184 Towards a Sociological Theory of Morp/ity

Social proximity and moral responsibility

Responsibility, this building block of all moral behaviour, arises out of the proximity of the other. Proximity means responsibility, and responsibility is proximity. Discussion of the relative priority of one or the other is admittedly gratuitous, as none is conceivable alone. Defusion of responsibility, and thus the neutralization of the moral urge which follows it, must necessarily involve (is, in fact, synonymous with) replacing proximity with a physical or spiritual separation. The alternative to proximity is social distance. The moral attribute of proximity is responsibility; the moral attribute of social distance is lack of moral relationship, or heterophobia. Responsibility is silenced once proximity is eroded; it may eventually be replaced with resentment once the fellow human subject is transformed into an Other. The process of transformation is one of social separation. It was such a separation which made it possible for thousands to kill, and for millions to watch the murder without protesting. It was the technological and bureaucratic achievement of modern rational society which made such a separation possible.

Hans Mommsen, one of the most distinguished German historians of the Nazi era, has recently summarized the historical significance of the Holocaust and the problems it creates for the self-awareness of modern society:

While Western Civilization has developed the means for unimaginable mass-destruction, the training provided by modern technology and techniques of rationalization has produced a purely technocratic and bureaucratic mentality, exemplified by the group of perpetrators of the Holocaust, whether they committed murder directly themselves or prepared deportation and liquidation at the desks of the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicher-heithauptamt), at the offices of the diplomatic service, or as plenipotentiaries of the Third Reich within the occupied or satellite countries. To this extent the history of the Holocaust seems to be the mene tekel of the modern state.⁸

Whatever else the Nazi state has achieved, it certainly succeeded in overcoming the most formidable of obstacles to systematic, purposeful non-emotional, cold-blooded murder of people - old and young, mer and women: that animal pity by which all normal men are affected ir the presence of physical suffering'." We do not know much about tht

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unthinking physical forces; he achieves this by opposing againsi them the great and intelligent force of society, under whose protection he shelters. By putting himself under the w ing of society, he makes himself also, to a certain extent, dependent upon it But this is a liberating

dependence; there is no contradiction in this. These and similar memorable phrases of Durkheim reverberate to this day in sociological practice. All morality comes from society;there is not moral litfe outside society-; society is best understood as a morality-producing plant; society promotes morally regulated behaviour and marginalizes, suppresses or prevents immorality. The alternative to the moral grip of society is not human autonomy, but the rule of animal passions It is because the pre social drives of the human animal are selfish, cruel and threatening that they have to be tamed and subdued if social life is to he sustained lake away social coercion, and humans will relapse into the barbarity from which they had been but precariously lifted by the force of society This deep-seated trust in social arrangements as ennobling, elevating, humanizing factors goes against the grain of Durkheim sown insistence that actions are evil because they are socially prohibited, rather than socially prohibited because they are evil. The cool and sceptical sceptical in Durkheim debunks all pretentious that there is substance in evil other than its rejection by a force powerful enough to make its will into a binding rule. But the warm patriot and devout believer in the superiority and progress of civilized life cannot but feel that what has been rejected is indeed evil, and that the rejection must have been an emancipating and dignifying act.

This feeling chimes in with the self-consciousness of the form of life which, having attained and secured its material superiority, could not but convince itself of the superiority of the rules by whkh it lived. It was, after all. not society as such', an abstract theoretical category, but modern Western society that served .is the pattern tor the moralizing mission. Only from the crusading-proselytizing practice of the specifically modern and Western gardening society could the self-confidence be derived, which allowed the rule-enforcement to be viewed as the process ot humanization. rather than of suppression ot one form of humanity by another. The same self-confidence allowed the socially unregulated (whether disregarded, unattended to. or not full) sub ordinated) manifestation s of humanity to be cast aside as instances of inhumanity or, at best, as suspect and potentially dangerous. The theoretical vision, in the end, legitimized the sovereignty of society over its members as well as its contenders.