Robert D. Kaplan
But there was something even more fundamental than the close-run failure of 1848 that wrought the ideological horrors of the 20th century: technology. The tens of millions of the “dispossessed of the Industrial Revolution,” in Strausz-Hupé’s words, became mindless foot-soldiers to class and racial warfare, abetted by the new force of mass media. It’s impossible to imagine Hitler and Stalin except against the backdrop of industrialization, which wrought everything from tanks and railways to radio and newsreels. Propaganda, after all, has a distinct 20th-century resonance, integral to communications technology.
Technology has kept evolving, so that the roots of our present crisis lie in what went wrong in the 20th century. Nazism and communism shared two decisive elements: the safety of the crowd and the yearning for purity. In “Crowds and Power,” first published in German in 1960, Elias Canetti may have written the most intuitive book about the crisis of the West over the past 100 years. Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” argues that Western civilization, like all civilizations, is ultimately ephemeral, but Canetti’s book shows the actual mechanics.
The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.
Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the “questioner,” and the accuser. “When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd “is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.”
There are strong echoes of this in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” and particularly in Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” But Canetti isolates crowd psychology as an intellectual subject all its own. Crowds have existed since the dawn of time. But modern technology—first radio and newspapers, now Twitter and Facebook —has created untold vistas for the tyranny of the crowd. That tyranny, born of an assemblage of lonely people, has as its goal the destruction of the individual, whose existence proves his lack of virtue in the eyes of the crowd.
There is a difference, however, between the 20th and 21st centuries. The 20th century was an age of mass communications often controlled by big governments, so that ideology and its attendant intimidation was delivered from the top down. The 21st century has produced an inversion, whereby individuals work through digital networks to gather together from the bottom up.
But while the tyranny produced has a different style, it has a similar result: the intimidation of dissent through a professed monopoly on virtue. If you don’t agree with us, you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should be not only denounced but destroyed. Remember, both Nazism and communism were utopian ideologies. In the minds of their believers they were systems of virtue, and precisely because of that they opened up new vistas for tyranny.
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were defeated by U.S. military and industrial power. Civilizations rest not only on intellectual and cultural foundations but also on coarser aspects of strength and power. The historic West, which is ultimately about the freedom of the individual to rise above the crowd, survived the 20th century thanks to American hard power, itself maintained by a system of individual excellence in the arts and sciences, in turn nurtured by an independent and diverse media. But that media is now becoming immersed in the crowd, where it demands virtue in its purest ideological form, so that much of the media too often plays the role of Canetti’s accuser.
The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.
This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.
The brilliant 19th-century Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen, anticipating Spengler and writing in the wake of the failed 1848 democratic revolutions, delivered perhaps the most pessimistic of warnings:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
That is what we are up against. As globalization naturally plunges the West into the crosscurrents of other civilizations, and extreme forms of identity politics trample the rights of the individual, historic liberalism has the task of infinitely postponing Herzen’s vision. Historic liberalism, as the champion of individual agency, delivers a rebuke to all ideologies and to the fate Herzen had in mind. The direction of history is unknowable, thus we have no choice but to fight on. After all, 1848 was not a foregone conclusion.
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