Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide

Identity and Moral Choice

Kristen Renwick Monroe

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400840366
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

The significance of identity and psychology in determining moral choice What causes genocide? Why do some stand by, doing nothing, while others risk their lives to help the persecuted? Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide analyzes riveting interviews with bystanders, Nazi supporters, and rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust to lay bare critical psychological forces operating during genocide. Monroe's insightful examination of these moving—and disturbing—interviews underscores the significance of identity for moral choice.Monroe finds that self-image and identity—especially the sense of self in relation to others—determine and delineate our choice options, not just morally but cognitively. She introduces the concept of moral salience to explain how we establish a critical psychological relationship with others, classifying individuals in need as "people just like us" or reducing them to strangers perceived as different, threatening, or even beyond the boundaries of our concern. Monroe explicates the psychological dehumanization that is a prerequisite for genocide and uses her knowledge of human behavior during the Holocaust to develop a broader theory of moral choice, one applicable to other forms of ethnic, religious, racial, and sectarian prejudice, aggression, and violence. Her book fills a long-standing void in ethics and suggests that identity is more fundamental than reasoning in our treatment of others.

PART 1

The Puzzle

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I BEGIN WITH A PUZZLE. When I asked people who had rescued Jews during the Holocaust why they had risked their lives—and those of their families—to save strangers, rescuers invariably responded with bewilderment. “But what else could I do? They were human beings like you and me.” When I asked bystanders about this same time period and inquired whether they had done anything to help Jews, I came across the same baffled looks. “But what could I do? I was one person, alone against the Nazis,” was their reply.

The same puzzlement. The same lack of choice. But different perceptions of themselves in relation to others, and vastly different behavior. Identity, it seemed, influenced moral choice. But how, and why? I considered the fascinating complex of relationships among identity, choice, and moral acts in my analysis of the political psychology of rescuers (Hand of Compassion, 2004) but was unable, because of space and time constraints, to give it either the documentation or the systematic consideration it merits. This is my purpose in this book.

In particular, I ask if the psychological process of categorization I found so important in explaining altruism among people who rescued Jews also exists—albeit with a different focus and outcome—among bystanders and among those who tacitly or enthusiastically supported or engaged in ethnic, religious, and communal violence and genocide. In broader terms, this book thus continues my exploration of moral psychology by presenting data designed to capture the full range of behavior along a moral continuum.¹

My initial intellectual objective was to explain the psychology of genocide, determining what made some people rescuers while others actively supported Nazi policies or stood by and did nothing. A scholar dealing with the Holocaust, however, cannot long remain involved at only an intellectual level. The human anguish is too great, the emotions too universal, and most of us who write about this dreadful period do so in the hope that, in some small way, our work will help end the kind of pathology that lay at the heart of the Holocaust. I have been disturbed more times than I can recount when, lost in the daily newspaper, I find myself uncertain whether I am reading about current events or my academic research on World War II. The past seems to repeat itself with a vengeance that still catches me unaware. Worse, while the locale changes and the geography and specifics of the political groups involved shift, man’s inhumanity to man seems to remain a constant.

Nor is it only the news that blurs into my research themes. Pieces of literature and films about places far removed from the Holocaust—The Cellist of Sarajevo or Hotel Rwanda, for example—describe psychological processes that feel eerily familiar to me. Identity and, more particularly, our sense of self in relation to others, play a powerful role in our responses to the suffering of others.

I thus became conscious of what should have been obvious all along: the themes found in the Holocaust resonate with other periods of genocide, other instances of ethnic cleansing, other acts of prejudice, discrimination and group hatred, and animosity, just as they resonate with other instances of compassion, heroic altruism, and moral courage. The psychological forces at work during the Holocaust partake of the same political psychology underlying other political acts driven by identity. The same need for affirmation, and the relation such validation can have to group identity and to those who are different, lies at the heart of other important political behavior, from prejudice and discrimination to sectarian hatred and violence on the one hand and forgiveness, reconciliation, and amazing acts of grace on the other.

I slowly realized I faced two challenges. First, I had to untangle the puzzle presented by participants of World War II, constructing the diverse parts of it into something that made sense in the hope that my interviews with rescuers, bystanders, and Nazi supporters were representative enough to lend insight into behavior of others in similar wartime situations. My goal in this part of the analysis was to reveal the political psychology of genocide and to determine whether the altruistic perspective I had detected earlier was part of a broader framework for thinking about ethics that all people share. Second, however, understanding the psychology of genocide meant I had to link my analysis of archetypal behavior during the Holocaust to deeper themes that run throughout other political periods, other instances of prejudice, discrimination, and group hatred that deteriorate into a wide variety of evil acts, from apartheid in South Africa or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to civil war and political rape in the Congo or Darfur. Doing so resulted in using my analysis of Holocaust interviews to construct an empirically grounded theory of moral choice, one I believe accounts for influences on moral behavior that traditional theories—such as Kant’s or Utilitarianism—leave undetected.

This book thus has two closely related goals. As a piece of political psychology, it tries to explain the psychology surrounding genocide. As a work in empirical political theory, it uses the examination of genocide as an analytical lens to bring into focus a critical foundational theme in ethics and normative political science: how we treat others. These goals worked in tandem, and I found making sense of moral choice during the Holocaust helped me appreciate how moral psychology influences our daily lives in a wide variety of situations, producing choices that are sometimes morally commendable and at other times morally neutral or morally repugnant. Ultimately, I developed a new theory of moral choice. Essentially, this theory argues that our sense of self in relation to others shapes and delineates the range of actions we find available, not just morally but cognitively.

This theory begins by assuming we each have a moral framework through which identity sifts and filters perceptions to set and delineate the possible choices we find available and thus can act upon.² The ethical framework is the cognitive scaffolding—akin to an innate ability for language—that is filled in by life experiences. Its key parts are our self-images, worldviews, and the integration of particular moral values into our self-images. Identity works through the ethical framework to produce an ethical perspective, unique to each individual and situation and developed in phenotypic fashion according to the individual and external influences that frame the situation demanding a moral choice, the person needing help, and so on. It is this ethical perspective that helps us make sense of the ethical situations presented to us. The way we categorize and classify others, our perceived relationship to the person in need, our idealized cognitive models, and our canonical expectations about what constitutes appropriate behavior all work through the ethical perspective to produce both a cognitive menu of choice options we find available and a sense of moral salience, the feeling that the suffering of others is relevant for us and therefore demands action to help, not just a generalized sense of concern or sympathy. These last two factors produce the acts that affect others, whether these acts are morally ethical, immoral, or ethically neutral. The sense of moral salience provides the impetus to act; the menu of choices determines the type of action taken.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

As with my previous work on altruism (The Heart of Altruism, 1996) and moral choice (The Hand of Compassion, 2004), I begin by listening to ordinary people as they speak about their behavior. Their words are important, for they reveal the minds of the speakers, their self-images, and their way of seeing and making sense of the world. Although I spoke with many people who lived through the Nazi period, some informally, some in formal interviews that were taped and transcribed, I focus on one remarkable and especially rich set of interviews, broadening my own prior narrative interpretive analysis of altruists to also include bystanders and both tacit and enthusiastic supporters of Nazi policies.

Chapter 2 reviews the literature on genocide to define it, ask what scholars already know about it, and provide a context within which we can analyze the stories that constitute the heart of the data section of the book. This chapter is important for it makes clear that my findings are not simply about the Holocaust; these findings also suggest how people react to moral challenges in a wide range of situations, extending far beyond genocide. We often think of the Holocaust and World War II as so horrific that they become unique. This is not the case.

Chapters 3–7 contain the interviews in the form of first-person narratives. Parts of Tony’s narrative were printed in an earlier book,³ and occasional quotes from other narratives appeared in journal articles.⁴ This is the first opportunity, however, to print all of these narratives in full. I do so for several reasons, some familiar to readers of my earlier work on moral choice. First, the stories constitute a particularly rich data source, one I hope other scholars will be able to utilize to better understand World War II, the psychology of genocide, the importance of cognitive frameworks for choice, and the process by which individuals accord moral salience to the needs of others. As our scientific knowledge of human cognition expands, such data constitute a valuable historical archive for future analysts to probe using superior methodological tools.⁵

Second, the stories themselves are rich in human drama. They engage the reader’s imagination as they reveal the speakers’ cognitive frameworks and how the speakers think about ethical issues. Such data present a rare opportunity for the researcher by demanding that the reader engage with them sufficiently to reach an independent judgment concerning the material. This reassures the analyst that there is a natural corrective for the inevitable selectivity inherent in excerpting passages to illustrate analytical points. For this reason, it is important that the interviews precede my own analysis and thus are presented first with no commentary on my part.

Third, narratives provide a unique insight into the human mind, suggesting how decisions are made and how the individual interacts with cultural forces to create the moral life.

Finally, and most simply, the stories are exciting to read. So much scholarly work is dry and analytical that it is a treat—albeit sometimes an unsettling one—to be able to leave behind the world of academia and try entering another time and worldview, even when that worldview is deeply disturbing. I have tried to recreate the experience for the reader in the narratives. To do so, I print the stories with minimal comment and save my analysis until after the reader has had a chance to form an independent impression of the speakers. Only then do I put forward my analysis of the narratives. By placing the stories before my analysis, I hope to provide the reader the opportunity to form an independent judgment and to have a richer context within which to understand and evaluate the analysis I present.

The stories begin (chapter 3) with an interview with Tony, who was a young Dutch cavalry officer when the war began. Tony was extremely articulate, and I had the opportunity to spend time with him over a number of years—from 1988 to 2004—so his interview is both lengthy and insightful. As with all my interviews, I present Tony’s narrative in as unadorned a form as possible, with limited editing and no analytical comment. I do so to facilitate the reader’s entering into Tony’s head, to understand how Tony’s ethical framework, and particularly his perceptions of himself in relation to others, worked to limit the choices Tony found available.

The rest of the interviews presented here were selected via a respondent-driven sample because of the speakers’ relation to Tony. Chapter 4 presents a narrative interview with Tony’s cousin, a woman I call Beatrix. I interviewed Beatrix in her apartment in Rotterdam in 1992. Since the two are related, Beatrix shared many background characteristics with Tony, and she spent much time with Tony’s family after her mother died. In terms of behavior, however, Beatrix would be classified as a bystander, whereas Tony was a rescuer.

The most elusive person I interviewed was Kurt, a German soldier whose interview contains fascinating insight on how identity constrains choice. Kurt matched ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1. The Puzzle
• Part 2. A Study in Contrasts
• Part 3. Cracking the Code
• Conclusion. The Psychology of Difference
• Methodological Afterword
• Notes
• References
• Index