Smart, But Not Always Wise

Values are attributed to us the moment we exit the womb. Over time, this inculcation of values serves to humanize us into our sociocultural collective, thereby rendering ethical, moral beings in that we have come to participate in the only socio-cultural order which we have ever known. But from what source are these values derived and to what extent may we deviate from them, in theory, or in practice, and nevertheless remain rational actors in the dramatic production of social order? For many, these values—or, indeed, values of any kind—are derived from some theological basis wrought of organized religion. But if our existence amounts to little more than the capacity to conform our behavior to some perceived higher-order or the values underlying it, then are we not genuinely engaged in the formation and perpetuation of personhood? Are we not instead engaged in a futile attempt to access and conform to some higher-order? If so, our humanity amounts to an empty collective vessel in that what we are is not of ourselves.

The Judeo-Christian principles of moral and ethical behavior have come to be identified as the set of values by which the person is formed through his application of them to interactive human settings. And yet, the greatest contributors to this setting have steadfastly espoused that human morality “should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.” When Albert Einstein penned these words in a 1931 New York Times Magazine editorial, the world would soon embark upon one of the darkest periods of its history: World War II and the genocidal massacre of millions of de-personified beings; Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents, all of whom has ceded their personhood to a fascist regime’s appropriation. This de-personification occurred in part because the de-personified parties cultivated insufficiently defined personas, especially relative to the Nazi Regime or Third Reich, for whom uniforms became a means of indelible personification through values-driven inculcation. This, however, is not to say that Jews, for example, had insufficiently transmitted their values, but rather to state to the contrary that Jews had too deeply absorbed these values such that they had transformed themselves into caricatures ripe for the picking of those who did not identify in them as willing participants in a moral socio-cultural infrastructure.

When Napoleon Bonaparte inquired into whether the Jews of France considered themselves citizens of his nation or the nation of Israel, the cosmopolitan-ized Jews almost universally answered: “We are Frenchmen.” Smart enough to make the decision suited to their short-term best interest, but unwise enough to fail to consider what the asking of such a question by such a person might portend, the Jews of Europe remained, by and large. And, by and large, they were murdered some 200 years later. Inordinate effectuation of the values derived from the Old Testament had rendered Jews visibly unwilling to perpetuate the drama of socio-cultural interaction, evincing a kind of self-segregationist mentality that did not sit well with their fellows, regardless of nationality. While the Third Reich led the charge, Jews were murdered by the thousands in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and all across Eastern and Western Europe. Perhaps the perception of a kind of primitive racism inherent in their values prompted this genocidal initiative on the part of the majority of non-Semitic Europeans.

They embody the consciousness of personhood is to transcend racial demarcations and Jews of the period had increasingly trended toward the shtetl lifestyle, isolated from this collective consciousness. The perception of a kind of racial superiority likely contributed to Hitler’s demonization of the Jews in that Jews became remarkably ripe targets for demonization; indeed, they were rarely seen or heard from. As such, Jews had de-personified themselves in alienating their personhood in an isolative value system, slavishly adhered to, even before this de-personification turned formal and gruesome. Whether unable to integrate into the perpetuation of dramatic existence or simply unwilling to participate in this drama, Jews of Europe were stationary targets for those seeking to exert a values-laden superiority in disqualifying the morality of other people.

In an afore-described manner did the Jews of Europe inadvertently succumb to de-personification that resulted in their wholesale destruction at the hands of a people who also sought to predicate internal morality and personal construction upon some higher order of socio-cultural values. However, as stated by the late Christopher Hitchens, “[I]mplicit in this ancient chestnut of an argument is the further--and equally disagreeable--self-satisfaction that simply assumes, whether or not religion is metaphysically ‘true,’ that at least it stands for morality.” Perhaps then the Jews and Nazis did share a common enemy in the form of the self-satisfaction described by Higgins—that unexamined values in and of themselves can simply coalesce into a model for the construction of the persona, to be imbued with the moralistic value necessary to engage humanity incarnate. Only the Nazis, however, came to worship their value system thereby alienating their own collective persona within it, precluding them from constructing that which is necessary for the genuine development of ethical behavior.

Nazism was itself a kind of “quazi-pagan” order, as described by Hitchens and others; imagery of cultural mythos in the form of Thor and other Norse gods permeated the Nazi order. Nazis did not pursue genocide as a calling as they did pursue it for the purpose of furthering a kind of new world order that might restore humanity to a perceived Eden in which Aryanism is an exclusive standard. While the Nazi party promoted the social order of Aryanism and its implicit values, it was as though the Aryan order first needed to be brought about in order for its values to be transmitted to the people worshipping at its altar for purposes of forming a superior social-cultural order. In engaging this process, the Nazis began to alienate themselves within it, ceasing to absorb and transmitting in an axiological context, while only constructing the sources from which they believed such knowledge might be derived.

Central to Nazi theology, so to say, were notions antithetical to Western Christianity and monotheistic faith. For example, The Old Testament was a kind of hoax, which only served to obscure the reality that true Nazis should return their faiths to the cultural mythos of the Nordic peoples. Jesus of Nazareth became, for example, a Nordic-descended being. For the Nazis, the value-transmitting infrastructures by which socio-cultural engagement might be achieved were insufficient for their purposes and thus had to be reconstituted to a particular end. In seeking to identify and then account for this misguided end, the Nazis thus de-personified themselves. Instead of transmitting the values by which the being transforms in an ethical subject, operating in the socio-cultural world, the Nazis sought to attain this degree of humanity by merely emulating what it perceived as its apex or, in a sense, endeavoring to mutate into personae not of their own socio-cultural construction.

When Allied forces Allied captured and then arranged for the trials of Nazis with substantial leadership authority--including Herman Goering and Albert Speer, considered the literal and figurative architects of Hitler’s regime—American researchers Gustave Gilbert and Douglas Kelley were commissioned to conduct psychological profiles of the interned Nazi leadership, as much for prosecutorial purposes as for posterity-related ones. Afterward, Kelley stated that these profiles merited limited attention at trial, writing instead that they had been undertaken in order to establish whether some psycho-somatic or psychosis-driven impetus had influenced the Nazis, ultimately stating that it was not his belief that any of those whom he profiled suffered from mental illness. Indeed, Kelley instead determined that Nazism was not a function of a mentally ill leadership structure, but rather of a "socio-cultural disease.” After all, as Hitler himself stated, ‘‘anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must, first of all, summon up the courage to make clear the cause of this disease.’’ Hitler, however, only exacerbated this disease.

In seeking to institute the kind of socio-cultural integration that should facilitate the evolution of morally-sound beings, Nazi Germany took a different approach. Michael Grodin and George Annas well describe the backward manner in which this approach operated:

“This medicalized and political ‘‘solution’’ to mental disorders and disability may have played a role in drawing psychiatrists and psychoanalysts into the regime. The Third Reich is often portrayed as decrying psychoanalysis; the Nazi Party ceremoniously burned the works of Freud along with those of Marx and other ‘Jewish’ thinkers who were seen as threatening the National Socialist state. Those who stayed changed their ideas to mesh with the ideology of the ruling party, ultimately playing a large role in getting rid of ‘untreatable patients’. Science was bent to the service of the Nazi Party, and the new guiding spirit of Nazified psychoanalysis was employed.”

Ultimately, this perversion of socio-cultural engagement was predicated upon the elimination of certain personae perceived as antithetical to the new Nordic myths Nazism had created to write the old ones, which they perceived as being in need of correction. In other words, instead of turning more aggressively to humanities so as to better account for what is perceived as some shortcoming in its mythos, the Nazi regime sought to rectify this ostensible shortcoming not through proliferation of values, but through the literal disqualification and elimination of those whose existence is perceived as counter-productive to the proliferation of these values.

Unsurprisingly, youth persona development mirrored Nazism’s misguided approach to the cultivation of socio-cultural value. The Hitler Youth groups and, for girls, the German Maidens League amounted to the infrastructures by which Nazi youth was inculcated, not with values or ideas with the potential to form even a faux-morality, but with a vision of something to be emulated, thereby alienating youth culture within a previously developed Aryan persona, as opposed to one relevant to engagement with their own socio-cultural world or, indeed, one developed in accordance with a socio-cultural order of the here and now. The function of Hitler Youth was simply to promote Nazi ideology, itself bereft of non-racialized. An emphasis was placed not on the axiological, but on the physical insofar as military training and superior fitness were not just means to an end but also the ends that justified the means.

For female children, they were merely encouraged to maintain sufficient fitness in order to one day do their part to contribute to the Nazi order by giving birth to a child who would further it, ostensibly by his mere existence, and nothing more. In this sense, Hitler’s Youth initiatives functioned to guarantee little more than a de-personification or future generations, thereby operating in counter-intuitive fashion relative to his aims. Nevertheless, Hitler believed that a simple increase in the Nazi birth-rate would allow for some empirically-rooted cultivation of personhood. This brand of personhood, however, was a kind of deontologically-rooted one, in which productive socio-cultural participants would be deemed so strictly by virtue of the fact that they were proficient on subjugating their respective personae to the perceived morality of the Nazi order. Of course, attainment of moral personhood requires much more than mere obligatory cognition, which is all that Hitler wished to inspire in the generation that would have endeavored to perpetuate his order.

In this sense, the Nazi socio-cultural conception was devoid of praxeological considerations in that human action and conduct was no more than a function of the perpetuation of mythos, as opposed to its cultivation in the process of socio-cultural value transmissions by which persona is formed. Rothbard suggests that “[P]raxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals.” However, the actions of those who Hitler expected to further his cause were, first and foremost, undertaken on behalf of simple adhering to this order, without regard for creating or perpetuating the axiological foundations underlying it. Indeed, it remains unclear what the ultimate “chosen goal” of Nazism was; its ideological ambitions never emerged as entirely coherent, thereby precluding their praxeological pursuit.

For classical theorists Marx and Weber, the primordial self-preservational interests of man must at some point cede to man’s desire to operate in the world from a praxeological complex perspective. In order to cultivate meaningful socio-cultural orders humans must create such orders through the exercise of conduct; namely, interacting with the physical world so as to dominate its natural order. Only then can the human provide for himself the baseline from which he may engage with his world. Michael Zimmerman, in presenting the backwards conceptualization of Marx, speaks to the unfitness of Nazism’s socio-cultural atmosphere:

“Here, it is important to recall that because Nazism so emphasized the relation between healthy nature and pure racial blood, widespread environmental movements could not begin in Europe or American until decades after World War II. Many progressive thinkers, whether socialist or liberal democratic, have suspected that radical environmentalism promotes reactionary, anti-humanistic, and possibly racist views.”

For Nazism, however, especially as gleaned from its treatment of the youth structures underlying its future, this human conquest was forgone; not necessarily abandoned, but ignored as a process not essential to the cultivation of social order. In depriving its individuals of the opportunity to define themselves by exercising their humanity through dominion over natural resources, Nazism subjugated them to the physical, relegating one to defacto ontological status. Indeed, the Marxist conception mandates that humans may only define their existence in axiological terms through the act of labor that serves to reinforce the human condition by way of manipulating the natural order accounting for it. Instead of allowing for this opportunity, Hitler sought to circumvent its necessity, in exacerbation of this “socio-cultural disease.”

As such, instead of engaging in socio-cultural value-building and the transmission of these values, Nazis engaged in socio-cultural cleansing or assimilation. In endeavoring to simply recreate the socio-cultural structures and values of their perceived Nordic ancestry, Nazism neglected to forge a morality wrought of the creative or axiological processes by which humanity persists. In 1933, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels began to “synchronize” cultural elements, items, and mores with Nazi ideological principles. In order to achieve this, the Nazi regime sought to eradicate all socio-cultural influences that hailed from undesirable backgrounds; ones created or furthered by Jews, political dissidents or homosexuals. Books and other historical artifacts of culture were burned by the thousands and modern art of the abstract kind was identified as “degenerative” in nature. Accordingly, the quest for concretized human experience came, for the Nazis, at the expense of abstract thought and expression, as opposed to in conjunction with them.

In fact, Nazi propaganda encouraged a kind of socio-cultural immorality, perhaps unwittingly, in urging a passive and inactive response to the marginalization of various cultural and ethnic groups. As presented through Nazi propaganda, the Nazi order was intended to supplant the previous one but, as discussed above, it endeavored to do so without the socio-cultural foundations of abstractifying educational initiatives. The socio-cultural atmosphere promoted by the Nazi order was insufficient for purposes of transforming humans into persons in that the ideals promoted by it were often counter-intuitively related to each other. While Nazism was to be founded upon or operated within a context of modernity, Nazi propaganda routinely evoked imagery of the pastoral German countryside, hailing the reincarnation of a glorious Bavarian past, if not a semi-supernatural Nordic one. In encouraging the subjugation of the individual persona to the collective order of the Nazi regime, Nazism’s inherently-rooted racism functioned to defeat its own purpose in this regard by precluding the meaningful participation in socio-cultural order of the individuals upon which perpetuation of its principles relied.

In Nazism, we witness the process by which faux ideology functions to supplant the socio-cultural transmission of and participation in values. Such values are to be derived from some higher-order, but the dangers of failing to find these values in and of ourselves can have devastating consequences, as was the case for and because of the Nazi regime. In illustrating the dangers of alienating the human in process by which it is to become a moral, ethical person, Nazism sought the socio-cultural elimination of that which is perceived as antithetical to its ideals but failed to create the atmosphere necessary for cultivating an enduring socio-cultural transmission of the values that account for the transformation of human being into moral person. Instead of searching for the values upon which personhood could be founded, Nazis sought merely to mutate into a kind of perverted personhood that essentially de-personified the individuals upon which perpetuation of Nazism relied. In depriving these people of the opportunity for the praxeological exercise of values, as applied to interactivity with and dominion over the natural order, the Nazis de-personified their own individual selves, just as those they hate had served to do in self-segregation fashion.

While the Jews of Europe to some extent created the axiological conditions that rendered them susceptible to Nazi abuse, the Nazis themselves did far more to bring about their own end in cultivating a socio-cultural order predicated upon a kind of pagan worship of the ends to be achieved via this order’s means. This process, however, and the means by which it was ostensibly to be effectuated, lacked not only internal consistency but any semblance of a mechanism by which an ethical, moral person might be formed.

In seeking to de-personify all those perceived as antithetical to the sought-for order, Nazism doomed itself to ignorance of the socio-cultural participation necessary to engender the conditions required for purposes of instituting an enduring civilization. In this sense, Nazi racism was merely a form of expression for the “socio-cultural disease” with which its leaders and followers were afflicted and which was transmitted to their youth ranks; “a socio-cultural disease” that created interactive infrastructures that not only served to de-personify others but which functioned according to the de-personification of those who would purvey it.

In considering the manner in which Nazism failed to account for the transmission of values and socio-cultural participation by which ethical personhood is achieved, it is worth considering the manner in which this process has today been foregone, or at least delegated to robotic or electronic systems with no capacity for facilitating the evolution of personhood. Today, any given baby-bouncer device might be equipped with little more than an iPad. If we are to transmit the values by which moral societal ideals are evolved through devices that do not themselves have consciousness and which certainly do not participate in our socio-cultural drama, then we might expect to alienate this process in de-personified, ontological entities with no capacity to contribute to our own structuring of the persona. And yet, in order to achieve personhood and evolve the human condition, must we not be engaged with a human community? And how might we expect this engagement to occur if we continue to fail to transmit the value of its nature to our offspring, who are to be formed through these values from the moment they exit the womb. Such are the questions to which we continue to hope to find answers through the socio-cultural and often religious structures that we have cultivated. It remains to be seen whether these structures and the means by which they are perpetuated are themselves sufficient for the purpose of perpetuating our own humanity through the enduring cultivation of individual personae within the context of a socio-cultural environment ripe for such cultivation.