You’ve probably heard of Godwin’s Law—the idea that as an online discussion progresses, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler increases. Godwin’s Law is meant to be humorous, but it says something serious about our society that one of the last remaining vestiges of moral coherence is that we all know Hitler was wrong.
Richard John Neuhaus once described the Holocaust as “our only culturally available icon of absolute evil.” We may not know what’s good anymore, but we know that is bad. This is why many rush to Hitler as a shortcut to or substitute for making a moral argument.
The often tenuous attempts to link certain attitudes and actions to Hitler—as if we can’t name something as bad unless it’s tied to our culture’s agreed standard of what constitutes evil on a massive scale—signal that many in our society are increasingly incapable of recognizing evil unless it shows up without ambiguity, perpetrated by people already in the category we’ve deemed “morally problematic.” Our moral imagination is impoverished. And this may be why we have a harder time recognizing evil deeds by people who don’t seem to be villains.
Heroes and Villains
I recently watched Netflix’s adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See, a book by Anthony Doerr I appreciated several years ago. It’s been too long since I read the book to remember how the German villains were portrayed in the original text, but the miniseries made them out to be sadistic animals, gleefully inflicting terror and trauma wherever possible. It’s as if the German commanders know they’re the bad guys. They seem to relish their role.
The truth is scarier. Yes, the historical record reveals the brutality of some of the worst officers in the German army (the entire enterprise was evil through and through), but most soldiers believed they were on the right side of history. They were the heroes, preserving their fatherland by eliminating the Jewish menace and paving the way for their superior race to install a new kingdom in Europe. Don’t forget: for the highly educated, culturally sophisticated, technologically advanced German society in the 1930s, Hitler was a hero.
The Germans saw themselves as the good guys. That’s why a clip from the British sketch comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look went viral, where one Nazi looks to the others in a moment of self-assessment and says, “Are we the baddies?” It’s funny, but the point is serious.
Frighteningly Ordinary Face of Evil
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a deeply unsettling book about WWII. Browning reminds us of the sheer scale of the killing that took place in Eastern Europe, much of it outside the concentration camps and most of it done by ordinary people without much investment in the fight—simple men and women conscripted into Hitler’s killing machine. Browning claims the majority of individuals in this particular battalion weren’t zealous Nazis. They were ordinary, middle-aged, working-class men who nevertheless perpetrated heinous acts.
Browning’s book shows three distinct groups emerging within the battalion: a core of enthusiastic participants, a majority who executed their responsibilities reliably but lacked initiative, and a small minority who avoided involvement in the acts of violence but were engaged in other activities that did nothing to diminish the battalion’s overall efficiency in carrying out atrocities. Hardly anyone seriously resisted. Ordinary Men shows how easy it is for people to yield to the influences of those around them, leading to actions they’d never consider otherwise.
I recently read Romania’s Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust by Grant T. Harward, a new study in military history that demolishes the myth that Romania was a reluctant part of the Axis powers in the early years of WWII, before they switched to fight on the side of the Allies late in the war.
The people’s fear of Bolshevism and Russian influence far outweighed their fear of a fascist dictatorship. The toxic mix of Romanian nationalism, antisemitism, and folk religion led to disaster for Romania’s Jews and dissenting religious groups. (By far the creepiest figure of the era was Corneliu Codreanu. Just picture a young man in the prime of life, strikingly handsome and vigorous, dressed in white robes and riding on a horse, calling for a crusade as the head of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, his surreal piety a mask for shocking brutality and violence.)
No one should walk away from these books thinking, I’m so glad I’m not like those men. No, you say, God, help me never to face such pressures, and if I do, help me to do good, not evil. When we look at evil up close, we hope to walk away with a greater sense of moral clarity, and part of that clarity is the realization we’re all capable of justifying, minimizing, or engaging in evil.
Line of Good and Evil
A few years ago, the New York Times interviewed a nationalist, Hitler-loving man from Ohio, describing his “cherry pie” tattoo and “Midwestern manners” and enjoyment of Seinfeld. He seems so normal, even though “books about Mussolini and Hitler share shelf space with a stack of Nintendo Wii games.” The response to the article was loud. The writer and editors were blasted for “normalizing hate” and for offering too sympathetic a portrayal of a Nazi fan.
The critics thought we should maintain a clear separation between the virtuous and the malevolent. They seemed to imply evil individuals are monstrous, belonging to an entirely different class of humanity than the enlightened and good. But surely history teaches us it’s self-deception to believe that evil is confined to “monsters” or that malevolent beliefs reside exclusively in one political party or in a distinct class of humanity. The unsettling truth about evil is its pervasiveness, often manifesting in subtle and seemingly normal circumstances.
Every Southerner likes to think they’d have spread abolitionist literature in the 1850s or been on the front lines of the civil rights marches in the 1950s and 1960s. Most likely, you’d have gone with the societal flow, because when you look closely at history, that’s what actually happened. And that’s what still happens. All of us are capable of doing evil deeds or being complicit with evil, but that self-knowledge seems to be missing from our moral imagination today.
It’s not hard to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are when watching a movie about the Nazis. But it’s a little harder to recognize evil when it’s closer to home, when it appears respectful and reasonable, urbane and sophisticated: When a bishop desires to protect the church’s reputation and quietly moves a child-molesting priest to another part of the country. When an esteemed ethics professor makes a winsome case for infanticide. When we support a candidate as the “lesser of two evils” but then only apply the “evil” description to the opposing side, while seeing the “less evil” candidate, in the end, as good.
Moral Justifications
There’s another sign our society’s moral calculus is broken. Even when moral wrongs or evil deeds happen right before our eyes, we’re more likely to explain away the actions if we find a different moral judgment would upset our categories or shock our senses.
Foreign propaganda machines may be at least somewhat responsible for the slew of videos of young people recently reassessing 9/11 after having come across a fake letter from Osama bin Laden. He had legitimate reasons for grievance. Wow! This is rocking my world! Maybe 9/11 was understandable. Still, this development is disturbing.
Surely the most frightening example of this impoverished moral imagination is the sight of young people tearing down posters of hostages in Gaza and marching in support of Hamas while justifying the brutality the terrorist organization has intentionally inflicted on civilians. The horseshoe effect is real, as far left and far right fringes appear to shake hands when it comes to antisemitism, regardless of their differing reasons.
Deliver Us from the Evil One
All this gives me a greater sense of urgency when I pray the Lord’s Prayer. As I recognize the dark forces that stand behind their human manifestations—the principalities and powers arrayed against the living God—I shudder at a simplistic moral calculus that absolves “people like me” from complicity or fails to discern the human heart’s surprising capacity for justifying atrocities.
Deliver us from the Evil One. Lord, hear our prayer.
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