Carolyn J. Dean

On her book Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust

Cover Interview of February 01, 2011

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“How attitudes toward victims have been shaped historically.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“A focus on victims helps us to discuss things that are uncomfortable and yet central to our self-image: how do we really feel about those who suffer? Do they always evoke our sympathy? Why or why not?”

On the second:

“Fragile, powerless, and helpless victims make us uncomfortable, evoke complicated responses in us, and make it hard for us to empathize with the humiliation they underwent.”

sovereignty / philosophy / polemics / media studies / violence / wwii / war / political theory / holocaust / victimhood /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009