The Enlightenment, "Moral Relativism" and the Holocaust?

Note: I dashed most of this off as soon as I heard Penny Nance's absurd declaration that the Holocaust was a product of the Enlightenment and submitted it to the local paper, where I was on a winning streak.  They declined to print (which I thought a distinct possibility) at least in part because "the peg was obscure."  It's not the first time, they have rejected me, but it was the first time they gave me a reason, so that's good.  

As a sort of counter-programming move to the National Day of Prayer, humanists and atheists called on May 2  for a National Day of Reason, to celebrate freethinkers and call attention to what Roy Speckhardt of the American Humanist Association has called "assaults on the wall separating church and state."  As part of these celebrations, Charlotte mayor Anthony Foxx issued a proclamation celebrating the day, a move that prompted Fox News commentator Penny Nance to  declare, among other things, that reason, a product of the Enlightenment, was the source of the "moral relativism" that ultimately "led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust."

Leaving aside for the moment questions of whether reason and faith must be at odds, we need to explore this rather extraordinary claim in the light of history.  It is, needless to say, completely wrong.

I have been trying to reconstruct the train of thought that connects the Enlightenment, the time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the tools of reason, already opening new vistas in science, were being applied to social and religious questions, to the mass murder of six million Jews and a like number of various other "undesirables."  It is difficult to trace.  One sees references to a rise of "secular anti-Semitism" linked to the rise of reason, supposedly separating anti-Jewish racism from its religious underpinnings.  One can imagine a line from the Enlightenment, through Charles Darwin, Social Darwinism and culminating in genocide.  

Nance seems to find problematic the application of reason to religion which, she claims, stripped morality of its basis, allowing for moral relativism.  Yes, the application of reason to religion led many to abandon traditional religion in favor of deism or atheism.   On the other hand, it led others  to a stronger embrace of faith in the so-called Great Awakening, in which some religious thinkers rejected Enlightenment thinkers, while others used it to strengthen their faith.  The Enlightenment is, in a way, the origin not only of modern science, but of modern Christianity.

Darwin is certainly a grandchild of the Enlightenment, who is famous for his theory that all life on Earth as evolved through natural selection.  I suggest Darwin as her starting point because the eugenics programs of the twentieth century, of which the Holocaust was a type, result from so-called "Social Darwinism," the misapplication of Darwinian theory to "better" society.  If this were actually the root of the matter, we might stop here.

But we can't, because while Social Darwinism might have provided a theoretical justification for eliminating "undesirables," it took the ideology of Naziism to provide a moral justification.  Far from representing moral relativism, Naziism was the application of a rigid morality to the control of society.  This is notably expressed in the Nazi encouragement of traditional marriage and exhortation to produce babies for the Reich, as well as in the suppression of the vibrant—and sexually charged—Weimar culture that preceded it.  

Were we to examine the sources of this morality, we would not find them in the Enlightenment, but in the Romantic movement that arose in response to the Enlightenment, and which embraced what were perceived as older values, which valued community over the individual, emotion over intellect , and faith over reason.  This movement reached a fever pitch following the failure of what was seen as the ultimate Enlightenment project, the French Revolution.  Romantic values were associated by many with the middle ages.  It is no accident that when the Palace of Westminster, home to the British Parliament, burned in 1834, it was rebuilt in a neo-medieval style.  It is no accident that the legends of Arthur and Robin Hood were revived, nor that the aesthetic of Dante Gabriel Rosetti and the pre-Raphelites in England reflected medieval themes.  In France, Romantics looked back to the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before the conclusion of the Wars of Religion.  

Germany also proved fertile ground for the Romantic movement.  Romantic ideals permeated Germany during the period of its unification under Kaiser Wilhelm in 1871 and church-state relations, which were more and more estranged in England and France, became cozier, despite the speed-bump of Otto von Bismarck's attempted disestablishment of Catholicism in Prussia, the so-called Kulturkampf.  Medieval themes are evident in Wagner operas.  In literature, German romanticism was characterized by the embrace of German folk tales, themselves set in the pre-modern past.  German romanticism is also evident in the foundations of history as a scholarly field.  "Western civilization" itself was constructed in part to link Germans to their noble, pre-Roman forbears, before the corruption of the German Volk by the ways of Romans.  It would eventually be extended further, to connect them to the civilizations that were  being uncovered in Iraq.  This period, it should be noted, is the period Hitler would later identify as the Second Reich, showing he was not drawing on Enlightenment traditions.  The First Reich  was the Holy Roman Empire, founded in the tenth century in the German heartland.   

The Romantic period not only revived the forms of the middle ages, but also borrowed and built upon the anti-Semitic fantasies, such as the accusation of ritual murder and Host desecration, that began circulating in the twelfth century.  The idea of Jews as a group apart, secretly plotting, had festered for centuries.  Using the nascent mass media, this revived anti-Semitism saw expression in the circulation of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Sion and in the treason accusation against the French officer Alfred Dreyfuss in the 1890s.  If you want to look for markers on the road to the Holocaust, these are good ones.  Hitler imbibed the anti-Semitic thought that lurked in the background and channeled it by radio, motion pictures, and mass rallies.

Hitler, then, while he embraced industrialization and eugenic notions of Social Darwinism, was no child of the Enlightenment.  The ideology that drove him was a romantic ideology, born in the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment and laced with medieval anti-Semitic fantasies.  Its image is not the clockwork universe of the deist or the scientist at his bench, but the knight in armor that featured in so many Nazi propaganda posters, defending "timeless" moral truths against the encroachments of modernity.