Watched "The Sorrow and the Pity" with my Dad over the weekend, Marcel Ophul's 1972 film about the WWII collaborationist government of Vichy France. It's long but fascinating, focusing on personal interviews and allowing a lot of scope for explorations of motivation. And it is for that very reason, for the personal context that accompanies every stage in the narrative, that a sense of heartbreak grows with the watching. The betrayal of ideals in Vichy's collaboration with the Nazis was breathtaking in its completeness, nor did it die with Vichy proper. During the siege of Berlin, a fact not mentioned in the film, fascist French units fought with the Germans against the Russian advance. Such actions in retrospect condense into obvious black and white choices. If you can't back the right horse in WWII, when could you ever. The underlying assumption is that one could never make such a mistake oneself. But through the interviews of "The Sorrow and the Pity," if one can't excuse the betrayal one still comes to appreciate the confusion of the time. How loyalties to one virtue could lead an individual into alliances completely unworthy of their devotion. How a cramped political vocabulary that forced so much into a prism of Fascism or Communism obscured larger realities and impelled people to act as if under compulsions that with more imagination or more attentiveness they could have seen as non-existent. Why allow an aversion to Communism to force you into a proxy Fascism? On the basis of such delusions, such mistakes, and such blindnesses to allow yourself to stain a lifetime? It's heartbreaking. Chagrin and pity are good words for it.
With that tinkering around in the background, Dad reached for the Bible after dinner Monday night and began his evening devotional.
I have to confess I was a little distracted. Where Christ's parable had the throne of judgment, I imagined the judgment of history. Where the righteous and unrighteous were divided as sheep and goats, I saw the resistance and the collaborationists. So far so good, a blithe analogy. A simple warning, if I take the trouble to tune back in to my Dad in the background, to do right, back the right horse, be holy etc. But there was more there. Notice, pointed out my Dad, that both sheep and goats are incredulous as to why they end up where they do. Not only are the unrighteous mystified over the source of their wrong, the righteous are mystified over the source of their right. How they did wrong or right is an equal mystery to both parties. In this, Christ suggests that in the end we do not anticipate the grounds upon which we will be judged. Not that those grounds are unknowable, but simply that we are bad at applying the obvious to everyday life. How obvious seem the moral choices faced by Frenchmen in WWII with the benefit of hindsight. Yet in practice, the intersection of scores virtues and vices and our own limited vocabulary of options, our lack of perspective, obscures the "obvious" to such an extent that thousands of people find themselves complicit in great wrong. It is a disturbing idea that our estimation of where the right lies should be so faulty, all the more if you are convinced of the necessity of right action. How to survive a true judgment, by history or even a more supreme judge? There is some comfort in the fact that it wasn't in the capacity of sheep or goat to spot the moving hand of God in their daily events that salvation lay - "When were you ever in prison, ever naked, ever sick?" they say -it was in the inculcation of a reflex to do right in the most absurd and trivial moments (to the prisoner, the stranger, the sick). See the instincts of your heart, scripture seems to warn, be wary there and there be on guard to have that heart renewed and true. Because who can say with any confidence that they will read the tea leaves of history right or guess correctly when the Judge will come and of whose party he might be.
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