Then Bothmann … ordered me to start the engine and let it run for ten minutes. I carried out this order and after about a minute I heard terrible cries and groans from inside the van. I got scared and leapt from the cab. Now I understood that the exhaust fumes had been fed into the inside of the van to kill the people. Bothmann then snapped at me asking if I had gone mad. He ordered me to get behind the steering wheel again. I sat behind the wheel again and waited. I didn’t dare do anything because I was afraid of Bothmann. After a few minutes the cries and groans of the people gradually died away.
— Testimony of Gustav Laabs, gas-van driver in Chelmno, Poland, Nov. 29, 1960.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Europeans and Americans had high hopes for the future. For hundreds of years, Enlightenment thinkers had preached the gospel of Reason, arguing that the spread of science and humanitarianism would one day banish cruelty and barbarity. Now, at last, that day was near.
Yale professor Henry Davies, for example, proclaimed that the new century would bring with it "a nobler man living in a nobler environment … gentler in mind and manners, in every way an improvement over the past."
Yet human savagery was more deeply entrenched than Enlightenment thinkers had anticipated. The 20th century was marked by one outrage after another: World War I, the Armenian genocide, the Bolshevik revolution, the Rape of Nanking, the terror-famine of the Ukraine, the Gulag, Auschwitz, World War II, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia, to name just a few. In the wake of such "festivals of cruelty," we can see that the optimism of Davies and others was wildly unrealistic.
But does that mean that humankind has no prospect of better days ahead? Must savagery and selfish ruthlessness always prevail?
One person who doesn’t think so is British ethicist Jonathan Glover. In his recent book, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Glover dredges through that century’s atrocities to discover what went wrong. What he finds is "much that is exceptionally dark." But this secular scholar also finds flashes of hope—from a source that many Christians will instantly recognize.
The Art of Cruelty
Finding hope in the 20th century is no small task. To do so, we must overcome two towering obstacles. The first obstacle is the human bent toward cruelty and conflict.
"Deep in human psychology," Glover says, "there are urges to humiliate, torment, wound and kill people."
This is shown not only by the prevalence of atrocities, but in the way they are carried out. There is an "artistry" (i.e. depravity) to human cruelty that defies the simplistic explanations provided by pop psychology and pop science. Glover provides just enough examples of this "artistry" to ensure that his readers take is seriously.
One such example is the case of Ahmad Qabazard, a 19-year-old Kuwaiti held by the Iraqis during their occupation of Kuwait. When an Iraqi officer told his parents he was about to be released, "they were overjoyed, cooked wonderful things, and when they heard cars approaching went to the door. When Ahmad was taken out of the car, they saw that his ears, his nose and his genitalia had been cut off. He was coming out of the car with his eyes in his hands. The Iraqis shot him, once in the stomach and once in the head, and told his mother to be sure not to move the body for three days."
As Ivan Karamazov aptly observes, in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, "No animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel." And as Glover points out, any assessment of humankind that ignores this fact is naďve.
Nietzsche’s Challenge
The other obstacle to hope is the fading of the moral law. At the end of the 19th century, most people believed that there was a moral order to the universe, which was self-evident to all. Even such an eminent scholar as Lord Acton could confidently say that "opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity."
By the end of the 20th century, says Glover, that confidence had largely disappeared—for both intellectual and social reasons:
The challenge to the moral law is intellectual: to find good reasons for thinking that it exists and that it has any claim on us. The problem is hardly new; Plato wrote about it. But the collapse of authority of religion and decline in belief in God are reasons for it now being a problem for many who are not philosophers.
This fading of the moral law has brought us face to face with the specter of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Over 100 years ago, Nietzsche had predicted the collapse of the moral law and hailed it as "the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles."
Nietzsche regarded Judeo-Christian morality—with its emphasis on compassion, self-denial and self-sacrifice—as a sham, invented by the weak to tame the powerful ruling classes ("the nobles"). This "slave morality" condemned the "life affirming" values of boldness, pride, self will, health, beauty and happiness, and replaced them with the enfeebling values of meekness, humility, love of suffering and so on.
The death of Judeo-Christian morality, Nietzsche believed, would open the door for deliberate "self-creation." Without the moral law, people could decide for themselves what they want to be, and then create themselves in that image: "We, however, would seek to become what we are—the new, the unique, the incomparable, making laws for ourselves and creating ourselves!"
Although this resonates with many people today, Nietzsche’s brave new world is horrific. Glover notes:
The man Nietzsche admires will overcome bad conscience, which is the mark of slave morality, and will want to dominate others. He believed that egoism is essential to the noble soul, and he defines "egoism" as the faith that "other beings have to be subordinate by nature, and sacrifice themselves to us." This attitude is the sign of a healthy aristocracy, which "accepts with good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sake have to be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments."
In place of sympathy, Glover says, Nietzsche advocates hardness—hardness toward oneself and hardness toward others:
His version of hardness, with its rejection of unmanly compassion, supports the domination, even the cruel domination of others: "To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more. This is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle …. Without cruelty there is no festival."
The Nietzschean world, then, is a nightmare. But in the absence of the moral law, is such a world inevitable?
Perhaps not, Glover says. In fact, the major burden of his book is to defend the hope that we can live humanely without believing in a divinely inspired moral law. Nevertheless, the fading of that law is a towering obstacle to living humanely: "Those of us who do not believe in a religious moral law should still be troubled by its fading. The evils of religious intolerance, religious persecution and religious wars are well known, but it is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have also come from principled religious commitment. … The decline of this commitment would be a huge loss."
Ground for Hope?
Glover’s portrayal of humanity’s cruel side, though dark, is a welcome contrast to the "evolutionary psychology" now in vogue. Though he sees this cruelty as rooted in our evolutionary past, he doesn’t try to stuff it into a Darwinian straitjacket and persuade us that it conferred some kind of survival value (as do Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, for example, in their recent book, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion).
Indeed, the sheer "artistry" of human cruelty defies such utilitarian explanations and call to mind the Biblical language of such passages as Romans 3:14-18:
Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.
But Glover’s dark portrayal poses the question: Where does he find his hope? Ironically, he finds it in something very much like the moral law that he’s discarded.
The Christian understanding of the moral law is expressed in Romans 2: 14-15. In that passage, St. Paul observes that "when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them."
Glover’s conception is remarkably similar to this — only Glover psychologizes it and views it as a collection of "moral resources." He defines these resources as "certain human needs and psychological tendencies which work against narrowly selfish behavior. These tendencies make it natural for people to display self-restraint and respect and care for others. They make it unlikely that ‘morality’ in a broad sense will perish, despite the fading of belief in a moral law."
These moral resources are "distinctive psychological responses to different things people do: Acts of cruelty may arouse our revulsion; we may respond to some mean swindle with contempt; courage or generosity may win our respect or admiration. These responses to others are linked to our sense of our own ‘moral identity.’ … We have a conception of what we are like, and of the kind of person we want to be, which may limit what we are prepared to do to others."
Two of the most important moral resources are what he terms the "human responses." "One is the tendency to respond to people with certain kinds of respect. This may be bound up with ideas about their dignity or about their having certain status, either as members of our community or just as fellow humans. The other human response is sympathy: caring about the miseries and the happiness of others, and perhaps feeling a degree of identification with them."
Glover acknowledges that these are frail resources, and spends much of his book showing how they have been subverted, overwhelmed or deliberately suppressed. Yet he also finds that in some instances these resources held firm.
For example, during the Nazi years, people could find themselves drawn into mild but increasing collaboration. They might gradually lose the self-respect which gave strength to their opposition. There is terrible danger in taking the first small step in collaboration and there is great value in early protest or refusal. Holland provides an instance. The Dutch were not able to prevent transports of Jews to the death camps and many died. But large numbers of Dutch people gave help and support to Jews. Louis de Jong estimates that 25,000 Jews were hidden in Dutch homes, and that at least 2,000-3,000 resistance workers helped Jews with hiding places, papers, food coupons and money.
This record of opposition was present right at the beginning, before the corrupting effects of creeping collaboration could set in. In 1940 the German authorities started by saying that no more Jews should be admitted to the Dutch civil service. This was met by an immediate protest from all university student organizations and by a letter of protest signed by half of all the university teachers. The next step, the dismissal of all Jews from the civil service, was met by student strikes. The brutal rounding up for deportation of 400 Jews in Amsterdam was met with a virtually total strike in Amsterdam and nearby towns. The self-respect maintained by these responses must have helped the many Dutch people who kept up resistance and gave shelter.
Such instances give Glover hope that perhaps we can find ways to guard and strengthen our moral resources — even if we don’t believe in an objective moral law.
But this is a strange place to find such hope. For many of his examples involve people who acted from principled religious commitment. That includes the example above. Though Glover doesn’t mention it, the Dutch people have a rich religious heritage which profoundly influenced their reaction to Nazi policies (Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place is a prime example).
Such "evidence" doesn’t give us much help in deciding how humanity will fare in the absence of belief in a moral law. What we need is a greater focus on people who rejected that moral law.
However, such people may be harder to find than Glover realizes. Although there is much lip service to relativism in modern Western culture, most of us still seem to believe in an objective moral law. Violations of that law evoke not only an emotive response, but the factual claim that the act was wrong.
Even Glover can’t seem to escape this. Near the end of the book he states:
With disasters on the scale of some in the twentieth century, any ethical theory which either justifies them or can give no help in avoiding them is inadequate. The thought at Auschwitz and at other places, "never again," is more compelling than any abstract ethical principle. (There is a parallel with a thought sometimes expressed about another part of philosophy: belief in the existence of the physical world is more compelling than belief in any philosophical theory which purports to disprove it.) If persuaded that an otherwise convincing ethical theory could justify the Nazi genocide, I should without hesitation give up the theory. In reconstructing ethics, revulsion against these things which people have done has a central place.
Glover’s pronouncements drip with moral judgment. Not only does he view the atrocities at Auschwitz as objectively wrong, he makes the acknowledgement of this fact a standard for judging the correctness of ethical theories.
Nor is this merely a matter of emotion. For although Glover advocates a central place for "revulsion" in reconstructing ethics, this advocacy carries the moral judgment that such revulsion is right and proper.
In the end, Glover gives us no reason to hope that humanity could withstand a genuine fading of the moral law.
Indeed, in the wake of the 20th century’s atrocities, Glover’s hope seems a forlorn one — especially to Christians who hold a strong view of human depravity. His "moral resources" are simply no match for our sinful nature. And the loss of belief in an objective moral law can only make matters worse.
That being said, however, Glover’s book drives home an important point: No matter what we might think of an objective moral law, there is something remarkably like it engraved on our hearts. We may dismiss it, resent it or claim it doesn’t exist. But it’s there all the same. And even in the worst of people, it can provide at least some small point of contact — some faint understanding — to which we can appeal.
Glover is also right in claiming that this "something" should be carefully guarded. We may wonder how he justifies this claim, given his expressed skepticism about an objective moral law. But the claim itself is correct, and echoes the admonition of Scripture to "keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life" (Prov. 4:23).
For even though our ‘moral resources" cannot save us, they can still help us. And if we take them seriously enough, we may find them pointing to something greater than themselves — to the one true Prince of Peace, of whom Isaiah said, "In His name the nations will put their hope."
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