Rationalism

Weber captured the essence of the character of modernity when he predicted that growing rationality would result not in liberating humankind, but in confining humankind to an "iron cage" of rationality (Weber 1979). Throughout his work, "Weber alludes to the 'unavoidable elements of irrationality in the [capitalist] system'" (Eldridge 1971, p. 65). Weber argued that capitalism was the only socioeconomic system where such things as bureaucracy could be found (Ritzer 1992).

The following is an application of the theory of rationalism to the Holocaust. The key to this analysis is that while in rhetoric Nazism appears to oppose Enlightenment rationality, in practice there have been few political and economic orders as rationalized so completely as Nazi Germany. What was missing, of course, was the humanism and the democracy of the Enlightenment, essential safeguards in tempering the excesses of applying ratio to ever increasing domains of human social life.

The Holocaust: The End-Product Was Death

George Ritzer (1995)

Weber wrote about rationalization in the early 1900s. It can be argued that his worst fears about these processes were realized in the Nazi Holocaust that began within a few decades of his death in 1920.

Zygrnunt Bauman contends that "the Holocaust may serve as a paradigm of modern bureaucratic rationality." Like the bureaucracy, the Holocaust was a distinctive product of Western civilization. Further, Bauman argues that the Holocaust was not an aberration, but "in keeping with everything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world." That is, the Holocaust required the rationality of the modern world. It could not have occurred in premodern, less rationalized societies. In fact, the pogroms that occurred in such societies were too primitive, too inefficient to murder systematically the millions of people killed in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust can be seen as an example of modern social engineering in which the goal was the production of a perfectly rational society. To the Nazis, this perfect society was free of Jews (as well as gypsies, gays, lesbians, and the disabled). Bauman sees an analogy here to gardening. Just as a perfect garden is free of weeds so a perfect Nazi society was one that was Fudenfrei. Using a medical analogy, Hitler also defined the Jews as a "virus," a disease that had to be eliminated from Nazi society.

The Holocaust had all of the basic characteristics of rationalization:

It was an efficient mechanism for the destruction of massive numbers of human beings. For example, early experiments showed that bullets were inefficient, the Nazis eventually settled on gas as the most efficient means of destroying people. The Nazis also found it efficient to use members of the Jewish community to perform a variety of tasks (for example, choosing the: next group of victims) that they otherwise would have had to perform themselves. Many Jews cooperated because it seemed like the "rational" thing to do (they might be able to save others, or themselves) in such a rationalized system.
The Holocaust emphasized calculability, for instance, how many people could be killed in the shortest period of time. There was certainly little attention paid to the quality of the life, or even of the death, of the Jews as they marched inexorably to the gas chambers. In another quantitative sense, the Holocaust has the dubious distinction of being seen as the most extreme of mass exterminations: "Like everything else done in the modern-rational, planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed. co-ordinated-way, the Holocaust left behind and put to shame all its alleged pre-modern equivalents, exposing them as primitive, wasteful and ineffective by comparison. Like everything else in our modern society, the Holocaust was an accomplishment in every respect superior.... It towers high above the past genocidal episodes.''
There was an effort to make mass murder predictable. Thus, the whole process had an assembly-line quality about it. Trains snaked their the concentration camps, victims lined up and followed a set series of steps. Once the process was complete, camp workers produced stacks of dead bodies for systematic disposal.
The victims were controlled by a huge nonhuman technology including the camps, the train system, the crematoria, and the bureaucracy that managed the entire process. Here is how Feingold describes some elements of this nonhuman technology:

"[Auschwitz] was also a mundane extension of the modern factory system. Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end-product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager's production charts. The chimneys, the very symbol of the modern factory system, poured forth acrid smoke produced by burning human flesh. The brilliantly organized railroad grid of modern Europe carried a new kind of raw material to the factories. It did so in the same manner as with other cargo... Engineers designed the crematoria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with a zest and efficiency... What we witnessed was nothing less than a massive scheme of social engineering."

The Holocaust represented the ultimate in the irrationality of rationality--more specifically, the ultimate in dehumanization. After all, what could by more dehumanizing than murdering millions of people in such a mechanical way? Further, for the murders to have occurred in the first place, the victims had to be dehumanized, that is, "reduced to a set of quantitative measures." Bauman concludes, "German bureaucratic machinery was put in the service of a goal incomprehensible in its irrationality."
There has been no more heinous crime in the history of humankind. First, the Holocaust was based on the principals of formal rationality, relying extensively on the paradigm of that type of rationality-the bureaucracy. Second. the Holocaust was also linked, as we have seen, to the factory system. Finally, the spread of formal rationality today [rationalization processes] supports Bauman's view that something like the Holocaust could happen again.
Excerpt from Ritzer's 1995 The MacDonaldization of Society.