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

I’ve also been reading an interesting book — Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Glover.

The book tries to examine some of the worst wars and atrocities of the last century with an eye toward finding some sort of strategy for making them less likely or not as awful in the next century. He explores these events from a number of angles — asking how the people who advocated them came to have their views and how those views became influential, how the people who participated in them overcame any aversion they might have had to becoming monsters, and how the way society was structured encouraged or failed to inhibit the atrocities.

At the same time it tries to uncover examples of people who did take risks to go against the tide — and to discover what sort of stuff these people were made of, how they were formed, and what triggered their brave and sadly unusual acts.

Glover is a philosopher of ethics — and he sees the history of the last century as a call for ethicists to leave the ivory tower and turn their sights on practical matters. For this reason, he also asks along the way through his recounting of bloody history: “what did the philosophers say about all this?”

Which can make for interesting reading. Glover acknowledges that the solutions to his problem, if there are any, will run the gamut from personal strategies for fortifying individual conscience through social techniques for encouraging humane behavior up to methods for preventing large-scale social institutions like governments from turning psychotic. He is much stronger when talking about individual ethical decision-making, and fairly weak when discussing political reform (for instance he can say in the course of a single paragraph that history teaches that “[t]here is a need for proper policing of the world, with a legitimate and properly backed international authority to keep the peace and to protect human rights” and also that “[t]here is a need to avoid large-scale utopian political projects,” which strikes me as obviously contradictory — that he doesn’t feel the need to argue otherwise suggests to me that he hasn’t given enough thought to these political problems.)

“That in fact all the people pay for all the acts of their government… is a mere empirical fact; that they know themselves liable is the first indication of their dawning political liberty. It is to the extent of the existence and recognition of this knowledge that freedom is real, not a mere outward claim put forth by unfree men.

“The inner political unfreedom has the opposite feeling. It obeys on the one hand, and feels not guilty on the other. The feeling of guilt, which makes us accept liability, is the beginning of the inner upheaval which seeks to realize political liberty.”

Over the last two days I’ve spent some time reading The Question of German Guilt by Karl Jaspers (E.B. Ashton, translator), which is based on lectures Jaspers gave in Germany in the aftermath of World War Ⅱ when he was allowed to teach again (his Jewish wife, and probably his politics, had gotten him kicked out during the Reich).

I came to this book for a few conscious reasons — most immediately because I had some store credit at a used book store, but more to the point because I had gone through a Hannah Arendt phase a while back (see, for instance The Picket Line 8 January 2004) and knew that Jaspers was a big influence on her, and also because I was curious enough to read through the University of Colorado report about the deceptive scholarship practiced by Ward Churchill.

Churchill, from the looks of things, is a shifty character who is dishonest in the way he argues. His brand of dishonesty, at least that portion that has been well-documented by the University of Colorado investigative committee, would be considered par-for-the-course (or probably insufficiently disingenuous) if his career was as a politician or pundit, but hurrah to the University for holding him to a higher standard.

He was investigated because during the height of post-9/11 jingoism, denouncing him became a cause célèbre amongst the flag-waving set. He’d made an attempt to derive rhetorical power from calling the victims in the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns” and this succeeded beyond his wildest dreams as he became, in the scope of every right-wing rifle, “that librul professor who thinks the people in the towers were Nazis who deserved to die.”

He was not misquoted, or even really misinterpreted much. This was really what he meant to say. In his words:

Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire — the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved — and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” — a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” — counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in — and in many cases excelling at — it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

When I argue for tax resistance, I often argue that being a taxpayer means that you share in the responsibility for how the money you give to the government is spent. This argument of collective responsibility gets tangled up in arguments about collective guilt and, inevitably as Ward Churchill reminds us, collective punishment. And I’ve found it very hard to explicitly delineate how such things work in a way that is useful and satisfying.

Issues of collective guilt and collective punishment also come into play in defenses of the U.S. and its actions, for instance in arguments about the decision to go to war in the nation of Iraq in retribution for the crimes of the person Saddam Hussein, or in the excuses for “collateral damage” in airstrikes.

I hoped that Jaspers, in analyzing “German Guilt,” might have some better answers.

He starts of by trying to pin down what is meant by “guilt,” as he believes we’re using too general a term and that this is part of our difficulty. In his system, there are four varieties of guilt, which I’ll try to briefly describe:

Criminal Guilt

These are “acts capable of objective proof and [which] violate unequivocal laws.” Only individuals, not groups, can be criminally guilty (although in some circumstances it can be a crime merely to belong to a criminal organization). Charges of criminal guilt come from outside of the accused and guilt is judged by a court of law. The court is not concerned with trying to make the accused a better person so much as trying to give justice to the victims. Anyone may accuse someone of criminal guilt and may have a valid interest in justice being done. The proper response to criminal guilt is atonement.

Political Guilt

This is guilt that citizens bear for the deeds of statesmen and citizens, and means that all citizens face the consequences for the deeds of their nation. (Political guilt may apply to various sorts of groups of people, not just nations, though it is national guilt that is focused on here.) This doesn’t mean that individuals bear moral or criminal guilt for the acts done by other individuals in the name of the state. Political guilt falls on people who oppose the régime in power as well as those who support it. Charges of political guilt come from outside of the accused, and guilt is successfully judged by the victorious party in a war or capitulation. As with criminal guilt, anyone may accuse citizens of political guilt and may have a valid interest in justice being done, and the successful judges are not so much interested in the fate of the guilty nation so much as they are in administering “justice.” The proper response to political guilt is accepting liability and making reparation, though in reality this amounts to total submission to the demands of the victor. Individual political liability properly “is graduated according to the degree of participation in the régime.”

Moral Guilt

“I, who cannot act otherwise than as an individual, am morally responsible for all my deeds, including the execution of political and military orders.” Only individuals, not groups, can have moral guilt. It is mostly an internal matter — I may accuse myself, but should only advise others out of loving concern for them, not of a desire to punish. My judge is my own conscience, and those “friends and intimates who are lovingly concerned about my soul.” Moral guilt cannot be erased or atoned for, but it becomes part of what you have to work with from the time you judge yourself. The proper response is penance & renewal.

Metaphysical Guilt

This is the most abstract and, for me, difficult to understand. It seems in part to be something like “survivor’s guilt.” You notice that some people have sacrificed everything, heroically or quixotically, and you feel guilty for deciding to survive instead. Your guilt is also a portion of a guilt for humanity in general for failing to live up to an ideal justice that we can all vaguely envision but never come close to living up to — even for such an ordinary human thing as favoring friends and loved ones rather than treating humanity in general wholly impartially. You can’t avoid metaphysical guilt — if you could, you’d be like the angels, and free from the other forms of guilt as well — and like moral guilt, once you’ve got it, it’s yours to chew on for all your life. Like moral guilt, it’s something to deal with inside of you and is not really the proper business of other people. Your proper response to metaphysical guilt is to transform your self-consciousness before God, losing your pride in favor of humility. He described how a German might feel this form of guilt in this way:

It was possible for us to seek death in humiliation — in 1933 when the Constitution was torn up, the dictatorship established in sham legality and all resistance swept away in the intoxication of a large part of our people. We could seek death when the crimes of the régime became publicly apparent on June 30, 1934, or with the lootings, deportations and murders of our Jewish friends and fellow-citizens in 1938, when to our ineradicable shame and disgrace the synagogues, houses of God, went up in flames throughout Germany. We could seek death when from the start of the war the régime acted against the words of Kant, our greatest philosopher, who called it a premise of international law that nothing must occur in war which would make a later reconcilement of the belligerents impossible. Thousands in Germany sought, or at least found death in battling the régime, most of them anonymously. We survivors did not seek it. We did not go into the streets when our Jewish friends were led away; we did not scream until we too were destroyed. We preferred to stay alive, on the feeble, if logical, ground that our death could not have helped anyone. We are guilty of being alive.

It is the distinction between political and moral guilt that Jaspers spends the most time trying to define.

First, he says that the choice of being politically aloof is not really available to us. “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.”

But even if you resist the temptation to remain aloof and take care to avoid moral guilt, “all citizens of a country [are] liable [that is, ‘politically guilty’] for the results of actions taken by their state… [T]he liability is definite and limited, involving neither moral nor metaphysical charges against the individuals. [But i]t affects also those who opposed the régime and its actions.”

When the political power fails to limit itself properly, when it works against what is right instead of for it, to the extent you contribute to this power either actively or passively (as the power will arrange the prerequisites for “passivity” to its benefit), your share of political guilt will also be moral guilt.

Political guilt, and the liability for it, is the only legitimate collective guilt, Jaspers says, and he limits it in many ways. First of all, it is very much the result of “victor’s justice” and “might makes right.” The stronger, more forceful adversary decides the crime and punishment, and none of this really contains much in the way of larger moral lessons.

(Jaspers believes that the rule of force can, under favorable circumstances, give way to the rule of “Right” — “a natural law to which both victor and vanquished may appeal.” At this point, politics stops being the essentially arbitrary rule of the most powerful and starts becoming a collective intellectual project to discover and delineate the extent of “Right.”)

Secondly, while the proper punishment is the whims of the victor, mitigated perhaps by magnanimity and international norms and laws, the proper response of the guilty individuals is more-or-less to grin and bear it and to spread the effects of the punishment justly among themselves. As time passes, the effects of political guilt dim and die away.

Okay, now that we’ve got some definitions out of the way, Jaspers turns to an example of the posters that started turning up in occupied Germany featuring a picture of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the caption “You Are Guilty.” Who is “You” and what kind of “Guilty”?

Jaspers says that when Germans are accused of being guilty, this might mean political, moral, or metaphysical guilt — any of which is likely true, though moral and metaphysical guilt are properly the sorts of things that people wrestle with internally and are not properly the subjects of accusations by others. To the extent that it is meant to mean that Germans are criminally guilty, it is false in the majority of cases. Jaspers also considers that it may just be meant as a curse, something like “you assholes!”

He spends some time discussing the ongoing Nuremberg trials, and the prosecution strategy of Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor.

He hopefully sees this trial as a magnanimous attempt by the allies to transform their hard-won opportunity to impose whatever form of justice they choose on conquered Germany into an opportunity to establish the precedent of using an appeal to Right rather than an appeal to force to try these political crimes:

For the first time, and for all times to come, it is to make war a crime and to draw the conclusions… The undertaking may appear fantastic. But when the stakes become clear to us, the event makes us tremble with hope…

…The essential point is whether the Nuremberg trial comes to be a link in a chain of meaningful, constructive political acts (however often these may be frustrated by error, unreason, heartlessness and hate) or whether, by the yardstick there applied to mankind, the very powers now erecting it will in the end be found wanting…

It will either create confidence in the world that right was done and a foundation laid in Nuremberg.… Or disappointment by untruthfulness will create an even worse world atmosphere breeding new wars; instead of a blessing, Nuremberg would become a factor of doom, and in the world’s eventual judgment the trial would have been a sham and a mock trial. This must not happen.

Jackson certainly seemed to have this in mind. He thought that the international law he was helping to invent in Nuremberg “represents mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace” and said “let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.”

By now, the dream of an international order of states in which impartial law makes the rule of force obsolete should seem almost as silly as the utopian communism that shared its century. For some reason this was less obvious sixty years ago, when authoritarians and classical liberals alike saw a world government as the natural extension of their dreams. Clearly the United States, despite Jackson’s rhetoric, has been unable to resist the temptations that being the biggest bully on the block brings — it has enshrined the might-makes-right principle into a more-or-less explicit plank of its foreign policy, with no principled internal opposition worth the name, and has proven international law and its firm prohibition on aggressive war to be an unenforceable modernist prose-poem.

Putting that digression aside, while the Nuremberg prosecution was attempting to fix the specific criminal guilt of a specific number of defendants, it was very explicitly not trying to say anything about the guilt of the German people — not even its “political guilt” as Jaspers would have it, which had anyway (in his system) already been pronounced by virtue of the allies subduing and ruling a defeated Germany.

Political guilt being a fait accompli, and criminal guilt being decided by tribunals like the one at Nuremberg, there remains moral and metaphysical guilt, which each German must deal with individually or in a spirit of humble cooperation with each other. You cannot compel another person to feel moral guilt, or even to evaluate it in himself (I’m going to follow Jaspers and/or his translator and use masculine pronouns as neuter pronouns — sorry if this gets your goat). To feel guilt, you must be self-motivated by honest conscience and a willingness to repent if necessary.

There are a number of reasons a German who is not criminally guilty might nonetheless feel morally guilty, and Jaspers enumerates some:

• “living in disguise” — some Germans pretended to be loyal to a government they loathed, throwing their Heil Hitlers and hiding their real thoughts.

• “false conscience” — others really believed that they were doing the right thing, were acting in a spirit of idealism and self-sacrifice from noble intentions, and did not realize for a long time that they were supporting evil — such a person becomes guilty “by haziness, by unwillingness to see, by conscious seclusion, [or] isolation of his own life in a ‘decent’ sphere.”

  He gives the example of a soldier who “kept faith with his comrades, did not flinch in danger and proved himself calm and courageous” but because he did these things in an evil cause, he bears moral guilt:

  Duty to the fatherland did not by any means lead consistently to obedience to Hitler and to the assumption that even as a Hitler state Germany must, of course, win the war at all costs. Herein lies the false conscience. It is no simple guilt. It is at the same time a tragic confusion, notably of a large part of our unwitting youth. To do one’s duty to the fatherland means to commit one’s whole person to the highest demands made on us by the best of our ancestors, not by the idols of a false tradition.

  It was amazing to see the complete self-identification with army and state, in spite of all evil. For this unconditionality of a blind nationalism — only conceivable as the last crumbling ground in a world about to lose all faith — was moral guilt.

  …“This is an order” — in the ears of many these words had and still have a ring of pathos as if voicing the highest duty. But simultaneously, by shrugging off stupidity and evil as inevitable, they furnished an excuse. What finally turned this conduct into full-fledged moral guilt was the eagerness to obey — that compulsive conduct, feeling itself conscientious and, in fact, forsaking all conscience.

• “straddling” and “inner assimilation” — the attempt to find a silver lining, looking at the Nazi disaster and suspending judgment.
• “self deception” — believing that if you just bide your time things will change on their own, or that when the German army wins the war or Hitler dies the state will change for the better on its own, or that it’s best to try to work from within the system, or that it would be better to avoid politics and just work subtly for spiritual uplift in the hopes that future generations will benefit. Also the belief of people who didn’t join the opposition until the war was clearly lost and who now feel like this means they don’t have to wrestle with moral guilt. “Whoever took part in the race mania, whoever had delusions of a revival based on fraud, whoever winked at the crimes then already committed is not merely liable [that is, ‘politically guilty’] but must renew himself morally. Whether and how he can do it is up to him alone, and scarcely open to any outside scrutiny.”
• using passivity as an excuse — in other words, claiming that because you did no overtly criminal acts you have no moral guilt either. “The political performers and executors, the leaders and the propagandists are guilty.… But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death… But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner indifference toward the witnessed evil — that is moral guilt.”
• “running with the pack” — I was unable to distinguish this by his description from “living in disguise,” above.

He also warns against using his system of dividing up different varieties of guilt as a method of hiding from your own guilt, the way a child might hide unwanted peas under a chicken bone. Then he discusses four ways in which a person might try to avoid taking moral responsibility or to mitigate guilt:

• Jaspers says that it is valid to note that after a certain point, effective resistance to the Nazi régime from inside German-controlled territory really was suicide. People complied because the alternative was torture & death.
• Some people try to say that the whole Nazi period was a matter of fate and inevitability for reasons of geography and history, and that individual choices and decisions didn’t really mean much. Jaspers says that there are grains of truth in this, but that they aren’t very convincing as excuses for individual behavior, though they might serve as good warnings to similarly-situated nations.
• That other people and other nations are also guilty is not a very good excuse either, but it is true that most of the nations of the civilized world failed to stand up to Hitler just as the people of Germany failed, and they should do their own soul searching. But the purpose of this discussion is to understand German guilt.
• You will occasionally hear the sophomoric sigh “we are all guilty” or that we are all capable of the same horrible crimes and that but for the grace of God, we too would turn into Klaus Barbie. Jaspers dismisses this as “dishonest haziness.”

If a German manages to get past these and other such tempting excuses, he will morally judge himself and quite possibly find himself morally guilty (to add to the political guilt he shares). What comes next is to purge this guilt (without ever fully atoning for it) through restitution, inner renewal and metamorphosis.

There are also many ways to dodge the responsibility to own up to your moral guilt and face the consequences, for instance:

mutual accusations

finding other people who you think are more guilty than you and spending your time worrying about them instead of yourself. There’s not much to be gained trying to morally or metaphysically judge anyone but yourself.

self-abasement

trying to out-do other people in how guilty you proclaim yourself to be, using confessions of guilt in a self-aggrandizing way. It’s better to do the work quietly and internally.

defiance

seeing your moral guilt as really something good and noble when seen from the right perspective.

“dodging into specialities intrinsically correct but unessential to the guilt question”

for instance, reiterating that innocent Germans were victimized too or arguing that because you have already suffered enough you shouldn’t also have to confront your guilt. On the contrary, “We should question ourselves, should pitilessly analyze ourselves; where did I feel wrongly, think wrongly, act wrongly — we should, as far as possible, look for guilt within ourselves, not in things, nor in the others; we should not dodge into distress. This follows from the decision to turn about, to improve daily. In doing so we face God as individuals, no longer as Germans and not collectively.”

dodging into a generality

some idea that “ultimately justice will be done” or “from the point of view of the universe and eternity, none of this really matters” or “Germany was chosen to exemplify mankind’s sins” or “by our suffering we have already atoned.”

None of these excuses works, and they all have the effect of diminishing us.

This tendency not to take ourselves seriously as individuals paralyzes our moral impulses.… serving in turn to divert men from the sober task of doing what is really in their power — from improvement within the sphere of the comprehensible and from the inner transformation.

The proper response to German guilt has two parts: making amends, which includes paying the reparations demanded by the allies but also means individually seeking out and assisting those wronged by the Nazi régime (“Our life remains permitted only to be consumed by a task”) — and purification:

[P]urification is an inner process which is never ended but in which we continually become ourselves. Purification is a matter of our freedom. Everyone comes again and again to the fork in the road, to the choice between the clean and the murky.

As people begin to take responsibility for themselves and for the consequences of their decisions, this will be the method of reforming the political realm:

Political liberty begins with the majority of individuals in a people feeling jointly liable for the politics of their community. It begins when the individual not merely covets and chides, when he demands of himself, rather, to see reality and not to act upon the faith — misplaced in politics — in an earthly paradise failing of realization only because of the others’ stupidity and ill-will. It begins when he knows, rather, that politics looks in the concrete world for the negotiable path of each day, guided by the ideal of human existence as liberty.

In short: without purification of the soul there is no political liberty.

There is an element of “I am the professor, I’m in the front of the room, I have a theoretical edifice, you listen and write it all down good” about all of this. Jaspers doesn’t really argue his position so much as he declares it, leaving it to stand or fall on how much it matches your own intuition.

I appreciate his attempt to separate categories of guilt, since no generic category seems capable of carrying all of the weight that the concept typically bears — this itself is enough to vault me to a new and more interesting level of confusion on the subject. And I especially like the way he links the inward work of taking responsibility and self-judging with the outward work of fighting for liberty in the political sphere, in the quotes that lead off this page.

Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You

“Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You overwhelmed me,” wrote Gandhi. “It left an abiding impression on me.”

Ammon Hennacy wrote: “I felt that it must have been written especially for me, for here was the answer already written out to all the questions that I had tried to figure out for myself…”

Gandhi went on to read more of Tolstoy’s works on nonviolence, and began to develop his own implementations of ahimsa (non-harm) and satyagraha (truth-force) at a place he called “Tolstoy Farm” in South Africa. Hennacy adopted a life of voluntary poverty and tax resistance “as I had learned them from Tolstoy and the Catholic Worker.”

The book is the most influential work of Christian anarchism, and would probably be considered the founding work of that tradition if it didn’t itself claim to merely be pointing out Christian anarchism as the plain meaning of the gospels.

Well, why don’t you read it yourself, then?

I’ve made a translation of The Kingdom of God Is Within You available on The Picket Line.

I added many links so that when Tolstoy mentions events and personalities from the end of the 19^th century that are no longer common knowledge, or he references Bible verses or quotes from other works, you can more-easily figure out what he was getting at.

I’ve also made a few changes to Leo Wiener’s translation: modernizing and Americanizing spelling, putting Tolstoy’s footnotes in-line in bracketed sections, correcting some unfortunate translation decisions (calling Ivan the Terrible “John Ⅳ,” overliterally translating Nicene Creed into the Nicene “Symbol,” referring to icons as “images,” and so forth), and when I could find the original sources for things in English that Tolstoy quoted but that Wiener translated back to English from Tolstoy’s Russian translations I have replaced these with the originals.

You’d rather I summarize it for you?

It is hard to do justice to the book by a quick summary, but I’ll give it a shot.

Tolstoy argues that Christianity as it currently exists in the form of doctrines, church institutions and hierarchies, and ritual practices, is anti-Christian. Not just that it happens to be anti-Christian because these things have become corrupt (though they have) but because Christ explicitly told his followers to reject doctrines, church institutions and hierarchies, and ritual practices, and instead to love truth, to honor God, and to treat all people as your family and as you would want to be treated.

This intuitive and simple message, which Jesus made explicit in the gospels, ought to be the lodestone of all of our lives, and indeed the progress of society throughout human history is leading us in this direction as truth slowly erodes away falsehood.

An inevitable conclusion of the command to treat all people as your family and as you would want to be treated is that the current political order is unsupportable. You cannot participate in the political system, which is based on the use of violence to enforce the separation of people and the privileging of some people over others, and at the same time follow the guideline to love your neighbor.

Everybody ought to work to orient their lives along true Christian lines immediately (without waiting for the world to be “ready” for it). This means ending all support of and participation in government, for instance as a soldier, an office-holder, a juror, or a taxpayer. And it also means renouncing any privileges that the government implicitly defends by violent means (such as private property).

What did I think of it?

I am not a Christian. That Jesus said this or the gospels say that, to me does not constitute an argument for a course of action. Tolstoy’s interpretation of Jesus’s message is attractive in some ways, but does not convince me as being so clearly the best and most accurate summation of what Jesus had to say (though it strikes me as much less preposterous than most of Christianity then or now). When I read the gospels, Jesus seems to me to be saying something like:

There is nothing in this world — family, honor, riches, even knowing where your next meal is coming from — that matters even a little bit compared to devoting yourself entirely to God, since I will be coming back to earth on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory, sending my angels with a loud trumpet call to gather my elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other, and putting an end to everything and ushering in something entirely new within your lifetime.

This makes questions of worldly ethics a sideshow at best, and may explain why people have so much difficulty trying to get a consistent worldly ethics, applicable to our situation today, from the gospels (Jesus never intended to develop one).

Jesus also didn’t come back on the clouds of the sky, etc., etc., like he said he would, which to me means that we do need to create a worldly ethics after all and that Jesus is unlikely to be of much help to us in this regard.

So while Tolstoy thought of himself as explaining the clear teachings of Christ to people who wanted to follow those teachings, I think of Tolstoy as explaining to us what worldly ethics he thinks the wisest person he can think of would have naturally taught. This is the Gospel of Tolstoy, and as such it is interesting even to a non-Christian.

The Birds & The Bees

One of my favorite parts of the book is when Tolstoy explains why he thinks small, individual, conscientious actions are important in creating large-scale social changes:

In their present condition men are like bees which have just swarmed and are hanging down a limb in a cluster. The position of the bees on the limb is temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They must rise and find a new home for themselves. Every one of the bees knows that and wishes to change its position and that of the others, but not one is able to do so before the others are going to do so. They cannot rise all at once, because one hangs down from the other, keeping it from separating itself from the swarm, and so all continue to hang. It would seem that the bees could not get out of this state, just as it seems to worldly men who are entangled in the snare of the social world-conception. But there would be no way out for the bees, if each of the bees were not separately a living being, endowed with wings. So there would also be no way out for men, if each of them were not a separate living being, endowed with the ability of acquiring the Christian concept of life.

If every bee which can fly did not fly, the rest, too, would not move, and the swarm would never change its position. And as one bee need but open its wings, rise up, and fly away, and after it a second, third, tenth, hundredth, in order that the immovable cluster may become a freely flying swarm of bees, so one man need but understand life as Christianity teaches him to understand it, and begin to live accordingly, and a second, third, hundredth, to do so after him, in order that the magic circle of the social life, from which there seemed to be no way out, be destroyed.

But people think that the liberation of all men in this manner is too slow, and that it is necessary to find and use another such a means, so as to free all at once; something like what the bees would do, if, wishing to rise and fly away, they should find that it was too long for them to wait for the whole swarm to rise one after another, and should try to find a way where every individual bee would not have to unfold its wings and fly away, but the whole swarm could fly at once wherever it wanted. But that is impossible: so long as the first, second, third, hundredth bee does not unfold its wings and fly, the swarm, too, will not fly away or find the new life. So long as every individual man does not make the Christian life-conception his own, and does not live in accordance with it, the contradiction of the human life will not be solved and the new form of life will not be established.

I also found interesting his discussion of the “intoxication of servility” — what happens when, by submitting to the orders of an authority figure, you become capable of doing things that your conscience would normally not permit you to do. (Several times before at The Picket Line I have referred to Hannah Arendt’s ponderings about this temptation and its consequences and to the Milgram Experiment and its theory of the “agentic state.”) Tolstoy sees the intoxication of servility as the flip-side of the intoxication of power — if you feel yourself to be occupying a role that gives you authority over other people, this has the same intoxicating, morally enfeebling, and disastrous effects as does feeling yourself to be occupying a role in which you are obeying and carrying out orders.

To Tolstoy, much of the evil in the world is done by people who have become blinded by the hierarchical roles they inhabit, and it doesn’t really matter where in the hierarchy the roles put you. When you feel you are enacting a role in a hierarchy rather than fulfilling the common responsibilities of an equal human being, you become willing to do things to other people that you would never do to them if you saw them as a member of the human family whose needs were as worthy of respect as anyone else’s.

I always appreciate Tolstoy’s witty mockery of liberal pretensions, and this book has a particularly good analogy. He spends some time reviewing the proclamations, propositions, declarations, denunciations, petitions, and recommendations of various international peace conferences, and says:

When I was a little fellow, I was assured that to catch a bird it was just necessary to pour some salt on its tail. I went out with the salt to the birds, and immediately convinced myself that, if I could get near enough to pour the salt on a bird’s tail, I could catch it, and I understood that they were making fun of me.

It is the same that must be understood by those who read books and pamphlets on courts of arbitration and disarmament.

If it is possible to pour salt on a bird’s tail, this means that it does not fly, and that there is no need of catching it. But if a bird has wings and does not want to be caught, it does not allow any one to pour salt on its tail, because it is the property of a bird to fly. Even so the property of a government does not consist in being subjected, but in subjecting, and a government is a government only in so far as it is able, not to be subjected, but to subject, and so it strives to do so, and can never voluntarily renounce its power; but the power gives it the army, and so it will never give up the army and its use for purposes of war.

A little clumsy, in translation anyway, but a good analogy. I see a lot of these salting-the-bird’s-tail proposals from liberal peaceniks today.

Yesterday I finished The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle by J. Glenn Gray, which had been given to me with a recommendation from one of the attendees of the NWTRCC conference earlier this month.

Gray received the notice that his doctorate in philosophy had been awarded in the same batch of mail that contained his draft notice. He served from 1941 to 1945 in Africa and Europe in counter-intelligence: working to root out and interrogate spies and saboteurs and prisoners and the like as the Allies moved in on Axis-controlled territory.

He wrote his book years afterwards, using letters he wrote at the time and a journal he kept during the war to refresh his memory of what it was like to be a soldier in war time. His book tries to explore what war means to people, what its attractions are, how different people cope with its stresses in different ways, how the impulse to make war relates to other human drives, and his vision for how a great nation might become greater by renouncing war entirely.

In a way, it picks up where William James’s more superficial The Moral Equivalent of War leaves off.

A book like this almost can’t help but be thought-provoking, and it was, but I still thought it was a little too abstract and ethereal for my tastes. His most interesting observations come from the battlefield, but his conclusions seem to float way above it.

Here are some excerpts that I thought were noteworthy. First, from his forward to the 1970 edition:

To the usual judgment [the My Lai massacre] seems far more of an atrocity than the actions of the pilots who bomb such hamlets from the sky or of the artillery men who lob in shells from a great distance. The reason given is that the infantrymen are brutalized by their deeds. Yet brutalization is hardly the worst that can happen to a man, for it can be healed in time and in circumstances of peaceful living. But the man who kills from a distance and without consciousness of the consequences of his deeds feels no need to answer to anyone or to himself. His is an unconscious depravity that can increase imperceptibly in civilian life. Dissociated from his deeds he can become far more monstrous than the infantry soldier or lower-echelon officer who occasionally goes beserk under battle strain. The “terrifyingly normal” men, who are ever in the vast majority, are those who make our age a monstrous one.

From a section on “political guilt”:

[W]hen the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came, many an American soldier felt shocked and ashamed. The combat soldier knew better than did Americans at home what those bombs meant in suffering and injustice. The man of conscience wherever he was realized intuitively that the vast majority of the Japanese in both cities were no more, if no less, guilty of the war than were his own parents, sisters, or brothers. In his shame, he may have said to himself, as some of us did: “The next atomic bomb, dropped in anger, will probably fall on my own country and we will have deserved it.” Such a conviction will hardly relieve him of the heavy sense of wrong that his nation committed and the responsibility for which he must now in some measure share. All the arguments used in justification — the shortening of the war by many months and the thousands of American lives presumably saved — cannot alter the fact that his government was the first to use on undefended cities, without any warning, a monstrous new weapon of annihilation.

Worst of all about such deeds is that millions accepted and felt relief. Hearing this near-exultation in the enemy’s annihilation, one can only conclude that political guilt has another source than the freedom of the individual to affect group action. It lies in the degree of his identification with the goals and the means of realizing them that his nation adopts. The person who inwardly approves an immoral action of his government or military unit testifies to his own probable decision had he possessed the freedom and opportunity of the actors. Freedom is possible, therefore, not only in the power to do or prevent, but also in inner assent and consent to action by others. With a relative criterion like this it is, of course, impossible to be exact in estimating even one’s own guilt. Yet the jubilation in evil deeds allows little room for doubt that inner consent is often forthcoming. So do thousands of people increase their political guilt in wartime beyond the range of their direct action.

In Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil, Fred E. Katz begins where Hannah Arendt’s examination of the banality of evil ended, and Katz tries to apply the techniques of sociology to the question of how ordinary people, without deliberate evil intent, commit horrendous deeds.

Katz himself narrowly escaped the massacre of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. When he returned to his former village after the war, he heard the villagers explain their passivity or collaboration during the Nazi persecutions using the very same language they used at the time: “There is nothing we could do about it. We are just little people. It’s the government”

But he noticed that the village had erected a plaque in honor of the boys and men who had died fighting for the fatherland, and remarks that it was just this loyalty and willingness to serve that doomed the victims of the Nazi era.

Yet some little people, in some little villages, did do something about it. They hid some of these hounded people. They fed some of these hounded people. They helped some of these hounded people escape.

During the visit to my village I found out that there had been one exception to the pattern of passively leaving Jews to the evil deeds of the Nazi government: A lone woman stood by Jews. She brought them food. She talked with them. She did not join in the distancing by the rest of the villagers. But she was not able to save anyone or offer much protection. She said to me, concerning the Nazis, “what they did was not right.” And she wept.

Despite such exceptional human beings, the Nazi-German government achieved its objectives of carrying out massive evil because it had the help of a multitude of “the little people,” who paid their taxes, sent their sons to the front, and closed their eyes to the savaging of innocent people in their midst.

How do ordinary people, who largely profess good values, and who have no particular interest in doing evil things, nonetheless become instrumental in horrible crimes? Katz set himself the task of analyzing this question from the perspective of sociology, concentrating mainly on the Holocaust but also looking at some other examples. Here are some of the conclusions he draws:

Some of the most important, far-reaching, portentious decisions that we make in our lives as ordinary people — whom we marry, what profession we adopt, etc. — we tend to make without thinking at the large scale. Instead, we make these decisions in the form of a culmination of smaller decisions that we make with a very short-term, here-and-now focus on transient priorities. Katz gives the example of someone who has spent her professional career as a nurse despite never having had any passion for nursing. She went into nursing school because a high school friend did, or in the hopes of catching the eye of a marriageable doctor, then got out of school with no better job prospects, then had no experience in anything but nursing, and finally found herself to be a life-long nurse in spite of herself.

In the same way, Katz argues, we can be beguiled into great careers of evil by taking many small steps in which our minds are only focused on the concerns of the moment. Never intending to be an evil monster, like never intending to be a nurse, one can nonetheless find oneself fulfilling that role.

Also, our roles and our enterprises tend to be a package of many elements, some of which we find engaging or are passionately invested in, and to others of which we are indifferent or even opposed. In these packages, we will emphasize to ourselves the parts that we care about, and play down the other parts. Because of this, we may find ourselves doing evil things, thinking that those things are merely incidental to our real purpose. (Am I designing a terrible new weapon of mass destruction? No! I’m solving a difficult engineering challenge… I’m serving my country ably… I’m impressing senior management… I’m providing for my family… etc.)

In addition, our values tend not to be held as absolutes, but as things in flux and in competition with each other. At any time, and in any circumstance, certain values may be prioritized over other ones. Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, said he was repulsed by his job of mass extermination of the victims of the Nazi regime — it offended his idea of the value of human life. But he held other values, such as his loyalty to the Nazi government and its ideology, and his bureaucratic ambitions, at a higher priority, and so not only did he do his job, but he did it well, in an enterprising and inventive way.

For the unfortunate victims of Hoess’s deeds it made no difference whether he had renounced the sanctity-of-human-life value or merely placed it in a very subordinate position in his personal package of values. But for Hoess, personally, it made a great deal of difference. By placing that value in a subordinate position, and not explicitly renouncing it, he could continue to tell himself that he was still a sensitive and humane person, still the same person he had always been.

Indeed, Hoess used the revulsion he felt at the job he was assigned as a way of justifying his acts — as a variety of personal suffering that consecrated his deeds. His twinges of conscience ironically served him as further evidence of his virtue.

Hoess also used compartmentalization to help preserve his self-image. At work, he was a ruthless and efficient mass murderer who brooked no squeamishness from his underlings. At home, he tried to have a placid, mundane, warm home life, at which concerns from “the office” were not allowed to intrude.

Katz also notes how important it is to respond to qualms of conscience quickly. When you have started doing evil deeds you will also start developing justifications for them, and these justifications will make it easier for you to continue doing more evil. Many times these justifications take the form of reprioritizations of your values, so that by justifying an evil act in one area, you open the door to committing evil in many others (after all, if I was justified in killing this Jew with impunity because Jews are subhuman, why should I have to be at all humane to any Jews ever?)

I found this slim book to be thought-provoking and its project to be an important and welcome one. I am a little concerned that the application of what he insists is the “science” of sociology to the question may run the risk of merely inventing “just-so” stories that offer the illusion of being explanatory or predictive without actually being so. Even so, I think that the process of taking this issue seriously and in soberly trying to understand and defend against it can’t help but be beneficial, even if it isn’t literally scientific.

I’ve lately been introducing myself to some of the stories of Thomas Mann. One of them is a parable about fascism that contains some insightful observations about the psychology of totalitarianism.

The story “Mario and the Magician” concerns a family that is vacationing in an Italian beach town when they go to see an itinerant stage magician. The magician is more of a hypnotist than a conjurer or illusionist. He works his magic by using uncanny powers of suggestion to get members of the audience to do things.

The magician, Cipolla, is kind of repulsive: his stage presence is rude, he is slightly deformed and wears a ridiculous hair style and a pretentious sash, and he smokes and drinks throughout his performance. But despite this, he mesmerizes his audience by in turns insulting them and complimenting them, and finally inducing them to do strange things largely by suggesting to them that they’re things they really wanted to do all along anyway.

One subject in particular submits to being commanded “against his will” to do one ridiculous thing after another. Mann writes of him:

He seemed quite content in his abject state, quite pleased to be relieved of the burden of voluntary choice. Again and again he offered himself as a subject and gloried in the model facility he had in losing consciousness. … It looked unmistakably like enjoyment, and other recruits were not long in coming forward…

(German, like some other languages, has had some ambiguity in using the same word — Gewissen — to mean both “consciousness” and “conscience.” The modern word for consciousness — Bewusstsein — is an 18^th century invention. I haven’t been able to track down which word Mann used in this section; though “losing consciousness” doesn’t seem to fit what is happening very well, “losing conscience” sounds weird in English and would probably be replaced by “relinquishing self-control” or some such.)

The scene that most stood out to me was one in which Cipolla instructs the audience to find some item, while his back is turned, and carefully pass it from person to person, with the last one hiding it on his or her person, whereupon Cipolla will turn around and — using his uncanny powers — discover the object:

He sat smoking at the rear of the stage, his back to the audience while they conferred. The object passed from hand to hand which it was his task to find, with which he was to perform some action agreed upon beforehand. Then he would start to move zigzag through the hall, with his head thrown back and one hand outstretched, the other clasped in that of a guide who was in the secret but enjoined to keep himself perfectly passive, with his thoughts directed upon the agreed goal. Cipolla moved with the bearing typical in these experiments: now groping upon a false start, now with a quick forward thrust, now pausing as though to listen and by sudden inspiration correcting his course. The roles seemed reversed, the stream of influence was moving in the contrary direction, as the artist himself pointed out, in his ceaseless flow of discourse. The suffering, receptive, performing part was now his, the will he had before imposed on others was shut out, he acted in obedience to a voiceless common will which was in the air. But he made it perfectly clear that it all came to the same thing. The capacity for self-surrender, he said, for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command. Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another. But that which was done, the highly exacting and exhausting performance, was in every case his, the leader’s and mover’s, in whom the will became obedience, the obedience will, whose person was the cradle and womb of both, and who thus suffered enormous hardship. Repeatedly he emphasized the fact that his lot was a hard one — presumably to account for his need of stimulant and his frequent recourse to the little glass.

All this reminds me of Arne Johan Vetlesen’s assertion in Evil and Human Agency that, contrary to the generous assumptions of Stanley Milgram, authority doesn’t coerce people into doing evil things they would otherwise oppose, but it permits people to do evil things they have been waiting for an excuse to perform. That, and Tolstoy’s observation that the intoxication of servility is the flip-side of the intoxication of power.