Transcendent Systems: The Road to Auschwitz              

In some respects the relation between systems of knowledge and the power they generate or dictate is paradoxical. But even when this relation is not paradoxical, it is complex and problematic.  Unraveling some of the paradoxes and problems of the relations between knowledge and power and how these problems and paradoxes have helped generate terrible atrocities is what this book is about,  These paradoxes and problems are most easily explored through history.  Ideas are historical phenomena, despite the pretensions of philosophers, mystics and scientists to view ideas as disembodied entities. To understand our world means to understand what men and women have thought of it, and to understand what they have thought of it means to understand what they have done it in. Thought and action are not separate things. But, this does not mean that historians are necessarily the best judges of history. Sometimes poets have insights into history that historians overlook. Sometimes not.

            The poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes in one of his Duino Elegies that the "minds of murderers are easily fathomed. This though: death, the whole of death, before life's start, to hold it so gently and so free from all resentment, transcends description".[1]  What Rilke is describing here is a state of mind that transcends birth, life and death. It is a rare and rather aristocratic luxury, this imagining one has transcended  life, death and suffering.  It is this impulse that is probably at the root of the religions. But what Rilke has overlooked, just as the religions overlook it, is that the transcendent perspective, the "truth" that defies "description" is itself probably the primary cause of most of the atrocities in the last 500-800 years. The minds of murderers are no more easily fathomed than "god", "history", "science" or any of the other sublime abstractions that act as an engine for historical events. Indeed, Rilke appears to be tragically mistaken. [2]The minds of murderers are not easily divined or fathomed, because the "divine" itself, in history, has been the worst of all murderers.  History and science have also acted as agents of atrocity.

            Strictly speaking, the divine, like history or science, is merely a transcendental fiction, and thus murdered no one.  But this is true only if one accepts the mythological framework of religions or abstractions.  The concept of divinity is an organizing theory of knowledge and legitimacy, and this, in the hands of men who know how to use such systems for power, is the source of the world's  worst atrocities in the last 500 years, and probably before this. Rilke is dreaming: resentment for these atrocities, which continue in the present, cannot be escaped so easily. Resentment disappears when the offending injustice is faced squarely and honestly and the causes of the injustice and the suffering are removed. Rilke is kidding himself: his sublime intuition of the transcendent and ineffable is itself part of the problem of knowledge/power and how large scale atrocities are produced.

             David Stannard is much more accurate than Rilke. He writes that the way to Auschwitz, led not only through Christendom but "strait through the heart of the Indies and through North and South America". [3] But I would add that the road to Auschwitz led also through the high ideals of those who imitated  the mind of Christ, Plato, Newton,  Descartes, the Bhagavad Gita and other symbolic and scientific systems of knowledge that justified socializing and iniquitous powers.

            Systems of knowledge/power operate by sanctioning benefits to some, in accord with what is considered legitimate and useful knowledge, while depriving others and exacting punishments against those who fail to meet the standards. Ideas generate and justify power, power sanctions and deprives or punishes. Those who conform to the hierarchies of the knowledge system receive its benefits and become the victimizers of those who do not conform.  One cannot speak of the victims of atrocity without questioning the victimizers. Atrocities occur because someone benefits from them. The complex interplay of victim and victimizer revolves around beliefs, symbols or systems of knowledge which pretend to a neutral, middle or in-between status. To question the unjust benefits and punishments that accompany a system of knowledge thus means to question the system of knowledge itself.

              To question the atrocities that Western culture has produced in the last 500 years thus means to look at those who have prospered.  One seeks the cause of the vast numbers killed not only in the history of those murdered but in the history of the exalted, the famous, the rich and the culture-heroes of the West. Those who have produced the atrocities since Columbus are brought into question by those they killed, deprived and dispossessed but, at the same time, justice for the victims of the atrocities is to be found in bringing the dearest, most glorious, profound, happiest and exalted systems of Europe and America into question. The systems of knowledge, the great geniuses and political figures, the great ideas, which justified and legitimized Columbus, the Conquest, the American Holocaust, imperial colonization and Nagasaki become questionable. As the questions concerning knowledge systems deepen, opportunities arise for redressing the causes of injustice, provided that another form of the will to power through knowledge is not allowed to supersede the one that has already been deconstructed.

             The most dangerous murderers are rarely considered such, much less is the relation between ideas and atrocity "easily divined" or even noticed, despite Rilke' imaginings.. Many American Presidents were murderers, yet libraries are erected for them, which record almost their every word, and they are almost worshipped as Kings or religious icons, in some cases. George Washington and Tom Jefferson advocated the genocide of Native Americans, as well as enacted policy that furthered the atrocities, yet they are revered as "founding" saints of the United States. The "Founding Mothers and Fathers",  in Mary Beth Norton's phrase, contributed to genocide, and this fact must be faced.  The foundations of US hegemony are severely flawed, and ignoring this perpetuates the harms that continue to be done. The involvement of capitalist organizations, companies and corporations have likewise been deeply involved in killing people, both in the US. but especially in other nations, But this is rarely discussed, and even more rarely are they brought to account. Nor is the involvement of mytho-historical figures in atrocity much discussed, such as Christ or Descartes, Newton and the other founding Icons and saints of modern science, history and politics.

             Himmler, everyone agrees, was a murderer. But little has been written about why he did what he did, and even less about how the mentalities that inspired his actions relate to similar mentalities and their relation to atrocities as far back as Columbus, or as recent as George Bush and the Iraqi war.  Ideas and beliefs help create, sustain and cover up acts of atrocity. How this occurs is not "easily fathomed". But I will be attempting to understand how this happens here in hopes of criticizing the mind set that allows it. Perhaps the killing could stop if we understood better how it occurs and how transcendent systems of knowledge aid in creating atrocities.

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