The Nazi movement and the Holocaust had early origins that were easily detectable. We must understand how Nazism formed in Germany to understand how we can detect whether a similar philosophy can survive and thrive in the modern world. I argue that the conditions for Nazism are unlikely to be ripe for today because modern western culture is vastly different from the 19th century.
Intellectual Culture
18th century Enlightenment fundamentally changed Western society. Its reliance on science and reason rather than religion and faith made the preeminence of science inevitable. The 19th century brought the logical consequences of this intellectual movement. Modernism eschewed God and objective morality and regarded any such value system with suspicion. And with this, ideas of human nature and humanity fundamentally changed, too. And in the 19th century, racism became the standard norm.
French scientific racist Arthur de Gobineau wrote that there was an inequality of races, and the Aryan master race was the most excellent race of people. He argued that the Aryans should subjugate and rule over the weak races as a divine duty. German biologist Ernst Haeckel taught the idea of polygenism, which taught that human races were considered separate species instead of one species. This made one human race different from others, thus less human than others. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution brought a view called “Social Darwinism”, which championed that the strongest group must survive while the weakest group must be destroyed as the natural order of things. As one can see, metaphysical ideas such as human nature and humanity are totally absent in a materialist world, thus making the killing of millions of inferior “people” justified.
This brought about systematic racist ideas from serious philosophers. Houston Stewart Chamberlain wrote systematically about Aryanism in his famous work “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century”. This was followed by Alfred Rosenberg, the premier Nazi philosopher, writing his famous work, “The Myth of the 20th Century” to promote Nazism. Rosenberg used the same philosophical ideas that the aforementioned writers used to justify the destruction of the Jews and other inferior races. All in all, the genesis of the Holocaust can be seen with materialistic ideas morphing into genocide.
Conclusion
Nazism received its ideological values from its time period. With western culture engaging in materialism and positivism, state-sanctioned murder was permissible. Such people like disabled people were killed due to Social Darwinism. So-called inferior races were forcibly sterilized. And the state became the dominant force in society as its monopolized ability to enact violence enabled it to rule over the people. Modern western culture has moved away from Social Darwinism and raw materialism, but secularism is still influential. Despite this, there is no semblance of Social Darwinism or polygenism in modern culture. No tolerance for killing those who are deemed inferior. No tolerance for raw materialism. Thus, we can rest assure that movements like Nazism will not spring up in our present time. World War II’s trauma changed how Western Culture evaluated itself in light of the millions perished.