Next I’m looking at morality and altruism after the Holocaust. Zymunt Bauman argues that the Holocaust proves that societal rules, norms and standards cannot be the only source of morality. Perpetrators often argued in court that they were only following the law of their country. How can we judge them if morals are the product of a relative social context? Instead, he argues, the source of morality is in a fundamental responsibility to an other in proximity. And there’s plenty of evidence for this. A biological repulision to killing, for example. Or the distancing and division of labour that was required to scale the genocide. If proximity and responsibility are at the heart of a kind of moral objectivity, what might the consequences of this be?
What can we learn about morality from the Holocaust?
In the last video – How We Become Genocidal – I looked at the psychological factors that lead ordinary people to kill, asking what it is that motivates humans to be immoral. Today, I want to ask what that can teach us about morality itself? To do so, we’ll employ the help of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and look at bureaucracy, the rescuers of Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, and see if we can find an objective core to what morality is.
But briefly, what is morality?
- What is Morality
Morality and ethics are the question of right and wrong behaviour. Moral questions about friendship, family, money, politics, following the rules of the road are a central part of our every day lives. We tend to follow certain rules and ideas about what the right thing to do is; you should keep a promise to your friend, for example.
So where do these moral rules come from? What’s their source?
The dominant perspective is that moral norms come from society. Their cause or source is societal. Certain behaviours are beneficial for the society you live in. The behaviour – driving on the correct side of the road, for example – are functional, useful.
This means that morality only exists because of the social context you live in. If you lived on a desert island it wouldn’t really matter what you did The sociologist Emile Durkhiem said ‘man is a moral being only because he lives in society.’
But this means that if moral rules come from society, you can only be judged right or wrong by that society. Immoral behaviour is measured as a ‘deviation from a norm’ a norm which is supplied by society. On the desert island there are no norms. And if a society practices cannibalism whose to say its wrong? Whose to say murder or human sacrifice is wrong if that’s just how a group lives?
And who can prove the Holocaust was morally wrong if the perpetrators were simply following the laws of the their country? Clearly, morality must not just come from the norms and rules of particular societies.
This is a problem the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman addresses in his book Modernity and the Holocaust. And it’s a problem that came up in the postwar trials of German soldiers. They were, they argued, just following orders.
Hannah Arendt wrote that ‘What we have demanded in these trials, where the defendants had committed `legal’ crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgement, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all these around them.’
Bauman calls it the question of whether there can be a ‘moral responsibility for resisting socialization.’
If social rules – years of propaganda, for example, upbringing, everything you’ve ever known – call for you to kill and you decide its immoral to do so, you decide to resist, then morality must also come from elsewhere.
And we all have an intuition – I think – that this is the case. We just know, in our gut, its wrong to be violent, independent of what you’re told? Does moral responsibility not come from somewhere in the individual too?
Bauman has an answer that’s both simple and complicated at the same time. In short, he says that the source of morality is not social rules, but the moment when two or more people come together in proximity with each other.
He says morality comes from the social but not the societal sphere. It comes from being with others, in a ‘social’ context, but not from ‘societal’ training, enforcement, culture, or education. There is something between those two things.
Fundamentally, morality is a responsibility to another.
Responsibility
Imagine an encounter between two people in a state of nature – a presocietal world.
There could be a number of responses. They might act with suspicion, with fear, with retreat, or with communication, with friendliness, with cooperation.
Either way, there’s a response, a back and forth, a need to react. A ‘re’ – a ‘what should I do’. I am no longer alone, no longer the master of all choices, there is another that constrains, or at least alters, my options. Why is re a prefix to so many moral words? Re-prehensible, re-roach, re-cede, re-flect, re-sponse, re-sponsibilty.
There’s something fundamental and universal about this moment:
Responsibility is the condition of having to react and respond in the proximity of another person. It is, Bauman says, unconditional. It precedes knowledge, language, culture, norms.
He says that ‘Morality is not a product of society. Morality is something society manipulates – exploits, re-directs, jams’
If this is the case then morality and proximity are fundamentally linked.
Morality and Proximity
So how does this fit in with the Holocaust?
First, its consistent with what we saw in the last video. In Christopher Browning’s book ordinary men, the police order to murder unarmed men, women and children struggled to come to terms with their task. Many of them being physically sick. One officer said that ‘some of our comrades got sick from the smell and sight of the half decomposed corpses , so they had to throw up all over the truck.’ One said there was a ‘bestial sense.’
Others reported– and this is consistent with evidence from other genocides too – that if they knew the person or they’d gotten to know them while they were a prisoner in some way, they’d struggle to kill them.
When confronted with a responsibility for an other, people find it difficult to kill. Many studies point to how soldiers purposely shoot around their targets, for example.
Now again, this might be intuitive to most of us but whats more interesting is how Nazis got around this. Bauman says the answer is not only found anti-semitism, but in the nature of modernity itself. Modernity technologizes, bureaucratises, it has the effect of distancing us from each other.
HE writes ‘This neutralizing, isolating and marginalizing was an achievement of the Nazi regime deploying the formidable apparatus of modern industry, transport, science, bureaucracy, technology. Without them, the Holocaust would be unthinkable; the grandiose vision of a Jew free Europe, of the total annihilation of the Jewish race, would peter out in a multitude of bigger and smaller pogroms perpetrated by psychopaths, sadists, fanatics or other addicts of gratuitous violence;’
Bauman points out that at the rate of death on Krystalnacht it would have taken 200 years to kill as many as were eventually killed. The Nazis needed modern technology and bureaucracy. Both things that distance people from one another, both physically and mentally.
Take bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy leads to a division of labour. And part of this is a kind of managerial authority. Authority, in many cases, means a transfer of moral responsibility on to a superior. You don’t have to think about the big picture, you have a single task in the overall project.
Tasks are divided and so the task you perform is separated from the overall goal. You could be a train driver transporting Jews to Auschwitz but be unaware of what you’re doing because of the division of labour. The same train car that transported Jews to is used to transport coal and wood and soldiers. So engineers asked to calculate the tonnage of human bodies use the same rational means they use to calculate the weight of coal. In modernity, moral knowledge is replaced with technical know-how.
There’s also the distancing that took place by ghettoization, by shaving, by enforcing the wearing of the star of David. The distancing in propaganda. This also fits with Milgrams study, where the closer you were to the person you were meant to shock the less likely it was that you’d comply. Much of this fits with Baumans theory. Once you remove proximity, you weaken the feeling of responsibility towards another person in need.
Rescuers.
But there’s another way this topic can be approached. By looking at the rescuers of Jews in occupied Germany.In a landmark study, the historian Perry London found that there were three dominant factors found in those who rescued Jews.
A spirit of adventurousness. A strong tie with a parent with strong moral conduct. And a sense of being socially marginal.
All of one group, for example, had parents that taught them bible studies at home. Others felt like they were also outsiders in society: Baptists in catholic countries or Catholics in protestants.
This leads to a challenge to Bauman. The literature on rescuers implies not that altruism and the compulsion to rescue arises from proximity but that it must be taught, or at least is intensified by a context – like being marginal, or by reading the bible. But there is another factor.
Most rescuers had a moment of recognition, a realisation about what was happening. They saw beatings or found bodies, had an encounter with a Jew Hunter.
There was a ‘recognition of needs’ – and note the ‘re’ in recognition again.
Historian Douglas Huneke argues that there’s often a moment where rescuers decided that they are ‘personally responsible for an intervention’. That a failure to act will have consequences, that if they didn’t do something someone would die. Rescuers often saw a situation in terms of a need that they could fulfil. A hiding place, food, false documents. They often said things like ‘they had to do it.’ That they had no choice. Or ‘What else could I do’?
Which fits perfectly with Bauman’s proximity theory. When they saw a need they could address rescuers were compelled, felt a duty, a responsibility.
Ultimately, when were confronted with a situation in which another person needs something for survival, and we can fulfil that need, there’s likely a strong natural and biological compulsion to do so. Conversely, Distances erodes this compulsion.
CONCLUSION
If morality has some objective foundation in proximity and responsibility, then distancing becomes dangerous.
This has a worrying significance in the modern world, when technology, social media, bureaucracy, individualism and neoliberalism distance and isolate us from one and another every day.
Bauman says ‘The significance — and danger — of moral indifference becomes particularly acute in our modern, rationalized, industrial technologically proficient society because in such a society human action can be effective at a distance’
Long-range weapons, division of labour in bureaucracy – especially in welfare systems – , the internet – all of these things could have a dangerous effect on how we interpret what we’re doing when others are in involved. It’s easy to be a troll online, much harder in real life. Thinking about teaching morality or building moral institutions must start from this foundation.
Sources:
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust
https://people.duke.edu/~jmoody77/TheoryNotes/mod_hol_1.htm
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men
Douglas Huneke, A Study of Christians Who Rescued Jews During the Nazi Era
Roger S. Gottlieb, Some Implications of the Holocaust for Ethics and Social Philosophy
Janusz Reykowski, The Justice Motive and Altruistic Helping: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Europe
Kristen Renwick Monroe, Cracking the Code of Genocide: The Moral Psychology of Rescuers, Bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust