On the Road

2024-04-19

I'm in a New York State of mind. It's 43°, cloudy and windy. It's enough to make you miss Florida. Kinda. The weather anyway. (The weather in the header is from Jacksonville. I'm in Albany, NY.)

Finished Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power yesterday. In an Afterword the author, Timothy W. Ryback, mentions Dr. Richard M. Hunt, a "teacher, mentor, and friend," and Harvard professor. Specifically:

When I visited Rick in a retirement community outside Boston in autumn 2019, he was asking similar questions about political fragmentation and polarization in America. He wondered whether Weimar Germany might serve as a cautionary tale even as he warned against drawing false parallels or tenuous conclusions. He invoked an old adage: History never repeats itself, but the events of past and present can rhyme. With this caveat in mind, I have let the historic facts speak for themselves.

Indeed, the facts do speak for themselves, and they are chilling. Because of the differences of the respective political systems, it's impossible to align personalities and dynamics with 100% correspondence. But what is congruent is deeply troubling. The short lesson is that it is quite possible to destroy democracy through democratic means. Perhaps this comes as no surprise to anyone paying attention for the past eight years.

I suppose it also supports the idea the that democracy isn't necessarily an ideal that everyone in a democracy shares. That there's a strong trait present in human nature that craves a "powerful" leader.

Given the reliance on abstractions that democracy and democratic political institutions require, that seems unsurprising. Civilization itself is an abstraction. It exists only in our minds. When enough minds abandon those abstractions, or subordinate them to other ideas, or are wholly incapable of establishing and maintaining them in the first place, you get WW II, a large scale, multi-regional collapse of civilization.

Today, as profit and competition push aside the value of a functioning civilization, we have a global catastrophe unfolding.

What happened in Germany was plainly visible to anyone who cared to look at the facts. Many tried to wish it away, but others saw what was coming, were powerless to stop it, and what followed was as inevitable as the sunrise.

Similarly today, what is happening is plainly visible to anyone who cares to see. While many of us may wish to believe that the outcome isn't inevitable, it very likely is.

Our cognitive capacity isn't sufficiently evolved to maintain a near-universal hierarchy of fundamental abstractions. We have emotionally anchored primitives instead, and we're highly evolved to "reason backward from our feelings." We value simple concepts like "competition," or "the market." Our notions of "freedom" are similarly crude. They may have functioned reasonably well in the 18th Century, but they're wholly outmoded in the 21st. But we're emotionally wedded to them, and that can be exploited.

I've read a lot of books about the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany, because it does seem like it ought to have been inconceivable. That itself should demand that it be studied and understood. But we have "Godwin's law," to relieve us of any burden of investigation and understanding.

The "banality of evil" is the extent to which we will, as a matter of routine, empower others, even the worst of us, to perform evil. It's written throughout our history. The "bad guys" never see themselves that way. Hierarchy of abstractions. "We did what we had to do." Razor wire in the river. "Destroy Hamas."

Anyway, maybe it's the weather. There are hints of spring on the branches of the trees, but the sky is gray, the air is cold and the wind howls.