Beyond Disbelief

Mark Larrimore
Assistant Professor of Religion
Princeton University

Among the reasons the Holocaust -- the systematic murder of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis -- went unstopped for so long was disbelief: reports of the killing factories at Auschwitz and elsewhere were dismissed as incredible by United States officials contacted by members of the Polish underground, no less than by German Jews who did not flee Germany while they still could. In reports of the liberators of the death camps, too, the language of disbelief is pervasive. And the first generation of writers who made their way gingerly about the cataclysm spoke repeatedly of the no longer credible state of inherited understandings of human nature, of civilization, of science, of religion, of ethics, of art, even of language after the Holocaust. After Auschwitz, nothing human made sense any more.

This sense of disbelief, of shock, of rupture has perhaps been the major way of thinking about the significance and legacy of the Holocaust for people living with and after it. But I want to suggest today that it needs to be reconsidered. For the Holocaust doesn't shock us in that way anymore, at least not those of us born too late too have experienced a pre-Holocaust world. In its very calculated barbarity, in its very use of "useless violence,"¹ the Holocaust makes sense -- as much sense, in any event, as anything else people do, good or evil or indifferent. Born two decades after the end of the war, I don't have the luxury of saying that the acts of the perpetrators are unintelligible, incomprehensible, because these acts are among those human behaviors my notions of the intelligibility, comprehensibility of human action were designed to account for. The evil of the perpetrators has been described as "inhuman," off the map of human good or evil. But nowadays, the map has been extended to include genocide. The map with the help of which we try to orient ourselves as human beings trying to live good and decent lives is a map with Auschwitz on it. Protestations of incomprehension risk becoming merely rhetorical, even nostalgically sentimental.

This is in no way to suggest that the events of the Holocaust are not shocking; as the disbelief of millions then and now attests, they are. But can we still be shocked in the same way? Those who lived at least part of their lives before the Holocaust had a certain faith that things like the Holocaust could not happen which we now cannot but see as an illusion. (This may be a faith people only realized they had had in retrospect .) To try to recover that illusion is both futile and dangerous. Without that illusion, however, our shock is likely to take on an affected character. We mouth the words "I can't believe human beings were capable of this," but deep down we know perfectly well that they are capable, that they have indeed always been capable of this. We are horrified, but the shock is not the same as finding out that someone you thought incapable of killing is a killer. Our horror on encountering an aspect of the Holocaust we did not know of -- or reports of atrocities in Cambodia or Rwanda or Bosnia, or earlier in human history -- is that of someone seeing a proven killer kill again. One might say that we have lost the sense of what a truly innocent person is, of a person who is not a potential killer.

The illusion destroyed by what we know happened in and on the way to the death camps, is irretrievable to us today as a candidate for belief -- as irretrievable as a thoroughly extinguished religion, or (to give a more recent example) the unthinking confidence in the moral superiority of European civilization which was by all accounts destroyed by the butchery of the first World War. The senseless savagery we know the imperial European powers were capable of on the battlefields of the Great War makes us see the prior history of these countries, as well as their relations to their colonial subjects, in a manner radically different from any available to them. In the same way, the rise of Nazism has changed irrevocably the way we understand much more than just 20th century German history -- the enlightenment, the reformation, the inquisition, the crusades, as well as the moral blindnesses of Christian societies like the slave-holding United States.

I say "we" here somewhat unconfidently. Audience reactions to the film "Schindler's List" seem to show that many people can yet be shocked in the way I said we no longer can be. But I wonder how many of even those viewers of the film who apparently knew next to nothing about the Holocaust had not already assimilated the idea that human beings are capable of such crimes from television and other films. For them, too, the shock of seeing "Schindler's List" will have been like finding out that a potential killer has in fact killed. This is a point related to but distinct from the widely remarked numbness to violence in American culture. Even if they have not seen images of the Holocaust, for instance, chances are there are few Americans who have not seen pious or impious references to the theory and practice of Nazi genocide in art and entertainment, or read about it in novels or books on ethics. (It is a sobering thought to consider that rendering its populace numb to violence was a goal of Nazi policy.)

I do not recommend an approach to human beings -- oneself always included -- as potential killers for its own sake. (It's not something we can choose to have.) I want, rather, to suggest that after Auschwitz not seeing people that way is naive, perhaps culpably so, at least as a point of departure for ethics and politics. More, in many cases the naivetŽ is affected, or dishonestly gained. What do I mean by this? By affected naivetŽ I mean that of someone who looks away from something she knows is there because she doesn't want to see it, as so many of us avoid eye contact with the homeless, and turn the pages of the newspaper reporting the ongoing agony of countries in famine or civil war, or of poverty and disease in our own. By dishonestly gained naivetŽ I mean the varieties of fatuous faith that "It can't happen here" which are often stowaways in our indispensable work of reconstructing the concrete historical reality of the Holocaust. As we name and commemorate its victims, name and condemn its perpetrators, and try to make sense of the behavior of these perpetrators, as well as of those people who looked on or looked away, the indifferent and the acquiescing, those who actively and those who passively profited from the fate of their neighbors -- a group we are rapidly coming to realize extends well beyond the limits of Nazi Germany and its allies -- we may unwittingly lend solace to those who think the Holocaust an expression only of the potential for evil of some, perhaps reassuringly few, members of the human race. We ought to know better: it could happen anywhere. Knowing this, we are doubly responsible if we let it happen again -- more responsible than most of those who lived in the time of Auschwitz.

This sense of responsibility is liable to arrive together with a feeling of futility, of despair at or at least skepticism concerning the capacity of human art, reflection and legislation to curb the potential for evil in us. What Judith Shklar called a "liberalism of fear"² seems indispensable, but it is not enough to assure us that the dream of human goodness isn't just that -- a dream. The more we learn about the involvement of or acquiescence in evil of ordinary as well as extraordinary Germans and others, the harder it becomes to think that anything straight can be made from the crooked timber of humanity.

* * *

I want to spend the rest of my remarks recommending a book which faces these problems more honestly than anything else I have read, the late Philip Hallie's Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm.³ This book records a passionate moral philosopher's lifetime of grappling with the often desperate skepticism any prolonged engagement with the Holocaust and what it tells us about human potential is bound to produce. Tales of Good and Evil tells of his effort to make sense of the possibility and significance of human goodness in the face of the depressing reality of what, borrowing from e. e. cummings, he calls "manunkind."⁴ For this reason, Hallie's book is an excellent guide for us as we consider how to balance memory with action, realism with hope.

Hallie may be known to you as the author of Lest innocent blood be shed: the story of the village of Le Chambon and how goodness happened there,⁵ his deeply affecting description of the moral heroism of the small French town of Chambon-sur-Lignon during the German occupation of France, which saved the lives of thousands of Jewish refugees, many of them children. Tales of Good and Evil shows us how the discovery that "goodness happened" in le Chambon changed Hallie's understanding of human nature and of ethics -- but also that his moral questioning continued after it. Hallie's explorations help us to a chastened awareness of the goodness of good in the absence of any confidence in the goodness of most of us (including ourselves). He grapples with despair and skepticism both about the possibility of genuine goodness, and about its odds of survival in a world of morally complex people and situations, a world in which goodness appears as rare and strange (to use one of Hallie's favorite analogies) as the eye of a hurricane.⁶

I would like very briefly to mention three aspects of Tales of Good and Evil of particular relevance to the question, what we can yet aspire to in the age of manunkind. First, as I've mentioned, Tales of Good and Evil describes a lifetime of restless searching. The discovery of the goodness at le Chambon saves Hallie from one kind of despair, but plunges him into a new kind of doubt, as he considers the insignificance of such goodness in the struggle against evil, as well as its inaccessibility to people like himself. Hallie goes on to explore other cases of moral heroism, producing an intensely personal and ever more complex -- but never final -- account of the continuing wonder of human goodness. Tales of Good and Evil is a book of ethics for our times because it chronicles rather than concealing the never satisfied searching for meaning and hope in human affairs which is one of the legacies of the Holocaust.

This leads to a second instructive aspect of Hallie's work. Hallie finds in his searching that stories alone make ethical concepts real to him.

For forty years now I have been studying and teaching ethics ... I have found that the soul, the demand of ethics, has very little to do with abstract words like "good" and "evil." General principles, like John Stuart Mill's greatest happiness [principle] ... or Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative ..., do not make the goodness in helping as clear to me as do ... stories of the Good Samaritan or Father Damien [the Belgian priest who helped lepers on Molokai until he died with them]. At their best Kant's and Mill's philosophies are ingenious generalizations about particular people doing and feeling particular things. I can understand principles only insofar as I can understand a story that embodies them. If there were no stories to illuminate their principles, I would not understand the principles at all. They would be words about words about words....

It has been said that God dwells in detail; be that as it may, it is plain that good and evil and help and harm dwell in detail, or they dwell nowhere.⁷

I said earlier that the Holocaust makes sense -- as much sense as anything else people do, good or evil or indifferent. That does not mean that I think any human actions make ultimately satisfying sense at all. Our understanding of the human is crippled, and most every kind of human act can seem natural or extraordinary from the vantage point of some theory of human nature. No theory, however, seems to be able to make sense at once of the very great evil and the very great good of which human beings are capable. In this context, concrete tales of human good and human evil, of help and harm, are the only way to conquer -- however fleetingly -- the skepticism which is the natural response to this untransparency of human nature to itself.

A third and final point. When Hallie discovers goodness, he is shocked by it. (In Lest Innocent Blood be Shed and again in Tales of Good and Evil, Hallie recounts how his first reaction to reading about the activities of le Chambon was to weep.⁸) His shock is only deepened by the discovery that the heroes of le Chambon refuse to think of themselves and their actions as good. He describes a conversation with one citizen of le Chambon, whose description of the heroism of her town during the war makes him whisper "words that came from the same deep levels of my being from which my tears had sprung: 'But you are good people, good." At this his interlocutor interrupts him:

"I'm sorry, but you see, you have not understood what I have been saying. We have been talking about saving the children. We did not do what we did for goodness' sake. We did it for the children. Don't use words like 'good' with me. They are foolish words."⁹

 

With wonder, Hallie ruminates on the utter self-evidence of good, the sense in which it seems to its agents natural, ordinary, matter-of-course. Hallie regularly invokes the language of "mystery" when discussing goodness -- "It has something supernatural in it"¹⁰ -- but mysterious in an almost paradoxical way, as when he characterizes good as a "beautiful, useful, and utterly clear mystery."¹¹ A clear mystery? What Hallie is struggling to describe here is the great mystery that it is precisely the naturalness, the ordinariness, the banality of true good (as it is understood by its agents) that is most shocking to us in the age of manunkind. It shows us that human good is possible, too, but not how to get there from here. And so it renders us more, not less, aware of the brokenness of our view of human nature.¹²

In this lies an important lesson. As Hallie helps us see, what the Holocaust presents us with may well be the problem not of evil but of good -- for in some ways, extreme good has become as incomprehensible to us as extreme evil was to the generations who lived before Auschwitz.¹³ While it is necessary that we come to as concrete and detailed an understanding of the events of those dark days as possible, and while it is important that people be shocked out of the varieties of affected and dishonestly gained naivetŽ, it is needful also to collect tales of good to combat the skepticism and moral numbness which are natural responses to manunkind. Without reminders that human beings, potential killers all, are also potential savers, we are in danger of losing our capacity to be shocked out of despondent acquiescence into action in the effort to ensure that such crimes never happen again.¹⁴

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¹Cf. Primo Levi, "Useless Violence," in The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 105-26.

²See Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), as well as the essays collected in Liberalism without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar, ed. Bernard Yack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

³Philip Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).

⁴See e. e. cummings' "pity this busy monster, manunkind, not." My thanks to Doris A. Hallie for the genealogy of the term.

⁵Philip P. Hallie, Lest innocent blood be shed: the story of the village of Le Chambon and how goodness happened there (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

⁶See esp. Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, 52f.

⁷Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, 6-7.

⁸Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood be Shed, "Prelude"; Tales of Good and Evil, 24-26.

⁹Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, 31.

¹⁰Hallie, Introduction to the HarperPerennial Edition of Lest innocent blood be shed (dated Aug. 1993), 9.

¹¹Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, 7.

¹²Remarking on how his perspective had changed since the writing of Lest innocent blood be shed, Hallie in 1993 reflected: "The moral brilliance of the villagers does not light up the moral darkness around the village as much as it makes that vast darkness seem darker by contrast." (Introduction to the HarperPerennial Edition, 3)

¹³The confidence that good is to be expected -- either because human nature is good, or because it is part of the creation of a good God -- which informs the traditional ways of approaching the problem of evil is now questionable. We are now as likely to expect evil, and be surprised by the good.

¹⁴I would like to thank Leora Batnitzky, Shaun Marmon, Victor Preller and J. B. Schneewind for their comments and suggestions, and Natalie Brender for introducing me to the work of Philip Hallie.