The cold blooded complex human being

Edward Said tells of ‘an exchange with an old college friend who worked in the Department of Defense for a period during the Vietnam war. The bombings were in full course then, and I was naively trying to understand the kind of person who could order daily B-52 strikes over a distant Asian country in the name of the American interest in defending freedom and stopping communism. “You know,” my friend said, “the Secretary is a complex human being: he doesn’t fit the picture you may have formed of the cold-blooded imperialist murderer. The last time I was in his office I noticed Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on his desk.” He paused meaningfully… The further implication of my friend’s story was that no one who read and presumably appreciated a novel could be the cold-blooded butcher one might suppose him to have been… "

What came to mind when reading this was the question of fascism, or Nazism more specifically. I’m thinking of what has been rightly reiterated by the likes of George Steiner: the realisation that unspeakable brutality and inhumanity could indeed co-exist with a ‘civilised’ culture, a culture which had known the enlightenment, not one consumed with religious wars or still suffering feudal despotism, a culture in which the fully autonomous ‘bourgeois subject’ could engage in witty and erudite conversation with his peers, relax on Sundays, exchange pleasantries, eyes twinkling with playful irony, and so on and so forth. None of this was a bulwark against the inhuman. That was the alarm call. And on an individual level, being a cultured, psychologically ‘complex’ individual, sensitive to music etc – this alibi no longer worked. It was no longer a tenable case for the defence. Evil was no longer something that invaded from the non-European world or from an earlier stage in history.

There were various get-out clauses proposed: It was a specifically German thing - Hitler the lunatic demagogue was indeed the symbol of the whole (rather than, for example, Speer); or it was a regression to pre-modern irrationality; it was ultimately foreign to Western European culture, a pathological aberration. (Ironically, such rhetoric of the healthy and the pathological, of the purely ‘irrational’ were themselves all too current in the Germany of the 1930’s.)

But perhaps the inhumanity that co-existed alongside or in the midst of industrial civilisation, perhaps this wasn’t just the old inhumanity returning, a regression or even aberration. Perhaps we were dealing with a new inhumanity, genetically linked to the new industrial civilisation. At the time, wasn’t this idea examined with some urgency, wasn’t it obvious that the language of regression, of a return of the repressed was an evasion? Barbarism and Civilisation – could they be twinned?; could there be links other than that of temporal succession (the idea that industrial civilisation came after and was synonymous with the vanishing of barbarism)? Steiner, for one, advised eternal vigilance – it could indeed ‘happen here’, not necessarily in full dress, the whole thing, but strains of it, tendencies held in check.

Does anybody today really take such ideas seriously? Are we as suitably unimpressed as we should be by the ‘complex human being’ alibi? The ‘lesson’ famously underlined by the George Steiners, that yes, ‘it could happen here’, has it been consigned to a history lesson? Are we still thinking through the idea that modern industrial civilisation and its culture can actively foster and reproduce forms of cruelty, of inhumanity – or do we still believe, on the whole, that these are most likely to come from the Outside, from elsewhere?