Che Guevara posters are found all over the world; I doubt if there is much of a market for Himmlers. The crimes of the Left are no less vicious than those of the Right, but we cannot condemn them without arousing what we fear the most, the resentment of our Others at home and abroad.
Postmodernism is a commemoration of Auschwitz for the wrong reasons, a cult of victims that ignores who they were and why they were killed. That is why it so enjoys squeezing tears out of the Holocaust but finds crushing “kulaks” under the treads of tractors “beautiful” and “lyrical.”
Sunday, December 03, 2006
The moral failure of the academy
A very effective summation by Eric Gans:
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8 comments:
First, making a film-jacket Exhibit A against the academy is pretty lame. Second, what to make of this:
The crimes of the Left are no less vicious than those of the Right...
No moral difference between genocide against the Jews and the crushing of a counter-revolutionary? How about the fact that the latter was killed for a political choice and the former was killed for simply existing. I don’t need to defend communism to recognize that revolutionary violence is in a different category than ethnic genocide. The author is right on one point: people who celebrate icons of leftist violence are deluded and morally backward. For the most part, though, far-right violence is philosophically more abhorrent than leftist violence (unless, of course, that violence completely denies some form of choice to the victim.)
The academy has more than its fair share of lousy scholars touting trendy lefty political views. Of course, the presence of useless radicals varies by faculty and the importance of the practical importance of these views varies by professor. If anything, the piece made me question the author’s moral credibility more than the academy’s.
It's always been my understanding that the Soviet butchers slaughtered kulaks precisely because they were kulaks, which is morally equivalent to the Nazi's slaughter of the Jews. Professor Gans is rather specific in comparing the two propagandists - Eisenstein and Riefenstahl.
Comparing the rationales profered by either propagandist seems rather beside the point.
Well anon. if you are questioning the author's moral credibility or seriousness, be sure that this tidbit from a blog is the smallest snapshot into one of the most important intellectuals. If you like, go to his website and search on "white guilt" "antisemitism" and "firstness to get a sense of the argument in its entirety, developed in many essays.
I don't know if you followed my link to the blog entry, but it starts to address your point: Why do campuses invite Noam Chomsky but not David Duke or even Pat Buchanan? It is a bit too easy to point to the difference between an ideology that is “essentially” exclusionary (”Germany for the Aryans/Germans”) and one that excludes others only “contingently” (”The kulaks cannot be permitted to thwart the will of the Soviet people”). What this difference really shows is how little all the righteous indignation against Nazism corresponds to any true moral awakening....
Anyway, with respect I have to disagree with you. I think the common distinction that Gans adapts here between "left" and "right" totalitarianism is just his (and my) way of deferring to common ways of conceptualizing the problem. But what I think he and I both believe is that this is ultimately a distinction without a difference and that at root there is no significant ethical, moral, or conceptual difference between the Nazis and Communists of the twentieth century, even as we admit that there were indeed surface differences in their theory and praxis, and apparently different criteria for killing people - but would the millions of Stalin's victims really appreciate the kind of distinction you are trying to articulate here? did they really have a choice to live or die? or were they not just most often random targets of a paranoid regime intent on creating fear and submission anywhere, including in its own ranks? Would the Ukrainians, or even the Jews, agree with you that there was nothing racial in Stalin's crimes? Wasn't "communism" at root just a veil for Russian imperialism - even if Stalin was from Georgia? Millions in Eastern Europe would say it was.
You wrote: No moral difference between genocide against the Jews and the crushing of a counter-revolutionary? How about the fact that the latter was killed for a political choice and the former was killed for simply existing.
- where is the real distinction here? The Kulaks were also often killed for simply existing... as agents of bourgeois market society... which is just one of the important qualities of the Jews that led the Nazis to hate the Jews. Because one ideology constructs its hatred of market society in class terms and another in racial or religious terms, we are to treat one hatred differently, less morally obscene, even if it results in numerically more deaths?
But, you say, the Kulaks presumably had a choice to give up their property and become communists. In some cases, no doubt. But in many they were targeted as scapegoats whatever they did, just as the educated in Pol Pot's Cambodia had no choice but to die. The bottom line is that communism needed scapegoats, it needed to kill millions for that kind of regime to sustain itself. Thus, ultimately, whoever chose the victims, whether in some cases the victims themselves, is besides the point if the point is to condemn western academics for sympathizing with a form of totalitarianism that necessarily kills millions. We supposedly learned people should know by now that all forms of anti-market totalitarianism necessarily involve millions of deaths when they achieve anything like the share of global power that 20thC. Communists did.
-but anyway, the Jews were not simply killed just for existing. They were the target of a specific kind of racial hatred. Racism is not racism is not racism. Hatred of Jews is not the same as hatred of Blacks which is not the same as hatred of Arabs, (or Islam, if we want to go non-racial). What it is that one may resent about each different group is different in ways that will have an effect on how one acts out one's resentment. Again, the point about antisemitism is that it is rooted in a fear of "the Jew's" supposed superiority: "he" is a member of the first nation with a special relationship to monotheism and he seemingly refuses to convert to Christianity, implicitly making a claim for the superiority of his faith, and perhaps nation. At the same time, "he" succeeds so often in modern market society, which must be for some nefarious reason.
In contrast, other races are hated for appearing incapable of an existence in modern society.
What Gans is saying is that the left essentially hate those who take initiative, those who go first in changing existing conditions through their pursuit of market freedoms, even as this market freedom - howevermuch it is simply the least bad of our bad choices in the way of economic systems - is necessary to the kind of modern society in which milions aren't murdered. While the left uses the Holocaust as the centrepoint of their postmodern victimary ideology, they refuse to inquire seriously into what the Holocaust was really all about (it wasn't just about the Jews but about Jews-as-agents-of-the market, including the market for leftist ideas) because doing so would implicate their own anti-market ideology, even as this ideology paradoxically brings them much market success in today's academy - which make them hypocrites who then go to further lengths to construct a delusional ideology to medate their guilt at being "privileged"). This suggests the left is little different in terms of the core resentment that motivates them - hatred of "the Jew", hatred of the "Kulak", the Anglo-American Freemasons, the American oil man, is essentially all the same hatred of market man, even if one of these identities is more fundamental to a person than the others - than the Judeophobic Nazis. Yes, there were differences in how these similar hatreds played out historically, but aren't the left now helping prepare the ground for the wiping out of Israel in a second Holocaust? Admittedly, some on the left are deluded - but some aren't - about the effects of their support for Arab fascism.
Your rebuttal (as I understand it):
1. Communists didn’t always offer choice (Pol Pot vs. intellectuals; Stalin vs. Ukrainians, etc)
-Granted, though I tried to leave open the possibility that choice is not always offered in practice.
2. There is no category difference between totalitarian induced political violence [Because one ideology constructs its hatred of market society in class terms and another in racial or religious terms, we are to treat one hatred differently, less morally obscene, even if it results in numerically more deaths?]
- I still think the genocide of an ethnic group like the Jews and the destruction of a class like the Kulaks are two different things. The latter does not necessitate genocide (though it can play out like that in practice). This isn’t just theoretical window dressing. It is the deliberate nature of the mass slaughter of a distinct political community that tends to produce the public’s particular moral revulsion of the Holocaust. Other acts of totalitarianism have caused more death, though they don’t quite equal the extreme intentions of the Nazis. Are body counts really the most appropriate way to judge the morality of action?
3. The genocide of the Jews was really about a hatred of the market [ it wasn't just about the Jews but about Jews-as-agents-of-the market, including the market for leftist ideas]
-I still haven’t really figured this one out. People have always found a way to hate Jews, be they active and successful or separate and destitute.
4. All the talk about an equality of genocides is beside the point. Professors who celebrate communism should be condemned for their moral failure
-I agreed with part of this point in my original post. I still think the morality argument is intriguing, though wholly unsatisfying.
5. You probably didn’t follow the link
-I did, but disagreed with much the argument, including the one you posted in italics.
6. You should be more modest in your claims based on a reading of one post. Gens offers a whole body of morally credible work.
-Re-read Gen’s first paragraph, and your post title. My couched criticism of Gens’ credibility is modest in comparison.
Normally when I engage in arguments about the ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust my opponents are Islamists or post-colonial folks. The latest trend is to talk about multiple ‘holocausts,’ thus minimalizing the Holocaust itself. Engaging the right on this issue is an interesting change of pace.
As a side note, I notice the occasional condemnation of post-modern victim ideology. I found ample amounts of postmodernism in Gens own writings. Postmodernism is normally concerned with rejecting universalist claims, rejecting ‘objective’ reality, and ‘unmasking’ the power relations behind political arguments. Gens’s short piece is trying to ‘unmask’ campus leftism to show that, at its core, it is about obscuring and reinforcing the leftist professors own role and power in the market system. Ironic no?
Good to see you back. Long resopnse here, needs editing, but I don't have the time, sorry. Let's start with this:
Normally when I engage in arguments about the ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust my opponents are Islamists or post-colonial folks. The latest trend is to talk about multiple ‘holocausts,’ thus minimalizing the Holocaust itself. Engaging the right on this issue is an interesting change of pace.
I don't deny that the Holocaust is unique, as every historical event worthy of memory is. Rather, what I am saying is that there is no important moral distinction to be made between one kind of mass murderer and another. In other words, the difference you are trying to get at are about historical, or ethical, differences having to do with the horrifically memorable - historical - implications of different forms of social organization and scapegoating, and less to do with the universal moral claim against all forms of murderous scapegoating. I think you essentially agree with me on the moral point - murder is always wrong and absolutely wrong. What confuses though is that you recognize (as do I) that the Holocaust has had a much different cultural impact than the Soviet killings. For some reason it has more meaning in our world. It is central to the "white guilt" that stems from knowledge of the genocidal possibility in hte modern state treating races differently. This is one question and there is a good reason for this different cultural impact. But it is a question separate from that of why so many academics are unable to draw the same moral conclusions about the Soviets and Nazis as mass killers.
If you really want to argue that Stalin's regime was less murderous as engaged in counter-revolutionary warfare, give it a try; but this is an empirical point I yet have little reason to accept, given what I know of the history.
I think we need to distinguish between what the scapegoater may say - these are "counter-revolutionaries" - and what the reality was: a regime that could only exist by scapegoating millions. If we know this, as people today should know it, then what is the difference in making a distinction in one's sympathies between those who scapegoated the entire Jewish race and those who scapegoated some more ambiguously-defined social entity?
It would certainly be a catastrophe if the Jews disappeared, but the fundamental point of monotheism is that we are all equally God's children.
Is our concern really to distinguish one scapegoat from another, or is it to condemn all mass murder, absolutely, with no hemming and hawing apologetics? The difference in a people's choice of scapegoats is an interesting historical question, with many implications, but I don't think that we can accord a higher degree of moral wrongness to any particular form of mass murder.
There are essentially two historical questions here that we are confusing. 1) what, in retrospect, was the real historical nature of "communism" and, once we know this, is there any ( I'm arguing no) moral differentiation between those who sympathize with it today and those who sympathize with the Nazis' socialism? 2) what could people have reasonably foreseen about the nature of communism in, say, the 1930s when it was the vogue for western leftists to champion the Soviet cause while having a pretty clear idea in the 1930s what Hitler meant for the world and for Jews.
I am willing to grant - though it is not an obvious or irrefutable claim - that people saw through Hitler more easily than they saw through Stalin. But if the latter evil were less evident in the 1930s should we really think it less now?
Again, I am not denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust or its absolutely central role in the birth of postmodern thought. As a genocide, the Holocaust is like other genocides or we wouldn't have this general category of crime. But its historical role as an event that has shaped cultural history is certainly very different from other genocides, precisely because it was the act of one of the supposedly most modern and culturally sophisticated peoples and states, thus throwing into dispute any and all claims about the values of modernity, progress, colonialism, etc. These are all important things to debate with leftists who wish to universalize the Holocaust and the kind of victimary politics they can build on it, which requires they first deny the unique role of the Jews as the quintessential victims of a modern and advanced state turning against modernity and free markets in certain ways. The antisemitism that is inherent in the postmodern left and that comes out in times like the present is a result of their inability to come fully to terms with why it was specifically the Jews as symbols of a fallen modernity and market society who were Hitler's scapegoats. This is because the left's own scapegoats have many of the negative qualities commonly ascribed to the Jews, though the left today have to deny there is anything particularly Jewish about either their scapegoats or the central event (the Holocaust) in the moral revelation that underpins their postmodernism. Thus the left profess that they are anti-Zionist but not antisemitic. The difference exists in theory. But if you look at how they actuially talk about the state of Israel, you may notice that this is just a way of claiming that Israel acts like a dirty Jew, as the uprooted and violent man of the market who seeks to destroy the supposedly natural and long-rooted people of Palestine.
And by the way, neither I nor Gans consider ourselves on the right. We are defenders of the centre, i.e. of the most widely held sacred values or compacts on which the order of our society is founded. A defender of the centre sometimes finds conservative ideologues to have the better political positions for defending the centre, as some of them do today. But sometimes it's the liberals, as in the recent fights agaisnt racial segregation in the US, and for universal rights before the law.
Are body counts really the most appropriate way to judge the morality of action?
-no, a murderer of one can be as morally indefensible as a murderer of millions, though admittedly there will be differences in the historical situation of the two killers. Again, this difference leads to ethical, not moral, questions about the scope and scale of the violent possibilities inherent in modern organization.
I still think the genocide of an ethnic group like the Jews and the destruction of a class like the Kulaks are two different things. The latter does not necessitate genocide (though it can play out like that in practice). This isn’t just theoretical window dressing. It is the deliberate nature of the mass slaughter of a distinct political community that tends to produce the public’s particular moral revulsion of the Holocaust.
-again, yes, these are two different historical things, from the perspective of what has prompted the most memorialization and revulsion in the postmodern culture. The amount of revulsion that the Holocaust prompts is not, from our perspective, strictly moral, solely concerned with the universal law. The power in the revelation provided by the Holocaust rather tells us about a particular historical context - modernism in the mid-20thC and its ties to the industrialization of human sacrifice, such that treating people as different by dint of race is no longer acceptable as a necessary evil as it once was. Western people have long known or suspected that the bloody sacrifice of human scapegoats is evil, whether one or a million. But they have often pitted one evil against another. What is new with the HOlocaust is the ability to see the full implications inherent in the human tendency to scapegoat. While the revelation of mass murder along racial lines forcefully reminds us of our moral imperative not to murder, we also learn that no pragmatic claim for an ethic in which different races need sometimes be treated differently before the law as the lessser of two evils can any longer be made. Once we see fully the moral evil implicit in a given ethic we have to change the ethic. We are not learning something new about the morality of murder, but about the outdated ethics of certain forms of organization under modern conditions.
The comparison to the Kulaks is interesting because perhaps it was not immediately evident to rational people in the 1930s that there was not some basis for claiming this killing a necessary evil. If communism had turned out a great success, providing for all the people of the world, might we have justified the killing? Some would - though I wouldn't (but then I could never believe in the possibility of communism) - e.g. the historian Eric Hobsbawm who explicitly said in the 1990s that if Communism could work, all the killing would have been worth it.
But this is just to say that Hobsbawm has learned nothing fundamental about humanity or morality from history, which is precisely Gans' point about the academics in the blog post here. Anyone who thinks a life can ever be justifiably taken as a means to an end is wrong because he is still living in a utopian fantasy that would justify this killing. But human society will always be full of conflict; there is no way ever to avoid this; that's why killing people in the name of ending conflict and bringing permanent peace is always wrong, a delusion. Sometimes you have to fight and kill to maintain or restore peace and order - that may be justified; but it's not the same as promising that your killing will bring about some relatively permanent peace in a new kind of historical era. The nazi promise of a thousand year Reich lasted 12 years. Millions were killed for a Gnostic fantasy that was quickly revealed as a fantasy. In the case of communism, it took 70 years for the Gnostic fantasy to be fully revealed as such to everyone.
So the real difference I see is that one evil fantasy was somewhat better veiled than another. But at the end of the day, with the benefit of historical hindsight, I think we should be able to expect university teachers to show no sympathy for either murderous fantasy. Yes the ethical, or historical, revelations have played out differently. But at the end of the day it should be clear that National Socialism and Soviet Communism were essentially the same poison.
However, it isn't clear to many in the academy. And that's because their moral compass doesn't work. They haven't learned anything; they can still allow themselves some utopian fantasy: "Communist murder would have been worth it if only Communism proved workable... and maybe if today we stand up for all the world's victims and for "diversity" against the hegemonic forces... we will keep the socialist hope alive". They prefer this fantasy to the simply correct position: "there can never be a utopia." Just because they are less willing or able to sympathize with the utopian promise in the Nazi position, so what? why should it move us that some require a different form of delusion than others?
I still haven’t really figured this one out. People have always found a way to hate Jews, be they active and successful or separate and destitute.
-yes, a historical analysis would reveal different themes in Judeophobia throughout the ages. No doubt these themes mingled to some degree in the Nazi propaganda in certain contradictory ways. But the dominant theme in Judeophobia is resentment for people who formed the first nation and were the first to discover monotheism - basically, the theme of "they think they're better than us (Christians or Germans)". And many Nazis did think the Jews were superior in some respects (though this didn't stop them from also claiming they were racially inferior): Jews were alleged to control the financial markets, the Bank of England, to own much of industry, to be in league with the Freemasons to control the world politically, to have dictated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, etc. etc. This was not just some backwards Asian tribe. National Socialism hated the Jews as manipulators of the market economy that somehow stripped good Gemrn men and warriors of their manhood. Communism hated Kulaks for pretty much the same reason, though not all the attributes of antisemitism were brought to bear.
I found ample amounts of postmodernism in Gens own writings. Postmodernism is normally concerned with rejecting universalist claims, rejecting ‘objective’ reality, and ‘unmasking’ the power relations behind political arguments. Gens’s short piece is trying to ‘unmask’ campus leftism to show that, at its core, it is about obscuring and reinforcing the leftist professors own role and power in the market system. Ironic no?
While Gans would be the first to admit that his way of thinking can only come into existence on the back of postmodernism, some of whose arguments he will accept in order to extend them, he is also in many ways rejecting pomo. He believes in a universal humanity and morality (though what all humans share in common is relatively little compared to what is particular to their creeds); and he believes in objective reality, though the relationshiop between this reality and the language that memorializes it is not straightforward and this is what his anthropology is all about tyring to explain, to the degree we can explain it, which isn't fully. He would say that the postmoderns were on to something in identifying the centrality of language but ultimately made a fetish of language as a force in itself, instead of explaining the relationship between real human events and the transcendent culture that somewhat mysteriously emerges from them.
As for unmasking power relations, yes he is doing that. But he is not doing it in order to argue that human history is nothing but a conspiracy of knowledge and power. He does not fall into the nihilst trap. He is arguing that human culture can never be well understood as a conspiracy of the powerful, or of the many, or of the few. History is fundamentally about evolving ethical systems of exchange in which we all play a responsible role.
To the degree that pomo academics don't provide anything much new to the culture, their games can be seen as largely about maintaining their positions. Thus we may deride a postmodern academic who will condemn the 19th European for the "white man's burden" which, according to the academic, was disguised as a genuine concern for the native when it was really just a play for western institutioanl power. Maybe, maybe not, depending on the case. In any case, Gans says, the postmodern academic is usually doing the very same thing: he is disguising his "white guilt burden" as a genuine concern for the subaltern peoples, when in fact it is largely a play for his own stake in institutional power.
Is Gans in turn doing the very same thing? Well, first of all he does not make the claim or act as if he is being high and righteous. Having seen him lecture I can tell you he is anything but a charismatic leader/teacher. He does not play victim games to shift attention away from his own privileged position when he is at the front of the room talking, and everyone else is listening. Instead he tries his best to follow old school norms of academic politeness and openly discuss the kind of issue you raise, pointing to and examining the problem that one speaks while others listen.
He knows he is as immersed in human sin as the rest of us. Still, he does claim to be pursuing some truth and he also claims that the truth is liberating, to a degree - not in any utopian sense (and this is how he is different from the postmoderns who still cling to some utopian promise; he often defines his position as "post-millennial" - he is not promising some solution to conflict, only teaching us how we must forever struggle to defer it) but in the sense that growth in human self-understanding does expand the freedoms possible in our systems of exchange. Ultimately, Gans' justification for holding our attention depends on whether or not he really does help us expand our human self-understanding. I think he does. To some degree so did postmodernism. But Gans takes us further, beyond the lingering utopian promises. And he is much more open and honest about what he is trying to do. He does not play games of word magic as if righteous incantations could deconsruct and change the world. No, our words can only ever defer our conflict, not end it. You can judge him accordingly.
I have edited my last comment since I first posted it; it still needs more editing but perhaps it's now better than before.
My summation of the argument your and Gens’ argument: Utopian regimes require scapegoats. Morally speaking, political murder of scapegoats is always equally abhorrent. Thus utopian regimes are all equally abhorrent.
I’ll give you home-court advantage on the next historical example (well, one of the posters here appears to have experience in France): What, then, do we make of revolutionary France? The Republicans certainly had their streaks of utopianism. And their class/ideological scapegoats. And yet, the Terror has never really struck me as the moral equivalent of the Holocaust. There was too much opportunity for choice in the former. The despised identity of the scapegoats was, comparatively speaking, malleable. As well, the ends of Republicanism just strike me as more defensible than those of communism or Nazism. Thoughts?
Well, your question really answers itself – when do the means justify the ends? When they really serve the ends and not just wishful thinking.
In other words, I am arguing that to be justified the means must pre-figure the ideal “end” you wish to bring into being. And murder can at best serve a pragmatic end in war-like conditions; it does not serve an idealistic end. If a regime comes into existence by terrorizing the very people it presumes to rule, can it offer anything more than tyranny to (at least some of) the people? Arguably, the French republic has always been scarred by the means that brought it into being. And the fifth republic is crumbling today as certain utopian fantasies inherent to it continue to undermine it.
While an existing or primitive order can and so often is maintained by throwing victims to the mob, a new form of order (“republican” or whatever) cannot evolve through scapegoating murder unless the scapegoat is first represented in new ways in some cultural or esthetic-ethical advance, such that the representation can survive the murder or martyr and play a role in constructing the new order. But this in turns only begs the question of the necessity of the murder; and outside of a primitive religious context it won’t really seem necessary. Republican ideas existed before the terror; the terror wasn’t necessary to the ideas, except in terms of some pragmatic balance of power which could have been addressed more honestly – representative democracy or civil war – if the state were not to be corrupted from the start by the seed of terror in the name of utopia.
Does human society only advance on the back of scapegoats: do we need the murder because only murder can be memorialized with new forms of representation – i.e. turning our victims into new gods in some transformative moment of guilt or joy? Or do the representations (new or old) always precede those who are sacrificed to them? I think the latter. Murder can only be given a pragmatic justification as a necessary evil in the context of a war.
Anyway, the usefulness of Gans’ contrast of our reactions to Nazi and Soviet mass killings depends on their historical contemporaneity. Otherwise we are indeed comparing ethical apples and oranges - there is indeed a significant difference between the terror and the Holocaust even though I, from my perspective in 2006, can maintain that such killing is always wrong, without a real purposeful end. (I further assume that the moral knowledge regarding the wrong of murder of the average German, circa 1940, and Frenchman, circa 1790, would have been roughly equivalent if not slightly in the Frenchman’s favor.)
Let’s rework the question: why do we feel somewhat differently (and how is this a “moral” difference?) about say slavery in classical Greece, the birthplace of democracy, and in 18-19th-century Virginia, the birthplace of American democracy? In retrospect, we see both forms of slavery as contrary to some intuition we think we now have acquired about a universal morality, but we may well think that any anachronistic historical moralizing, especially regarding the ancient world, is somehow besides the point of proper historical study: the Greeks could not have been in touch with this moral intuition to the same extent we think the Virginians should have been, let alone us today; and yet… we sense this intuition is universal. At the very least, we think that holding on to slaves may have been a necessary evil for the survival of societies, but after the economic leaders of the world have shown slavery to be no longer as productive as free labour or investment in new science and technology, holding on to slavery is an unwillingness to learn from history, and this unwillingness is a moral failing.
As history unfolds more and more ethical contexts, with greater degrees of freedom or possibility from which we learn, it sharpens our moral intuitions about what is original or fundamental to humanity. In other words, the truth about something is not evident at its beginning, even though all that is inherently possible in it is somewhere there at the beginning. No, we learn about what man and his morality is as it never-endingly unfolds in history.
This does not mean that everything is relative to time and place, that we can only judge morality in context. No, it is once we learn to think and record historically that we learn from a variety of contexts, and we are able to distill from them some sense of what is plausibly universal, rooted in some original imperative for all humans to engage in some kind of moral reciprocity while juggling the original imperatives of freedom and equality. In other words, at a certain point in our historical development - roughly, with the birth of monotheism and the Jewish and Greek development of historical thought - we start to distinguish a universal morality from historically shifting ethics, and this allows us eventually both a universal moral perspective about, say, slavery and at the same time a sense that there is something about the ethical possibilities in earlier societies that qualifies our ability to denounce a limited understanding of morality in them.
Now that we in 2006 know more about the meaning of reciprocity inherent in our human origins, we can see that slavery is always wrong (at least, we should never allow the idea that there can be any reason to go back to it), even though we understand that every society once practiced it in some shape or form. In other words, we forgive, like Jesus as he is being sacrificed by those who “don’t know what they are doing”. Once we know what we know, it would be almost impossible to bring ourselves to go back to slavery; we would most likely fight to the death first. Historical memory would have to be destroyed before slavery returned.
In other words, moralizing about ancient history is a pointless indulgence. The moral struggle should be to see 1) how our sense of our original “god-given” morality has grown and 2) how the freedoms inherent in any given historical context, the freedoms that allow us to understand morality, emerged from previous limits.
Let’s make your comparison more extreme to bring out the point: we don’t judge the many primitive societies that performed human sacrifices, which they truly believed were necessary to maintaining social order via the favor of the sacred being, as harshly as we do the Nazis. What the primitives did was morally horrific in retrospect, but we forgive the primitives for they knew not what they did, while we think the Nazis knew well what they were doing or they did it to such an extreme that they must at some point have known it was wrong – well, they knew more than the primitives, to be sure, but there was still a genuine delusion at play for many that said the elimination of the Jews was necessary to bringing in the peace and order of the thousand year reich for all the gentiles of the world. If only it could have worked…could it have been justified? when exactly is it that most of us clearly see it couldn’t have ever worked? that killing all the objects of your resentment does not magically free you from resentment or conflict. Kill the Jews and you will still need to find another “Jew” to whip. You’re better off to have a talk with God about universal morality and learn to transcend the resentment that keeps you fixed in a particular time and place.
Once we know this, any pointless scapegoat murder we know about, whether we know it in 1790 or 1940 is equally wrong. But surely neither Robespierre nor Hitler fully understood this. However, if not just hte act but an inability to learn from the repeated act is a moral failing, perhaps there is more with which to condemn Hitler. BUt at what point, what minimum number of victims, does such a contrast become pointless? How much time is needed for the lesson to be learned? You see, trying to compare moral failures strikes me as foolhardy.
While I think human, as opposed to animal, sacrifice is not original to humanity, we can nonetheless think of the human need for violent sacrifice as our original sin. We all partake in original sin. However, over time we have evolved less violent forms of sacrifice so that the ways in which today’s consumer society and international law operates do not offend us as much as the Nazis though we still recognize there is a quantum of problematic violence in our systems, and that we can never reduce our violence to zero, only minimize it.
But the reason we can have a sense of a universally applicable morality is that our original sin is always, on some level, the same original sin, however it plays out today in the Congo or Cairo. Instead of comparing sinners, we are better off asking how the lessons of history teach us how to refine our understanding of original sin.
So the question Gans is really asking is why is moral progress so slow. Why do we have to go through so much before the lightbulb flickers and we say, heh, there’s something wrong in this kind of behaviour? Why do we have to get to the extreme point of the Nazis before we say there is something fundamentally wrong with racism and differential treatment of races before the law? And why is it that even as we grasp that there is something fundamentally wrong about the Nazis, we are not able to grasp the same as readily about the Soviets, their contemporaries, whose differences in theory and practice were there to be made into something, by those who will, into a claim for significant difference, even as a broader perspective allows us to see that all modern socialisms are the same poison? Why can we not grasp that socialism is universally evil? Why must we continue to dream it could somehow work? Because we haven't really learned the lessons of original sin.
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