By Norman E. Anderson
Words are inadequate for the Holocaust, utterly so; yet silence is worse. My own depths, such as they are, are merely shallows that trickle like tiny rivulets into the vast unfathomable ocean that is the Holocaust; yet the gravitas of that horrible crime, that horde of crimes, draws me in as inexorably as rivers are drawn to the sea or as matter into a black hole; and I would not pretend that I can go on as if the world were unaffected, as if moral space and time were flat or evenly distributed.
No, the Holocaust has rent the veil and warped the fabric; and, forever more, no morality can be adequate that fails to grapple with both its significance and its utter waste.
To what can the Holocaust be compared? Nothing, for its horror is too particular, its place in history too shattering. Certainly it can be rounded up and classified with other mass murders and "ethnic cleansings" of this passing century, from Armenia to Kosovo; and commonalities can be noted, such as the influence of nationalism (or tribalism) and the participation of ordinary people. Yet each mass murder is sui generis, a unique concoction of evil emerging out of particular historical circumstances and having a particular impact.
Among the many mass killings of long duration that have been reported in my lifetime, those in Cambodia and Uganda and Argentina and Guatemala and Bosnia and Rwanda have perhaps made the greatest impression, upon me.Note Part of the reason is, of course, empathy with the victims and a sense of horror at the atrocities committed, a sense which has to be largely fended off lest it overwhelm. But the sharp impress of those crimes against humanity has been to a significant degree brought about by our impotence to stop them, that is, by my own impotence, by the impotence of my country, by the impotence of the United Nations, and by the impotence of all those of universal spirit who had said, "Never again!"
Indeed, the mass murders of my own lifetime have made a profound impact upon me; yet the Holocaust, which occurred before I was born, holds a central place in my sensibilities -- as an ethicist, as one who has benefited from the European heritage (though American), as one who has benefited from the Jewish heritage (though not Jewish), and above all as a human being.
I realize that for some the Holocaust was a communal and a family tragedy and that the trauma is still felt by survivors and descendants. For them there is a sense of ownership of that tragedy which no one else can share, not because the survivors and descendants refuse to share, but because the unfathomable was inseparably joined to them.
That sense of ownership and that trauma are to be respected. Nevertheless, the significance and impact of the Holocaust cannot be so confined. The problem of the Holocaust belongs not just to the victims and their survivors, nor even to European civilization, but to all of humankind; and, for many people all over the planet, it is simply riveting.
To articulate why the Holocaust is central in this way is terribly difficult. Certainly I can make a long list of reasons. It was the first mass murder of such magnitude to break upon the consciousness of a globalized civilization. It was in large part a genocide of a people, the Jewish people, whose heritage had greatly enriched many nations and cultures. (This is not to forget the Gypsies or others the Nazis attempted to exterminate, or to downplay their value.) It was a genocide that emerged out of a culture, the German, which was renowned for its philosophy and science and music. It was a genocide that entailed extensive complicity internationally. It was a genocide that, along with the saturation bombing of civilian populations and the development of atomic weapons, put the lie to the idea that technological progress means human progress, for it can just as easily mean retrogression into horrors previously unknown. This list could go on and on, yet it barely scratches the surface of why the Holocaust holds the place of centrality that it does.
Only if we switch to a different mode might we begin to make some inroads into the question of centrality, a mode, perhaps, of intangibility and inwardness.
There is in the Holocaust a dual sense of betrayal, betrayal by God and betrayal by the human spirit. There is also a sense of the melt-down of morality itself and of a need for its reconstitution on terms that take the Holocaust fully into account. Let us take each point in turn.
First is the sense of betrayal by God.
We cannot help but ask, where was God. Does God not care about goodness, justice, love, peace on earth? Is God ignorant? Is God, like so many of the rest of us, impotent in the face of such evil? Is God nothing more than an abyss? Is there any blasphemy with which human beings can be justly charged when God has unfettered such evil among us?
Consider too that the nation perhaps most associated with religious reform attempted to annihilate a people with one of the richest and most profound religious traditions on the earth. Do worshippers and their actions mean nothing to God?
To murder is to do obeisance to hatred, to make hatred one's god. So why did the Being that the faithful regard as the true and the living God not topple the god of hatred before it was too late for the millions that perished?
Alas! Alas for them and alas for us, where was God?
Of course, theodicy is an everyday problem. The justification of the ways of God in the face of evil is at play wherever we find suffering or death. But the Holocaust closes avenues of escape. Its focus burns through every ordinary theodicy just as rays of the sun burn through a dry leaf when focused through a magnifying glass.
We squirm when we think such thoughts. We emphasize the word sense, our sense of things, rather than betrayal, actual betrayal by God. It is our sense of things that must be restored, not God the unrestorable -- such is our desperate hope. But does the Holocaust leave any room for God?
Second is the sense of betrayal by the human spirit.
Here I am not speaking of disillusionment with regard to the idea of an essential human goodness. Perhaps the Augustinian and Calvinistic thought of the West, which has touted the essential depravity of human nature, has deprived us of the ability to give due weight to such disillusionment.
Nor am I speaking of an ironic triumphalism, the idea that Europe had achieved a summit of thought and sensibility that the rest of the world had yet to reach, thus making the betrayal of humankind's intellectual and spiritual achievement by the Holocaust complete. To think triumphalistically, especially in the wake of the Holocaust, is hubris in the extreme.
Nevertheless, civilization had taken deep root. A religion that preached love for one's fellow human beings had dominated for centuries. Issues of good and evil had been engaged by philosophers for millennia in a way that was historically aware and richly so. Many of the recesses of human experience had been explored not just privately but by widely published poets and novelists. The transcendent value of each individual human being had been prominently asserted by preeminent schools of faith and thought. And the political principle of human equality had emerged not only as an ideal but as a practical right.
The Holocaust was a denial, a negation, and a betrayal of all that was good in European civilization or, for that matter, in any civilization. Indeed it was a betrayal of goodness itself. Further, it destroyed any confidence in the idea of civilization as safe and not dangerous; and it has set us, or at least many of the serious among us, on a path of soul-searching in rugged, dangerous, nearly impossible terrain.
I am at a loss to explain why other mass murders perpetrated by "civilized peoples" have not themselves spurred more soul-searching -- the rape of Nanking or the Stalinist purges, for instance. Perhaps the responsibility was too easy to shuck off. Perhaps those crimes were too successfully cloaked for too long a time. Perhaps continuing enmity choked the emergence of an empathetic sensibility. Perhaps the survivors can as yet bear only to look forward. Perhaps those tragedies have yet to work their way into the moral consciousness of the peoples involved.
The Holocaust broke through the labyrinthine mechanisms of human escapism. It came to be owned by Europe and those who shared the European heritage as more than an anomaly or aberration. It came to be understood as integral to certain confluences of their history and as an ever present danger lurking -- potentially, at least -- in the very heart of civilization, of society, perhaps of humankind itself.
Third is the melt-down and reconfiguration of morality itself.
Here I am not speaking of the moral character of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Nor am I speaking -- specifically, at least -- of the reconfiguration of the moral ground by the addition of a new crime, that of administrative mass murder. Rather I am speaking of the disintegration of any rationale for any morality that is in any way or sense anti-human and the need for a reconstituted morality to arise from the ashes of the Holocaust.
Admittedly an ironic paradox is involved. How can one label the Holocaust as evil without a moral measure? After all, wasn't the Holocaust recognized as evil precisely because it egregiously offended the conscience, which had been informed by traditional morality? Obviously the Holocaust flew in the face of already well-established moral principles: "Do not murder," "love your fellow." The problem, it might be said, is not morality, but the violation of morality; not principles, but the heart. So how can we say that morality needs reconstitution?
I submit that the Holocaust, not uniquely but more intensively than any other development, upset moral thought in a host of ways, among them these:
This list far from exhausts the transforming power of the Holocaust upon morality. By way of illustration, let us follow up just one of the points in the list, the idea that the Holocaust challenged defective moral thought. We must consider how morality can be so configured as to help reduce to the minimum the chance for future mass murders.
Moral beliefs are not as simple as we tend to frame them. Typically they entail circles of responsibility, that is, to whom and to what degree a person is responsible; they entail judgments of worthiness; they encompass certain emphases, certain information and misinformation, and certain gaps of content; they provide for a special role for authority; they employ certain stratagems for operating in the world and for their own perpetuation; and they have particular constituencies of consensus. Add to these matters the spiritual and psychological complexities of virtue, the philosophical problems of value, and, for canonical communities, the hermeneutical challenges, and we are able to see that moral beliefs can be fashioned in many different ways, some better and some worse.
Configure moral beliefs one way in society, and the door is left wide open for mass murder to gain a foothold. Configure them another way, and mass murder is often successfully resisted, as was the case, for instance, in Denmark during the Nazi horror.
I am not suggesting that moral beliefs can be configured by human whim. There is a reality to good and evil that cannot be overridden by arbitrary definition. However, we can refine our moral beliefs according to that reality as we encounter it.
In the wake of the Holocaust, certain concerns, such as the social control of the passions and the homogeneity of a society, have receded, while others have surged forward, most notably an orientation to certain political subsets of morality, namely toleration and respect for human rights.
I would suggest that this is not only a natural development in the wake of genocide -- one of many natural developments possible and probably the healthiest -- but that this is one of many necessary steps which must be taken before genocide and other forms of mass murder can be successfully resisted, some of the other steps entailing a refashioning of the mechanisms of power. If toleration and human rights fail to come to the fore, what barriers have we against tribalism and nationalism?
Some regard this course as doomed to failure, since the philosophical grounds of human rights theory are shaky, whether natural law is cited or positivistic approaches -- natural law being grounded in the divine or, more precisely, in our supposed knowledge of the divinely ordained order; and positivistic approaches being grounded in the human spirit.
I would suggest that human rights can rest upon and take deep root in the victims of history, all the more so where inflicted suffering and death has been concentrated. This is not to say that human rights should be grounded in horror or in fear. Rather it is to say that human rights can be grounded -- temporarily at least, until the philosophical problems are resolved -- in the involuntary payment made by the victims of history, in a sort of personalism, a personalism with a deep respect for human suffering and death.
When morality passes through the incinerating flame of the Holocaust, what emerges is not the traditional configuration nor even a mere change of emphases, but a structure still in the process of being redesigned and rebuilt.
Strong remarks have been made about God, about the human spirit, and about traditional morality; yet, in each case, there remains the burdensome sense of a lack of resolution, of answers that continue to elude us. Despite what has been said, I am one who is not ready to give up on the essential genius of that triumvirate.
At the core of that genius is the idea of selflessness -- that we should live for God (understanding God as perfectly good), not for ourselves; that the human spirit is meant to reach upwards beyond itself, not serving as its own end; and that morality ultimately is of God, not of ourselves. By being lifted out of our self-centeredness, our selves come into their own. Thus living for God humanizes us. In this sense and in the sense that the valuing of humankind is part of God's goodness, even to the point of self-sacrifice on God's part, God is the ultimate ethical humanist.
This idea, if sustainable, has the power -- perhaps, in the last analysis, the unique power -- to overcome nihilism, that vicious circle of valuelessness. I, for one, am therefore unwilling to throw it away lightly, all the more so since to do so would seem a concession to the spirit of evil that led to the Holocaust.
Therefore, we are faced with a threefold task of monumental proportions:
The Holocaust forces a transformation of how we think about morality and, for that matter, how we think about both theology and political philosophy. The impact is not limited to considerations of how to stop mass murder. It extends into many areas, possibly every area, of life.
Perhaps we should have seen long ago in the smallest of evils inflicted upon human beings all that we now find morally significant about the Holocaust. After all, in every evil is an image of hell; in every goodness, an image of heaven. And perhaps we should have felt long ago in the innumerable mass murders known to history all of the moral compulsion we feel in reaction to the Holocaust.
How much evil can we stand before we fall into horror -- horror at needless death; horror at those who would impose needless grief; horror at the willingness to proceed to ultimate measures, such as the deprivation of life or freedom, with insufficient rationale; horror at the negation of love? Whether we are talking about racial discrimination in the United States or ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, whether we are talking about the denial of civil rights for gays or the judgmentalism and rejection still too often suffered by AIDS patients rather than sympathy and care, whether we are talking about tribal strife in certain nations of Africa or the continuing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, how much tragedy can we stand before we embrace toleration, before we can join ranks as human beings and shout no to the forces of death?
It was the Holocaust, not alone, but centrally, that finally drove home the seriousness of morality.
It is my habit to leave many an essay open-ended, for I am not seeking to fix a final position, rather I am groping for the truth. Sometimes I do this by elaborating stances that challenge my most cherished beliefs or by elucidating one or more sides of a conflict I feel within myself.
For much of my life, the Holocaust has been like a battering ram within, smashing comfortable ideas about morality, unsettling conventionalism and complacency, and hurtling me into corners I cannot easily escape. This essay reflects mostly the battering ram, not conflicting thoughts and desires, such as the desire to develop an adequate apologetic for the roots of traditional morality. Nor does it represent an ultimate resolution, at least, not necessarily. I may myself someday rebut elements of this essay; but for now the thoughts it conveys stand as a challenge to all who would dare to do ethics.
I do not mean to suggest that mass murder began in the Twentieth Century or that it is foreign either to my turf or to my ethnic consciousness. From the slaughter of the Pequots in 1637, right here in New England, to the massacre of a band of Sioux at Wounded Nee in 1890 -- which is not to overlook subsequent unconscionable actions by some Americans, especially in wartime -- the evidence is clear and compelling: I share in no cultural or geographical immunity to atrocity. Is there any culture that is immune, I wonder. Unfortunately the dismal record of mass extermination reaches back through all of human history. Some have suggested that it may even account for the disappearance of other hominoid groups.
Essays and Reflections; no. 1
First draft, June 17, 1998; posted, November 18, 1998; new url, Janaury 28, 2004; last modification, January 28, 2004
Copyright ©1998-2004 by Norman E. Anderson
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