On Disobedience_ Why Freedom Means Saying _No_ to Power - Erich Fromm [11]
However, the attraction to death which Unamuno called necrophilia is not a product of fascist thought alone. It is a phenomenon deeply rooted in a culture which is increasingly dominated by the bureaucratic organizations of the big corporations, governments, and armies, and by the central role of man-made things, gadgets, and machines. This bureaucratic industrialism tends to transform human beings into things. It tends to replace nature by technical devices, the organic by the inorganic.
One of the earliest expressions of this love for destruction and for machines, and of the contempt for woman (woman is a manifestation of life for man just as man is a manifestation of life for woman), is to be found in the futuristic manifesto (by Marinetti in 1909), one of the intellectual forerunners of Italian fascism. He wrote:
. . . 4. We declare that the world’s splendor has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing motor-car, its frame adorned with great pipes, like snakes with explosive breath . . . a roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on a shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We shall sing of the man at the steering wheel, whose ideal stem transfixes the Earth, rushing over the circuit of her orbit.
. . . 8. Why should we look behind us, when we have to break in the mysterious portals of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. Already we live in the absolute, since we have already created speed, eternal and ever-present.
9. We wish to glorify War—the only health-giver of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill, the contempt for woman.
10. We wish to destroy the museums, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian meannesses.
There is indeed no greater distinction among human beings than that between those who love life and those who love death. This love of death is a typically human acquisition. Man is the only animal that can be bored, he is the only animal that can love death. While the impotent man (I am not referring to sexual impotence) cannot create life, he can destroy it and thus transcend it. The love of death in the midst of living is the ultimate perversion. There are some who are the true necrophiles—and they salute war and promote it, even though they are mostly not aware of their motivation and rationalize their desires as serving life, honor, or freedom. They are probably the minority; but there are many who have never made the choice between life and death, and who have escaped in busy-ness in order to hide this. They do not salute destruction, but they also do not salute life. They lack the joy of life which would be necessary to oppose war vigorously.
Goethe once said that the most profound distinction between various historical periods is that between belief and disbelief, and added that all epochs in which belief dominates are brilliant, uplifting, and fruitful, while those in which disbelief dominates vanish because nobody cares to devote himself to the unfruitful. The “belief” Goethe spoke of is deeply rooted in the love of life. Cultures which create the conditions for loving life are also cultures of belief; those which cannot create this love also cannot create belief.
Bertrand Russell is a man of belief. In reading his books and in watching his activities for peace his love of life seems to me the mainspring of his whole person. He warns the world of impending doom precisely as the prophets did, because he loves life and all its forms and manifestations. He, again like the prophets, is not a determinist who claims that the historical future is already determined; he is an “alternativist” who sees that what is determined are certain limited and ascertainable alternatives. Our alternative is that between the end of the nuclear arms race—and destruction. Whether the voice of this prophet will win over the voices of doom and weariness depends