Aristotle vs. Christianity?

From C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love:

"For us moderns the essense of the moral life seems to lie in the antithesis between duty and inclination . . . . [This] remains . . . the experience from which we all start. All our serious imaginative work, when it touches morals, paints a conflict: all practical moralists sing to battle or give hints about the appropriate strategy. Take away the concept of 'temptation' and nearly all that we say or think about good and evil would vanish into thin air. But when we first opened our Aristotle, we found to our astonishment that this inner conflict was for him so little of the essence of the moral life, that he tended to thrust it into a corner and treat it almost as a special case—that of the ακρατης. The really good man, in Aristotle's view, is not tempted. Where we incline to think that 'good thews inforced with pains' are more praiseworthy than mere goodness of disposition, Aristotle coolly remarks that the man who is temperate at a cost is profligate: the really temperate man abstains because he likes abstaining. The ease and pleasure with which good acts are done, the absence of moral 'effort' is for him the symptom of virtue."

Herbert Spencer on intuitive knowledge

"So profound an ignorance is there of the laws of life, that men do not even know that their sensations are their natural guides, and (when not rendered morbid by long continued disobedience) their trustworthy guides."           ——Essays on Education (c. 1861)

Christianity and collectivism

To a great extent, Christianity, somewhat like Buddhism, has traditionally evaded the issue of just political behaviour by simply counselling obedience to government under almost all circumstances. (Luther advised that Christians should not even revolt against an Islamic ruler.) Unfortunately, this tradition leaves a gaping hole in Christian doctrine under the present circumstances, where we have democratic governments which tend to regulate life ever more closely. This means that the scope for the exercise of personal morality tends to shrink to a sphere of unimportant matters, somewhat as in a Jane Austen novel, in which the women characters intensively focus their moral attention on the rather impoverished field of action left to them by the men. Instead, the important questions come to be decided collectively. Our most important moral decisions thus tend to shift from personal to political life.

Yet there is much confusion over what Christian political ethics is, or whether such a thing exists at all. For Luther, if I remember correctly, politics should simply be governed by "reason", which seems to amount to utilitarianism. On the Catholic side, the Scholastics would, I think, recommend that political rulers adopt a minimal level of morality without attempting to impose supererogatory virtues on their subjects (I hasten to add that I am not an expert on this subject). In both cases one probably ends up with a government that, at best, follows basic pre-Christian ethics, the "natural law". Such Christianity claims to bring no more than any other traditional ethical system to political decisionmaking. Collectivization then implies that specifically Christian ethics become irrelevant.

In recent times, many people have held that our collective decisions should be made on a more elevated, specifically Christian plane. But this is, in my opinion, a disastrous mistake, since it amounts to forcing individual citizens to adopt an outward show of "supererogatory" ethical standards (at least with regard to some limited set of decisions; even collectives cannot implement these superlative standards systematically). There may be no more effective way of abolishing genuine, freely chosen virtue than this denial of free will by a pseudo-ethical collective. Those who have reacted against oppressive "Christian" family environments will recognize how this works.

Christianity in 40 words or less?

"Love creates; Love by self-sacrifice reveals itself to the created thing; Love thereby calls out from the created thing the Love which belongs to it as Love's creature, so making it what Love created it to be."

——William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury), Christus Veritas, p. 279.

The myth of eternal recurrence

(A thought that occurred while reading Schopenhauer)

The ancient idea of the eternal repetition of events has always struck me as very strange, though apparently Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for example, didn't think so. (Supposedly, Eternal Recurrence is the normal world view of cultures before Judaism and Christianity, which are said to have originated the idea of history. Though I think C.S. Lewis pointed out that the Scandinavian pagans also had an idea of history—one involving a world-ending catastrophe to which one simply had to submit heroically . . . something like what happened in the final episode of the Angel spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer . . . )

The mistake of these pagans, it occurred to me, is to think of the infinity of time as being larger than the infinity of all possible events. Modern mathematics does in fact acknowledge infinities of different sizes: for example, the number of irrational numbers is known to be larger than the number of rational numbers (fractions), although both are infinite. But intuitively at least, the infinity of possible time seems much smaller than the infinity of possible events. (Even if there were just a single spatial dimension, instead of three, there would appear to be an astronomical number of permutations possible for configurations of events on that dimension; far too many to fit on a single time dimension.) It follows from this, apparently, that one cannot fit all possible events in infinite space even once, let alone with an infinite number of repetitions, into an infinite time-line. One will never be able to duplicate the present state of the universe by looking at some point in the distant past or future. One would only be able to find patterns that were broadly similar to the present state. Any cycles in history would be approximate, not perfect, repetitions.

(A modernized version of the Myth might instead make use of the "many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics. An unimaginably large number of different versions of the universe are said to exist side-by-side, in "Hilbert space" if I remember my physics correctly, as a result of the "splitting" of the universe into different possible outcomes that occurs with each probabilistic quantum event. Perhaps some of those alternate universes are identical to this one.)

A great Christian warns against religion

From William Law, Christian Regeneration:

"When religion is in the hands of the mere natural man, he is always the worse for it; it adds a bad heat to his own dark fire and helps to inflame his . . . selfishness, envy, pride, and wrath . . . "

(Cited by Charles Williams in The Descent of the Dove.)

Democracy and totalitarianism (IV)

The spiritual arrogance common to totalitarian and post-Christian democratic élites

From C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Macmillan, New York, 1947; pp 84–85 of the paperback edition (1955).

"We have been trying, like Lear, to have it both ways; to lay down our human prerogative and yet at the same time to retain it. It is impossible. Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao [i.e., the Natural Law—Spog], or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own 'natural' impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective values is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

"I am not here thinking solely, perhaps not even chiefly, of those who are our public enemies at the moment [World War II]. The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man, goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be 'debunked' and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape by the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent 'ideologies' at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere υλη, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are 'potential officer material'. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance."

Democracy and totalitarianism (III)

Aurel Kolnai on the three totalitarianisms

From "Three Riders of the Apocalypse: Communism, Nazism and Progressive Democracy" (circa 1950), in Aurel Kolnai, Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, Ed. Daniel J. Mahoney, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, 1999, pp 108–110. (Further edited by Spog.)

"What Nazism and Progressive Democracy have in common is, to put it briefly, the character of incomplete totalitarianism. . . . CONTINUE So far as ideological "signs" and "emphases" alone are concerned it would seem, admittedly, that our democratic régimes are not totalitarian at all, whereas Nazism is most noisily and definitely so, connoting Socialism too and insisting on State omnipotence not a whit less than does Communism. Again, if instead of judging by the sound of party slogans and the demeanour of terroristic gangsters drunk with power we consider the "insidious" totalitarianism inherent in the trend towards equality, uniformity and administrative "planning for welfare," we might on the contrary find that Progressive Democracy really outstrips the totalitarianism not only of the Nazis but even of the Communists, assimilating as it does (under the deceptive verbal cloak of liberalism and tolerance) the thinking, moods, and wills of everybody to a wholesale standard of the "socialized" mind more organically and perhaps more durably; eliminating all essential opposition to its own pattern by incomparably milder methods but so much the more effectively and irrevocably. However, both these perspectives, though highly relevant to a full assessment of the objects of our study, are one-sided and liable to make us miss the central point of distinction. Neither our horror of Nazi perversity, cruelty and vulgarity nor our disgust at the mediocrity and duplicity, the inner unfreedom, the deadening quack rationality and the sickening pseudo-culture of Progressive Democracy should blind us to the patent and highly important truth that, in contraposition to the Communist régime bent on determining the whole of human reality according to the pattern of an unnatural utopia and reducing every aspect and detail of men's lives to a function of one all-absorbing political Will, both Nazism and Progressive Democracy represent the maimed forms of normal human society, not integrally suppressed but, respectively, overlaid with a fiendish tyranny totalitarian in temper, and infiltrated by the virus of a subversive utopia bound for a totalitarian goal. As regards Progressive Democracy, its essentially curtailed totalitarianism is too obvious to need elaborate treatment. Notwithstanding the subtle expansion of the old concept of political liberty into that of "Freedom from Want" and the surreptitious displacement of citizens' rights by the changeling idol of a "right to security," the elements of the "rights of man" and "the dignity of the individual" cannot be wholly ousted from Progressive Democracy short of a radical overthrow of the system: until that, the bar to keep out tyranny proper continues acting, though there is no denying that the inward logic of the system makes it wear ever thinner and threatens to eat it away altogether. Still, how could a Conservative writer call the democratic régime properly tyrannical or actually totalitarian, so long as he is able to get his very accusations into print?—and without on that score coming to immediate and crushing grief, into the bargain!

"To deny a genuinely totalitarian character to Nazism may sound a little odder, seeing that not only liberal-democratic but also conservative and Christian authors have betrayed a fondness for arguing glibly from Communism to Nazism and conversely, interpreting Nazism as a "Brown" variety of its "Red" model and Bolshevism as nationalism or imperialism under a Red flag, overworking the term "National Socialism," harping on the disciplinarian and allegedly "nationalistic" traits in Russian Bolshevism, subsuming the two evil things under an identical concept of "Neo-Paganism" and placing the Nazi worship of a "superior race" on a level with the Marxian deity (absolutely different as to its logical structure and historical meaning) of the "class struggle." The truth is that the Nazi order never was, nor was intended to be, a socialistic one—in the proper, collectivist sense of that term—; and for that reason alone, which is far from being the deepest, could not amount and could never have attained to true totalitarianism. Despite the terrorism of Nazi dictatorship which bore down severely on the noble and wealthy classes as well as on the broad masses (thus connoting, as it were, a kind of new equalitarianism), it was utterly alien to the Nazi conception of society to do away with class distinctions. Despite the enmity it had sworn to the "Jewish moneylender," Nazism reserved a high place of honor to the "German entrepreneur"; depite its playing ducks and drakes with the economy of the country and countries it had subjugated, Nazism would not dream of effecting incisive structural changes in the economic system, let alone of seeking them for their own sake; despite its wallowing in the ecstasy of "total state-power," Nazism was definitely and consistently hostile to the idea of reducing all social relations of power and dependence to a mere function or expression of that state-power, and in fact ultimately aimed at creating a new type of social aristocracy. To be sure, Nazi tyranny was "unlimited" in the sense that it kicked aside constitutional "checks and balances" and even moral restraints just as scornfully as did Bolshevism, but not at all in the sense of claiming, as Bolshevism does claim, a total determination of the order of human life and relationships on behalf on one exclusive political will as actualized by the rulers; to be sure, it ruthlessly trampled under foot all "opposition" but it did not define from the outset everything not of its own making as "opposition"; to be sure, it would order about capitalists perhaps as harshly as workers, but without for a moment entertaining the idea of "liquidating" the capitalist class (or, for that matter, the peasantry) and of manufacturing Society anew as a homogenous mass of "toilers." It should be added that, if Nazi tyranny was explicitly oppressive and (unlike the old absolutisms at their worst) positively totalitarian in the educational, literary, artistic and similar fields, the intellectual life of Germany under its heel—and of occupied France as well—still compared as a paradise of freedom and spontaneity with the spiritual cemetery which promptly covers every place where the Bolshevik steam-roller has passed. Could any one imagine, in Soviet Russia or one of her dependencies a counterpart to Jünger's Marble Cliffs: a nauseating and at the same time wholly unambiguous vision of Stalin as the incarnation of malicious barbarism, published with impunity—or only published; or, indeed, only written—by, say, a Menshevik university professor or an anarchist Prince of yesterday, disillusioned with the revolution?

"In some respects Progressive Democracy, and in another but not entirely different sense Nazism, might be described as more "progressive," "modern" and "totalitarian" than Communism. Democratic thought is more anxious to be up-to-date and elastic; to scan, to recognize and to put to the test—rather than merely prescribe and enforce—the new states of mind rising, in society, in a kind of perpetual flux; to effect not only but to undergo a constant change, absorbing as it were all aspects of a "world in change" into the very tissue of its own details and formulations. Nazism, in its turn, views man, his nature and history, in a perspective admitting of a greater manifoldness of dimensions, and thus aspires to a totalitarian determination of man by state-power through more numerous channels; through more complex leverage. Biological and eugenic points of view seem to rank higher, not only in Nazi racialism but also in the Progressive Democratic tend towards a medical and psychiatric dictatorship, than in the Communist state-worship with its monomaniac reference to political power and social (in the sense of extra-political) equality. Thus Communism cares less, one might say, about an all-round predetermination of the "human material," including its natural quality, on which Society as represented by its central agency of power expects to work. But, on the other hand, all such lines of determination are of a more partial, haphazard, experimental, uncertain kind than is the direct bending of men's wills by an unrestrained and effectively organized power of Command; moreover, they leave some space for categories of value—specifications of "good" and "bad"—not defined in terms of present governmental decision as such: for measures of judgment that lie beyond the one and indivisible will of man. Communism, then, remains the absolute, classic and insuperable type of totalitarianism proper." (See comment section for my thoughts on this.)

Democracy and totalitarianism (II)

Tocqueville and totalitarian democracy

(From Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality (Hollis and Carter, London, 1952), pp 28–31.)

"It was also De Tocqueville who foresaw, in a more precise and concrete way than all his contemporaries, the danger of an evolution from democracy—and especially from democratic republicanism—to tyranny. He envisaged this evolution not as a process of dialectics, but in a direct and logical sequence. Because of his objectivity and balance in judgment, this Norman count has often been declared to be an outright supporter of democracy—which he decidedly was not. It was with horror and melancholy fear that he contemplated the coming victory of democracy, which, it must be admitted, he detested less than the "next stage". . . . CONTINUE With resignation this great liberal wrote:

The absolute monarchies have dishonoured despotism; let us be careful that the democratic republics do not rehabilitate it.

De Tocqueville's Catholic background prevented him from becoming a cultural or historical determinist; nevertheless, the chances for the survival of liberty in the "present" democratic age he thought to be less than in the preceding aristocratic periods. He wrote to Gobineau:

In my eyes human societies, like individuals, are nothing if not by the use of liberty. I have always said that liberty is more difficult to establish and to maintain in democratic societies, like ours, than in certain aristocratic societies which have preceded us. But that this should be impossible I would never be rash enough to believe.

Yet the picture he painted of the coming servitude—grandiose and depressing by its very depth and accuracy—shows a more pessimistic outlook. We find it in the second volume of his Democracy in America, contained in two chapters entitled 'What sort of despotism have democratic nations to fear?'

"He begins his speculation by remarking that during his sojourn in the United States (1831–32) and after his return to Europe, he was haunted by the spectre of a new despotism which would engulf the nations of Christendom. After analyzing tyranny in antiquity, he comes to the conclusion that in spite of all the arbitrariness, brutality and vindictiveness of despots and emperors, the totalitarian element was fairly absent: the natural and historical obstacles for a complete regulation of civic and political life over vast areas would have proved insurmountable. About these early despots he remarks that:

their tyranny rested very heavily on a few but did not extend to a great number; it was focussed on a few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent but limited in its scope.

It seems to me that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it would have different characteristics: it would be more extensive and more mild, it would degrade men without tormenting them.

He then insists that the coming form of tyranny is going to be so fundamentally new that there is absolutely no term, no label, no appropriate appellation he could use for it. 'The thing is new, and since I cannot name it, I have to define it.'

"His descriptive analysis starts with a vision of masses of men 'alike and equal' attracted by small and vulgar pleasures. Yet:

above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

This is an accurate picture of the totalitarian state, only seemingly marred by the author's emphasis on the element of mildness. Here we have to bear in mind that brutality and cruelty in the totalitarian state are merely means to achieve specific ends. The vistas of De Tocqueville relate to a peaceful evolution (or, if we prefer, degeneration)—a slow process of interaction and decline, with men becoming gradually more like mice, and states more like Leviathans. His error is merely one of 'timing'. If the political process is faster than the sociological (psychological, cultural, characteriological) decay; in other words, if full political totality is reached before individuals are ready for it—a reign of terror and brutality must set in, so that the population can be 'weeded out' (and thus 'homogenized', as well as paralyzed) by abject terror. Such a situation will prevail if democracy has not had enough time to prepare the stage—if, for instance, the religious background is too personalistic, if racial diversities are too pronounced, of if class differences are too divisive a factor. Under these circumstances mildness will have to be replaced by concentration camps, mass exiles, deportations and gas chambers, until and unless a totally new and uniform generation grows up.

"Yet if the whole process happens in an 'orderly fashion' these excesses can be avoided. Men whose civilian valour finds its supreme expression in pulling a lever behind a protective curtain will not have the courage to rebel, and concentration camps (actually a 'healthy sign' because they denote resistance) will not exist. Governmental paternalism will be acclaimed. And De Tocqueville remarks:

The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.

He then continues to add a score of other details to the sordid picture, which sometimes reminds us of the democratic and at other times of the dictatorial governments of our days. Our author admits that the new tyranny not only might use libertarian slogans but even be established in 'the shadow of the sovereignty of the people.' Torn between the (surviving) demand for liberty and the desire to be led, the masses are prone to make a compromise by electing masters who give them the illusion that they are ruled by 'themselves' after all. It is at the end of this chapter that he meditates on the result of a form of government with an elected head but an unbending absolutism in the scope of its legislation and the execution of all regulations and laws [i.e., "elective dictatorship"—Spog]:

A constitution which would be republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always seemed to me to be a monstrosity of short duration. The vices of the governors and the imbecility of the subjects could not fail to bring about its ruin. And the people, tired of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or would soon give up and prostrate itself at the feet of a single master."

Democracy and totalitarianism (I)

Here are some selections I have accumulated chiefly with the aim of conveying an appreciation of the totalitarian tendencies in democracy, which most people think of as diametrically opposed to the totalitarian systems, Nazism and Communism. The first excerpt shows how totalitarianism can creep up on a people without their realizing that anything is wrong, until it is too late to mount an effective resistance. It is a quote of an anonymous Nazi-era German scholar by Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, University of Chicago, 1955, p. 168 f. (From a reading list suggested by Keith Preston.)

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted", that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. CONTINUE

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—"Resist the beginnings" and "Consider the end". But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn't, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.

"Your "little men", your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late.

"You see, one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble". Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, "everyone" is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France and Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're alarmist".

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, then end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in `43 had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in `33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "Jew swine", collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or "adjust" your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."