The young Primo Levi was tormented at the thought of picking up a gun and killing another human being. His biographer Carole Angier writes of his ‘deep horror of violence’. But in 1943, he would ‘resist his instincts and make a moral choice to accept the necessity of killing’ by joining the anti-Nazi resistance.
After weeks of agonising Levi came to the painful conclusion that his personal ethic of non-violence was inadequate to his times. By joining the Justice and Liberty partisans he resolved a tension between what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr famously called ‘moral man’ and ‘immoral society’.
One night, after a successful raid to capture arms, Levi talked to his fellow partisan and friend, Aldo, as they walked back to their camp. ‘How sad’ said Levi, ‘that a man must seek weapons to use against other men’. His sadness was his personal feeling as a moral man. But his seeking of the guns nonetheless, and his willingness to use them, was his public ethic in an immoral society. Today we must honour Levis sadness, but also his seeking.
Levi complicates his first thought – fight! – with other thoughts: the need for prudence, the threshold of ‘last resort’, and the awareness of the unintended consequences, or what Levi calls the hard-to-control ‘genealogies’ of violence.
Regarding prudence, Levi advised that politicians should ‘learn to live like chess players’. He wanted his politicians ‘meditating before moving, even though knowing that the time allowed for each move is limited, remembering that every move of ours provokes another by the opponent, difficult but not impossible to foresee; and paying for wrong moves’. On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, and Jonathan Powell’s admission that the post-conflict planning was woeful, I don’t need to belabour the relevance of that insight.
On ‘last resort’, ‘there do not exist problems that cannot be solved around a table’, Levi wrote, though he added, crucially, ‘provided there is good will and reciprocal trust’.
About ‘unintended consequences’: ‘from violence only violence is born’ he wrote. One can disagree with that formulation and think it an overstatement, and is contradicted by much else that Levi wrote. But where he says it, in his last book The Drowned and the Saved, he is telling an important truth: war, even a just war, will pulse out violence in uncontrollable ways, ‘in a pendular action that becomes more frenzied,’ as he puts it.
But none of this should make us forget that force is sometimes necessary and sometimes just. Levi himself, I think, was sometimes guilty of that forgetting.
For example, his story, Force Majeur is often read as a parable about the Holocaust. A man enters an alley with high walls and no way out. He encounters another bigger stronger man dressed as a sailor, with a dog. The sailor bars his way, forcing him to the ground, face down, and then deliberately walks on him, along his length from head to toe, before leaving. During the encounter, no words are spoken, no reason is offered. Someone else, a prostitute, walks past, and the sailor lets her through.
As a parable about the survivor’s psychic demolition it is brilliant. But as a parable of the Holocaust, or the totalitarian situation per se, which is how is has often been read, the story is radically incomplete. In real life the ‘sailor’ never walks away. Men like my father had to pick up a gun aged 19, leave North Shields, go into the alley and kill the sailor. Some commentators on Levi’s story seem unable to handle that truth, as perhaps the story itself is. Recent events suggest we have trouble handling that truth as a society, in our public philosophy. Perhaps that is why our culture risks breaking the covenant with the troops. We want to write them out of the story. We are embarrassed.
We should not be. Levi recalls that in Auschwitz on June 7 1944, ‘we saw the English prisoners on their way, and there was something different about them … they saluted us with the V-sign of victory … freedom seemed within reach’. And it was. The allied forces were coming into the alley to kill the Nazi and rescue the victim on the ground. From their violence would come something other than ‘more violence’. Liberation would come.
Our 21st century dilemma is that we want to promote non-violent cultures and a wider global human security whilst retaining the ability to become warlike when challenged by the new totalitarians. That’s some ask. Levi, with his sadness and his seeking, can help us.