Philosophy for a Better World by Floris Van Den Berg

Author:Floris Van Den Berg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2013-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

8. SUPPOSE YOU'RE ANNE FRANK

Moral relativism can assume absurd forms: the American philosopher Austin Dacey notes that his students say they doubt that slavery, the Holocaust, and ethnic cleansing were morally wrong because, influenced by postmodern ideas, they do not want to make absolute judgments.82 According to relativism, morality and justice are always bound to time, place, and cultural context. The rejection of moral relativism is, however, not the same as claiming that the West and, more specifically, the United States are and always have been in the right. A rejection of moral relativism does not equate with a defense of imperialism or neo-imperialism.

Postmodern thinkers as Jean-François Lyotard have announced grandly that “there are no more great narratives,” or rather, that the validity of great narratives and the universal claims of ethics has been undermined. Postmodernism tends to lean toward moral relativism. Moral relativism can be very simply and insightfully contradicted by imagining yourself in the situation of a victim. Would you want to be a Jew yourself and be subjected to persecution by the Nazis?

My sons, aged ten and nine, are enrolled in Anne Frank Elementary School. With some trepidation I have tried carefully to tell them who Anne Frank was, but I find it hard to tell them the full story. “Anne was a girl who lived in Amsterdam and kept a diary.” So far, so good.

“Anne had to go into hiding with her family; they had to hide because there were people who wanted to capture her and her family.”

“Why did those people want to capture Anne, Daddy?”

“Because Anne was Jewish and the Nazis believed that the Jews were very bad, but they really weren't, you know!”

“What happened to Anne, Daddy?”

“She was captured and killed.”

Lump in the throat.

Who would want to change places with Anne Frank? Through her diary, Anne has given a face to one of the six million victims.83 That number is an abstraction. But Anne Frank offers a clear image. It is deeply depraved to murder six million people. Anyone who puts a question mark after that or seeks to try to relativize it is a moral monster. Most of the Jews who lived in the Netherlands were murdered, often with the complicity of Dutch citizens. Someone betrayed Anne Frank's hiding place. Who is not altogether clear, but in any case it was a Netherlander.

Reading Anne's diary is so poignant because the reader knows how the story ends, but Anne doesn't know she is going to die soon. She is simply fearful and unsure. And yet she is trying to live as normal a life as possible.

It is possible to make moral judgments about the past: nobody would want to trade places with Anne Frank, or with Etty Hillesum, a writer who kept a diary while she was interned in Westerbork transit camp.84 Hillesum was gassed in Auschwitz in 1943. There are Holocaust survivors who have tried to describe their indescribable suffering, for example, Gerhard Durlacher in Stripes in the Sky.85 This is called “scar literature” or “literature of the wounded.

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