David B. and Group:
David, Your post about “good revolutionaries” (Jesus, Ghandi, John Brown,
etc.) was persuasive. The question boils down to, “How do you tell the good
guys from the bad?” You wrote:
DAVID B:
He (Pirsig) says that the MOQ can do something that SOM couldn’t; tell the
difference between criminals and revolutionaries.
PLATT:
We saw in the varied answers to Roger’s moral dilemmas that the group’s
application of the MoQ to “real life” moral issues was uneven, to put it kindly.
(-: Now the challenge is to see if the MoQ can do better in identifying good
revolutionaries from bad.
The following editorial appeared recently in the N.Y. Post. My question is,
“What principles of the MoQ would you use to show that Fred Leuchter, Jr. is
one of the bad guys?” My point in asking is that if the MoQ (or other method)
cannot determine in advance the good contrarians from the bad, my paranoia
about self-appointed champions of humanity may be justified.
NYPOST
The Holocaust, in which the most culturally and technologically advanced
nation on earth systematically murdered a people in the name of an Idea, is
the signal event of the 20th century. Stalin and Mao practiced variations on
the theme.
How could such a thing happen? The peculiar case of a little man from
Malden, Mass., named Fred Leuchter Jr. goes a long way toward explaining
it.
Leuchter is the title character of “Mr. Death,” another riveting nonfiction
portrait of an eccentric personality by the great filmmaker Errol Morris.
Morris’ film is a tale of how a garrulous mild-mannered Everyman gave his
mind over to pure evil. It offers nothing less than a moral history of mankind
in the 20th century. Leuchter, the son of a state prison official, developed
early on an obsession with death – specifically, prison executions. As an
adult, the affable egghead taught himself enough engineering to become a
much-sought-after expert on electric chairs, gas chambers and the like.
In 1987, the neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel was put on trial in Canada for denying the
Holocaust, a crime there. He commissioned Leuchter to travel to Auschwitz
to evaluate the ruins of the crematoria there. The result was “The Leuchter
Report,” which concluded that no one could have been gassed at Auschwitz.
The report was thrown out of court, but has had a galvanizing effect on the
Holocaust-denial movement.
“Mr. Death” makes it crystal clear that Leuchter’s analysis is hopelessly
faulty, and that Holocaust denial is utter nonsense. And yet, Leuchter,
consumed by vanity and pride, still believes he is correct.
Morris, who is Jewish, doesn’t believe Leuchter is a Jew-hater. Leuchter
sees himself as a Galileo figure, a courageous martyr for free speech and
scientific inquiry.
Here’s the rub: He thinks he’s a hero.
This is what makes Leuchter so fascinating, and disturbing – and an unlikely
metaphor for us all in this century in which much evil has been committed
and defended by PEOPLE WHO BELIEVED THEY WERE DOING GOOD.
(Emphasis added.)
Is amiable Fred Leuchter guilty of thoughtlessness, of leading an
unexamined life?
Yes, but Morris says this blindness comes not from neglecting to think; it
comes from turning his mind’s eye away from reality to the “truth” one would
prefer to see.
“That’s more disturbing, construing the world to suit your own purposes,
despite evidence to the contrary,“ he says.
Morris wants audiences to come away from the film wondering about
themselves. How do we know we’re not like good old Fred, who looks as
about as dangerous as Don Knotts?
We celebrate freedom of expression, for example, as a virtue. But will our
descendants consider us criminally insane for creating a culture where lurid
sex and extreme violence were mainstays of popular entertainment?
What about abortion, of the killing of 1.6 million unborn American children
annually. Will people a hundred years from now think of us as we do about
ordinary Germans of the Nazi era: as willing accomplices to mass murder?
This next hundred years will tell much. The tragic rise and fall of Fred
Leuchter is a timely warning that the unreflective egotism and hysterical
optimism of modern man is a blind trap leading to what Robert Conquest, the
great historian of Soviet terror, calls “mindslaughter.”
The rest follows.
PLATT:
I’ve tried to apply MoQ principles to the Fred Leuchter case without much
success, due no doubt to my inability to see the light. I hope David B. or
anyone else who cares to tackle the problem can set me aright.
If there are many truths, why isn’t Leuchter’s as good as anyone’s?
Was the Canadian court, representing social values, acting morally when it
threw out his report?
How do MoQ principles prevent one from “turning his mind’s eye away from
reality to the “truth” one would prefer to see?”
Is the author correct in calling Leuchter a “metaphor for us all in this century
in which much evil has been committed and defended by people who
believed they were doing good?”
Platt
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