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Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 1 (Herbert Marcuse: Collected Papers)

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There is so much to be said about Herbert Marcuse that this short space will not suffice.

What can be said about this collection of essays is its outline of the modern age, relating as the title suggests: "Technology, war and fascism."

Often, we think of technology as being simply the increasing of our tools' efficacy, in all other ways benign, that war is perpetrated by nations and leaders, and that fascism is a dead ideology based on hate, suspicion, and opposition to everthing in the status quo. Marcuse helps us find an understanding of these elements of the twentieth century, placing them in the context of world civilization, industrialization, political development, and capitalism.

In relation to my personal collection, I do not have a book more relevent to understanding the world, than those which Marcuse contributed.

Marcuse was retained by the United States Office of War Information and later the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor of the CIA) because of his insight into German society.
His insights are attractive to this nonsociologist. Although Lady Thatcher, who seems to be descending into a form of insanity, said recently "there is no such thing as society", ordinary working people, who cannot afford gated communities, must perforce live in society.


Numeric results, innocent of theory, are useless for insight and only theory can match the qualitative texture of daily life. This is perhaps why Adorno's American typists at the Princeton Radio Research project both understood his "complex" prose and were sympathetic to his conclusions, while his "educated" superiors thought him "elitist."


One of Marcuse's insights into Nazi society describes the ordinary person as informed by "matter of fact cynicism". Perhaps because of Marcuse's German background, he here fashions a surprising neologism, a Katzenjammer, a jamming-together of concepts useful precisely because it is striking. This neologistic fashioning of terms-of-art is a permission German gives the speaker which his withheld, superficially, by English.


The cynical are not usually thought of as matter-of-fact, and the matter-of-fact, not usually thought of as cynical. The two sets, while not considered disjoint, are not considered to largely intersect.

Nonetheless, Marcuse's insight captured something about German society during the war that many observers missed. The ordinary German mind was thought by Anglo-American commentators to share in the mysticism of Hitler.


But Marcuse saw that the ordinary German, although silenced, was quite cynical about the war and Hitlerdom. Much later, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's research has confirmed Marcuse's hypothesis, for in the latter's book HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS, Goldhagen finds that many Germans were, as matter-of-fact cynics, not willing to participate in the Holocaust but equally unwilling to make a protest. This combination may have resulted from what Marcuse described as the destruction of pre-war Wilhelmine patriarchy and the regression to the matter-of-fact cynicism which is the protective coloration of silenced women.

The execution of a Rosa Luxembourg had shown countless Germans the consequence of protest while not necessarily convincing them that their leaders were anything but fools and madmen. The patriarchal response, commencing with the German revolts to Napoleon's rule during its awakening in 1800, was to act on the revolutionary belief. The matter-of-fact cynical response was quietism.


The Nazis in their origin in reaction to the Left revolutions of 1918 had succeeded in "debunking" liberatory narratives and in making resistance seem foolish. Young Germans of the Weimar period would be psychically familiar to young Americans of today, in the naivete of believing oneself free of "illusions."

The destruction of German patriarchy also foreshadows the consequences of the destruction of patriarchy good and bad in American life, where Lost Boys, filled with fancies but empty of "illusions", curse women in darkened streets and bars reminiscent of Cabaret.


This is the most troubling aspect of Marcuse's work: the fact that modern Americans, at least prior to the watershed of Sept 11 2001, were in their high levels of cynicism, their growing inability to treat their psychological troubles with anything other than legal or illegal drugs, and their pseudo-sophisticated, "ironic" rejection of narrative grand and small, closer to Weimar and Hitler period Germans than their grandparents.


Marcuse's insights led him in later life to a more general critique of society as composed of "one-dimensional", disempowered atoms. Only by actively maintaining an alternative stance to generalized depression can one prevent cynical matter-of-factness from taking over one's life.