The Most Pessimistic Book Written in Los Angeles

Picture this. It is 1944. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer are living in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, surrounded by Hollywood, sunshine, and the full machinery of American consumer culture. They are German Jewish émigrés who fled Nazi Germany. They have watched, with their own eyes, the country that produced Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, and Hegel also produce Auschwitz. And they are sitting in the most gleaming, optimistic, entertainment-saturated city on earth, writing what is perhaps the most despairing book of the 20th century.

The book is called Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, revised 1947). Its central argument is not that Nazism was an aberration, a temporary madness that overtook an otherwise healthy civilization. Its argument is that Nazism was a logical consequence of the Enlightenment project itself. Reason did not fail when fascism rose. Reason produced fascism, or at least created the conditions for it. The very tools that were supposed to liberate humanity turned out to be the most efficient instruments of domination.

This is an extraordinary claim, and it requires a serious philosophical argument to back it up. Adorno and Horkheimer provide one, and it is worth following carefully.

The Enlightenment, they argue, was built on a particular conception of reason: instrumental reason, or what they sometimes call identificatory thinking. The Enlightenment promised to free humanity from myth, superstition, and fear by replacing them with rational knowledge. But the kind of rational knowledge it valued was not contemplative, appreciative, or open-ended. It was the kind that masters, controls, and manipulates: the reason of the engineer, the scientist who extracts usable laws from nature, the administrator who organizes human beings into efficient systems.

Instrumental reason is reason in the service of a predetermined end, and it is extraordinarily powerful. It is why modern technology works. It is also why modern technology can be turned toward mass murder with breathtaking efficiency, because instrumental reason has no internal resources for evaluating the ends it serves. It can tell you how to achieve anything. It cannot tell you whether the anything is worth achieving. Its only question is: what are the means to this end? The question of whether the end is good is not a question reason, in this instrumental sense, can answer.

Here is the historical move that makes the argument so disturbing. Adorno and Horkheimer point out that myth, which the Enlightenment was supposed to replace, was already a kind of proto-instrumental reason. Greek mythology systematically organizes and names the forces of nature, establishing human control over them by identifying them, classifying them, giving them forms that can be appeased or outwitted. Odysseus, their paradigm case, survives by being cunning: by outwitting nature and the gods through a kind of proto-rational manipulation. The Enlightenment did not abolish mythological thinking. It inherited its basic structure, accelerated it, and stripped away the residue of animist respect that had at least partially constrained it.

The frightening corollary: in freeing itself from myth, Enlightenment reason destroyed the symbolic, the non-instrumental, the aspects of human life that resisted reduction to means and ends. Art, love, religion, the sense of the sacred, solidarity with the particular person in front of you: all of these are either rationalized away or converted into commodities. The result is not freedom but a new kind of domination, more total than anything mythology achieved because it has no outside. At least under the old myths, the forest had spirits. Under instrumental reason, the forest is timber.