For the elebenty bazillionth time, Nazism and Stalinism were NOT caused by secular, rational, scientific values

It’s like whacking gophers in that classic arcade game; no matter how many times you debunk the argument that too much reason and science gave us Nazism and Stalinism, it keeps popping back up. Which it did in a Facebook discussion I participated in recently. Apparently, all one has to do is promote reason, critical thinking and the scientific method as the only paths to (provisional) knowledge and eventually someone will feel obligated to play the ‘rational totalitarianism’ card as a corrective. Someone like the quitting Pope Benedict XVI, or the philosopher John Gray, the latter being schooled by his confrere A C Grayling on why making a tenuous connection between 20^th century totalitarianism and Enlightenment values – which include a healthy respect for science – is so full of fail.

In his typically elegant prose, Grayling demolishes the idea that Nazism and Stalinism were the logical culmination of overzealous rationality and ‘scientism’:

As to the weary old canard about the 20th-century totalitarianisms: it astonishes me how those who should know better can fail to see them as quintessentially counter-Enlightenment projects, and ones which the rest of the Enlightenment-derived world would not put up with and therefore defeated: Nazism in 17 years and Soviet communism in 70. They were counter-Enlightenment projects because they rejected the idea of pluralism and its concomitant liberties of thought and the person, and in the time-honoured unEnlightened way forcibly demanded submission to a monolithic ideal. They even used the forms and techniques of religion, from the notion of thought-crime to the embalming of saints in mausoleums (Lenin and Mao, like any number of saints and their relics, invite pilgrimage to their glass cases). Totalitarianism is not about progress but stasis; it is not about realising a golden age but coercively sustaining the myth of one. This indeed is the lineament of religion: it is the opposite of secular progressivism.

Other critics of scientific rationality like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Ardono are also guilty of false equivalence when they paint science as just another kind of totalitarian ideology, with the same capacity to oppress. In the introduction to The Britannica Guide to the Ideas That Made the Modern World, Grayling again rebuts these critics by pointing out the fallacies of their arguments. He writes:

In the crisis of the 1930s and 40s the oppressive power that Horkheimer and Adorno had in mind was Nazism, which they saw as the Enlightenment’s self-fulfillingly paradoxical outcome: in their terminology, “instrumental rationality” had been transformed into “bureaucratic politics”. In effect, Horkheimer and Adorno were claiming that the Enlightenment empowered capitalism and with it a deeply oppressive form of managerialism that served its interests to the exclusion of all others. 

This analysis does not survive scrutiny. Nazism drew its principal strength from a peasantry and petit-bourgeoisie that mostly felt threatened by capitalism, so it is not the latter which was the source of oppression, but in fact the former, viewed as descendents of the various constituencies that had most to lose from Enlightenment and which therefore reacted against it. The votaries of Nazism, had they lived in the eighteenth century, would have defended the traditions of absolutism, whether in Versailles or in heaven, against the “instrumental rationality” which expressed itself in the eighteenth century as secularizing and democratizing impulses.

And the key passage, with my emphasis in bold:

As this implies, the same answer can be addressed to the other example cited by critics as an inheritor of Enlightenment principles, namely Stalinism. The general point to be made is that totalitarianism, of which Nazism and Stalinism are paradigms, is a monolithic ideology that demands the unwavering loyalty and obedience of all. Whether in the form of a religion or a political movement, it is precisely opposed by the Enlightenment values of individual liberty, freedom of thought, consent of the people, rational argument, the constraints of evidence, and the absence of controlling hegemonies.

Not exactly rational guys.

So, for the umpteenth time, a commitment to reason and science does not lead to genocide, or gas chambers, or gulags, or personality cults, or delusions of ethnic superiority. Quite the opposite.

I’ll let Grayling have the last word, since he says it so well.

By resisting the counter-Enlightenment pessimism of Horkheimer and Adorno in this way one sees, by the intended contrast, how much of the Enlightenment remains operative in the contemporary world as the same force it was historically intended to be: a force for progress, for liberty, for rationality.

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