Totalitarianism. An Immigration Story

Fed up with certain complacent tics in the liberal press after the recent border brouhaha (i.e. President Trump’s attempt to enforce his “zero-tolerance” policy on illegal immigration by separating the children of illegal immigrants from their parents detained in custody) I fired off this letter to the New York Times. I hope it was at least worth a chuckle. You judge. (To the Times, who didn't publish me: thank you at least for not alienating me from all my friends.)

Dear New York Times,

I wonder if your style editor might consider researching the word “totalitarian,” frequently used by your editorial columnists these days, and banishing it from your style book (if banishing words from a style book is not too totalitarian)? The word is liberally applied by writers in your paper to immigrant-bashers in the Trump administration, for reasons I will try to explain. “The horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism” warn us about “forces pervading the politics of the United States and Europe today” (especially as they pertain to issues of immigration) wrote Richard J. Bernstein in your paper, June 20, 2018, shortly after the border fuss, in a typical outburst of overwrought journalism. I know some people will bristle at the word “fuss.” I just want to splash some cold light on deliberations.

Let me stress that I am not for or against immigration. The body is nothing but a swarming republic of immigrating and emigrating molecules. Immigration represents intrusion, disruption and opportunity all at once. We are all immigrants, members of a powerful antique brotherhood. European settlers in America, empowered by a sense of privilege and destiny, gained admittance to this club by proving themselves nimbler, smarter and more ruthless than the now effectively extinct race of indigenous Americans—themselves Asian immigrants—who once tried to block their immigration.

(To scientifically-minded know-it-alls who swear indignantly that there is no such thing as race—a word of obscure origin—I use the word in its ordinary, pre-scientific sense. In English it once meant “wines of a characteristic flavor,” all sparkling, so to speak, with distinct possibilities.)

I believe many share responsibility for immigrant family separation, including past administrations and illegal-immigrant parents themselves. Pro-immigration Democrats in Congress, allied with the same Republican business interests who stalled the promising e-verify program, block effective border-control legislation, hoping that the ensuing border chaos will blow up in the administration’s face. American parents are routinely separated from their children after being charged with a crime. I welcome genuine discussion about the issue, without words like Hitler and totalitarian being hurled indiscriminately. It grieves me to see children used as ammunition in a propaganda war. I actually agree with Anne Coulter for once. (Who needs a red pill or a blue pill when reality is so damn purple?) There is no such thing as “woke” or asleep. Life is an in-between.

Count me as an open-minded member of the environmentalists for sensible immigration law, who regularly face scurrilous accusations of “greenwashing” their racism. I am willing to throw open the borders to unrestricted immigration, but not without a debate. I know that history is an airy soufflé sustained by hope and unintended consequences. In this letter, my interest is narrowly focused not on immigration but on words, and on the excesses of political rhetoric. My curiosity piqued by passages in the press like the one above, in the following paragraphs I try to make sense of the stubborn grip the elusive word “totalitarian” (an immigrant itself, as it turns out) has on our popular imagination.

In use, the word seems to have little content beyond its formulaic links to Hitler and Stalin. If you call someone a totalitarian, you might as well be calling him a Nazi. But there are persistent attempts by commentators to fill in the empty space enclosed by the word with actual content.

Many of these attempts stem from the resistance of old-school philosophy to the mid-twentieth-century ideas of postmodernism, including its critique of the correspondence theory of truth. According to this theory, truths (statements of fact) correspond to the facts they express, and this correspondence is what we call truth. Truth is something like the totality of truths. There are countless attempts in the philosophical literature to understand the nature of this correspondence. Despite its ancient provenance, it is a theory well-suited to the information age, where all processed facts are already several layers of abstraction removed from ordinary language.

In his article Bernstein, seconding Hannah Arendt, deplores totalitarianism’s Nietzschean (i.e. postmodern) nihilism toward what he calls “factual truth”—real, honest-to-goodness truth, as opposed to mere “poetic” or “religious” truth. Modern man accepts the binding authority of plain facts as a medieval peasant once accepted the authority of Holy Scripture: unconditionally and reverently. Like Arendt and George Orwell, both adherents to the correspondence theory, Bernstein equates facts with truth. “One of the most successful techniques for blurring the distinction between factual truth and falsehood is to claim that any so-called factual truth is just another opinion—something we hear almost every day from the Trump administration.” (An opinion is a statement that lacks correspondence with a fact.) Old-fashioned policy makers (liberal technocrats) who could once hold the floor by reciting a laundry list of facts suddenly feel threatened by populists (i.e., the rabble) who are deaf to information. (The People are hard-ass dudes.) “What happened so blatantly in totalitarian regimes is being practiced today by leading politicians with great success,” Bernstein alleges. (Why are contemporary accusations of totalitarianism almost never leveled at leftist populists?)

Bernstein longs for science to provide the same truth-grounding role in the new world which God played in the old one. But if he thinks he is opposing totalitarianism by clinging to old-fashioned Enlightenment superstitions about science, he is pathetically mistaken—especially since he doesn't have a clue about what the word is really supposed to mean.

 

Like others who swoon at the occult magic of the word “totalitarian,” Bernstein misinterprets the casual mystification, cruelty and gaslighting practiced by bullies, thugs and murderers at all levels of the power chain as if it were dictated by an office memo, or written up in a company mission statement. Compare the elaborate regimen of torture and psychological conditioning through which 1984’s Winston Smith is implausibly forced to renounce his belief in 2+2=4, Orwell’s secular version of the True Cross. Monochromatic conspiracy theorists like Bernstein and Orwell see things in black and white, but the truth is multicolored. (Forget the banality of evil. Worry about the banality of slogans.) The bully and thug doesn’t need a rogue’s playbook. He is an instinctive manipulator, with an inborn knowledge of human psychology. He takes perverse delight in his work, unlike the unconvincing bureaucrats in Orwell’s famous novel. (Compare the convincing bureaucrats in a Kafka novel.) Evil joy is his keynote emotion, one that consoles him in the day-to-day drudgery of his thankless task, and gleeful enthusiasm at the wreckage he leaves behind.  He makes few long-range plans. His knack for mayhem is its own reward. In his political avatar he never lays the foundations for a lasting state. (Even in the case of the Soviet nightmare, aided by “scientific” socialism and its yen for facts, the terror was relatively short-lived). His reign is invariably as brief as a blazing meteor. Think of Edmund in King Lear. Inspired malice, not programmatic intent, rules his actions. Programs are for cucks and E.U politicians. As the sun sets on its nighted plans, evil leaves pretty contrails in the sky. Any contemporary politico who practices the art of disruption feels a kinship, however slight, with the legendary monsters of the last century.

The word “totalitarian” gives us a spooky little chill when we hear it, like the word “Orwellian,” and convinces us at once that it holds the key to a mystery that concerns all of us nearly, the problem of evil—i.e., the problem of Hitler and Stalin. It assures us that are we are free of complicity in the crimes of these men. For the key element of totalitarianism is its cultivated hostility toward facts (like Orwell’s famous 2+2=4) which we, for our part, cherish. “Nothing is true; everything is allowed,” in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche. Man is innately good apart from the corrupting influence of bad ideas. But the comforting feeling the word “totalitarian” gives us that we finally understand the source of our fears evaporates as soon as we actually examine it.

One thread in the tangled skein of our overused word “totalitarian” is the idea of a centralized economy. Having undermined “factual” truth as the first step in its plans of world domination, totalitarianism then seeks to solidify its hold on power through total control of all other aspects of the lives of its citizens. But the German economy under the popularly-elected Hitler was a loose association of autonomous corporations—Krupp, Siemans, Porsche, Hugo Boss—much like ours. (IG Farben even supplied Zyklon B to Nazi gas chambers.) Neighbor exerted on neighbor far more pressure to conform to the state than did the secret police. Such conformity is the universal glue of all political unions, murderous or benign.  Responding to a latent cruelty in his people, an inspired leader brought that cruelty to light and unleashed it on the world. It was the source of his power. Whether in a tyranny or a democracy, all governance is a partnership between leader and people. They form a totality. So why exactly do we reflexively label Nazi Germany (but not ourselves) totalitarian?

Benito Mussolini used the term “totalitario” (totalitarian) to describe a state that fulfills a totality of its citizens’ needs (and demands a totality of their loyalty in exchange). The word “totality” has a nice “I really mean it” sound to it. It expresses commitment and devotion, a total investment of one’s being, and has a “modern” ring. (Compare Ernst Jünger’s 1930 essay, “Totale Mobilmachung,” total mobilization: life as a soldier’s struggle and achievement.) Mussolini liked that. It satisfied certain aesthetic needs. It evoked memories of the Church Militant. Soldiers of Christ united in a cause. Onward, Christian soldiers, to salvation (the universal goal of history) with our race leading the way. A new secular church for the twentieth century. (Compare the modern liberal ideal of total inclusivity—with its “merit”-selected architects leading the way.) What country doesn’t want a population of energized citizens, especially in difficult times? Supreme leader as high-school coach giving a half-time pep talk.

The word “totalitarian” was then turned against its inventor by nameless anti-Fascists (it is hard to track down exact sources) and used as a general term to designate states that are oppressive, or illegitimate, or something.  Should we just say Fascist? But we have to use the lowercase word “fascist” if it is to be a general term applicable to any state, and then the whole tug-of-war over meaning starts again.  The signification of the term (what does it have to do with totality?) has never been satisfactorily explained, even by its creator. E pluribus unum, isn’t that the definition of totality? But in most people’s mouths totalitarian is practically a synonym for authoritarian, an equally slippery term, and not exactly one which springs to mind when we read the motto on our currency.

We recoil from the idea that our autonomy and free will have their roots deeply planted in a—what should we call it? Totality? Something which embraces, sustains and gives rise to our very individuality. This is partly the reason why the word “totalitarian” gives off sinister vibrations for us, and why we are so eager to apply it to evil regimes. At the same time, we sense that our belief in our self-sufficiency arises from confused ignorance. Philosophy has always sought to understand the paradox of a freedom subject to nature (compare Kant).

Something of a philosophical buzz surrounded the concept of totality before its use in a word by Mussolini. In Hegel’s Logic totality (one of Kant’s categories of pure reason) is a very primitive—and deficient—manifestation of the Absolute Idea. (Bear with me here.) Imagine infinity and eternity exhaustively itemized in a bookkeeper’s ledger. That’s totality.

Martin Heidegger considered the concept of “totality” to be imbued with Western Metaphysics and the forgetfulness of Being. But he located the source of this baneful forgetfulness (and the debasement of language that emanates from it) in the United States. Having immigrated from the continent, the word “totalitarian” became associated by educated American readers with the name Hannah Arendt (Heidegger’s refugee Jewish friend and student) after the publication of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. Its history forgotten, the word “totalitarian” was then applied in the post-war years exclusively to Communists (the original anti-fascists!) by the American press and State Department. It was linked to pejorative shibboleths like a “centralized economy” and “rigid adherence to a creed,” with a blizzard of ill-defined terms like “ideology” supporting the whole lexical edifice on a foundation of air. Muslim Jihadists, godless Communists and Evangelical Christians (compare The Handmaid’s Tale): all our enemies in the culture wars are totalitarian under some definition or other.

Hannah Arendt’s own treatment of the term in her book, infused with her personal history, only adds to the confusion—confusion carefully cultivated as an effective rhetorical tool in a thousand applications of the word to the Trump administration in Vox, the Guardian, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the New Yorker and the New York Times, to name a few. (Of course, all these outlets are careful to say that Trump and his associates only “recall” or “threaten” totalitarianism—in other words, wish to summon it like ghosts from the deep.) Hannah Arendt’s totalitarian regimes are invariably old-fashioned despotisms enhanced with twentieth-century technology. Arendt never—unlike her teacher, Martin Heidegger—exhibits much interest in the essence of technology, or asks whether it is despotic in some more original sense than a murderous tyrant. Technology undercuts and dominates every clash of personal wills and fuses, as Michel Foucault saw, the oppressed with the oppressor in an indissoluble totality. In many ways technology—to which the idea of recursivity is central—is the very embodiment of a self-enclosed totality, and therefore totalitarian in an eminent sense.(The representation of nature as a dynamic ecological system according to the science of control systems is technological, hence also totalitarian.)

In short, the misused word “totalitarian,” newly dusted-off by the liberal press to refer to our Orwellian enemies in the Republican Party, with their reputed disrespect for facts, is just an empty propaganda slogan—a debasement of language. Unseemly name-calling. Republicans are far from having a monopoly on the degradation of language, which Hannah Arendt considered primarily a cause rather than an effect of the rise of totalitarian states. (I confess I have not always been scrupulously fair to Arendt in this cantankerous manifesto. Feminist hagiography makes Arendt off-limits to criticism in our totalitarian lecture halls.) When Republicans brazenly deny facts, for the most part they are just trolling Democrats, who are inordinately fond of facts. (If only they were always fond of the right ones!). Who can resist? Democrats should not take the bait. Let’s stop confusing facts with truth. Since there is something like an economy of knowledge, those with wealth and privilege will always have more ready access to facts than those who are fact-impoverished. An extensive infrastructure supports the collection and validation of facts. Democrats are rich in facts. But only an elite technocrat with a defective sense of reality thinks they have a fast track to truth. Let our managerial classes concern themselves with facts. Leaders tap into a future more real than the factual present.

Read Stanley Fish’s recent Stone column—“‘Transparency’ Is the Mother of Fake News,” New York Times, May 8, 2018—on the ponderous irrelevance of most facts. Facts are overrated—even overabundant—but the truth is in short supply. Just because you think your pet fact demands everybody’s immediate attention doesn’t mean that it really does. The Fact—standing alone outside history and purged of all interest and motive—is a creature of metaphysics. Even the most mundane fact is impregnated with a forgetfulness that closes off the future and all its possibilities. A so-called "possible world" is just a cloned variation of the actual one, woven out of select abstract negations of the same attenuated facts with which we construct our world rather than dwell in it (and are constructed by it in return). Why be caught in a factual error when, like a good liberal or conservative pundit, you can weave a story that highlights irrelevant facts and casts the important ones into obscurity, all the while remaining willfully ignorant of what you are doing? (An "important" fact is simply one which is upfront about its questionable bearing on truth.) In other words, why ever lie when you can just—lie? There is hypocrisy in proclaiming truth while remaining ignorant of the true nature of facts.

I love America, but I wish I could enlighten her fathomless ignorance. Still sitting on a preponderance of the world’s wealth, legacy of two centuries of genocide and slavery, America pretends to fulfill the totality of its citizens’ needs by promising us “freedom” and supplying us with the latest expensive technological gadgets like social media. It uses targeted advertising to elicit—or create—the totality of our deepest desires, dreams and opinions, in all their diversity, and to satisfy and disseminate them with marketing expertise. It demands loyalty to its core values in exchange, values which it honors with reverent lip-service, like everybody else. So I guess that makes us totalitarians—like everybody else.

And “exclusionary” to boot. United we stand against the enemies of democracy, the one true religion, soldiers in the cause of universal salvation: the reduction of every facet of human experience and natural existence to commercial exploitation.

With the help of Amazon, Facebook and Google—facilitators of our dreams and maestros of artificial intelligence—America calls the shots on the world stage. Immigration has always been a vital cog in her wheel. Migrants come, wave after wave, astraddle on the dolphins’ mire and blood, from struggling countries well-stocked like Amazon fulfillment centers with low-wage labor. They are at the disposal of American capitalism, which seems to cultivate foreign poverty like U.S. agribusiness cultivates El Salvadoran bananas.

Liberal: sworn to hard-fought principles of freedom.

Generous: from the Latin word generosus, meaning high-born, high-minded.

When did these words come to denote the cynical indulgence a master—enslaved by his own lavishness—uses to pacify his slave? Technology exudes prodigality as its chief poison. Talk about the banality of evil! The toy-store banality of the sleek new products on display at a tech expo positively glistens with evil possibilities, regardless of any of the military or surveillance uses to which these beaming novelties can be put. Technology polices and surveils, so as to better serve. It arrogates to itself the sum of human aspirations. As for migration, a much-used term in cybernetics, it means to move data or software from one location to another, so as to maximize efficiency and distribute resources evenly. Everyone profits in the shuffle. As far as business is concerned, we all know that the name of the future is mobility and fluidity. Mobilismo (to coin a new word). Futurismo.

(Futurism. Marinetti. Boccioni. Lest we forget the paramount importance of art in the creation of any national-scale criminal enterprise, I want to stress that all politics is a product of the creative imagination. Count Lincoln Center as a major factor in our global expansion.)

Lords once spacious in the possession of dirt, now rich in intellectual property, we skim above the treetops in a dream of weightlessness like Marvel franchises on crystal meth, slaying populist dragons with the obscene versatility of our facts.

(And stop harping on Russia and its stiff-necked strongman, the ice hockey-adept Vladimir Putin, that nettle in the West's sneaker. Swallowed up by this web of totalities, all the fir trees in the Siberian forest are destined one day to become either oriented strand board or display specimens in a nature theme park. Let us hope Russian backwardness spares them a while longer.)

How fast is your processor? Everything is fluid, blurred by motion. Whatever has the solidity and composure to stand still is left behind in the rush (Rausch, intoxication) and is resolved into its constituent metallic ores like a quarried mountain in order to make a smart phone. (At least our phones are smart.) As Martin Heidegger said, only a god can save us.