We Do Have a Choice — At the Very Least, We Can Refuse to Do Evil | 2017 Book Recommendations ①

On the individual in a time like this: three new books — Neighbors, Beautiful Souls and Born Guilty — plus a few older ones.

Strictly speaking, these are not put before readers with the rigor of a "best books of the year" list. We have been through a lot this year, and these books, all published in 2017, happen to help us think it through.

We recommend in four categories: humanities and social sciences (fiction excluded), business and technology, lifestyle and aesthetics, and fiction.

Candidates in the first three categories came from two places: more than 20 specialist publishing houses, and QDaily's own editors, reporters and contributing writers. For fiction, we gathered the views of novelists, translators, scholars, book critics, book editors and literary critics, and commissioned the pieces from them. The rest was written by QDaily's editors and contributing writers.

We read these books through as far as we could, "sincerely believing they really are good" — as last year, that is the least we owe you before recommending anything.

Kant said that a man who has spent his whole life among scoundrels, knowing nothing of anyone else, cannot possibly hold a concept of virtue in his heart. Two books seem to bear on that line. One, Neighbors, can be read as proof of it; the other, which looks like a counterexample, is Beautiful Souls. Both happened to appear in Chinese translation in 2017, so we recommend them together.

Neighbors tells the story of a massacre of Jews during World War II in the Polish town of Jedwabne. The killers were neither Germans nor Soviets. They were the Jews' own neighbors — local Poles.

It is often mentioned alongside another massacre of Jews, this one carried out by Germany's "Reserve Police Battalion 101," with one difference: Reserve Police Battalion 101 was still a paramilitary force, still "following orders," while Jedwabne was a massacre begun by civilians.

What makes it so horrifying is this: "They were men of different occupations, whole families were present, fathers and sons worked side by side; some had been induced — in response to the town government's call — to describe themselves as good citizens (given the horror of what they did, this may well be meant as mockery). What the Jews saw were familiar faces, and this filled them with extreme terror and, I would say, incomprehension. Not strangers in uniform, not cold cogs in a war machine, not agents following orders, but their own neighbors, who chose to pick up axes and throw themselves into bloody slaughter — becoming, willingly, a band of executioners."

Some have tried to explain the atrocity through Jewish collaboration with the Soviets (after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the town fell under Soviet control), with the German invasion of Poland cast as a "liberation." But the author investigated, and found it was not so. Greed for their neighbors' property was the most direct cause, and once the killing began, the killers' fear took the form of a need to "root out" the Jews completely, so that no descendant or relative could ever take revenge (this kind of "fear" turns up in massacres across every culture).

In the end, religion, society and the human taboo on "murdering the innocent" all failed to work.

Tony Judt marveled in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945: "As late as 1966, four-fifths of Polish government employees had only an elementary education. That the whole country was governed by such a poorly educated administration is astonishing."

For the Poles, the country was first split in half, one part taken by the Soviets and one by the Germans; then the Germans came through and "liberated" it once (for the Soviet-held zone), and then the Soviets liberated it again — every arrival meant another reordering of society, and every one brought its own tragedies... By the end of the war the Jews had been wiped out, and the German and Ukrainian minorities had been moved out by the redrawing of borders.

Judt had nothing much to be astonished about: by the end of World War II, 20 percent of Poles were dead, "the Polish elite in every field had been drastically thinned," and "more than a third of the urban population had vanished. Fifty-five percent of lawyers, 40 percent of doctors, and a third of university professors and Roman Catholic clergy were dead."

Neighbors tells us that the Poles themselves were part of what made the evil. When Hannah Arendt argued for "the banality of evil," she looked closely at how perpetrators who called themselves ordinary people shrugged off responsibility — the gentlemen of the SS and IG Farben, for instance, would push the blame onto the Jews, claiming the prisoners' "badness" had corrupted them, which is especially plain in the Jedwabne atrocity. More often the excuse takes the form of comparing oneself to a "little person," and that is the explanation we meet most often: "We were only following orders," "There was nothing we could do," "We had no power against a powerful organization"... Most such lines start here.

All they wanted was pardon and forgiveness — not from the Jews of their own village, who had all been killed, but from themselves, so they could live at ease with their own conscience.

Hannah Arendt could see the trickery in that. Writing about Adolf Eichmann's "evil," she stressed that if forgiveness exists in this world, what is forgiven is the person, not the single act.

"If we accuse someone because of what he has done, then when a murderer is forgiven, we are not forgiving the act. What is forgiven is not the act of murder, but the murderer himself, and the personhood he reveals through the circumstances and intentions surrounding it. The trouble with Nazi criminals is precisely that they automatically renounced every quality of personhood, as though no one could be punished or forgiven. They protested again and again that they had never spontaneously done anything wrong, that they had no intentions at all, good or bad, and that they were merely obeying orders. In other words, the greatest evil was committed by nobody — by those who refused to become persons."

In a sense, Neighbors, a book about nobody, is an anthropological case study of Arendt's "banality of evil" (humanity has never run short of such cases). How yesterday's neighbors turned into killers, how fast they found excuses afterward, and how firmly they forgot — all of it confirms what Arendt found in the depths of the human heart.

Arendt forgave no one, and with that sharpness she proposed turning the question around: the question to put to those who "took part in crimes and obeyed orders" should never be "Why did you obey?" but "Why did you support it?"

There is a deeply rooted idea, and it has plenty of currency here too. Put simply: "we are all guilty." Arendt said many people had tried to prove to her that "there is an Eichmann in each of us," "just as many people, in one voice, tried to prove to Hochhuth that it was not Pope Pius XII — after all, he was only a man, a pope — who was guilty, but all Christians, indeed all of humanity."

Hannah Arendt did not think much of this. "I do not know how many precedents there are in history for this kind of misplaced experience, but I do know that in postwar Germany, when people spoke of what the Hitler regime had done to the Jews, the same situation arose: the cry of 'we are all guilty,' which sounds so noble and appealing at first, actually served, to some degree, to excuse those who were truly guilty. Where all are guilty, no one is. Unlike responsibility, guilt is always specific; it belongs strictly to the individual."

Then she twisted the knife: "this view coincides, remarkably, with Eichmann's own view of these matters."

Peter Sichrovsky once interviewed a number of children of Nazis (collected in Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families, which also came out in Chinese translation in 2017). One exchange, with the son of a former SS man, who was defending his father, went like this:

— (The son, defending his SS father) He had no choice. — (Peter Sichrovsky) No choice about what? — Refusing. — Why not? — Because they would have killed him. — Who is "they"? — The SS, of course. — And he was in the SS himself. — But not by choice. — Is that what he told you? — Yes. — Who forced him? — I don't know the details. — You didn't ask him? — Stop pressing me, it's not my fault. — If you had asked him, it wouldn't be your fault. — He wanted to live, that's all it was. — By killing other people?

Luckily, there is another kind of person in this world.

Eyal Press writes in Beautiful Souls: "In every society there are rebels and saboteurs who reject the moral code most other citizens accept — whatever the authorities want them to believe, they scoff at it, and take pleasure in doing so. The rebels this book is about are not that kind of person. Their problem is not that they lightly disregard the values and ideals of the society or organization they belong to, but that they hold those values and ideals to be beyond compromise."

Before we come to those people, go back to Kant's line. His conclusion rests on two conditions. We usually stress the first — "a man who has lived his whole life among scoundrels" — and skip the second — "knowing nothing of anyone else." When Hannah Arendt quoted this line, she quoted another of Kant's alongside it: stupidity is caused by a wicked heart.

Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times tells the stories of several people with one thing in common: they refused to obey. We know their names because of the remarkable acts of refusal they carried out. The book tells us why they made choices so unlike everyone else's, why they chose disobedience or resistance.

The book tells the stories of several people and their beautiful souls.

Take one of them. The Serb militiaman Aleksandar Jevtić faced a hard choice. Among the thousand-odd captured civilians were Croats — the "enemy" — and Serbs, and his job was to pick the Serbs out; the Croats left behind would be killed. Serbs and Croats look and sound no different from one another, and Jevtić had been chosen for the job precisely because he came from the same town — because he knew them.

In the end, roughly 150 to 200 Croats were saved. Jevtić's method was simple and dangerous: he gave Croats Serbian names, and when they caught on and answered to them, they were treated as Serbs and passed out of danger.

Aleksandar Jevtić could have done none of this, in the name of obeying his commander's orders. Another man in the book, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, said: "If I must disobey orders, I would rather stand with God against man than with man against God." In Bordeaux in 1940 he issued transit visas to Jewish refugees, defying orders to save a great many Jews who were fleeing for their lives.

Telling right from wrong is not a rare ability. Germany's Reserve Police Battalion 101, mentioned earlier, in fact had its chance before the killings. Its commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, reminded his men that the Jews were Germany's enemy, but even though a quarter of the men were Nazi Party members, he announced that any soldier unwilling to take part in the shooting could step out. "The soldiers were silent for a moment, then one suddenly stepped forward, and more than a dozen others soon said they would not take part either."

This detail shows two things. First, that "we had no choice" will not hold. Second, it leaves a question: why did the great majority of Battalion 101 give up the chance not to do evil?

Christopher Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, argues that it was because they "feared standing apart from the group." Not taking part in the massacre meant leaving the "dirty work" to their comrades, and would be read as passing negative judgment on their country and their countrymen — "most men in the unit found such behavior repugnant, let alone doing it for the sake of the Jews."

Born Guilty offers another example. A man named Rudolf, son of a Nazi who fled after the war, recalls the father who never spoke of the Nazi years: "My father and the others drove trucks into Polish villages, rounded up the Jews and took them to the base — men on one side, women on the other. The men dug a long trench, and the women and children took off their clothes and stacked them, and their jewelry, neatly. Once, only once, my father got drunk and talked about the past. It was horrible! They had to shoot the children one by one with pistols, because those idiot soldiers held the muzzles of their automatic weapons too high and could only aim at the adults' heads."

In that story we can dimly make out soldiers choosing the strategy of "raising the muzzle an inch," hoping at least to be the ones doing "less evil." Rudolf's father, by contrast, seems never to have recognized the evil at all. And yet these may have been the very men who listened to Bach and read Hölderlin, who knew more about Kant than we do. They were not ignorant of other people, which may simply confirm the line: "stupidity comes from a wicked heart."

Aleksandar Jevtić believed in the spirit of tolerance he had inherited from his mother, the one called for in the slogan "Brotherhood and Unity." The other people in Beautiful Souls — perhaps because, like him, every Swiss citizen should "cherish the tradition of welcoming strangers," or because they believed the Israeli army really was "the most moral army in the world," or because they held that "every professional in the field has a duty to carry out due diligence"... — took these values and ideals to be beyond compromise, and so they chose to disobey. The right choice.

At the very least, one can do as Thoreau said: "A person certainly should not devote himself to rooting out any other group, however wrong and however large. He may have other pressing matters on his hands, but at the very least he should not soil himself with it, should not think about it, and should not support it."

A theater director, in an interview with QDaily, named the thing that has worried him most lately: "I'm afraid China will go down the road to war. What I'm really afraid of is China invading someone else."

What lies under that worry may be this: in such a situation, what do we do? And there is far more to worry about than that. This kind of doubt should have come up long ago in every bizarre incident we have lived through, because ordinary people are caught up in every one of them: the man swinging a club to drive people out into the cold night, the man hunting for a grand, righteous-sounding excuse for a wrong, the man working day and night to draft such policies... Now we know that if you recognize that these things come out of evil, you can refuse. You can decline to soil yourself with them.

This is what we most want to share with readers. The future cannot be predicted, so we prepare for the worst. That is not scaremongering. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, "in the 1930s, when the true horror of this century (she means the twentieth) was still unknown," Churchill had already written this: "Little has persisted, whether objective or man-made, among the things I was taught in my childhood to believe were eternal and momentous. Every single thing that I was certain was impossible, or that I was taught to be certain was impossible, has already happened."

When every kind of "impossible" happens and tears into our lives, we can still hold to our values and ideals — or at least keep our distance from wrongdoing, refuse to be soiled by it, refuse to go along with it.

Cover image: Eichmann in Jerusalem; Hannah Arendt. Sources: AP Photo, b/w file, blogspot