26. The Sunflower part 5 + Autumn

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Deborah Lipstadt - Wiki

p193 "... In the Talmud we read: 'In a place where people who have... [repaired their relationship with God and man] stand, the purist... (righteous person) cannot stand...' [Maimonides] Citing the verse from Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden fruit, God says: 'Now Adam is like one of us... knowing the difference between right and wrong.'

"The simple explanation that after humans have sinned they become Godlike seems puzzling. In the Mishnah Torah Maimonides reads the verse differently... 'Now Adam is... unique... From within himself, he knows the difference between right and wrong.' The human species is unique in the world, in that humans use their own intelligence and reason to distinguish good and evil. [Or we invent "good" and "evil." As we have invented the days of the week and the hours of the day which have no reality independent of us.]

"So too those who have done wrong and then... [repaired their relationship with God and man] have reached a new level: from within themselves, they know the true difference between right and wrong. It is this unique human ability to know the difference between right and wrong which makes... [repairing their relationship with God and man] transformational...."

If you are reading the book while reading my blog, you are aware that I'm leaving out all the -- to me tiresome -- examination of the process of forgiveness and contrition and penance and atonement, and the details of each cult's views on these subjects. While religions provide valuable insights into the moral instincts of humans, I'm more interested in the root of these instincts than I am in how many Acts of Contrition you need to say for a Crime Against Humanity. In fact, I see this focusing on the minutia of the various beliefs as a sort of coping mechanism -- you don't have to think so much about what the Holocaust says about man and God if you are calculating exactly what your religion requires from the sinner in this unusual case.

Why aren't there publication dates for these commentaries? You really need to know when they were written.

Cynthia Ozick - Wiki

p213 "The SS man had a Catholic education...

"Does the habit, inculcated in infancy, of worshiping a Master -- a Master depicted in human form yet seen to be Omnipotent -- make it easy to accept a Fuhrer?

p214 "... The commandment against idols [the Second] is above all a Commandment against victimization, and in behalf of pity.

"Molock springs up wherever the Second Commandment is silenced. In the absence of the Second Commandment, the hunt for victims begins...

"In Germany, did the Church say, 'Hitler is Moloch'?

"Moloch's appetite for victims cannot be stemmed. Begin by feeding it only Jews, and in the end it will eat even the little boys who are servers in their church.

"There are no innocent idols. Every idol suppresses human pity. That is what it is made for...

p216 "...forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It negates the right of the victim to his own life. It blurs over suffering and death. It drowns the past. It cultivates sensitiveness toward the murderer at the price of insensitiveness toward the victim...."

I'm not sure Ivan Karamazov's "Grand Inquisitor" understood the Second Commandment in quite this way, but it is an interesting interpretation. The Church -- especially the Roman Catholic church -- has historically been quite fond of sacrificing victims to its own idols. And, again, sociologically sacrificing a few victims of other groups (or even the laggards of your group) has always made Darwinist sense.

I thought Ozick was finished but she continues,

p219 "The intelligent man of conscience also shovels in the babies [to feed Moloch, just as the brute does], and it does not matter that he does it without exaltation. Conscience, education, insight -- nothing stops him. He goes on shoveling. He knows what wickedness is. By now he has been shoveling for so long that he knows what Moloch is, he is intimate with Moloch. He is a morally sensitive man, and he shovels babies to glut the iron stomach of the idol...

p220 "I discover a quotation attributed to Hannah Arendt: 'The only antidote to the irreversability of history is the faculty of forgiveness...' She is the greatest moral philosopher of the age, but even she cannot make a Lazarus [not sure if this is meant to be Luke's Lazarus or John's Lazarus] of history.

"Graham Greene explains the Catholic idea of hell -- no longer the medieval site of endless conflagration; instead, an eternal separation from God.

"Let the SS man die unshriven.

"Let him go to hell.

"Sooner the fly to God than he."

One thing we can say for Ozick is that she doesn't equivocate. But you already know my sociological interpretation of all this, so you should guess that I see Ozick as being desperate to defend the moral order of her God. The God who was so evidently "on leave." She can't forgive "the SS man" because if it wasn't his fault it must have been part of God's plan. Or, worse, there is no plan. What we have here in the Holocaust is not men feeding Moloch but a Twilight of all Idols (play on English translation of a title by Nietzsche) including her own.

But I really do like the way she tore into this question. And what she says about how Karl's sins are actually worse because he is sensitive and educated is an interesting echo (echo in reverse?) of the notion that the repentant sinner has a special status and understanding of both God and sin. 

Which reminds me of something I forgot to mention when Deborah Lipstadt was talking about that "unique" understanding of good and evil possessed by the recovered sinner. This special status of the sinner was brought up repeatedly in The Brothers Karamazov. The prime example is Father Zosima himself, but there's also his mentor from when Zosima was in the process of leaving the military for the Church, and even Dmitri -- though that transformation is still in doubt, and I have little faith in it. (Ha! to "little faith.")

Dennis Prager - Wiki

I'm not going to quote him, but he does a wonderful job of describing the differing views of Jews and Christians when it comes to forgiveness. Christians -- and their God -- forgive everyone regardless. Jews -- and their God -- cannot forgive a murderer... only the victim can forgive a crime and in the case of murder the victim is dead.

Having recently read The Brothers Karamazov, I fully understand the Christian position. But as a person outside both religious communities, the Jewish view makes more sense to me, just as Draco's Code makes more sense to me, as I've written about before (yes? I didn't label it so I can't find it now. Briefly, Draco's aim was to end honor killings in ancient Greece, so his laws called for the death of anyone -- or anything, trees that dropped a limb on a person had to be cut down as well -- whose actions resulted in another's death, regardless of intent.)

Joshua Rubenstein - Bio

I'm going to quote his quote of Heinrich Himmler, speaking to a group of Nazi officers, in 1943, p237 "Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, when 500 are lying there or when 1000 are lying there. To have stuck this out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions due to human weaknesses -- to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard."

Himmler addresses the difficulty of individuals serving the best interests of their social group. As Marius's Roman legionnaires could have told the Nazi's, massacring even unarmed women and children is hard work. (I just realized how apt this is as the Roman victims were the Nazi's Aryan ancestors... or related to them.) 

Sidney Shachnow - Wiki

p242 "...Karl managed to overcome the voice within him that said a person cannot murder innocent men, women, and children and still call himself a human being. He allowed himself to be changed into a foul beast who did the unforgivable. He gave up his moral life -- his soul -- to his leader and his state. He believed it when he was told that his victims were less than animals an that he was a superior being who was obligated to torture and annihilate them. What he did was the ultimate and irreversible denial of his humanity...."

This is all the more damning coming from a career military officer and Green Beret. However, I return again to what I said about the U.S. (and U.K.) bomber crews in both Europe and Japan, who participated in fire bombings and nuclear attacks on civilian targets. How you would distinguish between Karl and these airmen I really can't imagine.

Autumn... 

...is coming. The Japanese maple has gotten the news, there's not that much green left up near the top, but the poor, nearly naked tree in the alley is in full denial. The days are getting shorter but, what with it's having been shifted from place to place the past several months and all the damage it has suffered, perhaps it hasn't been able to compare the morning and afternoon light as trees are said to do and arrive at the correct inference. It really should be bare of leaves by now, but instead the few leaves that remain look more like June leaves then almost September leaves. 

The scaffolding came down yesterday across the alley, so the tree -- and the entire end of the alley -- is suddenly getting more light. And in a week or two, we may even have some fog free mornings and afternoons. So far, August has managed only a single day when the temperature rose as high as 70F, but September tends to be our warmest month. Things should be changing soon. 

Next - 27. Reprise + Lunch

23. The Sunflower part 4 + Feeling off

Previous - 22. Restoration vs wabi sabi

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Rebecca Goldstein

p149 Rebecca Goldstein [worth following that link] on Karl, "... He is not a selfish creature who devotes himself to the gratification of his own personal desires. No, he is a dutiful sort, one who submits his will to the imperatives he sees as serving the greater good. A model boy, as his grieving mother recalls him, the parish priest's favorite.

p150 "His submissive posture before the demands of normative abstractions [it seems this is Ayn Rand jargon. Something to consider.] does not alter when he turns from Christianity to Nazi ideology. In some fundamental sense, horrible to say, his moral nature does not change at all.... It seems to me, that his 'conscience,' his normative makeup, remains essentially the same both before his Nazi conversion and after." A great observation and I will expand on this myself later.

Me

And here's my observation: As presented, I don't believe that Simon speaks in the presence of Karl. How would Karl have known that this Jew understood the story, I assume in German, he was telling? It seems to me that this is really more of an ethical thought experiment than a real life anecdote. This is important because quite a few of the commentators try to parse the selection of Simon by Karl and the way Karl addresses Simon. I think it's a mistake to focus on the details of this story.

Hans Habe - Wiki

p159 "... Those who are born murderers are the pathological exceptions -- their deeds, as a matter of fact, are more pardonable than those who were born 'healthy...' "  Karl is worse because he started out with ethical (Catholic) standards and "fell" into Nazi sin.

p161 "For the [Nazi] regime we are discussing there is no 'problem' of forgiveness. The crimes of the regime were unforgivable, the regime has been tried and destroyed. Meanwhile we are faced not with Mephistopheles, but with Faust. [My ears perk.] Corruption, though a force of permanent duration, cannot exist without collaboration from the corrupted. The corrupted, in a word, are not victims of the corrupters, but collaborators. With the words 'Terrible vision!" Faust turns away, but the ghost rightly defends himself: 'You invited me cordially, you have long dabbled in my domain . . . You have passionately striven to see me, to hear my voice, to gaze on my countenance . . .' 

"The firm is Faust & Co. or, if you prefer it, Mephistophelies & Co., partners just like Hitler and Karl S. The proof lies in the counterproof. The devilish Nazi regime did not corrupt everybody, and of those whom it corrupted most stopped at murder. I cannot accept the excuse that the system relieves the individual of responsibility... Resistance to evil is not heroism but a duty. [But see Me below.]



As I've pointed out in my earlier blogging of Faust, what people write about Faust is mostly interesting in revealing something about themselves, rather than giving us any insight into Goethe's confusing creation. So what does this passage tell us? 

In the passage Habe quotes, Faust, in a moment of Romantic, existential despair, invokes the "Spirit of Earth" but is frightened, just as he is later blinded by the direct light of the sun and has to fall back on an indirect view in the prismatic mist of the waterfall. In this case Mephisto is the indirect contact Faust can handle. So is Habe suggesting that Karl, while attempting to be a good Hitler Youth and SS volunteer, is undone by the reality of the burning Jewish family? That he is not enough of an Übermensch for the stark reality of the Nazi ideal?

This distinction between victim and collaborator, while I don't entirely reject it, I question as it is precisely the seduction of the good boy Karl into the, ultimately failed, SS volunteer that is the form his victimization takes. 

And since Habe has introduced Faust to the conversation, this is the kind of thing Mephisto repeatedly does to Faust: Giving him the means to seduce and ruin Gretchen; to lead the Emperor into (new levels of) fiscal disaster; and finally setting him up to create a new City on the Sea (my play on City on a Hill or even City of God) leading to acts of cruelty strikingly similar to the fate of Karl's Jewish family. Wow. If this is really where Habe was going why wasn't he this explicit... the spirit of Goethe, perhaps.

And yet I don't buy Karl as a "Faustian" character in the striving sense of that term. For one thing he isn't an "agent" in any of this. This also relates to what I said in my post #16. about U.S. service men during WW2. They may have been appalled by the reality they were contributing to, but they themselves were not the agents of these atrocities. (Atrocities I've argued elsewhere you might not want to undo even if you could.) Which is not to say individual U.S. servicemen weren't agents of their own intimate scale atrocities that were at least as morally questionable as the better known Crimes Against Humanity. But we aren't through with Habe yet.

p162 "... in the history of man since the beginning of Creation, love and justice have opposed each other. At one period justice was the human ideal, at another, love. The divine idea of justice in love, love in justice, mankind has magnanimously left to the Creator.

"Forgiveness is the imitation of God. Punishment too is an imitation of God. God punishes and forgives, in that order. But God never hates. That is the moral value worth striving for, but perhaps unattainable."

Now this reminds me of The Brothers K. Dostoevsky repeatedly talks about the forgiving nature of true Orthodox Christianity. This is the substance of that discussion about the RC role in jurisprudence in the West. That the Church should never be in the position of judging and condemning criminals but always in the position of forgiving them.  

p162 "One of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime was that it made it so hard for us to forgive. It led us into the labyrinth of our souls. We must find a way out of the labyrinth -- not for the murderer's sake, but for our own... "

Interesting that he should choose one of Michel Foucault's favorite words. If you view Foucault as one of the victims -- or collaborators -- as a result of his childhood during the occupation of France, than this certainly would apply.

Jose Hobday - Wiki

p174 "...the words of my Seneca mother to me when I was badly wronged and wanted revenge and retaliation stay with me: 'Do not be so ignorant and stupid and inhuman as they are. Go to an elder and ask for the medicine that will turn your heart from bitterness to sweetness. You must learn the wisdom of how to let go of poison.'

p175 "Forgetting and forgiving... are of a piece... From my experience, wrongs will return to the mind for years and years and years. Each recall asks for forgiveness, and you stay in the power of that act until you let go. Compassion is all-embracing, extending to all creation -- to plants and to animals, including the two-legged variety. Forgiveness is of the heart. I would have forgiven, as much for my own peace of mind as for Karl's... No one, no memory, should have the power to hold us down, to deny us peace. Forgiving is the real power...."

This Native American perspective is strikingly similar to the Tibetan Buddhist perspective. 

Christopher Hollis - Wiki

"The Sunflower, whether wholly autobiographical or in parts fictional, is an intensely moving and vivid book..." Someone else doubts the reliability of this story.

Harold Kushner - Wiki

p186 "Forgiving is not something we do for another person... Forgiving happens inside us. It represents a letting go of the sense of grievance, and perhaps most importantly a letting go of the sense of victim...." 

This, again, is similar to the Dalai Lama's position.

Lawrence Langer - Wiki

p188 "...Of course, Wiesenthal and not Bolek records these words for the reader, and this raises a question of narrative authority in the text of The Sunflower that would require separate investigation."

Langer points out several other questionable aspects of the tale we are told. I mention this because I don't think we can take this tale as literally true, but as an ethical thought experiment. 

p189 "Deep in the bowels of Dante's Inferno is a sinner whose presence must have confounded Dante's readers, because they believed that this sinner was still alive. In fact, he was; but Dante the poet invents the heretical idea of acts so outrageous that they condemn the soul of the sinner to eternal damnation before his death. Hence the possibility of an unrepentable and thus unforgivable crime is not a new one, though Dante could not have known how this quirk in his orderly design for Hell might herald our current threatening impasse about atrocities that are beyond guilt and atonement."

p190 "...The vital question to ask about this text is not whether Wiesenthal should have forgiven the SS man. It is rather why the SS man, as a young boy, against his father's wishes, joined enthusiastically in the activities of the Hitler Youth; and, again presumably against his father's wishes, he volunteered for the SS... why he then pursued a career in that murderous league of killers without protest, including the episode he tells of on his deathbed; and most important of all, why he had to wait until he was dying to feel the time had come for repentance and forgiveness. On these issues, the SS man is deftly silent."

Me

I can't hold off any longer. Too many people are raising issues I need to respond to.

Several of these commentaries have talked about the guilt of all Germans living under the Nazi regime. This brings up the question, not of the nature of good and evil, but of what constitutes sociological good behavior. I think you can argue that "good" behavior on the part of an individual is behavior that benefits your group and that solidifies your position in that group. I realize this is influenced by The Righteous Mind.

Yes, in this relativistic interpretation Nazi behavior is only "wrong" because the Germans (and Japanese) lost. In the Nazi world, and also in the world of the Camps where God was viewed as "on leave," the Final Solution was neither good not evil, wrong or right. This is the ultimate expression of Ivan Karamazov's "everything is permitted." 

(For Dostoevsky there would be nothing really new in this story -- though the shear scale of Nazi evil would take some getting used to. And I'm pretty sure his response would be an Orthodox version of the Dalai Lama's, expressed in the words of Father Zosima.)

Even worse, to not behave as Karl did -- to remain aloof as Karl's father had or as the author both of and within Doctor Faustus did -- is sociologically wrong behavior and can only be justified with an appeal to arbitrarily derived moral codes and "Gods." Or, to be a little more fair, it can be justified by the sociological claims of a religious group... whose identity is based on arbitrarily derived moral codes and "Gods." Even then it is easier to demonstrate why Hitler Youth behavior is "good" within a nationalistic context than to justify behavior based on cult dogma.

Jesus, everything I read from here on out really is going to be informed by my reading of Faust, The Brothers K, Doctor Faustus, and The Righteous Mind.

What I would really like to know (if I truly believed there was a Karl) is what exactly caused him to abandon the ethical beliefs of his parents and join the Hitler Youth. This process must be documented someplace. There must have been tens of thousands of people after the war trying to justify themselves and showing how they were seduced in such and such a way.

Feeling off

This afternoon, after going to the gym this morning and running around all afternoon only to come home to discover the contractors were leaving early (when I'm here before 4pm they don't get away until close to 4:30, if I just barely make it by 4 or am a few minutes late they are invariably on their way out) and they didn't do half the things they are supposed to do before leaving. So I had to do them.

At any rate, when I finally sat down I was feeling off -- almost like I was coming down with something. So I did all the things I do at a time like that including making soup. But I also had cravings for some things I don't usually have around (yogurt, English muffins, Orange Juice), and I didn't feel like walking 12 blocks to the supermarket, so I went to one of the little markets scattered around my block. 

I chose the 2nd closest one which is tiny and sits under a building maybe 70 meters away as the crow flies. Their stock is pretty amazing, considering the size of the place, so I found everything I wanted. It's not cheap, but I like being able to give them at least a little business from one year to the next. Also it makes me feel smug about my neighborhood. If I'm looking for something specific and uncommon (this has happened) I can follow this nautilus-like route where I hit six different markets and am still less than two blocks away from home. The two slightly bigger market options are just over two, maybe three in one case, blocks away. Try finding that in a "planned community."

And everything was delicious. 

Next - 24. "I can't fight this feeling..."

18. The Sunflower part 3

Previous - 17. Lemonaide

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Getting to the crux of the problem

This is from p122 of the Schocken Books edition of The Sunflower from 1997, the section by Robert McAfee Brown,

... If God forgives such deeds, does not that likewise strain to the breaking point any contention that the universe of God's creation is a moral universe? A malevolent deity might be placed in charge of such arrangements but surely not a god of mercy and compassion...

p123 1. I do not believe we can supply an answer to the first question [of Elie Wiesel], "Where is God in all this?" -- a question on the lips of character after  character in Wiesel's novels...

What follows is a lot of dancing around the issue but really avoiding the reasonable questions he's raised. This is almost the reverse of a Straw man rhetorical device --  he's raised an argument he can't really touch but pretends he has refuted it with a few brave words.

Either God is an integral part of this story or "God" is not a part of our story at all. If "God" is viewed after the Hindu interpretation as a mix of light and darkness, then there is less of a problem. If "God" is viewed as man's greatest creation, then, again, there is really no problem as He (or They if you choose to separate out the darkness in the form of Satan) must reflect human nature in all its variations.

It seems to me that this is also more of a problem for Christians than Jews as the Old Testament God is really not all that "Moral," in the way we think about it today. The God of Moses had no qualms about genocide. (Though the God sanctioned genocide that followed Moses' death was at least more rational and efficient than that practiced by the Nazis.)

The Dalai Lama has the most sensible attitude to this moral question -- because, I think, he is coming from a very different metaphysical place. As his story of the Tibetan monk makes clear, he is less interested in the actions or guilt of Karl than he is in his own state of mind.

Next - 19. QCD musical speculation

13. Architecture walk + The Sunflower

Previous - 12. Budd Road

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Photos!

I finally went back and got a couple shots of that multi-building project going up where a bus parking lot once was: 

None of these structures have much appeal on their own but I think they are an improvement over a parking lot. Would also be unfair to judge the complex until the landscaping is finished. The buildings on the far left of the bottom image are common to both photos -- just for reference.

[Note to self: You have to select the image in Google Photo then two finger click it to get the correct image address.]

An assortment of new buildings in the SOMA/Mission Bay area of San Francisco. We start with some indifferent urban infill:

And then move into Mission Bay where they started from scratch and decided that people who choose to spend a premium for building space in San Francisco really want buildings and a new neighborhood that could be anywhere:

Yes, these are goats clearing brush on lots that haven't yet been built on.

The view towards downtown.

Back to the pre-existing street grid as we near Pier 70 (the old shipyard) and Dogpatch:

The building below, and in the center above, at least has some visual interest. Why is it feasible to do small projects of interest as infill but not as part of large scale projects? Why is bigger almost always duller?

They are starting to re-develop the old shipyard. I had hoped they would preserve these old cranes as industrial sculpture (think Gas Works Park on Lake Union in Seattle), but apparently that isn't going to happen.

More infill, the second image below shows a project that incorporates older, masonry buildings (the two structures on the left) along with the new.

The building below with the interesting facade is an older structure converted for use as an event venue.

This sculpture of the SF Bay is in the lobby.

A new take on the traditional SF bay window.

The images below show the interesting podium that supports a very dull residential building that tries everything it can think of to be not quite so dull.

Loved this detail of the electrical hookups.

The north facing wall of the building -- above the podium -- reads as flat and blank even a few blocks away.

My life...

...seems to be getting back to normal. I'm currently reading The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal while very slowly re-reading Martha Grimes' Belle Ruin. An odd sort of normal, I'll admit. 

Belle Ruin is dreamy and full of good food and innocent childhood. The Sunflower is the "problem of evil" coupled with an ethical dilemma. 

I've only started the latter today, but I'm plowing through rather quickly. The question presented is, "Can a Jew in the midst of the Holocaust forgive a repentant member of the SS? And if he can, should he?" 

As for the first question, I'm tempted to say that we are all just doing the best we can, so we have to be willing to give others a break. We can't know how we would have behaved in their place so we are really in no position to judge them. 

But the second question is harder. I can say the above in part because I've lived a very easy and fortunate life. In Wiesenthal's place I could only say, "I wish I could forgive you but you're asking the wrong person. I sympathize but I can't be the one to forgive."

I couldn't help noticing that the SS guy in this story had a background similar to Mussolini's -- a socialist father and a religious, Catholic mother. I tend to think that people adopt the prejudices of their families, but here he rejected his family's values and embraced the values of his peers and society, in this instance the Hitler Youth. In some ways this is even more depressing than people raised to be hateful. (We really don't know that much about the values of the parents except that they were not National Socialists. So I may be reading too much into this little biography.)

Next - 14. Turnbuckles