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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   16872 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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You're right, but probably not for the reasons you think. Nazi empathy was popular among the Jewish emigre academics of the postwar era, and empathy took on particular prominence as things like the Banality of Evil and the Milgram experiments entered the public consciousness. The problem was that Germany couldn't be written off as a political, economic, and social backwater where Hitler was a thug exerting his will over an ignorant and unorganized population. That the German public went along with the horrors of the Third Reich was proof to them that Western Enlightenment epistemology was fundamentally flawed and in need of replacement. The Marxism that they offered as an alternative, however, was verboten during the Cold War, and this interpretation would only take hold among committed leftists.

For conservatives, the argument that they were all just evil was convenient and would prove to have wider applications. The idea of being empathetic to the circumstances of a criminal's upbringing would become a punchline.

For conservatives, the argument that they were all just evil was convenient and would prove to have wider applications.

I do not believe it was an issue of "convenience" so much as a shining example of the moral framework of secular progressivism failing in exactly the manner that classical conservatives from De'Maistre through to Kipling had predicted it would fail.

That is to say that is to say that it is always easier to destroy than to build, and that it is always easier to be cruel or indifferent than it is to care. One of the core conceits of western conservatism is that people will naturally gravitate towards "the easy path", and that it takes conscious effort to avoid it. See also @burkeboi's reply below.

To me the banality of evil and "Nazi empathy" of Jewish academics and Wilsonian progressives in the immediate post-war period reads as an attempt to salvage what they could from the ashes rather concede that their critics had been right about where their ideology was likely to lead.

I think @Iconochasm was correct: most people do seem to consider "empathy" as "feeling really hard about someone or something" without any shift to their information state. No theory of mind is exercised in the process, and so it usually ends up being an onanistic "see how hard I feel? I'm not callous (like those on the other side)".

I don't think your observations are wrong, it's just that they're orthogonal to the point being made.

"feeling really hard about someone or something"

The other point is that this is sympathy. I can be very sympathetic to your plight while not understanding a damn thing about why you do the things you do.

They were in my view, about half right. Enlightenment thinking does have flaws, especially in moral reasoning. It’s almost impossible to find any evil that one cannot find some justification for if given just the right set of circumstances. I can justify the murder of millions if my reason is “good enough”. The relativism and utilitarian principles given by the enlightenment put everything, up to and including genocide, on the table. Marxism doesn’t work any better as it is a product of the enlightenment. It’s not really an alternative source of moral inspiration, it’s just a different flavor. What is needed in my view is an outside, definitive and authoritative source of the ideal of Good, and a framework that imagines that the most important thing is to live by the ideals of The Good and thus you cannot change the ideals just because you have a good excuse.

I can justify the murder of millions if my reason is “good enough”.

Can't you always do that anyway? Aside from hypothetical "no-killing-ever-ever" systems, the ones that really exist and are widely adopted always have killing exceptions, and they all revert to some kind of consequentialist decision process in sufficiently unusual circumstances (what is most virtuous? what violates the rules the least?).

I don't know, seems to me that all the talk about ethics is just wankery, that in the end it has to all be broadly isomorph.

For conservatives, the argument that they were all just evil was convenient and would prove to have wider applications. The idea of being empathetic to the circumstances of a criminal's upbringing would become a punchline.

I don’t really recall that being the dominant conservative viewpoint, at least where I grew up. Explaining Nazism isn’t really that big an issue for classical conservatism: humans are prone to cruelty, and civilization barely holds those impulses in check until it doesn’t. While the specifics differ, Germans went Nazi for the same reasons Russians went Stalinist for the same reason Comanches smashed babies against rocks: humans are inclined to cruelty, and organize in ways to facilitate organized cruelty.

The bigger argument is if conservatism, or any particular ideology, has a good track record of restraining those impulses. That’s a far bigger and honestly unresolved argument.

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