Early last year, three friends were exchanging ideas on how to teach and keep in touch with undergraduate students during a pandemic that required most of us to stay at home. They had similar expectations about how people would cooperate in fighting the virus to protect the common good, hoping governments would take the lead in that fight. In early May, one of the friends died unexpectedly and left two of us sharing our sadness.
Our shared expectations regarding governments turned out to be an illusion.
If some people did take risks for the common good, including those who put their own lives in jeopardy while caring for those who became very sick, governments were slow to do the right thing. Even worse, some governments ignored the most relevant facts regarding public health, and the pandemic brought other side effects, including a crisis in democratic forms of government.
We have been attempting to understand one of those effects. As we try to throw light from the past on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the resulting impeachment trial, we should explain how we came to collaborate.
Bill Nichols, an occasional columnist in the Valley News for 10 years, was introduced to Francois Rochat by Stuart Stritzler-Levine, who taught at Bard College, serving as academic dean there for 21 years while fostering several of Bard’s most creative programs. One of the courses Stritzler-Levine most enjoyed teaching explored Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority, which were partly an effort to understand the psychology of the many people who made the Holocaust possible.
Milgram’s famous experiments led to his conclusion that when people merge their personalities with large and powerful institutional structures, they abandon their humanity. “This,” he concluded in Obedience to Authority (1974), “is the fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.”
Enraged by Milgram’s conclusion, Nichols published an essay in 1975, asking why Milgram paid so little attention to the people who resisted authority in his experiments. Stritzler-Levine liked the essay and, many years later, in 2016, found Nichols, who had retired in New Hampshire. In 2017, he invited Nichols to meet Rochat, who teaches at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Rochat was Stritzler-Levine’s guest at Bard, where he presented a paper titled “When Brutalization Fails to Contaminate Common Decency: From Milgram’s Disobedient Subjects to Rescuers During the Holocaust.” He had been studying for years the people who resisted authority and worked to protect potential victims of the Nazis.
After Stritzler-Levine died, on May 1, 2020, Rochat and Nichols continued to exchange ideas about common decency, resistance to authority, courage, heroism and human nature. Recently, Rochat sent Nichols a paper he coauthored with Andre Modigliani and presented in 1999 to the American Psychological Association in Boston, “The Stories of Holocaust Rescuers: A Narrative Analysis.” It offers a way of thinking about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The paper explores the coherence in stories told by people who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust. Masha Gessen’s recent New Yorker column, “The Trial of Donald Trump Must Tell the Full Story of the Capitol Insurrection,” suggests the significance of the stories we tell ourselves and others about an event as important as an attempt to overthrow our government. “At this moment,” Gessen wrote, “we (the people of the United States) are deciding whether we will try to forge a coherent story.”
Those of us who have tried to imagine how Republican senators could bring themselves to oppose a powerful, demagogic leader have told ourselves stories of the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, a military hero whose courage has been questioned only by Donald Trump, or, more recently, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the only Republican willing to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial.
“The Stories of Holocaust Rescuers” suggests an alternative understanding of behavior that now seems to us heroic.
One of the things we know about Holocaust rescuers is they had to resist Nazi propaganda, which recruited citizens to fascism with heroic tales of deeds carried out for the greater glory of “the Fatherland” or “the Volk” or the “master race.” In their accounts of their efforts to help people threatened by the Holocaust, rescuers provided matter-of-fact explanations of taking practical steps that only gradually became illegal and dangerous. They resisted heroic interpretations of their behavior just as they had resisted tales of Nazi heroism.
The stories of the rescuers are instructive. They considered their efforts to protect persecuted people a natural result of their upbringing, assuming all people needed to be mutually protective. Their stories might help us imagine how resistance can grow to the words and thoughts that empowered the Jan. 6 insurrection. The impeachment trial brought together images of people led by their president to see themselves as heroic when they attacked the Capitol, and democracy, on that day, pressing all of us to think about the attack’s meaning. Apart from the Senate’s verdict, could such evidence move citizens at the grassroots enough to influence Republican politicians who have assumed their political future depended primarily on avoiding Donald Trump’s wrath?
It might be up to all of us to build coherent stories from what happened inside the Capitol. Those stories are likely to tell how respected democratic institutions can be rendered fragile, even destroyed, from inside. Maybe they will teach our children to be wary of those who pretend to value democracy while they take unfair advantage of its freedoms.
Taken together, perhaps the stories we begin to tell ourselves about this dangerous time will provide a full and fair enough account of how the attack on the Capitol came to be that it will help us avoid anything like a repetition.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu. Francois Rochat lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. Email him at Francois.Rochat@unifr.ch.