Crowds and Power, Terrorism, and the Hounds of War

Terrorism, Crowds and Power, and the Dogs of War

by Lesley Brill

This paper has been published in

Anthropological Quarterly 76(1), Winter 2003: 87-94.

“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 the attacks and attackers.

Alongside the grief, fright, and disgust, however, one sensed a swelling pleasure, even exuberance, as among the stunned, delighted audience of an over-the-top horror movie. Was it because at last, after nearly thirty years, there was a real battle to join? Desert Storm, long in build-up but brief and one-sided (if partly inconclusive), hardly counted. Grenada and Panama were risible. Various UN and NATO actions had some interest but weren’t really ours. The last true fight was Vietnam, humiliatingly lost both in Southeast Asia and at home. Here, finally, came a crisis worthy of our half-trillion-dollar-a-year armed forces, one offering moral certitude and potential redemption. With it arrived a dreary, increasingly dangerous bonus: “After 9/11” instantly replaced “In the new Millennium” as the signal cliché for declaring Now to be definitively different from an outmoded Then.

In truth, the attacks wrought on us even profounder, more exultant changes. They detonated, as explosively as the airliners slamming into the WTC Towers and the Pentagon, the bursting forth of a national crowd—a militant mass that at once reenergized and swallowed the existing, somewhat enervated crowds of religion and patriotism. “God Bless America.”

People love to be in crowds. “The outbreak of a war,” wrote Canetti, “is primarily an eruption of two crowds” (72). The declaration of war is a crowd phenomenon, unlikely to be contested by the small crowd of Congress (whatever its constitutional obligations) and supremely well suited to bringing together and galvanizing a mass of people or a nation.

Canetti identified four fundamental qualities of crowds: an insatiable desire to grow, equality among members, density, and direction (that is, a goal). The last two are relatively easy to provide in present circumstances. Combating terrorism (for our crowd) and western imperialists or unbelievers (for theirs) provides urgent motives; and density in an era of world-wide mass communications is easily achieved without actually needing to bring people physically together.

Growth is difficult for a crowd to maintain, since its appetite is endless and the sources for new recruits limited. In the shadow of the attacks, both the U.S. and al Qaeda almost immediately felt the need to enlarge the definitions of their enemies in order to attract new recruits. Osama bin Laden expanded his bellicose rhetoric to include the struggle of the Palestinians against Israel and, more recently, that of Iraq against the U.S. and Britain. Bush, after steadily increasing the reach of the word “terrorist,” unveiled his awkwardly named Axis of Evil. Neither of these ploys seems entirely fortuitous, although the U.S. Administration’s public campaign to demonize Iraq and Hussein (who hardly needs it) seems to be meeting some politically convenient success. Both risk diluting or distracting the passionately unified crowds against terrorism and unholiness that already exist.

Maintaining a sense of equality is especially problematic. It occurs fully, according to Canetti, only during the most intense moment of crowd dynamics, “when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal” (17). But such a moment is as fleeting as it is liberating. “It is based on an illusion; the people who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel equal forever” (18) As attention threatens to drift from terrorism to other things—energy policy, tax cuts, abortion, the environment—people return to preexisting concerns and the war crowd disintegrates. Frequent vague alarms from Washington are required to refocus dispersing interests. But crying terrorist can be effective for only so long and not even the proposed massive reformulation of much of the government into a Bureau of Homeland Security can keep people’s attention for more than a few months. Opening a second active battlefront, say Iraq, seems promising.

“The surest, and often the only, way by which a crowd can preserve itself lies in the existence of a second crowd to which it is related.” Canetti continues, “For the formation of a two-crowd structure it is important that both sides should feel roughly equal in strength” (63). Defining ourselves as a war crowd energizes and gives us stamina; but it also energizes those who define themselves against us, predictably recruits converts to their cause, and increases their as well as our durability. In the short run, we seem to gain by our crowd rhetoric, but in the long term we probably decrease our security by enlarging and stabilizing the crowd that opposes ours. As laws multiply crime, so can “defense” multiply aggression. Insisting on identifying much of the world as the enemy, we give much of the world cause to fear, to reason that we may attack them and that they must therefore defend themselves. Our perception of “terrorism” in others becomes the motive for their resistance to our “imperialism,” a danger nearly as incorrigible.

When it comes to maintaining its crowd through time, al Qaeda and other antagonistic Islamic organizations may have a decisive advantage. Their goal is distant, heaven itself, and the struggle they contemplate is life-long. Our goal is more proximate, security and freedom for the pursuit of happiness. We look forward to building wealth, advancing science, making art, supporting our families, having fun. Crowds and Power suggests that the U.S. should not be splitting humanity into opposing crowds—at least not for an extended time—but rather making the world congenial for individuals and relatively small, diverse groups. Our efforts might better be directed toward removing motives for the formation of antagonistic crowds than trying to suppress all anti-American feeling. Canetti was not the first to observe that “an attack from outside can only strengthen the crowd” (23)—in the current situation theirs, as well as ours. Long term, we should probably be appealing to the “small traitor” Canetti identifies in every crowd member “who wants to eat, drink, make love, and be left alone” (23). Hendrik Hertzberg advised soon after the attacks that they be called and dealt with as crimes rather than acts of war.[3] That strategy would probably not have been as effective for rallying a national crowd as the course the Administration has taken, but it may have led eventually to global configurations far safer for the United States.

To fund colossal military budgets and to justify the secrecy and reduced individual rights that the power-passionate in the government desire, the claim that our enemies are numerous, dedicated, and formidable is effective almost to the point of blackmail. Simultaneously, however, it does what some of our officials have alleged of even the mildest domestic dissent: gives the enemy aid and comfort. The extravagant claims that the Administration rehearses about the size, strength, and ferocity of al Qaeda and other terrorists must be a boon to their morale in difficult times. Such claims probably preserve the war crowd that the U. S. has become and inflate the President’s approval ratings, but by fixing a global two-crowd structure as the basis for American foreign and domestic policy, the Bush White House may ultimately extend the very existence of the most dangerous of our adversaries.

Consciously or not, keeping our enemies in the game is probably the point of current policy. Without a dangerous adversary both numerous and long-enduring—for our lifetimes, Vice-President Cheney has announced—would we attach ourselves so enthusiastically to an Ashcroft, a Rumsfeld, or a President who lost the popular vote? Canetti wrote, “The curious and unmistakable high-tension which characterizes all the processes of war has two causes: people want to forestall death, and they are acting as a crowd. … As long as the war lasts they must remain a crowd, and the war really ends as soon as they cease to be one” (73). The current Administration needs the opposing crowd as much as it needs its own. In practice, they are structurally one.

What are the motives of those the country has been flocking to follow? The charges against Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, and other designated enemies offer various reasons for concern, some more persuasive and reputable than others: harboring al Qaeda, owning vast reserves of oil, attempting to murder a presidential parent, threatening to develop nuclear weapons, menacing Israel, and so on. Such reasons may justify or impel the use of power; but they do not explain why it is sought in the first place.

Here Canetti offers a general theory as chilling as it is, I believe, illuminating. The seekers of power, like those who form crowds, also act from a primal fear of an unknown touch. But they respond in a manner opposite to the forming of crowds, however much they may use masses of people to advance their purposes. Canetti calls the power-addicted “survivors” (die Überlebenden) and identifies them as the greatest hazard to humankind’s continued existence. Their psychopathology is paranoid, but unlike the diagnosed and confined mentally ill, they have within their grasp potentially world-destroying weapons.

“The lowest form of survival is killing” (227). We should not forget that the assumption of the presidency by George W. Bush had the effect of restoring to power some who got a copious taste of killing during Desert Storm, and many whose greatest regret was that the U. S. “failed to finish the job.” (Personally, I always thought it to G. H. W. Bush’s credit that he restrained us from unnecessarily killing another one- or two-hundred-thousand people.) “The satisfaction in survival, which is a kind of pleasure, can become a dangerous and insatiable passion. It feeds on its occasions” (230). Maybe Saddam Hussein and Iraq, as the Administration represents, constitute a pressing danger. One suspects that the unfinished business of 1991, the only partial pleasure of survival that it afforded, provides a deeper motive. The enthusiasts of Desert Storm might at once want more of the rush of survival that they experienced then and—of equal significance—retain considerable fear that the killing they directed against others may be in turn inflicted on them. (One could argue that it already has been, through the attacks of 9/11. In the weeks following that horror, it dawned on us that the legacy of Desert Storm, especially its legacy of U.S. troops on sacred Arabian soil, was a primary motive for many of the terrorists who flew the airliners, and themselves, into American targets. Most of them, as has been widely noticed, were Saudis—“cowards” or “martyrs,” depending on one’s point-of-view, but natives of that soil in either case.)

Nor should we forget that G. W. Bush, as Governor of Texas, signed more than one-hundred-fifty orders of execution. This is no routine clerical task. Each signature must have reinforced his sense of power, his conviction of his superiority, his identity as a survivor. Our President is a person accustomed to dispatching other people to their deaths.

Bush and his close advisors exhibit what Canetti identifies as symptoms of the power-addicted: an almost unfailing instinct toward secrecy, demands for rigid obedience in lower echelons, and quick recourse to imprisoning, threatening, or killing perceived opponents. The instinct for secrecy creates a defensive space around the Administration, a space that keeps at a distance the uninitiated, whom the paranoia of power assumes to be enemies. Unquestioning obedience has proved difficult to enforce; an early attempt to do so led to the loss of Republican control of the Senate. Both the deep distrust of anyone outside the ruling circle and the attraction toward force have been evinced by the Administration’s withdrawals from or refusals to negotiate various treaties, insistent talk of “preemptive strikes,” authorizations to kill foreign leaders “in self-defense,” and reconsideration of proscriptions against using nuclear weapons in ordinary battlefield situations. All of these tendencies should alarm anyone in the world who aspires to die from some cause other than military action, torture, or assassination.

The last of these markers of power—the only intermittently sublimated imperative toward killing—is both immediately alarming and a most unfitting instrument of foreign policy for a democracy. In a representative democratic system, as Canetti remarks, struggles for power take place “in a form of warfare that has renounced killing. … The parliamentary system functions only so long as this immunity is preserved. It crumbles as soon as it admits anyone who allows himself to reckon on the death of any member whatsoever” (188-9). While all this may seem obvious enough, the consequences of adopting democratic forms contain the hope of humankind’s future. Representative democracy need not be more efficient, wiser, more entertaining, or fairer than other forms of government. It need only be what it is, the system that renounces killing as a means for resolving conflict. It is better because it is less murderous. If, as Max Weber famously declared, states are entities that claim a monopoly on the use of force within a certain geographical area, then parliamentary systems exercise their monopoly by forbidding routine uses of violence.

The most encompassing and ambitious parliament in the world is the United Nations, an organization to which the U.S. in general and conservative Republicans in particular have consistently resisted making a firm commitment. Indeed, the United States quite openly “reckons on” the death of at least one of the leaders of another nation in this parliament. The blunt unilateralism of our foreign policy, our historical willingness to support anti-democratic regimes for short-term gains, our withdrawal from or refusal to join international treaties except on terms that especially favor us—all communicate an attitude that democracy is fine for us but an option for other people only when it suits our advantage. We are manifestly unwilling to consider ourselves one of the participants—rather than the only one—in a democratic world. Ours are the actions, as most of the rest of the world perceives, of a nation obsessed with power and therefore unwilling to embrace the equality of a world crowd, whether of nations or of people. We declare ourselves a country whose commitment to replacing killing with voting does not extend beyond its own borders. In doing so, we define ourselves as one side of a double crowd, the other side of which comprises the remaining ninety-six percent of humanity. Which side would a realist expect to prevail?