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THE NEW INQUISITIONS: HERETIC-HUNTING AND THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM |
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10: Theodor Adorno and the "Occult" Without doubt, one of the more influential authors of the mid· twentieth century is Theodor A. Adorno (19°3-1969), whose work, especially as a central member of the "Frankfurt School," was instrumental in creating what became known as "cultural studies" -- that is, the critical-theoretical analysis of contemporary culture. Underlying much of Adorno's work -- from The Authoritarian Personality (1950) to Minima Moralia (1951)and to the kinds of cultural criticism represented in such posthumous collections in English as The Culture Industry (1991) -- is his effort to understand and analyze the nature of National Socialism in the wake of Hitler. A significant theme in Adorno's writing, especially in the decade after World War II, was "irrationalism," especially as manifested in what he termed "the occult" or "occultism." But as we shall see, Adorno's attacks on what he believed to be "occultism" in fact represent an anti-esotericism of the left that is almost a mirror reflection of the Inquisitorial tendency that we often see operating on the political right. Adorno believed that Nazism represented an eruption of antirational or irrational forces in society, and that by analyzing and combating "authoritarian irrationalism" in forms like popular astrology and "occultism," he also in some larger sense was combating what he believed to be contributing conditions for anti-Semitism and Nazi authoritarianism. After all, in the popular mind, many major figures within German National Socialism are associated with "occultism"; not only Hitler himself but also Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, and various other primary Nazi figures had some "occult" interests. [1] What is more, it is well established that Nazism emerged in an ambience that included figures and movements often loosely associated with "occultism," such as the Thule Society, various kinds of "Aryan" quasi-mythologies, in turn often bound up with racial theories, forms of antimodernism, neopaganism, vegetarianism, and other perspectives that, however disparate and even opposed to one another they might be, could be lumped together as "irrational" if not outright "occultism." One can see how Adorno, looking at the nightmare of Nazi totalitarianism and its persecution of Jews, arrived at his thesis that the enemy of the rational and humane must be irrational and inhumane -- and that what one must do to prevent the reappearance of Nazism is to analyze and root out the irrational as it presents itself in modern societies. Hence Adorno wrote such works as "Theses against Occultism," or "The Stars Down to Earth," which bitterly attack and dismiss "occultism" as irrational and thus as symptomatic of the pathology that produces fascism. Of course, there is an obvious question that doesn't seem to have occurred to Adorno himself, but that we are compelled to broach during our inquiry into Adorno's anti-occultism. Why is it Adorno didn't recognize that historically, "occultists" in Anglo-European history were far more likely to be among those persecuted along with Jews than to be themselves persecutors? Is Adorno, in his anti-occultism, engaged in the same kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that we see in such figures of the right as Voegelin and Schmitt -- that is, a blaming of the victim? After all, at the very basis of Adorno's critique of "occultism" is the belief that it is "irrational" in binary opposition to that which is "rational" -- yet such a belief is precisely the kind of dualism that we see underlying Inquisitional logic more generally. Ironically, Adorno objectifies and rejects "occultism" and "occultists" in a manner rather reminiscent of an anti-Semite objectifying and rejecting "the Jews" on the basis of gross overgeneralizations, caricatures, half-truths, logical fallacies, and outright lies. Let us begin by looking at one of the most widely reprinted of Adorno's writings on occultism: his "Theses Against Occultism" (1946-1947), published in Minima Moralia, but also as a separate piece in Telos (1974), and again in The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture (1994). [2] The first thing one notices about Adorno's remarks on "occultism" is their abruptness and abstractness. He begins, "The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness. Consciousness has lost the strength to think the absolute and to bear the conditional." [3] "Monotheism," he continues, "disintegrates into a second mythology." "Spirit dissociates itself into spirits, and in the process loses the ability to see that they do not exist," "society's veiled forces" "fool its victims with false prophecy," and "after millennia of enlightenment, panic once again breaks out over humanity, whose domination over nature, by turning into domination over man, surpasses all the horrors that man ever had to fear from nature." Where should one begin to comment on Adorno's pronouncements? First, one cannot tell what he means by the term "occultism," which he never defines and which remains entirely nebulous. Apparently, he chiefly means here by "occultism," spiritualism, that is, phenomena of mediumship that became popular during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and also various kinds of "fortune tellers." Underlying his assertions is an insight into the commodification of "the occult" that took place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: "a reborn animism denies the very alienation that it itself has generated and thrives on, [for which] it substitutes non-existing experience." [4] But one must at least ask: why is an "animist" or "occult" experience by definition "non-existing"? Merely because one says so? Assertion without evidence does not constitute an argument. Furthermore, the first paragraph of "Theses Against Occultism," which begins with the bald claim that "attraction to the occult is a symptom of the retrogression of consciousness," concludes with a giant leap to the idea that somehow the modern "domination of nature" has turned into "domination over man" (presumably totalitarianism). But how does one arrive at such a conclusion? Adorno wants to make a "retrogression to magical thinking" responsible for totalitarianism, by which specifically he means Nazi totalitarianism. However, the link between these two -- occultism and totalitarianism -- is more of a fuzzy smooshing together of disparate, disconnected things. Hence in the third paragraph, Adorno claims that "the hypnosis exerted by occult objects resembles totalitarian terror: over time, they become one and the same." [5] Really? Why? How? Adorno's bizarre explanation: "the horoscope corresponds to the Central Office's directives to the citizens and the mystique of numbers prepares for administrative statistics and price fixing." "Ultimately," he concludes, "integration reveals itself as the ideology of disintegration into power groups exterminating each other. Whoever gets into it is lost." Into what? A tarot card reader is somehow akin to -- what? Hitler's brownshirts? This is the kind of fallacious thinking and illogic that one would reject in a freshman college paper. How on earth do we arrive at some sort of link between the suppressed and marginalized "occult" in the form of astrology or Kabbalistic number mysticism on the one hand, and central office directives or administrative statistics? As to a "power group" "exterminating" anyone -- isn't "the occult" typically associated with the victims of such efforts at extermination in the West? Witches, heretics, do these not represent the suppressed, the marginalized, the objects of Inquisitional terror? Yet by Adorno's logic, they are somehow, inexplicably, to blame for the bureaucracies that persecute them. One is frequently struck by how Adorno's rhetoric really is an unconscious transposition from anti-Semitism to anti-occultism. He refers to "occultists" as aligned with "shady asocial marginal phenomena," revealing "the forces of inner decay," as "diseased consciousness" for which "the refuse from the world of appearances becomes the mundus intelligibilis"; "occultism" is "barbarically insane" "crudeness," that appeals to "the decaying subject." The "occultist" [or "occultism"] "wants the world to conform to its [occultism's or the occultist's] own decay; this is why it has to do with props and bad wishes." [6] Adorno himself makes the connection: "like Fascism, the power of the occult is not just a pathos [pathisch] -- the two being related by a model of thought as in the case of anti- Semitism." [7] But the connection is slightly different: the "model of thought" of anti-Semitism (i.e., making all manner of negative associations with Jews as "shady," "asocial," "marginal," and representing forces of "decay") is simply transposed by Adorno to attack "occultists" with exactly the same bitter hostility. At this point, Adorno hauls out what he sees as more big guns, which he trains mostly on spiritualism. "Occultism," he announces, "is the metaphysics of the dopes." "Since the early days of spiritualism, the beyond has conveyed nothing more essential than the greetings from the deceased grandmother," he writes, acknowledging "the lumen naturale did go further than the trip to the grandmother." The allusion to the lumen naturale or "light of nature" here suggests a distinction between the complexities of traditional esotericism as manifested in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century alchemical texts, and the more superficial and banal forms of twentieth-century spiritualism that offer a commodified "occult" access to the dead. But this is not a distinction he is interested in pursuing; rather, "Theses Against Occultism" is, as its title would suggest, a diatribe largely free of subtle (or even unsubtle) distinctions. He is more interested in claiming that "occultists" "provide feeble-mindedness with a Weltanschauung," and that their "rotten tricks are nothing but the rotten existence which they brighten." [8] Near the end of his attack on "occultism," Adorno offers a side trip into what he construes as comparative religion. He asserts that
What a strange passage! Usually, spiritualism is attacked as being crude because it insists too much on an extension of the physical world into the spiritual -- but here all great religions are proposed to have insisted on bodily perception and bodily fulfillment, and "occultists" are claimed to be uninterested in these, or in the "inseparability of the spiritual and the corporeal"! As anyone with some knowledge of the vast and complex history of esotericism knows, these are all rather peculiar overgeneralizations that bear little or no relation to the actual history of esoteric currents, groups, or individuals. [10] Adorno concludes his odd "Theses Against Occultism" by asserting that "the idea of the existence of the spirit [or of spirit] is "the most extreme height of bourgeois consciousness." [11] Here we are not very far at all from Marx's claim that religion is the opiate of the masses. But Adorno has a final target: Hegel. He thinks that "occultists" confuse spirit and the world of things as commodity, and that thus "the world spirit becomes the highest spirit, the guardian angel of the existing, the deranged." This, he continues, "is what the occultists live on: their mysticism is the enfant terrible of Hegel's mystical element. They push speculation to fraudulent bankruptcy." [12] "Occultists" objectify spirit, and in so doing (Adorno concludes), make possible the final assertion: "There is no Spirit." Frankly, it is hard to write about "Theses Against Occultism" because the work is so full of confusion and overgeneralization mixed up with a disturbing bitterness that borders on a kind of nihilism. Although there are a few hints that Adorno is distinguishing between traditional currents of Western esotericism like alchemy and later movements like spiritualism, the fact is that he never defines what he means by "occultism" and as a result, the whole thing seems like a mean-spirited attack on what he might as well refer to as "those people." How is it that someone so attuned to the rhetoric of anti-Semitism could fail to recognize that his own rhetoric of anti-occultism so resembles it? There is little more effort to understand or to accurately depict "occultism" in Adorno's "Theses" than there is to understand or to accurately depict Jewish culture or Jews in "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The strange reversal that, in effect, blames the victims of history for authoritarianism is also at work in the other often-reprinted work of antioccultism by Adorno, an article entitled "The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column." [13] To the extent that "The Stars Down to Earth" only analyzed the phenomenon of popular newspaper astrology columns, it may be rather interesting. But instead of straightforward analysis, Adorno seriously takes a popular astrology listing in the Los Angeles Times as an example of "occultism," and furthermore earnestly analyzes the newspaper astrology listing as if its purported "occultism" in turn reveals latent Nazism in American society. In his view, the popular astrology listing represents "large-scale social phenomena involving irrational elements" bound up with "various mass movements spread all over the world in which people seem to act against their own rational interests of self-preservation." [14] In what we now can see is his typical style on this subject, he does not arrive at this conclusion but, rather, begins with it as his premise in the very first lines. Throughout Adorno's article on the Los Angeles Times astrology column during the period 1952-1953, he uses the same kind of anti-occultist rhetoric that we saw in "Theses Against Occultism." Those who pay attention to astrology columns may be "psychotic" or exhibit "psychotic character structure;" astrologers and astrology are "nefarious;" the occult is "modern big time irrationality;" "the modem occultist movements, including astrology, are more or less artificial rehashes of old and by-gone superstitions" "discordant with today's universal state of enlightenment." [15] It is "pseudo-rationality" "the very same traits that play such a conspicuous role in totalitarian social movements." [16] Why? Because "astrological irrationality" represents "abstract authority." Thus "it is a moot point whether people who fall for astrology show" "a psychotic predisposition." [17] Adorno's particular contribution to anti-occultism is to claim that astrology is "an enlarged duplicate of an opaque and reified world. [18] In other words, an interest in astrology is symptomatic of the alienation inherent in modernity itself; but Adorno goes much further yet in his anti-occultist claims based on a single popular newspaper column. Astrology, as represented by a popular newspaper column, resembles a "sect," and is thus "sinister" by nature because it "is indicative" of emerging "totalitarianism." How? "Just as those who can read the phony signs of the stars believe that they are in the know, the followers of totalitarian parties believe that their special panaceas are universally valid and feel justified in imposing them as a general rule," Adorno claims. In other words, because astrologers presumably believe in astrology, they "presage" nothing less than "the one-party state"! [19] How did we get here? By huge, totally unsubstantiated leaps. One could as easily argue on the same premise that Adorno himself, by believing in his own unsubstantiated claims, presages a "one-party state" driven by ideology -- say, a Marxist totalitarianism. Adorno coyly admits that astrology can serve "the function of a defense against psychosis," but still holds that astrology is bound up with mental illness, in particular with "paranoid tendencies" and "the retrogression of society as a whole," if not with outright psychosis. And he concludes with a reference to Leibniz's "profound contempt only for those activities of the mind which aimed at deception," chief among which is "astrology." [20] Once again, one hardly knows where to begin. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Adorno's attack on "astrology" is his chosen subject: a newspaper astrology column. Such columns then, as now, have virtually nothing to do with astrology in any historically informed or complete sense. [21] Rather, "sun sign" columns consist in bland, abstract pronouncements meant to apply to huge swaths of the population: "beware of strangers today" is about as specific as the predictions get. Virtually no one takes them seriously. To take newspaper "sun signs" as synecdochic for "occultism" as a whole is a parody of academic or scholarly analysis; it conflates a popular simulacrum of "occultism" commodified into a newspaper product with all the complex variants and historical forms of esotericism simply by using the, broad, undefined label of "occultism." One can understand, given his interest in popular culture, why Adorno would choose to analyze a newspaper astrology column -- what's peculiar is his use of that column to draw sweeping conclusions about "occultism" as a whole. In that, his work in many respects resembles that of fundamentalist Christians who also draw sweeping, dramatic conclusions from the thinnest of "evidence" from popular culture. Yet how few scholars seem willing to criticize or even to question Adorno's anti-esotericism. Adorno's anti-occultist premises are transmitted through various scholarly works and accepted wholesale without much if any critical analysis. For instance, Daphna Canetti-Nisim, in her contribution to a collection entitled Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism (2004), accepts the basic idea that "an" [sic] "alternative religious tradition," comprised of such disparate currents as astrology, divination, spiritualism, and even Kabbalah, somehow predisposes people to support an authoritarian political system. [22] The mostly unspoken corollary to such a claim is, of course, that those who accept "an" alternative religious tradition (as if "occultism" were a single unified entity) ought to be placed under surveillance or perhaps better, gotten rid of -- they are, just as the Inquisition saw them, "dangerous." Hence, once again, those who historically represent a marginalized viewpoint are not victims but, by the special jiu-jitsu of anti-esotericism, are to blame for authoritarianism! The fallacy here is the same that we find in Voegelin's work, even if Voegelin and Adorno might seem to come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Somehow, "Gnostics" or "occultists" are to blame for the emergence of totalitarianism -- even if, as recent scholarship has amply demonstrated, in reality "occultists" were among the first victims of the Nazis, and were marked for immediate suppression, imprisonment, or even extermination. [23] If Voegelin's thesis that "Gnostics" were to blame for leftist or Marxist totalitarianism had some grain of truth, then why do we find that in fact influential leftist or Marxist authors are at least as anti-occultist (or, as the case may be, anti- Gnostic) as their counterparts on the right? Voegelin and Adorno actually proceed on the same basis: they simply make assertions or pronouncements about how "occultists" or "Gnostics" are to blame for totalitarianism, how they "set the stage" for it, or whatnot. But neither of them adduce any convincing evidence, and their subsequent followers then take for granted as proven what has merely been claimed without support. There are two primary aspects of the inquisitorial instinct: the first is ideological, and the second, the practical implementation of that ideology. What we see in Adorno is essentially the same kind of ideological inquisitionalism that one sees in Voegelin: here is a political tendency one both fears and detests -- in Adorno's case, Nazism; in Voegelin's case, Communism -- and so one seeks an ideological-political scapegoat. "Occultism" or "Gnosticism" are ideal as scapegoats because they carry much historical baggage; they are freighted with centuries of opprobrium, yet they remain vague and indefinable, ideal for service as vehicles of contempt precisely because of their imprecision. "Everyone" knows that "occultism" (or "Gnosticism") is bad, even if "everyone" isn't entirely sure what is meant by the term. Both Adorno and Voegelin draw on this dynamic in order to construct an ideological scapegoat through an intellectual inquisition; but neither of them witnessed the practical consequences of scapegoating "occultists" or "Gnostics," for theirs was a purely intellectual exercise in witch-hunting. What happens when an ideological inquisition becomes a basis for state policy? Let us take the case of Germany after 1933, in which as Corinna Treitel documents, "participants in the German occult movement faced a largely hostile state." They "continued their occult activities under constant threat of discovery and punishment"; they belonged "to a criminalized group in a brutal police state: they suffered intimidation, coercion, suppression, and -- in extreme cases -- murder." [24] It is true that a few "occultists" were affiliated with the Nazis, but take the case of "Hitler's prophet," professional astrologer and clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen. He published an astrological newsletter that predicted the triumph of National Socialism and was rumored to be an advisor to Hitler; but "a few days after the Reichstag fire [in 1933), 'Hitler's prophet' was arrested and summarily executed by three storm troopers just outside of Berlin." [25] Or take the case of Johannes Maria Verweyen, a professor of philosophy with interests in Freemasonry, vegetarianism, and poetry, as well as in the Theosophical Society of Blavatsky (which he renounced in 1934 to return to Catholicism). He was blacklisted by the Nazis in 1934, was driven from his chair in philosophy at the University of Bonn, was harassed and put under surveillance, was arrested in 1941, and, finally, died in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in 1945. [26] Good idea to blame him for Nazism. My point here is not that there were no occult influences on National Socialism-such influence is well documented, especially in a figure such as Heinrich Himmler. See, for example, the extensive research of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, notably The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985/1992). [27] Rather, in good part because of such influences (but also because National Socialism engaged a rhetoric of "progress"), the Nazis were inclined to persecute or eliminate occultists that might be perceived as a threat. This phenomenon is similar to what we see in the inquisitional archetype more generally: Communists purged fellow Communists; and as we shall see, in the early twenty-first century, American evangelical Christians often attacked other evangelical Christians more bitterly than anyone else. I certainly sympathize with Adorno in his desire to determine exactly why and how totalitarianismism comes to power. Indeed, my own great-grandparents on my mother's side fled Germany to settle in the United States around 1930 in part because (we only recently discovered) my great-grandmother was Jewish, something she kept hidden from us her whole life. Although it may be rhetorically convenient to blame Nazism on "occultism," and certainly there were connections between the Nazi regime and occultism, it is also true that some occultists were right there in the concentration camps next to Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and others. What accounts for Adorno's bitter, derisive, and far from subtle anti-occultism, expressed in terms that echo the anti-occultist rhetoric of Nazi Germany? I think that for Adorno, as for Voegelin, and for all of us who have inherited the rhetorical constructs of "progress" and the "enlightenment," "the occult" makes for an easy target and scapegoat. "Occultists," particularly popular figures who write newspaper or tabloid astrology columns and the like, represent the "superstitious past," and so are often targeted for elimination by rightist and leftist ideologues who engage the language of "progress" toward a future utopia from which "backward" figures such as "occultists" are purged. What I began to suspect, as I considered the case of Adorno in light of Carl Schmitt and Eric Voegelin, is that anti-occultism is a phenomenon in itself, one that appears on both the political left and right. The temptation toward ideological inquisitionism and political scapegoating seems to be very strong on both ends of the political spectrum, and the natural victim often seems to be "occultism." By engaging the rhetoric of anti-occultism, figures on both the left and the right were drawing (mostly unconsciously) on the inherited language and conceptual frameworks of their predecessors in the Inquisition and in the witch-hunts of the early modern era. Mostly, the rhetoric of anti-occultism remains intellectual. But when the rhetoric of anti-occultism is taken seriously by a police state, then the consequences -- in terms of suppression, harassment, surveillance, imprisonment, and murder -- are brutally evident, regardless of whether the state power is nominally of the left or of the right. Thus, although Adorno's bitter attacks upon "occultists" at first glance may seem harmless, they exist in a larger context that is far from harmless, and that he surely should have known. How is it that he, or Voegelin, or Schmitt, could have overlooked this historical and rhetorical context of anti-occultism, let alone its human consequences when put into practice through witchhunters, or grand inquisitor -- or state police? One perhaps can understand, I suppose, why those on the right sympathetic to Roman Catholicism would consciously (as in the case of Schmitt) or unconsciously (as in the case of Voegelin) embrace the Inquisition as an intellectual and political model. By why would Adorno (even by implication) accept such a model, too, let alone anti-occultist rhetoric like that of the Nazis themselves? The fact is, anti-occultism or anti-esotericism is woven deeply into the very fabric of twentieth-century thought both on the left and on the right. Both Communists and Nazis continued the prior Church tendency to persecute and obliterate those who were seen to embrace or embody "irrational" "occult" or "heretical" beliefs or practices. In his reaction against the mythological and irrational dimensions of National Socialism, Adorno was unconsciously reiterating the kind of rhetorical demonization that the Nazis engaged in! And in his crusade against irrationalism, Adorno was in fact overlooking the terrifying role that rationalist industrialism played within National Socialism -- what were the gas chambers if not industrial chambers of death? These are sets of paradoxes worth noting. Such paradoxes came into being precisely because antioccultism or anti-esotericism is so deeply embedded within the history of the West that it goes almost unrecognized even by its practitioners, and it goes almost totally unremarked on by commentators or analysts. Virtually no one on the left seems to have noted the unpleasant origins and implications of Adorno's anti-occultism-instead, one finds almost exclusively tacit or explicit endorsements. Of course one should be anti-occultist, goes the assumption. As Adorno himself would have acknowledged and appreciated, the more unrecognized such assumptions are, the more malign power they have. But, one might reply to all this, surely the rhetoric of anti-occultism had ceased or at least lost its power by the end of the twentieth century. So one might think -- but one would be wrong. Let us consider the case of Carl Raschke in relation to American evangelical Christianity.
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