Joy, satisfaction, pain, hunger, sadness, violence – sensations, or feelings, are, ultimately, at the heart of human history. Avoiding them, encouraging them, pursuing them, studying the best way to provide them. The economy of feeling pushes history towards or away from ideas, warfare, innovation, political systems. What ways will we organise to maximise positivity? Conversely, what is it that’s happened when a knife is plunged into a soldier? Or an African American is dragged to the town square by a raging mob?

These moments are often driven by historical forces. A force, we know from physics, is an impulse, a pressure, an energy that exerts itself upon an object. In history, we talk of economic, social, cultural, and political forces. We also might hear someone described as a ‘forceful’ character.

Social forces are difficult to imagine. But an idea – built upon the shoulders of history – translated into sound waves and gestures by a charismatic dictator or a quietly convincing scholar hits your eyes and ears with all the power of a physical force – the same power – and moves you to speak, to move a pen, to protest, to work, to kill.

In fact, the great movements in history – wars, campaigns, revolutions, genocide, progress – have, for a long time now, been described by most historians as being driven by forces, rather than individuals. The French Revolution’s ‘cultural causes’ – the force of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Economic forces – like depression or hyperinflation – that contributed to the rise of the Third Reich. The institutional corruption of the catholic Church leading to the Reformation. The economic forces that drove Africans helplessly over the Atlantic on slave ships, and the scientific beliefs that served to rationalise their subservience for centuries.

Historical forces move people to act in ways that seems to suggest they’re devoid of their own force, their own free will, their own power to resist or choose for themselves. That if George Washington or Robespierre or Martin Luther King or Karl Marx had never been born, someone else – shaped by the same historical forces of the context they lived in – would have inevitably, at some point, taken their place. Maybe in slightly different ways but with the same fundamental principles. If Bill Gates or Steve Jobs were never born, someone else would have been at the centre of the development of personal computers.

There were several reasons lynch mobs in Jim Crow America and soldiers and police officers in Nazi Germany were motivated to kill African Americans and Jews. Historical forces like a sense of victimhood, both having lost wars, cultural forces and propaganda that depicted the victims stereotypically as inferior, greedy, or a threat, and economic forces – ‘the frustration of basic needs’ as social psychologist Ervin Staub puts it.

The stated reasons were similar: the powerful Jewish interests were colluding to deprive ordinary Germans and that black Americans, through their natural inferiority, were going to pollute the racial purity of the white race.

In the lynch mobs that murdered black southerners in America, the participants were under no illusions that they might not have been doing the correct thing, the moral thing, the ethical thing. Difficult, maybe, but just all the same.

They were motivated, in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America, by a moral culture made up of stereotypes, adverts, scientific literature, societal standards, norms, and sensibilities that all pushed the perpetrators towards killing.

In both cases, the perpetrators had rationales, justifications, reasons for what they were doing, even if, with historical hindsight, we can see these to be incorrect.

But there are points in memoirs and testimonies that fascinate me: points of resistance. Where, despite the historical forces bearing down upon them, the perpetrators have a moment of conscience, maybe.

When a German commander tearful and shaking tells his men they have to kill women and children.

When ordinary police officers of the Nazi Order Police report being sick, being unable to pull the trigger.

When one describes it as ‘bestial’.

Others reported – and this is consistent with evidence from other genocides too – that if they knew the person or they’d gotten to know them even slightly while they were a prisoner, they’d have to leave the killing to someone else.

In her autobiography, Katharine DePre Lumpkin – a white American Southerner from a slave owning family – describes her racial awakening.

She was 19, listening to an African American talk at a college conference on race. The speaker was introduced as Miss Arthur, a form of address reserved for whites in the South. She imagined having to shake Miss Arthur’s hand and panicked. When she closed her eyes, listening to Miss Arthur, she realised she couldn’t tell her race from the way she was speaking.

Later she realised that, ‘the heavens had not fallen, nor the earth parted asunder to swallow up this un-heard of transgression. Indeed, I found I could breathe freely again, eat heartily, even laugh again’.

Another autobiography, Anne Braden’s, recalls eating a meal with an African American for the first time, forgetting about race and realising, ‘Why, there is no race problem at all! There are only the people who have not realized it yet’.

This begs an important question: how is resistance possible? How does one know when they’re being pushed by historical forces to do something that in retrospect we will see as wholly immoral? How does one escape from under the hand of history if culture, society, and the economy are all moving you towards acting in a particular way? Do we retain a moral sense?

The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, for example, has asked whether there can be a ‘moral responsibility for resisting socialization’.

The point of looking at history in this way is to understand how we can recognise similar conditions in the present, whether we can examine our own principles, standards, and norms, and ask how we’d ever know what the right thing to do is.

Often, what makes people like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther notable, is not that they are shaped by historical forces, but that that the very same forces are felt by them as coercion and that they stand up to them, counter them, resist them.

Like a stick flowing down a river, individuals are either taken along by the flow of history or, like a fish, they can – for some reason – resist.

The question that’s been asked by many, such as the philosopher Hannah Arendt, is whether this absolves the lyncher and the contributor to genocide of guilt. Are they morally innocent, if historical forces are at work on them? As if they are coerced by another and aren’t even aware?

If the factors that lead to atrocities are larger – economic, cultural, social, even scientific – and the people who create the narratives are elites, then is the ordinary man or woman to blame? Where do we find that causal point of moral action? The bit that we can say that was ethically wrong or right, and we should discourage or encourage more of it?

One way is to ask what we admire in figures like Rosa Parks or the rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. The first thing I think that is obvious to note is that they were doing something difficult. They resisted those historical forces that were bearing down upon them, as if struggling from underneath heavy metaphysical weights.

Morality is only interesting when it’s difficult. The moral acts that we celebrate are often those that are most difficult, that cost the person in some way. We can examine this on a banal level too. It’s cold, rainy, you’re tired from a long day, but it’s your friends birthday. And you said you’d go out. This wouldn’t be a moral situation if it was a sunny Saturday full of energy and you wanted to go out. What makes it morally interesting is that you do the right thing by going out despite finding it difficult to find the motivation to do so because you want to be a good friend.

Morality consists in resistance.

Now, we usually think about resistance as being type of strength. The rubber band resists snapping when stretched.

So where does this moral strength to resist historical forces come from? Does this locate the source, the well-spring, the elixir of morality?

As we’ve seen, the perpetrators thought they were doing the right thing. That there was a universe of cultural reasoning that went into protecting the colour line or cleansing the homeland. They even rationalised killing Jewish women and children by telling themselves they wouldn’t survive another harsh war-torn foodless winter anyway. That they were doing the humane thing.

Strength here seems to be the difference between accepting the reasoning and challenging it. That can happen in two ways.

One is knowing that the cultural facts presented to you are wrong. The Nazis, for example, used Theodore Kaufman’s book Germany Must Perish as propaganda to convince Germans of a Jewish plot against them. They claimed in propaganda that Kaufman’s book was influential on American foreign policy, despite it being a fringe book that most people wouldn’t have heard of.

If you know this to be a mistruth, a lie, a piece of propaganda, you’re less likely to be incited by it to murder. You can reason your way out of doing the immoral thing.

But what if you accept the propaganda? What if you believe the stereotypes?

The other way to build moral strength comes not from reason but from emotion: empathy.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume had a lot to say about morality. For him, morality – rather than being grounded in reason or thinking logically – was, at its core, a feeling.

Adam Smith called morality a sentiment.

When we see someone in pain, for example, we can literally feel that pain in some way in ourselves, and conversely, when we see someone happy, we might feel buoyed in spirits, too. This is what we refer to as empathy today, a word not around when Hume and Smith were writing in the 18th century.

Empathy is feeling joyful yourself when you hear someone say something moving. The feeling of disgust seeing someone mistreated. Being moved to tears by a scene in a film. When these things happen something beyond thinking, beyond cognition, is going on – we are moved by others.

Hume wrote that, ‘Where friendship appears, my heart catches the same passion, and is warm’d by those warm sentiments, that display themselves before me’.

In this way, empathy is a kind of involuntary translation of one person’s feelings into another. Hume talks about passions – good or bad – being contagious. Of another person’s feelings almost being infused with another’s.

How is this the basis of morality?

Well, we approve – we judge as moral – the things we imagine to cause pleasure or good feelings within us and others, and disapprove – or judge as immoral – the things that cause pain or bad outcomes.

If someone hurts someone we might feel the pain the person is in and feel cold towards the perpetrator. We feel metaphorically, but in some sense literally, chilled towards them. Conversely, we might be warmed by someone’s warm heartedness or tenderness.

Morality as empathy can spread as an infusion, hence the hot and cold metaphors.

Moral philosopher Michael Slote has argued that empathy is the ‘cement of the moral universe’.

Thinking about morality and empathy in this way helps us to understand the resistance to those historical forces – the economics, the cultural and social beliefs, the attitudes, sensibilities, norms, and codes – that can bear down on us.

That no matter how powerful they are, empathy can interrupt them.

Of course, in the case of the Holocaust and lynchings, that obviously didn’t happen. Most seemed content to be unempathetic towards the victim. Why might this be?

I think we should look to three factors: proximity, equality, and education.

First proximity. We usually feel more empathy when the pleasure or pain we’re seeing is spatially or temporally nearer. We feel more empathy for the child drowning in front of us than a starving child thousand miles away, even though we know the latter is more frequent.

Jews and African Americans were segregated. As Bauman has pointed out, the Nazis had an entire system of bureaucratisation to keep distance between those carrying out the Holocaust and Jews – breaking tasks into separate components, admin, driving trains, loading gas – to make it easier for the killers, since asking them to just shoot thousands of women and children had been proving difficult.

Bauman says, ‘The significance – and danger – of moral indifference becomes particularly acute in our modern, rationalized, industrial technologically proficient society because in such a society human action can be effective at a distance’.

Second, and related, is equality. Empathy requires imagining that you and the person you feel empathy for have the same faculties, the same capacities for pleasure and pain, the same hopes, fears, and dreams. It requires an understanding that we all share a similar range of emotions and feelings, a fundamental equality. African Americans and Jews were dehumanized, described as separate races, and in many cases almost as separate species.

Finally, but still related, is education or, at least, the need to be reliably informed. This happens in many ways.

For the psychologist Martin Hoffman, empathy is developed through experience. Parents, for example, disciplining the child when they’ve hit another child and asking questions like, ‘how do you think your friend feels when you hit him?’ Others have pointed to how novels in the 18th century expanded the circle of empathy by describing the inner lives of people you would never have encountered. An empathetic education is important.

But there is a final reason empathy or resistance might not be triggered – related to education. Perpetrators simply didn’t know the truth.

We could say that the perpetrators were being empathetic – just to their own in-group rather than the victims, who they believed were in danger of some kind.

And we might also say that the perpetrators were being reasonable.

Perpetrators must have in some sense used their ‘reason’ to conclude that, despite the pain it might cause black Americans or Jews, they were inflicting that pain for some greater good. They were using a moral principle – they thought it was, despite the difficulty they sometimes might have felt doing it, the right thing to do.

I think the problem here is simple: their information was wrong. Resistance and empathy is only possible if you know the book Germany Must Perish is not informing US foreign policy, or if you know that particular a African American has been wrongly accused of a crime.

And – and I think this is a difficult truth – in most cases the perpetrators, the ordinary men and women, didn’t know. They were being led. And so the condemnation, blame – the causal point of responsibility – is moved into the public sphere, into the leaders, authors, thinkers who lied, who made mistakes, who printed mistruths, rather than the ordinary men and women.

So what have we found? Have we discovered that spring, that elixir, that foundation of morality? Of resistance?

We can at least say that morality is found somewhere in the midst of difficulty – it’s only found in resistance – but that it’s grounded in empathy, which is learned through a moral education. A public sphere that keeps all people in its view, makes sure no-one is distanced – in other words, is inclusive. An understanding that we all share the same faculties, that we are the same. And, of course, a commitment to due process, to principles, to codes and norms and standards in all institutions, to making sure we’re searching for the truth.