Restoring “Western” Values

After the depravity of Nazism and fascism, cultural currents in Europe and the United States reemphasized universal values. Responding to what he saw as a crisis in faith caused by affluence and secularism, Pope John XXIII (r. 1958–1963) in 1962 convened the Second Vatican Council. Known as Vatican II, this council modernized the liturgy, democratized many church procedures, and at the last session in 1965 renounced church doctrine that condemned the Jewish people as guilty of killing Jesus. Vatican II promoted ecumenism—that is, mutual cooperation among the world’s faiths—and outreach to the world without imperial designs.

In the early postwar years, people in the U.S. bloc emphasized the triumph of a Western heritage, a Western civilization, and Western values as they encountered “barbaric” forces, a concept that came to include nomadic tribes, Nazi armies, Communist agents, or national liberation movements in Asia and Africa. Many white Europeans looked back nostalgically on their imperial history and produced exotic films and novels about conquest and its pageantry.

Readers around the world snapped up memoirs of the death camps and tales of the resistance. Rescued from the Third Reich in 1940, Nelly Sachs won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966 for her poetry about the Holocaust. Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl (1947), the moving record of a Jewish teenager hidden with her family in the back of an Amsterdam house, showed the survival of Western values in the face of Nazi persecution. Amid the menacing evils of Nazism, Frank, who died near the end of the war in the Bergen-Belsen camp, wrote that she never stopped believing that “people are really good at heart.” Governments erected permanent plaques at spots where resisters had been killed, and organizations of resisters publicly commemorated their role in winning the war, hiding the fact of widespread collaboration. Many a politician with a Nazi past returned easily to the new cultural mainstream even as the stories of resistance took on mythical qualities.

At the end of the 1940s, existentialism became the rage among the cultural elites and students in universities. This philosophy explored the meaning of human existence in a world where evil flourished. Two of existentialism’s leaders, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, confronted the question of “being,” given what they perceived as the absence of God and the tragic breakdown of morality. Their answer was that being, or existing, was not the automatic process either of God’s creation or of birth into the natural world. One was not born with spiritual goodness in the image of a creator, but instead one created an “authentic” existence through action and choice. Sartre’s writings emphasized political activism and resistance under totalitarianism. Even though they had never confronted the enormous problems of making choices while living under fascism, young people in the 1950s found existentialism compelling and made it the most fashionable philosophy of the day.

In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifetime companion, published the twentieth century’s most important work on the condition of women, The Second Sex. Beauvoir believed that most women had failed to take the kind of action necessary to lead authentic lives. Instead, they lived in the world of biological necessity, devoting themselves exclusively to having children. Failing to create an authentic self through action and accomplishment, they had become its opposite—an object, or “Other.” Moreover, instead of struggling to define themselves and assert their freedom, women passively accepted their lives as defined by men. Beauvoir’s now classic book was a smash hit, and people wrote her thousands of letters asking for advice. Both Sartre and Beauvoir became celebrities, for the media spread the new commitment to humane values just as it had previously spread support for Nazism or for other political ideas.

People of color in Africa and Asia contributed new theories of humanity by exploring the topics of liberation and racial difference. During the 1950s, Frantz Fanon, a black psychiatrist from the French colony of Martinique, began analyzing liberation movements, gaining his insights from his participation in the Algerian war of liberation and other struggles at the time. He wrote that the mental functioning of the colonized person was “traumatized” by the brutal imposition of an outside culture. Ruled by guns, the colonized person knew only violence and would thus naturally decolonize by means of violence. Translated into many languages, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) posed the question of how to decolonize one’s culture and mind.

Simultaneously, the commitment to the cause of civil rights intensified in the 1950s. African Americans had fought in World War II to defeat the Nazi idea of white racial superiority; as civilians, they now hoped to advance that ideal in the United States. With its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the U.S. Supreme Court declared that segregated education violated the U.S. Constitution. In December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and part-time secretary for the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), boarded a city bus and took the first available seat in the “colored” section. When a white man found himself without a seat, the driver screamed at Parks, “Nigger, move back.” She refused to move, and her studied use of civil disobedience led to widespread nonviolent disobedience among African Americans throughout the South. Talented leaders emerged, foremost among them the great orator Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), a Baptist pastor from Georgia who advocated “soulforce”—Gandhi’s satyagraha (“holding to truth”)—to counter aggression. The postwar culture of nonviolence shaped the early years of the U.S. civil rights movement until the influence of Fanon and other third world activists turned some toward more violent activism.