Liberating the Will of Australia. Geoffrey Burn
the effects of abuse trans-generationally.26
It is particularly tragic that the distorted willing of the perpetrators affects the willing of their victims. In the case of the survivors27 of childhood sexual abuse, where there are age-related disparities of power, status and knowledge, the child’s willing cannot be an operative cause of the abuse, but the fact that survivor’s basic patterns of intentionality (including willing) are distorted strongly suggests that the distortion of willing may be traceable back to the situation of the abuse itself. In abuse, the abuser confuses the victim’s willing, for example, because the relationship with the abuser outweighs the abuse, or the use of rewards, inducements or other benefits, or because the initiation of abuse is seductively incremental. In the first two cases, the willing for the inducements may be confused with willing the abuse, especially so when desire for benefits leads to initiation of abuse, so eliminating the distinction between means and ends. “Childhood sexual abuse abuses the child’s active willing and intentionality, and this is why it can have such long-term traumatic consequences.”28 For incremental abuse, the gradient is so shallow that it obfuscates not only when the relationship became abusive, but also the point at which willing became operative. What seems abusive does not seem to be so different from the step before so, looking back, the victim can be easily convinced that the abuse was willingly accepted from the beginning. Secrecy encloses the abuse as a total context for all the child’s willing, and so no willing in relation to abuse can be free from it.29
Those who have survived sexual abuse as children or who have worked with people who have been sexually abused as children will recognize how the distortion of the will in survivors carries on into later life and affects the ways that people form relationships. This full description is needed in order to be able to see how to best restore the damage that has been done in such an abusive relationship, something that will be returned to below, after considering the second case study.
The first case study has shown the basic dynamics of bound willing. The second case study is the Nazi holocaust of Jewish, Gypsy and other peoples, and so explores the binding of the will of a whole nation. The focus is on the perpetrators rather than the victims. Alistair McFadyen draws heavily on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that modernity was the essential framework for enabling the holocausts to happen.30 The genocide was not driven by ideas, but by pragmatic issues due to the failure of other attempted solutions to the “Jewish problem,” and it was intricately tied up with the country being in a war, where the goal of the country was to fulfill what it saw as its historic destiny. This destiny was related to racist ideas and it built on previous historical developments, such as “the historical relationship between the churches and the Jews; the defeat of Germany in World War I and the conditions of the armistice; the perceived threat of Bolshevism; social Darwinism; the science of eugenics; [and] the rise of rationality and its fantasies of perfection.”31 That is, the Second World War and its eventual holocaust did not come out of a vacuum, but was a continuation and development of the distorted willing of the German nation that was already in place.
This holocaust can be seen as taking one of the ideas of modernity to its extreme end: the triumph of rationality in planning and action, which is threatened whenever irrationality intrudes into and interrupts efficient organization. German society was trying to create the perfect society without problems of emotions and irrationality.32 Science and technology were dominant in all areas of life in order to do this. Anything that got in their way was a problem to be eliminated. Nazi policy towards Jewish and Gypsy peoples and others was designed to eliminate pathogens that they believed threatened a perfectly rational social order based on the purity of race.33
In the Nazi worldview, the Jewish and Gypsy peoples were a nation without a state, so they could not participate in the Darwinian struggle between the races by the normal means of diplomacy and war. Instead they were dispersed amongst the nations, and so they could be presented as peoples involved in international conspiratorial action to undermine and overtake the nations of the world. It was believed that intermarriage with these peoples would dilute the Arian bloodline. Jewishness could not be cultivated out of Jewish people, so it had to be removed by their exclusion. This turned Germans into participants or bystanders in a bureaucratic, administrative process which dealt with the commonly perceived “Jewish question” in a rational, and therefore apparently civilized and, above all, legal manner.34
Initially, the plan was to remove Jewish and Gypsy peoples and others from the German state. The invasion of other countries in the war introduced two further problems: greater numbers of such people were living in the areas controlled by Germany, and they needed to be taken further away. This situation gradually morphed into a further instance of the one of the most shameful things in history, where one group of people seeks to totally remove another group of people from the face of the earth.
McFadyen argues that this was only possible because of a triumph of reason over all other considerations, where all decisions and actions were subjected to the question of whether they were the best way of implementing the goal; the goal itself could not be discussed: “In the Nazi’s Final Solution, we not only encounter the politics of a totalitarian ideology; we also find the totalitarian tendencies of technical-instrumental reason, of rational expertise in establishing and implementing means toward the end set by the political agenda.”35 Implementation therefore becomes “objective”: once the goals are set, only the means of implementing them can be discussed, not the ends. Whether one liked or approved of what was being done was only allowing nonrational, personal and subjective things to intrude. There was thus a shift for evaluation from the moral and political to the instrumental, and the instrumental discourse became totalitarian, redefining ends without the competition of other rationalities; goodness was redefined as meeting the requirements of the efficient functioning of the system.36 The bureaucracy needed to implement this reduced people from subjects to objects and so people disappear. Appeals could only be made as procedural questions concerning the proper application of the rules (e.g., to prove Aryan descent), but the rules could not be questioned.37
There is a question as to how people could be caught up in such a program. McFadyen argues that the logic of the situation was that the distastefulness of the task was seen as a sign not of its being evil but of its necessity in pursuit of the greater good: people would not be asked to do such things unless it was absolutely necessary. Individual wills had to be subjected to the great task. Sensitivity to what was being done was decreased by repeated action. Group loyalty and solidarity was key to the continuing action.38
The “Final Solution” was the act of a society, people continuing to do the tasks that they had done prior to their incorporation into genocide, such as making railway time tables, maintaining tracks and so on. It was hard for individuals to take responsibility because the task was broken down into separate actions which did not allow the workforce to piece it all together. This functional specialization separates the work of one group from other parts of the process and the end product. The meaning of one’s actions is hidden because the meaning is in the interaction and total product of the actions; a single task has no intrinsic meaning, so moral evaluation and responsibility are somehow externalized. Even those directly killing could or would have experienced it in nonpersonal and nonmoral categories: they were just fulfilling orders, which were legally and procedurally correct. The principal moral virtues become loyalty, discipline, obedience, particularly in the face of conflict with one’s own wishes or views: “Bureaucracy’s double feat is the moralization of technology, coupled with the denial of the moral significance of non-technical issues.”39
Perhaps the most insidious part of the whole process is the incorporation of the Jewish people themselves in the project of genocide. The Jewish people were included in the process, such as managing ghettos and selecting people for “transport,” perhaps thinking they could help to alleviate the problem. Within ghettos, the authority of the Jewish council was total, but only within the parameters set by the state. Cooperation was rational. When it became clear that the policy was to kill all Jewish people, then resistance came, even in face of almost certain lethal and total retribution. The Nazis were always careful to give choice in order to give the illusion of some freedom, but whichever choice was taken would lead towards their desired ends. In camps, they went even further and aimed at destroying people’s personhood, encouraging competition for survival.40
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