Washing Our Hands of Responsibility

Pilate famously washed his hands of responsibility when he sent Jesus to his torturous death.

So much horror and evil has been propagated (or allowed) by leaders who reject responsibility.

One famous example is a mid-tier leader in the Nazi regime named Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was responsible for the imprisonment, torture, and death of countless Jews.

Hannah Arendt, who wrote a piercing essay about his trial in Jerusalem, connected the dots between Eichmann and Pilate in the following passage.

“There was another reason that made the day of this conference unforgettable for Eichmann. Although he had been doing his best right along to help with the Final Solution, he had still harbored some doubts about "such a bloody solution through violence," and these doubts had now been dispelled. “Here now, during this conference, the most prominent people had spoken, the Popes of the Third Reich." Now he could see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears that not only Hitler, not only Heydrich or the "sphinx" Müller, not just the S.S. or the Party, but the élite of the good old Civil Service were vying and fighting with each other for the honor of taking the lead in these "bloody" matters. "At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt." Who was he to judge? Who was he "to have [his] own thoughts in this matter"? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.” - Hannah Arendt, Eichman in Jerusalem, page 114

Here we have someone partially responsible for the Holocaust of the Jews and he says he doesn't bear any responsibility.

It's not his fault, he says.

Wow.

That's an indication that no matter how bad it gets, or how clear the responsibility is demonstrated, we humans can always find a way to skirt that responsibility and put the blame anywhere but on ourselves. In fact, the more explicit the responsibility is, the more, in our pride, we resist and reject it.

This is a stark contrast to Jesus taking responsibility for that which he had no blame; out of love.

When we are facing a difficult situation we want to wash our hands of responsibility. We’d like to slither into a position or place where the pressure and spotlight are redirected elsewhere. 

In the case of Pilate, the persistence of the religious leaders and the cries of the people cornered him to defy them all or go along with them. Washing his hands soothes his conscience and satisfies the people's desire for blood while giving him an escape hatch.

We allow (or other times, directly make happen) horrible things to happen to those we love and others who we don't.

We lack courage and we embrace cowardice.

The Fragmentation of Responsibility 

So much evil has been propagated by people and we wonder, in confusion, why?

One of the ways evil is enabled is through the fragmentation of responsibility for those involved. This makes people feel that no one person is responsible and instead distributed amongst a large enough group as to make it feel negligible for each individual.

This idea is articulated in the book, Ordinary Men, about how a group of middle-aged German men became ruthless Nazis. It's also a possibility for us too.

“...with the division of labor and removal of the killing process to the death camps, the men felt scarcely any responsibility at all for their actions…

If they accept authority's ideology, action follows logically and willingly.

Hence "ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behavior as serving a desirable end…” - Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men, Page 176

Embracing Responsibility For Evil

The crowd voluntarily embraces the responsibility for the death of Jesus. As Jesus says on the cross, they know not what they are doing.

Shortly after I got my first car, I allowed an unlicensed friend to drive it and soon after, crashed it into a tree. Panicked, I didn’t know what to do. Someone I knew stepped in to provide their insight about the situation. They told me my choices and how those choices would likely play out. And then this person handed me the decision.

Instead of accepting responsibility, I created and perpetuated a lie to the police officer, my parents, and the community. 

I didn't want to accept the consequences, so I used blame to escape; a deer in this case. It was another step of compromise on my journey into the abyss. My pathway has much less severe consequences but it was not so much different, at the heart level, than the most severe of history's horrors. This is where we fail to recognize the problem of sin. We don't see, often due to limitations on us, how bad and into what our sin can truly grow.

Primo Levi, a concentration camp survivor said the following in his book attempting to make sense of the evil he encountered.

“The person who has inflicted the wound pushes the memory deep down, to be rid of it, to alleviate the feeling of guilt, indeed the need, to separate evil from good, to be able to take sides...

The young above all demand clarity, a sharp cut; their experience of the world being meagre, they do not like ambiguity... [they] expected to find a terrible but decipherable world...

The world into which one was precipitated was terrible, yes, but also indecipherable: it did not conform to any model, the enemy was all around but also inside, the 'we' lost its limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier but rather many confused, perhaps innumerable frontiers, which stretched between each of us."- Primo Levi, the Drowned and the Saved, Page 33

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from the Gulag Archipelago, said this idea in a much more concise and well-known way. 

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

The potential, in the right brewing circumstances, is there for us all. In the end, we're either Pilate washing our hands of responsibility, or the people calling for the torment and death of an innocent man. 

Fundamentally, we're helpless to stop it. An intervention is required.