Human is: What Steinbeck and Levi have to say

The courage that Steinbeck writes about is one of physical and moral bravery whereas the strength of character Levi portrays should properly be termed “spiritual” or “existential” valour.

The Third of May 1808, Francisco de Goya 1814 (Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)

e seem of late to be more and more concerned with the question of what makes us human. Perhaps this has to do with the rise of secularism or our angst about machines. But it would seem humans have mulled over this question for a lot longer than we realise (even if not with the same intensity). Aristotle for instance thought that reason was what was so unique about us. We were not only the only species to have the ability to exercise our intellect but are conscious that it is also morally good to do so.

In more recent times, the historian  Yuval Noah Harari has steered clear of reason and morality while holding that what is special about humans is the fact that they are the only animals who can work collectively and build social systems - such as ideologies, corporates and nation states - virtually overnight. Others have argued that what separates us from other animals is a set of special qualities such as culture, language, rationality or tool use. Historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto contends however that none of these are uniquely human traits. Apparently, a number of other animal species too share these abilities. The primatologist Frans de Waal has also pointed out how various animal species exhibit behaviour indicative of the design and use of tools and planning for the future. New Caledonian crows, for example, make intricate tools by shaping pointed branches and adding poisonous barbs. There is evidence of how Japanese macaques learned to wash sweet potatoes and even make them saltier. Western scrub jays not only hide their food for later use but they also anticipate and plan for what they will need in the future.

Philip K Dick thought kindness was the most typical human quality. This was the theme of his eponymous short story “Human Is?” Kindness seems to be a quality that we humans may not exhibit often enough but when we do it seems to reveal an inner light and even suggests that there is something almost divine about being human. This is more so when kindness is displayed in certain extreme circumstances where only those with considerable courage and altruism possess the will and desire to show it. Vasily Grossman, in his monumental and supposedly fictional epic Life and Fate, describes a place in Eastern Europe where the majority remained silent “as though mesmerized” as the occupying Germans slaughtered Ukrainian and Byelorussian Jews. There was also among them, “a particular minority… [of] ideological fanatics... which actively helps create the atmosphere of these campaigns…. And very few of them even disturbed the quiet unanimity” of these acts. Nonetheless, Grossman notes allegorically, a few “rather than turning away from the beseeching gaze of a dog suspected of rabies, dared to take the dog in and allow it to live in their houses.”

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While kindness comes close to being the hallmark of humanity, the one attribute that, I believe, defines us as humans even more unambiguously is our ability to show courage and nobility in the face of horror. Horror is no doubt not unique to humans as in nature every animal has its predator and where there are killers and killed horror won’t be far behind. But what makes us humans different is the way we respond to such encounters. It is the way we - or, more correctly, those very special people amongst us - exhibit a certain nobility (including a disdain for the malevolent) and altruism in such situations. I feel that writers, particularly writers of fiction - more than any other group of thinkers - seem to possess the best insights on this question and, more importantly, have the nous to express their thoughts with exquisite finesse. There are two other excellent literary works that epitomise this. One of them a work of fiction and the other not so easily definable. They are both about those rare individuals who tell us that “true nobility is exempt from fear,” and so can truly claim “more can I bear than you dare execute,” (William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2).

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What separates those who people John Steinbeck’s 1942 book The Moon is Down from those in Moments of Reprieve by Primo Levi (first published in Italian in 1981), we could say, is the type of courage that is displayed. The fearlessness that Steinbeck writes about is one of physical and moral bravery whereas the strength of character that Levi portrays should properly be termed “spiritual” or “existential” valour. What differentiates the former work is that it includes an element of hope that the oppression by the enemy could end someday, whereas the latter tells a tale of inexorable despair and hopelessness. If Banquo from Shakespeare’s Macbeth had witnessed the palpable despair of the prisoners of Auschwitz, he might have exclaimed (as he does at the sight of the Three Sisters),

“What are these,

So withered, and so wild in their attire,

That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ the earth,

And yet are on ‘t?”

(Again in Macbeth, When Banquo asks his son Fleance, “How goes the night?” the latter replies that “The moon is down; I have not heard the clock,” foreshadowing evil descending on the kingdom. Steinbeck has fittingly adopted this response from Fleance for the title of his story which is also about doom falling upon a small town.)

Heroism is not something without shades of grey. It is invariably accompanied by misgivings and these feelings of self-doubt make the act of valour that much harder. In The Moon is Down, at the imminent and certain threat of his execution and that of his deputy and friend Doctor Winter by the occupying forces, Mayor Orden confesses to the latter: “I am afraid, I have been thinking of ways to escape, to get out of it…. I have been thinking of pleading for my life, and it makes me ashamed.”  To this, Winter responds, “How do you know everyone doesn’t think of it? How do you know I haven’t thought of it?” The mayor then attempts to console himself by recollecting Socrates’s rejoinder when someone asked him if he were not ashamed of a life which is likely to bring one to an untimely end. To this, Socrates responded (as a little misquoted by the mayor and for which he gets chided by his friend), “There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether he is doing right or wrong.” Orden has occasion to refer to Socrates again later when his executioner arrives. He turns at that time to Winter and quotes the philosopher’s famous last request: “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius. Will you remember to pay the debt?” Some scholars have interpreted this to imply that Socrates wishes to thank Asclepius for identifying death as a cure for the sorrows and miseries of life. Steinbeck leaves it to the reader to judge if Orden’s reference to these words is merely a continuance of his thoughts on Socrates or has a more poignant and philosophical import associated with it.

As Donald V Coers points out in his introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of The Moon is Down, some early critics - including famous names like Clifton Fadiman and James Thurber - accused Steinbeck of being too soft on the Nazis in the book “by depicting them as human beings and infusing his story with a fuzzy, fairy-tale atmosphere.” Some may wonder too whether in real life a person about to be executed will possess the presence of mind to discuss Socrates with his friend who is also about to die. This however, doesn’t seem so melodramatic or unrealistic when we recall that there have been instances - albeit rare – in real life where some have actually exhibited such great resolve and desisted from fruitless calculations of survival and extinction, as Socrates did. Alberto Manguel, the Argentine-Canadian writer, recounts in his book The Library at Night the last moments of Jacob Edelstein, a former elder of the Theresienstadt ghetto and later prisoner at Birkenau. While Edelstein was saying his prayers, one of the commanders of the camp burst into the former’s hut to take him away. When Edelstein did not move in a hurry, the SS Lieutenant screamed: “I am waiting for you, hurry up!” Edelstein then turned round very slowly, faced the Lieutenant and replied, “"Of my last moments on this earth, allotted to me by the Almighty, I am the master, not you." Whereupon he turned back to face the wall and finished his prayers. He then folded his prayer shawl unhurriedly, handed it to one of the inmates and said to the commandant: "I am now ready."

To reinforce our own humanity, it is imperative that we look for goodness even the direst situation. There is of course no certainty that we will find it. In such existential quests the goal is, akin to philosophy, not necessarily to find the answer but to raise questions. The consolations of philosophy when offered to someone who is about to be shot, as Mayor Orden acknowledges, are “a sad knowledge and little enough gift.” Nevertheless, it is a defiant call in to the fog, something that needs to be uttered, needs to be heard to reinforce, however futilely, the preservation of what it means to be human. The clear eyed writing of Levi of his experiences at Auschwitz (“the ultimate drainage point of the German universe,” as he wryly describes it in his Moments of Reprieve) is perhaps the best and most poignant illustration of looking through such bleak horizons. Speaking aloud at and of such moments reaffirms the idea that “the one impossible job in the world is to break a man’s spirit permanently,” as the mayor observes in The Moon is Down.

The Massacre of the Innocents, Peter Paul Rubens 1638 (Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)

After writing If This is a Man and The Truce, Levi felt (as he notes in his preface to Moments of Reprieve) that he had “performed a task.”  Nevertheless, sometime later he felt that his “experience of Auschwitz was far from exhausted” when a number of his friends who had shared the horror with him begged him to explain their testimonies to the world - which Levi does in Moments of Reprieve. (In this putative collection of “short stories”, Levi uses fiction as the loosest garment to talk of what really happened.) These friends, Levi contends, were “no longer the anonymous, faceless, voiceless mass of the shipwrecked”. (The last phrase is reminiscent of the title of another of Levi’s seminal books The Drowned and the Saved. Levi adds that his vignettes are about “the few, the different, the ones in whom (if only for a moment) I had recognised the will and capacity to react, and hence a rudiment of virtue.” Levi perhaps had one of these remarkable beings in mind in his poem “to B.V” which is the very first piece in the collection and includes the following words:

“I haven’t dispossessed anyone,

Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread.

No one died in my place. No one….

It’s not my fault if I live and breathe…”

In Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler explains how a totalitarian state dismissed concepts like the individual and the infinite - and the “oceanic sense” the individual feels when realising his or her place in the infinite - as “petty bourgeois mysticism.” and counter-revolutionary. While the infinite was therefore a politically suspect quantity the ‘I’ was a politically suspect quality. “The definition [instead] of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.” By this measure, a prisoner in a death factory like Auschwitz would have been looked upon as not even a whole integer but a mere fraction. Levi stresses in his poem to B.V. the moral courage required to uphold values and a sense of ethics in a dog eat dog world. In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel too spoke of this bravery and the need to not remain silent and ‘bear witness” (a phrase that Levi too uses with great meaning). Wiesel swore to speak up and to “take sides.” He was afraid that “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim…. When human dignity is in jeopardy… that place must become the centre of the universe.” We therefore need to listen more to writers like Steinbeck, Levi and others who keep telling us (reassuring us?) that we are not just fractions nor mere numbers, at best: we are humans.

© Venkat Ramanan