Were Hitler and the Nazis Socialists? Only Kind Of

Posted on by under Socialism

How socialist were the National Socialists?

We know there will be times when an organization or national name doesn’t tell the whole story. As Jacobin writes, how democratic is the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea? It’s hardly a republic either. (Hitler once asked, “Is there a truer form of Democracy” than the Reich — dictators, apparently, misuse terms.) Or look to the Likud, the National Liberals, one of Israel’s major conservative parties. And if the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were Christians, do they represent Christianity at large? So let us examine the Nazis and see if they fall into this category.

The first task, as always, is to define socialism. Like today, “socialism” and “communism” were used by some in the early 20th century to mean the same thing (communism) and by others to mean different things. As a poet from the 1880s put it, there are indeed “two socialisms”: the one where the workers own their workplaces and the one where the government owns the workplaces. We must remember these different term uses, but to make it easy we will simply be open to both: “Were the Nazis socialists?” can therefore mean either. There is more to it than that, of course, such as direct democracy and large government programs. But these additions are not sufficient qualifiers. There will be whining that the Nazi regime had large government programs and thus it was socialist, but if that’s the criteria then so were all the nations fighting the Nazis, including the U.S. (remember our huge public jobs programs and Social Security Act of the era?). Advanced societies tend to have sizable State services — and you can have these things without being truly socialist. If one has even a minimal understanding of socialist thought and history, then the conclusion that no country can earnestly be called socialist without worker or State ownership of business is hardly controversial. To speak of socialism was to speak of the elimination of private ownership of the means of production (called “private property,” businesses), with transfer of ownership away from capitalists to one of the two aforementioned bodies.

The German Workers Party, founded in 1919 in Munich by Anton Drexler and renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party in 1920, included actual socialists. Gregor and Otto Strasser, for instance, supported nationalization of industry — it’s simply not accurate to say the rhetoric of ending capitalism, building socialism, of revolution, workers, class, exploitation, and so on was solely propaganda. It was a mix of honest belief and empty propagandistic promises to attract voters in a time of extreme poverty and economic crisis, all depending on which Nazi was using it, as we will see. Socialists can be anti-semites, racists, patriots, and authoritarians, just like non-socialists and people of other belief systems. (I’ve written more elsewhere about the separability of ideologies and horrific things, if interested, typically using socialism and Christianity as examples. The response to “Nazis were socialists, so socialism is pure evil” is of course “Nazis were also Christians — Germany was an extremely religious nation — so is Christianity also pure evil? If the Nazis distorted Christianity, changing what it fundamentally was with their ‘Positive Christianity,’ advocated for in the Nazi platform, is true Christianity to be abandoned alongside true socialism if that has been distorted as well?”)

The meaning of socialism was distorted by Hitler and other party members. To Hitler, socialism meant the common weal, the common good for a community. While rhetorically familiar, this was divorced from ideas of worker or State ownership of the means of production. In a 1923 interview with The Guardian‘s George Sylvester Viereck, Hitler made this clear. After vowing to end Bolshevism (communism), Hitler got the key question:

“Why,” I asked Hitler, “do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?”

“Socialism,” he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, “is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

“Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.

“We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.”

Hitler’s socialism, then, had to do with the common good of one race, united as a nation around ancestral Aryan land and identity. What socialism meant to Hitler and other Nazis can only be understood through the lens of racial purity and extreme nationalism. They come first, forming the colander, and everything else is filtered through. In the same way, what Christianity meant to Hitler was fully shaped by these obsessions: it was a false religion invented by the Jews (who Jesus fought!), but could at the same time be used to justify their destruction. Bolshevism was likewise labeled a sinister Jewish creation (was not Marx ethnically Jewish?): “The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature…” Further, when Hitler criticized capitalists, it was often specific: Germany needed “delivery from the Jewish capitalist shackles,” the Jews being to blame for economic problems. A consumed conspiratorial bigot, and often contradictory and nonsensical, he would attack both sides of any issue if they smacked to him of Judaism. But we see Hitler’s agreement that National Socialism was the “antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism”: there would still be private property, private ownership of the means of production; the internationalism and the racial diversity and tolerance at times preached by other socialists would be rejected. (So would class conflict: “National Socialism always bears in mind the interests of the people as a whole and not the interests of one class or another.”) Racial supremacy and the worship of country — elements of the new fascism, and the latter a typical element of the Right, not traditional socialism — were in order. (If these things were socialism, then again the nations fighting Germany were socialist: Jim Crow laws in America were used as models by Nazi planners, there existed devotion to American exceptionalism and greatness, and so forth.)

Hitler often repeated his view. On May 21, 1935:

National Socialism is a doctrine that has reference exclusively to the German people. Bolshevism lays stress on international mission. We National Socialists believe a man can, in the long run, be happy only among his own people… We National Socialists see in private property a higher level of human economic development that according to the differences in performance controls the management of what has been accomplished enabling and guaranteeing the advantage of a higher standard of living for everyone. Bolshevism destroys not only private property but also private initiative and the readiness to shoulder responsibility.

In a December 28, 1938 speech he declared:

A Socialist is one who serves the common good without giving up his individuality or personality or the product of his personal efficiency. Our adopted term ‘Socialist’ has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not. Marxism places no value on the individual or the individual effort, or efficiency; true Socialism values the individual and encourages him in individual efficiency, at the same time holding that his interests as an individual must be in consonance with those of the community.

He who believed in “Germany, people and land — that man is a Socialist.” Otto Strasser, in his 1940 book Hitler and I, wrote that Hitler told him in 1930 that the revolution would be racial, not economic; that democracy should not be brought into the economic sphere; and that large corporations should be left alone; to which Strasser replied, “If you wish to preserve the capitalist regime, Herr Hitler, you have no right to talk of socialism. For our supporters are socialists, and your programme demands the socialisation of private enterprise.” Hitler responded:

That word ‘socialism’ is the trouble… I have never said that all enterprises should be socialised. On the contrary, I have maintained that we might socialise enterprises prejudicial to the interests of the nation. Unless they were so guilty, I should consider it a crime to destroy essential elements in our economic life… There is only one economic system, and that is responsibility and authority on the part of directors and executives. That is how it has been for thousands of years, and that is how it will always be. Profit-sharing and the workers’ right to be consulted are Marxist principles. I consider that the right to exercise influence on private enterprise should be conceded only to the state, directed by the superior class… The capitalists have worked their way to the top through their capacity, and on the basis of this selection, which again only proves their higher race, they have a right to lead. Now you want an incapable government council or works council, which has no notion of anything, to have a say; no leader in economic life would tolerate it.

Otto Strasser and his brother grew disillusioned that the party wasn’t pursuing actual socialism, and upset that Hitler supported and worked with big business, industrialists, capitalists, German princes. Otto was expelled from the party in 1930. Gregor resigned two years later.

The referenced National Socialist Program, or 25-point Plan, of 1920 demanded the “nationalization of all enterprises (already) converted into corporations (trusts),” “profit-sharing in large enterprises,” “communalization of the large department stores, which are to be leased at low rates to small tradesmen,” and nationalization “of land for public purposes.” Hitler clarified that since “the NSDAP stands on the platform of private ownership,” the nationalization of land for public use “concerns only the creation of legal opportunities to expropriate if necessary, land which has been illegally acquired or is not administered from the view-point of the national welfare. This is directed primarily against the Jewish land-speculation companies.” Large department stores were largely Jewish-run. And above we saw Hitler’s resistance to profit-sharing. Further, nationalization of businesses would be limited, as noted, to trusts. It could be that the disproportionately strong representation of Jews in ownership of big German companies played a role here, too. Now, a “secret” interview with Hitler that some scholars suspect is a forgery contains the quote: “Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism,” yet even this limits the promise to publicly traded companies, and Hitler goes on, tellingly, to speak of “owners” and their “possessions,” “property owners,” “the bourgeoisie,” etc. that, while “controlled” by the State, plainly exist independently of it in his socialist vision. Nevertheless, the program has a socialist flair, making Otto Strasser’s comment in 1930 comprehensible, yet its timidity vis-à-vis economics (compare it to the German communist party’s platform of 1932) and its embrace of nationalism and rejection of internationalism would understandably make some ask the question George Sylvester Viereck did in 1923.

This socialist tinge, apart from attacks on Jewish businesses, was forgotten when the Nazis came to power. Historian Karl Bracher said such things to Hitler were “little more than an effective, persuasive propaganda weapon for mobilizing and manipulating the masses. Once it had brought him to power, it became pure decoration: ‘unalterable,’ yet unrealized in its demands for nationalization and expropriation, for land reform…” Indeed, while other Western nations were bringing businesses under State control to combat the Depression, the Nazis in the 1930s ran a program of privatization. Many firms and sectors were handed back to the private sphere. The Nazis valued private ownership for its efficiency. The German economy was State-directed in the sense that the government made purchases, contracting with private firms to produce commodities, such as armaments, and regulated business in many ways, as advanced nations often do, including the U.S. Historian Ian Kershaw wrote: “Hitler was never a socialist. But although he upheld private property, individual entrepreneurship, and economic competition, and disapproved of trade unions and workers’ interference in the freedom of owners and managers to run their concerns, the state, not the market, would determine the shape of economic development. Capitalism was, therefore, left in place. But in operation it was turned into an adjunct of the state.” While the regime incentivized business and regulated it, especially in preparation for war, intervening to keep entities aligned with State goals and ideology, “there occurred hardly any nationalizations of private firms during the Third Reich. In addition, there were few enterprises newly created as state-run firms,” summarized Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner in The Journal of Economic History. Companies retained their independence and autonomy: they still “had ample scope to follow their own production plans… The state normally did not use power to secure the unconditional support of industry,” but rather offered attractive contracts. Socialism cannot simply be regulation of and incentives for private companies, to meet national goals — again, this is what non-socialist states do every day (and the U.S. war economy had plenty of centrally planned production goals and quotas, contracts, regulations, rationing, and even government takeovers).

The betrayal of the program was noticed at the time. A 1940 report said that:

Economic planks of the “unalterable program” on the basis of which the National Socialists campaigned before they came to power in 1933 were designed to win the support of as many disgruntled voters as possible rather than to present a coordinated plan for a new economic system. Within the party there has always been, and there still is, serious disagreement about the extent to which the “socialist” part of the party’s title is to be applied… The planks calling for expropriation have been least honored in the fulfillment of this platform; in practice, the economic reorganizations undertaken by the Nazis have followed a very different pattern from the one which was originally projected.

That pattern was tighter regulation, generous contracts, economic recovery programs for ordinary people, and so on, though the occasional State takeover did occur. All this makes sense given what we’ve seen. The Nazis weren’t interested in the socialism of the Marxists, the communists. Hitler, in his words, rejected “the false notion that the economic system could exist and operate entirely freely and entirely outside of any control or supervision on the part of the State,” but business ultimately belonged to the capitalists.

The Bramberg Conference of 1926 was a key moment for the direction of the Nazi Party: would it go in an earnestly socialist direction or simply use this new, diluted version Hitler was fond of? There were ideological divisions that had to be addressed. Hitler, as party leader since 1921 and with the conference officially establishing Fuhrerprinzip (absolute power of the party leader), was likely to win from the beginning. Gregor Strasser led the push at this convening of Nazi leaders for socialist policies, backed by others from Germany’s northern urban, industrial areas. Leaders from the rural south stood opposed; they wanted to instead lean into nationalism, populism, racialism. One such policy was the seizing of the estates of rich nobles, the landed princes — did the National Socialist Program not say land could be expropriated for the common good? “The law must remain the law for aristocrats as well,” Hitler said. “No questioning of private property!” This was communism, that old Jewish plot. Hitler made sure the idea, being pursued at the time by the social democratic and communist parties, died in its cradle. “For us there are today no princes, only Germans,” he said. “We stand on the basis of the law, and will not give a Jewish system of exploitation a legal pretext for the complete plundering of our people.” Again, the rejection of the class war and overthrow of the rich inherent to socialism and instead a simple focus on the Jews — Hitler was “replacing class with race,” as one historian put it, swapping out “the usual terms of socialist ideology.” Hitler was “a reactionary,” Joseph Goebbels realized. After this, Strasser backed off, and the socialist push in the party was quelled.

Similar to State ownership, while the German Workers Party in 1919 spoke of worker cooperatives — worker ownership — the Nazis had no actual interest in this, in fact making cooperative entities targets to be destroyed in Germany and conquered nations because they smacked of Marxism. A dictatorship isn’t going to give ordinary people power.

Outside observers continued to mock Hitler’s socialism — this isn’t simply a tactic of an embarrassed American Left today. As we’ve seen, people of the era noticed the meaning was changed and watched how the Nazis acted when in power. For Leon Trotsky, an actual communist-style socialist writing in 1934, Nazi “socialism” was always in derisive quotation marks. “The Nazis required the programme in order to assume the power; but power serves Hitler not all for the purpose of fulfilling the programme,” with “the social system untouched,” the “class nature” and competition of capitalism alive and well. Stalin said in 1936, “The foundation of [Soviet] society is public property: state, i.e., national, and also co-operative, collective farm property. Neither Italian fascism nor German National-‘Socialism’ has anything in common with such a society. Primarily, this is because the private ownership of the factories and works, of the land, the banks, transport, etc., has remained intact, and, therefore, capitalism remains in full force in Germany and in Italy.”

When one considers how actual socialists were treated under the Reich, the point is driven home.

Communist and social democratic politicians were purged from the legislature and imprisoned. Dachau, the first concentration camp, first held political enemies such as socialists. In an article in The Guardian from March 21, 1933, the president of the Munich police said, “Communists, ‘Marxists’ and Reichsbanner [social democratic] leaders” would be imprisoned there. The next year reports of the horrid conditions inside emerged, such as that in The New Republic, likewise noting the “Social Democrats, Socialist Workers’ party members,” and others held within. Part of the impetus for the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, in which Hitler had Nazi Party members killed, was too much talk of workers, actual socialism, anti-capitalist ideas. Gregor Strasser was murdered that night. Otto fled for his life.

There is a famous saying that is in fact authentic. Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller of Germany often said various versions of the following after the war:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

One might wonder why the socialists would be coming for the socialists. But if this new socialism simply had to do with race and land, opposing State or worker ownership, it begins to make sense. You have to take care of ideological opponents, whether through a conference or a concentration camp. In response, communists and socialists took part in the valiant resistance to Nazism in Germany and throughout Europe.

The recent articles offering a Yes or No answer to the question “Were Hitler and the Nazis Socialists?” are far too simplistic. Honest history can’t always be captured in a word. Here is an attempt to do so in a paragraph:

Foundationally, socialists wanted either worker ownership of workplaces or government ownership of workplaces, the removal of capitalists. The Nazi Party had actual socialists. But over time they grew frustrated that the party wasn’t pursuing socialism; some left. Other members, including party leader Adolf Hitler, opposed actual socialism, and changed the definition of socialism to simply mean unity of the Aryan race and its collective flourishing. True to this, when he seized power, Hitler did not implement socialism, leaving capitalists in place, and instead crushed those speaking of actual socialism.

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Faith and Intelligence

Posted on by under Religion

Atheists and agnostics are sometimes accused of seeing themselves as more intelligent than people of faith. Which begs the question: as a former believer, do I consider myself to be smarter now that I am a freethinker? In a sense yes, in that I’ve gained knowledge I did not possess before and have developed critical thinking skills that I likewise used to lack. It feels like learning an instrument, in fact a good analogy. People who learn the violin are from one perspective smarter than they were before, with new knowledge and abilities, a brain rewired, and indeed smarter than me, and others, in that respect. But this is a rather informal meaning of intelligence. Virtually anyone can learn the violin, and virtually anyone can find the knowledge and skills I did. Now we’re talking about capacity. We’ve entered the more formal definition of intelligence, under which the answer is obviously no, I’m not smarter than my old self or believers. So the answer is yes and no, as is often the case with variable meanings.

Consider this in detail. There are many definitions of “intelligence” (“smart” can simply be used as a synonym). The formal definition of intelligence generally has to do with the ability or capacity to gain knowledge and skills. You wouldn’t grow in intelligence by gaining knowledge and skills, but rather by somehow expanding the capacity to do so in the first place. (Granted, it could well be that doing the former does impact the latter, a virtuous cycle.) The human and the ape have different capacities, a sizable intelligence gap. Humans have differences too, in terms of genetic predispositions granted by the birth lottery and environmental factors. An ape won’t get far on the violin, and some humans will struggle more, or less, than others to learn it. Human beings have greater or weaker baseline capacities in various areas, different intelligence levels, but most can learn the basics (the idea that enough practice can make anyone advanced or expert has been thoroughly blown up). So under the formal framework, the believer and the skeptic have roughly the same intelligence on average, with the same ability to discover certain knowledge and develop certain skills — whether that ever happens is a separate question entirely, coming down to luck, life experiences, environment, and so on. While studies have often found that religiosity correlates with lower IQ, the difference is very small, with possible causes ranging from autistic persons helping tip the scales for the non-religious to people of faith relying too much on intuition rather than logic or reason when problem-solving, a problem of “behavioral biases rather than impaired general intelligence” — and behavior can be changed, very different than capacity. If this latter hypothesis is true, it would be like giving a violin proficiency test to both violin students and non-students and marveling that the non-students underperformed. Had my logic and reasoning been tested before my transition from pious to dubious, I suspect it would have been lower than today, as I learned many critical thinking skills during and after, but this is not about capacity; it’s just learning anyone can do. Under the more serious definition of intelligence, I don’t believe I’m smarter than my former self or the faithful.

But now we can work under the informal, colloquial meaning, where growing intelligence simply has something to do with a growing base of knowledge and new skill sets. Do we not often say “He’s really smart” of someone who knows copious facts about astronomy or history? Don’t we consider a woman highly intelligent who speaks multiple languages, or is a blazingly fast coder? When we suspect that if we devoted the same time and energy to those things, we could probably hold our own? (Rightly or wrongly, as noted. Either way, we often don’t think as much about capacity as simple acquisition.) This writer, at least, sometimes uses these flattering terms to describe possession of much information or foreign abilities.

In that sense, I certainly believe I’m smarter than I used to be. I realize how insulting that sounds, given that the natural extension is that I consider myself smarter than religious persons. But I don’t know how unique that is. When the weak Christian becomes a strong Christian through reading and thinking and conversing, she may consider herself smarter than before — perhaps even more knowledgable and a more sensible thinker than an atheist! In other words, more intelligent than a nonbeliever (wouldn’t you have to be a fool to think existence, the universe, is possible without a creator being?). When a man learns vast amounts about aerophysics, he sees himself as smarter than before and by extension others on this topic; when he masters the skill of building planes that fly, the same. If intelligence simply means more knowledgable about or skilled at something, everyone thinks they’re smarter than their past selves and by extension other people, with, obviously, many clashing and contradictory opinions between individuals (the Christian and the atheist both thinking they are more knowledgable, for instance).

Some examples are in order from my personal growth, just to illuminate my perspective better. I’ll offer two. I used to believe that, among other reasons, the gospels could be trusted as being entirely factual because they were written 30-40 years after the alleged miraculous events they describe (at least, Mark was; the others were later). “Too soon after to be fictional.” But then I learned something. Other religions, which I disbelieved, had much shorter timespans between supposed events and written accounts! Made-up nonsense about what happened on Day X to Person A was being written about and earnestly believed just a year or two later, in some cases just a day or two later — birthing new religions and stories still believed today! That was just the way humans operated; it’s never too soon for fictions, things can be invented and spread immediately, never to be tamped down. So, I’d gained knowledge. I felt more intelligent because of this — even embarrassed at my old ways of thinking. Not right away, but eventually. How could anyone learn this and not change their way of thinking accordingly, realizing that this argument for the gospels’ trustworthiness is simply dreadful and should be retired?

Since the first example was in the knowledge category, the second can concern critical thinking skills, and is neatly paired with the first. I used to suppose that it was sensible to believe in the gospels (and of course God) because they could not be disproved. After all, why not? If you can’t disprove them, they could be true. So why not continue to believe the gospels to be full of truths rather than fictions, as you’ve been raised or long held? Eventually I started thinking more critically, more clearly. This was the argument from ignorance fallacy: if something hasn’t been disproved that’s reason to suppose there’s truth to it. It’s rather irrational — there are a million stories from all human religions that cannot be disproved…therefore it’s reasonable to think they are true? You can’t disprove that the Greek gods formed Mount Olympus, that Allah or Thor exists, that the god Krishna spoke with Arjuna as described in the Bhagavad Gita, or that we’re living in a simulation. The ocean of unprovable things is infinite and of course highly contradictory, with many sets of things that cannot both or all be true. There are too many fictions in this ocean — you may believe in one of them. To only apply the argument from ignorance to your own faith, to believe that the gospels are true because they cannot be disproved but not all these other things for the precise same reason, is simple bias. Mightn’t it be more sensible to believe that which can be proven, rather than what cannot be disproven? That would be, in stark contrast, a solid justification. Now on the other side of the gulf, I can barely understand how I ever thought in such fallacious ways. But better, more logical ways of thinking I simply developed over time, and as with the development of any skill I can’t help but feel more intelligent because of it.

One does regret how derogatory this may seem to many readers. Yet it is impossible to avoid. I consider myself more intelligent than I used to be because I have knowledge I did not possess before and ways of thinking I consider better than prior ones. By extension, it seems I have to consider myself more intelligent, in this area, than those who, like my past self, do not possess that knowledge or those habits of critical thinking. However (and apologies for growing repetitive, it stems from a desire not to offend too much), this is no different than any person who uses the informal meaning of intelligence in any context. If you use that definition, and believe yourself to be more knowledge of the contents of the bible or biology, or more skilled at mathematics or reading people, than before or compared to others, you consider yourself smarter than other people, in those areas but not necessarily in others. If you instead use the formal definition of intelligence, regarding the mere capacity to gain knowledge and develop skills, then you’d say you’re not actually smarter than others (as they could simply do as you have done) or at least not necessarily or only possibly smarter (again, there are differences in capacities between human beings; some will be naturally better at mathematics no matter how hard others practice). In this latter sense, I’m again compelled in my answer: I essentially have to say I’m not smarter than my former self or current believers who think as I once did.

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Review: ‘A History of the American People’

Posted on by under History

At times I read books from the other side of the political spectrum, and conservative Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People (1998) was the latest.

This was mostly a decent book, and Johnson deserves credit for various inclusions: a look at how British democracy influenced American colonial democracy, the full influence of religion on early American society, Jefferson’s racism, U.S. persecution of socialists and Wobblies during World War I, how the Democratic Party was made up of southern conservatives and northern progressives for a long time, and more.

However, in addition to (and in alignment with) being a top-down, “Great Men,” traditionalist history, the work dodges the darkness of our national story in significant ways. That’s the only way, after all, you can say things like Americans are “sometimes wrong-headed but always generous” (a blatant contradiction — go ask the Japanese in the camps about generosity) or “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures” (what a wonderful adventure black people had in this country). It’s the pitfall of conservative, patriotic histories — if you want the U.S. to be the greatest country ever, our horrors must necessarily be downplayed.

Thus, black Americans don’t get much coverage until the Civil War, whereas Native Americans aren’t really worth discussing before or after the Trail of Tears era. Shockingly, in this history the internment of the Japanese never occurred. It’s simply not mentioned! Johnson offers a rosy view of what the U.S. did in Vietnam, believing that we should have inflicted more vigorous violence on both Vietnam and Cuba. Poverty doesn’t get much attention. The Founding Fathers’ expressions of protecting their own wealth, class interests, and aristocratic power when designing our democracy naturally go unmentioned. Likewise, American attacks on other countries are always from a place of benevolence and good intentions, rather than, as they often were in actuality, for economic or business interests, to maintain global power, or to seize land and resources. To Johnson, the U.S. had “one” imperialist adventure, its war with Spain — this incredible statement was made not long after his outline of the U.S. invasion of Mexico to expand its borders to the Pacific.

Other events and people given short shrift include LGBTQ Americans, non-European immigrants, and the abolitionist movement — until the end of the book when the modern pro-life movement is compared to it in approving fashion. The labor and feminist movements aren’t worth mentioning for their crucial successes, or intersectional solidarity in some places, only for their racism in others. Johnson is rather sympathetic of Richard Nixon, and somehow describes his downfall with no mention of Nixon’s attempts, recorded on White House tapes, to obstruct the Watergate investigation — the discovery of which led to his resignation. If anything, the book is a valuable study on how bias, in serious history and journalism, usually manifests itself in the sin of omission, conscious or no, rather than outright falsities, conscious or no (not that conservatives are the only ones who do this, of course; the Left, which can take the opposite approach and downplay positive happenings in American history, shouldn’t shy away from acknowledging, for instance, that the U.S. Constitution was a strong step forward for representative democracy, secular government, and personal rights, despite the obvious exclusivity, compared to Europe’s systems).

Things really start to go off the rails with this book in the 1960s and later, when America loses its way and becomes not-great (something slavery and women as second-class citizens could somehow never cause), with much whining about welfare, academia, political correctness, and the media (he truly should have read Manufacturing Consent before propagating the myth that the liberal media turned everyone against the war in Vietnam). Affirmative action receives special attention and passion, far more than slavery or Jim Crow, and Johnson proves particularly thick-skulled on other matters of race (Malcolm X is a “black racist,” slang and rap are super dangerous, no socio-economic and historical causes are mentioned that could illuminate highlighted racial discrepancies, and so on). Cringingly blaming the 1960-1990 crime wave on a less religious society, one wonders what Johnson would make of the dramatic decrease in crime from the 1990s to today, occurring as the percentage of religious Americans continues to plunge — a good lesson on false causation.

All this may not sound at all like a “mostly decent” book, but I did enjoy reading most of it, and — despite the serious flaws outlined here, some unforgivable — most of the information in the space of 1,000 pages was accurate and interesting. It served as a good refresher on many of the major people and events in U.S. history, a look at the perspective of the other side, a prompt for thinking about bias (omission vs. inaccuracy, subconscious vs. conscious), and a reminder of who and what are left out of history — and why.

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Woke Cancel Culture Through the Lens of Reason

Posted on by under Politics

What follows are a few thoughts on how to view wokeism and cancel culture with nuance:

Two Basic Principles (or, Too Much of a Good Thing)

There are two principles that first spring to mind when considering cancel culture. First, reason and ethics, to this writer, suggest that social consequences are a good thing. There are certain words and actions that one in a free society would certainly not wish to result in fines, community service, imprisonment, or execution by government, but are deserving of proportional and reasonable punishments by private actors, ordinary people. It is right that someone who uses a racial slur loses their job or show or social media account. A decent person and decent society wants there to be social consequences for immoral actions, because it discourages such actions and helps build a better world. One can believe in this while also supporting free speech rights and the First Amendment, which obviously have to do with how the government responds to what you say and do, not private persons and entities.

The second principle acknowledges that there will be many cases where social consequences are not proportional or reasonable, where things go too far and people, Right and Left, are crushed for rather minor offenses. It’s difficult to think of many social trends or ideological movements that did not go overboard in some fashion, after all. There are simply some circumstances where there was an overreaction to words and deeds, where mercy should have been the course rather than retribution. (Especially worthy of consideration: was the perpetrator young at the time of the crime, with an underdeveloped brain? Was the offense in the past, giving someone time to change and grow, to regret it?) Readers will disagree over which specific cases fall into this category, but surely most will agree with the general principle, simply that overreaction in fact occurs. I can’t be the only Leftist who both nods approvingly in some cases and in others thinks, “She didn’t deserve that” or “My, what a disproportionate response.” Stupid acts might deserve a different response than racist ones, dumb ideas a different tack than dangerous ones, and so on. It might be added that overreactions not only punish others improperly, but also encourage forced, insincere apologies — somewhat reminiscent of the adage than you shouldn’t make faith a requirement of holding office, as you’ll only end up with performative religiosity.

Acknowledging and pondering both these principles is important.

“Free Speech” Only Concerns Government-Citizen Interaction

Again, in most cases, the phrase “free speech” is basically irrelevant to the cancel culture conversation. It’s worth emphasizing. Businesses and individuals — social media companies, workplaces, show venues, a virtual friend who blocks you or deletes your comment — have every right to de-platform, cancel, censor, and fire. The whining about someone’s “free speech” being violated when they’re cancelled is sophomoric and ignorant — the First Amendment and free speech rights are about whether the government will punish you, not non-government actors.

Which makes sense, for an employer or individual could just as easily be said to have the “free speech right” to fire or cancel you — why is your “free speech right” mightier than theirs?

Public universities and government workplaces, a bit different, are discussed below.

Why is the Left at Each Other’s Throats?

At times the national conversation is about the left-wing mob coming for conservatives, but we know it comes for its own with just as much enthusiasm. Maybe more, some special drive to purge bad ideas and practices from our own house. Few involved in left-wing advocacy of some kind haven’t found themselves in the circular firing squad, whether firing or getting blasted — most of us have probably experienced both. It’s a race to be the most woke, and can lead to a lot of nastiness.

What produces this? Largely pure motives, for if there’s a path that’s more tolerant, more just, that will build a better future, we want others to see and take it. It’s a deep desire to do what’s right and get others to do the same. (That the pursuit of certain kinds of tolerance [racial, gender, etc.] would lead to ideological intolerance has been called ironic or hypocritical, but seems, while it can go too far at times, more natural and inevitable — there’s no ending separate drinking fountains without crushing the segregationist’s ideology.)

But perhaps the inner turmoil also comes from troublesome ideas of group monolithic thinking, plus a desperate desire for there to be one right answer when there isn’t one. Because we sometimes look at impacted groups as comprised of members all thinking the same way, or enough thinking the same way, there is therefore one right answer and anyone who questions it should be trampled on. For example, you could use “person with autism” (person-first language) rather than “autistic person” (identity-first language) and fall under attack for not being woke enough. Identity-first language is more popular among the impacted group members, and the common practice with language among non-impacted persons is to defer to majority opinions. But majority opinions aren’t strictly “right” — to say this is of course to say the minority of the impacted group members are simply wrong. Who would have the arrogance and audacity to say this? It’s simply different opinions, diversity of thought. (Language and semantics are minefields on the Left, but also varying policy ideas.) There’s nothing wrong with deferring to majority opinion, but if we were not so focused on there being one right answer, if we didn’t view groups as single-minded or single-minded enough, we would be much more tolerant of people’s “mistakes” and less likely to stoop to nastiness. We’d respect and explore and perhaps even celebrate different views within our side of the political spectrum. It’s worth adding that we go just as crazy when the majority impacted group opinion is against an idea. It may be more woke, for example, to support police abolition or smaller police presences in black neighborhoods, but 81% of black Americans don’t want the police going anywhere, so the majority argument won’t always help a case. Instead of condemning someone who isn’t on board with such policies as not caring enough about racial justice, not being woke enough, being dead wrong, we should again remember there is great diversity of thought out there and many ideas, many possible right answers beyond our own, to consider and discuss with civility. One suspects that few individuals, if intellectually honest, would always support the most radical or woke policy posited (more likely, you’ll disagree with something), so more tolerance and humility is appropriate.

The same should be shown toward many in the middle and on the Right as well. Some deserve a thrashing. Others don’t.

The University Onus

One hardly envies the position college administrators find themselves in, pulled between the idea that a true place of learning should include diverse and dissenting opinions, the desire to punish and prevent hate speech or awful behaviors, the interest in responding to student demands, and the knowledge that the loudest, best organized demands are at times themselves minority opinions, not representative.

Private universities are like private businesses, in that there’s no real argument against them cancelling as they please.

But public universities, owned by the states, have a special responsibility to protect a wide range of opinion, from faculty, students, guest speakers, and more, as I’ve written elsewhere. As much as this writer loves seeing the power of student organizing and protest, and the capitulation to that power by decision-makers at the top, public colleges should take a harder line in many cases to defend views or actions that are deemed offensive, in order to keep these spaces open to ideological diversity and not drive away students who could very much benefit from being in an environment with people of different classes, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and politics. Similar to the above, that is a sensible general principle. There will of course be circumstances where words and deeds should be crushed, cancellation swift and terrible. Where that line is, again, is a matter of disagreement. But the principle is simply that public colleges should save firings, censorship, cancellation, suspension, and expulsion for more extreme cases than is current practice. The same for other public entities and public workplaces. Such spaces are linked to the government, which actually does bring the First Amendment and other free speech rights into the conversation, and therefore there exists a special onus to allow broader ranges of views.

Cancel Culture Isn’t New — It’s Just the Left’s Turn

If you look at the surveys that have been conducted, two things become clear: 1) support for cancel culture is higher on the Left, but 2) it’s also a problem on the Right.

50% of staunch progressives “would support firing a business executive who personally donated to Donald Trump’s campaign,” vs. 36% of staunch conservatives who “would support firing Biden donors.” Republicans are much more worried about their beliefs costing them their jobs (though a quarter of Democrats worry, too), conservatives are drastically more afraid to share opinions (nearly 80%, vs. just over 40% for strong liberals), and only in the “strong liberal” camp does a majority (58%) feel free to speak its mind without offending others (liberals 48%, conservatives 23%). While almost 100% of the most conservative Americans see political correctness as a problem, 30% of the most progressive Americans agree, not an insignificant figure (overall, 80% of citizens agree). There’s some common ground here.

While the Left is clearly leading modern cancel culture, it’s important to note that conservatives often play by the same rules, despite rhetoric about how they are the true defenders of “free speech.” If Kaepernick kneels for the anthem, he should be fired. If a company (Nike, Gillette, Target, NASCAR, Keurig, MLB, Delta, etc.) gets political on the wrong side of the spectrum, boycott it and destroy your possessions, while Republican officials legislate punishment. If Republican Liz Cheney denounces Trump’s lies, remove her from her leadership post. Rage over and demand cancellation of Ellen, Beyonce, Jane Fonda, Samantha Bee, Kathy Griffin, Michelle Wolf, and Bill Maher for using their free speech. Obviously, no one called for more firings for views he didn’t like than Trump. If the Dixie Chicks criticize the invasion of Iraq, wipe them from the airways, destroy their CDs. Thomas Hitchner recently put together an important piece on conservative censorship and cancellation during the post-9/11 orgy of patriotism, for those interested. And don’t forget what happened to Sinéad O’Connor after she tore up a photograph of the Pope (over the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal) on SNL in 1992: her records were crushed under a steamroller in Times Square and her career was cancelled. Think also of the Right’s myriad book bans of late (like those of yesteryear), and how this impacts authors.

More importantly, when we place this phenomenon of study in the context of history, we come to suspect that rather than being something special to the Left (or naturally more powerful on the Left, because liberals hate free speech and so on), cancel culture seems to be, predictably, led by the strongest cultural and political ideology of the moment. When the U.S. was more conservative, it was the Right that was leading the charge to ensure people with dissenting views were fired, censored, and so on. The hammer, rather than wielded by the far Left, came down on it.

You could look to the socialists and radicals, like Eugene Debs, who were literally imprisoned for speaking out against World War I, but more recently the McCarthy era after World War II, when government workers, literary figures, media anchors, and Hollywood writers, actors, and filmmakers accused of socialist or communist sympathies were hunted down and fired, blacklisted, slandered, imprisoned for refusing to answer questions at the witch trials, and so forth, as discussed in A History of the American People by conservative Paul Johnson. The Red Scare was in many ways far worse than modern cancel culture — it wasn’t simply the mob that came for you, it was the mob and the government. However, lest anyone think this was just Republican Big Government run amok rather than a cultural craze working in concert, recall that it was the movie studios doing the actual firing and blacklisting, the universities letting faculty go, LOOK and other magazines reprinting Army “How to Spot a Communist” propaganda, ordinary people pushing and marching and rallying against communism, etc.

All this overlapped, as leftwing economic philosophies usually do, with the fight for racial justice. Kali Holloway writes for The Nation:

There was also [black socialist] Paul Robeson, who had his passport revoked by the US State Department for his political beliefs and was forced to spend more than a decade living abroad. Racism and red-scare hysteria also canceled the acting career of Canada Lee, who was blacklisted from movies and died broke in 1952 at the age of 45. The [anti-segregationist] song “Mississippi Goddam” got Nina Simone banned from the radio and much of the American South, and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics essentially hounded Billie Holiday to death for the sin of stubbornly refusing to stop performing the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit.”

Connectedly, there was the Lavender Scare, a purge of gays and suspected gays from government and private workplaces. 5,000-10,000 people lost their jobs:

“It’s important to remember that the Cold War was perceived as a kind of moral crusade,” says [historian David K.] Johnson, whose 2004 book The Lavender Scare popularized the phrase and is widely regarded as the first major historical examination of the policy and its impact. The political and moral fears about alleged subversives became intertwined with a backlash against homosexuality, as gay and lesbian culture had grown in visibility in the post-war years. The Lavender Scare tied these notions together, conflating gay people with communists and alleging they could not be trusted with government secrets and labelling them as security risks, even though there was no evidence to prove this.

The 1950s was a difficult era for the Left and its civil rights advocates, class warriors, artists, and gay liberators, with persecution and censorship the norm. More conservative times, a stronger conservative cancel culture. Not even rock and roll was safe. All this did not end in this decade, of course (one of my own heroes, Howard Zinn, was fired from Spelman College in 1963 for his civil rights activism), but soon a long transition began. Paul Johnson mused:

The significant fact about McCarthyism, seen in retrospect, was that it was the last occasion, in the 20th century, when the hysterical pressure on the American people to conform came from the right of the political spectrum, and when the witchhunt was organized by conservative elements. Thereafter the hunters became the hunted.

While, as we saw, the Right are still often hunters as well, and therefore we see much hypocrisy today, there is some truth to this statement, as from the 1960s and ’70s the nation began slowly liberalizing. Individuals increasingly embraced liberalism, as did some institutions, like academia, the media, and Hollywood (others, such as the church, military, and law enforcement remain quite conservative). The U.S. is still growing increasingly liberal, more favoring New Deal policies, for example, even though more Americans still identify as conservative:

Since 1992, the percentage of Americans identifying as liberal has risen from 17% then to 26% today. This has been mostly offset by a shrinking percentage of moderates, from 43% to 35%. Meanwhile, from 1993 to 2016 the percentage conservative was consistently between 36% and 40%, before dipping to 35% in 2017 and holding at that level in 2018.

On top of this, the invention and growth of social media since the mid-2000s has dramatically changed the way public anger coalesces and is heard — and greatly increased its power.

So the Left has grown in strength at the same time as technology that can amplify and expand cancel culture, a convergence that is both fortunate and unfortunate — respectively, for those who deserve harsh social consequences and for those who do not.

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The Great Debate Over Robert Owen’s Five Fundamental Facts

Posted on by under History

In the early 1830s, British social reformer Robert Owen, called the “Founder of Socialism”[1] by contemporaries, brought forth his “Five Fundamental Facts” on human nature and ignited in London and elsewhere a dramatic debate — in the literal sense of fiery public discussions, as well as in books, pamphlets, and other works. While the five facts are cited in the extant literature on Owen and his utopian movement, a full exploration of the controversy is lacking, which is unfortunate for a moment that left such an impression on witnesses and participants. Famous secularist and editor George Jacob Holyoake, at the end of his life in 1906, wrote, “Human nature in England was never so tried as it was during the first five years” after Owen’s writings, when these five facts “were discussed in every town in the kingdom. When a future generation has courage to look into this unprecedented code as one of the curiosities of propagandism, it will find many sensible and wholesome propositions, which nobody now disputes, and sentiments of toleration and practical objects of wise import.”[2]

The discourse continued into the 1840s, but its intensity lessened, and thus we will focus our attention on its decade of origin. This work will add to scholarship a little-explored subject, and argue that the great debate transcended common ideological divisions, not simply pitting socialist against anti-socialist and freethinker against believer, but freethinker against freethinker and socialist against socialist as well. The debate was nuanced and complex, and makes for a fascinating study of intellectual history in Victorian Britain, an overlooked piece of the Western discourse on free will going back to the ancient Greek philosophers and nature-nurture stirred up by John Locke and René Descartes in the 17th century.

The limited historiography of the “Five Fundamental Facts” recognizes their significance. J.F.C. Harrison of the University of Sussex wrote that Owen, in his “confidence in the discoverability of laws governing human action,” thought as immutable as physical laws, in fact “provided the beginnings of behavioural science.”[3] Indeed, “in an unsophisticated form, and without the conceptual tools of later social psychology, Owen had hit upon the crucial role of character structure in the social process.”[4] Further, Nanette Whitbread wrote that the school Owen founded to put his five facts into action and change human nature, the New Lanark Infant School, could “be justly described as the first in the developmental tradition of primary education.”[5] However, the facts are normally mentioned only in passing — works on Owen and his movement that make no mention of them at all are not unusual — and for anything close to an exploration of the debate surrounding them one must turn to brief outlines in works like Robert Owen: A Biography by Frank Podmore, not an historian at all, but rather a parapsychologist and a founder of the Fabian Society.[6]

Robert Owen, to quote The Morning Post in 1836, was “alternately venerated as an apostle, ridiculed as a quack, looked up to and followed as the founder of a new philosophy, contemned as a visionary enthusiast, denounced as a revolutionary adventurer.”[7] He was born in Wales in 1771, and as a young man came to manage a large textile mill in Manchester and then buy one in New Lanark, Scotland. Influenced by the conditions of the working poor and the ideas of the Enlightenment, and as a prosperous man, he engaged in writing, advocacy, and philanthropy for better working conditions and early childhood education in Britain after the turn of the century. Adopting a philosophy of cooperative, communal economics, Owen purchased an American town, New Harmony in Indiana, in 1825 and ran a utopian experiment, inspiring many more across the U.S. and elsewhere, that was ultimately unsuccessful. He returned home in 1828, living in London and continuing to write and lecture for broad social change.

Soon Owen brought forth his Outline of the Rational System of Society, in circulation as early as 1832 — and by 1836 “too well known to make it requisite now to repeat,” as a Mr. Alger put it in the Owenite weekly New Moral World.[8] The Home Colonisation Society in London, an organization promoting the formation of utopian communities with “good, practical education” and “permanent beneficial employment” for all, without the “present competitive arrangements of society,” was just one of the work’s many publishers.[9] Owen, not one for modesty, declared it developed “the First Principles of the Science of Human Nature” and constituted “the only effectual Remedy for the Evils experienced by the Population of the world,” addressing human society’s “moral and physical Evils, by removing the Causes which produce them.”[10]

The text from the Home Colonisation Society began with Owen’s “Five Fundamental Facts,” the key to his rational system and therefore the prime target of later criticism.[11] They assert:

1st. That man is a compound being, whose character is formed of his constitution or organization at birth, and of the effects of external circumstances upon it from birth to death; such original organization and external influences continually acting and re-acting each upon the other.

2d. That man is compelled by his original constitution to receive his feelings and his convictions independently of his will.

3d. That his feelings, or his convictions, or both of them united, create the motive to action called the will, which stimulates him to act, and decides his actions.  

4th. That the organization of no two human beings is ever precisely similar at birth; nor can art subsequently form any two individuals, from infancy to maturity, to be precisely similar.

5th. That, nevertheless, the constitution of every infant, except in the case of organic disease, is capable of being formed into a very inferior, or a very superior, being, according to the qualities of the external circumstances allowed to influence that constitution from birth.[12]

As crucial as Owen’s five facts were to the subsequent arguments, he offered no defense of them in the short Society pamphlet, stating them, perhaps expectedly, as fact and immediately proceeding to build upon them, offering twenty points comprising “The Fundamental Laws of Human Nature.” Here again he explained that the character of an individual was malleable according to the environment and society in which he or she developed and existed — and how by building a superior society humanity could allow its members to flourish and maximize well-being. This was the materialism of the early socialists. That section was followed by “The Conditions Requisite for Human Happiness,” “The Principles and Practice of the Rational Religion,” “The Elements of the Science of Society,” and finally a constitution for a new civilization.

This paper will not explore Owen’s specific utopian designs in detail, but at a glance the rational society offered a government focused on human happiness, with free speech, equality for persons of all religions, education for all, gender equality, communal property, a mix of direct and representative democracy, the replacement of the family unit with the larger community structure, an end to punishments, and more. Overall, the needs of all would be provided for collectively, and work would be done collectively — the termination of “ignorance, poverty, individual competition…and national wars” was in reach.[13] Happier people were thought better people — by creating a socialist society, addressing human needs and happiness, “remodelling the character of man” was possible.[14] The five facts aimed to demonstrate this. While this pamphlet and others were brief, in The Book of the New Moral World, Owen devoted a chapter to justifying and explaining each of the five facts, and wrote of them in other publications as well. In that work he clarified, for instance, that it was an “erroneous supposition that the will is free,” an implication of the second and third facts.[15]

The reaction? As Holyoake wrote, in a front-page piece in The Oracle of Reason, “Political economists have run wild, immaculate bishops raved, and parsons have been convulsed at [Owen’s] communities and five facts.”[16] The facts, to many of the pious, smacked of the determinism rejected by their Christian sects. An anonymous letter on the front page of a later edition of the same publication laid out a view held by both Christians and freethinkers: “‘Man’s character is formed for him and not by him’ — therefore, all the religions of the world are false, is the sum and substance of the moral philosophy of R. Owen.”[17] With biological inheritances and environmental influences birthing one’s “feelings and convictions,” one’s “character,” free will was put into question. What moral culpability did human beings then have for their actions, and how could an individual truly be said to make a “choice” to believe or follow religious doctrine? Any religion that rested on free will would be contradictory to reality, and thus untrue. But, the anonymous writer noted, Calvinists and other determinists were safer — they believed in “supernatural” causes that formed one’s character, thus it would be disingenuous to say “all the religions of the world” were fiction, solely on the grounds that individuals did not have mastery over who they were.

The writer then offered further nuance and assistance to ideological opponents (he or she was clearly a freethinker, not only given the journal read and written to but also revealed by lines such as: “But what care religionists for justice in this world or the next? If they cared anything about ‘justice,’ and knew what the word meant, they would have long ere this abandoned the doctrine of an eternal hell”).[18] It was pointed out that “original sin” was found in non-deterministic and deterministic Christian sects alike — a formation of character before birth. “How then can the ‘five facts’ refute all religions…?”[19] If human beings were, from the universal or at least near-universal Christian point of view, shaped by supernatural forces beyond their control after Adam and Eve’s storied betrayal, it was a non sequitur, in the anonymous author’s mind, to say the molding of character invalidated common religions. Here we see an introduction to the complex ways the British of the Victorian era approached the debate.

Yet others were not always so gracious. In 1836, The Monthly Review wrote that “No one doubts the sincerity of Mr. Owen” and his desire to “create a world of happiness,” but “no man who takes for his guides common observation, and common sense — much more, that no person who has studied and who confides in the doctrines of the Bible, can ever become a convert to his views.”[20] The five facts were “intangible” and “obscure,” the arguments “bold, unauthorised, unsupported, ridiculous,” the vision for society as a whole “fanciful, impractical, and irreligious.”[21] How was it, the periodical asked, that these views could be “demonstrably true” yet had “never found acceptance with the mass of sober intelligent thinkers,” only the “paltry, insignificant, uninfluential, and ridiculed class of people” that were the Owenites, and Owen himself, who was “incompetent”?[22] The writer (or writers) further resented how Owen centered himself as something of a savior figure. Ridding the world of evil could be “accomplished by one whose soul like a mirror was to receive and reflect the whole truth and light which concerned the happiness of the world — and I, Robert Owen, am that mirror” — and did not the New Testament already serve the purpose of outlining the path to a more moral and happier world?[23] Overall, it was a scathing attack, an example of the hardline Christian view.

The January 1838 volume of The Christian Teacher, published to “uphold the religion of the New Testament, in contradistinction to the religion of creeds and parties,” included a writing by H. Clarke of Chorley.[24] To him the facts were “inconsistent and fallacious”: facts one, two, and four contradicted the fifth.[25] The first, second, and fourth facts established that a “man’s self” at birth “has at least something to do with forming his character,” but then the fifth established that “by the influence of external circumstances alone, any being” could be transformed into a “superior being.”[26] To Clarke, the facts at first emphasized that one’s biological constitution played a sizable, seemingly co-equal, role in forming one’s character — then the fifth fact threw all that out the window. If anyone could be made into a superior being, just via environment, what sense did it make to say that biology had any effect whatsoever on an individual’s nature?

Owen did seem to view circumstances as the predominant power. Though he firmly believed there existed, as he wrote, a “decided and palatable difference between [infants] at birth” due to biology, he indeed believed in bold, universal results: “selfishness…will cease to exist” alongside “all motives to individual pride and vanity,” and as “all shall be trained, from infancy, to be rational,” a humanity of “superior beings physically, intellectually, and morally” could arise.[27] Clarke was not alone in this critique. J.R. Beard wrote something similar in The Religion of Jesus Christ Defended from the Assaults of Owenism, which further held the common blank slate view of human nature (“at birth there is no mental or moral development”), meaning environment was all that was left: “What is this but to make ‘external circumstances’ the sole creator of the lot of man?”[28]

Clarke further took issue with what he viewed as the contradictory or hypocritical language of the Owenites. “So I learn from the votaries of Owenism…man’s feelings and convictions are forced upon him irrespective of his will, it is [therefore] the extreme of folly to ask a man to believe this or that.”[29] The Christian believed in belief, but “Owenism denies that man can believe as he pleases…yet strange to tell, almost the first question asked by an Owenite is, ‘Do you believe Mr. Owen’s five fundamental facts?’”[30] Belief in the five facts, Clarke pointed out, was required to be a member of Owen’s association, which an “Appendix to the Laws and Regulations” of the association printed in The New Moral World in 1836 made clear.[31] If one’s convictions were formed against one’s will, what sense did it make to ask after or require beliefs? Clarke’s own beliefs, one should note, while against Owen’s views of human nature, were not necessarily hostile to socialism. He prefered “Christ to Mr. Owen, Christian Socialism to the five-fact-socialism.”[32]

There were some who saw a distinction between the value of Owen’s theories on human nature and that of his planned civilization. In 1836, The Morning Post found Owen, in his Book of the New Moral World, to be “radical” and “destructive,” wanting to dissolve civilization and remake it; the idea that humanity had for millenia been living in systems contrary to their own nature and happiness was “almost incredible.”[33] But the Post came from a more philosophical position and background than theological (“the Millenium [is] about as probable a consummation as the ‘Rational System’”).[34] Owen had therefore “displayed considerable acuteness and ability” regarding “metaphysical discussions,” making the book worth a read for ontologists and those who enjoyed a “‘keen encounter of the wit.’”[35]

As we saw with the anonymous writer in The Oracle of Reason, the five facts divided not only freethinkers and Christians, but also freethinkers as a group. There was too much intellectual diversity for consensus. For example, Charles Southwell, who was “rapidly becoming one of the most popular freethought lecturers in London,” debated Owen’s facts with well-known atheist Richard Carlile in Lambeth, a borough of south London.[36] The room “was crowded to suffocation, and hundreds retired unable to attain admittance. The discussion lasted two nights, and was conducted with talent and good feeling by both parties.”[37] Southwell defended the facts, while Carlile went on the offensive against them. 

The agnostic Lloyd Jones, journalist and friend of Owen, had much to say of Richard Carlile’s lectures on this topic.[38] In A Reply to Mr. R. Carlile’s Objections to the Five Fundamental Facts as Laid Down by Mr. Owen, Jones remarked that Carlile had called Owen’s Book of the New Moral World a “book of blunders” during his talk on November 27, 1837, but the audience “certainly could not avoid observing the multitudinous blunders committed by yourself, in endeavouring to prove it such.”[39] Carlile, according to Jones, insisted that individuals had much more power to steel themselves against circumstances and environments than Owen was letting on, throwing facts one and two into doubt. This is all rather one-sided, as Jones did not even bother to quote Carlile directly, but instead wrote, “You tell us we have a power to adopt or reject [convictions and feelings]: you have not given us your reasons for so saying; in fact, you did not condescend to reason upon any of the subjects broached during the evening’s discussion.”[40] Carlile should “try the question… Can you, by a voluntary action of your mind, believe that to be true which you now consider to be false; — or believe that to be false which you now consider true?… Certainly not.”[41] Jones also defended the idea that conviction and will were distinct, rather than one and the same as Carlile insisted.[42]

For the socialists, many of them of course Owenites anyway, there was much acceptance of the five facts. James Pate, for the Socialists of Padiham, wrote that an Owenite named Mr. Fleming came to their organization and, to a full house of about 300 people, “proved, in a plain yet forcible manner, the truth of the five fundamental facts; and…showed how little difficulty there would be in the practical application of Mr. Owen’s views to all classes of society.”[43] The audience was “so fully convinced” that few “dared venture to question any remarks.”[44] But here divergent thoughts existed too, as we saw with H. Clarke. The branches of religious socialism and secular socialism made for varying thoughts on human nature among the radicals, or simply those sympathetic to or not offended by the idea of socialism. Frederick Lees, for instance, secretary of the British Association for the Suppression of Intemperance, castigated the “infidelity” of Owenism and his five facts but had little to say of socialism, save that it was a front for the former: “In the fair name of Socialism, and in the mask of friendship, Judas like, she [untruth, especially as related to infidelity] seeks to ensnare and betray.”[45] Owen’s followers, while they professed to desire the “establishment of a ‘SOCIAL COMMUNITY,’ their chief and greatest object is the ascendancy of an ‘INFIDEL CREED.’”[46] Lees, striking a sympathetic note once more, added that Owenites should “dissolve the forced and arbitrary union between their absurd and infidel metaphysics, and the practical or working part of Socialism, which association of the two excites the rightful opposition of all lovers of christian truth…”[47]

For a forceful defense of religious socialism, take T.H. Hudson’s lengthy work Christian Socialism, Explained and Enforced, and Compared with Infidel Fellowship: Especially, as Propounded by Robert Owen, Esq., and His Disciples. It was up to “the Christian Religion to secure true socialism,” whereas Owen’s views were “more likely to serve the purposes of the Prince of darkness.”[48] Hudson spent one chapter, about forty pages, attacking the five facts, followed by three chapters, over 120 pages, advocating for Christian Socialism. The five facts were “based on the false assumptions, that man is good by nature” and were “decidedly irreligious.”[49] Hudson lambasted the “disguised atheism” of the first fact: it did not mention God as man’s creator, nor his spirit or soul, and left him helpless before nature, without free will.[50] The “infidel Socialist,” in believing facts two and three, deepened trust in fatalism and the irresponsibility of individuals, but also fell for a “gross contradiction.”[51] Hudson pointed out that the second fact established feelings and convictions were received independently of one’s will, yet the third fact stated the will was made up of, created by, one’s feelings and convictions.[52] Initially presented as distinct phenomena, subsequently as a unified phenomenon. J.R. Beard echoed this: it would have been better to say feelings and convictions were received “anteriorly ‘to his will’; for it is obviously his notion that man’s will is not independent, but the result, the creation of his feelings and convictions.”[53]

Like the atheist Carlile, Hudson thought one could put up “resistance” to external influences, could decide whether to “receive” or reject feelings and convictions — an exercise in willpower, which was thus independent of and prior to feelings and convictions; a person was not a “slave to circumstances.”[54] This was a refrain of Owen’s critics, with the added element at times of the impossibility of personal change under Owen’s theory (indeed the impossibility that changing circumstances could change people). For instance, Minister John Eustace Giles, in Socialism, as a Religious Theory, Irrational and Absurd (1839), based on his lectures in Leeds, wondered how Owen could believe that “‘man is the creature of circumstances’” yet “professes to have become wise” — did that not show Owen had “resisted” circumstances?[55] Did not this, plus Owen’s desire to “change the condition of the world…thus shew that while man is the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of man”?[56] After focusing on semantics and perceived ambiguities in the fourth fact, but not closed to the possibility it was a simple truism, Hudson saw the improvement of individuals in the fifth fact true but was insulted that Christianity, no longer “being alienated from God” and addressing humanity’s “depraved nature,” was not thought necessary to this improvement alongside changing environments.[57] Indeed, most egregious was the Owenite belief that people were fundamentally good.[58]

Whether due to varying personal beliefs or simply varying cautions about driving away potential converts in a pious age, the actual presentation of the fundamental facts as irreligious was not consistent. Lloyd Jones, in an 1839 debate over whether socialism was atheistic with Mr. Troup, editor of The Montrose Review, asked some variant of “Where is the Atheism here?” after reading each of the five facts.[59] Whereas Owen, also an unbeliever, in an 1837 debate with Rev. J.H. Roebuck of Manchester, called religions “geographical insanities” that could be wiped away by the five facts.[60] “Mr. Roebuck stated…that the two systems for which we contend are opposed to each other, and that both, therefore, cannot be true. Herein we perfectly agree.”[61] The national discourse so intertwined the facts and the question of God that a person, on either side of the debate, could not help but assume that one would accompany the other. When a debate on “the mystery of God” was proposed to Owenite J. Smith in January 1837, “the challenge was [mis]understood by myself and all our friends, to be the discussion of the five fundamental facts.”[62]

Overall, perhaps Robert Owen’s facts flustered the religious and irreligious, and socialists and anti-socialists alike, because they were simply so counterintuitive — not to mention theoretical, without contemporary science to back them up. Owen wrote, in The Book of the New Moral World, for instance: “Man is not, therefore, to be made a being of a superior order by teaching him that he is responsible for his will and his actions.”[63] Such blunt statements turned on its head what many, across ideologies, judged common sense. Owen’s ideas were “contrary to common sense” for Hudson, Christian socialist, in the same way they were “opposed to the common sense of mankind” for Giles, anti-socialist.[64] Would not teaching individual moral responsibility enable personal change and create a better society? Not so for Owen. The will was formed by circumstances — thus true personal change came about by purposefully changing environments. Create a better society first, and the positive personal change would follow. These were, according to Owen, “the laws of nature respecting man, individually, and the science of society,” and few posited laws of nature, proven or otherwise, do not provoke intense philosophical debate.[65]

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[1] J. Eustace Giles, Socialism, as a Religious Theory, Irrational and Absurd: the First of Three Lectures on Socialism (as Propounded by Robert Owen and Others) Delivered in the Baptist Chapel South-Parade, Leeds, September 23, 1838 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., Ward & Co., G. Wightman, 1838), 4, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiuo.ark:/13960/t63560551&view=1up&seq=10&q1=founder.

[2] George Jacob Holyoake, The History of Co-operation (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1906), 1:147.

[3] J.F.C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 66.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Nanette Whitbread, The Evolution of the Nursery-infant School: A History of Infant and Nursery Education in Britain, 1800-1970 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 39:9-10.

[6] Frank Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biography (London: Hutchinson & CO, 1906), 481-482, 499-502.

[7] The Morning Post, September 14, 1836, cited in “The Book of the New Moral World,” The New Moral World (Manchester: Abel Heywood, 1836-7), 3:6, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31970026956075&view=1up&seq=18&size=125&q1=%22five%20fundamental%20facts%22.

[8] The Westminster Review (London: Robert Heward, 1832), 26:317, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433096159896&view=1up&seq=329&q1=%22five%20fundamental%20facts%22; The New Moral World (London: Thomas Stagg, 1836), 2:62, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31970026956117&view=1up&seq=74&q1=%22five%20fundamental%20facts%22.

[9] Robert Owen, Outline of the Rational System of Society (London: Home Colonization Society, 1841), 2, retrieved fromhttps://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hnsp9t&view=1up&seq=6.

[10] Ibid, 1.

[11] This was explicitly stated by critics. Dismantle the five facts and the rest of the system goes down with it. See T.H. Hudson, Christian Socialism, Explained and Enforced, and Compared with Infidel Fellowship, Especially, As Propounded by Robert Owen, Esq., and His Disciples (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1839), 52, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433075925721&view=1up&seq=62&q1=%22fundamental%20facts%22.

[12] Owen, Outline, 3.

[13] Ibid, 14.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Robert Owen, The Book of the New Moral World (London: Richard Taylor, 1836), 17, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015003883991&view=1up&seq=47&q1=%22five%20fundamental%20facts%22.

[16] The Oracle of Reason (London: Thomas Paterson, 1842), 1:113, retrieved from https://archive.org/details/oracleofreasonor01lond/page/112/mode/2up?q=five+facts.

[17] Ibid, 161.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] The Monthly Review (London: G. Henderson, 1836), 3:62, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.319510028065374&view=1up&seq=80&q1=%22five%20fundamental%20facts%22.

[21] Ibid, 62, 67-68.

[22] Ibid, 63.

[23] Ibid, 62-63.

[24] The Christian Teacher and Chronicle of Beneficence (London: Charles Fox, 1838), 4:219, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.ah6jrz&view=1up&seq=255&q1=%22five%20facts%22.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid, 220.

[27] Owen, Book, 22-24.

[28] J.R. Beard, The Religion of Jesus Christ Defended from the Assaults of Owenism (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Company, 1839), 233, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hnmy5r&view=1up&seq=243&q1=%22second%20fact%22.

[29] Christian Teacher, 220.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid, 220; New Moral World, 2:261.

[32] Christian Teacher, 220.

[33] New Moral World, 3:6.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791-1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), 69.

[37] The New Moral World (Leeds: Joshua Hobson, 1839), 6:957, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31970026956133&view=1up&seq=361&size=125&q1=%22five%20fundamental%20facts%22.

[38] Regarding Jones’ agnosticism, see: Report of the Discussion betwixt Mr Troup, Editor of the Montrose Review, on the part of the Philalethean Society, and Mr Lloyd Jones, of Glasgow, on the part of the Socialists, in the Watt Institution Hall, Dundee on the propositions, I That Socialism is Atheistical; and II That Atheism is Incredible and Absurd (Dundee: James Chalmers & Alexander Reid, 1839), retrieved from shorturl.at/pvxM1.

[39] Lloyd Jones, A Reply to Mr. Carlile’s Objections to the Five Fundamental Facts as Laid Down by Mr. Owen (Manchester: A. Heywood, 1837), 4, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89097121669&view=1up&seq=12&q1=%22five%20fundamental%20facts%22.

[40] Ibid, 9.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid, 10-11.

[43] New Moral World, 3:380.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Frederick R. Lees, Owenism Dissected: A Calm Examination of the Fundamental Principles of Robert Owen’s Misnamed “Rational System” (Leeds: W.H. Walker, 1838), 7, retrieved from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112054157646&view=1up&seq=7&q1=%22socialism%22.

[46] Ibid, 16.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Hudson, Christian Socialism, 4, 13.

[49] Ibid, 50-51.

[50] Ibid, 53-63.

[51] Ibid, 63-64, 66.

[52] Ibid, 66.

[53] Beard, Religion, 234.

[54] Hudson, Christian Socialism, 65-66.

[55] Giles, Socialism, 7.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Hudson, Christian Socialism, 72-81, 87-88.

[58] Ibid, 89.

[59] Report of the Discussion, 12.

[60] Public Discussion, between Robert Owen, Late of New Lanark, and the Rev. J.H. Roebuck, of Manchester (Manchester: A. Heywood, 1837), 106-107, retrieved fromhttps://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c080961126&view=1up&seq=111&q1=%22fundamental%20facts%22.

[61] Ibid, 107.

[62] New Moral World, 3:122.

[63] Owen, Book, 20.

[64] Hudson, Christian Socialism, 65; Giles, Socialism, 36.

[65] Owen, Book, 20.