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Having spent the majority of his career teaching about the Holocaust and genocide, Claremont McKenna College Professor of Philosophy, John Roth, shares his thoughts on the ethical responsibility that memory imposes upon human beings. As discussed in “The Holocaust and the Common Good,” an essay in his book, “Ethics During and After the Holocaust: In the Shadow of Birkenau,” John discusses how memory shapes our values and our choices.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention. This week’s podcast will repeat an episode from December 14, 2006. Professor John Roth spoke with Jerry Fowler about the ethical responsibility that memory imposes on human beings.
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is John Roth. He is Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College where he is also the Director and Founder of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights. He is an internationally renowned scholar in the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In 2004-2005, he was the Ina Levine Invitation Scholar at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. During that time, he finished a book entitled “Ethics During and After the Holocaust: In the Shadow of Birkenau.” John, welcome to the program.
JOHN ROTH: Jerry I am very glad to be with you this morning.
JERRY FOWLER: John, I did not mention in the introduction that actually this month you are retiring after forty years at Claremont McKenna College. First, just let me say congratulations.
JOHN ROTH: Thank you. I am sort of retiring so I can keep doing what I have been doing; teaching and writing and doing research on the Holocaust and genocide.
JERRY FOWLER: We probably need a different word than retirement.
JOHN ROTH: Yes, I think it is just kind of shuffling the deck, and I want to have more discretionary time to work on my projects.
JERRY FOWLER: Forty years ago when you started your career at Claremont McKenna, you were a philosopher but you were not really dealing with Holocaust and Genocide Studies. How did you end up spending so much of your career on those topics?
JOHN ROTH: I was interested early on in questions about evil and suffering. These are topics philosophers often work on, but I was really moved to plunge into study of the Holocaust through reading that I did. First, an influence on me was Richard Rubenstein who had published an important book in the late 1960s called “After Auschwitz,” which explored some of the religious implications of the Holocaust, and then a few years after that I was led to discover the writings of Elie Wiesel, and that was really a formative influence, a life changing influence I think on me, and as I read about what had happened to him and contrasted that with the good fortune and the life I was having in the United States as a young professional, there was a kind of collision that emerged in my life, and I felt that I needed to find out more about the Holocaust and its history. One thing led to another, and as I began to study I became more and more captivated and compelled to keep working on this topic and it has turned into a passion of mine that is the most important part of my scholarly, professional and personal life in many ways.
JERRY FOWLER: In some ways then, your career has been carried out in the shadow of Birkenau or Auschwitz. Birkenau was the killing site at Auschwitz, and you chose that as the subtitle of this book that you just published. What does it mean to be in the shadow of Birkenau?
JOHN ROTH: The phrase actually comes from a statement made by Elie Wiesel that has been on my mind since I first discovered it decades ago. He says at one point something to the effect of, “In the shadow of Birkenau, everything must be revised and reconsidered and thought through again,” and I think it was his way of saying that the event that took place during the Nazi period that we call the Holocaust just calls into question all of our assumptions, our fondest beliefs, our traditions, our hopes in many ways, and we have to rethink all of this. I thought that this was right as I reflected on what he was saying, and what I tried to do in the book that you have mentioned—the most recent book—is that I have tried to bring that point to bear on ethics so that I ask the question in the book: what happened to ethics, both during the Holocaust and after it? I think this event had a huge impact on ethics, if only because it showed how weak ethics can be, how it can even be used and subverted to advance and legitimate causes of murder and killing and genocide. This is what I have been trying to think through and work on with Elie Wiesel’s image of the shadow of Birkenau as the sort of guiding point.
JERRY FOWLER: By ethics—the layman’s definition of ethics would be?
JOHN ROTH: I think ethics refers to the values that guide us primarily, our senses of right and wrong, what is just and injust, and of course, ethics also refers to the study of these things; how it is that we come to have the values we have; whether the values that we hold or the interpretations that we make of them are sound; whether they can withstand scrutiny; what the effects of our holding certain values may be. Ethics is—as I understand the term—is both something that refers to descriptions of how people value things, what their systems of right and wrong and justice and injustice are like. Then it also involves the more critical, philosophical effort to determine whether these codes or systems, the values that we hold, are right, are good, are true, and that is of course a contested and difficult analysis to engage in, but a very important one I think.
JERRY FOWLER: Of course as the theme, those questions are in a series of essays in this book, and I wanted to focus in on the final essay in the book which you also basically used as your validicatory lecture here at Claremont McKenna. It is titled, “The Holocaust and the Common Good,” and that is kind of jarring juxtaposition, the Holocaust and the common good, and in some ways a stunning evil and the common good.
JOHN ROTH: Yes, I meant it to be jarring. Let me start by commenting just a bit on what I mean by the common good. I think that this is a concept that is ambiguous, first of all, but also has importance and value in it. We speak sometimes of the public interest or what the notion of the common good can mean is that as human beings we share certain needs, we share certain concerns that all of us need to keep in mind if life is to be as good as it can be, not just for us as individuals, but for the social order that we live in, which is I think so important for confirming and making possible the individual goods that we have. I think that human beings are social creatures, and so the structures and the institutions and the communal life that we share are very important, and sometimes we take this too much for granted. I am using the notion of the “common good” as a way of getting at those communal, social realities and institutions that we need to care for if our individual lives are to be good. But the jarring part of this is in part that the Nazis also had a vision of the common good. They definitely had a philosophy and ideology that was focused on what they thought the world ought to be and how it would be better if certain conditions existed than did not exist. Of course, the vision that they had of the common good was deeply racist and anti-Semitic. They believed that the common good that they had in mind required a German hegemony dominance and that every other group, particularly as they saw the racially, should be subordinated to that hierarchy and that some people—Jews in particular—ought to be eliminated completely. The common good for the Nazis was a world without Jews, and it is that jarring juxtaposition that I think is so crucial, and we cannot assume that the common good is a pure, innocent, totally free of ambiguity kind of idea, but what we can see from looking at the Holocaust, I think, is what certain views of the common good ought not to be, and therefore, we can reason from those to a more inclusive non-racist, welcoming kind of understanding of what human life at its best ought to be.
JERRY FOWLER: I think that idea of looking at the Holocaust and deducing from that a vision of “common good” or at least the negative image of common good ties into one of the passages in the essay that I wanted to ask you about. You say that “ethics cannot exist without memory, but given that we human beings have memories, responsibility, and specifically moral responsibility, are thrust upon us.” I am wondering why is it that memory thrusts upon us moral responsibility?
JOHN ROTH: First, I think we cannot imagine what it would be like to live as human beings if we took memory off of the table. The fact that we are able to remember what has happened to us is so crucial to our identity as individual persons but also as people who are unavoidably parts of traditions and groups and nations and all of the things that make us what we are. Without memory there could not be human existence, but human existence is always infused with, fraught with, questions about what is right, what is not, what is just, what is not, what is good, and what is not good. These are just part and parcel of what it means to be human, and they are not abstract questions because they are always related to history, to things that have happened, to memory, so that being human involves already having the notion of ethical questions and dilemmas that we face, and those things are predicated upon the fact that human beings are capable of remembering. A lot hinges, not only just factually on memory and ethics—these two are inextricably bound together I think—but also there is the question of how we make use of our memories. Memories are—and here I am using the plural because it refers both to particular memories and also to the capacity of memory—memories are dangerous because they can incite us to revenge, to hatred, to violence, to prejudice, even to genocide. What we do with our memories is also, I think, an ethical question. How do we make memory function so that it serves justice, so that it makes the world a place that is less prone to violence and genocide? This is, I think, a key issue.
JERRY FOWLER: Along this line of memory, one of the things that you talk about in the essay is a quote that is on the outside of the Holocaust Museum from President Jimmy Carter about the need to harness the outrage of our memories of the Holocaust.
JOHN ROTH: I think I used to walk past that part of the Museum in Washington where that part of Carter’s statement was found, and I liked the idea of harnessing the outrage. Carter was right; memory can rightly produce anger. It can produce outrage, but the question is how do we organize that? How do we harness it, to use his words, so that it serves good purposes, not destructive ones? Emotion is part of being human too, and emotion is part of ethics, and because that is true, one of the things that we have to think about a lot, I believe, is how do we educate, how do we train, how do we take responsibility for one another so that our anger, our outrage, our emotion is harnessed—as Carter put it—for good purposes?
JERRY FOWLER: One thing that I think I sometimes have questions about is when we are talking about memory: we have personal memories, memories of things that have happened to us. In some ways, we have collective memories which are memories related to collective experience, and I guess the definition of that collective is sometimes problematic, and a question that has often been raised is why is it that there is a Holocaust memorial, Holocaust memory, in the United States, specifically in Washington?
JOHN ROTH: I think that there are multiple responses that rightly explain why that is the case or why is it good that there is memorial of that kind. First, we know, and I think the Museum documents this, that the United States also had a role, a part, in the history of the Holocaust. To some extent, it was a noble part that brought the Holocaust to an end because it took the defeat of Nazi Germany to ensure that outcome. But we also know that the United States did not do everything that it might have or could have, and so, it is a sobering experience to be in the Museum to see that part of the story told. But I think another thing that is really important here—and it goes back to the theme of the common good that we were talking about—I would put it this way: Nazi Germany had a vision of the common good that had values—we can put scare quotes around the term if we want there—but it did have values that were completely antithetical to what American values are at their best. For instance, Nazi Germany did not believe that all people are created equal. It did not believe that there were human rights that extended to every human person and that those rights involved, as Jefferson put it, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Nazi regime was opposed to those ideas. You could even argue, as some have done, that the Nazi regime really hated the word “humanity,” in so far as that concept entailed a vision of a human community in the broadest possible sense where people were equal and have rights. The Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C., I think, stands there as a very significant warning that says among other things that the values that Americans and human beings when we are at our best honor and extol are fragile; that they can be harmed; that they even can be put under threat that could destroy them, and there is no guarantee here that that will not happen or could not happen, so we have to be the guardians of these traditions and these values. I think that one of the most important things the Holocaust Museum does, standing where it does in Washington, right in the midst of all the major monuments that all Americans hold dear, is to warn us about this and perhaps to inspire courage to defend and honor the values that we hold when we are at our best.
JERRY FOWLER: In spite of that function, in the Shadow of Birkenau, we have had most recently, and since the opening of this Memorial, Rwanda and Srebrenica, and today Darfur.
JOHN ROTH: Yes, I think this is, for someone who has studied the Holocaust and genocide and teaches about it, that people who do that kind of work are hopeful and idealistic to some extent. That is, we hope that human beings will learn, that they will learn better, that they will change their ways so that these atrocities and catastrophes do not exist, but that hope and that idealism has not been borne out. What do we do in the face of that? I think the worst thing we could do would be to give up or to fall into despair or cynicism. I think that we have to keep trying; we have to redouble our efforts; we have to keep calling out; trying to encourage each other to take action that will intervene and perhaps prevent in the future, disasters of this kind, but it is not entirely encouraging work to be engaged in, but it is extremely necessary just for that reason.
JERRY FOWLER: At the end of the essay, “The Holocaust and the Common Good,” you talk about the story of the town Le Chambon, a little town in France where the residents collectively rescued something in the neighborhood of 5,000 Jews during the Holocaust. To you, what is the ethical significance of this little spec of light in the darkness that we call the Holocaust?
JOHN ROTH: I think one of the most important things about the people in Le Chambon is that they showed that history does not have to be the way it is or the way it turns out. They had a choice to make. Their choice was basically what would they do as these Jewish refugees came to their area in France and asked for help. They could have turned them away; they could have reacted with indifference, but instead they opened their doors and they received these people and they hid them and looked after them and gave them life. They stand as examples that show that people have choices, that things do not have to go in a direction that leads to death and indifference to death. That, I think, is a crucial thing. A second thing goes back to what we were saying about memory. In human experience, if we learn about who we are as human beings we are able also to face decision points where we have to decide, where do we stand? Who do we regard as our allies, our friends, the people we want to honor, the people we regard even as heroic? We know that there are neo-Nazis in the world; we know that there are people who are indifferent about what happened, but it is also possible to say “I want to stand with the people who did something that was courageous. I want to try to be like them. Maybe I cannot do that; maybe I do not have the courage or I do not have the strength to be exactly like they are, but I can see that what they did was good, it was right, it was needed, and if possible, I would like to try to emulate them.” I think these are the kinds of choices that we have. I have used the phrase a time or two in our discussion that it is important that we take responsibility for one another, and I think it is in this area that that kind of responsibility comes into play. We need to be people who challenge one another, we need to be people who help others to know about the people who did the right, and the good, and the courageous thing, and we need to be people who say, “Look, those are the people we should emulate to the best of our ability.”
JERRY FOWLER: John Roth is the Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College and he is preparing to move onto a new phase of life as a Professor Emeritus. John, thanks so much for being with us.
JOHN ROTH: Thanks Jerry. I have enjoyed the conversation.
