States of War, States of Mind: Living in the Shadow of WWII

Aug 7

“War made the state,” said the political scientist Charles Tilly, “and the state made war.” Tilly was talking about actual states, but the same could be said about metaphorical states: states of mind, or perhaps of the soul. The political, after all, is personal. People in a certain state of mind make war, and wars put people in a certain state of mind.

On one level this is obvious; think of a veteran with shell-shock. But I’m not a veteran, and war for me is just a media artefact. “War” is a word that jams together all the images and clips and snippets of text I’ve seen and watched and read in my 43 years of war-free life. I’ve been to the movies and bought the books. I’ve got a picture in my head, and it’s probably pretty accurate so far as facts go. I could probably list all the major wars we’ve fought. But it’s all at a great remove from the real thing. And yet, despite that distance, those wars have surely conspired to help make me me.

Even that kind of soul-shaping effect is fairly obvious, though we don’t usually think about it. The idea that we are all “products of history” is familiar enough, and true enough if we don’t mistake it for something more than a truism. Less obvious, and more striking, is the growing sense that I and others like me – Americans of a certain age – have been shaped not just in general ways by a national history that involves a lot of warfare, but in particular ways by one war in particular.

Like anything that happens before you’re born, the Second World War always felt like ancient history to me. This wasn’t the historical ignorance of the infamous man-on-the-street, that totem of stupidity so beloved of infotainers keen to grind some partisan axe. It was just the common chronological snobbery that instinctively divides all human history into two eras: “before me” and “after me.” Whatever happened before me is All One Thing, and the Thing’s main characteristic is that it happened “a long time ago.” Whatever happened after me is also All One Thing, a Thing which by contrast “feels like it was yesterday.” So it’s a salutary jolt to realize that when I was born, the Second World War had only been over for 36 years, and that I’ve now been alive for longer than that.

The point is that it’s relatively easy to grasp how things that happened during your lifetime might have shaped how you think and feel, since you were thinking and feeling while they were happening. Everybody my age knows where they were on September 11, 2001. It’s harder to grasp the concrete effect of things that happened before you were around to be concretely affected. For me, Pearl Harbor is a movie (and not a very good one). Yet the past has gravity. Like gravity, you feel its pull, even if you’ve only seen what’s pulling you through a screen. And certain past events seem to have more gravity than others. They’re more massive; they take up more space and exert their effect over greater distances. World War II is one of those events. It’s the black hole at the center of the long twentieth century – which is, perhaps, now finally coming to a close.

These days, you can read plenty of thinkpieces on the accelerating demise of the postwar order, but I think one of the most insightful is Alec Ryrie’s “The End of the Age of Hitler.” Ryrie argues that World War II has shaped not just our geopolitics but our souls in profound ways that we may soon be more able to appreciate, precisely because the war’s gravitational pull is fading, and it is becoming more possible to think outside of the political and ultimately spiritual categories in which it enclosed us. For Ryrie, the main effect of the war was to force our attention almost exclusively on evil, as embodied in the Nazis and especially in the figure of Hitler. After Auschwitz, we found it difficult to believe with confidence that anything is really and truly good. By contrast, we found it easy to know with absolute certainty what is really and truly evil. Nazis are evil; Hitler is evil incarnate. But what made him evil? What is the mark of evil, aside from jackboots and a toothbrush moustache? There’s the rub: if he had nothing else, Aolph Hitler had absolute certainty that he knew what was good. That certainty, it seemed, was what led to the Holocaust. Thus, the war against Hitler had a weird alchemical effect on our moral categories: we came to believe very strongly that what’s evil is to believe very strongly in your own convictions about what’s good. After all, that’s what Hitler did. We learned to understand good negatively, as the absence of evil, rather than understanding evil as the absence of good. Thus, the only thing that’s good is to fight what’s evil. It’s ok to punch Nazis.

The result is that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” as Yeats put it twenty years before the war broke out. Yet the age of Hitler has to end sometime – even a black hole’s gravity fades with enough distance from the event horizon – and Ryrie suggests that the end is probably nigh. Postwar liberalism was the age of Hitler, the age of “never again,” and it’s not surprising that as the Greatest Generation exits and the living memory of Hitler dies, the liberalism that defined itself in Hitler’s terms is losing its moral force, such as it was. This is a crisis, to be sure: the passionate intensity of the worst is unlikely to diminish when the milquetoast best lose elections. But perhaps the crisis is also an opportunity for the best to get some real conviction.

Every year my students get younger, and I get wiser to the depth of my roots in a century that was over before they were born. In his preface to The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand explains that he wrote the book for personal as much as for professional reasons. “[T]his is the period in which I grew up . . . . I heard all of these names, or almost all of them, when I was a kid. But I had only a vague idea of who these people really were, what they actually did, or what made them important, such that people like my parents knew about them. Writing this book was a way of filling in the blanks of my own story.” The details might be different, and I haven’t written a book to work them out, but the shape of my own story is probably much the same as Menand’s. And it’s very different from the story my students have grown up in.

I’m not going to try to tell their story. Part of what I’m realizing is just how big this generational gap actually is, and I don’t think I can fully understand it. There are too many blanks in my knowledge. My department recently hosted a breakfast discussion on “tyranny,” where both students and faculty were in attendance. One of my colleagues, a historian, told the students that he’d wanted to organize the event because he’s very concerned about rising authoritarianism both at home and abroad, but that he was sometimes unsure if his concern was warranted. His son, who recently graduated from an Ivy League university, had told him that his fears were exaggerated, and my colleague wanted to know what other young people thought. While I’ve had inklings about this, I was still surprised when most of the students generally agreed with his son. “I think you really are exaggerating things,” said one girl. Adults are always trying to get us to be very afraid of stuff. Always.”

Postwar liberalism has been, to borrow a phrase from the political theorist Judith Shklar, a “liberalism of fear.” Shklar was actually recommending such a liberalism – one modestly focused on avoiding the worst kinds of injustice, not on securing justice itself – as an antidote to the triumphalism and utopianism she saw as a twisted legacy of the Allies’ victory over the triumphalist utopianism of the Nazis. Shklar’s views are complex and are in some ways close to my own, so I am not exactly criticizing her. Rather, I’m wondering if there’s a sense in which something like a similarly twisted version of the view she defended – that politics is properly about stopping bad things from happening, not about making good things happen – ironically became its own kind of triumphalist and utopian project, and that this project is what is unraveling.

What’s unraveling, in other words, is the historical context which has made it necessary for every American institution, public and private, to justify its existence not by pointing to the specific and concrete goods it was built to pursue, but to an expanding set of harms it promises to prevent. I once heard the principal of a middle school tell a journalist that “safety is, of course, our number one priority.” If safety is your number one priority, you’re not a school, you’re a police force. Education is the number one priority of a school, by definition. I’ve heard the same claim made by the leaders of many different institutions, none of which exist to secure “safety,” even if safety is a prerequisite for their existence. Why do people talk like this?

Partly it’s just rhetoric; the principal was being interviewed in the wake of a school shooting, and his aim was to reassure anxious parents. But it’s also more than rhetoric; it’s the logic of everyday operations. Most young people today have grown up inside a set of tutelary institutions that David Graeber called “the utopia of rules.” In the utopia of rules, there’s lots of inspiring talk about building a better world, but it’s obvious to everybody that it’s just marketing. Equally obvious is that what is not just marketing is what these institutions actually do, which is mostly not to educate or heal or whatever, but to enforce a lot of rules against anybody who tries to “impose their values” by actually educating or healing. After all, people disagree about what it really means to do those things. And you know who else tried to impose their values on people who disagreed? That’s right. Hitler.

At my university, I recently offered a special summer course that required students to live in a “tech-free dorm” for the duration. After the fact, I wrote up an article about what I called my “experiment,” and at the beginning of the Fall semester, I was set to give a little talk about it to our faculty. A day before, I got an email from our Institutional Review Board. Every university is required by law to have one of these committees, which has to review any research project involving “human subjects” for potential ethical violations. The head of the committee told me I couldn’t give the talk – they’d seen the word “experiment” and concluded that since they hadn’t signed off, I might have done something illegal. After all, experimenting on people without their permission is what the Nazis did. Institutional Review Boards were set up with explicit reference to this history. The point was to stop another Mengele from torturing people for science. Now, they make sure professors get a permission slip before inviting students to give up their smartphones for a month.

This is the triumphalist version of the liberalism of fear, fully institutionalized. It imagines utopia as the prevention not only of Nazi aggressions but of “micro”-aggressions, on the implicit or even explicit grounds that micro-aggressions left unchecked lead straight back to the macro-aggressions of the brownshirts. While some of them are pretty into it, a lot of the other “kids these days” seem weary of this line. They seem tired of being told by teachers and doctors and therapists and politicians that prevention is the ultimate good, that their safety is our number one priority. That weariness is what I heard when that student gently rebuked all us “adults in the room” who still live in that post-war state of mind, without really knowing it. We think the war happened “a long time ago,” but for them, it really was a long time ago. It shaped me in a way that hasn’t shaped them.

As the younger generations achieve escape velocity and mature (or not) into whatever comes after the postwar world, they may well commit the mortal sin of “forgetting the past” and so repeating it. But this is the original sin of every generation. We can repent, but we can’t be innocent. “Never forget” seems doable when you were there in the flesh; it still seems doable when your grandparents were there and can tell you about it; but when the memory is no longer alive, when it exists only in books, it inevitably loses its prophylactic effect on all but a few sensitive souls. A new state of mind takes hold, and history moves on in its rhyming way. So I don’t exactly welcome the end of the age of Hitler. It’s a risky time. Terrible things may happen again. But I’d welcome the demise of the utopia of rules. I’d welcome the end of the fearful spirit that somehow turned the tragedy of the War into the farce of an Institutional Review Board. If the “kids these days” can shed their elders’ bureaucratic taboos against moral conviction and grow up to spend more political energy pursuing what’s good than preventing what’s bad, then the kids may well be alright, and the country might be better off.