What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties
I mentioned in a comment yesterday that the way bishops and theologians pride themselves on not letting compassion or empathy trump their mindless Absolute Rules reminded me of something Hannah Arendt said in Eichmann in Jerusalem –
The Nazis prided themselves on exactly that – to the point that they got maudlin about it. “Nobody knows how difficult it is for us” sort of thing. Seriously. They did a lot of quiet boasting about their ability to rise above their sympathies.
I found the passage I was thinking of – pp 105-6 in the Penguin edition.
The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted from the Armed S.S., a military unit with hardly more crimes in its record than any ordinary unit of the German army…Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler – who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself – was very simple and probably very effective: it consisted in turning these reactions around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!
Ronald Conte, with his “no matter the cost, no matter the cost, no matter the cost,” reminds me of that kind of thinking.
But…but…I thought the Holocaust was what happens when we don’t submit to God’s will. Those were atheists, right? And the comparison is especially outrageous because every real American knows that abortion is America’s Holocaust.
Or is it that fetuses are comparable to slaves?
Ah, man, I never remember which comparison to use.
A recent comment from a catholic woman on Nadal’s web-site thanks him for standing up to the ‘culture of death’ and asserts that critics misunderstand catholic compassion which is for both mother and foetus and not just the mother alone; the implication is that in the latter, non-catholic case, the foetus is a mere dispensable bit of tissue. What Nadal and such people do not seem to realise is that in such a case everybody with a modicum of moral feeling feels compassion both for mother and foetus; nobody wants the foetus to die in such a case, but if anybody at all is going to come out of such a situation alive, and since, whatever the outcome, the foetus will die, then the responsible thing to do is what the hospital did and what Olmsted, Nadal and Conte decry. Nadal also asserts that young girls who have been raped by their fathers and been made pregnant and any woman who is impregnated through rape should be forced to carry the foetus until it is born: ‘I side with the truth that this was a set-up and hit job on Bishop Olmsted, and that 26 years of abortions show that these people in charge are deceitful and treacherous, carrying out capital sentence on babies for their father’s crimes (rape and incest).’ No mention here of the cost to the woman; that catholic’s compassion doesn’t go very far.
I must say, I feel no compassion for the fetus whatsoever, and I couldn’t care less whether it dies once such a situation is reached. I’d care if the women desperately didn’t want to lose the fetus and wanted to have a baby, but that’s because I care about the woman. The bottom line is that a fetus of that age can’t suffer in any way, so how can it be rational to feel compassion for it? It is simply not an appropriate object of our compassion.
By contrast, the woman can suffer in all sorts of horrendous ways, physical as well as psychological.
Judged by a compassion-based standard, Catholic morality is not only sick. It’s just plain irrational.
I must add that even Christopher Hitchens doesn’t get this. He thinks that there’s something wrong with abortion, even though he doesn’t want it to be illegal. But what can possibly be wrong with it, if our standards of “wrong” are based on sympathy and compassion?
Hitchens also supported the invasion of Iraq. I don’t think his standards of “wrong” are strictly based on sympathy and compassion. (And he was wrong then too.)
No doubt I am not being rational here, but I am not sure I really want to be. Of course, you are right, but it surely is a sad thing to destroy a being that in happier circumstances could have grown and become fully human even if a foetus at that age cannot suffer, and it is also the case that the mother here wanted to bear the child (it could, admittedly, be that she wanted to not out of any real desire but because of her religious beliefs, but I don’t think we need to get into that question, although we could…). It seems to me that, because of the mother’s desire to bear the child, this was not an easy situation in terms of feelings, although from the medical point of view the situation was simple and stark: but it surely is the case that nobody actually likes taking life even when it is necessary, as it was here… But, no, having tried arguing this a bit, I think you are basically right.
CW,
I don’t want to side track this discussion, but I believe that Hitchens supported the invasion of Iraq because of his sympathy and compassion for its people (who he knew much about). Whereas I, for example, opposed it without considering them, merely on the basis that it was apparent that the case presented by Bush/Blair was based upon the lie of WMD rather than the arguable case that it was the right thing to do.
Blackford: “By contrast, the woman can suffer in all sorts of horrendous ways, physical as well as psychological.”
Moreover, in this case the woman has dependent children, so there are effects beyond the woman and her fetus.
I’m not, of course, defending the unfortunately named Conte but by that logic is it irrational to feel compassion for babies, victims of severe mental impairments or, heck, people that are quietly offed as they sleep?
Not that I feel differently from you: if I actually felt compassion for each aborted fetus then my life would be a great big fevered fit of fellow feeling. But I don’t see why it should apply to some but not another.
It’s amazing how similar the Nazis were to the KKK, although the Nazis didn’t require masks to hide behind, their nationalism was all the mask they required. They enjoyed the high drama of the rallies and marches, adopting uniforms and militarism and the ideals of crusading knights. When some of the Nazi leaders faced war crime trials, they discovered that they had no remorse whatsoever, because their nationalism took away their sense of individual responsibility.
And the same religious mentality can be found in the personality cults of communist state religions. It’s all there for all to see, the same hero worship, lack of individuality, and of course the most important thing of all: an enemy to purify yourself from.
And so, the Catholic clergy adopt much the same, with the uniform, their heirarchy, their religious leader, the lack of individual responsibility, and of course the enemy: non-catholics, sinners, women.
There is an amazing discussion of Himmler’s self-pity in Jonathan Bennett’s wonderful essay : –
The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn.
Most on here will have read this, of course, but I do recommend to those that have not.
Have just read it. It is very good, isn’t it? And it explains why I find the rationalism espoused by Russell Blackford uncomfortable even as I find it difficult to argue against.
Having read Hitch 22, I couldn’t help getting the feeling that the basis of Hitchens’ opposition to abortion is his visceral reaction to the news that his mother had had an abortion before becoming pregnant with him.
Catholics have carried out a very effective “framing” campaign here. When asked how any compassionate person could be so cruel as to force a victim of rape and/or incest to carry the resulting pregnancy to term, the answer is “But it’s not the BABY’s fault!” By insisting on the word “baby” they attempt to conjure the image of a plump, healthy 3-month old baby being strapped into an electric chair to pay for his father’s crimes. It’s dishonest and emotionally manipulative – what the church does best.
There’s another passage on the same page that is worthwhile remembering, especially in this context:
In the theological context, suffering and enduring becomes not only gradiose and unique, but sacred. One endures for Christ’s sake, one shares one’s sufferings with Christ, and so on. Just as Himmler’s SS had something which enabled them to rise above their sympathies, so Conte and like-minded Christians can rise above their sympathies, can even celebrate the sufferings of those who are made to bear them for Christ’s sake, because they are engaged in sacred undertakings. It is one thing to remain hard and still be a decent fellow. It is another thing to rejoice that people suffer, and impose this on them as an obligation.
Thank you, by the way, Hazel, for pointing to Bennett’s wonderfully sensitive paper on Huck Finn. I’m just reading his The Act Itself, so it was timely. I’m also thrilled to find a poem by Owen that I had not read before, “Insensibility,” with its very telling closing lines:
That ‘eternal reciprocity of tears’ is very poignant.
Regarding framing… Yes the catholics have done a wonderful job of framing: Think ‘culture of death’, ‘pro-life’, assisted dying as ‘murder’, blastocyst/zygote/embryo/foetus as ‘baby’, ‘child’, ‘person’, etc. It’s devilish effective, downright dishonest.
OB:
Brilliant point that I’ve had running around in my head for a while. It does strike me that someone who gives over wholly to Catholic doctrine has to resist a lot of their own urges for compassion; notice that the nun at the centre of the furore wasn’t able to resist the urge of compassion and only the more “rational” commentators, i.e. people talking about the incident after the fact without knowing any of the people involved, manage to stick to doctrine. I don’t doubt they feel suitably proud about their objectivity; I wonder if we can convince the nun that she obvious chose the wrong profession.
BenSix:
Your definition of personhood is going to play a big part in driving how you think about those issues. Me, I’m not ashamed to say I agree with Russell in that personhood is psychological and that the problems you suggest do indeed follow from that definition. I’m curious if you think there’s an alternative definition of personhood because otherwise I’m inclined to think so much the worse for our intuitions about brain dead babies.
Wow, thanks for the link, Hazel. The Huck Finn passage has been a touchstone of mine for years…I’ve mentioned it here more than once. Himmler’s self-pity has been another. It’s exhilarating (perhaps oddly) to see them together.
You are welcome, Eric and Ophelia.
That one is a favourite of mine.
I agree, thanks Hazel. Huck`s morality, though he does not yet recognize it, is based in his humanity, and is not codified by dogma. It doesn`t surprise me that every so often in this country, ideologues of various stripes attempt to ban Huckleberry Finn from schools and libraries, always for some thinly-disguised `moral`reasons. Can`t have a natural morality based on compassion and rejection of ideology seeping into young, retentive minds!!
1
It is now a favourite of mine! I have always been taken with Arendt’s words about Himmler and the SS. One of the reasons I think the passage on p. 106 so striking is because she thinks that the trick was probably effective. Until I read that I simply took it for granted that it was a piece of bad faith, but when you put it next to the Huck Finn struggle with conscience, it seems clear that it would be possible to trick your conscience. Huck thinks that they got to him too late, so morality didn’t sink as deep as his feelings. This bothers him. But if you did get to someone early enough, and instilled into their minds the virtue of obedience, and following the code, and not being soft — what does Huck say? — he ‘hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit’ — well, there is no reason why it would not silence the voice of conscience and compassion. Very interesting reflection on moral psychology.
Don’t forget the Stanford Prison Experiment, and Milgram Experiments, in particular the Milgram experiments in relation to the above topic.
Haven’t forgotten them. Have discussed them many times.
Then again, I’m not sure I’ve discussed them in connection with Catholic authority and obedience. Then again…I probably have. Well wait, I’ve certainly discussed Zimbardo in connection with the hideous nightmare of the industrial schools.
#8, no offence but those sorts of issues are often raised and they really don’t have much merit. Here’s a quick run-through.
I don’t see why we can’t feel compassion for babies – indeed, if you think it through there are very good reasons to welcome actual babies into the world, treat them as precious, want to nurture them, and so on. Every human society does that. There’s a nice synergy between the way mothers tend to bond with their babies and the need for societies to renew themselves – and for growing children to turn out to have flourishing lives, which is something that most of us do care about. It’s no wonder that evolution has programmed us to find babies cute and to have an extreme tendency to want to be kind to them.
But that doesn’t mean that we should feel about them in exactly the same way as we do about each other – e.g. there’s no point getting worked up about a baby’s right to vote or its freedom of speech. We should have a kind of sympathy that’s appropriate to the facts about babies. It can be intense, but should be focused initially on some fairly basic concerns.
But an early fetus? Nah, not so much. It doesn’t matter whether or not every pregnancy comes to term. I can certainly see why we’d want pregnant women to be developing a feeling of emotional bonding with fetuses that they’re carrying as birth approaches, and to be glad that this sort of bonding usually takes place. That’s all part of the process of having family bonds, which is socially useful, etc., as in the previous paras. But again, the situation of an early fetus is remote from this. No damage along those lines is done by actual abortions, which almost always happen quite early in pregnancy.
Why wouldn’t you want to treat cognitively disabled people kindly? They can still experience pain and, depending on the case, perhaps other kinds of suffering. But note that people who are not cognitively disabled are capable of suffering in all sorts of ways that greatly cognitively disabled people can’t. Someone who is very cognitively disabled will not be able, for example, to suffer from being denied the right to vote or the right to freedom of political speech. As our cognitive abilities increase, our goals and desires become more complex in many dimensions, and there are many new ways in which we can suffer psychologically. That gives rise to many claims that we make against each other that go beyond asking for ordinary comfort and the most basic kindness.
Someone who is asleep? Are we talking about an ordinary person with ordinary fears, relationships, etc.? Someone like us?
Okay, now ask yourself: Do I, right now, want to be quietly offed in my sleep tonight? Of course you don’t. You have all sorts of reasons to want to go on living. You may not be conscious of them while you are actually asleep, but if you think about it now you have very good reasons to want to live in a society where people are repulsed by the idea of killing others in their sleep. Indeed, that’s one of the strongest taboos you should want – a taboo that protects people like yourself from having their lives cut short while they are sleeping and vulnerable. So it’s a good thing that when you are tempted to off someone in her sleep that the temptation is overwhelmed by a feeling of sympathetic identification with the interests of that person.
The point is that there are very good reasons for treating babies as precious, for looking askance at very late abortions that are not for medical reasons (though I question whether such abortions ever actually take place), for treating disabled people with basic kindness, and for us to have an extreme level of hesitation to simply kill each other in our sleep. Our various psychological inhibitions and moral rules along those lines are not just arbitrary, and we should be glad of their existence. At the margins, the form they take may have an arbitrary element, but it really is at the margins. Overall, we need to have inhibitions and rules something like the ones we actually do have. But none of that really applies to real-world abortions, and it’s not surprising that most Western societies gets along just fine with a permissive attitude to abortions.
Really, it’s difficult to see anything at all wrong with an abortion chosen by the woman concerned in normal circumstances within the first few months of pregnancy.
And Tim, I guess you could say that I am adopting a position of rationalism that many people find uncomfortable. But really, I think the rational thing to do is usually to go with our natural sympathies – for babies, for sleeping people, for cognitively disabled people, for animals that are bred on factory farms, or whatever it may be. I just don’t see how our sympathies can extend to a fetus in the first few months. I think it takes something like a religious morality to trick us into thinking sentimentally about an early fetus … and especially to get us to override our sympathy for the real interests of the pregnant woman and of others who are dependent on her, or who have an emotional connection with her.
Thank you, Russell, for that.
Superb summary of all the issues touching on personhood from Russell. I just want to add that social pressure and ignorance are likely equally as compelling in perverting our intuitions as rotten moral foundations (anything other than joy and suffering). Then again, perhaps that particular trifecta was already implied by the term “religious morality.”
It’s a compelling argument. Something that troubles me, however, is I don’t see what reason we’d have for judging people if there wasn’t social utility behind childbirth. And, in a world that’s creaking at the seams, there often isn’t. Take the Ethiopians: they need to renew their society like ten students in a single bedroom need to look for housemates. If, after some bizarre shift in their consciousness, they started getting all King Herod on their newborn kids how would we justify our anger? As a charming misfunction of our evolutionary drives?
Well, I do: the trouble is, if all I’ve got are my own visceral reactions it’s hard to legitimise them as moral imperatives; to judge people who don’t share them. For example, I find that my next door neighbour has just done away with her disabled husband. “How could you?” I ask. “Well, he took up a lot of my time when I could have been working productively and starting new relationships.” “But…but…he still felt pain.” “No pain. Just a jar of painkillers washed down with a cool vodka.” “But he must have wanted to stay alive.” “Are you kidding? He’d crashed his bike; he had severe TBI. I’ve known goldfish with a clearer sense of themselves.” “Well, I’m going to have to turn you in.” “Why?” “Because of a by-product of our evolutionary survival mechanisms, that‘s why…” (That illustration didn’t need to be so long, I admit, but I was getting into the drama. I should so write for Eastenders.)
Weeell…
No, I see the point.