphlets printed simultaneously in five different cities to evade the Gestapo. The most brutal use of the book was as a tool to expose priests: Catholic Nazis were ordered to refer to the Mythus in the confessional, and then denounce any priest who was so duped into criticising the ideology of the NSDAP.129 For a time it seems that Rosenberg truly believed that a new religion was coming into being – he told Hermann Goring as much in August 1939. Within a month, however, Germany was at war, and after that the impact of the Mythus was patchy. Rosenberg himself remained popular with Hitler, and when the war began, he was given his own unit, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, charged with looting art.