Thingification

Thingification

I have been working on a piece inspired by Martin Gilbert’s history of the Holocaust titled The Righteous, which recounts the stories of Gentiles who took Jews into their homes to hide them and save their lives. In my usual way what interests me most are the Whys and For Whats of people’s actions and the vision of the world and themselves that inspire them.

Many have agonized over the fact that so few people actually did stand up to the extermination of Jews by the Nazis and that most either turned away or actually aided the effort for a variety of reasons ranging from protecting their own families to profit and ethnic/religious hatred. In fact the mostly unopposed barbarity and general convenient indifference to the mass extermination of the Jews and others occasioned a rather wide-spread turn towards secularism and science as the paradigms for resolving human evil and suffering. God had, apparently, failed. Whether it was through cruelty, indifference, incapacity or non-existence didn’t matter.

I see it otherwise. It is, rather, astonishing that anyone stood up and put their own and their family’s lives on the line for strangers and did so for years in many cases. This seems nearly miraculous and inexplicable within the scientific/materialistic model of the world we have come to value so much in the wake of this great moral failure of the West.

To cut to the chase of what Mr. Gilbert’s wonderful (and harrowing) book taught me about the qualities that allowed some people to destroy or ignore the destruction of the Jews and the qualities that called others to help them even at great risk: it is that the former managed to see the Jews, and other “undesirables”, as Things and the latter could only see them as People even when it was mortally dangerous to do so. This is obviously an over-simplification, but I insist that a necessary condition of caring for someone is to see them as a Person, and that not doing so makes it much easier to abuse and destroy them, or to merely “leave them to their fate.”

What disturbs me greatly is the ease with which in contemporary Western society so many seem so willing to see others, and even themselves, as basically things without passions, ideas, virtues and weaknesses, talents and failures or agency of their own. People are increasingly conceived of as mere embodiments of the groups to which they purportedly belong, and thus responsible for those groups’ sins or virtues and condemned to their collective fate or owed for their historical grievances. And, of course, the groups are always arranged in a hierarchy of virtue. The source of the virtue may vary between one political party or ideology and another, but no matter from where it is thought to arise — Merit or Oppression for example — it determines the respective quality of all groups and their ostensible members.

This way of seeing Human Society is becoming epidemic, even, or perhaps especially, among our public intellectuals. It is amply represented by members of all political parties and political ideologies. It is increasingly embedded within our legal systems, educational institutions, the Press and even our medical practices. It is increasingly common for people to define themselves by the groups to which they believe themselves to belong, accepting the characteristics of those groups as their own and living them with pride, disgust, resentment, indignation, etc. — but always defined by them.

Humans have always disliked each other, and most of us are more likely to dislike, or even hate, someone who does not look, act, speak or think like we do. Of course there are those who are more inclined to be attracted by those who are NOT like them, too. We have also always known through experience that the groups to which we “belong” have never been as determinate or homogenous as we pretend they are. There have always been, and God Willing, always will be odd-balls and weirdos within every group. If a family has more than one kid, it has at least two very different kids.

We in the West, and particularly in the New World, have worked very hard for centuries to create societies in which History and Inheritance are NOT Destiny, in which one’s past, ethnicity, family, religion, native language, etc. are NOT determinant of one’s future possibilities, and much less of one’s inherent virtues or sins. Here, in the Americas, many of us arrived in order to leave history and its demands behind. We accepted that the rivalries and resentments of the Old World would no longer apply. Many of us left behind our languages and even our names. It was a great sacrifice and it was worth it. Over time we became Americans, Canadians, Mexicans, Argentinians, etc. Some kept the traditions of our past or of our Gods, but even so we often shared those traditions with our neighbors as well, and they shared their different traditions and Gods with us. We were all distinct but we shared a common home and purpose. Our children married those who would have been “enemies” in the Old World. Our grandchildren were a delight. And so it went. New peoples came with new traditions and Gods. It caused conflict sometimes, but those of us who had already gone through it were here to show the way…

Through it all — through wars, civil unrest, economic crisis, personal tragedy, disease — most of us found a way to see our compatriots as People first — as American, Canadian, Mexican, Argentinian first — and as whatever else they happened to be second. We also had great success changing those who found it hard to leave Old World habits behind, or at least making sure that they knew how they must behave in public, even if they didn’t believe in or fully understand the New World they had come to. I lived the results of this in the North and in the South of the USA, in two places that saw themselves as different, that were different, but it was very rare when I couldn’t find the American in everyone, even in my still foreign friends who had decided to make their futures in the New World.

None of this was easy. None of it happened overnight or naturally. We weren’t always tolerant, very often we were terrible. Many marriages between Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Christians, Italians and Germans, Blacks and Whites, Yankees and Southerners were fraught, with grand parents being worried, afraid for their grand children’s futures, for the loss of Tradition and their God, sometime for their immortal souls. Some families were forever ruptured. Most were not. Sometimes they came to blows. But always there were neighbors who had gone through something similar or who simply knew that we could remake History in the New World. They would make us welcome. Or, failing that, there was always some other State, City or Province where there were like-minded people and we were all free to go where we wished. Wherever we went we were always People, not for everyone for sure, but for most, or at least for enough. It was hard. It was worth it.

It still IS hard but I am afraid that we have lost our stomach for the work and our faith in the project, not all of us for sure, but too many, more and more. It is now banally common to depict one’s political rival, or even anyone who doesn’t hold the same “sacred” views one does, as being members of the worst of groups and embodying the worst of qualities— Fascists, Nazis, Racists, etc. — especially if they appear to belong to certain other groups as well — Whites, Jews, Men, Cis, the “Rich”. And of course the opposite is true as well.

We never lack for a reason to despise each other. Pick someone you don’t know on the street. Look at them carefully. Listen to them if you can. Watch how they behave. You will surely find something you don’t like. Focus on it and you will find more things, even if they are imaginary. You’ll probably be able to convince yourself pretty easily that there’s something wrong with them, that they’re an asshole. Well, maybe you couldn’t but I sure could. That’s the way people are.

We are also more than that, but it takes work to grow and keep the qualities and habits of always seeing a Person, and maybe more than just work. I suspect it requires deep conviction or faith, along with humility to keep seeing the Person in front of us and the People around us rather than representatives of groups or ideological tropes, or simply Things. Perhaps in order to do so we must live as if we are part of some purpose that transcends us and which demands we pursue our best nature, even if we disagree about what precisely that purpose is.

As we continue to Thingify each other it should come as no surprise that we will find it much easier and more convenient to cancel and kill each other, and to revel in the failures and deaths of our “enemies”. They will not really be People, after all. They will be a manifestation or symptom of some dark force or ideology, or simply inferior because of what they are. We will not know nor care who they are. It won’t be important at all.

One of the more perplexing and challenging accounts of a Righteous Gentile in Martin Gilbert’s book concerned a devoted and passionate anti-semite in Poland. She was a political activist who believed that Jews were a nefarious and corrupting influence on Polish Society. She believed they should all be removed from Poland. Yet she risked her life to save many Jews over several years, using her political position as a trusted ally of the Nazis to get many to safety and to deceive both the Polish authorities and the SS. When asked why she did this after the war by the investigators from Jerusalem who were documenting the actions of the Righteous, she said that no matter what she thought about Jews in general or their effects on Polish Society she was still bound as a Christian and a decent person to protect jewish People from persecution and slaughter. No matter what she believed, she could not help but to see the People around her, even if they were Jews.

What we are — this physical, frustrating, contradictory, irreducible and unrepeatable being — is more important and more real that what we think about each other and about ourselves. The work to keep People at the center of all of our conversations about how to achieve justice, fairness, opportunity, prosperity and a better world is something we all have a part in. No matter what cultural, historical or technological forces are driving us to accept and propagate “group think” (thinking of others and ourselves as primarily members of groups from which their and our values and value derive) we are responsible for how we act and treat others.

Truthfully, it is very difficult to NOT see the technological landscape that emerged less that 20 years ago and which we are still frantically elaborating as inimical to the work of seeing each other as People rather than Things. Certainly correlation does not prove causality, much less when that correlation seems primarily temporal, and yet it is difficult to not suspect that the fact that so many of our social interactions now occur at a distance and are mediated by bloodless things has played a significant part in our willingness to see each other as Things, too.

Always it has been the fact that none of us are merely one thing that has made it possible to find the Person in the Stranger. None of us are the perfect embodiment of our family, culture, country or religion. We are not even the perfect embodiment of our own will. We are complex and conflicted. We struggle to fit-in, or to find a place where we can. We defy those we love and we repudiate when we are young the traditions that we find most dear later in life. We hide what we are and boast about what we are not. It is the complexity and inconvenience of our relations that make them genuine and nurturing, and which drive us to grow. We learn to look beyond the surface because we know from experience that the surface is often deceiving and that we, too, are different than we appear to be to others — deeper, weaker, stronger…

Communication at a distance mediated by algorithms reduces all of this complex richness to words, flat images and recordings that can be carefully curated, that we can skip when we become bored or hurt, that we can ignore completely “just because”, and more and more easily fake. Communication at a distance and in groups as with Social Media is fraught with temptations to pander and the desire to be pandered to while imagining ourselves as content to be consumed. Such a vast, impersonal stage is no place for young Humans to learn who they are or to test and refine what they think and believe. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that young people are lonely and at a loss, that they try more and more to script their intimate relationships, that they worry about not being safe (The fact that we are never safe is one of the most important lessons they and we need to take to heart), that the gulf between the self they present to the world and the internal turmoil they necessarily feel seems unnavigable, and that at their most extreme they demand that everyone else MUST see them as they feel themselves to be no matter what they do, no matter the contradictions they manifest, and no matter how angry, unhappy and brittle they seem to be because of them.

How do we learn about forgiveness and love, about staying friends “through thick and thin”? How do we learn that we can make mistakes, even terrible ones, and still belong with those we care about? How do we learn humility and courage and gain the strength to defend those we love and stand up for what we believe? How do we learn to look for the Person in everyone, even when we don’t know or even like them? How do we become truly decent people?

In vast stretches of Eastern Europe during the Holocaust the overall number of truly decent people may have been small and the penalty for for being decent terrible, yet decent people were also to be found everywhere — in cities, towns and countrysides, among all classes, all religions and all ethnicities, among the educated and the “ignorant”, among Democrats, Communists, Fascists and Nazis, although I know this latter must sound so dissonant to some. I don’t know why this was the case, but I can’t help believing that if it hadn’t been for such people the Liberal West would never have survived the war even though the Nazis were doomed to fail, that there would have been nothing worth saving of Germany, Poland, Ukraine, the Balkans, France, Holland, Denmark, etc., that it was the Righteous who kept the Human Project alive even though so many were lost. It’s not that they somehow redeemed the evil of the Third Reich, or compensated in some way for the passivity or overweening self-interest of the majority of Gentiles, which are understandable, but that they were living proof that a Humanity that appeared on its death bed was not yet extinguished. They were, and continue to be, the breakwater against which the great floods of universalizing ideologies which view People as mere playing pieces in some “Great Struggle” crash and fail. Thank God.

Are we right now creating societies in which decent people can readily flower, or are we rather incentivizing and promoting group think and thingification? Are you? If you were to come across Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in the middle of the desert dying of thirst would you give them water, would you make sure they were safe? Would you hide your MAGA or Woke neighbor who believes in things you despise from a mob that is coming to drive them out or destroy them, from a mob that will drive you out, too, for helping them even though you believe in the ideas the mob believes in? There are many who are actively declaring that they would be happy to leave Mr. Trump, Ms. Cortez or their ideologically impure neighbors to die, turn them over to the mob, or even help the mob to tear them apart. That’s what you do to things you despise.

I hope that most of these people are simply performing for their Social Media bubbles. Luigi Mangione wasn’t. The man who almost killed Donald Trump wasn’t. Neither was the man who shot down the young Israeli couple in New York, or the one who just killed a cop because the COVID vaccine “fucked his life up” and he couldn’t get into the CDC to kill someone there. Nor are the masked Antifa mobs who feel they can scream at and harass anyone who stands in their way, no matter who they are. Would you step between the Antifa mob and the Jewish person they are attacking even though you too are protesting in support of Palestine? Would you demand that they treat them as a Person?

We learn love and friendship from our families and neighbors. We learn humility from those who care enough to be honest with us, and by being honest with ourselves. We learn courage by seeing courage in those around us and by choosing to be courageous when doing so is the only way to be decent. We learn to see People when we accept how small we are and how much we have depended on the willingness of others to see us for the best we might be.

The USA didn’t become a great, heterogenous nation because of law or principle. We did so slowly, one dinner at a time, one birthday or wedding, one Cinco de mayo, one moment in the trenches defending our brother in arms, one 4th of July, one Person at a time until we knew inside that wherever we went we were People and would be with People. It was hard. It took generations of work, and there will always be much more work to do. It is a tremendous gift that I fear we are squandering.

The conviction that one is “on the right side of history” and is behaving morally and ethically for the betterment of Mankind, your nation, the future, the environment, etc. has been shared by zealots of all stripes throughout modern history. Having the conviction that you are doing good is no guarantee that you are, in fact, doing good. If your conviction leads you to think in terms of broken eggs and omelettes, or ends justifying means, or deserved versus undeserved suffering, or groups of oppressors versus groups of oppressed I suggest you are in extreme danger of losing your way. If you believe in correcting history by punishing the descendants of past “evil doers” or “oppressors” and find it easier and more satisfying to vilify your neighbor than to listen to him you are already almost all the way to treating them as Things. If you believe the members of one or more groups should have nothing to say or that they must listen and agree with you if they are virtuous you are making it incredibly difficult to change anything at all, much less your own perspective. If you never look for the contradictions and unavoidable holes in your own knowledge, experience and desires it will be very difficult to care about anyone who doesn’t think and feel as you do.

Of course we must also face the terrible truth that in this world we are sometimes unavoidably called to violence. That is also what we are. I can’t help but to believe that if we can bring ourselves to take on the responsibility of counting each life we take as belonging to a Person that we might find the killing more and more difficult. Alas, it seems likely that we will avoid this problem altogether soon by creating machines to do our killing for us without humans hands, minds or wills involved at all. Our digital agents will be the only ones to carry the memories of those who are destroyed, and their families, too, of course. In such conditions what force will ever move us to look for a way to stop short of utter anihilation?

On a personal note: I know very well what it is like to lose sight of People and to view the world as a collection of Things— of ideas, problems, habits, systems, gears, wheels, interleaved conceptions — that appear to be understandable, analyzable and reducible, or at least they should be from the unmoored view from Olympus. It is a terrible way to live. It is very dangerous and seductive. On the Mountain one is easily impressed by the beauty and intricacy of one’s own Vision, often to the point where the inconvenience of Reality — of People — is seen as a blight on the World rather than as evidence of the paucity of the Vision. It can seem preferable, justifiable and even noble to make People conform to the Vision of what they should be, even if that means silencing, or even destroying, those who will not. There are many who see the world like this. I suspect that the algorithmic Mountains we dedicate more and more time to will help them to prosper and grow.

I was very fortunate to have avoided some of the worst consequences of seeing People this way. Somehow, even on the comfortable Mountain where memory was dissected and stripped of its venom, supposedly, a small face or voice continued to bother me and I was unwilling to extinguish him. I don’t know why. It just didn’t seem right. Or perhaps I was unable to… In any case, I am very grateful.