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Holocaust has become our moral touchstone — the most important cultural
symbol of our era. And that's a problem. The Jewish Holocaust of
World War II was a human tragedy on a scale that beggars description.
Serious study of the Holocaust, as well as meditation upon this
terrible event by the general public, are most necessary and worthy
endeavors. But can the Holocaust ever serve as the chief organizing
principle of our moral universe? In an important sense, it already
does.
In a relativist
age, the Holocaust is our moral anchor. Forty years ago, preoccupation
with the Holocaust was still considered morbid, and the moral lesson
it taught remained something of a debater's point. We knew, when
pressed, that if nothing else was immoral the Holocaust was. But
we did not yet know how to turn the Holocaust into an engine of
meaning. We learned. Perhaps because we had to. Human beings crave
moral certainty. If the Holocaust had waved us away from moral certainty
for fear of committing horrors in the name of some higher cause,
then the Holocaust would itself, of necessity, become our moral
certainty. But how? How could a debater's point become a way of
life? We would have to learn how to use the Holocaust to actually
generate meaning. And having mastered this, we would learn how to
recognize "little Holocausts" everywhere. All too frequently,
the world would accommodate this need for little Holocausts. When
it did not, we would have to use our imaginations.
Weighed down
by a sense of the banality of their existence, the baby boomers
were given a life of material comfort but longed instead for a life
of exertion in the service of some larger purpose, or at least for
the appearance of such a life. The solution they hit upon was to
identify with struggling groups — however temporarily, however superficially,
however counterproductively. Student involvement in the early movement
for civil rights was the entirely praiseworthy prototype of this
moral pattern, but the many later attempts to copy that original
crusade left much to be desired.
The world was
soon divided into torturers and victims, and a shallow but ostentatious
appropriation of the victim's superior prestige created a new aristocracy
of suffering. Heightened sensitivity to prejudice, or apparent prejudice,
would become the keynote of the new identities since, over and above
a few affected markers, no belief or way of life actually distinguished
American blacks, women, Jews, or any given ethnic group, from anyone
else.
The new ethnicity
seemed to operate as a way of associating individuals with some
larger community. More deeply, however, the new ethnicity was a
form of self-cultivation. Pasting together a series of identities,
preferably rebellious and often fleeting, was more a way of distinguishing
oneself from the mass than of forging stable connections to a given
community. And yet, more paradoxically still, the gesture of suffering
rebellion had itself become obligatory — a required ritual of admission
to a society in which everyone became an individual in precisely
the same way.
The denial
of freedom — or better, life — to an innocent multitude serves as
the sacred icon of our time. The new goal is to identify oneself
with mass-scale suffering and to strive to prevent it. On the face
of it, of course, any such horror rightly calls forth our outrage.
The fact that we are stirred to action by collective oppression
or mass killing seems transparently to be our obligation, not some
novel religion. Christ on the cross, after all, long the West's
most potent icon, is the very image of blameless suffering. Yet
the crucifixion is more than a picture of innocent agony. It is
a paradigm of sacrifice — of a God who so loved the world that He
gave to it, and willingly lost to it, His only begotten son. The
displacement of the icon of Christ by the Holocaust metaphor marks
a cultural shift of considerable significance.
Many are now
unable to work within the old paradigm of sacrifice, or even to
recognize or comprehend it. This is reflected, for example, in the
diminishing ability of young Catholics to find vocations as nuns
or priests, and in the incomprehension of those who are disinclined
to accept, say, marital advice, from a celibate priest. For many,
the connection between Jesus's sacrifice of his life, the sacrifice
entailed in celibacy, and the sacrifice at the heart of marriage,
has been lost.
For Jews, the
struggle between the old sacrificial mode and the newer Holocaust
metaphor is direct. To the distress of many traditionalists, the
story of the Holocaust seems to have substituted itself for the
story of the Exodus as the chief rationale for Jewish survival.
For many, Judaism has become a sort of secular religion centered
around ethnic identity, in which traditionally religious elements
are considered private and strictly optional.
Yet the focus
on the Holocaust hasn't stemmed the tide of Jewish intermarriage.
Paradoxically, the Holocaust cult's preoccupation with Jewish survival
is actually undercut by the focus on mere survival implicit in commemorations
of the Holocaust. Only the apprenticeship in sacrifice built into
day-to-day religious practice — sacrifice on behalf of the opportunity
to live amongst a people shaped by the purposes of God — has the
power to compel and justify a refusal to marry outside. The hidden
individualism of victim-centered forms of identity is evident here.
In my earlier
piece, " The
Church of the Left," I showed how feminism constitutes
a kind of modern religion built around Holocaust metaphors. But
the purest example of the Holocaust metaphor's operation in contemporary
leftist thinking is probably found in the eco-terrorism movement.
Eco-terrorism,
sponsored by loosely knit groups like the Animal Liberation Front
and Earth Liberation Front, began in earnest in 1998, with the burning
down of a mountaintop ski resort in Vail Colorado, the release of
10,000 minks from an Oregon mink farm, and the burning of a slaughterhouse.
Eco-terrorism has proliferated since then, although, until recently,
fear of provoking further retaliation has prevented targeted businesses
from publicizing the problem. Biotechnology projects are the latest
targets, with a fire set to the offices of a global biotech project
at Michigan State University in Lansing and various experimental
crop sites destroyed.
The attacks
are sometimes mistaken (targeting scientists who are not in fact
engaged in bioengineering) and often counterproductive (released
minks only die in the wilderness, and the attacks themselves tend
to backfire politically on the activists). But (as with much contemporary
liberalism) it's the feeling of being a rescuer that counts, not
the reality.
The iconography
of these activists is Holocaust iconography — photos of animals
being experimented on, or locked away in small cages. The release
of the minks and the burning of the slaughterhouse resemble nothing
so much as our dream of preventing the Holocaust. In fact the Animal
Liberation Front explicitly invokes the image of U.S. soldiers liberating
Jews from Nazi death camps to justify its actions.
Of course a
great deal depends upon whether we accept the analogy between animals
and people. But the question of the moral status of animals actually
serves to disguise the underlying religious significance of eco-terrorism.
The eco-terrorists have a very particular way of equating animals
and humans. Many Hindus, for example, are vegetarians, but see animals
in a completely different way than the eco-terrorists. Hindus worship
the cow as the embodiment of motherly sacrifice, and the monkey
as a symbol of manly self-control and power.
Things are
different in the church of the Left. Here animals embody no socially
authorized pattern of sacrifice. They are, on the contrary, mute
victims, whose relative incapacity only serves to ratify the purity
of their victimhood. The credibility of any human claim of oppression
can always be called into question, but a mass of mute animals is
the perfect image of large-scale innocent suffering — a perfect
little Holocaust just waiting to be prevented.
Of course animals
have an annoying tendency to consume one another. This muddying
of the moral waters has been nicely circumvented, however, by the
LLF, or the "Lawn Liberation Front," which recently distributed
fliers to homeowners in a Pittsburgh suburb claiming that 12-inch
spikes may have been driven into their lawn to stop them from cutting
the grass. "Grass is a living entity that deserves as much
respect as humans," said the fliers. So nostalgia for the heroism
of World War II can now take the form of action to prevent the "herbicide"
of millions of blades of innocent grass. In an ultimate bid to spread
the new religion, every man is now "offered" the opportunity
to prevent a Holocaust from taking place, quite literally, in his
own backyard.
Few eco-terrorists
get caught. The risks are minimal, but the sense of moral superiority
substantial. And such sacrifice as is entailed in the risk of criminal
prosecution is dramatically different than the sacrifice embodied
in the old religious mode. Eco-terrorists operate in isolated cells
of individuals around the country, few of whom know each other's
identity. This is not the sort of sacrifice that builds families
and communities. It is a simulacrum of sacrifice, undertaken to
rescue pampered middle-class children of affluence from the oppressive
sense of being ordinary.
The physical
destruction of university research is perhaps the clearest example
we have of the implications of "political correctness"
for academic freedom. But the threat of eco-terrorism goes deeper.
Intelligence analysts worry that the history of violence combined
with the ideology of "deep ecology," which holds that
human civilization has to be rolled back until the earth's natural
environment is fully restored, may lead to the use of large-scale
weapons of mass destruction (especially biological warfare) by eco-terrorists.
Ironically, those who seek to prevent holocausts create a rationalization
for perpetrating holocausts of their own.
But the real
significance of eco-terrorism is the clarity with which it reveals
the larger tendencies of the contemporary religion of the Left.
The religion of the Left works by seizing upon, exaggerating, distorting,
or inventing images of mass-scale death and oppression. The point
of this religion is not to gain salvation, power, or community through
self-discipline and sacrifice, but to achieve a feeling of individual
moral superiority through attempts to stave off potential Holocausts
(every man a Schindler). (The movement for gun control is based
on a close cousin of this ideology, as shown in the very interesting
final chapter of Richard Poe's new book, "The
Seven Myths of Gun Control.")
The majority
of environmental activists eschew violence, and the public at large
favors well-lit houses and SUV's. But that doesn't mean that the
Holocaust metaphor isn't alive and well in, say, the public battle
over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Agree or
disagree with the president's plan, it ought to be possible to debate
it as a complex effort to balance environmental sensitivity with
the public's evident need and desire for energy. But the president's
proposal can't seem to get around that "cringe factor"
— the feeling that, whatever the safeguards, whatever the need for
energy, drilling in ANWR is like a little Holocaust. The debate
over ANWR may seem to be about public policy, but it's really a
theological skirmish in the ongoing war between two American cultures
and their respective religions.
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