Totalitarianism, Aesthetics, Health, and Science

Jean Bethke Elshtain has an excellent review essay on four new books that examine academic and cultural matters in the Third Reich. I can't do her essay justice in this space except to say that new scholarship on Hitler's Germany demonstrates how his rise to power was facilitated not merely by militarism, but by what Elshtain calls "an entire Weltanschauung that penetrated every aspect of German life, including art, industry, technology, medicine, nutrition, health, and psychology."

She notes that this perversion of the production and dissemination of knowledge and, even more, of the philosophy of being, hasn't received sufficient scrutiny by Western scholars. Much of what Elshtain writes is eerily familiar to modern readers, so much so in fact that one wonders if our lack of interest isn't due in part to our familiarity with that evil system's lingering influences. What Elshtain and the authors she reviews make abundantly clear, however, is that Nazism, like all forms of totalitarianism, had to bastardize historically important fields of knowledge in order to establish itself and thrive. The antidote is the freedom to think, write, and pursue knowledge, and this can be achieved only in free societies.