I Dismissals of employees and expropriation of business firms
I Concentration
1 Exploitation of labour and starvation measures
I Annihilation
1 Confiscation of personal effects
The sequence of steps in a destruction process is thus determined. If there is an attempt to inflict maximum injury upon a group of people, it is therefore inevitable that a bureaucracy - no matter
towards a Sociological Theory of Morality 191
how decentralized its apparatus or how unplanned its activities should push its victims through these stages.18
The stages, Hilberg suggests, are logically determined; they form a rational sequence, a sequence conforming to the modern standards which prompt us to seek the shortest ways and the most efficient means to the end. If we now try to discover the guiding principle in this rational solution to the problem of mass destruction, we find out that the successive stages are arranged according to the logic of eviction from the realm of moral duty (or, to use the concept suggested by Helen Fein,19 from the universe of obligations).
Definition sets the victimized group apart (all definitions mean splitting the totality into two parts - the marked and the unmarked), as a different category, so that whatever applies to it does not apply to all the rest. By the very act of being defined, the group has been targeted for special treatment; what is proper in relation to 'ordinary' people must not necessarily be proper in relation to it. Individual members of the group become now in addition exemplars of a type; something of the nature of the type cannot but seep into their individualized images, compromise the originally innocent proximity, limit its autonomy as the self-sustained moral universe.
Dismissals and expropriations tear apart most of the general contracts, substituting physical and spiritual distance for past proximity. The victimized group is now effectively removed from sight; it is a category one at best hears of, so that what one hears about it has no chance to be translated into the knowledge of individual destinies, and thus to be checked against personal experience.
Concentration completes this process of distantiation. The victimized group and the rest do not meet any more, their life-processes to not cross, communication grinds to a halt, whatever happens to one of the now segregated groups does not concern the other, has no meaning easy to translate into the vocabulary of human intercourse.
Exploitation and starvation perform a further, truly astonishing, feat: they disguise inhumanity as humanity. There is ample evidence of local Nazi chiefs asking their superiors for permission to kill some Jews under their jurisdiction (well before the signal was given to start mass killings) in order to spare them the agony of famine; as the food supplies were not available to sustain a mass of ghettoized population previously robbed of wealth and income, killing seemed an act of mercy - indeed, the manifestation of humanity. 'The diabolical circle of fascist policies
a thick moral wall virtually impenetrable to merely abstract' arguments. Persuasive or insidious the intellectual stereotype may be, yet its zone of application stops abruptly where the sphere of personal intercourse begins. The other' as an abstract category simply does not communicate with 'the other' / know. The second belongs within the realm of morality, while the first is cast firmly outside. The second resides in the semantic universe of good and evil, which stubbornly refuses to be subordinated to the discourse of efficiency and rational choice.
Social suppression of moral responsibility
We know already that there was little direct link between diffuse hetero-phobia and the mass murder designed and perpetrated by the Nazis. What the accumulated historical evidence strongly suggests in additon is that mass murder on the unprecedented scale of the Holocaust was not (and in all probability could not be) an effect of awakening, release, prompting, intensification, or an outburst of dormant personal inclinations; nor was it in any other sense continuous with hostility emerging from personal face-to-face relationships, however soured or bitter those might have been on occasion, there is a clear limit to which such personally-based animosity may be stretched. In more cases than not, it would resist being pushed beyond the line drawn by that elementary responsibility for the other which is inextricably interwoven in human proximity, in 'living with others'. The Holocaust could be accomplished only on the condition of neutralizing the impact of primeval moral drives, of isolating the machinery of murder from the sphere where such drives arise and apply, of rendering such drives marginal or altogether irrelevant to the task.
This neutralizing, isolating and marginalizing was an achievement of the Nazi regime deploying the formidable apparatus of modern industry, transport, science, bureaucracy, technology. Without them, the Holocaust would be unthinkable; the grandiose vision of judenrein Europe, of the total annihilation of the Jewish race, would peter out in a multitude of bigger and smaller pogroms perpetrated by psychopaths, sadists, fanatics or other addicts of gratuitous violence; however cruel and gory, such actions would be hardly commensurable with the purpose. It was the designing of the solution to the Jewish problem' as a rational, bureaucratic-technical task, as something to be done to a particular category of objects by a particular set of experts and
Towards a Sociological Theory of Morality 189
specialized organizations - in other words, as a depersonalized task not dependent on feelings and personal commitments - which proved to be, in the end, adequate to Hitler's vision. Yet the solution could not be so designed, and certainly not executed, until the future objects of bureaucratic operations, the Jews, had been removed from the horizon of German daily life, cut off from the network of personal intercourse, transformed in practice into exemplars of a category, of a stereotype -into the abstract concept of the metaphysical Jew. Until, that is, they had ceased to be those others' to whom moral responsibility normally extends, and lost (he protection which such natural morality offers.
Having thoroughly analyzed the successive failures of the Nazis to arouse the popular hatred of Jews and to harness it in the service of the 'solution to the Jewish problem', Ian Kershaw comes to the conclusion that
Where the Nazis were most successful was in the depersonaliz-ation of the Jews. The more the Jew was forced out of social life, the more he seemed to fit the stereotypes of a propaganda which intensified, paradoxically, its campaign against 'Jewry' the fewer / actual Jews there were in Germany itself. Depersonalization increased the already existent widespread indifference of German popular opinion and formed a vital stage between the archaic violence and the rationalized 'assembly line' annihilation of the death camps.
The 'Final Solution' would not have been possible without the progressive steps to exclude the Jews from German society which took place in full view of the public, in their legal form met with widespread approval, and resulted in the depersonalization and debasement of the figure of the Jew.n
As we have already noted in the third chapter, the Germans who did object to the exploits of SA hoodlums when the Jew next door' was their victim (even those among them who found the courage to make their revulsion manifest), accepted with indifference and often with satisfaction legal restrictions imposed on the Jew as such'. What would stir their moral conscience if focused on persons they knew, aroused hardly any feelings when targeted on an abstract and stereotyped category. They noted with equanimity, or failed to note, the gradual disappearance of Jews from their world of everyday life. Until, for the young German soldiers and SS men entrusted with the task of liquidation' of so many Figuren, the Jew was 'only a "museum-piece",
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allowed to create deliberately intolerable conditions and states of emergency and then to use them to legitimize even more radical steps
And thus the final act, annihilation, was in no way a revolutionary departure. It was, so to speak, a logical (though, remember, unanticipated at the start) outcome of the many steps taken before. None of the steps was made inevitable by the already attained state of affairs, but each step rendered rational the choice of the next stage on the road to destruction. The further away the sequence moved from the original act of Definition, the more it was guided by purely rational-technical considerations, and the less did it have to reckon with moral inhibitions. Indeed, it all but ceased to necessitate moral choices.
The passages between the stages had one striking feature in common. They all increased the physical and mental distance between the purported victims and the rest of the population - the perpetrators and the witnesses of the genocide alike. In this quality resided their inherent rationality from the point of view of the final destination, and their effectiveness in bringing the task of destruction to its completion. Evidently, moral inhibitions do not act at a distance. They arc-inextricably tied down to human proximity. Commitment of immoral acts, on the contrary, becomes easier with every inch of social distance. If Mommsen is right when he singles out as the anthropological dimension' of the Holocaust experience 'the danger inherent in present-day industrial society of a process of becoming accustomed to moral indifference in regard to actions not immediately related to one's own sphere of experience'21 - then the danger he warns about must be traced to the capacity of that present-day industrial society to extend inter-human distance to a point where moral responsibility and moral inhibitions become inaudible.
be a matter of distance and technology. You could never go wrong if you killed people at long range with sophisticated weapons.'22 As long as one does not see the practical effects of one's action, or as long as one cannot unambiguously relate what one saw to such innocent and minuscule acts of one's own as pushing button or switching a pointer, a moral conflict is unlikely to appear, or likely to appear in muted form. One can think of the invention of artillery able to.hit a target invisible to those who operate the guns as a symbolic starting point of modern warfare and the concomitant irrelevancy of moral factors: such artillery allows the destruction of the target while aiming the gun in an entirely different direction.
The accomplishment of modern weaponry can be taken as a metaphor for a much more diversified and ramified process of the social production of distance. John Lachs has located the unifying characteristics of the many manifestations of this process in the introduction, on a massive scale, of the mediation of action, and of the intermediary man - one who 'standsJsetween me and my action, making it impossible forme to experience it directly'. . . . .
The" distance we feel from our actions is proportionate to our
the length of the chain of intermediaries between ourselves and
our acts ... As consciousness of the context drops out, the actions --§--
become motions without consequence. With the consequences out -|~
of view, people can be parties to the most abhorrent acts without .i
ever raising the question of their own role and responsibility ... _j_
[It is extremely difficult] to see how our own actions, through i
their remote effects, contributed to causing misery. It is no cop out f
to think oneself blameless and condemn society. It is the natural -i result of large-scale mediation which inevitably leads to monstrous jT~
Once the action has been mediated, the action's ultimate effects are j_
located outside that relatively narrow area of intercourse inside which _k_
moral drives retain their regulating force. Obversely, acts contained within that morally pregnant area are for most of the participants or !
their witnesses innocuous enough not to come under moral censure. T
Minute division of labour, as well as the sheer length of the chain of acts f ~
that mediate between the initiative and its tangible effects, emancipates most - however decisive - constituents of the collective venture from moral significance and scrutiny. They are still subject to analysis and
Towards a Sociological Theory of Morality 19^
evaluation - but criteria are technical, not moral. 'Problems' call for better, more rational designs, not for soul-searching. The actors occupy themselves with the rational task of finding better means fof the given -and partial - end, not with a moral task of the evaluation of the ultimate objective (of which they have but a vague idea, or for which they do not
feel responsible).. . .
. In his detailed account of the history of invention and deployment of the infamous gas, van, the initial Nazi solution to the technicaj task of fast, neat and cheap mass murder, Christopher R. Browning offers the following insight into the psychological world of the people involved.
Specialists whose expertise normally had nothing to do with mass murder suddenly found themselves a minor cog in the machinery of destruction. Occupied with procuring, dispatching, maintaining, and repairing motor vehicles, their expertise and facilities were suddenly pressed into the service of mass murder when they were charged with producing gas vans ... What disturbed them was the criticism and complaints about faults in their product. The shortcomings of the gas vans were a negative reflection on their workmanship that had to be remedied. Kept Fully abreast of the problems arising in the" field, they strove for ingenious technical adjustments to rnakerheir product more efficient and acceptable to its operators ... Their greatest concern seemed to be that they might be deemed inadequate to their assigned task.24
Being inextricably tied to human proximity, morality seems to conform to the law of optical perspective. It looms large and thick close to the eye. With the growth of distance, responsibility for the other shrivels, moral dimensions of the object blur, till both reach the vanishing point and disppear from view.
This quality of moral drive seems independent of the social order which supplies the framework of interaction. What does depend on that order is the pragmatic effectiveness of moral predispositions; then
Cowafdi a Sociological Theory dj Morality 193
capacity to control human actions, to set limits to the harm inflicted on the other, to draw the parameters in which all intercourse tends to be contained. The significance and clanger - of moral indifference becomes particularly acute in our modern, rationalized, industrial technologically proficient society because in such a society human action can be effective at a distance, and at a distance constantly growing with the progress of science, technology and bureaucracy. In such a society, the effects of human action reach far beyond the 'vanishing point' of moral visibility. The visual capacity of moral drive, limited as it is by the principle of proximity, remains constant, while the distance at which human action may be effective and consequential, and thus also the number of people who may be affected by such action, grow rapidly. The sphere of interaction influenced by moral drives is dwarfed by comparison with the expanding volume of actions excepted from its interference.
The notorious success of modern civilization in substituting rational criteria of action for all other, and by the modern definition irrational criteria (moral evaluations looming large among the latter), was in decisive measure conditioned by the progress in remote control', that is in extending the distance at which human action is able to bring effects. It is the remote, barely visible targets of action which are free from moral evaluation; and so the choice of action which affects such targets is free from limitations imposed by moral drive.
As Milgram's experiments dramatically demonstrated, the silencing of the moral urge and the suspension of moral inhibitions is achieved precisely through making the genuine (though often unknown to the actor) targets of action 'remote and barely visible , rather than through an overt anti-moral crusade, or an indoctrination aimed at substituting an alternative set of rules for the old moral system. The most obvious example of the technique which places the victims out of sight, and hence renders them inaccessible to moral assessment, are modern weapons. The progress of the latter consisted mostly in eliminating to an ever-growing extent the chance of face-to-face combat, of committing the act of killing in its human-size, commonsensical meaning, with weapons separating and distantiating, rather than confronting and bringing together the warring armies, the drill of the weapon-operators in suppressing their moral drives, or direct attacks on 'old-fashioned morality, lose much of their former importance, as the use of weapons seems to bear merely an abstract-intellectual relation to the moral integrity of the users. In the words of Philip (.aputo, war ethos seems to
T- j.
T_, J.