Moments of Permanence - Good people do bad things: demonising Them is not the answer

From: morgan_dhu Date: May 21st, 2009 06:35 pm (UTC) (Link)

Oddly enough, this is the kind of thing I think about a lot.

I'm not a very courageous person. I've risked my job sometimes to do the right thing, but I'm a fairly broadly qualified person and I don't have much attachment to material stuff, so that's not really much of a test.

I don't know if I would risk my life or the lives of people I love to do the right thing.

But knowing that I don't know what I would do if faced with the really big decision has made me more aware how important it is to take the smaller risks, becasue if enough people do the right thing early enough, there's a chance no one will have to make the decisions about risking one's life later on.

Speaking more directly to your main point, one of my personal mottos is Terence's "Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto." It means a number of different things to me, depending on the context, but one of the things it means to me is that I am just as vulnerable to the weaknesses and fears and inattention and selfishness and all the other things that do lead humans to commit acts of great harm as anyone else, and that it is my responsibility to try to avoid doing so - and to stop, make what reparations I can and do better when I realise I've done it anyway.

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From: sami Date: May 22nd, 2009 06:17 am (UTC) (Link)

I'm not sure anyone can know how much they would risk if not put in the position of having to make that choice. And nobody wants to have to choose.

I know that in the small things, I can do what I think is right - when I made a post about race and derailing and a friend of mine made a clueless and offensive comment, I called him on it and didn't tell other people who responded to him angrily that he was "a good person really" and they should just ignore how badly he'd just failed. I talked to him at length (as did others, primarily people who also know him socially) until he realised why he was wrong and apologised.

There was a risk in this that I might lose his friendship, which I didn't want... but I was pretty careful to phrase the discussion in terms that minimised the risk.

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From: morgan_dhu Date: May 22nd, 2009 07:16 pm (UTC) (Link)

Confronting people that you want to maintain a relationship with is difficult. For me, the most difficult experience of that was dealing with my former partner's father. He held some profoundly racist and sexist opinions, and I simply could not let the things he said go unchallenged, even though it made for some rather difficult family gatherings. At least my then-partner understood and accepted my decision to raise these issues with his father, even though he did not feel comfortable doing it himself.

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From: willow Date: May 21st, 2009 11:23 pm (UTC) (Link)

Torture leads to lies. This is something I discovered the truth of as a child. If someone hurt me enough, I'd admit to anything they wanted, just so they'd stop. It was a compromise of self protection. Less pain was far more important after a point, than to falsely admit wrong doing.

Accepting even MORE punishment for said false admittance, still meant less pain. Because then at least an end of the pain would be insight. A formal punishment meant beginning, middle and end, instead of constant attempts to get me to confess and losing more and more things I found pleasurable.

And then there comes a point where you admit to the most ridiculous things ever, pre-emptively, because telling people what they want to hear means there won't be any pain at all. Not even a little hint of it. All they have to do is threaten and you talk.

It's an eating away at one's sense of self.

Good people doing bad things is very, very, similar. It comes from a place of self protection. Each moment to make a choice, becomes a wearing down of the sense of self. And then there's always the added weight of not having said something earlier combined with looking around at the pit one is currently in.

Are there people who take non compromising too far? I don't doubt it. They fear the slide, so they won't think about how one situation differs from another, they won't think about context. And they won't ever let themselves empathize.

It's the road in the middle, the ability to take stock when something pings as wrong and to look at the context and decide yes or no that I think is best. And with it, an ability to think not in terms of 'Am I risking my family physically, am I risking my own life' but:

"Would I want someone to speak up for me? Would I want to know that someone thought this was wrong enough to stand by me. Would I be the same father/mother/daughter/son/husband/wife/citizen if I say nothing? What of who I am do I lose by not raising my voice?"

But like you said, people have to accept that good people can do bad things. It's sort of like parents (or other authority figures) having to admit they can make mistakes.

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From: sami Date: May 22nd, 2009 09:08 am (UTC) (Link)

*nods* That sense that you've already gone this far is dangerous too, yeah. If the next step isn't too far from here, and you're not thinking about the next step, taken separately... you might never quite have the point where it feels like you really should draw the line.

I've been realising, lately, just how much my fucked-up childhood has left me needing to unlearn. Because, for the same kind of self-defensive reasoning, I learned some seriously messed-up habits, that remain very, very bad for me. I'm only now starting to learn how relationships based on mutual respect and love actually work. And learning that various things don't automatically lead to punishment, that it's okay to feel certain things, okay to speak up for myself as well as for others.

In an odd way, it's made me a better person morally, too, because developing the ability to say, no, I will not, that is not something that is acceptable to me, includes the ability to say, no, I will not, because that is wrong, and I choose to try to be a better person than that.

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From: willow Date: May 22nd, 2009 10:11 am (UTC) (Link)

People recovering from effed up childhoods tend to be BIG on boundaries as good things. Which means we're more sensitive to the crossing and/or violation of said boundaries, which immediately pings to us as wrong.

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From: sami Date: May 22nd, 2009 12:04 pm (UTC) (Link)

Huh. I never thought of it that way, but that's exactly it. It's the conscious way of limiting definitions of appropriate, acceptable, etc.

Thank you for that.

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From: morgan_dhu Date: May 22nd, 2009 07:05 pm (UTC) (Link)

Yes, that's a very good way of putting it.

Sometimes I also wonder if it can make someone more sensitive to the idea that someone who does bad things is not necessarily a completely bad person. I know that growing up with people who did both very bad things to me, and very good things, was confusing, and may have made me more conscious of boundaries, but also prepared me for the fact that people are not generally all one thing or the other.

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From: willow Date: May 22nd, 2009 11:06 pm (UTC) (Link)

True. The person who burns your hand with the iron may also be the person who buys you ice-cream and pets your hair and doesn't let other people bully you.

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From: sqbr Date: May 22nd, 2009 12:48 am (UTC) (Link)

YES. I remember at some point realising that the people in the past (or present, but that took longer) who did things like the nazis or owning slaves..were just people. Like me. Who thought what they were doing wasn't such a big deal, or was at least the lesser of two evils. And a lot of them didn't have the lives of their families held over their heads, or at least not in such a blatant way.

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From: sami Date: May 22nd, 2009 09:00 am (UTC) (Link)

Yeah. There are traps, you know?

And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom you shall fear: Fear him, which after he has killed has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, Fear him.

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From: schemingreader Date: May 22nd, 2009 08:21 am (UTC) (Link)

This post really bothers me. I understand why it's important not to demonize people who do evil acts, and to be able to see how any person could be responsible for similar acts. What I fear, here, is that you are taking seriously the self-justifications of a mass murderer. Was it somehow less obvious that people with disabilities didn't deserve to die in the 1930s than it is today? Was it somehow less evil to say, "I'm going to enslave and kill my Jewish neighbors because Jews are bad," back then than it is now?

I'm sorry, I never buy these arguments. When you use this kind of language, "he was sent to a place...called Treblinka"--no. Don't create a moral equivalence of passivity between the Nazis who took paying jobs to efficiently murder my people and the people whom THEY sent to Treblinka.

There are better examples of people who colluded with racism because of their fear of violence or because they didn't understand what they were doing until it was too late. (Or maybe there aren't. I don't know. Somehow I don't think the people who are the targets want to know how the local Grand Dragon of the KKK was forced to be a racist.)

And no. That could not be me, and not merely because I would have been that person's target for murder. Because passively accepting white privilege is wrong, but it's not the same as figuring out how to kill the most people with the least poison in the shortest time.

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From: sami Date: May 22nd, 2009 08:56 am (UTC) (Link)

This post really bothers me.

I apologise. That was not my intention.

What I fear, here, is that you are taking seriously the self-justifications of a mass murderer. Was it somehow less obvious that people with disabilities didn't deserve to die in the 1930s than it is today?

Yes, actually.

Capacities for treatment were very different, then. So were options for working around disability. Added to that, attitudes were very different; many people today live active, independent lives who, a hundred years ago, would have been locked away in institutions, given no opportunities for education, and treated, overall, in ways that would nowadays be unacceptable for animals. See here, for example.

In Germany specifically, an extensive propaganda campaign had been taking place to persuade the populace that the disabled were a worthless burden on the state. The modern belief that people with disabilities have rights, and deserve to be assisted in ways sufficient to allow them to live as normal a life as possible, is a recent innovation.

When you use this kind of language, "he was sent to a place...called Treblinka"--no.

But he was. He didn't want to go there; he was ordered to go there. He didn't volunteer. He was sent there. This does not mean that his getting sent there was in any way equivalent to the circumstances of the Poles who were sent there. It just means he was told to go there. It doesn't even entail recognition of the fact that had he refused, he would have certainly died for it, and probably his wife and young children would have been killed too, which should be taken into account when looking at his non-resistance.

I'm not saying he was right, but... he was sent there.

Don't create a moral equivalence of passivity between the Nazis who took paying jobs to efficiently murder my people and the people whom THEY sent to Treblinka.

I'm not doing that. In the very next sentence I point out that he knew exactly what was going on - this makes his going there and working there an amoral act. He wasn't a victim - there's a reason I didn't use that word. The whole point of this essay is to make it clear that Stangl became evil. That it's possible for someone to start out decent and become one of the most evil individuals ever to walk the land. He was no longer a decent person by the time he got to Treblinka. He was evil. If he hated himself and his surroundings enough to be drinking himself into a stupor every day, it doesn't do a damn thing to mitigate against the fact that he was still doing absolutely evil things.

Maybe it couldn't be you. I'd argue you can't be sure of that, you can't know what your breaking point would be. You can't know how far you'd go to save the people you love most in the world, especially if you went there by tiny stages.

I know I don't know that - given the choice, I would rather die than commit a murder. I am sure of that. But what if my choice was to kill a child molester, or let my best friend die? I'd pull that trigger. It's not that hard a choice. But it could well be the first step on a path towards making seriously evil decisions without a qualm.

Passively accepting white privilege is not the same as finding more efficient ways to commit mass murder, it's true. I am not and never was denying that.

What I am saying is that it's at the other end of the same spectrum. The little, tiny wrongs add up, and if you let yourself accept them, and let the little wrongs become normal to you, so slightly bigger wrongs now seem smaller by comparison, you can end up making a series of adjustments that end with treating really quite big wrongs as normal.

Very, very few people fall as far as Stangl did, but very very few people have the chance.

It's not like it's inevitable - many people did, in fact, resist the Nazi regime, covertly or not. Many people were faced with similar choices to his and took risks, earlier, to keep from being compromised so much. But being mindful that that IS the path one takes is important.

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From: schemingreader Date: May 22nd, 2009 12:14 pm (UTC) (Link)

I don't think you read these interviews critically enough.

The current pope also perceived his family to be at risk if he didn't join the Nazi party. He did not feel compelled to repudiate the Church. I don't think that was something most people did in predominantly Catholic Austria. No matter how harsh attitudes were toward people with disabilities, the Church doesn't go along with the concept of euthanasia and I can't imagine we're going to be able to dig up some kind of encyclical giving Catholics permission to take part in it.

(To what extent the church went along with anti-Semitism--well. They were never a monolithic body, including that period.)

I do believe in the concepts of systemic racism and of benefiting from being a member of a privileged class. But there is a difference between turning your face away and refusing to perceive what is happening to your neighbors and joining an actively racist organization. The Nazi party was an anti-Semitic party.

People don't "become evil." They make repeated choices in a social context. Some of those choices they perceive as being under compulsion. Whether we choose to view their choices in this light is also a decision. If someone has murdered at least a million people, you might reasonably be skeptical of whether that person can reliably report his own motivations.

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From: sami Date: May 22nd, 2009 12:45 pm (UTC) (Link)

I don't think you read these interviews critically enough.

Wow. You know, I'm trying to stay with civil discourse here, but just for the record? That's a statement I have trouble replying to in a way that's even vaguely polite.

Point the first: The initial interviews are recorded in a book by Gitta Sereny, who does a whole lot of critical assessment herself. The degree to which the evidence backs up his claims, for a start, is something that she examines.

I've read the book. I've also read quite a lot of other books, so as to be able to look critically not just at Stangl's claims, but at Sereny's analysis. Because this? Is what I do. Your apparent determination to do exactly what I'm arguing against - assume that people who do profoundly evil things are inherently evil people - does not automatically invalidate my argument, and it sure as hell does not give you the right to assume that I don't critically appraise my sources, that I post bad history.

If you want to make those kinds of claims, bring evidence, thanks.

The current pope also perceived his family to be at risk if he didn't join the Nazi party. He did not feel compelled to repudiate the Church.

Sorry, did Joseph Ratzinger, who turned 18 in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, somehow also join the police force of the Third Reich? No? Okay then, I'm assuming we're both clear that this point is completely irrelevant.

But there is a difference between turning your face away and refusing to perceive what is happening to your neighbors and joining an actively racist organization. The Nazi party was an anti-Semitic party.

You. Don't. Say.

One of the less-secret aspects of the history of the Third Reich is that anyone in public service - police, teachers, university professors, civil servants - was de facto required to join the Nazi Party. Those who did not would at best be out of work, and at worst, be made to "disappear" by the Gestapo.

Added to that, generalised anti-Semitic sentiments were not actually a particularly good indicator of a person's character. Not after years of reasonably skilful, extremely widespread and active anti-Semitic propaganda. There's a reason why the German people who participated in efforts to assist the survival of Jewish people were the exception rather than the rule.

People don't "become evil."

And here, clearly, is a point of fundamental disagreement. My entire argument is that good people, if they are not watchful, can be corrupted, and can do unconscionable things. You, clearly, believe that some people are just inherently evil.

I think that viewpoint is both wrong and dangerous.

If someone has murdered at least a million people, you might reasonably be skeptical of whether that person can reliably report his own motivations.

Indeed. However, you also might reasonably conclude that it is in fact possible to derive realistic assessments of his motivations from the combination of his statements, the statements of others, and recorded evidence surrounding the events in question.

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From: schemingreader Date: May 22nd, 2009 01:46 pm (UTC) (Link)

You mistake me on several grounds. I think that people do not become evil, they choose to do evil. (So on this we agree.) While social context can compel people to make the choices they do, I don't think we should give so much weight to the insistence of someone who has killed a lot of people that they had to do these acts because of their social context. I also feel intense discomfort with the notion of corruption here.

I don't know your context in coming to this text and I can only respond to what I read in your post. (Which is something a person has to say a lot, isn't it!)

I see that you mention that some of the victims were half-Jewish, but I don't see much discussion of ideological anti-Semitism as a motivation for Stangl to join the Nazi party in 1931 when it was still illegal. I mentioned anti-Semitism because you didn't. (Which is why I'm a little weirded out about the notion of corruption. He was ideologically committed to their genocidal politics before they even came to power in Germany.)

I'm not a big expert on this particular Nazi and his motivations, though I've had to read some assigned texts on the rise of Nazism and the character of Nazi leaders for courses when I was a teaching assistant in graduate school. I also participated in a German-Jewish dialogue group discussing Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners, so I know a little bit about the position you are writing against (the idea that they were all a priori evil.)

My more immediate context for this is the work I've been doing editing for a Polish historian of the Holocaust. I have read a lot of her work on survivor testimonies, in particular the testimonies of Jewish children who survived in Poland.

One piece of that context is my friend's work on the tendency to privilege the narratives of the perpetrators over those of the victims and survivors.

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From: sami Date: May 22nd, 2009 02:17 pm (UTC) (Link)

One piece of that context is my friend's work on the tendency to privilege the narratives of the perpetrators over those of the victims and survivors.

But that's not the case here. There are no competing narratives - they're separate stories.

Stangl's membership of the Nazi party while it was illegal is questionable. He claimed that he forged it later for self-preservation; there is no direct evidence whether this was or wasn't true, as far as I know, but it was certainly not uncommon, and it is consistent with other known details of his life at the time.

Regardless, the precise details of Stangl's life aren't precisely the issue. Is is provable from evidence that in his youth he was deeply concerned with issues of morality; after the war, he appeared to have divorced himself from the very concept. He didn't insist that he had to do what he did - the point is not that he was forced, the point is that carelessness and inattention to the greater context of one's actions can lead to a gradual erosion of better impulse such that he did not, at any point, choose not to.

Regardless of whether you "know a little bit about" the position of assuming that Germans who went along with the Nazi regime were a priori evil, you seem to be maintaining that as your argument. I cannot support that.

Being "uncomfortable" with the idea that a decent person can be corrupted to the point of becoming thoroughly indecent is kind of the point. It's not comfortable, it's terrifying and unnerving and something no-one wants to think can be true. It's easier if you can condemn unreservedly, it's easier if you can assume that people who do bad things are Bad People.

However.

Consider the present.

American soldiers either allowed or participated in the torture and mistreatment of prisoners. Ordinary soldiers. They committed acts of deliberate, barbaric cruelty. Are they Bad People, or are they ordinary people, whose sense of right and wrong has been eroded by circumstance?

The American people let it happen. It's not that no-one knew - everyone's known since Abu Ghraib that torture is happening. The conditions of prisoners at Guantanemo Bay are not a secret. It's not a secret that people have been held without trial or counsel for years.

Does that make American citizens automatically bad people, because almost no-one's really, genuinely tried to stop it?

How about the disabled children being murdered in schools?

Black people getting harassed or even killed just for being black in the wrong place at the wrong time? People hear about it and disapprove, but they don't DO anything.

Where's the line? There's a difference between all of these things and the Holocaust, but that difference is only one of scale. That's the whole point. Everyone has a limit of tolerance, but that limit can shift. And if it shifts too far, it ceases to mean anything at all, and if it shifts slowly enough, you might not notice it happening.

Good people can become bad people.

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From: schemingreader Date: May 22nd, 2009 02:55 pm (UTC) (Link)

Regardless of whether you "know a little bit about" the position of assuming that Germans who went along with the Nazi regime were a priori evil, you seem to be maintaining that as your argument. I cannot support that.

This is my third comment, and it's the third time that I'm telling you that it's not my position that people are good or evil. People do good or do evil, they don't become good or evil.

If you become evil, you're no longer responsible for your actions. That's why Stangl made this argument. He wanted to say that anyone could have done this. I don't think that's true. He decided to kill people. He was not morally deadened or amoral, or he wouldn't have tried to justify himself in this way.

Your examples from the US are entirely compelling. The people convicted for implementing government policy to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib were, as Stangl tried to assert he was, compelled by their social context to follow orders. There is recognition under law of some culpability in soldiers who follow immoral orders, though most countries understand that culpability to be limited. (Which is largely the result of public reaction to post WWII trials.)

Here in the US, there has been political agitation to hold the people who issued the orders accountable for their crimes, to close the black sites, to close Guantanamo and Bagram. Some of that political movement has come from within our military.

If I had to compare Stangl's role to anyone's role in the unfolding torture scandal in the US, I would compare him to the psychologists who pushed for the SERE program to be turned into a training program for torturers. In both cases, people lent their technical expertise to harming people. Stangl knew that he was going to be killing people in large numbers, and he understood that this was wrong. The psychologists in this case were aware that the scientific consensus was against the efficacy of torture as means of collecting intelligence. Currently, some of these psychologists are arguing that they felt pressure from the post-9/11, War on Terror context.

You would not, if you were an army psychologist, have argued in favor of creating a program to torture prisoners. You just wouldn't. It's not because you are a good person and they are bad people. It's because it takes an active moral choice to do the wrong thing. It would have been very difficult for the soldiers who were prosecuted for the Abu Ghraib discoveries to have refused their orders. (Though someone had to have the courage to leak the information that it was happening to cause the scandal in the first place.)

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From: sami Date: May 23rd, 2009 04:28 am (UTC) (Link)

This is my third comment, and it's the third time that I'm telling you that it's not my position that people are good or evil. People do good or do evil, they don't become good or evil.

If you become evil, you're no longer responsible for your actions.

I disagree with your position and your interpretation. People can become evil.

If you become evil, you are still responsible for your actions. The difference it makes is that you lose entitlement to forgiveness, to the benefit of the doubt, to the assumption of good intentions. Good people can do bad things if they're thoughtless, if they're misguided... and, under those circumstances, their errors should be corrected, the consequences repaired as much as possible, and the person given the opportunity to make amends as best they can, and forgiven thereafter.

Bad people don't get that.

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