Let the Others Help, Said Superman

Mentatrix #14

Trigger warning: Nazi crime, xenophobic threat

Jonathan is sitting in a pub in a small town close to the German-Swiss border. It’s late in the evening, his Michelin-rated restaurant has already closed, and he’s taking some time to breathe. At a table nearby, four loud, drunken Swiss guys are hollering about f..ing foreigners, asylum seekers, social welfare leeches. (Interestingly, Germans perceive the word for foreigner – Ausländer – as highly sensitive, precisely because it’s so often used in such company.)

At some point, Jonathan decides, this is it. He stands up and addresses the four men, asking them to reconsider their behaviour. They turn on him instantly; his skin is darker than Arian, as his father is Iranian. They stretch out their arms and give him Hitler’s heil.

There are other guests sitting in the pub, but they are quiet, although the salute is forbidden by law. In this small town, they most likely know Jonathan quite well, just as they know the four guys, too, for being banned entrance to several pubs over in Basel.

I read this news report last night.

In a peaceful town like mine, which boasts over a hundred nationalities among its barely fifty thousand people, the recent elections have caused a shock by giving the extreme right party a whooping 22% of votes. When did it come to this, and what will it mean? Will there be more and more Jonathans?

At least Jonathan stood up. He later posted on Instagram a vehement no to racism.

What would I have done? (And what would you?)

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In fact, I was on a train last year, packed full because the previous train had been cancelled. An open-space compartment for bikes was crowded with passengers standing like sardines pressed against each other. Most of the sardines were tipsy middle-aged football fans – those guys who want to show the world they still have it even if they’ve gone bald and have a paunch. Loud and hahaha.

I’m sitting (lucky me!).

In front of me, two women, most likely Indian origin, are starting to see how to get to the door for the next stop. One of them says something to the guy standing right against my knees. She has interrupted his hollering. He bends his head to her, what was that? The woman whispers, eyes bent, embarrassed, almost fearful of letting her voice become audible in the general blabber.

You wanna get off? Why don’t you say so? If you can’t speak German right,” he hollers in a strong regional accent.

He budges an inch, with a sardonic smile on his face, feeling comfortably superior.

“Why, you think YOU speak German right?”

This – no, I didn’t say that aloud. Although the words were on the tip of my tongue. But I quickly assessed the situation.

Me sitting, he and all the other pied sardines, standing. At least twenty of them. Alcohol involved. Post-football-match excitement, Saturday evening. The other passengers, quiet, ignoring the hollering. And yes, my own accent is not authentic German. I’d be just a foreigner speaking up for another foreigner. If anything, it might even make it worse for the two women squeezing through to get off, drawing attention to myself and, by association, to them.

I kept quiet, like the other passengers. There was noticeable relief when the merry crowd got off.

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Responsibility and guilt

Keen to learn about the past of this region where I live, and to support a local writer, I read a novel recently about the crimes committed by the Nazis in one of the most infamous sites here in the German southwest: Schloss Grafeneck¹. It was the first place where the Nazi regime tested euthanasia, gas chambers, and mass cremation.

The victims were not Jews at that time, early 1940, but Germans born with some physical or mental disability. They were considered expendable human life, which could serve a “higher” purpose as guinea pigs, and would this way release their families and the society of the burden posed by their care.

Over 10,000 people were killed there in 1940: brought over in buses, put through a summary medical check, stripped of clothes, herded into a gas chamber set up in an old barn, then piled up in ovens.

The novel focuses on a ninety-nine-year-old nun, who, in 1940, as a young woman, had worked at Grafeneck as a clerk. Although the novel itself has no great literary merits, it does pose questions on the theme of individual guilt set against a society, a political regime, and, maybe most interestingly, against the later generations. “I didn’t help kill those people”; “if I hadn’t done the filing, someone else would have”; “when I found out what was going on, it was too late to back off, or they would have killed me, as the operation was top secret,” are some of the nun’s statements. “Who are you to judge me? You would have done the same.”

I’m not writing about guilt here; at least, not about someone else’s. (There’s so much out there already anyway, whether related to Nazi crime, or not.) If anything on guilt, then it’s the premises for absolving ourselves of it that I’m looking into.

What I’m more interested in is our perceived responsibility. This is related to what we see as our role in a particular situation, while guilt is what we feel if we don’t fulfil that role.

The bystander effect

I remembered, reading the book, the so-called bystander effect². If you’re the only witness of an emergency, you are a lot more likely to intervene to help than if there were other witnesses around. It’s also called diffusion of responsibility, acting alongside a fear of evaluation (how will this make me look?), and pluralistic ignorance (if they don’t act, the situation is not an emergency).

The classical experiment was done in the subway, where various situations were tested to examine bystander intervention, such as victim’s race, the perceived urgency of the case (drunk? ill?) and the number of bystanders.

Some studies have focused on the neurological and physiological aspects. Observing someone in danger, it seems, triggers somatic reactions in our brain, which push us to act, by virtue of an evolutionary mechanism.  Experiments in this strand have also shown that such responses get weaker as the group increases in size.

Equally evolutionary is, on the other hand, the self-preservation instinct. On a motivational level, one thesis is that we tend to assign the responsibility for action to the fittest member of the group; this would explain the narrative “my action wouldn’t make a difference anyway, let the other(s) do it.”

Something like, “Let Superman take care of it; he’s got the powers.” Imagine Superman saying: “Let the others help; they’ve got the strength of the crowd.”

Another research angle has proposed that in such situations we weigh costs against rewards for intervening to help. The bystander effect can sometimes be overridden, as a result of the cost-rewards balance.

We would typically evaluate the safety risks to our own person, as I did on that crowded train. Without that risk, the passive stance of the others might not have stopped me from snubbing the presumptuous idiot.

Or we can still take action on our own, although surrounded by passive witnesses, if the reward might be saving someone close to us, or setting an example that might benefit ourselves and our likes, in a hypothetical future.

This could be, ultimately, what pushed Jonathan to act: the vision of himself and other non-Arian-looking people who need to be protected from a generalised threat of xenophobia and racism.

Just as coaches urge us to visualise our victorious self once we have finished the race, the diet, the negotiation.

All of the above refers to situations of immediate danger to an individual. How about when the danger is not directly witnessed, as in the nun’s case in the novel, or is even hypothetical, as in Jonathan’s case? There may not be an instinctive, somatic urge to stand up for principles, as we do for a fellow human suffering under our own eyes; intervention becomes an act of civic courage, responding to a higher-level push to stick with ethics, principles and the view of the world we want to live in.

This may mean that the pressure to act might be an evolutionary stage away, a leap from instinct to abstract thinking, from individual distress to society models.

But the costs-rewards balance will be similar, I suppose.

What does this mean to us?

Mentatrix is not about preaching a course of action, handing out recipes, flooding the page with imperatives. It’s a call to reflect on how we respond to a specific situation. And can we respond better? That’s an individual choice.

The mechanisms behind our decisions to act or not in situations requiring intervention are unconscious for the most part, scientists say.

That’s where Mentatrix comes in pleading: let us become more aware.

First, let’s become aware of the typical narratives that rationalise our dodging the responsibility, so that next time we recognise them and hopefully make a more conscious decision, more aligned with who we want to be.

Beyond the choice of action, there’s often the judgement – judging the others for not having acted. Implicitly considering ourselves morally superior, or outside the scope of guilt. But, going back to the nun in the novel:

Were those who had no jobs in such extermination camps a-priori morally superior? If not, should we judge them for passive participation, too?

Are we morally superior simply because we were not around in those times?

Deeper still, and fuzzier still: do we hold this right-wrong balance simply because the Nazis lost the war? Would we think the same, and feel enraged by those crimes and their perpetrators, if we lived in a society similar to theirs, nowadays? How much of our moral superiority, then, is owed to the collective values, and to subsequent knowledge we gained post-factum? How often do we judge others based on whether they were acclaimed or condemned publicly, or on their fate in history?

Let me be clear: a society needs to assign guilt through the rule of law, in court. That’s how values are set and nurtured. Germany is one of the few countries (personally, I’m not aware of any other) who has faced its past horrors and is continually standing up against a possible revival of xenophobia.

But as I wrote above, Mentatrix is about our own, individual, level of consciousness. Guilt is but the side effect of unfulfilled responsibility. Are we always entitled to assign it?

The real questions I want to leave you with are:

What premises am I using when judging others? Could it be I’m assuming myself superior? Why? What would I have done in their context?

What about me, in a situation that calls for my intervention: do I have any responsibility? If I think I don’t, what makes me think it should be up to others? If I think I do, but I don’t act, how am I justifying it to myself?

And once I’m done questioning: does it change my decision?

I hope the 22% of votes for the extreme right in my town will only trigger an even stronger concerted stance of all the other, un-like-minded people. The bigger the group, in this case, may create the right motivation to act:

We are the fittest to act, and we’re no bystanders.

1. Grafeneck Memorial Centre

2. Some references I checked: Bystander Effect in Psychology, The neural basis of the bystander effect, From Empathy to Apathy: The Bystander Effect Revisited.