15
I Could’ve Been a Perpetrator
One of FASPE’s central premises is the challenge of seeing ourselves in the perpetrators, to see what we, as human beings, are capable of and how we might become the “bad guys.” Reflecting on this idea, both intentionally and unintentionally during the trip, I became acutely aware of how the values which animate me can indeed look very similar to those which animated the Third Reich’s leaders.
For most of my life, I have wrestled with bearing triple-minority status: my race, religion, and gender. I am a Chinese Indonesian (Indonesian nationality with Chinese ethnicity), a Christian from the world’s largest Muslim country, and a woman in a patriarchal society. As such, I have constantly lived in the shadow of the history of “my people.” I have felt this way throughout growing up, whether because of the 1998 riots, in which Chinese Indonesians were targeted, or in the bombings of churches back home. But I have also benefited from much privilege, where even writing this reflection seems strange when only ten percent of Indonesians receive a university education.
I bring these factors up to contextualize why group loyalty seems natural to me. Yet, the closeness I feel to those identities is not as straightforward as I once imagined. What I have realized is that this language of loyalty, duty, and love sounds precisely like that which was used to justify the Holocaust. As came up during one of our classroom discussions, we seem to exist on the same value-spectrum as Heinrich Himmler himself, whether we like it or not. We may not act as he did, but our motivations and ethical orientations are not—through our shared humanity and the intrinsic fallibility of that condition—totally unalike.
Degrees of Complicity
One classroom conversation that has lingered with me concerned whether Nazi bureaucrats were more culpable than the businesspeople who, for instance, provided the logistical support that transported the disabled towards their death as part of Aktion T4. At first, the answer seems obvious—of course the Nazi bureaucrats were more culpable. But our conversation provoked questions that denied us such a neat answer. Who had more agency to not follow orders? Which group truly possessed the faculty of judgment? Despite our best attempts, we could come to no simple “right” answer.
The discussion did, however, bring out the issue of degrees of complicity. Whose hands are dirtier? Does that matter? And if it does matter, how dirty is too dirty? This line of reasoning seems most prevalent in politics, in which Michael Walzer’s seminal article on the problem of dirty hands provokes such questions.1 Its central premise is simple: it is by his dirty hands that we know the truly moral politician. If such a person says he does not have dirty hands, he is either pretending they are clean—and thus a politician and nothing more—or cannot bring himself to dirty them—and thus a moral man and nothing more. The argument follows then, that to do the good work of politics, some form of dirty hands is necessary. It is inherently part of the job.
This provokes a related question: can we say the same for business? Are these forms of complicity simply the cost of doing business, or are we able to find ways out of such a bind? If we avoid dirtying our hands, would that make us moral people and nothing more, or could we still be moral businesspeople? I would like to think we can be the latter. Business decisions need not adopt the zero-sum mentality Walzer describes. Couching the problem in these terms, however, does reveal important nuances within our profession.
In evaluating these nuances, two categories seem helpful: industry—that is, what sector a business is in—and locality—that is, where it is located. Are some businesses more prone to this form of thinking than others? A company in the defense industry likely wrestles with these issues far more often and on a larger scale than a retail company does. Beyond sectors, the place at which a business exists and operates must also have an impact. Ways of working or conceptions of business responsibilities in Southeast Asia, for example, can vary drastically from those in North America. On the one hand, this fact brings us to the classic problem of the universal and the particular. On the other, it forces us to ask whether there are limits to qualities like agility and adaptability that our profession prizes so dearly.
I Could’ve Been a Perpetrator
One of FASPE’s central premises is the challenge of seeing ourselves in the perpetrators, to see what we, as human beings, are capable of and how we might become the “bad guys.” Reflecting on this idea, both intentionally and unintentionally during the trip, I became acutely aware of how the values which animate me can indeed look very similar to those which animated the Third Reich’s leaders.
For most of my life, I have wrestled with bearing triple-minority status: my race, religion, and gender. I am a Chinese Indonesian (Indonesian nationality with Chinese ethnicity), a Christian from the world’s largest Muslim country, and a woman in a patriarchal society. As such, I have constantly lived in the shadow of the history of “my people.” I have felt this way throughout growing up, whether because of the 1998 riots, in which Chinese Indonesians were targeted, or in the bombings of churches back home. But I have also benefited from much privilege, where even writing this reflection seems strange when only ten percent of Indonesians receive a university education.
I bring these factors up to contextualize why group loyalty seems natural to me. Yet, the closeness I feel to those identities is not as straightforward as I once imagined. What I have realized is that this language of loyalty, duty, and love sounds precisely like that which was used to justify the Holocaust. As came up during one of our classroom discussions, we seem to exist on the same value-spectrum as Heinrich Himmler himself, whether we like it or not. We may not act as he did, but our motivations and ethical orientations are not—through our shared humanity and the intrinsic fallibility of that condition—totally unalike.
Degrees of Complicity
One classroom conversation that has lingered with me concerned whether Nazi bureaucrats were more culpable than the businesspeople who, for instance, provided the logistical support that transported the disabled towards their death as part of Aktion T4. At first, the answer seems obvious—of course the Nazi bureaucrats were more culpable. But our conversation provoked questions that denied us such a neat answer. Who had more agency to not follow orders? Which group truly possessed the faculty of judgment? Despite our best attempts, we could come to no simple “right” answer.
The discussion did, however, bring out the issue of degrees of complicity. Whose hands are dirtier? Does that matter? And if it does matter, how dirty is too dirty? This line of reasoning seems most prevalent in politics, in which Michael Walzer’s seminal article on the problem of dirty hands provokes such questions.1 Its central premise is simple: it is by his dirty hands that we know the truly moral politician. If such a person says he does not have dirty hands, he is either pretending they are clean—and thus a politician and nothing more—or cannot bring himself to dirty them—and thus a moral man and nothing more. The argument follows then, that to do the good work of politics, some form of dirty hands is necessary. It is inherently part of the job.
This provokes a related question: can we say the same for business? Are these forms of complicity simply the cost of doing business, or are we able to find ways out of such a bind? If we avoid dirtying our hands, would that make us moral people and nothing more, or could we still be moral businesspeople? I would like to think we can be the latter. Business decisions need not adopt the zero-sum mentality Walzer describes. Couching the problem in these terms, however, does reveal important nuances within our profession.
In evaluating these nuances, two categories seem helpful: industry—that is, what sector a business is in—and locality—that is, where it is located. Are some businesses more prone to this form of thinking than others? A company in the defense industry likely wrestles with these issues far more often and on a larger scale than a retail company does. Beyond sectors, the place at which a business exists and operates must also have an impact. Ways of working or conceptions of business responsibilities in Southeast Asia, for example, can vary drastically from those in North America. On the one hand, this fact brings us to the classic problem of the universal and the particular. On the other, it forces us to ask whether there are limits to qualities like agility and adaptability that our profession prizes so dearly.