Monday, February 21, 2005
(10:47 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Causing Nazism
We have it on good authority that the liberal theologians of the Nazi period were unable to resist the temptation to join the Nazi party because of some theological inadequacies. To oversimplify somewhat, they were Nazis because they were not Karl Barth and did not have his same theology. Never mind that many members of Barth's own theological circle became Nazis -- that can be explained away by the fact that they weren't "for real" in terms of believing along Barthian lines. Never mind that Roman Catholics, whom Barth viewed as being severely theologically disadvantaged, were also among those who resisted the Nazis. And finally, never mind that Paul Tillich, who is very much a liberal theologian, resisted the Nazis. Nope -- even though in point of fact, the rag-tag group of resisters to the Nazis came from all walks of life and held all different kinds of beliefs on a variety of issues, the real problem was that certain theologians did not jump onto the Barthian train quickly enough. And therefore, theologians who stray too far from the narrow Barthian path are in danger of coddling the next group of insane thugs who somehow manage to take control of a weak, ravaged state.I say, bull-shit. I have a deep and abiding love for Barth, but come on. It's the same with all those who blame philosophy for the Holocaust. If we're going to do a political analysis, let's do a fucking political analysis -- but as of this writing, I have never seen a convincing account of the causal mechanism that leads from espousing the theology of Schleiermacher to joining the National Socialist Party, or from a careful study of Hegel's Science of Logic to sending people into ovens.
If there is some book that lays bare the actual causal mechanism of how one gets from Aufhebung to Auschwitz, then I'd be glad to hear about it, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there probably is not such a book, nor is such a book possible. Instead, what we get is a highly nuanced and erudite version of the old Usenet truism known as Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." The side who first deploys the Nazi comparison is effectively invulnerable to all future disproof -- after all, they hold in their hands the ideas that, if implemented in time, would have prevented Nazism! And those who argue against them certainly don't like Nazis, do they? Well?
It's ridiculous. I refuse to dignify jingoistic, racist, genocidal nationalism by treating it as a set of ideas in direct competition with Schleiermacher, or Hegel, or Barth, or any serious thinker. I refuse a moralization of thought that marks out acceptable territories and labels the rest as "Here there be Nazis." I agree with Derrida, Benjamin, Agamben, and so many others who count freedom of thought as a necessary condition of any future political order that would be worth the trouble, and while thought is not important on the same level that preventing Nazi-like extermination campaigns is important, it is important enough to resist hamstringing it through an arbitrary association with horrible crimes.
