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Introduction: Samuel and Pearl Oliner's The Altruistic Personality
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14195 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1988 |
481 Words |
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He was twelve years old when his entire family was driven out of a Jewish ghetto in Poland and murdered by the Nazis. In desperation Samuel Oliner knocked at the door of a Polish Christian woman, who took him in, gave him a new name, and found a place for him to hide throughout the war. His experience left him with a profound sense of wonder and a question that he could only properly explore forty years later, as a sociologist: In a time of extreme danger, what had led this woman and many thousands like her to risk their lives to help people who were marked for death--even total strangers--while others stood passively by?
To answer that complex and critically important question, Samuel and Pearl Oliner undertook the massive Altruistic Personality Project, which interviewed over seven hundred rescuers and nonrescuers living in Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy during the Nazi occupation. Drawing on the data from this study, The Altruistic Personality, portions of which are excerpted in the following pages, explores the experiences and motivations of those uncommon individuals who aided Jews without compensation--and with full knowledge of the fatal consequences that would befall them if their actions were discovered.
By comparing and contrasting rescuers and bystanders, the Oliners discovered that those who intervened were distinguished by certain characteristics, including a deep-seated, wide-ranging empathy to others developed in their childhood homes, where moral and ethical values were not only strongly held but acted upon by their own parents. The Oliners' findings dispel popular perceptions of moral heroism as lone acts of spontaneous courage, for they show that the behavior of many rescuers was foreshadowed by the conduct of those in their own social circle--relatives and friends, as well as religious and community groups.
Following the excerpt are four essay responses to The Altruistic Personality. In "The Chain of Concern" (p. 374), Lutheran theologian Richard John Neuhaus argues that the book is about the seeming paradox of freedom through obligation. The rescuers were "free" to risk themselves for others precisely because they were bound by a chain of concern, or of moral obligation, which they typically explained in the vocabulary of religion. In "The Human Face of Altruism" (p. 383), journalist Perry Garfinkel profiles the coauthors and tells the story of the six-year research project that resulted in The Altruistic Personality. In "The Banality of Altruism" (p. 388), sociologist Amitai Etzione recalls the history of arguments over whether authentic altruistic behavior ever
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