Ellul,
Jacques. “The Betrayal of the West.” Sources
of European History Since 1900. Ed. Marvin Perry, Matthew Berg, and James
Krukones. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. 492-496. Print.
Hitler, Adolf. “Mein Kampf.” Meridians: Sources in World History. Ed. Ashlee Quosigk. New York: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2011. 97-102. Print.
Summary:
In “The
Betrayal of the West,” Ellul discusses the importance of the West’s contribution
to history and culture. He claims that
ideas such as freedom, the “rights of man”, the elimination of exploitation,
and socialism, no matter where they are found in the world, originated in the
West. His main themes are the individual
and freedom, which he calls “the goal and desire implicit in the history of all
civilizations” and what “made the West what it is” (496). “The West alone has defended the inalienable
rights of the human person, the dignity of the individual, the man who is alone
with everyone against him,” Ellul claims (493).
He then goes through the heritage of the West, beginning with the Jews,
then the Greeks, and then the Romans. He
admits the failings of the West, but insists that the “certain number of
values, movements, and orientations that no one else has provided” not be
overlooked or discounted (495). The
final paragraph in the selection contains this statement: “the West… thus
produced a type of human being that is unique in history: true western man… I
am bound to say that I regard this type as superior to anything I have seen or
known elsewhere” (496).
My Opinion:
When I read
this selection, I was immediately struck with how similar it is to parts of “Mein
Kampf” that we read earlier on. This
really surprised me because Ellul was a sociologist, an intellectual, while I
do not consider Hitler to be an intellectual.
I am sure that Ellul would not condone Hitler’s application of these
ideas, but the theories are remarkably alike.
Compare some
of these quotes:
“But if,
starting today, all further Aryan influence upon Japan should stop, and
supposing that Europe and America were to perish, then a further development of
Japan’s present rise in science and technology could take place for a little
while longer; but in the time of a few years the source would dry out, Japanese
life would gain, but its culture would stiffen and fall back into the sleep out
of which it was startled seven decades ago by the Aryan wave of culture”
(Hitler, 99).
“I simply
observe that the peoples of the world had abided in relative ignorance and [religious]
repose until the encounter with the West set them on their journey. Please, then, don’t deafen us with talk about
the greatness of Chinese or Japanese civilization. These civilizations existed indeed, but in a
larval or embryonic state; they were approximations, essays. The always related to only one sector of the
human or social totality and tended to be static and immobile. Because the West was motivated by the ideal
of freedom and had discovered the individual, it alone launched society in its
entirety on its present course” (Ellul, 495).
Ellul’s
superiority of the Western man sounds a lot like Hitler’s superiority of the
Aryan. Hitler’s idea of the Aryan being
a “culture-founder” is very similar to Ellul’s ideas such as: “The West turned
the whole human project into a conscious, deliberate business” (494).
My question
is this: should Ellul’s ideas be discounted because of this similarity to
Hitler? Is the reminiscence of something which is, granted, repugnant enough to
condemn it? Perhaps such a connection
isn’t enough to entirely reject it, but I would say it at least makes it highly
suspect.
