It is my hope that this essay will be a useful contribution to the discourse surrounding the events in Charlottesville. There already exist far greater accounts and analyses of the actual events than I could ever provide. Rather, I discuss the classification of human beings, and the risk it poses to our ability to respond properly to the events in Charlottesville. For the purposes of this essay, “good” is defined as “conducive to human life and welfare (in terms of material prosperity)” and “bad” is defined as the opposite of good, “detrimental to human life and welfare (in terms of material prosperity).” Additionally, “Nazism,” which is primarily an economic platform, will be used in the vernacular sense, “anti-Semitic plus....”
There is a difference between bigotry and a bigot. One is an attitude, one is a person. There is a difference between racism and a racist. One is a belief, one is a person. There is a difference between Nazism and a Nazi. One is an ideology, one is a person. These distinctions are important because condemning Nazis, saying that they have no place in your city or in our country, is not the same thing as condemning Nazism. And such a pattern of condemnation, I believe, is a grievous error.
It seems to me that all of the accusations of being Nazis and the condemnations of Nazis that have followed the events in Charlottesville carry an implied assumption: that being a Nazi is bad. This is a proposition that I can readily agree with. But, listen closer to people’s comments, and you’ll begin to hear something a little different: that being a Nazi makes someone a bad person. This proposition I have a problem with. Is being a Nazi enough to qualify someone as a bad person? What is the criteria for classifying someone as a bad person, as opposed to just someone who has done bad things?
You see, being a Nazi is just one feature of a person. He may also be a devoted family-man, a successful businessman, a generous tipper, a regular church-goer, a willing tax-payer. The bold proclamations that such individuals should have no part in our society seem infantile when one realizes that these individuals are, in fact, part of our society. Are these contributions enough to outweigh their racist views and actions? I don’t know. But I don’t think we can dismiss them outright.
Indeed, since it’s impossible to weigh the good and bad actions of an individual in any objective sense of the word, one may question the propriety of applying such labels to as complex a creature as a human being. Murder, the intentional killing of a human being with malice aforethought, is, and must always be, a bad thing. Socialism, the elimination of private ownership of the means of production, is, and must always be, a bad thing. Human beings, in contrast, may be bad sometimes and good at other times. Should we apply such a damning label to an individual when the applicability of the label could be so ephemeral?
Of course, the same problem arises when considering any label commonly applied to living human beings, who always retain the capacity to change. We may properly label someone a Nazi today, but that individual may see the light and become a libertarian tomorrow. So, if we are to use any labels, we must do so cognizant of their temporary status. Labels are useful and important in the course of human activity, and it is not suggested that their use as applied to human beings be abandoned merely because of their chance of being temporary. Therefore, since the label “bad” is not used in a sense any more permanent than any other label, it does not seem improper to label someone who intentionally and repeatedly does bad things as a bad person. It remains unanswered whether holding Nazi views, or even shouting racial slurs while holding a tiki torch and throwing rocks at counter-protesters, is enough to earn that label.
So we’ve determined that it is appropriate to call someone a bad person under certain circumstances, and we’ve allowed that being a Nazi may be such a circumstance. But now I’d like to consider the wisdom of doing so. Because, from what I’ve observed in public discourse, such a practice has the tendency of being counterproductive, as it misdirects people’s focus away from the real problems, the definitionally bad things that taint the human beings they work through. In this age of underdeveloped critical thinking skills, lack of precision can cause confusion, and this confusion can be costly.
One of the clearest examples of this confusion is the comparison between President Trump and Hitler. “Trump is ‘literally’ Hitler,” we hear. The implication, of course, is that Trump is a very bad person, just like Hitler was a very bad person. But this is a confused line of thinking, because there’s nothing bad about being Hitler. You see, Hitler wasn’t a bad person because he was Hitler; he was a bad person because he did many bad things. Things that Trump has not done. My point is that this comparison represents the public’s identification of Hitler, a complex human being, as synonymous with evil. But, again, being Hitler is not the crime that Hitler was guilty of; he was guilty of invading neighboring nations and orchestrating a Jewish genocide. It’s the actions of the individual that are bad, punishable, condemnable. Not the identity of the person. It’s not people who are bad; it’s the things they believe and the things that they do. We call people bad when they act badly.
Now, none of us are likely to forget Hitler’s crimes. But we are almost certain to not exercise the necessary care to specifically condemn Hitler for being a genocidal dictator rather than generally condemn Hitler as a bad person. And as slight as it might be, risk of confusion exists when we fail to exercise such care.
Why does specificity matter? Why should we make painstakingly clear that murderers are punished for killing someone, rather than because of who they are? Why should we distinguish between being a Nazi and being a bad person? Because otherwise we misidentify the enemy, and we risk focusing our efforts on the wrong solutions. For example, our goal as a society should not be to punish criminals, but to reduce crime. The crime is the bad thing, the thing we need to fight. But if we lose focus of this goal, and start viewing punishment as the end rather than the means, we run the risk of instituting a solution that doesn’t actually address our real problem, of taking a step that doesn’t actually bring us any closer to our real goal. A cursory overview of our criminal justice system might suggest that we have, in fact, misplaced some of our focus.
A similar loss of focus explains the Nazi problem. Our real enemy is not the adherents of Nazism, but Nazism itself. I have heard a number of commentators say something like “Hey, Nazis! We already beat you, back in World War II. You’ve already lost!” Sometimes this is said with condescension, sometimes with confusion. But the truth is, we only defeated a specific group of Nazis. Nazism was condemned, but not truly engaged, let alone defeated. The Nazi problem calls for an intellectual fight. Only good ideas can defeat bad ideas. World War II failed to eradicate the Nazis because we tried to fight an ideology with force, not reason.
We seem to be making the same mistake today. The public, along with their elected representatives, seem to be laboring under the delusion that it is enough to label people as Nazis and to publically condemn them. If this isn’t enough to make them go away, then perhaps it may be necessary to resort to police action. But almost no one has taken the time or care to identify the real enemy as Nazism, the ideology, and offer a refutation of it. This leaves it alive and virulent enough to continue collecting recruits, free to rear its ugly head at some later date in yet another attempt to destroy the liberal social order.
Some people are Nazis, and they should be labelled as such. And it may be that these Nazis are, in fact, bad people, although I continue to question whether being the one is sufficient to make someone the other. But even if we admit that Nazis are bad people, we must remember that they are bad people because they are Nazis, and that our eternal struggle against bad things is more accurately directed at the Nazism than at the Nazis. We should, therefore, take great care in forming our response to events like those in Charlottesville.
Human beings are complex creatures. Not one of us is either all good or all bad, and we are all capable of change. For that reason, it is better to focus not on fighting bad people, but on fighting the bad parts of each flawed human being. We should not ostracize the Nazis among us as irredeemably bad people. We should, instead, offer them a better vision to replace the hate in their hearts, a vision of a peaceful and prosperous future that we can build together.
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