Northwestern University professor Gary Saul Morson tells us in the Wall Street Journal (subscription) that the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wouldn't have been surprised and we shouldn't either.
Morson opens with Dostoevsky's description of atrocities committed by Turkish Muslims in the 19th century including one episode where a young girl was forced to watch her father being flayed alive and then continues,
For the time being, “people are simply intimidated by some sort of habit,” Dostoevsky continues, but if some progressive expert were to come up with a theory showing that sometimes flaying skins can benefit the right cause because “the end justifies any means,” and if that expert were to express his view “using the appropriate style,” then, “believe me,” there would be respectable people among us “willing to carry out the idea.”There's little doubt which group would be populated by a lot of those university students chanting for the elimination of Israel, the gassing of Jews, and insisting that whatever barbarisms Hamas inflicted upon those people in their kibbutzes, it was justified.
Despite our sophistication and professions of compassion, “all that’s needed is for some new fad to appear and people would be instantly transformed.”
Not everyone, of course, but the number of adherents of the new fad would grow while others would be afraid, or embarrassed, to cling to old ideas. And then, “where would we find ourselves: among the flayed or among the flayers?”
Morson again:
Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principles—“and this after Rousseau and Voltaire!”It's a mistake, Morson writes, to imagine that thuggish deeds are performed only by thugs, and he's right. As Alexander Solzhnitsyn famously wrote:
We know, as Dostoevsky could only suppose, that during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured in the most degrading way possible; and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine and take bits of food away from bloated children.
In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism and anti-imperialism.
Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any place at any time that allows the dark side of human nature to show itself, clad in the language of whatever passes for progressive and enlightened. “Believe me,” Dostoevsky addresses his readers, “the most complete aberration of human hearts and minds is always possible.”
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.Every human being is capable of doing evil given sufficient motivation, which is why we need to believe that some behaviors are wrong and that we'll be held accountable for what we do. If we don't believe that then there are no guardrails to our behavior.
Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand, imprisoned and tortured in communist Romania in the late 40s and early 50s for being a Christian, wrote in his book Tortured for Christ, that,
The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint fromn the depths of evil that is in man.The only adequate guardrail for the perfidy in the human heart is the belief that God commands us to love our neighbor, that our neighbor is whoever crosses our path and that we'll ultimately be held accountable for how we treat others.
The Communist torturers often said, "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish." I heard one torturer say, "I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."
Morson adds that, "If it seems that only uncivilized people could be such sadists, Dostoevsky cautions, know that the same thing could happen among civilized Europeans as well. 'For the moment it is still against the law,' he writes, 'but were it to depend on us, perhaps, nothing would stop us despite all our civilization.' "
Mathematician David Berlinski, in his book Devil's Delusion, recounts an illustrative episode from WWII:
In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe...Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.Some people insist that human beings are basically good, but to believe that one has to ignore much of the history of the last two centuries.
Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.
And then he was shot dead.
What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.
And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.