If we take a closer look at the ideology the family Smith believes in, we can see that it is not all bad. They just value other goods than we might value. Being useful to society matters more to them than their individual life. The will of the group is more important than personal emotions. Their life is based on family, achievement and community. When we look at these priorities, we might even understand them. It is not their priorities that are evil. Just one crucial thing is: the idea of blind obedience.
What’s so disturbing about Obergruppenführer Smith’s family is the co-existence of normality and cruelty. It’s hard for us to believe that a man so evil could be capable of love. This normal and almost likeable side of a cruel Nazi disrupts our ordinary conception of evil. Evil like that, our moral instinct tells us, is done by cruel psychopaths. But it is not psychopaths we’re dealing with, it is ordinary people profiting from a system that privileges them and who are not asking questions, just like Smith. That doesn’t mean that Obergruppenführer Smith is not cruel. He certainly is. (We’ve seen him mercilessly torture human beings, after all.) But Smith does not enjoy cruelty as much as, for example, Heydrich does. Smith simply sees it as a necessity; a job that needs to be done. And he doesn’t focus on his feelings of repulsion, if he has any.
To examine “the strange interdependence of brainlessness and evil,” as Arendt put it, became a task that occupied her mind for the rest of her life. Arendt realized that evil doesn’t lie in the malicious character of bad people. It lies in the unreflecting character of ordinary people; people who choose to forfeit their right to think. “Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?” she asked.
What Arendt observed during the Eichmann trial was that the accused didn’t feel guilty for his bad deeds, because he was not the one who gave the orders. According to Nazi ideology, personal opinions and feelings do not matter. In a society, where the individual does not matter, there is no one left to blame. These questions—the question of how his deeds might be judged, or perhaps even how he himself might judged—never even occurred to Eichmann. He did not question his deeds because that was simply not part of his orders. Challenging the existing order and making judgments was simply not a part of his upbringing. (Just like it is not a part of Thomas’s.) Evil lies in this failure to think. And therein also lies its banality: when we try to understand this kind of evil, we realize that there’s nothing there. No deeper ground on which it is based upon. Eichmann, and many other Nazis, did evil without deeper motives; they did it just out of sheer blind obedience. Arendt had set out to understand the human mind but all she found was brainlessness.
This blind obedience was the mindset of Eichmann’s times. In The Man in the High Castle, it still is. That is as true for the Nazi Empire as it is for the Resistance. The men who send Joe on his mission to the Neutral Zone expect him not to ask questions and to follow their orders, just like the Nazis or the Japanese do. Being obedient is a part of this time’s upbringing. Therefore, what we observe in The Man in the High Castle is not so much a fight between the “good” resistance and the “evil” Nazi-Japanese Empire. It is rather a fight between the typical “brainlessness” of those times and people who dare to think for themselves.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil
His guilt came from his obedience, and obedience is praised as a virtue.
—HANNAH ARENDT
In The Man in the High Castle we see a society full of people who don’t ask any questions anymore—because it’s simply more convenient not to. Not speaking about evil, not questioning deeds that go against humanity, is a recurring theme throughout the show. This mindset is depicted in the show by the three monkeys, a Japanese proverb that Juliana stumbles upon when she is looking for “Sakura Iwazaru.” The three monkeys, as a Japanese colleague explains to Juliana, are Mizaru, who sees no evil, Kikazaru, who hears no evil, and Iwazaru, who speaks no evil. Juliana realizes that Iwazaru (“Speak no evil”) is the one the surveillance room at the Nippon Building is named after.
This old proverb originally refers to the art of kindness. It suggests that we can live a much happier life if we choose not to focus on the bad deeds of others, and not to badmouth others. In the world depicted in The Man in the High Castle this proverb gets another, more sinister, meaning: looking the other way and letting evil take its course.
In a world where “the practice of self-deception had become so common” that it was “almost a moral prerequisite for survival,” as Arendt noted, not noticing reality has been turned into a virtue. If you don’t notice it, you don’t have to think about it. This way you are able to live a much more anxiety-free life. Looking the other way might be the thing that comes most naturally to us, when we have to face hard truths. This mindset is represented in the character of Juliana’s stepfather, Arnold. He works in the surveillance room at the Nippon Building, and therefore knows a lot about the evil that is going on, and still refuses to acknowledge it.
But even people who have learned to look the other way, will experience moral dilemmas which will force them to take a good hard look at reality. These moral dilemmas will make obedience a more difficult task, and will open up a chance for them to experience freedom. “Brainlessness” is not a static character trait; even people who prefer to follow the rules to feel safe, like Frank and Joe, can begin to think again, when their world of rules doesn’t feel safe anymore. The inability to “see no evil” is what happens to Juliana when her sister Trudy gets killed by the Japanese. It’s what happens to Frank when his sister and her kids get murdered. It’s what happens to Joe when he meets Juliana. And it even happens to Obergruppenführer Smith.
Obergruppenführer Smith has to face quite a few moral dilemmas because of the ideology he believes in. While he justifies his killings in the concentration camps by reference to his orders, he throws Captain Connolly from the roof when he was following Heydrich’s order to kill Smith. Then, Smith has to make the decision to hand his old friend Rudolf Wegener over to the SS. “Emotions can’t be allowed to interfere with what is right,” he explains to Joe, and to himself.
In a system where evil is so common, doing good is nothing but a temptation you have to resist. Obedience, on the other hand, is praised as a virtue. When Obergruppenführer Smith is sitting in the office of the doctor who diagnoses his son with a congenital disease, he can’t not hear the evil the doctor is suggesting: the euthanasia of his son. This might be the first time in Smith’s life that he realizes how unfree he actually is.
Freedom can make life seem unbearably complicated. That’s why some of us want to follow the simple rules obedience provides. The banality of evil lies in the fact that men lack the courage to be free, that they’d rather not think for themselves. But it just as much lies in the fact that men lack the emotional independence to stand on their own due to their upbringing. The banality of evil lies not only in those undeveloped minds that don’t use their capacity for thinking, but also, or even more so, in those undeveloped hearts that don’t dare to, and have never learned to, stand on their own.
20
The Spirit of Abstraction
CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
We abstract every day. We look at the larger world and see something in it that attracts our attention and we focus on it. That’s abstraction. Just imagine if we could not abstract the tiger hiding in the jungle.
In traffic we abstract the car that is on course to pass us by from one that looks as if it is heading right for us. If you have a peanut allergy you must abstract whether that brown paste is peanut butter or hummus. How does it happen? Something catches our eye as being important, not quite right, or different. It produces a question which requires our focus to better understand what this thing is my mind has abstracted. Sometimes we just say, okay, that’s what it is and move on. Sometimes like the tiger we go, uh oh, and prepare to deal with the danger posed by the abstraction.
However, what if
the abstraction is another person? Not just the big hulking brute that we see towering over the crowd in front, but a particular kind of person we have been told is fundamentally bad, inferior, or some other derogatory term. The Nazis abstracted the Jews from all other persons and tried their best to exterminate them. In other words, the world where Germany and Japan won World War II in The Man in the High Castle maintains the idea that whole categories of people can be abstracted as non-persons, especially Jews and black Africans.
Right away you say, this is not right. However, it’s easily done. Your hated rival football team you abstract from the colors of their uniforms and their logo. Is that bad? What if you sent in your goons, your thugs, into their stadium to beat up everyone wearing their hated colors of orange and white? That’s not good. Who gave you the idea that your team is better than their team? What criteria other than the colors that they wear are different? Good question. Abstracting the tiger can be productive; but like the Nazi treatment of the Jews, abstracting can be damaging, hurtful, or worse.
Gabriel Marcel said, “As soon as we accord to any category, isolated from all other categories, an arbitrary primacy, we are victims of the spirit of abstraction.” The spirit of abstraction arises when someone plants the idea that this or that people, culture, color, religious belief, or some other aspect of being is less than you, and as a result you are superior to them. You work with Baynes who just happens to like your rival team. Do you abstract Baynes as a lesser person? Only on game day. Alright, but what if you are in Nazi Germany and Baynes is a Jew and you are what the government calls Aryan? If you don’t abstract Baynes the Jew and assert that you the Aryan are superior to him, you will not only be shunned by fellow Aryans but may also face other consequences. You like Baynes, so why do you have to abstract him into this arbitrary category called hated Jew? It is the arbitrary nature of abstraction that Marcel called the spirit of abstraction.
Anti-Semite and Jew
Put the shoe on the other foot. Let’s say you are the Baynes in The Man in the High Castle. You were born a Jew. What do you do? Why not try to do everything possible to disguise your Jewishness? Baynes tells others and gets others to believe he’s Swedish. He has abstracted himself from his Jewishness.
Baynes the “Swede” and Mr. Loetze, a German, happen to sit together on a rocket transport. They engage in simple conversation until Loetze, who sees a new building below, says “It looks as if it was designed by a Jew.” Loetze then says he wants a good Aryan companion to help him navigate San Francisco, so he tells Baynes that they are both racially kin, that is, Germans and Swedes. Baynes carries on a conversation with himself asking what is it about the Germans and their abstractions? Is it something they are born with? Do they understand the destruction that they are causing? They have abstracted themselves as God!
Baynes has had enough. To Mr. Loetze in The Man in the High Castle novel he says, “You would not have known . . . because I do not in any physical way appear Jewish; I have had my nose altered, my large greasy pores made smaller, my skin chemically lightened, the shape of my skull changed.” Baynes isn’t some aging Hollywood starlet trying to restore her vanity. He is trying to “pass” as someone he is not. We can say the same about the starlet, but she doesn’t get her plastic surgery to save her life. Baynes changes his appearance; Frank Fink (was Frink) in the television series hides his Jewish heritage so as not to be murdered by the Nazis. How did we come to a place where a person’s physical identity must be altered or heritage silenced to live?
How did abstraction of the Jews begin in Hitler’s Germany? The population was angry. Hyperinflation and war reparations bankrupted Germany after World War I. Hitler made the Jews the scapegoat. He created a caricature of the Jew so that they could be easily recognized on the street. He made up stories about their cleanliness, their personalities, and their greed. He created an abstracted picture of them and backed it up with “evidence of their malfeasance.” They are all murderers and rapists. They are all unwanted immigrants and are an inferior race to the real original Germans. They are taking jobs from the real Germans. They are all lazy and won’t work and are mooching from the real German people. They have taken all of the wealth of Germany for themselves and we, the real Germans, need to take it back. Oh, by the way, they killed Jesus.
Wait, how can they be taking our jobs and mooching off of us at the same time? If they are all mooching, how did they get all the wealth of Germany . . . from mooching? How do they find time to work if they are all murderers and rapists? None of this needs to make logical sense. It only needs to be emotionally powerful to work to marginalize, criminalize, and segregate the they. For the Nazis, the they were the Jews. Nazis then whipped up German emotions and anger against the Jews.
Isn’t this spirit of abstraction a combination of evidence poured upon more evidence that bends both logic and emotion into each other and confuses both? This spirit of abstraction makes they different from us. It then says that we (us) are superior to them (they). For this to stick we must be emotionally attached to the idea of our superiority as much as we do when we root for our team at the expense of the other team. This Baynes saw in Loetze and wondered how this could have come to be. Jean-Paul Sartre also saw the emotional context of the abstraction of the Jew, “Indeed, it is something quite other than an idea. It is first of all a passion.”
This abstraction is only the beginning. Caricatures of the Jew are plastered all over the newspapers and public places in posters and other visual media. You know a Jew when you see one. Hence, Bayne’s plastic surgery to erase his Jewishness and to make him disappear from those who may have known him as a Jew.
The efficiency of Hitler’s bureaucracy was its passion to catalogue your ancestry to brand you this or that. If you have any of that anywhere in recorded history, you are not a this. You don’t want to be a that because existence is not pleasant for a that. Baynes determined to erase his thatness so even his neighbors and even relatives wouldn’t recognize him and call him out as a that. However, not only are the that victims but the this are also victims in that they have been duped by the lies those who claim primacy for thisness.
Victims of the Spirit of Abstraction
Wait, how can we, the superior Germans who won the Second World War in The Man in the High Castle be “victims of the spirit of abstraction”? We made those who lost the war (Americans and Europeans) and Jews victims, not us, you say. Understand this, you the so-called Aryan have been duped, snookered, trolled, and your emotions have been brought to boil by lies compounded by more lies that started the war in the first place. Those who protest such lies disappear. They are silenced. You only hear the lies. Nazis told the German people: Just look at our poverty compared to their wealth. They are eating our lunch.
Philip K. Dick echoes another of Gabriel Marcel’s notions that lying and war are somehow intertwined and that the lie is both to ourselves and to others. We’re never sure which is truth and which is not in The Man in the High Castle. Fink, born a Jew, has changed his name to Frink and makes counterfeit collectible jewelry. In the novel, Childan, a collector of long lost things, believes he has a valuable Colt 44, but the knowledgeable representative of Admiral Harusha explains that Childan has been duped by counterfeiters. Though this is true, Childan later finds out that the Admiral’s ship was sunk during the war—so who is this “knowledgeable representative”?
Baynes tells Mr. Loetze that he has completely disguised his Jewishness. However, who is Baynes now? He keeps molting like a serpent. Characters lie to themselves and others and Dick often “lies” to us.
Sartre asked why intelligent people don’t see through the lies. He said it is more complex than truth, “The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt upon it.” Even the rational among us are unsure until we are, sort of . . . Sartre explained, “The anti-Semite has chosen to hate because hate is a faith; at the ou
tset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result.” The faith of unending evidence is a powerful tool of the spirit of abstraction.
At first, the rational person doubts what he hears about the abstracted they but listens to others. It is the insertion of emotion into rhetoric that begins his journey to become born again and to believe the rhetoric as a new-found faith which is difficult to undermine with a return to reason—because reason has been exorcized from the faith. The abstracted have been given what W.E.B. Du Bois called a dual consciousness. Meaning, deep down they know that they are rational humans but the lies and propaganda around them call into question their rationality until they find themselves living in the quasi-world of uncertainty about even themselves. Those in power have the capacity to keep them thinking this way . . . that they are an abstraction, not part of the majority, perhaps not even human.
As Dick did in The Man in the High Castle, Marcel saw through the patina of power, of self-proclamation. Marcel said, “It is only through organized lying that we can hope to make war acceptable to those who must wage or suffer it.” It appears that in Dick’s tale the lies the Nazis told about the Jews and others during the war have metastasized to where society itself has become a lie and those within it have become adept at lying to maintain existence in a bureaucratized world where the truth may not be easily discovered.
The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Page 21