Back to Barbarism
Is there any way out from this?
“Barbarism” is a word that keeps coming to my lips lately. It’s not just that everything feels more coarse under Trump. That’s too easy. That’s pointing the finger at the Big Ugly Orange Man. That’s saying that he’s pulling us down. That’s saying that we’re better — or were better — until he showed up and made everything shittier.
And it’s not that we’re complicit, either. Not like the Europeans were.
The Casual Barbarism of the Nazis
I picked up Curzio Malaparte’s novel-memoir, Kaputt, to try to nail down a parallel. Kaputt is not unlike a far more demented and bleak Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Malaparte is hallucinating his way across Nazi Europe, palling around with the masterminds of the atrocities, as well as the foot-soldiers doing the wet work.
As an Italian journalist, he tours the Warsaw ghetto accompanied by a young SS Black Guard minder, witnesses and documents the widespread misery and starvation — and then helplessly jokes about it with Hitler’s viceroy in Poland, Hans Frank, and the governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fischer, over a meal of goose and venison.
“You should deal with them as with rats,” I said. “Give them rat poison. It would be simpler.”
“It's not worth the trouble to poison them,” said Fischer. “They die at an incredible rate. Last month forty-two thousand died in the Warsaw ghetto.”
“It's rather a high rate," I said. "If they go on like this in a couple of years the ghetto will be empty.”
“It's impossible to foretell as far as Jews are concerned,” said Frank. “All the estimates of our experts have proved wrong. The faster they die, the faster their number increases.”
“The Jews persist in having children,” I said. “It is all the fault of the children.”
“Ach, die kinder! — Ah, the children!” said Frau Brigitte Frank.
“Ja, so schmutzig — Yes, so dirty,” said Frau Fischer.
“Ah, did you notice the children in the ghetto?" asked Frank. "They are horrible! They are dirty and diseased; they are covered with scabs and prey for vermin; they would be pitiful if they were not so loathsome. They look like skeletons. The child death rate is very high in the ghettos. What’s the children’s death rate in the Warsaw ghetto?” he asked turning to Governor Fischer.
“Fifty-four per cent,” replied Fischer.
“The Jews are a diseased race, in full decay,” said Frank. “They are all degenerates. They do not know how to rear children or how to care for them, as we do in Germany.”
“Germany is a country with a high Kultur,” I said.
“Ja, natürlich, in child hygiene Germany leads the world,” said Frank.
Then, flashing back to when he was an Italian officer, he recalls the Jews of Jassy in Romania pleading with him to use whatever meager clout he has to avert a pogrom they all know is coming. He tells them it’s pointless to try, that the German commander will ignore his pleas, that the Romanian authorities are themselves planning the massacre. And the very next evening, he witnesses1 the slaughter. The Italian consulate manages to shelter some one hundred wretches, but the streets of Jassy run slick with the blood of thousands of others.
Back in Warsaw, his Nazi hosts try to commiserate after he recounts what he saw.
“Though my heart is not as soft as yours,” said Frank, “I share and I understand your horror at the Jassy massacres. As a man, a German, and as Governor-General of Poland I disapprove of pogroms.”
“Very kind of you,” I answered with a bow.
“Germany is a country that has a higher civilization and abominates barbaric methods,” said Frank gazing around him with an expression of sincere indignation.
“Natürlich,” the others chorused.
“Germany,” said Wächter, “is called upon to carry out a great civilizing mission in the East.”
“The term ‘pogrom’ is not a German word,” said Frank.
“Naturally, it is a Jewish word,” and I smiled.
“I don’t know whether it is a Jewish word,” said Frank, “but I know that it never has been and never will be a part of the German vocabulary.”
Malaparte, a charming and witty man of letters, tries his best to needle his hosts, but he knows he’s just playing along. And his Nazi interlocutors are superficially no “barbarians” either. Their Kultur is real. Frank has refined tastes in music (he rhapsodizes over Schumann, Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven) and literature (he freely cites Apuleius and Apollinaris). Socially and culturally, they’re reading from the same hymnal.
Malaparte’s main trick is to show how the high culture of Europe is the thinnest veneer over an almost incomprehensible capacity for violence and cold cruelty. The educated use culture to aestheticize the violence. But the less-educated are no more innocent. Indeed, they openly thrill in their murders. Romanian soldiers lob grenades into basements in Jassy packed tightly with terrified Jews — and some drop to their knees “to look at the results of the explosions within the cellars and turn laughing faces to their companions.”2
Modern Democracy and Narcissism
Perhaps needless to say, we’re nowhere near what Europe got up to in the early 1940s. We’re certainly moving away from our status quo ante, but we shouldn’t overstate our prior innocence. Trump didn’t invent detention camps for illegal aliens, for example, but he did come up with “Alligator Alcatraz.” Its purpose is different and its scale is vanishingly minuscule compared to Europe’s former camps. And it’s arguably been set up more for theater than outcomes. But that we now have a theater of cruelty is notable. Our capacity for inhumanity was always there, but we hide it from ourselves better.
Maybe the way we hide it is different. We Americans famously scorn Europeans for their refined airs. Kultur is aristocratic, undemocratic. We reverse-snob our sophisticate cousins across the pond. We pay visits to their majestic castles (which they’ve kindly converted into parks for our amusement), both attracted by their opulence and smug in our knowledge that our democratic age somehow represents progress.
But is it progress? Or do we just flatter ourselves? I suspect it’s the latter. Or something worse. I suspect it’s the source of our own barbarism only now coming more clearly into view. And no, again, it’s not The Orange One. It’s much broader than that — a kind of vanity and vapidity rolled tightly into one.
The democratic spirit wasn’t always quite so narcissistic. Americans have always thrilled at derring-do and the frontier spirit of figures like Daniel Boone or Davey Crockett. But mythic heroes were specifically not everyman, but rather types. All Americans could aspire to their virtues, but no one saw them as blueprints for self-improvement. One could always “make it” in America, but one’s goal was not to “become” something, as one does today.
This distinction points to something incredibly self-centered, if not outright selfish. As I suggested to
and on the podcast last week, if dating is more miserable today than it was before, it’s probably because people have redefined relationships in terms of personal growth and personal satisfaction, rather than as anything higher than themselves.Where did this narcissism come from? My rough guess is that it probably tracks with growing secularization.
Killing God
Secularization afflicted Europeans much earlier than it did Americans. Nietzsche famously proclaimed the death of God in 1882. For Americans of the same period, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural was still within living memory, its copious invocations of the Almighty drowning out whatever Nietzsche’s madman was on about.
Nietzsche’s Europeans killed God through the Enlightenment. You could already see it in Rousseau’s thought, which started to bear its bloody fruits in the French Revolution. As Carl Schmitt aptly put it in his book Political Theology, the core conceit is of this line of thinking is that “the will of the people is always good.”
“The people are always virtuous,” said Emmanuel Sieyès. “In whatever manner a nation expresses its wishes, it is enough that it wishes; all forms are good but its will is always the supreme law.”
And what if the will of the people diverges from progressive goals? The benighted publics must be educated. Rousseau’s revolutionary descendants in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and North Korea took this idea of education (often termed “re-education”) to its logical end. And left-liberals today echo all this in their obsession with “misinformation,” which claims that if only people knew all the facts, they would converge on a broadly leftist political program.
After the Revolution petered out, monarchy remained allied with the Church, solidifying the remaining radicals’ commitment to atheism. They concluded that faith was fundamentally inimical to social progress and emancipation, and believed that only the extirpation of religion could lead to full liberation. As Schmitt tells us, “The battle against God was taken up by Proudhon under the clear influence of Auguste Comte. Bakunin continued it with Scythian fury.” For Bakunin in particular, all that is fundamentally good comes from man.
[And] there is nothing negative and evil except the theological doctrine of God and sin, which stamps man as a villain in order to provide a pretext for domination and the hunger for power. All moral valuations lead to theology and to an authority that artificially imposes an alien or extrinsic “ought” on the natural and intrinsic truth and beauty of human life.
The idea that God is inextricably tied to monarchy is not necessarily true at all. The radicals’ conclusion is due to a historical accident in Europe. In the United States, Schmitt points out, God and democracy were not at all in tension.
In America this manifested itself in the reasonable and pragmatic belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God — a belief that is at the foundation of Jefferson's victory of 1801. Tocqueville in his account of American democracy observed that in democratic thought the people hover above the entire political life of the state, just as God does above the world, as the cause and the end of all things, as the point from which everything emanates and to which everything returns.
And yet Americans, too, killed God eventually, if only gradually, with the strangulation picking up pace in the 20th century. To tell that story accurately would probably take several books and decades more of research. I suspect it has something to do with 20th century liberalism becoming a “fighting faith” for Cold War America, and in doing so helping bleed away the more difficult commitments that traditional faith traditions demand. Part of it had to do with the blasphemous elevation of the individual, which comfortably mated with the idea of a personal Jesus of American folk Protestantism.
Over time, American Christianity turned to telling people what God wants with and for them, rather than encouraging them to abase themselves as fallen wretches before His unknowable plan. And over time, they lost even more ground to the secular priests of psychotherapy, who encouraged people to put self-actualization above everything else. The “alien and extrinsic ‘ought’” that Bakunin fought against is the same oppressive force that much of psychotherapy hopes to liberate us from.
The Roots of our Barbarism?
Thérèse Delpech, a tragically under-appreciated French political theorist, had a thesis on how and why the untold depravities of the European soul came to the surface. In her book Savage Century: Back to Barbarism, she links exactly what Nietzsche was warning about to what Malaparte brings to grisly life.
Franz Kafka meticulously described it in his work: a view of the world suddenly deserted by the idea of the divine, revealing unsuspected depths in man. The end of religion and the death of the Father for the majority of Europeans left an enormous void in Western civilization, of which all thinkers and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were aware.
She cites François de Menthon, French chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunal:
“While inner spiritual life grew weaker, cruel uncertainty afflicted men’s minds, an uncertainty admirably defined by the term Ratslosigkeit, an untranslatable word meaning roughly not knowing which way to turn, a cruel state of mind of the nineteenth century that many Germans have described with tragic eloquence. A gaping void opened within souls unhinged by the search for new values.”
Delpech again:
The intellectual and spiritual chaos visible everywhere spring from the feverishness of societies that have lost their way, in the resulting boredom, in the destruction of hope for the future, but above all in the decline of confidence in the human spirit. That is a worldwide phenomenon, which affects former communist societies, where nationalism is attempting to take the place of Marxism-Leninism or Maoism, as much as Western societies, where hedonism is beginning to come up against its limitations.
Both emphases are mine.
Matthew Rose has picked up on similarities between Weimar German youth and the Vance brigade — angry young men “disturbed by a culture that seemed to celebrate transgression” and motivated to defend an “endangered morality,” but without the vocabulary to express either the threat or the delicate thing they tried to defend. “Unable to understand or express themselves in any other way . . . they gave voice to savage forms of group identity,” Rose writes. “The mark of barbarism . . . was the belief that truth and justice should be defined in terms of ethnic or racial membership.”
But it’s worth sitting with just what these young barbarians were rebelling against: an empty, selfish culture based on the limits of hedonism, devoid of ultimate meaning, with all “oughts” not just absent but banished and scorned, a culture whose ultimate truth is grounded only in the satisfaction of needs and the completion of the self. In short, they rose up against the empty onanism of modern existence.
Faith used to provide a salve for this, Delpech says, if only by quieting the passions:
Religions, at least, had been restrained by the idea of a superior power, by belief in the corruption of mankind, and by the need for close monitoring of one’s actions and impulses. With the end of those beliefs, which constituted so many barriers to action, there appeared tyrannies without limits, capable of any crime.
But is it possible to roll the clock back? In Germany and the rest of Europe, the evil energies spent themselves and left the continent teetering. It has rebuilt itself, largely under America’s security umbrella and with copious American aid. But a hard-charging belief in anything never returned. The war in Ukraine seems to have proven that a faith in universal liberal values is not a fighting faith after all. And the magnificent churches that dot the continent remain “the tombs and sepulchers of God,” as Nietzsche predicted.
Here in the United States, however, every so often there’s anecdotal evidence that the rising generation is rediscovering organized religion. Maybe it’ll develop into a bona fide trend. The Christian faith is, after all, predicated on a resurrection.
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It’s worth pointing out here that Kaputt mixes memoir and hallucination, and Malaparte is an unreliable narrator. He writes as if he is a witness of the Jassy pogrom, but he very likely was not there, and compiled his account from interviews.
You’ll have to forgive me for going on at such length about the barbarities of the Europeans. But part of the problem is that the epithet “Nazi” is thrown around far too casually these days, and the scale of Nazi crimes is far too easily conflated with modern atrocities. And part of the problem is that we have been taught to conflate Nazism with the absolute moral category of evil, and in doing so we insufficiently contemplate just what they did.
I'm a Christian. I'm cautiously optimistic about a broad-based faith revival. But I worry it may be for the wrong reasons.
There have been plenty of instrumental defenses of religion, especially Christianity, in recent years. A common one is that it promotes Western civilization and values. (First-century Roman aristocrats would not have been amused.)
This puts the cart before the horse. It's an interesting and valid social-scientific question to think about the effects of religiosity on politics and culture. But embracing religiosity as a strategy to get a "better" politics or culture is self-defeating. If we embrace Christianity because we don't want to be barbarians, we'll end up barbarians with a Christian veneer.
We'll only get the civilizational benefits of Christianity if we become Christians for non-civilizational (or at least a-civilizational) reasons. I, too, am very fond of what Christianity has to say about moral anthropology, and therefore human rights. But the only reason to buy it is that *you think it is true.*
Meant to skim this but couldn't put it down.
Isn't this a perfect summary of the millennial and gen Z experience? I think so: "the term Ratslosigkeit, an untranslatable word meaning roughly not knowing which way to turn, a cruel state of mind of the nineteenth century that many Germans have described with tragic eloquence. A gaping void opened within souls unhinged by the search for new values."
I have been wondering if our social depravity is picking up pace and showing signs of the same hedonistic weariness that Rome experienced. Language has certainly expanded to include taboo words I'd be beaten for saying in the 90's, and every streaming show hints at sex as if it's a requirement of every plot. Did Rome's depravity signal her barbarian defeat? If that's the case maybe we have a couple hundred years left. Selfishly, I'm hoping so.
You're mixing your foreign affairs with cosmic ones. It's the right way to 'understand' humanity, imo. Bravo.