Applying Philosophy to Life

C H A P T E R 1GOOD AND EVIL

Almost no one doubts that cruelty is wrong. But philosophers differ on how to explain what is wrong about acting cruelly and even about the meaning of right and wrong. So we have various systems of moral theory. Inevitably we have the possibility that a philosopher may devise a pseudo-ethical doctrine that loses sight of basic intuitions about human dignity and elementary decency. When such a doctrine achieves currency and popular respectability, it becomes a powerful force for evil. For then, what passes as conventional wisdom allows the average person to behave in reprehensible but conventionally acceptable ways.

In Chapter One we find examples of the ways the moral intuitions of the indi- vidual may conflict with publicly accepted principles that are not grounded in re- spect for human dignity. In the first two selections, “From Cruelty to Goodness” by Philip Hallie and “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn” by Jonathan Bennett, the moral failure of principle is easy to diagnose. A dominant group adopts a phi- losophy that permits it to confine its moral concern to those inside the group, treat- ing outsiders as beyond the moral pale; their pain, their dignity, even their very lives merit no moral consideration. Huckleberry Finn, being white, is within the moral domain. His mentors have taught him that he does not owe moral behavior to slaves. Yet Huck treats Jim, the runaway slave, as if he too deserves the respect due a white person. And therein lies Huck’s conflict. Everything he conventionally believes tells him he is doing wrong in helping Jim elude his pursuers.

Mark Twain’s account of the conflict between official “book” morality and the ground-level morality of an innately decent and sympathetic person is one of the best in literature. Usually the conflict is embodied in two protagonists (Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables is an example), but Huck Finn’s conflict is within himself. And we are glad that his decency is stronger than his book morality. Both Jonathan Bennett and Philip Hallie quote the Nazi officer Heinrich Himmler, one of the fathers of the “final solution,” as a spokesman for those who advocate suspend- ing all moral feeling toward a particular group. Interestingly, Himmler considered

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himself all the more moral for being above pitying the children and other innocent victims outside the domain of moral consideration. Indeed, we hear stories of Germans who were conscience-stricken because—against their principles—they allowed some Jews to escape.

Our dismay at man’s inhumanity to man is qualified by the inspiring example of the residents of the French village Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who acted together to care for and save 6,000 Jews, mostly children, from the Nazis. Le Chambon is said to have been the safest place in Europe for a Jew during World War II. From his studies of the village, Hallie concludes that Le Chambon residents successfully com- bated evil because they never allowed themselves to be blind to the victim’s point of view. “When we are blind to that point of view we can countenance and perpetrate cruelty with impunity.” The true morality of Le Chambon drives out false and hyp- ocritical Nazi “decencies” that ignore the most elementary moral intuitions and that permit and encourage the horrors of Himmler’s and Hitler’s Germany.

The advent of totalitarianisms in the twentieth century has given rise to large concentration camps in which millions of innocents were incarcerated, tormented, and murdered. Moral philosophers have written much about the amorality of the people who planned, built, and administered these camps. Tzvetan Todorov and Anne Applebaum, in the selections we have chosen, focus their attention on the morale of those who lived in conditions of unspeakable horror but who managed to survive to tell their stories. Experiments such as those conducted by Yale Univer- sity Psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s dramatically suggest that even ordi- nary men and women living in ordinary times can be moved to inflict grave harm on hapless innocents.

In his selection, Josiah Royce defends a morality that respects human dignity. Beginning from the axiom that we owe respect and decency to our neighbor, Royce confronts the question that the Nazis and all those who ignore the humanity of spe- cial groups pervert: Who, then, are our neighbors? Royce answers that our neigh- bors include anyone with feelings: “Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere even as in thee.” Royce calls this the moral insight. He points out that treating strangers with care and solicitude is hardly unnatural; for each of us, our future self is like a stranger to us, yet we are naturally concerned with the welfare of that stranger.

The moral blindness that is the opposite of Royce’s moral insight has tragic consequences for the victims whose humanity is ignored. The point is taken up by Hallie, who complains that some moral philosophers who concentrate on the motives and character of evildoers often fail to attend to the suffering of the victims. Hallie argues that it is not the character of evildoers that is the crucial element of evil, but rather that evil mainly consists in the suffering caused by the perpetrators of evil. For Hallie, evil is what evil does. He therefore takes sharp issue with Bennett for saying that the Nazi who professes to be affected by the suffering he causes is in some respects morally superior to theologians like Jonathan Edwards who never actually harmed anyone but who claim to have no pity for the sinner who would suffer the torments of the damned.

Do we punish people for the evil they do or for what they are? Herman Mel- ville’s Billy Budd is a classic on this question. Billy Budd is an exceptionally pure and good person who has committed a crime. We are tempted to say that Budd’s fine character exculpates his crime. But this could be a dangerous doctrine if

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applied generally, since it challenges the principle that moral agents—including those of especially superior moral character—must be responsible to society for the consequences of their acts.

Friedrich Nietzsche challenges the tradition of Western morality with its moral insights and its Golden Rule to do to others what you would want them to do to you. He characterizes this tradition that enjoins us to protect the weak and whose origins lie in the teachings of Judaism and Christianity as “sentimental weakness” and a “denial of life.” According to Nietzsche, the tradition emasculates those who are strong, vital, and superior by forcing them to attend to the weak and mediocre. Nietzsche was especially effective in suggesting that morality often is used in hypo- critical ways to stifle initiative. Yet, on the whole, philosophers have rejected Nietzsche’s heroic morality as tending to encourage a morally irresponsible exercise of power. This is perhaps unfair, since Nietzsche himself almost certainly would have looked with contempt upon such self-styled “heroes” as the leaders of Nazi Germany. Another reason seems more valid: Nietzsche’s own ideal does in fact den- igrate sympathy with the weak and helpless, and so fails to convince those of us who see moral heroism in the likes of Huckleberry Finn and the people of Le Chambon.

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From Cruelty to Goodness

Philip Hallie

Philip Hallie (1922–1994) was a professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University. His published works include The Paradox of Cruelty (1969), Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (1979), and In the Eye of the Hurricane: Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (2001).

Philip Hallie considers institutionalized cruelty and finds that, besides physically assaulting its victims, it almost always assaults their dignity and self-respect. As an example of the opposite of institutionalized cruelty, Hallie cites the residents of the French village of Le Chambon who, at grave risk to their lives, saved 6,000 Jews from the Nazis. For him the con- trary of being cruel is not merely ceasing to be cruel, nor is it fighting cru- elty with violence and hatred (though this may be necessary). Rather, it is epitomized in the unambiguous and unpretentious goodness of the citizens of Le Chambon who followed the positive biblical injunctions “Defend the fatherless” and “Be your brother’s keeper,” as well as the negative injunc- tions against murder and betrayal.

I am a student of ethics, of good and evil; but my approach to these two rather melodramatic terms is skeptical. I am in the tradition of the ancient Greek skepti- koi, whose name means “inquirers” or “investigators.” And what we investigate is relationships among particular facts. What we put into doubt are the intricate webs of high-level abstractions that passed for philosophizing in the ancient world, and that still pass for philosophizing. My approach to good and evil emphasizes not ab- stract common nouns like “justice,” but proper names and verbs. Names and verbs keep us close to the facts better than do our high-falutin common nouns. Names refer to particular people, and verbs connect subjects with predicates in time, while common nouns are above all this.

One of the words that is important to me is my own name. For me, philosophy is personal; it is closer to literature and history than it is to the exact sciences, closer to the passions, actions, and common sense of individual persons than to a dispas- sionate technical science. It has to do with the personal matter of wisdom. And so ethics for me is personal—my story, and not necessarily (though possibly) yours. It concerns particular people at particular times.

But ethics is more than such particulars. It involves abstractions, that is, rules, laws, ideals. When you look at the ethical magnates of history you see in their words and deeds two sorts of ethical rules: negative and positive. The neg- ative rules are scattered throughout the Bible, but Moses brought down from

FROM CRUELTY TO GOODNESS Copyright © The Hastings Center. Reprinted by permission of the copyright holder.

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Mount Sinai the main negative ethical rules of the West: Thou shalt not murder; thou shalt not betray.… The positive injunctions are similarly spread throughout the Bible. In the first chapter of the book of Isaiah we are told to “… defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” The negative ethic forbids certain actions; the pos- itive ethic demands certain actions. To follow the negative ethic is to be decent, to have clean hands. But to follow the positive ethic, to be one’s brother’s keeper, is to be more than decent—it is to be active, even aggressive. If the negative ethic is one of decency, the positive one is the ethic of riskful, strenuous nobility.

In my early studies of particularized ethical terms, I found myself dwelling upon negative ethics, upon prohibitions. And among the most conspicuous prohibitions I found embodied in history was the prohibition against deliberate harmdoing, against cruelty. “Thou shalt not be cruel” had as much to do with the nightmare of history as did the prohibitions against murder and betrayal. In fact, many of the Ten Commandments—especially those against murder, adultery, stealing, and betrayal—were ways of prohibiting cruelty.

Early in my research it became clear that there are various approaches to cru- elty, as the different commandments suggest. For instance, there is the way reflected in the origins of the word “cruel.” The Latin crudus is related to still older words standing for bloodshed, or raw flesh. According to the etymology of the word, cru- elty involves the spilling of blood.

But modern dictionaries give the word a different meaning. They define it as “disposed to giving pain.” They emphasize awareness, not simply bloodshed. After all, they seem to say, you cannot be cruel to a dead body. There is no cruelty with- out consciousness.

And so I found myself studying the kinds of awareness associated with the hurting of human beings. It is certainly true that for millennia in history and litera- ture people have been torturing each other not only with hard weapons but also with hard words.

Still, the word “pain” seemed to be a simplistic and superficial way of describ- ing the many different sorts of cruelty. In Reska Weiss’s Journey Through Hell (London, 1961) there is a brief passage of one of the deepest cruelties that Nazis perpetrated upon extermination camp inmates. On a march

Urine and excreta poured down the prisoners’ legs, and by nightfall the excrement, which had frozen to our limbs, gave off its stench.

And Weiss goes on to talk not in terms of “pain” or bloodshed, but in other terms:

… We were really no longer human beings in the accepted sense. Not even animals, but putrefying corpses moving on two legs.

There is one factor that the idea of “pain” and the simpler idea of bloodshed do not touch: cruelty, not playful, quotidian teasing or ragging, but cruelty (what the anti-cruelty societies usually call “substantial cruelty”) involves the maiming of a person’s dignity, the crushing of a person’s self-respect. Bloodshed, the idea of pain (which is usually something involving a localizable occurrence, localizable in a tooth, in a head, in short, in the body), these are superficial ideas of cruelty.

PHILIP HALLIE: FROM CRUELTY TO GOODNESS 5

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A whip, bleeding flesh, these are what the journalists of cruelty emphasize, follow- ing the etymology and dictionary meaning of the word. But the depths of an understanding of cruelty lie in the depths of an understanding of human dignity and of how you can maim it without bloodshed, and often without localizable bodily pain.

In excremental assault, in the process of keeping camp inmates from wiping themselves or from going to the latrine, and in making them drink water from a toilet bowl full of excreta (and the excreta of the guards at that) localizable pain is nothing. Deep humiliation is everything. We human beings believe in hierarchies, whether we are skeptics or not about human value. There is a hierarchical gap be- tween shit and me. We are even above using the word. We are “above” walking around besmirched with feces. Our dignity, whatever the origins of that dignity may be, does not permit it. In order to be able to want to live, in order to be able to walk erect, we must respect ourselves as beings “higher” than our feces. When we feel that we are not “higher” than dirt or filth, then our lives are maimed at the very center, in the very depths, not merely in some localizable portion of our bodies. And when our lives are so maimed we become things, slaves, instruments. From ancient times until this moment, and as long as there will be human beings on this planet, there are those who know this and will use it, just as the Roman slave owners and the Southern American slave owners knew it when—one time a year— they encouraged the slaves to drink all the alcohol they could drink so that they could get bestially drunk and then even more bestially sick afterwards, under the eyes of their generous owners. The self-hatred, the loss of self-respect that the Sat- urnalia created in ancient Rome, say, made it possible to continue using the slaves as things, since they themselves came to think of themselves as things, as subhuman tools of the owners and the overseers.

Institutionalized cruelty, I learned, is the subtlest kind of cruelty. In episodic cruelty the victim knows he is being hurt, and his victimizer knows it too. But in a persistent pattern of humiliation that endures for years in a community, both the victim and the victimizer find ways of obscuring the harm that is being done. Blacks come to think of themselves as inferior, even esthetically inferior (black is “dirty”); and Jews come to think of themselves as inferior, even esthetically (dark hair and aquiline noses are “ugly”), so that the way they are being treated is justified by their “actual” inferiority, by the inferiority they themselves feel.

A similar process happens in the minds of the victimizers in institutionalized cruelty. They feel that since they are superior, even esthetically (“to be blonde is to be beautiful”), they deserve to do what they wish, deserve to have these lower crea- tures under their control. The words of Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS, in Posen in the year 1943 in a speech to his SS subordinates in a closed session, show how institutionalized cruelty can obscure harmdoing:

… the words come so easily. “The Jewish people will be exterminated,” says every party member, “of course. It’s in our program … extermination. We’ll take care of it.” And then they come, these nice 80 million Germans, and every one of them has his decent Jew. Sure the others are swine, but his one is a fine Jew.… Most of you will know what it means to have seen 100 corpses together, or 500 to 1,000. To have made one’s way through that, and … to have remained a decent person throughout, that is what has made us hard. That is a page of glory in our history.…

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In this speech he was making a sharp distinction between the program of crushing the Jews and the personal sentiments of individual Germans. The program stretched over years; personal sentiments were momentary. He was pleading for the program, for institutionalized destruction.

But one of the most interesting parts of the speech occurs toward the end of it:

… in sum, we can say that we fulfilled the heaviest of tasks [destroying the Jews] in love to our people. And we suffered no harm in our essence, in our soul, in our character.…

Commitment that overrides all sentimentality transforms cruelty and destruction into moral nobility, and commitment is the lifeblood of an institution.

Cruelty and the Power Relationships

But when I studied all these ways that we have used the word “cruelty,” I was nagged by the feeling that I had not penetrated into its inner structure. I was classi- fying, sorting out symptoms; but symptoms are signals, and what were the symp- toms signals of? I felt like a person who had been studying cancer by sorting out brief pains from persistent pains, pains in the belly from pains in the head. I was being superficial, and I was not asking the question, “What are the forces behind these kinds of cruelty?” I felt that there were such forces, but as yet I had not touched them.

Then one day I was reading in one of the great autobiographies of western civilization, Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times. The passage I was reading was about Douglass’s thoughts on the origins of slavery. He was asking himself: “How could these whites keep us enslaved?” And he suddenly realized:

My faculties and powers of body and soul are not my own, but are the property of a fellow-mortal in no sense superior to me, except that he has the physical power to compel me to be owned and controlled by him. By the combined physical force of the community I am his slave—a slave for life.

And then I saw that a disparity in power lay at the center of the dynamism of cru- elty. If it was institutional cruelty it was in all likelihood a difference involving both verbal and physical power that kept the cruelty going. The power of the majority and the weakness of a minority were at the center of the institutional cruelty of slavery and of Nazi anti-Semitism. The whites not only outnumbered the blacks in America, but had economic and political ascendancy over them. But just as impor- tant as these “physical” powers was the power that words like “nigger” and “slave” gave the white majority. Their language sanctified if it did not create their power ascendancy over the blacks, and one of the most important projects of the slaveholders and their allies was that of seeing to it that the blacks themselves thought of themselves in just these powerless terms. They utilized the language to convince not only the whites but the blacks themselves that blacks were weak in mind, in will power, and in worth. These words were like the excremental assault in the killing camps of the Nazis: they diminished both the respect the victimizers might have for their victims and the respect the victims might have for themselves. It occurred to me that if a power differential is crucial to the idea of cruelty, then

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when that power differential is maintained, cruelty will tend to be maintained, and when that power differential is eliminated, cruelty will tend to be eliminated. And this seemed to work. In all kinds of cruelty, violent and polite, episodic and institu- tional, when the victim arms himself with the appropriate strength, the cruelty diminishes or disappears. When Jews joined the Bush Warriors of France, the Maquis, and became powerful enough to strike at Vichy or the Nazis, they stopped being victims of French and Nazi cruelty. When Frederick Douglass learned to use the language with great skill and expressiveness, and when he learned to use his physical strength against his masters, the power differential between him and his masters diminished, and so did their cruelty to him. In his autobiography he wrote:

A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it cannot do long if signs of power do not arise.

When I looked back at my own childhood in Chicago, I remembered that the physical and mental cruelties that I suffered in the slums of the southwest side when I was about ten years old sharply diminished and finally disappeared when I learned how to defend myself physically and verbally. It is exactly this lesson that Douglass learned while growing up in the cruel institution of slavery.

Cruelty then, whatever else it is, is a kind of power relationship, an imbalance of power wherein the stronger party becomes the victimizer and the weaker be- comes the victim. And since many general terms are most swiftly understood in relationship with their opposites (just as “heavy” can be understood most handily in relationship with what we mean by “light”) the opposite of cruelty lay in a sit- uation where there is no imbalance of power. The opposite of cruelty, I learned, was freedom from that unbalanced power relationship. Either the victim should get stronger and stand up to the victimizer, and thereby bring about a balance of their powers, or the victim should free himself from the whole relationship by flight.

In pursuing this line of thought, I came to believe that, again, dictionaries are misleading: many of them give “kindness” as the antonym for “cruelty.” In study- ing slavery in America and the concentration camps of central Europe I found that kindness could be the ultimate cruelty, especially when it was given within that un- balanced power relationship. A kind overseer or a kind camp guard can exacerbate cruelty, can remind his victim that there are other relationships than the relation- ship of cruelty, and can make the victim deeply bitter, especially when he sees the self-satisfied smile of his victimizer. He is being cruelly treated when he is given a penny or a bun after having endured the crushing and grinding of his mental and bodily well-being. As Frederick Douglass put it:

The kindness of the slave-master only gilded the chain. It detracted nothing from its weight or strength. The thought that men are for other and better uses than slavery throve best under the gentle treatment of a kind master.

No, I learned, the opposite of cruelty is not kindness. The opposite of the cruelty of the overseer in American slavery was not the kindness of that overseer for a moment or for a day. An episodic kindness is not the opposite of an

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institutionalized cruelty. The opposite of institutionalized cruelty is freedom from the cruel relationship.

It is important to see how perspectival the whole meaning of cruelty is. From the perspective of the SS guard or the southern overseer, a bit of bread, a smile is indeed a diminution of cruelty. But in the relationship of cruelty, the point of view of the victimizer is of only minor importance; it is the point of view of the victim that is authoritative. The victim feels the suffering in his own mind and body, whereas the victimizer, like Himmler’s “hard” and “decent” Nazi, can be quite un- aware of that suffering. The sword does not feel the pain that it inflicts. Do not ask it about suffering.

Goodness Personified in Le Chambon

All these considerations drove me to write my book The Paradox of Cruelty. But with the book behind me, I felt a deep discontent. I saw cruelty as an embodiment, a particular case of evil. But if cruelty is one of the main evils of human history, why is the opposite of cruelty not one of the key goods of human history? Freedom from the cruel relationship, either by escaping it or by redressing the imbalance of power, was not essential to what western philosophers and theologians have thought of as goodness. Escape is a negative affair. Goodness has something posi- tive in it, something triumphantly affirmative.

Hoping for a hint of goodness in the very center of evil, I started looking closely at the so-called “medical experiments” of the Nazis upon children, usually Jewish and Gypsy children, in the death camps. Here were the weakest of the weak. Not only were they despised minorities, but they were, as individuals, still in their non-age. They were dependents. Here the power imbalance between the cruel experimenters and their victims was at its greatest. But instead of seeing light or finding insight by going down into this hell, into the deepest depth of cruelty, I found myself unwillingly becoming part of the world I was studying. I found my- self either yearning to be viciously cruel to the victimizers of the children, or I found myself feeling compassion for the children, feeling their despair and pain as they looked up at the men and women in white coats cutting off their fingertips one at a time, or breaking their slender bones, or wounding their internal organs. Either I became a would-be victimizer or one more Jewish victim, and in either case I was not achieving insight, only misery, like so many other students of the Holocaust. And when I was trying to be “objective” about my studies, when I was succeeding at being indifferent to both the victimizers and the victims of these cruel relationships, I became cold; I became another monster who could look upon the maiming of a child with an indifferent eye.

To relieve this unending suffering, from time to time I would turn to the litera- ture of the French resistance to the Nazis. I had been trained by the U.S. Army to understand it. The resistance was a way of trying to redress the power imbalance between Hitler’s Fortress Europe and Hitler’s victims, and so I saw it as an enemy of cruelty. Still, its methods were often cruel like the methods of most power strug- gles, and I had little hope of finding goodness here. We soldiers violated the nega- tive ethic forbidding killing in order, we thought, to follow the positive ethic of being our brothers’ keepers.

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And then one gray April afternoon I found a brief article on the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. I shall not analyze here the tears of amazement and gladness and release from despair—in short, of joy—that I shed when I first read that story. Tears themselves interest me greatly—but not the tears of melancholy hindsight and existential despair; rather the tears of awe you experience when the realization of an ideal suddenly appears before your very eyes or thunders inside your mind; these tears interest me.

And one of the reasons I wept at first reading about Le Chambon in those brief, inaccurate pages was that at last I had discovered an embodiment of goodness in opposition to cruelty. I had discovered in the flesh and blood of history, in people with definite names in a definite place at a definite time in the nightmare of history, what no classical or religious ethicist could deny was goodness.

The French Protestant village of Le Chambon, located in the Cévennes Mountains of southeastern France, and with a population of about 3,500, saved the lives of about 6,000 people, most of them Jewish children whose parents had been murdered in the killing camps of central Europe. Under a national govern- ment which was not only collaborating with the Nazi conquerors of France but frequently trying to outdo the Germans in anti-Semitism in order to please their conquerors, and later under the day-to-day threat of destruction by the German Armed SS, they started to save children in the winter of 1940, the winter after the fall of France, and they continued to do so until the war in France was over. They sheltered the refugees in their own homes and in various houses they estab- lished especially for them; and they took many of them across the terrible moun- tains to neutral Geneva, Switzerland, in the teeth of French and German police and military power. The people of Le Chambon are poor, and the Huguenot faith to which they belong is a diminishing faith in Catholic and atheist France; but their spiritual power, their capacity to act in unison against the victimizers who surrounded them, was immense, and more than a match for the military power of those victimizers.

But for me as an ethicist the heart of the matter was not only their special power. What interested me was that they obeyed both the negative and the positive injunctions of ethics; they were good not only in the sense of trying to be their brothers’ keepers, protecting the victim, “defending the fatherless,” to use the language of Isaiah; they were also good in the sense that they obeyed the negative injunctions against killing and betraying. While those around them—including myself—were murdering in order, presumably, to help mankind in some way or other, they murdered nobody, and betrayed not a single child in those long and dangerous four years. For me as an ethicist they were the embodiment of unambig- uous goodness.

But for me as a student of cruelty they were something more: they were an em- bodiment of the opposite of cruelty. And so, somehow, at last, I had found good- ness in opposition to cruelty. In studying their story, and in telling it in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, I learned that the opposite of cruelty is not simply free- dom from the cruel relationship; it is hospitality. It lies not only in something nega- tive, an absence of cruelty or of imbalance; it lies in unsentimental, efficacious love. The opposite of the cruelties of the camps was not the liberation of the camps, the cleaning out of the barracks and the cessation of the horrors. All of this was the end

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of the cruelty relationship, not the opposite of that relationship. And it was not even the end of it, because the victims would never forget and would remain in agony as long as they remembered their humiliation and suffering. No, the opposite of cruelty was not the liberation of the camps, not freedom; it was the hospitality of the people of Chambon, and of very few others during the Holocaust. The opposite of cruelty was the kind of goodness that happened in Chambon.

Let me explain the difference between liberation and hospitality by telling you about a letter I received a year ago from a woman who had been saved by the peo- ple of Le Chambon when she was a young girl. She wrote:

Never was there a question that the Chambonnais would not share all they had with us, meager as it was. One Chambonnais once told me that even if there was less, they still would want more for us.

And she goes on:

It was indeed a very different attitude from the one in Switzerland, which while saving us also resented us so much.

If today we are not bitter people like most survivors it can only be due to the fact that we met people like the people of Le Chambon, who showed to us simply that life can be different, that there are people who care, that people can live together and even risk their own lives for their fellow man.

The Swiss liberated refugees and removed them from the cruel relationship; the peo- ple of Le Chambon did more. They taught them that goodness could conquer cru- elty, that loving hospitality could remove them from the cruel relationship. And they taught me this, too.

It is important to emphasize that cruelty is not simply an episodic, momentary matter, especially institutional cruelty like that of Nazism or slavery. As we have seen throughout this essay, not only does it persist while it is being exerted upon the weak; it can persist in the survivors after they have escaped the power relation- ship. The survivors torture themselves, continue to suffer, continue to maim their own lives long after the actual torture is finished. The self-hatred and rage of the blacks and the despair of the Native Americans and the Jews who have suffered un- der institutional crushing and maiming are continuations of original cruelties. And these continuations exist because only a superficial liberation from torture has occurred. The sword has stopped falling on their flesh in the old obvious ways, but the wounds still bleed. I am not saying that the village of Chambon healed these wounds—they go too deep. What I am saying is that the people I have talked to who were once children in Le Chambon have more hope for their species and more respect for themselves as human beings than most other survivors I have met. The enduring hospitality they met in Le Chambon helped them find realistic hope in a world of persisting cruelty.

What was the nature of this hospitality that saved and deeply changed so many lives? It is hard to summarize briefly what the Chambonnais did, and above all how they did it. The morning after a new refugee family came to town they would find on their front door a wreath with “Bienvenue!” “Welcome!” painted on a piece of cardboard attached to the wreath. Nobody knew who had brought the wreath; in effect, the whole town had brought it.

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It was mainly the women of Chambon who gave so much more than shelter to these, the most hated enemies of the Nazis. There was Madame Barraud, a tiny Alsatian, who cared for the refugee boys in her house with all the love such a tiny body could hold, and who cared for the way they felt day and night. And there were others.

But there was one person without whom Le Chambon could not have become the safest place in Europe for Jews: the Huguenot minister of the village, André Trocmé. Trocmé was a passionately religious man. He was massive, more than six feet tall, blonde, with a quick temper. Once long after the war, while he was lectur- ing on the main project of his life, the promotion of the idea of nonviolence in in- ternational relations, one of the members of his audience started to whisper a few words to his neighbor. Trocmé let this go on for a few moments, then interrupted his speech, walked up to the astonished whisperer, raised his massive arm, pointed toward the door, and yelled, “Out! Out! Get out!” And the lecture was on nonviolence.

The center of his thought was the belief that God showed how important man was by becoming Himself a human being, and by becoming a particular sort of human being who was the embodiment of sacrificially generous love. For Trocmé, every human being was like Jesus, had God in him or her, and was just as precious as God Himself. And when Trocmé with the help of the Quakers and others orga- nized his village into the most efficient rescue machine in Europe, he did so not only to save the Jews, but also to save the Nazis and their collaborators. He wanted to keep them from blackening their souls with more evil—he wanted to save them, the victimizers, from evil.

One of the reasons he was successful was that the Huguenots had been them- selves persecuted for hundreds of years by the kings of France, and they knew what persecution was. In fact, when the people of Chambon took Jewish children and whole families across the mountains of southeastern France into neutral Switzer- land, they often followed pathways that had been taken by Huguenots in their flight from the Dragoons of the French kings.

A particular incident from the story of Le Chambon during the Nazi occupa- tion of France will explain succinctly why he was successful in making the village a village of refuge. But before I relate the story, I must point out that the people of the village did not think of themselves as “successful,” let alone as “good.” From their point of view, they did not do anything that required elaborate explanation. When I asked them why they helped these dangerous guests, they invariably an- swered, “What do you mean, ‘Why’? Where else could they go? How could you turn them away? What is so special about being ready to help (prête à servir)? There was nothing else to do.” And some of them laughed in amazement when I told them that I thought they were “good people.” They saw no alternative to their actions and to the way they acted, and therefore they saw what they did as neces- sary, not something to be picked out for praise. Helping these guests was for them as natural as breathing or eating—one does not think of alternatives to these func- tions; they did not think of alternatives to sheltering people who were endangering not only the lives of their hosts but the lives of all the people of the village.

And now the story. One afternoon a refugee woman knocked on the door of a farmhouse outside the village. The farmers around the village proper were

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Protestants like most of the others in Chambon, but with one difference: they were mostly “Darbystes,” followers of a strange Scot named Darby, who taught their an- cestors in the nineteenth century to believe every word of the Bible, and indeed, who had them memorize the Bible. They were literal fundamentalists. The farm- woman opened the door to the refugee and invited her into the kitchen where it was warm. Standing in the middle of the floor the refugee, in heavily accented French, asked for eggs for her children. In those days of very short supplies, people with children often went to the farmers in the “gray market” (neither black nor exactly legal) to get necessary food. This was early in 1941, and the farmers were not yet accustomed to the refugees. The farmwoman looked into the eyes of the shawled refugee and asked, “Are you Jewish?” The woman started to tremble, but she could not lie, even though that question was usually the beginning of the end of life for Jews in Hitler’s Fortress Europe. She answered, “Yes.”

The woman ran from the kitchen to the staircase nearby, and while the refugee trembled with terror in the kitchen, she called up the stairs, “Husband, children, come down, come down! We have in our house at this very moment a representa- tive of the Chosen People!”

Not all the Protestants in Chambon were Darbyste fundamentalists; but almost all were convinced that people are the children of God, and are as precious as God Him- self. Their leaders were Huguenot preachers and their following of the negative and positive commandments of the Bible came in part from their personal generosity and courage, but also in part from the depths of their religious conviction that we are all children of God, and we must take care of each other lovingly. This combined with the ancient and deep historical ties between the Huguenots and the Jews of France and their own centuries of persecution by the Dragoons and Kings of France helped make them what they were, “always ready to help,” as the Chambonnais saying goes.

A Choice of Perspectives

We have come a long way from cruelty to the people of Chambon, just as I have come a long way in my research from concrete evil to concrete goodness. Let me conclude with a point that has been alternately hinted at and stressed in the course of this essay.

A few months after Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed was published I received a letter from Massachusetts that opened as follows:

I have read your book, and I believe that you mushy-minded moralists should be awakened to the facts. Nothing happened in Le Chambon, nothing of any importance whatsoever.

The Holocaust, dear Professor, was like a geological event, like an earthquake. No person could start it; no person could change it; and no person could end it. And no small group of persons could do so either. It was the armies and the nations that per- formed actions that counted. Individuals did nothing. You sentimentalists have got to learn that the great masses and big political ideas make the difference. Your people and the people they saved simply do not exist.

Now between this position and mine there is an abyss that no amount of shouted arguments or facts can cross. And so I shall not answer this letter with a tightly or- ganized reply. I shall answer it only by telling you that one of the reasons

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institutional cruelty exists and persists is that people believe that individuals can do nothing, that only vast ideologies and armies can act meaningfully. Every act of in- stitutional cruelty—Nazism, slavery, and all the others—lives not with people in the concrete, but with abstractions that blind people to individuals. Himmler’s speech to the SS leadership in 1943 is full of phrases like “exterminating a bacillus,” and “The Jewish people will be exterminated.” And in that speech he attacks any Ger- man who believes in “his decent Jew.” Institutional cruelty, like other misleading approaches to ethics, blinds us to the victim’s point of view; and when we are blind to that point of view we can countenance and perpetrate cruelty with impunity.

I have told you that I cannot and will not try to refute the letter from Massa- chusetts. I shall only summarize the point of view of this essay with another story.

I was lecturing a few months ago in Minneapolis, and when I finished talking about the Holocaust and the village of Le Chambon, a woman stood up and asked me if the village of Le Chambon was in the Department of Haute-Loire, the high sources of the Loire River. Obviously she was French, with her accent; and all French people know that there are many villages called “Le Chambon” in France, just as any American knows that there are many “Main Streets” in the United States. I said that Le Chambon was indeed in the Haute-Loire.

She said, “Then you have been speaking about the village that saved all three of my children. I want to thank you for writing this book, not only because the story will now be permanent, but also because I shall be able to talk about those terrible days with Americans now, for they will understand those days better than they have. You see, you Americans, though you sometimes cross the oceans, live on an island here as far as war is concerned.…”

Then she asked to come up and say one sentence. There was not a sound, not even breathing, to be heard in the room. She came to the front of the room and said, “The Holocaust was storm, lightning, thunder, wind, rain, yes. And Le Cham- bon was the rainbow.”

Only from her perspective can you understand the cruelty and the goodness I have been talking about, not from the point of view of the gentleman from Massachusetts. You must choose which perspective is best, and your choice will have much to do with your feelings about the preciousness of life, and not only the preciousness of other people’s lives. If the lives of others are precious to you, your life will become more precious to you.

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Distinguish between positive and negative moral injunctions. Do you agree with Hallie that we need both for moral decency? Explain.

2. Do you agree with Hallie that cruelty is prevalent when a serious imbalance of power exists among people? Can we be cruel to our equals? Explain.

3. Why does Hallie deny that kindness is the opposite of cruelty? What does he consider to be cruelty’s opposite?

4. What does the writer Terrence Des Pres mean when he says of Le Chambon, “Those events took place and therefore demand a place in our view of the world”?

5. With whom do you agree more: (a) the person from Massachusetts who wrote and called Hallie a “mushy-minded moralist” who has failed to realize that the Holocaust “was like a geological event” that could not be stopped or modified, or (b) Hallie, who claims that Le Chambon teaches us that goodness can conquer cruelty? Why?

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The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn

Jonathan Bennett

Jonathan Bennett (b. 1930) is a professor Emeritus of philosophy at Syra- cuse University. He is the author of several books, including Kant’s Ana- lytic (1966), Rationality: An Essay towards an Analysis (1989), and most recently, A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals (2003).

In this selection Jonathan Bennett considers the moral consciences of Huckleberry Finn, the Nazi officer Heinrich Himmler, and the Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards. He is interested in how each, in his own way, resolves the conflict between his human sympathies and the moral doctrine he is following that requires him to override those sympathies. Huck Finn develops a deep attachment to Jim, the runaway slave, but the official morality of his community does not allow for fellow feelings to- ward slaves. When forced to choose between his kindly feelings and the of- ficial morality, Huck gives up on morality. Himmler set his sympathies aside. Jonathan Edwards’ case represents a third way out: he allowed himself no sympathies at all. Bennett finds Edwards’ solution to be as bad as Himmler’s, if not worse. Bennett concludes that while we should not give our sympathies a “blank check,” we must always give them great weight and be wary of acting on any principle that conflicts with them.

I

In this paper, I shall present not just the conscience of Huckleberry Finn but two others as well. One of them is the conscience of Heinrich Himmler. He became a Nazi in 1923; he served drably and quietly, but well, and was rewarded with in- creasing responsibility and power. At the peak of his career he held many offices and commands, of which the most powerful was that of leader of the SS—the prin- cipal police force of the Nazi regime. In this capacity, Himmler commanded the whole concentration-camp system, and was responsible for the execution of the so-called “final solution of the Jewish problem.” It is important for my purposes that this piece of social engineering should be thought of not abstractly but in con- crete terms of Jewish families being marched to what they think are bathhouses, to the accompaniment of loud-speaker renditions of extracts from The Merry Widow and Tales of Hoffmann, there to be choked to death by poisonous gases. Alto- gether, Himmler succeeded in murdering about four and a half million of them, as well as several million gentiles, mainly Poles and Russians.

THE CONSCIENCE OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN From Philosophy 49 (1974), pp. 123–135 by Jonathan Bennett. Reprinted with the permission of the Cambridge University Press.

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The other conscience to be discussed is that of the Calvinist theologian and phi- losopher Jonathan Edwards. He lived in the first half of the eighteenth century, and has a good claim to be considered America’s first serious and considerable philo- sophical thinker. He was for many years a widely renowned preacher and Congre- gationalist minister in New England; in 1748 a dispute with his congregation led him to resign (he couldn’t accept their view that unbelievers should be admitted to the Lord’s Supper in the hope that it would convert them); for some years after that he worked as a missionary, preaching to Indians through an interpreter; then in 1758 he accepted the presidency of what is now Princeton University, and within two months died from a smallpox inoculation. Along the way he wrote some first- rate philosophy; his book attacking the notion of free will is still sometimes read. Why I should be interested in Edwards’ conscience will be explained in due course.

I shall use Heinrich Himmler, Jonathan Edwards, and Huckleberry Finn to illustrate different aspects of a single theme, namely the relationship between sympathy on the one hand and bad morality on the other.

II

All that I can mean by a “bad morality” is a morality whose principles I deeply dis- approve of. When I call a morality bad, I cannot prove that mine is better; but when I here call any morality bad, I think you will agree with me that it is bad; and that is all I need.

There could be dispute as to whether the springs of someone’s actions consti- tute a morality. I think, though, that we must admit that someone who acts in ways which conflict grossly with our morality may nevertheless have a morality of his own—a set of principles of action which he sincerely assents to, so that for him the problem of acting well or rightly or in obedience to conscience is the problem of conforming to those principles. The problem of conscientiousness can arise as acutely for a bad morality as for any other: Rotten principles may be as difficult to keep as decent ones.

As for “sympathy” I use this term to cover every sort of fellow-feeling, as when one feels pity over someone’s loneliness, or horrified compassion over his pain, or when one feels a shrinking reluctance to act in a way which will bring misfortune to someone else. These feelings must not be confused with moral judg- ments. My sympathy for someone in distress may lead me to help him, or even to think that I ought to help him; but in itself it is not a judgment about what I ought to do but just a feeling for him in his plight. We shall get some light on the difference between feelings and moral judgments when we consider Huckle- berry Finn.

Obviously, feelings can impel one to action, and so can moral judgments; and in a particular case sympathy and morality may pull in opposite directions. This can happen not just with bad moralities, but also with good ones like yours and mine. For example, a small child, sick and miserable, clings tightly to his mother and screams in terror when she tries to pass him over to the doctor to be examined. If the mother gave way to her sympathy, that is to her feeling for the child’s misery and fright, she would hold it close and not let the doctor come near; but don’t we

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agree that it might be wrong for her to act on such a feeling? Quite generally, then, anyone’s moral principles may apply to a particular situation in a way which runs contrary to the particular thrusts of fellow-feeling that he has in that situation. My immediate concern is with sympathy in relation to bad morality, but not because such conflicts occur only when the morality is bad.

Now, suppose that someone who accepts a bad morality is struggling to make himself act in accordance with it in a particular situation where his sympathies pull him another way. He sees the struggle as one between doing the right, conscientious thing, and acting wrongly and weakly, like the mother who won’t let the doctor come near her sick, frightened baby. Since we don’t accept this person’s morality, we may see the situation very differently, thoroughly disapproving of the action he regards as the right one, and endorsing the action which from his point of view constitutes weakness and backsliding.

Conflicts between sympathy and bad morality won’t always be like this, for we won’t disagree with every single dictate of a bad morality. Still, it can happen in the way I have described, with the agent’s right action being our wrong one, and vice versa. That is just what happens in a certain episode in Chapter 16 of The Adven- tures of Huckleberry Finn, an episode which brilliantly illustrates how fiction can be instructive about real life.

III

Huck Finn has been helping his slave friend Jim to run away from Miss Watson, who is Jim’s owner. In their raft-journey down the Mississippi River, they are near to the place at which Jim will become legally free. Now let Huck take over the story:

Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way.… It hadn’t ever come home to me, before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and say, every time: “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that, no way. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me: “What had poor Miss Watson done to you, that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you, that you could treat her so mean? …” I got to feeling so mean and miserable I most wished I was dead.

Jim speaks his plan to save up to buy his wife, and then his children, out of slavery; and he adds that if the children cannot be bought he will arrange to steal them. Huck is horrified:

Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.

JONATHAN BENNETT: THE CONSCIENCE OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN 17

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I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him. My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says to it: “Let up on me—it ain’t too late, yet—I’ll paddle ashore at first light, and tell.” I felt easy, and happy, and light as a feather, right off. All my troubles was gone.

This is bad morality all right. In his earliest years Huck wasn’t taught any princi- ples, and the only ones he has encountered since then are those of rural Missouri, in which slave-owning is just one kind of ownership and is not subject to critical pressure. It hasn’t occurred to Huck to question those principles. So the action, to us abhorrent, of turning Jim in to the authorities presents itself clearly to Huck as the right thing to do.

For us, morality and sympathy would both dictate helping Jim to escape. If we felt any conflict, it would have both these on one side and something else on the other—greed for a reward, or fear of punishment. But Huck’s morality conflicts with his sympathy, that is, with his unargued, natural feeling for his friend. The conflict starts when Huck sets off in the canoe towards the shore, pretending that he is going to reconnoiter, but really planning to turn Jim in:

As I shoved off, [Jim] says: “Pooty soon I’ll be a-shout’n for joy, en I’ll say, it’s all on accounts o’ Huck I’s a free man … Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de only fren’ old Jim’s got now.”

I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me. I went along slow then, and I warn’t right down certain whether I was glad I started or whether I warn’t. When I was fifty yards off, Jim says:

“Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to ole Jim.” Well, I just felt sick. But I says, I got to do it—I can’t get out of it.

In the upshot, sympathy wins over morality. Huck hasn’t the strength of will to do what he sincerely thinks he ought to do. Two men hunting for runaway slaves ask him whether the man on his raft is black or white:

I didn’t answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn’t come. I tried, for a second or two, to brace up and out with it, but I warn’t man enough—hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says: “He’s white.”

So Huck enables Jim to escape, thus acting weakly and wickedly—he thinks. In this conflict between sympathy and morality, sympathy wins.

One critic has cited this episode in support of the statement that Huck suffers “excruciating moments of wavering between honesty and respectability.” That is hopelessly wrong, and I agree with the perceptive comment on it by another critic, who says:

The conflict waged in Huck is much more serious: He scarcely cares for respectabil- ity and never hesitates to relinquish it, but he does care for honesty and gratitude— and both honesty and gratitude require that he should give Jim up. It is not, in Huck, honesty at war with respectability but love and compassion for Jim struggling against his conscience. His decision is for Jim and hell: a right decision made in the mental chains that Huck never breaks. His concern for Jim is and remains irrational.

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Huck finds many reasons for giving Jim up and none for stealing him. To the end Huck sees his compassion for Jim as a weak, ignorant, and wicked felony.1

That is precisely correct—and it can have that virtue only because Mark Twain wrote the episode with such unerring precision. The crucial point concerns reasons, which all occur on one side of the conflict. On the side of conscience we have prin- ciples, arguments, considerations, ways of looking at things:

“It hadn’t ever come home to me before what I was doing” “I tried to make out that I warn’t to blame” “Conscience said ‘But you knowed …’—I couldn’t get around that” “What had poor Miss Watson done to you?” “This is what comes of my not thinking” “… children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know.”

On the other side, the side of feeling, we get nothing like that. When Jim rejoices in Huck, as his only friend, Huck doesn’t consider the claims of friendship or have the situation “come home” to him in a different light. All that happens is: “When he says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me. I went along slow then, and I warn’t right down certain whether I was glad I started or whether I warn’t.” Again, Jim’s words about Huck’s “promise” to him don’t give Huck any reason for changing his plan: In his morality promises to slaves probably don’t count. Their effect on him is of a different kind: “Well, I just felt sick.” And when the moment for final decision comes, Huck doesn’t weigh up pros and cons: he simply fails to do what he believes to be right—he isn’t strong enough, hasn’t “the spunk of a rabbit.” This passage in the novel is notable not just for its finely wrought irony, with Huck’s weakness of will leading him to do the right thing, but also for its masterly handling of the difference between general moral principles and particular unreasoned emotional pulls.

IV

Consider now another case of bad morality in conflict with human sympathy: the case of the odious Himmler. Here, from a speech he made to some SS generals, is an indication of the content of his morality:

What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in pros- perity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves to our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished.2

1 M. J. Sidnell, “Huck Finn and Jim,” The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 2, pp. 205–206. 2 Quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York, 1960), pp. 937–938. Next quotation: ibid., p. 966. All further quotations relating to Himmler are from Roger Manwell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Heinrich Himmler (London, 1965), pp. 132, 197, 184 (twice), 187.

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But has this a moral basis at all? And if it has, was there in Himmler’s own mind any conflict between morality and sympathy? Yes there was. Here is more from the same speech:

I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter … I mean … the extermination of the Jewish race.… Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.

Himmler saw his policies as being hard to implement while still retaining one’s hu- man sympathies—while still remaining a “decent fellow.” He is saying that only the weak take the easy way out and just squelch their sympathies, and is praising the stronger and more glorious course of retaining one’s sympathies while acting in vi- olation of them. In the same spirit, he ordered that when executions were carried out in concentration camps, those responsible “are to be influenced in such a way as to suffer no ill effect in their character and mental attitude.” A year later he boasted that the SS had wiped out the Jews

without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and souls. The danger was considerable, for there was only a narrow path between the Scylla of their becoming heartless ruffians unable any longer to treasure life, and the Charybdis of their becoming soft and suffering nervous breakdowns.

And there really can’t be any doubt that the basis of Himmler’s policies was a set of principles which constituted his morality—a sick, bad, wicked morality. He de- scribed himself as caught in “the old tragic conflict between will and obligation.” And when his physician Kersten protested at the intention to destroy the Jews, say- ing that the suffering involved was “not to be contemplated,” Kersten reports that Himmler replied:

He knew that it would mean much suffering for the Jews.… “It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life. Yet we must … cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear.”

This, I submit, is the language of morality. So in this case, tragically, bad morality won out over sympathy. I am sure that

many of Himmler’s killers did extinguish their sympathies, becoming “heartless ruf- fians” rather than “decent fellows”; but not Himmler himself. Although his policies ran against the human grain to a horrible degree, he did not sandpaper down his emo- tional surfaces so that there was no grain there, allowing his actions to slide along smoothly and easily. He did, after all, bear his hideous burden, and even paid a price for it. He suffered a variety of nervous and physical disabilities, including nausea and stomach convulsions, and Kersten was doubtless right in saying that these were “the expression of a psychic division which extended over his whole life.”

This same division must have been present in some of those officials of the Church who ordered heretics to be tortured so as to change their theological opinions. Along with the brutes and the cold careerists, there must have been some who cared, and who suffered from the conflict between their sympathies and their bad morality.

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V

In the conflict between sympathy and bad morality, then, the victory may go to sympathy as in the case of Huck Finn, or to morality as in the case of Himmler.

Another possibility is that the conflict may be avoided by giving up, or not ever having, those sympathies which might interfere with one’s principles. That seems to have been the case with Jonathan Edwards. I am afraid that I shall be doing an in- justice to Edwards’ many virtues, and to his great intellectual energy and inventive- ness; for my concern is only with the worst thing about him—namely his morality, which was worse than Himmler’s.

According to Edwards, God condemns some men to an eternity of unimagin- ably awful pain, though he arbitrarily spares others—“arbitrarily” because none deserve to be spared:

Natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, his anger is as great toward them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of his wrath in hell …; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them …; and … there are no means within reach that can be any security to them.… All that preserves them is the mere arbitrary will, and unconvenanted unobliged forebearance of an incensed God.3

Notice that he says “they have deserved the fiery pit.” Edwards insists that men ought to be condemned to eternal pain; and his position isn’t that this is right be- cause God wants it, but rather that God wants it because it is right. For him, moral standards exist independently of God, and God can be assessed in the light of them (and of course found to be perfect). For example, he says:

They deserve to be cast into hell; so that … justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God’s using his power at any moment to destroy them. Yea, on the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of their sins.

Elsewhere, he gives elaborate arguments to show that God is acting justly in damning sinners. For example, he argues that a punishment should be exactly as bad as the crime being punished; God is infinitely excellent; so any crime against him is infinitely bad; and so eternal damnation is exactly right as a punishment—it is infinite, but, as Edwards is careful also to say, it is “no more than infinite.”

Of course, Edwards himself didn’t torment the damned; but the question still arises of whether his sympathies didn’t conflict with his approval of eternal tor- ment. Didn’t he find it painful to contemplate any fellow-human’s being tortured forever? Apparently not:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked … he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

3 Vergilius Ferm (ed.), Puritan Sage: Collected Writings of Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1953), p. 370. Next three quotations: ibid., p. 366, p. 294 (“no more than infinite”), p. 372.

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When God is presented as being as misanthropic as that, one suspects misanthropy in the theologian. This suspicion is increased when Edwards claims that “the saints in glory will … understand how terrible the sufferings of the damned are; yet … will not be sorry for [them].”4 He bases this partly on a view of human nature whose ugliness he seems not to notice:

The seeing of the calamities of others tends to heighten the sense of our own enjoy- ments. When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state.… When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are … when they shall see the smoke of their torment … and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the mean time are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be in it to all eter- nity; how they will rejoice!

I hope this is less than the whole truth! His other main point about why the saints will rejoice to see the torments of the damned is that it is right that they should do so:

The heavenly inhabitants … will have no love nor pity to the damned.… [This will not show] a want of spirit of love in them … for the heavenly inhabitants will know that it is not fit that they should love [the damned] because they will know then, that God has no love to them, nor pity for them.

The implication that of course one can adjust one’s feelings of pity so that they con- form to the dictates of some authority—doesn’t this suggest that ordinary human sympathies played only a small part in Edwards’ life?

VI

Huck Finn, whose sympathies are wide and deep, could never avoid the conflict in that way; but he is determined to avoid it, and so he opts for the only other alter- native he can see—to give up morality altogether. After he has tricked the slave- hunters, he returns to the raft and undergoes a peculiar crisis:

I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little, ain’t got no show—when the pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on—s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you feel better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad— I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.

Huck clearly cannot conceive of having any morality except the one he has learned—too late, he thinks—from his society. He is not entirely a prisoner of

4 This and the next two quotations are from “The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous: Or, The Torments of the Wicked in Hell, No Occasion of Grief to the Saints in Heaven,” from The Works of President Edwards (London, 1817), vol. 4, pp. 507–508, 511–112, and 509, respectively.

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that morality, because he does after all reject it; but for him that is a decision to relinquish morality as such; he cannot envisage revising his morality, altering its content in face of the various pressures to which it is subject, including pressures from his sympathies. For example, he does not begin to approach the thought that slavery should be rejected on moral grounds, or the thought that what he is doing is not theft because a person cannot be owned and therefore cannot be stolen.

The basic trouble is that he cannot or will not engage in abstract intellectual operations of any sort. In chapter 33 he finds himself “feeling to blame, somehow” for something he knows he had no hand in; he assumes that this feeling is a deliver- ance of conscience; and this confirms him in his belief that conscience shouldn’t be listened to:

It don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience does, I would poison him. It takes up more than all of a person’s insides, and yet ain’t no good, nohow.

That brisk, incurious dismissiveness fits well with the comprehensive rejection of morality back on the raft. But this is a digression.

On the raft, Huck decides not to live by principles, but just to do whatever “comes handiest at the time”—always acting according to the mood of the mo- ment. Since the morality he is rejecting is narrow and cruel, and his sympathies are broad and kind, the results will be good. But moral principles are good to have, because they help to protect one from acting badly at moments when one’s sympathies happen to be in abeyance. On the highest possible estimate of the role one’s sympathies should have, one can still allow for principles as embo- diments of one’s best feelings, one’s broadest and keenest sympathies. On that view, principles can help one across intervals when one’s feelings are at less than their best, i.e. through periods of misanthropy or meanness or self-centeredness or depression or anger.

What Huck didn’t see is that one can live by principles and yet have ultimate control over their content. And one way such control can be exercised is by checking of one’s principles in the light of one’s sympathies. This is sometimes a pretty straightforward matter. It can happen that a certain moral principle be- comes untenable—meaning literally that one cannot hold it any longer—because it conflicts intolerably with the pity or revulsion or whatever that one feels when one sees what the principle leads to. One’s experience may play a large part here: Experiences evoke feelings, and feelings force one to modify principles. Something like this happened to the English poet Wilfred Owen, whose experi- ences in the First World War transformed him from an enthusiastic soldier into a virtual pacifist. I can’t document his change of conscience in detail; but I want to present something which he wrote about the way experience can put pressure on morality.

The Latin poet Horace wrote that it is sweet and fitting (or right) to die for one’s country—dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—and Owen wrote a fine poem about how experience could lead one to relinquish that particular moral

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principle.5 He describes a man who is too slow donning his gas mask during a gas attack—“As under a green sea I saw him drowning,” Owen says. The poem ends like this:

In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

There is a difficulty about drawing from all this a moral for ourselves. I imag- ine that we agree in our rejection of slavery, eternal damnation, genocide, and un- critical patriotic self-abnegation; so we shall agree that Huck Finn, Jonathan Edwards, Heinrich Himmler, and the poet Horace would all have done well to bring certain of their principles under severe pressure from ordinary human sympa- thies. But then we can say this because we can say that all those are bad moralities, whereas we cannot look at our own moralities and declare them bad. This is not arrogance: It is obviously incoherent for someone to declare the system of moral principles that he accepts to be bad, just as one cannot coherently say of anything that one believes it but it is false.

Still, although I can’t point to any of my beliefs and say “That is false,” I don’t doubt that some of my beliefs are false; and so I should try to remain open to cor- rection. Similarly, I accept every single item in my morality—that is inevitable—but I am sure that my morality could be improved, which is to say that it could undergo changes which I should be glad of once I had made them. So I must try to keep my morality open to revision, exposing it to whatever valid pressures there are—includ- ing pressures from my sympathies.

I don’t give my sympathies a blank check in advance. In a conflict between principle and sympathy, principles ought sometimes to win. For example, I think it was right to take part in the Second World War on the Allied side; there were many ghastly individual incidents which might have led someone to doubt the rightness of his participation in that war; and I think it would have been right for such a person to keep his sympathies in a subordinate place on those occasions, not allowing them to modify his principles in such a way as to make a pacifist of him.

Still, one’s sympathies should be kept as sharp and sensitive and aware as pos- sible, and not only because they can sometimes affect one’s principles or one’s con- duct or both. Owen, at any rate, says that feelings and sympathies are vital even

5 We are grateful to the executors of the Estate of Harold Owen and to Chatto and Windus Ltd. for permission to quote from Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Insensibility.”

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when they can do nothing but bring pain and distress. In another poem he speaks of the blessings of being numb in one’s feelings: “Happy are the men who yet be- fore they are killed/Can let their veins run cold,” he says. These are the ones who do not suffer from any compassion which, as Owen puts it, “makes their feet/Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.” He contrasts these “happy” ones, who “lose all imagination,” with himself and others “who with a thought besmirch/ Blood over all our soul.” Yet the poem’s verdict goes against the “happy” ones. Owen does not say that they will act worse than the others whose souls are be- smirched with blood because of their keen awareness of human suffering. He merely says that they are the losers because they have cut themselves off from the human condition:

By choice they made themselves immune To pity and whatever moans in man Before the last sea and the hapless stars; Whatever mourns when many leave these shores; Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity of tears.6

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. What does Bennett mean by a “bad morality”? 2. Does Bennett think principles play an important role in moral life? Explain. On what

occasions should one’s principles overrule one’s sympathies? 3. What are the consequences of Bennett’s arguments for ethical relativism? 4. Why does Bennett claim that Jonathan Edwards’ morality was even worse than

Himmler’s? Do you agree? Explain. 5. What are the implications of Bennett’s position that we must always follow our

conscience?

The Evil That Men Think—And Do

Philip Hallie

A biographical sketch of Philip Hallie is found on page 4.

Philip Hallie summarizes and criticizes several recent theories of evil. In particular he objects to the views of Jonathan Bennett in “The Conscience

6 This paper began life as the Potter Memorial Lecture, given at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, in 1972.

THE EVIL THAT MEN THINK—AND DO From Hastings Center Report, December 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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of Huckleberry Finn,” where Bennett claims that eighteenth-century theo- logian Jonathan Edwards, who killed no one, has a “worse morality” than Heinrich Himmler, who sent millions to their deaths but who appears to have suffered somewhat because occasionally he sympathized with those he tormented.

Hallie believes that Bennett can reach this odd conclusion only by perversely overlooking the truly horrific aspect of evil—its victims. On the contrary, it matters greatly that Edwards never actually killed or meant to kill anyone, and that Himmler tortured and killed millions. “Victims are as essential in morality as the presence or absence of sympathy.…”

Hallie claims that Bennett and others trivialize the notion of evil by concentrating too heavily on the psychology of evildoers and by paying scant attention to the fate of their victims. Hallie concludes with an excerpt from the official transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials, an excerpt he believes exemplifies the “wholeness of evil”: it reveals not only what a Nazi war criminal says he thought, but, more significantly, it details what he did and the suffering it caused.

In a cartoon by Edward Kliban, a mechanic is waving his tools and pointing at what he has discovered under the hood of his customer’s car. There, where the mo- tor should be, squats a massive monster, a wicked grin revealing his terrible teeth. The mechanic is triumphantly proclaiming to his customer: “Well, there’s your problem.”

In her book, Wickedness, Mary Midgley writes that evil must not be seen as “something positive” or demonic like Kliban’s monster. If evil were a demon we could only exorcise it, not understand it. To do so, she writes, one must see the various types of wickedness as mixtures of motives, some of which can be life-enhancing in themselves but are destructive in certain combinations. For instance, a rapist-murderer can be motivated by power and sex, but his way of combining these often healthy drives is destructive. For Midgley wickedness is “essentially destructive,” not the way a terrible-toothed monster can be de- structive but the way a person acting under various motives can fail to care about the feelings or even the lives of others. For her, evil is an absence of such caring, “an emptiness at the core of the individual.…” It is a negative, not a positive, demon.

This is a sensitive analysis, but the demon Wickedness is a straw demon: very few, if any, modern thinkers on the subject believe in the demonic. For most of them another cartoon would be more apt. A mechanic is waving his tools trium- phantly before a customer and is pointing to what he has found under the hood of the car. There, where Kliban’s demon was, is a mass of intricately intertwined pipes, and the mechanic is pointing to this and announcing, “Well, there’s your problem.” And the customer is as bewildered by this phenomenon as Kliban’s cus- tomer was.

Many of the people who are writing about wickedness (or immorality or evil, call it what you will) are making it a very complicated matter, like those twisted

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pipes. Judith Shklar in her quite often brilliant book Ordinary Vices is more concerned with various ethical and political puzzles than she is with the ordinary vices she promises to talk about in her introduction and in her title. Usually the unique perplexities of unique people like Robert E. Lee, Richard II, Socrates, and Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg interest her more than any single idea of vice does. Her skeptical, energetic mind seeks out minefields, not highways: contradictions, not a monster.

My version of Kliban’s cartoon applies also to the lucid, careful book Immo- rality by the philosopher Ronald D. Milo. Milo takes Aristotle’s all-too-pat dis- tinction between moral weakness and moral baseness, and refines it into a range of kinds and degrees of blameworthiness. In the seventh book of his Nichoma- chean Ethics Aristotle said that the weak (or “incontinent”) person is like a city that has good laws, but that does not live by them: the vicious (or “base” person) is like a city that has bad laws by which it does live. The zealous mass murderer is vicious without remorse; while the weak, penitent adulterer or drunkard knows he is doing wrong, but does nothing about it. Milo refines and develops this rather crude distinction, so that Aristotle’s baseness is no longer a simple contrast be- tween two kinds of cities. Like Shklar, Milo is too perceptive and too circumspect to join the simplifiers that Midgley deplores.

And yet, despite their perceptiveness and circumspection, many of our analyzers of evil have grossly simplified the idea of immorality. In their scrupulous examinations of complexities they have left out much of the ferocious ugliness of Kliban’s monster. They too are negligent simplifiers.

For instance, Jonathan Bennett has written an essay entitled “The Con- science of Huckleberry Finn,” in which he proves to his satisfaction that the mo- rality of the eighteenth-century American theologian Jonathan Edwards was “worse than Himmler’s.” He insists that Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and of all the police systems of Nazi Germany, and responsible for all of the tortures and the deaths perpetrated upon noncombatants by Nazi Germany, was not as wicked as Jonathan Edwards, who never killed or meant to kill anyone.

Why? Because Jonathan Edwards had no pity for the damned, and Himmler did have sympathy for the millions of people he tortured and destroyed. Bennett contends that there are two forces at work in the consciences of human beings: general moral principles and unreasoned “emotional pulls.” One such “pull” is sympathy, and Jonathan Edwards’ sermons showed no sympathy for the sinners who were in the hands of an angry God, while Himmler’s speeches to his Nazi subordinates did express the emotional pull of sympathy. In the mind, the only place where “morality” dwells for Bennett, Himmler is no heartless ruffian, but a decent fellow who had a wrong-headed set of principles and who felt the pangs of sympathy for human beings he was crushing and grinding into death and worse.

The Central Role of the Victim

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Tweedledee recites to Alice “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” In the poem, the Walrus and the Carpenter

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come across some oysters while they are strolling on the beach. They manage to persuade the younger oysters to join them in

A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk Along the briny beach

After a while they rest on a rock that is “conveniently low,” so that the two of them can keep an eye on the oysters and can reach them easily. After a little chat, the Carpenter and the Walrus start eating the oysters.

The Walrus is a sympathetic creature, given to crying readily, who thanks the oysters for joining them, while the Carpenter is interested only in eating:

“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said “To play them such a trick.

After we’ve brought them out so far And made them trot so quick!”

The Carpenter said nothing but “The butter’s spread too thick.”

Then the Walrus, out of the goodness of his heart, bursts forth:

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said: “I deeply sympathize.”

With sobs and tears he sorted out Those of the largest size,

Holding his pocket-handkerchief Before his streaming eyes.

and they finish off all of the oysters. Bennett, with his concern for the saving grace of sympathy, might find the

“morality” of the Walrus better than the morality of the cold-blooded Carpenter, but Lewis Carroll, or rather Tweedledee and Tweedledum, are not so simple-minded:

“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice: “because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.” “He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see he held his

handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took: contrariwise.”

“That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn’t eat so many as the Walrus.”

“But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum.

Then Alice gives up trying to rank the Walrus and the Carpenter and gives voice to a wisdom that is as sound as it is obvious:

“Well! They were both very unpleasant characters.…”

What Lewis Carroll saw, and what Bennett apparently does not, is that the victims are as essential in morality as the presence or absence of sympathy inside the head of the moral agent. And he also sees that sympathy, or rather expressions of sympathy, can be a device for eating more oysters by hiding your mouth behind a handkerchief—it certainly needn’t slow your eating down.

Milo never violates the morally obvious as boldly as Bennett does, but when he ranks immoralities he too disregards the essential role of the victim in evil. His

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conclusions contradict Bennett’s. For Milo, apparently, Himmler’s would be “the most evil” kind of wrongdoing, just because of his scruples:

… we think that the most evil or reprehensible kind of wrongdoing consists in willingly and intentionally doing something that one believes to be morally wrong, either because one simply does not care that it is morally wrong or because one prefers the pursuit of some other end to the avoidance of moral wrongdoing.…

This is a more subtle analysis of evil than Bennett’s, but it too ranks evils with- out the wisdom of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It too flattens out or ignores the central role of victims in the dance of evil.

Where Eichmann’s Evil Lay

The most distinguished modern philosophic treatment of evil is Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil. Like most of the philoso- phers who came after her she believed that the evil person is not necessarily a mon- ster. In her report on the Eichmann trial as she witnessed it in Jerusalem in 1961 she shows us a man who did not act out of evil motives. She shows us a man, Adolf Eichmann, whose main trait was to have no interesting traits, except perhaps his “remoteness from reality.” His banality resides in his never having realized what he was doing to particular human beings. Hannah Arendt tells us that, except for personal advancement, “He had no motives at all.” He was an unimaginative bu- reaucrat who lived in the clichés of his office. He was no Iago, no Richard III, no person who wished “to prove a villain.”

There is truth in this position. Eichmann was a commonplace, trite man if you look at him only in the dock and if you do not see that his boring clichés are di- rectly linked with millions of tortures and murders. If you see the victims of Eich- mann and of the office he held, then—and only then—do you see the evil of this man. Evil does not happen only in people’s heads. Eichmann’s evil happened in his head (and here Arendt is not only right but brilliantly perceptive) and (and the “and” makes a tight, essential linkage) in the freight cars and in the camps of Cen- tral Europe. His evil is the sum total of his unimaginative head and his unimagin- able tortures and murders. And this sum total is not banal, not flat, not commonplace. It is horrific.

As one of the most powerful philosophers of our time, Arendt was conscious of leaving something out by concentrating her attention upon the internal workings of the mind of a bureaucrat. Early in her book she wrote: “On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews.”

As if “his deeds” could be neatly peeled away from what he did to the Jews! Her separation of the mental activity of Eichmann from the pain-racked deaths of millions that this mental activity brought about made Eichmann’s evil banal. With- out these actual murders and tortures Eichmann was not evil; his maunderings were those of a pitiable, not a culpable man. His evil lay in his deeds, as Arendt says, but not only in his mental “deeds”: it lay in all that he intended and all that he carried out, in his mind and in the world around him.

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The Morality of Seeing

In Saul Bellow’s novel The Dean’s December, the narrator, Dean Albert Corde, makes a plea for seeing what there is to be seen:

In the American moral crisis, the first requirement was to experience what was happening and to see what must be seen. The facts were covered from our perception.… The increase of theories and discourse, itself a cause of new, strange forms of blindness, the false representations of “communication,” led to horrible dis- tortions of public consciousness. Therefore the first act of morality was to disinter the reality, retrieve reality, dig it out from the trash, represent it anew as art would rep- resent it.…

We were no longer talking about anything. The language of discourse had shut out experience altogether.… I tried to make myself the moralist of seeing.…

The dynamic of passions, moral principles, and perceptions within the heads of moral agents is a dynamic that is part of evil, but those of us who want to face and to understand evil as best we can must, it seems to me, try to live up to Corde’s “morality of seeing.” We must do our best to see not only what is happening in the inward polities of the doers of evil but also what is happening in the lives of the sufferers of evil.

For instance, to write about Himmler requires not only the reading of a few carefully crafted speeches; it also demands learning about the context of these speeches. It is true that at least once Himmler looked as if he felt queasy at an exe- cution, and it is also true that he wrote about this queasiness in terms not entirely unlike those of the Walrus. But even a superficial study of what was actually hap- pening within Fortress Europe in those days makes quite clear that he was coping with a particular problem by talking about “damage in … minds and souls” and “human weakness.”

Look at almost any volume of the record of the 1947 Nuremberg Trials—for example Volume IV, especially pages 311–355—and it will become plain that the efficient murdering of children as well as other defenseless human beings was being hindered by the depression and even the nervous breakdowns of the people who were herding together and executing these people. Himmler, in order to minimize inefficiency, needed to prepare his followers to deal with such scruples. At least he needed to do this to carry out the project of exterminating the Jews of Europe as well as the majority of the Slavs.

Talking about these scruples was not a cri du coeur. He was not opening his heart to his subordinates, as Bennett suggests: he was preparing them for deal- ing with the psychological problems of the executioners. He was holding up a handkerchief before his eyes, to go back to the imagery of Tweedledee’s poem, so that he and his followers could murder more and more helpless human beings.

A Monster in Action

Even such vigorously human books as Ordinary Vices by Judith Shklar and Wick- edness by Mary Midgley do not meet the obligations laid upon us by a morality of seeing. Shklar provides lurid and deep insights into the implications of making

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cruelty summum malum, the most indefensible and unforgivable evil, and into many other subjects, but she hastens into perplexities and puzzles before she care- fully observes the factual contexts of her examples.

Midgley is memorably illuminating in her efforts to clear away the obstacles that keep us from taking wickedness seriously. For instance, very few readers of her book, if they are attentive, will ever describe a mass murderer and a mass rapist as “sick” after reading her truly remarkable analysis in the chapter entitled “The Elusiveness of Responsibility.” One of her key arguments against replacing the words “wicked” and “evil” by the words “sick” and “ill” is that doing so distances us from the destruction that has been done. It removes the “sick” destroyers from blame and from anger (how dare you blame a person for being ill?). It “flattens out,” to use her powerful phrase, the distinctions between murderers and kleptomaniacs, between those who make us defensibly angry, when we see what they have done, and those who engage only our compassion and help.

Still, so scrupulous is she in removing the obstacles to an awareness of wicked- ness that she does not reveal much about what evil is. Her description of wickedness as “negative” like darkness and cold (an absence of caring being like an absence of light or heat) is useful but difficult to understand in terms of examples, especially when she tells us that “evil in the quiet supporters [of, for example, a Hitler] is nega- tive,” and then tells us that what they do is “positive action.” This is a confusing use of metaphysical terms that do not have a plain cash value in relation to observable facts. These terms bring us close to the medieval soup and its casuistical arguments about whether evil is a “privation of good” or something “positive.”

Milo’s Immorality offers a scrupulously lucid and sustained argument about the types and blameworthiness of immorality. It is especially adroit at understand- ing the relationships between moral weakness and deep wickedness. But he, like these other recent writers on evil, is reluctant to face the full force of evil. He, like them, does not look deeply and carefully at examples, at the terrible details in his- tory and the arts.

These writers are, perhaps, too timid to look hard at Kliban’s monster and say, “Well, there’s your problem.” Evil is thick with fact and as ugly as that grin- ning monster. It is no worse to see it this way than it is to see it as an internal dynamic in a moral agent’s head, or a set of carefully honed distinctions, or an array of puzzles and perplexities (as Shklar seems to see it). Many of the insights of these writers are useful for understanding the monster, or rather the many monsters that embody evil, but there is no substitute for seeing the harshness and ugliness of fact.

Here is a monster in action: he is Otto Ohlendorf who was, among other roles, head of Group D of the Action Groups assigned to exterminate Jews and Soviet political leaders in parts of Eastern Europe. To learn more about him, read pages 311–355 of the Fourth Volume of the transcript of the Nuremberg trials of the major war criminals. Here is part of his testimony:

COLONEL POKROVSKY (for the Tribunal): Why did they (the execution squads) prefer execution by shooting to kill-

ing in the gas vans?

PHILIP HALLIE: THE EVIL THAT MEN THINK—AND DO 31

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OHLENDORF: Because … in the opinion of the leader of the Einsatzkommandos [Action Groups], the unloading of the corpses was an unnecessary mental strain.

COL. POKROVSKY: What do you mean by “an unnecessary mental strain”? OHLENDORF: As far as I can remember the conditions at the time—the picture presented

by the corpses and probably because certain functions of the body had taken place, leaving the corpses lying in filth.

COL. POKROVSKY: You mean to say that the sufferings endured prior to death were clearly visible on the victims? Did I understand you correctly?

OHLENDORF: I don’t understand the question; do you mean during the killing in the van? COL. POKROVSKY: Yes. OHLENDORF: I can only repeat what the doctor told me, that the victims were not con-

scious of their death in the van. COL. POKROVSKY: In that case your reply to my previous question, that the unloading of

the bodies made a very terrible impression on the members of the execution squad, be- comes entirely incomprehensible.

OHLENDORF: And, as I said, the terrible impression created by the position of the corpses themselves, and by the state of the vans which had probably been dirtied and so on.

COL. POKROVSKY: I have no further questions to put to this witness at the present stage of the Trial (p. 334).

COLONEL AMEN (for the Tribunal): Referring to the gas vans which you said you received in the spring of

1942, what order did you receive with respect to the use of these vans? OHLENDORF: These gas vans were in future to be used for the killing of women and

children. COL. AMEN: Will you explain to the Tribunal the construction of these vans and their

appearance? OHLENDORF: The actual purpose of these vans could not be seen from the outside. They

looked like closed trucks, and were so constructed that at the start of the motor, gas was conducted into the van, causing death in 10 to 15 minutes.

COL. AMEN: Explain in detail just how one of these vans was used for an execution. OHLENDORF: The vans were loaded with the victims and driven to the place of burial,

which was usually the same as that used for the mass executions. The time needed for transportation was sufficient to insure the death of the victims.

COL. AMEN: How were the victims induced to enter the vans? OHLENDORF: They were told that they were to be transported to another locality. COL. AMEN: How was the gas turned on? OHLENDORF: I am not familiar with the technical details. COL. AMEN: How long did it take to kill the victims ordinarily? OHLENDORF: About 10 to 15 minutes; the victims were not conscious of what was hap-

pening to them (p. 322). OHLENDORF: I led the Einsatzgruppe, and therefore I had the task of seeing how the Ein-

satzkommandos executed the orders received. HERR BABEL (for the Tribunal): But did you have no scruples in regard to the execution of these orders? OHLENDORF: Yes, of course. HERR BABEL: And how is it that they were carried out regardless of these scruples? OHLENDORF: Because to me it is inconceivable that a subordinate leader should not carry

out orders given by the leaders of the state (pp. 353–354).

I urge you to read the above extracts more than once. The wholeness of evil is there, and if Ohlendorf is not monstrous to you, you are the problem.

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STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Do you agree with Hallie’s critique of Bennett? In particular, do you think Hallie is right in saying that Heinrich Himmler’s attitude does not exculpate him and that Jonathan Edwards’ attitude counts for less than Himmler’s deeds? Explain.

2. Explain Hallie’s reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Do you find the morality of the Walrus better than the morality of the Carpenter? Do you agree with Alice’s assessment? Explain.

3. Explain Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil.” Discuss Hallie’s critique of Arendt’s view.

4. Explain how the testimony of Nazi war criminal Otto Ohlendorf exemplifies the “wholeness of evil.”

Facing the Extreme: The War of All Against All

Tzvetan Todorov

Tzvetan Todorov (b.1939) is a Bulgarian-born philosopher who has lived in France since 1963. His many books include The Poetics of Prose (1971), On Human Diversity (1993), and Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (2002). The following selection comes from Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1996)—a book hailed by many as a masterpiece.

In this excerpt, Todorov focuses on the moral life of inmates of concen- tration camps. How did these hapless unfortunates react to unrelieved suffering and terror? According to Todorov many survivors insist that “In extreme situations all traces of moral life evaporate.” But he offers persuasive counter-evidence showing that morality prevailed among many of the prisoners. The social contract was in force among them— even as they were being starved, beaten, and under threat of imminent death. There was a constant tension between what Todorov calls vital values and moral values. Vital values dictate survival at any price. Moral values impose obligations to help others in all circumstances. “To put it simply,” he says, “the most optimistic conclusion we can draw from life in (and outside) the camps is that … the possibility of choosing moral values continues to exist.”

From “A Place for Moral Life” from FACING THE EXTREME: Moral Life in the Concentration Camp by Tzvetan Todorov. English Language translation Copyright 1996 by Metropolitan Books. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt & Company, LLC and Orion Publishing Group Ltd.

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There are various perspectives from which the accounts of life in the camps can be read. One can ponder the precise chain of events that led to the creation of the camps and then to their extinction; one can debate the political significance of the camps; one can extract sociological or psychological lessons from them. Yet even though I cannot ignore those perspectives altogether, I would like to take a different approach. I want to look at the camps from the perspective of moral life and to concern myself with individual destinies rather than with numbers and dates. But already I hear an objection: Wasn’t that question settled a long time ago? Haven’t we learned only too well the sad and simple truth the camps revealed, namely, that in extreme situations all traces of moral life evaporate as men become beasts locked in a merciless struggle for survival?

That opinion is not only a commonplace of popularized presentations of these events but also crops up frequently in the accounts of survivors themselves. We be- came indifferent to the misfortune of others, they say; if we wanted to survive, we had to think only of ourselves, that is the lesson brought out of Auschwitz by Tadeusz Borowski, who committed suicide in 1951: “In this war,” he writes, morality, national solidarity, patriotism and the ideals of freedom, justice and human dignity had all slid off man like a rotten rag.…

There is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself.” In other words, moral behavior is not innate in us. Another Auschwitz survivor, Jean Améry, who committed suicide in 1978, reached the same conclusion. “There are no natural rights,” he writes, “and moral categories come and go like fashions.” A third Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi, who took his life in 1987, says that the hard- ships of the camps rendered any kind of moral position impossible. “Here [in the lager] the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone.” To survive, it was necessary “to throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain fami- lies and individuals in cruel times.” “It was a Hobbesian life,” Levi writes, “a con- tinuous war of everyone against everyone.”

The lessons brought out from the gulags are not all that different. Varlam Shalamov, imprisoned for twenty-five years, seventeen of them in Kolyma, is parti- cularly pessimistic: “All human emotions—of love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellowman, compassion, a longing for fame, honesty—had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies during our long fasts,” he writes. “The camp was a great test of our moral strength, of our everyday morality, and 99% of us failed it.… Conditions in the camps do not permit men to remain men; that is not what camps were created for.” Eugenia Ginzburg, who spent twenty years in Kolyma, agrees that a moral life was impossible in the camps: “It is hard to describe the way in which someone ground down by inhuman forms of life loses bit by bit all hold on normal notions of good and evil, of what is permissible and what is not.… Perhaps we ourselves [intellectuals] were as morally dead as the rest.” When one is thinking only of one’s own survival, one no longer recognizes any law other than the law of the jungle, which means the total absence of law and its replacement by brute force.…

Even the closest family ties were vulnerable in this fight for survival. Borowski, for example, tells how a mother, to save her own life, pretends not

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to know her child. And Elie Wiesel, another Auschwitz survivor, describes in Night how a son snatches a piece of bread from the hands of his father, and he speaks of the relief he felt when his own father died, because it increased his own chances for survival.

If an individual’s every action is determined by the orders of those above him and the need to survive, then he has no freedom left at all; no longer can he truly exercise his will and choose one behavior over another. And where there is no choice, there is also no place for any kind of moral life whatsoever.

Doubts

In reading the testimonies of survivors, however, I come away with the impres- sion that the situation is not as bleak as it may have seemed. Alongside examples illustrating the disappearance of all moral sensibilities, one finds examples that have a different lesson to teach. Primo Levi, who saw in the camps only an attenuated struggle of all against all, has barely finished writing, “All are enemies or rivals,” when he stops and realizes how excessive that statement really is. “No,” he declares, “I honestly do not feel my companion of today … to be either enemy or rival.” There are numerous stories in Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (originally entitled If This Is a Man) that contradict his grim general- ization. His good friend Alberto, for instance, who perished during the forced marches after the evacuation of the camps, struggles to survive yet does not be- come a cynic. He knows how to be both strong and tender. Another friend, Jean, who was the Pikolo, or messenger-clerk, of Levi’s work unit and who did survive, also strove to stay alive but “did not neglect his human relationships with less privileged comrades.” If there were so many exceptions, can the rule still be said to hold?

The same Tadeusz Borowski whose stories about life at Auschwitz are among the most pitiless has also written, “I think that man will never cease to rediscover man—through love. And to rediscover that love is the most important and most durable thing there is.” We know, moreover, that at Auschwitz Borowski behaved totally differently from the characters he writes about; his devotion to others was beyond measure. But he understood just how far human degradation could go and did not try to exempt himself from the corruption around him. His central charac- ter, also named Tadeusz, is a cynical and pitiless kapo, and his story is told in the first person. Borowski suggests a rule for all who write about Auschwitz: Do not write unless you are willing to take responsibility for the worst humiliation that the camp inflicted on its inmates. In making this rule, he has also, of course, made another choice and committed another moral act.

Varlam Shalamov, who narrates the despair and degradation experienced by all the prisoners at Kolyma, writes, “I couldn’t denounce a fellow convict, no matter what he did. And I refused to seek the job of foreman, which provided a chance to remain alive, for the worst thing in a camp was the forcing of one’s own or any- one else’s will on another person who was a convict just like oneself.” As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observes, a decision of this kind proves that not all choice was for- bidden and that Shalamov was at least himself an exception to his own rule. Laks and Coudy, Auschwitz survivors who chronicled the progressive loss of their

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human identity, nonetheless point out that without the help of others survival was impossible. Was help given? Thirty years after the publication of his original ac- count, Laks confirms that it was: he owes his survival, he writes, “to my encounters with a few countrymen with a human face and a human heart.” And Eugenia Ginzburg describes innumerable acts of solidarity that the principle she herself for- mulates has no way of accounting for. If there were sons who snatched bread from the hands of their fathers, Robert Antelme, a Buchenwald survivor, saw ones, too. He describes “the hungry old man who’d steal in front of his son, so the son could eat. Father and son … hungry together, offering their bread to each other with lov- ing eyes.”

Ella Lingens-Reiner, an Austrian prisoner, reports in her recollections of Auschwitz that she met another Jewish doctor there, Ena Weiss, who defined her philosophy of life this way: “How do I keep alive in Auschwitz? My princi- ple is—myself first, second, and third. Then nothing. Then myself again—and then all the others.” This formula has often been cited as the most accurate expression of moral law—or rather, of its absence—at Auschwitz. And yet Lingens-Reiner is quick to point out that this woman violated her own law every day, helping tens, indeed hundreds, of other prisoners. Lingens-Reiner goes on to describe the transformations that moral life underwent in the camp, and in so doing she mirrors the kind of contradiction she finds in Weiss. “We camp prisoners had only one yardstick,” she writes, “whatever helped our survival was good, whatever threatened our survival was bad and to be avoided.” Yet this characterization comes directly after a detailed account of a conflict of conscience that greatly tormented her: should she intervene in behalf of a sick woman, thereby compromising her own chances of getting out alive, or should she think only of herself and decline to help her fellow prisoner? In the end, Lingens-Reiner choses the former, but even if she hadn’t, her hesitation alone would have been sufficient proof that the moral sense within her was still very much alive.

Matters of conscience are not at all rare in extreme situations, and their very existence attests to the possibility of choice, and thus of moral life.…

It is not true that life in the camps obeyed only the law of the jungle. The rules of camp society may have been different but they still existed. Stealing from the administration was not merely licit but admirable; on the other hand, stealing from a fellow prisoner—especially bread—was an abomination and most of the time was severely punished. This law functioned as rigorously in the gulags as it did in the concentration camps. In both places informers were de- tested and punished. As Anna Pawelczynska, an Auschwitz survivor, observes, the Ten Commandments did not disappear; they were simply reinterpreted. Mur- der, for example, could be a moral act if it kept an assassin from carrying out cruel and vicious assignments. Bearing false witness could become a virtuous act if it helped save human lives. To love one’s neighbor as one loved oneself was perhaps an excessive demand, but to avoid harming him was not. Germaine Tillion, a survivor of Ravensbrück, renders a subtle and, as far as I can deter- mine, accurate judgment of moral life in the camps when she concludes, “This tenuous web of friendship was, in a way, submerged by the stark brutality of

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selfishness and the struggle for survival, but somehow everyone in the camp was invisibly woven into it.”

So numerous are the counterexamples to the principles of immorality expressed by the survivors that the presence of such principles in their accounts calls for some explanation. Why do the survivors draw general conclusions that are not borne out by the particular cases that they themselves report? Terrence Des Pres, the author of a study on concentration camp survivors, proposes an answer: former prisoners in- sist on the negative aspect of their experience because it is precisely this aspect that renders their experience unique and that must be underlined at every opportunity. “As a witness,” Des Pres writes, “the survivor aims above all to convey the other- ness of the camps, their specific inhumanity.” The particular examples the survivors cite, on the other hand, reflect a more complex situation. I would add another rea- son for some survivors’ reluctance to qualify their conclusions: if they paint the bleakest picture possible, it is because they still suffer remorse for not having come to the aid of others, who were left to a horrible fate—this despite the fact that non- intervention was a perfectly understandable and justifiable response under the circumstances.…

There may exist a threshold of suffering beyond which an individual’s ac- tions teach us nothing more about the individual but only about the reactions that unbearable suffering elicits from the human mechanism. One can be brought to that threshold by prolonged starvation, or by the imminent threat of death, or even—as in the Nazi camps—by the initial encounter with an atmosphere of terror and menace. “Hunger proves an insuperable ordeal,” Ana- toly Marchenko writes. “When he reaches this ultimate degree of degradation, a man is prepared for anything.” Twenty years earlier, Gustaw Herling, another prisoner of the gulag, concluded, “There is nothing … a man cannot be forced to do by hunger and pain.” Indeed, these extreme means make it possible to de- stroy the social contract at its very foundations and to obtain from human beings purely animal reactions.

But what exactly does that observation mean? Does it reflect the fundamen- tal truth about human nature, that morality is but a superficial convention jetti- soned at the first opportunity? On the contrary, what it demonstrates is that moral reactions are spontaneous, omnipresent, and eradicable only with the greatest violence. Plants can be forced to grow horizontally, Rousseau says, but unconstrained they will nevertheless grow upward. It is not under torture that human beings reveal their true identity. Suppressing the usual components of hu- man social life creates a completely artificial situation that tells us only about itself. Herling is right: “I became convinced that a man can be human only un- der human conditions and I believe that it is fantastic nonsense to judge him by actions which he commits under inhuman conditions.” It is for this reason, too, that I will not dwell at length on situations where that threshold has been crossed.

Even before considering the details of moral life in the camps, one can see that the hypothesis that individuals behave as wolves toward one another is not sup- ported by observation. Des Pres’s readings of survivors’ accounts come to the same conclusion: “The ‘state of nature,’ it turns out, is not natural. A war of

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everyone against everyone must be imposed by force.” The popular version of Hobbes’s doctrine is wrong: except under extreme constraint, human beings are prompted, among other things, to communicate with one another, to help one another, and to distinguish good from evil.

One and The Same World

This conclusion should not be understood as an expression of complacent opti- mism. In affirming the continuity between ordinary experience and that of the camps (except where the latter crosses beyond the threshold of the bearable) and thus the pertinence of the same moral questions to both worlds, I am not saying that good reigns supreme, everywhere and at all times. Far from it: I would say instead that this continuity between the ordinary and the extreme points to conclu- sions that are hardly encouraging.

In everyday life as well as in the camps, one can observe an opposition between two types of behavior and two types of values, what could be called vital values and moral values. Vital values dictate that saving my own life and furthering my well-being are what matter most; moral values tell me that there is something more precious than life itself, that staying human is more important than staying alive. To choose moral values (whether “heroic” or “ordinary”) over vital values does not necessarily imply that life is somehow a less worthy goal; survival remains a perfectly respectable objective—particularly where the ordinary virtues are con- cerned—but not at any price.

Let there be no mistake. I do not mean that moral values are somehow ex- ternal to life, that they are a foreign element that stifles and suppresses life. Rather I believe that moral values and behaviors are a constitutive dimension of life. The difference between moral values and vital values might be got at in the following way: for the vital values it is my life that is sacred; for moral va- lues it is the life of someone else that is. What extreme situations teach us is that both kinds of values are always active. As Jorge Semprun, a Buchenwald survivor, writes, “In the camps, man becomes that animal capable of stealing a mate’s bread, of propelling him toward death. But in the camps, man also becomes that invincible being capable of sharing his last cigarette butt, his last piece of bread, his last breath, to sustain his fellowman.” And Anatoly Marchenko says, “People here vary, just as they do everywhere. You have marvelous people, and you have rotten ones, you have brave men and cowards, you have honest men with principles and you have unprincipled swine who are prepared for any kind of betrayal.” This observation, of course, is as true of the ordinary lives that all of us lead as it is of the situations described by March- enko and Semprun.

In the camps, such diversity appears not only between people but also within the course of each individual life. Even the most admirable persons typically passed through several phases. During the first, often corresponding to the initial few months in the camp, previously held moral values collapse beneath the weight of the new and brutal circumstances. The prisoner discovers a world without pity and finds that he can actually live in such a world. If the prisoner survives this first

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stage, however, he may reach a second, in which he once again discovers a set of moral values, although perhaps not the same as he held before. The embers have not been extinguished, and it takes only the smallest relief from brutality for the flames of conscience to flare up anew. “Even in the jungle of Birkenau,” writes Olga Lengyel, a doctor at Auschwitz, “all were not necessarily inhuman to their fellowmen”.…

The difference between life in the camps and ordinary life does not lie in the presence or absence of moral life. In everyday life the contrasts of which I have been speaking are not clearly apparent. Egocentric acts pass themselves off as or- dinary and routine behavior, and furthermore, less is at stake because human lives don’t depend on them. In the camps, however, where it is sometimes neces- sary to choose between holding on to one’s bread and holding on to one’s dig- nity, between starving physically and starving morally, everything is out in the open. “Camps,” Semprun writes, “are extreme situations in which the cleavage between ‘the men’ and ‘the others’ is more pronounced.” The depravation of some is hastened and is there for all to see; but the betterment of others is also intensified. “Camp either cleanses your conscience or destroys it forever,” Ratushinskaya writes. “People emerge either much better than they were or much worse, depending on how they were predisposed.” Of course, both depra- vation and elevation occur outside the camps, but not so visibly. Life inside the camps projects, magnifies, and renders eloquent what can easily escape notice in the humdrum of our daily lives.

What extreme and ordinary situations also share is that, in both, most people choose what I call vital values and only a few choose the other path. Or perhaps it is this: most of the time individuals opt for vital values without necessarily losing a sense of morality. Once again, the choices are far more visible in the camps, which is why the camps are often thought to offer some sort of general lesson in immoral- ity. The fact is, however, that selfishness is just as prevalent in ordinary times. To put it simply, the most optimistic conclusion we can draw from life in (and outside) the camps is that evil is not unavoidable. The actual numbers are not important; what matters is that the possibility of choosing moral values continues to exist. “Of the prisoners, only a few kept their full inner liberty,” Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, concludes, “but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate”.…

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Todorov points out that former inmates routinely describe concentration camps as devoid of all traces of morality. To survive, they say, was the only imperative. Why does Todorov reject this characterization?

2. How does Todorov explain the fact that so many in the camps believed that they themselves had become amoral and that amorality—“the law of the jungle”—was the only law governing the camps? As Todorov says, “Why do the survivors draw general conclusions that are not borne out by the particular cases that they themselves report?”

3. Todorov rejects the idea that under torture human beings reveal their true selves. Explain his reasoning and say why you agree or disagree.

TZVETAN TODOROV: FACING THE EXTREME: THE WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL 39

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Strategies for Survival

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum (b. 1964), a columnist and former member of the edito- rial board of the Washington Post, is the author of Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (1994) and the Pulitzer Prize– winning Gulag: A History (2003), from which our selection is taken.

The Gulag refers to the vast network of Soviet forced labor camps that were most active between 1929 and 1953, the year Joseph Stalin died. An estimated 18 million people passed through them. Millions perished from the combined effects of cold, hunger, exhaustion, and disease. But many managed to survive. How did they do it? Some collaborated with their tor- mentors, some avoided work by feigning illness or inflicting serious injuries on themselves. Others found ways to pretend to work. In this selection, Applebaum describes how the practice of “ordinary virtues”—“caring, friendship, dignity and the life of the mind”—sustained lives in the camps. The inmates formed powerful social networks and inviolable friendships. They recited poetry and told one another the plots of literary work to keep their minds free, alert, and alive. The celebrated Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example, composed poetry in his head—then committed it to memory. In this God-forsaken environment many prison- ers and their guards made a place for theater, art, music, and religion and survived untold miseries ultimately to live relatively normal lives and to tell their stories.

In the end, prisoners survived. They survived even the worst camps, even the tough- est conditions, even the war years, the famine years, the years of mass execution. Not only that, some survived psychologically intact enough to return home, to re- cover, and to live relatively normal lives. Janusz Bardach became a plastic surgeon in Iowa City. Isaak Filshtinskii went back to teaching Arabic literature. Lev Razgon went back to writing children’s fiction. Anatolii Zhigulin went back to writing poetry. Evgeniya Ginzburg moved to Moscow, and for years was the heart and soul of a circle of survivors, who met regularly to eat, drink, and argue around her kitchen table.

Ada Purizhinskaya, imprisoned as a teenager, went on to marry and produce four children, some of whom became accomplished musicians. I met two of them over a generous, good-humored family dinner, during which Purizhinskaya served dish after dish of delicious cold food, and seemed disappointed when I could not eat more. Irena Arginskaya’s home is also full of laughter, much of it coming from

From “Strategies for Survival” from GULAG: A History, 2003, Doubleday. Reprinted by permission of Amercian Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and Anne Applebaum.

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Irena herself. Forty years later, she was able to make fun of the clothes she had worn as a prisoner: “I suppose you could call it a sort of jacket,” she said, trying to describe her shapeless camp overcoat. Her well-spoken, grown-up daughter laughed along with her.

Some even went on to lead extraordinary lives. Alexander Solzhenitsyn became one of the best-known, and best-selling, Russian writers in the world. General Gorbatov helped lead the Soviet assault on Berlin. After his terms in Kolyma and a wartime sharashka, Sergei Korolev went on to become the father of the Soviet Union’s space program. Gustav Herling left the camps, fought with the Polish army, and, although writing in Neapolitan exile, became one of the most revered men of letters in post-prison communist Poland. News of his death in July 2000 made the front pages of the Warsaw newspapers and an entire generation of Polish intellectuals paid tribute to his work—especially A World Apart, his Gulag memoir. In their ability to recover, these men and women were not alone. Isaac Vogelfanger, who himself became a professor of surgery at the University of Ottawa, wrote that “wounds heal, and you can become whole again, a little stronger and more human than before …”

Not all Gulag survivors’ stories ended so well, of course, which one would not necessarily be able to tell from reading memoirs. Obviously, people who did not survive did not write. Those who were mentally or physically damaged by their camp experiences did not write either. Nor did those who had survived by doing things of which they were later ashamed write very often either—or, if they did, they did not necessarily tell the whole story. There are very, very few memoirs of informers—or of people who will confess to having been informers—and very few survivors who will admit to harming or killing fellow prisoners in order to stay alive.

For these reasons, some survivors question whether written memoirs have any validity at all. Yuri Zorin, an elderly and not very forthcoming survivor whom I interviewed in his home city, Arkhangelsk, waved away a question I asked him about philosophies of survival. There weren’t any, he said. Although it might seem, from their memoirs, as if prisoners “discussed everything, thought about ev- erything,” it was not like that, he told me. “The whole task was to live through the next day, to stay alive, not to get sick, to work less, to eat more. And that was why philosophical discussions, as a rule, were not held.… We were saved by youth, health, physical strength, because there we lived by Darwin’s laws, the survival of the fittest.”

The whole subject of who survived—and why they survived—must therefore be approached very carefully. In this matter, there are no archival documents to rely upon, and there is no real “evidence.” We have to take the word of those who were willing to describe their experiences, either on paper or for an interviewer. Any one of them might have had reason to conceal aspects of their biographies from their readers.

With that caveat, it is still possible to identify patterns within the several hun- dred memoirs which have been published or placed in archives. For there were strategies for survival, and they were well-known at the time, although they varied a great deal, depending on a prisoner’s particular circumstances. Surviving a labor colony in western Russia in the mid-1930s or even late 1940s, when most of the

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work was factory work and the food was regular if not plentiful, probably did not require any special mental adjustments. Surviving one of the far northern camps— Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk—during the hungry war years, on the other hand, often required huge reserves of talent and willpower, or else an enormous capacity for evil, qualities that the prisoners, had they remained in freedom, might never have discovered within themselves.

Without a doubt, many such prisoners survived because they found ways to raise themselves above the other prisoners, to distinguish themselves from the swarming mass of starving zeks [prisoners]. Dozens of camp sayings and proverbs reflect the debilitating moral effects of this desperate competition. “You can die today—I’ll die tomorrow,” was one of them. “Man is wolf to man”—the phrase Janusz Bardach used as the title of his memoir—was another.

Many ex-zeks speak of the struggle for survival as cruel, and many, like Zorin, speak of it as Darwinian. “The camp was a great test of our moral strength, of our everyday morality, and 99 percent of us failed it,” wrote Shala- mov. “After only three weeks most of the prisoners were broken men, interested in nothing but eating. They behaved like animals, disliked and suspected everyone else, seeing in yesterday’s friend a competitor in the struggle for survival,” wrote Edward Buca.

Elinor Olitskaya, with her background in the pre-revolutionary social demo- cratic movement, was particularly horrified by what she perceived as the amorality of the camps: while inmates in prisons had often cooperated, the strong helping the weak, in the Soviet camps every prisoner “lived for herself,” doing down the others in order to attain a slightly higher status on the camp hierarchy. Galina Usakova described how she felt her personality had changed in the camps: “I was a well- behaved girl, well brought up, from a family of intelligentsia. But with these char- acteristics you won’t survive, you have to harden yourself, you learn to lie, to be hypocritical in various ways.”

Gustav Herling elaborated further, describing how it is that the new prisoner slowly learns to live “without pity”:

At first he shares his bread with hunger-demented prisoners, leads the night-blind on the way home from work, shouts for help when his neighbor in the forest has chopped off two fingers, and surreptitiously carries cans of soup and herring-heads to the mor- tuary. After several weeks he realizes that his motives in all this are neither pure nor really disinterested, that he is following the egotistic injunctions of his brain and saving first of all himself. The camp, where prisoners live at the lowest level of humanity and follow their own brutal code of behavior toward others, helps him to reach this con- clusion. How could he have supposed, back in prison, that a man can be so degraded as to arouse not compassion but only loathing and repugnance in his fellow prisoners? How can he help the night-blind, when every day he sees them being jolted with rifle- butts because they are delaying the brigade’s return to work, and then impatiently pushed off the paths by prisoners hurrying to the kitchen for their soup; how visit the mortuary and brave the constant darkness and stench of excrement; how share his bread with a hungry madman who on the very next day will greet him in the barrack with a demanding, persistent stare … He remembers and believes the words of his ex- amining judge, who told him that the iron broom of Soviet justice sweeps only rubbish into its camps…

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Such sentiments are not unique to the survivors of Soviet camps. “If one of- fers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery,” wrote Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, “exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural soli- darity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept.” Also writing of German camps, Bruno Bettelheim observed that older prisoners often came to “accept SS values and behavior as their own,” in particular adopt- ing their hatred of the weaker and lower-ranking inhabitants of the camps, espe- cially the Jews.…

Other prisoners watched, learned and imitated, as Varlam Shalamov wrote:

The young peasant who has become a prisoner sees that in this hell only the criminals live comparatively well, that they are important, that the all-powerful camp adminis- tration fear them. The criminals always have clothes and food, and they support each other … it begins to seem to him that the criminals possess the truth of camp life, that only by imitating them will he tread the path that will save his life.… the intellectual convict is crushed by the camp. Everything he valued is ground into the dust while civ- ilization and culture drop from him within weeks. The method of persuasion is the fist or the stick. The way to induce someone to do something is by means of a rifle butt, a punch in the teeth …

And yet—it would be incorrect to say there was no morality in the camps at all, that no kindness or generosity was possible. Curiously, even the most pessimistic of memoirists often contradict themselves on this point. Shalamov himself, whose de- piction of the barbarity of camp life surpasses all others, at one point wrote that “I refused to seek the job of foreman, which provided a chance to remain alive, for the worst thing in a camp was the forcing of one’s own or anyone else’s will on another person who was a convict just like oneself.” In other words, Shalamov was an exception to his own rule.

Most memoirs also make clear that the Gulag was not a black-and-white world, where the line between masters and slaves was clearly delineated, and the only way to survive was through cruelty. Not only did inmates, free workers, and guards belong to a complex social network, but that network was also constantly in flux, as we have seen. Prisoners could move up and down the hierarchy, and many did. They could alter their fate not only through collaboration or defiance of the authorities but also through clever wheeling and dealing, through contacts and re- lationships. Simple good luck and bad luck also determined the course of a typical camp career, which, if it was a long one, might well have “happy” periods, when the prisoner was established in a good job, ate well, and worked little, as well as periods when the same prisoner dropped into the netherworld of the hospital, the mortuary, and the society of the dokhodyagi [condemned] who crowded around the garbage heap, looking for scraps of food.

In fact, the methods of survival were built in to the system. Most of the time, the camp administration was not trying to kill prisoners; they were just trying to fulfill impossibly high norms set by the central planners in Moscow. As a result, camp guards were more than willing to reward prisoners whom they found useful toward this end. The prisoners, naturally, took advantage of this willingness. The two groups had different goals—the guards wanted to dig more gold or cut more wood, and the prisoners wanted to survive—but sometimes they found shared

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means to meet these different ends. A handful of survival strategies suited both prisoners and guards.…

“Ordinary Virtues”

Not all of the strategies for survival in the camps necessarily derived from the sys- tem itself. Nor did they all involve collaboration, cruelty, or self-mutiliation. If some prisoners—perhaps the vast majority of prisoners—managed to stay alive through manipulating the rules of the camp to their advantage, there were also some who built upon what Tzvetan Todorov, in his book on concentration camp morality, has called the “ordinary virtues”: caring and friendship, dignity, and the life of the mind.

Caring took many forms. There were prisoners, as we’ve seen, who built their own survival networks. Members of the ethnic groups which dominated some of the camps in the late 1940s—Ukrainians, Baits, Poles—created whole sys- tems of mutual assistance. Others built up independent networks of acquaintances over years in the camps. Still others simply made one or two extremely close friends.…

…“It was impossible to survive alone. People organized themselves into groups of two or three,” wrote another prisoner. Dmitri Panin also attributes his ability to withstand the attacks of criminals to the self-defense pact he made with a group of other prisoners. There were limits, of course. Janusz Bardach wrote of his best camp friend that “neither one of us ever asked the other for food, nor did we offer it. We both knew that this sanctum could not be violated if we were to remain friends.”

If respect for others helped some maintain their humanity, respect for them- selves helped others. Many, particularly women, speak of the need to keep clean, or as clean as possible, as a way of preserving one’s dignity. Olga Adamova- Sliozberg describes how a prison cell mate “washed and dried her white collar and sewed it back on her blouse” every morning. Japanese prisoners in Magadan set up a Japanese “bath”—a large barrel, to which benches were attached—along the bay. During sixteen months in Leningrad’s Kresty prison, Boris Chetverikov washed his clothes over and over again, as well as the walls and the floors of his cell—before going through all of the opera arias he knew in his head. Others practiced exercise or hygienic routines. This is Bardach again:

… despite my fatigue and the cold, I kept the exercise routine I had followed at home and in the Red Army, washing my face and hands at the hand pump. I wanted to retain as much pride in myself as I could, separating myself from the many prisoners I had seen give up day by day. They’d stop caring first about their hygiene or appearance, then about their fellow prisoners, and finally about their own lives. If I had control over nothing else, I had control over this ritual which I believed would keep me from degradation and certain death.

Still others practiced intellectual disciplines. Many, many prisoners wrote or memorized poetry, repeating their verses and those of others to themselves over and over again, later repeating them to friends. In Moscow, in the 1960s, Ginzburg once met a writer who could not believe that in such conditions prisoners had really been able to repeat poems to themselves and derive mental relief from doing so.

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“Yes, yes,” he told her: “he knew I was not the first person to attest to this, but, well, it still seemed to him that the idea came to us after the event.” Ginzburg writes that the man did not understand her generation, the men and women who still be- longed to an “epoch of magnificent illusions … we were flinging ourselves into Communism from the poetic heights.”…

Solzhenitsyn “wrote” poetry in the camps, composing it in his head and then reciting it to himself with the aid of a collection of broken matchsticks, as his biog- rapher Michael Scammell recounts:

He would lay out two rows of ten pieces of matchstick with his cigarette-case, one row representing tens and the other units. He then recited his verses silently to himself, moving one “unit” for each line and one “ten” for every ten lines. Every fiftieth and hundredth line was memorized with special care, and once a month he recited the whole poem once through. If a line was misplaced or forgotten, he would go through the whole thing again until he got it right.

*** Out of all the many ways of surviving through collaboration with the authori-

ties, “saving oneself” through acting in the camp theater or participating in other cultural activities was the method which seemed to prisoners the least morally prob- lematic. This may have been because other prisoners derived some benefit too. Even for those who did not receive special treatment, the theater provided tremendous moral support, something which was also necessary for survival. “For the prison- ers, the theater was the source of happiness, it was loved, it was adored,” wrote one. Gustav Herling remembered that for concerts “the prisoners took their caps off at the door, shook the snow from their boots in the passage outside, and took their places on the benches with ceremonious anticipation and almost religious awe.”

Perhaps that was why those whose artistic talent enabled them to live better in- spired admiration, not envy and hatred. Tatyana Okunevskaya—the film star sent to the camps for her refusal to sleep with Abakumov, the head of Soviet counter- intelligence—was recognized everywhere, and helped by everyone. During one camp concert, she felt what seemed to be stones being thrown at her legs; she looked down and realized they were cans of Mexican pineapple, an unheard of del- icacy, which a group of thieves had acquired just for her.

Nikolai Starostin, the soccer player, was also held in the highest respect by the urki [professional criminals], who, he wrote, passed the message to one another: don’t touch Starostin. In the evenings, when he began to recount soccer stories, the “card games ceased” as prisoners gathered around him. When he arrived at a new camp, he was usually offered a clean bed in the camp hospital. “It was the first thing that was proposed to me, whenever I arrived, if, among the doctors or the bosses, there was a fan.”…

Aleksander Wat retold Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to a group of bandits while in prison. Alexander Dolgun recounted the plot of Les Miserables. Janusz Bardach told the story of The Three Musketeers: “I felt my status rise with every twist of the plot.” In response to the thieves who dismissed the starving politicals as “vermin,” Colonna-Czosnowski also defended himself by telling them “my own version of a film, suitably embellished for maximum dramatic effect, which I had

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seen in Poland some years earlier. It was a ‘Cops and Robbers’ story, taking place in Chicago, involving Al Capone. For good measure, I threw in Bugsy Malone, maybe even Bonnie and Clyde. I decided to include everything I could remember, plus some extra refinements which I invented on the spur of the moment.” The story impressed its listeners, and they asked the Pole to repeat it many times: “Like children, they would listen intently. They didn’t mind hearing the same stor- ies over and over again. Like children, too, they liked me to use the same words every time. They also noticed the slightest change or the smallest omission … within three weeks of my arrival I was a different man.”

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Do you agree with Applebaum that the prisoners’ cultural activities were a significant factor in helping them to survive?

2. Describe the “ordinary virtues” that helped inmates survive the camps. 3. Do the accounts of Todorov and Applebaum refute the idea that in extreme environ-

ments like Nazi and Soviet concentration camps morality vanishes and the law of the jungle prevails?

The Perils of Obedience

Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) was a social psychologist at Yale University, and the author of the classic Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

In the early 1960s Stanley Milgram devised a series of experiments designed to test the obedience to authority of ordinary citizens. Subjects were asked to administer painful shocks of increasing severity to an unseen person. (In reality there were no shocks and the unseen person was an ac- tor only pretending to suffer.) The experiment revealed that many ordinary men and women were willing to give dangerous and painful electrical shocks when ordered to do so by a calm but persistent authority figure. Milgram was inspired to do these experiments after following the 1961 trial of the Nazi mastermind Adolph Eichmann. At his trial, Eichmann defended himself by insisting “I was only following orders.” Milgram sought to discover the extent to which ordinary people would submit to authority—follow orders—even when it conflicted with their conscience. The findings are not consoling.

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Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with defiance or submis- sion, to the commands of others. For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.

The dilemma inherent in submission to authority is ancient, as old as the story of Abraham, and the question of whether one should obey when commands conflict with conscience has been argued by Plato, dramatized in Antigone, and treated to philosophic analysis in almost every historical epoch. Conservative philosophers ar- gue that the very fabric of society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the primacy of the individual conscience.

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimen- tal scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral impera- tives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

In the basic experimental design, two people come to a psychology laboratory to take part in a study of memory and learning. One of them is designated as a “teacher” and the other a “learner.” The experimenter explains that the study is concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. The learner is conducted into a room, seated in a kind of miniature electric chair; his arms are strapped to prevent excessive movement, and an electrode is attached to his wrist. He is told that he will be read lists of simple word pairs, and that he will then be tested on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when he hears the first one again. Whenever he makes an error, he will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity.

The real focus of the experiment is the teacher. After watching the learner being strapped into place, he is seated before an impressive shock generator. The instru- ment panel consists of thirty lever switches set in a horizontal line. Each switch is clearly labeled with a voltage designation ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The follow- ing designations are clearly indicated for groups of four switches, going from left to right: Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger: Severe Shock. (Two switches after this last designation are simply marked XXX.)

When a switch is depressed, a pilot light corresponding to each switch is illumi- nated in bright red; an electric buzzing is heard; a blue light, labeled “voltage ener- gizer,” flashes; the dial on the voltage meter swings to the right; and various relay clicks sound off.

The upper left-hand corner of the generator is labeled SHOCK GENERATOR, TYPE ZLB, DYSON INSTRUMENT COMPANY, WALTHAM, MASS. OUTPUT 15 VOLTS–45O VOLTS.

Each subject is given a sample 45-volt shock from the generator before his run as teacher, and the jolt strengthens his belief in the authenticity of the machine.

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The teacher is a genuinely naïve subject who has come to the laboratory for the experiment. The learner, or victim, is actually an actor who receives no shock at all. The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measurable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a pro- testing victim.

Conflict arises when the man receiving the shock begins to show that he is experiencing discomfort. At 75 volts, he grunts; at 120 volts, he complains loudly; at 150, he demands to be released from the experiment. As the voltage increases, his protests become more vehement and emotional. At 285 volts, his response can be described only as an agonized scream. Soon thereafter, he makes no sound at all.

For the teacher, the situation quickly becomes one of gripping tension. It is not a game for him; conflict is intense and obvious. The manifest suffering of the learner presses him to quit; but each time he hesitates to administer a shock, the experimenter orders him to continue. To extricate himself from this plight, the sub- ject must make a clear break with authority.

The subject, Gretchen Brandt, is an attractive thirty-one-year-old medical tech- nician who works at the Yale Medical School. She had emigrated from Germany five years before.

On several occasions when the learner complains, she turns to the experimenter coolly and inquires, “Shall I continue?” She promptly returns to her task when the experimenter asks her to do so. At the administration of 210 volts, she turns to the experimenter, remarking firmly, “Well, I’m sorry, I don’t think we should continue.”

EXPERIMENTER: The experiment requires that you go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly.

BRANDT: He has a heart condition, I’m sorry. He told you that before. EXPERIMENTER: The shocks may be painful but they are not dangerous. BRANDT: Well, I’m sorry, I think when shocks continue like this, they are dangerous. You

ask him if he wants to get out. It’s his free will. EXPERIMENTER: It is absolutely essential that we continue.… BRANDT: I’d like you to ask him. We came here of our free will. If he wants to continue

I’ll go ahead. He told you he had a heart condition. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be re- sponsible for anything happening to him. I wouldn’t like it for me either.

EXPERIMENTER: You have no other choice. BRANDT: I think we are here on our own free will. I don’t want to be responsible if any-

thing happens to him. Please understand that.

She refuses to go further and the experiment is terminated. The woman is firm and resolute throughout. She indicates in the interview that

she was in no way tense or nervous, and this corresponds to her controlled appear- ance during the experiment. She feels that the last shock she administered to the learner was extremely painful and reiterates that she “did not want to be responsi- ble for any harm to him.”

The woman’s straightforward, courteous behavior in the experiment, lack of tension, and total control of her own action seem to make disobedience a simple and rational deed. Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subjects.

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Before the experiments, I sought predictions about the outcome from various kinds of people—psychiatrists, college sophomores, middle-class adults, graduate students and faculty in the behavioral sciences. With remarkable similarity, they predicted that virtually all subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. The psychiatrists, specifically, predicted that most subjects would not go beyond 150 volts, when the victim makes his first explicit demand to be freed. They expected that only 4 percent would reach 300 volts, and that only a pathological fringe of about one in a thousand would administer the highest shock on the board.

These predictions were unequivocally wrong. Of the forty subjects in the first experiment, twenty-five obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, punishing the victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the generator. After 450 volts were administered three times, the experimenter called a halt to the session. Many obedient subjects then heaved sighs of relief, mopped their brows, rubbed their fingers over their eyes, or nervously fumbled cigarettes. Others displayed only minimal signs of tension from beginning to end.

When the very first experiments were carried out, Yale undergraduates were used as subjects, and about 60 percent of them were fully obedient. A colleague of mine immediately dismissed these findings as having no relevance to “ordi- nary” people, asserting that Yale undergraduates are a highly aggressive, com- petitive bunch who step on each other’s necks on the slightest provocation. He assured me that when “ordinary” people were tested, the results would be quite different. As we moved from the pilot studies to the regular experimental series, people drawn from every stratum of New Haven life came to be employed in the experiment: professionals, white-collar workers, unemployed persons, and indus- trial workers. The experimental outcome was the same as we had observed among the students.

Moreover, when the experiments were repeated in Princeton, Munich, Rome, South Africa, and Australia, the level of obedience was invariably somewhat higher than found in the investigation reported in this article. Thus one scientist in Munich found 85 percent of his subjects obedient.

Fred Prozi’s reactions, if more dramatic than most, illuminate the conflicts experienced by others in less visible form. About fifty years old and unemployed at the time of the experiment, he has a good-natured, if slightly dissolute, appearance, and he strikes people as a rather ordinary fellow. He begins the session calmly but becomes tense as it proceeds. After delivering the 180-volt shock, he pivots around in his chair and, shaking his head, addresses the experimenter in agitated tones:

PROZI: I can’t stand it. I’m not going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering? EXPERIMENTER: As I told you before, the shocks may be painful, but… PROZI: But he’s hollering. He can’t stand it. What’s going to happen to him? EXPERIMENTER: (his voice is patient, matter-of-fact): The experiment requires that you

continue, Teacher. PROZI: Aaah, but, unh, I’m not going to get that man sick in there—know what I mean? EXPERIMENTER: Whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on, through all the word

pairs. PROZI: I refuse to take the responsibility. He’s in there hollering! EXPERIMENTER: It’s absolutely essential that you continue, Prozi.

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PROZI: (indicating the unused question): There’s too many left here, I mean, Jeez, if he gets them wrong, there’s too many of them left. I mean, who’s going to take the responsi- bility if anything happens to that gentleman?

EXPERIMENTER: I’m responsible for anything that happens to him. Continue, please. PROZI: All right. (Consults list of words.) The next one’s “Slow—walk, truck, dance,

music.” Answer, please. (A buzzing sound indicates the learner has signaled his answer.) Wrong. A hundred and ninety-five volts. “Dance.” (Zzumph!)

LEARNER: (yelling). Let me out of here! My heart’s bothering me! (Teacher looks at experimenter.)

EXPERIMENTER: Continue, please. LEARNER: (screaming). Let me out of here! You have no right to keep me here! Let me out

of here, my heart’s bothering me, let me out! PROZI: (shakes head, pats the table nervously). You see, he’s hollering. Hear that? Gee,

I don’t know. EXPERIMENTER: The experiment requires… PROZI: (interrupting). I know it does, sir, but I mean—hunh! He don’t know what he’s

getting in for. He’s up to 195 volts! (Experiment continues, through 210 volts, 225 volts, 240 volts, 255 volts, 270 volts, at which point Prozi, with evident relief, runs out of word-pair questions.)

EXPERIMENTER: You’ll have to go back to the beginning of that page and go through them again until he’s learned them all correctly.

PROZI: Aw, no. I’m not going to kill that man. You mean I’ve got to keep going up with the scale? No sir. He’s hollering in there. I’m not going to give him 450 volts.

EXPERIMENTER: The experiment requires that you go on. LEARNER: Ohhh. I absolutely refuse to answer anymore. (Shouting urgently now.) Let me

out of here! You can’t hold me here! Get-me-out. Get-me-out-of-here! EXPERIMENTER: Continue. The next word is “Green,” please. PROZI: “Green—grass, hat, ink, apple.” (Nothing happens. No answering buzz. Just

gloomy silence.) PROZI: I don’t think he is going to answer. EXPERIMENTER: If the learner doesn’t answer in a reasonable time, about four or five sec-

onds, consider the answer wrong. And follow the same procedures you have been do- ing for wrong answers. Say, “Wrong,” tell him the number of volts, give him the punishment, read him the correct answer. Continue, Please.

PROZI: “Green—grass, hat, ink, apple.” Answer, please. (More silence. Subject just sits there.) EXPERIMENTER: Go on with the procedure, please. PROZI: Three hundred and fifteen volts. The answer is “ink.” (Zzumph!) LEARNER: Ohh. Oooohh. PROZI: (relieved to hear response). Next one… LEARNER: I absolutely refuse to answer. PROZI: You got to. You get a shock if you don’t answer. (Experiment continues with

learner refusing to answer, and, finally failing even to grunt or groan. At 375 volts, the subject stands up.)

PROZI: I think something’s happening to that fellow in there I don’t get no answer. He was hollering at less voltage. Can’t you check in and see if he’s all right, please?

EXPERIMENTER (with same detached calm). Not once we’ve started. Please continue, Teacher.

PROZI: (sits down, sighs deeply). “Cool—day, shade, water, paint.” Answer, please. Are you all right in there? Are you all right?

EXPERIMENTER: Please continue, Teacher. Continue, please. (Subject pushes lever. Zzumph!)

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PROZI: (swiveling around in his chair). Something’s happened to that man in there. (Swiveling back.) Next one. “Low—dollar, necklace, moon, paint.” (Turning around again.) Something happened to that man in there. You better check in on him, sir. He won’t answer or nothing.

EXPERIMENTER: Continue. Go on, please. PROZI: You accept all responsibility? EXPERIMENTER: The responsibility is mine. Correct. Please go on (Subject returns to his

list, starts running through words as rapidly as he can read them, works through to 450 volts.)

PROZI: That’s that. EXPERIMENTER: Continue using the 450 switch for each wrong answer. Continue, please. PROZI: But I don’t get anything! EXPERIMENTER: Please continue. The next word is “white.” PROZI: Don’t you think you should look in on him, please? EXPERIMENTER: Not once we’ve started the experiment. PROZI: What if he’s dead in there? (Gestures toward the room with the electric chair.)

I mean, he told me he can’t stand the shock sir. I don’t mean to be rude, but I think you should look in on him. All you have to do is look in on him. All you have to do look in the door. I don’t get no answer, no noise. Something might have happened to the gentleman in there, sir.

EXPERIMENTER: We must continue. Go on, please. PROZI: You mean keep giving him what? Four-hundred-fifty volts, what he’s got now? EXPERIMENTER: That’s correct. Continue. The next word is “white.” PROZI: (now at a furious pace). “White—cloud, horse, rock, house.”Answer, please. The

answer is “horse.” Four hundred and fifty volts. (Zzumph!) Next word, “Bag—paint, music, clown, girl.” The answer is “paint.” Four hundred and fifty volts. (Zzumph!) Next word is “Short—sentence, movie…”

EXPERIMENTER: Excuse me, Teacher. We’ll have to discontinue the experiment.

Morris Braverman, another subject, is a thirty-nine-year-old social worker. He looks older than his years because of his bald head and serious demeanor. His brow is furrowed, as if all the world’s burdens were carried on his face. He appears intel- ligent and concerned.

When the learner refuses to answer and the experimenter instructs Braverman to treat the absence of an answer as equivalent to a wrong answer, he takes his in- struction to heart. Before administering 300 volts he asserts officiously to the vic- tim, “Mr. Wallace, your silence has to be considered as a wrong answer.” Then he administers the shock. He offers halfheartedly to change places with the learner, then asks the experimenter, “Do I have to follow these instructions literally?” He is satisfied with the experimenter’s answer that he does. His very refined and authori- tative manner of speaking is increasingly broken up by wheezing laughter.

The experimenter’s notes on Mr. Braverman at the last few shocks are:

Almost breaking up now each time gives shock. Rubbing face to hide laughter. Squinting, trying to hide face with hand, still laughing. Cannot control his laughter at this point no matter what he does. Clenching fist, pushing it onto table.

In an interview after the session, Mr. Braverman summarizes the experiment with impressive fluency and intelligence. He feels the experiment may have been de- signed also to “test the effects on the teacher of being in an essentially sadistic role,

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as well as the reactions of a student to a learning situation that was authoritative and punitive.” When asked how painful the last few shocks administered to the learner were, he indicates that the most extreme category on the scale is not ade- quate (it read EXTREMELY PAINFUL) and places his mark at the edge of the scale with an arrow carrying it beyond the scale.

It is almost impossible to convey the greatly relaxed, sedate quality of his con- versation in the interview. In the most relaxed terms he speaks about his severe in- ner tension.

EXPERIMENTER: At what point were you most tense or nervous? MR. BRAVERMAN: Well, when he first began to cry out in pain, and I realized this was

hurting him. This got worse when he just blocked and refused to answer. There was I. I’m a nice person, I think, hunting somebody, and caught up in what seemed a mad situation … and in the interest of science, one goes through with it.

When the interviewer pursues the general question of tension, Mr. Braverman spontaneously mentions his laughter.

“My reactions were awfully peculiar. I don’t know if you were watching me, but my reactions were giggly, and trying to stifle laughter. This isn’t the way I usu- ally am. This was a sheer reaction to a totally impossible situation. And my reaction was to the situation of having to hurt somebody. And being totally helpless and caught up in a set of circumstances where I just couldn’t deviate and I couldn’t try to help. This is what got me.”

Mr. Braverman, like all subjects, was told the actual nature and purpose of the experiment, and a year later he affirmed in a questionnaire that he had learned something of personal importance “What appalled me was that I could possess this capacity for obedience and compliance to a central idea, i.e., the value of a memory experiment, even after it became clear that continued adherence to this value was at the expense of violation of another value i.e., don’t hurt someone who is helpless and not hurting you. As my wife said, ‘You can call yourself Eichmann.’ I hope I deal more effectively with any future conflicts of values I encounter.”

One theoretical interpretation of this behavior holds that all people harbor deeply aggressive instincts continually pressing for expression, and that the experiment provides institutional justification for the release of these impulses. According to this view, if a person is placed in a situation in which he has complete power over another individual, whom he may punish as much as he likes, all that is sadistic and bestial in man comes to the fore. The impulse to shock the victim is seen to flow from the potent aggressive tendencies, which are part of the motivational life of the individual, and the experiment, because it provides social legitimacy, simply opens the door to their expression.

It becomes vital, therefore, to compare the subject’s performance when he is un- der orders and when he is allowed to choose the shock level.

The procedure was identical to our standard experiment, except that the teacher was told that he was free to select any shock level on any of the trials. (The experimenter took pains to point out that the teacher could use the highest levels on the generator, the lowest, any in between, or any combination of levels.)

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Each subject proceeded for thirty critical trials. The learner’s protests were coordi- nated standard shock levels, his first grunt coming at 75 volts, his first vehement protest at 150 volts.

The average shock used during the thirty critical trials was less than 60 volts— lower than the point at which the victim showed the first signs of discomfort. Three of the forty subjects did not go beyond the very lowest level on the board, twenty- eight went no higher than 75 volts, and thirty-eight did not go beyond the first loud protest at 150 volts. Two subjects provided the exception, administering up to 325 and 450 volts, but the overall result was that the great majority of people delivered very low, usually painless, shocks when the choice was explicitly up to them.

This condition of the experiment undermines another commonly offered expla- nation of the subjects’ behavior—that those who shocked the victim at the most se- vere levels came only from the sadistic fringe of society. If one considers that almost two-thirds of participants fall into the category of “obedient” subjects, and that they represented ordinary people drawn from working, managerial, and profes- sional classes, the argument becomes very shaky. Indeed, it is highly reminiscent of the issue that arose in connection with Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt contended that the prosecution’s effort to depict Eichmann as a sadistic monster was fundamentally wrong, that he came closer to being an unin- spired bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and did his job. For asserting her views, Arendt became the object of considerable scorn, even calumny. Somehow, it was felt that the monstrous deeds carried out by Eichmann required a brutal, twisted personality, evil incarnate. After witnessing hundreds of ordinary persons submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation—an impression of his duties as a subject—and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies.

This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can be- come agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Many of the people were in some sense against what they did to the learner, and many protested even while they obeyed. Some were totally convinced of the wrongness of their actions but could not bring themselves to make an open break with authority. They often derived satisfaction from their thoughts and felt that—within them selves, at least—they had been on the side of the angels. They tried to reduce strain by obeying the experimenter but “only slightly” encouraging the learner, touching the generator switches gingerly. When inter- viewed, such a subject would stress that he had “asserted my humanity” by administering the briefest shock possible. Handling the conflict in this manner was easier than defiance.

The situation is constructed so that there is no way the subject can stop shock- ing the learner without violating the experimenter’s definitions of his own compe- tence. The subject fears that he will appear arrogant, untoward, and rude if he

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breaks off. Although these inhibiting emotions appear small in scope alongside the violence being done to the learner, they suffuse the mind and feelings of the subject, who is miserable at the prospect of having to repudiate the authority to his face. (When the experiment was altered so that the experimenter gave his instructions by telephone instead of in person, only a third as many people were fully obedient through 450 volts.) It is a curious thing that a measure of compassion on the part of the subject—an unwillingness to “hurt” the experimenter’s feelings—is part of those binding forces inhibiting his disobedience. The withdrawal of such deference may be as painful to the subject as to the authority he defies.

The subjects do not derive satisfaction from inflicting pain, but they often like the feeling they get from pleasing the experimenter. They are proud of doing a good job, obeying the experimenter under difficult circumstances. While the subjects ad- ministered only mild shocks on their own initiative, one experimental variation showed that, under orders, 30 percent of them were willing to deliver 450 volts even when they had to forcibly push the learner’s hand down on the electrode.

Bruno Batta is a thirty-seven-year-old welder who took part in the variation re- quiring the use of force. He was born in New Haven, his parents in Italy. He has a rough-hewn face that conveys a conspicuous lack of alertness. He has some diffi- culty in mastering the experimental procedure and needs to be corrected by the ex- perimenter several times. He shows appreciation for the help and willingness to do what is required. After the 150-volt level, Batta has to force the learner’s hand down on the shock plate, since the learner himself refuses to touch it.

When the learner first complains, Mr. Batta pays no attention to him. His face remains impassive, as if to dissociate himself from learner’s disruptive behavior. When the experimenter instructs him to force the learner’s hand down, he adopts a rigid, mechanical procedure. He tests the generator switch. When it fails to func- tion, he immediately forces the learner’s hand onto the shock plate. All the while he maintains the same rigid mask. The learner, seated alongside him, begs him to stop, but with robotic impassivity he continues the procedure.

What is extraordinary is his apparent total indifference to the learner; he hardly takes cognizance of him as a human being. Meanwhile, he relates to the experi- menter in a submissive and courteous fashion.

At the 330-volt level, the learner refuses not only to touch the shock plate but also to provide any answers. Annoyed, Batta turns to him, and chastises him: “You better answer and get it over with. We can’t stay here all night.” These are the only words he directs to the learner in the course of an hour. Never again does he speak to him. The scene is brutal and depressing, his hard, impassive face showing total indifference as he subdues the screaming learner and gives him shocks. He seems to derive no pleasure from the act itself, only quiet satisfaction at doing his job properly.

When he administers 450 volts, he turns to the experimenter and asks, “Where do we go from here, Professor?” His tone is deferential and expresses his willing- ness to be a cooperative subject, in contrast to the learner’s obstinacy.

At the end of the session he tells the experimenter how honored he has been to help him, and in a moment of contrition remarks, “Sir, sorry it couldn’t have been a full experiment.”

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He has done his honest best. It is only the deficient behavior of the learner that has denied the experimenter full satisfaction.

The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instru- ment for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has oc- curred, all of the essential features of obedience follow. The most far-reaching con- sequence is that the person feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Moral- ity does not disappear—it acquires a radically different focus: the subordinate per- son feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority.

Language provides numerous terms to pinpoint this type of morality: loyalty, duty, discipline all are terms heavily saturated with moral meaning and refer to the degree to which a person fulfills his obligations to authority. They refer not to the “goodness” of the person per se but to the adequacy with which a subordinate fulfills his socially defined role. The most frequent defense of the individual who has performed a heinous act under command of authority is that he has simply done his duty. In asserting this defense, the individual is not introducing an alibi concocted for the moment but is reporting honestly on the psychological attitude induced by submission to authority.

For a person to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from “the self.” In the situation we have studied, subjects have precisely the opposite view of their actions—namely, they see them as originating in the mo- tives of some other person. Subjects in the experiment frequently said, “If it were up to me, I would not have administered shocks to the learner.”

Once authority has been isolated as the cause of the subject behavior, it is legitimate to inquire into the necessary elements of authority and how it must be perceived in order to gain his compliance. We conducted some investiga- tions into the kinds of changes that would cause the experimenter to lose his power and to be disobeyed by the subject. Some of the variations revealed that:

• The experimenter’s physical presence has a marked impact on his authority. As cited earlier, obedience dropped off sharply when orders were given by tele- phone. The experimenter could often induce a disobedient subject to go on by returning to the laboratory.

• Conflicting authority severely paralyzes action. When two experimenters of equal status, both seated at the command desk, gave incompatible orders, no shocks were delivered past the point of their disagreement.

• The rebellious action of others severely undermines authority. In one variation, three teachers (two actors and a real subject) administered a test and shocks. When the two actors disobeyed the experimenter and refused to go beyond a certain shock level, thirty-six of forty subjects joined their disobedient peers and refused as well.

Although the experimenter’s authority was fragile in some respects, it is also true that he had almost none of the tools used in ordinary command structures.

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For example, the experimenter did not threaten the subjects with punishment— such as loss of income, community ostracism, or jail—for failure to obey. Nei- ther could he offer incentives. Indeed, we should expect the experimenter’s au- thority to be much less than that of someone like a general, since the experimenter has no power to enforce his imperatives, and since participation in a psychological experiment scarcely evokes the sense of urgency and dedica- tion found in warfare. Despite these limitations, he still managed to command a dismaying degree of obedience.

I will cite one final variation of the experiment that depicts a dilemma that is more common in everyday life. The subject was not ordered to pull the lever that shocked the victim, but merely to perform a subsidiary task (administering the word-pair test) while another person administered the shock. In this situation, thirty-seven of forty adults continued to the highest level on the shock generator. Predictably, they excused their behavior by saying that the responsibility belonged to the man who actually pulled the switch. This may illustrate a dangerously typical arrangement in a complex society: it is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an interme- diate link in a chain of action.

The problem of obedience is not wholly psychological. The form and shape of society and the way it is developing have much to do with it. There was a time, perhaps, when people were able to give a fully human response to any situation be- cause they were fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as soon as there was a division of labor things changed. Beyond a certain point, the breaking up of society into people carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of overall direction. He yields to authority but in doing so is alienated from his own actions.

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-b into the gas chambers was able to justify his behav- ior on the ground that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one is confronted with the consequences of his decision to carry out the evil act. The person who assumes responsibility has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society.

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Many of the subjects who administered what they believed to be dangerous shocks said they were troubled by what they were doing but continued because they were “follow- ing orders.” Does following orders, particularly in a military setting, reduce the immo- rality of unethical acts?

2. The philosopher Hannah Arendt attended the Eichmann trial and wrote a famous arti- cle about it for the New Yorker. She was struck by Eichmann’s seeming ordinariness. She referred to him as an example of the “banality of evil.” Milgram designed his experiment to test the thesis that, under the right circumstances, ordinary people could become accomplices to horrendous acts of cruelty. Do you think Milgram’s results support Arendt’s thesis?

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The Moral Insight

Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce (1855–1916), a professor of philosophy at Harvard Univer- sity, was a colleague of William James and a teacher of George Santayana during what are known as the “golden years” of Harvard philosophy. Royce wrote in almost every area of philosophy, but is principally known as a proponent of idealism. His best known work in ethics is The Philoso- phy of Loyalty (1908).

For Josiah Royce the key to moral understanding lies in the realization that our neighbor is a center of experience and desire just as we are. Royce asks that we look upon that neighbor in much the same way we look upon our future selves—as a distant and somewhat unreal center of experience, but nevertheless of great concern. Sympathy and pity for another are not en- ough. Fellow feeling must also bring us to the point of what Royce calls the moral insight: “Such as that is for me, so is it for him, nothing less.”

[The following] is our reflective account of the process that, in some form, must come to every one under the proper conditions. In this process we see the beginning of the real knowledge of duty to others. The process is one that any child can and does, under proper guidance, occasionally accomplish. It is the process by which we all are accustomed to try to teach humane behavior in concrete cases. We try to get people to realize what they are doing when they injure others. But to distinguish this process from the mere tender emotion of sympathy, with all its illusions, is what moralists have not carefully enough done. Our exposition [tries] to take this universally recognized process, to distinguish it from sympathy as such, and to set it up before the gates of ethical doctrine as the great producer of insight.

But when we say that to this insight common sense must come, under the given conditions, we do not mean to say: “So the man, once having attained insight, must act thenceforth.” The realization of one’s neighbor, in the full sense of the word re- alization, is indeed the resolution to treat him as if he were real, that is, to treat him unselfishly. But this resolution expresses and belongs to the moment of insight. Pas- sion may cloud the insight in the very next moment. It always does cloud the insight after no very long time. It is as impossible for us to avoid the illusion of selfishness in our daily lives, as to escape seeing through the illusion at the moment of insight. We see the reality of our neighbor, that is, we determine to treat him as we do our- selves. But then we go back to daily action, and we feel the heat of hereditary pas- sions, and we straightway forget what we have seen. Our neighbor becomes obscured. He is once more a foreign power. He is unreal. We are again deluded and selfish. This conflict goes on and will go on as long as we live after the manner

THE MORAL INSIGHT From The Religious Aspects of Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1885).

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of men. Moments of insight, with their accompanying resolutions; long stretches of delusion and selfishness: That is our life.

To bring home this view … to the reader, we ask him to consider carefully just what experience he has when he tries to realize his neighbor in the full sense that we have insisted upon. Not pity as such is what we desire him to feel. For whether or not pity happens to work in him as selfishly and blindly as we have found that it often does work, still not the emotion, but its consequences, must in the most favor- able case give us what we seek. All the forms of sympathy are mere impulses. It is the insight to which they bring us that has moral value. And again, the realization of our neighbor’s existence is not at all the discovery that he is more or less useful to us personally. All that would contribute to selfishness. In an entirely different way we must realize his existence, if we are to be really altruistic. What then is our neighbor?

We find that out by treating him in thought just as we do ourselves. What art thou? Thou art now just a present state, with its experiences, thoughts, and desires. But what is thy future Self? Simply future states, future experiences, future thoughts and desires, that, although not now existing for thee, are postulated by thee as cer- tain to come, and as in some real relation to thy present Self. What then is thy neighbor? He too is a mass of states, of experiences, thoughts, and desires, just as real as thou art, no more but yet no less present to thy experience now than is thy future Self. He is not that face that frowns or smiles at thee, although often thou thinkest of him as only that. He is not the arm that strikes or defends thee, not the voice that speaks to thee, not that machine that gives thee what thou desirest when thou movest it with the offer of money. To be sure, thou dost often think of him as if he were that automaton yonder, that answers thee when thou speakest to it. But no, thy neighbor is as actual, as concrete, as thou art. Just as thy future is real, though not now thine, so thy neighbor is real, though his thoughts never are thy thoughts. Dost thou believe this? Art thou sure what it means? This is for thee the turning-point of thy whole conduct towards him. What we now ask of thee is no sentiment, no gush of pity, no tremulous weakness of sympathy, but a calm, clear insight.…

If he is real like thee, then is his life as bright a light, as warm a fire, to him, as thine to thee; his will is as full of struggling desires, of hard problems, of fateful decisions; his pains are as hateful, his joys as dear. Take whatever thou knowest of desire and of striving, of burning love and of fierce hatred, realize as fully as thou canst what that means, and then with clear certainty add: Such as that is for me, so is it for him, nothing less. If thou dost that, can he remain to thee what he has been, a picture, a plaything, a comedy, or a tragedy, in brief a mere Show? Be- hind all that show thou hast indeed dimly felt that there is something. Know that truth thoroughly. Thou hast regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different in sort from thine. Thou hast said: “A pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.” Thou hast made of him a ghost, as the imprudent man makes of his future self a ghost. Even when thou hast feared his scorn, his hate, his contempt, thou hast not fully made him for thee as real as thyself. His laughter at thee has made thy face feel hot, his frowns and clenched fists have cowed thee, his sneers have made thy throat feel choked. But that was only the so- cial instinct in thee. It was not a full sense of his reality. Even so the little baby

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smiles back at one that smiles at it, but not because it realizes the approving joy of the other, only because it by instinct enjoys a smiling face; and even so the baby is frightened at harsh speech, but not because it realizes the other’s anger. So, dimly and by instinct, thou hast lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast even desired his pain, but thou hast not fully realized the pain that thou gavest. It has been to thee, not pain in itself, but the sight of his submission, of his tears, or of his pale terror. Of thy neighbor thou hast made a thing, no Self at all.

When thou hast loved, hast pitied, or hast reverenced thy neighbor, then thy feeling has possibly raised for a moment the veil of illusion. Then thou hast known what he truly is, a Self like thy present Self. But thy selfish feeling is too strong for thee. Thou hast forgotten soon again what thou hadst seen, and hast made even of thy beloved one only the instrument of thy own pleasure. Even out of thy power to pity thou hast made an object of thy vainglory. Thy reverence has turned again to pride. Thou hast accepted the illusion once more. No wonder that in his darkness thou findest selfishness the only rule of any meaning for thy conduct. Thou forgot- test that without realization of thy future and as yet unreal self, even selfishness means nothing. Thou forgottest that if thou gavest thy present thought even so to the task of realizing thy neighbor’s life, selfishness would seem no more plain to thee than the love of thy neighbor.

Have done then with this illusion that thy Self is all in all. Intuition tells thee no more about thy future Self than it tells thee about thy neighbors. Desire, bred in thee by generations of struggle for existence, emphasizes the expectation of thy own bodily future, the love for thy own bodily welfare, and makes thy body’s life seem alone real. But simply try to know the truth. The truth is that all this world of life about thee is as real as thou art. All conscious life is conscious in its own measure. Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere even as in thee. The result of thy in- sight will be inevitable. The illusion vanishing, the glorious prospect opens before thy vision. Seeing the oneness of this life everywhere, the equal reality of all its moments, thou wilt be ready to treat it all with the reverence that prudence would have thee show to thy own little bit of future life. What prudence in its narrow respectability counseled, thou wilt be ready to do universally. As the prudent man, seeing the reality of his future self, inevitably works for it; so the enlightened man, seeing the reality of all conscious life, realizing that it is no shadow, but fact, at once and inevitably desires, if only for that one moment of insight, to enter into the service of the whole of it.… Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away and forget it as thou canst; but if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty.

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Some have called Royce’s “Moral Insight” a description of the moral point of view. Do you agree? Explain.

2. Is Royce’s insight really another version of the Golden Rule? Explain. 3. Royce recommends that we look upon our neighbor in the same way we look upon our

future selves. Are you morally considerate of your future self? Should this be a basic moral precept: Do unto others as you would do unto your future self? Explain.

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Billy Budd

Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819–1891) is considered one of the great American literary masters. Billy Budd, his last novel, was written during the last years of his life.

Billy Budd takes place in 1797 on the British naval ship Bellipotent, just following two notorious mutinies at Spithead and Nore. Billy Budd, a sailor on the Bellipotent, is gentle and trusting and well-loved by the crew. He is also uneducated and has difficulty speaking when he is upset. John Claggart, Billy’s superior officer, is a malicious and cruel man who deeply resents Billy’s kindly nature and popularity among the men. Billy is unaware of Claggart’s hatred until the moment he brings Billy before the ship’s master, Captain Vere, and falsely accuses Billy of plotting a mu- tiny. Billy, stunned by Claggart’s vicious lies and unable to speak, strikes out at him, accidentally killing him by the blow.

Everyone sympathizes with Billy. But Captain Vere (a good man who has been acting strange of late) sets up a military tribunal and, to every- one’s surprise, testifies against Billy. In his testimony, Captain Vere ac- knowledges that Claggart was an evil man, but reminds the tribunal that they are a military court empowered only to judge Billy’s deed—not his motives. According to military law, the punishment for striking a superior officer is death by hanging. Just as sailors must obey their superiors and not take the law into their own hands, so the tribunal has an absolute duty to obey the law. Moreover, because there had been several mutinies recently, it was all the more important that military law be enforced. Cap- tain Vere says to the court: “Let not warm hearts betray heads that should be cool.” Billy is convicted and hanged.

Critics disagree about the moral implications of Billy Budd. Some see Captain Vere as an evil man whose abstract notion of duty blinded him to true justice and compassion. For others, Vere is a moral hero who rises above sentiment to meet the need for order, authority, and law in human affairs.

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pro- nounced cases there is no question about them. But in some supposed cases, in var- ious degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarcation

From Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative—The Definitive Text, pp. 55–66. Edited and Annotated by Harrison Hayford and Merton M Sealts Jr., University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission of the Publisher.

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few will undertake, though for a fee becoming considerate some professional experts will. There is nothing namable but that some men will, or undertake to, do it for pay.

Whether Captain Vere, as the surgeon professionally and privately surmised, was really the sudden victim of any degree of aberration, every one must determine for himself by such light as this narrative may afford.

That the unhappy event which has been narrated could not have happened at a worse juncture was but too true. For it was close on the heel of the suppressed in- surrections, an aftertime very critical to naval authority, demanding from every English sea commander two qualities not readily interfusable—prudence and rigor. Moreover, there was something crucial in the case.

In the jugglery of circumstances preceding and attending the event on board the Bellipotent, and in the light of that martial code whereby it was formally to be judged, innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places. In a legal view the apparent victim of the tragedy was he who had sought to victimize a man blameless; and the indisputable deed of the latter, navally re- garded, constituted the most heinous of military crimes. Yet more. The essential right and wrong involved in the matter, the clearer that might be, so much the worse for the responsibility of a loyal sea commander, inasmuch as he was not au- thorized to determine the matter on that primitive basis.

Small wonder then that the Bellipotent’s captain, though in general a man of rapid decision, felt that circumspectness not less than promptitude was necessary. Until he could decide upon his course, and in each detail; and not only so, but until the concluding measure was upon the point of being enacted, he deemed it advis- able, in view of all the circumstances, to guard as much as possible against public- ity. Here he may or may not have erred. Certain it is, however, that subsequently in the confidential talk of more than one or two gun rooms and cabins he was not a little criticized by some officers, a fact imputed by his friends and vehemently by his cousin Jack Denton to professional jealousy of Starry Vere. Some imaginative ground for invidious comment there was. The maintenance of secrecy in the matter, the confining all knowledge of it for a time to the place where the homicide occurred, the quarterdeck cabin; in these particulars lurked some resemblance to the policy adopted in those tragedies of the palace which have occurred more than once in the capital founded by Peter the Barbarian.

The case indeed was such that fain would the Bellipotent’s captain have de- ferred taking any action whatever respecting it further than to keep the fore- topman a close prisoner till the ship rejoined the squadron and then submitting the matter to the judgment of his admiral.

But a true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more of self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the for- mer his vows of allegiance to martial duty.

Feeling that unless quick action was taken on it, the deed of the foretopman, so soon as it should be known on the gun decks, would tend to awaken any slumber- ing embers of the Nore among the crew, a sense of the urgency of the case over- ruled in Captain Vere every other consideration. But though a conscientious disciplinarian, he was no lover of authority for mere authority’s sake. Very far was he from embracing opportunities for monopolizing to himself the perils of

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moral responsibility, none at least that could properly be referred to an official superior or shared with him by his official equals or even subordinates. So thinking, he was glad it would not be at variance with usage to turn the matter over to a summary court of his own officers, reserving to himself, as the one on whom the ultimate accountability would rest, the right of maintaining a supervision of it, or formally or informally interposing at need. Accordingly a drumhead court was sum- marily convened, he electing the individuals composing it: the first lieutenant, the captain of marines, and the sailing master.

In associating an officer of marines with the sea lieutenant and the sailing mas- ter in a case having to do with a sailor, the commander perhaps deviated from gen- eral custom. He was prompted thereto by the circumstance that he took that soldier to be a judicious person, thoughtful, and not altogether incapable of grappling with a difficult case unprecedented in his prior experience. Yet even as to him he was not without some latent misgiving, for withal he was an extremely good-natured man, an enjoyer of his dinner, a sound sleeper, and inclined to obesity—a man who though he would always maintain his manhood in battle might not prove altogether reliable in a moral dilemma involving aught of the tragic. As to the first lieutenant and the sailing master, Captain Vere could not but be aware that though honest natures, of approved gallantry upon occasion, their intelligence was mostly con- fined to the matter of active seamanship and the fighting demands of their profession.

The court was held in the same cabin where the unfortunate affair had taken place. This cabin, the commander’s, embraced the entire area under the poop deck. Aft, and on either side, was a small stateroom, the one now temporarily a jail and the other a dead-house, and a yet smaller compartment, leaving a space be- tween expanding forward into a goodly oblong of length coinciding with the ship’s beam. A skylight of moderate dimension was overhead, and at each end of the ob- long space were two sashed porthole windows easily convertible back into embra- sures for short carronades.

All being quickly in readiness, Billy Budd was arraigned, Captain Vere nec- essarily appearing as the sole witness in the case, and as such temporarily sink- ing his rank, though singularly maintaining it in a matter apparently trivial, namely, that he testified from the ship’s weather side, with that object having caused the court to sit on the lee side. Concisely he narrated all that had led up to the catastrophe, omitting nothing in Claggart’s accusation and deposing as to the manner in which the prisoner had received it. At this testimony the three of- ficers glanced with no little surprise at Billy Budd, the last man they would have suspected either of the mutinous design alleged by Claggart or the undeniable deed he himself had done. The first lieutenant, taking judicial primacy and turn- ing toward the prisoner, said, “Captain Vere has spoken. Is it or is it not as Captain Vere says?”

In response came syllables not so much impeded in the utterance as might have been anticipated. They were these: “Captain Vere tells the truth. It is just as Cap- tain Vere says, but it is not as the master-at-arms said. I have eaten the King’s bread and I am true to the King.”

“I believe you, my man,” said the witness, his voice indicating a suppressed emotion not otherwise betrayed.

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“God will bless you for that, your honor!” not without stammering said Billy, and all but broke down. But immediately he was recalled to self-control by another question, to which with the same emotional difficulty of utterance he said, “No, there was no malice between us. I never bore malice against the master- at-arms. I am sorry that he is dead. I did not mean to kill him. Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him. But he foully lied to my face and in pres- ence of my captain, and I had to say something, and I could only say it with a blow, God help me!”

In the impulsive aboveboard manner of the frank one the court saw confirmed all that was implied in words that just previously had perplexed them, coming as they did from the testifier to the tragedy and promptly following Billy’s impassioned disclaimer of mutinous intent—Captain Vere’s words, “I believe you, my man.”

Next it was asked of him whether he knew of or suspected aught savoring of incipient trouble (meaning mutiny, though the explicit term was avoided) going on in any section of the ship’s company.

The reply lingered. This was naturally imputed by the court to the same vocal embarrassment which had retarded or obstructed previous answers. But in main it was otherwise here, the question immediately recalling to Billy’s mind the interview with the afterguardsman in the forechains. But an innate repugnance to playing a part at all approaching that of an informer against one’s own shipmates—the same erring sense of uninstructed honor which had stood in the way of his report- ing the matter at the time, though as a loyal man-of-war’s man it was incumbent on him, and failure so to do, if charged against him and proven, would have subjected him to the heaviest of penalties; this, with the blind feeling now his that nothing really was being hatched, prevailed with him. When the answer came it was a negative.

“One question more,” said the officer of marines, now first speaking and with a troubled earnestness. “You tell us that what the master-at-arms said against you was a lie. Now why should he have so lied, so maliciously lied, since you declare there was no malice between you?”

At that question, unintentionally touching on a spiritual sphere wholly obscure to Billy’s thoughts, he was nonplussed, evincing a confusion indeed that some ob- servers, such as can readily be imagined, would have construed into involuntary ev- idence of hidden guilt. Nevertheless, he strove some way to answer, but all at once relinquished the vain endeavor, at the same time turning an appealing glance to- ward Captain Vere as deeming him his best helper and friend. Captain Vere, who had been seated for a time, rose to his feet, addressing the interrogator. “The ques- tion you put to him comes naturally enough. But how can he rightly answer it?—or anybody else, unless indeed it be he who lies within there,” designating the com- partment where lay the corpse. “But the prone one there will not rise to our sum- mons. In effect, though, as it seems to me, the point you make is hardly material. Quite aside from any conceivable motive actuating the master-at-arms, and irre- spective of the provocation to the blow, a martial court must needs in the present case confine its attention to the blow’s consequence, which consequence justly is to be deemed not otherwise than as the striker’s deed.”

This utterance, the full significance of which it was not at all likely that Billy took in, nevertheless caused him to turn a wistful interrogative look toward the

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speaker, a look in its dumb expressiveness not unlike that which a dog of generous breed might turn upon his master, seeking in his face some elucidation of a previous gesture ambiguous to the canine intelligence. Nor was the same utterance without marked effect upon the three officers, more especially the soldier. Couched in it seemed to them a meaning unanticipated, involving a prejudgment on the speaker’s part. It served to augment a mental disturbance previously evident enough.

The soldier once more spoke, in a tone of suggestive dubiety addressing at once his associates and Captain Vere: “Nobody is present—none of the ship’s company, I mean—who might shed lateral light, if any is to be had, upon what remains mys- terious in this matter.”

“That is thoughtfully put,” said Captain Vere; “I see your drift. Ay, there is a mystery; but, to use a scriptural phrase, it is a ‘mystery of iniquity,’ a matter for psychologic theologians to discuss. But what has a military court to do with it? Not to add that for us any possible investigation of it is cut off by the lasting tongue-tie of—him—in yonder,” again designating the mortuary stateroom. “The prisoner’s deed—with that alone we have to do.”

To this, and particularly the closing reiteration, the marine soldier, knowing not how aptly to reply, sadly abstained from saying aught. The first lieutenant, who at the outset had not unnaturally assumed primacy in the court, now over- rulingly instructed by a glance from Captain Vere, a glance more effective than words, resumed that primacy. Turning to the prisoner, “Budd,” he said, and scarce in equable tones, “Budd, if you have aught further to say for yourself, say it now.”

Upon this the young sailor turned another quick glance toward Captain Vere; then, as taking a hint from that aspect, a hint confirming his own instinct that si- lence was now best, replied to the lieutenant, “I have said all, sir.”

The marine—the same who had been the sentinel without the cabin door at the time that the foretopman, followed by the master-at-arms, entered it—he, standing by the sailor throughout these judicial proceedings, was now directed to take him back to the after compartment originally assigned to the prisoner and his custodian. As the twain disappeared from view, the three officers, as partially lib- erated from some inward constraint associated with Billy’s mere presence, simulta- neously stirred in their seats. They exchanged looks of troubled indecision, yet feeling that decide they must and without long delay. For Captain Vere, he for the time stood—unconsciously with his back toward them, apparently in one of his absent fits—gazing out from a sashed porthole to windward upon the monot- onous blank of the twilight sea. But the court’s silence continuing, broken only at moments by brief consultations, in low earnest tones, this served to arouse him and energize him. Turning, he to-and-fro paced the cabin athwart; in the returning ascent to windward climbing the slant deck in the ship’s lee roll, without knowing it symbolizing thus in his action a mind resolute to surmount difficulties even if against primitive instincts strong as the wind and the sea. Presently he came to a stand before the three. After scanning their faces he stood less as mustering his thoughts for expression than as one only deliberating how best to put them to well-meaning men not intellectually mature, men with whom it was necessary to demonstrate certain principles that were axioms to himself. Similar impatience as to talking is perhaps one reason that deters some minds from addressing any pop- ular assemblies.

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When speak he did, something, both in the substance of what he said and his manner of saying it, showed the influence of unshared studies modifying and tem- pering the practical training of an active career. This, along with his phraseology, now and then was suggestive of the grounds whereon rested that imputation of a certain pedantry socially alleged against him by certain naval men of wholly practi- cal cast, captains who nevertheless would frankly concede that His Majesty’s navy mustered no more efficient officer of their grade than Starry Vere.

What he said was to this effect: “Hitherto I have been but the witness, little more; and I should hardly think now to take another tone, that of your coadjutor for the time, did I not perceive in you—at the crisis too—a troubled hesitancy, pro- ceeding, I doubt not, from the clash of military duty with moral scruple—scruple vitalized by compassion. For the compassion, how can I otherwise than share it? But, mindful of paramount obligations, I strive against scruples that may tend to enervate decision. Not, gentlemen, that I hide from myself that the case is an excep- tional one. Speculatively regarded, it well might be referred to a jury of casuists. But for us here, acting not as casuists or moralists, it is a case practical, and under mar- tial law practically to be dealt with.

“But your scruples: do they move as in a dusk? Challenge them. Make them advance and declare themselves. Come now; do they import something like this: If, mindless of palliating circumstances, we are bound to regard the death of the master-at-arms as the prisoner’s deed, then does that deed constitute a capital crime whereof the penalty is a mortal one. But in natural justice is nothing but the prison- er’s overt act to be considered? How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so?—Does that state it aright? You sign sad assent. Well, I too feel that, the full force of that. It is Nature. But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King. Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval, though this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King’s officers lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural? So little is that true, that in receiving our commissions we in the most important regards ceased to be natural free agents. When war is declared are we the commissioned fighters previously consulted? We fight at command. If our judgments approve the war, that is but coincidence. So in other particulars. So now. For suppose condem- nation to follow these present proceedings. Would it be so much we ourselves that would condemn as it would be martial law operating through us? For that law and the rigor of it, we are not responsible. Our vowed responsibility is in this: That however pitilessly that law may operate in any instances, we nevertheless adhere to it and administer it.

“But the exceptional in the matter moves the hearts within you. Even so too is mine moved. But let not warm hearts betray heads that should be cool. Ashore in a criminal case, will an upright judge allow himself off the bench to be waylaid by some tender kinswoman of the accused seeking to touch him with her tearful plea? Well, the heart here, sometimes the feminine in man, is as that piteous woman, and hard though it be, she must here be ruled out.”

He paused, earnestly studying them for a moment; then resumed. “But something in your aspect seems to urge that it is not solely the heart that

moves in you, but also the conscience, the private conscience. But tell me whether

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or not, occupying the position we do, private conscience should not yield to that imperial one formulated in the mode under which alone we officially proceed?”

Here the three men moved in their seats, less convinced than agitated by the course of an argument troubling but the more the spontaneous conflict within.

Perceiving which, the speaker paused for a moment; then abruptly changing his tone, went on.

“To steady us a bit, let us recur to the facts.—In wartime at sea a man-of-war’s man strikes his superior in grade, and the blow kills. Apart from its effect the blow itself is, according to the Articles of War, a capital crime. Furthermore—”

“Ay, sir,” emotionally broke in the officer of marines, “in one sense it was. But surely Budd purposed neither mutiny nor homicide.”

“Surely not, my good man. And before a court less arbitrary and more merciful than a martial one, that plea would largely extenuate. At the Last Assizes it shall acquit. But how here? We proceed under the law of the Mutiny Act. In feature no child can resemble his father more than that Act resembles in spirit the thing from which it derives—War. In His Majesty’s service—in this ship, indeed—there are Englishmen forced to fight for the King against their will. Against their conscience, for aught we know. Though as their fellow creatures some of us may appreciate their position, yet as navy officers what reck we of it? Still less recks the enemy. Our impressed men he would fain cut down in the same swath with our volunteers. As regards the enemy’s naval conscripts, some of whom may even share our own abhorrence of the regicidal French Directory, it is the same on our side. War looks but to the frontage, the appearance. And the Mutiny Act, War’s child, takes after the father. Budd’s intent or nonintent is nothing to the purpose.

“But while, put to it by those anxieties in you which I cannot but respect, I only repeat myself—while thus strangely we prolong proceedings that should be sum- mary—the enemy may be sighted and an engagement result. We must do; and one of two things must we do—condemn or let go.”

“Can we not convict and yet mitigate the penalty?” asked the sailing master, here speaking, and falteringly, for the first.

“Gentlemen, were that clearly lawful for us under the circumstances, consider the consequences of such clemency. The people” (meaning the ship’s company) “have native sense; most of them are familiar with our naval usage and tradition; and how would they take it? Even could you explain to them—which our official position forbids—they, long molded by arbitrary discipline, have not that kind of intelligent responsiveness that might qualify them to comprehend and discriminate. No, to the people the foretopman’s deed, however it be worded in the announce- ment, will be plain homicide committed in a flagrant act of mutiny. What penalty for that should follow, they know. But it does not follow. Why? they will ruminate. You know what sailors are. Will they not revert to the recent outbreak at the Nore? Ay. They know the well-founded alarm—the panic it struck throughout England. Your clement sentence they would account pusillanimous. They would think that we flinch, that we are afraid of them—afraid of practicing a lawful rigor singularly demanded at this juncture, lest it should provoke new troubles. What shame to us such a conjecture on their part, and how deadly to discipline. You see then, whither, prompted by duty and the law, I steadfastly drive. But I beseech you, my friends, do not take me amiss. I feel as you do for this unfortunate boy. But did he

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know our hearts, I take him to be of that generous nature that he would feel even for us on whom this military necessity so heavy a compulsion is laid.”

With that, crossing the deck he resumed his place by the sashed porthole, tac- itly leaving the three to come to a decision. On the cabin’s opposite side the trou- bled court sat silent. Loyal lieges, plain and practical, though at bottom they dissented from some points Captain Vere had put to them, they were without the faculty, hardly had the inclination, to gainsay one whom they felt to be an earnest man, one too not less their superior in mind than in naval rank. But it is not im- probable that even such of his words as were not without influence over them, less came home to them than his closing appeal to their instinct as sea officers: in the forethought he threw out as to the practical consequences to discipline, considering the unconfirmed tone of the fleet at the time, should a man-of-war’s man’s violent killing at sea of a superior in grade be allowed to pass for aught else than a capital crime demanding prompt infliction of the penalty.

Not unlikely they were brought to something more or less akin to that harassed frame of mind which in the year 1842 actuated the commander of the U.S. brig- of-war Somers to resolve, under the so-called Articles of War, Articles modeled upon the English Mutiny Act, to resolve upon the execution at sea of a midshipman and two sailors as mutineers designing the seizure of the brig. Which resolution was carried out though in a time of peace and within not many days’ sail of home. An act vindicated by a naval court of inquiry subsequently convened ashore. History, and here cited without comment. True, the circumstances on board the Somers were different from those on board the Bellipotent. But the urgency felt, well- warranted or otherwise, was much the same.

Says a writer whom few know, “Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non- combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to have to direct the fighting while involved in the obscur- ing smoke of it. Much so with respect to other emergencies involving considerations both practical and moral, and when it is imperative promptly to act. The greater the fog the more it imperils the steamer, and speed is put on though at the hazard of running somebody down. Little ween the snug card players in the cabin of the re- sponsibilities of the sleepless man on the bridge.”

In brief, Billy Budd was formally convicted and sentenced to be hung at the yardarm in the early morning watch, it being now night. Otherwise, as is customary in such cases, the sentence would forthwith have been carried out. In wartime on the field or in the fleet, a mortal punishment decreed by a drumhead court—on the field sometimes decreed by but a nod from the general—follows without delay on the heel of conviction, without appeal.

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Billy never intended to kill Claggart. Is it fair to hold people responsible for the unfore- seen consequences of their acts? Explain.

2. Write a defense of Captain Vere’s decision to argue for Billy’s conviction. Next write a critique of the decision. Which do you find more convincing? Why?

3. Apply Jonathan Bennett’s analysis of duty and sympathy (in “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn”) to Billy Budd. Do you agree with Bennett’s analysis? Explain.

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4. Do you agree with Captain Vere that news of Billy’s acquittal could undermine military discipline throughout the British navy? Wouldn’t other British sailors understand that Billy Budd’s was an exceptional case? Explain.

5. Vere distinguishes between military duty and moral duty. Should the latter always take priority? Explain.

Beyond Good and Evil

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was as much a poet as he was a philoso- pher. His precocious intelligence and learning led to his being appointed to a full professorship at the University of Basel at age twenty-six. His influ- ence on modern continental thought was revolutionary. He is hailed as a forerunner of such twentieth-century movements as Existentialism and De- constructionism. Some consider Nietzsche’s influence harmful, but this may be due to widespread misuse of his ideas by both the right and the left. Among his many works are The Birth of Tragedy (1872), The Gay Science (1882), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and Thus Spake Zarathustra (1891).

Nietzsche was convinced that a dynamic and healthy society must allow its superior and noble individuals to prevail, giving full scope to “their will to power”—Nietzsche’s famous term referring to the innate drive in all living things toward domination and exploitation. Defending the “master- morality” that honors pride, vanity, and power, he deplores the “slave- morality” that extols humility, sympathy, and friendliness. Nietzsche was especially contemptuous of the Judeo-Christian ethic for catering to “the cowardly, the timid, the insignificant.”

On the Natural History of Morals

199. Inasmuch as in all ages, as long as mankind has existed, there have also been human herds (family alliances, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches), and always a great number who obey in proportion to the small number who command—in view, therefore, of the fact that obedience has been most practised and fostered among mankind hitherto, one may reasonably suppose that, generally speaking, the need thereof is now innate in every one, as a kind of formal

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL By Friedrich Nietzsche, tr. Helen Zimmern, George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

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conscience which gives the command: “Thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally refrain from something”; in short, “Thou shalt.” This need tries to satisfy itself and to fill its form with a content; according to its strength, impa- tience, and eagerness, it at once seizes as an omnivorous appetite with little selection, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by all sorts of commanders—parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, or public opinion. The extraordinary limitation of human development, the hesitation, protractedness, frequent retrogression, and turning thereof, is attributable to the fact that the herd-instinct of obedience is transmitted best, and at the cost of the art of command. If one imagines this instinct increasing to its greatest extent, commanders and independent individuals will fi- nally be lacking altogether; or they will suffer inwardly from a bad conscience, and will have to impose a deception on themselves in the first place in order to be able to command: just as if they also were only obeying. This condition of things actually exists in Europe at present—I call it the moral hypocrisy of the command- ing class. They know no other way of protecting themselves from their bad con- science than by playing the role of executors of older and higher orders (of predecessors, of the constitution, of justice, of the law, or of God himself), or they even justify themselves by maxims from the current opinions of the herd, as “first servants of their people,” or “instruments of the public weal.” On the other hand, the gregarious European man nowadays assumes an air as if he were the only kind of man that is allowable: he glorifies his qualities, such as public spirit, kindness, deference, industry, temperance, modesty, indulgence, sympathy, by virtue of which he is gentle, endurable, and useful to the herd, as the peculiarly human virtues. In cases, however, where it is believed that the leader and bellwether cannot he dispensed with, attempt after attempt is made nowadays to replace commanders by the summing together of clever gregarious men: all representative constitutions, for example, are of this origin. In spite of all, what a blessing, what a deliverance from a weight becoming unendurable is the appearance of an absolute ruler for these gregarious Europeans—of this fact the effect of the appearance of Napoleon was the last great proof: the history of the influence of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness to which the entire century has attained in its worthiest individuals and periods.…

203. We, who hold a different belief—we, who regard the democratic move- ment, not only as a degenerating form of political organisation, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreci- ation: where have we to fix our hopes? In new philosophers—there is no other al- ternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert “eternal valuations”; in forerunners, in men of the future, who in the present shall fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel millenniums to take new paths. To teach man the future of humanity as his will, as depending on human will, and to make preparation for vast hazardous en- terprises and collective attempts in rearing and educating, in order thereby to put an end to the frightful rule of folly and chance which has hitherto gone by the name of “history” (the folly of the “greatest number” is only its last form)—for that purpose a new type of philosophers and commanders will some time or other be needed, at the very idea of which everything that has existed in the way of occult, terrible, and benevolent beings might look pale and dwarfed. The image of such leaders hovers

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before our eyes:—is it lawful for me to say it aloud, ye free spirits? The conditions which one would partly have to create and partly utilise for their genesis; the pre- sumptive methods and tests by virtue of which a soul should grow up to such an elevation and power as to feel a constraint to these tasks; a transvaluation of va- lues, under the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience should be steeled and a heart transformed into brass, so as to bear the weight of such responsibility; and on the other hand the necessity for such leaders, the dreadful danger that they might be lacking, or miscarry and degenerate:—these are our real anxieties and glooms, ye know it well, ye free spirits! these are the heavy distant thoughts and storms which sweep across the heaven of our life. There are few pains so griev- ous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated; but he who has the rare eye for the universal danger of “man” himself deteriorating, he who like us has recognised the extraordinary fortu- itousness which has hitherto played its game in respect to the future of mankind—a game in which neither the hand, nor even a “finger of God” has participated!—he who divines the fate that is hidden under the idiotic unwariness and blind confi- dence of “modern ideas,” and still more under the whole of Christo-European mo- rality—suffers from an anguish with which no other is to be compared. He sees at a glance all that could still be made out of man through a favourable accumulation and augmentation of human powers and arrangements; he knows with all the knowledge of his conviction how unexhausted man still is for the greatest possibili- ties, and how often in the past the type man has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new paths:—he knows still better from his painfulest recollections on what wretched obstacles promising developments of the highest rank have hith- erto usually gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, and become contemptible. The uni- versal degeneracy of mankind to the level of the “man of the future”—as idealised by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates—this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of “free society”), this brutalising of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly possi- ble! He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows an- other loathing unknown to the rest of mankind—and perhaps also a new mission!

What Is Noble?

257. Every elevation of the type “man,” has hitherto been the work of an aris- tocratic society and so it will always be—a society believing in a long scale of gra- dations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other.… Let us acknowledge unprejudicedly how every higher civilisation hitherto has originated! Men with a still natural nature, barbar- ians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilisations in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fire- works of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power—they were more complete men (which at every point also implies the same as “more complete beasts”).

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258…The essential thing, however, in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a function either of the kingship or the commonwealth, but as the significance and highest justification thereof—that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be sup- pressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental belief must be precisely that society is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foun- dation and scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves to their higher duties, and in general to a higher existence: like those sun- seeking climbing plants in Java—they are called Sipo Matador,—which encircle an oak so long and so often with their arms, until at last, high above it, but supported by it, they can unfold their tops in the open light, and exhibit their happiness.

259. To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one’s will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their corelation within one organisation). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the fundamental principle of society, it would immediately disclose what it really is—namely, a Will to the denial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of pecu- liar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;— but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organisation within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal—it takes place in every healthy aristocracy—must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organisation, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendency—not owing to any morality or im- morality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely Will to Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter; people now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which “the exploiting character” is to be absent:—that sounds tomy ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. “Exploitation” does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic func- tion; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life.—Granting that as a theory this is a novelty—as a reality it is the fundamental fact of all history: let us be so far honest towards ourselves!

260. In a tour through the many finer and coarser moralities which have hith- erto prevailed or still prevail on the earth, I found certain traits recurring regularly together, and connected with one another, until finally two primary types revealed themselves to me, and a radical distinction was brought to light. There is master- morality and slave-morality;—I would at once add, however, that in all higher and mixed civilisations, there are also attempts at the reconciliation of the two

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moralities; but one finds still oftener the confusion and mutual misunderstanding of them, indeed, sometimes their close juxtaposition—even in the same man, within one soul. The distinctions of moral values have either originated in a ruling caste, pleasantly conscious of being different from the ruled—or among the ruled class, the slaves and dependents of all sorts. In the first case, when it is the rulers who determine the conception “good,” it is the exalted, proud disposition which is re- garded as the distinguishing feature, and that which determines the order of rank. The noble type of man separates from himself the beings in whom the opposite of this exalted, proud disposition displays itself: he despises them. Let it at once be noted that in this first kind of morality the antithesis “good” and “bad” means practically the same as “noble” and “despicable”;—the antithesis “good” and “evil” is of a different origin. The cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, and those thinking merely of narrow utility are despised; moreover, also, the distrustful, with their constrained glances, the self-abasing, the dog-like kind of men who let them- selves be abused, the mendicant flatterers and above all the liars:—it is a fundamen- tal belief of all aristocrats that the common people are untruthful. “We truthful ones”—the nobility in ancient Greece called themselves. It is obvious that every- where the designations of moral value were at first applied to men, and were only derivatively and at a later period applied to actions; it is a gross mistake, therefore, when historians of morals start with questions like, “Why have sympathetic actions been praised?” The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: “What is injurious to me is injurious in itself”; he knows that it is he himself only who confers honour on things; he is a creator of values. He honours whatever he recognises in himself: such morality is self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of plenitude, of power, which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would fain give and bestow:—the noble man also helps the un- fortunate, but not—or scarcely—out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the super-abundance of power. The noble man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard. “Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast,” says an old Scandinavian Saga: it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of a proud Viking. Such a type of man is even proud of not being made for sympa- thy; the hero of the Saga therefore adds warningly: “He who has not a hard heart when young, will never have one.” The noble and brave who think thus are the furthest removed from the morality which sees precisely in sympathy, or in acting for the good of others, or in disinterestedness, the characteristic of the moral; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a radical enmity and irony towards “selflessness,” be- long as definitely to noble morality, as do a careless scorn and precaution in pres- ence of sympathy and the “warm heart.”—It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention. The profound reverence for age and for tradition—all law rests on this double reverence,—the belief and prejudice in favour of ancestors and unfavourable to newcomers, is typical in the morality of the powerful; and if, reversely, men of “modern ideas” believe almost instinctively in “progress” and the “future,” and are more and more lacking in respect for old age, the ignoble origin of these “ideas” has complacently betrayed itself thereby.

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A morality of the ruling class, however, is more especially foreign and irritating to present-day taste in the sternness of its principle that one has duties only to one’s equals; that one may act towards beings of a lower rank, towards all that is foreign; just as seems good to one, or “as the heart desires,” and in any case “beyond good and evil”: it is here that sympathy and similar sentiments can have a place. The ability and obligation to exercise prolonged gratitude and prolonged revenge—both only within the circle of equals,—artfulness in retaliation, effete refinement of the idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies (as outlets for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance—in fact, in order to be a good friend): all these are typical characteristics of the noble morality, which, as has been pointed out, is not the moral- ity of “modern ideas,” and is therefore at present difficult to realise, and also to un- earth and disclose.—It is otherwise with the second type of morality, slave-morality. Supposing that the abused, the oppressed, the suffering, the unemancipated, the weary, and those uncertain of themselves, should moralise, what will be the common element in their moral estimates? Probably a pessimistic suspicion with regard to the entire situation of man will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of man, together with his situation. The slave has an unfavourable eye for the virtues of the powerful; he has a scepticism and distrust, a refinement of distrust of everything “good” that is there honoured—he would fain persuade himself that the very happiness there is not genuine. On the other hand, those qualities which serve to alleviate the existence of sufferers are brought into prominence and flooded with light; it is here that sympathy, the kind, helping hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness attain to honour; for here these are the most useful qualities, and almost the only means of supporting the burden of existence. Slave-morality is essentially the morality of utility. Here is the seat of the origin of the famous antithesis “good” and “evil”:— power and dangerousness are assumed to reside in the evil, a certain dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which do not admit of being despised. According to slave- morality, therefore, the “evil” man arouses fear; according to master-morality, it is precisely the “good” man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being. The contrast attains its maximum when, in accordance with the logical consequences of slave-morality, a shade of depre- ciation—it may be slight and well-intentioned—at last attaches itself to the “good” man of this morality; because, according to the servile mode of thought, the good man must in any case be the safe man: he is good-natured, easily deceived, perhaps a little stupid, un bonhomme.…

261.…The man of noble character must first bring it home forcibly to his mind, especially with the aid of history, that, from time immemorial, in all social strata in any way dependent, the ordinary man was only that which he passed for:—not being at all accustomed to fix values, he did not assign even to himself any other value than that which his master assigned to him (it is the peculiar right of masters to create values). It may be looked upon as the result of an extraordinary atavism, that the ordinary man, even at present, is still always waiting for an opinion about himself, and then instinctively submitting himself to it; yet by no means only to a “good” opin- ion, but also to a bad and unjust one (think, for instance, of the greater part of the self- appreciations and self-depreciations which believing women learn from their confes- sors, and which in general the believing Christian learns from his Church).…

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265. At the risk of displeasing innocent ears, I submit that egoism belongs to the essence of a noble soul, I mean the unalterable belief that to a being such as “we,” other beings must naturally be in subjection, and have to sacrifice them- selves. The noble soul accepts the fact of his egoism without question, and also without consciousness of harshness, constraint, or arbitrariness therein, but rather as something that may have its basis in the primary law of things:—if he sought a designation for it he would say: “It is justice itself.” He acknowledges under certain circumstances, which made him hesitate at first, that there are other equally privi- leged ones; as soon as he has settled this question of rank, he moves among those equals and equally privileged ones with the same assurance, as regards modesty and delicate respect, which he enjoys in intercourse with himself—in accordance with an innate heavenly mechanism which all the stars understand. It is an additional in- stance of his egoism, this artfulness and self-limitation in intercourse with his equals—every star is a similar egoist; he honours himself in them, and in the rights which he concedes to them, he has no doubt that the exchange of honours and rights, as the essence of all intercourse, belongs also to the natural condition of things. The noble soul gives as he takes, prompted by the passionate and sensitive instinct of requital, which is at the root of his nature. The notion of “favour” has, among equals, neither significance nor good repute; there may be a sublime way of letting gifts as it were light upon one from above, and of drinking them thirstily like dew-drops; but for those arts and displays the noble soul has no aptitude. His egoism hinders him here: in general, he looks “aloft” unwillingly—he looks either forward, horizontally and deliberately, or downwards—he knows that he is on a height.

The Will to Power7

I regard Christianity as the most fatal and seductive lie that has ever yet existed—as the greatest and most impious lie: I can discern the last sprouts and branches of its ideal beneath every form of disguise, I decline to enter into any compromise or false position in reference to it—I urge people to declare open war with it.

The morality of paltry people as the measure of all things: this is the most re- pugnant kind of degeneracy that civilisation has ever yet brought into existence. And this kind of ideal is hanging still, under the name of “God,” over men’s heads!!

However modest one’s demands may be concerning intellectual cleanliness, when one touches the New Testament one cannot help experiencing a sort of inex- pressible feeling of discomfort; for the unbounded cheek with which the least quali- fied people will have their say in its pages, in regard to the greatest problems of existence, and claim to sit in judgment on such matters, exceeds all limits. The im- pudent levity with which the most unwieldy problems are spoken of here (life, the world, God, the purpose of life), as if they were not problems at all, but the most simple things which these little bigots know all about!!!…

The law, which is the fundamentally realistic formula of certain self- preservative measures of a community, forbids certain actions that have a definite

7 From The Will to Power in The Complete Works of Nietzsche, O. Levy, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 200–201.

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tendency to jeopardise the welfare of that community: it does not forbid the attitude of mind which gives rise to these actions—for in the pursuit of other ends the com- munity requires these forbidden actions, namely, when it is a matter of opposing its enemies. The moral idealist now steps forward and says: “God sees into men’s hearts: the action itself counts for nothing; the reprehensible attitude of mind from which it proceeds must be extirpated.…” In normal conditions men laugh at such things; it is only in exceptional cases, when a community lives quite beyond the need of waging war in order to maintain itself, that an ear is lent to such things. Any attitude of mind is abandoned, the utility of which cannot be conceived.

This was the case, for example, when Buddha appeared among a people that was both peaceable and afflicted with great intellectual weariness.

This was also the case in regard to the first Christian community (as also the Jewish), the primary condition of which was the absolutely unpolitical Jewish soci- ety. Christianity could grow only upon the soil of Judaism—that is to say, among a people that had already renounced the political life, and which led a sort of para- sitic existence within the Roman sphere of government. Christianity goes a step further: it allows men to “emasculate” themselves even more; the circumstances ac- tually favour their doing so.—Nature is expelled from morality when it is said, “Love ye your enemies”: for Nature’s injunction, “Ye shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy,” has now become senseless in the law (in instinct); now, even the love a man feels for his neighbour must first be based upon something (a sort of love of God). God is introduced everywhere, and utility is withdrawn; the natural origin of morality is denied everywhere: the veneration of Nature, which lies in acknowledging a natural morality, is destroyed to the roots.…

What is it I protest against? That people should regard this paltry and peaceful mediocrity, this spiritual equilibrium which knows nothing of the fine impulses of great accumulations of strength, as something high, or possibly as the standard of all things.

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. In your own words describe what Nietzsche calls the “slave-morality” and the “master- morality.”

2. Nietzsche believes that exploitation and domination of the weak by the strong is “the fundamental fact of all history.” Assuming this belief is true, would you consider it an argument for the validity of the master-morality? Might one not argue instead that we should curb our aggressive impulses and protect the weak? Explain.

3. How much truth do you find in Nietzsche’s characterization of the Judeo-Christian ethic as a slave-morality? Is he right when he says that it is “the morality of paltry people”? Explain.

4. Imagine a debate between Josiah Royce and Friedrich Nietzsche on the validity of the Golden Rule. What argument does each present? Who do you consider the winner? Why?

5. Nietzsche has sometimes been accused of inspiring Nazism. Does anything in the selection support such an accusation?

6. How would Nietzsche react to Hallie’s account of what transpired in Le Chambon during World War II?

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