John Gray gives the Enlightenment a damn good thrashing
John Gray has a burr up his ass about the Enlightenment.
Central and Eastern Europe was a morass of ethnic enmities, and in Germany the Nazis were implementing their poisonous mix of nationalism and racism. Was this just a detour in the onward march to a brave new world where everyone will be treated equally? Or did it – as Roth suspected – reveal a darker side of modernity? There can be no doubt about Kenan Malik’s view. A pious disciple of the Enlightenment, though not untroubled by the doubts that can afflict any believer, he cannot tolerate the thought that some of the last century’s worst atrocities were by-products of modern Enlightenment thinking…Nazism – though it drew on some strands of Counter-Enlightenment thought and mobilised the prejudices of Christian anti-Semitism – was able to make use of a tradition of “scientific racism” that belongs squarely within the Enlightenment. The darkness that settled on Europe between the wars was not a reversion to medievalism. In crucial respects, it was peculiarly modern.
Well of course it was, but was it a necessary product of the Enlightenment? No. The darkness that settled on Europe between the wars was a very contingent sort of darkness; a lot of factors caused it and it wasn’t inevitable.
A belief in science and progress is part of the Enlightenment creed. So why does Malik resist the conclusion that these racists were, despite the ersatz character of their so-called science, Enlightenment thinkers?
Because belief in science and progress is only part of the Enlightenment ‘creed’? Because ersatz science doesn’t make anyone an Enlightenment thinker? Those would be a couple of my reasons, anyway.
When Roth mourned the demise of the Habsburgs, communists and liberals ridiculed his attachment to a pre-modern imperial structure. Yet it was Roth, not the progressive thinkers of the day, who foresaw the horrors that would come from its collapse. There is a lesson here, but it is not one that Malik – for whom progress and modernity are articles of secular faith – can be expected to learn.
Pious, doubts, believer, belief, creed, faith – he got quite a few variations on that – very stale by now – joke about secular religion. Me, I prefer people who prefer progress and modernity to those who prefer the other thing.
He has a point on the dangers self-determination, but I think he is wrong to attribute it to the enlightenment.
Just because some particular romantic notion has infected the thinking of most liberals, that doesn’t make the enlightenment responsible.
Unless he is holding the enlightenment responsible for the counter-enlightenment which would be a bit harsh.
I’d love to know by what criteria he’s decided that just *some* “strands of anti-enlightenment thinking” were present in Nazism, and also how he can justify the implication that Christian antisemitism wasn’t intrinsic to Nazism, no, it just *mobilised* it. It boggles my mind that someone can look at Nazism and say “yup, that’s enlightenment thinking that is. Sorry, what, Hitler ranted at length about glorifying God through massacring Jews? Hero was Martin Luther? Nope, enlightenment thinking. *Definitely*.”
John Gray has been pontificating on this subject for two or three decades. He’s never particularly consistent, for he seems, really, to think it’s a great thing that religion is making a come-back, yet secular ‘faith’ takes such a drubbing in everything he writes. It is an antidote to modernism, from his point of view. I first encountered John Gray in his book “Straw Dogs.” which went some way towards ruining a perfectly good holiday back in 2002.
But what Gray doesn’t seem to realise — possibly because he really knows so little history — is that Nazism was, arguably (see Jeffrey Herf’s “Reactionary Modernism”) a bundle of reactionary ideas wrapped up in modern technology. Herf describes the point of his book as follows: “Before and after the Nazi seizure of power, an important current within conservative and subsequently Nazi ideology, was a reconciliation between the antimodernist, romantic, and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism and the most obvious manifestation of means-end rationality, that is, modern technology.” (1)
Lots of people saw the conflagration coming — not only Roth — in fact, DH Lawrence, in one of his pieces from Germany in the 20’s, spoke about the new barbarism that seemed to be astir in Germany — but German barbarism didn’t result from the adoption of a modernist ‘creed’. It was precisely the reverse, the adoption of a strange, romantic amalgam of a nationalist (very often racial) dream with half absorbed ideas of science (and the race and eugenicist theories were a part of this crazy unscientific mix, however widely shared in late 19th-early 20th century Europe and America). (Heather Pringle’s rather light “The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust” gives the reader a pretty good idea of the loose grasp that Nazis had on science, though she seems not to realise it herself, since she thinks that the ability to misuse science is an aspect of science itself. Something similar could be said of Gray.)
What I cannot understand is why John Gray persists in spilling out this kind of idiocy, when a little Enlightenment thinking would quickly disabuse him of it.
“Totalitarianism is not about progress but stasis; it is not about realising a golden age but coercively sustaining the myth of one. This indeed is the lineament of religion: it is the opposite of secular progressivism.” – A.C. Grayling
Yes, that really is picking at a single thread in a cloth and trying to ignore the whole.
I liked this by him, though;
http://miscellaneous-sonstiges.blogspot.com/2008/05/modest-proposal-audio-mp3-interview.html
Is it just me, or is the Indy trying to usurp the Grauniad for the purveyor-of-unexpected-and-irritating-supernaturalist-drivel award?
That’s 3 mentions on B&W in a relatively short space of time…
Someone should warn the Graun that “Comment is free” is in danger of losing its crown.
:-)
Perhaps we should give Mr Gray a copy of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium to review for a somewhat different perspective, though I gather medievalists are a bit sniffy towards it.
Exelent post Eric,its a shame that J.P hadnt read it before he posted the silly Hitler was a christian type comment.
But Richard, nothing in Eric’s comments refutes the fact that Hitler was a Christian – because he was in fact a self-declared Christian, and Martin Luther was one of his heroes. Moreover, the list of adjectives Herf applies to German nationalism are every bit as well-suited to describing Christian ideology, which is certainly full to overflowing with “antimodernist, romantic, and irrationalist ideas.” Herf’s argument that Nazism wasn’t a product of modernity or Enlightment values, but rather was a product of more conservative prior ideologies, does not in any way refute or deny or undermine the essential compatibility of Christianity and Nazism: Where do you think those older conservative values were rooted? In practice most Nazis were Christians and many individual clergy as well as religious institutions wholly supported the Third Reich; and in theory there was very little in German Christian ideology that in any way opposed to Nazi ideology or actions. Go read anything Martin Luther had to say about Jews to understand why I say that.
G. Erics posts mkes it clear that Hitlers ideology was a mixture of several different things,it is a ludicrous over simplification to sugest that because he admired Martin Luther ect (as J.P does) he was religiously motivated. Hitler used christianity in the same way he used German nationalism to apeal to as many people as posible,as soon as christianity became of no use to him he became extremely hostile towards it.
G. I am not denying that there was a large amount of anti semetism in German christianity or christianity throughout Europe (and the U.S. as well)in general, but what I will not acept is this notion of it being a strong influence on Hitler and the nazis. The nazis were nominaly christian in much the same way that I am nominamly christian or anyone who lives in a predominantly christian society. Hitlers anti semetism was far more inspired by what he saw as Germany,s defeat in W.W.1 that he blamed on back stabbing Jews,he saw the Jews as a people that because they were living in a diaspora situation could never be relied apon to be loyal to Germany. Other nazi,s probably did hate the Jews for religious reasons.
“Hitlers anti semetism was far more inspired by what he saw as Germany,s defeat in W.W.1 that he blamed on back stabbing Jews”
And _why_ did he blame it on the Jews?
Take your pick:
Winston Churchill, 1940:
“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. … Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.'”
Adolf Hitler, 1938:
‘At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will– not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord…’
[other similar quotes at http://www.evilbible.com/hitler_was_christian.htm%5D
Sorry, Richard, could you point out where exactly I said that Hitler was motivated *exclusively* by religion? And evidence for Hitler becoming extremely hostile towards Christianity itself? Are you talking end-of-war drugged-up bunker Hitler or what? How exactly is it an over simplification to suggest he was religiously motivated? How about *your* ludicrous oversimplification that one can just a priori eliminate religious motivation on his part? Do you honestly want me to start quoting Mein Kampf?
I really don’t get the absurdly high standard of evidence that otehrwise reasonable people seem to have in regards to Hitler’s religiosity. You have someone raised in a predominantly Christian country, and by whose own writings clearly believed in the Judeo-Christian god. What else would you call somebody like that but Christian?
Sorry, Richard, could you point out where exactly I said that Hitler was motivated *exclusively* by religion? And evidence for Hitler becoming extremely hostile towards Christianity itself? Are you talking end-of-war drugged-up bunker Hitler or what? How exactly is it an over simplification to suggest he was religiously motivated? How about *your* ludicrous oversimplification that one can just a priori eliminate religious motivation on his part? Do you honestly want me to start quoting Mein Kampf?
I really don’t get the absurdly high standard of evidence that otehrwise reasonable people seem to have in regards to Hitler’s religiosity. You have someone raised in a predominantly Christian country, and by whose own writings clearly believed in the Judeo-Christian god. What else would you call somebody like that but Christian?
Bugger, double post, sorry
On reflection I probably owe a bit of a mea culpa here for mentioning Hitler specifically in the first place rather than keeping it to Nazism as a whole, given the likelihood of the discussion being derailed.
Andy Gilmour 01:31:05
Are you kidding ? CiF has had about seven gazillion articles on woo in the last couple of weeks. It’s been all ‘sharia law this’, ‘women priests’ that, ‘church schools the other’.
The best comment I have seen there was “it all boils down to this: are you for baby Jesus or against him ?”
Splendid.
The whole trouble with this debate is that “science” is being applied to social studies, and this is entirely inappropriate. Actually, what is happening is that social studies has tried to appropriate scientific methods, and have demonstrated that they are not applicable to social issues. This is because real science is about studying phenomena, and making measurable, falsifiable predicions about future events. Social studies are not able to make such predictions, except in such vague ways that they are really not measurable or reproduceable(sp?).
“Science” has been mis-appropriated by people who do social work because they think it will somehow make there conclusions easier to defend. They do not, and they cannot follow the scientific method.
Wait, I take it back – there have been , I believe, four real “social experiments”, involving variations of social systems among arguably identical base social units: (1) East vs West Germany, (2) North vs South Korea, (3) Taiwan vs China, (4) US vs USSR. These experiments tested the viability of capitalism vs comunism in different societies, at different scales, and starting with different levels of technological sophistication, and they all demonstrated that capitalism works to provide people with fundamental needs, while commnism does not. Unfortunately, communism was developed by social studies experts who thought that the world would work better if it was operated on “scientific” principles.
Now we have the deconstructionists trying to break down society into component parts, in much the way that physicists break down matter into smaller and smaller particles. Unfortunately, deconstructionists are only playing games with words – nothing they do is scientific.
I think there is quite a streak of envy in the non-scientific world about the way that scientists and engineers figure out how things work, to the extent that they can make stuff that people really want and need, while the social studies people are stuck in opinions and beliefs and doubts that can NEVER be “proven”, one way or another. So they just keep arguing with one another, into eternity.
What a waste of technology…
Yeah, boo politics, boo social studies, let’s let scientists and engineers run the world… Like Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Atta, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Yousef…
Yes, there are engineers who envy the non-technical side of society and the rewards there that few technical types ever see, and they have decided that they can do better by applying “science” and logic to governance, and they generally have been wrong. This proves my point that there is a LOT of human behavior that is not amenable to scientific inquiry. Maybe someday it might be, but that time is a long way away. My point is that attempts to justify policy positions based on pseudo-scientific “analyses” are making false claims about their rigor, and policies like this should only be considered to be subjective opinions, and not scientific “facts”.
I lived in DC under Marion Barry, who was a chemical engineer, and it was not pleasant. However, I understand that the current Chinese leaders are engineers, and they seem to be doing something right.
Finally, I would not want to trigger a Godwin’s law accusation, but I can think of some very bad leaders who took their inspirations and training from the arts and letters…
“the current Chinese leaders are engineers, and they seem to be doing something right.”
Ah yes – their policy on Darfur for example; very right indeed.
J.P Hitler murdered aprox 2.5 christians for every Jew that he killed although the impact on christians in general was far less than it was for jewish and gypsy people,s who were all but exterminated by the nazi,s. Although you did not use the term exclusive you did imply that Hitlers motivation was religious in nature. That said I agree that if you had used the term nazi,s rather than Hitler it would have not been an isue because Hitler had dozens of motivations (all of them barking mad)that led to his hatred of jews but it is not an unreasonable statement to say that a large number of nazi,s were motivated by their religion.
You mean it wasn’t?
hee hee
No no no, OB. The Qur’an was dictated directly to Muhammed by an angel acting at the direct behest of Allah.
Or so he claimed. And who are we to question?
And Richard, please don’t ever accuse anyone else of ludicrous oversimplification. Irony meters are expensive! I keep mine stored in the basement, but they still all exploded when that popped up on my computer screen…
Oh come on people. It’s simple. The Enlightenment was in the 18th century. Nazism was in the 20th century. Are you trying to tell me that the Nazis got nothing at all that they wouldn’t have gotten if the Enlightenment had never happened? Are you trying to tell me that they were, like, completely insulated from any possible influence of the Enlightenment? No? Well then!
[sits back triumphantly]
Eric J.P asked me to justify my statement about Hitler being hostile to christians hence my comment, I was not trying to equate the industrial slaughter of jews to the murder of christians. the industrial killing of at least 6 million jews and aprox 1.5 million gypsies is without paralell in human history. G. isnt that a bit of an over simplification?
Nice play acting, OB! And I’m sure that Gray is feeling quite chuffed putting it over on his readers once again. Do you really suppose he believes what he is writing?
But, of course, taking you au pied de la lettre, it is certain that Nazism could not have existed without the Enlightenment. But the core of Nazi ideology was a very strange amalgam of the romance of the ‘front generation’, the dream of Aryan biological syperiority, German myth and nationalism, economic woes and their racial solution, the willingness to use violence to settle political questions, and a willingness to rope in any scientific ideas that would serve their turn to make them stronger, or confirm their racial superiority. And don’t forget the Nazi emphasis on things like ‘family values’ too, which always comes up when Christians are worrying that the world is going to the dogs (when what they really mean is that it hasn’t stuck with the gods). John Gray suggests, however, that the whole amalgam was, taken overall, part of the Enlightenment project, which is a piece of nonsense all of a piece with Nazism itself.
Consider the quote you put up:
“A belief in science and progress is part of the Enlightenment creed. So why does Malik resist the conclusion that these racists were, despite the ersatz character of their so-called science, Enlightenment thinkers?”
Why not call them Enlightenment thinkers? Certainly, because belief in science is only part of the Enlightenment understanding of what ‘enlightenment’ (Aufklarüng) means, but more because ersatz science is not science. That’s not the way Aufklarüng works, and even Gray knows that. If they had been Enlightenment thinkers they’d have killed even more people than they did. (They seemed to stumble on more efficient ways of killing as they went along.) And they’d have found out more too, but their research was such a hit-and-miss affair, often based on the most outrageously assinine assumptions. How much of Nazi ‘medical’ experimentation on human beings is of value now? Practically none of it. Why? Because it was an ideological game of cruelty played with ‘subhuman’ species.
As to Hitler being hostile to Christians, Richard. Well, of course, he was, unless they agreed with him, and then they got on just fine. He was the saviour of Germany. You can’t be a saviour and be wrong. (Just as Jesus.) And the churches did their best to agree. As a result of the Concordat with the Vatican, the catholics disbanded the Centre Party, and the catholic youth groups. German Christians (protestants) turned their beliefs over to Nazi ideology. This didn’t mean that Hitler didn’t still find the churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church (and Bismarck taught him how to deal with that), to be unacceptable concentrations of power. Even the Confessing Church played its part in expressing its antisemitismus, Martin Niemoller, head of the World Council of Churches after the war, expressed terrible antisemitism before it. That Niemoller bought into it at all is a sign of how deep the rot had gone.
“If they had been Enlightenment thinkers they’d have killed even more people than they did.”
Eh?
At any rate, Gray’s bizarre rhetorical question simply deconstructs itself the instant it hits the screen.
A belief in science and progress is part of the Enlightenment ‘creed,’ which means that a belief in ersatz science is not, because ersatz science is not a kind of science, it’s fake science, which means it’s a negation, an anti-, an opposite, not an eccentric but still valid branch. So the whole silly question simply falls apart. Malik ‘resists’ Gray’s absurd conclusion because it’s absurd, that’s why.
Sure, that’s right, it was ersatz science, and that’s why the SS just stumbled onto ways of killing masses of people.
Hitler never thought things through. Neither did his henchmen. If they’d thought it through, experimented a bit, and then acted, they’d have been able to kill far more people. Shooting people costs bullets, takes time, and requires the stomach for it. Gassing people with carbon monoxide in gas vans is marginally more effective, in gas chambers a little more effective still. But Zyklon B in large gas chambers was more efficient altogether. But it was all done by the seat of the pants, not thoughtfully, just a sign of how completely inadequate Nazi thinking was. They couldn’t even use it when it concerned something at the very centre of their ideology. Fortunate in this case, no doubt, but what if people had been thinking from the start? That’s what I meant. Sorry to be obscure as well as repetitive.
Oh I see! Quite.
Yes…that’s one of the creepiest aspects of Holocaust historiography, I suppose: the detail about all the bungling at the start. All the frustrated military boffins in Poland writing to headquarters saying guys this isn’t going well at all, this is a cluster-fuck…
I do hate to point this out, but a statement like this:
“A belief in science and progress is part of the Enlightenment ‘creed,’ which means that a belief in ersatz science is not, because ersatz science is not a kind of science, it’s fake science, which means it’s a negation, an anti-, an opposite, not an eccentric but still valid branch”
is almost messianic in its belief in the historical actuality of ‘real’ science. Most thinkers of the actual Enlightenment who dabbled in science held views about nature, and human nature in particular, that were just flat wrong. Most thinkers who attempted to apply science to human social problems a century later were equally flat wrong – Lombroso, anyone?
And one can note that many of the scientists who forged a consensus against Nazi racial ‘science’ from the 1930s onwards did so because they opposed the politics of its proponents, not because they actually disagreed with the core conept of ‘race’ – see recent work by my colleague Gavin Schaffer.
Fortunately, as the scientific method has been applied critically over time, the flat wrongness of many beliefs and conclusions have been overturned. But at any given point in time, we have no way of knowing, in the absence of hindsight, which ‘scientifically-supported’ views will turn out to be flat wrong in the future.
But what I said doesn’t entail belief in any historical actuality of ‘real’ science. The first phrase is quoting Gray, and I’m simply saying that a belief in ersatz science is a negation of this putative creed. But I’m not convinced that there is any such creed, or that it belongs in the crude terms that Gray uses.
Ah, ‘sokay, then.
On the Hitler and “true Christianity” question: I actually disagree with the contention that people’s actions determine a religion’s true values (or any ideology’s true values), because people so often fail to live up to the standards they espouse. Dwelling on this failure doesn’t address the question of the whether the standards themselves have any merit.
So, no, maybe Hitler wasn’t a “true Christian.” But in my opinion that’s not the point. The point is that his Christian upbringing did not stop him from, and in fact seemed to encourage, massacring millions of Jews.
Also, John Gray says many foolish things.