The Passive Barbarian
SLAVERY at the bottom, caprice at the top; mechanization at the bottom and raw savagery at the top — this is what modern society has come to. It is not due to the accidental rise of a Hitler or a Mussolini: it is rather the goal toward which the universal cult of power has driven us.
Those who have lost the very attributes of men will still, with what is left of their manhood, worship the first leader who exhibits them. Those whose jobs have become sterile and life-denying will seize the opportunity to feed the sources of their vitality, not with ordinary food, but with raw meat. They will scream because they have been permitted in their work only to whisper, or have been compelled to observe a Trappist silence. Silence! No smoking! Watch your step! Check out for the toilet!
So, too, they will worship great armaments, because they feel so powerless; they will bow to tribal gods, who demand blood and tribute, because the god within them is dead. They will give absolute freedom to their leader — trusting utterly his demonic inspirations or whims — because in that act they vicariously recover the normal sense of a free personality. They will be seized with delusions of grandeur, and fancy themselves blood brothers in a conquering race, because they themselves have been conquered.
In short, these victims of the machine will confirm their slavery in order to recover, at second hand, at least the illusion of freedom. This is, I believe, the psychological basis of fascism. Out of frustration come its grand aggressions; out of an inhuman mechanical discipline comes its more primitive assertion of inhumanity. Fascism has happened first in Russia, Italy, and Germany for a very simple reason: none of those countries had a long tradition of freedom. The despotism of the army and the machine erected itself on a tradition that had long favored despotism. Serfdom was not finally abolished in Germany until the middle of the nineteenth century; that country had never undergone the sanative bath of a liberal revolution. Italy was governed by a succession of despots, in every principality and city, since the fifteenth century; while Russia had not even a dim memory of freedom: it was a word the educated had come across in English books. All these circumstances gave the initiative to countries whose very soil favored despotism, when the time came to make a religion out of the denial of life.
But the same facts which explain the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy also explain the lack of resistance in other countries. Men and women, industrial leaders and workers, the poor and even the rich, have all been subject to the same impersonal forces. But in Great Britain, France, and the United States, power in the form of money took precedence over power in the form of military weapons. And the cult of the primitive, in these countries, came back less in the forms of violence than in those of sensuous indolence and animal indulgence — in drunkenness and promiscuous sexuality and the paraphernalia of material wealth. These people are passive barbarians: no less than the more active ones that have produced fascism, they deny the values of mind and spirit, and renounce the discipline and the sacrifice that make men truly human.
In America we have created a new race, with healthy physiques, sometimes beautiful bodies, but empty minds — people who have accepted life as an alternation of meaningless routine with insignificant sensation. They deny because of their lack of experience that life has any other meanings or values or possibilities. At their best, these passive barbarians live on an innocent animal level: they sun-tan their bodies, sometimes at vast public bathing beaches, sometimes under a lamp. They dance, whirl, sway, in mild orgies of vacant sexuality, or they engage in more intimate felicities without a feeling, a sentiment, or an ultimate intention that a copulating cat would not equally share. They dress themselves carefully within the range of uniformity dictated by fashion. Their hair is curled by a machine; and what passes for thought or feeling is also achieved, passively, through the use of a machine — the radio or the moving picture today, or Aldous Huxley’s ‘feelies’ tomorrow.
These people eat, drink, marry, bear children, and go to their grave in a state that is at best hilarious anæsthesia, and at worst is anxiety, fear, and envy, for lack of the necessary means to achieve the fashionable minimum of sensation. Without this minimum, their routine would be unbearable or their vacancy worse. Shopgirls and clerks, millionaires and mechanics, share the same underlying beliefs, engage in the same practices: they have a common contempt for life on any other level than that of animal satisfaction, animal vitality. Deprive them of this, and it is not worth living. Half dead in their work — half alive outside their work. This is their destiny. Every big city counts such people by the million; even the smaller provincial centres, imitating the luxury and the style of the big centres, with their fashion shows, night clubs, roadhouses, and organized inanities, produce their full share of people equally empty of human standards and aims.
No small part of the cynicism that has eaten into this civilization is due to the triviality of its products and to the false excitement that attends their exploitation. A new brand of chewing gum; a new container for coffee; canned vitamins to achieve eternal youth; a new cigarette lighter; scientific research that proves pepper is hot in the mouth or water is wet! An opulence of carefully packaged emptiness.
The novel and the newspaper accommodate themselves to the needs of these new barbarians; likewise the motion pictures. By endless repetition they build up a mental world that is free from any values except those of physical sensation and material wealth. This is a world in which business men become gangsters and gangsters become business men without changing a single essential habit in their lives: a world in which violence becomes normalized as part of the daily routine. The popular mind becomes softly inured to human degeneracy. Tobacco Road and Of Mice and Men become popular dramas without the faintest degree of public protest — except in traditional clerical circles — over the defilement which they spread.
What such dramas portray doubtless exists. But the way in which they portray it shows that, for the writer and his public, despite all their ‘good intentions’ and ‘social interests,’ nothing else really exists. Murder, incest, adultery, sacrilege, have been the perpetual themes of human drama from Æschylus to Shakespeare. What I challenge, therefore, is not the subject, but the method and attitude. Only by a cleansing greatness of spirit, only by the sure possession of a scheme of ideal values, can a writer treat these subjects without degrading both himself and the spectator. Today this degradation is all but universal. No one is surprised when a gangster murders a man in the public thoroughfare; no one is surprised when a band of gangsters invade a peaceful country and put it under their ‘protection.’ People have seen it all before; they watch it passively, as they do the motion pictures. They count themselves lucky if they get a good snapshot of the murder or the invasion with their candid cameras.
It is on these passive barbarians, who have come to exist in great numbers even in countries that have free traditions, that the fascists have successfully relied in prosecuting their conquests. The people who turn their heads away when a Brown Shirt kicks a helpless old man in a public thoroughfare; the people who cower behind their doors when the Ogpu or the Gestapo rouses some poor victim at midnight to be taken to a concentration camp or shot in the back without going that far; the people who utter no word of protest against a régime that denies their humanity, people who dare not even vote No on a plebiscite, lest they be detected in that act — these are the passive supporters of fascism.
At best, there is lack of even animal courage among these passive barbarians; their chief motto is ‘Don’t stick out your neck!’ At worst, there is emptiness — a failure to feel their humanity challenged by cruelty, by violence, by despotism, by contempt for the weak and the helpless, by the spiteful renunciation of all the higher goods of morality, art, and science. Sometimes these barbarians by their passiveness pay off old resentments against a class or a people against whom they have a real or imagined grievance; sometimes, as with many ‘communists,’/ they pass over into the opposite camp and renounce the very love of humanity as a whole which once stirred them to work everywhere for the exploited and the oppressed. So the tribes that were conquered by the Aztecs betrayed their masters to Cortez, only to suffer grievously in turn from the same conquest. That, too, has happened in our midst.
The more threatening the active barbarian’s assault, the more inevitable becomes the passive barbarian’s whine. ‘Why should we die in order to defend our country? Why shouldn’t Hitler rule us, too? Maybe we’d be just as well off. What’s freedom or democracy? Just words.’
Even now that whine, under the skillful shaping of fascist propaganda, is beginning to swell into a demand. Those who have already lost their manhood and their self-respect, who value their shabby little selves, regardless of what sort of life they pass on to their children, are the chosen accomplices of fascism: they are ready for its more boisterous denials of freedom, justice, and truth.