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[continued from p119]
“He is right,” Matthaeus Arzt declared roundly. The others called him the Socialist, because the social was his passion. He was a Christian Socialist and often quoted Goethe’s saying that Christianity was a political revolution which, having failed, became a moral one. Political, he said now, it must again become, that is to say social: that was the true and only means for the disciplining of the religious element, now in danger of a degeneration which Leverkuhn had not so badly described. Religious socialism, religiosity linked with the social, that was it; for everything depended on finding the right link, the theonomic sanction must be united with the social, bound up with the God-given task of social fulfilment. “Believe me,” he said, “it all depends on the development of a responsible industrial population, an international nation of industry, which some day can form a right and genuine European economic society. In it all shaping impulses will lie, they lie in the germ even now, now merely for the technical achievement of a new economic organization, not only to result in a thorough sanitation of the natural relations of life, but also to found new political orders.”
That, “the theonomic sanction must be united with the social” is an idea to give one pause. On the outside chance that some readers -- not you, but other people -- are not following all my links, I’m going to quote part of what Wiki says about Theonomy here,
Various theonomic authors have stated such goals as "the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics", exclusion of non-Christians from voting and citizenship, and the application of Biblical law by the state. Under such a system of Biblical law, homosexual acts, adultery, witchcraft, and blasphemy would be punishable by death. Propagation of idolatry or "false religions" would be illegal and could also be punished by the death penalty.
I don’t know about you, but to me this sounds a lot like Sharia law. Until I looked up this definition I thought Arzt was going to be the representative of humanistic socialism. The Settembrini of this book. But apparently not. In fact he seems to be arguing for a position much closer to that of Napthta.
p120 I repeat the ideas of these young people as they were uttered, in their own terminology, a sort of learned lingo, quite unaware how pompous they sounded, flinging about the stilted and pretentious phrases with artless virtuosity and self-satisfaction. “Natural relations of life,” “theonomic sanctions,” such were their preciosities... With gusto they propounded the “problem of being,” talked about “the sphere of the divine,” “the political sphere,” or “the academic sphere”; about the “structural principle,” “condition of dialectic tension,” “existential correspondences,” and so on. [I love the way Mann distances himself like this and places himself beside the reader. Here he has to do it in Zeitblom’s voice, but it is even better in The Magic Mountain] Deutschlin, with his hands clasped behind his head, now put the ‘problem of being’ in the sense of the genetic origin of Arzt’s economic society. That was nothing but common sense, and nothing but this could ever be represented in the economic society. “But we must be clear on this point, Matthaeus,” said he, “that the social ideal of an economic social organization comes from autonomous thinking in its nature enlightening, in short from a rationalism which is still by no means grasped by the mighty forces either above or below the rational. [What?!] You believe you can develop a just order out of the pure insight and reason of man, equating the just and socially useful, and you think that out of it new political forms will come. But the economic sphere is quite different from the political, and from economic expediency to historically related political consciousness there is no direct transition. I don’t see why you fail to recognize that. Political organization refers to the State, a kind and degree of control not conditioned by usefulness; wherein other qualities are represented than those known to representatives of enterprises and secretaries of unions; for instance, honour and dignity. For such qualities, my dear chap, the inhabitants of the economic sphere do not contribute the necessary existential correspondences.”
“Ach, Deutschlin, what are you talking about?” said Arzt [me, too]. “As modern sociologists we very well know that the State too is conditioned by utilitarian functions. There is the administration of justice and the preservation of order. [Michel Foucault suddenly appears and proceeds to viciously whip the surprised Arzt] And then after all we live in an economic age, the economic is simply the historical character of this time, and honour and dignity do not help the State one jot, if it does not of itself have a grasp of the economic situation and know how to direct it.”
p121 Deutschlin admitted that [but I don’t. I have just spent many minutes of my life reading a document, very much of its time, published in 1893 about the Prussian State Railroad. This article confirms that it was the cash cow of the Prussian State, but I was given to understand that it was operated in a way that was not advantageous to economic development. Sadly, there is nothing here about that]. But he denied that useful functions were the essential objects and raisons d’etre of the State. The legitimacy of the State resided, he said, in its elevation, its sovereignty, which thus existed independent of the valuations of individuals, because it -- very much in contrast to the shufflings of the Contrat Social -- was there before the individual. The supra-individual associations had, that is, just as much original existence as the individual human beings, and an economist, for just that reason, could understand nothing of the State, because he understood nothing of its transcendental foundation.
This talk of the “supra-individual” State reminds me of the current debate about the status of corporations. Today corporations seem to be gaining the kind of status that the State had at this time.
To which Teutleben added:
“I am of course not without sympathy for the socio-religious combination that Arzt is speaking for, it is anyhow better than none at all, and Matthaeus is only too right when he says that everything depends on finding the right combination. But to be right, to be at once political and religious, it must be of the people, and what I ask myself is: can a new nationality rise out of an economic society? Look at the Ruhr: there you have your assembly centres of men, yet no new national cells. Travel in the local train from Leuna to Halle. You will see workmen sitting together [probably disenfranchised under Prussian rule], who can talk very well about tariffs; but from their conversation it does not appear that they have drawn any national strength from their common activity. In economics the nakedly finite rules more and more.”
“But the national is finite too,” somebody else said, it was either Hubmeyer or Schappeler, I don’t know which. “As theologians we must not admit that the folk is anything eternal. Capacity for enthusiasm is very fine and a need for faith very natural to youth; but it is a temptation too, and one must look very hard at the new groupings, which today, when liberalism is dying off, are everywhere being presented, to see whether they have genuine substance, and whether the thing creating the bond is itself something real or perhaps only the product of, let us say, structural romanticism, which creates for itself ideological connections in a nominalistic not to say fictionalistic way, I think, or rather I am afraid, that the deified national State and the State regarded as a utopia are just such nominalistic structures; and the recognition of them, let us say the recognition of Germany, has something not binding about it because it has nothing to do with personal substance and qualitative content. Nothing is asked about that, and when one says ‘Germany’ and declares that to be his connecting link, he does not need to validate it at all. He will be asked by nobody, not even by himself, how much Germanism he in fact and in a personal -- that is, in a qualitative sense -- represents and realizes; or how far he is in a position to serve the assertion of a German form of life in the world. It is that which I call nominalism, or rather the fetish of names, which in my opinion is the ideological worship of idols.”
p122 "Good, Hubmeyer,” Said Deutschlin. “All you say is quite right, and in any case I admit that your criticism has brought us closer to the problem. I disagree with Matthaeus Arzt because the domination of the utilitarian principle in the economic field does not suit me; but I entirely agree with him that the theonomic sanction in itself, that is to say the religious in general, has something formalistic and unobjective about it. It needs some kind of down-to-earth, empirical content or application or confirmation, some practice in obedience to God. And so now Arzt has chosen socialism and Carl Teutleben nationalism. These are the two between which we have today to choose. I deny that there is an outbidding of ideologies, since today nobody is beguiled by the empty word ‘freedom.’ There are in fact just these two possibilities, of religious submission and religious realization: the social and the national. But as ill luck will have it, both of them have their drawbacks and dangers, and very serious ones. Hubmeyer has expressed himself very tellingly on a certain nominalistic hollowness and personal lack of substance so frequently evident in the acceptance of the national; and, generally speaking, one should add that it is futile to fling oneself into the arms of a reinvigorating objectivism if it means nothing for the actual shaping of one’s personal life but is only valid for solemn occasions, among which indeed I count the intoxication of sacrificial death. To a genuine sacrifice two valuations and qualitative ingredients belong: that of the thing and that of the sacrifice. . . . For we have cases where the personal substance, let us say, was very rich in Germanness and quite involuntarily objectivated itself also as sacrifice; yet where acknowledgement of the folk-bond not only utterly failed, but there was even a permanent and violent negation of it, so that the tragic sacrifice consisted precisely in the conflict between being and confession. . . . So much for tonight about the national sanction. As for the social, the hitch is that when everything in the economic field is regulated in the best possible manner, the problem of the meaning and fulfilment of existence and a worthy conduct of life is left open, just as open as it is today. Some day we shall have universal economic administration of the world, the complete victory of collectivism. Good; the relative insecurity of man due to the catastrophic social character of the capitalistic system will have disappeared; that is, there will have vanished from human life the last memory of risk and loss -- and with it the intellectual problem. One asks oneself why then continue to live. . . .”
This is, of course, the debate at the heart of The Magic Mountain. Nationalism vs Socialism -- before the arrival of National Socialism as a result of the Great War. There, Joachim, who represents some of the crucial -- spiritual -- aspects of nationalism mentioned here, dies his sad and pointless, but honorable death.
This last point is also at the heart of Brave New World, which was contemporary with The Magic Mountain. The meaninglessness of life in a perfect world -- economically and socially speaking.
[to be continued]
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