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...but the people who led and cultivated the critical thinking of 1900-1914 were also the people who thought throwing the flower of your civilization into flowering shrapnel on the French frontier was a better national policy than not.
And most of the generation raised to be critical thinkers in the 1900-1914 range- which is to say, the generation born in 1890s and before- went along with it, and shamed, ridiculed, or forced others to do so as well. Theirs was a critical thinking shaped by / built upon nationalism, propaganda, imperialist delusions, and various pseudo-sciences racial and otherwise.
And then the people born or with their own formative years between 1900-1914 went on to do it again.
WW1 was a madness born from the civilization it ended, not an external imposition. WW2 was an extension of that turn-of-the-century generation. Any exceptional critical thinkers were despite, not because, of the nature of that era.
I would argue that WWI killed the enlightenment, and then WWII and the Cold War were struggles over what ideology should replace it.
On the one hand you had Fascism (“screw the enlightenment, let’s go back to premodern barbarism with industrial Revolution characteristics”) and Communism (“We need to just keep pushing the enlightenment as far as it will go. Real enlightenment has never been tried!”). Between 1940 and 1991, both of those proposed successor ideologies failed. It turned out that premodern tribal society with modern technology could get very bloody very fast. And after fifty years of experimentation, it turned out that, counterintuitively, so could enlightenment times ten.
So what that leaves us with is the Bretton Woods ostrich consensus, “let’s uhh... just pretend that whole WWI business never happened and keep muddling on as we were”, where WWII is severed from its connection to war that came before it, and is retroactively portrayed as the enlightenment’s ultimate triumph over the darkness. And as not the obvious result of the enlightenment’s catastrophic failure and collapse. I think it’s no accident that this ostrich consensus came primarily from the United States, the country least affected by either of the two wars.
To piggyback on what @FCfromSSC said, your view is interesting, if only it weren't ahistorical. The reason Communism gained purchase on the left in the postwar years wasn't because it was enlightenment times ten, but because it was seen as an alternative to the enlightenment liberalism that ultimately led to fascism. Logic, efficiency, sceintific progress, and economic development didn't change our basic nature, it just meant that we could commit atrocities at an industrial scale while keeping detailed records of how much gold was extracted from the deceased Jews' teeth. Fascism wasn't a rejection of the enlightenment but the ultimate culmination of it. The Germans may have got there first, but this was the inevitable result unless the power structures were radically changed.
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Fascists observably loved progress, mechanization, modernization and "rational" materialism. Their behavior was not generally recognized as pre-modern barbarism in advance, and its barbarity was not notably distinct in character from that of the Communists. Likewise, the communists were obsessed with both the industrial revolution and what is very easy to describe as "premodern barbarism"; arguably by the 30s, Fascism was pretty clearly the more "civilized" of the two in observable outcomes.
I don’t mean pre-modern barbarism in the sense of living in a mud hut banging together stone axes, or in the sense that “they did a lot of bad things, therefore barbarism”. But a lot of naziism does seem like a conscious attempt to try and return to premodern modes of thinking, where the chief’s or king’s obligation is to Protect the Tribe and there are very loose rules of conduct of what you can do to the out group. Now obviously, both Communists and enlightenment era monarchies did a lot of sketchy things too, but there were a lot more mental gymnastics involved in getting there.
If you were pointing to the fascists' claim of the trappings (and it really does seem to me to be the trappings, not the substance) of national history and tradition, I could understand the reference to "premodern modes of thinking". But you tie it directly to centralized power and authority to "protect the tribe", and "very loose rules of conduct for what you can do to the outgroup", and both of these describe the Communists (and the ur-Enlightened French Revolution) perfectly.
I'm not sure what to make of the claim that the Communists or the French Revolution used "a lot more mental gymnastics" to get to the core idea of "we are right, hurt people who seem to be getting in our way". The concept of a Revolutionary Conscience does not seem particularly complicated to me. To the extent that Communist theory is more elaborate than Fascist theory, a claim I'm skeptical of, I don't see why that should matter unless the theory were actually load-bearing in some meaningful way, and my assessment of the historical record is that it wasn't. Marx very clearly preached mass-slaughter of the outgroup, and mass-slaughter of the outgroup was the explicit plan of Lenin and his associates going into the revolution.
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This is consistent with Enlightenment-derived movements and thinking, however. While this begs (as always) what the nature of the enlightenment was, it's generally accepted that both the slave-holding American and the Europe-conquering French revolutions were expressions of it, and the idea of a national / social contract model which ties the ruler to the people, and vice versa, was absolutely a part of both. So was the relative partition of 'us' versus 'them' that led to looser rules of conducts to the out groups including, well, slavery and conquest. You even had the shared rationalizations of tearing down an unjust surrounding political order to all the people (tribes, if you will) express themselves. Naturally we remember this as good because they won and we liked them winning, but the French revolution wasn't exactly shy about exporting the revolution.
For all that the nazis were warmongers who wanted to conquer and colonize others, that too was consistent with the enlightenment civilizations. The status quo powers had just already conquered and colonized enough of the world between them that they didn't want to continue- but they were enlightenment-derived nations when they did so. That is the primary 'pre-modern' thinking- modernity was the status quo, not that post-enlightenment states didn't conquer or do terrible things.
There is always a tension in the enlightenment between it's generally positive connotation and the bad-to-terrible things that Enlightenment-states did. But the French Revolution has about as much a claim as anyone else attempts to separate the french revolution and Napoleon from it runs into typical problems of trying to define away the morally bad stuff, which returns it to the moral connotation argument. The Nazis aren't non-enlightenment just because they did bad things, unless bad things are incompatible with Enlightenment influence.
Which seems pretty unlikely, unless you start moving back the enlightenment a few hundred years to after the Nazis and European de-imperialization.
Using the word "modern" in any such discussion without exactly specifying what it is supposed to mean is usually a massive source of confusion. The comment you are replying to seems to use it with the meaning of post-1945-liberalism, and with such a comparison of course historical fascism is not "modern". post-1945-liberalism was pretty explicitly theorized to be a complete refutal of historical fascism.
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