Morality and historical perspective

MadArchitect · Sun Nov 11, 2007 1:19 pm

I don't have a lot of time to post at the moment, but I did want to throw out a few general questions that I've been mulling over since starting the book, to see what everyone thought.

In his introduction to the book, Jerome Kohn writes,


	Quote: No one was more aware than Arendt that the political crises of the twentieth centur-- first the outbreak of total war in 1914; then the rise of totalitarian regimes in Russia and Germany and the annihilation of entire classes and races of human beings; then the invention of the atomic bomb and its deployment to obliterate two Japanese cities in World War II; then the cold war and the unprecedented capacity of the post-totalitarian world to destroy itself with nuclear weapons; then Korea; the Vietnam; and on and on, events "cascading like a Niagra Falls of history" -- can be viewed in terms of a breakdown in morality.

I think we can all take it as given that those events can be viewed as "a breakdown of morality", so my question is, ought we to view them thus? Do you think that's the most valuable way to look at those historical events, or is there a better way to view them? Or is it simply a matter of what you need at the time, such that, sometimes it will be better to look at those events moralistically, and sometimes it will be better to look at them through some other lens?

Niall001 · Sun Nov 11, 2007 1:33 pm

It strikes me as an odd way to view the situation if only because I don't think that we can really say that morality was built up in the nineteenth century.

I think that the twentieth century events listed might be viewed as forming part of a pattern where the world began attempting to deal with technological and scientific advancements against a background where the old aristocracies went into decline and Marxism was on the rise.

MadArchitect · Wed Nov 14, 2007 7:59 pm


	Niall001 wrote: I think that the twentieth century events listed might be viewed as forming part of a pattern where the world began attempting to deal with technological and scientific advancements against a background where the old aristocracies went into decline and Marxism was on the rise.

Marxism adds a very specific element to that perspective, but otherwise, I'm not sure that it says anything all that unique about the twentieth century. Other centuries also had to deal with technological and scientific changes (I prefer that term to "advancements"), but we tend to downplay their significance in part because those earlier centuries rarely left any written testament to the chances wrought by technology. A pretty classic study on the matter is Lynn White Jr.'s "Medieval Technology and Social Change", which deals specifically with the introduction of the stirrup and its effects on the political and social organization of medieval Europe. The declining fortunes of the aristocracy provide another handle on the specific events that led us into the twentieth century, but social upheavel of that sort is evident in almost every time and place. Even Marxism, by far the most specific element you named, has its parallels in the utopian and enthusiastic movements of earlier generations -- nothing in its ideology distinguishes it so much as the fact that it garnered broader support than its predecessors.

Skipping ahead to the essay "Some Questions of Moral Responsibility", we find Arendt getting more specific (which is only natural, since the passage quoted at the outset of this thread was from Kohn's introduction).

Here she divides modernity into roughly three phases. The first was characterized by something akin to "premonition." Even Churchill, who thought he was describing what had already transpired, was only noting a step towards the middle stage. But over the course of more than a century, intellectuals and laypersons alike talked as though civilization were coming unmoored/unmored, and voiced some anxiety as to what would come of it.

Then there's the middle period, the result, which Arendt marks down as the period between the rise of the Nazis in 1933 to the end of World War II and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb in 1945. (It's possible, of course, that even that is not the final culmination, and we may yet see worse, as difficult to imagine as that may be.)

And then there's our own period, when we no longer look forward, as the Victorians did, to some horrible future portended by our present lack of mores, but backwards to the undeniable evidence of our incapacity, as a civilization, to adhere to some good. Prior to the Holocaust, prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people could still maintain that it was possible to order society in accordance with something like a human morality, but now we suspect the reality of any moral view of humanity.

(The Enlightenment, incidentally, faced the same kind of crisis with the destruction of Lisbon, at which point the notion that humans lived in a benignly ordered universe became practically untenable. Lisbon became a kind of unanswerable challenge to any argument that argued, with Leibnitz, that this was the best of all possible worlds. In like terms, the name Auschwitz has the power to end nearly any discussion on the inherent goodness of humanity.)

seeker · Sat Nov 17, 2007 6:16 pm

I'm getting off to a slow start in this book, since I've been spending most of my reading time on the other one. Although I disagree with much of what Arendt says (so far, at least) I found the following thought-provoking:

Arendt said:


	Quote: A moment of reflection will convince you that none of these grounds is valid for the punishment of the so-called war criminals: these people were not ordinary criminals and hardly any one of them can reasonably be expected to commit further crimes; society is in no need of being protected from them. That they can be improved through prison sentences is even less likely than in the case of ordinary criminals, and as to the possibility of deterring such criminals in the future, the chances again are dismally small in view of the extraordinary circumstances under which these crimes were committed or might be committed in the future.

This seems to be suggesting that "ordinary criminals" are those who are dispositionally inclined toward criminal behavior, while war criminals only behave in criminal ways under very specific circumstances and are not likely to repeat that behavior. Apart from the fact that this seems like a surprising statement for Arendt to make, it is an interesting assertion. My thinking on this, until now, has been influenced by Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, in which he asserts that a fanatic is always a fanatic (by disposition), and that if you discredit one cause or ideology, the True Believer will adopt another one.

So, here is my question. Is a person who kills thousands of people, not for personal gain, but for an ideology or religion, or a person who kills and martyrs themselves (e.g. a suicide bomber), driven by a disposition to "True Belief" and extreme demonstrations of it, or by a specific situation that only happens once in a lifetime, if ever? And just to muddy the waters a bit more, recall that a True Believer (someone who is willing to sacrifice his/her own interest for a cause), may be judged a criminal (e.g. a terrorist) or a saint (e.g. the nuns who where slaughtered in South America for defending the rights of the poor), sometimes depending on which side you are on (I'm thinking revolutionaries such as Che Guevara here).

MadArchitect · Sun Nov 18, 2007 4:16 am


	seeker wrote: My thinking on this, until now, has been influenced by Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, in which he asserts that a fanatic is always a fanatic (by disposition), and that if you discredit one cause or ideology, the True Believer will adopt another one.

But part of Arendt's point is that the majority of people accused as war criminals were not, in any appreciable sense, fanatics. Most of them were actually quite mild mannered, like Eichmann, and were acting in full accordance with the laws and aims of the societies in which they lived. In coining the phrase "banality of evil" she was resisting the urge to see Nazi war criminals in just that light -- as exceptional cases of zealotry or depravity. An Eichmann living in Denmark probably never would have involved himself in anything so extraordinary as genocide -- that a German Eichmann did so is due only to an extraordinary set of circumstances that he himself was unlikely to ever encounter again.


	Quote: Is a person who kills thousands of people, not for personal gain, but for an ideology or religion, or a person who kills and martyrs themselves (e.g. a suicide bomber), driven by a disposition to "True Belief" and extreme demonstrations of it, or by a specific situation that only happens once in a lifetime, if ever?

Well, first off, I don't think the question is entirely germaine to what Arendt is talking about. The sort of war criminals she has in mind didn't kill for ideological or religious reasons. They killed because the law enjoined them to, and they considered it a rather routine form of good citizenship to follow the law.

Recognizing as much, however, does nothing to invalidate your question, and I think it's worth answering for its own merit, regardless of whether or not it bears on Arendt's points.

What I would say is that an disposition towards "True Belief" (if we're going to stick to Hoffer's terminology -- I find Hoffer a little problematic, but I recognize his influence and import) is developed biographically. People aren't born true believers; events and experiences in their lives create that need, so there is an element of contingency that is erratic and unpredictable because it depends on events that are by no means inevitable. I wouldn't say that's the same thing as their being situational, though. It depends, I would think, on responses that are the result of a person's individual character, so you can't subject two different people to the same set of experiences and expect reliable results in terms of making "True Believers" of them.

The distinction between situational and biographical development is mostly that the latter is an issue of character. Having developed that inclination towards True Belief does a lot to determine how you'll react in a given situation, whereas in a more schematic sense of the term situational we'd be talking about fairly predictable responses that occur in humans across the board.

But getting back to Arendt, one of the remarkable things about mid-20th century war criminals -- particular when you compare them to today's bogeymen: terrorists -- is that, for the most part, they didn't have the character you would expect of a killer. A lot of the SS officers directly involved in the torture and killing of the "inferior races" probably were sadists, but they make up only a small proportion of the people who were knowing accomplices in the act of genocide, and most of those people could hardly be considered zealots. On the contrart, a lot of them seemed to exhibit the same sort of detached indifference characteristic of the rising middle classes in 19th and 20th century Europe. So in their case, I would say that the willingness to engage in or at least condone behavior that, from a broader perspective would have struck them as patently immoral, probably was at least partly a situational response, rather than a matter character. And it seems to me that part of Arendt's point is that they never would have made war criminals of themselves had they been more conscientious in making their own personal characters an element of their assessment of the situation.

Dissident Heart · Wed Nov 21, 2007 3:12 pm


	Quote: H. Arendt: A moment of reflection will convince you that none of these grounds is valid for the punishment of the so-called war criminals: these people were not ordinary criminals and hardly any one of them can reasonably be expected to commit further crimes; society is in no need of being protected from them. That they can be improved through prison sentences is even less likely than in the case of ordinary criminals, and as to the possibility of deterring such criminals in the future, the chances again are dismally small in view of the extraordinary circumstances under which these crimes were committed or might be committed in the future.

So, penalizing them will do no good, because they aren't real criminals: and locking them away from society is really no protection, since they aren't really a threat. But the crimes they committed were real and threatened to really destroy soceity. The deed is severed from the doer; better, the doer during deed is not the same doer after the deed. Something happened to the doer that led to a deed which is not of their doing. Holding the doer accountable for the deed does not accurately reflect the relationship between deed and doer: an extenuating set of circumstances and arrangement of forces forced the doer to do the deed.

What are the extenuating set of circumstances and arrangement of forces that forced the deed out of the doer? The banality of evil describes the consolidation of laws, customs, attitudes, morals and values that forced the doer to do the deed. But whence the banality of evil but the combination of deeds done by individual doers? If individual doers chose differently, then the deed would not have been done: or, a different deed would have developed.

Thus, the banality of evil is not social forces beyond individual control, but individuals relinquishing their duty to do the right deed. Duty to who or what, from where?

Ophelia · Wed Jan 02, 2008 4:52 pm

I haven't read Arendt's book, but I am much interested in the quotation being
discussed:


	Quote: Arendt: A moment of reflection will convince you that none of these grounds is valid for the punishment of the so-called war criminals: these people were not ordinary criminals and hardly any one of them can reasonably be expected to commit further crimes; society is in no need of being protected from them. That they can be improved through prison sentences is even less likely than in the case of ordinary criminals, and as to the possibility of deterring such criminals in the future, the chances again are dismally small in view of the extraordinary circumstances under which these crimes were committed or might be committed in the future.

I believe war criminals should be punished, even if the possibility that prison will improve them is slight. Their punishment will have a symbolical value, and even if the chance that it can act as a deterrent in the future is slight and may only work with a few would-be evil doers in the future, it is worth punishing them.

Arendt forgets an important point (unless she mentions this elsewhere) : punishing war criminals will help those of their victims that are still alive by making a clear and public condemnation of their acts. It will help the victims heal, if only a little.

"these people were not ordinary criminals and hardly any one of them can reasonably be expected to commit further crimes"

There is one famous case from French contemporary history which shows that Arendt's reasoning is wrong, and I am sure that more examples could be found.
Have you heard of the Papon Case?

M Papon was a high-ranking civil servant during the infamous Vichy regime which "governed " the "free" part of France during most of 1941_44. It was only found much later that he had personally signed the deportation of 1690 Bordaux Jews.

As he managed to keep this secret, he was not punished for his crimes against humanity until several decades later, and he was responsible for more crimes in 1961: As Prefect of Paris, he organized a brutal repression against Algerian demonstrators. Several of them were killed, and their bodies were thrown into the Seine.

He was finally tried in 1998.
This was probably too late to help the victims, but it also made French people remember or dig up information that had been allowed to be forgotten.
The trial was important because it symbolized all the cowardice and wrong choices that had been made during the Vichy Years.

The wikipedia article about Maurice Papon is worth reading.

MadArchitect · Thu Jan 03, 2008 12:15 am


	Ophelia wrote: Arendt forgets an important point (unless she mentions this elsewhere) : punishing war criminals will help those of their victims that are still alive by making a clear and public condemnation of their acts. It will help the victims heal, if only a little.

I don't think that a point Arendt would be likely to forget, she being, herself, a Jewish fugitive from Germany. But it's a point she might debate, having also attended the trial of Adolph Eichmann. I am, by no means, qualified to answer your suggestion, but I do think it an interesting question, however implicit: Do public trials of this sort really help the victims? Can you help anyone by putting to death a symbol of an act that was so huge.

With all due respect, I'm not sure the M. Papon case is really analogous. Papon was, it seems, the sole perpetrator of the betrayal, and was acting against the prevailing legal standards of the nation he represented. By those terms, his behavior would hardly have been defended as an act of state. He was acting extraordinarily given his context, whereas the war criminals of Nazi Germany were behaving in strict observance of the law of their nation.

At any rate, I'm not sure that Arendt would accept an argument that the symbolic value of an execution should trump other consideration pertaining to the issue of justice. Once we've allowed that argument, how do we steer clear of other forms of scapegoatism?

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