Morality’s Muddy Waters

Morality’s

    Muddy Waters

Ethical Quandaries in Modern America

George Cotkin

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2010 George Cotkin

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cotkin, George

Morality’s muddy waters : ethical quandaries in modern America / George Cotkin.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-8122-4227-0 (alk. paper)

1. Ethics—United States—History—20th century—Case studies. 2. Ethics—United

States—History—21st century—Case studies. 3. Ethical problems—Case studies.

4. Bombing, Aerial—Moral and ethical aspects. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Moral

and ethical aspects—United States. 6. My Lai Massacre, Vietnam, 1968—Moral

and ethical aspects. 7. Racism—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. 8. Capital

punishment—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. 9. Iraq War, 2003– —Moral

and ethical aspects. 10. United States—History—1945–. I. Title.

E839.C68 2010

2009041294

973.91—dc22

For My Father

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1 The Problems of Evil

Part I. In Times of War

2 A Sky That Never Cared Less

3 The Moral Mystery of My Lai

Part II. In Times of Peace

4 The Hate Stare: Empathy and Moral Luck

5 Just Rewards? Capital Punishment

Part III. Present Problems

6 Muddiness and Moral Clarity: The Iraqi Situation

Conclusion: Torture and the Tortured

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Preface

The idea for this book came to me a few years ago, the evening I saw Hotel Rwanda. At the time I was writing a book about American cultural criticism since World War II, an engrossing and satisfying project. But the film’s depiction of suffering, the moral heroism of Paul Rusesabagina, and the politics of intervention all followed me out into the suddenly uncomfortable night air. I told my wife, Marta, that I needed to write a more relevant book that would grapple with inhumanity—a work that might generate moral clarity and engagement. Marta sagely counseled me to wait a couple of weeks before abandoning my work on cultural criticism. Early the next morning, however, I was at my desk, hunched over the new project.

The book before you took several turns before it gradually attained its present form. At first, I imagined that it would be about scholars and activists—Erich Fromm, Iris Chang, Ben Kiernan, Hannah Arendt, and Robert Jay Lifton—who had devoted themselves to trying to understand and challenge the evil in the world. How could they immerse themselves in the muck of hatred without paying a price? Hadn’t Nietzsche famously warned against looking into the abyss of evil, lest it engulf you? What could be learned from these figures of moral authority and their excavations of the landscape of cruelty? While such a book still needs to be written, I ended up on the more familiar ground of postwar American history, starting to wonder if moral questions are indeed answerable with any degree of certitude.

As this work emerged, I came to realize that while we must take moral stands against real evils, such stands—and especially the means we choose to defend them—can be challenged fairly by others. We do well to acknowledge potential truths in other stances, for only out of debate and process can strong moral thinking emerge. Thus, although I remain personally opposed to capital punishment, I have come to respect the position of those in favor of it. While we may never agree on the death penalty, perhaps the volume of our shouting back and forth can be lowered.

Introduction

Americans crave moral clarity. Some ponder how Jesus would act in a particular situation. Others seek guidance elsewhere on how to cultivate a moral character.¹ Even when moral clarity is presumably close at hand, we stumble. Moral strictures—thou shalt not commit adultery, honor thy mother and father, and cherish human life—become matters of testimonial adherence rather than living reality.

Of course, such strictures are invaluable as general landmarks along life’s crooked trails. They are inadequate and sometimes dangerous, however, for the tough situations we often confront. Decisions are called for in moral moments when we have to choose between two less than appealing options. Act we must but the manner may be perplexingly paradoxical. Such is the nature of moral moments.²

Alas, we often find that even when we begin with the best of moral intentions, things go awry. Rather than questioning the paradoxes of morality or the reign of contingency (moral luck) in situations, we stubbornly ignore complexity and contradictions, determining to soldier on or to condemn a world that does not bend to our moral principles. Beyond parading our moral presumptions, we come to believe that we act more morally the less we think about it. Hence former President George W. Bush proudly proclaimed that he acted from his gut or from his religious feelings. And in the bestselling volume Blink, journalist Malcolm Gladwell celebrates how first impressions or inclinations are on target more often than deeper ruminations about a particular problem.³ Listening to your instinct and acting without careful deliberation appear to be the common responses to present-day moral challenges.

Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America rejects such easy certitude and argues that what we need instead is a healthy dose of befuddlement, and even when we are assured that our ends are correct and moral, as in ending a war or supporting democracy, the means to achieve them may be deeply problematic. Acceptance of the difficulty of acting morally starts us on a road toward greater moral enlightenment. It opens up the process that philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to as simply thinking, which halts us in our tracks, makes us aware of our choices and responsibility, and strikes the chords of tragedy and irony that we need to hear more often.

Like morality itself, the very concepts we employ in discussing and acting on it—empathy, evil, and character—are essential as well as troubling. Without empathy, we fail to inhabit or even appreciate the world of others. With empathy, we sometimes perceive others’ experience in a vicarious manner; we prioritize alleviating their suffering over political complexities. Evil gets bandied about as a meaningless epithet or rejected as a metaphysical conceit. Yet evil must remain in our moral vocabulary, for it captures much of the horror that happens, both within the world and in our hearts. Moral character, based upon virtue, is, of course, necessary; without it we are blown by the winds of social convention or peer pressure. But how well does moral virtue hold up when confronted with moral luck, with contingencies that push and pull, that sap our moral stamina? Historical analysis of situations in modern America may help us to reenergize these concepts for moral thinking and acting.

This book is about how Americans have confronted moral issues, sometimes with swagger, sometimes with nonchalance. How have people thought about their actions in moral terms before the dust of history has settled? Were their horizons of moral contemplation cloudy or clear—and why? And how do we, after the fact, consider and debate these actions and events?

Ethics and morality have long graced the disciplines of literature and philosophy. Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, for example, proclaimed that fiction cultivates our ethical or moral sensibilities. This builds upon critic Lionel Trilling’s view that literature supports the moral imagination by presenting it with situations teeming with variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.⁴ Nussbaum lauds literature for its ability to evoke the empathy of readers and to place action within a nest of context. True enough. But I part from her conclusion that history engages with moral problems only when it comes more to resemble fiction and thus negates its own methods.⁵ To the degree that history is beholden to context, to appreciation for complexity and contingency, to paradox and irony, it partakes vigorously in the conversation about morals our culture desperately needs.⁶

This book hopes to invigorate and expand history’s moral compass by pointing it in a somewhat different direction. Historians have, of course, long been devoted to moral concerns and to moral argumentation. They have, for example, charted how and why moral outrage about slavery arose at a particular moment or demonstrated how patriarchy molds moral boundaries. By reading historical analysis and narrative, we can feel empathy with the struggles of slaves, workers, women, and Native Americans against oppression and in attempting to maintain control over their lives. The study of history properly extracts moral lessons and offers us moral guideposts. We begin with these, and must clutch them fervently. The Holocaust was an abomination; the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was repellent, racism is wrong, and unfortunately the list goes on. But these bold and valuable statements fail to readily yield sufficient sense of what was done—or what is to be done—in the face of competing moral claims. Too little of traditional history, no matter how compelling its morals and politics have been, has engaged with this moral muddiness. Moreover, traditional historical work has been loath to employ concepts from moral and psychological theory.⁷ More needs to be done.

The particular kind of moral turn for history that I hope drives the narrative of Morality’s Muddy Waters is the embrace of moral muddiness and the belief that history and moral philosophy can benefit from explicit dialogue with one another. The best in moral philosophy and ethical theory offers historians invaluable questions and concepts. Moral luck, evil as either radical or banal, empathy, just war, dirty hands, retribution, and responsibility are a few of the key terms from these fields that inform the analysis within these pages. The pressing concerns of moral philosophy prevent us from resting comfortably on recycled historical claims. As a result, historical narratives are enriched by complexity and productive confusion. Philosophers have increasingly been using history as a preferred method for wondering about abstract concepts in concrete situations. But their work sometimes suffers from inadequate attention to context and historiographical complexity.⁸ Morality’s Muddy Waters attempts to wed history and moral philosophy as a way to consider well-known events and controversies in a new light.

In recent years, a more theoretically informed moral turn has begun in some historical work. Most of these studies focus on wartime situations, often applying the strictures of Just War theory (the claim that civilians are not proper targets, and that if they are struck, it is only when the target’s importance is monumental and all efforts are made to avoid civilian casualties) for evaluative purposes. This is a critical endeavor, with nuanced conclusions sometimes advanced as a result. But Just War doctrines, however necessary as moral guidelines, offer too-rigid standards for the modern world: we need ideals; we should strive always to be more humane. In historical studies, however, it is too easy to demonstrate after the fact that the actions of a general during World War II or of soldiers in the Vietnam War were in violation of such rules.⁹ History is particularly gifted at showing the shortcomings of easy conclusions and condemnations; historians present explanations for why moral absolutes are more often ignored by historical figures otherwise perceived as conventionally moral beings. The point of history is to muddy the waters of easy moral clarity rather than to confirm our own sense of moral righteousness or political persuasion.

Moral moments flow through history because history is the study of men and women acting and thinking, avoiding or confronting such moments. Of course, unlike historians, these individuals don’t have the luxury of hindsight. But the study of history is wonderfully rich in its potential for capturing their moral quandaries. Crucial to this book, then, is allowing moral moments to emerge in their full confusion. We need to learn from historical situations—no less than from present-day ones—that we, like historical actors in the recent past, wander through a fog-enshrouded landscape of perplexing issues. Few targets are as evasive and ever-shifting as a moral dilemma. In this sense, the examination of moral issues, within the frame of historical narrative, helps us see how others have faced up to, or ignored, moral questions.¹⁰

Morality’s Muddy Waters intends to help general readers and historians revisit in a new light momentous moral issues and choices in the postwar history of the United States. It is organized more or less by chronology and divided into sections dealing with wartime situations and home-front concerns. The events and controversies recounted in this book were chosen for their ability to demonstrate how particular moral decisions were made (or avoided) in specific historical moments. Thus we begin with evil as conceptualized by Hannah Arendt following World War II. Her concepts—evil as radical and banal—are tempting ways for us to confront the phenomenon of totalitarianism and to understand how otherwise unremarkable people can undertake horrible actions. As we will see, the tensions within Arendt’s perspective complicate matters, albeit in a useful manner.

I move next to the path taken from saturation bombing to atomic bombing in World War II. Given the context of total war, can we with any moral assurance condemn the massive numbers of civilians killed? Does a new custom of war intrude on traditional modes of moral thinking during wartime? How did America’s leaders and the public deal with moral issues during this prolonged conflict? I continue with the Vietnam War by proposing the My Lai massacre as a moral mystery, perhaps as an exemplification of evil afoot in the world, in all of its concreteness and impenetrability. How did My Lai happen? Do our traditional explanations for it mask a full understanding, leading us away from its radical nature and ultimate incomprehensibility?

I then turn to the home front to examine two of the most challenging moral quandaries faced by American society in the latter half of the twentieth century. The first, racism, is examined through white writer John Howard Griffin’s masquerade as a black man in the Jim Crow South. This chapter’s topic may seem unrelated to the previous pair of chapters that deal with the killing of civilians in wartime. But the central questions it raises about empathy and moral luck shed some light, however dim, on the potential of empathy to stop the logic of killing, or at least to show us that the faces of its victims are not so different from those of our own. The second moral quandary moves from the perspective on empathy to grapple with capital punishment and the debate over the morality of state-sanctioned killing. In the 1970s, the reinstatement of the death penalty brought the issue to the fore in American society. This chapter contextualizes the problem of capital punishment and accepts that, on a moral level, it cannot be resolved definitively. But in practice, U.S. elected officials, including former Texas governor George W. Bush, predominately failed to embrace careful moral consideration when death penalty cases were decided.

The concluding chapter brings us closer to the present in its examination of those unassociated with the conservatism of the Bush administration and generally beholden to some form of liberal politics and the moral challenge presented to them by the totalitarian dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Given their heartfelt empathy for the suffering of Iraqis, how could they, or their nation, stand by idly? Was this bloody war in Iraq a moral imperative, a justified humanitarian intervention? Or was such moral clarity on the part of the liberals a sign of their failure to appreciate the muddy waters of the reality of Iraq?

Morality’s Muddy Waters claims that the best moral decision-making occurs only after internal struggle and the recognition of bewilderment concerning means and ends. We invariably act with what Jean-Paul Sartre referred to as dirty hands, choosing less between good and evil than between two degrees of evil, and we must therefore begin to address any moral dilemma with a firm sense of our own limitations on the stage of history.¹¹ This book, then, is not about moral oughts; it is about moral ifs, ands, or buts.

In one episode of his 1970s public television series about science and culture, historian of science Jacob Bronowski visited the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Many in his family had been incinerated there by Nazis who were armed with the fanaticism of their own moral certitude. Bronowski ran his hands through a muddy puddle that may have contained bone fragments from his murdered relations. He stared into the camera and then pleaded with his audience to reject moral absolutism. True moral thinking, he averred, depended on openness to complexity, willingness to entertain other possibilities, and an imperative to recognize the plurality of the world. Anything less threatens to plunge us into the abyss of fanaticism or nihilism. With this recognition and awareness that moral moments are often muddied and resistant to simple rules and inclinations, we must try to act morally. In the roiling waters of choice and responsibility, our morality needs to be buoyed by humility, self-examination, and a sense of the tragic.

Chapter One

The Problems of Evil

An image in the New York Times in the spring of 1945 shows a crate recently discovered by American soldiers near the Nazi extermination camp at Buchenwald.¹ In it are thousands of wedding bands ripped from the fingers of victimized Jews before the Nazis exterminated them by gas, starvation, or overwork. These rings, symbols of commitment and caring, had been reduced by the Nazis to objects for their own aggrandizement. More graphic images from this time refuse to let us rest easily in the face of atrocity. Think here of the oft-reprinted pictures of bodies of dead Jews, stacked as if in woodpiles, or of emaciated Jews, among the living-dead, wondering with hollow-eyed disbelief at the miraculous nature of their own survival. A relative of mine, serving with the United States Army, was among those who liberated one of these death camps. He was shaken to the core of his being by what he had seen. It stained the remainder of his days, and he was always a bit off, distracted, unable to sink roots.

Should we call what he witnessed evil? If so, how can we explain it? Evil strikes me as the proper term for Nazi totalitarianism, for Stalin’s purges, for the genocide of too many ethnic groups since, and even for the use of conventional and atomic bombs against civilian targets during World War II. These events should be understood as evil—as affronts to our moral imagination.² Many of the moral moments that will be discussed in this book pivot on the hard ground of evil. But, as we shall see, even when evil is called by name, solutions to it remain clouded by ambiguity. Morality demands that we respond to evil, but it does not tell us exactly what to do. Oftentimes, various forms of evil are forced to duel with one another; we opt for the lesser of two evils, finding ourselves with dirty hands rather than with a clear moral victory.

Some readers may chafe at talk of evil as too tinged with religious overtones or weighted by heavy metaphysical baggage. It resists explanation and therefore obfuscates reality or explains away horror—all dangers, to be sure. But as novelists concerned with the human condition know full well, evil is in the sinews of our existence. In Cormac McCarthy’s novels, in the character of the Judge in Blood Meridian (1985), evil towers over the landscape, dancing and howling with delight as the rivers run blood-red. In a more contemporary setting in No Country for Old Men (2005), Anton Chigurh is a man devoted to his vocation of murder with a strange sense of duty and a total lack of compassion. Think, too, of the well-known character Hannibal Lecter, in Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs (1988). Lecter delights in murdering and then consuming his victims. The FBI needs his brilliant mind to help them track down a serial killer. Neophyte FBI agent Clarice Starling apparently believes that psychological explanations for human behavior can reveal Lecter’s essential motivations. Lecter quickly disabuses her of this notion. "Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say to me I’m evil? Am I evil, Officer Starling?"³

Philosopher Hannah Arendt had seen evil actions, and she knew that evil takes various forms. But she wavered over the years about how to conceptualize it. While the embers of the crematoria were still aglow, she set about her grim, near-ten-year task of charting and understanding the evil of her time, in the slim hope that her work might prevent its virulent reappearance. I begin with Arendt because she devoted much of her intellectual and philosophical life to tracking down this scourge, bringing it to judgment in the court of thought, and gauging its complexities.

Arendt in Germany

As a German-born Jew, twenty-six-year-old Arendt witnessed the emergence of Nazi evil. Before she devoted years to thinking about the problem of evil, she had fought it. Her Berlin apartment became a temporary stopping place for anti-Nazi activists fleeing Hitler’s terror. She worked in archives to compile a list of anti-Semitic statements to document the spiraling hatred against Jews in Germany, for use at a Zionist congress to be held that summer in Prague. Then Arendt’s subversive work came to a quick end. In spring 1933 she was arrested, questioned, and imprisoned for eight days. The arresting officer, however, treated her with fatherly concern: He allowed her to purchase cigarettes prior to her interrogation, and he promised to get her released. Miraculously, he did arrange for her freedom. In an interview thirty years later, Arendt recalled the police officer as a man with an open, decent face, a charming fellow! However benevolent her captor, Arendt could predict her fate in Germany. Along with her mother, she quickly fled, first to Prague, then to Geneva, eventually to Paris, and finally to a permanent home in the United States in 1941.⁴

Americans Facing Evil

Arendt was hardly the only one in America after World War II to contend with the problem of evil. Popular fiction widely vetted the issue. Meyer Levin sought to confront the will to evil and its aftermath. In his bestselling novel Compulsion (1956), he examined the notorious case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Two brilliant Chicago teens, Leopold and Loeb in 1924 murdered another teenager in cold blood, as a callous expression of their free will. To what degree, Levin wondered, might this will to power, this affinity with evil, be within all of us? As Levin recalled, he had even felt the tantalizing seduction of evil at one point in his life. During World War II, he realized he could rape a defenseless German woman and rationalize it away as revenge for what the Nazis had done.⁵ But he chose not to.

In his later work, Levin became obsessed with Anne Frank and the murderous machinery that had condemned the young woman to death. Her purity and talent stood as a beacon, but, he cautioned, she should not become merely a naïve symbol of human goodness. Instead, we must never forget to focus on the evil that was done to her.⁶

Richard Wright, in his 1953 novel The Outsider, allows his protagonist, Cross Damon, a chance for a life free from tradition, morality, and commitments to others. Damon’s status as a newly minted superman allows him to kill with apparent impunity and lack of regret. Freedom goes to his head, and he fails to realize, until it is too late, that it brings with it responsibilities both to oneself and to others.⁷ The concept of unchecked freedom suffuses Wright’s novel, but radical evil as a genetic trait comes to define another bestselling work of the period, William March’s The Bad Seed (1954). Outwardly charming and bright, Rhoda Penmark is a child serial killer, apparently lacking any sense of limits or conscience for her actions. When her caring mother discovers that her own mother was a serial killer, she realizes her child has inherited the bad seed.⁸ This depiction of a serial killer as a sort of genetic development served as yet another explanation for radical evil. Soon after the war, in a similar manner, British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that Hitler’s evil was demonic, almost beyond explication, akin to a genetic anomaly, something that simply occurred.⁹

Contemporary theologian Reinhold Niebuhr pondered issues of evil, sin, and free will in almost all of his writing. He viewed human existence as tragic; men and women created evil when they chose to think of themselves as all-knowing, dominating, infinite creatures. Such hubris, such a lack of a sense of limitation, struck Niebuhr as the essence of evil.¹⁰ As he put it in the preface to one of his many books, Christianity’s view of history is tragic insofar as it recognizes evil as an inevitable concomitant of the highest spiritual enterprises.¹¹ Evil came with the territory of being human, but it had to be fought at each and every turn.

In his journal politics, Dwight Macdonald, a free-spirited writer and close friend of Arendt, exploded with moral outrage against the evils revealed by the concentration camps and atomic bombs. Trying to comprehend the Nazi death factories, Macdonald remarked that reality has now caught up with Kafka’s imagination. This was an apt literary allusion. In Kafka’s short story The Penal Colony, a modern torture machine etches onto the body of the victim a history of his presumed crimes. Macdonald shivered at how he now lived in Kafka’s universe, in a world run amok.¹² The sum total of insanity and evil afoot was exacerbated by the stunning reality of the atomic bomb: no good, he wrote, can be extracted from the Evil of atomic weapons. Any rationalization for the use of the bomb, Macdonald declared, reveals how inhuman our normal life has become.¹³ Our traditional ways of thinking had, quite simply, been rendered obsolete by the death camps and atomic bombs.

A new world, drenched with evil, confronted Lewis Mumford as well. A well-known urban and architectural critic, Mumford had lost a son in action in Italy during World War II. After the explosion of two atomic bombs in Japan, he became convinced that millions more sons, and perhaps the human race, would soon forfeit their lives to nuclear madness. In a series of impassioned books and essays, Mumford confronted the evil of nuclear weapons: The end of the world, he announced, was not apocalyptic hyperbole.¹⁴ Barbarism, disintegration, genocide, irrationality, depravity, and nihilism, for Mumford, became the signposts of a new and frightening evil.¹⁵ Others agreed. In such apocalyptic times, one had to struggle, lest—as Norman Cousins famously wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature immediately after the Hiroshima bomb had been dropped—we surrender to the conviction that modern man is obsolete.¹⁶

Too often we think of the postwar years in America, when Arendt composed her work on evil, as awash in confidence and consumerism, lulled into mundane conformity by sock hops and madcap television comedy shows. Some historians have argued that the Nazi crimes against the Jews were largely absent from the consciousness of Americans during this period. Yet even in the most optimistic and upbeat books of the postwar years, evil threatens to crash the party. In the bestseller Peace of Mind (1948), Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman admitted at the outset that we are endowed with explosive energies as ruthless and amoral as the atomic bomb. He noted, too, that ours is an age of fierce turmoil and harrowing doubts. He desperately wanted, through a combination of psychology and religion, to wean individuals away from anger, anxiety, and hatred, and to deposit them in a safe haven of happiness. Responding to the horrors of the Holocaust, Liebman based his therapeutic ideals on tolerance, love, balance, and forgiveness.¹⁷ But more was needed. Arendt first had to excavate the ruins of Nazi totalitarianism in order to comprehend what had happened.

Writing Origins of Totalitarianism

Almost immediately after arriving in the United States in 1941, and for the next eight years, Arendt labored on her study of totalitarianism. In the midst of composition, she learned more about the extent of the Nazi horror. By the time she completed the work, she faced the growing specter of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fanatical anti-communist campaign.¹⁸ Beginning in the 1930s, and continuing into the late 1940s, consideration of the new phenomenon of totalitarianism had become something of an academic cottage industry. Some of these works began when the threat of the Nazi state first appeared on the European continent; the focus of later studies shifted to understanding the nature of the Soviet state and the People’s Republic of China. Such worries of course, connected to the realities of the Cold War, which, as historian Leo P. Ribuffo has remarked, was awash in moral judgments.¹⁹ But the historian Abbott Gleason notes in his bravura study of totalitarianism that Cold War concerns were not central to Arendt’s project. She wanted to get to the heart of the matter—to grasp the whys and hows of the rise of the totalitarian state, despite its illogic and fevered madness.²⁰

Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism describes how changes beginning in the late nineteenth century set the stage for totalitarianism. The work has a breathtaking structure, proposing to demonstrate how anti-Semitism and imperialism, along with the decline of the nation-state, somehow became an incubus of totalitarianism. At times, the work seemed to escape the bounds of historical analysis and enter into what sociologist Philip Rieff termed a theology of politics. Rieff recognized that Arendt’s book, despite its thick shellac of historical material, was riveted on the spiritual life—the fall of humanity, the appearance of a new form of evil in the world—without a glance at any potential for redemption.

Before focusing on these thorny moral and theological issues, a brief analysis of the argument made by The Origins of Totalitarianism is in order. For while Arendt worked hard to present a coherent and wide-ranging historical narrative, her analysis remains confusing. Too often, she lumps together disparate entities or tosses off an ill-considered judgment. No matter how riddled with gaffes, Arendt’s text remains a testament to a mind struggling to find moral bearings in a world adrift in evil.²¹

Arendt maintains that the nation-state, whatever its problems in the late nineteenth century, at least offered Jews a modicum of protection. Jews flourished by serving these states as bankers and middlemen, part of an emerging cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. But at the same time, their role in helping bring about the modern social order would paradoxically imperil them.²² New forces had been unleashed with the development of imperialism. In a narrative that leaves numerous logical gaps, Arendt posits imperialism as having created models of exploitation and criminality that define totalitarian states. Imperialism also fed into racial doctrines that appealed to mobs and elites, especially in new forms of pan-tribalism. Finally, in the wake of the destruction of World War I and the evolution of the mob into the mass (united only by shared feelings of alienation and superfluity), totalitarian movements arose.

The allure of totalitarianism, in Arendt’s view, lay in its seductive promises to the masses. By the postwar 1920s, after years of witnessing the declining value of craft skills and in the midst of financial depression, Europe’s masses found themselves increasingly cut off from tradition, as well as from their traditional means of economic sustenance. Alienated, they saw in totalitarianism the direction and organic sense of place they had lost. Totalitarianism, in turn, promised to create truth out of fiction, to proclaim itself in step with the laws of History or Nature, and to parade proudly its tribalism and dreams of conquest. The appeal of fascism in part flowed from its aesthetics of power; its rituals and theatricality promoted illusions of solidarity and purpose in an otherwise chaotic world. The irony of this formulation, of course, was that the very impetus that attracted the masses to totalitarianism—their