Black Earth(143)

On the Left, the dominant current of interpretation of the Holocaust can be called the Frankfurt School. The members of the group known by this name, largely German Jews who immigrated to the United States, portrayed the Nazi state as an expression of overgrown modernity. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their influential Dialectic of Enlightenment, began (as did Hitler) from the premise that “bourgeois civilization” was about to collapse. They reduced scientific method to practical mastery, failing (as did Hitler) to grasp the reflective and unpredictable character of scientific investigation. Whereas Hitler presented the Jews as the creators of bogus universalisms that served as fa?ades for Jewish mastery, Adorno and Horkheimer opposed all universalisms as fa?ades for mastery in general. The murder of Jews, they claimed, was just one instance of the general intolerance for variety that was inherent in attempts to inform politics with reason. It is hard to overstate the depth and significance of this error. Hitler was not a supporter of the Enlightenment but its enemy. He did not champion science but conflated nature with politics.

On the Right, the dominant explanation of the Holocaust can be called the Vienna School. Followers of the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek claim that the overweening welfare state led to National Socialism, and thus prescribe deregulation and privatization as the cure for political evil. This narrative, though convenient, is historically indefensible. There has never been a democratic state that built a social welfare system and then succumbed to fascism (or communism) as a result. What happened in central Europe was rather the opposite. Hitler came to power during a Great Depression which had spread around the world precisely because governments did not yet know how to intervene in the business cycle. Hayek’s homeland Austria practiced capitalism according to the free-market orthodoxies of the time, with the consequence that the downturn was awful and seemingly endless. The oppression of Austrian Jews began not as the state grew, but as it collapsed in 1938.

The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate. In the particular form of capitalism generated by German policy and experienced by Jews and their rescuers during the Holocaust, every exchange depended upon personal trust, in the sense that the other party in the arrangement could betray and kill. In an extreme version of market utopianism, which Hayek himself opposed, the Vienna School merges with the thought of Ayn Rand. She believed that competition was the meaning of life itself; Hitler said much the same thing. Such reductionism, although temptingly elegant, is fatal. If nothing matters but competition, then it is natural to eliminate people who resist it and institutions that prevent it. For Hitler, those people were Jews and those institutions were states.

As all economists know, markets do not function perfectly at either the macro or the micro level. At the macro level, unregulated capitalism is subject to the extremes of the business cycle. In theory, markets always recover from depression; in practice, the human suffering induced by economic collapse can have profound political consequences, including the end of capitalism itself, before any recovery takes place. At the micro level, firms in theory provide goods that are desired and affordable. In practice, companies seeking profits can generate external costs that they do not themselves remediate. The classical example of such an externality is pollution, which costs its producers nothing but harms other people.

A government can assign a cost to pollution, which internalizes the externality and thus reduces the undesired consequence. It would be simple to internalize the costs of the carbon pollution that causes climate change. It requires a dogma to oppose such an operation, which depends upon markets and in the long run will preserve them, as anticapitalist. On the American secular right, some supporters of the unrestrained free market have found that dogma: the claim that science is nothing more than politics. Since the science of climate change is clear, some American conservatives and libertarians deny the validity of science itself by presenting its findings as a cover for conniving politicians. This is a merger of science and politics—quite possibly a dangerous one.

Though no American would deny that tanks work in the desert, some Americans do deny that deserts are growing larger. Though no American would deny ballistics, some Americans do deny climate science. Hitler denied that science could solve the basic problem of nutrition, but assumed that technology could win territory. It seemed to follow that waiting for research was pointless and that immediate military action was necessary. In the case of climate change, the denial of science likewise legitimates military action rather than investment in technology. If people do not take responsibility for the climate themselves, they will shift responsibility for the associated calamities to other people. Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible. A vicious circle can begin in which politics collapses into ecological panic.