L’amour, l’amour – no more, no more

I have commented before on the curious moral malady that seems to have overtaken Europe (see, for example, this).  Even those who dream of a united continent, like Timothy Garton Ash, ask with a kind of despair:  What does it mean to be a European?

Well, we now have one answer.  Domingo Tringuero, mayor of the small Spanish town of Pozuelo de Calatrava, was quoted as saying:  “To be European means not to get angry with your wife if she sleeps with someone else.”  This, according to Spain’s excellent newsblog, periodista digital.  The good mayor also stated, “I went to a hooker’s funeral, and people were offering me their condolences.”  All a misunderstanding:  “I’ve gone to whorehouses to chat, we politicians have to know how to do things like that.”

Tringuero belongs to the opposition conservative party. The Socialist Party, in power since the elections that followed the deadly bombing of the Madrid train stations, has raised a hue and cry about the mayor’s public blatherings – though not, as it happens, because of his original approach to family values.  The socialists find Tringuero repugnantly antifemenist, and have called on the head of the conservatives to “stop these outbreaks of machismo among your friends.”  Moral qualms there are none.

The comments that follow the article add another layer of insight into the European condition.  One commenter demands, with a certain befuddlement, if you want to do something, and can, why should you not?  Another compares the political correctness of the socialists with “American biblical fanaticism,” which he had just read about in the NYT.

Yet a third agrees that anger at a cheating wife is indeed un-European, and concludes with a rhetorical flourish:  “Would you prefer the image of the Spanish male to stay the same as in Bizet’s Carmen?”

 

Easter thought

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg address

North Korea is simple

After the uncertainty, real and feigned, about a single woman dying under tragic circumstances in Florida, we have this story in the WaPo about death in North Korea.  In the U.S., we struggle to balance freedom and moral discipline.  In North Korea, it’s much simpler:  neither apply.  Being distant and walled off from the world, the country enjoys an additional advantage:  nobody pays attention.  Nobody can be expected to agonize, or write angry editorials, or strike epic poses in Congress, over the suffering of people born in such an obscure place.

The article details the experimentation on living prisoners by North Korean scientists, working to develop killer biological agents.  Actual persons who have participated in this enlightened research activity, but have now defected, are interviewed.  It took an hour into our debriefing for Dr. Lee to get around to the fact that he helped develop deadly agents at a secret underground poison and toxin research institute. In that connection, he matter-of-factly described how, in 1979, he was in charge of gassing two political prisoners. The victims’ suffering was documented by scientists, who took notes outside glass-encased gas chambers that were also wired for sound. One prisoner died after 2 1/2 hours, the other after 3 1/2 hours of agony. Then a young scientist, Dr. Lee was rewarded with a medal and promotions for his role in these successful experiments. Twenty-five years later, he expressed no remorse, but his recall of details and dates make him a credible, if frightening, witness.

Another North Korean defector I interviewed was 31-year-old Chun Ji Suang (also a pseudonym). In 1994, while attending a prestigious scientific institute, he was selected to be part of two teams researching various types of gassing — from slow-acting, untraceable poisons to be used for assassinations to those that would cause instantaneous death. For eight years these scientists constantly moved their base of operations throughout the North Korean gulag. He belonged to Team A, which experimented exclusively on animals. When they successfully concluded an experiment, Team B then used those results on human guinea pigs. Unlike Dr. Lee, this young man is very remorseful. His escape from North Korea was facilitated by a supervisor and other secret sympathizers who urged him to expose Kim Jong Il’s atrocities.

A modest proposal:  let us never turn our minds away from from a stranger’s agony in Florida, or Michael Jackson’s world-historical trial in California, or Martha Stewart’s frilly-curtained jailhouse wherever that is, and reflect, even for a moment, about the murder of thousands by ghastly means on the orders of Kim Jong Il.  The harsh simplicity of the subject matter might damage the compassion centers in our brains.

 

Terri Schiavo and human vanity

This isn’t about Terri Schiavo.  Her inert body has already been desecrated by too many strange hands.  This is about what it means to be human in a world defined by uncertainty.

Since our species emerged from some mysterious nowhere, fully conscious, awake to our own weakness and inescapable death, we have considered our existence as a puzzle, and we have desired most powerfully an absolute explanation of it.  The world appeared perfect, complete, but we ourselves were a terrible question, a haunting and everpresent doubt.

From our race alone something was missing.  The earliest attempts at an explanation, painted in caves like Lascaux and Altamira, show beautifully drawn animals, and bizarre, half-bestial people.

The desire for absolute answers fuels the emotional potency of our religions, and religion, in turn, allows us to accept with great courage the incompleteness of our lives and our dissolution in death.  The central fact of Christianity is death and new life.  The confusion of this world - the fear and suffering, but also the temptations of pride and selfishness - can be placed in perspective by the believer.  This is summed up by the famous phrase in Ecclesiastes:  “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

Absolute faith in a particular explanation - a way of life - must be universally shared, or conflict ensues.  Yet once social relations achieve a degree of complexity, universal agreement becomes, for practical purposes, impossible.  The goods of the world, Isaiah Berlin once observed, are irreconcilable.  I can’t be a Hollywood star and an ascetic in the desert.  Every community in history has faced the problem of competing absolutes.  Some have solved it with violence, with Inquisitions or Gulags or ethnic cleansings.  Others have lapsed into cynicism and self-indulgence.  The uncertainty of human life must somehow be resolved short of chaos and fratricide.

More than the settled nations of the globe, we Americans feel the primal loneliness and doubt of human life.  Others stay put, and weave webs of gentle illusions; we are restless, and keep before our eyes the gap between ideals and facts.

The American way of life was established along the crossed axes of freedom and morality.  We see clearly that the farther we go down one virtuous path, the more distant we grow from the other.  We are a secular country that aggressively promotes and defends religion.  We are a nation of churchgoers that sells smut to the world.  In this outsiders suspect hypocrisy, but it is really an endless and titanic wrestling match, the greatest show on earth.

The wise men who laid the foundations of our country dealt boldly with the conflict of absolutes.  They were not faint-hearted; in the restless seeking after truth, they saw moral health, not political trouble.  Let the secularist go as far as his principles will take him.  Let the believer do the same.

But the Founders also carved out a civic space in which Americans of every persuasion debate with one another the boundaries of freedom and power, and the dispensation of tax dollars - and on this space they imposed, as ruling principle, the original uncertainty of our condition.  Here, we must assume a becoming modesty.  We accept that we may be wrong, and our opponent right, and that facts matter more than authority in the business of democratic persuasion.  To grow deaf to opposing voices and demand the triumph of one’s sectarian absolute is, in this sacred space, the most unwholesome kind of vanity:  an insult to the common sense of the American people, and a trampling on our ideals.

Terri Schiavo’s condition is a private tragedy.  But in the most painful manner imaginable, it raises questions and doubts about what it means to be a human being, about the purposes of human life.  She is so incomplete.

Those who seek to make a public scandal of this silent woman crave a resolution that will make her whole:  alive or dead.  A weight of uncertainty oppresses them, so they appeal to absolute and irreconcilable doctrines, religious and secular, in infantile language.  Their words are vanity; all their controversy is vanity.  Among the hurling of anathemas and pontification of certitudes, only one person, mysterious and mute in her hospital bed, has managed to retain a measure of dignity.

 

Springtime for Hitler

On the question of Hitler’s popularity with the Germans of his day, an article in Der Spiegel’s online English-language site (via Arts & Letters Daily) reviews a book that makes some interesting claims.

A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a “feel good dictator,” a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.

According to the author, the Hitlerian springtime for Germans was financed by plunder from Jews and defeated nations.

 

Books to read: The Dictators – The guilt of the people

How popular was Adolf Hitler with the German population?  Some information is available on the subject.  In the March 1932 presidential elections, against the ancient and uninspiring Hindenburg, Hitler received 30 percent of the vote; in the April runoff, his share of the vote rose to 37 percent, as opposed to 53 percent for Hindenburg.  In July of that year, the Nazis again won 37 percent of the vote.  While a distinct minority of Germans favored Hitler and his party, they were enough to make him a force in German politics, and this in turn paved the way to his appointment as Chancellor, by legitimate means, in January 1933.

Of course, since Hitler ruled until 1945, and the true nature of the Nazi system only emerged after the conquest of power, we may ask whether his popularity increased or diminished as a result of the violent security measures, pushing Germany into a world war, the mass murder of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals - the immense moral and political transformation that gave rise to the term “totalitarianism.”  The question is of great importance  to our understanding of the causes of tyranny and human degradation, but an answer may well be impossible to obtain.  Hitler held referendums while in power, but the results, I believe, can be dismissed as meaningless.  By the “fuehrer principle,” his was the only vote that counted.  Referendums were ritualistic triumphs, not open debates between opposed points of view.

This is my second post on Richard Overy’s penetrating analysis of Hitler and Stalin, The Dictators.  The first discussed the moral foundations of totalitarianism.  Both systems (if I read Overy correctly) placed ultimate value in advancing the revolutionary struggle, but defined this struggle as the identification and destruction of various classes of enemies.  The millions who died under Hitler and Stalin were necessary sacrificial offerings to the totalitarian morality of destruction.  Most posed no threat to either regime:  they needed to die in large numbers to fuel the moral and political energy of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.

To what degree were ordinary people complicit in these crimes?  Asked in a historical void, the question is gibberish.  Neither dictatorship would have been possible without that culture-shattering catastrophe we call the First World War.  The collapse of capitalism during the Depression added to the sense of moral failure and political doom.

The death of the West was not only predicted, it was welcomed by many intelligent persons.  Beyond that, Germany and Russia, among the great European nations, had the least developed sense of individual freedom, individual rights and protections, ultimately of the individual as the foundation of all legitimate government.  Historical accidents taught both societies the virtue of obedience to authority:  the leadership principle was in place long before Hitler turned up on the scene.

Overy provides the historical context, and his analysis of the totalitarian moral universe erected on that foundation is nothing short of brilliant.  But the question of the people’s complicity, which is asked forthrightly, gets answered with a certain evasiveness.  Overy acknowledges the difficulty of learning what went on inside people’s minds in regimes that killed over a casual word or gesture.  He could conceivably have stopped right there.  Instead, he offers up a number of vague assertions, beginning with a classification of the people by the intensity of devotion:  zealots, opportunists, silent rejectionists, open dissenters.

The categories are intuitive but unsupported by anything in the text or notes.  I might assert (also intuitively, but with an equal lack of evidence) that individuals moved from one category to another as their situation in life, or even of the moment, changed.  I could be a zealous Nazi when the Jew in the appartment I craved was taken away, and a silent rejectionist, even a dissident, when asked to die for the cause in the Eastern Front.

I find most troubling Overy’s conclusion that “broad sections of the German and Soviet public supported the dictatorships, often with enthusiasm and devotion, or at least with a general approval.”  This might well have been the case, but where’s the evidence?

Overy states that, in reaching his conclusion, he merely follows the findings of ”recent discussion of popular attitudes to the two dictatorships.”  I confess to not having partaken of those discussions; the notes indicate nearly all concern Hitler’s Germany.  Whatever these sources turned up in the way of evidence, one finds only soft information - impressions and anecdotes - in The Dictators, fortified by repeated assertions about the “broad, if conditional, approval” of the murderous regimes by their peoples.

Let this stand as illustration:  “The promises made by the dictatorships were seductively attractive because they reflected aspirations already shared by an important fraction of the population, and easily communicated to the rest.”

What are we to make of such statements?  Obviously, some fraction of the population had actively to support the dictators - the political goon squads and secret police, at a minimum, had to be staffed.  But what constitutes “an important fraction”?  Five percent?  Fifty percent?  Given the lack of data provided by Overy, we immediately slam into a theoretical wall:  no one has the slightest idea what the minimum number of thugs and zealots required to terrorize a modern nation happens to be.  All we can do, then, is look at such facts as we do have in each case, and see if we can arrive at a reasonable guess.

In Germany, as I noted, a truly “important fraction” of the population voted for Adolf Hitler to become president.  After his rise to power, no significant internal opposition, whether peaceful or violent, manifested itself.  Leftwing thugs, evident in large numbers before 1933, either ended up in prison camps or switched uniforms.

Lack of organized resistance, it should be said, fits the pattern of totalitarian regimes.  The risk is too high, the cost too terrible.  Yet German workers watched their living standards erode without protest.  German males went off to an endless and ultimately disastrous war, fighting valiantly to the end.  Desertion was rare.  Emigration was largely limited to Jews, intellectuals, and artists.

Matters stand differently with the Soviet Union.  The Bolsheviks came to power in a military coup.  The elections they held after achieving power went badly, and were disregarded.  Stalin faced a violent, if uncoordinated, revolt of the farmers, during the collectivization campaign.  It was drowned in blood.  Soviet soldiers deserted in large numbers, and some enlisted on the German side.  This was partly a factor of ethnic hatreds, but the Nazis, according to Overy, raised two divisions of ethnic Russians from their pool of POWs.  Stalin’s successor, Khrushchev, considered the adulation of the great man “nauseatingly false.”   Khrushchev, who had been deeply implicated in the crimes of the regime, described their psychological effect on good communists:  “insecurity, fear, and even desperation.”  One can only guess how ordinary Russians felt.

Stalinism has endured long after Stalin’s death, long after Khrushchev’s secret speech.  Nowhere do I find an indicator of broad enthusiasm or devotion.  We can ignore nationalist rebellions in places like Poland and Hungary that were essentially colonies of the Soviet Union.  But if we turn to Cuba, we observe more than a million escapees.  And if we look to North Korea, and the tormenting and starving of an entire population, we must begin to wonder whether that “important fraction” mentioned by Overy can be a very small number indeed, armed with technology, cunning, and an absolute ruthlessness.

I have no idea.  I can only guess.  Provisionally, from the scant evidence, it would appear that the German population was complicit in the crimes of Adolf Hitler.  Large numbers supported him, willingly carried out murder and destruction, and defended to the death the system he imposed on them.  Evil, in this case, attaches to persons - Hitler, the Nazis, “good Germans” – who made monstrous choices at a given time.

I find it much more difficult to pass a similar judgment on the Russian people.  Anecdotal support of Stalin can be gathered in bulk, but that falls in the same category as Hitler’s referendums:  ritual genuflection, inspired by motives unknown.  Certainly, the Gulags were almost as efficiently run as the Nazi concentration camps.  How was that possible, without a minimum of support?  But here we once again run into our theoretical wall:  how many jailers are required to cow and demoralize a population of 150 million?  We can’t say.

We know that, all things being equal, people tend to obey the commands of power; and historically, it may be, the Russians tended to obey somewhat faster than most.  We also know that people like to live, not die, and live happily, not in misery, and that if the cost of survival is acceptance of monstrous evil, or even complicity in it, many people will look away and accept and live, and a smaller number will join in murder and try to conceal or forget or rationalize.

These actions, whatever their moral worth, are done out of weakness, not enthusiasm or devotion.  On occasion, dissenting from his own theme, Overy appears to glimpse the tragedy of human weakness:  “Most people…neither opposed nor wildly applauded but adapted their expectations to existing possibilities.”

If my guess is correct, the Russian people were more victims than accomplices in the crimes of their masters.  But it follows, too, that Stalin was less original in his guilt than Hitler:  he inherited his apparatus of terror from Lenin, and only put it to more extreme use.  So, later, did Mao in China, and Pol Pot in Cambodia; so does Kim Jong Il to this very day.

Between the 1917 coup and the end of the Russian civil war, the Bolsheviks engineered the most effective machinery in history for the domination by a minority of huge populations.  The moral horror is in the system, which began before Hitler and is still with us today, having spread like a plague across continents and cultures.  If guilt falls on the evil geniuses, like Stalin, who wielded the system to destroy tens of millions of lives, complicity must pertain to those who first built it, and others who promoted and defended it without compulsion, or failed to expose and condemn it when free to do so.

 

Deep thought

“Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political freedom.”

Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”

Veiled women, free countries

Another disturbing piece by Theodore Dalrymple in the City Journal site.  Darlymple excoriates, with typical flair, the decision of a British judge to allow a young Muslim woman to wear an extreme version of the veil to school, in violation of a pretty tolerant dress code.  The young woman’s brother belongs to a radical Islamic party, which means two things.  First, the individual rights which determined the outcome of the case are abominated by the winners.  Second, the woman is unlikely to have been the prime mover in her own case:  in Britain, women in strict Muslim families live in a sort of totalitarianism, according to Dalrymple.

Regardless of whether Shabina Begum acted in this case without duress and of her own free will, which seems to me highly unlikely given that the traditional place of Muslim women is not the public spotlight, the fact is that substantial numbers of young Muslim women are virtually enslaved in Britain; they grow up in what can only be called a totalitarian environment. I know this from what my patients have told me. They are not allowed out of the house except under escort, and sometimes not even then; they are allowed no mail or use of the telephone; they are not allowed to contradict a male member of the household, and are automatically subject to his wishes; it is regarded as quite legitimate to beat them if they disobey in the slightest. Their brothers are often quite willing to attack anyone who speaks to the women in any informal context. They are forced to wear modes of dress that they do not wish to wear. Their schooling is quite often deliberately interrupted, so that they are not infected by Western ideas of personal liberty; ambitious for a career, they are kept at home as prisoners and domestic slaves.

Most disturbing aspect of the case is that Cherie Blair, the prime minister’s wife, represented the young woman who wished to be protected from human contact.  Dalrymple suspects sleazy electoral politics as the motive; I don’t know enough about Cherie Blair, or British politics, to say one way or another.  But it wouldn’t be the first time that the unconquerable simple-mindedness of well-meaning people led them to defend principles and people that are at war with everything they espouse.

It’s instructive to compare this woman, appealing to the courts of a free country to retain her chains, with the Indonesia maidservant in Ras Al Khaima, who having slipped her chains in a moment of human weakness, has now been sentenced by a different court to 150 lashes.  One sentence is far more brutal that the other; which is more unjust, I find it difficult to say.

 

America and the “Machiavellian moment”

An interesting article on “Power and Morals” by Owen Harries, who I believe is an Australian writer, can be found in Prospect Magazine (via the endless bounty of Realclearpolitics).

The power in question is national power, exerted in relations with other countries.  Harries makes the usual dichotomies between realists and idealists (or Machiavellians versus Wilsonians; or Henry Kissinger versus Ronald Reagan), criticizes the Bush Administration for its heedless ambition, and comes down in favor of an ethics of  “prudence.”  While I don’t agree with many of Harries’ assumptions, he is to be commended for taking on a big subject and scrutinizing it with something like calm and clarity.

The whole problem of morality in foreign affairs begs a question, though.  The call of survival often drives us to accept self-interested decisions in foreign policy:  for example, making an ally of Stalinist Russia to combat Nazi Germany.  But how is this different from any other conflict, political or social, in which power plays a part?  Why do we give foreign policy a moral pass, but demand and assume righteousness in our domestic arrangements?

The answer is that, in some sense, we are all the children of John Locke.  We believe, universally, that we have individual rights and protections encoded in our DNA, and that the main difference between America and the world is that America has laws in the books to protect these rights, and policemen to enforce them, and judges to uphold them.

We consider morality to be a primitive and natural condition, and government to be the protector of our original virtue.  As for ultimate questions of power, we Americans delegate these to our elected representatives, whom we then despise and vilify for doing what they must do; while, free from such temptations, we go about the business of becoming good men and women.

That is the great liberal tradition.  It derives directly from the Christian doctrine of natural law, so it should not surprise us that the assumption of morality is embedded in it.

Yet another, much older tradition exists, that makes no such assumption:  the republican idea.  Republicanism denies that citizens can have natural or inborn rights.  It casts doubt on the possibility that a free person can delegate the wielding of power to another, and still remain free.  At its most hard-headed, it confronts us with an either-or choice between civic virtue and Christian morality, between remaining free and becoming good.  The republican assumption is that tough men, driven by private desires, will destroy the liberty of good men, who follow Christ’s example to love and forgive their enemies.

I have just finished reading J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment, which is a history of the republican idea from its first articulation in Renaissance Florence to its adoption and adaptation by many of the Founders.  The “Machiavellian moment” described by Pocock is one of tremendous moral ambivalence, pitting the virtues required by a republic of free men to survive in time against the moral commandments every Christian soul must heed to endure in eternity.

Machiavelli famously came down on the side of freedom even at the cost of damnation.  He had watched the monk Savonarola, an ”unarmed prophet,” attempt a Christian reformation of Florentine politics, only to be burned at the stake for his troubles.  The prophet must be armed, Machiavelli concluded.  Political reformation, the “return to first principles,” often entailed brutal methods.

I find it interesting that, according to Pocock, the conflict between civic virtue and Christianity evolved, in the eighteenth century, into a conflict between civic virtue and commerce - or, more accurately, the credit required by a commercial nation to prosper.  Here liberalism stands for Christian morality in the tug of war with republican “reasons of state.”

Another interesting reflection:  at this moment we enter the moral universe, not of Machiavelli, but of Thomas Jefferson.  That universe, as Jean Yarbrough has pretty conclusively shown, placed moral limits on commerce, denounced all credit as corruption, but also glorified the liberal faith in the individual against the (republican) government, and in the individual’s inborn moral sense.  Jefferson assumed virtue would triumph, and he based his optimism on his reading of the Scottish philosophers - who, Pocock maintains, failed to resolve the contradiction between the liberal passion for wealth and the freedom from corruption required by republican institutions.

Americans, it would seem, exist in a “Jeffersonian moment,” in which the contradictions standing in the way of freedom are leaped over, and the moral tensions between power and virtue are never acknowledged or felt.  Somewhere in Hell, I imagine, Machiavelli is shaking his head in wonder and puzzlement.

 

…No, wait – Europe is reborn

So claims Timothy Garton Ash, in an unintentionally moving attempt to say something inspiring about the new Europe.  Ash is a sincere man and, one suspects, the owner of a good heart.  But to write of rebirths in a continent sinking into depopulation is beyond inept .  Ash illustrates the problem described by Weigel below.  He writes about the past with some feeling.  He concludes that all Europeans can unite around “food and football” - again, an unintentional parallel to bread and circuses that, I believe, will become the EU battle-cry.  He sounds vaguely aware that something is missing from the mix, but is utterly clueless about what that might be.  Abe Lincoln could tell him:  Europe is missing a proposition around which it can unite, and toward which people, as individuals and communities, can aspire.