MORE OF THE interview with Peter Singer.
How did your family first come to live in Australia?
My parents were both living in Vienna in the nineteen-thirties. They were around thirty years old when Hitler marched into Austria, and they were both Jewish. They realized very rapidly that they had no future in Austria. Jews could not own businesses under Nazi laws, and my mother was just qualified as a physician. The Nazis said that Jewish doctors could only treat Jewish patients. I don’t think they actually, at that stage anyway, really thought that they could be murdered. But my father wrote to an uncle in America, and said, “Could you provide a sponsorship for me and my wife?” And the uncle wrote back, saying, “I’m very happy to sponsor you. But, unfortunately, as I’ve not had the opportunity to meet your wife, I can’t sponsor her.” So, obviously, that was a pretty devastating blow.
My mother then remembered that she had met an Australian who had come to Austria to ski, and she’d been invited to join him and some friends at one of the wine bars on the edge of Vienna. He had then sent her a card from Australia, thanking her for the company. She thought she would write to this man. He was not Jewish. He was a Catholic of Irish descent, but he was very supportive and moved rapidly to organize visas for my father and for her. And that’s why they came to Australia. We went to see the man who sponsored them, Jerry Donovan, in Melbourne, when I was a child.
Of my four grandparents, one, my mother’s mother, survived the Holocaust and came to Australia just about when I was born, in 1946. She lived until 1955. We were very close. We had other Jewish friends in Melbourne, some of whom had concentration-camp numbers tattooed on their arms. I wondered what that meant.
Did your family history influence your views of ethics?
I’m sure, but I can’t say that I was really conscious of it. The elements that I was conscious of were an abhorrence of racism and violence. I read a lot of history of the coming of Fascism in Europe, and how the Holocaust was conceived and planned. Some people have said, “Well, if you’re aware of this kind of sheer physical suffering being inflicted on your family, then it’s easier to empathize with the suffering that’s being inflicted on nonhuman animals.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, who is no relation to me, said the same kind of thing—in one of his stories, he has a character saying, “For the animals, every day is Treblinka.
This might be the most incredible passage of the entire interview. How could such a family history NOT knowingly influence his view of ethics? Both of my parents and a couple of my uncles were in the American military during World War Two, none of them saw the death camps though they learned of them earlier than most and knew those who did see them. They all saw terrible things, no one in my family died because of Nazi eugenics, no one of them was ever in a German prisoner of war or a death camp but I've been aware of the role that the Nazis' genocides, the genocides of the fascist Italian and French Vichy regime and other European gangster run countries, the Japanese Imperial crimes against humanity played in virtually every conclusion about morality those are related to which I've ever come to. I will include other genocides under other regimes, those derived from Marxism, certainly. I can honestly say that every political and legal area I've thought about is highly influenced by knowing that history. There is no philosophical or theological or academic area in which I've thought that is uninfluenced by knowing that history.
Surely, a world-promoted Ivy-League and big-press anointed expert" in "ethics" should be more aware of such a thing than "I’m sure, but I can’t say that I was really conscious of it."
That Peter Singer can't tell you that when he's world famous as an 'ethicist' and philosopher has to be the most unbelievable thing I've heard or read this month, and I follow the news of the lying Republican-fascists quite closely. I think that his response to that is to cite the evils and cruelty of animal husbandry and the meat industry without making the connection between that treatment of non-human beings and the equally objectifying, materialistic, devaluation of human beings into objects for use or disposal is pathological. And I do mean that word literally, to be so detached from such proximate history which is such an important part of your own family history is exactly that. If nothing else in his professional discourse led me to be skeptical of his ideological framing, that would make me highly doubtful as to its depth or attachment to reality. I have come to have such skepticism about a good part of current academic discourse, probably most of all that which mimics the methods of science or mathematics, though as the thinking of lawyers and judges and "justices" is more exposed, I think that is probably more immediately dangerous.
In a book about your maternal grandfather, “Pushing Time Away,” you write that he met your grandmother, in part, because he was attracted to men, and she was attracted to women, and they were meeting to discuss that. That seemed like a real discovery.
That was a real discovery, yes. I learned about it only when I obtained letters that my grandfather had written to my grandmother, which had been brought to Australia. I found this whole stack of letters in my aunt’s apartment. I read German, but this earlier style of handwriting was a lot of trouble to read. When I got somebody to transcribe them, I was completely amazed. I had no idea that their original connection was because of attractions to people of their own sex.
What motivated you to go through all that, and write a book about it in the end?
I originally was interested in learning more about my grandfather, because he was the person in my family who I could perhaps most see as a forerunner to myself. I knew that he had been a member of Freud’s Wednesday circle, that he had co-authored a paper with Freud, and that then he had been involved with Alfred Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology. I wanted to see: Were there any parallels between his thinking and mine? But then I found out other things that I didn’t expect.
I got the sense, from the book, that you questioned whether it was worthwhile to write about your family history.
That’s right. And I still have that feeling a little bit. Which of my works have done the most good? It’s not going to be “Pushing Time Away.” It’s going to be “Animal Liberation” or “The Life You Can Save.” I think it’s good for my children and grandchildren, but from an impartial calculation of how I can do the most good, this was something of an indulgence.
Peter Singer calls himself a consequentialist: he believes that actions should be judged by their consequences.
This reminds me of a disability rights advocate's critique of Oliver Sachs that called him "The Man Who Mistook His Patients For A Literary Career." Only Peter Singer used his grandparents in that way. I have to question the ethics of revealing so much about private people who were not there to give their grandson permission to use their intimate lives to do that. I don't know if he got the permission of their living descendants to do it, though, of course, the two who mattered the most aren't around to give him that permission.
However, that's just my sense of morality. But I don't think the consequences of what he did in violating his grandparents privacy , which he apparently believes are minimal, are the only matters to consider. One is the devaluation of personal and family privacy which such uses of other private People by writers and others leads to. It normalizes it and presents it as acceptable. I think there has been a devaluation of privacy that is ongoing throughout the modern period in which tabloids and cabloids and the publicity industry and the gossip industry have led to a disturbing number of People to have no sense of value for their own privacy and the privacy of those around them. The internet has made that quite consequential. I remember having long, drawn out arguments with people freaking out about the NSA collecting very general data about their online behavior when they, themselves, gave away much larger parts of their privacy voluntarily. Giving it away to companies and online forums in forms that anyone, from greedy corporations, malicious gossips to the worst dictatorships and gangsters in the world could read about their most intimate lives. I think celebrities who use the private lives of other People to get something published contribute to that. It does have malignant consequences in real lives of real, living People. When there is a person who has chosen to have a public life, especially people in politics, in the judiciary, those who chose to be in a position to have an impact on many others, involuntarily, the right to an expectation of privacy is a quite different matter. I would not be commenting on Peter Singer or his use of his grandparents if he didn't take it on himself to have a career in prescriptive disposal of other peoples' lives.
I realized about ten years ago that I was finding reading contemporary theology a lot more compelling than much if any contemporary philosophy I tried to read was. About the same time I realized that the field of "ethics" was anything but what it used to be. These points are relatively minor compared to his advocacy of killing people but they're of a piece in why I conclude he and his colleagues are such asses.
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