Eric Voegelin (9)

Hitler and the Germans

For most readers this is probably one of Voegelin's more accessible and interesting books, though he does not seem to have put as great a value on it as on some of his more theoretical work. It is basically a critique of modern German culture, which he sees as to a large extent "radically stupid"—as incapable of correctly perceiving reality—despite the existence of individual sages such as Thomas Mann and a few others Voegelin names, and of the substantial fraction of ordinary German voters who refused to vote for Hitler. Those who refuse to acknowledge the prevalence of this stupidity are forced to conclude that Hitler was either not really all that bad, or else some kind of demon with hypnotic powers.

Such radical stupidity was by no means cured by the German defeat in World War Two, Voegelin finds. It extended and extends (as of the 1960s) through all levels of German society, into the churches and universities as well as the political leadership. Germany has church leaders who are ignorant of basic theology, writers who are oblivious of the existence of the basic literature in their fields, politicians who are morally and intellectually unqualified to lead, let alone to assume the role of "Teacher of the People" as Hitler presumed to. Such stupidity is not confined to Germany; but he regards other countries such as Britain and the United States as suffering less from it, apparently because of their greater experience in self-government and relative freedom from the influence of ideological thinking (which has corrupted German philosophical language into a kind of Newspeak). God knows what he would think of the current state of political, academic and ecclesiastical life in Britain and America.

Voegelin follows Robert Musil (in Precision and Soul) in distinguishing "simple" from "higher" stupidity. Simple stupidity is consistent with "decent middle class" virtues such as loyalty and purity of feeling. These have nothing to do, however, with the higher virtues—the primary Christian virtues of faith, humility, charity and asceticism. (Josef Pieper might put the classical virtue of prudence or wisdom at the top of this latter list.) The middle-class decencies, the virtues of the "good Germans", merely serve to add effectiveness to evil if the higher virtues, which should guide them, are missing or deformed. The German problem is that of

the simple man, who is a decent man as long as the society as a whole is in order but who then goes wild, without knowing what he is doing, when disorder arises somewhere . . .

Since one cannot expect everyone to possess higher virtues, such guidance is properly the role of social élites (I may be interpolating a bit here). But in Germany the élites are riddled with people who lay claim to higher virtues, or at any rate higher knowledge, while actually lacking them. These are the stupid in the higher sense. Professors and bishops, too, can form an ignorant "rabble".

Voegelin recommends Alan Bullock as an intelligent biographer of Hitler (while noting that Bullock was largely unknown in Germany).

An interesting aside: Voegelin, who does not usually talk about natural science, remarks that Darwin derived the idea of the Survival of the Fittest from Herbert Spencer, not the other way around. Darwinianism is a derivative of early English liberalism (p. 144). To refer to "Social Darwinism" is in effect to make the false claim that the political ideology of the Survival of the Fittest is founded on objective scientific knowledge.

Eric Voegelin (8)