We must be careful, however, not to pitch Hitler’s thought too high. For a start, as Maser highlights, much of his later reading was done merely to confirm the views he already held. Second, in order to preserve a consistency in his position, he was required to do severe violence to the facts. For example, Hitler several times argued that Germany had abandoned its expansion toward the East ‘six hundred years ago.’ This had to do with his explanation of Germany’s failure in the past, and its future needs. Yet both the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns had had a well established Ostpolitik — Poland, for instance, being partitioned three times. Above all there was Hitler’s skill at drawing up his own version of history, convincing himself and others that he was right and academic opinion usually wrong. For example, whereas most scholars believed that Napoleon’s downfall was the result of his Russian campaign, Hitler attributed it to his Corsican ‘sense of family’ and his ‘want of taste’ in accepting the imperial crown, which meant that he made ‘common cause with degenerates.131
In political terms, Hitler’s accomplishments embraced the Third Reich, the Nazi Party, and, if they can be called accomplishments, World War II and the Holocaust. In the context of this book, however, he represents the final convulsions of the old metaphysics. Weimar was a place of both ‘unparalleled mental alertness’ and the dregs of nineteenth-century völkisch romanticism, where people ‘thought with their blood.’ That the Weimar culture which Hitler hated should be exported virtually en bloc in years to come was entirely apropos. Hitler’s intellectual failings shaped the second half of the century every bit as much as did his military megalomania.
14
THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION
Perhaps the greatest intellectual casualty of World War I was the idea of progress. Prior to 1914 there had been no major conflict for a hundred years, life expectancy in the West had increased dramatically, many diseases and child mortality had been conquered, Christianity had spread to vast areas of Africa and Asia. Not everyone agreed this was progress – Joseph Conrad had drawn attention to racism and imperialism, and Emile Zola to squalor. But for most people the nineteenth century had been an era of moral, material, and social progress. World War I overturned that at a stroke.
Or did it? Progress is a notoriously elusive concept. It is one thing to say that mankind has made no moral progress, that our capacity for cruelty and injustice has grown in parallel with our technological advances; but that there has been technological progress, few would doubt. As the war was ending, J. B. Bury, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, embarked on an inquiry into the idea of progress, to see how it had developed, how best it should be understood, and what lessons could be learned. The Idea of Progress was released in 1920, and it contained one very provocative – even subversive – thought.1 Bury found that the idea of progress had itself progressed. In the first place, it was mainly a French idea, but until the French Revolution it had been pursued only on a casual basis. This was because in a predominantly religious society most people were concerned with their own salvation in a future life and because of this were (relatively speaking) less concerned with their lot in the current world. People had all sorts of ideas about the way the world was organised, for the most part intuitive. For example, Bernard de Fontenelle, the seventeenth-century French writer, did not believe any aesthetic progress was possible, arguing that literature had reached perfection with Cicero and Livy.2 Marie Jean de Condorcet (1743–94), the French philosopher and mathematician, had argued that there had been ten periods of civilisation, whereas Auguste Comte (1798–1857) thought there had been three.3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) had gone the other way, believing civilisation was actually a degenerate – i.e., retrogressive – process.4 Bury unearthed two books published (in French) in the late eighteenth century, The Year 2000 and The Year 2440, which predicted, among other things, that the perfect, progressive society would have no credit, only cash, and where historical and literary records of the past would have all been burned, history being regarded as ‘the disgrace of humanity, every page … crowded with crime and follies.’5 Bury’s second period ran from the French Revolution, 1789, to 1859, embracing the era of the first industrial revolution, which he found to be an almost wholly optimistic time when it was believed that science would transform society, easing poverty, reducing inequality, even doing God’s work. Since 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, however, Bury thought that the very notion of progress had become more ambiguous: people were able to read both optimistic and pessimistic outcomes into the evolutionary algorithm.6 He viewed the hardening of the idea of progress as the result of the decline of religious feeling, directing people’s minds to the present world, not the next one; to scientific change, giving man greater control over nature, so that more change was possible; and to the growth of democracy, the formal political embodiment of the aim to promote freedom and equality. Sociology he saw as the science of progress, or the science designed to define it and measure the change.7 He then added the thought that maybe the very idea of progress itself had something to do with the bloodiness of World War I. Progress implied that material and moral conditions would get better in the future, that there was such a thing as posterity, if sacrifices were made. Progress therefore became something worth dying for.8
The last chapter of Bury’s book outlined how ‘progress’ had, in effect, evolved into the idea of evolution.9 This was a pertinent philosophical change, as Bury realised, because evolution was nonteleological – had no political, or social, or religious significance. It theorised that there would be progress without specifying in what direction progress would take place. Moreover, the opposite – extinction – was always a possibility. In other words, the idea of progress was now mixed up with all the old concepts of social Darwinism, race theory, and degeneration.10 It was a seductive idea, and one immediate practical consequence was that a whole range of disciplines – geology, zoology, botany, palaeontology, anthropology, linguistics – took on a historical dimension: all discoveries, whatever value they had in themselves, were henceforth analysed for the way they filled in our understanding of evolution – progress. In the 1920s in particular our understanding of the progress, evolution, of civilisation was pushed back much further.
T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Adolf Hitler, so different in many ways, had one thing in common – a love of the classical world. In 1922, the very year that both Eliot and Joyce published their masterpieces and Hitler was asked to address the National Club in Berlin, which consisted mainly of army officers, senior civil servants, and captains of industry, an expedition was leaving London, bound for Egypt. Its aim was to search for the man who may have been the greatest king of all in classical times.
Before World War I there had been three elaborate excavations in the Valley of the Kings, about 300 miles south of Cairo. In each, the name Tutankhamen kept appearing: it was inscribed on a faience cup, on some gold leaf, and on some clay seals.11 Tutankhamen was therefore believed to have been an important personage, but most Egyptologists never imagined his remains would ever be found. Despite the fact that the Valley of the Kings had already been excavated so often, the British archaeologist Howard Carter and his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, were determined to dig there. They had tried to do so for a number of years, and had been prevented by the war. But neither would give up. Carter, a slim man with dark eyes and a bushy moustache, was a meticulous scientist, patient and thorough, who had been excavating in the Middle East since 1899. After the Armistice, Carnarvon and he finally obtained a licence to excavate across the Nile from Karnak and Luxor.