A beautiful excerpt from the book that I’m currently reading: Man’s search for meaning, by Viktor Frankl. And a truly memorable quote: “There are two races of men in this world but only these two: the race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man.” I couldn’t agree more.
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"It must be stated that even among the guards there were some who took pity on us. I shall only mention the commander of the camp from which I was liberated. It was found after the liberation – only the camp doctor, a prisoner himself, had known of it previously – that this man had paid no small sum of money from his own pocket in order to purchase medicines for his prisoners from the nearest market town. But the senior camp warden, a prisoner himself, was harder than any of the SS guards. He beat the other prisoners at every slightest opportunity, while the camp commander, to my knowledge, never once lifted his hand against any of us.
It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between grous overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camp’s influences, and on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible. Obviously the prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting, while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from any of the guards.
I remember one day a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at that time. It was the human something which this man also gave to me, the word and look which accompanied the gift. From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world but only these two. The race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere, they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense no group is of pure race."
I wish everything was so simple.
ReplyDeleteBecause that sentence makes decisions really easy: only exists good and bad. People who are decent and make good actions or people who are indecent and make bad actions. There is nothing in the middle.
Things rarely are so simple. Of course Hitler can be called bad and indecent. But, for example, I'm sure you've read about Chamberlain and Churchill. In their time, Chamberlain was called a hero because he avoided a war with Hitler. People in Great Britain said Churchill only wanted war, because he said they couldn't allow Hitler conquering Checoslovaquia. Was he indecent? Was Chamberlain indecent? Time proved that Chamberlain was wrong and Churchill was right. In the end, Churchill helped to save Europe from Hitler and Chamberlain allowed him to rule part of Europe (and made that our Civil War didn't come into II World War, something that would have changed our History, maybe for better). But, I repeat, was Chamberlain an indecent person? Were his intentions indecent?
Then, if intentions of people can't divide people into decent and indecent, what is the parameter to make the line? The final result? But people can't prevent the result of their acts so easily. What if Hitler had been cleverer and hadn't conquered Polony? Would have been Chamberlain's decision decent?
Besides, people can be decent in some conditions and evil in others. Even more, people's acts can be good for some people and evil for other. Very few acts are be good for everybody.
The situation lived by Viktor Frankl is an extreme situation. In that condition, he met decent (good) people and indecent (bad) people. But I suppose there were also a lot of people who were neither decent nor indecent. Take the case of a guard who wanted to help his prisoners, but was really frightened because his family could be punished. Was he indecent? Can you blame him? Where is the line between decent and indecent people?
Yes, sometimes there is white and black. But most times there are only grey levels.
Great comment, Gema! Very well written and supported with solid arguments.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, let me clarify the fact that when I included Frankl’s quote, I was not really focusing on it from the perspective according to which everybody must necessarily belong to one of the two races he mentions: “decent” or “indecent”, but rather from the perspective according to which the only legitimate reasons to favor one person over another can be those that are based on that person’s moral standards, that person’s choices, as opposed to the traditional notions of nationality, religion or sexual orientation (to cite just a few) which are intrinsically circumstantial and thus very often lead to unfair treatments.
Going back to your post, I do not really agree with the first part. You say “if intentions of people can't divide people into decent and indecent, , what is the parameter to make the line?”. My feeling is that intentions of people can indeed divide those people into decent or indecent. The problem at this respect is that it is not necessarily easy, sometimes it might be actually impossible, to evaluate the “goodness” or “evilness” of those intentions from the outsides.
As you say, Chamberlain may have been a very decent person who just happened to take the wrong decision, but he may have taken it thinking that it was the right thing for his country, that a diplomatic solution could be found which would save millions of casualties, etc. If that were the case, he would probably be a very decent person even if he made the wrong choice; a decent person who simply made an error of judgement. If, on the other hand, he didn’t want to go to war because he just wanted to take the easiest solution at that time, which may have been “to look somewhere else” and because he didn’t care about the atrocities of the Nazis as long as they were far kept away from the British shores, then he would be very indecent. And the same applies to Churchill… he may have decided to go into war because he was moved by noble ideals and beautiful intentions, in which case he would certainly be very decent, or he may have decided to go into war just looking to secure his very own political ambitions while risking the lives of millions in his own country by sending them to a certain death. As far as I´m concerned, and in the view of my knowledge of these two figures, the four binary possibilities remain open: they might have been both decent, both indecent, or half and half.
What I’m trying to tell you is that the fact that we cannot judge from the outside does not mean that those people are not either decent or indecent, it just means that we may never actually be capable of actually judging them using such a classification. But the classification is there. In other words: the fact that you probably do not know my blood type does not mean that I do not have a blood type, but rather that without a certain knowledge that is probably unavailable to you right now you are incapable of evaluating what my blood type is.
As for the second part of the post, you say something very interesting: “people can be decent in some conditions and evil in others”. I agree with that. It is not possible to put a permanent label on a person because he or she may be decent at times and indecent at other times. This is very well depicted, for example, in the movie “Crash”, where – if I remember correctly – the same policeman acts as a jerk and as a hero within a short period of time and in the context of two different sets of circumstances.
Could it be that the two races mentioned by Frankl exist, but evolve dynamically? i.e. maybe people are good or bad depending on their choices, and therefore they are entitled to switch classes all the time, to go from white to black as a result of their true motivations for everything they do in their lives, even if those motivations are – as we were saying before – impossible to evaluate from the outside. Certainly, you may argue that “a race that evolves dynamically” is kind of an oxymoron, since people do not normally switch races as easily as they switch hats. However, it seems to me that this idea provides an interesting first order approximation to the problem at hand. If you take a square and you switch its color from white to black quickly enough it will give you the illusion of grey. Furthermore, the actual level of grey will depend on the relative frequency of blacks and whites, so that if white is shown 90% of the time the grey that you observe will be much lighter than if black is shown 90% all the time… and yet, you may still be using two single colors: black and white.
Anyway, as I said before, a very interesting comment which, I think, has triggered an interesting line of thoughts.
Un abrazo desde Baltimore.
:-)