Gerhart Niemeyer

A SENSATIONAL book by the German paleontologist Heinrich Erben maintains that mankind is probably a declining species. He points to certain parallels between extinct animal species that lost their fitness for survival because they were too protected by circumstances, and the human race as it exists today in its “plastic environment.” Just as over-populous animal species developed an immaturity of behavior, so has man. To Erben’s list of human immaturities (childishness in modern science, hedonistic search for thrills and kicks, increase in group violence), let us add another: moral dishonesty. This is strictly modern. The familiar types of dishonesty are fraud, cowardice, and intellectual dishonesty, all of which bend or sacrifice truth to myopic ends of self-preservation. Moral dishonesty, by contrast, arises unwittingly from an attempt to serve morality itself.

Let us look at two typical examples. First, the Communist threat. The modern world has often rallied in virtuous indignation against dictatorship and despotism, provided it occurs in Chile, Brazil, Spain, South Korea. The “logical crimes” of Communist regimes, however, go unnoticed or at least unmentioned. To be sure, Communist terror may well figure in a review of Gulag Archipelago but it is never allowed to come up in a discussion of foreign policy (“Cold Warrior!”). In thinking about detente we tend to see the Soviet regime as a normal government, its relations to its subjects as normal policies, its attitudes toward other countries as merely in the “national interest”—even though there is much evidence that says, It just ain’t so. Evidence disturbing to attitudes of good will toward the Soviet Union is simply read out of court. The truth about Communism must not be known, so that “moral” feelings toward the Soviets may prevail. Why? One explanation is that certain people are incapable of perceiving any enemy on the Left and reserve all their hostility for the Right. That would simply be a case of bias, of which many of us are guilty at one time or another. More probably, however, it is a form of misguided decency that falsifies facts because mentioning them would seem to feed an (immoral) confrontation and thus endanger the (moral) cause of peace. The truth is conceived as an enemy of international goodness.

Featured Tags

A SENSATIONAL book by the German paleontologist Heinrich Erben maintains that mankind is probably a declining species. He points to certain parallels between extinct animal species that lost their fitness for survival because they were too protected by circumstances, and the human race as it exists today in its “plastic environment.” Just as over-populous animal species developed an immaturity of behavior, so has man. To Erben’s list of human immaturities (childishness in modern science, hedonistic search for thrills and kicks, increase in group violence), let us add another: moral dishonesty. This is strictly modern. The familiar types of dishonesty are fraud, cowardice, and intellectual dishonesty, all of which bend or sacrifice truth to myopic ends of self-preservation. Moral dishonesty, by contrast, arises unwittingly from an attempt to serve morality itself.

Let us look at two typical examples. First, the Communist threat. The modern world has often rallied in virtuous indignation against dictatorship and despotism, provided it occurs in Chile, Brazil, Spain, South Korea. The “logical crimes” of Communist regimes, however, go unnoticed or at least unmentioned. To be sure, Communist terror may well figure in a review of Gulag Archipelago but it is never allowed to come up in a discussion of foreign policy (“Cold Warrior!”). In thinking about detente we tend to see the Soviet regime as a normal government, its relations to its subjects as normal policies, its attitudes toward other countries as merely in the “national interest”—even though there is much evidence that says, It just ain’t so. Evidence disturbing to attitudes of good will toward the Soviet Union is simply read out of court. The truth about Communism must not be known, so that “moral” feelings toward the Soviets may prevail. Why? One explanation is that certain people are incapable of perceiving any enemy on the Left and reserve all their hostility for the Right. That would simply be a case of bias, of which many of us are guilty at one time or another. More probably, however, it is a form of misguided decency that falsifies facts because mentioning them would seem to feed an (immoral) confrontation and thus endanger the (moral) cause of peace. The truth is conceived as an enemy of international goodness.