The Pope needed to convince Europeans to embark on a crusade. The Persians, Urban II told a French crowd in 1095, ‘a foreign race, a race absolutely alien to God, has invaded the land of those Christians and has reduced the people with sword, rapine and fire’.
They’ve burned god’s churches, tortured Christians, desecrated religious icons, and furthermore Europe is too small for us, doesn’t have enough farmland, is bound by mountains and sea, and so we squabble amongst ourselves. ‘Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre’, he said, ‘wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves’.
Urban II and the priesthood raised an army of 100,000 men from all walks of life – from nobles to peasants – to march on Jerusalem, led by a monk called Peter the Hermit.
What resulted was unimaginable. Muslims and Christians on both sides hung the slain enemies to rot along walls, skewered their heads on spears, catapulted those heads over each other’s defences, raped, burned and terrorised cities, killed children, amputated limbs and left each other to die slowly in agony. There were reports of soldiers wading through pools of blood up to their ankles. When winter came and the soldiers began to starve they ate the dead, and rumours spread that the coming Christians were cannibalistic savages. Terror set in.
One crusader wrote, ‘some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others tortured for a long time and burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets… they were stabbing women who had fled into palaces and dwellings; seizing infants by the soles of their feet from their mothers’ laps or cradles and dashing them against the walls and breaking their necks; they were slaughtering some with weapons, or striking them down with stones’.
When the Pope heard all of this, he expressed some doubt about ordinary Christians’ motives for joining the crusade. But he drew on a doctrine that he was helping to develop – what we’d now called just war theory – stemming from Christian thought back to Saint Augustine – that some wars are necessary. God needed defending. Yes, Jesus had told Saint Peter to sheathe his sword, but he had not told him to discard it altogether. Urban II told Christendom that the ‘soldiers of Christ’ would receive eternal reward in the afterlife.
Millions died in the Crusades. A few centuries before, in China, somewhere between ten million and thirty million died during the An Lushan Rebellion, one of the worst recorded catastrophes in history. But the deaths weren’t directly from the violent civil war. They were from the resulting collapse of canals and irrigation systems that peasants relied on for food. Similar famines happened in Bengal under British colonial rule.
During the Holocaust the murders were more deliberate, but even then, as Hannah Arendt famously observed, it was often banal – bureaucrats doing their job, checking off lists, running the trains, ordering gas, following orders, being told ‘we’re at war’, it’s a necessary evil.
From Aristotle to the Atlantic slave trade, the justification was the same: a necessary evil – look how incapable these captive men and women are, if they weren’t under our care, like animals, they wouldn’t survive.
These few examples illustrate the diversity of ways evil, murder, warfare, catastrophe, torture, genocide have been rationalised throughout history, and the differences in how they were caused. And this leads to a question: how do we make sense of this diversity?
‘dark side of history’ suggests violence, death, destruction, sadism, slavery, famine – in short, human pain. But it also includes unintended consequences – like the famine during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or maybe psychological darkness, prisons of the mind as much as the body, depression, anxiety, fear – a variable much more difficult to measure.
There’s also the matter of perspective. Death and illness that’s the result of a life of poverty is rarely placed in the same category as murder, but why? If pain is the criteria, then pain is pain.
Is a long life of boredom any better than a short life of war? Is a long torturous life in a Victorian factory worse than a quick death? What distinguishes deaths from pollution from deaths from war? Any attempt to judge history assumes certain biases, criteria, ideological perspectives.
In a pioneering French study, for example, Jean-Claude Chesnais looked at historical trends in violent death in France and realised that things like suicides and car accidents had to be included alongside violence and war. The former are today among the leading causes of death worldwide, but it’s unlikely that we’d call them evil.
I think then that it’s useful to start from a common assumption. That the world has got better, that violence and pain have declined, and that freedom, wealth, and comfort have all increased. This is what’s often referred to as whiggish history – a ‘civilising thesis’.
It’s a narrative, in historian Philip Dwyer’s words, that’s ‘wrapped in a constant, triumphalist, linear march across history toward a better, less violent future’.
We’ve evolved – biologically, socially, culturally, psychologically – from savages to the civilised, from grunting cavemen to polite ladies and gentlemen, from superstitious pagans to enlightened scientists, from callous torturers to empathetic teachers.
Is it really true? If so, why? If not, why does it seem so? The idea that history improves over time has taken many forms. In 1931, the historian, Herbert Butterfield published a book criticising what he called the ‘Whiggish’ interpretation of history – named after the progressive party in Britain at the time – describing it as ‘the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’.
We can see the tendency in many thinkers before and since – Hegel, Marx, Kant, the idea of the End of History, Steven Pinker’s work on the decline of violence, and many more.
For them, in varying ways, history has progressed through the unfolding of reason, economic development, the overcoming of logical or social contradictions, through the triumph of liberal ideas, through innovation, scientific and technological progress.
So where the hell do we start? There’s quite a history to choose from.
The Crusades were ironically justified by a Christian ideology of turning the other cheek, a set of ideas that were themselves responding to a world of Roman violence. Crucifixion was so common in the Roman Empire that 6000 slaves were crucified along an 120 mile stretch of road after Spartacus’s revolt. Each with nails through the wrists and feet, the weight of the body pulling the wretched bodies down, making it difficult to breath, the legs sometimes broken, each death taking somewhere between a few hours and a few days.
I think it’s safe to say we’re unlikely to see something like this today, and that’s the progressive’s point – that we have, in some ways, improved. But I think it does no good to look so far back. The more interesting historical moments are the ones where, despite supposed progress, we seem to have degenerated in some way.
Like how science, technology, and modern methods of bureaucracy were necessary for the Holocaust to take place in the way that it did, or how nuclear fission led to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. These are Frankenstein moments, when progress becomes Faustian, when Enlightenment reverts to mythology, when innovation trips itself up, when Prometheus gives us fire and gets punished for it by having his liver pecked out by an eagle for eternity.
These moments are where wisdom lies. These are the moments when we’re caught out as a species by tripwires of our own hubris.
After all, what is the first technological innovation? The first use of fire by our ancestors around 400,000 years ago could have been the first step on a path of historical development – it gave us the ability to unlock energy by cooking and warming, lengthened the hours of light, lead to metalwork, and more – but fire also burns, it kills, it led to violence and death and the destruction of ecosystems.
It seems that each innovation – from agriculture to nuclear energy – contains both the seeds of liberation and the possibility of destruction. The neutral release of energy can be used for both good and ill. Discoveries can used to emancipate and dominate.
Powers at the heart of matter, powers
We shall have hacked through thorns to kiss awake,
Will open baleful, sweeping eyes, draw breath
And speak new formulae of megadeath.
– James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover
Darkness has long been associated with the irrational – with demons, monsters, dread and fear – and light with the reasonable – angels, vision, clarity. Many Enlightenment philosophers and scientists were interested in optics, sight, and light – many like Goethe and Descartes experimenting with colour and rainbows – and the image of light and vision as a symbol for reason was, and is, common.
Reason, thinking rationally about causes and effects and the qualities of things, leads to understanding, that if I understand the physical around me I can invent lightbulbs, heat my house, construct better buildings, ships, technology – modernity. So is it the sleep of reason that produces monsters?
Well it’s not that simple. Mathematics, geometry, engineering can of course be used and misused. It can lead to lightbulbs but also guns, bombs, poisons, war.
You can also make ‘rational’ arguments to pursue selfish or evil ends – the art of perverse persuasion. Cicero complained of those who ‘make contorted conclusions, to speak filthily, to use petty little arguments’.
A powerful critique of rationalism was made by the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who argued that reason could only ever be the slave of the passions.
What he meant was that thinking logically can tell us how to do something but it cannot tell us what to do in the first place. We feel we want to something then reason how to do it. Reason is a means to end – it might tell us how to cook a meal, but ultimately we’re cooking it because we feel hungry.
Reason might aid us in designing a new car but then I can jump in that car and use it to run someone over on purpose.
But let’s not abandon reason as something that can lead us from the darkness too quickly. Reason tells us that witchcraft is superstition, that alchemy is a misguided pursuit, it tells us how to perform surgery and understand weather systems. It helps us understand the causes of things.
And so the light of the Enlightenment was to be shone in all dark corners. Immanuel Kant wrote, ‘The land of shadows is the paradise of dreamers. Here they find an unlimited country where they may build their houses as they please. Hypochondriac vapors, nursery tales, and monastic miracles provide them with ample building materials’.
He argued that the ‘spirit-seers’ who claimed to have access to divine revelation were, ‘like a sick man’s dream, creating vain phantasms’.
Kant said, in one of his wittier moments, ‘If a hypochondriac wind clamors in the gut, it all comes down to the direction it takes: if it goes downward, it becomes a fart, but if it goes upwards, it is an apparition or a holy inspiration’.
So if reason is the simple mechanism we use to pursue goals, surely we want more of it – while also being wary that it can be used for both good and ill.
And we must be careful to remember that those things that fall outside of logic and reason are not automatically dangers lurking in the darkness.
As the philosopher Justin Smith writes: ‘At the individual level irrationality manifests itself as dreams, emotion, passion, desire, affect, enhanced by drugs, alcohol, meditation; at the social level it is expressed as religion, mysticism, storytelling, conspiracy theory, sports fandom, rioting, rhetoric, mass demonstrations, sexuality when it bursts out of its prescribed roles, music when it breaks away from the notes on the sheet and takes on a life of its own’.
Dreams are irrational but can inspire, religion can be a force for good and bad, emotion is at the core of our lives. So if the irrational can be both good and bad, maybe we have to dig deeper to understand the dark side of history.
Do we have insatiable appetites? Do our desires go beyond having just enough? Do we crave wealth, prestige, and power?
We are all hungry, thirsty, in search of safety, guarantees, and comforts. Empire and colonisation was not an exercise in the pursuit of essential goods but luxury tastes – sugar, tobacco, silk, spices. As Smith says, ‘commodities Europeans naturally did not know they needed until they knew they existed’.
We seem to be a species that wants to push at the limits.
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment rationalised and mathematised the world, but this new way of looking at the natural world and ourselves replaced an older set of values – virtues, religious beliefs, traditional norms.
For many Europeans – including a group of ambitious Brits setting up the new East India Company in a dusty office in London – older ethical guidelines were replaced by the pursuit of profit and self-interest.
This unleashing of energy was something new. The Bible had said, ‘Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions’.
But the early Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes instead argued that all of our actions are in the pursuit of power. As one periodical claimed in 1730, ‘The love of power is natural; it is insatiable‘.
Thinkers like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith made the case that private vices and the pursuit of self-interest led to public good.
In the eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham argued that all of our actions are in the pursuit of pleasure and happiness. In 1817 he had to invent a new word to describe it – maximise.
Seeing the world mathematically and as humans as just calculating machines acting on their own interests naturally led to a new force – greed has always existed, but profit, this was new. Human desire could become superhuman – we are capable of more than we knew.
It started laying the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, in building new innovations, but like rationality more broadly, our insatiable desires can have a dark side.
Explorers, colonists and capitalists used ships, guns, technology to bring comforts and luxuries home, while on the other hand, as one commentator of the British in India wrote, ‘permit themselves all sorts of liberties in the pursuit of private profit or in the hope of impunity. I have seen some so far forget their duty, that they beat to death unfortunate Indians to extract money not owed to them. The country lies groaning under the Anarchy, laws have no power of sanction, morals are corrupt to the ultimate degree, the people groan under a multitude of vexations, all caused by the decay and confusion into which this once-great empire has fallen’.
Mir Qasim, the nawab of Bengal, complaining to a Company official, wrote that the English ‘forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the merchants for a fourth part of their value; and by way of violence and oppression they oblige the farmers to give five rupees for goods that are worth but one’.
Private gains for the British led to India’s GDP stagnating for almost two hundred years. Gains for some led to apartheid for others, to the deaths of native Americans, to the systematic enslavement of millions.
India was conquered by an unregulated private corporation with profit as their sole motive, underwritten by the desires of millions of Europeans. In 1830, parliamentarian James Buckingham said in a speech that, ‘the idea of consigning over to a joint stock association the political administration of an Empire people with 100 million souls were so preposterous that if it were now for the first time proposed it would be deemed not merely an absurdity, but an insult to the meanest understanding of the realm’.
Historian William Dalrymple called it ‘the supreme act of corporate violence in world history’.
If you look to some of the worst periods in history, the events with the largest death tolls, you’ll see that, like the An Lushan Rebellion against the Tang Emperor, many of the deaths were the result not of direct war or domination, but of famine.
Another of the worst famines in history happened in China in the 19th century during the Taiping Rebellion. Around sixty million died.
In India in 1770, a famine hit East Indian Company ruled Bengal. A third of the Bengalese population perished – around a million people. Bodies floated down rivers, parents sold children to protect others, and one observer wrote that, ‘dogs, jackals, vultures and every bird and beast of prey grey fat and unwieldy on the flesh of man’.
Traditionally, the rulers of India – used to dealing with bad harvests, droughts, or flooding – had managed crises with reserve grain systems and public relief measures. The ruling East India Company provided no such support to the population, and continued to enforce tax collection during famines, hanging many who resisted.
In the worst famine year, £100 million worth of goods in today’s money was transferred from India to London. The governor of the East India Company, Robert Clive, became one of the richest self-made men to have ever lived.
Fast forward to the middle of the twentieth century and Mao is embarking on a campaign of communist reform in China. He wanted to transform agriculture in China and modernise the country, and he wanted to do it as quickly as possible.
The goal of Mao’s Great Leap Forward was to industrialise and urbanise the country and he ordered 90 million peasants to move from the countryside to factories. Grain production dropped by a quarter, pig farming by around 50% in a few years, and as a result around 40 million died of starvation.
So here’s a question: does this make Mao as bad as Hitler? Is it as bad to kill intentionally as it is to kill through gross negligence?
Historian Maurice Meisner writes: ‘Mao Zedong, the main author of the Great Leap, obviously bears the greatest moral and social responsibility for the human disaster from the adventure. But this does not make Mao a mass murderer on the order of Hitler and Stalin, as it is now the fashion to portray him… There is a vast moral difference between unintended and unforeseen consequences of political actions… and deliberate and wilful genocide’.
A similar famine had happened in the thirties in the Soviet Union where around 7-10 million perished as grain was seized by Stalin.
But it wasn’t just gross negligence. Stalin and Mao both sent millions to labour camps. The Khmer Rouge murdered between 1.5-2 million. And while the numbers aren’t as high, the Jacobins made good use of the guillotine during the French Revolution.
Stalin’s head of the NKVD – the secret police – led the Great Purge of around seven million arrests, a million executions, and two million deaths in the Gulag.
Stalin, Mao, Pot, Robespierre and many others were all caught in a spiral of suspicion, paranoia, blame and, like Urban II, used the ‘just war’ theory that the violence was necessary to secure their revolution. One new ideology tries to entrench itself against the ghosts – sometimes very real and often very imagined – of the past.
Here we have two different measures of darkness. One was rationalisation – that new ideologies have to be protected – another of negligence or even, in the case of some famines, just the horrific accident of unintended consequences. Abrupt and violent changes in governance, ideology, ideas, can often lead to catastrophe.
In 1768, the German poet and philosopher Johann Herder urged his fellow countrymen to stop speaking French. He said, ‘spew out … the ugly slime of the Seine / Speak German, O you Germans’. In Geneva, many argued that the city was being corrupted by Francisation. The Russian nobility spoke French, across Europe French culture stood for elegance and luxury, speaking French meant one was cultured, enlightened. But Herder thought it was a way of imposing so called ‘universal values’ on German distinctness – and that one’s local culture, beliefs, arts, and ideas were fundamental to a nation’s character. Herder is now known as the father of nationalism.
Throughout history, in endless places, we see a question about the relationship between a dominant culture and a dependent one, high and low culture, master and servant, invader and invaded.
Voltaire – the prototypical Enlightenment man of reason, science, and progress – told the Empress Catherine of Russia that she was justified in conquering the Poles because they were a backward people – that Enlightenment should be forced upon them for their own good.
The combination of using reason, technology, and the pursuit of interest for one person or group at the expense of another has always resulted in the production of an ideology to justify the actions of the dominant group.
In both Jim Crow America and the British Raj, for example, the ideological justification was that African Americans and Indians needed looking after, that they were incapable of self-government, and needed guiding like children – magazines and cartoons often caricatured African Americans as childlike, easily frightened, dirty, and lazy. Take on the white man’s burden, Kipling urged America.
In his 1867 state of the union address Andrew Johnson said that: ‘It must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism’.
The philosophers Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued in the wake of the Second World War that, ‘Domination is in effect whenever the individual’s goals and purposes and the means of striving for and attaining them are prescribed to him and performed by him… Domination can be exercised by men, by nature, by things – it can also be internal, exercised by the individual on himself, and appear in the form of autonomy’.
They saw the roots of reason’s powers to dominate in the simple domination of man over nature – of humans bending the natural world to our own ends.
Adorno and Horkheimer wrote: ‘reason constitutes the court of judgement of calculation, which adjusts the world for the ends of self-preservation and recognizes no function other than the preparation of the object from mere sensory material in order to make it the material of subjugation’.
In that, they provocatively claim that Enlightenment becomes totalitarian. It becomes about standardisation, about commanding and controlling, about dictating and one way of doing things.
They write: ‘The more dominant the complex social organism becomes, the less it tolerates interruptions of the ordinary course of life. Today as yesterday, tomorrow as today, everything must follow the same course’.
In searching for universal rules of nature, ‘Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings’.
Other thinkers have made similar claims. The philosopher turned Nazi Martin Heidegger argued that technology entraps us, frames us, pushes us, calls us. He argued that we become trapped in psychological cages of our own making, with some suffering more than others.
The ideology of reason and domination can insidiously seep into the mentalities of both oppressors and oppressed. The dark side of history might be measured in death, war, slavery, pain but it begins in ideology and discipline – in the excited soldier marching off joyously to war, in subtle cultural jingoism, in the deep-rooted entrenchment of the status quo that limits protest and stops change.
The most obvious way the status quo at home and abroad is maintained is through the creation, expansion, and militarisation of the modern police force. Humans lived without being policed for millennia, and police forces seem so normal to us now that it’s useful to remember how controversial they were when they were introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Much of the media and many of the politicians of the time protested vehemently.
The Gazette newspaper in Britain called it, ‘a base attempt upon the liberty of the subject’, and warned that the purpose of the police state was, ‘to drill, discipline and dragoon us all into virtue’.
A parliament enquiry concluded that ‘such a system would of necessity be odious and repulsive, and one which no government would be able to carry into execution… the very proposal would be rejected with abhorrence’.
In 1867 the commentator Walter Bagehot wrote that, ‘The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority. The introduction of effectual policemen was not liked; I know people, old people I admit, who to this day consider them an infringement of freedom. If the original policeman had been started with the present helmets, the result might have been dubious; there might have been a cry of military tyranny, and the inbred insubordination of the English people might have prevailed over the very modern love of perfect peace and order’.
In the US, the police force grew out of slave patrols.
The justification for the introduction of a modern police force was that murder and crime was on the rise. But research has shown the opposite to be the case, and that most crime was petty theft associated the poverty.
Much more interesting is the rationalisation, bureaucratisation, and consolidation of state power, the regulation of efficient order and the protection against radical change in the wake of the French Revolution. Governments across Europe increasingly turned their attention to maintaining order. The streets became the site of surveillance, political radicals were spied on and infiltrated, street fairs were supressed.
The introduction of criminal records, photography, fingerprinting, police vehicles, and radios expanded the surveillance state.
Once statistical data and a focus on abnormality in one’s own citizenry is introduced we see a new form of subjectifying power: discipline, punishment, routinisation, burgeoning bureaucracy; a quantitative population with an average, the normal citizen.
The abnormal category could then be normalised or eradicated – the unclean, the unfit, the undesirable, the immigrant, eugenics.
Sterilizing the unfit and the criminal was explored to varying degrees in America and Europe but reached its zenith in the Nazi regime, which passed a law in 1933 that declared that, ‘anyone with hereditary diseases may be rendered sterile by surgical means, when, according to medical experience, it is highly probable that the offspring of such person will suffer from severe inherited mental or bodily disorders’.
At least 400,000 compulsory sterilisations were carried out during Nazi rule on those with anything from alcoholism to blindness, epilepsy to ‘feeble-mindedness’ and homosexuality.
300,000 were killed in what came to be known as Action T4, as doctors were given permission to kill those deemed ‘incurable’.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had warned that, ‘To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so’.
Each year millions try to commit suicide, countless millions more report depression, millions are subject to abuse, mental and physical Any exploration of the dark side of history has to shine a light in the dark corners of the human mind.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard commented on the changing world around him and the freedoms and possibilities it brought and argued that, ‘deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked by the millions and millions in this enormous household’.
It was a period of crisis. Darwin showed that humans were just another animal, Nietzsche commented on the decline of religiosity, Romantics rallied against industrialisation and urbanisation. People moved in droves from the predictability of rural life to cramped and dirty cities.
Kierkegaard said, ‘Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss… Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’.
The word panic was coined at around the same time by the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley who used it to describe the increasing cases he was seeing of extreme agitation, trembling, and terror.
Doctors were diagnosing a new condition – neurasthenia, a precursor to what we’d now call stress or anxiety. The term stress wouldn’t be used until the middle of the twentieth century, borrowed from the idea of a physical object being stressed – metal in factories, train tracks, alloys, tools, pushed and pulled, hammered, bashed, and formed.
Neurasthenia, the doctor Charles Beard wrote, was characterised by nervousness, and there were five main causes: steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women.
In short, the noise and speed of the modern world was too much for some people.
Beard wrote, for example, that, ‘the perfection of clocks and the invention of watches have something to do with modern nervousness, since they compel us to be on time, and excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment, so as not to be late for trains or appointments. Before the general use of these instruments of precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments. We are under constant strain, mostly unconscious, often times in sleeping as well as in waking hours, to get somewhere or do something at some definite moment’.
There was simply too much going on. The demands of democratic politics, of business, of family life, of your own salvation, of keeping up with the latest news and innovations.
Beard wrote that, ‘The experiment attempted on this continent of making every man, every child, and every woman an expert in politics and theology is one of the costliest of experiments with living human beings’.
Some of the observations may seem strange and outdated now but Beard had a point: fast changes have fast demands. Modern ideas, progress, technology could have a mental dark side.
Let’s return to that whiggish belief in progress and end with maybe the biggest challenge to that thesis – the Holocaust.
Hegel, one of the most well-known proponents of the march of reason and progress, said, ‘the finest and noblest individuals were likely to be immolated on the altar of history’, that the contradictions, wars, and violence of history was the cost paid, the lessons to learn from, the battle of ideas.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt responded, ‘who would dare to reconcile himself with the reality of extermination camps, or play the game of synthesis-antithesis-synthesis until his dialectics have discovered ‘meaning’ in slave labor?’
And the philosopher Hans Jonas wrote, ‘The disgrace of Auschwitz is not to be charged to some all-powerful providence or to some dialectically wise necessity, as if it were an antithesis demanding a synthesis or a step on the road to salvation… It remains on our account, and it is we who must again wash away the disgrace from our own disfigured faces, indeed from the very countenance of God. Don’t talk to me here about the cunning of reason’.
In other words, we cannot be complacent. The Holocaust was an expression of so much of what we’ve looked at here – that the Jewry of Germany were engaged in a plot to destroy the nation, that Germans had enemies on all sides, was used as the rationalisation for the just war. The ideology that dehumanised Jews that was built upon that rationalisation, the bureaucratisation, technologisation, militarisation of state power, the unquestioned power of a group of men – these are all problems not for history, but for all of us, we are all responsible for understanding them.
The tripwires laid down by innovation, technology, our capacity for reason have grown, the stakes have gotten higher. History now makes demands of all of us to take an interest in our own survival. The postmodern world has challenged our faith in progress. We’ve discovered that primates are naturally more violent than any other mammal. We’ve come to terms with the death of god and find ourselves scrambling around in the dark for meaning. We live in an age of anxiety, depression, drug use, screen addiction, the shadow of great wars, and apocalypses of climate change, the AI singularity, and nuclear war.
This history has of course not been anywhere near exhaustive, but what I’ve tried to sketch, in outline, are periods where innovations and progress uncovered their opposites – darkness, depression, slavery, famine. What they sometimes show is something we’ve always known – that things that seem good can lead to excess, pride, gluttony, sloth – the positive uncovers its own negative.
If we don’t learn from our dark past, the next dark spot could be the darkest of all.
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