The banality of goodness

By being too distant and dispassionate could our writers, judges, social theorists and others in the public space be accused of not bestowing requisite warmth and empathy in their actions and pronouncements? Is it in other words proper to apply the above praxis of detachment in all human encounters that call for the use of both judgement and empathy and compassion?

The defendant is one of six accused of not having gone to the aid of several hundred women prisoners locked into a church that was later bombed by the Allies. All defendants were women guards at a Nazi satellite concentration camp near Auschwitz.

Photo: Edward Onslow Ford, Justice, partie d'un monument au maharajah de Mysore

During a moment in the trial the defendant does not apparently know what she should or could have done differently. She therefore poses that question to the judge asking him what he would have done. The judge replies that there are matters “one could not get drawn into”. By using the pronoun “one in his response, the judge avoids explaining what he personally would have done and escapes getting involved - deliberately or not – in the emotional interstices of the human drama.

This is a scene, as some may have guessed, from Bernard Schlink’s novel, The Reader. The judge’s action is may be not so uncommon: it is akin to a doctor trying to maintain a veil of dispassion while the most objective and informed decision possible on the disease’s prognosis. Nevertheless, the court's response sounds cold, callous, lacking in empathy. Does a judge making life and death decisions need to take refuge behind aloof and unemotional legalese in dealing with a very human question?

In another scene from The Reader, the narrator thinks that a book containing the story of one of the prisoners who escaped from the church horror possesses a certain numbness and distance. “It never gives [the guards] clear enough faces or shapes for the reader to be able to relate to them, to judge their acts for better or worse.” One perceives similar measured distance in a number of other accounts too - both fiction and non-fiction - of comparable horror and evil. A classic instance is the set of Primo Levi books presenting quite non-emotive accounts of the chilling reality of life and death in a lager. This clinical remoteness is manifest also in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novels about the gulag. Moreover, some of his writing is imbued too with so much humor and lightness:  this is particularly evident in his Cancer Ward, whose main subject matter is how someone deals with the twin scourges of oppression and disease.)

It appears that we are at times compelled to use such considered reserve when trying to adequately describe acute emotions and events which may be beyond the pale of day to day experience. It is as if we fear that we could get burnt if we got too close to these recollections of cruelty, dismay and inhumanity. We could consequently have to relive the suffering and be unable to properly bear witness, to tell others about it or to act as a judge who needs to remain unbiased lest the rest of humanity also gets sucked into the vortex of evil.

By being too distant and dispassionate could our writers, judges, social theorists and others in the public space be accused of not bestowing requisite warmth and empathy in their actions and pronouncements? Is it in other words proper to apply the above praxis of detachment in all human encounters that call for the use of both judgement and empathy and compassion? Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and essayist, seems to support this view when she bemoans (in her non-fiction work Absence of Mind: The Dispelling Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self) the lack of human warmth that goes missing when we deal with existential and sociological questions. She cites in this context the theories of Malthus and Darwin and their analysis and conclusions about political economy and evolution. Their approach, Robinson contends, by being too academic and remote “puts compassion or conscience out of play — two of the most potent and engrossing individual experiences.”

Time for us to reveal our human face a bit more?