Excerpts from "Learning from the Germans" (March 8, 2020)

The following excerpts from Learning from the Germans are provided here as potential discussion starters for the March 8, 2020 meeting of the Adult Sunday school class:

• Page 19: How should we live in a world riven with evil? Is the question that has driven philosophy since its beginnings. (If the world were as it should be, thought Schopenhauer, philosophy would have no reason to raise any questions at all.) Since I believe that abstract ideas become most compelling when refracted through particular experience, I have alternated between analysis and anecdote, in the conviction that concrete historical examples will not obscure general moral questions but illuminate them. The goal is to wrestle with questions about how working-off-the-past can prepare the ground for freer futures, and how it can become a process that blocks access to them instead. My aim is to explore how the past should, and should not, be used in thinking about our moral and political futures.

• Page 23: We have a natural impulse to believe that we and our tribe, may make mistakes, but nothing that merits a word like evil. The impulse is just as strong toward evils past as evils present.

• Page 26: If even those raised in the heart of darkness needed time and trouble to see the light, why shouldn’t it take time and trouble to bring Americans—nurtured for years on messages of their own exceptional goodness—to come to terms with homegrown crimes?

• Page 29: James Baldwin said that white Americans share collective guilt for the persecution of black Americans as Germany did for their silence during the Nazi persecution of Jews.

• Page 30: For comparison: Imagine a monument to the Middle Passage or the genocide of Native Americans at the center of the Washington Mall.

• Page 32: Today there’s at least this much consensus: both the Holocaust and slavery and its aftermath were evil. Now what?

        This book is about comparative redemption, not comparative evil.

• Page 35: racist violence occurs most often when black people advance.

• Page 39: Growing up involves sifting through all the things you couldn’t help inheriting and figuring out what you want to claim as your own—and what you have to do to dispose of the rest of it.