Imported Post: Absolute Truth

Originally posted: Saturday, February 21, 2009

I've been working on an idea for a novel, and have been casting a wide net. Recently Post Modernism got caught in the mesh and I took a look. While I've written about relativism before, it again gave me pause. Post Modernism can be defined as that school of thought that came after 'modernism.' Well, that's self-evident. Specifically it is a branch of philosophy that holds there are no absolute truths--we are stories without authors--everything must be approached with skepticism.

From there we get moral relativism, I would guess.

Well it makes me damn bilious. While I find the far right wing completely bankrupt intellectually and ethically, I find the far left wing completely bankrupt morally. This sounds like just the ticket for far left wing professors who want to stick it to the establishment, by questioning its most cherished traditional values.

What I don't understand about the school of thought, and I'm completely eager to be taught, is when does the skepticism and the questioning stop? When do you get an answer?

And when do you accept truth as being a priori? I think it's a-priori that murder is wrong. I would object to murder on ethical and moral grounds because if Decartes is right, and my capacity to think defines my humanity, then my murder would deprive me of my ability to think, and by extension, my being.

By questioning absolute truths, see, I think that most people in academe would want to limit that to traditional truths. They wouldn't want to contemplate skepticism from the other side of the spectrum. Such as, "Torture can be justly applied in certain circumstances." or, "Genocide can be a legitimate tool for social engineering."

I do think there is a place for legitimate skepticism in most areas of human endeavor--especially the arts. It's perfectly fine to question the absolute truth that every wall must meet in a right angle (architecture) or "all plays must conform to the unities of time and place," or "All novels must be sub-divided in equal parts called chapters." By questioning the norm, we can often make great leaps of logic and aesthetics. The humanities flourish when questioned. But we cannot ignore experience in our questioning. We cannot question whether genocide is moral because we know empirically, posteriori, that it is not. There is no epistemology like experience.

Imported Post: The Leader Principle

Originally posted: Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Her performance in The Reader won Kate Winslet an Oscar. She plays a concentration camp guard on trial for war crimes. I've been doing a lot of reading this past year about the Third Reich, including Peter Levenda's Unholy Alliance and The Hitler Book, edited by Mathias Uhl. While I recommend Levenda's book wholeheartedly (I'm currently reading Sinister Forces), The Hitler Book really seemed to capture more of the zeitgeist of the Third Reich. I also recommend The Goebbels Experiment, a documentary available through Netflix.

One cannot resist the temptation of comparing those times with the times in which we live. For example, the burning of Reichstag as a prelude for war shares certain harmonies with the lead up to war in Iraq in 2002-2003, and George Bush's conflation of Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, and the destruction of the World Trade Center. It also shares similarities with Emperor Nero's burning of Rome and his subsequent blaming of the Christians for the arson.

And while the Patriot Act, the bobble-heads on Fox News calling any dissent unAmerican, etc. and the ilk on talk radio and internet, had a chilling effect on free speech, this was still a Western Democracy. That was not the case when the first concentration camps were built in 1935-36.

Germany had become a totalitarian dictatorship in June, 1934 when Hitler purged his political enemies by murdering 85 of them, including Kurt von Schleicher, former Chancellor of Germany. This would have been on par of say, Richard Nixon ordering the assassination of ex-President Eisenhower. Though the dissemination of news was not nearly as fluid as it exists today, the German hierarchy could not keep the news secret. But the lie told was that the murdered, led by Ernst Rohm, were planning a coup. This event is also known as The Night of Long Knives, Operation Hummingbird, and "the so-called Rohm-Putsch."

It was a turning point for Germany and the German government. It did more than solidify Hitler's power base, it confirmed Hitler as de jure, the sole highest judge of the German people, and above the law. All law was vested in the personal fiat of Adolf Hitler. Extra-constitutional courts and executions would become commonplace thereafter.

This was when The Fuhrerprinzip became the whole of the law in German society. After the war, at Nuremberg, defendants tried unsuccessfully to use the existence of the leader principle as a mitigating factor, or even an outright defense. It was denied by the tribunals, under the rationale that soldiers are not obliged to obey illegal orders. Under the Fuherprinzip, however, it was argued that there was no such thing as an illegal order, that any order that came from your leader was legal. The tribunals responded that officers should have used their moral consciences as their guides.

While I certainly don't excuse their conduct, nor do I weep at their executions, the defendants had a point that was lost. The Third Reich was not a democracy. No dissent was tolerated. Dissent was punishable by death, and this was frequently proven. Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose movement, was guillotined for passing out innocuous mimeographs questioning the policies of the Third Reich--nothing more.

After 1934 no resistance to Hitler was possible on the individual level, and all who attempted it were murdered. The Hitler book reveals how bloodthirsty Hitler was, and illustrates his pathology--his compartmentalization of the suffering of his victims. He was a true psychopath, no doubt about it. He was the Gordian Knot of the German People. I don't think it's rational to expect someone to make a choice between one's own death, or the death of another (even many, many others), and hold them accountable for not choosing the former!

All that said, we must remember that Hitler didn't almost destroy the world by himself. There were a host of fellow travelers eager for the bloodbath and the victory, and they share Hitler's guilt and culpability. Those at Nuremberg enthusiastically supported Nazi programs and policies, it was just and meet that they should be executed for their crimes. But for the individual German? I'm not so sure how much suffering they needed to experience to atone. In any event, most of those who were alive at the time, are alive no longer. Time is justice.

Imported Posts

I'm going to import a few posts from my other blog - White Space - here. This is an attempt to separate the themes of the two blogs, and reserve White Space for news about my writing and its publication. I'll post links here from time to time when that blog is updated with specific news about writing.

Blinding me with Science

I was recently raked over the coals by Katherine Ramsland for comparing dactyloscopy to phrenology and spectral evidence. In my own defense, I was not making a literal comparison, only citing examples from history where generally accepted practices were later found to be unreliable. This was in response to a phrase I thought I read in her article--that the underlying assumption of dactyloscopy, that no two persons have identical fingerprints, has never been proven, and as such, is an urban myth. Certainly the forensic study of dactyloscopy is scientific, and the points of comparison between two fingerprints can be trusted in a court of law. My point was somehow lost in this exchange--which was, that jurors mostly do not have the wherewithal to independently verify the assertions of scientists on the stand, that they must trust those conclusions on faith. Faith that the scientist is telling the truth and that his or her method is sound. I don't think that prosecutors can as jurors to take scientific evidence on faith. They MUST educate jurors in the science, or risk them disregarding the evidence as irrelevant.

It's like the legal term "beyond a reasonable doubt." What exactly does that mean? And how does it differ from "a preponderance of the evidence" or "clear and convincing evidence?"

I'm speaking here only as a layperson. Katherine Ramsland, with her scientific/forensic background would never be picked to be on a jury. I have a jury summons laying on my desk as I write this. These are questions that matter.

The Other - Thomas Tryon

So, this entry follows on the heels of the previous entry, as I further hone my thinking about psychological doubling, and the doppelganger. One non-fiction project I've had on the far back burner for some years (along with an encyclopedia of Seattle murder) is a biography of Thomas Tryon, the author of The Other. What makes Tryon's life interesting is his metamorphosis from a leading man film star with rugged good looks into a literary lion. In that transformation I feel a resonance within my own life (though I was never so handsome nor famous as Mr. Tryon). The forsaking of acting for an altogether more secluded, isolated form of creative endeavor. I'm indebted to my dear friend David Dollase for confronting me with this truth ("I think acting is a creative outlet for you."). With regard to Tryon, his switch, or drift, or course correction, as it were, may have come as the result of a species of artistic post-traumatic stress disorder after working with the dictatorial German director Otto Preminger. It took him seven more years to complete the transition, but perhaps the seeds of the change were planted during this horrific experience.

When actors must expose themselves to the most dubious manipulations in the bad-director's handbook, they have very little power in the matter. They can only hope that their directors are human beings. People like Christian Bale, for example, regarding his recent on-set tantrum, can be forgiven their temperament because that's the only way they have of maintaining a sense of personal power in this relationship. Bale was powerless to walk away from this commitment. He would have been ruined financially. But nothing in his contract prevents a temperamental outburst. I'm so happy I'm out of it...

Anyway, back to Tryon. It seems clear to me that The Other is a classic example of the doppelganger/doubling trope in American literature.

Doppelganger

Websters defines "doppelganger" as "a ghostly counterpart of a living person." Different from a ghost because the individual is still alive. The doppelganger is a psychic double or distinct separate entity from the individual. This metaphor has been used throughout literature and is deeply ingrained in the psyche of Western Civilization. The astrological sign of Gemini comes to mind. Also the sign Pisces, with its twin inverted individuals. The god Janus, the god with two faces, one looking forward, the other back. Popular culture is repleat with intances of "evil twins." The novels and stories of Joyce Carol Oates and the films of David Lynch explore this theme tirelessly.

Dr. Robert J. Lifton, in his book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Pyschology of Genocide suggests that psychological doubling was the means by which such individuals as Josef Mengele (to name only the most infamous) were psychologically capable of being loving family men on the one hand, and ruthless mass murderers on the other.

In Dr. Lifton's view, the psyche doubles. This process is distinct from splitting, the effect of which is usually dissociation. The result is that the split personality is numb or catatonic. On the other hand, the psychological double experiences no loss of efficiency.

Says Dr. Lifton:

Doubling is part of the universal potential for what William James called the “divided self”: that is, for opposing tendencies in the self. James quoted the nineteenth-century French writer Alphonse Daudet’s despairing cry "Homo duplex, homo duplex!” in noting his “horrible duality” — as, in the face of his brother Henri’s death, Daudet’s “first self wept” while his “second self” sat back and somewhat mockingly staged the scene for an imagined theatrical performance.9 To James and Daudet, the potential for doubling is part of being human, and the process is likely to take place in extremity, in relation to death.

I have experienced this phenomenon when performing on stage, also watching myself perform from the audience. George C. Scott, the actor, also reported having this experience (as well as many other performers). Dr. Lifton's theory though, is that psychological doubling occurs under duress. The duress is the ego's rejection of the moral depravity of mass murder on the scale of Auschwitz. Thus the ego "doubles" or allows a separate and distinct personality to emerge that has no moral scruples.

Dr. Lipton states that for the Nazi doctors, the turning away from their previous code of ethics and moral equalibrium was a kind of psychological stress fracture. Their individuality had been pummeled into submission by the fuhrerprinzip. The Nazi hierarchy was entrenched and intractable. It allowed for no deviation, no dissent, and no disagreement. The alternative to utter submission to the will of the fuhrer was death. So yes, the psychological doubling of the Nazi doctors was in effect a Faustian bargain, which allowed them to survive as participants and organizers of the horror of the concentration camps and in particular the medical "treatments" and experimental procedures they imposed. That the resulting holocaust was so extreme is testament to the very nature of the SS Nazi "cult" they were all desperately trying to function within, coupling intense fear of death or reprisal with a desire to please one's superiors. None of this emancipates one from ethical responsibility, of course.

New Home

Welcome to the new home of Furor Scribendi at Blogger. I attempted to merge my AOL Journal with my Blogger account which I set up back in 2005, but I could only import into a new blog, rather than merge with an existing blog, and this is it. You are in the right place for info about Mike Hacker's doings. For more specific details about Mike Hacker's writing, please visit my other blog, White Space. This blog is more for politics, philosophy and issues of personal interest, whereas White Space is geared specifically toward writing.

So please kick back and take a look through the archives. Lots of comments on lots of different issues. Make yourselves t'home.