A choice of weapons
Hallie, Philip P.
A CHOICE OF WEAPONS THE LIMITS OF VIOLENCE, THE MYSTERY OF MERCY PHILIP P. HALLIE What follows is a sort of spiritual autobiography. It is a story about a particular person, myself, who has...
...It is a story about a particular person, myself, who has spent more than three decades trying to understand good and evil, not in terms of abstract words, but in terms of facts...
...I had an Uncle Louie (sometimes I think that everybody in Chicago had an Uncle Louie) and when he learned about what happened to me, he gave me a brief, terrifying course in street-fighting...
...In novels, in films, even in newspapers strong-arm tactics are usually the only means of rescuing somebody from harm...
...The word "rescue" carries with it the high drama of great power saving the innocent...
...Many of them, especially the farmers, could not afford rubber or leather shoes...
...We did not fight the war to rescue them-in fact President Roosevelt was careful not to tie the invasion of Europe into the rescue of Hitler's Jewish and other victims...
...She looked at me almost in anger, and she said, "No, no, Philip...
...Her contribution came from the habit of being "toujours prete a servir," always ready to help...
...Mind you, I cannot and I shall not shake off my deep conviction that there is a place for sheer force in this violent world of ours...
...In any case, it was no easy matter to rescue those children (and other refugees) during four long years of betrayal, danger, and murder...
...In such a world as ours if love can conquer all, it is only when we give the word "love" a very long and very dubious interpretation...
...There has to be forcible rescue in this world of ours...
...I am convinced that this is the basic thing that I have learned from the story of Le Chambon...
...But when I went to France and met the leaders of the village who were still alive-this was in 1977-I began to understand it, and with that understanding a second notion of rescue started becoming clearer and clearer to me...
...The whole business of giving and taking was like breathing out and breathing in, or like passing an apple from one's right hand to one's left hand...
...As Natalia Ginzburg urges us, we must teach our young, and even our friends and our very selves, the heart-wisdom of compassion and generosity, the mysterious, life-giving virtues...
...Do you want to reduce your cholesterol...
...He was holding me by my shoulders, and he was snapping my head down against the concrete sidewalk near my tenement house...
...He was torn...
...Physical torture happens when somebody or some group has enough power to inflict it...
...They'll learn how to protect their hides if and when they learn to keep their eyes open and their wits about them...
...The penny virtues are common-sensical, reasonable, not mysterious...
...We invaded Europe for other reasons than rescue, but only by the sheer force of arms did we stop the tortures and murders that were happening across Central Europe...
...This kind of joy is what I have been searching for in my life, a joy that is by no means empty of meaning...
...I learned that it also can be a matter of peaceful, undramatic hospitality...
...Such motivations are, for example, played upon by the advertisements we are swimming in these days...
...Magda Trocme would say, "Eh bien, naturellement, entrez, entrez...
...We all are more or less aware that we are living in a public world where kindness is a veneer and the power of self-interest is the solid stuff beneath the veneer...
...He still cared for me, but I had violated the household code of forbearance and tenderness for the animals...
...I shall never regret fighting against Hitler's Germany...
...One of them would ask for help, or they would stand there in silent terror...
...As a philosopher and as a person I am not much concerned with finding "the meaning of life...
...I remember all too clearly the big blond boy who sat upon my belly in the slums of Chicago when I was about ten years old...
...Why do we spend so much time drumming penny wisdom into the heads of our children, virtues like thrift and caution...
...Essentially, it consists in striking first, with one unanswerable blow...
...You do not understand...
...The world is not sentimental...
...Somewhere William James has written that habit is the flywheel of civilization...
...After a few moments he sought out the cat and petted her, still weeping a little...
...It makes it look as if no courage, no risk, no loss is necessary in order to be hospitable...
...I have given Magda things, especially since the success of my book on the village, and at first I was surprised and even a bit confused at her taking these gifts for granted...
...but I have learned that for her, and for the villagers like her, taking was as automatic, as much a matter of course, as giving...
...There is a Danish saying: "If there's room in the heart there's room in the house...
...Of course, teaching children such things is far from easy...
...In his sermons and by personal example he taught his fellow villagers to save the refugees not only out of love for the wretched of the earth, but also out of love for the Germans...
...Now there are seven cats and a dog in Daniel's home, and he has spent all the three years of his life living close to the floor, at almost eye-level, with these animals...
...The habit of service, the habit of hospitality, this is what made the mountain village of Le Chambon work for four bitter, dangerous years...
...The story I know best, the story I know in greatest detail, is my story...
...This is a mystery to me, as it was to Schopenhauer, who founded his rather grim but beautiful ethics upon it...
...Still, if this is the only kind of rescue there is, if sheer force is all there is to helping others, then I wonder whether life is worth living...
...Perhaps it is a mystery because we have been habituated in a thousand ways to be motivated only by our own miseries, needs, desires...
...If the Allies had not smashed the German armed forces and had not broken the German will to fight, the camps might still be functioning, and children might still be having parts of their bodies cut out without anesthesia...
...What all of this means to me is that habituation is a vital part of moral courage, just as habituation is a vital part of military courage...
...It is automatic...
...She would open the door, and there would be a family of refugees, or a pair of children...
...And I have found that the way you muster details best is not in triumphant systems or proofs, but in stories, narratives about the actions, passions, and thoughts of particular people in particular times and places...
...Maybe he stopped when my eyes started to glaze, or when he saw the blood from the back of my head on the pavement, but he stopped of his own accord, gave me one slap on the face, and took off...
...To my mind the most perfect decency in the world is not dramatic, and it is not supernatural...
...Poppie...
...He had rescued me from them by empowering me...
...Do you want the highest tax-free yield for your investment...
...Only what protects our own skins motivates us...
...For more than ten years now I have known Magda Trocme, the widow of the spiritual leader of the village of Le Chambon, and the more time I have spent with her the clearer it has become to me that for her giving is as natural, and as unnoticed, as breathing is to a person in good health...
...Well, I had just hugged my grandchild for the first time that morning, when I turned and saw one of the cats put her foot, of all things, right into my carefully prepared cereal...
...The bowl was on the kitchen table...
...He calls me "Poppie," and we are good playfellows, and so he loves me...
...For me the crown of ethics is aesthetics...
...Goodness dwells in details, and so does evil, or they dwell nowhere for me...
...For me the payoff of living is joy, the richest, and the most enduring joy...
...A few weeks ago I was in a kitchen with my grandson, Daniel...
...In this account I do not use the old words like "good" and "evil" very much, because they tempt people to talk abstractly instead of particularly...
...To learn all this was one of the most surprising experiences of my life...
...Pastor Andre Trocme gave inspiring sermons in his ugly gray Temple near the Lignon River, and he turned the village into a rescue-machine driven by a desire to imitate Jesus Christ's love for all mankind...
...There was a time when I thought that rescue meant only one thing: forcible recovery, the use of force to save somebody...
...You damned Jews...
...And they rescued them without using military power...
...Nature is a realm where the predator's food is the prey's death, and so-called civilizations are full of hunger, rage, and indifference...
...But he was torn by what he had just witnessed...
...If I have a motto it is William Carlos Williams's "No ideas but in things...
...During World War II, I was a combat soldier in a vast armed group that rescued many of Germany's victims by defeating Germany...
...You killed Jesus...
...But the villagers of Le Chambon had to have immense courage, surrounded as they were by the violent auxiliary troops of German occupiers and living as they did amongst French collaborators with the Germans...
...I learned that rescue is not only a matter of troops and brute force...
...The second element in the rescue was habit, habituation, education...
...When we see or hear such things we all know that under this thin veneer of their being kind enough to help us lose weight or get money the advertisers are self-serving...
...Yes, but the saying makes it look a bit too easy...
...And they were poor people...
...Perhaps this way of thinking comes to a large extent from our upbringing...
...A dozen Le Chambons would not have stopped or even slowed down the concentration camps of Central Europe...
...You killed Jesus...
...For a while I could not believe the story, because it went against all of my experience and all of my research...
...Her husband the pastor would take care of that angle...
...She and her fellow Chambonnais were not self-conscious do-gooders...
...If the mystery of being motivated by the feelings inside somebody else's skin becomes part and parcel of their lives, becomes a casual "Naturally, come in, come in," then there may be more Le Chambons than there are now...
...I do not know it perfectly or assuredly, because I have forgotten much of it, and because in the process of telling it I may be fooling myself, even inventing things, for all I know...
...He taught them to keep the Germans from sinning before God...
...I had thought of rescue as dramatic, like my striking back at the blond boys in Chicago, or like the Allies conquering Germany...
...Without thinking-except perhaps a fleeting thought about where the cat's foot had been recently-I seized the cat, picked her up off the table, and threw her down on the kitchen floor...
...Such a search is too cognitive, too puritanical, too bloodless for the likes of me...
...They had to carve their shoes out of wood from the many trees in the region...
...They were seldom thoughts about any supernatural demands...
...But I know more details about myself than I know about anyone else, and I just do my best to get the story straight...
...Only the mass killings of the sort that I participated in as a combat artilleryman in the Seventh Army stopped the slaughter of the innocents...
...It will save your hide...
...We must teach these things carefully because they are impractical, sometimes even dangerous...
...And in his house people are very patient with animals...
...After the war I wrote a book on cruelty, and after I wrote that book I started to do research on what I perceived to be the crudest deeds of that whole cruel period: the so-called "medical experiments" on children...
...Do you need to lose weight...
...Magda Trocme would hear a knock on her presbytery door...
...The teachers of heart-virtues need to be virtuous or they are bad teachers...
...The next thing I knew my grandson was pulling on my bathrobe, and looking up at me with confusion in his eyes...
...Here the imbalance of power between vic-timizer and victim was vast...
...And so is taking...
...It is rough and surly...
...It was breakfast time, and I had just filled a bowl with milk and cereal for myself...
...Once, early in my spiritual love affair with Magda Trocme, I let slip a phrase like, "Oh, that was good of you...
...I use words like "rescue" and "cruelty" instead, because these words usually keep us close to the details of living, and they express very well the life-giving nature of decency and the life-throttling nature of indecency...
...I believed-and I still believe-that cruelty happens only when one person or group has more power than another person or group, and when the victimizer uses that power to crush and grind the victim...
...But this "Naturally, come in, come in" business really flabbergasted me...
...He has also watched with great interest how adults treat these animals...
...A couple of decades ago I wrote a book about cruelty that made rescue a matter of sheer power...
...He brought a supernatural dimension into their lives...
...But one day I came across a very brief account of a little village high in the mountains of central France that rescued many refugees from the Germans during their occupation of France...
...Incidentally, the forests in and around Le Chambon helped them to save the children when raids struck the village...
...The tender mercies of the strong are as dependable as the tender mercies of a hungry lion...
...And so he stood there, all two-and-a-half feet of him, pulling hard on my bathrobe, looking up at me, and sobbing, "Poppie...
...She was Magda, and they were Chambonnais...
...On the one hand was an adult German "doctor" in a white coat with the might of Germany behind him, and on the other hand was a little dark child naked on a table that was constructed to carry off her blood...
...In military courage the habit of absolute obedience to superiors is essential...
...Nobody was there to rescue me...
...And they would enter, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for months, even years...
...The first was the spiritual leadership of the village...
...For centuries jurisprudence and black letter law itself have defined "rescue" as the forcible removal of somebody from custody...
...And Andre Trocme's emphasis upon the supernatural, upon following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, was certainly dramatic, though I was never sure I understood it very well...
...The simple fact is that the villagers of the tiny impoverished village of Le Chambon on the Lignon River took about five thousand people (mostly children) into their homes and saved them from torture, despair, and death...
...But when it happens it is clearly happening...
...I became a rather terrifying little monster for my age, and the big blond boys stopped torturing me...
...Mainly you teach the mysterious virtues by example, and your example has to be good and solid...
...But my main point is that it was not physical power, nor physical courage that did it...
...It is a lucid mystery...
...But in the kind of moral courage I saw everywhere in the four-year-long story of Le Chambon the habit was the habit of compassion, the habit of taking the suffering of a stranger as a motive for your action, as if it were your own suffering...
...Buy this, from me...
...In Le Chambon there were at least two things that made that rescue possible...
...And one of the deepest and most enduring joys I have ever known is the joy of learning and telling the story of Le Chambon, just as one of the deepest and most enduring joys of Magda Trocme's life is the joy she now feels in having helped to live that story...
...The hero arrives, or the troops arrive, and they save the victims by making the victimizers bite the dust...
...They were the particular people they were, doing what came naturally to them...
...Poppie...
...Well, we redressed that imbalance: we rescued the remaining children, and we did it by industrial might and by military skill and courage...
...It is so-what-ish...
...They would follow these paths into the same clearings in the same deep woods that helped save the Huguenots before the French Revolution...
...He was chanting, "You damned Jews...
...No, I have not forgotten the feeling of that pebbly Chicago pavement on the back of my head and the blood pouring down the back of my neck, and I have not forgotten how I could walk in peace in that neighborhood only after I learned street fighting...
...And in fact for centuries this has been the meaning of the word...
...The thoughts in Magda's mind were thoughts of tactics...
...well, the habit of being ready to help was the flywheel of the rescue-machine of Le Chambon...
...But the habits are different in the two cases...
...It is habitual...
...The refugees would take the same paths the ancestors of the villagers`the old Huguenots of France-would take when they were hiding from the dragoons of the kings of France...
...What follows is an account of two kinds of goodness that I have encountered in my life-not abstract definitions of goodness, but flesh-and-blood embodiments of it...
Vol. 117 • October 1990 • No. 18
