Thursday, February 24, 2022
7:10 a.m. Setting switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. Yesterday you indicated we would move to group karma, and I am anxious to have your views on it. I have heard of the concept for many years, but I have never known what to make of it, in two ways. A) I may not understand what people are meaning by it, and B) what I do think I understand, I can’t make sense of.
Let us peel off one layer of misunderstanding right away. Tell your second-hand story you told Jane Coleman.
Larry Lorence in his old age was an instructor at TMI who ran a morning exercise class, but in his youth in Czechoslovakia, he had been an athlete training for the 1940 Olympics [which did not take place, of course, due to the outbreak of World War II in 1939]. After the Germans invaded in 1938, he and his father were put into a concentration camp. He survived, and remembered one specific conversation or some act of kindness (I can’t remember which, though hopefully I wrote it down when Larry told me the story) from one of the guards.
After the war, and after the communists took over the country in 1948, Larry was working as a young reporter. He saw or heard an official pronouncement that all Germans were guilty of German crimes; that there was no such thing as an innocent German. He remembered the guard and that incident, and wrote up an opinion piece contradicting what he had just heard or read. But when his editor read Larry’s piece, he called him to the rim and tore it up in his face, saying that he was doing that for Larry’s sake; that is, because it wouldn’t be safe for Larry to express that opinion in the climate of the day.
And this tells you what?
That Larry was right, that you can’t tar everybody with one brush. That certain opinions have their moment when they are taken as undeniable truths, you being the bad guy if you contradict them. That – as you yourselves always say – you can’t really judge another’s life, not even necessarily their actions, as for instance that editor.
So you don’t condone the crimes committed by the Germans?
Of course not, and I recognize a cheap rhetorical trick when I see it, especially when it is my pen writing it.
Yes, well. But surely, if not all Germans, surely all Nazis are guilty?
Could we perhaps be a little less obvious, a little less heavy-handed, this morning?
You think it’s heavy handed. Has it occurred to you that for 70 years and more, this is exactly what people have been told , to the point of accepting it as obvious truth? All Nazis are bad, end of discussion.
The right-wing types pretty nearly turn it on its head and say the Nazis were right.
Should it surprise you that a one-dimensional portrait would call forth a counter-portrait, equally one-dimensional, and energized by the force of so long a suppression of the rest of the story?
It doesn’t surprise me, but it is true I don’t seem to have much success in telling people that liberal and conservative extremism generate their opposite and invigorate it. It sometimes seems that people prefer to look at the 3D world as if it were a huge football game, or series of games, in each of which we choose “our” side and excoriate the other side.
That same process happens when considering past events, and when fearing future events. Ideologies think they are founded in hope and ideals; emotionally they are founded in fear.
So, suppose you had to look at Nazis and Communists not as heroes or villains (depending upon your starting-point, your ideals) but as human attempts to steer “history” through group effort. Suppose you see them from their own eyes, rather than the eyes of their opponents, and see them from what they thought they were doing, and even wanted to do, rather than what they wound up doing? Wouldn’t that produce a truer portrait, because more nuanced? And suppose you then differentiated (conceptually, because how easy is it to see into the heart of another?) good men and women from bad? Suppose you recognized the good accomplishments and the bad equally? By “equally” we don’t mean, pretend that they balance out; we mean, look at the evidence with balanced view, being equally willing to see what you do and don’t prefer to see.
If you find that difficult to do – perhaps you are hazy about the actual history – try something that is both easier and harder, because closer to home both geographically and temporally. Apply your judgment to your own country’s actions, domestic and foreign, over whatever span of time you prefer. No honest view will see it as all bad or all good, any more than an honest view would see a given human life – one’s own, we mean – as all good or all bad. For one thing, there is the scale to be considered, the standards by which you deem a thing good or bad. If it were a fixed scale that everyone could agree on, it would be one thing, but it is not so and never could be so. One man’s good is another man’s evil. That is one example of the bitter fruit that grew on the Tree of Perceiving Things as Good and Evil.
You are thinking we have forgotten about group karma. Not at all. It is necessary to pose these questions before one’s prejudices can be exposed.
Take Germany as an example of an individual at a different level, as we were suggesting yesterday. The humans who inhabit the land of today are nearly all too old to have taken part in Nazi activities. 2022 minus 1945 equals 77 years. Add ten years for the age of innocence, and it means that no one younger than their mid-eighties could possibly have been caught up in Nazi activities even at its youngest manifestation, the Hitler Youth. So clearly on an individual 3D human level, there can be no responsibility due to their own actions. (Let us leave aside the question of one’s responsibility for the actions of one’s ancestors. It is an abstract question conducted mostly emotionally; very little logically.)
Can the individual that is known as Germany have responsibility for its prior actions? Can it not? It is a complicated question, if you look at it carefully, and as it happens (we smile) it is almost uniquely a good and instructive example, because it was divided physically and ideologically as the war ended.
Ah, I see what you are driving at. As one example, East Germany never paid reparations to the state of Israel for what Germany had done to its Jews, because in the East German view – the view of the Communists – it and they had had no responsibility for actions that they not endorsed and indeed had opposed. The East Germans regarded West Germany as the lineal and ideological successor to the Third Reich; they themselves were innocent of its crimes.
And your judgment of that opinion?
I’m more interested in your judgment.
Indulge us. The process of thinking-out your response will show you gaps in your logic, and unsuspected discontinuities in your thought.
Well, the East Germans had a point, though I never realized it till I read Markus Wolf’s book. [Man Without a Face. Wolf became the number two man in East Germany’s Stasi, after a childhood spent fighting the Nazis.]
End of subject?
Of course not, but I’m mobilizing my thoughts on the subject. It seems to me that the East Germans, in blaming West Germany for Nazi Germany’s crimes, are letting themselves off too easily and are at the same time scapegoating the West.
And here you approach our point.
Oh, I get it, or get part of it, anyway. What is important is not what our parents did, but what attitudes we inherited from them and carry on knowingly or unknowingly.
Yes, and that, you see, is group karma. Not some unpaid parking ticked, nor even some long-delayed trial heretofore evaded, but the living consequences of past moments of time. It is not what someone did but what you are, which means how you think, no less than what you do. It means how you see, to some extent.
I get tired of saying it, though it is always said with a sense of satisfaction, but – obvious, once you say it.
There’s much more to be said, but there’s your hour. Next time we can look a little closer at a country’s karma as opposed to the inhabitants past present and future. That is, treating a country as a unit, humans are the equivalent of – oh, ideas, or even perhaps neurons. What of karma on the country level from the point of view of the country itself? Not something individuals could easily imagine, but with our help, we’ll see.
Today’s theme?
Simply, “Group karma,” we’d say.
I agree. Okay, our thanks, and see you next time.