‘Modernity and violence are inexorably connected.’
By Charlie Standen, First Year History Student.
For my definition of modernity, I shall take the period spanning from 1792 to 1945. As for all periodisations, within in it I see a rational progression that warrants the period to be separated from ages prior and post. Namely, the rise and culmination of mass violence supported by those peoples within Europe. Moreover, we need a nuanced definition of violence. Instances of mass violence, which is where my focus lies, too often have been argued as instances of releasing entirely primal urges, an almost cyclical unleashing of the darker, more primitive aspects of humanity. Lorenz has argued so and thus put us on a plane shared by animals.1 This is misleading. Of course, humanity has an instinctive side, but the mass violence of modernity is not a product of this. As Tinbergen rightly declares: ‘Man is the only species that is a mass murderer’. It instead is a product of what has been coined ‘malignant-destructive aggression’, born of the human necessity to fulfil existential needs. To fulfil a power process entailing the conception of an end and corresponding means taken to achieve it.
Modernity is inexorably connected to this specific kind of violence due to the birth of modern popular sovereignty on our continent. This gave power and responsibility to the people on an unprecedented scale in a competitive environment. Thus, for the first time in recent history, the people played an active role in the effort to make a widely recognised civilisation of their nation (they had a collective political power process: a collective means and end). Furthermore, this gave opportunities to individuals/groups able to pervert this newfound collective end through the promises of a utopian civilisation (the ultimate end). The combination of the collective wish to create a supreme civilisation and the guidance by those who promised such a civilisation led to significant violence. It was both rational, for the collective, whether on an intrastate or international level, wanted to achieve supremacy, and violent, for such supremacy is exclusive and makes enemies of those excluded. In this sense, Rubenstein is justified in claiming ‘the Holocaust bears witness to the advance of civilisation’. This aim of modernity, for nations/intrastate collectives to create dominant civilisations, was skewed from the outset and its consequences were terrifying and ineffably violent.
Following 1792, the formation of the First Republic, the French felt a new and fervent pride in la patrie and a strongly felt responsibility in her well-being. The success of the nation became their collective political power process. Those of merit came into power and did so most effectively by realising latent forces present in society made more prominent by the advent of popular sovereignty. When I refer to latent forces, I refer to those collective prejudices, passions and outlooks that permeate widely through a society at a given time (similar to Trotsky’s term: ‘historic forces’). During the Revolution, men such as Danton and Marat played to the ubiquitous latent forces that so despised the upper classes. Later, Napoleon recognised and latched onto another widespread latent force: namely the nationalism of the French people and their lust for continental supremacy (that the Revolution led directly to international war and the Terror made this the more obvious).
The role of such individuals/groups is thus: to take advantage of a latent force widespread in society, rationalise it into means and ends and through social engineering and other methods ensure that these means and ends satiate the population’s search for meaning and purpose. In creating an end for an exclusive society based on latent forces, violence is inevitable as those excluded become obstacles or worse in the way to achieving these ends (ends based in the prejudices and the passions of the nation are seldom defended peacefully). Thus, here we can see the chink in the armour of the popular sovereignty of modernity: it can be manipulated by those who are able to nurture and refine latent forces in our societies and create utopian ends for said societies. Modernity can be characterised by the formation of such idealistic ends enabling grand narratives of progress that in fact have resulted in terrible violence and destruction. Those predictions of the Enlightenment that declared violence would perish as an irrationality proved false: by the nineteenth century, both Hegel and Darwin advocated the regenerative effects of war. By the early twentieth century, the Futurist movement in the arts sought to glorify it.
In early twentieth century Germany, the population generally was, and had been to varying degrees since the crusades, antisemitic. This was a latent force. Hitler recognised this early on. In a letter to his commander, 1919, Hitler, then a private, recognised the ‘anti-Semitism of pure emotion’, but also urged the creation of an ‘anti-Semitism of reason’. He recognised the opportunity to create a means (the Holocaust and a war for international supremacy) and an end (a Lebensraum, a superior race and so on) for the German people and used those methods of social engineering and regulation that had become so much more prominent in modernity by necessity of popular sovereignty to establish this in the public mind. By creating this framework, Nazi Germany was then able to convince itself of a narrative of progress (for rational progress can only be achieved with an end in mind). This progress was both tangible and artificial. The growth of industry, the innovations in technology, the rise in real wages were all indicators of rational progress but progress towards an end that not only was compatible with the Holocaust but actively sought the Holocaust. Browning takes a very individualistic approach when looking at Reserve Police Battalion 101 but even he concedes the stark fact that ninety percent of this battalion proceeded to kill Jews regardless of their personal attitudes. This is not due to authoritarian pressure: no soldier under the Nazi regime was ever punished for refusing to kill an unarmed civilian. The majority did it because they felt a moral obligation to do it; because it seemed the right thing to do in order to contribute to the manifestation of the Nazi utopia. Hilberg explains succinctly: ‘It [the Holocaust] was not a narrow strategy for the attainment of some ulterior goal, but an undertaking for its own sake’. What makes the Holocaust unique is this: the Nazi regime were the most effective regime in harnessing the population to achieve their ends. They boiled the latent antisemitism already present in German society to what Goldhagen has termed ‘eliminationist antisemitism’. The Jewish community were thought to be an unbelievable threat to the civilisation they had envisioned for themselves and it is the threat they seemingly posed to the German ideal that led to the unparalleled brutality of the Holocaust.
This is a failure of modernity and its conceptions of civilisation based on supremacy (whether on an intrastate/international level). A failure that has produced the most tremendous violence. Socioeconomic and political climates, as Gerlach argues, human nature, as Lorenz argues, and the brutalisation that war produces, as Browning argues, are all contributors to violence. But what is unique to modernity, and what inexorably connects it to violence, is the unleashing of the power of popular sovereignty and the perversion of this power by individuals and groups towards their own conceptions of civilisation which have resulted in destruction. Increasing sophistication of weapons technology and the efficacy of bureaucracy only served as methods to achieving this end. They themselves are not causes but rather manifestations of the collective power process at work.
Bibliography
Secondary Sources:
Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
Browning, Christopher, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
Bryant, Michael, ‘Punishing the Excess: Sadism, Bureaucratised Atrocity, and the U.S. Army Concentration Camp Trials, 1945-1947’, in Nazi Crimes and the Law, ed. by Nathan Stoltzfuss and Henry Friedlander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp.63-85.
Fromm, Erich, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Canada: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973).
Gerlach, Christian, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Goldhagen, Daniel, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Abacus, 1997).
Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985).
Lorenz, Konrad, On Aggression, trans. Majorie Kerr Wilson (London: Routledge Classics, 2005).
Rubenstein, Richard, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Harper, 1978).
Ruehl, Martin, ‘‘An Uncanny Re-Awakening’: Nietzsche’s Renascence of the Renaissance out of the Spirit of Jacob Burckhardt’, in Nietzsche on Time and History, ed. by Manuel Dries (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp.231-272.
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Influential sources not mentioned explicitly in the Context Essay:
Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, trans. Ninian Hill Thomson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882).
Orwell, George, Notes on Nationalism (London: Penguin, 2018).
Staub, Ervin, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Tec, Nechama, When Light Pierced the Darkness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).