ArticleThe era since World War II contains few moral certainties. One of the few is that any reasonable person regards Hitler as the embodiment of evil. This is the basic insight of British historian Alec Ryrie in his new book The Age of Hitler. We may not know what goodness is, but we can pick evil a mile away.
Hence the popularity of branding someone a fascist or a Nazi. The second aspect of “Godwin’s Law” is this: once you’ve called someone a Nazi, the argument is over. It’s a failsafe mechanism to shut the whole thing down.
Everyone can play this game. Vladimir Putin says he invaded Ukraine in order to de-Nazify it.
The former Labour mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, once called Hitler a supporter of Zionism. Our own Barnaby Joyce openly speculated whether the Indigenous Voice to Parliament might be analogous to the 1933 Civil Service Act in Germany. Once you’ve associated someone with Hitler—at least in the mind of the person making the argument—it’s game, set, match. That’s why we draw little moustaches on our placards of Dan Andrews or Benjamin Netanyahu. It means the talking can stop.
The problems with this tactic are legion. As recent marches in Australia demonstrate, actual Nazis remain a thing—a horrifying, indisputable thing. Branding anyone and everyone you disagree with as a fascist debases the currency, potentially impeding our ability to discern and dismantle the real ones in our midst.
But there are deeper concerns at play. For one thing, the hasty labelling of our ideological opponents shows our disinclination to think deeply. Caricaturing is easier than conversation. It is far more efficient to navigate life when my debates are with someone who is pure evil. Think of the time you can save. For another, the fact that our fundamental moral convictions have been framed by an experience of war easily leads us to see every discussion as a battle to be won, rather than a puzzle to be solved.
But as Ryrie points out, our eight-decade recourse to Nazism as a singular moral touchstone is beginning to splinter. In its place we have begun to insert other axiomatic evils by which to point our moral compass. Depending on our politics, it might be the evils of whiteness or wokeness, or it may be a contemporary claim of genocide that stirs our public morals. We still set our compass by what we hate. But we lack consensus on where evil resides.
A defining mark of our age, on both the right and the left, is the refusal to apologise for anything. To concede where I have failed would be to open a crack that others will exploit.
There remains an inherent negativity to our modern moral order. What happens to us when we know who we hate more than what we love? This appears to be precisely what we see before us now: “purity spirals,” where past heroes become present villains, and causes end up eating their own in a ceaseless quest for political perfection. Rolling and rotating protests and counter-protests. All of it suffused with a sense of inertia and stagnation; everybody screaming, nobody changing.
The hole in contemporary discourse is a positive vision of goodness. In our various tribes we unite around a shared view of evil. We are better at identifying villains than exemplars. It is one thing to decry toxic masculinity; it’s something far bigger to offer a compelling alternative. Being “not a fascist” isn’t exactly a moral achievement. It’s the bare minimum.
When William Peter Blatty wrote his 1971 novel The Exorcist, he offered it in the hope of affirming the existence of God and the possibility of a happy ending. By the time it was rendered into a classic film, Blatty had convinced us that evil exists, but goodness barely got a look in. The same could be said about our present moral discourse.
In other generations, our moral compass was configured primarily by a positive vision of the good. This, of course, is a space in which religion has traditionally operated. While we have become accustomed to associating religion with war and hate, at their best, faith communities have painted hope-filled pictures of what people are meant to be. At the base level, we need something to aspire to.
Perhaps the imaginative resources our culture needs to move forward are found in the ancient language of repentance and forgiveness.
As Ryrie puts it, what we want is “something worth loving, some good worth pursuing for its own sake, to go along with all the things that we know we have to be against.”
At first blush, this feels a cop-out, an erasure of injustice, a papering over of oppression. But the proper practice of repentance requires a full reckoning with one’s complicity in evil, and a resolve for us all to turn away. So too, forgiveness enables moving forward, but with a full accounting of the cost. Among the many things I might want for my enemy, might one of them be that they would repent? And could it be that I model that for them by going first? A defining mark of our age, on both the right and the left, is the refusal to apologise for anything. To concede where I have failed would be to open a crack that others will exploit. So we present ourselves as perfect, and paint everything else as black. For a time, it makes us feel better. But in the end, it makes everything worse.
Dr Mark Stephens is a New Testament Lecturer at Sydney Missionary & Bible College and a Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity.