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11 THE HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN PROGRESS Ronald Aronson After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims' fate. And these feelings do have an objective side after events that make a mockery of the construction of immanence as endowed with a meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence. Theodor w. Adorno1 After Auschwitz is absorbed as fact, it must be contemplated as meaning. Philosophy, and other disciplines as well, must paint its gray in gray, setting it alongside what we already know and think about human beings, their actions, the life and world they have created. Language, for example, must be rethought in light of both the massive masking and distorting functions it assumed during the Holocaust,2 and its weakness in rendering what happened. Is it no more than a desperate rhetorical flourish to say that poetry is impossible after Auschwitz?3 Furthermore, all disciplines concerned with morality must be rethought in light of both the unexpected human possibilities for evil revealed at Auschwitz and our lack of a moral vocabulary for properly expressing them. The very coldness, system, and deliberateness -the industrial character- of the extermination camps reveal human capacities that will forever banish complacency about the human prospect. Our secularized world is left grasping in vain for words both descriptive and condemnatory, of sufficient charge and resonance to carry the weight of events in the extermination camps. Or rather, we are driven to recover such terms as evil from our obsolescent theological lexicons. But what else can remain of the theologies? Religions must lose all relevance to human life if they fail adequately to confront the 223 Copyrighted Material 224 I PART THREE: ECHOES FROM THE DEATH CAMPS greatest accusation that can be made against any God: that he let millions of innocent children die at the hands of the Nazi executioners. In other words, long after we have chronicled it, Auschwitz will occupy us for years to come in sifting through its implications. It forces recasting after recasting of our pre-Holocaust knowledge, values, intellectual tools, hopes, and conclusions. Above all, I would suggest that it forces us to ask anew what we, human beings, are doing on this planet. What is the meaning of our history? If history can produce the Holocaust, where, if anywhere, is it headed? In this essay I focus on the outlook most directly threatened by the Nazis' "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem." Before 1933 most people in the West believed, in J. B. Bury's famous formulation, that the world was slowly advancing in "a definite and desirable direction" leading to a "condition of general happiness" which would "justify the whole process of civilization."4 And this mood continued long after 1945. Most members of Western society have been raised, in the words of Charles Frankel, "to expect that, short of a cataclysm, their children would live happier and better lives than they. They have supposed that this improvement would be cumulative and continuing and that although temporary setbacks, accidents, and disasters might take place, human knowledge, power, and happiness would increase over the long run."s Frankel's qualification indicates our task. What has become of progress? Do we now walk away from the (surprisingly briefly held) view of steady human betterment and search for new ways to orient ourselves in time? Was the Holocaust a cataclysm exploding progress itself, or was it a limited disaster? On the one hand, the Holocaust was a cataclysm for its millions of victims, but the rest of the world was spared. On the other, it did destroy a world. And in so doing, it revealed the very real possibilities of cataclysm lying in wait for all of us. Although Frankel wrote the above lines after 1945, his own death-at the hands of a robber in New York-proposes an answer as eloquent as his continued hope. After Auschwitz, I would argue, progress as we have come to know it is over. What, then, if any, revised vision of progress is compatible with the Holocaust? AUSCHWITZ AND THE END OF PROGRESS First, the Holocaust explodes as myth the popular belief in steady, irreversible progress. Generally this view accepts the existing social order, sees significant development in either (or some combination of) science and technology, education, gradual democratization, or the productivity of capitalism (and, more recently, socialism). It sees...

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