Bauman, Zygmunt - Modernity and Holocaust

who looked Polish and spoke the elegant Polish of a nobleman; but refused to do the same for his three sisters, who looked Jewish and spoke with a pronounced Jewish accent. The friend refused to be saved alone. Jastrzebowski comments:.

Had the decision of my family been: different, there were nine chances to one that we would!be all shot, fin Nazi-occupied Poland, - the punishment for hidingor helping Jews was death.] The probability that our friend and his-sisters would survive in those conditions was perhaps smaller still. And yet the person telling me this family drama and repeating What could we do, there was nothing we could do!', did not look me in the eyes. He sensed I felt a lie, though all the facts were true.

Another contributor to the discussion, Kazimierz Dziewanowski, wrote:

If in our country, in our presence and in Front of our eyes, several millions of innocent people were killedthis was an event so horrifying, a tragedy so immense - that it is proper, human, and understandable that those who survived are haunted and cannot recover their calm ... It is impossible to prove that more could have been done, yet neither is it possible to prove that one could not.do.more.

Wiadystaw Bartoszewski, during the occupation in charge of the Polish assistance to the Jews, commented: 'only he may say he has done everything he could, who paid the price of death'.

-- - By far the most shocking among Lanzmann's messages is the rationality .of evil (or was it the evil of rationality?). Hour after hour during that interminable agony of watching Shoah the terrible, humiliating truth is uncovered and paraded in its obscene nakedness: how few men with guns were needed to murder millions.

Amazing how frightened those few men with the rifles were; how conscious of the brittleness of their mastery over human cattle. Their power rested on the doomed living in a make-believe world, the world which they, the men with rifles, defined and narrated for their victims. In that world, obedience was rational; rationality was obedience. Rationality paid - at least for a time - but in that world there was no other, longer time. Each step on the road to death was carefully shaped so as to be calculable in terms of gains and losses, rewards and punishments. Fresh air and music rewarded the long, unremitting suffocation in the cattle carriage. A bath, complete with cloakrooms and

barbers, towel and soap, was a welcome liberation from lice, dirt, and the stench ot human sweat and excrement. Rational people will go quietly, meekly, joyously into a gas chamber, if only they are allowed to believe it is a bathroom.

Members of the Sonderkommando knew that to tell the bathers that the bathroom was a gas chamber was an offence punishable by instant death. The crime would not seem so abominable, and the punishment would not be so harsh-, had the victims been led to their death simply by fear or suicidal resignation. But to found their order on fear alone, the SS

would have needed ore.troops,;arms and money. Rationality was more effective,.easier to obtain, and cheaper. And thus to destroy them, the SS men carefully cultivated the rationality of their victims.

Interviewed recently on British TV, a high-ranking South African security chief let the cat out of the bag: the true danger of the ANC, he said, lies not in acts of sabotage and terrorism - however spectacular or costly - but in inducing the black population, or the large part of it, to disregard 'law and order'; if that happened even the best intelligence and most powerful security forces would be helpless (an expectation confirmed recently by the experience of Intifada). Terror remains effective as long as the balloon of rationality has not been pricked. The most sinister,. cruel, bloody-minded ruler must remain a staunch . preacher, and defender of rationality - or perish. Addressing his subjects, he must.'speak to reason'. He must protect reason, eulogize on the virtues of the calculus of costs and effects, defend logic against passions and values which, unreasonably, do not count costs and refuse to obey logic.

By and large, all rulers can count on rationality being on their side. But the Nazi rulers, additionally, twisted the stakes of the game so that the rationality of survival would render all other motives of human action irrational. Inside the Nazi-made world, reason was the enemy of morality. Logic required consent to crime. Rational defence of one's survival called for non-resistance to the other's destruction. This rationality pitched the sufferers against each other and obliterated their . joint humanity. It also made them into a threat and an enemy of all the, others, not yet marked for death, and granted for the time being the role of bystanders. Graciously, the noble creed of rationality absolved both the victims and the bystanders from the charge of immorality and from guilty conscience. Having reduced human life to the calculus of selfpreservation, this rationality robbed human life of humanity.

Nazi rule is long over, yet its poisonous legacy is far from dead. Our

continuous inability to come to terms with the meaning of the Holocaust, our inability to call the bluff of the murderous hoax, our willingness to go on playing the game of history with the loaded dice of reason so understood that it shrugs the clamours of morality as irrelevant or loony, our consent to the authority of cost-effective calculus as an argument against ethical commandments - all these bear an eloquent evidence to the corruption the Holocaust exposed but did little, it appears, to discredit.

Two years of my early childhood were marked with my grandfather's heroic yet vain attempts to introduce me to the treasures of biblical lore. Perhaps he was not a very inspiring teacher; perhaps I was an obtuse and ungrateful pupil. The fact is, I remember next to nothing from his lessons. One story, however, carved itself into my brain deeply and haunted me for many years. This was a story of a saintly sage who met a beggar on the road while travelling with a donkey loaded with sackfuls of food. The beggar asked for something to eat. 'Wait,' said the sage, I must first untie the sacks.' Before he finished the unpacking, however, the long hunger took its toll and the beggar died. Then the sage started his prayer: Punish me, o Lord, as I failed to save the life of my fellow man!' The shock this story gave me is well-nigh the only thing I remember from the interminable list of my grandfather's homilies..It clashed with all the mental drill to which my schoolteachers subjected me at that time and ever since. The story struck me as illogical (which it was), and therefore wrong (which it was not). It took the Holocaust to convince me that the second does not necessarily follow from the first.

Even if one knows that not much more could have been done practically to save the victims of the Holocaust (at least not without additional, and probably formidable, costs), this does not mean that moral qualms can be put to sleep. Neither does it mean that a moral person's feeling of shame is unfounded (even if its irrationality in terms of self-preservation can be, indeed, easily proved). To this feeling of shame - an indispensable condition of victory over the slow-acting poison, the pernicious legacy of the Holocaust - the most scrupulous and historically accurate computations of the numbers of those who could' and those who 'could not' help, of those who could' and those who 'could not' be helped, are irrelevant.

Even the most sophisticated quantitative methods of researching 'the facts of the matter' would not advance us very far toward an objective (i.e. universally binding) solution to the issue of moral responsibility. There is no scientific method to decide whether their gentile neighbours

Afterthought: Rationality and Shame

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failed to prevent the transportation of Jews to the camps because the Jews were so passive and docile, or whether the Jews so seldom escaped their guards because they had nowhere to escape to - sensing the hostility, or indifference, of the environment. Equally, there are no scientific methods to decide whether the well-off residents of the Warsaw ghetto could have done more to alleviate the lot of the poor dying in the streets of hunger and hypothermia, or whether the German Jews could have rebelled against the deportaton of the Ostjuden, or the Jews with French citizenship could have done something to prevent incarceration of the 'non-French Jews'. Worse still, however, the calculation of objective possibilities and computation of costs only blurs the moral essence of the problem.

The issue is not whether those who survived, collectively - fighters who on occasion could not but be bystanders, bystanders who on occasion could not but fear to become victims - should feel ashamed, or whether they should feel proud of themselves. The issue is that only the liberating feeling of shame may help to recover the moral significance of the awesome historical experience and thus help to exorcise the spectre of the Holocaust, which to this day haunts human conscience and makes us neglect vigilance at present for the sake of living in peace with the past. The choice is not between shame and pride. The choice is between the pride of morally purifying shame, and the shame of morally devastating pride. I am not sure how I would react to a stranger knocking on my door and asking me to sacrifice myself and my family to save his life. I have been spared such a choice. I am sure, however, that had I refused shelter, I would be fully able to justify to others and to myself that, counting the number of lives saved and lost, turning the stranger away was an entirely rational decision. I am also sure that I would feel that unreasonable, illogical, yet all-too-human shame. And yet I am sure, as well, that were it not for this feeling of shame, my decision to turn away the stranger would go on corrupting me till the end of my days.

The inhuman world created by a homicidal tyranny dehumanized Us victims and those who passively watched the victimization by pressing both to use the logic of self-preservation as absolution for moral insensitivtty and inaction. No one can be proclaimed guilty for the sheer fact of breaking down under such pressure. Yet no one can be excused from moral self-deprecation for such surrender. And only when feeling ashamed for one's weakness can one finally shatter the mental prison which has outlived its builders and its guards. The task today is to destroy that potency of tyranny to keep its victims and witnesses

prisoners long after the prison had been dismantled.

Year by year the Holocaust shrinks to the size of a historical episode which, in addition, is fast receding into the past. The significance of its memory consists less and less in the need to punish the criminals, or to setrlq still-open accounts. The criminals who escaped trial are now old men well advanced in their senility; so are, or they soon will be, most of" those who survived their crimes. Even if another murderer is discovered, pulled out of his hiding ancf brought to belated justice, it will be increasingly difficult to match the enormity of his crime with the sanctity of;dignity of the legal process. (Witness the embarassing

. experience of Demianiuk's and barbie's court cases.) There are also fewer and fewer people left who, in the times of gas chambers, were old enough to decide whether to open, or. to dose the door to the strangers seeking shelter. If repayment of cfimes and account-settling exhausted the historical significance of the Holocaust, one could well let this horrifying episode stay where it ostensibly belongs - in the past - and leave it to the care of professional historians. The truth is, however, that the settling of accounts is just one reason to remember the Holocaust forever. And a minor reason at that - at no time has it yet been so evident as it is now, when that reason rapidly loses whatever remained of its practical importance. ■ [ '

•Today, more than at any other time, the Holocaust is nor a private r property, (if.it ever was one); not of its perpetrators, t<? be punished for; nqt of its direct victims, .to -ask for special sympathy, favours or indulgence on account of past sufferings; and not of its-witnesses, taseek redemption or certificates of innocence. The present-day significance of the Holocaust is the lesson it contains for the whole of humanity.

The lesson of the Holocaust is the facility with which most people, put into a situation that does not contain a good choice, or renders such a good choke very costly, argue thenjiselves away from qhe issue of moral duty (or fail to argue themselves towards it), adopting instead the precepts of rational interest and self-preservation. In a system where

- rationality and ethics point in opposite directions, humanity is the main -loser. Evil can do its dirty work, hoping -that most people most of the 4time will.refrain from doing rash, reckless things - and resisting evil is rash and reckless. Evil needs neither enthusiastic followers nor an applauding audience - the instinct of self-preservation will do, encouraged by the comforting thought that it is not my turn yet, thank

God: by lying low, I can still escape.

And there is another lesson of the Holocaust, of no lessee importance.

If the first lesson contained a warning, the second offers hope; it is the second lesson that makes the first worth repeating.

The second lesson tells us that putting self-preservation above moral duty is in no way predetermined, inevitable and inescapable. One can be pressed to do it, but one cannot be forced to do it, and thus one cannot really shift the responsibility for doing it on to those who exerted the pressure. It does not matter how many people chose moral duty over the rationality of self-preservation - what does matter is that some did. Evil is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the authority of the logic of self-preservation. It shows it for what it is in the end - a choice. One wonders how many people must defy that logic for evil to be incapacitated. Is there a magic threshold of defiance beyond which the technology of evil grinds to a halt?

Appendix

Social Manipulation of Morality:

Moralizing Actors, Adiaphorizing

Action..................

I believe that the great honour of the Amalfi European Prize has been given to the book called Modernity and the Holocaust, not to its author, and it is in the name of that book, and particularly of the message that book" contained, that with gratitude and joy I accept your~ professional accolade. I am happy for"the distinction this book has earned for several reasons: "" First: this is a book which grew our of the experience that spans the untilrecently deep and seemingly unbridgeable divide between what we usedto call Eastern' and Western' Europe. The ideas that went into-the book and its message gestated as much in my home university of Warsaw as they did in the company of my colleagues in Britain, the country that - in the years of exile - offered me my second home. These ideas knew of no divide; they knew only of our common European experience, of our shared history whose unity may be belied, even temporarily suppressed, but not broken. It is our joint, all-European fate that my book is addressing. Second: this book would never have come to be if not for my life-long friend and'companion, "Jarilna,Twhose Winter in the Morning, a book of femintscences^from the'years of human infamy, opened my-eyes to what we normally refuse to look upon. The writing of Modernity and-the H&lecaust became an intellectual compulsion and moral duty, once I had

-read Janina's summary of the sad wisdom she acquired in the inner circle of the man-made inferno: The cruellest thing about cruelty is that

it

_ dehumanizes its victims before it destroys them. And the hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman conditions. It is Janina's bitter wisdom that 1 tried to enclose in the message of my book.

Third: the message itself, one about the hidden and unseemly face of our confident, affluent, brave world, and of the dangerous game this world plays with human moral impulse, seems to be resonant with ever more widely shared concerns. This, 1 presume, is the meaning of awarding the coveted Amalfi Prize to the book that contains that message.' But also of the fact that the prestigious Amalfi "Conference has been dedicated in full to the issue of morality and utility, whose divorce, as the message implies, lies at the foundation of our civilization's most spectacular successes and most terrifying crimes, and whose reunification is the one .chance our world may have to come to terms withits own awesome powers. My lecture that follows is therefore more than a mere restatement of the book's message. It is a voice in a discourse which, one hopes, will stay in the focus of our shared vocation.

Virtutem doctrina paret naturane donet For the Ancient Roman the dilemma was as acute as it is Tor us today. Is morality taught, or does" it reside in the very modality' of "human existe'rice? Does it arise out of the process of socialization; or is it 'in place' before" all teaching starts? Is morality a social product? Or is it rather, as Max Scheler insisted, the other way round: the fellow feeling, that substance of all moral behaviour, is a precondition of all social life?

All too often the question is dismissed as of no more than purely academic interest. Sometimes it is cast among idle and superfluous issues born of the indefatigable, but notoriously suspect, metaphysical curiosity. When asked explicitly by sociologists, it is assumed to have been answered conclusively long ago, by Hobbes and by Durkheim, in a manner leaving little to doubt, and since then to have been transformed into a nonquestion by routine sociological practice. For the sociologists at least, society is the root of everything human and everything human comes into existence through social learning: Hardly ever do we have occasion to argue the rase explicitly. For all we care, the matter had been resolved before it could be discussed: its resolution hadibunded the language that constitutes our distinctively sociological discourse. In that language, one cannot speak of morality in any other way but in terms of socialization, teaching and learning, systemic prerequisites and societal functions. And, as Wittgenstein reminded us, we can say nothing except what can be said The form of life sustained by the language of sociology does not contain socially un-sanctioned morality. In that language, nothing that is not socially sanctioned can be talked about as moral. And what one cannot speak of is bound to remain silent.

All discourses define their topics, keep their integrity by guarding the distinctiveness of theirdefinitions and reproduce themselves through reiterating, them.. We could as it were stop at this trival observation and allow sociology to proceed, with its habitual selective speech and selective numbness, were not the stakes of continuing silence too high. Just how high they are has been brought up, gradually yet relentlessly, by Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Gulag. Or, rather, by the problem the victorious perpetrators of the Gulag and Hiroshima faced when bringing to trial, condemning and convicting the vanquished perpetrators of Auschwitz. It was Hannah Arendt, at her perceptive and irreverent best, who spelled out what these problems truly entailed:

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 when all they have to guide them is their judgment, which, however, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of alt these around them. And this question is all the more serious as we know that the few who were arrogant' enough to trust only their own judgment were by no means identical with those persons who continued to abide by old values, or who were guided by a religious belief... These few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed.

And thus the question had to be asked; would any one of those now brought to trial have suffered from a guilty conscience if they had won? The most horrifying discovery' that followed was that the answer must have been emphatically 'no', and that we lack arguments to show why it should be otherwise. Having decreed out of existence or out of court such distinctions between good and evil as do not bear the sanctioning stamp of society, we cannot seriously demand that individuals take moral initiatives. Neither can we burden them with responsibility for their moral choices unless the responsibility had been de facto pre-empted by the choices being prescribed by society. And we would not normally wish to do so (that is, to demand that individuals make their moral decisions on their own responsibility). Doing so would mean, after all, allowing for a moral responsibility that undermines the legislative power of society; and what society would resign such power of its own will, unless disabled by an overwhelming military force? Indeed, sitting in judgement on the perpet-

Social Manipulation of Morality

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rators of Auschwitz was not an easy task for those who guarded the secrets of the Gulag and those who were secretly preparing for Hiroshima.

It is perhaps because of this difficulty that, as Harry Redner observed, much of life and thought as it is still carried on now js based on the assumption that Auschwitz and Hiroshima never happened, or, if they did, then only as mere vents, far away, and long ago, that need not concern us now'. The legal quandaries arising from the Nuremberg trials were resolved there and then, having been treated as local issues, specific to one extraordinary and pathological case, that were never allowed to spill over the boundaries of their carefully circumscribed parochiality, and were hastily "wound up as soon as they threatened to get out of hand. No fundamental revision of our self-consciousness occurred or was contemplated. For many decades - to this very day, one may say - Arendt's remained a voice in the wilderness. Much of the fury with which Arendt's analysis was met at the time stemmed from the attempt to keep that selfconsciousness watertight. Only such explanations of the Nazi crimes have been accepted as are conspicuously irrelevant to us, to our world, to our form of life. Such explanations commit the double feat of condemning the defendant while exonerating the world of his victors.

It is in vain to contest whether the resulting marginalization of the crime committed - in the full glare of social acclaim or with tacit popular approval - by people who 'were neither perverted nor sadistic', who 'were, and still are, terrifyingly normal' (Arendt), was deliberate or inadvertent, accomplished by design or by default. The fact is that the quarantine set half a century ago has never ended; if anything, the rows of barbed wire have grown thicker over the years. Auschwitz has gone down in history as a Jewish' or German' problem and as Jewish or German private property. Looming large in the centre of Jewish studies', it has been confined to footnotes or cursory paragraphs by the mainstream European historiography. Books on the Holocaust are reviewed under the heading of Jewish themes'. The impact of such habits is reinforced by the vehement opposition of the Jewish establishment to any attempt, however tentative, to expropriate the injustice that the Jews and the Jews alone have suffered. Of this injustice, the Jewish state would keenly wish to be the sole guardian and, indeed, the only legitimate beneficiary. This unholy alliance effectively prevents the experience it narrates as -'uniquely Jewish from turning into a universal problem of the modern human condition and thus into public property. Alternatively, Auschwitz is cast as an event explicable only in terms of the extraordinary convolutions of German history, of inner conflicts of German culture, blunders ol German philo-