Our conscience is a fragile thing that we must vigilantly protect
Obergruppenführer John Smith (left) played by Rufus Sewell in The Man in the High Castle
*SPOILER ALERT! this article contains spoilers for the Amazon TV series ‘The Man in the High Castle’ and the movie ‘Good’
I’m not sure if you’ve seen the Amazon TV series The Man in the High Castle, but the very important theme of conscience and moral decision making is one that keeps recurring over all four seasons.
This is hardly surprising, considering that the plot revolves around an alternate history where the Nazis and the Japanese are the victors of WW2 and now in control of the world.
Initially this is a TV series that appears to be telling the story of the main protagonist, Juliana Crain. By the end of the fourth and final season, however, it has become apparent that is just as concerned, if not more so, about the main antagonist Obergruppenführer John Smith.
We are even presented with a subplot involving an alternate world (the historically accurate one where the Nazis and Japan lose the war) where John Smith is actually a good and moral man.
The comparison is clear - in one world, John Smith is a cruel and evil Nazi dictator, in the other he is a man with a properly formed moral conscience that drives him to do good.
In season one a dramatically compelling subplot involving eugenics and euthanasia is introduced when John Smith’s only son is diagnosed with Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy.
Rather than reporting the diagnosis and presenting his son to officials for death by lethal injection in the Reich’s euthanasia program, Smith opts to break the law, even resorting to murder to try and save his son.
The inference of this is inescapable - it’s one thing to support a regime that is actively killing other people, but evil suddenly becomes a lot harder to ignore when the system is proposing to kill your own child.
The one subplot that really brings home the issue of conscience and moral conflict in a very stark way, comes in the fourth and final season when we are shown flashbacks about the immediate aftermath of the Nazi defeat of America.
John Smith is an officer in the American Army when news arrives of the US surrender, and the fact that important positions in the new Nazi American Reich will be given to those Allied officers who acquiesce and submit themselves to the Nazis the quickest.
John has little trouble in signing up to the new regime, and willingly accepting the red swastika arm band - his passport into a life of prestige, power and importance in the brave new world.
Not long after this, one of his closest friends and fellow officers, who is Jewish, is rounded up and loaded onto a truck to be taken away and executed by the Nazis.
As the truck is about to depart he pleads with John to unlatch the back gate so that he and his fellow Jews can escape once the truck has made its way further down the road.
It would have been the good and right thing to do, and Smith could have easily and quickly opened the latch without being seen, but, either out of moral cowardice or moral complicity, he doesn’t unlatch the cage and his friend is killed.
This one simple act of turning away, of refusing to do the good, even when minimal cost was required of him, places him on a trajectory to becoming the overseer of a barbaric and evil dictatorship as the eventual Obergruppenführer of the new American Reich.
The irony, of course, is that this same culture of death that he has willingly participated in and reaped the rewards of is the very same system that will one day mercilessly come for his own beloved son.
That episode in season four reminded me of the 2008 movie Good.
In that film, Viggo Mortensen plays a fairly ordinary German husband, father and university academic living under the Nazi regime.
A novel he has written advocating euthanasia is enlisted by the Nazis for propaganda purposes, and he finds himself in an increasingly privileged position as a result.
As his conscience becomes more and more dulled, what begins as moral cowardice quickly morphs into active moral complicity. He even betrays his closest friend, a former academic colleague who is Jewish.
In the final shocking scene in the film we see Viggo Mortensen standing in a concentration camp, dressed in his SS uniform, as he is forced to confront the true and vile nurture of the evil that he has been aiding and abetting all this time.
These fictional portrayals are a powerful reminder of how precious the human conscience is, and just how easily it can be corrupted if it is not vigilantly guarded.
We can see this same moral cowardice and complicity all around us today when it comes to abortion and euthanasia.
What initially starts as a refusal to speak up, quickly makes us actively complicit in the system that enables and carries out these grave evils.
The more comfortable we become with being comfortable, the less willing we are to rock the boat by speaking. up, and the more likely we are to actually look down upon or even openly ridicule those who do.
Pro-lifers who speak up publicly, or act out against this culture of death aren’t just a threat to our comfort, they are also a gnawing thorn to our conscience which challenges our own compromise and inaction.
Far better to have them silenced, so we can continue to look away and reassure ourselves that all is well, or that saying nothing is somehow the more compassionate and effective thing to do in the face of such a grave evil as the violent killing of the most vulnerable amongst us.
We can only do this so long though, before the very system we have enabled through silence or refusal to act eventually comes for us as well.
Just think of the euthanasia issue. The tragic and frightening reality is that, in the years to come, many of its supporters will actually become its victims in one way or another.
In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian minister who was executed by the Nazis: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”