Postmortems After Auschwitz

I’d like to write a book about the soul-searching that was undertaken after World War II. During the early postwar years, Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Many other books fall into the genre. In Return of the Strong Gods, I discuss Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). I also treat The Authoritarian Personality (1950), an extremely influential book that conveyed the results of an extended study by a group of social scientists and Theodor Adorno. Their approach and conclusions echoed the analysis pioneered by Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1933) and Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom, 1941).

In truth, the list of postmortems of disaster is nearly endless. From the 1930s through the first decades of the postwar era, many sought to understand the civilizational catastrophe that engulfed the West. Christopher Dawson (The Making of Europe, 1932) and T. S. Eliot (The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939) viewed the recession of Christianity with foreboding. They recognized that culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum. A millennium ago, the love society of the Church had tamed the warrior society. The victory was not permanent. Unless the leaven of the gospel is renewed in every generation, hard men willing to do hard things will be ascendant.

Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948) should be read as a meditation on Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Weaver blames William of Ockham and the nominalist view of truth. In the Catholic tradition, too, this account was often advanced as a general explanation of modern perversions and evils. A young Jacques Maritain wrote a book in this genre, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (1928). Étienne Gilson advanced the anti-nominalist thesis in a more erudite fashion in a book that influenced Weaver, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (1936).

The question of what went wrong was so pressing that answers crop up in surprising places. As a graduate student in the late 1980s, I was taken aback when I read Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach’s account of the rise of narrative realism. In the book’s final pages, Auerbach reveals that he intends his richly detailed analysis as a preparation for understanding the rise of Nazism. The brutalities of modern ideology reflect the tyranny of the “single formula,” which runs roughshod over the unique particularity of the human person. Moreover, the literary culture of the twentieth century was captive to the “impression of hopelessness” and prone to delight in portraying the human condition “under its most brutal aspects.” As a result, literature had not played its role as defender of reality in all its vulnerable texture. Auerbach’s claims about the literary causes of Auschwitz seem a stretch, the sort of thing only an academic can believe. Yet when I put down the book, I found myself unable to reject his assessment. I came to see that Auerbach was advancing a literary version of the more theologically explicit diagnoses provided by Dawson and Eliot.

More theological still was the work of Reinhold Niebuhr. His star rose in the 1950s because he helped readers understand the importance of the doctrines of original sin and divine providence. We cannot author a utopian “new beginning.” The undertow of self-love is too great. We can only do what little good is within our power, trusting in God to ensure the triumph of justice on his timetable, not ours. Niebuhr also saw that an optimistic, liberal mindset had disarmed us in the face of grave evils. Auschwitz was authored by evil men, to be sure, but their path was made clear by naive men.

Michael Polanyi deserves his own chapter. I’ve described his analysis above. There’s more to say. He understood the allure of modern science. Its promise of truth, adamantine, pure, and objective, can bewitch us. Yet “science” is an abstraction. It knows nothing. It is a discipline, a method. Only human beings know. Truth remains a mere possibility unless we grasp it, affirm it, and remain loyal to it. In Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958), his most widely read book, Polanyi details our dependence on intuitions, sentiments, and prejudices. He calls these ways of knowing “tacit knowledge,” on which we depend to make reliable judgments concerning truth. Knowing is an art, in which we must be trained. The tragedy of modernity lies in our exaltation of science at the expense of other ways of knowing. We have failed to educate our souls (an education Plato recognized as essential for philosophy), and as a result we have made ourselves vulnerable to all manner of seductions.

By my reading, a great deal of what Leo Strauss wrote chimes with Polanyi. His wartime lecture “German Nihilism” identifies the peril of an intellectual culture that, however sophisticated, is unwilling to dwell patiently with perennial questions of truth and goodness. Deprived of an encounter with “the classical ideal of humanity,” the best and brightest students hearken to political prophets and modern witch doctors of the soul. Strauss’s distinctive pedagogy sought to remedy this metaphysical deficiency. It required close (noncritical in the modern sense) readings of premodern books. It’s controversial to say so, but after World War II Martin Heidegger’s gnomic writings expressed views that seem quite different but in fact were similar. Both men recoiled from the nihilism implicit in modern scientific culture. And both conjured metaphysical substance that they could not quite bring themselves to believe in, even as they insisted on its necessity.

I’ve mentioned Richard Weaver. In the American context, his voice was eccentric. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was more typical. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949) was not written as a postmortem for Europe. Schlesinger sought to shape the postwar liberal consensus in the United States. But the social analysis he used to frame the challenges facing the country was widely believed to be the best way to understand the turmoil of the first decades of the twentieth century. Schlesinger saw a central tension in modern life. (The great sociologist Émile Durkheim had identified this tension a generation earlier.) We cherish the new freedoms of an open, liberal society and we enjoy the fruits of a dynamic capitalist economy, but we also seek continuity and belonging. Responsible leadership involves sustaining a balance between freedom and solidarity—the vital center.

The notion that we must balance change and continuity, individualism and belonging, played an important role in my education. By and large, this analysis was the canonical explanation of Nazism for most postwar Americans. (In my youth, communism was largely excused by establishment liberals.) Europe had been shipwrecked because it lost the proper balance. Demoralized by defeat, disoriented by democracy, buffeted by inflation, the German people felt unmoored, and they overcorrected toward an authoritarian and ethnocentric sense of belonging. Our job was to keep things in balance.

In his own postwar book, The Quest for Community (1953), Robert Nisbet warned that what seemed like a snug middle-class culture in America was in fact a dangerously atomized and lonely place. Others emphasized the inhumanity of modern industrial society. James Burnham foresaw the triumph of a cold-blooded technocratic elite in The Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham’s account informed George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which is perhaps the most widely read and influential diagnosis of the self-immolation of the West during the first half of the twentieth century.

Polanyi spoke of the destruction of Europe, but America was implicated as well. Not only is our country part of the same civilization that endured between 1914 and 1945 a cataclysm that was as devastating as the wars of religion. It also participated, firebombing cities and dropping atomic bombs. The trauma was so great that after 1945 every aspect of our culture was reshaped in order to guard against the return of Hitler. (I argue this thesis in Return of the Strong Gods.) The postmortems not only explained what had occurred; their analyses and warnings shaped the world in which we now live, a world that seems to be careening toward a very different kind of catastrophe, one trait of which is a dangerously misguided preoccupation with fighting fascism.