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The Chain of Concern
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14205 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1988 |
5,440 Words |
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Richard John Neuhaus
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"My father said the whole world is one big chain. One little part breaks and the chain is broken and it won't work anymore." These are the words of Johan, a Dutch youth who in 1941 at age seventeen became a rescuer of Jews from Hitler's Final Solution. He is one of hundreds of voices heard in The Altruistic Personality. These rescuers had in common that they wanted the world to work again, and to work morally. They were convicted of the truth that each had an obligation to keep the chain together and to do what they could to mend it where it was broken.
The metaphor of a chain is apt. One is bound and held captive by a chain. A chain suggests a matter not of choice but of duty. What they did was a matter of ultimate duty, one might say of religious duty. The word religion comes from religere, which means "to bind together," as with a chain. Because the rescuers knew themselves to be so bound, they evidenced a remarkable freedom, including the freedom to act to free others from the horror of the Holocaust. The Altruistic Personality is about the seeming paradox of freedom through obligation.
In a book that should occasion lively debate, Samuel and Pearl Oliner tell a story, but they also make an argument. And the argument is the stronger for being embedded in a story. The story is about 50,000 to 500,000 (the figures vary widely) men and women who exhibited an astonishing capacity for self-transcendence in reaching out to help Jews who had been targeted for death by the Third Reich. The Oliners estimate that for every rescuer there were ten others who were more or less supportive in helping the rescuers do what they did. Add to this the number of people who knew what was going on and "helped" by not informing the authorities and it becomes apparent that millions of Germans and others in German-occupied territories opposed, at greater and lesser risk, the Reich's program for resolving "the Jewish problem." And yet, all these people are but a small fraction of those who could have helped. And yet further, it is imperative for us to try to understand why those who did help did what they did.
Books on the Holocaust typically focus on "the problem of evil." The Oliners direct our attention to the possibility of virtue. By doing so, the edge of evil is not blunted. Far from denying or diluting evil, the story of the rescuers throws it into sharpest relief. That the horror was not inevitable or irresistible was demonstrated by those who, at the heart of the terror, enacted the word of hope, the simple word "no." Thus do they expose the easy lies that smooth the way of complicity with evil. To those who plead that they had no choice, the story of the rescuers stands in clear rebuke.
To be sure, some readers will be made uneasy by the Oliner study. In the fields of ethics and moral philosophy there are self-declared "realists" who assault every form of "sentimentalism" that would diminish the starkness of a Hobbesian world of "a war of all against all." The possibility of human goodness threatens a moral theory that misreads cynicism as realism and ends up embracing a view of human behavior that is profoundly unrealistic. The concept of selfless behavior has no place in this view; it is but the product of the naïve self-indulgence of a delusory "idealism." That such a view is unrealistic is evident from the fact that it cannot explain the rescuers' behavior. Fortunately, we do not have to choose between "idealists" who deny selfishness and "realists" who deny everything but selfishness.
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