Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → not being a “Good German” → Hannah Arendt

After my first young suspicions about the evil of psychotic human hives were awakened by the book Alan and Naomi, as I related in yesterday’s entry, my initial reaction was not surprisingly unsophisticated.

I remember as a young child having trouble sleeping for weeks after reading in the newspaper about local squirrels that had been found to be infected with the plague or rabies or something. I’d seen squirrels, even fed them, patiently waiting for them to come take nuts out of my hands, and it terrified me that their seeming harmlessness had hidden a potentially fatal danger (that my parents had failed to protect me from and that I had only learned about in the paper). Being wee, I became frightened of malicious squirrels hiding under the bed or coming through the windows at night to attack me.

My fear of the Nazis was at first of a similar irrational bent — but more easily countered. The Nazis were on a scale between squirrels (which certainly existed, but which I was assured weren’t generally menacing) and wicked witches (which were undeniably malevolent, particularly toward children, but which didn’t actually exist) — the Nazis were real and evil, but no longer existed, and so I didn’t have to fear them.

And so I came to see the problem at first as something that was confined to the (to me) distant past, and that was essentially a battle between a group of evil people and a group of good people, and the good ones won, end of story.

One of my earliest attempts at creative writing was called “The Japs! They’ve Found Us!” and is part love-story, part action-adventure and centers around a tunnel escape from a Japanese P.O.W. camp. It was based almost entirely on the understanding of World War Two I had gleaned from my collection of Sgt. Rock comic books (which, comics though they were, did occasionally confront some ambiguities, ironies and tragedies of war that helped to break down my early naïveté, that is when they weren’t occasionally introducing super-robots or caped heroes in tights onto the battlefields of World War Two).

As I grew older, I came to understand that the evil I feared wasn’t an aggressive race of inhuman slant-eyes (nice to get our crudest bigotries out of the way early), or a strangely-mustached set of men in funny pants and jackboots from a country that existed in black-and-white. It started to dawn on me that the evil was still around, and that if it came to where I lived, there’s a good chance it would come speaking my language, handing out gold stars to good boys, and looking far more respectable and civilized than its victims. And I came to understand that I needed to learn how not to be one of the victimizers as much as I needed to learn how to keep from being one of the victims.

And literature helped nudge me along there, too, with books like The Chocolate War and Lord of the Flies feeding my thought experiments on human nature.

Recent history had given liberal adults a wariness and a respect for civil disobedience as well, and this had trickled down to me. The civil rights movement was largely responsible for this, although Deep Throat’s Watergate leaks and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers were also examples of individuals defying authority for (what my parents and many teachers certainly believed to be) good reasons.

When I was born, a delusional and aggressive lunatic was in the White House, the country was at war, and the state security apparatus was out-of-control and was being used to silence and intimidate critics of the country’s war policy. An unconventionally conservative adventure movie actor was California’s governor. People wrote op-ed pieces about America’s imperial ambitions — although in those days they usually meant this rhetorically, and they considered it a bad thing.

Yesterday and the day before I started to ramble on a bit about how I first came to be scared of Nazis and why they still have me looking over my shoulder today. Today is part three of Nazis Creep Me Out, subtitled: The Road to Auschwitz is Paved with Good Telemarketers

Maybe it’s a little phobic to worry so much about the possibility of your neighbors turning into cogs in a mass killing machine. Maybe not. One estimate was that (as of 1987), governments had organized people in such a way as to murder about 170,000,000 noncombatants off of the field of war (typically their own citizens) in the 20^th Century. An additional number of people, about a quarter as large a total, were killed in the course of warfare in that timespan.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations show that that comes to about two and a half million each year, about 6,500 per day, about one every 13 seconds.

Even as a public health problem, that’s big: Compare it to, say, malaria, which kills over a million people each year, or tuberculosis and AIDS, which kill some two million each, for instance. But there’s something worse about a calamity that’s deliberately inflicted — worse and at the same time something that requires attention: it seems to be not only something that people might hope to prevent, but something that people might be convinced not to commit. That at least gives us another angle than we’ve got, say, on tuberculosis.

There’s a huge preexisting canon of poetic “why?”s about “man’s inhumanity to man” that I didn’t really intend to try to add any more redundancies to, so I’ll stop there.

Just about everybody has thought about this problem at some point or other, maybe even dwelled on it. And then most of us just kind of give up. The giving up is accompanied by a resigned commemoration that goes a little something like this:

The human race — so full of noble aspirations, so capable of warm emotions, uniquely gifted in our capacity for communication and altruism — and yet ironically so brutal, so unrepentantly savage, so war-loving. We’ve always been this way, and we always will be, in the absence of some science-fiction solution, until (chances are) we finally wipe ourselves out. The cost of this is so high, and has been for so long, that this desperation I feel to find a solution is surely not new, and if our good intentions and our cleverness and reason were enough to solve the problem, surely we would at least have a solution in sight by now… but we don’t. We can continue to chant “peace” until we’re blue in the face, but it isn’t going to change this fact. Wars, massacres — nobody wants them to happen, but they will, and it’s a fool’s errand to try to bring us a world without them.

This outlook may be as true as it is pessimistic. But it really misses the point that it pretends to be addressing so soberly, and becomes an unhealthy evasion. I see two related catches: First, it poses the problem of these two and a half million deaths per year as a problem demanding an all-or-nothing solution. Second, and because of this, it can only imagine a utopian, top-down solution.

The first catch comes from looking at the pile of mangled bodies from a century, or from a war, or from a policy and, being overwhelmed, wanting to come up with something that would prevent them all at once. For example: What if we had a world-wide government, democratic of course, that guaranteed political freedoms, and had a universally respected judiciary that peoples and countries could turn to to resolve grievances? Then we wouldn’t need wars and massacres to solve our problems! And pigs could perch on phone lines instead of taking up valuable real estate!

(Some darker utopian visions stem from a similar urge: What if instead of our tribe and their tribe always going to war over this and that, there were only our tribe and theirs had become extinct?)

If in looking for a solution you find none that promise to more-or-less completely solve the problem except for grandiose sci-fi utopian schemes you have no hope of implementing — the next step isn’t to give up, but to back up.

The point is that a proposal that lessens the problem, or a small first step that doesn’t do much in itself but is the first step in slowly, incrementally or gradually solving the problem, may be a good proposal. Even something that merely prevents things from getting worse is worth listening to when the stakes are so high! Humanity may not ever find an on/off switch for this horror, but perhaps it can learn to turn the volume down.

The second catch is in assuming that because the solution is necessarily so gigantic and universal in its nature that it must be something that is implemented top-down — from the headquarters of the United Nations, or via Pax Americana, or from a spacecraft sent by benevolent aliens, or from God.

I think there may be a solution that’s admittedly gradual and slow, but also promises to be practical and to show returns more than proportional to the extent that it is applied. Furthermore, it’s not top-down — it isn’t even bottom-up — it’s anybody-out. It necessarily, crucially, begins with and within individual people. (And no, it’s not tax resistance, but for me that’s part of how it’s blooming).

It comes down to this: I don’t think there are enough sufficiently angry people in the world, or enough cruel psychopaths in the world, to murder two and a half million people a year all by themselves. They need help and they need accomplices — people who aren’t themselves inclined to do these things but are willing to do them anyway by convincing themselves they’re doing something else, be it “following orders” or “doing my duty” or “earning a living somehow.”

As Hannah Arendt demonstrated in her examples, where enough of these people can be found, the wheels of what she calls “administrative massacre” are greased. But she also found that where enough counterexamples are found, they become monkeywrenches in this same machinery. And where they’re especially numerous, they can break the machinery entirely.

Every “administrative massacre” will be a little different — the victims will be chosen differently, and different methods will be used. What will the gas chambers look like next time — a mushroom cloud, a virus released on a subway, a gulag archipelago for terrorist suspects?

Who is stacking the bricks? Who is conducting the trains? You’ll know them by their excuses — “what can you do?” “I’ve got nothing against them personally” “it’s my job” “somebody else would do it if I didn’t” “I’ve got a family to feed” “I don’t make the rules” “they don’t pay me to think about that.”

And you can hear these excuses around you today, right where you live. People who are doing rude, anti-social, dishonest things but who insist that they aren’t rude, or anti-social, or dishonest people — it’s their job, or it’s the rules, or it’s just a part they’re playing.

I try very hard never to make these kind of excuses. Which is to say that I try not to put myself into the sorts of positions where excuses like these might seem reasonable to me. I think I may avoid killing a Jew some day this way.

And when telemarketers call I tell them, politely but firmly, that it is rude to call up a stranger just to try to sell them something, and won’t they please consider another line of work. “What can you do?” “it’s my job” “somebody else would do it if I didn’t” “I’ve got a family to feed” “I don’t make the rules” “they don’t pay me to think about that.” I’m as persistent as they are, and eventually they hang up. Still, I think I may save a Jew some day this way.

I make up aphorisms for myself, sometimes paraphrasing from others when my creativity isn’t up to it. Here’s one: “Have the courage to fight for what you believe in, the stubbornness not to fight without believing, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Usually, like this one, they aren’t very good, either not very catchy or too glib, but it keeps me thinking about it.

And steps like this are my solution, anyone-out. We’re anyone. Over and out.

Last month I tried to summarize Karl Jaspers’ The Question of German Guilt. One of his arguments was that, when it comes to questions of politics the choice of being aloof is not available to us. We are unable to look at the political mess around us and just say “I’m not going to participate and I take no responsibility for what happens in the name of my community or nation.”

As Jaspers put it:

Every human being is fated to be enmeshed in the power relations he lives by. This is the inevitable guilt of all, the guilt of human existence. It is counteracted by supporting the power that achieves what is right, the rights of man. Failure to collaborate in organizing power relations, in the struggle for power for the sake of serving the right, creates basic political guilt and moral guilt at the same time.^*

In other words, we’re all doomed to have to take a stand of one sort or another. Attempts to stand aloof are really just evasions of this responsibility, and amount to acquiescence and acceptance of the current regime.

When I started my experiment in tax resistance, my goal was “to stop supporting the government personally — to wash my hands of it. I had a selfish desire to live my life according to my principles, and not a more overarching agenda of regime change or reform.” I felt that “a compelling case for the need to resist the government can be made. Now, finally, I have earned the right to weigh that case. Once I stop supporting the government, I can make the decision of whether to wash my hands of it or whether to actively oppose it.”

I was following Thoreau’s lead, here. He argued in Resistance to Civil Government that while a person might decide to take on the task of reforming society as a hobby or a calling, a person is not obligated to try to make the world a more just place, but is only obligated to make sure that he or she is not acting as an agent of injustice. For him, voluntarily paying taxes to the government stepped over this line, but his goal was not to overthrow the government, but “to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually.”

Later on I came to have doubts about whether standing aloof and reclaiming one’s innocence is an option. I was debating someone who felt that as long as you take no fully voluntary steps to commit injustice, you are in the clear. Since paying taxes is not voluntary, you cannot be held responsible for what the government does with your taxes, and so you shouldn’t feel like you are obligated to inconvenience yourself in any way in order to avoid paying taxes.

I had a hard time answering this objection, though I gave it a good go. It just seems to me that the horror of a state like ours is too gargantuan to be just the work of those people with actual evil intentions and shameless direct culpability. It requires a nation of people working together. The American government rules because of the consent of the American people (not because it is a democracy, but because it like all governments ultimately relies on consent). The many ways, large and small, in which we manifest this consent serve to weave together the leviathan that enables murder and suffering on vast scales.

I incline toward the viewpoint that the libertarian ethical ideal of “initiate no aggressive act” is damn near impossible due to this complex web of complicity, and that people who believe that they can escape this by merely “intending” to initiate no aggressive acts are missing something important about intentions and actions. How does one cope with this fog of culpability and diffuse aggression, especially if it is impossible to actually stand aloof from it? Ball-and-stick models like “if you commit an aggressive act, you owe the victim appropriate restitution” fail under the load of this complexity.

There’s a utopian folklore in the libertarian tradition — sometimes called “Libertarian Zionism” — that envisions some promised land (or promised “gulch”) where the libertarian non-aggression principle is the only law. Some people hope to reach this place through magic, others through imagination, others by building an island in international waters, or even moving to New Hampshire.

William Williams just wanted a place to call his own, that’s all. He didn’t want anything from the government, and he didn’t care to give anything to it either. He bought himself some land and has steadfastly refused to hook up to any public utilities. He collects rainwater, uses a septic tank, has solar panels for electricity and uses propane, kerosene and wood for heating and cooking. He has no telephone.

He’s roughly the sort of person I imagine when I think of someone doing things Thoreau-style — deciding to cut off corrupt civil society and just go it alone. And in my daydreams of Thoreauvian aloofness, William Williams is visited by songbirds not bureaucrats, and it all ends happily ever after.

“I don’t bother anyone. Why should they bother me?” he said. He’s about as apart from the state as you can get… except that he’s been hauled into court again and again — for refusing to hook up to the local sewer system, for refusing to let Allegheny Power run a line through his property, for refusing to respond to court orders.

We seem to be stuck — the more energetically you try to get out of the government’s clutches, the more tightly it squeezes. If you decide to cooperate, even only to the extent that it demands at gunpoint, you become part of the web of complicity that makes the leviathan stronger. All the libertarian utopias and strategies of aloofness are chimerical. The only choice seems to be to plod ahead in the mud of this real world, choosing to side with the angels or the devils and making your decisions accordingly.

^* I found a similar argument in Hannah Arendt’s essay on Civil Disobedience. It seems to me to suffer from the same problems found in the long line of myths inventing the consent of the governed from the Hobbes/Locke tradition of Western philosophy. These amount to hand-waving and just-so-story-telling, and to the extent that they are taken literally were well-refuted by, for instance, Lysander Spooner’s No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.

Still, there does seem to be something important in the ideas that, first, we are born into civilization and there is never any question of entering it or leaving it and so we must decide how we are going to coexist with it, and, second, that to the extent that we know we can dissent if we do not do so we are in some manner consenting.

Arendt wrote:

Every man is born as a member of a particular community and can survive only if he is welcomed and made at home within it. Some kind of consent is implied in every newly born’s factual situation, namely, some kind of conformity to the rules under which the great game of the world is played in the particular group into which he belongs by birth. We all live and survive by a kind of tacit consent, which however it would be difficult to call voluntary. How can we will what is there anyhow? We might call it voluntary, though, when the child happens to be born into a community in which dissent is also a legal and de facto possibility once it has grown into a man. Dissent implies consent and is the hallmark of free government; who knows that he may dissent knows also that he somehow consents when he does not dissent.…

…Seen in this perspective, tacit consent is not a fiction; it is inherent in the human condition. This consensus universalis, however, does not cover consent to specific laws or specific policies, even if they are the result of majority decisions. It is often argued that the consent to the Constitution, the consensus universalis, implies also consent to statutory laws because in representative government the people helped to make them. This consent, I think, is indeed entirely fictitious; under present circumstances, at any rate, it has lost all plausibility.…

An excerpt from Moral Responsibility under Totalitarian Dictatorships by Hannah Arendt, which seems to me a good counterpoint to some of the attitudes that Robert McGee found in his surveys (see yesterday’s entry):

…there was the horror that it had been quite easy to still the conscience of a whole people — except a numerically small minority. … Was it really possible to change the morals of a whole people like table manners? There were however the minority of non-participants — we are not concerned with heroes or saints — but with everybody. Who were the participants, who were the others? …

Those who did not participate were neither people who were old-fashioned enough not to accept new standards nor were they in possession of better ones. Their conscience did not function in this mechanical way — where you have a law and then subsume all particular cases under it. They were arrogant enough to judge by themselves. And their criterion, I’d suggest, was Socratic: Socrates said not only: Better to suffer than to do wrong, but he explained it: It is better to be at odds with the whole world than being one to be at odds with yourself. They asked themselves if they would still be able to live with themselves after having done certain deeds. And they decided not to participate, not because the world would be better (not because of political responsibility) and not because they were worried about the salvation of their soul, but because they wanted to go on living with themselves. They refused to murder not so much because they still held fast to the command Thou Shalt not Kill but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer.

…The presupposition for this kind of judging is the habit of examining and living together with yourself. We call that silent dialogue in which you speak with yourself Thinking, but it is not technical, not the privilege of the educated and sophisticated.…

We have a tendency to think of people who are in the habit of examining basic propositions and standards as destructive. We have every reason to change our minds on this subject. Doubters and skeptics are more reliable, not because doubting is wholesome or skepticism good but because such people are used to make up their own minds — to live together with themselves.

This attitude of non-participation, of not doing certain things quite irrespective of the world, is politically a marginal situation. It is irresponsible, and such irresponsibility is justified when you are completely impotent. Hence it is the right attitude in extreme situations, and it can also be the right attitude for those who have made Thinking a way of life — the philosopher, or whoever claims freedom from politics…

Against this attitude, the current claim was: Every citizen has a duty to obey the laws. He cannot examine the laws and then decide whether or not they are good laws; such conduct would undermine every body politic. No government can survive without this obedience. This is a fallacy, and it resides in the word obedience. Only a child obeys. An adult actually supports the laws or the authority that claims obedience. No action is possible without support and help from others. The one who starts action needs the support from others to see the matter through… Without such “obedience,” a leader is helpless — whereas in the nursery the child is helpless…

If I obey the laws of the land, I actually support its constitution, and every revolution starts when this tacit consent is withdrawn.

In political terms, the non-participants to the extent that they came in conflict with the laws of the land did not claim freedom from politics but withdrew their consent, refused to support by shunning such places of responsibility where such support under the name of obedience was required, or by paying with their lives for non-obedience.

…And though there may be many people who don’t live with themselves — and that means who, strictly speaking, have no conscience — for me life would not be worth living if I lost myself.…

I’m reading Arne Johan Vetlesen’s Evil and Human Agency.

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, 26 September 2006). 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 the day, not quite at the half-way mark.

From time to time I mull over Arendt’s “banality of evil” concept. For instance, last May I mentioned Arne Johan Vetlesen’s criticisms. Now, this month’s edition of The Psychologist features an article — Questioning the banality of evil — that continues to build on (or tear down, depending on how you see it) Arendt’s influential theory.

There is a widespread consensus amongst psychologists that tyranny triumphs either because ordinary people blindly follow orders or else because they mindlessly conform to powerful roles. However, recent evidence concerning historical events challenges these views. In particular, studies of the Nazi regime reveal that its functionaries engaged actively and creatively with their tasks.

Re-examination of classic social psychological studies points to the same dynamics at work. This article summarises these developments and lays out the case for an updated social psychology of tyranny that explains both the influence of tyrannical leaders and the active contributions of their followers.

The paper doesn’t treat Arendt’s work very fairly, I don’t think, but it does give some good pointers to conflicting data and new interpretations.

As I mentioned yesterday, a frequent point of contention in debates about conscientious tax resistance is whether (and if so, to what extent) paying taxes makes a taxpayer complicit in the deeds of the government.

Different people have taken positions at either extreme (not at all complicit, absolutely complicit) and at various points in the middle, and have deployed persuasive arguments and metaphors to argue their cases.

I’ll explore some of these arguments today. I’m going to start off with some discussion of law and legal culpability.

The Nuremberg Principles

One reason a discussion of legal theory is important in what initially seems to be a discussion about moral, not legal, responsibility, is the Nuremberg Principles. The people who drafted these Principles were trying to articulate what they supposed to be universal, eternal, and self-evident crimes. (This was meant to solve the problems of jurisdiction and ex post facto law in the trials of Nazi war criminals, and also to formally outlaw such things as aggressive war.)

The Principles state, in part,

• “Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity [elsewhere defined] is a crime under international law.”

and

• “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

A number of war tax resisters have taken these Principles as an inspiration, and some have even adopted the conceit of saying that they are afraid that if they pay taxes they may risk being prosecuted under the theory the Principles articulate.

The United States government is certainly guilty of the crimes listed under that first bullet point, so — leaving aside the practical difficulties involved in holding anyone accountable for complicity with the United States government at this stage of the game — what must one do if one wants to avoid such complicity? Must one resist paying taxes, for example?

Larry Rosenwald is one war tax resister who believes the answer to that question is an unequivocal “yes”:

To pay war taxes is to acquiesce in building weapons of mass destruction… what international law as derived from the Nuremberg principles arguably defines as a crime… It is, simply, a wrong act for any pacifist, any adherent of international law, any person fundamentally opposed to American policy; and I do not understand what keeps such people from refusing taxes…

And he’s not alone.

Conspiracy theory

I quoted blogger FSK yesterday as saying, “If you pay taxes, you are as responsible for war as the soldier who kills people. If you pay taxes, you are directly responsible for every bad thing government does. Paying taxes is immoral.”

This representation bears some resemblance to the legal concept of conspiracy. One set of jury instructions about conspiracy put it this way:

[W]here several persons conspire or combine together to commit any unlawful act, each is criminally responsible for the acts of his associates or confederates committed in furtherance of any prosecution of the common design for which they combine. In contemplation of law, the act of one is the act of all. Each is responsible for everything done by his confederates, which follows incidentally in the execution of the common design as one of its probable and natural consequences, even though it was not intended as a part of the original design or common plan.

There are a couple of glaring problems with stretching the concept of conspiracy to cover taxpayers. For starters, it seems hard to take seriously once you consider all of its ramifications.

For instance, I don’t think FSK really believes what he’s saying he believes. He’s said on other occasions that he has an above-ground job at which taxes are withheld from his paycheck, and that while he’d be willing to take a job in the underground or “agorist” economy in order to avoid these taxes, he wouldn’t be willing to take a pay cut to do so. Can it really be true that as a taxpayer he feels “directly responsible for every bad thing government does,” — as responsible as the people who directly carry out those bad things, but that he feels so blasé about this that he wouldn’t stop doing it if it cost him any money?

His excuse may be that he has to earn a living, but how is this different from the same excuse given by a soldier, Senator, or bureaucrat — assuming you believe, as FSK says he does, that a taxpayer is just as responsible as they are for their actions?

Secondly, to prove “conspiracy” in the legal sense, you have to show that the parties to the agreement agreed to work together to achieve some common end, and that either the end itself, or the methods they chose to reach that end, were illegal. This isn’t as hard to prove as it might sound at first. You don’t necessarily have to prove that the conspirators actually met or signed onto a formal plan. As one set of jury instructions put it:

[I]t is not necessary to constitute a conspiracy that two or more persons should meet together, and enter into an explicit or formal agreement for an unlawful scheme, or that they should directly, by words or in writing, state what the unlawful scheme was to be, and the detail of the plans or means by which the unlawful combination was to be made effective. It is sufficient if two or more persons, in any manner, or through any contrivance, positively or tacitly come to a mutual understanding to accomplish a common and unlawful design.

and another:

[A]ll who take part in a conspiracy after it is formed and while it is in execution, and all who, with the knowledge of the facts, concur in the facts originally formed and aid in executing them, are fellow conspirators. Their concurrence, without proof of an agreement to concur, is conclusive against them. They commit the offense when they become partners to the transaction or further the original plan.

Do taxpayers meet this sort of qualification? If you’re putting on your prosecutor’s-hat, you can probably look at these instructions and say, sure, I could make it stick. But if you’re defending the taxpayer against a charge of conspiracy, you’ve got a good trump card to play: In short, if my client is accused of illegally conspiring with a government, by paying taxes to it — how can you suggest that there was some sort of “agreement” or “mutual understanding” if the government had to threaten my client to comply? That doesn’t sound like an agreement to me. My client isn’t an accomplice, but a victim!

Duress — How much can it excuse?

But just how good of a defense is it to say that you were paying taxes under duress? Can such an argument always relieve you of all responsibility, or does it only work when certain conditions are met, or only relieve you of a certain amount of responsibility? How much compulsion must the government use before it absorbs responsibility? Is there a threshold? Does it depend on what they’re trying to absorb responsibility for?

It couldn’t be the case (could it?) that the government could “force” you to murder someone by threatening you with a $25 fine for refusing — and that the government could take all of the guilt off your shoulders in this way.

Alas, in the debates about tax resistance, usually government compulsion is seen as an all-or-nothing sort of thing, and questions like these go unanswered.

William Lloyd Garrison said at one point that willingly paying taxes to a government that upholds slavery was wrong, but that to acquit yourself it is sufficient for you to announce that you are not cooperating willingly, and to strike an attitude that is consonant with that declaration:

[A man] may consent peaceably to yield up what is demanded of him, but not without remonstrance, and only as he would give up his purse to a highwayman. He will not recognize it as a lawful tax — he will not pay it as a tax — but will denounce it as robbery and oppression.

Tolstoy agreed, emphasizing that although it was wrong to voluntarily pay taxes, under the Christian non-resistance principle that he (and Garrison) adhered to, it was also wrong to resist the government in seizing taxes:

A religious man may not resist by force those who take any of the fruits of his labour — whether they be private robbers or robbers that are called “the Government”…

The proper thing to do when the government comes calling, in this school of thought, is to refuse to pay voluntarily but to submit peacefully to distraint of property. But J.G. James argued against such passive tax resistance, by saying:

It may well be questioned if the payment of rates or taxes is voluntary at all, since the account is presented in the form of a demand, and not a polite request. Inasmuch as payment is compulsory in any case, is not Passive Resistance merely an awkward, expensive, and an inconvenient mode of payment for all concerned?

It’s easy to confuse these two cases:

1. in which someone actually forces you to do something (such as forcing you to stay in prison by locking the doors)
2. in which someone threatens you with unpleasant consequences if you do not do something.

In the first case, you don’t have alternatives to choose from, so you don’t have any blame for what you’re stuck with. In the second case, though, your options have merely been changed. You still have a choice to make, and that choice can be praiseworthy or blameworthy. Hannah Arendt wrote:

…in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: “If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.” And while a temptation where one’s life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification.

If the tax collector says “give me your money or else,” that isn’t the end of the inquiry, but the time to say “or else what?” and then to weigh the options. If I believed FSK’s argument that what the tax collector was saying was “be directly responsible for every bad thing government does or else” I’d be asking my “or else what?” with bluff-calling incredulity.

When you eat a Chiquita you’ve done your part

Can you be found legally guilty for payments you made under duress? You certainly can, under some circumstances anyway. Look at what happened to Chiquita (you know, the banana company).

Chiquita had been operating in Colombia and, as a cost of doing business there, had to pay taxes to some of the governments that control parts of the country. Three of those governments were designated as terrorist organizations by the United States government, which has passed a law prohibiting anyone from funding such organizations anywhere. In addition, there is an international agreement (as of 2002) that prohibits funding terrorist organizations. It says:

Any person commits an offence within the meaning of this Convention if that person by any means, directly or indirectly, unlawfully and willfully, provides or collects funds with the intention that they should be used or in the knowledge that they are to be used, in full or in part, in order to carry out:

(a) An act which constitutes an offence within the scope of and as defined in one of the treaties listed in the annex; or

(b) Any other act intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.

(On its face, this would seem to prohibit paying taxes to the United States government, but seeing as the government is a signatory to this agreement, and seeing as all of the signatories are governments, I’m sure there’s a loophole.)

In any case, Chiquita pled guilty in a plea bargain and was hit with a $25 million fine.

But I’m not sure if this really is relevant to the topic at hand. Note that Chiquita was not charged with conspiring with these Colombian terrorist groups — wasn’t charged as a co-conspirator or accessory in their crimes — but was charged with a distinct crime of providing funds to terrorist organizations. On the other hand, that crime may itself just be a sort of legal shorthand that amounts to essentially the same sort of thing. I haven’t investigated the legal theory behind it.

It’s Caesar’s fault

J.G. James was a believer in law and government, and so he felt that when taxes or tax expenditures conflicted with conscience, the proper response was to do what could be done within the law to rectify the problem, but to go no further:

[I]t is the duty of a conscientious citizen to pay an unjust charge if he has tried in vain to prevent the measure passing into law, on the ground that he is no longer responsible for the expenditure of public funds, after he has done his utmost to control that expenditure by legalized means

This argument, that once the money is out of your hands you are no longer responsible for how it is spent, comes up frequently in debates about tax resistance — often even from tax resisters themselves, when trying to explain the limits of their resistance.

For instance, John H. Dadmun was a conscientious objector during the American Civil War who, in addition to refusing to serve in the military, refused also to pay someone else to serve as a substitute in his place (which was at the time a legal alternative to service). This was because, he said, “that is the same as to go myself.”

But he was willing to pay a militia exemption tax (though it would take him some time to raise the money). Someone chided him about this, noting that “the government can take the money and get a substitute.” Dadmun responded:

“It might do so, but there is no provision into the law to carry that into effect; and furthermore, the Marshal has told me it had not been so used, but must be paid into government and he could not trace it further…”

Eventually…

[T]he brethren gave me almost a hundred dollars, and others lent me for Christ’s sake, not knowing whether I would be able to pay or not, and thus I was able to purchase my liberty, and satisfying the government, by “rendering Caesar his own,” with image and superscription thereon; and if he makes a bad use of it, he is responsible; as I have no further control of it.

G.W. Gillespe, another Civil War-era conscientious objector, had a nearly identical stand:

[T]he idea of hiring a man to kill for me would implicate me in the crime; so I refused to give even five cents for a substitute.

If I had had three hundred dollars, I could conscientiously have given it to Caesar as a last resort, to get exempt from the bloody field of carnal strife. Some tried to persuade me that it was just as bad to pay the money as to hire a substitute, as the money was for that purpose. The difference is great. The Lord will not hold me accountable for the mischief that money, taken from me by force, would do when employed by others. Caesar demands taxes of us; we pay them, according to the instruction and example of our Lord. We render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and Caesar hires a man to shoot his enemies for him; are we to blame? By no means. But to hire a man to fight in my place, would be like hiring a thief to steal in my place. Both guilty.

Rendering unto Caesar

Here we hit one of the big stumbling blocks that Christian tax resisters have run into. The New Testament is distressingly explicit, in Romans 13:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.… [I]t is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

If Jesus wanted us to know that we should resist taxes to governments that were going to apply the tax money in sinful ways, he was given every opportunity to make this clear when he was asked: “Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Instead, he responded with the koan “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” which confused everybody at the time, and the meaning of which continues to defy consensus today.

The best the resisters could come up with to justify their position was either a confidently asserted, if somewhat strained reading of the “Give to Caesar” koan (one war tax resister insisted that Jesus delivered his koan during a time of peace in the Roman Empire, so Jesus was by no means countenancing war taxes), or the story from Acts 5 in which the apostles defied the law and continued to preach the gospel according to God’s explicit command. Asked to explain themselves,

Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than men!”

Most Christian tax resisters took the “Give to Caesar” koan and certainly the Romans passage to mean that God does indeed command us to pay taxes, even to unjust governments, but took the Acts “We must obey God rather than men” statement to provide an occasional override: Essentially “render unto Caesar and submit to the government, unless that means disobeying God.”

T.S. Grimké put it this way:

[If the ruler] require me to pay taxes, although one object of the taxes be the support of idolatry, or the waging of war, I comply, simply because he has a clear right to levy taxes, and the responsibility of applying them is with him, not with me. He is lawfully possessed of the power on the principle of civil obedience, as taught us in the New Testament; taxes are among the usual and necessary instruments for the administration of government; the use to which he shall apply them, is not my province, but his: he requires nothing unlawful of me, and therefore I comply.

Here then is the distinction. If he commands what is unlawful, as a means for the attainment of even a lawful end, I refuse obedience. But if he commands what is lawful, intending when the command has been performed by me, to employ the fruit of my obedience in the accomplishment of unlawful purposes in which I have no hand, I obey, because he requires of me only what is rightful. I have nothing to do with his motive or his object.

I would illustrate this by the case of a debt. I am indebted to another. He demands payment. I am not at liberty to refuse, because I happen to know, or have reason to believe that he will employ the money, when paid, for unlawful or immoral purposes. This follows from the principle already stated. My duty is very clear, to pay the debt: the use of the money, when paid, is at once his right and responsibility. This may be aptly illustrated by a modification of the case stated. I am indebted to another; but the debt is not due. He calls for payment, not having a right to do so, and I happen to know, that his reason for wishing the money then, is to make an improper use of it. I am bound to refuse; because not being bound to pay then, I am volunteering to grant a favor, knowing that it will be abused.

On the same principle I can conscientiously pay taxes, knowing, that among other objects, the public money will be applied to pay judges and jurors for trying and condemning criminals to capital punishment; to pay the salary of the president of a college, who teaches that public prayer is unchristian, and the clergy a set of impostors; or to pay the expenses of war. This seems to me the only safe and wise principle, and it furnishes a suitable criterion for civil obedience.

[However, if the] magistrate, instead of a general tax law divides the taxes, and lays on the advocates of Peace the war tax. They cannot conscientiously pay it; because they are thus made the sole and direct instrument of carrying on the war, and without their compliance, it must be at a stand.…

…Obedience is due to the civil magistrate, not as a duty to society, but as a duty to God. God only can then lawfully fix the land-marks of that duty.

This was also Edward Swaine’s argument against tax resistance by nonconformist Christians against government support for establishment churches. And he was unafraid to take his argument to its logical ends:

If Cæsar say “Give me money,” we must give it; for God has nowhere said “Do not give Cæsar money,” or “Do not give Cæsar money without satisfaction that he will properly apply it.” If Cæsar say “Do not preach,” Paul must refuse obedience, for Christ has said to him “preach!” If Cæsar say to us, “Go to the North Pole” — or “wear a cocked hat” — we must do so; for God has not claimed our obedience to the contrary. He has not said, “Do not go to the North Pole” or “go only where you please.” He has not said, “Do not wear a cocked hat,” or “wear only what you like.” Those things, then, concerning which God has claimed nothing of us, we must render unto Cæsar.

Swaine draws the line in this way:

God says to us in effect… If [Caesar] should say to you… “I resolve to establish the worship of Baal for the good of the Empire,” and to levy a tax for that purpose, the resources of the State are his, and you are bound to render the tax. But, if he should say I hold it to be for the good of the land, that every one acknowledge Baal to be God, and therefore require the payment of the tax to be accompanied by a recognition by the payers of the godhead of Baal, you are bound, while you pay the tax, to refuse the recognition, though impaling or burning be the penalty. Or, if the tax be collected under an enactment that every one who pays shall be considered as offering to Baal, you are bound to refuse the payment, for to pay in such case would be equivalent to worship, and a rendering to Cæsar of that which is God’s. But I do not justify your refusal of taxes, because they may be levied for a purpose that my law condemns. He who violates my law must answer, and that is not you who pay the tax, but he who levies it if a bad one. It is he who misapplies the National Funds, not you who had no rightful command over them to apply or misapply.

You have no responsibility, and violate none of God’s laws, if your tax dollars are spent in sinful ways, according to Swaine, because “the tax-gatherer comes… not for a contribution, or subscription, or aid, but for property no longer the subject’s to give or to withhold, and no longer under his rightful control…”

Taxes for bad objects are to be paid, not because we can be excused for helping evil by any voluntary act, that we are morally free to forbear, nor because the payment of such taxes will not help evil, for it will help evil, just as much as the payment of a debt to one who is going to misapply the money will help the evil, — but because the tax is not the subject’s any more than the debt is the debtor’s to help with or to withhold. The payment therefore is his duty, for he is not morally free to decline it, although it will help evil.

Is paying a tax like paying a debt?

This comparison of taxes to debts, as used by Grimké and Swaine above, was an important metaphor in the ongoing debate about tax resistance. If paying taxes to the government is good in and of itself, because God has so decreed it, then taxpaying can’t simply be judged according to its consequences.

A tax payment, in this way of thinking, is not a donation or a subscription or a contribution that is made voluntarily, but is a duty akin to repaying a debt. You can’t ethically refuse to repay a loan because you think the person you owe money to will spend it unwisely.

Here’s an example of how this metaphor was used by one tax resister: Joshua Maule was a Quaker advocate of war tax resistance. When a general tax was increased by a certain percentage in order to pay for war expenses (with the government explicitly saying this was the reason), Maule refused to pay this additional fraction of his taxes, and he insisted that this was the only position consistent with traditional Quaker teaching regarding war.

Maule’s critics asked him why he continued to pay other taxes (like excise fees) or the remaining portion of his general tax — since surely some of these taxes would also go to pay for war. Nathan Hall compared Maule’s stand to someone trying to avoid drinking intoxicating beverages by, for instance, only drinking 75% of a bottle of 50-proof (25% alcohol) liquor:

We both have a testimony against the use of ardent spirits, but are, being very thirsty, placed in a situation where we can get no water except some that has a small portion of whiskey in it. Being under the necessity of taking something, thee may, by inquiry and calculation, find what proportion of the objectionable article is contained in it, and leave just that much in thy bowl; while my understanding will be that in partaking I partake of both good and bad, and in refusing refuse both. So that with me the question is and has been, not what portion I should pay so much as whether any at all.

Maule responded by trying to draw a sharp line between ordinary civil taxes, which like a debt he must pay regardless of how some of it may be used, and explicit war taxes, which fall under a different rule:

The arguments used in reference to what disposition the officers of the law might make of the money collected appeared to me to be valueless.… I am not accountable for the acts of other men: if I owe a just debt, I must pay it; if the person receiving the money uses it for a bad purpose, the accountability is with him; but if he demand money of me avowedly to be used in any way to the plundering of my neighbor, destroying his property, or taking his life, then if I furnish money thus demanded I become an accomplice in the evil work and accountable for the sin. I consider our civil taxes a just debt that should be promptly paid, but I am satisfied that no human authority has either a moral or a religious right to demand of me money or means of any kind to aid in destroying the lives and property of my fellow-men.

Samuel Allinson put forward the most forceful attack on the tax-as-debt analogy in 1780. First off, he denied outright that God has commanded us to give Caesar anything that Caesar plans to put to a sinful purpose: “if tribute is demanded for a use that is antichristian, it seems right for every Christian to deny it, for Cæsar can have no title to that which opposes the Lord’s command.” Having knocked out the divine pillar upholding taxpaying as a moral duty, he then proceeds to attack the idea that taxation represents some sort of secularly-contracted debt, or part of an implied “social contract.” Allinson argues that no Christian would agree to the terms of a contract that might require him to do the devil’s work:

Every valid contract is voluntarily entered into, and as it is the duty of every one previously to see that his engagement is innocent, so when his promise is purchased by a consideration given it would be dishonest and deceitful not to perform it, the other party having, as it were, deposited so much effects in his hands, which he is to render back according to agreement and when received the receiver has a right to apply it as he pleases without any account to the payer, but in the case of taxes he who gives has a right to call to such an account and therefore seems himself liable for and privy to the application. Every man has or has not given his assent to the government he lives under, in the first, he has formally declared his allegiance thereto, in the latter, that allegiance is implied in consideration of his receiving the protection and benefit of it in the safety of his person and the security of his property, in both, it is no more than to be “true and faithful” which can never mean a compliance with every requisition, for we owe a superior allegiance to the King of Kings, and whenever the requisitions of man run counter thereto we “ought to obey God rather than men” … We have never entered into any contract, express or implied, for the payment of taxes for war, nor the performance of anything contrary to our religious duties…

Conclusion?

So have we made any progress here? We’ve at least been able to review the question from several angles and to get some historical perspective on how it has been wrestled with. I think I’ve demonstrated that both of the extreme positions — that paying taxes makes you a fully-guilty accomplice in whatever the government then does, or that paying taxes because it is involuntary is a decision without ethical import — have serious flaws.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the Christian and the legal viewpoints, but as an atheist and an anarchist, to me those viewpoints are often only tangentially advisory at best and mere curiosities at worst. For me the question is an ethical one that has to be resolved with my reason and my conscience.

And as best as I can make out: I am under no original ethical obligation to pay a tax. Taxpaying is not in and of itself good, and I did not in reality enter into something akin to an agreement or contract that I would be unethically violating by failing to pay. Given that, I have to evaluate my decision to pay or not to pay a tax by looking at what consequences I expect will result — in other words, by imagining two worlds, one in which I paid the tax and one in which I haven’t — and choosing from them which one I’d prefer to be in. By doing this, I also imagine two of me, one who paid the tax and one who didn’t, and I choose which one I want to become.

In doing this, as with so many other decisions, some of my considerations are ethicalish (which of these worlds is more just? which of the possible me am I more proud of?) and some are more ordinarily self-interested (in which world am I more satisfied or better-off or esteemed?). This is, as far as I can tell, how it is and how it should be.

And where this has led me so far is where I’m at. Resisting some taxes completely (the federal income tax), others not-so completely (federal excise taxes), others hardly at all (the state sales tax), others dysfunctionally (the self-employment tax, which I don’t pay voluntarily, but which I accept will probably be seized). Along the way, I recalculate my situation and recalibrate my decisions based on my best judgment and my evolving understanding. And these wanderings through the thoughts of people who have grappled with these conundrums before me don’t hurt.

Some bits and pieces from here and there…

• They’re still trying to refine the Milgram Experiment after all these years, and they’re still teasing new insights out of it, including this unsurprising nugget: “the author interviewed the participants afterward and found that those who stopped [administering the shocks as they were told to] generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable.”
• The question is not “why do you obey” but “why do you support” says Arthur Silber at Once Upon a Time…. He’s trying to untangle the tangled concepts of obedience and support when it comes to adults and political matters. He quotes Hannah Arendt on this topic as writing:

  In our context, all that matters is the insight that no man, however strong, can ever accomplish anything, good or bad, without the help of others. What you have here is the notion of an equality which accounts for a “leader” who is never more than primus inter pares, the first among his peers. Those who seem to obey him actually support him and his enterprise; without such “obedience” he would be helpless, whereas in the nursery or under conditions of slavery — the two spheres in which the notion of obedience made sense and from which it was then transposed into political matters — it is the child or the slave who becomes helpless if he refuses to “cooperate.” Even in a strictly bureaucratic organization, with its fixed hierarchical order, it would make much more sense to look upon the functioning of the “cogs” and wheels in terms of overall support for a common enterprise than in our usual terms of obedience to superiors. If I obey the laws of the land, I actually support its constitution, as becomes glaringly obvious in the case of revolutionaries and rebels who disobey because they have withdrawn this tacit consent.

  In these terms, the nonparticipators in public life under a dictatorship are those who have refused their support by shunning those places of “responsibility” where such support, under the name of obedience, is required. And we have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act “irresponsibly” and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many variations of nonviolent action and resistance — for instance the power that is potential in civil disobedience — which are being discovered in our century. The reason, however, that we can hold these new criminals, who never committed a crime out of their own initiative, nevertheless responsible for what they did is that there is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. The only domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult and child.

  Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, “Why did you obey?” but “Why did you support?” This change of words is no semantic irrelevancy for those who know the strange and powerful influence mere “words” have over the minds of men who, first of all, are speaking animals. Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word “obedience” from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.

• Philip Brewer at Wise Bread puts it all together in a blog post that summarizes what he’s been trying to get across with his many writings on simplified, deliberate, meaningful, abundant living. If you don’t find something fantastic there, I’ll be surprised.
• Francois Tremblay writes about a society based on love at Check Your Premises. It’s hard to summarize, so I’ll just invite you to take a look. Though the title sounds like it ought to be on the cover of some flimsy tract over a kitschy painting of lions and lambs frolicking with children in tunics, the contents are thought-provoking.

I was on the bus on the way back from my Spanish tutor a couple of days back, and I think it must have been an old song that came through my earbuds… you know how a smell or a tune or something will all of a sudden coalesce a vivid constellation of memory? I got a flashback to a certain part of my mental state when I was a kid.

I remembered how much anxiety I felt when I was young and unsure of myself. I was constantly alert to ways in which I might be being judged by others or making myself vulnerable to their negative judgment.

On one hand, this is natural: We come into life ignorant of our cultures’ standards of behavior and have to learn them largely through observation and through trial-and-error. So when we’re young we’re especially sensitive to the judgments of others.

On the other hand, this is partially exaggerated and artificial: We create environments like schools in which children spend hours and hours every school day being run through a gamut of external judgments by institutional design — these days, with the current mania for testing and tracking, more than ever.

John Taylor Gatto was a schoolteacher in New York, and was declared the state’s “teacher of the year” in 1991. He’s since become better-known as a critic of institutional schooling. One of his criticisms is that in addition to whatever individual subjects are being taught in school at any particular time, the institution of school is itself constantly teaching a set of lessons that are more pervasive and enduring, and many of which are malignant.

He once described six of these lessons that every schoolteacher teaches. Here is the fifth of these:

I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer’s measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students’ homes to spread approval or to mark exactly down to a single percentage point how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective-seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers. Self-evaluation — the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet — is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

It is common for people to get to the end of their school years being so accustomed to trying to perform in such a way as to get external validation that they never grow up to that stage in which they are able to judge themselves and internalize appropriate standards. They graduate with a stunted ethical immaturity and no hints on how to get over it or why.

As a youth, having to monitor myself without the confidence of a mature internal judge, it was as if I were simulating the standpoints of multiple, contradictory, external judges — without any coherent way of discriminating among their judgments, and only the most rudimentary methods of guessing what those judgments would be. And so a question like “am I going to get made fun of for wearing these shoes” could become a consuming angst, with dozens of these simulated judges in my head trying on new ways of mocking my sneakers and the import of their judgments exaggerated beyond all reason. Oh to be a teenager again.

After I had this little flashback to the mental state of my youth, I felt thankful and relieved at having gotten past it. Some people never do, it seems, and that must suck. On the other hand, I’ve heard this surrender of self-judgment to others described in other contexts as a relief or as laying down a burden, so maybe I’m missing something.

Hannah Arendt pointed out how this lack of confident self-judgment — she bluntly called it the act of refusing to be a person — makes people ungrounded and easily-manipulated into committing atrocity. She was writing of the Nazi transformation of Germany when she wrote:

…the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong, and which were invoked to judge or justify others and themselves, and whose validity were supposed to be self-evident to every sane person either as a part of divine or of natural law.… without much notice… collapsed almost overnight, and then it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people.

She looked at the examples of people who refused to go along with the madness and found:

Those who did not participate were neither people who were old-fashioned enough not to accept new standards nor were they in possession of better ones. Their conscience did not function in this mechanical way — where you have a law and then subsume all particular cases under it. They were arrogant enough to judge by themselves.

I don’t think “arrogant” is really called for, even if, in the context, it serves as a complement. “Confident” seems to work better. An arrogant person judges himself and denigrates the judgments of others. A confident person judges himself and scrutinizes the judgments of others — learning from them rather than passively accepting them or trying to avoid them. Learning to judge for yourself doesn’t mean you can start ignoring other people’s opinions, but that you have a basis from which to evaluate them and appreciate them and you no longer just have to flinch from them or deny them.

In the fifth section of the third book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle, having pinpointed the subset of acts that are voluntary, chosen, and deliberate, now says that it is these acts in which virtue is demonstrated.

Virtue is found in the exercise of means (wishing for the correct ends is presumably more a matter of wisdom than virtue). The exercise of means (or the decision not to) is a matter of deliberation and choice, and so is in our power, and therefore so is our virtue.

You are responsible for being reasonably informed about what you need to know to make the right decisions in the circumstances you encounter, and if you ignore this responsibility (or if you actively contribute to your own ignorance, for instance by being drunk or by looking away from some inconvenient truth), you cannot use your ignorance as an excuse for vicious actions.

Since virtue is a habit (as is vice), it may be a choice to initially acquire a vice or to neglect a virtue, but once you have done this habitually, it becomes less voluntary over time. This is interesting for a couple of reasons: first, if virtues and vices become less voluntary as they become more habitual, it would seem that they become less praiseworthy or blameworthy also; second, it seems to create another obstacle in the path to becoming a virtuous person if you aren’t one already — how do you go about changing bad habits if they aren’t even very voluntary any longer? (Aristotle does not yet address either of these points, but I hope he does eventually.)

In some recorded lectures about the Nicomachean Ethics that I was listening to during a recent leisurely train ride down California, Joseph Koturksi emphasized that Aristotle defined moral virtue in particular as a habit of choosing the golden mean — that is to say that it differs from other varieties of habit in not constricting choice but in exhibiting itself as choosing.

It seems from this that the lack of moral virtue can take two forms, or a combination of the two: not choosing, or choosing poorly. (I suppose a third variety would be a failure to make correct choosing habitual, but my reading of Aristotle suggests that this habituation is an automatic process, and so its absence would be more suggestive of, say, brain damage, than of anything correctable by philosophy.)

Anyway: “habit” in the case of moral virtue isn’t meant as a sort of unthinking, repetitive, by-rote sort of behavior. Point made.

Next, Aristotle addresses the argument that while everybody aims for the apparent good, what appears to be good to each of us is not under our control but is just a given part of our temperament or constitution or some such. Aristotle says that if this is true, then you aren’t really to be blamed for deeds you perform under the misapprehension that you’re doing the right thing. However, he says that to some extent, you are responsible for your own temperament and constitution, and to that extent you can inherit responsibility for the misdeeds you perform under its influence.

But in any case, if our virtues are voluntary and we can be praised for them, our vices are too, and we can be blamed for them.

From here, for most of the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics, we’re going to go into an in-depth look at particular virtues. The rest of this book will look at courage and temperance. Book four will concern liberality, magnificence, pride, industriousness, good temper, friendliness, truthfulness, bonhomie, and the quasi-virtue of shame. Book five is all about justice. Book six concerns the intellectual virtues. Book seven concerns continence and also contains a discussion of pleasure that will be continued in book ten.

Several days ago my sweetie and I were relaxing at home with a DVD from the library: the movie Secretary. It’s a silly story about a mousy young woman (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also, coincidentally, played the vivacious tax resister in Stranger than Fiction) who becomes the secretary of an eccentric lawyer and who finds her job transforming into an erotic dominance/submission scene in which she learns to play the submissive and ends up personally flowering and maturing in the course of doing so.

It’s not a very deep film, but some of her character’s comments about the pleasures of submission — unthinking obedience to the commands of a trusted dominant — and the sort of confidence and, oddly, “freedom” that results from this, lodged in my head and got me thinking about this and that.

Much of this “freedom” is freedom from having to make up your own mind and make your own decisions and assert your own risky initiative. What am I going to do? Whatever the dominant wants me to do or tells me to do. If that’s always the right answer, it makes deciding a snap and much less of a burden, and permits you (or seems to permit you) to shift most of the burden of the responsibility for the consequences onto the dominant “decider.”

In a bedroom scene, that’s all fun and games, but when such things come out of the bedroom and into society at large, this sort of evasion of responsibility can be very dangerous. Hannah Arendt spent some time analyzing Adolf Eichmann as someone who had decided to renounce his will and devote himself to carrying out his Fuhrer’s will; once he was caught and put on trial for this, he pathetically tried to excuse his behavior by saying that having made himself an agent of the Fuhrer’s whims, he was no longer able to behave according to his remaining ethical instincts.

A couple of years back I quoted Arne Johan Vetlesen’s summary of Arendt’s argument: “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.” Vetlesen says that indulging this temptation not only dangerously enables you to commit evil, but is a sort of evil itself:

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.

The military chain of command is another dangerous variety of D&S game in which essentially unquestioning obedience is expected. I suspect that a craving for submission and for freedom from the burden of decision-making and its consequences is a strong motivation for many people who join the military. This burden can feel especially heavy to young people just emerging from home and from institutional education into the freedom of adulthood and all of the responsibility it entails.

But I also thought about Aristotle’s assertion that a virtuous person takes pleasure in behaving virtuously that outweighs any incidental discomfort of any particular virtuous act. If you have an image of virtue in your mind and you conform your actions to that image and then take pleasure in having done so, to what extent is this like a sort of private D&S game in which your image of virtue is the dominant and you are the submissive?

In a Christian context, this is explicit: the Christian accepts Christ as his or her Lord and Master, and says Thy Will Be Done, I will deny myself and take up my cross daily, and so forth. Kant, for his part, thought that an act was really virtuous only if it was unpleasant, painful, or difficult — whip me! beat me! make me virtuous!

How do you identify and correct for a decadent parody of virtue that really amounts to a responsibility-denying D&S scene? That is, how do you know whether you’re being virtuous or whether you’re submitting to a freedom-restricting straitjacket in the name of virtue? How do you avoid getting in a situation where you do the wrong thing, but “can’t help it” because you’ve obligated yourself to submit to Christ’s teachings, or to think of the greatest good for the greatest number, or to maintain Army discipline, or to obey the categorical imperative, or whatever your dom happens to be?

And how would you defend against the argument that Aristotle’s model of virtue is essentially a D&S scene in which a mental model of virtue is the dom?

One possible line of defense would be to note that, in Aristotle’s scheme (unlike Kant’s, for instance), virtuous acts are not necessarily painful or difficult or against your inclinations — indeed, often quite the opposite: virtue is a variety of excellence and an important path toward eudaimonia — flourishing, thriving, happiness. So at least this isn’t an S&M thing, where you martyr yourself and then take pleasure in your suffering. Also, as Joseph Koturski pointed out, moral virtue is the habit of choosing well, so it doesn’t unburden you of the need to choose at all. To the extent that a D&S scene is partially about freedom-from-choice, an internal, non-dogmatic dom doesn’t do the trick (whereas a Categorical Imperative or a scriptural Jesus might do).

Doing the rounds in all the best circles these past several days has been an ongoing series of articles at Once Upon a Time… inspired by the recent WikiLeaks releases, the work of Bradley Manning in getting the information out at great risk, and the resulting media chit-chat.

The author, Arthur Silber, takes the opportunity for some meditation on responsibility, consent, obedience, support, and other such subjects, and caught my eye by dropping in some of Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the subject.

I have to confess that between being out-of-the-country for a month and then a variety of things eating up my time in the days since I got back, I haven’t followed the Wikileaks/Manning saga at all closely, and I haven’t even had time to do much more than glance at this particular series of articles. I read enough to convince me to donate some money to Bradley Manning’s defense fund though.

That said, here’s Claire Wolfe’s take on it, and here’s Dana Visalli’s note on the wtr-s war tax resistance mailing list.

As I mentioned yesterday, a while back I tried to flesh out a variety of political philosophy that I whimsically dubbed “topianism.”

I meant the name to highlight the distinction between it and utopian political philosophies (meaning, most all of the rest of them, including the mainstream ones that pass for conventional wisdom) — that is to say that it’s not aiming at organizing society in some ideal way, but in understanding and navigating society as it is in the here-and-now (not in the outopos where it will never be, or the eutopos where we might ideally project it to be, but in this topos right here where we’re standing). I’m not crazy about the name “topianism,” but I need some sort of tag to attach to the idea while I look for a better one.

Topianism is almost more of an ethical code than a political philosophy, except that it has a component with profound political consequences: its claim that there is no second standard (or set of standards) by which to judge acts in the political sphere — instead, a single standard applies to everyone. Questions like “is she a citizen?” or “is he a defendant?” or “is she the queen?” or “is he licensed?” or “is that legal?” don’t play the same sort of decisive role in topian evaluation as they do in utopian philosophies.

Topianism bears a lot of resemblance to existentialism because of its emphasis on personal responsibility and on avoiding the temptation to deflect or deny this responsibility.

When you talk about responsibility, you sometimes end up getting into the tangle over free will. There’s a lot of philosophical debate over whether free will makes any sense at all, and if it does, how it must be structured so as to make sense and whether a free will so structured bears any resemblance to the more intuitive, common-sense version of the concept. And there’s a lot of psychological debate over the extent to which our conscious decision-making is actually a causal factor in our actions or is only an after-the-fact “just so story” we tell ourselves.

Be all that as it may, most of us feel that we inhabit a world in which we choose some actions and some things just happen to us and in which there is a big difference between the two. This is crucial to our sense of being living participants in existence and not just spectators along for the ride.

The existentialist tradition did a lot of work identifying some of the ways we conveniently pretend to be spectators instead of participants from time to time in order to try to cheat our way out of confronting our need to decide and our responsibility for the results of our decision-making.

Topianism emphasizes how this works (or rather doesn’t work) in the political sphere. It insists that you cannot displace an individual human decision onto an institution, a hierarchical order, a rule, or anything of the sort. In other words, you cannot say “I did it because it was the law,” or “I did it because it was my job,” or “I did it because it was an order,” or “I did it because it got more votes than the alternative” as a way of trying to mean “the choice I made to do it wasn’t really my choice.”

In its most uncompromising form, topianism won’t even let you foist your decisions off on rules of thumb, ethical principles, or topianism itself. You can refer to such things in the course of explaining your decision-making, but you can’t try to make such things bear any of the weight of your actual decision-making or shoulder any of the responsibility for your actions.

It is an anarchist philosophy, but not because it preaches that The State should be abolished, but because it asserts that The State, as an independent moral agent capable of making decisions and shouldering responsibility, does not exist. The attitude of a topian to The State is not like the attitude of an assassin to the Emperor but like the attitude of an atheist to God.

Topianism does not mandate pacifism, or the nonaggression principle, or aversion to coercion (though some, like Tolstoy in the quotes below and in what I quoted yesterday, blend the two ideas or find that they both derive from a common root). Indeed if it were to mandate such a thing, it would be self-undermining, as its practitioners would be pacifists or nonaggressive or noncoercive because of a rule rather than because of their choice.

A topian can throw a man in prison, but only by saying “it’s because I think they should be confined and I’m willing to take responsibility for confining them,” and not “I’m following the law and what the warrant says.” A topian can steal from his neighbor, but only by saying “I want his property and don’t respect his ownership of it,” never by saying “I have a legal seizure order” or “to each according to his need.” Topian decisions can be wise or unwise, good or bad, praiseworthy or blameworthy. The one thing they cannot be is foisted off on someone or something other than the person actually deciding.

A topian can never merely follow an order because it is an order or because the person who gave it holds a rank or position. But a topian may conclude that some other person has a better track record of wisdom and good judgment in some field and may follow his or her advice for that reason — though never losing track of the fact that the choice and the responsibility for the consequences lie with the person taking the advice, not the person giving it.

This may sound slippery, since it seems easy to just linguistically transform an improper delegation of responsibility into a reasonable one just by saying “I choose it.” Is there a meaningful difference between saying “I did it because of an order from my commander” and saying “I did it because I chose to follow the advice of that commander-guy who seemed to me to be well-informed and of good judgment”?

I think there is. In the latter case, you have to at least ostensibly own the responsibility for your choice and make a more-or-less honest claim of having thought it over and justified it — furthermore, your posture is obviously conditional on the good judgment of “that commander-guy” and not just an unconditional carte blanche of obedience. In the former case, none of that is true: you’re merely a tool in your commander’s hands. That said, it’s certainly possible to describe your decision in a way that formally looks proper but is really a dishonest dodge gussied up in the right package. You can’t just change your language in a “politically correct” fashion, you really do have to honestly change your attitude.

Here are some ways I’ve seen the topian creed, or something close to it, expressed:

Juanita Nelson:

“It is, as far as I can see, an unpleasant fact that we cannot avoid decision-making. We are not absolved by following the dictates of a mentor or of a majority. For we then have made the decision to do that — have concluded because of belief or of fear or of apathy that this is the thing which we should do or cannot avoid doing. And then we share in the consequences of any such action. Are we doing more than trying to hide our nakedness with a fig leaf when we take the view expressed by a friend who belonged to a fundamental religious sect? At the time he wore the uniform of the United States Marines. ‘I’m not helping to murder,’ he said. ‘I’m carrying out the orders of my government, and the sin is not mine.’ I could never tell whether there was a bitter smile playing around his lips or if he was quite earnest. It is a rationalization commonly held and defended. It is a comforting presumption, but it still appears to me that, while the seat of government is in Washington, the seat of conscience is in me. It cannot be voted out of office by one or a million others.”

“Bernardo de la Paz” in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress:

“A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame… as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else.”

Mary McCarthy:

“If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.”

Hannah Arendt:

“[T]here is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. The only domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult and child. ¶ Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, ‘Why did you obey?’ but ‘Why did you support?’ … Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word ‘obedience’ from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.”

Vlasov, in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago:

“For myself, I’ve decided one thing only. I’m going to tell the executioner: ‘You alone, not the judges, not the prosecutors, you alone are guilty of my death, and you are going to have to live with it! If it weren’t for you willing executioners, there would be no death sentences!’ So then let him kill me, the rat!”

Tolstoy:

“The men of our time complain of the evil current of life in our Christian world. This cannot be otherwise, when in our consciousness we have recognized not only the fundamental divine commandment, ‘Do not kill,’ which was proclaimed thousands of years ago, but also the law of the love and brotherhood of all men, and when, in spite of this, every man of our European world in reality renounces this fundamental divine law, which he recognizes, and at the command of a president, emperor, minister, a Nicholas, a William, puts on a fool’s costume, takes up instruments of murder, and says, ‘I am ready, — I will strike down, ruin, and kill whomsoever you command me to.’ ¶ What, then, can society be, which is composed of such men? It must be terrible, and, indeed, it is terrible.”

“[T]he chief evil from which men suffer has for a long time not consisted in this: that they do not know God’s true law; but in this: that men, to whom the knowledge and the execution of the true law is inconvenient, being unable to destroy or overthrow it, invent ‘precept upon precept and rule upon rule,’ as Isaiah says, and give them out as just as obligatory as, or even more obligatory than the true laws of God. And so, the only thing that now is needed for freeing men from their sufferings, is this: that they should free themselves from all the theological, governmental, and scientific reflections, which are proclaimed to be obligatory laws of life, and, having freed themselves, should naturally recognize as more binding upon them than all the other precepts and laws, that true, eternal law, which is already known to them, and gives, not only to a few, but to all men, the greatest possible good in social life.”

“ ‘What is to be done?’ ask both the rulers and the ruled, the revolutionists and those engaged in public life, always attaching to the words, ‘What is to be done?’ the meaning of, ‘How should men’s lives be organized?’ ¶ They all ask how to arrange men’s lives, that is to say, what to do with other people; but no one asks, ‘What must I do with myself?’ … ¶ [T]he chief cause of men’s stagnation in a form of life they already admit to be wrong, lies in the amazing superstition… that some men not only can, but have the right to, predetermine and forcibly organize the life of others. ¶ People need only free themselves from this common superstition and it would at once become clear to all that the life of every group of men gets arranged only in the same way that each individual arranges his own life. And if men — both those who arrange others’ lives, and those who submit to such arranging — would only understand that, it would become evident to all that nothing can justify any kind of violence between man and man; and that violence is not only a violation of love and even of justice, but of common sense.”

“Suppose a problem in psychology was set: What can be done to persuade the men of our time — Christians, humanitarians or, simply, kindhearted people — into committing the most abominable crimes with no feeling of guilt? There could be only one way: to do precisely what is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen, and so forth; which means, first, that they must be convinced of the existence of a kind of organization called ‘government service,’ allowing men to be treated like inanimate objects and banning thereby all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this ‘government service’ must be so unified that the responsibility for their dealings with men would never fall on any one of them individually.”

Thoreau:

“It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.”

“There is but one obligation and that is the obligation to obey the highest dictate. — None can lay me under another which will supersede this. The Gods have given me these years without any incumbrance — society has no mortgage on them. If any man assist me in the way of the world, let him derive satisfaction from the deed itself — for I think I never shall have dissolved my prior obligations to God.”

“I must conclude that Conscience, if that be the name of it, was not given us for no purpose, or for a hindrance. However flattering order and expediency may look, it is but the repose of a lethargy, and we will choose rather to be awake, though it be stormy, and maintain ourselves on this earth and in this life, as we may, without signing our death-warrant. Let us see if we cannot stay here, where He has put us, on his own conditions. Does not his law reach as far as his light? The expedients of the nations clash with one another, only the absolutely right is expedient for all.”

“The disease and disorder in society are wont to be referred to the false relations in which men live one to another, but strictly speaking there can be no such thing as a false relation if the condition of the things related is true. False relations grow out of false conditions.”

“Consider the cloak that our employment or station is; how rarely men treat each other for what in their true and naked characters they are; how we use and tolerate pretension; how the judge is clothed with dignity which does not belong to him, and the trembling witness with humility that does not belong to him, and the criminal, perchance, with shame or impudence which no more belong to him. It does not matter so much, then, what is the fashion of the cloak with which we cloak these cloaks. Change the coat; put the judge in the criminal-box, and the criminal on the bench, and you might think that you had changed the men.”

“Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good? Is there any necessity for a man’s being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves? Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit? What right have you to enter into a compact with yourself that you will do thus or so, against the light within you? Is it for you to make up your mind, — to form any resolution whatever, — and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and which ever pass your understanding? I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases. Business men may arrange that among themselves. If they were the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing.”

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”

“A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences… They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments… ¶ The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, &c. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.”

“My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with, — for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel, — and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action.”

“If… a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening?”

Walter Raleigh:

“[N]o senate nor civil assembly can be under such natural impulses to honor and justice as single persons; for politic members meet with neither encouragement nor reproaches for what was the effect of number only. For a majority is nobody when that majority is separated, and a collective body can have no synteresis, or divine ray, which is in the mind of every man, never assenting to evil, but upbraiding and tormenting him when he does it: but the honor and conscience that lies in the majority is too thin and diffusive to be efficacious; for a number can do a great wrong, and call it right, and not one of that majority blush for it. Hence it is, that though a public assembly may lie under great censures, yet each member looks upon himself as little concerned: this must be the reason why a Roman senate should act with less spirit and less honor than any single Roman would do.”

Susan Nieman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy visualized as a modern social media discussion thread, the fourth and final chapter.

(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:

• chapter one
• chapter two
• chapter three

Trending Article

Lisbon destroyed by earthquake, fires, tsunami; tens of thousands killed; God’s benevolence thrown into doubt.

Johann Gottlob Krüger

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.

Gabriel Malagrida

Immanuel Kant

This was a natural disaster, but it should humble us in our scientific and technological hubris.

John Stuart Mill

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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?

Albert Camus

Hannah Arendt changed her relationship status with Martin Heidegger to “It’s complicated.”

Trending Article

Nation that brought us Goethe now brings us the premeditated, methodical, industrialized murder of millions of people. World saved from those rat bastards by a people who celebrate the incineration of cities and advance the technology of mass murder to make it push-button and near-instantaneous. Philosophy again caught flat-footed by evil.

anonymous

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Hannah Arendt

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.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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.

Hannah Arendt

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?

David Rousset

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.

David Rousset

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.

Giorgio Agamben

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.

Jean Améry

Theodor W. Adorno

Hannah Arendt

Auschwitz should not have happened. It is something to which we cannot ever reconcile ourselves. Amends can never be made.

Jean Améry

And yet it did happen, and Nietzsche is right at least in saying that there is something amiss in our irrational desire to alter the unalterable past.

Arthur Schopenhauer

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.

Emmanuel Levinas

Adolf Eichmann

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.

Hannah Arendt

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.

Hannah Arendt

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sigmund Freud

‘Childish’ is right.

Theodor W. Adorno

We have so broken the world that it’s indecent to feel at home in it now. We can’t even feel at home in our own skins.

John Rawls

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.

Albert Camus

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.

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Terrorists turn airliners into missiles, crash them into the Twin Towers in New York and elsewhere in a remarkably un-banal fashion; thousands killed. Those few philosophers still interested in evil still trying unsuccessfully to grapple with the Holocaust, surrender the discussion to postmodernist provocateurs and pundits.

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.

I’m reading a collection of short works by Hannah Arendt (Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism), and thought that her assessment of Hitler’s “charisma” was insightful and relevant to our time and situation:

The problem of Hitler’s charisma is relatively easy to solve. It was to a great extent identical with… the “fanatical faith the man had in himself,” and it rested on the well-known experiential fact that Hitler must have realized early in his life, namely, that modern society in its desperate inability to form judgments will take every individual for what he considers himself and professes himself to be and will judge him on that basis. Extraordinary self-confidence and displays of self-confidence therefore inspire confidence in others; pretensions of genius waken the conviction in others that they are indeed dealing with a genius. This is merely the perversion of an old and justified rule of all good society according to which everyone has to be capable of showing what he is and of presenting himself in the proper light. The perversion occurs when the social role becomes, as it were, arbitrary, when it is completely separated from the actual human substance, indeed, when a role consistently played is unquestioningly accepted as the substance itself. In such an atmosphere any kind of fraud becomes possible because there appears to be no one at all left for whom the difference between fraud and authenticity matters in the least. People therefore fall prey to judgments apodictically expressed because the apodictic tone frees them from the chaos of an infinite number of totally arbitrary judgments. The crucial point is that not only is the apodictic quality of tone more convincing than the content of the judgment but also the content of the judgment, the object judged, becomes irrelevant. Hitler’s tirades about the evils of smoking seem to have had a no less fascinating effect on his listeners than his speeches about Napoleon Ⅰ or his views on world history. To assess correctly this phenomenon of charisma in Hitler’s case we have to remind ourselves that in present-day society it is not really all that difficult to create an aura about oneself that will fool everyone — or just about everyone — who comes under its influence. In this respect Hitler behaved no differently than have many less talented charlatans. It goes without saying that under these conditions the rule of a good upbringing that says one must not blow one’s own horn has to be ruthlessly put aside. The more that the vulgar practice of unbridled self-praise spreads in a society which for the most part still adheres to the rules of good upbringing, the more powerful its effect will be and the more easily that society can be convinced that only a truly “great man” who cannot be judged by normal standards could summon the courage to break rules as sacrosanct as those of good breeding. In other words, Hitler held a far greater fascination for generals and other members of good society than he did for the “old fighters” who, like him, came from the mob strata of society.

In the prevailing chaos that inability to form judgments created, however, Hitler’s superiority went considerably beyond the fascination, the mere “charisma,” that any charlatan can emanate. The awareness of the social possibilities that the modern inability to judge offered, and the ability to exploit them, were supported by the vastly more telling insight that in the modern world’s chaos of opinion the normal mortal is yanked about from one opinion to another without the slightest understanding of what distinguishes the one from the other. Hitler knew from his own most personal experience what the maelstrom was like into which modern man is drawn and in which he changes his political or other “philosophy” from day to day on the basis of whatever options are offered him as he whirls helplessly about. He is himself that newspaper reader of whom he says that “in a city [in which] twelve newspapers each report the same event differently… he will finally come to the conclusion that it is all nonsense.” What distinguished Hitler from this newspaper reader and his desperation was simply that he had discovered one fine day that if you really hang onto any one of the current opinions and develop it with (as he was fond of saying) “ice-cold” consistency, then everything would somehow fall back into place again. Hitler’s real superiority consisted in the fact that under any and all circumstances he had an opinion and that his opinion always fit perfectly into his over-all “philosophy.” In this social context (and only in this context) superiority is indeed increased by fanaticism because obvious and demonstrable errors can no longer undermine it. What immediately reasserts itself after any demonstrated error is the fact that one not only has an opinion but also embraces that opinion and is therefore capable of judgment. And in politics, where one constantly has to act and therefore constantly has to make judgments, it is indeed altogether correct in a practical sense and more advantageous to reach any judgment and to pursue any course of action than not to judge and not to act at all.

Not to judge and not to act at all is a condition devoutly desired by many in the modern world.…

From “At Table with Hitler”, a review of Hitler’s Tischgespräche published in 1951, originally in German, translated by Robert and Rita Kimber.