Farnham, J.F. (1983). Ethical
ambiguity and the teaching of the Holocaust. English
Journal,
72(3) , 519-542.
Farnham argues for an educational system that tries to sensitize students to ethical matters and to cultivate both complexity and ambiguity in ethics. His experiences teaching about the Holocaust through literature suggest that the impact of witnessing prisoners and victims abandon their moral codes and follow ethical values geared to survival can rupture a student's binary of good and evil. Our socially constructed notions of what and who is good or evil come with us as we bear witness/listen to stories of atrocity. We expect an S.S. man to be a "moral monster" just as we expect the "victim to be good and innocent," so when students read about what the victim does to survive (see my notes on Never Fall Down), their preconceived notions/stereotypes interrupt "authentic, analytic responses." Farnham writes: "We honor victims more easilyif they are recognizably more innocent like...Martin Luther King, whereas we tend to say that victims whose qualities violate our own sense of morality deserve what they got" (63). If we can select or lead students to inquiry about the "ordinary" victims -- ones who do not fit the hero or martyr stock character -- and if we can create a framework of ideas for students to critically engage -- we can trouble this binary. Farnham asks, "Do victims have to be innocent to make their death significant to us?"
This might be a good place to refer back to Walter Mignolo's work in The Darker Side of Western Modernity (see my notes on that, too). He talks about the rhetoric of Western modernity based on the logic of coloniality. Where this is relevant is that we -- students and teachers linked with Western rhetoric and coloniality -- come to bear witness as readers/listeners with the values of our Western culture. Farnham, however, says that because the Nazi's, when speaking about Holocaust literature, "disavowed the Western tradition of the dignity of the individual person" that what was left was a "moral vacuum, a world without traditional ethical values, and it was within this world that the victims tried to survive, some successfully by abandoning their former ethical values in a world without culture, a world in which traditional ethical values, through no fault of the victims, were absent" (64). While I certainly agree that the camps were a moral vacuum, I am not convinced that Hitler was, in fact, not enacting Western ideology and working within the logic of coloniality. There is little in Western culture that values an individual or sees every human being worthy of dignity. Western ideology values the "1%" or what Mignolo identified as all but the 80% of the population living "without."
The "lamb-like" victims that Farnham argues students want to see when they read about atrocities is evidence of Western rhetoric, which has indoctrinated students with notions of America as good, with victims as innocent, with soldiers and guerrillas as bad; thus, when students encounter a victim surviving at the cost of stealing food from a fellow victim or digging a mass grave for another victim or even invoking a punishment upon fellow man for the sake of survival, students/readers/listeners face a crisis because for this victim to fit into the binary, the student must decide the victim was at fault somehow. And how can we say the victim can be held to the same moral standard when imprisoned in this moral vacuum? So the framework of pedagogy needs to provide support for making sense of why students experience this crisis, why they want to turn way or blame rather than reconstruct notions of good and evil (the Gorgon effect from Clendinen). Farnham writes, " We are in no position to judge the actions of people forced to live without the support of their culture and its values" (64). Here, he is talking about the Judeo-Christian culture whereby to judge a deed morally is to interpret it without context -- and to an extent that is what our students lean toward. How does the logic of death -- certain and irrefutable -- fit with the cultural logic of ethical behavior?
In the "ethical behavior" section, Farnham talks about the importance of education to sensitize its students to ethical matters of our culture. The ethics that I see in the schools are those of capitalism and free market -- those who work hard get ahead; those who prepare for and participate in the market deserve to be successful; those who are not rich are not rich because they didn't work hard; competition breeds greatness not fairness; and equality is based on opportunity not on the conditions of that opportunity. What Farnham argues in this section is that for a deed to be moral, it need not conform to external principles of authority ( I think he means Judeo-Christian) but that because it "contributes to another person's freedom can make that deed moral in itself (but isn't that a principle?_). I guess the idea here is to bring in notions of obedience and conformity as not necessarily being moral but that we are free to choose or to "determine the moral nature of our deeds" (65), which requires a critical consciousness (thinking of Freire here).
Now we can think about how ethics reflect culture. I want to make a comparison here that might not work. In literature of atrocity, we can see the logic of ethics in a moral vacuum -- one of survival that is outside of the culture in which the victim lived or was raised. Behavior may change when people lose the support of their habitual culture. Farnham writes, "...the Holocaust was a rupture in Western culture and thus in Western values." I know what he means here, in the sense that Western culture valued human dignity. However, and here is my comparison, can we begin to think how Western culture and Western values do not value human dignity? Can we talk about how what we see in literature of atrocity and testimony of victims is a consequence of Western rhetoric and the logic of coloniality taken to its logical outcome? The "normal" environment from which the victims are taken might actually be a facade of sorts, that hegemonic forces constructed and allowed until....? So the argument from Farnham that people can still act freely and ethically without the support of authority holds -- yes, we can and should provide this framework for critical engagement. Mignolo would call this delinking, I think. But, I suggest that teaching about atrocities provides a framework for students to see the rhetoric that has constructed their culture. (I am now imagining if readers in third world countries would experience the same crisis reading literature of atrocity as Western readers. Would they be appalled or think the victims are behaving amorally as they struggle to survive? In McCormick's rendering of Arn Chorn-Pond's experience suriving the "killing fields," did she impose her rhetorically shaped Western values in the theme about survival's guilt?)
As Farnham suggests that what is latent in the Western tradition in literature and thus student expectations is "the assumption that heroes in books should be models of good behavior," and what "good behavior" means is also part of that tradition, a tradition that schools cultivate, a tradition that, as I have been arguing, is about conforming to Western rhetoric and the logic of coloniality -- capitalism rather than social democracy.
- · An education system which does not try to sensistize its students to ethical matters fails
- · What materials do you use to sensitize students to ethical matters?
- · Ethical values are one of the voices with which culture speaks to use
- · Examples of individuals and groups whose moral behavior disintegrated when they were deprived of the support of culture
- · What happens when we lose touch with the morals our culture teachers and conditions us to observe
- · Not every deed to be moral must be performed in obedience to some external principle of authority; performing a deed because it contributres to another person’s freedom can make that deed moral in itself
- · Existential approach to ethics – a deed is good because it contributes to another person’s freedom to be, not because it conforms to some external principle of authority, our freedom being that which defines us as human
- · Simone de Beauvoir in the Ethics of Ambiguity – choice and the responsibility which dervies from free choice;
- · Michael Siegel, We want to encourage the growth of citizens who can say no to authority when they judge the response necessary
- · Ethical behavior is not necessarily obedient behavior, not merely conformity to an external set of values – when we practice our freedom, we make ourselves more available to error than if we were to obey a fixed set of values which brook no ambiguity
- · While culture may support us in acting ethically, we are free at all times under all conditions to determine the moral nature of our deeds, as long as we are not deprived of consciousness and self-awareness
- · Surveys the literary texts where ethically ambiguous occurrences reveal ethical choices without cultural support –
