Authority & Responsibility

As the last soldiers of World War II die off, it's worthwhile to review the mental states of the Nazis, of those who thought it was not only acceptable but even admirable to participate in genocide. Recently the New York Times ran an obituary for Rochus Misch, one of Hitler's bodyguards. Apparently Misch lived openly and happily in post-war German society, often visiting the bunker where Hitler died and bragging that he was there! But what really caught my attention was this statement by Misch: “I ask you, if Hitler really did all the terrible things people now say he did, how could he have been our Fuhrer? How is it possible?”¹ Fuhrer means leader in German; Misch is expressing incredulity that any person could accept that the leader of the Germans (“our Fuhrer”) could have done “terrible things.” To people like Misch, leaders are seen by definition or out of necessity as infallible. Such willful blindness arises, surely in part, out of fear of the dissolution of society without a strong and trusted leader. An emphasis on loyalty, to groups and leaders, is a marker of the conservative mentality even today, while liberals tend to value fairness over loyalty.²

The danger of placing too much trust in authority is not only the very great tendency of power to corrupt those who assume it, but also the excuse it can give those subordinate to that power not to have to think for themselves, and Misch is a good example of the latter problem. That power corrupts is not just a cliché. Brian Resnick published an interesting article in The Atlantic recently that summarized recent laboratory studies on the phenomenon of power, titled “How Power Corrupts the Mind.”³ Perhaps in part because authorities have to look at the big picture, “powerful people . . . tend to think more abstractly, favoring the bigger picture over smaller consequences.” Often, Resnick reports, because they are not so closely linked to the actual lives of others, being cocooned in their authority, powerful people tend to develop the traits of hypocrisy, infidelity, and dishonesty. We need only look to politics and, recently, some religions, to see how this scenario develops, unfortunately. People to whom certain authority figures, such as a priest, carry great value at times will deny their own observations and the reports of their own children to preserve the power of the authority. Then, great tragedies can occur. Can you see the connection to metaphor here? To overlook the negative effects on your child in order to preserve authority is essentially a yielding to the abstract and neglecting the concrete.

Misch's words also reminded me of Hannah Arendt's works on the mentality of the Nazis, in particular her chilling observation on the “banality of evil.” In a recent article on Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem,⁴ Roger Berkowitz reminds us of what Arendt observed and recorded during that trial: Eichmann's “evil acts were motivated by thoughtlessness that was neither stupidity nor bureaucratic obedience, but a staggering inability to see the world beyond Nazi cliches. . . . an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of someone else.” Again, power allows an individual to disconnect himself from the experiences of other human beings. Berkowitz continues:

“The insight of Eichmann in Jerusalem is not that Eichmann was just following orders, but that

Eichmann was a 'joiner.' In his own words, Eichmann feared 'to live a leaderless and difficult

individual life,' in which 'I would receive no directives from anybody.' [To Arendt, Eichmann

was] an ideologue, someone who will sacrifice his own moral convictions when they come in

conflict with the 'idea' of the movement that gives life meaning.”

And, importantly, Eichmann saw his actions of buttressing the movement (including genocide, which he admitted to be evil) as “a heroic burden demanded by his idealism,” which he called “the fatherland morality.” Thus, he “relied on his oath to Hitler and the Nazi flag, a bond he calls 'the highest duty.'”

So, Berkowitz summarizes: Eichmann “acted thoughtlessly and dutifully . . . convinced that he was sacrificing an easy morality [do not kill] for a higher good [fatherland]. . . . Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats but by 'joiners.' That need . . . originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. . . . Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists [ideologues] to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.”

Other than the last sentence, this description could be of the Tea Partiers of today, or even just strict conservatives in Congress, couldn't it? And some violence is perpetrated by our current ideologues, isn't it?--both physical (bombing abortion clinics, shooting abortion providers) and psychological (warning of government death squads). And the people who engage in such activities are, indeed, very proud of themselves for their defense of “traditional values.” They seem to be quite blind to the fact that not harming others is also a traditional value: Do unto others . . . . As for the role of technology mentioned by Berkowitz, consider this statement by Thomas Nagel:
“ . . . science and technology have put extraordinary knowledge and power at the command of

beings who come into the world with the same brains and mental faculties as humans born

5,000 years ago. . . . we are faced with a secular version of the problem of evil: how can we

expect beings capable of behaving so badly to design and sustain a system that will lead them

to be good?”⁵

I don't think this is an exaggeration. I had an experience some time ago, in which someone apparently spread a lie about me over the social media. After experiencing shunning and other negative effects, I tried to find out what was said about me and who said it. One young man I spoke to about this said, with a smile, “Why do you want to blame one person, when we were all involved?” This attitude concerns me quite a bit. It reveals that an individual can hide from responsibility for individual action in a group and that a group will believe the reports of an individual within that group and act on it (and even consider it fun) without bothering to verify the report by discussing it with the accused person. This is another case of abstraction. I do not really know who my accuser was or exactly what that person said; I can do nothing about it because the concrete experience of facing my accuser is not available to me because of the anonymity of social media. Also, the individuals who embrace the “movement” of social media, if I can echo Berkowitz's term in that way, apparently feel no concern for me as a physical being who has been psychologically and socially insulted. I'm an adult and can deal with it, but what about all those adolescents who show up in the news after harming or killing themselves because of abuse via social media?

This is a serious problem. Arendt had something to say about a phenomenon like this as well: “What stuck in the minds [of men like Eichmann was] simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique.” As a college teacher and mother of two young adults, I know that young people today are quite conscious of participating in a paradigm shift. They seem not to have too much concern about individual responsibility and privacy; they are very much engaged in the sharing of selves and information in an awesome new world. I am concerned that they do not see the possible downsides of this phenomenon yet—after all, they were pretty much born into a world of great technological powers; they take it as their norm, even though they realize that historically it is quite a mind-blowing time. Again, to the extent that technology leads us humans to ignore the physical and psychological realities on the ground of others, it will lead us into abstractions that will far too easily overlook the sufferings of some in order to reenforce the movement. Humans have never before had such powers, and so we believe this really is a new and different world that commands new ways of behaving and a new ethics. It's way too easy to believe this and not to see how deferral to authority or to abstraction has caused very great problems in the past and probably still can do so today if we are not thoughtful and watchful.

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz was a defender of religion in the modern world; indeed, he credited the Polish people's strong Catholicism with their ability to eventually turn back totalitarian Soviet rule. But note how he phrases this admiration: “For me, the religious dimension is extremely important. I feel that everything depends on whether people are pious or not pious. Reverence toward being, which can be formulated in strictly religious terms or more general terms, that is the basic value. Piety protects us against nihilism.”⁶ Personally, I'm happier with Gaia than with God, if only because the problem of authority is not so great when thinking of earth as one integrated organism, whereas God will always have his priests and zealots. Either way, “reverence toward being” is the key—recognizing that no matter how much power you have you are not worth any more than the least powerful person on earth and that the daily realities of that least powerful person must be considered and respected as much as yours are. The word “piety” comes from the Latin for “pity” and is related to “compassion.” If we can see ourselves all as created beings, part of one whole creation—none more important than any other, essentially, we may have a chance. We must always anchor the abstract in the concrete, in being itself, lest we defeat ourselves with our very intelligence.

1http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/world/europe/rochus-misch-bodyguard-of-hitler-dies-at-96.html?emc=eta1

2http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/opinion/sunday/the-whistle-blowers-quandary.html

3http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/how-power-corrupts-the-mind/277638/

4http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/misreading-hannah-arendts-eichmann-in-jerusalem/?emc=eta1

5http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/books/review/john-grays-silence-of-animals.html?pagewanted=all

6http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/feb/27/an-interview-with-czeslaw-milosz/