When I was 11 years old, I read Mein Kampf. Please bear with me, here. I don’t remember how or when I first heard about the Jewish Holocaust, but I was preoccupied by it to a point that bordered on obsession. I couldn’t stop my mind from returning over and over to the questions of why and how something like the Holocaust could happen. I read everything I could get my hands on and asked endless questions of the adults around me, yet nothing really answered my fundamental question of why and how such inhumanity took root. I somehow came to the conclusion that I had to go into the belly of the beast and read Hitler’s thoughts for myself.

Honestly, I don’t remember much of it now other than I thought it was long-winded and boring. And because I’ve always been a relatively slow reader, it took me a long time to get through. What I do remember is that the people of Germany had been going through their own Great Depression. They were hungry, poor, and out of work. Hitler came along with solutions to those problems and for the most part, when he dropped xenophobic slurs, most people just kind of said, yeah, I don’t like his racism, but he has good ideas, or he doesn’t really mean that the way it sounds. Or he validated their own bigotry. Many ordinary Germans were wrapped up in their own lives and day-to-day problems. Many didn’t believe reports of Jews disappearing from their homes because Hitler had worked hard to first discredit and then dismantle the free press. I couldn’t articulate it then, but Hitler facilitated such abject inhumanity because he was a master of pathos.

What then of Aristotle’s structure of rhetorical arguments, that they require credibility/authority (ethos), logical reasoning (logos) and an emotional appeal (pathos)? Hitler’s political ethos was shaky. The Nazi party was the largest elected party but did not hold a majority within the democratic Weimar Republic. He rose through party leadership because he was such a charismatic speaker, but he hadn’t been elected into office or chosen by the people. His logos of ethnic cleansing was of course abhorrent, generalizing the blame of Germany’s economic catastrophe upon ethnicity. So how in the world did he manage to get the German people to go along with him? Because he knew how to manipulate the emotions of his audience.

As a kid, I had heard that Hitler had been a charismatic speaker, but when I watched his speeches, I saw a terrifying, shouty man in a language I didn’t understand. But what Hitler understood was that the people wanted someone strong and authoritative to come along and solve their problems because they felt powerless. Hitler was able to channel the fear and rage they felt and to focus blame on the Jewish community. In reading Mein Kampf, I gathered a logical answer to the questions that bothered me, but I still couldn’t reconcile the historical events with my conception of humanity. I just could not emotionally understand.

A few years later, I was in high school and assigned to read and see a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. If you don’t know or remember the story, it’s about a group of young girls that whip their town into a frenzy with accusations of witchcraft. Characters are sentenced to death and executed for witchcraft based purely on the demented and manipulative rantings of a group of young girls. Before I read it, it sounded fantastical and frankly unbelievable that a group of kids could impact such horror on their neighbors. Then I learned that not only had Miller based his play on the actual Salem witch trials, but he did so in response to McCarthyism, which gripped the U.S. when he wrote it. Miller used fiction to draw lines connecting the witch trials and McCarthy’s HUAC hearings, both of which sprang out of the fear and panic of the masses which was conjured and spread by a select few. They preyed upon people’s sense of decency and wielded a warped normalization of repugnant behavior, subverting evidence and due process of law because they were afraid. In Act II, scene II of The Crucible, John Proctor attempts to bring reason to the court proceedings and in the interest of establishing his honesty, admits that he has had an affair with young Abigail. He does so to show the ulterior motives and manipulation in Abigail’s accusations. As the judges argue over Abigail’s credibility, Abigail invokes pathos to cover her lack of ethos:

DANFORTH: I believe him! ... (Pointing at Abigail.) This girl has always struck me false! She … (Abigail with a weird cry screams up to ceiling.)

ABIGAIL: You will not! Begone! Begone, I say! (Mercy and Susanna rise, looking up.)

DANFORTH: What is it, child? (But Abigail, pointing with fear, is now raising up her frightened eyes, her awed face, toward ceiling—the girls doing the same—and now Hathorne, Hale, Putnam, Cheever and Danforth do the same.) What’s there? (He lowers his eyes from the ceiling and now he is frightened there is real tension in his voice.) Child! (She is transfixed—with all the girls, in complete silence, she is open-mouthed, agape at ceiling, and in great fear.) Girls! Why do you … ?

MERCY: It’s on the beam! –behind the rafter!

DANFORTH: (Looking up.) Where!

ABIGAIL: Why … ? Why do you come, yellow bird? … Oh, Mary, this is a black art to change your shape. No, I cannot, I cannot stop my mouth; it’s God’s work I do.1 (Miller 71-72)

To regain her power, Abigail accuses one of her friends with a preposterous claim that Mary has shape-shifted into a bird; proof that Mary is a witch. Abigail understands quite well that Mercy, Susanna, and the rest of the girls are under her control because they look to her for protection. She also understands how to manipulate Judge Danforth’s very real fear of the Devil in order to hide that she has no real credibility once Proctor exposes their affair and no logical argument supported by factual evidence. Abigail relies solely upon pathos to win her argument and innocent people pay for it with their lives. Once people begin to accept the dehumanization of their friends and neighbors, it becomes far easier to persecute and even execute. This play brought me right back to the rise of the Holocaust because those Salem teenagers and Joseph McCarthy and Hitler were all using the same tactic: they understood and manipulated emotions to get what they wanted. And in times of fear, people accepted their methods, sometimes because they were afraid and sometimes because they had become convinced that however extreme, those heinous methods were the right course of action.

So, how do we protect ourselves and each other from becoming swept up in dangerous pathos? I found an answer in the wake of finishing Mein Kampf when I continued to struggle through the why of the Holocaust. I read a biography of a woman named Sophie Scholl, who provided the answer I was looking for: The White Rose.

“[E]very individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization…must work against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism. Offer passive resistance—resistance—wherever you may be.”2  -The First Leaflet (Scholl 74)

Sophie joined the White Rose, a student resistance group, founded by her older brother, Hans. The hope Sophie gave my psychologically scarred mind changed my life and I still celebrate her birthday—May 9—every year. Sophie and the members of the White Rose refused to ignore and participate in the dehumanization of others. I was 12 when I first encountered Sophie and, in my eyes, she was an adult, but as I grew up, her courage impacted me more deeply. She was, in fact, incredibly young and by all accounts, extraordinarily brave. When Sophie was 21, she, Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst were caught distributing leaflets critical of Hitler at their university campus, tried and convicted of treason, and executed by guillotine. They knew the consequence would be death if they were ever caught, and yet they believed they had to speak out anyway. They were ordinary German citizens, indoctrinated in the Hitler Youth, and they had no remarkable ties to the Jewish community. They were simply people that looked at what was happening and refused to go along. They refused to be silent and complicit.

How do we protect ourselves and each other from becoming swept up in dangerous pathos? We resist, just like the White Rose resisted. We find ways to speak out, ways to protest. We challenge ourselves to examine our beliefs and ask if our beliefs come at the cost of someone else’s life or dignity. It’s not enough to remain silent. Humans have a penchant for getting caught up and misdirected in the fervor of the moment; we understand this about ourselves and each other. In response, we have a responsibility to hold ourselves accountable and to question authority before we add another scar to humanity and the history books.

What are your thoughts on pathos? How do you recognize when it becomes dangerous and what do you do about it? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below, I look forward to reading them.

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Notes:

Artwork: "Rose" by Cor Gaasbeek is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.

1)     Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. Dramatists Play Service, Inc, 1980.
2)     Scholl, Inge, and Sölle Dorothee. The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943. Translated by Arthur R. Schultz, 2nd ed., Wesleyan University Press, 1983.