Renaissance and Nazism as Ideas of Progress By Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

The Renaissance ("rebirth" c. 1348-1648) evolved around a modernist and, therefore, reactionary idea of progress. This statement is not as nonsensical as it sounds. As Roger Griffin observed in his essay "Springtime for Hitler" (The New Humanist, Volume 122 Issue 4 July/August 2007):

"(Modernism is the) drive to formulate a new social order capable of redeeming humanity from the growing chaos and crisis resulting from modernity’s devastation of traditional securities ... Modernity ... by threatening the cohesion of traditional culture and its capacity to absorb change, triggers an instinctive self-defensive reflex to repair it by reasserting “eternal” values and truths that transcend the ephemerality of individual existence ... From this perspective modernism is a radical reaction against modernity."

Adolf Hitler put it more succinctly:

"The new age of today is at work on a new human type. Men and women are to be healthier, stronger: there is a new feeling of life, a new joy in life.”

Hence the twin Nazi projects of eugenic euthanasia and continent-wide mass genocide - both components of a Herculean program of social-anthropological engineering. The Nazis sought to perfect humanity by ridding it of inferior and deleterious specimen and by restoring a glorious, "clean", albeit self-consciously idealized past.

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