Ping Pong 51: The Shout of Evil
Surely the oddest legacy of the Second World War is the legacy of Evil which it bequeathed to subsequent generations. It is of course very seldom in human history that something so horrific, so needless and so widespread happens that almost everyone can agree after the event, that here at last is Evil manifested in the world. Moreover it is surely unique, in the fact that nothing, under any circumstance is allowed to mitigate that Evil. If one mitigates or even explains the evil of the Final Solution, then one is somehow caught up in it or one is somehow an apologist for it. This, the rubric runs, is really unforgivable, almost unfathomable EVIL. The Second World War or more particularly the Final Solution thereby takes an almost totemic role. It is the one thing in a world of doubt and complex realities, a world which can find moral absolutes difficult and problematic, that we can all agree on. The Nazis and the policy of the Final Solution is manifest evil.
This is most certainly justified and probably inevitable, and yet it has cast a long legacy on subsequent times. The problem of course is that this ‘absolute’ provides a strange and yet compulsive measure against which all other acts of violence and destruction can be judged. One therefore looks at particularly grisly states or violent acts and measures them up against the callous horrific brutality of the Final Solution. They are seen as alike, akin, and therefore to be condemned. The moral absolute of the Evil state has then become the means to measure subsequent acts. The problem with this, is that while in extreme cases the rules here are relatively (and it is only relatively) clear, the application is by no means simple. The real problem underpinning the monolithic vileness the Third Reich was a mixture of elements which in themselves are callous or idiotic or expressions of Real-politik but not ‘simply’ evil. What we can condemn out of hand is the violence and horror of the Final Solution as it was enacted towards the end of the Second World War. Wrapped up in that, we also condemn the policies or racism and stigmatization that lead up to this ‘solution’. But then there is the problem of where these two ‘evils’ (big and little) begin, and at least two other policies start. For we might well condemn the elaborate bureaucracy and impersonal organization which was capable of creating a machine capable of killing so many and with such apparent ease. Or again we might condemn the real policy element implicit within any final solution. That is, the idea that a state needs to do something horrific from time to time to ensure that a certain ethnic or religious group remain in charge of that state. The problem is of course that all these condemnations are never simple. Or rather it is never a simple matter to decide at what point (if ever) these other policies of the Third Reich, policies which to a degree all governments indulge in, come under the category of ‘Evil’. We might say then ‘Never again’ and wonder who they will come for next, and yet we can never really know or can invent no clear way of knowing whether (or if) this is again threatening, and whether therefore it is time to man the barricades again and drive the ‘Third Reich’ and all its legacy off again.
This problem is made all the more extreme because of course different countries or classes or cultures have different takes on who and what is being evil, or whether that ‘evil’ is merely practical government. Your evil is my effective rule and vice versa. It therefore becomes impossible to actually have a very meaningful discussion with one another. We each look at the other evils and start to mutter about fascisms and ’Never Again’… This intolerance of evil or rather the problem of understanding where it is, can be usefully divided up into four distinct separate topics. There are; evils in the abstract, evils in the biological, evils of the state and evils of society. Each of these separate manifestations of evil be examined in turn. The first two in this Rant and the second two in the next one.
In the abstract, Evil is of course relatively easy to define. One can draw up a system of Human Rights that are inalienable and absolute, as the response to what the Second World War and its evil stripped out of humanity. However this very simplicity leads to important problems with our use of this world of simple moral absolutes.
Firstly, if one takes an example such as torture; One can therefore condemn torture and false imprisonment, one can condemn racisms and murder with an open heart. However while of course such moves are beautifully simply in the abstract, they immediately hit rather heavy water, the minute they move off from the world of high ideals. Or to put it slightly differently, it is in the nature of high ideals and the reaction to an abstracted notion of evil (the concentration camp) that it assumes that its absolutes are just that, and just that for all of time. We condemn torture period. There is no need to compromise or justify – we simply condemn, which is utterly a noble sentiment. However it hits the problem that it fails to tackle or address exactly why torture happens in the first place. It simply condemns. It faces those states who are undergoing the temptation to torture, with an absolute to either ignore or avoid. Moreover those who torture do not feel questioned seriously by this absolute moratorium. That is, for those who torture, this rule exists merely as a local custom to be avoided at all costs. One knows the rule and sets up detention sites to avoid its implications (i.e. sleep deprivation in Abu Ghraib prison).
The entire battle then slips into a meaningless struggle about international law and its infringement, as if that law itself was good. The actual real debate is then lost. Why one absolutely condemns torture is because it mixes in a horrific manner the policies of vengeance with the policies of justice and the policies of prevention, and does so in such a way that one can no longer tell truth from lies or real wars from fantasy wars. Torture is wrong therefore because it takes one into a dark world where war becomes endless and problematic (my loathing of torture makes me your enemy, your using torture makes me more likely to attack you, to think about it, etc.). This deep and very real problem of torture is then totally occluded within a legalistic debate of absolute moralities versus real policy, and the entire world loses by the fact. Torture therefore is wrong in that it makes wars endless in the mind (“I cannot get certain images out of my head”) and then in reality (“I just had to do something”), and not because it is wrong simply on an abstract plain. If one pretends that it is simply ‘against the rules’ one invites states to simply avoid those rules (extraordinary rendition).
Secondly there is that age old problem of exactly where culture ends and absolutes start. We all condemn murder and rape of course – but we might not all condemn at all times war and marriage, which from another angle might involve both. One is then left with the impossible choice - does one act in the name of universal human rights (where all war and all rape are clearly wrong) or does one allow cultural (and partial) exceptions? The problem of course being that once you allow an exception, then the power of that exception is likely to grow and flourish. The actual beauty of the abstract right is thereby lost in the process. If you do not allow the exception, however then one is condemned into accepting increasingly extreme, potentially hypocritical and possibly invasive acts of policing. That is, are we really going to condemn all wars? Or are we going to allow that certain wars are defensive? If we do, as we proved time and time again in Palestine and Israel, my defensive war is your act of native aggression; and so the seeming innocent exception involves its adherants apparently having to take sides in the conflict (do I agree that the war is defensive or not?). Nor of course does the modern variation of this theme, ‘proportionate’ help much, because the absolutist would of course claim that killing is killing is killing (and needs to be condemned), and anyway my ‘proportional response’ is your genocide…Attempts therefore to demark and delimit the types of murders (wars) which we allow, seem almost inevitably to force us to become a protagonist in the conflict, or at least to appear as such to those fighting it. It is of course deeply ironic (and yet possibly inevitable) therefore that our attempts to define humanity and human rights have made us a party in almost every war in the last half of the last century. How could it be otherwise if we do not allow ourselves to simply ignore human rights (in the abstract) and yet cannot intervene in any one conflict?
Thirdly and arising out of the last point, the effect of our apparent adherence to a charter of rights makes us appear to be hypocritical. That is, we very clearly waive or only nod at the rules when they are in our interest, while we trump them from the skies when they are not in our interests. Even worse, we are very cagey (and vet heavy handed) when other states and other traditions attempt to use the rules against us. Iran might take America to court and yet it does so in the knowledge that America’s reaction or rather its lack of reaction, its lack of acting whether it is condemned or no, will reveal the hypocrisy in the system. We (by which I mean the West) condemn others, but we simply do not expect the same set of rules to be applied to us. Or rather we simply assume that we are innocent, and reject any attempt to compromise that innocence, and reject it out of hand (and irrespective of whether we are relatively innocent or not). The paradox is then that the fact that actually ‘we in the West’ ore indeed at worst ‘evil’-light and at best 'not too bad (really)’, whilst other regimes are of course far worse, is occluded by our very unwillingness to engage with the rules which we have created. We look shifty, we look guilty, and it is enough to make us appear to be the worst of the worst (and not merely hypocrites).
The Third Reich with its appeal to ‘blood’ and ‘race’ cast a very long shadow over much biology. In a sense this shadow is senseless. The Nazi appeal to the politics of biology was cod, and their biology puerile and backward looking. It has then very little to do with modern genetics or even theories of evolution, and never could, as its very premise (‘blood’ and ‘race’ understood as a ‘people’) were what modern genetics set itself against. And yet this fact is never bought out (in a ‘Nazi purge’ modern genetics would be about the third up against the wall…). All that we remember is the fact that the Nazis wanted to interfere with life itself (is some unspecified way) and had very strong opinions about who should or should not be. It is this knee-jerk reaction to this prejudice that then casts a long shadow on our current adventures in biology, and do so in at least two ways.
The row about genetic modification is strangely caught up in the politics of the Nazi era. Both sides look at the other as proto-Nazis. On the one side, one has scientists interfering with the stuff of nature. It is mankind therefore carrying itself too far in the direction of God. On the other, one might accuse the ‘nature purists’ as being only a few steps removed from those other purists of ‘race’. Either side therefore frames the other against the same basic backdrop, a backdrop that does not prevent serious debate, but rather haunts it. Both know what the other side might be thinking, and tailors their arguments to answer the unspoken challenge that they are the ones who are the Nazi. In such a debate it is clear that somewhere between the two the assumption is, lies the Third Reich - it is just never clear which one is IT.
Secondly it is very clear that the fit between the agonizing choice whether or not to have or to abort profoundly differently abled children is very badly served by confusing that very personal and difficult choice with the ethics of a bygone obnoxious era. Humans are neither ‘playing God’ nor ‘ethnic cleansing’ if they decide that they lack the mental resources to manage a profoundly tricky child. The problem is agonizing and vulgar categorizations which make for easy thinking but sloppy or extremist policies will not help (overmuch). Nor will they even help police the mild (and it is mild) danger of the technology that allows choice, slipping into ‘designer babies’. In a sense the mere condemnation of this move in advance (in the name of Nazism) is of course enough to make individuals more likely to want such ‘designer children’. If the possibility had not been condemned, no one would have known about it, and so the choice would not have been opened out. The very pretending then, that there is a problem with this, actually makes the problem real or at least possibly genuine.
For over sixty years therefore, the Second World War has left posterity with a strange problem. The events in that conflict were too horrific to simply allow them to be forgotten, and yet their very memory is highly problematic, loaded and complex. To remember in an active sense that conflict, is to look for evil in this world. A move that starts off in noble thoughts and (possibly) lofty ideals, but which then soon involves its proponents in odd compromises and strangely ambivalent relations. We suddenly all become guilty of… something, and mired in a complex swamp of hope, law and memory. This swamp is all the more foetid when one considers the legacy which the Second World War left to states and their citizens, a problem to which the next of these rants turn.
