Conscience

Volodymyr Denyssenko’s film, Conscience (1968), is set in a small Ukrainian village under Nazi occupation during World War II. Vasyl, a Ukrainian man, kills a German soldier, and the chief German stationed there gives the villagers an ultimatum: Turn in the culprit or the entire village will be liquidated; all of the villagers will be executed. The film is all about this ethical dilemma. According to Jeremy Bentham’s ethic of utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number should prevail; any villager would be ethically justified in bringing Vasyl to the Germans to be executed so that the villagers can be spared. The ongoing pleasure of 100 people outweighs the ongoing pleasure of one person. But the film doesn’t follow this logic, and can thus be looked at as a critique of Bentham’s ethical theory. This is not to say that deontology, operating as an ethical constraint on utilitarianism, is entirely without risk. If I have just lost you, my dear liebe reader, consider this: Going beyond ethical constraints on an otherwise ethical theory, what if, as in the film, a political (or religious) cause is allowed to upend ethical considerations altogether, or at least to eclipse them?  I contend that the villagers do this in the film, for they sacrifice themselves as a matter of conscience to protect a murderer because they value his political cause, which is resistance to the Nazi occupation. At what cost? If in relegating the ethical level our species opens the floodgates to committing atrocities by good intentions, what might people like the Nazi occupiers in the film do without a conscience and external ethical constraints?

The full essay is at "Conscience."

Golda

In introducing a screening of Golda (2023) at Yale, Shiri Goren, a faculty member in the university’s Near Eastern Languages department, told the audience that “the non-Israeli, non-Jew Helen Mirren plays Golda Meir in the film." Strange. Normally, a presenter of a film would say, "Helen Mirren plays Golda." I contend that a squalid ideology accounts for the difference. Rather than evincing gratitude that such an excellent actress would play an ugly character (in the film, even Golda herself refers to her feet in a derogatory way), the implication obvious to everyone in the room was that an actor can, or even worse, should only play characters of the actor’s own background. How dare an actor play a character of a different background. Goren’s basic ignorance of the craft of acting (i.e., playing characters who are not like oneself) belies her credibility in teaching a course called Israeli Society in Film. Did the screenings only include films whose actors were Israelis? Golda herself was Ukrainian. Goren also taught Israeli Identity and Culture, which explains why her knowledge of acting was eclipsed. To Goren, a group-identity that monopolizes a person's self-image trumps the craft of acting. I contend that underlying her false-belief or delusion concerning acting (and film, moreover) lies a much larger problem: namely, that of the artificial monopolization of one of several group-identities that apply to a given person and can precipitate an exclusivist ideology alone one axis. Each of us has more than one group-identity, so to allow one to envelop one’s very identity is artificial and thus problematic. Resulting ideologies tend to be monopolistic and thus too extreme too. 

The full essay is at "Golda."