The Nature of Evil

CROWDS AND POWER 495 pp.--Elios Canetti-- Viking ($7.50 The gloomiest of modern thinkers have found the human being sex-ridden, despairing or just plain hollow. But Elias Canetti, 57, a Bulgarian-born novelist and playwright, goes further. In this massive, provocative and often brilliant work, he concludes that man is power-mad, and never more so than in a crowd.

Recently published in England, Crowds and Power impressed all critics with its erudition, dazzled some into superlatives, and numbed others. Like Spengler, Toynbee and other sweeping theorists, Canetti casts a net over all of human history and tends to describe the entire sea from what he finds in his net.

The human body, according to Canetti, bristles with power. The most innocent-seeming gesture recalls the primitive seizing and devouring of prey. "The hand's real glory derives from the grip," writes Canetti, "the central and most often celebrated act of power." The hard, unyielding rows of teeth resemble smoothly polished stone weapons, and in an open mouth often appear menacing. Even the way a person sits in a chair may reveal whether he is, at heart, gripping a throne or a horse or another human being.' Canetti has small patience for those who think man's basic instinct is self-preservation. Man is not a "statue," writes Canetti, "with one hand reaching for food and with the other fending off its enemies. His way of procuring his prey is cunning, bloodthirsty and strenuous. He does not mildly defend himself but attacks his enemies as he senses them in the distance; his weapons of attack are far better developed than his weapons of defense."

Killing for Equality. Man's lust for power is given freest rein in a crowd. A crowd, for Canetti, is the basic unit of human society, akin to many things in nature: a contagious fire, an all-embracing sea, an immovable forest of trees, boundless sand. Men join crowds to escape the restrictions of life and the sense of isolation from others; the crowd provides a short-lived but deeply felt equality and companionship. "Stepping out of everything which binds, encloses and burdens them is the real reason for the elation which people feel in a crowd," writes Canetti. "Nowhere does the individual feel more free and if he tries to remain part of a crowd, it is because he knows what awaits him afterwards. When he returns to his house, to himself, he finds again, boundaries, burdens and stings."

All crowds in the raw behave much the same, Canetti argues, whether they form for feasts, funerals, rebellions or lynchings. They have a demoniacal urge to grow and an equally demoniacal urge to battle an opposing crowd. Rummaging through history, Canetti cites some gory examples of crowd behavior to support his thesis. Crowds that form for the most exalted reasons can become the most murderous. Typical was an Easter service in Jerusalem in 1834. The faithful flocked to the church by the thousands to see the descent of the Holy Fire. When the "miraculous" fire appeared, people were in a frenzy to get to it. In the turmoil, two crowds squared off and started senselessly slaughtering each other until the church floor was littered with corpses.

Taming the Bloodthirsty. In Canetti's view, the history of civilization is the history of combating crowds. Over the centuries, men have developed institutions that can turn open, or natural, crowds into closed, or "domesticated," ones. A closed crowd can then offer advantages that an open crowd cannot. The closed crowd provides permanence; its members know that when they disband they will meet again. They lack the elation of a natural crowd, but they share a "mild state of crowd feeling," which can be indefinitely repeated. The members also know they are protected from death in a way they are not in an open crowd. The best crowd domesticators, says Canetti, are the world's great religions. Parliamentary democracy is another example of successful domestication. In politics, two crowds continue to assemble to do battle, but it is a peaceful one, with prescribed rules. Since neither crowd is threatened with death if it loses, each is willing to abide by democracy.

If a closed crowd is disbanded, then an open crowd forms again in all its fury. When the Treaty of Versailles abolished the German army, then Germany's "most essential closed crowd," the Nazi mob sprang up in its place.

Natural crowds need a leader, and he is, writes Canetti, "mankind's worst evil, its curse and perhaps its doom." For the leader not only has the urge to kill the enemy but his own people as well, so that he alone can survive. Surviving others is the headiest form of power, writes Canetti. Everyone to some degree shares it, as anyone knows who has gone to war. But this feeling is dangerously exaggerated in the leader. Canetti argues in a brilliant series of comparisons that the acts of autocratic rulers reflect the same lust for survival as the dreams of paranoids, the fantasies of alcoholics, the rites of primitive people. He dismisses the historical justifications of crowd leaders like Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan or Napoleon; and argues that, at bottom, their goal was not the making of an empire but the slaughter of others: "Their fame depends in the end less on victory or defeat than on the monstrous number of their victims."

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