Empathy for evil

I hold no brief for Oliver Stone, I find those who would deny the Jewish holocaust to be stupid to the point of evil, and I am no moral relativist.

Nevertheless, Dvir Abramovich’s rant in the SMH is surely missing the point. He quotes Oliver Stone as saying, with reference to Hitler, Stalin and Mao:

“You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate.”

Abramovich then goes on to ask:

“So let us understand: The director of films such as Wall Street and Platoon wants to empathise with Hitler, and thinks the mass murderer was an easy scapegoat who needs to be put in context?”

Well, yes, if that’s what Stone wants, I support him. Empathy is (I quote the OED) “The power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.” It is vital that we attempt to do so.

What is the alternative? We might want to rest with Abramovich’s simple view that “When you have killed millions as Hitler did, you are going to be judged as bad and be vilified”. I would add that both Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao were involved in even more deaths, but the point is that none of these people acts in a vacuum; they do not spring out of nowhere as self-existent, singular generators of evil. They come into the world as babies, grow up in societies and operate in contexts. If we don’t empathise, if we make no effort to understand, then we will maintain the conditions that give them form.

Wouldn’t it be convenient if these people were “just” incomprehensibly evil! We could then just kill them, and all would be well! Let’s kill the evil bad guys! No need to worry about why they came to be like that, no need to care about the oppressed groups like Chinese or Russian peasants, Irish peasants, Palestinians, Jews, or about manipulation by the “military-industrial-financial complex”… Kill a few evil guys, and everything will be hunky-dory!

I recently came across a famous quote from Solzhenitsyn:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”