Norman Geras on the oddity, not the banality, of evil

I haven't mentioned Norman Geras for some time.  It's partly my fault and partly his!  Mine because I am idle and his because he does not allow comments, and one of the things I like most about blogs and blogging are the conversations that can ensue.  Anyway, I 'popped in' today and was immediately taken by one of his posts.  Incidentally, for those unaquainted with Norman Geras he is a man possessed of Marxist leanings but any self-respecting Marxist tyranny - and when are they anything but - would have him shot on the spot!  Apart from that he is also a cricket nut, too!

Anyway, yesterday he was quoting an article by Howard Jacobsen in The Indepedent which posed an intriguing question put to him by a survivor of Buchenwald:

"In the mornings," he said, "in Buchenwald, when the guards lined us up to count us, to see how many had survived the night, and we stood there in the cold in just our shirts and bare feet, an orchestra played, a Jewish orchestra playing classical music. It had no effect on me. I was too numb to feel anything. Now, before I am able to sleep, I have to listen to classical music. No, it doesn't bring back memories of the music the orchestra played then. I listen to classical music now because it helps me to forget. They are not connected. But this is my question – why did the Germans order that music to be played?" [My emphasis]

Why, indeed?!  Was it, perhaps, an example of what we Brits call 'a Yerman yoke' to match the one over the entrance saying "Arbeit Macht Frei"?  One should never underestimate the German capacity for absurdist humour!  It cannot have been for the enjoyment of the Germans, after all, most of the guards would have preferred some 'oom-pah-pah' Berliner songs rather than Beethoven.  Nor, as the survivor testifies above, could anyone have imagined that it would affect the prisoners since it was obvious that they spent every waking hour wondering if they would ever experience the next waking hour!

So perhaps it was just an exquisite but meaningless act of extra cruelty.  Norman suggests strongly that no reason is needed because it simply derives from the innate cruelty which lies in human nature:

There is no limit to the inventiveness of the human capacity for cruelty, and in that sense evil is bottomless. This doesn't mean either that everyone will do evil or that humans are more evil than good. It only means that people's creative talents are boundless and when they apply themselves to cruelty no moral or other barrier will restrict them from horrors or from ghastly ingenuities.

From that, certain other dangers arise which are always and forever with us:

It is also why so many well-meaning sociologies and psychologies of extreme human wrong-doing miss a certain mark. Endeavouring to find preceding causes influencing individuals to behave badly - something one can always do because no human action comes out of a causal vacuum - they have a tendency then to downplay the gravity of the evil committed, as if it proceeded by an unbroken chain from its putative causes. But what the example Howard was given here shows is that such evils always 'exceed' their causes, real or supposed. As depressing as it is to have to acknowledge this, they reflect those human sources of all that is also admirable about our species - the freedom to choose and the fertility of the human imagination.

Spot on!  Good man that Norman Geras, all we have to do is knock that Marxism out of him - ve haf vays, you know!

 

Comments

[A K Haart]

"But what the example Howard was given here shows is that such evils always 'exceed' their causes, real or supposed."

In other words, some people go too far and believe they must exterminate their real or supposed enemies.

I see what he means too, because although these evil extremes must have their causes, the effect still seems appallingly disproportionate.

[David Duff]

Indeed so, AK, but I still can't get my head round the nazis insisting that an orchestra played amongst the carnage. It reminds me of the last lines of the ineffabley dotty Olga in Three Sisters:

And the band plays so bravely, so joyfully - another moment, you feel, and we shall know why we live and why we suffer . . . If only we could know, if only we could know!

As so often with Chekhov you don't know whether to laugh or cry.