Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government →
ethics →
the concept of “evil”
Today: a grab-bag of readings from around the web —
“We Don’t Need Them” by Joe Carpenter — “I’ve never understood the idea of speaking truth to power.
The truth, surely, is that in almost all countries of the world, political and economic systems are designed to benefit only the rich and powerful, at the expense of those with less money and power.
This is how the world works, and I see no reason to think that the powerful don’t already understand that.
After all, they designed it, they maintain it.… ¶ They are very few and we, here in the U.S. alone, are roughly three hundred million.
We don’t need to rush out to tell the few that they are abusing the many.
They already know that.
We need to stand upright and walk out to tell the many that they are being slowly devoured by the few, for — incredibly, they do not know.
We need to look to our next-door neighbors, and to their next door neighbors and to the folks all along the block.
We need to tell the truth to each other — for we are the answer.
Ben Tripp at Counterpunch tries to visualize the monetary cost of the war: “Every month, the United States spends enough money killing Arabs of various kinds so that, if we instead decided to paperclip all those dollars together, we could not only reach the moon, we could come all the way back again with another chain of dollars, and still have enough dollars left over to go all the way around the equator ($262,954,560) 3.8 times… And that is every month.
¶ …Where are all these dollars coming from?
You can’t slip that kind of loot out of mom’s purse.
These dollars are coming from foreign governments and financial institutions.
The USA has borrowed all this money from people that don’t even use dollars at home!
How many Chinese yuan does it take to reach the moon?
We’re about to find out.
Since G. W. Bush took office (and he did take it), his government has borrowed $1.05 trillion.
That is to say, over one thousand billion.
Remember how many a billion is?
$1.05 trillion is more than the total borrowed by every administration ($1.01 trillion).
The mind implodes.
Half of this nation’s debt in 224 years, the other half since Junior Bush got the top job.
Remember how far away the sun is?
We have spent enough dollars to get us all the way to the sun with plenty to spare for sunscreen.”
If I wait to finish it before writing a review, I’ll pen one of those unreadable monster blockquote-dumps that goes on forever.
So I’ll try something different: I’ll break up my reading and write up my thoughts along the way.
Vetlesen is trying to reconcile sociological, psychological, and philosophical accounts of human evildoing, particularly those prompted by attempts to wrestle with the Holocaust and other examples of large-scale massacre: things like Hannah Arendt’s examinations of totalitarianism and “the banality of evil,” and the Milgram experiment.
He compares the conclusions of various thinkers in these disciplines, and examines their predictions in light of subsequent examples of collective evil, for instance the massacres in the former Yugoslavia.
He starts by offering a “commonsensical and minimalist” definition of evil: to “intentionally inflict pain and suffering on another human being, against her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm to her.”
This makes me defensive, partially because it seems too simple, and partially, I think, because it reminds me of the definitions of torture that the fine legal minds in the White House had so much fun drilling loopholes through.
But at least so far, Vetlesen’s definition plays very little role in his book, so I’ll leave it at that.
There is a school of thought in reaction to the Holocaust that sees its perpetrators — the people who actually did the day-to-day mechanics of murdering millions of people, not the ideologues in the newsreels — as having been swept along against their own inclinations by an overwhelming force that only extraordinary personalities were able to resist.
Arendt showed Eichmann to be not a conventionally wicked sadist delighting in evil, but a thoughtless careerist oblivious to the results of his actions.
Milgram showed that ordinary people would do awful things to innocent strangers if someone in a position of authority gave the word.
While reading Evil and Human Agency on public transit I have — twice now! — been interrupted by the person in the seat next to me who, reading over my shoulder, could not help but discuss it with me.
This is pretty remarkable, since for one thing it violates social taboos about talking to strangers on public transit and about interrupting people who are reading, and for another, I didn’t have any idea this was a topic that many people care about.
Anyway, one of these people had absorbed the school of thought I described above, and repeated it back to me in a way that really demonstrated how defeatist and excusing it can be if it is absorbed uncritically and superficially: looking at the perpetrators of the Holocaust and shrugging, saying “it could happen to anyone, human nature being what it is; they didn’t know any better, with the morality of their society gone all topsy-turvy like that.”
Arendt tried to head off this sort of sloppy thinking, insisting (and showing) that those who participated in administrative massacre had real choices, made them, and bear real guilt for the choices they made.
She also insists (and shows) that other choices were possible, and that other people could have (and did) evaluate their situations and make conscientious choices, even in the topsy-turvy morality of Nazi Germany.
But Vetlesen, though respectful of Arendt’s contributions to the study of collective and individual evil, thinks that her portrait of Eichmann is partially “naïve: in suggesting that he was ‘merely thoughtless’, she in fact adopts the very self-presentation he cultivated.… [T]his is a blindness in Arendt caused by her privileging the role of intellectual capacities over — morally crucial — emotional ones.”
Vetlesen is referring not only to Eichmann in Jerusalem but also to other writings of Arendt in which she puts thinking at the center of morality (see The Picket Line, ).
Indeed, in her view, conscience is a by-product of thinking, where “thinking” is an honest and curious inner dialog of the sort that would make Socrates proud.
Vetlesen doesn’t buy it.
Conscience and moral perception, he believes, has much more to do with empathy, and Eichmann’s problem was not that he was “thoughtless” but that he “was insensitive.”
Vetlesen also critically examines Milgram’s interpretation of his famous experiment.
Milgram believed that his subjects, in the presence of an authority figure, stepped into a corresponding role and something called the “agentic state, the state in which the agent finds himself once responsibility has been shifted away by his consent to the superior’s right to command” which leads one “to restrict one’s sense of responsibility to the purely technical aspects of one’s action” as opposed to their effects or ends.
The first objection to this “agentic state” is that it is illusory, and the way it is described often seems to grant it an undeserved reality.
When you enter the agentic state, you don’t really shift away your responsibility, you only agree to conspire with the authority figure to act as if you have done so.
This doesn’t excuse anything, and Vetlesen suggests that this conspiracy of dishonesty not only helps people to commit evil but is itself a sort of evil:
Morally speaking, permitting oneself to be dehumanized, to be robbed of one’s autonomy (Kant), is in itself no lesser sin than participating in the dehumanization of others; it entails permitting oneself to become an instrument in the realization of ends posited by others.
He summarizes Arendt’s own view: “superfluousness represents a temptation: it holds the promise of an existence devoid of (enacted) human agency, hence free of the burdens of responsibility and guilt, as well as hurt and loss.”
If people are selfishly tempted to enter the “agentic state”, then their evil actions when in such a state are the sort of garden variety “sins” that come from being willing to harm other people in pursuit of selfish aims.
This in contrast to the usual interpretation of Milgram’s experiment: that people are willing to act against their own inclinations and interests to do things they would ordinarily not want to do, in certain contexts of authoritarian role-play.
Vetlesen extends this objection by considering what Milgram never allows himself to consider: that his subjects may have had genuine sadistic impulses — that in subjecting their victims to pain, they were not being somehow coerced by their situation to do things they would ordinarily not want to do, but that they were being allowed by their situation to do things they were ordinarily inhibited from doing.
He quotes Ernest Becker, who took a second look at Freud’s take on mob violence:
…[M]an brings his motives in with him when he identifies with power figures.
He is suggestible and submissive because he is waiting for the magical helper.
He gives in to the magic transformation of the group because he wants relief of conflict and guilt.
He follows the leader’s initiatory act because he needs priority magic so that he can delight in holy aggression.
He moves in to kill the sacrificial scapegoat with the wave of the crowd, not because he is carried along by the wave, but because he likes the psychological barter of another life for his own: “You die, not me.”
The motives and the needs are in men and not in situations or surroundings.
And this is where I’ve stopped for , not quite at the half-way mark.
Several years after composing this entry, I read H.L. Mencken’s Damn: A book of Calumny and found that he had anticipated this attack on Milgram before Milgram was around to attack:
The numskull runs amuck in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated with new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because his habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely.
In other words, the numskull is vicious, but a poltroon.
He refrains from all attempts at lynching a cappella, not because it takes suggestion to make him desire to lynch, but because it takes the protection of a crowd to make him brave enough to try it.
…
In other words, the particular swinishness of a crowd is permanently resident in the majority of its members — in all those members, that is, who are naturally ignorant and vicious — perhaps 95 per cent.
All studies of mob psychology are defective in that they underestimate this viciousness.
They are poisoned by the prevailing delusion that the lower orders of men are angels.
This is nonsense.
The lower orders of men are incurable rascals, either individually or collectively.
Decency, self-restraint, the sense of justice, courage — these virtues belong only to a small minority of men.
This minority never runs amuck.
Its most distinguishing character, in truth, is its resistance to all running amuck.
The third-rate man, though he may wear the false whiskers of a first-rate man, may always be detected by his inability to keep his head in the face of an appeal to his emotions.
A whoop strips off his disguise.
In Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil, Fred E. Katz begins where Hannah Arendt’s examination of the banality of evil ended, and Katz tries to apply the techniques of sociology to the question of how ordinary people, without deliberate evil intent, commit horrendous deeds.
Katz himself narrowly escaped the massacre of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
When he returned to his former village after the war, he heard the villagers explain their passivity or collaboration during the Nazi persecutions using the very same language they used at the time: “There is nothing we could do about it.
We are just little people.
It’s the government”
But he noticed that the village had erected a plaque in honor of the boys and men who had died fighting for the fatherland, and remarks that it was just this loyalty and willingness to serve that doomed the victims of the Nazi era.
Yet some little people, in some little villages, did do something about it.
They hid some of these hounded people.
They fed some of these hounded people.
They helped some of these hounded people escape.
During the visit to my village I found out that there had been one exception to the pattern of passively leaving Jews to the evil deeds of the Nazi government: A lone woman stood by Jews.
She brought them food.
She talked with them.
She did not join in the distancing by the rest of the villagers.
But she was not able to save anyone or offer much protection.
She said to me, concerning the Nazis, “what they did was not right.”
And she wept.
Despite such exceptional human beings, the Nazi-German government achieved its objectives of carrying out massive evil because it had the help of a multitude of “the little people,” who paid their taxes, sent their sons to the front, and closed their eyes to the savaging of innocent people in their midst.
How do ordinary people, who largely profess good values, and who have no particular interest in doing evil things, nonetheless become instrumental in horrible crimes?
Katz set himself the task of analyzing this question from the perspective of sociology, concentrating mainly on the Holocaust but also looking at some other examples.
Here are some of the conclusions he draws:
Some of the most important, far-reaching, portentious decisions that we make in our lives as ordinary people — whom we marry, what profession we adopt, etc. — we tend to make without thinking at the large scale.
Instead, we make these decisions in the form of a culmination of smaller decisions that we make with a very short-term, here-and-now focus on transient priorities.
Katz gives the example of someone who has spent her professional career as a nurse despite never having had any passion for nursing.
She went into nursing school because a high school friend did, or in the hopes of catching the eye of a marriageable doctor, then got out of school with no better job prospects, then had no experience in anything but nursing, and finally found herself to be a life-long nurse in spite of herself.
In the same way, Katz argues, we can be beguiled into great careers of evil by taking many small steps in which our minds are only focused on the concerns of the moment.
Never intending to be an evil monster, like never intending to be a nurse, one can nonetheless find oneself fulfilling that role.
Also, our roles and our enterprises tend to be a package of many elements, some of which we find engaging or are passionately invested in, and to others of which we are indifferent or even opposed.
In these packages, we will emphasize to ourselves the parts that we care about, and play down the other parts.
Because of this, we may find ourselves doing evil things, thinking that those things are merely incidental to our real purpose.
(Am I designing a terrible new weapon of mass destruction?
No!
I’m solving a difficult engineering challenge… I’m serving my country ably… I’m impressing senior management… I’m providing for my family… etc.)
In addition, our values tend not to be held as absolutes, but as things in flux and in competition with each other.
At any time, and in any circumstance, certain values may be prioritized over other ones.
Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, said he was repulsed by his job of mass extermination of the victims of the Nazi regime — it offended his idea of the value of human life.
But he held other values, such as his loyalty to the Nazi government and its ideology, and his bureaucratic ambitions, at a higher priority, and so not only did he do his job, but he did it well, in an enterprising and inventive way.
For the unfortunate victims of Hoess’s deeds it made no difference whether he had renounced the sanctity-of-human-life value or merely placed it in a very subordinate position in his personal package of values.
But for Hoess, personally, it made a great deal of difference.
By placing that value in a subordinate position, and not explicitly renouncing it, he could continue to tell himself that he was still a sensitive and humane person, still the same person he had always been.
Indeed, Hoess used the revulsion he felt at the job he was assigned as a way of justifying his acts — as a variety of personal suffering that consecrated his deeds.
His twinges of conscience ironically served him as further evidence of his virtue.
Hoess also used compartmentalization to help preserve his self-image.
At work, he was a ruthless and efficient mass murderer who brooked no squeamishness from his underlings.
At home, he tried to have a placid, mundane, warm home life, at which concerns from “the office” were not allowed to intrude.
Katz also notes how important it is to respond to qualms of conscience quickly.
When you have started doing evil deeds you will also start developing justifications for them, and these justifications will make it easier for you to continue doing more evil.
Many times these justifications take the form of reprioritizations of your values, so that by justifying an evil act in one area, you open the door to committing evil in many others (after all, if I was justified in killing this Jew with impunity because Jews are subhuman, why should I have to be at all humane to any Jews ever?)
I found this slim book to be thought-provoking and its project to be an important and welcome one.
I am a little concerned that the application of what he insists is the “science” of sociology to the question may run the risk of merely inventing “just-so” stories that offer the illusion of being explanatory or predictive without actually being so.
Even so, I think that the process of taking this issue seriously and in soberly trying to understand and defend against it can’t help but be beneficial, even if it isn’t literally scientific.
(Those of you reading this in a feed aggregator will probably want to follow the link to read the post at my blog where the formatting will make a lot more sense.)
But how do you know your observations aren’t the result of an evil demon manipulating your senses rather than true reflections on the state of creation?
You’re as short-sighted as Alfonso. What look like crimes and misfortunes to you are just part of the mosaic of the best of all possible worlds from God’s point of view.
On the contrary, Pierre. History — including the crimes and misfortunes of the human race — is the plan of God fulfilled, verifying the reality of providence. We just need to crack the code.
God could no more create a most perfect world without evil than He could create a square circle. If we were omniscient and could see the whole of creation over the whole of time, we would realize its perfection. Over time we will learn the connections between sin and suffering, and better understand God’s wisdom.
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee: All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good; And in spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite, One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
To deny the existence of evil is a most convenient way of excusing the author of that evil; the Stoics formerly made themselves a laughing-stock for less.
The tragedy wasn’t caused so much by the earthquake as by the idiocy of packing so many people into an urban environment which is foolish humanity’s method for making earthquakes as horrible as possible.
I think you’re right after all. All these attempts to excuse-away suffering and praise this as ‘the best of all possible worlds’ are just philosophers brown-nosing God in the hopes of getting on His good side.
We need to retreat along the path we took to decadent civilization all the way back to when we were noble savages and then make our decisions again without the influence of vanity.
good Christians everywhere
You mean that we should ‘become as little children’ to escape the consequences of the Fall of Man. I think I know this story.
Uh… not exactly. God’s guidance is not necessary here. If we do not interfere, nature will punish vice and reward virtue all by itself.
anonymous
If we are naturally good and virtue prompts its own rewards, how did we fall so far so fast and why would it take so much work to get us back to paradise?
I’m starting to distrust the intuition that says virtue and reward are systematically, necessarily connected. All human moral effort seems an attempt to fulfill this intuition, but it fails, and so requires faith in a Divine judge to set the scales right in the end.
That’s too passive. The aim of philosophy is to describe reality in terms of the divine ideal it is enacting — a divine ideal that is the same as that of enlightened human reason — and then to press our reason on reality, to make our ‘ought’ an ‘is’ by force or to understand every ‘is’ as an ‘ought’ by reason.
Come to think of it, if we knew that there was a necessary connection between virtue and reward, that would be the end of virtue, as it would just be subsumed by self-interest. What makes an action virtuous is that we do it because it is right, not because we expect fortuitous consequences.
anonymous
So we should always do ‘the right thing’ whatever the consequences? What if a murderer asks me if his intended victim is hiding in my cellar, is it okay to lie to him and say ‘No’?
In such a case, you shouldn’t lie. How confident can you be in the consequences of your actions? What if you lie and the murderer goes away only to immediately find your friend who has, unbeknownst to you, crawled out your cellar window to try to escape?
Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder the more often and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
It’s kind of like imagining that although this isn’t the best of all possible worlds, it could be quasi-better if some of our freedom were replaced with natural laws that compelled goodness; if we behave as though those laws were already in force, we get the goodness and the freedom too. Imagine that you yourself were God creating the perfect world with the principles you choose.
(Those of you reading this in a feed aggregator will probably want to follow
the link to read the post at my blog
where the formatting will make a lot more sense. You can find chapter one at
this link.)
God is either willing to remove evil and cannot; or he can and is unwilling; or he is neither willing nor able to do so; or else he is both willing and able. If he is willing and not able, he must then be weak, which cannot be affirmed of God. If he is able and not willing, he must be envious, which is also contrary to the nature of God. If he is neither willing nor able, he must be both envious and weak, and consequently not be God. If he is both willing and able — the only possibility that agrees with the nature of God — then where does evil come from?
God gave us a great gift, the gift of free will, but that necessarily included the freedom to do wrong. God, in order to be just, as we know God to be, must meet wrong actions with bad consequences. So there is no incompatibility between there being evil and cruelty in the world and there being a just and good God in charge of it all.
Yes, but God, being omniscient, knew that we were going to abuse this gift of free will, and so He admitted evil into creation voluntarily. This is the difference between giving your son the car keys, knowing that he could get drunk, and giving your son the car keys knowing that he is drunk.
So either there is a competing evil agency up against God’s power, or God Himself planned man’s fall from grace, and that this fall should be contagious, that it should ceaselessly and endlessly produce all imaginable crimes over the entire face of the earth — in consequence of which he prepared all the misfortunes that can be conceived for the human race — plague, war, famine, pain, trouble — and after this life a hell in which almost all men will be eternally tormented in such a way that makes our hair stand on end when we read descriptions of it.
I suppose there’s another option: we could reject reason itself for getting us in this dilemma in the first place, and instead just throw ourselves blindly on faith.
I admire Pope and agree with him. No philosopher has been able to explain moral and physical evil. Bayle only taught us to doubt, but he also makes us doubt ourselves in our doubting. Yet it is cruel to respond to a Lisbon earthquake by speculating that maybe it is part of a greater good. (Still, if people did not themselves do such evil to one another, we could well tolerate a Lisbon earthquake now and then.)
When you look at the inner perfection of mechanism and delicate beauty of a plant that preserves itself throughout the turns of the seasons, it is impossible for anyone to believe that this is just the result of natural laws — one immediately discerns the hand of the Creator in this.
On the contrary, most people never point to ordinary miracles like these when they attempt to come up with evidence for the influence of the divine. They always point out the weird deviations — some sudden and unexpected death or accident, or an unusual drought or monsoon. It’s only philosophers who gaze thoughtfully at their own wrists, musing ‘God designed this!’
You know what really gets my goat? The Creator gave us eros, or in any event eros is such a magnificent and uncanny thing that even without the Creator, it would tend to make anybody worship the Divinity. But then, in this ‘best of all possible worlds,’ we get syphilis. And where did it come from? Not from fallen sinners getting their just deserts, but from innocent Indians living in a state of nature overseas.
Polytheism makes more sense, given the weird contradictions in the world around us — the universe doesn’t appear to have a purpose, but many cross-purposes. The idea that this universe must have a creator, who is thereby mighty and praiseworthy, doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s just as likely to have many creators, or a creator who was haphazard and thoughtless, from the evidence available to us. For that matter, why assume it was created at all. The universe isn’t like a watch lovingly crafted by a watchmaker, but like an egg laid by an ostrich, who generates and deploys it without putting any thought into its construction or destiny at all.
No, just a skeptic. The differences between theism and atheism are only differences in degree and tone. Religion and reason both lead you into thickets of nonsense. Reason is especially inept at explaining evil.
I’ve been trying to think up the worst crime against nature imaginable, but I’m having a devil of a time of it. All crimes seem to either be encouraged by nature or surpassed by it. I still have hope of one day outdoing the devil himself in evil, but I don’t think I’ll ever outdo God… I’ll have to be content to learn from His example and describe Him carefully in my writing, between bouts of sodomy.
anonymous
You are one sick f—er. I’m surprised the guards let you play on the Internet.
I am the sick fucker. One day they’re going to name sick fuckery after me. But, you know, God must have created evil for a purpose, right? In this best of all possible worlds, what appears to be evil must be an essential part of the greater good, right? So why not give yourself over wholly to evil, confident that you are helping to fulfill God’s design? Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, so saith the Lord, and I intend to do all I can to add to the ranks of the blessed.
Life is a monotony of uninterrupted suffering. Or rather suffering interrupted only by monotony. (Even our fondest imaginings of the afterlife divide it into suffering and monotony.) The world is likely as bad as it could possibly be and yet still continue to exist. But there is a sort of justice in this, in that we are so contemptible that this is what we deserve.
(Those of you reading this in a feed aggregator will probably want to follow
the link to read the post at my blog
where the formatting will make a lot more sense. You can find chapter one at
this link and chapter two at
this link.)
Really? I think if you asked most people, on their death beds, whether they’d choose to live again with the expectation of getting a similar mix of the bad and the good in their lives the next time around, most of them would take you up on the offer. It’s only in comparison to the promised life to come that our earthly lives look awful.
People seem biased to a deceptive optimism. Ask them if they would willingly live over again the last ten or twenty years of their life: ‘No!’ But the next twenty, they say, will be better, so they stick around (complaining about their lost youth).
Why do you suppose so many philosophers are so unhappy? I daresay there may not be in the upper Valais a single mountaineer who is unhappy with his life, and who would not voluntarily accept, even in place of paradise, an unending cycle of rebirth.
In every age, the wisest have said of life ‘it is worthless.’ Instead of saying simply ‘I am no longer worth anything,’ they lie and say ‘Nothing is worth anything — life is not worth anything.’ Stop wasting your time and infecting the healthy by trying to prove that life is worth living and start living a worthy life and loving it enough that you would consider it a blessing to live it again and again for eternity.
anonymous
So instead of reasoning that this is the best of all possible worlds, or having faith that this must be the best of all possible worlds, you will this to be the best of all possible worlds? That sounds every bit as nutty.
Morality by its very nature is constantly looking at Reality and calling it wrong and unacceptable in comparison with the unreal ideal it sets up. Morality therefore stands between you and your healthy impulse to embrace life. If you want to know the nature of evil, don’t look to philosophy and theology, look to psychology and history: we invented it to serve a need, and we can remember that it is just an invented myth if we try. God is dead, but good & evil continue to wheeze on life support. Embrace all the world, including what you now call ‘evil.’
No, I’m going further than the stoics. Don’t just face suffering with equanimity: embrace it. Will it! Suffering — ‘evil’ — is the tempering you need to make you stronger. Don’t look at it as something that you need to justify by looking over your shoulder at what you did to deserve it, look at it as something that you will justify in the future by what you make of it.
Morality may be a myth, but it’s a useful one, in that it allows us to live in modern civilization without all trying to be alpha übermenschen and ripping each other apart.
You want to know why we have these intuitions and longings about a Creator who is intensely concerned with our behavior and who metes out just or unjust suffering and rewards? It’s because we have lingering issues about our parents and have only incompetently and incompletely grown up. They’re illusions we cling to as we try to evade the responsibilities of maturity.
(Those of you reading this in a feed aggregator will probably want to follow
the link to read the post at my blog
where the formatting will make a lot more sense.)
You can find the rest of this series at the following links:
This is a sign and a warning. Don’t be sorry for the victims, but be thankful for the mercy shown to the survivors who now have a lesson in God’s promised end to worldly treasures.
Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, is nature’s plot against every living being — in many cases after tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of purposely inflict on their fellow living creatures.
Imagine that you are rebuilding the world with the object of making people happy — of giving them peace and rest at last — but to do this you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one small child, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears. Would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Will you believe that the people for whom you do this would agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, remain forever happy?
Philosophy is out of its depth here. You don’t respond to Auschwitz by trying to make sense of it, but by acknowledging and trying to cope with the senselessness of it.
We must rationally grapple with this. It was refusal to think actively that enabled so many people to bring this evil about. We have to analyze, and judge, and condemn, and not just stare slack-jawed at this as though it were a natural disaster or an inevitable growing pain of historical progress.
In the history of the world, we see before us the concrete image of evil in its most fully developed form. If we consider the mass of individual happenings, history appears as an altar on which individuals and entire nations are immolated; we see all that is noblest and finest destroyed. But out of death new life arises, purified and rejuvenated.
Who would dare to reconcile himself with the reality of extermination camps, or play the game of thesis-antithesis-synthesis until his dialectics have discovered ‘meaning’ in slave labor?
This is a sign and a warning. Germany was the innovator in the creation of the concentration camp world, but she is not so different from the states that will follow her.
For example, the Soviet Union and its gulag world.
good Communists everywhere
Blasphemy!
anonymous
Why are we so shocked? The British created the concentration camp world in South Africa decades earlier, World War Ⅰ should have gotten you used to senseless mass murder already, and were you not paying attention to the Russian pogroms and the massacres in Armenia and the carnival-like American lynchings? There is nothing really new here. Philosophical responses to evil have never been able to keep up with evil itself.
Would Nietzsche ask us to will this evil? Could anyone consider himself blessed if his eternal recurrence included an eternally recurring Auschwitz? Were its victims made stronger by their suffering? Whatever else Auschwitz did, it decisively refuted Nietzsche.
If the world were not something that ought not to be, it would also not be theoretically a problem. On the contrary, its existence would require no explanation at all, since it would be so entirely self evident.
My life’s principle, which I was taught very early on, was to desire and to strive to achieve ethical values. From a particular moment on, however, I was prevented by the State from living according to this principle. I have nothing against the Jews, personally.
Nonsense. You could and should have chosen differently. Others did. Tremendous evil sometimes takes the banal form of a thoughtless bureaucrat, and to convict you of it does not also require that we discover in you a frothing malice that seems proportional to the crime. Why should we feel the need to trudge through the cesspit of your soul to inspect your motives and intentions? Your crimes speak for themselves.
Some people went along with the horror, but others did not. Some people said ‘no, I won’t.’ Evil is not a mighty, domineering, magnificent, calculating agent — it is a petty, threadbare, cowardly, weak, and vulnerable one. This allows me to still feel at home in the world and to have a childish trust in God.
I think, if we use our imaginations, we can envision a realistic, possible social and political order that minimizes injustice. Envisioning it is only the start, of course, but it gives us reasonable hope that we can again be reconciled with the real world.
In the midst of a murderous world, reflect on murder and make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers or accomplices, and those who refuse. Over the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward.
By the way, in case it hasn’t been clear throughout, I’ve been playing fast
and loose with chronology, and have mixed actual quotes with paraphrases.
Neiman’s book puts all of these philosophers, from various time periods, into
a sort of conversation with each other, and I’ve just tried to somewhat
whimsically illustrate it as one.
Someone really did put a magnet on our refrigerator depicting an angel in
flowing gossamer next to the (unattributed) quote from Kant about how he is
filled with awe when he reflects on the starry heavens above and the moral law
within.
