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PDF FormatCriticism of modernity, of course, has its place. It is necessary, and often not incorrect. However, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff, the legitimate claims from the baseless attacks that repeatedly evoke the Nazi demon, it is important to understand what modernity had actually promised, and what it could not deliver; which of the hopes it inspired were unrealistic from the outset; and, perhaps most important, whether the atrocities committed by the Third Reich consign it to complete failure. These are difficult questions, and deserve in-depth answers. We will have to make do, however, with a few preliminary thoughts.
The term “modernity,” recurring throughout this essay, has meant various things since its first appearance in the late fifth century. The term usually denotes a particular worldview, a kind of consciousness that perceives the present, or near future, as a dramatic innovation in comparison to the past. In a historical and sociological context, the term designates the era that began after the Middle Ages; more specifically, it refers to the processes of secularization, industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratization that have transformed Western society over the last few hundred years. Intellectually, however, what is known as the “project of modernity” is primarily identified with the European Enlightenment and its desire to liberate humanity from the fetters of prejudice and ancient custom, thus creating a new, reformed order under the rule of reason. Unprecedented scientific progress, the rational investigation of politics and ethics, and new artistic experimentations—all these convinced the denizens of the West in the 1700s that man would finally emerge, in the words of Immanuel Kant, “from his self-incurred immaturity.”50
The disillusionment began long before the Holocaust. The promise of a new world, in which humanity would utilize its scientific knowledge and technological prowess to cure its physical and spiritual ailments, was shattered in the senseless mass slaughter of World War I. The disappointment and despair that prevailed in its aftermath found voice in the words of Martin Heidegger’s teacher, the German Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl, in his work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology:
The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the “prosperity” they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people. The change in public evaluation was unavoidable, especially after the war, and we know that it has gradually become a feeling of hostility among the younger generation. In our vital need—so we are told—this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence…. But can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have a meaning if the sciences recognize as true only what is objectively established in this fashion, and if history has nothing more to teach us than that all the shapes of the spiritual world, all the conditions of life, ideals, norms upon which man relies, form and dissolve themselves like fleeting waves, that it always was and ever will be so, that again and again reason must turn into nonsense, and well-being into misery? Can we console ourselves with that? Can we live in this world, where historical occurrence is nothing but an unending concatenation of illusory progress and bitter disappointment?51
The bitter realization that reason—and its offspring, science—did not bring about the anticipated salvation or provide answers to the burning questions that occupied man, but rather abandoned him to a world of “illusory progress and bitter disappointment,” runs through the critical thought of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two leading representatives of the Frankfurt school. Yet Adorno and Horkheimer went even further than Husserl, accusing modernity of not only impotence, but also actual fraud. In their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947, they presented the history of reason as a continuous struggle for dominance dating back to the early days of antiquity. Man’s alleged liberation from the yoke of the ancient mythical worldview made way for the new mythology of the Enlightenment and the enslavement it cunningly perpetuates under the guise of freedom. Instead of promoting critical and reflective thought, they argued, modernity has subjugated the masses to the avaricious and vain authority of instrumental rationality:
The technical process, into which the subject has objectified itself after being removed from the consciousness, is free of the ambiguity of mythic thought as of all meaning altogether, because reason itself has become the mere instrument of the all-inclusive economic apparatus. It serves as a general tool, useful for the manufacture of all other tools, firmly directed toward its end, as fateful as the precisely calculated movement of material production, whose result for mankind is beyond all calculation. At last its old ambition, to be a pure organ of ends, has been realized.52
Under the inspiration of Horkheimer and Adorno, resistance to the absolute rule of instrumental rationality has become a central motif in the critique of modern society. Turning their back on the “meta-narrative” of progress, philosophers such as Jean-Franחois Lyotard and Bauman have followed the Frankfurt school in arguing that modernity is not an emancipatory force but an oppressive order, and that there is no greater evidence of the illusion on which it is based than the success of the market economy. “The victory of capitalist technoscience over the other candidates for the universal finality of human history is another means of destroying the project of modernity while giving the impression of completing it,” wrote Lyotard. “The subject’s mastery over the objects generated by contemporary science and technology does not bring greater freedom, more public education or greater wealth more evenly distributed.”53
Clearly, these objections imply a bitter sense of disappointment with the ignominious failure of Marxism in all its forms, a disappointment that the radical criticisms of the Enlightenment and its legacy cannot seem to overcome. While the beginning of the twentieth century saw modernity progressing down two main paths—one of the liberal bourgeois ethos and the other of socialist utopianism—the total and utter collapse of the latter left the end of the century with only one rational social possibility. For radical left-wing intellectuals, including many who were disenchanted by the fall of secular Marxist messianism (notably Bauman and Lyotard), this situation is insufferable. In their view, capitalism was and remains a corrupt and corrupting system, possibly the worst system of all. If it succeeded in winning the ideological, political, and economic war against egalitarianism, they concluded, there must be something fundamentally wrong with modernity, the Enlightenment, and the Western tradition at large. The only answer to the growing power of evil, according to these thinkers, is the development of a criticism no longer grounded in objectivity and rationality, but predicated instead on an abstract ideal of “resistance” to the status quo.54
Radical thought’s recurrent use of the word “Auschwitz” as a code for the sins of modernity gave rise to a series of attempts to bind the Holocaust together with the ills of Western consumerism.55 George Ritzer, for example, a well-known sociologist at the University of Maryland, sees much in common between the Nazi death camps and the fast-food chain McDonald’s. Ritzer, a staunch critic of global capitalism, condemns what he calls “the McDonaldization of society,” which prizes quantity over quality and destroys mankind in the name of efficiency and inhuman technology.56 From there, the road connecting Auschwitz’s gas chambers to the greasy frying pan is not very long:
To many it will seem obscene to discuss fast-food restaurants and the Holocaust in the same context. Yet, there is a clear line in sociological thinking about modern rationality from the bureaucracy to the Holocaust and then to the fast-food restaurant. Weber’s principles of rationality can be applied usefully and meaningfully to each. The perpetrators of the Holocaust employed the bureaucracy as one of their major tools. The conditions that made the Holocaust possible, especially the formally rational system, continue to exist today. Indeed, what the process of McDonaldization indicates is not only that formally rational systems persist, but that they are expanding dramatically.57
This observation, it bears mentioning, appears in a standard textbook for students of social sciences—showing how easily radical discourse is allowed to stray from the limits of decency and common sense. The sweeping generalizations of the Holocaust-modernity equation allow academics and social activists seeking provocation to portray liberal democracies as no better than totalitarian tyrants, and to brand as “Nazi” anything with a semblance of rational management—especially if it is part of the detested corporate capitalism.58
Naturally, exaggerations and distortions of this kind do not render criticism of modernity in general and the Enlightenment in particular illegitimate. Such critiques certainly have their grounds. Who can deny that the great hopes for a secular redemption of humankind were dashed? Who truly believes that science alone can give our lives ultimate meaning? Life in modern society is very far from the ideals envisioned by eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers or nineteenth-century positivists. Political, economic, and social exploitation are still realities to be reckoned with, exacerbated by the new miseries of loneliness, alienation, depression, cynicism, and apathy.
Still, the “project of modernity” is by no means a failure. In many ways, it is an overwhelming success. True, science could not satisfy metaphysical yearning or spiritual thirst—but has it ever presumed to do so? It has broadened the horizons of humanity, enhanced its confidence in itself, granted it protection (albeit not completely) against natural disasters, and empowered it to make use of its surroundings (and improve and repair them where necessary). Reason did not fill the void in man’s soul or bring him paradise, but it did endow him with the ability to distinguish truth from error, well-founded theories from delusions, fancies, and fallacies. The value of these capacities is momentous. Whether or not one uses them well is a choice human beings must make, and they must bear responsibility for the results.
Radical thinkers would have us believe that the worship of instrumental reason has tainted liberal-bourgeois society. But it is these societies, imperfect though they may be, that harbor many of the conditions that allow for the cultivation of “essential” rationality: They are open, encourage a free exchange of information and ideas, and demonstrate a readiness—if not actual eagerness—for self-criticism. And although they are at times fertile ground for outlandishly radical philosophies, the harm caused by such views is limited compared to the damage wrought by the dogmatic ideologies of authoritarian regimes.
Modernity is not infallible; it is not immune to the mass outbursts of fanaticism, rage, and hatred that may plague even the most progressive of nations. National Socialism’s road to power and the heinous crimes it committed demonstrate this clearly. Yet the most effective antidote to extremism and evil (of which the Third Reich was but one contemporary example) still lies in enlightened thinking, rational judgment, and loyalty to the noble moral values the West has so long fought to impart to the world.
Yaki Menschenfreund teaches philosophy at the Open University of Israel.
Notes
1. Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 554.
2. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Neither an Accident Nor a Mistake,” Critical Inquiry 15:2 (Winter 1989), p. 484.
3. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), p. 17.
4. Richard Rubenstein, “Modernization and the Politics of Extermination,” in Michael Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis (New York: New York University, 1990), p. 20.
5. Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (New York: Zone, 2005), pp. 555-556.
6. Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton, 1999), p. 16. Proctor devotes his book to the study of cancer research in Germany, which was not only highly developed (German physicians, for example, were the first to prove the connection between smoking and lung cancer), but also led to preventative legislation and enforcement that some would consider advanced even by today’s standards.
7. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, The Note-Books of Anton Chekhov, trans. Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (New York: Huebsch, 1921), p. 4. Emphasis added.
8. Heather Pringle, The Master Plan, Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (London: Harper Perennial, 2006).
9. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), pp. 345-404.
10. Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (New York: Cold Spring Harbor, 2001).
11. Michel Foucault, “Sade: Sargeant of Sex,” in Sylvטre Lotringer, ed., Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961-1984 (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 188.
12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1999), p. 138.
13. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 139.
14. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 139.
15. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 137.
16. Detlev J.K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,” in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), pp. 234-252.
17. Peukert, “Genesis of the ‘Final Solution,’” p. 236.
18. Peukert, “Genesis of the ‘Final Solution,’” p. 247.
19. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: MIT, 1985), p. 15.
20. Pringle, Master Plan, p. 3.
21. Pringle, Master Plan, pp. 56-57.
22. Burleigh, Third Reich, p. 348.
23. The very claim that science aspires—or ought to aspire—to ideological objectivity has elicited strong opposition from the proponents of postmodernism. According to Zygmunt Bauman, for example, science’s disengagement from the “normative pressures” of ethics and religion made it morally deaf and dumb, as well as responsible for the Final Solution. Bauman seems to forget that “Nazi science” was not stripped of beliefs and values. On the contrary, it was absolutely committed to Hitler’s vision, which is exactly why it erred so grossly. See Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 108.
24. Historian Michael Burleigh’s indignation in the face of Peukert’s arguments is understandable: “On what kind of ‘science’ is this pretentious drivel based?” he thunders. “The science that explains the origin of the universe and its maker, the climatic changes on the sun’s surface, the science that to a large extent eradicated cholera and malaria and purified the water in Asia and Africa?” Michael Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1997), p. 180.
25. Christopher Browning, “The German Bureaucracy and the Holocaust,” in Alex Grobman and Daniel Landes, eds., Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust (Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1983), p. 148.
26. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A.M. Henerson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 338.
27. Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 1 (Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster, 1968), p. liii.
28. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford, 1942).
29. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, revised ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985).
30. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 1, p. ix.
31. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 3, p. 998.
32. The terms “functionalism” and “intentionalism” in regards to the Holocaust were coined in 1981 by the British Marxist historian Tim Mason. See Tim Mason, “Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy About the Interpretation of National Socialism,” in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker, eds., The Fahrerstaat: Myth and Reality (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 21-40 [German]. For an edifying description of the debate between the two schools of thought, see Boaz Neumann, Nazism (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 2007), pp. 150-179 [Hebrew].
33. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 87.
34. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 13.
35. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 91.
36. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 91.
37. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 74.
38. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 17. Emphasis in the original.
39. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 99.
40. This description, not coincidentally, evokes Hannah Arendt’s controversial claim that “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied—as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels—that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.” See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1965), p. 276.
41. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 104.
42. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 11.
43. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale, 2002), p. 78.
44. Some try to present the very plan of annihilating the Jews as rational. Historians Götz Aly and Suzanne Heim argue that the extermination policy was informed not by racial ideology, but by purely economic considerations: the maximization of the Third Reich’s productive capabilities by getting rid of populations regarded by Nazi technocrats as “excess baggage.” See Götz Aly and Suzanne Heim, “The Holocaust and Population Policy: Remarks on the Decision on the ‘Final Solution,’” Yad Vashem Studies 24 (1995), pp. 33-53 [Hebrew]. For an exhaustive and thorough criticism of Götz’s and Heim’s position, see Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, pp. 96-98, and Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California, 2000), ch. 6, pp. 138-159.
45. Saul Friedlהnder, Reflection of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York: Avon, 1984), p. 75. For additional examples of the sacrifice of rational interest for the sake of the Final Solution, see David Bankier, “Modernization and the Rationality of Extermination,” Yad Vashem Studies 24 (1995), pp. 109-131.
46. Friedlהnder, Reflections of Nazism, p. 74.
47. Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution: Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California, 1981), p. 527.
48. Boaz Neumann, Nazi Weltanschauung—Space, Body, Language (Tel Aviv: Haifa University and Sifriat Maariv, 2002), pp. 29-30 [Hebrew].
49. Boaz Neumann touches on this when he points out the limitations of the functionalist approach in Holocaust studies: “Functionalist historians describe the unfolding of events concerning the Jewish problem as largely arbitrary and random. They do not, however, consider the fact that even if this is a course of trial and error, or a circumstantial process determined by improvisation—the Nazi-German motivation to solve the Jewish problem remains a constant throughout the story…. Functionalist historians certainly present the casual element of the narrative well, yet they fail to connect the dots between one attempted solution and another. Despite the arbitrariness and improvisation, there is an underlying ‘desire’ at work.” Neumann, Nazi Weltanschauung, pp. 177-178.
50. Immanuel Kant, “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” Berlin Monthly (December 1784).
51. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern, 1970), pp. 5-7.
52. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 30.
53. Jean-Franחois Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992), p. 18.
54. Frederick Crews, Skeptical Engagements (New York: Oxford, 1986), pp. 138-139.
55. In the words of Lyotard: “‘Auschwitz’ can be taken as a paradigmatic name for the tragic ‘incompletion’ of modernity.” See Lyotard, Postmodern Explained, p. 18.
56. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge, 1993).
57. George Ritzer, Sociological Theory, fourth ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), pp. 582-583. Ironically, Ritzer’s argument echoes an infamous claim made by Martin Heidegger, who was a member of the Nazi party and served it loyally (if unsuccessfully) as the rector of Freiburg University in 1933-1934. During a lecture he gave on December 1, 1949, Heidegger—an influential critic of technology—attacked modern agriculture for turning into a “motorized-food-industry,” insisting that it is “in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.” See Victor Farםas, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1989), p. 287.
58. In a similar vein, the prominent thinker Giorgio Agamben could argue that “the camp… is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford, 1998), p. 181.
