Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century By Jonathan Glover

I was part of the generation of North American Jews who were taught that Israel was good and the Arabs were bad. Israel was the victim; Arabs the victor. There were no people in this conflict. Just Us and Them.

Recently, I picked up a book called Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by renowned British ethicist, Jonathan Glover.  After a few harrowing pages, every kneejerk emotional response that had been drilled into me by rabbis, professors, and journalists was gone. 

In Humanity, Glover delivers a devastating account of what normal people are capable of doing to each other when our “moral resources” are lost. Glover defines the moral resources and accompanying human responses as: respect for people’s dignity, sympathy, moral identity (what kind of person we think we are), moral imagination (when we are able to clearly understand what the impact of a current norm or official policy will mean for real people), and skepticism. When the moral resources are lost, hardness towards people, the cold joke (in Argentina, the machine used to give people electric shocks was called “Susan” and torture by this machine was called: ‘a chat with Susan’) , sleepwalking when making decisions that affect real people’s lives (the decision to drop the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima)  all take over. The potential for atrocity becomes greater. 

Glover identifies the key challenges to our moral resources as national tribalism and Belief in ideology. Many 20^th c atrocities stem from either one of these concepts. National tribalism was responsible for Rwanda while Belief in ideology was responsible for Stalinism and Maoism.

One can also see how both of these concepts are at play in the Israel/Palestinian conflict. Jews and Arabs  are both guilty of having their moral resources weakened by national tribalism. Others have lost their moral resources—notably skepticism—by Belief in a vague, anti-oppression ideology that singles out Israel for boycotts and divestment strategies. 

While not spending much time on the Israel/Palestine conflict, Glover does make some observations that could help reconstruct one’s thinking about this problem if one was prepared to admit that the problem is as much psychological (our desire to be part of a “group” or to believe in something bigger than ourselves)  as it is political. Why, for example, do we all freak out at the idea of Jerusalem being the capital of both Israel and Palestine?  Why do we outright reject the idea of one state for both people? Does it really matter if one state is really the end of Israel as we know it? Is “Israel” or “Palestine” really worth dying and killing for?

As I read through Glover and was horrified by the endless graphic examples of murder and torture and suffering, I felt that he was asking some very tough questions of all of us on both sides of this conflict: Why are we all clinging to our tribes? Why can’t we let it all go? Why do we see Israel or Palestine as though they were people whose well-being must be supported at all costs? Why can’t we see the suffering that our support costs other people?  

Consider this quote relating to the origins of World War I:

Thinking in terms of the emotions, health, the life and death of an imaginary people called ‘German’ or ‘Britain’ contributed to the outbreak of war. It turned attention away from what war would mean for the emotions, the health, and the lives and deaths, of real people. (p. 197)

When I consider my pre-Glover response to the Israel/Palestinian crisis and examine it against his moral resources and human responses, I was woefully lacking both. I didn’t have a lot of respect for Palestinian dignity. They were fanatical, uneducated and got what they deserved. I was not sympathetic at all to their situation. As for my moral identity, it was wrapped up in my Jewish, pro-Israel identity—my tribal identity. My moral imagination was limited to my Israeli brothers and sisters and to their suffering. It did not extend to my fellow human beings in the West Bank and in Gaza. I had no skepticism at all. Why would I? I was surrounded by like-minded Jews. And without my moral resources, I became hard to Palestinian suffering, I accepted phrases like “they are all terrorists”, “What can you expect from a bunch of Arabs”. I committed Glover’s sin of sleepwalking by blindly accepting the two-state solution as feasible despite the fact that on any given map, there seems to be three-states. 

Despite studying several of the genocides so brutally documented in Glover’s book, I was—until fairly recently—utterly indifferent to the plight of the Palestinians. Glover’s brilliance lies in how he explained to me why that was the case and how I needed to reverse my thinking to change that attitude.

To avoid further disasters, we need political restraints on a world scale. But politics is not the whole story….The means for expressing cruelty and carrying out mass killing have been fully developed. It is too late to stop the technology. It is to the psychology that we should now turn.

I needed Glover to tell me to stop reading about politics and geostrategic concerns and Iranian uranium deposits and to change my psychological attitude toward the Palestinians. I needed him to remind me that they are people just like me. And I needed him to show me—as he does throughout his book in Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda—what happens when we forget that people are human beings.

We give this messaging to our children over and over again, but when the emotions of tribal nationalism overcome us or the desire to Believe in an ideology, we revert to Us and Them. This psychological tendency must be overcome to avoid another century like the one that just passed.

Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
By Jonathan Glover 
Yale University Press: 2001

"Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell

Prior to reading this post, you should check out George Orwell’s short essay, “Politics and the English Language.” You can find it at https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm.

Years ago, I worked as something called a “management consultant.”  During the 9 months that I lasted in this job, I learned phrases such as “transparent process”, “pick the low-hanging fruit”, “perfuming the pig,” “cherry-picking”, “table stakes”, “magic quadrant”, and “motherhood and apple pie.”  I didn’t know what many of these phrases meant, but I was told that they were “industry terms” and that our clients expected to hear them.  I lived in constant fear that someone would actually ask me during a presentation what these phrases meant. No one did.  Our clients never questioned what we said. The cloudy, meaningless words we used gave us authenticity and, I suspect, intimidated our audience.

Every time I wrote or spoke any of these phrases, I thought of George Orwell’s brilliant essay, “Politics and the English Language” which he wrote in 1946. This essay is a lesson on how to improve one’s writing as well as an exploration of the relationship between politics and language. As Orwell writes:  “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.”  Much of what Orwell wrote in this essay remains applicable to our lives today, particularly in the area of management consulting.

Management consultants, for those of you who have been spared contact with these people, are brought into organizations (banks, universities, not-for-profits, synagogues, hospitals) to tell staff how to fix their company’s problems and how to do their jobs better. Management consultants often spend a few hours reading background material on these organizations and then conduct interviews with various “stakeholders” (a term that would have made Orwell ill) to arrive at a plan to make the organization more efficient or, as I used to say, “to improve their efficiencies.” That management consultants often have no experience working in these organizations and are advising people who have decades of experience doesn’t faze anyone. I remember once listening to a management consultant who had experience in the music industry advise people at a large clothing distributor.

Management consulting defies logic, and yet management consultant firms continue to exist. Why? Management consultants have learned how to mask their ignorance by inventing a way of communicating to make them sound authoritative and intimidating. By doing so, they break many of Orwell’s rules for good writing.

One of the phrases that I often heard, wrote, and used was: “Motherhood and Apple Pie.” In his analysis of several poorly written quotes, Orwell observes that they all suffer from lack of precision. So does this phrase.  Does it mean:

a.      Something so obvious to the reader, we don’t need to discuss it further?

b.      Something so important to the reader, we need to really discuss it?

To this day, I still don’t know the answer. And yet I used this phrase as though I did knowing that Orwell would have accused me of all of the following: “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything at all.”

Orwell highlights several writing mistakes that he finds particularly disturbing in political writing: dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs, and pretentious diction. Management consultant communications are filled with these errors such as dying metaphors like “stakeholder”, roadmap” and “table stakes,” verbs that end in “ize” (“utilize” or “operationalize” instead of “use”), and sentences that end with anticlimactic endings such as “going forward.” Pretentious language is everywhere. “Website Experience Analytics” instead of “Is your website effective?”

Management consultants also prefer the passive voice— common also to political writing--which does not name a subject of an action. Consultants, journalists, politicians, do this to be purposely vague. “The IT system, that cost the public millions of tax dollars, failed.” When the passive voice is used, the guilty are not identified, not reprimanded, and therefore free to make the same mistakes or commit the same crimes.

People who work in consulting companies are also notorious for taking the words of others, tweaking them to suit their needs, and then putting their own names on it. This kind of plagiarism or what Orwell describes as: “[the] gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug” is perfectly acceptable in the consulting world. Ironically, if you do it as a business student, you are disciplined by your institution.

Orwell also mentions that the “whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.” Can you imagine what he would have said about the tendency of consultant language with its preference for phrases such as: “perfuming the pig”, “low-hanging fruit”, and “stickiness.”  Or how about this sentence that I wrote for a hospital strategic plan (having no background in either hospital administration or strategic planning): “This medical institution needs to identify a method to create a culture of measurement and accountability driven to continuously measure the quality and cost effectiveness of its market leading services currently under deployment.” For this nonsense, my client paid my employer $1000 a day. Orwell would have fired me on the spot. 

 We, the audience, have not only encouraged this kind of language, we now expect it. When people speak clearly and simply, we think they are stupid. We want to hear long words and foreign terms because we believe that the people uttering these sounds are smarter than us and so whatever they say—regardless if they have the experience or knowledge to say it—is right. We become silent when we hear people speak like this and when we do so, we give up our responsibility to think for ourselves. Many of us want to be fooled into thinking that others know better than we do. And management consultants are only too happy to play along. Even though he is writing in a different context, Orwell describes this insanity perfectly:

When one watches some tired hack (management consultant) on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder (cherry-picking, going forward, create efficiencies) -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity…

And favourable to creating conformity in board rooms: the silent, acquiescent nodding of heads.

In this essay, Orwell writes example after example of what happens when language is vague and people don’t question it. This is one of the more harrowing examples:

People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

This kind of language, Orwell concludes, is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.”

Management consulting language is designed to hide the massive holes in consultants’ knowledge of their clients, to make their consulting firms looks authoritative and respectable as they destroy people’s lives by recommending their firing or calling them redundant, and to intimidate into silence the few people still capable of asking me, the unqualified consultant: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Why do we allow this to happen? I think it is because my clients wanted me to fool them. They wanted to believe that I had the answers even though having seen my resume they knew that was impossible.

In general, people like when people in authority tell them what to do. Perhaps we are lazy, or busy, or afraid to make decisions. What this essay tells us is that how we write today—with a lack of clarity, passively, big words--allows people in authority to perform this task easily. In both politics and business, the consequences have been disastrous.

This essay should be the first piece of required reading for every college or university student not only because it is brilliant, but because it is a warning as prevalent in 1946 as it is today.

 

 

 

 

 

"Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy" by Eric Metaxas

“….at some point [Bonhoeffer] would be able to do nothing more than “suffer faithfully” in his cell, praising God as he did so, thanking him for the high privilege of being counted worthy to do so.”
(Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Eric Metaxas (Thomas Nelson: 2010), p. 195

I can’t remember the last time I was so struck by a sentence. Like so many others under the age of about 55, I have watched organized religion become watered down to the point of being meaningless and airy words like “spirituality” replacing the much harder concept of “faith.”

In this accessible biography of the brilliant Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer - hanged by the Nazis for his role in several assassination attempts on Hitler - Eric Metaxas explores the idea of faith in a hopeless world. Bonhoeffer, one of eight offspring, grew up in an extraordinary cultured, intellectual German family. His father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was a renowned professor of psychology and neurology. Bonhoeffer was not the only one in his family who joined the German resistance movement. His brother-in-law, an eminent German jurist, Karl von Dohnanyi and his brother Klaus Bonhoeffer were both executed for their participation. In the early 30s, as Germany began its descent,  Bonhoeffer was studying theology in New York. After a brief return to Germany, he moved to England and then back to New York in the summer of 1939.  He could have remained in either place, but in July 1939—weeks before the beginning of WWII—he was back in Berlin fully aware that his colleagues in the Church were being persecuted. He held no illusions as to where his fate lay.

We can find the reason why Bonhoeffer returns to Germany in the following quotes. The first is taken from a 1935 letter from Bonhoeffer to his brother, Karl-Friedrich, as Bonhoeffer is making a decision to lead the Confessing Church, an illegal seminary. The second was written from Tegal Prison in 1944.

The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount….Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and justice are such things as in Christ himself. (Metaxas, p. 260)

Who stands firm? Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when in faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to obedient and responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be nothing but an answer to God's question and call. (Metaxas, p. 432)

I can’t be the only one who finds these passages moving. But why? I think these words resonate because faith gave Bonhoeffer both courage and comfort- two feelings which most of us struggle to find in our daily lives.

Faith, for Bonhoeffer, meant a belief in something bigger than himself. It was this belief, this devotion, this faith in the larger idea that enabled him to act. What we learn then from Bonhoeffer is that to act when someone is holding a gun to your head requires a disciplined, unshaken faith in something larger than yourself. It is only faith, by this definition, that gives you the courage to act in a hopeless world.

We don’t talk about faith like this today. Faith is associated with God and talking about God has become embarrassing. Further, most of us live in a safe and peaceful world, quite the opposite of 1930’s Germany. We don’t need to have faith in something larger than ourselves. We don’t need to have that kind of courage. It suffices today to have faith only in oneself.

Or does it?

Faith in something bigger than himself clearly gave Bonhoeffer courage, but if you read the opening quote, you will see that it also gave him comfort. When he sat desperate for eighteen months in his cell in Tegal Prison, he prayed daily and engaged in his habit of scriptural meditation, that is, he spoke—we don’t know whether he did this in his head or out loud—words that had been spoken for hundreds of years, by his historical predecessors and by his contemporaries. What can this martyred Lutheran pastor teach us here?

Let me offer a personal example. There is a service contained within Yom Kippur, the holy Day of Atonement for Jews around the world, called Yizkor. This is a short service where one recites a memorial prayer that may date from the time of the Crusades in the 11^th century. It is traditional for people who have not lost a parent, sibling, or child to excuse themselves from this service leaving only the community of mourners. When I thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer alone in his cell at Tegal praying alone, vulnerable, helpless in the face of inevitable death, I thought a lot about Yizkor because it is during this service that we too can feel alone, vulnerable, and helpless in the face of inevitable death. We think as we say these prayers for our parents:  who will say them for us and when?

How can Bonhoeffer’s view of faith as something bigger than ourselves be a comfort to us during this service? If you believe in God as Bonhoeffer did, the answer is clear: you derive comfort in the fact that God is bigger than you. But what if you, like me, have rejected the existence of a divine being.

First, I derive comfort in the fact that my community is bigger than I am. When I say the Yizkor prayer and look around the shul (it is actually a gym housed in a Jewish community centre) at all the people in my Toronto Jewish community, I realize I am just one of many, and that the community will go on with or without me. Second, I find enormous comfort in words that have been said for hundreds of years. That these words have survived and continue to be spoken provides a sense of historical connection to the past and a sense of continuity—they have been spoken before my lifetime, they are spoken in my lifetime, they will be spoken after my death. The words themselves are bigger than I am. They will outlive me, and I find that comforting. When I say these words with and in my community, I am part of something larger and therefore I am not alone.

Of course, as we know from the example of my earlier post on Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, that faith in words and ideas can be disastrous: the reason Bonhoeffer is executed for his faith is because others had faith in something else. For my next post, I will be looking carefully at one of the most important essays on words, George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, written about a year after Bonhoeffer’s execution.

[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. (George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946)

Book: Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010)
The references in this posting relate to the e-book version of the text.

 

"Every Man Dies Alone" By Hans Fallada

Several years ago, I read one of the first anti-Nazi novels written immediately after WWII entitled, Every Man Dies Alone, by a well-known German author, Hans Fallada. Fallada, who was at one point in his career a favorite of Joseph Goebbels, wrote the book in 24 days but died just prior to its publication.

Every Man Dies Alone  is based on a true story of a husband and wife who lived in Hitler’s Berlin. This is a mid 20^th city held captive by Nazism. Its population exists in a constant state of fear. Any resistance—whether real or perceived—is punishable by death and not just your death, but the death of your family, associates and friends. And yet, as Fallada tells us, resistance happened. Upon hearing of the death of their son who was killed in action, the very quiet and peaceable, Otto and Anna Quangel, decide that in this city without freedom and without hope, they are going to do something. The something is actually quite mundane—even a bit silly to our 21^st c sensibilities: they drop postcards around the city: “Hitler has murdered my son.”  The Quangels will be betrayed, arrested, tortured and killed. They know this going in, and so does the reader.  We need to ask ourselves: what is Hans Fallada — who later in his career is also caught up in the Nazi mousetrap and incarcerated—trying to say to us almost 7 decades later? What are his ideas? How do they change how we live?

Fallada introduces two key themes that have influenced my reading over the last 2 years. First, that individuals must question their society’s Big Ideas. We do this to keep our politicians and journalists honest and clear in their thinking; we also do this to ensure we don’t wind up in Fallada’s Berlin.

 In an anthropology course I took in the early 90s called something like Cultures of Terror, my professor told us to beware of any word ending in “ism. Isms tend to represent Big Ideas. Vague ideas. Ideas that sometimes contain contradictions.  Writers, journalists, professors, politicians like to use “isms’. They slide these words easily into their writing and we the reader gloss over them and fool ourselves into thinking that a. we know what these words mean and b. that we and the author think these words mean the same thing. Think about it for a minute: Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Neoliberalism, Conservatism, and my personal favorite-post modernism. We all use these words. But what do these words mean? What context are they being used in? Who is using them, and how, and why? Are these words really benevolent or are they loaded with more unsavoury content? When we see these Big Ideas written by authors, journalists and politicians, we need to question them. This, I think, is what Fallada is trying to tell us.  His book is a warning of what happens when we become lazy and let others do our thinking for us.

Fallada’s second theme that has informed my reading is about individual heroism. The Quangels know that their resistance is futile. Why do they persist?  When the State (often in the name of a Big Idea) has a  machine gun with its hand on the trigger pointed at the heads of your spouse and children, how do you resist? What Individual Idea does one need to counter a State’s Big Idea?

My September 10th blog post on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who was part of the resistance movement against Hitler, will revisit this theme.

Book: Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone. Melville House Publishing: 2009

Welcome to What the Redhead is Reading

As a history editor who publishes books for undergraduates, I always ask prospective authors: “99% of your students are not going to become history teachers. So….what do you want them to get out of your book? What ideas do you want them to understand? How does your book change how your readers think about their daily life?”

Today, there is a lot to read. We are inundated with words. But if we want to derive more meaning from what we read, we need to ask ourselves these same questions: “What did I get out of this sentence, this phrase, this chapter, this book?” “What ideas have I understood?” “How does this book change how I think about my own life?”

This book blog is my guide to reading more deeply. It is also, I hope, an introduction to books that you may not have considered ever picking up.

The best conversations I have with people these days are about books. I hope that this blog will serve as a place for discussion and debate and, of course, suggestions for books to read.

 All feedback is welcome.