We and They
From Facing History and Ourselves:
Holocaust and Human Behavior, Chapter 2
Chapter 1 focused on factors that shape an individual’s identity. It also described how
those factors are sometimes used to exclude people from membership in various groups.
Chapter 2 considers the ways a nation’s identity is defined. That definition has enormous
significance. It indicates who holds power in the nation. And it determines who is a part
of its “universe of obligation” – the name Helen Fein has given to the circle of
individuals and groups “toward whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply, and
whose injuries call for [amends].”1
For much of world history, birth determined who was a part of a group’s “universe of
obligation” and who was not. As Jacob Bronowski once explained, “The distinction
[between self and other] emerges in prehistory in hunting cultures, where competition for
limited numbers of food sources requires a clear demarcation between your group and the
other group, and this is transferred to agricultural communities in the development of
history. Historically this distinction becomes a comparative category in which one judges
how like us, or unlike us, is the other, thus enabling people symbolically to organize and
divide up their worlds and structure reality.”2
This chapter explores the power of those classifications and labels. As legal scholar
Martha Minow has pointed out, “When we identify one thing as like the others, we are
not merely classifying the world; we are investing particular classifications with
consequences and positioning ourselves in relation to those meanings. When we identify
one thing as unlike the others, we are dividing the world; we use our language to exclude,
to distinguish – to discriminate.”3
The chapter begins with a short story that imagines a society in which differences
have been outlawed so that everyone is truly equal. That story introduces the key
concepts and themes of the chapter. The readings that follow apply those ideas to the real
world by examining the way three nations – the United States, France, and Germany –
“divided up their worlds and structured reality” in the 1700s and 1800s. The chapter
shows how those divisions led to a world war. It also describes what it meant to be them.
Were they tolerated? Exploited? Feared? Under what conditions could they become full
members of a nation? Under what conditions did they become outcasts – individuals
beyond our “universe of obligation.” What opportunities did they have to alter their
status? To protect it?
A number of ideas have shaped the way such questions were answered. One was
nationalism. Sociologist Theodore Abel defines it as “a strong positive feeling for the
accomplishments of the nation, its position of power, the men and institutions and the
traditions which are associated with the glorified events of its history.”4 Another set of
ideas stressed similarities rather than cultural differences. Those ideas are most
eloquently stated in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be selfevident,
that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving
their just power from the consent of the governed.”
Both sets of ideas have had tremendous appeal to people all over the world. And both,
when carried to an extreme, have been abused. Abel warns that nationalism almost
always involves “a certain amount of ethnocentricism, a feeling of superiority of one’s
nation over other nations, which might turn a nationalistic sentiment into chauvinism
when the claim for superiority becomes associated with a claim for exclusiveness and
consequent hostility to all other nations.”5 In the nineteenth century, false ideas about
“race” gave legitimacy to ethnocentrism and chauvinism. Democractic principles can also
be perverted. In their zeal for equality, some people viewed differences with suspicion or
used differences to deny their humanity.
Like the chapters that follow, this one uses primary sources to capture the ideas,
assumptions, and observations of those living through a particular age in history. As
Bronowski once wrote, those sources help us “draw conclusions from what we see to
what we do not see” and “recognize ourselves in the past, on the steps to the present.”
Download Chapter 2 from Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior
Selected Readings from the Chapter
Notes
1 Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide, (Free Press, 1979), 4.
2 From THE ASCENT OF MAN by Jacob Bronowski. Copyright 1973 by J. I Bronowski. By permission of
Little, Brown and Company.
3 Martha Minow, Making All the Difference, 3.
4 Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came to Power (Prentice-Hall, 1938), 29.
