Why Our Secular Morality Needs The Nazis
“Invoke the Nazis and you’ve lost the argument”, says the famous Internet adage. Anyone who spent some time arguing with strangers online can attest to the truthfulness of Godwin’s law, which states that “as online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”. But it would be a mistake to think that this is just a sign of argumentation laziness we all often succumb to, when discussing moral issues. Lately, I’ve come to think of it also as an indicator of the surprisingly shaky ground our Western secular morality is based on.
We don’t need religion to have morality. As someone who was born in USSR with no religion around me, this has been a very natural notion for me. But it was only about 10 years ago, when I’ve read Umberto Eco’s essay “When the Other Appears on the Scene”, that I could finally clearly articulate the biological basis of morality, one that doesn’t require God or the scriptures. Here’s an excerpt from the essay:
“We are erect animals, so it is tiring to stay upside down for long, and therefore we have a common notion of up and down, tending to favor the first over the second. Likewise, we have notions of right and left, of standing still and of walking, of standing up and lying down, of crawling and jumping, of waking and sleeping. The list is a long one, and could include seeing, hearing, eating or drinking, swallowing or excreting. And certainly every human being has notions about the meaning of perceiving, recalling, feeling, desire, fear, sorrow, relief, pleasure or pain, and of emitting sounds that express these things. Therefore (and we are already in the sphere of rights) there are universal concepts regarding constriction: we do not want anyone to prevent us from talking, seeing, listening, sleeping, swallowing, or excreting, or from going where we wish; we suffer if someone binds or segregates us, beats, wounds, or kills us, or subjects us to physical or psychological torture that diminishes or annuls our capacity to think”.
In subsequent paragraphs Eco expands on the biological reality of the human condition, pointing out that we aren’t just physical creatures restricted to bodies that can feel pain. We are also social animals that for hundreds of thousands of years foraged the Earth in small bands, relying on each other for survival. Empathic individuals had a better chance of say, being fed, when falling sick. Fairness and reciprocity is observed in all primates, not just humans. So empathy has had an adaptive advantage in our selection. Moreover, tribes that consisted of individuals who cared about each other had group advantage over those that displayed less solidarity.
So it’s easy to see that the rise of in-group morality can be wholly explained by evolutionary psychology. We all know that Code of Hammurabi, which predated the Old Testament, had explicit laws prohibiting killing. In most tribal societies studied by anthropologists, murder invariably carries heavy penalties, such as еxile from the tribe. So anyone believing we need God to base this kind of morality, is just plain ignorant.
But things get more complicated considering what we as humans have done to other humans, whom we didn’t consider our fellow brothers and sisters. An endless number of heretics massacred, genocidal campaigns against Native Americans waged, an entire African continent turned into a slave-producing machine. Our natural empathy hasn’t curbed our propensity for pillage and murder, especially when the victims could be excluded from our group and dehumanized, profited from, or whose existence has put our immortality project in risk.
Imagine that as a teenager you discovered that your mom, who cared and tended for you since your were a toddler and whom you regarded as the foundation of your world, turned out to be your sister, only slightly older than you, which in absence of actual parents, took on the parenting job. You would be amazed by her dedication. But your confidence in yourself and your belief in a just and orderly world be undermined by the realization that you were an orphan.
That’s how it feels то dive into the history of human rights. Fundamental in every modern, democratic society, universal human rights were clearly formulated just 70 years ago. The UN declaration of human rights, adopted in 1948, was a seminal document, that cemented our modern understanding of the universal right and wrong. When it used the terminology of human dignity to justify itself, it marked a turning point. We have not been talking about human dignity for long.
Our moral progress as the story of the expansion of the boundaries of “our tribe” is well documented. The Judeo-Christian idea that all men were made in God’s image has played an important role in the universalization of the human society. Some religious figures, such as Bartolomé de las Casas played their part in the promotion of the idea of human dignity that applies to everyone, including “others”, such as American natives. But the overall record of major religions as promoters of universal human dignity is at best mixed. For Christians, as scholar Bonnie Kent put it “human nature was so badly deformed by the Fall from Eden that it needed to be reformed in the likeness of Christ”. When different factions had different ideas on how salvation was to be acquired, bloody religious wars followed. Pagan Roman empire had far more religious tolerance than Middle-Ages Europe.
Kant is rightfully considered one of the founding fathers of secular morality. His idea that men shouldn’t be used as means but only as ends has been immensely influential. His attempt to build a complete moral framework on a basis of a rational thought, without appealing to opaque concepts such as God or soul turned out to be a milestone of moral thought, even though it sometimes produced strange results (according to Kant, you should never lie, not even to a serial killer asking you where you hid your child).
Kant published his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785. Influential as he was, it took 7 generations until the idea of universal human dignity took firm root. What happened in between? Many things, among them Nietzsche who rejected Christian morality and invented the Ubermensch (a new kind of man who is unconstrained by common morality); Joan Stuart Mill who popularized Utilitarianism, the ethics of maximizing the well-being of the greatest number of people (the exact opposite of Kantian deontology); Karl Marx who offered a vision of a new society (in which the means of production are owned by the workers), and the means to get there — the proletariat revolution.
Marxists, first in Russia and then elsewhere embraced the ethics of “greater good”, justifying their terror by the benefits that will be reaped by humanity in the future. Fascist movements embraced Nietzsche, finding in him the metaphysical justification for yielding power unconstrained by morality.
And then came Hitler. Waging a methodical genocide of unseen proportions against Europe’s Jews and other minorities, he has come to symbolize evil in our time. The Holocaust has become our modern Fall from Eden. The pictures of human skeletons gazing through barbed wire in Buchenwald has become our iconography. Showing how easy it is to demonize a group of people and through propaganda orient the whole of society towards apathy and silent consent, he demonstrated like no one else in history the need for a morality of the universal secular sanctity of the human life. One without distinction by ethnicity, gender, class or sexual orientation.
We don’t invoke Hitler because we are lazy. We invoke Hitler because the unimaginable scope and meticulousness of Nazi crimes has laid the emotional bedrock of modern, secular morality. Brutal conquest, ethnic cleansing and genocide accompanied humanity throughout its history. But nothing came close to the industrial scale of the Nazi killing factories, which had no goal, other then the complete extermination of “subhuman” people. The images and films from the extermination camps, the personal accounts of the survivors have become the magnetic field in which our moral compass works today.
Yovan Hoah Harrari argues that human rights are a “myth”. A useful, good myth, but still a myth. If you think about human right as a descriptive prism of the world, that would be an appropriate evaluation. There is no way to prove that a human has a right to life or freedom or property. But human rights are really a prescriptive concept, just like the Ten Commandments. Instead of relying on God’s word, we rely on historic lessons as a proof, why they are a good idea.
The large scale loss of civilian life in WWII (in which the Allies have also played their part) has prompted the 4th Geneva Convention and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since then, war crimes and violations of human rights have not stopped of course. The Cold War has brought a new wave of murder, rape and torture, from Indonesia to Latin America, orchestrated by brutal regimes supported by the superpowers. But we had names for these crimes now. And we had institutions to prosecute war criminals. And in some cases, the perpetrators are eventually brought to justice.
No one needs convincing that killing your neighbor is something your shouldn’t do. But what’s so wrong in taking rights away from minorities, whose backward religions, culture practices or way of life seem out of place in our cities? For this, we need Hitler. Our morality, like the human brain itself, has an ancient basic component and a much more recent add-on. A limbic system, which intuitively orients us against murdering our neighbors, and a cultural neo-cortex, through which we learn to respect the human rights of all people, even those we don’t relate to.
So the next time someone evokes the Nazi Germany in the context of current events, be it Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, the ascendance of far-right parties in Europe or the victory of a “proud homophobe” Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, don’t get squeamish at the hasty historical comparison. We do it because our moral compass often needs recalibration.
