The Zone of Interest is not really a Holocaust film. At least not in the traditional sense.

Unlike Schindler’s List, there are no scenes set in a concentration camp – no footage of gas chambers, or slaughter. And unlike The Pianist, the focus is not on suffering victims. Indeed, the victims are entirely offscreen, only present as a sort of ambient, sometimes audible, force. Our cast of characters here are a German family, living an ordinary life – or as ordinary as a life can be, when the patriarch, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is the commandant of Auschwitz, which lies just over the family’s garden wall.  

The film features no literal violence whatsoever. Occasionally, we glimpse smoke from Auschwitz’s chimneys, cutting through the air; tiny touches, and the only clues that we are literally next door to the camp.  

Instead, the genre that The Zone of Interest falls into – and cunningly undermines – is the domestic drama. Strip the Holocaust context out of the film, and you have a fairly humdrum story of a man trying to keep his family and his career together; working to raise his children, and rise up the ranks of his job. Insert that context back in, and the humdrum becomes terrifying.  

The result is a film that tackles the question, “How did the Holocaust happen?”. It is interested in the mechanics of the slaughter – how it was enacted, and by whom. The answer lies in Höss. He has, it seems, emptied his work of all emotional context. It’s just a job to him. There are only very rare points where we see him express something like remorse – and even then, such outbursts feel uncontrolled; unconscious. In that way, The Zone of Interest has much to tell us not just about the Holocaust, but about moral responsibility, and the lengths people can go to avoid it. 

Empathy and obligation

Höss has become so inured to his work – so horrifyingly, disturbingly used to it – that he acts like it has no moral quality at all. He seems to have no feelings, no empathy, and more than that, no knowledge that he even should have empathy.  

This dispassionate quality is a common basis of those who avoid moral responsibility. When we do not emotionally feel the pain of others, through empathy, we will not have any motivation to avoid inflicting that pain. This is the heart of moral sentimentalism. If we are emotionally blind to suffering – even if we are aware that it is happening – we will not be compelled to act to stop it. Simply put, without emotions and empathy, our moral obligations lose their force. 

Indeed, Höss’s lack of moral emotions makes him the successful endpoint of the Nazi propaganda machine. This machine worked hard to try and target the emotions of Nazi guards, and in the process neuter natural sympathetic responses. Most notably, Nazi propaganda dehumanised the Jewish population, painting Jews as fundamentally different from human beings. The comics writer Art Spiegelman attributes the following quote to Hitler, which sums up the position: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.” 

In this way, Nazi propaganda worked on “perceived similarity.” See, psychological studies suggest that empathy fires when we witness something that feels similar to our own experiences. We have to recognise the pain of others as meaningfully like our own in order to be sympathetic to it. This is why we don’t like seeing animals like dogs in pain – we anthropomorphise them, and see their suffering as “human”. It is also while most of us will not flinch at the torment of a bug. We think of dogs as like us, and bugs as not. The outward signs of a daddy longlegs in distress seem alien enough to us – different enough from our own – that our natural empathy is not triggered. 

For Nazis like Höss, Jewish people were perceived as so alien – so dissimilar from other human beings – that the suffering of Jewish people came with no associated moral obligation. This is what we see in The Zone of Interest. Höss knows he is sending Jewish people to their deaths – how could he not? It is happening right next door – but he feels nothing about this murder. Höss is not maintaining a literal distance from the horror he is enacting, but he is maintaining an emotional distance, and this is what allows him to do what he does. 

A reminder of what we share

This focus on emotional distance is what makes The Zone of Interest so timely – what expands its reach beyond the Holocaust.

We are all occasionally guilty of seeing those who suffer as being “different from us”; their pain as alien, or foreign. Those in warzones; refugees; victims of famine in the Third World – we can all see these people as being divorced from our regular life, emotionally different from us, and as a result, we can unconsciously discharge our obligation to them.

The antidote to this disaffection – to the emotional coolness that can stop us from helping when we need to – is reminding ourselves of what we share with others. It is about tapping into our essential humanity. The philosopher David Hume put this essential humanity simply – he believed as human beings, we all have an aversion to pain, and an attraction to pleasure. If we remember that, and keep in mind that all human beings want to live pain-free lives, then we will see the suffering of others as a great transgression, and will work harder to help when we can.  

Indeed, this is the strange optimism buried at the heart of The Zone of Interest. The film suggests, very subtly, that we have a natural connection to those around us; that this shared wellspring of humanity can never be entirely vanquished.  

Even Höss, who has worked so hard to completely distance himself from the suffering he is directly inflicting, is unable to escape his natural sense of empathy – in a key moment of the film, he has a kind of physical breakdown, suddenly overcome by all that he has tried not to see. There, in that scene, is buried a form of hope: even against all odds, sometimes, human connection survives. Because human feeling survives. And that is where our moral responsibility lives. 

How a 1990s science-fiction show reminds us that just because we can do something, it doesn’t always mean we should.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard commands the USS Enterprise-D, a 600-metre-long starship that runs on antimatter, giving it virtually unlimited energy, and wielding weapons of devastating power.  

In its journeys across the stars, depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the crew of the Enterprise-D is often forced to draw on all its resources to overcome tremendous challenges. But that’s not what the show is really about.  

If there’s one theme that pervades this iteration of Star Trek, it’s not how Picard and his crew use their prodigious power to get their way, it’s how their actions are more often defined by what they choose not to do. Countless times across the 176 episodes of the show, they’re faced with an opportunity to exert their power in a way that benefits them or their allies, but they choose to forgo that opportunity for principled reasons. Star Trek: The Next Generation is a rare and vivid depiction of the principle of ethical restraint.  

Consider the episode, ‘Measure of a Man’, which sees Picard defy his superiors’ order to dismantle his unique – and uniquely powerful – android second officer, Data. Picard argues that Data deserves full personhood, despite his being a machine. This is even though dismantling Data could lead to the production of countless more androids, dramatically amplifying the power of the Federation.  

One of the paradigmatic features of The Next Generation is its principle called the Prime Directive, which forbids the Federation from interfering with the cultural development of other planets. While the Prime Directive is often used as a plot device to introduce complications and moral quandaries – and is frequently bent or broken – its very existence speaks to the importance of ethical restraint. Instead of assuming the Federation’s wisdom and technology are fit for all, or using its influence to curry favour or extract resources from other worlds, it refuses to be the arbiter of what is right across the galaxy.  

This is an even deeper form of ethical restraint that speaks to the liberalism of Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator. The Federation not only guides its hand according to its own principles, but it also refuses to impose its principles on other societies, sometimes holding back from doing what it thinks is right out of respect for difference.  

The 1990s was another world

There’s a reason that restraint emerged as a theme of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was the product of 1990s America, which turned out to be a unique moment in that country’s history. The United States was a nation at the zenith of its power in a world that was newly unipolar since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  

It was an optimistic time, one that looked forward to an increasingly interconnected globalised world, where cultures could intermix in the “global village,” with its peace guarded by a benevolent superpower and its liberal vision. At least, that was the narrative cultivated within the US. 

In a time where the US was unchallenged, moral imagination turned to what limits it ought to impose on itself. And Star Trek did what science fiction does best: it explored the moral themes of the day by putting them to the test in the fantasy of the future. 

Today’s world is different. It’s now multipolar, with the rise of China and belligerence of Russia coinciding with the erosion of America’s power, political integrity and moral authority. The global outlook is more pessimistic, with the shadow of climate change and the persistence of inequality causing many to give up hope for a better future. Meanwhile, globalisation and liberalism have retreated in the face of parochialism and authoritarianism. 

When we see the future as bleak and feel surrounded by threats, ethical restraint seems like a luxury we cannot afford. Instead, the moral question becomes about how far we can go in order to guard what is precious to us and to keep our heads above literally rising waters. 

The power not to act

Yet ethical restraint remains an important virtue. It’s time for us to bring it back into our ethical vocabulary.  

For a start, we can change the narrative that frames how we see the world. Sure, the world is not as it was in the 1990s, but it’s not as bleak as many of us might feel. We can be prone to focusing on the negatives and filling uncertainties with our greatest fears. But that can distort our sense of reality. Instead, we should focus on those domains where we actually have power, as do many people living in wealthy developed countries like Australia. 

And we should use our power to help lift others out of despair, so they’re not in a position where ethical restraint is too expensive a luxury. Material and social wealth ultimately make ethics more affordable.

Just as importantly, restraint needs to become part of the vocabulary of those in positions of power, whether that be in business, community or politics.

Leaders need to implicitly understand the crucial distinction between ought and can: just because they can do something, it doesn’t mean they should.

This is not just a matter of greater regulation. For a start, laws are written by those in power, so they need to exercise restraint in their creation. Secondly, regulation often sets a minimum floor of acceptable behaviour rather than setting bar for what the community really deserves. It also requires ethical literacy and conviction to act responsibly within the bounds of what is legally permitted, not just a tick from a compliance team.  

If you have power, whether you lead a starship, a business or a nation, then the greater the power you wield, the greater the responsibility to have to wield it ethically, and sometimes that means choosing not to wield it at all. 

The recent dispute between Antoinette Lattouf and the ABC has brought into focus the need to address some fundamental questions about the role of journalism, in general, and professional journalists, in particular.

In my opinion, journalism is (or at least should be) practiced as a profession. This is not to ignore the fact that journalists work within an intensely commercial environment. But so do those lawyers, accountants, engineers, doctors and others who are employed by the private sector. For members of these professions, the fact that they work for, say, ‘industry’ in no way reduces the scope or depth of their professional obligations.

What marks out a profession is first, that its members are obliged to subordinate self-interest in the service of a public good. For example, as Officers of the Court, lawyers are bound by a paramount duty to assist in the administration of justice. This obligation comes before any duty to the client, to the profession or to oneself. Second, each profession exists in relation to its own ‘defining good’. Doctors and nurses work to secure the public good of ‘health’. Members of the profession of arms are supposed to secure the defining good of ‘peace’. Engineers aim for safety, etc. Two professions are oriented towards the good of ‘truth’ – accounting and journalism.

In both cases, the value of ‘truth’ is not in any sense vague or abstract. The preparation of accounts that are ‘true and fair’ is essential to the operation of free markets in which participants make informed decisions. As Adam Smith understood so well, markets can never be ‘free’ if participants lie, cheat, or use power oppressively. Yet, Smith also knew that merchants were always liable to employ such tactics in pursuit of self-interest. Thus, the need for the profession of accounting – made up of people who freely choose to abandon the pursuit of self-interest in service of the public interest and a higher ‘good’.

The role that accountants play in markets is mirrored by the role that journalists play in politics – and especially in democracies. The legitimacy of liberal democracies rests entirely on the consent of the governed. The only consent that counts is that which is free, prior and informed. And consent can never be informed if it is based on lies. That is why those politicians who resort to falsehood in the pursuit of power do so much damage to our democracy.

Unfortunately, just as some merchants can be relied upon to resort to deception in the pursuit of profits, so can some politicians be relied upon to do the same in the pursuit of victory. Professional journalists are supposed to help protect society from that risk – which is why they are so often lauded as the ‘fourth estate’.

I realise that there are some people who claim the title of ‘journalist’ while playing their own part in publishing or broadcasting falsehood, or who lack the ‘disinterested gaze’ that should be demanded of members of this profession. Yet, the fact that some (or even many) fail to uphold professional standards does not mean that the standard is either wrong or pointless.

Now, one might hope that those in charge of the ABC would champion the ideal of professional journalism as outlined above. If so, then you might also hope that they understood what is entailed by commitment to such an ideal. Finally, one might hope that the ABC would have discerned that a core commitment to the truth is fundamentally incompatible with the avoidance of controversy. Put simply, the truth is often controversial – especially when it challenges conventional belief or confronts power (which can reside in ‘settled’ ideas and prejudice as much as in the hands of individuals and institutions).

The truth is often controversial – especially when it challenges conventional belief or confronts power.

That is where I think the ABC ran off the rails. The moment it elevated the ‘avoidance of controversy’ as an end in itself, it set a standard that it is simply impossible for any professional journalist to uphold.

The noted German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that “ought implies can”. That is, one is not morally obliged to do that which is impossible. This clearly applies in cases of actual impossibility (e.g. flying to Mars on the back of a bandicoot). However, I think the maxim also extends to cases where something is ‘impossible’ to do without violating the dictates of a well-informed (and well-formed) conscience. It is in this sense that professional journalists are placed in an impossible position if required to seek and publish the truth without ever courting controversy.

Image by Pat M2007