Moral blindness still alive and well

There is a Room of Silence at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Visitors are invited "to remember inside this historic place the dark but also the hopeful events, to meditate and to feel gratitude for the achievements of recent years".

The Room of Silence itself is unimposing. A small, square, musty room where last Sunday morning the only other person present when I was there was a young man with what seemed like a transistor radio pressed to his ear.

There are many dark events to reflect upon at the Brandenburg Gate. The gate and its Quadriga (the winged Goddess of Victory on a two-wheeled chariot drawn by four horses) were themselves symbols of autocratic military power. Napoleon captured the Quadriga in 1806 when he sacked Berlin. It was here Hitler celebrated the establishment of the Third Reich.

The Brandenburg Gate witnessed the destruction of the city at the end of the war by Allied bombs that killed more than 100,000 civilians. It was here the Soviet flag was raised in 1945 when the Russians took the city. The Brandenburg Gate became the symbol of a divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989, when the Berlin Wall was built on its steps.

There is much around the Brandenburg Gate to feel joyous about, too. There is the spectacular rebirth of Berlin in the last decade. A hundred yards from the gate is the renovated Reichstag building, the seat of the old imperial parliament and now of the new federal Germany. It had been completely destroyed in the infamous Reichstag fire of 1933. It is now being entirely restored.

A few hundred yards across Tiergarten is Potsdamer Platz, a sensation of modern architecture. A few hundreds yards down Unter Den Liden is Museum Island, where many of the world's finest museums have been restored magnificently alongside the huge Berliner Dom (cathedral). The fall of the Berlin Wall was a hopeful event and the renaissance of one of the world's great cities is a joyous one.

And yet. . .

The darkness we are invited to reflect upon in that room of silence is a darkness that was not particular to the Nazi era or to Germany. Certainly, the Holocaust was probably the single greatest atrocity of history, but there has been much else that a focus on the Nazi era may obliterate. There is the institution of slavery upon which all the great civilisations of history were founded. We don't much reflect on that reality when celebrating the cultural inheritances of those eras or the great figures of those and other civilisations, most of whom accepted slavery. Even Jesus urged only kindness towards slaves, not liberation.

In celebrating the achievements of the New World, there is little reflection on the annihilation of almost the entire native populations of the New World. There is little regard for the millions massacred in wars throughout the centuries and the other miseries that those wars brought. There is not much reflection on the oppression of women down through the ages. It was not only the Nazis who committed crimes against humanity.

People of wicked intent perpetrated crimes but not only those. People without wickedness also perpetrated crimes, they condoned crimes of wicked people and they acquiesced in crimes. They did so because of a moral blindness. The kind of moral blindness that allowed people such as Plato, Aristotle and Jesus to condone slavery.

But is moral blindness a condition peculiar to previous ages? Can it be that our era is immune? If so, how can certain phenomena be explained? How is it that the assets of the top three billionaires in the world are more than the combined GDP of all least developed countries and their 600 million people? Yes, three people have assets greater than the combined assets of the poorest 600 million people in the world (UN Human Development Report 1999, page 3).

The same report shows that life expectancy at birth in countries such as Ireland, Canada, the UK, the US and Germany is around 77. In countries such as Mozambique, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic and Zambia, it is around 44. And it is not just that in these countries people die off suddenly in early middle age, it is because their lives up to then are struggles for basic survival.

For many others it is worse than that. The infant mortality rate (per 1,000 live births) is around six in the better-off countries - in many African countries it is around 130.

In our own countries there are also massive disparities of wealth. Just look at here, where mega-salaries are earned and enjoyed in the dot.com economy, and where in the ghetto societies of the Dublin suburbs bare subsistence is eked out. What possible moral justification can there be for the division of wealth and resources with such disparity? Isn't our attitude to such disparities akin to the moral blindness that allowed good people to condone slavery and to benefit from slavery?

It might be argued that there is little we can do about that world disparity. Just one question: how is it that we are resolutely opposed to allowing people from the deprived world to come and live and work in Ireland? Is there no bit of us that says we have to share these resources, this wealth and this country with them?

In the quiet of our own silent rooms, is there ever a point in which we acknowledge that the institutions of world society - like the institution of slavery - are unjust?

That amid the spectacular vigour of cities such as Berlin, along with its opulence and confidence, there is a world without hope, without joy? And if there is such a point of reflection that we reach in the stillness of our own rooms of silence, what individually do we do about it?

vbrowne@irish-times.ie