Things were a lot more clear-cut back in World War II.
You had the evil Nazis, the cruel Japanese Imperialists, and the slightly less bad Soviets. As for the Good Guys, you had the aging superpower in the United Kingdom handing off the baton over to the United States, the new defender of the liberal world order.
Even 80 years later, movies will portray World War II in, more or less, these Manichean terms. And it makes sense. The Japanese and the Nazis committed horrible crimes against humanity, orders of magnitude worse than anything that the Americans did during that same time period.
As a result, when we consume World War II movies, it’s pretty clear who to root for and who to root against. Moreover, in our minds, it’s a foregone conclusion who we’re going to be empathizing with. In Schindler’s List, for example, we empathize with Schindler and his problems, while feeling sorrow for the Jewish victims he’s attempting to save.
Very rarely, however, do we see ourselves in the shoes of the Nazi soldiers or the German people who stood idly by. And why should we? The evils that these people committed were so atrocious that there’s nothing else to do, other than to root against them in any World War II movie that we’re watching.
But the hard fact to reconcile is that the vast majority of the German public did not act like Schindler. Schindler was an exceptional human being, yet he’s the character we choose to identify with the most, as though we would do exactly what Schindler would have done if we were put in the same position.
This takes quite the mental gymnastics.
Imagine watching Magnus Carlsen demolish some amateur chess player on Youtube in 6 moves, and thinking to yourself, “Yup, I could have done what Magnus just did.”
Or, think about watching Usain Bolt speed across the finish line in a 100M race, and musing, “Yup, coulda done that too.”
When witnessing displays of mental genius or physical prowess, we have no problem acknowledging our lack of that superhuman power that people like Magnus or Usain have
But, when it comes to feats of moral strength like Schindler’s, we simply nod and think, “That was hard, but I would have done that too.”
I think we as a society need a bit more humility when it comes to morality.
Rather than identifying with the exceptional moral backbone of Schindler, we should ask ourselves, “What makes my moral backbone tougher than the average 2021 human being?”
My point is that having average levels of morality today might be good enough. But being average at a different point in time could mean being complicit in the murder of millions of innocents.
I don’t mean to rain on the moral progress we’ve achieved since World War II. I think it’s borderline miraculous that we’ve progressed to the point where the average 2021 human being has a much better sense of right and wrong than the average 1937 German.
But who’s to say that it will always remain this way? After all, for 99% of human history, humanity didn’t adhere to basic human rights like “I want to choose my own religion!” or “I don’t want to be a slave anymore!”
Moreover, there’s nothing in the rules of our universe that prevents us from backsliding morally as a species.
I guess what I’m getting at is that we need some sort of anchor to keep us tethered to our best guess at what Goodness is. Because if we don’t, we’ll just end up getting swayed by the average levels of morality at the time, just as those Germans in World War II did.
My argument for religion is that it can be that anchor. Sure, I could come up with a set of moral guidelines that I can adhere to, but realistically, these guidelines would mostly just be a product of present-day society. While these guidelines might seem good enough for us now, the strategy of following present-day guidelines has a pretty poor track record historically.
Either way, whether we call it a spiritual lifestyle or religion, I do think we need a moral anchor that, amidst the stormy chaos of the world, will hold us steadfast against the evils that come our way.