6 days ago
What we can learn from Adolf Hitler
January 1936: German dictator Adolf Hitler (left, centre) walks down the centre of two files of guardsman in front of a huge swastika at a parade at the Lustgarten, Berlin. (Photo by)
The strangest thing about this week's 100th anniversary of the publication of Mein Kampf is that it still matters.
Not that anyone is reading that famously unreadable book. Hitler's original title was Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice, which conveys the spittle-flecked mood better than the alternative his publisher came up with. But the book and its author still haunt us. For very, very good reasons; even so, maybe it's time to move on.
If in 1925 you'd asked people in Britain, Germany or anywhere in the North Atlantic world to name the most important moral figure in their culture – the human being who gave them a measure of good and evil – most of them would said, Jesus Christ. Atheists and agnostics as well as believers usually went out of their way to affirm that he was humanity's supreme moral exemplar. But ask the same question now, and our answer is the author of Mein Kampf.
Plenty of people still believe Jesus is good, but not with the same fervour and absolute conviction that we believe Hitler is evil. The reason Holocaust denial is the only thing that, even now, can get you properly, all-but-universally 'cancelled' is that it is our modern equivalent of blasphemy: a denial of our deepest shared values, words that would only be spoken by a monster. You can joke around with crosses and crucifixes nowadays and no-one really minds; but there is no visual image in our world that packs a greater punch than a swastika.
To understand the postwar era – as we still call it – we need to understand this: we have been living through the age of Hitler. The age when the man with the toothbrush moustache has dominated our moral imagination. We've used him and the Nazis to define evil for us. In a pluralist, relativist world, the fact that we all hate Nazis has become our one fixed point of reference.
Which is great – as far as it goes. If you're going to pick one person to stand as a representative of absolute evil, I challenge you to find a better candidate. But let's be clear about what we've done and its consequences. We've swapped out a positive exemplar, who showed us what's good, for a negative one, who shows us what's evil. We're better at knowing what to hate than what to love.
And now, all too obviously, those anti-Nazi taboos that we've built our values around since 1945 are crumbling. Which for those of us who've lived our lives swaddled in those moral certainties is properly scary, but it's not an accident. Nor is it just because the Second World War is falling off the edge of living memory. It's because we've taken an absolutely sound insight – that Hitler and the Nazis represent an exceptional evil – and we've tried to base our entire system of values on it. And it can't bear the weight.
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There are lots of signs of the problems this has caused. It's left us with a conviction that all evils look like Nazis: to the point when the most popular myths of the postwar world have been dominated by Dark Lords and ersatz Nazis, from Sauron and Darth Vader to the Daleks and Harry Potter's Death Eaters. Which is fine, until you have to face an evil that doesn't work that way, like economic injustice or the climate crisis, and you discover you don't have the tools. Remember when we tried to face down COVID by pretending it was a re-run of the Blitz?
It's also left us with the instinct that the ideal way to defeat evil is to fight it, often in an actual war, just like we did with Hitler; and that the worst moral mistake we can make is appeasement. Whereas most wars of course cause more problems than they solve, and the fear of appeasement has led us into a series of disasters from Suez to Iraq. During the Cuban missile crisis, it almost killed us all.
For the centre and centre-Left in our own times, our insistence on building our values exclusively around the anti-Nazi legacy poses a particularly painful problem. There's been a lot of talk in recent years about the 'crisis of conservatism', but it's worse than we think. It's not them: it's us.
In the 2020s, as we ravel out the last threads of the postwar consensus, the Left have become the true conservatives: trying to preserve what we have or to recover what we fear we've lost, but wretchedly short of actual ambitions. To be in the centre or centre-Left nowadays is to believe that the world as it stands is about as good as it gets, bar a little managerial fine-tuning that never seems to seep out very far. We mostly just want to stop things getting too much worse, whether we are talking about climate, economics or rights. The political offer is, no disasters and the distant hope of an incremental increase in rations. Is it a surprise that a lot of the world is trying other options?
In Britain, our poor government is endlessly berated for its inability to articulate a 'narrative', but it's not their fault. It's ours: democracy famously gives us what we deserve. They are faithfully expressing what were, until fairly recently, our shared core values, and trying as that consensus crumbles to find a line that they can hold. And they may or may not succeed in those terms, but of course they struggle to hold out a positive vision. We're not ready for one. 'All we want is someone competent', people say: and it's true. Our hopes really are that miserably limited.
That old, anti-Nazi consensus they speak for knows what it hates, but not what it loves. We know what evil looks like – or one version of it, anyway – but we have a very impoverished notion of the good. The things that we do affirm – human rights, liberty – are quite deliberately vacant categories: their whole point is that they are undefined spaces in which individuals and communities can find what they love and pursue it. Which would be wonderful, if we gave any attention to empowering those individuals and communities to find things worth loving and actually to choose them. Otherwise freedom is just freedom to obey the algorithms.
So there is good news: this whole situation is plainly untenable. Our attempt to build a whole system of values on the fact that we are not fascists is running out road. Various attempts to resolve this by doubling down on it, through purity tests, identity politics and the amplification of outrage, are not going terribly well. The taboos we've been trying to defend for a lifetime keep being broken, and monsters that we thought had had stakes driven through their hearts are shambling back into life. And if those monsters are growling that the old centre and Left have nothing to offer – merely 'project fear', or managerialism that's not actually very good at management – they are right. The only problem is, how do we stop them taking over?
Well, we'd better find some actual, positive values from somewhere. The government can't do it for us: we have to do it for them. And since we seem to be the actual conservatives now, let's own it. The only way out of this a synthesis: to bring the indispensable insights of our anti-Nazi values, insights which the world bought at a terrible price, together with the wisdom of our deeper-rooted philosophical, cultural and – yes – religious traditions.
Our anti-Nazi values set the ground rules: pluralism, human equality, rule of law. But the rooted traditions provide content for those empty vessels, and not just in the sense that they have deep wells of wisdom with which we can critically engage. They often offer suppleness: for example, the capacity to forgive and to repent, and to dodge the moral pitfalls that cluster around those manoeuvres – and those are essential operations which our anti-Nazi values find very difficult. They offer deeply unfashionable but surprisingly practical ethical techniques: for example, patience, humility, endurance and self-discipline, none of them qualities our culture is oversupplied with. And above all – which is what makes the whole business worth the trouble – they can offer us some beauty to spice all this tasteless technocratic gruel. Something worth loving, some good worth pursuing for its own sake, to go along with all the things that we know we have to be against. Indeed, they can remind us (since we have never quite forgotten) that our public, political life, important as it is, is only ever a means to an end, and that real human flourishing will come from somewhere else. They offer colour in place of all our ever-so-subtle shades of grey.
Which is why I think not only that we should re-embrace these traditions, bringing with them all the hard-earned lessons that the twentieth century taught us, but that we will. Because whatever the future might hold for us, it is not a universalized metropolitan utopia of the kind visionary progressives have imagined and reimagined from Aldous Huxley to Star Trek. If you believe that human identities, particularities, traditions and spiritualities are going to fade away or become superficial quirks in a secular metropolitan soup, then you are living in a particular world indeed. Like it or not, these identities matter profoundly to most of humanity, even those of us who kid ourselves that our sophisticated and modern ways are above such things. Our options are to get the best we can out of those identities – and their best is very good indeed; or, to relinquish control over them, and ultimately of us all, to the trolls. There is not a third way.
A hundred years on, let's stop just being proud of not having read Mein Kampf, and think about what we are reading instead.
Alec Ryrie is the author of 'The Age of Hitler'.
[See also: How the world stopped Hitler]
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