Was Hitler a vegetarian? What’s your onion?

When I first read that Hitler was vegetarian, I found all sorts of reasons to say he wasn’t really vegetarian. For instance, and this is just one of the deflections I found, I decided (and told people) that he was what snarky vegetarians call “carbotarian,” meaning he just ate pasta and dairy. And some people say he sometimes ate meat. The fact is that he was vegetarian. But the interesting question is: why did I care so much that I would engage in hair-splitting about it? Why was his being vegetarian such a threat to me that I, a scholar of argumentation, engaged in really bad arguments to make him not a vegetarian?

Because that’s how we all are when it comes to protecting our sense of our in-group as essentially good.

Vegetarians are an in-group for me. I have some grumps with vegetarians, but, since they’re an in-group, I always attribute basically good motives to them (even when I think they’re wrong). And that’s pretty typical for how all of us cognitively manage appalling behavior on the part of an in-group member. Once we’ve gone through “they didn’t do it,” “it wasn’t that thing,” “others have done worse,” and we’ve got Hitler, and he’s in our in-group, then we say, “he isn’t really in our in-group.”

So, obviously, this post isn’t really about Hitler, and it isn’t about vegetarians, but it’s about how we engage in actively stupid and irrational reasoning (“Hitler was a carbotarian”) because we’re really trying to hold onto the moral licensing that in-group membership gives us.

“Moral licensing” is the term that some researchers use for the fact that we all engage in very bad math about our own behavior. We have a tendency to engage in a credit/debit calculation: I did this good thing, so it’s okay for me to do that bad thing. But it’s always bad math. Giving some money to a homeless person on the freeway off-ramp doesn’t erase from the ledger voting for criminalizing homelessness or cutting services to the poor. But that’s how we reason.

I love the story in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov about the onion. A woman who has been completely evil in her life begs to be lifted from Hell on the basis of having once given a beggar an onion. It doesn’t work because that one act of kindness was just the only time she was ethical. In-group membership is the onion—it’s the one thing we do that we hope will justify everything we do and are.

The fantasy of in-group social licensing goes further—it goes into our fantasies about our in-group and history. We all want to believe that we would have been in the resistance, we would have been abolitionists, we would never have supported Hitler because our in-group is good, and therefore members of our in-group have always been on the right side of history, and therefore we would have made ethical choices.

But, if Hitler was vegetarian, and vegetarians are an in-group for me, then my in-group identification doesn’t guarantee I would never have supported Hitler. Hitler being a vegetarian means that being vegetarian isn’t a guarantee that I am and would always have been good.

And that is why I was so intent on profoundly irrational ways of trying to make Hitler not a vegetarian: because what was at stake was not whether he was vegetarian, but whether I was willing to admit that my in-group should have moral license—whether being a member of my in-group means that we are guaranteed to be right and good on the whole and can therefore be shitty at all sorts of individual moments.

What I had to do was to step back from my thinking about Hitler in terms of trying to hold onto a moral license for vegetarians and instead look at all the major scholars of Hitler, and admit that there was only one that would support my argument. More important, I had to think about how I was arguing. Could I find data to support my claim? Sure. Anyone can find data to support any claim. Having data doesn’t make an argument rational.

What I couldn’t do was make an argument that Hitler wasn’t really vegetarian that wouldn’t also mean all sorts of other people weren’t really vegetarian. What I couldn’t do was create a set of criteria of vegetarianism that I was willing to apply across people I do and don’t like (including me).

There are people who claim that Nazism was Protestant, left-wing, Catholic, or atheist, and they are making arguments as desperately irrational as my trying to claim that Hitler wasn’t vegetarian. They can find evidence to support their claims, but what they can’t do is come up with a set of criteria for Nazism being Protestant, left-wing, Catholic, atheist, or whatever that wouldn’t also apply to lots of governments, groups, and people (even including themselves) that they don’t want to condemn. For instance, if Hitler was left-wing because he supported a social safety net, then so was Reagan. If Hitler was Protestant because many of his supporters were Protestant, then Niemoller and Bonhoeffer were Nazis. If voting for Hitler becoming dictator means a group was Nazi, then Catholics were Nazis. Instead of deflecting the data, we need to think about the major premise: supporting a social safety net doesn’t make a person left-wing (as both Reagan and Eisenhower show); that Protestant areas gave Nazis a lot of support doesn’t change that the Catholic Party voted unanimously for Hitler becoming dictator. In-group membership is not some kind of “you’ve always been on the right side of history” guarantee.

Hitler was right-wing. There is simply no doubt about that. He was part of a right-wing coalition, he supported right-wing policies, and right-wing politicians saw him as any ally. The only people to vote against his becoming dictator were democratic socialists.

But, and this is the important point: Nazism eventually got buy-in from most Germans. Nazism was not a system of a small group of people who, because of their being members of some out-group, were able to force others to do tasks those people knew were wrong and didn’t want to do. Nazism was a group of policemen standing by a ditch murdering Jews even when they didn’t have to. And that group had people from all over the political, religious, and cultural spectrum. Nazism is not what that out-group does. It is what members of our in-group did. It isn’t what people like us would never do; it’s what people like us did. If we don’t understand that, then we will never understand Nazism.

We are so desperate to hold on to in-group moral licensing that we compulsively engage in all sorts of hair-splitting (not really vegetarian, dog-lover, conservative, Catholic, Protestant), even when that hair-splitting is completely inconsistent. That we use that kind of hair-splitting to pretend that people like us had nothing to do with Nazism (although they did) isn’t the worst consequence of in-group membership being treated as moral license.

In addition to in-group moral licensing enabling us to engage in bad math about behavior, and tell ourselves comfortable lies about how our in-group is always on the right side of history (and therefore we are, always will, and always would have been on the right side of history), it enables Machiavellianism and a sloppy moral relativism. Machiavellianism, in psychology, is a personality trait of people who “are temperamentally predisposed to be calculating, conniving, and deceptive. Essentially amoral, they use other people as stepping stones to reach their goals.” Machiavellianism says that strategies for getting what we want—the means—are amoral. Moral licensing says that lying, coercion, violating the law, blackmail—they’re amoral. What makes them moral or immoral is whether the person is engaged in them is in- or out-group. Since the in-group is essentially moral, then any act on the part of an in-group member oriented toward the triumph of the in-group is moral, even if we would condemn it as immoral were it done by out-group (once again, moral licensing). This sense that the in-group can behave in ways we would normally condemn as immoral and yet still praise their actions as moral is the basis of far too many Law and Order episodes, as well as almost all action movies.

In-group moral licensing is all about saying that we are allowed, in this moment, because of who we are and what we believe, to engage in behavior we on principle condemn, while we continue to claim that we are adherent to that principle. Moral licensing enables us to claim that we are committed to principles we violate (feminists and Bill Clinton, Mitch McConnell and the timing of appointing a SCOTUS justice). In-group moral licensing enables factional Machiavellianism.

I’m not saying that “both sides are equally bad”—I don’t think US politics is about two sides, and I’m not going to endorse the bad math of in-group moral licensing. More important, it doesn’t matter if the “other side” violates a principle. If we violate it, then it isn’t a principle for us. As Bill Murray says in Ghostbusters, it’s more of a guideline than a rule.

In-group moral licensing enables a kind of sloppy moral relativism in that the morality of an action is entirely dependent on whether the person engaged in the action is in- or out-group.

Here’s what I’m saying.

We can have a political world in which political leaders are motivated by the principles that maintain democracy or we can have factional Machiavellianism. If people want to engage in rabid factionalism, then they should own it, and stop claiming that they are acting on any principle other than promoting the in-group.

I’m a big fan of a guy who is very unpopular in US political discourse right now, who completely rejected the notion that your in-group membership means you can treat people in ways you would never want to be treated. If you take seriously what he said, then there is no such thing as moral licensing. That you believe that you are on the side of the good—that you believe your in-group is good—doesn’t, by his standards, mean that you can violate principles you want maintained on your behalf.

As I said, not a lot of people care about what he said. He didn’t say “do unto others in your in-group” or “do unto others except out-group.” He didn’t mumble.

And, if you’re claiming something is a principle, except when it isn’t, it isn’t a principle. It’s a rationalization. Hitler was a vegetarian. Your in-group membership is an onion. It will not pull you to heaven.