Terrorism, Crowds and Power, and the Dogs of War

"There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown."¹ So begins Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti's monumental meditation on human nature. What might Canetti have to tell us in the U.S. about our situation post-elections 2000 and 2002, and post-September 2001? At a time of increasing mass movements world-wide and of intense religious and cultural antagonisms, his insights into the human condition offer an illuminating perspective on the apparent political motivations of the current U.S. administration and their potential outcomes. A Nobel Prize winner who grew up between the World Wars in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany and was forced to flee Vienna when the Nazis came in 1938, Canetti spent much of his life thinking about the great catastrophes of his century. His assumption—who can doubt it?—was that "There is no other hope for the survival of mankind than knowing enough about the people it is made up of."² His experience, research, and reflection led him to conclude that a foundation block of the human psyche rests on our impulse to come together into crowds and to extend them through time. A universal fear motivates that impulse: the terror of an unknown touch that threatens predatory seizing, tearing, dismembering, and incorporation.

Although human masses are not always innocent or benign, the alternative response to the fear of an unknown touch, the drive to power, almost never is. The pathological opposite of the desire to form crowds, the desire to achieve security through the accumulation of power largely duplicates the mental illness called paranoia. Seekers of power attempt to survive alone rather than in crowds. Incapable of the deep empathy with others that Canetti called "transformation," they dehumanize those who oppose them, and assume that all who differ from them, however various, wear confounding disguises. Beneath those disguises, which it is the unending mission of the powerful to tear away, may be found in every case the same enemy.

Crowds and Power distills Canetti's ruminations on his dangerous, beloved species into a dense series of interlocking essays. It offers few prescriptions, but contains much to help us comprehend ourselves and our often obscure motives. Concrete in all his writing and resolutely independent, Canetti helps us to understand our time, when mass movements swell and threaten to clash horrifically and when national leaders are able to accrue unprecedented concentrations of power. As our President declares that the world is divided into two simple categories, those who oppose terrorism and those who support it, and as his Administration pushes for gargantuan military budgets and authoritarian powers, many people feel not more but less secure. Canetti's persuasive analyses of crowds and power offer compelling arguments in support of the doubts many harbor toward the current U.S. Administration's response to terrorist attacks and its tactics in the face of continuing threats.

Terrorism awakens the inborn human horror of mysterious, malign contact. It can strike anywhere, in the guise of anyone. Terrorists are the ideal "unknown," an incomprehensible Other—at once sub-and superhumanly relentless. Like evil itself, they cannot be understood, only labeled. They cannot be persuaded to quit their wickedness, but must be compelled to do so ... or killed. They are the ultimate justification for ever more extravagant military spending, because there can be no end to their threat nor any fully adequate defense against it.

On September 11, 2001, television presented us and the rest of the world with ceaselessly repeated images of the second plane hitting the second tower, the towers collapsing in apocalyptic explosions as crowds of people fled, the flaming Pentagon, lower Manhattan streaming smoke against the blue sky of a clear late-summer day. As if by repeating and rearranging the pictures, the assaults could be tamed and made less terrifying. But at the same time, the repetitions of those images documented the incomprehensibility, the terrible mystery of...