Living Humanely Amid Our Inhumanity

I just finished watching the series A Small Light (currently available on Amazon Prime) with my wife and 17-year-old daughter. The three of us are going to the Netherlands in a few days, me for a conference and a bit of sightseeing, and the two of them exclusively for sightseeing during my daughter’s spring break. My wife—who is obsessed with film and literature focused on the Holocaust—insisted on my daughter and me watching it, in part to prepare for some of the places we will visit.

I found the series to be deceptively devastating. It is the story of Miep Gies, who played a central role in attempting to hide Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. If you’re part of the generations of school kids who were assigned Anne’s Diary of a Young Girl, you know there isn’t a happy ending. I knew that going in but found myself devastated nonetheless—in part a testament to the work of the writers, actors, and directors of the series, and in part a testament to the tyranny, cruelty, and tragedy of the storyline.

Watching the series reacquainted me with something I know—or think I know: the capacity that human beings have for cruel, pitiless treatment of one another, sometimes at industrial scale and usually with otherwise decent people participating in the cruelty. Watching the show reminded me not only of the plight of European Jewish people during the 1930s and 1940s but also of other episodes of inhumanity, both before and after.

I was recently in Indonesia for a conference and a tour guide took me and four colleagues past a site in Jakarta where soldiers employed by the Dutch East India Company butchered around ten thousand people of Chinese descent in 1740. That grisly episode returned to my mind when watching the show, as did the two-and-a-half centuries of slavery—as well as its legacy—here in the United States, the genocide in Rwanda, the ongoing plight of women and girls in Afghanistan, and the current situation in Sudan. The list goes on, and sadly I’ve only scratched the surface.

I’m a theologian, so one of my tendencies in the face of such moments in the world’s history is to reflect upon the absurdity of the human condition. How is it possible that we, who bear God’s image, are capable of this kind of barbarism to one another? Of course, I know the answer, and I know that it is wrapped up in the spirals of vice and falsehood and violence and selfishness and rationalization that we human beings have wrapped around ourselves over our thousands of generations, which we capture theologically (but sometimes too antiseptically) with the category of “sin.” But still, for those of us who regard ourselves as basically decent and caring people, it’s hard to track with it all. How can we share a humanity with those who are willing to send children to death camps? Is that in us?

Back when I taught undergrads (I’m now an administrator involved in faculty development), there was a classroom exercise I did with my intro theology students. We would watch a slide show of pictures from 1944 of what the members and auxiliaries of the Auschwitz office corps were doing when they were not on duty. What were they doing? Very normal and even lovely human things: having dinner, playing with their kids, sharing a drink with friends, picking blueberries, going on an excursion to the beach, enjoying their pets, flirting, conversing, singing.

In the course of our discussion, almost inevitably one or more of the students would comment on how the people in the pictures reminded them of themselves—the people who were participating in mass, race-based murder. They reminded them of themselves because the people in the pictures were doing the same sorts of things they enjoy doing, things that are part of everyday life, the good life, the life that we all have good reason to want to live. Somehow it was compartmentalizable because of how it was rationalized through a thoroughgoing dehumanization of a race of people. The justifiable good life was partitioned off from their knowing participation in genocide. Based on the pictures (almost a 1940s-era antecedent of Instagram), the compartmentalization doesn’t appear to have been all that difficult.

So, as I watch A Small Light, in the comfort of my family room, on a 65 inch screen, with my wife and daughter and our yellow lab, and find myself devastated—surprisingly so, since I know this stuff; I’ve watched this sort of thing before; I’ve taught and theologized about it before—what should I think, what should I do? Is there a lesson? If so, what is it?

Part of what makes the story so devastating is, of course, the explicit and implicit cruelty it depicts. Families having to hide for two years because of their race, constantly fearing separation from one another, knowing that arrest means not only separation from one another but shipment to facilities designed to kill with efficiency after extracting slave labor from those destined for death.

Another part of the devastation comes from noticing what was taken from Otto Frank’s family. In a sense, this is the inverse of the lesson my students notice about the Nazi perpetrators who remind them so much of themselves in their enjoyment of everyday life. One of the things taken from the Frank family—and millions of others like them—was the small, everyday possibilities and tasks of life: going to work, running a business, walking down the street in the sunshine and cool air, going to school, falling in love, getting married, having children, growing up and growing old, making mistakes and learning from them. In one episode, Miep talks with Anne in the secret annex of the house about Anne’s future, how someday she will kiss a boy, possibly the wrong boy, but that’s part of the wonder of life.

That mundane yet wonderful possibility is taken from Anne and her family. They pursue a hollow but not joyless approximation of the good of the regular stuff of everyday life in their two years of cramped hiding in their small secret apartment. But it is finally stolen from them in a very specific instance of the limitless possibilities of human cruelty, as it has been or will be taken from so many others, both past, present, and future.

So, what do we do? How can it be right to live everyday life, to enjoy such life, with the knowledge of how it has been withheld from so many others? But it’s possible that is precisely the point. Such routine, everyday realities are life. They are what makes the world go ‘round. They are what the vast majority of human beings do and look forward to every day: the goods and joys and even frustrations and sufferings of family, friends, work, community, worship, food, etc. This is what life is all about before the face of God. Yes, we all have goals, some of them more grandiose than others. But mostly, this is what life is all about—doing things that we have to do, other things that we want to do, things that are routine, things that are difficult, things that are pleasurable, the humdrum of day-in, day-out. It is easy for us—those of us in situations where it is possible to take such things for granted—to forget the glory of the mundane.

Jean Bethke Elshtain spoke about this in 2001, in the context of a conversation about the just war tradition in relation to terrorism. What is it that terrorism aims to disrupt? What is it that is worth fighting to preserve? Her answer: the “basic civil peace,” which is “the simple but profound good that is moms and dads raising their children, men and women going to work, citizens of a great city making their way on streets and subways, ordinary people buying airplane tickets in order to visit the grandkids in California, men and women en route to transact business with colleagues in other cities, the faithful attending their churches, synagogues, and mosques without fear.”

It strikes me that this fits with what some Christian traditions call the “cultural mandate” (rooted in Genesis 1: 26-28). We may sometimes—and with legitimate reason—speak in lofty ways about this “mandate”: bringing forth the latent possibilities of God’s creation, creating amazing new cultural possibilities, harnessing nature for human flourishing, and so forth. Sure, have at it! But it also means bringing forth the everyday, quiet, subtle, easy-to-miss goods of making families, making goods, making friends, making ordinary products, making jokes, making love, making art, and sometimes making fools of ourselves. Business, family, civic life, friendship, religious observance, citizenship, cultural beauty. We are to do all of that and to do it with relish, just like the Frank family wanted to do, because it’s what we’re made for. And we are to do it in a way that not only leaves room but intentionally creates space for others to do the same.

In one of his early books, Nicholas Wolterstorff set the cultural mandate alongside what he termed the “liberation mandate.”¹ As we pursue the cultural mandate, usually in small and ordinary ways, we are also to look for ways to help those who have been denied the quiet joys of everyday life. Often we can do this in the course of our pursuit of the cultural mandate. Miep Gies was an employee of Otto Frank. In the series, while trying to preserve the family, she never stopped also trying to preserve the business Mr. Frank had painstakingly built up. Yet she and her husband, as well as other colleagues, also had to choose to put themselves at great risk to save others as they continued to live their everyday lives in a time of war.

Whether in war or peace or the messy and contested in-between during an age of political and cultural turmoil, we are called to do the same.

1. Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 72.