Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

One Nazi who was surely comprehending, and who still seems to be highly reputable — I use the term “Nazi” in the strict sense, to mean a member of the Nazi Party in the time of Hitler and an active supporter of his regime — is the Darwinian biologist Konrad Lorenz. In 1943 Lorenz wrote about the decline of humans in civilization: “In a very short time the degenerative types, thanks to their larger reproductive rates and their coarser competitive methods toward the fellow members of the species, pervade the Volk and the state and lead to their downfall, for the same biological reasons that the likewise ‘asocial’ cells of a cancerous growth destroy the structure of the cellular state.” In 1940 he wrote: “From the very beginning the Nordic movement has been emotionally opposed to this ‘domestication’ of humankind, all its ideals are such as would be destroyed by the biological consequences of civilization and domestication I have discussed.” In 1973 he wrote:

It is one of the many dilemmas into which mankind has maneuvered itself that here again, what humane feelings demand for the individual is in opposition to the interests of mankind as a whole. Our sympathy with the asocial defective, whose inferiority might be caused just as well by irreversible injury in early infancy as by hereditary defects, endangers the security of the nondefective. In speaking of human beings, even the words ‘inferior’ or ‘valuable’ cannot be used without arousing the suspicion that one is advocating the gas chamber.

How true. I quote Lorenz only to illustrate that his views can be derived from Darwin or from Nietzsche with equal plausibility. The fact that these ideas are fully within the intellectual range of the average blowhard is very far from exculpating their distinguished proponents.

The “two millennia of anti-nature” of which Nietzsche speaks is the Christian era. They are to be undone through “remorseless destruction,” making up for time lost, presumably, to the practice of mercy while that myth held sway. I hope for the sake of Christianity that it was indeed a constraint on cruelty, on balance. Certainly it was often enough a pretext for it. The thing to note here is that it is not the failure of Christianity but its success, in terms of its own highest values, for which it is despised. And it is despised because it is “anti-nature,” that is, it has fostered degeneracy and parasitism. The antireligious animus is directed at a “falseness” which inhibits the instinct of cruelty. It is another expression of the belief — for which no proof is imaginable — that human goodness is not natural, and therefore is neither beneficial, nor, if the truth were known, even truly good. This is the impetus of the attack on religion, the rejection of the belief, encoded in the terms of myth, that goodness is not only present in creation but is the essence of it. This attack is an impulse of fierce, fastidious aversion directed at humankind, which alone is capable of “degeneracy.”

Let us, as a thought experiment, imagine that all those disreputable Nazis who admired Nietzsche were not uncomprehending after all; that, being culturally and historically closer to Nietzsche than Daniel Dennett, and intimate with his language, they were actually the better interpreters. Let us say that they found in passages like the one quoted above an imperative to act as the agents of nature and to effect the splendid restoration foreseen by Nietzsche. The result was, of course, a hideous crime, which issued in so many kinds of catastrophe that we will never see the end of them. History would then have demonstrated, certainly, the superior naturalness of the very values Nietzsche so passionately derides, if naturalness can be taken to imply consistency with the survival of nature. Perhaps we ought not to be treating these questions of value as if they were purely theoretical, but should instead consider drawing tentative conclusions from experience and observation.

Surely it is useful to note affinity. Dennett remarks of Darwin’s contemporary and supporter Herbert Spencer that he was responsible for “an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking in defense of political doctrines that range from callous to heinous.” Why do these innocent scientific ideas veer so predictably toward ugliness and evil? I would suggest they do so because they systematically disallow the legitimacy of benign, or for that matter merely neutral, motives and behavior. They are not designed to arrive at any other result. Dennett notes, in his circuitous way, that Darwin did not disavow Spencer, publicly or privately. He interprets this as a regrettable omission. But since Spencer’s odious views were already in print while Darwin was still at work on Origin of Species, it seems appropriate to consider the implications of the very great probability that influence in fact went from Spencer to Darwin.

Then there is Sigmund Freud, a good Darwinist who has had as much to do with shaping the modern soul as any one man. Himself a compulsive mythologizer, he rejected the myths of Judeo-Christianity, and replaced them with his own luridly dismal accounts of primal cannibalism and so on. In keeping with the absurdity of this strain of intellectual history, this great debunker insists the events he sets at the beginning of human civilization actually happened. In Civilization and Its Discontents he says of religion, “Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner — which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.” It is characteristic of Freud to personify abstractions and to attribute to them motive and strategy. I know of no one else but Hesiod who is so inclined to this way of thinking.

In any case Freud restates the commonplace that religion is delusional, that it is external to the “real world” — though clearly very actively employed in it. And how does this un-deluded scientist view the world? Well, “the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only shrunken residue of a much more inclusive — indeed, an all-embracing — feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world around it.” This is the “oceanic feeling” he associates with religion, his version of Wordsworthian clouds of glory. He is expounding romanticism with the poles reversed, so that maturity as “shrunken residue” is a condition superior to the “intimate bond between the ego and the world.” Clearly in his own terms it is arbitrary to call one sense of things truer than the other, though it might have seemed daring, and therefore true, in a culture weary of romanticism.

As for the sentimental joy associated with feeling a bond with the world, the Freudian psyche has no place for it. “The program of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled,” though we must try. “Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido.” I will not pause here over the absolute awfulness of this language, a machinery of imposition and imprecision worthy of a Kafka story. I wish only to point out the utter asociality of the self in the Freudian world. Presumably the existence of others is implied in the concept “libido.” The Freudian psyche operates under the constraints and imperatives now to be found in the Darwinist’s “selfish gene,” with the difference that the psyche has no interest in genetic survival. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud ridicules the idea that one might love one’s neighbor as oneself, a commandment Jesus quotes from Leviticus, on the grounds that it is contrary to human nature. This is the great peculiarity of this school of thought, that it wishes to make an ethic of what it presents as an inevitability, when, if inevitability were a factor, no ethic would be needed.