Books: The Struggle of Ideas

DARWIN, MARX, WAGNER — Jacques Barzun — Atlantic — Little, Brown ($2.75).

Paganism, streamlined and arrogant, has reconquered more of Europe than it has held for a thousand years. Yet even among Christians, few people think of World War II as a religious war—Europe’s greatest since the Franks beat back the Saracens at Tours. This oversight and the pagan success has a common cause. What it is can be found out by reading Darwin, Marx, Wagner, a 420-page study of dominant ideas and intellectual climate of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries by Columbia University’s Assistant Professor of History Jacques Martin Barzun.

The cause: The Nazis have simply carried to its logical limits an idea that is shared in some degree throughout Western civilization—the fatalistic idea that evolution and progress are the result of the survival of the fittest in a struggle to the death for life. World War II is the political and military stage of an intellectual revolution whose mild beginnings Author Barzun dates from 1859.

He chose that year because in 1859 Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, Karl Marx published his Critique of Political Economy, Richard Wagner finished Tristan und Isolde. These three were the intellectual forebears of Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini. They were the intellectual forebears of nearly everybody else in the Western world too. And, says Author Barzun, “it would be hard to find in the whole history of Western civilization a corresponding trio to share the honors of a single epoch with such perfect parallelism.”

To understand how these three men have dominated our thinking, says Author Barzun, try to imagine our speech without terms like survival of the fittest, struggle for existence, natural selection, exploitation of labor, dialectic materialism, scientific socialism, social significance, Nordic culture, music drama, leitmotiv, the twilight of the gods.

“It is thus no accident that Germany’s West Front should have been named the Siegfried Line; that the new regimes of force should have taken the title of social ist; or that the most powerful myth of today should be a mixture of biological, economic and cultural dogmas. The 20th Century . . . belongs to Darwin, Marx and Wagner. … So true is this that the ordinary educated man of today sees no third choice between the ‘scientific ideas’ of the late 19th Century and the ‘obscurantism and superstition of the Middle Ages.’ ”

Tell such a man that you are not a Darwinian, and he will usually conclude that you must be a Fundamentalist. If you do not believe in the economic interpretation of history, you must be a “mystical Tory.” If you are not a materialist, you must be an idealist. “Ours is a scientific world, a literate world, saturated with —I will not say, the precise ideas of the three materialists—but surely with their deeper spirit, their faith in matter, their love of system, their abstract scientism, and their one-sided interpretation of Nature.” How directly their theoretical ideas have found current practical expression, Author Barzun highlights by bracketing two quotations:

> “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life. . . .”

> “War is not in contrast to peace, but simply another form of expression of the uninterrupted battle of nations and men. It is an expression of the highest and best in manhood.”

Author of Quotation No. 1: Charles Darwin; author of Quotation No. 2: Dr. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi labor front.

What gave these men such a powerful hold upon all subsequent thought? Says Author Barzun: they “made final the separation between man and his soul.” “Man was no longer a cherished creature of the gods. . . . Things were the only reality—indestructible matter in motion.” Result of this apotheosis of matter: “A premium was put on fact, brute force, valueless existence and bare survival.”

Some three-fourths of Author Barzun’s book is taken up with biographical sketches of Darwin, Marx, Wagner, which serve as background for the development of their ideas. Barzun describes Darwin’s difficulties in getting famed British Publisher John Murray to publish On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (a title whose four great phrases seem to Barzun “a stroke of genius”).

Murray considered Darwin’s theory “as absurd as contemplating the fruitful union of a poker and a rabbit,” suggested that Darwin bring out only his observations on pigeons—”everybody is interested in pigeons.” The public thought otherwise, bought up one edition after another.

Darwin’s discovery was “evolution by natural selection from accidental variations.” The dynamite, says Author Barzun, was in the phrase “from accidental variations.” Reason: it denied the role of God in the universe, ruled out a purpose in existence, made men mere puppets of mechanical forces. Author Barzun confesses that his mind is still “paralyzed with enchantment” when he considers Darwin’s theory.

The simplest comparison of the three materialists is made in Barzun’s chapter, The Triumph of the Absolute.

Darwin. “Darwinism yielded its basic law, and its name, when viewed historically, was Progress. . . Fatalism and Progress are as closely linked as the Heavenly Twins. . . . Mind . . . must be driven from the field, first in the form of God or Teleology, then in the form of consciousness or purpose. These were called illusions, superstitions, metaphysics. “The blind play of forces known as struggle replaced purpose. The vast arena of nature was pictured as a scene of ‘desperate’ conflict. . . . History was a sieve that worked. Man was the residue.”

“Marx took up the theme in the next higher register. History — man’s history —was the record of dialectically competing classes whose motives were as simply biological as those found in Darwin. Earning a living and fighting those who make it hard were the two forces that explained the past and propelled history. Environment, as in Darwin, was made up of things . . . man responded like a machine, and out of this same physical necessity … a perfected society was produced. History was a sieve that worked. The proletarian Utopia was the residue.”

Wagner. “With Wagner we . . . reach an uncertain twilight region — part biological, part social, and part . . . esthetic. But the pattern is the same. Art has its evolution, which follows the development of races and nations, the progress of culture ultimately requiring the union of the arts in a popular synthesis of sociological import. The Ring [of the Nibelungs] accordingly celebrates in turn the superman-to-be, the fall of the old gods through the curse of gold, and the triumph of Germanism, in one long tale of blood, lust and deceit. . . . History is a sieve that works, and the residue is the artwork of the future.”

From each of these isms, says Author Barzun, people learned that “the riddle of the Sphinx had been solved.” The solution might be a little technical and complicated. “Yet at bottom lay a simple principle” — the survival of the fittest, the theory of value and surplus value, the leitmotiv and its function. “The public could thus enjoy the double pleasure of simpleness and profundity. . . . Physical struggle led to survival, physical labor to value, physical object to musical theme, and at the end each system yielded the most exalted objects of contemplation; the adaptation of living forms; a perfect state, a religion of art and the regeneration of mankind.”

In doing this, Author Barzun believes, “the dogma and the confusion have plunged us into a state of scientific piety where we dare not call our soul our own.” For this Barzun has some antidotes: 1) he would send science back to the field of technology where it belongs; 2) he would rescue purpose from the debris of late 19th-Century materialism. He thinks it was left to our century to do this job. He is not too sure it will succeed: “the possibilities which Henry Adams foresaw seem likely to come true all at once; cynical pessimism among the leaders of mankind; a vast revival of semi-religious superstition; a brutish dictatorship by capital or labor. . . . But the difficulty of the task should only spur our efforts in the one realm which we have under some sort of immediate control: our minds.”

It is all very convincing if a little too neat. Every war has to have its ideological devils. In World War I, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were elected. This time, it seems, a first-rate scientist and a first-rate musician are to be blamed equally with a class-conscious revolutionist.