What was it about the 20th century that brought about within a single lifetime both the greatest achievements and the worst horrors ever witnessed by mankind? What was it about the Middle Ages that made its thinkers so pusillanimous and its politics so abject, and yet brought about the first enduring ideal of empathy as an intrinsic good and policy priority? Why do some ages of political history seem to have been endlessly devoted to violent ideological fragmentation, while others were obsessed with pursuing mystical unity and blurring even highly practical distinctions (e.g., reality and fantasy)? The trite and self-serving analysis has typically been that the former are Enlightened and the latter degenerate, but there is something deeper going on - we can see in the movements of civilization both the spiraling evolution and magnified internal struggles of the individual human mind: On the one hand, the Intuitive and holistic, and on the other the Cerebral and digitally logical. As humanity finds itself in another period of major transition, this realization can serve as a profound tool of prediction.
As above, so below.
--Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Tablet
I. E pluribus unum, E unus pluribum1
Every person with the intellectual means, from time to time, enters a psychological frame where the universe is digital and reductive - whether the components in which we perceive are words, numbers, or discrete physical constructs. We cerebralize, engaging our "higher functions" to deduce patterns and pursue empirical testing of our assumptions. From the objects, ideas, and phenomena we perceive directly on instinct, we are capable of comprehending them as emergent properties of smaller elements and acting to alter their relationships in productive ways. Science would not even be possible if this were not already an innate quality of human behavior, but its inconsistent and unmethodical application can also produce a stark and dangerously objectifying mentality.
But, at other times, we enter a frame where we're more disposed to observe the relationships among that which we see as individual rather than within it. We allow distinctions among objects to blur in order to perceive the larger pattern, and on rarer occasions, achieve an analog sense of continuous and unbounded reality. This state is an abstraction of "normal" awareness that is often poorly described as "spirituality," but is simply a reordering of perceptual priorities toward a level above our immediate selves and environment. In the best ways, we achieve this through communication and interaction with others and with our environment; and in baser ways, by compromising our ability to cerebralize with drugs or religious indoctrination that punishes rational inquiry.
Sometimes statistics are more persuasive than holistic appeals, and sometimes vice-versa. While we each have our own personalities that gravitate in one direction or another, we all oscillate continuously at every instant between manipulating discrete elements and placing ourselves passively within a larger framework. Different parts of the human brain are responsible for these processes, and they both communicate and compete for priority.
Oddly, the furthest extremes of either in individuals occur as the same spectrum of disorders - autism: The Cerebral impulse at its most dysfunctional extreme lives in a universe entirely populated by discrete perceptual objects, where the relationships among them are nearly invisible and largely incomprehensible. These may be thought of as the numerate savants and others with orientations to logical manipulation of their environment (e.g., engineering, architecture, policy). The Intuiting impulse at its most dysfunctional extreme, however, perceives an environment that is all continuity and no grain, and while it can perceive large-scale relationships far beyond the reach of most others, it often cannot see what is right in front of it. Many people in this domain are artistic geniuses, language savants, mystics, and high-level theoretical scientists. They contribute much to humanity as a whole, but their personal lives are often a clueless wreckage.
The relevance of these descriptions to large-scale changes in civilization will become apparent shortly.
1: I know nothing about Latin. Hopefully this turn of phrase makes sense, because all I did was apply the same apparent grammatical rules to the second clause as seem to be employed in the first. But even if it's agrammatical gibberish in the actual language, I'm sure you get my drift. (Update: ThePlainThinker informs me in comments that the proper form of the second clause is "Ex uno, plures.")
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II. Apollo, Ablaze with Light2 - Cerebralizing Epochs
What causes an era of history in a civilization or the world in general is beyond the scope of this discussion, but we can say that a Cerebral epoch is typically attended by a sudden realization of new potential, appreciation of simple elegance in art and theory, and an explosion in the diversity (and querulousness) of intellectual strains. Totally new ideas, or ones that had previously been the idle talk of cloistered religious/academic castes, become urgent matters of policy and political contention.
There was no first Cerebral epoch anymore than we could say there was a first rational individual human thought - it evolved in the background, in fits and starts, and then simply became apparent at some arbitrary point in time. But for the first clear, organized indications of such cycles occurring we look to ancient Egypt: At some point religious beliefs that were ancestral and tribal turned into an organized afterlife theology, and began motivating evolution of funerary architecture. What were originally just mounds piled on top of the elite dead became rational structures with specific metaphysical functions (i.e., channeling a spirit into the afterlife).
These structures were progressively experimented with over an extremely short period of time, evolving in a few generations of the Fourth Dynasty from the squat ancestral mastaba through step pyramids (Pyramid of Djoser), some cul-de-sacs involving inefficient or unaesthetic angles (e.g., the Bent Pyramid), all the way to the smooth-sided, precision-engineered marvels of the Giza plateau.
That the purposes of these efforts were mystical is neither here nor there - the religion of ancient Egypt had no intellectual competition in the experience of its people, so as far as they knew, channeling the spirit of the dead to the afterlife was as practical an application as channeling water for agriculture. The fact which sets it apart is the progressive experimentation, rapid honing of craft, and zeroing in on geometric perfection. In addition, the level of new social, artistic, technological, and political organization needed to achieve that process is definitive of a cerebralized society. However, this period in Egyptian history did not last long, and most subsequent changes occurred very slowly and conservatively.
But Classical Greece (primarily Athens) is where the Cerebral achieves its first enduring legacies, spawning objective history, comprehensive geometry, democracy, theater, organized debate, rational inquiry, systematic philosophy, explicit individual rights, and theoretical politics, in addition to a multitude of other intellectual and artistic frontiers. It is also, however, where we first begin to see some of the potential insanities such periods are prone to experience. Thucydides3 provides a routinely eyebrow-raising account of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta:
Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries.
--Book III, 3.82-[4]
...their own prosperity could not dissuade them from affronting danger; but blindly confident in the future, and full of hopes beyond their power though not beyond their ambition, they declared war and made their decision to prefer might to right, their attack being determined not by provocation but by the moment which seemed propitious. The truth is that great good fortune coming suddenly and unexpectedly tends to make a people insolent.
--Book III, 3.39-[3]
The historian speaks of rich, oligarchic plotters staging coups and overthrowing democracy in city-states across the peninsula with the collusion of Spartan money and military support; Athenian-backed mobs in other city-states massacring the entire families of people known or suspected to harbor oligarchic sympathies; Athens' best general, Alcibiades, being driven into exile and treason because of a smear campaign by his domestic political enemies (they accused him of being responsible when a group of drunken teenagers cut off the phalusses of statues of Hermes, the crime of sacrilege); the Athenian people making one stupid, greedy, disastrous decision after the next, and each time blaming their generals for it rather than self-examining. Centuries of authoritarian political theorists cited this account in (quite persuasively, for a very long time) dismissing democracy of any kind as suicidally unstable.
In fact, it was this same war, begun at the very height of Athenian intellectual flourishing, that would hammer the nail in its coffin and usher in the brutally conservative interregnum before the Romans began absorbing Hellenic culture and philosophy. This was probably the fastest turnabout of a Cerebral epoch in history, going within a single living memory from the sudden birth of democracy and all the other achievements mentioned to virtually its entire social and intellectual vigor being exterminated or suppressed. Progress was still made from time to time, here and there in Greek civilization, and the Hellenistic Alexandrians were quite educated, but they pushed few boundaries - and if any of their academics did make substantial progress in theory, their contributions led nowhere before the modern era.
Instead, the Greeks did what most highly creative people end up doing when they run out of steam - they became teachers and archivists of existing knowledge (hence the historical fame of the Library of Alexandria) rather than explorers themselves. Later on it ceased to be voluntary: The Romans enslaved them and then happened to notice that Greeks made great instructors in the fields their societies had pioneered. But by that point it wasn't much of a loss - they were already more or less slaves of military despots and cruel, unimaginative oligarchies that had no use for new ideas.
Rome was an adequate but uninspired pupil in the obsessions of the Greeks, making inferior copies of its sculptures and pretending to understand its translated philosophies (much as we still do), but its interests were of an entirely different character: Its cerebral energies were not occupied seeking the perfect theoretical representations of things, but rather efficient practical implementations. This divergence in character would become obvious when the Roman Empire would later split in two, and the Eastern half would end up splitting rhetorical hairs to the point of civil war over the abstract interpretation of a single word of theology (just one of many in a long series of ludicrous religious controversies).
While they did make unique contributions to many of the same fields of inquiry as the Greeks, Roman society almost didn't care what a thing was as long as it worked. Their aesthetic attitude was based on that very principle: Simple, confident, well-proportioned strength, simplicity, and efficiency. It was projected not only in their architecture and military, but in their very alphabet. They contented themselves to merely parrot the theories of the Greeks, but in practice explored untrod territory in civil engineering, military logistics, aqueducts, road-building, taxation, bureaucracy, jurisprudence, and public services.
Unfortunately, they were also tremendously innovative in the art of cynicism, making an intricate science of conquest, diverting and manipulating the unruly Roman mob, mass-enslavement of foreign peoples, cultural hegemony, colonialism, and the pursuit of power as an end in itself. Their civilization, in fact, is both the philosophical and moral model for fascism (fasces being a ceremonial bundle of rods given to magistrates and temporary dictators of the Republic). Ironically, this now quite sinister-looking obsession with the cynical mechanics of power is what enabled them to bring about the Pax Romana - the widest-scale era of relative peace, security, and prosperity in European history: An achievement that still hasn't been exceeded.
Most of its successor states, however, inherited the Roman cynicism and brutality without any of the pragmatic values that had made them productive. It would be the better part of two millennia before the animating virtues of the cerebral-era Romans would be seen again in the form of the Italian Renaissance, and in particular the Adriatic merchant republics that would give birth to it.
After a thousand years of religiosity and mysticism, the Black Death had made an impact on political psyches continent-wide: Nobles, peasants, and priests all died by the bushel in the same misery and hopelessness. The plague proved, repeatedly and indelibly to many of those who survived, that religion - or at least contemporary religious practice (i.e., the Catholic Church) - either was not as relevant as it pretended to be, or was not the "true faith." This was the beginning of a series of events that together add up to a single, continuous Cerebral revolution born in medieval Venice and surging onward for centuries before beginning to wane in the late 20th century.
In Northern Europe, the long-term consequence was an auspicious fragmentation of religious authority beginning with Martin Luther, creating political rifts and islands on which radically irreligious thinkers could begin to safely challenge the basic assumptions of the medieval era. Ironically, the Protestants were less tolerant of secular philosophy than the Catholic Church, but the fault lines between them created gaps in the overall ability of religion to dominate society. Directly from those gaps would come the Enlightenment some generations later.
Meanwhile, in Italy - where casting aside the Church would have been both politically impossible and, in social fact, redundant - the focus turned increasingly to money and innovative ways to make it, such as banking and advanced maritime technology. In fact, the enterprising spirit (read: happy-go-lucky thieving) of the merchant republics was long-established by the time of the plague - Marco Polo's journey preceded it by a half-century, and the Venetians had infamously turned an alleged Crusade into an excuse to sack Constantinople. But the tastes, attitudes, and interests resurrected and advanced on the Adriatic began to percolate into the rest of the continent, reintroducing Classical aesthetics and philosophical mischief into long-darkened corners.
Like the ancient Greek city-states before them, the maritime republics (Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, primarily) - and later with them, Florence - were usually at war and their relationships amazingly treacherous. Aside from banking, navigation, shipping, and art, they continued the Roman tradition by breaking new ground in the arts of depraved realpolitik, back-stabbing, bribery, and assassination. Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince was more a work of observation than of theory - like many works of insightful genius, it was simply taken from the author's environment and articulated for people with no direct experience of it.
Once again, the idea that the most important thing is whether something works appears in Italy - rational pragmatism taken to extremes that it probably shouldn't be. But "should" has never been the point in Italy, because expensive ideals do not work as well as machinations - at least not from perspectives already disposed to read the world that way. And that in itself, ironically, has often proven an expensive ideal throughout the history of that peninsula: One that continues to undermine its progress into the present day.
Moral inquiries were left to the Germans, French, and English to obsess on and occasionally lose their minds over in subsequent centuries, which the former two did with alacrity and enthusiasm (the French Revolution and, of course, Nazism), and the latter did with characteristic reserve before regaining its composure (the Cromwellian state). The Protestant Reformation turned Christianity from Dark Age mysticism and Italian politics into a hyper-cerebral exercise in moral philosophy, ethnic self-aggrandizement (see: Protestant ethic), and the earliest utopian prototypes for modern totalitarianism.
In particular, this becomes apparent in the renewed eagerness to pursue witches. While the Catholic Church conducted witch-hunts on occasion, under extreme circumstances when a convenient scapegoat was at hand, Protestant sects went further - they were known to seek out witches to preemptively extirpate them from society: A perfectly "rational" step if you already accept the premise of infallible religion and demonic forces.
This is one of the many tragic ironies of history, because if Protestants had been less Cerebral and more Intuitive, they would have been more inclined to trust their God to protect them rather than creating an institution for the annihilation of "spiritual malefactors." Such was the case in most of the history of Christianity: Absent extraordinary circumstances (the Black Death was one major exception), people were mainly content to attribute bad events to the will of God punishing them for their own transgressions - the idea that agents of evil could be systemically discovered and removed through human detective skills would usually have seemed arrogant if not blasphemous. But one of the key features of cerebralizing culture is an unyielding, consistent drive for and belief in the perfectability of society.
In fact, under the law of Charlemagne in the "Dark Ages," it was a capital offense to execute people on such grounds, and was an official position of the court at Aachen that witchcraft did not exist. Amazingly, society had to become a lot more rational and organized before authorities would believe in utter nonsense. But even in light of the tragic outcomes for so many, the process often showed the promise of a far better future - sometimes the trials were, within the context of the superstitions on which they were premised, conducted quite fairly for the time. Accusations could be based on genuine hysteria or just malice, but the communities in which they occurred wouldn't necessarily be infected by either at the time of the trial. There were acquittals. People were, in some cases, actually listening to what the defendants said and taking it into consideration, not just acting out the theater of condemnation and vengeance that would have occurred in a medieval setting.
However, the mainline Protestant churches were not willing to grant their individual constituents the religious freedom they had collectively demanded from Catholicism, so they were exhibiting yet another explosive tendency of societies in a highly Cerebral frame: Hypocrisy. They had sown the seeds of dissent and inquiry, but were not willing to reap the harvest when it would challenge their own assumptions or threaten social tranquility. Cromwell's puritan-dominated military dictatorship in England, for instance, was considered moderate among Protestant governments. As a result, a subculture of dissidence arose across the religious divide, acquainting French intellectuals with Protestant mavericks and laying the groundwork for the Enlightenment.
This is the point at which the modern Cerebral strain had turned viral. Suddenly it was not only safe, but chic for aspiring elites to take philosophical liberties contrary to dominant institutions, and for the first time in 1,500 years it became a mark of classiness and sophistication to be overtly aware of hypocrisy, irrationality, and moral repugnance in authority and tradition. The Italian merchant republics had analyzed and practiced these phenomena as immutable facts of life rather than judging them, but Enlightenment thinkers turned the vicarious fury of a hundred generations of repression on the institutions they inherited. What earlier critics had timidly asked in whispers and been answered with an executioner's axe, these new inquirers stated as an indictment and asked instead "What is to be done about this?"
By the 18th century, the United Kingdom and its erstwhile American colonies had come up with pretty encouraging implementations of Enlightenment theories, on the whole: Constitutionalism. Freedom of religion. Elected government. Checks and balances. These ideals were approached through pragmatic policies influenced not only by the Enlightenment, but also the experiences and failures of the Athenian democrats and Roman republicans.
Neither approach declared anything that could not be done or attempted to fashion something from nothing in the later, doomed Bolivarian style - they merely recognized a present state of society and built on it from where it already existed. And, perhaps the most important distinction given subsequent events in France, English and American leaders were inspired by Humanist values, not utopian ideology: For the most part, they had no designs on creating perfect societies, just governments that served and respected people better. They were able to accept balance, and reconcile their hopes for humanity and knowledge of its potential with awareness of its frailties.
In France, however, the Nightmare State that would haunt humanity's dreams and poison its history until the end of the Cold War was born in frustration and fear. Nearly every key event was guided either by fear of counterrevolution or a lust for revenge - not only for injustices committed by the monarchy and its supporters, but out of a need to rationalize the failures of the revolutionaries themselves. They could kill their enemies, but they could not give life to liberty through force of arms alone - the Republic fashioned on the Declaration of The Rights of Man and of the Citizen was stillborn, poisoned by both the intrigues of a Monarchist party who could not reconcile themselves to Republic and the increasingly eliminationist mentality of Jacobin radicals.
Rather than listening to the arguments of the revolutionaries and trying to address them with their own proposals - i.e., adopting the positive aspects of Cerebralism - the Monarchists responded to the darker impulses of the age by rationalizing a status quo they had previously attributed dismissively to the will of God and what they considered common sense. Now they characterized even the most benign, cooperation-oriented republican views as being chaos incarnate, crystallizing their emotional reactions into a set of highly selective intellectual principles. As we will see, this is a recurring pattern when the institutions of the prior epoch meet the social forces of the current one in full strength: The waning party, rather than adopting the positive, constructive attributes of the new age, defaults to its uglier nature and is invariably unable to compete with the more potent examples of their enemies.
By the time of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror, all semblance of Enlightenment principle had gone - it had become a simple, practical exercise in murdering every last person who gave any appearance of ideological impurity. Being insufficiently joyful over another's execution could be grounds for your own, and there didn't have to be a wig and a grande maison in your history to be accused. It was a spasm of murder, and not all of it involved the guillotine - suspects were beaten to death by mobs who were themselves terrified of seeming insufficiently bloodthirsty; experiments were done with mass-executions through putting people in a large cage and then lowering it into a lake; peasants were rounded up en masse and killed for suspected hoarding of grain contrary to the decrees of the now fully dictatorial government.
Robespierre's words are a chilling omen of the doublethink and moral psychosis of 20th century totalitarian movements:
The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death...
Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.
Pity is treason.
And yet he had said this earlier in the revolution, making his later perversion a bellwether for the descent of the Republic into nightmare:
Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil.
How did this happen? How did a revolution begun on the same principles and intellectual legacy as American independence and British parliamentary democracy end up serving as the political prototype for hell on Earth? It wasn't just the violence that made the Reign of Terror exceptional - people were often unjustly killed or imprisoned under the monarchy - it was the organized, methodical, disciplined attempt to invade and dictate people's very thoughts through constant, unavoidable, and all-encompassing Terror. Robespierre explicitly says this is his goal. A degenerate state ruled by mere thugs does not care what its people think, how they live, or even necessarily what they say to each other, as long as they obey on the whole. But an ideological dictatorship in a highly Cerebral state is not content to rule - it must imprint itself on the very psyches of its people.
We see that what makes Cerebral epochs dangerous is not that they are passionless, but exactly the opposite. Human passion in these eras is channeled into elaborate ideological frameworks and imposed on the unwitting masses through policy, social pressure, and in more negative cases, insidious propaganda or Terrorism (capital T). While the possibilities for positive development are enormous in these periods, they also put people under a lot of cognitive pressure to implement highly complex ideas that may not even be possible. No matter how elegant the politics created around an idea are, they are never a full account of reality, and being confronted with their inadequacies leads the most engaged minds to either a healthy degree of pragmatism or else destructive puritanism.
Even within the pragmatic camp, people are forced to choose between positive and negative interpretations. There is the Latin pragmatism, as I've already described it - the full acceptance of political amorality (ends justifying means) in the judgment that it provides the best utilitarian outcome. Napoleon Bonaparte's career as revolutionary general-turned-Emperor is a case in point: Although it would be easy (and, of course, somewhat true) to dismiss him as an egomaniac who exploited a crisis to indulge fantasies of being the next Julius Caesar, the fact remains that he served a very practical purpose for the people of France.
While not exactly reconciling the factions, he was able to somewhat drain lingering Monarchist sentiment within the republic by making himself Emperor, and at the same time appease the ongoing fury of revolutionary radicalism by invading other monarchies. The remarkable degree of sincere loyalty shown to him by the French people is indicative of his success in this. However, the trauma of the Napoleonic Wars and their ultimate failure to produce a better society even for France, let alone Europe as a whole, only reemphasized lessons already learned in memory of the Romans - that being exclusively concerned with what works and paying no need to what is right, does not itself work.
Then there is English pragmatism - an acknowledgement of amorality, but dogged resistance to being overwhelmed by it. In the American strain of English pragmatism, this has usually taken the form of a deliberate, cultivated naivete - choosing to treat the world through the eyes of innocence while applying a full awareness of facts. Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the most profound, consistent example of this mentality in action: Confronted by the unthinkable (dissolution of the Union) occurring in service to the indefensible (slavery), his decisions were inexplicable in the heat of the moment and yet utterly obvious in retrospect. He offered the South all possible guarantees that they would not be forced to abandon slavery if they stayed in the Union, having exactly the same understanding of the situation as the Confederacy - namely, that staying in the Union meant the inevitable end of slavery even if not by force of arms.
And then, in victory, Lincoln gave full amnesty to men who had committed the very definition of treason, murdering hundreds of thousands of their countrymen. Rather than seeing it remain weak and subjugated - the natural inclination of a more cynical political nature - he tried to rebuild the South and make it strong, functional, and just for its people. These were societies that had done absolutely nothing to deserve any level of forgiveness or consideration - who had adopted secession with nearly unanimous zeal and zero active resistance, and who remained committed to white supremacy and feudal politics. But Lincoln was concerned neither with what they deserved, nor with making them into a restive territorial possession - he wanted a united, prosperous, and just country, and accepted the price of that goal (as did Truman in Germany and Japan): Healing the enemy.
A Jacobin in his shoes would probably have executed everyone who had ever worn the grey and then simply repopulated the South with Yankee colonists - something that would merely have guaranteed future, far bloodier wars and massacres. A Latin pragmatist would have kept the South weak and backward, and accepted the local bigotry as a necessity of keeping them under control - pretty much what did happen in subsequent administrations with the sabotage of Reconstruction. There is no telling how much stronger, prouder, more just, and more prosperous the United States would be today if Lincoln's programs had been carried forward in good faith by his successors. We can at least say with some degree of justice that fascist mentalities would have had a harder time gaining traction in the South without much better disguises.
Now we consider the Big Ticket: The 20th century. Americans have a great fondness for it because our experiences were, on average, largely positive. The US confronted problems and succeeded in at least mitigating them; fought distant World Wars and returned home to countries unbroken the way our allies and enemies alike were; and although the Cold War was a period of fear and uncertainty, the nation's prosperity was unprecedented and broad. But for most of the world, the 20th century was a meatgrinder caught in the gears of competing ideologies that only became more strident, violent, and nightmarish the less relevant they were.
Russia repeated the history of the French Revolution with its own - overthrowing a monarch in favor of liberal democracy, then overthrowing that democracy in favor of psychotic, murderous radicalism and totalitarian mind control. The Soviet Union of Josef Stalin was essentially the Reign of Terror spread across two continents and repeated every moment of every day for thirty years. A legitimate desire to move on from monarchy and exploitation of the poor mutated into a compulsion to exterminate the very psychological capability for resistance.
Pretty soon an ideology premised on rescuing people from poverty was creating one of its worst and most persistent occurrences in human history. The process that Russian Socialism underwent, transforming from humanist crusaders into the jail-wardens of Hell on Earth, bore many similarities to the French experience - just much worse, much bigger, much longer, and this time literally endangering the world rather than merely destabilizing a single continent's institutions.
George Orwell's convincing portrayal of pure, absolute dystopia in "1984" was essentially just his observation of what was going on in Stalin's sphere of influence - and that was just what he could see from the outside looking in. People in the belly of the beast literally lived moment to moment fearing imminent execution, and not just the average citizen - everyone from the lowliest peasant up to Stalin's Inner Circle lived a hair's breadth away from death at all times. No trial or even interrogation might be involved - some apparatchik, himself fearing for his life, had to deliver a convincingly large quota of "counterrevolutionary" corpses or he would be one of them, so you might simply have been dragged off one night without warning or explanation, shot, and your body dumped in a ditch.
That state of affairs fortunately did not outlive Stalin himself, and the USSR reverted to being a mere bureaucratic police state / oligarchy, but the damage was done. Whenever Americans looked at the USSR, all they could see was Stalin and his perfectly monstrous, impenetrable, inescapable nightmare. But indirectly, the horrors of the Soviet Union also made something else possible that might not have been - the unchallenged takeover of the German state by genocidal maniacs. Germans could simply not imagine anything worse than Soviet Communism, let alone something apparently steeped in their own traditions being worse than what they feared from foreign powers.
Nazism was the absolute counterpoint to humanism in the digital perception of a Cerebral era: Most of how it "governed" was ordinary brutality, but what set it apart was the fact that its highest priority - a messianic vision it deemed central to all other objectives - was the extermination of a minority that had never even been politically disruptive to German order. The Holocaust, in the sensibilities of the Nazi Party true believers, was not something being done in addition to the war, but the very purpose of the war - invade Europe to "cleanse" it of Jews.
The crime was not merely illogical, but counter-logical; not merely immoral, but anti-moral - and in that it made a Satanic kind of sense, if one deemed the actual mission of Nazism to be the perfection of evil. It was as if even the cynical logic of Machiavelli was too much of a moral restraint for them: They wanted to exterminate an entire race of people from the face of the Earth, who hadn't done anything to justify even mild resentment against them, just to prove they could - an act of utterly arbitrary Will in violation not only of basic human decency, but even the pragmatic realities of power.
But the process of how they got there will sound familiar by now: The recognition that genetics plays a role in disease, mental illness, and anti-social behavior was "logically" (as in the witch-trial sense above) taken to imply a justification for involuntary eugenics programs - i.e., forced sterilization of people born with physical defects, the mentally ill, and the handicapped, among other "undesirables." German society had always been obsessed with strength and violence, so there was a pervasive undercurrent of resentment against those popularly deemed weak, cowardly, or passive, especially after the humiliating defeat of WW1. Ergo, much of Nazi racism was regarded as "reasonable" by mainstream German conservatives: Particularly, removing the Jews from positions of influence in society and the economy, and forcing them to wear patches so any "good Germans" they interacted with could be on guard not to be "corrupted."
Of course, once they were separated, the question became why the state should expend its resources keeping them pent up in perpetuity. The original plan was to deport the Jews to Madagascar, but the logistics involved were found to be prohibitive, so that's when it stopped being about segregation and became about elimination. At first, it would be the "humane" method of sterilizing them so that the "problem" would just naturally fade over time, but as is typical of a Cerebral ideological spiral, this met with impatience and a further intensification of the objective. If the point is that they be gone, why not just kill them? Germany had already killed large numbers of people invading its neighbors, so this did not seem like much of a moral leap to the depraved bureaucrats tasked with implementing it. The degenerate cerebral personality, the "Eichmann impulse" of morally neutral punctilio, was pervasive in Germany and a perfect substrate for the Perfect Evil.
From there, the descent was headlong and its ultimate depths shocked even the Red Army when it overran death camps. Not the atrocities themselves, of course - they were no stranger to horrors on a grand scale - but rather the industrial mechanization of the whole process, and the evident glee in it (such as wearing Death's Head insignia) displayed by the German authorities. The Communist Party was an organ of death in the USSR because every single person in it was constantly afraid they might be next, so it was a race to "inform" on others before they informed on you, and even with a massive body count there was no guarantee you would not be added to it - the apparatchiks just hoped they could tread water over the river of corpses and stay afloat. But there was no such explanation for the Nazis.
Aside from the brief internal violence of the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazis were in little direct danger from their own state. They lived relatively comfortably. They mixed freely in German society with no fear of drawing suspicion, being denounced by personal enemies, or being accused of subversion for innocuous behavior. Hitler would not become paranoid of his own people until the assassination attempt near the end of the war. And yet here they were, dressed up in Satanic black-and-red uniforms with death's head insignia, feeding women and children into ovens. There was no comprehending it except as a process of perverted logic based on unexamined assumptions eroding a people's sanity and conscience.
But, as hopefully I've made clear, a Cerebral epoch is not all about ideological insanity, mass-murder, and chaotic struggles between fanatic political factions. Good, creative, constructive people are also more energized, adventurous, and confident. Before Germany went mad, it had produced some of the deepest and most profound philosophical reflections of all time; the world's most beautiful music; and a vast catalog of contributions to physics, mathematics, psychology, sociology, and other fields. Before Russia went mad, it had broken new ground with the literature of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Before France went mad, it had been the catalyst for the entire Enlightenment that finally made it possible for human beings to work systematically toward a better life rather than just hope for mystical answers. And after WW2, the nations of the world came together in forming the UN to say that enough was enough.
At the pinnacle of it all, however banal its political motives, was a thing few imagined just a decade before its achievement - the US moon landings. Peaceful technological development; unprecedented adventure; science; the view of the whole Earth as one fragile blue marble in a vast black ocean; footprints on another world; and this world united for a brief moment in awe of what all people had achieved on that day. On that day, the clouds of crisis and fear parted for just a moment, and people saw the noble destiny of mankind. Those footprints, and that blue marble rising above an airless rock horizon from previous and subsequent missions, embodied in full glory everything that had ever been said since the dawn of time about the beauty of the world, the dignity of humanity, and the worthiness of hope and aspiration.
Project Apollo has since often been deprecated as economically irrelevant or wasteful; condemned as imperial; even its very reality denied by tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists; and yet the achievement stands as the greatest, most inspiring, noblest, and most unqualified success of human endeavor ever attempted. If the great mariners, explorers, and travelers of antiquity had seen it; if the Renaissance naturalists and early scientists had seen it; if the Enlightenment thinkers, philosophers, and humanist pioneers had seen it; if American colonists and the founders of the United States had seen it; if the Romantic painters, artists, and writers had seen it; how many would not have wept in joy and triumph? US industrialists and Soviet Communist apparatchiks alike did, because even in national triumph, Americans saw the whole world for what it was; and even being out-competed, the Russian rocket men knew the triumph was theirs too.
But that is not the end of the adventure. An ongoing process was begun by that achievement, however long it takes, and even though it will evolve through the lens of changing values. Just as the chaos, violence, and disorder in so many times and places of an intellectually vibrant era spiral down to their own ending, so the noble, curious, and indomitably optimistic ideas will always find fertile soil somewhere and spiral upward to indefinite new heights.
2: It is narratively interesting and apropos to this discussion that the Latin for Light-Bearer is "Lucifer," because it's a perfectly appropriate duality to offer with the Enlightenment. With the philosophy and humanism of the cerebralizing era comes ideological fragmentation, rigidity, and, at extremes, highly organized eliminationism and totalitarian impulses.
3: For some reason, I get the impression Thucydides regarded the Argives - the other major democracy on the Greek peninsula - as contemptible, clueless troglodytes. I'd be curious what that was about.
Note: None of the above photos were taken by me. Click on them to see attribution (in the case of the Apollo photos, merely credit of upload - all are public domain).
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Preview of Part 2:
III. Odin, One-eyed Wanderer - Intuiting Epochs
Eventually the successes of Cerebral eras always become their own worst enemy, and the environment becomes too complex to fit within people's conceptions of it. Ideologies are discredited; distinctions are blurred rather than invented; it becomes harder to know how to proceed, in the absence of an overriding sociopolitical framework; and people take to wandering either by choice or necessity, pushing into new geography and remixing both the culture and gene pools. Expertise in existing knowledge is emphasized in intellectual circles over innovation, and abstract, obscure, or mystical concerns take daily mindshare away from the practical and logistical. This may occur as radical social, economic, and political specialization in an increasingly stifling social environment, or the opposite - radical simplification, decentralization, and anarchy.