Nazi-era German society reacted to atrocity with numbed, anaesthetized emotion.
Evidence
The journalist Sebastian Haffner, a law student at the time, also used the word ‘uncanny’ in his diary, adding, ‘Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.’ Haffner thought modernity itself was partly to blame: people had become yoked to their habits and to mass media, forgetting to stop and think, or to disrupt their routines long enough to question what was going on. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 260
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how modern media and routine dull the capacity for pause and questioning - echoes themes from ‘One Square Inch of Silence’ on information overload. — connects to: People cling to hatred to postpone confronting underlying pain — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America…, 152; People feel emotions for group members and deny their group’s harmful acts — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2092; Popular antisemitism contributed to the Holocaust chiefly through induced apathy. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 115
- QUESTION: Does Haffner’s diagnosis - that routine and mass media enable moral anaesthesia - still apply to current media-saturated politics?
Broader Connections
- People feel emotions for group members and deny their group’s harmful acts
#expands(0.75) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2092 - People cling to hatred to postpone confronting underlying pain
#expands(0.72) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 152 - Popular antisemitism contributed to the Holocaust chiefly through induced apathy.
#corroborates(0.70) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 115