This morning I watched a recorded episode of 60 Minutes while doing my stretching and flexibility exercises. It was about the discovery of a photo album that belonged to a Nazi officer who took part in the horrendous killing of 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, about a million of whom were Jews.
You can see the episode via this You Tube video.
The photo album mostly showed the everyday side of living at Auschwitz from the German perspective. Several photos showed a Nazi shaking hands with his dog, just as many dog-owners do. There were pictures of smiling Germans listening to a man playing the accordion, along with Nazi officers flirting with female secretarial staff.
A man talks in the 60 Minutes episode about how he was surprised to see his grandfather in the photos, as I recall that he said he didn't know much about what his grandfather did in the war. A family photo showed the grandfather at a post-war gathering, looking like a kindly senior citizen. Asked to describe his relationship with his grandfather, he said it was normal.
Yet his grandfather was one of the Nazis who murdered over a million people at Auschwitz. Most would say that anyone who did this is horribly evil. But after the war, his grandson didn't view the man as evil. He was just an elderly relative.
There's no end of theories about how otherwise kind and gentle Germans turned into Nazi war criminals. I'm not at all an expert on this, and what I say below is very much open to criticism. While it makes sense to me, I realize that some will feel that I'm being too easy on the perpetrators of the Auschwitz horrors. So be it.
After I watched the 60 Minutes episode, I did my usual pre-meditation reading. I began reading a book that I'd bought after I'd seen it mentioned in a comment on my blog by Ron E., who has similar views on the mind, neuroscience, and selfhood (or the lack thereof) as I do. I just had time to read the Introduction to Selfless: The Social Creation of "You" by Brian Lowery, a social psychologist and Stanford professor.
Wow. Very impressive writer and thinker. I was instantly taken both by Lowery's style and message. Here's how the Introduction ends, with a summary of his central thesis.
I won't pander to what we want to believe about ourselves: that there is someone in there, inside you, waiting to be set free, to live the life of your dreams. Or that we are, or can be, in complete control of our lives or even know our selves deeply and truly.
We live our lives in complex relation to people and systems. Your parents, siblings, friends, and romantic partners affect who you were, are, and can be. The way we operate within society's institutions limits what we can do, and what you can conceive of.
Daydreams of who you can be, what your life might be, or have been, are limited by the cultural materials you have to work with. We can only create from what's available to us.
You are the product of the social world you inhabit. As such, there is no simple formula, no paint-by-numbers route to "fixing" your life. To change your circumstance -- to take care of your self -- is a collective effort.
Others create us and we create them. If we want to understand our selves, we must first understand this give-and-take.
In the 60 Minutes episode, when asked to explain how tragedies like Auschwitz could happen, a woman said that it is when a government gives permission. She didn't say that evil people are responsible. After all, there is no such thing as an evil person. This assumes that we humans come with simplistic labels attached to us: good, evil, saintly, sinner, genius, idiot.
Which almost certainly isn't true, because it goes against what we've come to know about human behavior. This is very much in line with what Lowery says in his Introduction.
It's obviously not just who we love. What we think of as right or wrong, for example, is also deeply affected by the social world we inhabit. Should children be allowed to play away from their home without supervision? At what age is marriage appropriate? Under what circumstances, if any, is it okay to kill another human being?
Answers to these questions have differed across time and continue to differ across cultures and communities.
If you read any of the wildly popular self-help books out there, you might get the impression that we should not want to be shaped by our social environments. Many of these books focus on helping you be unapologetically, unreservedly, your true self.
This book doesn't argue against this aim as much as argue that it's not possible. People want and need social engagement, which means we can't live completely free of external influences and constraints.
...What you believe about me affects the way you interact with me; your beliefs and actions, in turn, affect the nature of my self. Whether I accept or reject your view of me, it will change me. We bring multifaceted selves to our interactions, and in these interactions co-create each other again and again.
Selves don't emanate from some ineffable light within people. Instead, selves are created in relationships.
During World War II, social causes and conditions led the man's grandfather to become a Nazi who cruelly participated in the killing of over a million innocent people at Auschwitz. After the war, social causes and conditions led the same man to be a kindly grandfather to his family.
Different selves arise in different social circumstances. This happens with all of us. It just is much more dramatic when it happens in a setting like Auschwitz.
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