Press is right to view this as an abiding mystery. when thrust into a morally compromising situation: stop, say no, resist.” Even the more quotidian forms of evil always generate some resistance: Consider the Enron scandal’s whistle-blowers.īut what enables some to resist while most go along? Beautiful Souls, Press writes, is about “nonconformists, about the mystery of what impels people to do something risky. For every horror, there are courageous, conscientious resisters: Germans who hid Jews, Hutus who saved Tutsis, Serbs who saved Muslims. In Beautiful Souls, Eyal Press takes on a different challenge, more suited to the twenty-first century: He suggests that the true mystery is not what impels ordinary people into the moral abyss, but rather how some people manage to avoid the abyss altogether, by refusing to participate in atrocities. How could Germans herd Jewish families into the gas chambers? How could Serbs turn on their Bosnian neighbors, or Hutus pick up machetes and carry out the bloody work of genocidaires? The horrors of the twentieth century left artists and thinkers preoccupied with the problem of evil.
Still from artist Artur Żmijewski’s documentary work Powtórzenie (Repetition), 2005, a reenactment of the 1971 Stanford prison experiment.
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