As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each Other.
—Marcel Duchamp1
It is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.
—Michel Foucault2
The new century began like no other. A series of dramatic intellectual movements, radical art “isms,” brilliant scientific discoveries, electrified inventions, and disruptive social trends—rolled like dislodged pebbles down the mountainside of Western civilization. Together, they triggered an avalanche that altered human existence. At first, these developments seemed unrelated to women’s status, images, nature, and the Goddess, but subliminally they favorably inclined Westerners toward all four.
In 1900, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. Descending deeper into the dark unexplored interior of the human psyche than anyone before him, he shined a flashlight into its subterranean caverns. There he saw and identified the poltergeist that had so often gummed up “the best laid plans of mice and men.” The treacly enemy was us. Freud explained that human conduct was in part beholden to what he called the Id, a primal agent that rattled about in the right hemisphere, making things go bump in the night. No matter how diligently the left brain applies itself to solving scientific puzzles, Freud implied, it is never completely independent. The Id, operating in the Unconscious, has a way of jerking on the reins of Will when Reason least expects it. Men who were proud of their cool rationality had to confront the reality that they were not as far removed from their primate ancestors as they had so smugly thought. Further, Freud emphasized that aspects of the Unconscious—what could be called irrationality, intuition, or the sixth sense—have a wisdom that could exceed the calculus of reason. Poets, mystics, and women acknowledged this power for centuries, but the scientific community gave the notion little credence. Freud’s work elevated the importance of myth, trance, and dream.
Also in 1900, physicist Max Planck stumbled upon a strange feature of the atomic world that greatly upset Newton’s schema. Instead of the seamless linearity so long imagined to be at the heart of sequence, Planck discovered a ragged discontinuity. This minute jerkiness began to uncouple cause-effect, the concept supporting so many cherished Western notions including linear sequence, the core principle of alphabets. Average people needed little prompting to integrate Planck’s weird quantum dictum concerning discontinuity. They were flocking to see flickering images of film, the burgeoning new communication medium.
Spontaneity, randomness, and the unexpected erupted in the new century like the guffaw following the punch line of a joke. All three attributes found their exemplar in the single most famous personage of the era—Charlie Chaplin. In previous ages, a person so renowned would most likely have been a conqueror, a king, or perhaps a philosopher or religious figure. Individuals achieving such fame have generally embodied left-brain values.
Chaplin, in contrast, was the showman of the incongruous, genius of the jerky gesture, and master of the bellylaugh. A clown who poked fun at the serious endeavors of the left brain, he did so without using a single word. With pantomime, facial expressions, and a signature waddle, Chaplin showcased the communicative power of the right hemisphere. In the company of history’s other luminaries—for example, Pericles, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Gregory the Great, Martin Luther, and Napoleon—Chaplin sticks out like a sore thumb. Before Chaplin, had a jester ever even been included in any encyclopedia or history text? The tenor of any age is epitomized by its most celebrated resident. The prominence of Chaplin’s persona signified the rapid erosion of the left brain’s stature.
Just before Chaplin began lampooning the Mechanical Age in films such as City Lights, a major discovery in physics further challenged the supremacy of sequence in science. In 1905, Albert Einstein, an obscure twenty-six-year-old patent official in Bern, published his Special Theory of Relativity. The young genius posited that at very fast speeds reality did not obey Newton’s laws.
Sequence is a vital component of speech, and it is the very crux of alphabetic written languages. A theory that struck at the heart of this principle could not help but punch another hole in the taut fabric that supports all written alphabets.
There were other harbingers of the written word’s decline. Beginning in 1907, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began to insert pieces of words into their paintings. These alphabetic bits and tailings served as decorative icons integrated into the larger pattern of their compositions. The only other time the alphabet had assumed a similar function was in the Dark Ages when monks, illuminating manuscripts, converted letters into works of art more to be admired as patterns than to be used as tools of thought.
Since Giovanni Boccaccio invented the novel in the fourteenth century, writers based their works on the fundamental principle of linear sequential narrative. No matter how complex its plot, each story had a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the twentieth century, writers broke free of this convention. Novelist Virginia Woolf invited readers to view the events in her protagonists’ lives as tiles in a mosaic rather than as beads on a line. James Joyce in Finnegans Wake used the physical configuration of letters as iconic forms. Aware of the influence on culture of a phonetic alphabet, he warned readers that they were in danger of becoming “abcdminded.” He scrambled spelling in ingenious ways, giving words multiple, simultaneous meanings so that his alphabet resembled Chinese ideograms. Puns, double entendres, and palindromes are word games best appreciated by the right hemisphere. Joyce’s Wake was a prescient wake for the anticipated demise of left-brain hegemony. William Faulkner, e. e. cummings, and other writers continued to loosen the knots binding causality.
As the century edged into its third decade, a new branch of physics called quantum mechanics came into its own. Quantum turned science and common sense upside down by introducing into its equations the mathematics of chance. Niels Bohr, a quantum mechanics pioneer, put forth the heretical idea that the mental decisions of an investigator influenced the outcome of the experiments the investigator performed and thus the observer, to some extent, created the reality the observer observed. Classical Newtonians knit their brows. If Bohr was correct (he was), science would have to admit its nemesis—subjectivity—into its calculations. The strict separation between object and observer, a cherished tenet of science, was, under certain circumstances, abrogated.
. . .
Bohr’s work led him to the conclusion that everything in the universe is mysteriously interconnected—no event happens anywhere that does not affect events everywhere else. This insight was not a revelation to the right brain’s aesthetic sensibilities. Landscape painters understand that if they change even one small feature in the background, they will likely have to make adjustments throughout the composition. The concept of an invisible “web” (already favored as an image because of the earlier discovery of electromagnetism) became the operating metaphor for reality, and supplanted the Majestic Clockwork that had been Descartes’ and Newton’s model. The perceptual changes wrought by the two new fields of physics (relativity and quantum) enhanced the idea of gender equality as feminine metaphors supplanted masculine ones.
Bohr challenged another scientific shibboleth in 1927 by proposing that opposites were not necessarily either/or, as all earlier Western dualistic thinkers had assumed, but rather might be both/and. He said that the opposite of a shallow truth is a falsehood, but that the opposite of a profound truth was another profound truth. In his Theory of Complementarity, Bohr posited that opposites were two different aspects of a higher unity existing just beyond our limited perceptual apparatus. When the Danish king knighted him for his pioneering work, Bohr chose the Chinese yin/yang icon of the Tao for his heraldic coat of arms. Aware that his discovery had implications beyond the specialized world of quantum physics, Bohr chose to publish his Complementarity Theory in a philosophy journal, and it did not contain a single equation.
Psychiatrist Carl Jung’s work reflected Bohr’s description of the subatomic realm. In his Theory of Synchronicity concerning human interactions, Jung proposed that the ligatures of causality were not the only means of suturing life’s events together. Some inexplicable happenings in our lives are connected in another dimension by meaning. Uncanny coincidences too rich to be explained by mere statistical chance, key decisions correctly made with insufficient information, and paranormal phenomena happen, Jung said, for reasons beyond our ken. Jung translated Bohr’s hypothesis concerning physics into the biological realm, proposing that all living things are interconnected in a web that cannot be scientifically quantified.
Jung was the first man of science to propose that we are all born with an extensive foreknowledge of the world. Previously, Western rationalists had accepted with few caveats Locke’s” concept of a newborn’s brain as a tabula rasa, a clean slate upon which culture could write. Jung disagreed. He named his ancient knowing the “Collective Unconscious” and envisioned it as an inherited extra-corporeal net holding bits of experience filtered down through the consciousness of our forebears, both human and non-human. Like Freud’s hypothetical Id, the Collective Unconscious presupposed that human awareness was thoroughly grounded in its animal nature. To support his idea, Jung cited the fact that widely separated and isolated peoples invent the same myths, just as individuals in disparate cultures assign the same meanings to certain dream symbols. To account for this, he proposed the existence of universal archetypes to which peoples of all cultures, past and present, respond. Archetypes are buried deep in the strata of our minds and appear most often in the form of images; their close association with myths, dreams, and emotions localizes them to the right of the corpus callosum. Poets, playwrights, and religious figures have long intuitively understood the immense power of these mysterious, half-conscious, half-spectral icons.
Jung, Freud, Joyce, Planck, Einstein, Picasso, Chaplin, and many others shifted the intellectual climate of the West. Each in his own way added heft to the appreciation of the faculties of the right hemisphere.
There were so many alogical features of the new world of quantum that the two most common words scientists blurted out in half-wonder and half-exasperation to describe them were “weird” and “absurd.” Weirdness and absurdity also came to characterize art. “Make the world strange,” the poet Ezra Pound urged other artists.3 Dadaism, arising coincident with the mud-and-blood danse macabre of World War I, championed nonsensical art. One of its leaders, the poet Tristan Tzara, cut the daily newspaper into scraps of partial sentences. He dropped the pieces into a bag, shook it, dumped the contents on a tabletop, and declared that the arrangements into which the scraps fell were “Dada poems.” Dada artists passed long evenings together at the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich, laughing at each other’s crazy performances. Simultaneously in 1916, a few blocks distant, Albert Einstein was putting the finishing touches on his second great scientific contribution: the General Theory of Relativity. In this work, Einstein laid before us a vision of reality that was queerer than we could imagine.
Surrealism, the child of the Dada movement, explored the unconscious and jarred the viewer with such juxtapositions as fur-lined teacups and locomotives that floated in midair. Sur-real means “over-reality,” and the surrealist vision further validated the dreamscape of the right hemisphere at the expense of the correct-perspectivist left one.
A new breed of philosophers and logicians zeroing in on the cause of the confusion in the culture agreed that it lay in language: the very words we use to communicate with each other, they proposed, constrain our imaginations. For centuries, language itself was an all-but-invisible hand that structured thought. In the late nineteenth century, C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure founded the field of semiotics, the study of the nature of language. Building on their work, the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called language a “cage.” After years of exploring the intricacies of syntax and grammar, he reached the startling conclusion that language was so limited that it was inadequate for conveying the nature of reality, observing, “What can be shown cannot be said.”4 Resembling the stance taken by quantum physicists and the dadaists, Wittgenstein, too, challenged the linear thinking necessary for logic and writing. Wittgenstein retired from philosophy at the height of his career and became a hospital orderly. Later, Edward Sapir and Benjamin. Lee Whorf proposed that the form of the language we learn as children shapes our ability to imagine the world.
Under the combined weight of all the aforementioned movements, the left-brained substrate of Western philosophy and sensibility cracked. Westerners in the new century confronted mounting evidence, evident in every discipline, that something was fundamentally wrong with the dominant paradigm that had ruled for so long.
The many advances flooding the twentieth century should have made it a shining century. But they were overwhelmed by two world wars, a severe economic depression, a protracted Cold War, and the outbreak of ethnic conflicts that have left historians at a loss to explain how a society, with so much promise, could have descended into such dark times. Few have interpreted these chilling realities within the context of the era’s inundation by new media of communication.
In the five hundred years following Gutenberg, nationalism became the scourge that excoriated Western culture. Before nationalism, mercenaries on the payroll of one Renaissance Italian city-state fought their counterparts on another’s, and the prince of one German principality warred with the prince of another German principality. Soldiers belonged to a professional class whose principal aspirations were to get paid and to not get killed. Few mercenaries died in battle and, by common consent, most skirmishes broke off at five o’clock, in time for a beer and dinner. After the appearance of the printing press, Europeans saw themselves belonging to larger entities made up of all the people who spoke and wrote as they did. Loyalty to one’s “nation” suddenly became a noble cause for which to die. French-speaking people became Frenchmen—Vive la France! German-speaking people became Germans—Deutschland üuber Alles! And so on.
The wars fought because of jingoistic fervor are too numerous to list; most schoolchildren have groaned over having to memorize the ever-shifting national alliances of European history. The nationalistic war that was supposed to end all wars, World War I, was wholly a product of print-saturated cultures. Outside Europe and America, the mental constructions necessary to imagine nationhood did not exist. Tribesmen in Africa, though dressed in the military garb of their colonialist oppressors, rarely grasped why it was honorable to die for someone else’s king and country.
Alphabet letters, like soldiers ceaselessly marching off the presses, made Europeans and Americans peculiarly vulnerable to chauvinism. People of all the alphabet nations read avidly the “Great Novels” that issued from their best authors, the theme (content) of which emphasized the universality of the human experience. Yet at the same time, the process of book reading reinforced readers’ delusions that their fellows just across the river, who claimed a different nationality, were a subhuman or despicable species.
When all the wars fought for flag and country were over, France remained essentially the France of the past thousand years, Germany encompassed an area where most German-speaking people lived as they had for a thousand years, Italians still inhabited the peninsula that was their ancient home, and Englishmen still cultivated the “sceptered isle” their ancestors had tilled for a millennium. All the previous centuries’ hoarse-throated charges, clanging saber swipes, and fields of young men screaming for help in many languages had accomplished little.
Hardly noticed during all the shouting and mayhem, the right brain was at work quietly behind the scenes. In America, women received the right to vote in 1920, in England, 1936. In most of Europe and America, the fanaticism that had characterized patriarchal religions was imperceptibly fading. Protestantism softened, became more egalitarian, and even inspired mystics, beginning with Sören Kierkegaard (1813–55). Protestant women wore lipstick without fear of retribution. Large numbers of Jews abandoned Orthodoxy and turned to the Reform Movement, while many Catholics, in defiance of the reigning dogma, practiced birth control in the dark.
As we have seen, the written word, introduced into a previously illiterate population, initially drives it mad. A prime example is what happened after the appearance of the Communist Manifesto, Western culture’s fourth “sacred” alphabetic book (after the Old Testament, New Testament, and Quran.) I use the word “sacred” because the Communist Manifesto precipitated yet another “religious” revolution. Karl Marx’s imageless tome called for the repudiation of the existing God so that another—history—could be raised in His place. Marx saw history as an unseen force that determines the lives of humans, yet history, quintessentially masculine and emanating from the left brain, is nothing more than the linear, sequential ordering of male events. In his hermetically sealed system of thought, Marx’s “Force of History” replaced Yahweh’s wrath, Zeus’s thunderbolts, and Christ’s mercy. According to his new gospel, man is first and foremost an economic animal. After Newton’s impersonal “scientific determinism,” Marx’s concepts were not difficult for nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals to assimilate. Although he addressed the concerns of the male economic animal and wrote extensively about society’s natural division of labor, Marx failed to give credit to the role or contribution of women in his analysis of history.
With the self-assurance of a zealot, Marx predicted that his quasi-religious revolution would occur first in the most advanced industrial states. Voluble ideologues, gathering in coffeehouses, argued interminably about whether the first rotten fruit to fall would be France, America, England, or Germany. Much to the Marxists’ surprise, their guru’s turgid theories found their only Western success in Russia, the most backward of all the major Western nations.
The reason for this unexpected development, I believe, lies in Russia’s extremely delayed acquisition of literacy. By the time most of Europe and America had recovered from the madness stirred up by the press, Russia was still an essentially oral society. Prior to the nineteenth century, Russia had yet to produce a national literature. In the year 1800, there were only two bookstores in all of Moscow, and there were more universities in England, France, and Germany than there were university students in all of Russia.6 Despite the fact that Gutenberg’s revolution took place on Russia’s very doorstep, its citizens participated minimally in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment. They contributed little to scientific and global explorations, artistic innovation, or humanistic philosophy. But they were spared the orgy of religious wars, doctrinal persecutions, and witch hunts that rent the fabric of Continental society during the early phase of European print acquisition.
When the Russians finally embraced the printing press in the nineteenth century, a great awakening occurred: schools and universities burgeoned and the education of the masses began in earnest. Russian scientists began making world-class discoveries, and by the second half of the nineteenth century, a borealis glow illuminated the Russian literary scene. Besides the awesome international twin talents of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhov, Turgenev, and many others, were all churning out one masterpiece after another as if to make up for lost time. Russian literacy rates skyrocketed, as reading and writing became a matter of national pride.
It was in this same period that the Russian national character began to undergo a change. Historically, Russians had been tolerant of others’ religions. Prior to the nineteenth century, there had never been a purely religious war fought on Russian soil. (Those that involved religion were more about territorial conquest than ideology.) Almost no Russians participated in the Crusades, and Russia’s mass conversion to Christianity in the tenth century was notable for its tranquility. The high number of blond, blue-eyed Ashkenazi Jews attests to wholesale Slavic conversions to Judaism somewhere between the fifth and the ninth centuries. (These physiognomic features were conspicuously absent in the Semitic Jews who left Judea in the second century.) In fact, nineteenth-century Russia possessed the single largest Jewish population in the world. The benign Slavic attitude toward religious diversity had been one of the primary reasons millions of European Jews had fled to Russia in the first place.
In the nineteenth century, a murderous anti-Semitism began to boil the Russians’ blood, a development that has never been adequately explained. Russian Jews were industrious and law-abiding. They wielded little power, owned very little land, and threatened none of the major social structures. The Russian Orthodox Christian hierarchy was not in any danger from them; a minuscule number of Russians had converted in the preceding five centuries, and the aristocracy lost no sleep worrying over a possible Jewish takeover. But, paralleling the paranoia that occurred in Spain in 1492, the rapid spread of literacy in Russia was accompanied by large numbers of people turning viciously on a minority who happened to practice a religion different from their own.* The 1880s saw the Jewish communities in Russia savaged by pogroms that left many dead.
The pogroms of the nineteenth century were but a prodrome to a more malignant delirium that seized Russia in the twentieth. In 1917, the West’s fifth “protestant reformation” violently overthrew the Russian aristocracy and Church. This Russian “religious transformation,” coming so late after the European Reformation, was not easily recognized for what it was because it went under the alias of “Communism.” Its Bible was the Communist Manifesto. As it unfolded, the now-familiar litany of left-hemispheric assaults against right-sided values began. The worship of Sophia (Mary’s name in Russia) was execrated. Images came under assault. The Eastern Orthodox brand of Christianity practiced by Russians invested painted ikons with spiritual power. Communists relentlessly targeted them for destruction. Their hatred of images soon extended to include all twentieth-century Western art. The images Communists denounced as “decadent” were similar to the ones the Hebrews had called “abominations,” the fourth-century Orthodox Christians had repudiated as “pagan,” and the Protestants had railed against as “idolatry.” Communist thugs destroyed paintings and statues, and many artists were murdered or packed off to the gulag. Repeating the pattern of the earlier protestant movements, the Communists purged art, color, gaiety, and laughter from society. Clothing became drab, buildings gray, and smiles disappeared as people pored over their new black-and-white text. Dogma replaced rational discussions. Communists murdered Kulaks, who were productive agrarians, by the millions for an abstract principle called “collectivism.” Zealots protecting the purity of the new dogma condemned doctors, scientists, and humanists as “heretics” in public trials that aped the rituals, torture sessions, and “confessions” of earlier religious persecutions. A shot to the temple at 3:00 A.M. in the KGB’s Lubjianka prison replaced the burning stake in the public square.
Communism severely oppressed women. Extreme patriarchy was the rule. But it was Mother Nature that suffered the most grievous wounds at the hands of the Communists, who irretrievably despoiled much of Russia’s pristine landscape. Lichen in the tundra, fish in Lake Baikal, and children around Chernobyl were condemned to death as a result of this anti-feminine assault in the name of “industrialization.”
Most alphabet-based religions demonized the ones they supplanted. During the rise of patriarchy in Europe, the Goddess was turned into the anti-Christ (in the form of the devil). In the twentieth century, Communists blamed Christianity for Russia’s ills. Russian Orthodox Christianity had depended on rich spectacle and mystic ritual, but the new “protestants,” like those in the earlier Reformation, announced that since the citizens could read the new sacred book for themselves, they no longer needed Church patriarchs or rituals. Clutching dog-eared copies of the Manifesto, Communists tore down the structure of organized religion, which Marx called “the opiate of the people.” Converted churches became political assembly halls. Priests were imprisoned and worship of the Trinity was forbidden.
An economic theory presented in written form by a dead white male became, essentially, a religion. Those who embraced it were as zombie-like in their unquestioning obedience to its tenets as any fanatical religious convert. Because “history” was not a proper god per se, adherents and foes alike called Communism an “ideology,” but its passionate proselytizers differed little from religious zealots. The Communists instituted a reign of terror whose scope and ferocity could match any that harrowed sixteenth-century Europe. Perhaps if Russia had become literate at the same time as the rest of Europe, the twentieth century would have been spared the dark passage called the Cold War.
While the oral Russians were deeply agitated by the first stages of literacy, another “communication” phenomenon was discombobulating the highly literate Germans. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germany boasted one of best educational systems in the world. Its scrub-faced students, sitting alert in neat rows, were a teacher’s dream. American doctors, English scientists, and French industrialists made regular pilgrimages to Germany to learn about the latest developments in their respective fields. The Germans took immense pride in their poets, composers, industry, and technology. Efficient, polite, and law-abiding to a fault, they constructed a model of what a literate society could achieve.
How did Germany, arguably the most cultured nation in the world, transmogrify into the most bloodthirsty ogre ever to stalk the halls of history? Where were the spirits of Schiller, Leibniz, and Goethe at Babi-Yar, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald? Perpetrators of atrocities took pleasure in reciting Heine’s poetry, Mann’s prose, and Mozart’s music. If literacy is the key to civilizing the uncivilized, how then to explain the monstrosity called Nazi Germany? How could the cultured Germans have so thoroughly lost their collective moral compass? Why did not their refined educations protect them? After fifty years, these dark unanswered questions continue to cast a pall over all of the twentieth century’s accomplishments.
It was, after all, the God-fearing, Church-going Germans who gave the world the Reformation. They were the Teutons who successfully resisted Roman rule and who were so fractious that for thousands of years they would not follow any one leader. The bristling forest of straight-armed Sieg Heils! was evidence that they had forsaken God and transferred that faith to der Füurher. Why were the cultured, twentieth century Germans so susceptible to an uncouth rabble-rouser? The usual explanations include the legacy of World War I, humiliation over reparations, and the dishonor of surrender. But neither crushing military defeats nor tribute bitterly rendered to a conqueror are unique in history. The Nazi response to them, however, was singular. An extremely powerful new factor may have been at work to overcome Germany’s religious rectitude, moral education, and the Germans’ identification with the best of ancient classical culture.
The crucial factor in Hitler’s Svengali act was his use of radio, a relatively new technology that he manipulated with sinister effect. Radio is a medium of speech. It is sensuous, immediate, and very personal, like someone whispering into your ear in the dark. It can communicate nuance and intonation. Because the radio listener cannot see the speaker, radio is orality raised to the highest pitch of intensity. Because the Germans were extremely literate, they were particularly vulnerable to a demagogue with a microphone.
Prior to microphones and radio, a single speaker could only address a few hundred people. With radio, one speaker could address an entire nation at once, casting a wide, seductive net, invoking in listeners a sense of tribal unity and singleness of vision. Period photographs of mesmerized Germans gathered on street corners staring intently at outdoor radio speakers blaring Hitler’s voice tell the story. McLuhan observed:
That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to radio and public address systems…. Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilization.5
In Germany in the 1930s, Hitler used the radio to weld the German people into a fanatic Teutonic tribe entranced by his messianic Aryan message that they were his “chosen people.” If Germans had only read Hitler’s speeches, they would not have fallen under his spell.* In a radio speech, Hitler once said, “I go my way with the assurance of a somnambulist.”6 He perverted the new medium and turned a whole nation into sleepwalkers.
At the time, few grasped why Hitler, a modern day Pied Piper, had such appeal. The content of Hitler’s message was and is repugnant to virtually everyone, including modern Germans who cannot fathom how their grandparents were taken in by such a farrago. The irony is that Germany was so highly literate that it had few defenses against a new medium that blasted it with booming spoken words. Certainly the evil that was Nazi Germany cannot be explained away simply as the result of a new technology of communication, but I believe it has been minimized as a key factor that propelled the Austrian paperhanger to the pinnacle of German political power.
A man who originally had artistic aspirations, Hitler understood the power of spectacle and icons. He personally chose the swastika as the Third Reich’s emblem, and hired entertainment professionals to stage his dramatic rallies. Aware of the critical importance of media, Hitler and Goebbels invented the concept of propaganda, creating the first propaganda ministry. Brilliantly manipulating the powers of both visual image and spoken language, Hitler seduced the cultured Germans into suspending their highly developed rational and moral faculties. His success seared the most ghastly images of the twentieth century into the memories of generations.
Fascism, the “ideology” of Nazi Germany, was not really about the abstract “ideas” of some theorist: it was the distillation of one man’s charismatic voice into a hypnotic movement. The two rogue “ideologies” of the twentieth century, Fascism and Communism, were actually atheistic religions that unexpectedly gained huge followings during the turbulence that accompanies the changeover from one medium to another. They were also polar opposites. In Mother Russia, literacy supplanted orality. In the German Fatherland, orality upended literacy. Little wonder that the two “ideologies” were such implacable enemies.
I have asserted that the left brain’s domination of the right, through its acquisition of literacy, and especially print technology, unbalanced society. This is not to say that the world has nothing to fear from the sudden expression of all right-sided attributes. The irrational right hemisphere has its dark side too. Hitler’s voice burrowed into the depths of the right hemisphere, resurrecting tribal myths and rituals. The Germanic people and their language had been distinctive much earlier than Caesar’s time. Germanic culture has been one of the great contributors to world civilization. And yet, in the two thousand years since the Romans first wrote about them, there have been only two dramatic Germanic deviations from the norms of human behavior: the witch craze and the Holocaust. Each occurred at the interface between one form of communication and another.
The power of the new medium was not lost on Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. The American president inaugurated his “fireside chats” during the Depression, and millions of Americans gathered around their radios to hear his reassuring voice. Later, Churchill used the radio to stiffen the spirit of resistance to the Nazis. During the darkest days of World War II, his electronically amplified voice staved off defeatism and kept hope alive among those in the conquered European countries. And, as any World War II buff knows, the weapon the Germans feared most was the shortwave radio; anyone caught possessing one faced the direst punishments.
Although it was not apparent at the outset, World War II was the Güotter-düammerung of the Mechanical Age. Mechanized tank divisions executed maneuvers that epitomized the uniformity and linearity of the alphabet. Calibrated artillery pieces hurled missiles along Newtonian trajectories. At the zenith of these left-brained calculations everything changed. On August 6, 1945, a blinding flash that physicist Robert Oppenheimer described as “brighter than a thousand suns” signaled the end of the war. Few people realized that the advent of the Atomic Age was also the beginning of the end of patriarchy, the return of the Goddess, and the triumph of the image over written words. A new era was dawning.
*Russian Christian men considered Jews and women as “Other” and therefore interchangeable. Russia’s preoccupation with persecuting her Jews, I surmise, probably spared her “babushkas” in the nineteenth century from the misogynist witch hunts that had seized so many print cultures in sixteenth-century Europe.
*Mein Kampf, his personal addition to fanatical leaders’ books, was not as widely known as his radio speeches and image.