A Reason Why Good People Support Unjust Policies

 A segment from that television show “The Apprentice” keeps coming back into memory these days.  I don’t recall being a regular viewer, but somehow I caught one segment when that man was berating a leading contender who had chosen to take a leave of absence to care for a dying parent.  He lectured the apprentice for her bad choice, emphasizing that no one ever succeeds in business unless he or she is willing to put self first.  Even today, everything that occurs in that office seems to reflect an egoism that cannot see beyond itself. The markets crash; look how much money we made!  A governor’s home is firebombed; the perpetrator was not one of my fans.  Deportations without due process occur; take no worry, I’m only pleasing the voters who voted for me.

What troubles me more and more, though, is not this narcissistic, haphazard rule.  Instead, it is the loyalty, featly, and even sycophantic support of his minions of leaders.  It is one thing to encourage and work for reductions in expenses, exposures of fraud, and endings of abuse.  It is quite another shocking matter to ignore at best or equivocate and support at worst terrible abuses of human needs and rights and affronts to human dignity.  How is it that good citizens – women and men with successful careers, thriving families, and histories of servant leadership for the common good – can now be quiet in the face of injustice or rationalizing immoral actions in the light of day?

And I keep remembering a careful read from last year, the essays of Hannah Arendt in Responsibility and Judgement.  Although most people are capable of great moral crimes, she argues, most Germans who collaborated during the Holocaust years were not criminals.  On the contrary, they “precisely the members of respectable society” who “simply exchanged one system of values against another” (44). 

 On its surface, exchanging one system of values for another seems like something, say, an American Christian would never do.  “My values are firm and clear! Truth is truth! Right is right! Freedom and justice for all!”  But this kind of fixed position and uncompromising clarity of values often itself lacks any virtue or integrity of morals.  The language of values, tied to the maintenance of right and order, may indeed eclipse moral virtue itself.  Instead, to truly be and act morally, the character or action before us must be examined and evaluated, which entails an admission that morality is fluid or at least lacking in perfect objectivity.  This situation helps us to understand why in Germany’s case, it is an “undeniable fact that the few who managed not to be sucked into the whirlwind were by no means the ‘moralists,’ people who had always upheld rules of right conduct, but on the contrary very often those who had been convinced, even before the debacle, of the objective non-validity of these standards per se” (13).  In short, they were the people who understood that once values language collapses into certainty, loyalty, and an us/them world, moral discernment is choked out by moral language.

Perhaps those silent, obedient ones dutifully following his call are sliding into this trap.  Perhaps not.  I find the argument plausible, if not comforting.  It does give some explanation for the reality we face.