20th Century Hatred, It’s Causes and It’s Cures
Two abuses of science in the last century compromise our peace. This is about the other one.
With Miroslaw Manicki
Fixation by the public on violence and war
I get little comfort from reviewing available movies — on Netflix, Prime, Max, Peacock, or on other broadcast and streaming media. It is all about the affects of the wars and their effects — this including the Spy vs Spy aspects of the Cold War, stories of which continue under proxy conditions.
I originally got a sense of this ten years ago in visits to Poland. Any time I turned on the television there, I would see soldiers running around and things blowing up. I felt sorry for the Polish people being subjected to this — the angst and the hopelessness stirred up by such persistent violence.
I realize now that there is more to this than I experienced in Poland. Violence is thus embedded into the American psyche to be sure and via media’s constant 20th Century wartime drumbeat, prevalent around the world. This is true of historical as well as fictional and entertainment accounts of the period — from The Bridge on the River Kwai, Victory at Sea and The Guns of Navarone to Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy and to the Sound of Music and South Pacific and Madame Butterfly if not to hundreds and perhaps thousands of other popular media and other performance and artistic and literary offerings. The drumbeat of a century of war is still with us. These translate to contemporary and future altercations — around the world, in outer space, and in other conceptual realms.
This is reality for the people at large. This is what they know, or the nature of what they think and feel.
Hundreds of years of false Utopia
Is it really the way things must be; the real or necessary thing or state of things?
To consider the question, we need to look to history. Of course, there are many kinds of history — scope and application can be difficult to assign to a condition or situation such as we describe. I was stunned recently when reading a book on current conditions in Syria. It made the statement that to understand conditions in the country you needed to understand a long history of the country — way back to the 1940s! (Rubin, 2008).
Oh, but how can this be? The settled history of Syria goes back tens of thousands of years. Doesn’t the truly long story of how people lived there and elsewhere count?
As to modernist sensibilities, no. With scant attention to science, relevant history has been held for centuries to reliably date only to late medieval times, associated largely with the accidental discovery of the Americas and the awakening of European peoples and their prospects. in the 14th century, there was a furtive effort to look back further, as early Oxford scholars obtained Greek philosophical documents with the assistance of Muslim scholars, principally from Toledo, Spain. This was made necessary principally because originals had been systematically destroyed by Rome about a thousand years earlier.
We now know that there was much more to be known from antiquity. What the Greeks presented was an image of an image of an image of something much earlier, something of substance, something representing early kinds of civilization that now can be seen to be of great value. The records dovetail with the Biblical record and there are parallel, contemporaneous evidences of greatness and meritorious governance patterns from very early on.
What we understand now is that European conquerors as they emerged from the Dark Ages had little to go on in making their plans for advancement. While they did learn to produce much, allowing for substantial population growth, they made up a governance structure that was Utopian, and not in a good way. In Britain in particular, they did not learn how to live among themselves, they failed to establish peaceable ways in the 17th century and elected to make up the difference through conquest (van der Pijl, 2007).
The idea was of the ‘rising tides raise all ships’-kind of logic, with two major priorities. One was to preserve wealth once it was gotten — with a decidedly blind eye as to how it was gotten. The other was that all things English — including race and culture — were to prevail. These were inherently superior it was assumed, and the higher up the English ladder one was, both genetically and culturally, the better things went for you. Other European countries had their own versions of this, being in one analysis contender states that never rose to the occasion.
The plan failed everywhere — despoiling land and longstanding indigenous cultures to the degree possible. Some parts of the world were Anglicized to the degree possible — greening deserts with lawns and golf courses and diverting vast stores and flows of water to these and other prurient purposes. Alfred Crosby (1973/2003, 2004) called this the neo-Europeanization of the world.
The only places they held off by policy were the tropical islands needed to refresh navies and travelers. It was of no help to arrive at desert islands, so they developed what they called tropical science — tropical health, tropical ecology, and tropical social norms. In this, they accidentally invented science itself — in many cases, educated ministers converting themselves over to students of nature and natural phenomena, Charles Darwin being an example of this.
This was awkward. The science was great, but it had to be contained and constrained to continue to support the two British and European priorities — wealth maintenance above all and presumed racial superiority. From Africa to North America to the Caribbean to Australia and New Zealand, there were some English-like successes in ecology, but predation and violence were always ‘in the wings’. As Owen Lattimore indicated from experience in Asia, there was always the threat of guns (Lattimore, 1967) —referencing the famous ‘the m’s’ of colonization: Merchants, missionaries, and military.
Depravity took hold in China and India as the British export model faltered and disparate races were encountered. This included vast conquest and subjugation efforts in Africa, the Middle East, and South and East Asia. Not only were efforts led by the British, but France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, and the others. Spain and Portugal had actually led out, possibly more successfully, in both hemispheres to the south.
The Utopian colonization plan was not working — not for the colonized, but also not for the perpetrators of conquest. A rising tide did not raise all ships, not in the long term. It is not that global predation didn’t provide benefits — many that can be seen in the gardens and parks of England and of France. Many former citizens of the British Isles also found homes and prosperity for themselves. Nonetheless, no good end was achieved as to philosophy and governance.
By the late 19th century, predation and corruption descended into inhumanity. This is only now coming into view. Mike Davis documented somewhat recently what he calls Victorian holocausts of India and China, where in the face of extreme drought, the people were not given food in local storage because the British had earmarked the product for market. At the same time, vast new acreage had opened to world markets in Ukraine, North America, South America, and elsewhere — to no benefit to the Indian and Chinese people, who suffered greatly. Many died, as documented below.
The plan failed to achieve stability anywhere, with the result that they went everywhere looking for resources to tap into, land to confiscate for the good of the cause, and people to suborn to their monarchical ways.
The last century started with apparent prospects, but there were dark and deadly “hidden wedges” in human affairs at the time, particularly among the countries that had been involved in colonization, which had leveed onerous burdens around the world — on the colonizers as well as cultures and countries victimized by centuries of violent conquests and attempts at such.
The biggest problem up to World War II was Britain’s, which was a far cry from great. The pernicious effects from propping up the moribund empire were vast and they was overwhelmingly bad.
What the colonizers didn’t know
Had they been better informed, the English and the other Europeans could have established a much stronger foundation for public affairs.
Arnold Toynbee is one of the leaders in such studies (Toynbee 1972/1988). He put stock in the concept of civilization. He identified many of them. The following are thirty-four declared civilizations from his work. Simply speaking, the green segments by civilization and timeframe represent what he called pluralistic societies, which were characterized by collaborative or democratic-kinds of governance. Red in the same sense represents unitary, singular and authoritative times and places.
This question of plurality vs unitarian regimes is central to our concern for current affairs. In essence, as outlined by Toynbee, a unitarian state is much more likely to represent predation and authoritarian force. Political plurality is more likely to prove democratic in some cases, republican in others. One challenge in the Toynbee chart is that there are a number of cases where regimes converted from pluralistic to unitary, or potentially autocratic political conditions, far fewer changes the other way. Based on that record, it seems that plurality once lost is very difficult to regain.
Twentieth Century debacles in perspective
Had their conditions been stable, the British might not have insisted on onerous reparations from the Germans after World War I. John Maynard Keynes warned British leadership about risks from their draconian program for reparations from Germany — after resigning from the ranks of the British delegation to Versailles (Keynes, 1919). The young Keynes predicted at that time that what subsequently happened in Germany would happen.
Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin which Germany began, by a peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organizations already shaken and broken by war, Through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live (Keynes, 1919, 3).
His point was that poverty would create open space for political adventurism. It is important for us to understand how it happened — did the Social Democrats — Hitler’s people — invent their lasciviousness or did they learn it from others?
Of course, badness as a profession isn’t like theoretical physics — the bar for bad behavior is bottomlessly low and easily achieved. There are techniques, though. There are justifications and cultures, though. It is arguably not trivial to know how to establish a pernicious, destructive society based on violence, crime, and predation.
Germany is noted for the opposite of this, particularly in terms of study and practice in the 19th century. Germany is noted for knowledge of and benefitting from these dating back to at least a millennium (Weber, 1920/2003, 3–25). Cooperative societies and for sophisticated study and application of community decisionmaking.
Despite this, Germany takes the fall for the worst behavior of the time and there is no doubting that fact. This is in no way the whole story, though. Much was carried in from the 19th Century to the 20th one.
There is no question that events affect one another in succession, whether for good or ill.
How they did it
Enforced poverty left the door open to further “delusion and reckless self-regard” as indicated by Keynes and others. This could have simply resulted in poverty and want. This was as what Einstein hoped for, although when he wrote it in 1930, it was already too late:
The war machine that came to benefit from a new finding, one of the two great misapplications of science that made World War II significant above all. The more famous of these is well-known, the development and use of atomic bombs. More will be considered in that regard later.
The other emergent weapon was the leveraging of psychological findings to achieve mayhem of unprecedented proportions. Prior to this, terror was waged by the few on the many. Now, Germany served as the feeding ground for a new kind of terror — violence by the many on all else.
Elements of this are described below in the famous Mein Kampf of Adolf Hitler:
Mass assemblies are also necessary for the reason that, in attending them, the individual who felt himself formerly only on the point of joining the new movement, now begins to feel isolated and in fear of being left alone as he acquires for the first time the picture of a great community which has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. Brigaded in a company or battalion, surrounded by his companions, he will march with a lighter heart to the attack than if he had to march alone. In the crowd he feels himself in some way thus sheltered, though in reality there are a thousand arguments against such a feeling.
Mass demonstrations on the grand scale not only reinforce the will of the individual but they draw him still closer to the movement and help to create an ESPRIT DE CORPS. The man who appears first as the representative of a new doctrine in his place of business or in his factory is bound to feel himself embarrassed and has need of that reinforcement which comes from the consciousness that he is a member of a great community. And only a mass demonstration can impress upon him the greatness of this community. If, on leaving the shop or mammoth factory, in which he feels very small indeed, he should enter a vast assembly for the first time and see around him thousands and thousands of men who hold the same opinions; if, while still seeking his way, he is gripped by the force of mass-suggestion which comes from the excitement and enthusiasm of three or four thousand other men in whose midst he finds himself; if the manifest success and the consensus of thousands confirm the truth and justice of the new teaching and for the first time raise doubt in his mind as to the truth of the opinions held by himself up to now — then he submits himself to the fascination of what we call mass-suggestion. The will, the yearning and indeed the strength of thousands of people are in each individual. A man who enters such a meeting in doubt and hesitation leaves it inwardly fortified; he has become a member of a community (Hitler, 1924, 392).
Although such words were present in Hitler’s book, which was widely distributed as his movement grew, they conveniently appeared in print in 1922 by none other than Sigmund Freud, who was mostly passing on the message from contemporary publications of Le Bon.
Then there is the message of the meeting. The answer came, ironically, from writings of Sigmund Freud, which he was essentially passing along according from Gustave Le Bon, a longtime student of French revolutionary discourse. John Toland wrote in his biography of Adolf Hitler that Hitler clearly would have been able to review Freud’s work on the subject, Group psychology and the analysis of the ego” (Freud, 1922/1949). As written by Toland,
Ironically, it took a Viennese Jew to instruct Hitler that the orator who wished to sway a crowd “must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing again and again.” And it was Freud too who pointed out that the mass was “intolerant but obedient to authority… What it demands of its heroes is strength or even violence. It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters.” Typically Hitler took what he wanted from his compatriot, combining Freudian theory with his own ideas to form a formidable weapon (Toland, 1976, 300–301).
It isn’t just the mayhem, but it is perniciousness en masse. These were the two key elements. The first involved the characteristics of members of the crowds they described.
The second involved the nature of the message and the characteristics of the agent of crowd manipulation, the arresting and mesmerizing leader:
Boosted by Freud, himself instructed by Le Bon (1895/1920), Hitler learned how to turn terrorism into a retail thing, which had always hidden in the shadows and the corners of society. Why, oh why, was such a manual of debauchery provided, and under such compromised conditions, without even some plan to understand its effects if not prevent them?
As documented by David Rapoport (1984), terrorism from ancient time onward had been practiced by the few on the many. This was true of Jewish Sicarii, or dagger fighters, against Rome, Muslim Assassins from 1090–1275, who had religious objectives, and Hindu Thugs, who lasted as stranglers for about 600 years and possibly much more. These were in evidence in the various colonial efforts of the British and the others.
Perhaps we should expect to see growth of crowd manipulation and weaponization and related debauchery on par with commercial successes reflected by modernity otherwise. For one thing, how is it that Freud’s advice came right on time? His work was only made possible by Le Bon, who had worked out this philosophy by observing crowd in France during tumultuous times.
What happens when murderous debauchery becomes mainstream? We have learned that civilization itself lies in the balance. Neither Freud nor Le Bon couch their publications with warnings, nor do they offer diagnoses or guidelines as to how the techniques they describe can be mitigated or avoided. Furthermore, they do not couch their studies in light of the vast research on societal development and advancement. Freud rather described Le Bon’s work in this regard in positive, even flowery terms:
We cannot feel [but] that Le Bon has brought the function of the leader and the importance of prestige completely into harmony with his brilliantly executed picture of the group mind (Freud, 1922/1949, 22).
What? Freud did not identify this as a pathology. He certainly provided no diagnostic or normative guidance. He was particularly reckless in granting the imprimatur of these ideas, outside of his principal area of study, of psychoanalysis of individuals. He paid a sore price for this, being ultimately swept away to Canada, to die in London in 1939 as a refugee.
As seen below from the Oxford English Dictionary, showing the prevalence of the word terrorism in our published discourse, terrorism is on the minds of many.
This is a galling aspect of public affairs. There has always been violence, although historians such as Toynbee, Fernand Braudel (1995), and Karl Polanyi (1957), students of civilizations, demonstrates that it has not been as pervasive as has been perceived in modernity.
What is standing in the way of a true Utopia?
The Pandora’s Box of hatred, violence, and vitriol unleashed by Adolf Hitler and his followers resonate throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East. Wounds are not thus allowed to head. Indeed, new ones are regularly opened.
There is an important distinction between crowds as Hitler referred to them — encouraged by Le Bon and Freud — and communities. These are as described by a more robust set of thinkers, many German, such as Durkheim, Pareto, Weber, Parsons, and Tönnies (Parsons, 1937/1968). For example, Tönnies referred to both communities and societies, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, where salient activities of members contrast substantially with the willful violence of the crowds (Tingey and Manicki, 2020).
Einstein, who suffered much in the period from the effects of debauched crowds and who was problematically caught up in unintended consequences of his earlier work in atomic science, provides critical advice. His primary concern was for the bomb — but the other pernicious discovery that vexes us still undeniably applies as well, the art of perverting the unfulfilled crowd.
The war is won, but the peace is not.
The picture of our postwar world is not bright. As far as we, the physicists, are concerned we are not politicians and it has never been our wish to meddle in politics. But we know a few things that the politicians do not know. And we feel the duty to speak up and to remind those responsible that: there is no escape into easy comforts; there is no distance ahead for proceeding little by little and delaying the necessary changes into an indefinite future; there is no time left for petty bargaining.
The situation calls for a courageous effort, for a radical change in our whole attitude in the entire political concept. May the spirit that prompted Alfred Nobel to create this great institution — the spirit of trust and confidence, of generosity and brotherhood among men, prevail in the minds of those upon whose decisions our destiny rests. Otherwise, human civilization will be doomed…. (Einstein, 1945).
These are dark terms, indeed. We need to engage in a concerted program of addressing this second scourge of the last century.
Note on Society(n) approach to governance
We have published a two-volume set on the concept of Society(n) governance, which addresses these issues and more. They can be found here:
References
Braudel, F., and Mayne, R. (Tran.). 1995. A history of civilizations. New York: Penguin Books.
Crosby, A. W. 1972/2003. The Columbian exchange: Biological and cultural consequences of 1492. Westport, CT; Praeger Press.
Crosby, A. W. 2004. Ecological Imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed. Studies in environment and history. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, M. 2002. Late Victorian holocausts: El Niño famines and the making of the Third World. London: Verso.
Einstein, A. 1945. Nobel dinner address on transnational politics. New York: Fifth Nobel Anniversary Dinner, Hotel Astor.
Freud, S. 1922/1949. Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Hitler, A., and Murphy, J. (Tran.) 1924. Mein kampf. Nazi authorized English translation. Mystic, CT: Bank Square Books.
Keynes, J. M. 1919. The economic consequences of the peace. London: Macmillan & Co., Limited.
Lattimore, O. 1967. Inner Asian frontiers of China. Boston: Beacon Press.
Le Bon, G. 1895/1920. The crowd: A study of the popular mind, 12th impression. London: Fisher Unwin.
Murphy, M., and Srivastava, V. Don’t call me resilient: Why pollution is as much about colonialism as chemicals. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/why-pollution-is-as-much-about-colonialism-as-chemicals-dont-call-me-resilient-transcript-ep-11-170697
Parsons, T. 1937/1968. The structure of social action, vol i and ii. New York: The Free Press.
Polanyi,, K., Arensberg, C. M., and Person, H. W. 1937. Trade and market in the early empires. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Rapoport, D. C. 1984. Fear and trembling: Terrorism in three religious traditions. The American Political Science Review, 78(3), 658–677.
Rubin, B. 2008. The truth about Syria. New York: St Martin’s Griffin.
Tingey, K., B., and Manicki, M. 2020. The careful society: The untethered economy. Logan, Utah USA and Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland: Fluidity Finance.
Toland, J. 1976. Adolf Hitler. New York: Ballentine Books.
Toynbee, A. 1972/1988. A study of history: The one volume edition illustrated. London: Thames and Hudson, 72.
van der Pijl, K. 2007. Nomads, empires, states: Modes of foreign relations and political economy, Vol i. London: Pluto Press.
Weber, M. 1920/2003. General economic history. New York: Dover Publications.