The 20th Century as a Boorish Uncle

I wrote an appreciation of negative role-models here. These are people who set such a bad example that nobody close to them will be tempted to emulate them. They're an evil fun-house mirror showing you how bad it can get, like the boorish uncle who berates his wife in full view of the extended family.

I think of the 20th century as the ultimate negative role model. So many horrible things were tried. This is true also of previous centuries, but this time we had modern technology to record it and preserve this bad example for posterity's sake. Fascism. Eugenics, leading to whole-sale industrial genocide. Communism. Socialism. Hyper-inflation. So many terrible ideas were tried, and what's more they were tried to the hilt. We saw pure, undiluted examples of these phenomena. Eugenics is so horrifying because it's morally revolting to see it in actual practice, even if some pre-Nazi eugenicists had insufficient imagination to see the horror in theory. Same with communism. Even if centralized planning of an entire society had been intellectually respectable in theory, history has repudiated it.

My darkest thought is that history had to try these things to see just how bad they are. It would be easier to indulge empty ruminations if such-and-such a people didn't exist if it weren't for the horrific examples of Nazi genocide. It seems obvious now to us right-thinking folk, but I don't think it would be quite so obvious without a stark negative role-model in recent historical memory. To take another example, full-fledged communism is still respectable in some circles, but far less so than it would otherwise be. Coffee house intellectuals and college sophomores like to pontificate about how awesome society might be if someone were in control. History's repudiation of communism hasn't been quite as fully learned as the repudiation of eugenics and genocide. But the lesson is still there for the taking. Someone more knowledgeable than a coffee house intellectual can point to horrific counter-examples supplied by the 20th century. This would be a lot harder if communism hadn't been tried (and tried and tried and tried...).

I actually have a darker thought still. These lessons will fade from living memory, and we'll have to re-learn them with another round of horrific counter-examples. We'll begin to regard Hitler and Stalin as benignly as we now regard, say, Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan. Or worse, we'll start to think, "You know, we have the data an the computing power now to do central planning. And our understanding of social science is a lot more mature than it was in the 20th century. Let's give it another go." (Salvador Allende thought he could centrally plan the economy of Chile with the computing power available to him in the early 1970s, see here. I can imagine someone with better computers having the hubris to think they can naturally do better.) I don't know if we're really headed for that. I tend to believe the optimistic Stephen Pinker/Matt Ridley/Julian Simon narrative that life is getting better, cleaner, less violent, and more enlightened. But I'm not fully sure of that, and it terrifies me.