American Samizdat: Conscience and Human Judgment
Determinants of our fate
A PERSONAL NOTE: It nears a month since I announced that circumstances would temporality interfere with my writing progress on Homo Vitruvius. Those circumstances, including an intensive summer class to teach this past month, the work involved in moving our household, still two weeks away, and, unexpectedly, the theft of our motor scooter — a Honda Metropolitan (looks like a Vespa but at half the price) that answers to the name of Max, should you encounter it — interfered even more than anticipated. I managed to start American Samizdat with the revision of four essays previously published on Trumpism that I always intended to offer again at this time, but the more intensive creative effort, on Homo Vitruvius, of my memoir Reason for Being in the World was completely interrupted. What I publish today is the last of the essays on Trump. The events of this month have offered cause for optimism few of us were feeling before them. Should all go well, with Trump’s defeat, American Samizdat will end. If fortune fails to smile, American Samizdat will continue in its essential spirit of resistance and, as of this coming week, in more varied creative ways than simply essays by me. I do hope even before the move, now that the class is over, but certainly intend after, to resume publishing chapters of Reason for Being in the World, next up, “Burn the Boats.”
Fourth and last in a series.
Conscience and Human Judgment
Human beings may or may not have advanced to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and, at the price of totalitarian control, raised 800 million out of poverty since 1980 in China alone. But they have also produced, in little more than a century, two civilization-altering world wars, the Armenian Genocide, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, the Gulag, further tens of millions dead from China’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution,’ and lesser millions in the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia and the killing zones of Syria.
However factual that history, a reasonable knowledge of human nature tells us that such focus on the worst — not in the world, but in ourselves — holds no place either at the dinner tables of young families, the town halls of electoral politics, or the congregational gatherings of organized worship. In all these places hope must reign. Faith in ourselves. Faith in the future. Faith in our fellows.
Such hope has sustained humanity through all the causes of despair and all the fear and the visible reality around us of our ever-renewable capacity for self-destruction. It sustains us in the similarly renewable belief, most mornings and with every (re)generation, that life and the world can be better. And Pinker argues that in very calculable ways, for most people most of the time, over the course of time, life and the world became so.
Ancient barbarities, then, are accordingly discounted by that very word — “ancient,” from which the species has advanced. The more recent lapses are thus reconciled with hope, by labeling them precisely as lapses, however horrific, in the bending arc of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s moral universe toward justice.
It behooves us, however, sometimes — often — in the service of hope, not to think so hopefully. These myriad lapses have been major lapses, and much in our contemporary world argues compellingly for political regression in the reality of human stagnation. On a timescale of only the past three decades, after decades of liberated, liberal democratic advance since the Second World War, enlightened human political organization shows itself recognizably, reactively threatened. The climate we daily despoil threatens us, too, and the artificially intelligent technology that exalts homo habilis, or “handy” man, offers little reason to trust it in the hands of homo sapiens, so-called but little demonstrated “wise” man.
There is more than enough evidence to suspect that humans will expire from the earth only more grandly — or more slowly and sadly, or more foolishly — than their lower order evolutionary forebearers. Not to act too hopefully, in the service of hopefulness, then, requires among its many demands that we study, whatever the pain of it, our own capacity for grandiosity or meanness, for survivor and careerist cowardice, and for depravity. That we face it, in order to face it down.
For too long now since the rise of Trumpism, I have feared we sleep, as England slept between the world wars, as all Europe did, as the U.S. did. As most nations that were ever lulled by the promises of democracy or exercised by its imperfections have historically slept as autocracy overtook them. In the U.S., too, we have been acculturated to believe in some kind of American superiority — we call it “Exceptionalism” — and this belief has disempowered many Americans to see the potential for evil in their fellows if not themselves. Along with many others, in my small way, I have assumed the unpleasant task to help people see. Before, now only three months away, it is too late.
In 1991, historian Christopher R. Browning, assuming the same task, published Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. For our purposes, I link to and quote at length from Walter Reich’s New York Times review of the book, which provides superb summary. If not the book, I urge you to read the review.
Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police . . ., [a] group of 500 policemen, most of them from Hamburg, was made up of truly ordinary men. Most were in their 30's and 40's -- too old for conscription into the army -- and of middle- or lower-class origins. They included men who, before the war, had been professional policemen as well as businessmen, dockworkers, truck drivers, construction workers, machine operators, waiters, druggists and teachers. Only a minority were members of the Nazi Party, and only a few belonged to the SS. During their stay in Poland they participated in the shootings, or the transport to the Treblinka gas chambers, of at least 83,000 Jews.
We are presented by Browning with a version of what many would call, after Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil, his contrary finding to what most people believe or think they know about Nazi Germany and other monstrous authoritarian crucibles. Dissenting as I do from Arendt’s formulation, I rather conceive it as the capacity of ordinary people to submit themselves as instruments of evil, a more psychologically and socially complex phenomenon than invoked by “banality.”
The common belief about Naziism that Browning’s study contradicts is that the only way to resist one’s submission to pervasive evil is to accept one’s destruction by it. Refuse and die.
This, to dial it back for now some levels of ethical descent, is what the whole Republican Party rationalized in succumbing to Trump. The feared death in this instance was the rather less consequential death of individual political careers, but that is how it always begins — preservation of career, status, and fortune before preservation of the life.
Browning’s evidence informs us quite strikingly otherwise. Men did resist, ordinary men, and not only were not killed but not even punished. Many found subterfuges to avoid the task of murder. It wasn’t by any means always moral principle, but rather instead organic revulsion before the task. Writes Reich:
We know a lot about how the Germans carried out the Holocaust. We know much less about how they felt and what they thought as they did it, how they were affected by what they did, and what made it possible for them to do it. In fact, we know remarkably little about the ordinary Germans who made the Holocaust happen — not the desk murderers in Berlin, not the Eichmanns and Heydrichs, and not Hitler and Himmler, but the tens of thousands of conscripted soldiers and policemen from all walks of life, many of them middle-aged, who rounded up millions of Jews and methodically shot them, one by one, in forests, ravines and ditches, or stuffed them, one by one, into cattle cars and guarded those cars on their way to the gas chambers.
In his finely focused and stunningly powerful book, "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland," Christopher R. Browning tells us about such Germans and helps us understand, better than we did before, not only what they did to make the Holocaust happen but also how they were transformed psychologically from the ordinary men of his title into active participants in the most monstrous crime in human history. In doing so he aims a penetrating searchlight on the human capacity for utmost evil and leaves us staring at his subject matter with the shock of knowledge and the lurking fear of self-recognition.
Even just in Reich’s book review are to be found horrifying, graphic details of up-close and systematic murder beyond what you probably know. What is even more horrifying?
In the end, what disturbs the reader more than the policemen's escape from punishment is their capacity — as the ordinary men they were, as men not much different from those we know or even from ourselves — to kill as they did.
Battalion 101's killing wasn't, as Mr. Browning points out, the kind of "battlefield frenzy" occasionally seen in all wars, when soldiers, having faced death, and having seen their friends killed, slaughter enemy prisoners or even civilians. It was, rather, the cold-blooded fulfillment of German national policy, and involved, for the policemen, a process of accommodation to orders that required them to do things they would never have dreamed they would ever do, and to justify their actions, or somehow reinterpret them, so that they would not see themselves as evil people. [Emphasis added]
I came to know of Browning’s book by encountering it a few years back in an essay by Jordan Peterson titled “Hell, One Step at a Time,” developed from his then forthcoming Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.
At the time of Peterson’s first explosion into intellectual fame, despite some obvious political differences between us, I found him to be a person of incisive intellect. As his public persona and contributions grew, I came to think him, with greater discrimination, as most acute in his thinking when penetrating some of the more preposterous cultural truisms of contemporary progressive orthodoxy. He is clearly, too, at his most appealing to some when concocting and enumerating from his scholarly insights compellingly simple bromides to enable uncollected young males to get their shit together. But it is when Peterson seeks to affirm a more complex response to modern life and politics that he falters, developing in an increasingly more reactionary manner, and I mean that both literally, in a sensibly reactive manner to that which he disapproves, and as political categorization, in the kind of intellectual conceptualization that calls society back to an earlier state of organization he conceives as more spiritually and culturally integrated and whole. Reactionary politics always does this, always comfortably oblivious to the disadvantaged lives most people lived in such societies, however docilely many of them had been acculturated to accept their disadvantage as a God-ordained element of the spiritually and culturally integrated whole.
This is to conclude that while Peterson’s intelligence is impressive, his discriminating, practical judgments are decidedly less so. It is a phenomenon, hardly new in the world, yet before which millions of people, American and other, have found themselves entirely nonplussed.
In “Hell, One Step at a Time,” however, Peterson is at his intellectual and articulate best. Working from Browning, he focuses on the manner in which evil, rather than existent, is instead, in creeping stages, enacted. By ordinary men. Submission to evil was, Peterson tellingly observes, a choice, rationalized to be sure, and often incremental, “one step a time.”
As I read Peterson’s probing analysis, I found myself wondering about its purpose at that particular time, just two months before the 2020 election. Obviously, it served as promotion for the still forthcoming further “rules” book. But there was this passage and others like it:
Culture itself can become corrupt. Obeying its dictates under such circumstances is merely to participate in the corruption, as well as a genuine and serious dereliction of duty (even with regard to the culture itself, regardless of its collective opinion), given that the true duty of the patriot and citizen is revivification of the dead past, lost in chaos, and restoration of its vision. (Emphasis added)
And later still:
How does hell emerge on Earth? First, because people act in spite of their conscience, even to their own detriment, even when they know it; second because hell arrives step by step, one action of betrayal after another. And it should be remembered that it is very rare for people to stand up against what they know to be wrong even when the consequences are comparatively very slight. (Emphasis added)
Given my own preoccupation over the past eight years with the fate of the nation, the corruption of its culture, and the countless commissions of cowardice that have both followed from and produced the corruption, I kept thinking that Peterson must be further addressing that great moment of critical choice to come for all Americans that November. But the essay didn’t declare itself in that way. Then I reminded myself how absent Peterson had been in meeting the Trump moment — often, indeed, diminishing both it and the powerful uprising of resistance to Trump.
This time, in 2024, Peterson openly, if unenthusiastically, he has said, supports Trump. This deeply committed mapper of meaning in our lives has completely missed the profound meaning of this moment in humanistic history. He speaks instead, in the always reactionary vein of “revivification” of a “dead past.” It is the mythological, sociological science of a cultural Dr. Frankenstein.
I considered, then, how the broad beam and unfocused spotlight of brave conscientious nonconformity can be available for invocation by liberal democrat and Trumpist reactionary alike. So commonly praised, so regularly bandied about, has there ever been a more popular yet emptier vessel for moral meaning than the word conscience? But it is the universal, convertible currency of ethical decision making: follow your conscience.
If one reads, for instance, Henry David Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, one finds the word resorted to with regularity. Every stance for and against, and every act, from the disobedience itself to the obligation to accept the penalty for it (no other place for the just man, argues Thoreau, in an unjust society, than jail) is grounded in the workings of conscience. It doesn’t take a smart undergraduate very long — there’ll be one in every class within thirty minutes of discussion — to wonder, but what if my conscience tells me something different from yours? Thoreau provides no answer. While all dissenting action is grounded in conscience, conscience itself, for the radically libertarian Thoreau, stands on no ground at all but the individual who calls it up to justify his resistance.
Writes Peterson, “It’s far too frightening to consider the terrible places at which it is possible to arrive following one careless and willfully blind step at a time. But it’s necessary to contemplate, if we are to stop, once and for all, the catastrophe of the unconscionable social conformity that accompanies the sacrifice of the still small voice.”
Read enough of this in the essay, and one realizes how malleable in application is the appeal to conscience-driven nonconformity.
We have a thinker of Peterson’s acuity, limning for us the common path of a gradual descent into human hell, how it is accomplished along a slowly declining gradient of timorous indecisions, cowardly deferrals or concessions, and fearful leaps into the horrible void. Yet for all his, often, apt identifications of progressive ideological excess, Peterson fails to apprehend the greater threat — if at the very least only because so much more immediate, to be immediately imbued with awful power on taking office, perhaps, in only six months — of Trumpism. He even lends it his endorsement.
If conscience, then — that vitally necessary but insufficient determinant of sound and even moral judgment — on its own leaves us stranded, what more is needed? We have to turn to that additional, in some ways equally amorphous, yet others more calculable quality of decision making that is judgment. And we find Peterson, with so many others, sorely lacking in it. Instead, we see that he is activated — in the emotive hostility, so often, of his public speech — by clear psychological reactiveness rather than by any balanced clarity of perception. Maybe he should see a therapist.
What the grounds of judgment and conscience should be is no easy matter to decide: disagreement is at the heart of over two millennia of epistemological and moral philosophy. But that means also that we are hardly, in difficult times, starting from scratch. There is a deep, broad civilizational well of wisdom and goodness from which to draw. That is supposed to be part of Peterson’s message — a gift not of the dead but of the living past. Whether we refer to spiritual traditions and reciprocal golden rules, foundations in empathetic care for others, virtue ethics, or other ideas of goodness, we know – we know – what decency is and what it isn’t, but only rationalize something else, motivated by resentment and something other than respect for our fellows.
The so-called Christians who support Trump would be driven from the temple with a bulldozer to the tables and a bullhorn to blare: “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” A more modern Christ might yank the spikes from his palms, hop down from the cross, and toss over his shoulder walking away, “Buy your own plastic Jesus. He’s got some merch for that.”
One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter is the emptiest of relativistic thought ballons. Freedom fighters seek to liberate human potential and personality, terrorists to imprison them. Simply using the same words creates no balance of values. Every liar and hypocrite since the birth of language has employed the vocabulary of truth to fool those who don’t think past the letters.
So while judgment may be hard — evaluating the evidence, weighing the relative value of facts, analogizing one circumstance to another, reasoning to sound inferences — its older, more studied cousin, judiciousness, often works more invisibly still. Their lord, in wisdom, few are bold enough to claim. And we have had more than ample reminder these recent years that education in concepts is not the least guarantor of any of them, while the simplest, least educated people may be found richly endowed by experience with any of them, whether biologically enhanced or deeply, culturally inculcated.
So it is that of all words that have been penned against Donald Trump over the years of his ascension to awful and pathetic power and influence — all the sophisticated arguments and damning political broadsides — none has ever equaled the simplest critical observation made about him in the first year of his presidency, by Mark Salter, longtime speechwriter for John McCain. Trump had just given what would become an ever more typically sleazy and wildly inappropriate speech, before a still surprising, for some, audience of Boy Scouts, at their annual jamboree.
Commented Salter on Twitter that evening, in response,
“I was a Boy Scout for five or six years. The whole point of the experience was to teach kids not to grow up to be like Donald Trump.”
If you were a father worthy of the name and responsibility, you knew you would never want your son to grow up to be Donald Trump; you knew you should fear for the dignity and physical safety of your daughter, even if he didn’t always digitally insert himself or kiss them against their will. What contortions of the moral being must a person perform in order to extend that knowledge to the judgment that such a man should ever reign in power and responsibility over a great democracy and its often vulnerable people?
It has been a similar defensive contortionism that has led an oxymoronic Trump intelligentsia to sometimes scorn Never Trumpers and fierce anti-Trumpists as being ruled by nothing greater than a kind of elitist aesthetic disdain for his crudeness. As if any kind of meaningful conservative philosophy ever failed to invest the aesthetic with a moral character — as if an aesthetic revulsion to Trump ever did not arise from an originating moral rejection of him.
Trump supporters, critics of his foes, have abandoned — from the teachings and spirt of Jesus to the belief in state’s rights — every value for which they ever claimed to stand, so corrupted did they permit Ceasar to render them in service to their animus toward liberalism and the modern world.
In Salter’s pure and simple judgment, shared by so many but far too few, was the basis for all the befouling and defiling behavior of Trump that has followed, destroying democratic norms and the rule of law, degrading human dignity and standards of honesty at every turn. For all the political implications for specific government policies and for American society of a Trump with power, the fundamental offense of Trump — like that of any great or petty tyrant or demagogue — begins and ends with the assault on human dignity, not on the body politic, which will always follow.
It may be that Americans will manage in three months to save our democracy and rid ourselves of our vampire of the democratic lifeblood. In which case, Peterson, with millions of others, will never quite have cause painfully to recognize how the historical lessons he sought to teach he so sadly failed, through failure of judgment at the critical moment, to learn himself.
I write, in my small way, to make it so.
AJA
If you like writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range, I hope you’ll subscribe. If you do, consider becoming a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius and American Samizdat. You’ll gain access to the full archive and a free digital download of Waiting for Word on request. You’ll also have the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote. Most importantly, you’ll be supporting writing you appreciate, writing to which I give my all.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
SAMIZDAT.
Jay, This week I've been reading a great deal of Primo Levi, sparked by reading (devouring) a novel set during the early stages of the Holocaust by fellow Substacker Samuel Lopez-Barrantes.
In his "The Drowned And The Saved" Levi has a great essay about encroaching evil called The Gray Zone.
I thought about that as I read your essay.
I also thought about my favorite Graham Greene novel, The Heart Of The Matter, where the policeman protagonist Scobie, scrupulously honest, succumbs to a single dereliction of duty, motivated by empathy. But it breaks loose something inside of him that leads to disaster.
I hope as you do that this is your final entry in Samizdat! You have been an Upstanbder in calling out the Emperor's lack of clothes.
Superb, Jay. We will fail if we don't recognize this as the most important election of our lifetime. Trump is actually saying, as I'm sure you know, that, when he's elected, we won't ever have to vote again; thus, declaring his decision to become a dictator and not understanding that voting is a basic right of freedom, not a burden, but a privilege. I salute you for these detailed essays that are making a difference. I believe in you and in your commitment to freedom, to the fight for it and, in no small way, to your empathic soul that rides on your acuity and brilliant intelligence.