Cruel Conformity: Systemic Evil and Personal Guilt

 

         In the height of the American occupation of Iraq, a young soldier was manning the machine gun at a checkpoint in Baghdad. The others at the checkpoint had rifles, but his was the only weapon capable of stopping a vehicle in one burst, killing most or all of its occupants. Its purpose was to prevent suicide bombers from ramming the checkpoint. A car approached and rolled on after it was warned to stop. The commanding officer ordered the young soldier to open fire, but he hesitated for a few seconds--maybe doubting that the car looked like a threat--and it stopped near the checkpoint. A man, his wife, and two children got out and asked directions. They hadn't noticed the warning, maybe because they were too busy trying to figure out where they were. 

After the interpreter gave the family directions and they drove off, everybody at the checkpoint understood that the young soldier's hesitation had saved four innocent people, two of them children. He expected to be congratulated for doing the right thing, but he wasn't. Instead, the commanding officer told him, "Next time you fucking better shoot!"

At the end of his next stateside leave, the young soldier refused to report as a matter of conscience because he would be returning to duties that, he understood, included an obligation to slaughter innocents. Maybe he imagined mutilated children, blood-soaked in a bullet-riddled car, and that was enough to trigger PTSD. He wasn't the usual sort of conscientious objector. He didn't profess a pacifist religion or reject killing per se. If an apparent suicide bomber had accelerated toward the checkpoint, he would have squeezed the trigger. What he objected to were rules of engagement that, as he now understood them, obligated him to kill harmless families. I don't know how his case came out. Surely, the service didn't want a shell-shocked conscience back on its checkpoints, so maybe he got off with a dishonorable discharge, but I do see his resistance as moral high ground, like a German guard refusing to shoot an escapee from Dachau.

Neither case implies that a soldier on the low ground is individually evil. The commanding officer upheld an order to fire even after he knew he had been circumstantially mistaken--that there had been no real threat--but I doubt he was a bloodthirsty monster. He was probably prioritizing the (for him) greater good of protecting his men. He was probably an ordinary fellow caught up in the Alice-in-Wonderland morality of war, where the legitimate moral rule of self-defense (if somebody tries to hit you, you can hit back) transmogrifies into justification for slaughtering any number of foreign bystanders as a precaution to protect a few of your own. This moral inversion--manifest in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden and at the Iraqi checkpoint--finds traction among soldiers whose lives the slaughter of bystanders may protect, but it is indefensible as Christian morality. It violates the mandate to love our neighbors as ourselves in a gospel where Jesus explicitly identifies our neighbors as, not just our compatriots, families, or teammates, but as strangers from a despised nation (Luke 10:25-37).

Any evil embodied in a soldier who orders the next Iraqi family (if any) machine-gunned, shoots a skeletal Dachau escapee in the back, or drops an atomic bomb on Japan is not so much personal evil as systemic. Left to his own devices, such a soldier is unlikely to ever kill anyone. Homicidal maniacs exist, but there's no reason to suppose that he's one. He is probably an uncritical cog in a machine of moral inversion that causes him to experience the proddings of conscience as temptations to subvert the social order, betray his friends, or neglect his duty. 

         In this all-to-common state of moral inversion (as Hannah Arendt explains in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil) the urge to avoid socially mandated cruelty is felt as temptation to do wrong. In ethically deranged circumstances, temptation flips upside down and tempts us to do good. I recall Huck Finn, convinced that he was damned for "stealing" Jim from slavery. Hellish outcomes such as machine-gunned children and flattened cites are sanctified as patriotic duty. Agents of systematic evil may feel like heroes, brainwashed into believing they are doing good despite the tangible horror of their actions.

At Adolf Eichmann's trial, prosecutors showed he had continued to organize death marches even after his superior Himmler, seeing that Germany was losing the war, ordered him to keep Jewish prisoners alive as bargaining chips with the Allies. Prosecutors argued that this made Eichmann a bloodthirsty monster. Arendt disagrees. Eichmann's motive was not a Satanic cruelty, but rather inverted idealism, selfless devotion to the Fuhrer and his program, "the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique.” His priority was not merely to "obey orders" (a mantra in Nazi war trials), but rather to perform his duty within a sacred ideology--a secular religion inseparable from the Final Solution. In this context, Himmler's orders were corrupt and self-serving, a betrayal of the Cause, so Eichmann ignored them and kept killing. We might compare it to an inquisitor's continuing to hunt heretics against the orders of an apostate bishop, driven by loyalty to the Pope and (in his view) to God. Arendt does not excuse Eichmann's monstrosities, but she does situate them in systemic evil and redirects our attention there. If the mass of people accept systemic injustice, banal enforcers like Eichmann will appear.

There's a risk of the Reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy here, but Arendt identifies a real and pervasive moral pathology. American slavery is a historic example: systemic racism, kidnapping, torture, rape, murder, and more, so engrained in an economy that opposing it was criminalized. In 1865, the slaves were freed, but traces of the system, however weakened, still motivate banal evil. In 1965, I was assaulted and chased by a crowd for distributing flyers against segregation. If the nominal Christians who made up most of the crowd had recalled Matthew 7:12, the Golden Rule, and reflected that they would dislike being marginalized as blacks were under segregation, they might have joined me. Of course, they were blinded by generations of systemic moral inversion that sanctified racial inequality. Systemic immorality is like the air, mostly invisible and, when it is noticed, accepted as inevitable, even as the will of God. Injustice is usually a product of conformity, not hate. Good people float like blind fish in evil ponds. Only moral geniuses are capable of noticing their own daily immoral actions, much less avoiding them.

It is easy to recognize systemic evil in other cultures or in the rearview mirror of history, but anyone interested in living justly faces the challenge of detecting systemic evils of our own society and, at the very least, not cooperating with them--voting against them if possible. We can't fight them all or fight full-time--we have our little lives to lead--but if we don't recognize and at least speak against systemic evils, then we own them. Martin Luther King wrote in 1963 from Birmingham Jail, "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." It would be impossible to list in this little space the systemic evils now raging, but one "elephant in the living room" is inequality of wealth resulting purely from accidents of birth and worsened by racism.

The American medical system coddles the moneyed, and the legal system treats guilty, rich, white suspects better than the innocent, poor, black ones. Poor minorities are more likely to die young of chronic diseases, be shot by police, or receive long prison sentences, often as a result of inadequate representation and forced guilty pleas. The likelihood that an orphan in a crime-ridden ghetto will rise to the level of Donald Trump--or of that a Trump will fall to the orphan's level--is astronomically small. And this is only an extreme extreme of the systemic migration of wealth away from those in need (who suffer physically from its lack) and toward those with surpluses, largely on the basis of blind luck, particularly the "choice" of parents. 

          A recent Scientific American article explains a mathematical proof that, on the "yard sale" model, wealth gravitates to wealth--not merely because the money buys tax advice, education, and such, but even absent these. Money attracts money until, in a pure free market (ideal capitalism), one owner ends up owning everything. Of course, real-life correctives such as charity, taxation, unionism, and incompetence disrupt this model, but it is a systemic injustice. As the card game War demonstrates, fair but blind competition results in vast inequality. Inevitably, one player in the game--no more skillful than the other in a random turning of cards--collects the whole pack. 

Americans idealize a "level playing field," but real-world economic fields tilt in the favor of the high-scored team unless re-leveled by referees, usually governmental. Many of us accept economic tilting as inevitable--or made worse if interfered with by "socialism"--but a nuanced reading of history undermines this cruel complacence. The devil is, as always, in the details.

 Readings

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press, 2012.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin, 1977.

Boghosian, Bruce M. "The Inescapable Casino." Scientific American, November 2019, pp. 70-77.

"How to Play War." Bicycle How to Play. bicyclecards.com/how-to-play/war/.

King, Martin Luther. "Letter from Birmingham Jail." https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Letter_Birmingham_Jail.pdf 

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Spiegel & Grau, 2014.