The Fascist as Technophile–Herf’s “Reactionary Modernism”
Were Fascism and Nazism “modern” or “anti-modern” movements? Were they a product of the Enlightenment’s manipulative rationalism, as argued by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in “The Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1944, 1947)? Harvard (now University of Maryland) historian Jeffrey Herf addressed these questions in his 1984 book, “Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich.” Herf offered a clarification of these questions that may also help clarify unsuspected “fault-lines” and “hidden memes” in our own contemporary early 21st century culture.
Historians have long generally interpreted the cultural/political syndrome variously called “Fascism,” the “Conservative Revolution,” “Right-Radicalism,” or the “Counter-Enlightenment” as an anti-modern movement. They have called it a backward-looking nostalgic revolt against Enlightenment rationalism, liberalism, democracy, science, technology, and industrialism. Fascists, Nazis, and “conservative revolutionaries” have been seen as protesting against a soulless, mechanized, rationalized modern world of factories, machines, and big cities as well as against the politics of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” in favor of a neo-feudal agrarian idyll of happy, healthy peasants rooted in the soil joyously in touch with the elemental rhythms of nature and contentedly obeying their rightful natural superiors. The late 19th and early 20th century German and Austrian “völkisch” movement, denouncing deracinated, Jew-dominated big cities and yearning for healthy natural living in back-to-the-land utopias, has often been described as prototypical of this syndrome, especially by writers seeking the sources of German National Socialism. Only the practical demands of fighting a war (and efficiently exterminating the Jews and other “racial inferiors”), it has been argued, forced the Nazis and Fascists to compromise with a modern military and industrial technology they supposedly found distasteful.This was the view of historians like Fritz Stern (“The Politics of Cultural Despair,” 1961), George L. Mosse (“The Crisis of the German Ideology,” 1964), and Peter Pulzer (“The Origins of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria,” 1964).
Herf, however, challenged this view with “Reactionary Modernism” in 1984, portraying German National Socialism (and other European fascisms) as anti-rational and anti-liberal but enthusiastically pro-technological “reactionary modernisms.” He coined the term to describe the blend of great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and of the values and institutions of liberal democracy which he saw as characteristic of the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and then of National Socialism. While focusing mainly on German writers and thinkers, Herf also noted parallels among pro-Fascist avant-garde intellectuals in other European countries in the 1920's and 1930's--e.g., the Fascist sympathies of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Filippo Marinetti, and the Futurists in Italy, of Georges Sorel, Drieu La Rochelle, and Charles Maurras in France, and of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound in England.
Herf's application of “reactionary modernism” to describe Fascism has been widely echoed by other scholars. Herf had originally used the term for a trend in German (and to a lesser degree general European) thought during the era, what Thomas Mann called "a highly technological romanticism" during the inter-war years and Joseph Goebbels more enthusiastically hailed as a “steely romanticism” (“stählernde Romantik”). Herf used the term for such prominent “Conservative Revolutionary” German cultural figures of the 1920's and 1930's as the historical philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), the novelist and essayist Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), the economist and sociologist Werner Sombart (1863-1941), the jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), the sociologist and philosopher Hans Freyer (1887-1969), and the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). While rejecting the rationalist, liberal, humanitarian, and cosmopolitan values of the Enlightenment, liberalism, and Marxist socialism, they also rejected as well the Luddite technophobia and rural back-to-the-land nostalgia of the “völkisch” movement, instead hailing technology as a noble, beautiful spiritual expression of the will of the German folk-soul (in contrast to abstract Enlightenment rationalism and to mercenary parasitic Jewish capitalist commercialism). They also championed technology as an absolutely unavoidable necessity for the survival and triumph of a powerful, assertive Germany in a modern world of technologically advanced industrial nations, amid whom an agrarian “völkisch” Germany could not possibly survive.
While most of Herf’s book was devoted to an extended in-depth examination of the views of German literati and social thinkers like Spengler, Jünger, Sombart, Schmitt, and Heidegger, he also devoted an interesting chapter to “Engineers as Ideologues,” describing and documenting the enthusiastic contributions of German engineers to the ideology of reactionary modernism. German engineers, he showed, had been developing their own philosophy of technology, closely paralleling that of the reactionary modernist literati, since the late 19th century. Like the Spenglers, Jüngers, and Sombarts, the engineering ideologues emphasized the supposed independence of technology from abstract Enlightenment rationalism and materialistic scientific positivism, and portrayed technology as a heroic, beautiful expression of the Germanic folk-soul’s aesthetic will to form and masculine struggle against chaotic nature, which had little or nothing to do with the dead, cold abstractions of Anglo-French or Jewish scientific materialism. Also like the Spenglers, Jüngers, and Sombarts, the philosophers of engineering likewise took great pains to distinguish technology from what they considered its exploitation and perversion by Jewish or English-inspired bourgeois capitalism (most of the reactionary modernist literati like Spengler and even the more explicitly anti-Semitic Sombart,, Herf observed, attacked bourgeois capitalism as English rather than or as well as Jewish, as expressing what Spengler called an “inner England.”) Many German engineers, Herf noted, enthusiastically rallied to the Nazi regime in 1933–a phenomenon perhaps paralleled by the tendency of many engineers in Muslim countries in recent years to embrace militant Islamic fundamentalism.
One of Herf’s main themes in “Reactionary Modernism” is a critique of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s view in “The Dialectic of Enlightenment” that Nazism was a triumph of the Enlightenment’s dark side of manipulative rationalism, proving the Enlightenment’s ambiguous and questionable beneficence. Adorno and Horkheimer, Herf argued, ignored the special features of German history, society, and culture, leading to rapid massive industrialization combined with weak liberal institutions and a widespread persistence of pre-liberal social attitudes, that made Germany much more susceptible than Britain, France, or the United States to the sort of reactionary modernism, blending technophilia with a disdain for rationalism, liberalism, and democracy, described in Herz’s book. The weakness of liberalism in Germany was thus to blame for Nazism, not any supposed dark side of the Enlightenment. Germany’s problem, Herf felt, was too little rather than too much Enlightenment.
Oddly enough, Herf omitted any mention of perhaps the single most famous or notorious Nazi German engineer, rocketry pioneer and eventual U.S. space program godfather Wernher von Braun. He likewise did not mention the enthusiasm of many Nazi leaders, including Heinrich Himmler and even Adolf Hitler himself, for the pseudo-scientific “Welteislehre” (“World-Ice Theory”) cosmological cult of ice-covered moons and planets and of prehistoric collisions of the Earth with earlier moons preceding our present Moon, a forerunner of Immanuel Velikovsky’s 1950's and 1960's ancient planetary collisions fantasies. Founded by Austrian engineer and amateur astronomer Hanns Hörbiger (1860-1931) on the basis of a “vision” in 1894 while observing the Moon, the “Welteislehre” was touted by the Nazis as a patriotic “Aryan” cosmology to set against Einstein’s “Jewish” Theory of Relativity. Herf also puzzlingly omitted any mention or discussion of the views on science and technology of Nazism’s most eminent scholarly precursor, the Germanized Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), Richard Wagner’s son-in-law and author of the immensely popular and influential racist and anti-Semitic “Grundlagen des Neunzehntes Jahrhunderts” (1899; “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,” 1911).
Herf’s “reactionary modernism” concept has not only been widely echoed by other scholars to describe Fascism, but has also been explored as a theme and influential trend in the literature and broader political culture of other European countries, like Great Britain, Greece, Romania, and Spain between the two World Wars, and has even been applied to Fascism in Japan. Herf himself has now applied the term, along with scholars like Paul Berman, Mark Neocleous, William Thornton, and Emmanuel Sivan, to militant Islamic movements and regimes like al-Qa’eda and Iran under the Ayatollahs. English cultural critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron argued in 1995 that members of the “digerati” of influential computer industry opinion leaders and dot.com wizards adhering to the “Californian Ideology” linking American “free-market” neoliberalism with optimistic technological determinism embraced a form of reactionary modernism combining economic growth with social stratification. I myself have suggested that Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism,” and the American “hard science” science-fiction of John W. Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle, with its ardent technophilia blended with militarism, economic neoliberalism, and an elitist “competent man” mystique, could be seen as American versions of reactionary modernism. Herf’s observations about German engineers’ sympathy for reactionary modernism were echoed in 2009 by Italian psychologist Diego Gambetta and London School of Economics political scientist Steffen Hertog, who found that engineers (compared to both pure scientists and humanities graduates) are extraordinarily prone to Islamic extremism in Middle Eastern countries, to religious fundamentalism (e.g., scientific creationism) in Western countries, and to rigid, all-or-nothing, cut-and-dried black-and-white thinking both in the West and in Muslim countries.
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