It’s all culture’s fault, m’lord

The matter of collective responsibility is very much in the news these days, as it was in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Can all Germans be held responsible for the crimes of Nazism? Can all Russians be held responsible for the crimes of Bolshevism and Putinism?

The issue is multifarious. On the one hand, since it’s individuals and not groups that are moral agents, only individuals can be morally culpable. On the other hand, when people act within and as a group, they create a new quasi-homogeneous entity, whose characteristics may have little in common with those of the individual members.   

Those interested in the problem could do worse than read Karl Jaspers’s 1947 book The Question of German Guilt. Jaspers identifies four categories of guilt: criminal, political, moral and metaphysical. He then analyses each and pronounces his verdict on the eponymous question.

Meanwhile, I’d like to touch on a related issue. To what extent does the national culture, as a constituent of the national character, precipitate the savagery of modern totalitarian regimes?

Unfortunately, most of you will be unable to watch a Russian-language lecture on this subject by Andrei Baumeister, brilliant young professor of philosophy at Kiev University. (When a man in his early 50s looks young to you, you know the clock is running down).

I’ve listened to many of his YouTube streams, and, as a former lecturer myself, I can testify that he is one of the best I’ve seen. Baumeister’s presentation is lucid, erudite, well-argued, free of rancour and as simple to follow as the subjects allow.

What caught my eye the other day was Baumeister’s position on the role of culture, especially philosophy, in nudging a nation towards criminal behaviour. Understandably, he relies mostly on Germany and Russia for illustrations.

Speaking of the former, many commentators draw a direct line of descent from German philosophy all the way to Hitler. Nietzsche and Wagner are usually the first names to come up in this context, but Baumeister correctly mentions a few others, such as Fichte and Schopenhauer.

For once, his conclusion leaves me unconvinced. Without the thinkers who dominated the Romantic period of German culture, says Baumeister, Hitler wouldn’t have happened. Yet it’s wrong to say that Hitler happened because of them.

The nuance escapes me. I suppose Baumeister is arguing against historical determinism, the fallacy that says that, if things happen, they were bound to happen. In other words, the German philosophy of that period did eventually produce Hitler, but, had the cards fallen in a different way, it could have produced something entirely different.

The subjunctive mood makes me uncomfortable. If German philosophy indeed produced, or largely contributed to, Nazism, that’s a fact. What else, if anything, it could have produced is speculation. Such conjecture can be most entertaining, but facts are more reliable.

I’m interested in a different causality, one between philosophy (or culture in general) and the national character. Which produced which? Which is the chicken and which is the egg?

The earliest commentary on the German, or rather Germanic, character I’ve read came in Caesar’s Gallic War. After a major battle, Caesar walked through a Gaul field strewn with corpses. He noticed that the faces of the dead Germanic warriors were contorted by savage, defiant scowls, so different from the peaceful expressions of the other dead.

So half a century before Christ, the ancestors of today’s Germans already displayed the martial qualities that later were to make the country so belligerent. This goes to show yet again that national character develops over millennia, a process that can’t be profitably attributed to just a handful of events.

German mythology, full as it is of sylvan goblins like the murderous elf Erlking, is different from its counterparts in other European cultures, such as French or English. It doesn’t take X-ray vision to discern its dark pagan mysticism in, say, the Nuremberg rallies so poetically filmed by Leni Riefenstahl.

The culture of German exceptionalism is ever-present in German philosophy, though Kant and Hegel weren’t afflicted by it. Thus Hegel saw the 1806 Battle of Jena as one fought between culture and intellect, as personified by Napoleon, and spiritless barbarism as embodied in the Germans.

Yet one can hear the intimations of Nietzsche’s coming Superman in Hegel’s adoration of Napoleon: “…I saw the Emperor Napoleon, the World Soul, riding through the town… It’s a marvellous feeling to see such a personality dominating the entire world… He is capable of doing anything. How wonderful he is!”

Add this deification of a fallible man to Fichte’s German (and incidentally socialist) chauvinism and Nietzsche’s Superman, and you can see the ingredients of Nazism coming together. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was also rooted in German philosophical idealism.

Mainstream German thought was barely touched by Christianity, and the Reformation represented not so much a Christian reaction to clerical corruption as a pagan reaction to Christian discipline. The strict monotheism of the Jews also went against the grain of pagan self-deification implicit in Protestantism.

That partly explains the rabid anti-Semitism of leading Protestants, starting with Luther. Jews were to him “devil’s children” whose synagogue was a “defiled bride… an incorrigible whore and an evil slut”. Jews were full of the “devil’s faeces… in which they wallow like swine.”

He didn’t sit on the fence, did he? From Luther, anti-Semitism eventually drifted into German idealist philosophy, either implicitly, as in Kant and Hegel, or explicitly, as in Fichte, Nietzsche and Wagner.

Curiously, many commentators ascribe the rift between the last two to Nietzsche’s rejection of Wagner’s virulent anti-Semitism. They should read Nietzsche’s essay Antichrist, the most anti-Semitic tract I’ve ever read this side of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The German cultural soil was amply sown with seeds of Nazism. And, though Baumeister is right in saying that they didn’t have to sprout to such awful maturity, it was always likely that they would.

A similar argument applies to Russia, different though she is to Germany in so many respects. Russian supremacism has always been vaguely Christian and messianic, ever since the monk Philotheus of Pskov (d. 1542) pronounced Russia to be the sole heir to Byzantium and the Third Rome (“and there will not be a fourth”).

That was odd, considering that the Russian peasantry has always been deeply pagan in its outlook, using Christianity as merely a vessel containing their wild superstitions. But culture in Russia was always more divorced from the masses than in Germany.

If in Germany most people never read Fichte and Nietzsche, in Russia most people never read, full stop. Even at the beginning of the 20^th century, when literacy in Germany was practically 100 per cent, some 80 per cent of Russians remained illiterate.

Yet that didn’t mean that culture had nothing to do with Russian imperial expansionism, so much on show at present. It’s just that the illiterate masses have never had any input into the country’s behaviour. This was determined and mandated by the cultured élite, whose ideas were largely formed by Pushkin, Dostoyevsky et al. – and I am mentioning only the most benign influences.

Just a few days ago, I wrote a piece about this (It Didn’t Start with Putin), so I won’t repeat myself. Suffice it to say now that all those founders of Russian culture assumed and preached the innate superiority of saintly Russia over the decadent, materialistic West.

Yet Baumeister lets Russian culture off the hook much too easily. He acknowledges that, say, both Pushkin and Dostoyevsky produced some jingoistic works full of aggressive hatred. But, he says correctly, these formed only a small part of their output.

Yes, Pushkin might have written his chauvinistic poems Stances and To Slanderers of Russia, but he also wrote Eugene Onegin. And Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, not just anti-Semitic, supremacist rants.

That’s a curious line of argument. For example, a naturally violent man usually doesn’t commit violent acts every day of his life. He may spend years and years never even getting a parking ticket. However, when that fateful midnight comes, there he is, plunging a knife into a lonely passer-by.

True, says Baumeister, Dostoyevsky was an anti-Semite, and true, he did write A Writer’s Diary, a book spewing hatred at Jews, Catholics, Westerners in general and everyone else within reach. But he, Baumeister, could show you reams of things written by the Germans that were much worse.

So could I. But, much as I despise clichés, since when do two wrongs make a right?

Great writers and philosophers exert an immediate influence only on those who read them, which in Russia has always been a small group. But those readers then act as lightning rods, transmitting the electric charge of a great culture into the social earth of the population at large.

Writers and thinkers of genius thus shape, if only at several removes, the country’s ethos. And the ethos shapes them in return, for such men are endowed not only with unusually fecund minds but also with uncannily sensitive noses. They sense the unspoken cravings of the people, put them into words and reinject them into the masses.

Putin’s missiles raining on Ukrainian targets in 2022 are an expression of Russian culture by other means – just as Hitler’s bombs falling on the same targets in 1941 expressed German culture. Baumeister is right in saying that this link is neither total nor predetermined. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.