Bertold Brecht (1898-1956), German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer wrote in his poem “To Posterity”:
Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
And he who walks quietly across the street,
Passes out of the reach of his friends
Who are in danger?”
Yes we live in an age in which faith in reason has evaporated and we are in dark times. Darkness refers to the way these horrors appear in public discourse and yet remain hidden. The tragedies to which Brecht’s poem refers were not shrouded in secrecy and mystery, yet they were darkened by the highly efficient talk and double-talk of nearly all official representatives who, without interruption and in many ingenious variations, explained away unpleasant facts and justified concerns. The all-too-public invisibility of inconvenient facts, and not simply the horror of the facts themselves. The light of the public obscures everything. The black light of the public realm is the chatter and talk that drown the reality of life in “incomprehensible triviality.” Everything that is real or authentic is assaulted by the overwhelming power of “mere talk” that irresistibly arises out of the public realm.
The pressing need for rationally decipherable human values – let no one deny the need is pressing – does not, alas, render those values actual. Mature thought requires that we trade the fantasies of wish fulfilment for the honest work of thoughtful comprehension. To comprehend the failure of rationality as guarantor of a peaceful and prosperous life is not merely to recognize the limits of reason’s universal knowability. Reason does not think if it descends into justifications and rationalizations that spread darkness in our times.
If I disagree with others, I can walk away. I cannot, however, walk away from myself unless I cease the internal dialogue of myself with myself. Because the activity of thinking means that I must live with myself – with my other. Self-thinking is the one activity that can stop men and women from doing great wrongs. Motivations seem grounded in typical bourgeois drives. Many are ambitious. They seek recognition that come from success. Many want to excel at their profession. These banal motivations were there under the Nazi system of rule also. The German civil servants and the Jewish leaders were willing to justify morally suspect actions in the name of doing an unethical job as ethically as possible. They claimed that their cooperation was a lesser evil that helped to prevent an even greater evil. The argument of the lesser evil is endemic to our society. It is typically the case that both sides in a given political or ethical argument invoke reasoning of the lesser evil to buttress their position. There is widespread fear of judging that has nothing to do with the biblical “Judge not, that ye be not judged”, the increasingly common recourse to the argument of the lesser evil with the even more pervasive unwillingness to judge in general. This fear of judging is wide-ranging in society.
Only one who believes oneself right can judge another; thus, judgment presupposes a certain authority and superiority. The judge must have a feeling of distinction, what Nietzsche calls a “pathos of difference,” in order to arrogate to himself or herself the right to judge. There is a necessary arrogance to judging that is increasingly absent in our age in which pride is either absent or at least tempered by a mock-modesty that denies oneself the right to judge. To judge the war morally wrong, or to judge it as an unnecessary risk, reflects a sound mind. The unwillingness to make such stark judgments of guilt is indicative of a deep-seated fear of passing judgment, of naming and of fixing blame. In raising the question of personal responsibility under a dictatorship one must be able and willing to judge. When asked or ordered to participate in an evil government, the citizen must make a judgment. Good citizens never doubted that crimes remained crimes even if legalized by the government. Faced with laws and commands that rationalized actions they held to be wrong, these individuals said no; their no was based neither on a universal rationality nor social norms. They simply said “’This I can’t do.’” Those who think are drawn out of hiding, because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action. The thinker is the one who stands as a beacon not to some particular ideology or policy, but to following one’s conscience.