Does Humanity Equate Humaneness?

Does Humanity Equate Humaneness?
by Lisa Woerly

"We do not regard the animals as moral beings. But do you suppose the animals regard us as moral beings? An animal which could speak said: 'Humanity is a prejudice of which we animals at least are free.'"
-- Friedrich Nietzsche; Daybreak

Are human beings inherently "good?" Is it truly in our nature to show kindnesses to one another? To help one another? Or is our genetic structure one of chaos, destruction, cruelty, and selfishness?

I am currently reading Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum, and I had this book with me on my recent flight to San Francisco. Two old women, both probably in their mid to late seventies, boarded the plane with me and we all ended up making our way to the same row. All three of us immediately stole extra pillows from the overhead bins of other seats, and we all pulled enough gourmet cookies out of our bags to feed a third-world country. We were like three peas in a pod.

The two women sitting with me chattered back and forth. They had thick European accents, probably Polish, and the woman sitting directly next to me wore a small but beautiful Star of David around her neck. I suddenly felt guilty for reading a book on Hitler while sitting next to two Jewish women. I quietly hid the book in my briefcase; it felt intrinsically wrong to be reading about this subject in front of these women.

And then something profound presented itself to me. Since I had the isle seat, I passed two coffees over to the women when the drink cart came around. One of the women met me halfway with an arm that was covered in age spots and wrinkled, paper-thin skin. She grasped the paper cup with her bony fingers and that's when I saw it. On the inside of her forearm, an inch or two down from her wrist bone, was a faded green tattoo of numbers. I scanned both forearms of the other woman and she too had a tattoo that poked out from her jacket sleeve.

I was sitting next to Holocaust survivors.

This was an experience that seems fated to have happened to me at this time in my life. My small-town Midwestern life has shielded me from many peoples and cultures. I have not met more than a handful of Jewish people in my lifetime, and my curiosity to know some of the history of Judaism has influenced my obsession with the Holocaust since I was a teenager. I will never comprehend the demonic viciousness that infiltrated the minds and souls of Hitler and his SS. However, I cannot stop myself from trying to arrive at a reason why this happened not just to the Jews but to homosexuals, gypsies, political dissidents, and every other "faction" Hitler considered inferior. My intellect tells me there must be a reason, but my heart isn't so sure that true evil can ever be defined or explained.

Why is Hitler considered more "evil" than other political mass murderers like Stalin? Did Hitler consider his actions "wrong?" Why did Hitler have such psychological power over crowds? Why did American and European big business financially bankroll Hitler in the 1930s? Why were people so willing to let the Final Solution happen and even to actively participate in it?

How do we define humanity? Are some people, like Hitler and his willing henchmen, just born "evil?" Or does it go beyond good and evil? Philosophers have struggled with defining a person's nature and character genesis for over two thousand years, and have yet to arrive at a concise and definitive answer.

If the likes of Socrates and Nietzsche could not do it, I'm not even going to spew forth my feeble attempts to explain the nature of humanity and if there is such a thing as a "moral state." Explaining what makes us humane or inhumane is an infinite source of inadequacies and incomplete explanations. But does humanity equate humaneness? By virtue of being fellow human beings, are we predisposed or even inclined to display empathy to one another?

The idealist in me says yes, we do care about one another and we strive to do what is "right" by one another.

But the pragmatist in me wonders. I see a world filled with people who kill one another over tennis shoes and over skin color. These two Jewish women sitting next to me were victims and ultimately survivors of what is undoubtedly one of the most prolific hate crimes in history. Hatred for that which we do not understand or agree with; hatred that spawns inhumannesss, disassociation, and rage.

The base within everyone's soul seems to easily announce its arrival. We quietly lead our lives working, playing, and loving until a Hitler persona with a salesman smile comes along with his charismatic rhetoric of vileness and suddenly we are swept up in a miasma of evil actions. Are we that weak as individuals that we can be so easily swayed, or are we predisposed to violent tendencies? How can we defend these cruel actions against two innocent Jewish women who were persecuted solely for their religious beliefs? How can the human race lay claim to "higher intelligence" when we treat our fellow brothers and sisters like swine?

Does humanity equate humaneness? I hope Nietzsche was wrong when he surmised that morality was nonexistent and that it was nothing more than a man-made creation to make humanity feel superior. I hope that we are all not deluding ourselves into believing that we are "good" human beings.