History 513, European Cultural History 1880-1920 - Summary

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Lecture #3 - September 12, 1979 - 44:47 min (mp3)
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The bourgeois system of thought that took the place of religion became ever more anti-theological and materialistic. It was centered on a revival of interest in Greek history and culture, and the primacy of the body. Immorality, conceived of in theological terms, became obsolete. Now, with the rise of the medical profession, immorality becomes a disease: conversion was no longer possible. Medicine emancipated itself from theological concerns of sin and absolution.  Pasteur and Koch furnished the germ theory of disease, which was thus no longer a “moral failure”. In many ways, the medical profession became the custodian of the manners and morals underlining the materialism of that kind of thought. This could also be seen in the idea of criminality put forward by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombrozo. According to his theory, criminals are diseased and can be identified by physical signs. It involved the idea of physical disease as a language of the internal and the external. The word “degeneration” was invented at about the same time. Crimes were a sign of degeneration, and degeneration itself was in fact a disease. All of this rendered the father confessor useless. The poisoning of the bodily system by alcohol and stimulants- but also the surrounding polluted physical environment- lead to a deterioration of the nervous system. Another Italian doctor, Broca, believed mental diseases were curable by a prefrontal lobe operation. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the doctor is still the guardian of normality; all sexual activity that does not further reproduction is seen as perverted. Here, the influence of Darwin is important: “The Origin of the Species” greatly encouraged environmentalism, the material basis of this system of thought. In “The Origin of the Species”, everything is due to the influence of the environment. Normalcy is adjustment through progress, that is, through evolution; the abnormal is just the contrary. Following progress means strength. It is this kind of materialism on which the ideas of middle class societies were based. Darwin’s followers were more extreme, however. In England, T. H. Huxley maintained that man was determined by his juices. Yet if one’s material circumstances (or juices) determine everything, where is man’s volition? The latter played into the hands of the positivists. Lombrozo believed that genius is madness.

Mosse introduces Max Nordau’s book “Degeneration”: Nordau himself was an interesting man. He changed his real name, Erwin Suedfeld, meaning “southern field” to Nordau, meaning “northern meadow” in German. He became a Zionist organizer. The cornerstone belief in “Degeneration” is in ordered, natural progress. Accordingly, the future of mankind lay in the natural sciences. Human thought had to be based on science and progress (which went together), not on superstition. In “Degeneration” he explains how science operates through unchanging laws, whose creatures we are. We can discover these laws because they are based on reason, on cause and effect, leaving no room for romanticism and mysticism. For Nordau, Tolstoy was one of the degenerates. According to Nordau, man can achieve clarity mostly through observation, knowledge, and discipline. The absence of discipline is the enemy of progress. Evolution is terminated by the survival of the fittest. That means that man must face the problems of existing reality and adjust himself. “Degeneration” was written above all against modernism and modern art, which stood for an egomania that did not care about the end result.

Nordau thought that one cannot invent artistic forms, or for that matter political ones, but everything must be due to organic growth. The idea that egomaniacs would be the losers was part of bourgeois thinking from Lloyd George to FDR. Modern art was utter chaos to Nordau; people who wanted to change or abolish manners and morals, including egomaniacs, mystics, and misleaders, hindered human progress. These ideas grew, and intensified over a century; they came from the Enlightenment and corresponded to the realities of bourgeois life, and the disorientation caused by industrialization. This system of thought, tied to positivism, is still very strong in America according to Mosse, because America is the last truly intact bourgeois society in the Western world. It is another attempt at discipline and explanation in a world that is disturbed, a phenomenon inherent in industrialization in which the rationalizing, technologically based process manifests itself. Jenny Treibel wants higher things. A national culture of positivism made sentimentalism and positivism compatible.

Therefore, we must now look at Haeckel’s “Riddle of the Universe.” His theory answered nicely the need of the bourgeoisie: that matter had another, mystical dimension. Only science could answer the mysteries of faith. After all, we do not know how matter came about. This goes back to the 1770s, to Diderot, who claimed that the mystical component of matter was transmitted to the human soul without abrogating the natural law, which entailed a sense of wonder. Materialism, the soul, and religion can exist side by side. Not only for the bourgeoisie: much more that Marxism, eventually, this became the doctrine of the working classes in Germany. The idea of the progress of the working class, of natural law reinforced by the New Man, took root. The religious dimension Haeckel added to Darwin goes back to the origins of matter. Perverts, the criminal, the abnormal, were children of darkness who had no soul. In that sense, degeneration had a moral dimension that eventually developed into a racist idea. 

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