The petite 13 year-old Catholic girl told me she wasn’t able to fall asleep now that she was reading Elie Wiesel’s Night. She would finish it though because she needed to know how it ended. Curiosity and revulsion.
I remember. It brought back to me my loss of innocence when I saw the films of the concentration camps just after Liberation in Hebrew school. My mind couldn’t take in that it was documentary footage. Until then I didn’t know about the existence of evil.
-“I understand how you feel,” I told this pensive dark-haired girl. I am going to Eastern Europe where I will be visiting some camps.”
She looked aghast.
“Will you have to stay overnight?”
I remembered thinking the same thing when I heard about people visiting.
-“No, we’ll just be visiting for the day”
-“Why are you going?”
I told her I wasn’t sure. Later the words “to bear witness” formed. But I was feeling shaky in my own ability to deal with the enormity of evil. When I was a kid, I thought my family had been “safe” because we were from Belarus or Slovakia, not realizing then that whoever was left at the time of the Nazis likely was exterminated. My mom repeated those words when we asked her during Pesah about her impression when she was sixteen and saw the first headlines about the camps in April 1945. “We knew our family was safe,” she said. In fact, her relatives from Stropkov weren’t safe at all, but Mom was referring to her immediate family.
I wasn’t ready to leave for Eastern Europe yet. The title of Hannah Arendt’s book rang in my mind-- “the banality of evil.” In Arendt’s now controversial description of Eichmann, a key player in the Final Solution, she labeled him a narcissist with very little original thought who didn’t have antipathy toward Jews but was motivated by career advancement. It was banal. “He merely…never realized what he was doing. It was sheer thoughtlessness.” (p. 287)
I turned to Simon Baron-Cohen, a neuropsychologist famous for his studies of autism and for being a first cousin to Sacha Baron-Cohen. The content of The Science of Evil was surprisingly familiar to me as it would be to anyone who studied developmental psychology and had some good Hebrew school teachers.
He writes about the importance of empathy referencing Martin Buber’s distinction between “I-Thou” relationships and “I-It” relationships. Buber’s book was written ten years before Hitler came to power forcing his own resignation from his academic position. Buber contrasts the relationship between two human beings in which both understand the other to be subject in his/her own life and to be treated as sentient individuals. We would call this “empathy”, “perspective-taking” or “mindsight” (Daniel Siegel’s term which is an interesting contrast to “mindblindness,” Baron-Cohen’s description of the central deficit in autism).
Those who engage in an “I-It” relationship view others as objects to be exploited as necessary. Baron-Cohen identifies three types with zero empathy – borderline, narcissistic and sociopathic personalities. That would explain some of our favorite people to hate: Hitler, Stalin and Putin. But more devastating is the description of “empathy erosion” which could arise from fear, obedience to an authoritarian ruler or many other reasons that a clever Department of Propaganda can manufacture. This is the more insidious evil, when decent people become bystanders. We are all frighteningly vulnerable to this when we see people as “other” moving into the “I-it” relationship.
If we peek into Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, or Putin’s childhood, we see the same type of character - poor relationships with parents who barely acknowledge them, mediocre academics and a tendency toward bullying. They all likely would fit the category of zero empathy. Of course, this doesn’t explain how they butted their way to the front of the line of history bringing devastation in their wake and how this was permitted.
What of the righteous Gentiles, the ones who risked their lives to save Jews? Could it have really been as simple as a loving attachment and deep sense of empathy that put their need to act above their own safety?
"What distinguished rescuers was not their lack of concern with self, external approval, or achievement, but rather their capacity for extensive relationships – their stronger sense of attachment to others and their feeling of responsibility for the welfare of others, including those outside their immediate familial or communal circles. While some tried to resist the burdens imposed by such attachments, their sense of personal obligation did not allow them to do so. The help they extended to Jews was rarely the result of a perception of Jews as particularly worthy, but was the result of a reflection of their characteristic ways of determining moral values and actions.” ---http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/newsletter/07/main_article.asp
What to conclude? Empathy is difficult. We learn it first from our parents who teach us that we are worthy as separate individuals, in our own right. The Israeli “We love Iran” campaign was one attempt to humanize and change national enmity to an I-Thou relationship. So is the coming together of Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children. The ability to listen to the “other” until we recognize their humanity as “one of us” – may help us prevent erosion of empathy so that the cycle is not repeated.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 1994 (first published in 1963).
Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
See http://www.theparentscircle.org for a description of the coming together of Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children.
See http://www.ted.com/talks/israel_and_iran_a_love_story?language=en for the story of the Israeli who began the “We love Iran” campaign.
