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Saturday Review: Essay: The devil's progress: Modern social scienceh

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  • Saturday Review: Essay: The devil's progress: Modern social scienceh

    Saturday Review: Essay: The devil's progress: Modern social science
    has banished concepts of good and evil. But, argues Amos Oz,
    literature, from Shakespeare and Goethe to Grass and Boll, gives us
    truer insights into human nature

    The Guardian - United Kingdom; Sep 03, 2005
    AMOS OZ

    When I was a child in Jerusalem, our teacher at a Jewish orthodox
    school taught us the book of Job. All Israeli children, to this day,
    study the book of Job. Our teacher told us how Satan travelled all
    the way from that book to the New Testament, and to Goethe's Faust ,
    and to many other works of literature. And although each writer made
    something new of Satan, the devil, der Teufel , he was always the
    very same Satan: cool, amused, sarcastic and sceptical. A
    deconstructor of human faith, love and hope.

    Job's Satan, like Faust's Satan, enters upon a wager. His big prize
    is neither a hidden treasure, nor the heart of a beautiful woman, and
    not even a promotion to a higher position in the heavenly hierarchy.
    No: Satan enters a gamble out of some kind of didactic urge. He
    wishes to make a point. To prove something, and to refute something
    else. With enormous argumentative zeal, the biblical Satan and the
    Aufklarung Satan try to show God and his angels that man, when given
    the choice, will always opt for evil. He will choose bad over good,
    willingly and consciously.

    Shakespeare's Iago may well have been motivated by a very similar
    didactic zeal. Indeed, so it is with almost every thorough evildoer
    in world literature. Perhaps this is why Satan is often so charming.
    So beguiling. John Milton may have misunderstood the devil when he
    called him "the infernal serpent". Heinrich Heine knew better when he
    wrote:

    I call'd the devil, and he came,

    And with wonder his form did I closely scan;

    He is not ugly, and is not lame,

    But really a handsome and charming man.

    A man in the prime of life is the devil,

    Obliging, a man of the world, and civil;

    A diplomatist too, well skill'd in debate,

    He talks quite glibly of church and state.

    Man and the devil understood each other so well, because they were,
    in some ways, so alike. In the book of Job, Satan, the perverse
    educator, intimately understood how human pain breeds evil: "Put
    forth thy hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse thee
    to thy face". And Shakespeare's witches, in Macbeth , could sense the
    arrival of an evil man from afar: "I feel a pricking in my thumb;
    something wicked this way comes." Goethe, for his part, observed that
    the devil, like so many human beings, is simply a selfish charmer. "
    Der Teufel ist ein egotist ." The devil is an egotist. He only helps
    others in order to serve his own ends. Not, as God and Kant would
    have it, for the sake of the good deed alone.

    And this is why, ever since the book of Job, and until not so long
    ago, Satan, man and God lived in the same household. All three seemed
    to know the difference between good and evil. God, man and the devil
    knew that evil was evil and that good was good. God commanded one
    option. Satan seduced to try the other. God and Satan played on the
    same chessboard. Man was their game-piece. It was as simple as that.

    Personally, I believe that every human being, in his or her heart of
    hearts, is capable of telling good from bad. Even when they pretend
    not to. We have all eaten from that tree of Eden whose full name is
    the tree of knowledge of good from evil.

    The same distinction may apply to truth and lies: just as it is
    immensely difficult to define the truth, yet quite easy to smell a
    lie, it may sometimes be hard to define good; but evil has its
    unmistakable odour: every child knows what pain is. Therefore, each
    time we deliberately inflict pain on another, we know what we are
    doing. We are doing evil.

    But the modern age has changed all that. It has blurred the clear
    distinction that humanity has made since its early childhood, since
    the Garden of Eden. Some time in the 19th century, not so long after
    Goethe died, a new thinking entered western culture that brushed evil
    aside, indeed denied its very existence. That intellectual innovation
    was called social science. For the new, self-confident, exquisitely
    rational, optimistic, thoroughly scientific practitioners of
    psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics - evil was not an
    issue. Come to think of it, neither was good. To this very day,
    certain social scientists simply do not talk about good and evil. To
    them, all human motives and actions derive from circumstances, which
    are often beyond personal control. "Demons," said Freud, "do not
    exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic
    activity of man." We are controlled by our social background. For
    about 100 years now, they have been telling us that we are motivated
    exclusively by economic self-interest, that we are mere products of
    our ethnic cultures, that we are no more than marionettes of our own
    subconscious.

    In other words, the modern social sciences were the first major
    attempt to kick both good and evil off the human stage. For the first
    time in their long history, good and bad were both overruled by the
    idea that circumstances are always responsible for human decisions,
    human actions and especially human suffering. Society is to blame.
    Painful childhood is to blame. The political is to blame.
    Colonialism. Imperialism. Zionism. Globalisation. What not. So began
    the great world championship of victimhood.

    For the first time since the book of Job, the devil found himself out
    of a job. He could no longer play his ancient game with human minds.
    Satan was dismissed. This was the modern age.

    Well, the times may be changing again. Satan might have been sacked,
    but he did not remain unemployed. The 20th century was the worst
    arena of cold-blooded evil in human history. The social sciences
    failed to predict, encounter, or even grasp this modern, highly
    technologised evil. Very often, this 20th-century evil disguised
    itself as world reforming, as idealism, as re-educating the masses or
    "opening their eyes". Totalitarianism was presented as secular
    redemption for some, at the expense of millions of lives.

    Today, having emerged from the evil of totalitarian rule, we have
    enormous respect for cultures. For diversities. For pluralism. I know
    some people are willing to kill anyone who is not a pluralist. Satan
    was hired for work once again by postmodernism; but this time his job
    is verging on kitsch: a small, secretive bunch of "shady forces" are
    always guilty of everything, from poverty and discrimination, war and
    global warming to September 11 and the tsunami. Ordinary people are
    always innocent. Minorities are never to blame. Victims are, by
    definition, morally pure. Did you notice that today, the devil never
    seems to invade any individual person? We have no Fausts any more.
    According to trendy discourse, evil is a conglomerate. Systems are
    evil. Governments are bad. Faceless institutions run the world for
    their own sinister gain. Satan is no longer in the details.
    Individual men and women cannot be "bad", in the ancient sense of the
    book of Job, or Macbeth, of Iago, of Faust. You and I are always very
    nice people. The devil is always the establishment. This is, in my
    view, ethical kitsch.

    Let us consult our own most gifted adviser, der Geheimrat
    [councillor] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Let us look at his
    West-Eastern Divan , one of the earliest great tributes of western
    culture to its own curiosity and attraction to the east. Was Goethe a
    condescending "orientalist", as Edward Said might have him? Or was he
    a multiculturalist, in the fashion of today's guilt-ridden Europeans
    paying lip service to everything distant, to everything different,
    everything decisively non-European?

    I think Goethe was neither an orientalist nor a multiculturalist. It
    was not the extreme and imagined exoticism of the east that tempted
    him, but the strong and fresh substance that eastern cultures,
    eastern poetry and art may give to universal human truths and
    feelings. The good, and indeed God, are universal:

    God is of the east possess'd,

    God is ruler of the west;

    North and South alike, each land

    Rests within His gentle hand.

    Even more so, love is universal, whether it is for Gretchen or for
    Zuleika. So a German poet may well write a love poem for an imagined
    Persian woman. Or for a real Persian woman. And speak the truth. And
    yet more touchingly, pain is universal. As one of the finest poems in
    the West-Eastern Divan has it:

    Let me Weep, hemmed-in by night,

    In the boundless desert.

    Camels are resting, likewise their drivers,

    Calculating in silence the Armenian is awake;

    But I, beside him, calculate the miles

    That separate me from Zuleika, reiterate

    The annoying bends that prolong journeys.

    Let me weep. It is no shame.

    Weeping men are good.

    Didn't Achilles weep for his Briseis?

    Xerxes wept for his unfallen army;

    Over his self-murdered darling

    Alexander wept.

    Let me weep. Tears give life to dust.

    Already it's greening.

    Goethe does not recruit the east to prove anything. He takes humans,
    all humans, seriously. East or west, good men weep.

    I would like to take a moment here to weep for Johann Wolfgang von
    Goethe. I would like to weep for Weimar. Because Goethe's Weimar is
    gone for good. Even Thomas Mann's Weimar is gone and cannot return.
    Not that Weimar today is not a pretty, well renovated historical
    town. But Weimar today lies across the forest from Buchenwald.

    We may lament the passing of memories, the fading of landscape, the
    growth and change of old towns. But this is not what we are lamenting
    in Goethe's Weimar. Not the teeth of time, but the extreme and total
    evil of man, have taken Goethe's Weimar away from us.

    Mann, in his novel Lotte in Weimar , made Charlotte Kestner, who was
    once Lotte Buff, the real-life beloved of the young Werther, come to
    visit the old and famous Goethe in Weimar. Lotte in Weimar is an
    exquisite study in the slow fading of recollection: even when Goethe
    was still alive, the old Goethe-Zeit was slipping away, becoming the
    stuff of legend. That is normal; that is the way human life and
    memory, human homes and streets, flow and ebb as history moves on.

    But Goethe and his old love Lotte could still walk together to the
    woodland outside the town of Weimar, and observe the blissful,
    tranquil scenery of the Thuringian countryside. And maybe they could
    walk up to the beautiful oak tree there, known for many years to come
    as Goethe's oak tree. And years went by, and generations died, but
    the oak tree was still standing. Until it was bombed by an allied
    aircraft toward the end of the second world war. And Weimar became
    the neighbouring town, the "market town", of death camp Buchenwald.

    And so, the German Nazis killed not only their victims, but also the
    slow ageing innocence of Weimar and Goethe and Lotte. The subtitle of
    Lotte in Weimar is "The Beloved Returns". But the beloved can no
    longer return. Not for evermore.

    Which brings me from Lotte Kestner-Buff to another Lotte, Lotte
    Wreschner, the mother of my son-in-law. She was born in Frankfurt am
    Main, 174 years after Goethe and not far from his house. Not for
    nothing did the name Lotte run in her family: she grew up in a home
    full of books, shelves upon shelves of German, Jewish and
    German-Jewish spiritual treasures. Schiller and the Talmud. Heine and
    Kant. Buber and Holderlin. All were there. One uncle was a rabbi, the
    other a psychoanalyst. They all knew Goethe's poetry by heart. The
    Nazis imprisoned her, along with her mother and sister, and sent them
    to Ravensbruck, where the mother died of typhus and hard labour. She
    and her sister Margrit were transferred to Theresien-stadt. I wish I
    could tell you that they were liberated from Theresienstadt by peace
    demonstrators carrying placards saying "make love not war". But in
    fact they were set free not by pacifist idealists but by combat
    soldiers wearing helmets and carrying machine guns. We Israeli peace
    activists never forget this fact, even as we struggle against our
    country's attitude towards the Palestinians, even while we work for a
    livable, peaceful compromise between Israel and Palestine.

    Lotte and Margrit Wreschner came home to find all the books waiting,
    but none of the family. Not a living soul. Margrit Wreschner can bear
    witness to what all survivors of that mass murder can tell. There are
    good people in the world. There are evil people in the world. Evil
    cannot always be repelled by incantations, by demonstrations, by
    social analysis or by psychoanalysis. Sometimes, in the last resort,
    it has to be confronted by force.

    In my view, the ultimate evil in the world is not war itself, but
    aggression. Aggression is "the mother of all wars". And sometimes
    aggression has to be repelled by the force of arms before peace can
    prevail.

    Lotte Wreschner settled in Jerusalem. Eventually she became a leader
    in the Israeli civil-rights movement, as well as a deputy mayor of
    Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek. Her son Eli and my daughter Fania are
    both civil rights and peace activists, as are my other children Galia
    and Daniel.

    Let me turn back to Goethe, and back to my feelings about Germany.
    Goethe's Faust reminds us forever that the devil is personal, not
    impersonal. That the devil is putting every individual to the test,
    which every one of us can pass or fail. That evil is tempting and
    seducing. That aggression has a potential foothold inside every one
    of us.

    Personal good and evil are not the assets of any religion. They are
    not necessarily religious terms. The choice whether to inflict pain
    or not to inflict it, to look it in the face or to turn a blind eye
    to it, to get personally involved in healing pain, like a devoted
    country doctor, or to make do with organising angry demonstrations
    and signing wholesale petitions - this spectrum of choice confronts
    each one of us several times a day.

    Of course, we might occasionally take wrong turns. But even as we
    take a wrong turn, we still know what we are doing. We know the
    difference between good and evil, between inflicting pain and
    healing, between Goethe and Goebbels. Between Heine and Heydrich.
    Between Weimar and Buchenwald. Between individual responsibility and
    collective kitsch.

    Let me conclude with one more personal recollection: as a very
    nationalistic, even chauvinistic, little boy in Jerusalem of the
    1940s, I vowed never to set foot on German soil, never even to buy
    any German product. The only thing I could not boycott were German
    books. If you boycott the books, I told myself, you will become a
    little bit like "them". At first I limited myself to reading the
    pre-war German literature and the anti-Nazi writers. But later, in
    the 1960s, I began to read, in Hebrew translations, the works of the
    post-war generation of German writers and poets. In particular, the
    works of the Group 47 writers led by Hans Werner Richter. They made
    me imagine myself in their place. I'll put it more sharply: they
    seduced me to imagine myself in their stead, back in the dark years,
    and just before the dark years, and just after.

    Reading these authors, and others, I could no longer go on simply
    hating everything German, past, present and future.

    I believe that imagining the other is a powerful antidote to
    fanaticism and hatred. I believe that books that make us imagine the
    other, may turn us more immune to the ploys of the devil, including
    the inner devil, the Mephisto of the heart. Thus, Gunter Grass and
    Heinrich Boll, Ingeborg Bachmann and Uwe Johnson, and in particular
    my beloved friend Siegfried Lenz, opened for me the door into
    Germany. They, along with a number of dear personal German friends,
    made me break my taboos and open my mind, and eventually my heart.
    They re-introduced me to the healing powers of literature.

    Imagining the other is not only an aesthetic tool. It is, in my view,
    also a major moral imperative. And finally, imagining the other - if
    you promise not to quote this little professional secret - imagining
    the other is also a deep and very subtle human pleasure.

    Amos Oz's memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness is published in
    paperback by Vintage. To order a copy for pounds 7.99 with free UK
    p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. This article is
    adapted from a speech given by Amos Oz when he was awarded the Goethe
    prize in Frankfurt on August 28.
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