Would You Have Been a Nazi?

joy satisfaction pain hunger sadness violence sensations feelings are ultimately at the heart of human history avoiding them encouraging them pursuing them studying the best way to provide for them the moral economy of feelings pushes history away or towards ideas warfare innovation political systems which ways will we organize to maximize positivity or conversely what is it that's happened when a knife is plunged into a soldier or an african-american is dragged to the town square by a raging mob these moments are often driven by historical forces a force as we know from physics is an impulse a pressure an energy that exerts itself upon an object or a person in history we talk of economic social cultural and political forces we also might hear someone be described as a forceful character social forces are difficult to imagine but an idea built upon the shoulders of history translated into sound waves and gestures by a charismatic dictator or a quietly convincing scholar hits your eyes and ears with all the power of a physical force the same power and might move you to speak to transcribe to protest to work to kill in fact the great movements in history wars campaigns revolutions genocide progress have for a long time now been described by most historians as being driven by forces rather than by individuals the french revolution's cultural causes the force of the ideas of the enlightenment economic forces like depression or hyperinflation that contributed to the rise of the third reich say the institutional corruption of the catholic church leading to the reformation the economic forces that drove africans helplessly over the atlantic on slave ships and the scientific beliefs that served to rationalize their subservience for centuries historical forces move people to act in ways that seems to suggest they're devoid of their own force their own free will their own power to resist or choose for themselves that if george washington or robs beer or martin luther king or karl marx had never been born someone else shaped by the same forces of the context they lived in would have inevitably at some point taken their place maybe in slightly different ways but with the same fundamental underlying principles if bill gates or steve jobs were never born someone else would have been at the center of the development of personal computers for example there were several reasons lynch mobs in jim crow america and soldiers and police officers in nazi germany were motivated to kill african americans and jews historical forces like a sense of victimhood both having lost recent wars cultural forces and propaganda that depicted victims stereotypically as inferior greedy or a threat and economic forces poverty inequality the frustration of basic needs as social psychologist ervin stubb puts it reasons in both cases as i've explored in previous videos were similar the supposedly powerful jewish interests that were colluding to deprive ordinary germans and the black americans through their natural inferiority who were going to pollute the racial purity of the white race in the lynch mobs that murdered black southerners the participants were under no illusions that they might not have been doing the correct thing the moral thing the ethical thing difficult may be but just all the same they were motivated in nazi germany and jim crow america by a moral culture made up of stereotypes adverts literature supposedly scientific studies societal standards norms and sensibilities that all pushed the perpetrators towards killing and in both cases the perpetrators had rationales justifications reasons for what they were doing even if with historical hindsight we can see that those reasons were incorrect but there are points in memoirs and testimonies that fascinate me points of resistance where despite the historical forces bearing down upon them the perpetrators have a moment of conscience maybe or something like it when a german commander tearful and shaking tells his men that they have to kill women and children when ordinary police officers in the nazi order police report being sick crying being able to pull the trigger when one soldier describes the scene as bestial 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 even slightly while they were a prisoner they'd have to leave the killing to someone else this was reported in rwanda in her autobiography catherine de prolumpkin a white american southerner from a slave-owning family describes her racial awakening she was 19 listening to an african-american talk at a college conference on race the speaker was introduced as miss arthur a form of a dress reserved for whites in the south she imagined having to shake miss arthur's hand and she panicked when she closed her eyes though listening to miss arthur she realized she couldn't tell her race from the way she was speaking later she realized that the heavens had not fallen nor the earth parted asunder to swallow up this unheard of transgression indeed i found i could breathe freely again eat heartily even laugh again another autobiography anne brayden's recalls eating a meal with an african-american for the first time something that was forbidden and forgetting about race and realizing why there is no race problem at all there are only the people who have not realized it yet these moments as few and far between as they are beg an important question how is resistance possible how does one know when they're being pushed by historical forces to do something that in retrospect we see as wholly immoral how does one escape from under the hand of history if culture society and the economy are all moving you towards acting in a particular way do we retain any kind of moral sense the philosopher zigman bauman for example has asked whether there can be a moral responsibility for resisting socialization the point of looking at history in this way is to understand how we can recognize similar conditions in the present whether we can examine our own principles standards and norms and ask whether we'd ever know what the right thing to do is often what makes people like rosa parks or martin luther notable is not that they are shaped by history but that history the very same forces are felt by them as coercion and that they decide to stand up to them to counter them to resist them like a stick flowing down a river actors are either taken along by the flow of history or like a fish they can for some reason resist the question that's been asked by many like the philosopher hannah arendt is whether this could ever absolve the lyncher or the contributor to genocide of any guilt are they morally innocent if historical forces are at work upon them as if they're coerced by another and aren't even aware of it if the factors that lead to atrocities are larger economic cultural social even scientific and the people who create the narratives are elites not the ordinary people that carry them out then it's the ordinary man or woman ever to blame where do we find that causal point of moral action or moral blame that bit where we can say that was ethically wrong or right you should have known better can we find it so that we can discourage or encourage more of it one way to approach this is to ask what we admire in figures like rosa parks or the rescuers of jews during the holocaust the first thing i think that's obvious to note is that they were doing something difficult they resisted those historical forces that were bearing down upon them as if struggling out from underneath heavy metaphysical weights morality is only interesting when it's difficult the moral acts that we celebrate are often those that are most difficult that cost the person in some way we can examine this on a banal level too it's cold rainy you're tired from a long day and it's your friend's birthday you said you'd go out this wouldn't be a loosely moral situation if it was a sunny saturday full of energy and you wanted to go out anyway what makes it morally interesting is that you do the right thing by going out despite finding it difficult to find the motivation to do so because you want to be a good friend morality consists in resistance and difficulty now we usually think of resistance as being a type of strength the rubber band resists snapping under pressure when stretched so where does this moral strength to resist historical forces come from if we can find this do we locate the source the wellspring the elixir of morality as we've seen the perpetrators thought they were doing the right thing that there was an entire universe around them of cultural reasoning that went into protecting the color line or cleansing the homeland many even rationalized killing jewish women and children by telling themselves they wouldn't survive another harsh war-torn foodless winter anyway that because of this they were doing the humane thing the correct thing the moral thing strength here seems to be the difference between accepting the reasoning provided for you and challenging it i think that can happen in two ways one is knowing that the cultural facts presented to you are wrong false the nazis for example used theodore kaufman's book germany must perish as propaganda to convince germans of a jewish plot against them they claimed in propaganda that kaufman's book was influential in america on american foreign policy despite it in reality being a fringe unread book that most people wouldn't have heard of and was panned by critics if you know this to be a mistruth a lie a piece of propaganda you're less likely to be influenced by it to eventually potentially murder you can reason your way out of doing the immoral thing but what if you accept the propaganda what if you believe the falsehoods and the stereotypes the other way to build moral strength comes not from reason but from emotion empathy the scottish philosopher david hume had a lot to say about morality for hume morality rather than being grounded in reason or thinking logically was at its core feeling adam smith called morality a sentiment when we see someone in pain for example we can literally feel that pain in some way in ourselves and conversely when we see someone happy we might feel raised in our spirits too this is what we'd refer to as empathy today a word which wasn't around when human smith were writing in the 18th century empathy is feeling joyful yourself hearing someone say something moving the feeling of disgust seeing someone mistreated being moved to tears by a scene in a film when these things happen something beyond thinking beyond cognition is going on we're moved by others hume wrote that where friendship appears my heart catches the same passion and is warmed by those warm sentiments that display themselves before me in this way empathy is a kind of involuntary translation of one person's feelings into another's hume talks about passions good or bad being contagious of another person's feelings almost being infused into yours how is this the basis of morality well we approve we judge as moral the things we imagine to cause pleasure or good feelings within us and others and we disapprove or judge as immoral the things that cause pain or bad outcomes if someone hurts someone we might feel the pain the person is in and feel cold towards the perpetrator we feel metaphorically but in some sense literally chilled towards them conversely we might feel warmed by someone's warm-heartedness or tenderness morality as empathy can spread as a type of infusion hence the hot and cold metaphors moral philosopher michael sloat has argued that empathy is the moral cement of the universe thinking about morality and empathy in this way as something that often resists socialization might help us to understand that idea of resistance to those historical forces the economics the cultural and social beliefs the attitudes sensibilities norms and codes that can bear down on us that no matter how powerful they can be empathy can interrupt them but of course looking at the holocaust and lynchings that obviously didn't happen most seemed content to be unempathetic towards their victims why might this be i think we can look to three factors proximity equality and education first proximity we usually feel more empathy when the pleasure or pain we're seeing or hearing is spatially or temporally nearer to us we feel more empathy for the child drowning in front of us than a starving child thousands of miles away even though we know that the latter is more frequent jews and african-americans were segregated as bauman pointed out the nazis had an entire system of bureaucratization to keep distance between those doing the killing and the jews breaking tasks into separate components admin driving trains loading gas to make it easier for the killers because asking them to shoot thousands of men women and children had been proving difficult for the leadership 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 second and related equality empathy requires imagining that you and the person you feel empathy for have the same faculties the same capacities for pleasure and pain the same hopes fears and dreams it requires an understanding that we all share a similar range of emotions and feelings a fundamental equality african americans and jews were dehumanized described as separate races and in many cases almost separate species finally but still related is education or at least the need to be reliably informed this happens in many ways of course for the psychologist martin hoffman empathy is developed through experience parents for example disciplining their child when they've hit another child and asking questions like how do you think your friend feels when you hit him others have pointed to novels in the 18th century expanding the circle of empathy by describing the inner lives of people you would have never ordinarily encountered an empathetic education then of some kind is important but there is a final reason empathy or resistance might not be triggered related to education perpetrators simply didn't know the truth we might say that the perpetrators were being empathetic just to their own in-group rather than the victims friends and family who they believed were in danger in some way and we might also say that the perpetrators were being reasonable perpetrators must have in some sense use their reason to conclude that despite the pain it might cause black americans or jews they were inflicting that pain for some kind of greater good they were using a moral principle they thought it was despite the difficulty they sometimes might have felt the right correct moral thing to do i think the problem here is quite simple their information was wrong resistance and empathy is only possible if you know the book germany must perish for example is not informing u.s foreign policy if you know that the propaganda is based on falsehoods or if you know that a particular african-american has been wrongly accused of a crime and i think this is a difficult truth in many cases the perpetrators the ordinary men and women didn't know they were being led and so the condemnation the blame that causal point of responsibility is moved above them into the public sphere into the leaders authors thinkers who lied who made mistakes who printed mistruths rather than the ordinary men and women so what have we found have we discovered that spring that elixir that foundation of morality of resistance we can at least say that morality is found somewhere in the midst of difficulty it's only found in resistance but that it's grounded in empathy which is learned through a moral education in some way also a public sphere that keeps all people in its view make sure no one is distanced in other words is inclusive and an understanding that we all share the same faculties that we are all emotionally and cognitively at the base at the foundation the same and of course a commitment to due process to principles to codes and norms and standards in all institutions to making sure we're all searching for the truth because knowing what the right thing to do is is often akin to knowing what the right facts are thank you as always for watching and a huge thanks of course as always to my patreons without which this just wouldn't be possible so if you want to see scripts if you want to chat in the discord server if you want your name in the credits but most of all if you just want to help support make this content then click the link in the description below if not you can like you can share you can leave a comment all those things that help the algorithm thank you so much and i'll see you next time

Channel: Then & Now

Views: 79,606

Keywords: nazis, morality, ethics, empathy, moral sentimentalism, jim crow, the holocaust, racism

Id: YJhCHpG6TZg

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021