HOBBES-NOBBING WITH PRIMO LEVI

I came across an article in The Guardian yesterday relevant to my thoughts on the Israel-Hamas War, the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine, and the (by my count) 45 modern genocides recorded in the UN List of Genocides.  The Guardian article is entitled, ‘The perpetrators were people like us’:  the burden of history at Auschwitz.  There is a quote from a book by Primo Levi (above) in the article that really struck me.  Wiki describes Levi, who was born in Turin, Italy, in 1919 and died there in 1987, as

an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947, published as Survival in Auschwitz in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland….

The quote that struck me is from If This Is a Man:

“There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred: it is hate that is not in us, it is outside of man. We cannot understand it, but we must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.”

At my first read, I thought I understood what Levi was saying, but the more I reread his words, the more perplexed I became.

Like Levi, I cannot understand the kind of irrational hatred that leads to genocide, mass murder, crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, man-made famine, atrocities, and mass persecutions.  And I agree with him that, although I cannot understand such hatred, I must recognize that it exists, and that to ignore such hatred is at our collective peril.  As Levi from his horrific personal experience as a Holocaust survivor warns, we must be on our guard.  What happened not only could happen again, it has happened before and is happening again and again and again.  It seems that only the names of the victims, the dates and the places, and the sadistic forms of the violence change.

But I'm not sure I understand what Levi means when he says that "hatred is not in us; it is outside of man."  If I take him at his word, I must part ways with his literal language. Hate seems to me to be very much a part of the array of emotions that make us the human beings we are.  I know this from all the history that has come before me and from everything I see around me, most currently the vile and virulent Antisemitism and Islamophobia rekindled by the Israel-Hamas War.  While the acts fueled by hate may be in and of themselves inhumane, hate as an emotional state is not inhuman.  We have all felt this emotion.  Fortunately, we have not all acted upon it.

If the emotional state of hate cannot by definition be separated from the hater, when Levi refers to hate as being “outside of man,”is he really driving at the external conditions that ignite the feeling of hatred? If so, then he rejects the view of Thomas Hobbes (above), the English philosopher who postulated that without the thin veneer of civilization provided by the social compact that creates the State, the life of a man in the state of nature would be nasty, brutish, and short.  This 2019 article published by the BBC on the centenary of Levi’s birth, shows Levi to have a very different view of human nature from that of Hobbes and may resolve my conundrum: 

What Levi saw in the Holocaust changed his perception of humans, but he never believed it had shown us their true nature. “We do not believe in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every civilised institution is taken away… We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.”

If what Levi means by “fundamental” is that man’s nature is not exclusively or even mainly brutal, egoistic and stupid, then I agree with him.  Kindness, compassion and intelligence are also part of man's nature and make us the human beings we are.  I know this from all the history that has come before me and from everything I see around me, most currently the calls for humanitarian aid and a ceasefire or pause in the Israel-Hamas War.  Hate and love exist in tension and not in exclusion.  That is what makes us human, what makes situations neither black nor white, and what makes life so complicated and at times horrifying.

If our nature is complex and multifaceted, perhaps when we ask ourselves who we are, and if we can't do better than this, we are asking the wrong questions.  Perhaps the proper and more fruitful question is the one based on Levi's observations, namely:  "From whence does hatred spring?  What is the driving necessity and physical disabilities that reduce many social habits and instincts to silence?"  Put another way, What is the context?  Given our nature and that we often live in what Levi called a "gray zone," is that context likely to awaken hate and incite violence?  From my vantage point, and I think from that of Levi, the answer is sometimes sadly, Yes, and sometimes happily, No.

According to the BBC article,

In 1961, 14 years after its initial publication, If This Is a Man was translated into German. Levi agonised over his foreword to the book. He felt the pull of, and resisted, the consolations of rage and blame and despair. The words he chose were defiance, distilled: “I am alive, and I would like to understand you in order to judge you.”

But if we take Levi at his word, much as he would have liked to understand those who had grievously and horrifyingly wronged him, he knew that he never could understand them, and he told us so.  If he was telling us the truth, then it follows from his foreword above that he could not judge his persecutors.  He could only recognize their hatred and exhort us to be ever vigilant against its transformation from passion into action.  I think he would ask us to keep our eyes open to the place from which hatred springs.  He would tell us we must give weight to the human condition as well as to human nature.

 

Here is the poem that opens If This Is a Man:

If This Is a Man

You who live safe
In your warm house;
You who find, come evening,
Hot food and the faces of friends: 

Consider if this is a man
Who struggles in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for crumbs
Who dies because of a No or Yes

Consider if this is a woman,
Nameless and hairless
Without strength to remember
Vacant eyes and a womb
Cold like a frog in the winter:

Consider the fact that this has happened:
These words I suggest:
Etch them on your heart
When staying home and going out,

Closing your eyes and rising back;
Repeat them to your children:
Or may your house crumble,
Illness bind you
And they turn their faces away from you.

 

 

Keep it real!

Marilyn