How did the Nazis come to power? “Fear and Hitler’s Instant Subversion of Freedom” (Fritz Stern lecture notes)

THE BASICS
-National Socialism was a “temptation.”
-Persistent distortion of history got into the mainstream of German thinking, particularly the “stab in the back lie” (Marxists and Jews subverted the old regime and were an internal enemy). Liquidate the enemy at home before the enemy abroad, this notion nestled in elite German thought.
-It only took the Nazis 3-4 months to obtain totalitarian rule.
-Hitler was not elected chancellor. He was leader of the largest party but did not even seize power, it was handed to him by “conservatives.”

WORLD WAR 1
-In August 1914 Germany was divided and experienced mass delirium (context: “the sanctity of a soldiers death”).
-The military got more powerful through WW1.
-Sending Lenin to Russia and unrestricted submarine warfare were major mistakes of the German leadership.
-The German people had been misled and defeat “came as a total shock to people in grief and hunger.” The upper classes were stunned.
-“The hatreds that the war had spawned.” Germans were near unanimous in their hatred of Versailles, it epitomized humiliation.

WEIMAR
-Weimar Germany suffered from Versailles and inflation but more importantly the German upper classes could not make peace with the new regime. The churches, the judiciary, academics etc. felt uprooted and had contempt for liberal practices.
-In 1930 foreign troops departed from German soil.
-“In Weimar, death itself was anti-democratic. The moderates dying young, the enemies living on past unrecognized senility.”
-The Great Depression.
-The Nazis made major inroads in local elections before the Great Depression, and in student elections.

THE APPEAL OF HITLER AND THE NAZIS
-Hitler portrayed himself as hero who would save Germany from enemies, gain “Lebensraum” and put community over class.
-The Nazis undertook “astounding manipulation of the new media” and promoted a return to non-capitalist ideals.
-Germans harboured the dream of a new authoritarianism.
-Judges left over from the imperial regime dealt out justice favouring the right and punishing the left.
-Street fighting took place between communists and the right-wing. The divided right looked for an authoritarian solution.
-Social democrats were the “true and sole defenders of Weimar.” Communists attacked social democrats saying “after Hitler, us.”
-The left underestimated the psychological appeal of Hitler and the Nazis.
-National Socialism was “the enduring appeal to the swine in man.”
-“Hapless intriguers” in the conservative establishment handed Hitler the chancellorship.
-Hitler never received more than 37% of the vote in a free election.

COMPLETE POWER
-At the time Hitler was handed power civil society was still in place.
-People were deluded that some decency or “rule of law” would remain.
-It took Mussolini two and half years to establish complete power, it took Hitler a few months.
-The civil service was subservient.
-The “spread of ideology” was “a brute spectacle” that “touched the depths of desperate people.”
-Hitler moved with dizzying speed.
-Fear was rampant in Germany and for many reasons. Hitler spread and exploited fear. Concentration camps were publicly announced for purposes of fear and intimidation. Fear has a dumbing effect and is contagious.
-The SA were made auxiliary police, a white arm band sufficed.
-“Our own decency limited our imagination to think of what could happen.”
-“The themes of death and resurrection” acted to limit the “loyal christian patriot,” displaying and downplaying his antisemitism, and played into the virtues of “violence, war” and the “cult of death.”
-“The Nazis managed to combine to the appearance of legality with the reality of terror and intimidation, the former was important to maintain the self-respect of civil servants and the upper classes.”
-The Catholic party surrendered.
-The self-submission and self-censorship of the Germans was preemptive, even the Nazis were surprised.

Marshall McLuhan on why women are better suited for the modern workforce

“The electric world, because it does not favour specialism, does favour women. Men are naturally specialists compared to women. Men are very brittle and unadaptable people compared to women. Women have had through the centuries to adapt to men rather than vic versa. So, specialization, which used to be taken for granted in modern industry, has now become very very shaky and roleplaying has taken over from job holding in big business. Role playing means having several jobs simultaneously or being able to move rapidly from one job to another. A good actor can play many parts. So women’s lib is really a reply to the new electric conditions of employment in which huge information is available simultaneously to everybody. In the electric world the simultaneity of information is acoustic in the form that it comes from all directions. Role playing is a very different thing from goal seeking and in the electric time we are moving very much in that direction. The reason that most of you in this room find it difficult to imagine a goal in life is simply that you’re living in an electric world where everything happens at once. It’s hard to have a fixed point of view in a world where everything is happening simultaneously. It is hard to have an objective in a world that is changing faster than you can imagine the objective being fulfilled. Women’s lib therefore has very deep roots in the new technology and is not just a matter of votes for women. It means that the work that is being performed today can in many cases be done better by women.”

The late 19th century “New Woman”

“One of the most important and most visible threats to traditional masculinity was the New Woman. As described by John Tosh in A Man’s Place, the term was coined in 1894 but the phenomenon which it described “had been discernible since the 1880s.” These New Women, emblematic above all of feminine independence, smoked cigarettes, rode bicycles, and spoke their minds. Many took on jobs, postponed or eschewed marriage, and renounced familial obedience. As Tosh demonstrates, traditional male elites found their authority questioned in every aspect—as fathers, husbands, teachers, and representatives as the state. Not only did allegedly rogue women put men on the defensive, so too did new laws that eroded male privilege in matters from parental prerogatives and property rights to access to education and the vote.”

Gail Bederman in Manliness and Civilization

“Immigrant and working-class men were not the only ones challenging middle-class men’s claims on public power and authority. Concurrently, the middle-class woman’s movement was challenging past constructions of manhood by agitating for woman’s advancement. “Advancement,” as these New Women understood it, meant granting women access to activities which had previously been reserved for men. Small but increasing numbers of middle-class women were claiming the right to a college education, to become clergymen, social scientists, and physicians, and even to vote. Men reacted passionately by ridiculing these New Women, prophesying that they would make themselves ill and destroy national life, insisting that they were rebelling against nature. As one outraged male clergyman complained, feminists were opposing “the basic facts of womanhood itself.. We shall gain nothing in the end by displacing manhood by womanhood or the other way around.” Yet the New Woman did “displace manhood by womanhood,” if only because her successes undermined the assumption that education, professional status, and political power required a male body. The woman’s movement thus increased the pressure on middle-class men to reformulate manhood.”

Marshall McLuhan on Karl Marx, communism and “service environments”

“The mechanizing process that began in the eighteenth century and led to the development of new service environments—the press, the highway, the postal routes—was soon augmented by steam and rail. By the middle of the nineteenth century the extent of environmental services available to the workers of the community greatly exceeded the scale of services that could be monopolized by individual wealth. By Karl Marx’s time, a “communism” resulting from such services so far surpassed the older private wealth and services contained within the new communal environment that it was quite natural for Marx to use it as a rear-view mirror for his Utopian hopes. The paradox of poverty amidst plenty had begun. Even the pauper lived, and lives, in an environment of multi-billion dollar communal services. Yet communal wealth developed by the mechanical extensions of man was soon outstripped by the electric services that began with the telegraph and which steadily enhanced the information environment. With the advent of an electric information environment, all the territorial aims and objectives of business and politics tended to become illusory. By now Communism is something that lies more than a century behind us, and we are deep into the new age of tribal involvement.”

Frantz Fanon on radio in the Algerian War

“Since 1956 the purchase of a radio in Algeria has meant, not the adoption of a modern technique for getting news, but the obtaining of access to the only means of entering into communication with the Revolution, of living with it. In the special case of the portable battery set, an improved form of the standard receiver operating on current, the specialist in technical changes in underdeveloped countries might see a sign of a radical mutation. The Algerian, in fact, gives the impression of finding short cuts and of achieving the most modern forms of new-communication without passing through the intermediary stages. In reality, we have seen that this “progress” is to be explained by the absence of electric current in the Algerian douars.

The French authorities did not immediately realize the exceptional importance of this change in attitude of the Algerian people with regard to the radio. Traditional resistances broke down and one could see in a douar groups of families in which fathers, mothers, daughters, elbow to elbow, would scrutinize the radio dial, waiting for the Voice of Algeria. Suddenly indifferent to the sterile, archaic modesty and antique social arrangements devoid of brotherhood, the Algerian family discovered itself to be immune to the off-color jokes and the libidinous references that the announcer occasionally let drop.

Almost magically—but we have seen the rapid and dialectical progression of the new national requirements—the technical instrument of the radio receiver lost its identity as an enemy object. The radio set was no longer a part of the occupier’s arsenal of cultural oppression. In making of the radio a primary means of resisting the increasingly overwhelming psychological and military pressures of the occupant, Algerian society made an autonomous decision to embrace the new technique and thus tune itself in on the new signaling systems brought into being by the Revolution.

The Voice of Fighting Algeria was to be of capital importance in consolidating and unifying the people . . . the use of the Arab, Kabyle and French languages which, as colonialism was obliged to recognize, was the expression of a non-racial conception, had the advantage of developing and of strengthening the unity of the people, of making the fighting Djurdjura area real for the Algerian patriots of Batna or of Nemours.”

At the end of the first paragraph Fanon alludes to a concept called “technological leapfrogging.” The “absence of electrical current” in Fanon’s Algeria is something like the many regions worldwide that never had landline phones but have seen mass uptake of cellphones in the last 15 years.

Ursula Franklin on technology and “reciprocity”

“And now I’d like to focus for a moment on the human consequences which are particularly evident in what are called the communications technologies, and which I would like to call the “non-communications” technologies because very often that word, “communication”, is a misnomer. Whenever human activities incorporate human machines or rigidly prescribed procedures, the modes of human interaction change. In general, technical arrangements reduce or eliminate reciprocity. Reciprocity is some manner of interactive give and take, a genuine communication among interacting parties. For example, a face-to-face discussion or a transaction between people needs to be started, carried out, and terminated with a certain amount of reciprocity. Once technical devices are interposed, they allow a physical distance between the parties. The give and take —that is, the reciprocity— is distorted, reduced, or even eliminated.

…

Any reciprocity is ruled out by design. This loss of reciprocity is a continuing form of technologically executed inequality. It has very profound political and psychological consequences.

I’d like to stress that reciprocity is not feedback. Feedback is a particular technique of systems adjustment. It is designed to improve a specific performance. The performance need not be mechanical or carried out by devices, but the purpose of feedback is to make the thing work. Feedback normally exists within a given design. It can improve the performance but it cannot alter its thrust or the design. Reciprocity, on the other hand, is situationally based. It’s a response to a given situation. It is neither designed into the system nor is it predictable. Reciprocal responses may indeed alter initial assumptions. They can lead to negotiations, to give and take, to adjustment, and they may result in new and unforeseen developments.

I emphasized earlier the extent to which the new technologies of image procurement have invaded the real world of technology. By design, these technologies have no room for reciprocity. There is no place for response.”

Franklin is writing in 1990, shortly before mass uptake of the internet. The same point—if made today—would require a caveat about how the internet enables interactivity. Indeed, simulated reciprocity is a major part of many internet business models. In Franklin’s terms, much of this pseudo-reciprocity would actually be “feedback.” Beyond pseudo-reciprocity from “the source” of communication to the user, there are endless attempts to create contexts—”communities”—where users can provoke fellow feeling in one another so that they form a warm association with the product or service.

Marshall McLuhan on the return to “acoustic space,” writing, civilization and “our electrically-configured world”

“Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.”

“Time” has ceased, “space” has vanished. We now live in a global village . . . a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.

…

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.”

This is one of Marshall McLuhan’s famous claims about media and social change. Electric technology has created a “global village” defined by “acoustic space.” Writing—a visual medium—supplanted the “primordial” acoustic world and was subsequently dispatched by electricity, a return to the ear.

McLuhan’s claim rings true in the context of podcasts, audio books, voice ordering/assistants, voice/text services, ASMR and all the other superficially visual media experiences like video calling, streaming, TikTok etc. that are ultimately more defined by audio. All the above consumed on smartphones in every manner of intimate environment, ensuring maximum “involvement.”

daily notes #5: R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant exceptionalism

If you aren’t an architecture person the only Toronto landmark that’s worth going out of your way to see is the R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant. Countless other pieces of internet writing will give you a précis of the institutions history. This one won’t because it’s the 2020’s and there’s no timeline, only an array of moments.

Downtown Toronto’s aesthetic chaos and speed aren’t given to… virtually anything. It’s best to embrace the void but R. C. Harris is far enough from the core that you’re completely abstracted from it as a treat. It’s separate and distinct even in its immediate context.

The plant’s interior is Toronto at its most first-half-of-the-20th-century. What’s your middling grab bag of aesthetic references? Anyways, it’s Art Deco. Everyone likes that. Time and place, it’ll put you there. A Canadian Gesamtkunstwerk? It was at least a possibility.

Can’t get inside? The overall site is still an experience. On entering the front gate a hairpin road guides down to the lake. Looked at from outside the buildings have an abattoir-vibe. In daylight any creepiness is undermined by the fun facades. At night you can lean into it.

No piece of Toronto public grass is manicured like the R. C. Harris lawn. A curving railing contours the divide where the groomed grass meets the sparkling water’s edge. Here, you can pretend you aren’t anywhere. A flat plane greets a flat plane and there’s nothing nearby.

There’s something very sensual about it. Music videos and fashion photography are shot at this exact spot for a reason. The R. C. Harris grounds are a make-out spot for east-end teenagers who, when kicked off, keep partying on the endless beach that starts just steps away.

Forget about the interior, it’s almost never open to the public anyway. Instead, aim to be at R. C. Harris for sunset on a summer night with a full moon. Have dinner on Queen St. first and then ease down to the water. As the sun sets start west along the sand.

daily notes #4: What does “the medium is the message” really mean? Here’s Marshall McLuhan in his own words

What does Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism “the medium is the message” actually mean? Let’s go straight to the source. Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter of Understanding Media:

“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. . . . Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology [e.g., the assembly line]. The essence of automation technology [e.g., computers] is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.”

Want a more explicit definition? Here’s one from a 1974 lecture. Speaking of Cadillacs…

“The motorcar as the supreme form of privacy has been threatened, in fact superseded, by television. Television brings the outside inside and takes the inside outside. It really pulls the rug out, or the highway out, from under the car. It deprives the car of its rationale and its meaning. If the car had not lost its real meaning in our lives there would be no oil crisis whatever. That is, nobody would even dream of allowing the oil crisis to occur . . . It is something that could not have happened if the car had not already been obsolesced. The car has lost its place in the heart of the people. That doesn’t mean it’s going to disappear overnight. Not at all. All it means is that the effect of the car are disappearing, and privacy and service environment are part of the effects. When I say “the medium is the message” I’m saying that the motorcar is not a medium, the medium is the highway, the factories and the oil companies, that is the medium. In other words, the medium of the car is the effects of the car. When you pull the effects away, the meaning of the car is gone. The car as an engineering object has nothing to do with these effects. The car is a figure in a ground of services. It’s when you change the ground that you change the car. The car does not operate as the medium but rather as one of the major effects of the medium. So “the medium is the message” is not a simple remark and I’ve always hesitated to explain it. It really means a hidden environment of services created by an innovation. And the hidden environment of services is the thing that changes people. It is the environment that changes people not the technology.“

A medium is “any extension of ourselves” but whatever given object or innovation -ie. the extension- is not the point, the message is what’s key. And the message is “a hidden environment of services created by an innovation.” In other words, since McLuhan’s central preoccupation is “effects on people,” the “hidden environment” -the message- is what concerns him because it is “the environment that changes people not the technology.”

Bonus: guidance from the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology

“Note that it is not the content or use of the innovation, but the change in inter-personal dynamics that the innovation brings with it. Thus, the message of theatrical production is not the musical or the play being produced, but perhaps the change in tourism that the production may encourage. In the case of a specific theatrical production, its message may be a change in attitude or action on the part of the audience that results from the medium of the play itself, which is quite distinct from the medium of theatrical production in general. Similarly, the message of a newscast are not the news stories themselves, but a change in the public attitude towards crime, or the creation of a climate of fear. A McLuhan message always tells us to look beyond the obvious and seek the non-obvious changes or effects that are enabled, enhanced, accelerated or extended by the new thing.”

Why don’t people believe in God anymore? Walter Lippmann on religiosity by political analogy and secularization

“These pictures of how the universe is governed change with men’s political experience. Thus it would not have been easy for an Asiatic people to imagine the divine government in any other way but as a despotism, and Yahveh, as he appears in many famous portraits in the Old Testament, is very evidently an Oriental monarch inclined to be somewhat moody and very vain. He governs as he chooses, constrained by no law, and often without mercy, justice, or righteousness. The God of mediaeval Christianity, on the other hand, is more like a great feudal lord, supreme and yet bound by covenants to treat his vassals on earth according to a well-established system of reciprocal rights and duties. The God of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century is a constitutional monarch who reigns but does not govern. And the God of Modernism, who is variously pictured as the elan vital within the evolutionary process, or as the sum total of the laws of nature, is really a kind of constitutionalism deified.

Provided that the picture is so consistent with experience that it is taken utterly for granted, it will serve as a background for the religious experience. But when daily experience for one reason or another provides no credible analogy by which men can imagine that the universe is governed by a supernatural king and father, then the disposition to believe, however strong it may be at the roots, is like a vine that reaches out and can find nothing solid upon which to grow. It cannot support itself. If faith is to flourish, there must be a conception of how the universe is governed to support it.

It is these supporting conceptions — the unconscious assumption that we are related to God as creatures to creator, as vassals to a king, as children to a father — that the acids of modernity have, eaten away. The modem man’s daily experience of modernity makes instinctively incredible to him these unconscious ideas which are at the core of the great traditional and popular religions. He does not wantonly reject belief, as so many churchmen assert. His predicament is much more serious. With the best will in the world, he finds himself not quite believing.

In the last four hundred years many influences have conspired to make incredible the idea that the universe is governed by a kingly person. An account of all of these influences would be a history of the growth of modern civilization. I am attempting nothing so comprehensive or so ambitious. I should like merely to note certain aspects of that revolutionary change which, as Lord Acton says, came “unheralded” and “founded a new order of things . . . sapping the ancient reign of continuity.” For that new order of things has made it impossible for us to believe, as plainly and literally as our forefathers did, that the universe is a monarchy administered on this planet through divinely commissioned, and, therefore, unimpeachably authoritative ministers.”

Bonus: Aristotle in The Politics

“That is why men say that the Gods have a king, because they themselves either are or were in ancient times under the rule of a king. For they imagine not only the forms of the Gods but their ways of life to be like their own.”