gracchusdixit

In 1960, a Bulgarian-born writer named Elias Canetti published a strange and provocative book, entitled, in the original German, Masse und Macht.  Two years later, it was translated into English and published under the title, Crowds and Power.  It was difficult then to shoehorn Canetti’s work into any sort of conventional category, and it still is.  Crowds and Power is a work that defies tidy classifications. It commingles mythology and anthropology, sociology and psychology, history and philosophy, all the while combining scrupulous analysis with sometimes fantastical interpretation.

When Crowds and Power was first published, there were some who hailed it as a tour de force, as one of the most original and insightful works of the 20th century.  There were others who dismissed it as pretentious hocus-pocus.  The verdict is still out and will probably never be settled.  I will say this, however:  reading Crowds and Power today, more than 50 years after it first appeared, is nothing less than frightening—because so much of what Canetti had to say seems so eerily familiar.

To appreciate this book and its relevance to our present circumstances, it may be helpful to say something about the man who wrote it.  Elias Canetti’s ancestors were Sephardic Jews, who fled Spain to escape persecution under the Inquisition, eventually making their way to the city of Adrianople, which was situated at the intersection of Europe and Asia and part of the Ottoman Empire.  Canetti himself was born in 1905, in the Bulgarian city of Ruse on the southern bank of the Danube, also ruled by the Ottomans.  As the Ottoman Empire began to unravel, the Canetti’s emigrated yet again—to England.  There it was that Elias began his long and astonishing intellectual journey.

He had grown up speaking Bulgarian and Ladino (sometimes called “Judaeo-Spanish,” though it is a mixture of many languages); he became fluent in English, wrote in German, and was conversant in French.  After studying in Frankfurt and Vienna, he became a British subject, but spent the last 20 years of his life in Zurich.  Along the way, he picked up a Nobel Prize for literature.  Elias Canetti was an old-world cosmopolitan to his fingertips, at home in a dozen different cultures, with a range of interests and a depth of knowledge that is almost impossible to imagine in the cramped and crass age we now inhabit.  It is this that accounts for the fascinating complexity of his book.

When I say “complexity,” I don’t mean “obscurity”.  On the contrary, Canetti’s language is clear as day, and his premise is simple.  It is that much of human behavior can be traced back to primitive origins, to a time when human beings huddled together in close-knit groups for warmth, sustenance, and safety.  There were no “individuals” then; there was only the pack, the tribe, and ultimately the crowd.  It is Canetti’s claim that the crowd behavior we learned over the course of several hundred thousands of years is with us still.  Canetti identifies the different kinds of crowds according to the emotions that move them—anger, joy, fear, jealousy—and he shows how the impulses motivating crowd behavior cast their spell over politics, religion, and war.

Underlying the various kinds of crowd behavior Canetti describes, there is a single psychological narrative.  When a crowd begins to gather, tension sets in, as individuals struggle to decide whether to surrender themselves to the crowd or to stand apart.  This tension builds, until it can be contained no longer, leading to a moment of “discharge”—a cathartic release that can be ecstatic, inspiring, or violent.  The moment of “discharge” is what makes a crowd.  Only then do individuals sublimate their differences and surrender to the group.   In Canetti’s words:  “It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.”  The moment of discharge can be harmless and benign, but it always contains the potential for something more sinister.

The “discharge” Canetti describes is not an abstraction.  A “discharge” occurs, for example, when the pent-up crowd at a football game leaps to its feet and frantically cheers a touchdown or boos a fumble.  It occurs when a congregation of evangelicals rise from their pews, shut their eyes, begin to sway, and intone “amen” and “hallelujah”.  A “discharge” occurred during the French Revolution, when the Parisian mob jammed into the Place de la Bastille and roared its collective approval, as the severed heads of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI dropped onto the sawdust below the guillotine.  It occurred when throngs of glassy-eyed Germans, once the most cultured people in Europe, goose-stepped into the stadium at Nuremberg, thrust up their arms in salute, and shouted, in a single demonic voice, Sieg Heil! 

Among the many crowds Canetti describes, perhaps the most terrifying is what he calls  a ”Baiting Crowd:”

This crowd is out for killing and it knows whom it wants to kill.  It heads for this goal with unique determination and cannot be cheated of it.  The proclaiming of the goal, and the spreading about of who it is that is to perish, is enough to make the crowd form.  This concentration on killing is of a special kind and of an unsurpassed intensity.  Everyone wants to participate; everyone wants to strike a blow and, in order to do this, pushes as near as he can to the victim…One important reason for the rapid growth of the baiting crowd is that there is no risk.  There is no risk because the crowd have immense superiority on their side.  The victim can do nothing to them…A murder shared with many others, which is not only safe and permitted, but indeed recommended, is irresistible to the great majority of men.

It is impossible to read these words without thinking of Donald Trump and the feral crowds that swarmed, and still swarm, to his rallies, pummeling protestors, intimidating journalists, and chanting “Lock her up!”  This behavior surely fits Canetti’s definition of a “Baiting Crowd” that is “out for killing” and knows “whom it wants to kill”.

If Crowds and Power has anything to say to us today, it is this:  the veneer of civilization and culture, of laws and norms, that stands between human decency and human depravity is as thin as a sheet of glass and just as fragile.  A mere chip can suddenly spread to become a sprawling crack—one that may shatter civilization itself.  Thanks to Donald Trump, there is already a chip in that glass; we cannot in good conscience sit by and wait for it to spread.