The Question of German Guilt

Our Purification

The self-analysis of a people in historical reflection and the personal self-analysis of the individual are two different things. But the first can happen only by way of the second. What individuals accomplish jointly in communication may, if true, become the spreading consciousness of many and then is called national consciousness.

Again we must reject collective thinking, as fictitious thinking. Any real metamorphosis occurs through individuals—in the individual, in many individuals independent of or mutually inspiring one another.

We Germans, no matter how differently or even contrastingly, all ponder our guilt or guiltlessness. All of us do, National-Socialists and opponents of National-Socialism. By “we” I mean those with whom language, descent, situation, fate, give me a feeling of immediate solidarity. I do not mean to accuse anyone by saying, “We.” If other Germans feel guiltless, that is up to them—except in the two points of the punishment of criminals for crimes and of the political liability of all for the acts of the Hitler state. Those feeling guiltless are not being assailed until they start assailing. If in considering themselves guiltless they call others guilty, we should, of course, always inquire into the substance of their charges but also into their right to make them here. If, however, continuing the National-Socialist type of thought, they call us un-German—if instead of meditating and listening to reason they blindly seek to destroy others by means of generalized judgments, they disrupt our solidarity and are unwilling to test and develop themselves by talking with each other. For their way of attack they are to be charged with violating human rights.

Among our population a natural insight, thoughtful and’ without pathos, is not rare. The following are samples of such simple utterances.

An eighty-year-old scholar: “I never wavered in these twelve years, and yet I was never satisfied with myself. Time and again I would ruminate whether the purely passive resistance to the Nazis might not be turned into action. But Hitler’s organization was too diabolical.”

A younger anti-Nazi: “After years of bowing to ‘government by fear,’ even though with gnashing teeth, we opponents of National-Socialism also need purification. Thus we dissociate ourselves from the pharisaism of those who think the mere absence of a Party badge makes them first-class people.”

An official in the process of denazification: “If I let myself be pushed into the Party, if I lived in relative comfort, if I adapted myself to the Nazi state and to this extent benefited from it—even though in inner opposition—I have no decent right to complain if now I reap the disadvantages.”

Our use of the word purification in the guilt question has a good sense. We have to purge ourselves of whatever guilt each one finds in himself, as far as this is possible by restitution, by atonement, by inner renewal and metamorphosis. We shall come to that later.

First we shall glance at some of the tendencies which are tempting us to evade purification. Lured by false impulses and instincts, we not only leave the way that might cleanse us but add to confusion by unclean motivations.

DODGING PURIFICATION

Mutual Accusations

We Germans differ greatly in the kind and degree of our participation in, or resistance to, National-Socialism. Everyone must reflect on his own internal and external conduct, and seek his own peculiar rebirth in this German crisis.

Another great difference between individuals concerns the starting time of this inner metamorphosis—whether it began in 1933 or in 1934, after the murders of June 30; whether it happened from 1938 on, after the synagogue burnings, or not until the war, or not until the threatening defeat, or not until the collapse.

In these matters we Germans cannot be reduced to a common denominator. We must keep an open mind in approaching each other from essentially different starting points. The only common denominator may be our nationality which makes all jointly guilty and liable for having let 1933 come to pass without dying. This also unites the outer and the inner emigration.

Due to our great diversity, everybody can apparently blame everybody else. This lasts as long as the individual really envisions only his own situation and that of people similar to him, and judges the situation of the others only in relation to himself. It is amazing to observe how we get really excited only when we are personally concerned, and how we see everything in the perspective of our special position. It takes a constant, conscious effort to escape from this perspective.

A recital of the recriminations current among the Germans of today would lead to endless discussions. Only some incidental examples from the present and the recent past are to be mentioned here. We may well falter at times, when our patience threatens to give out in talking with each other and we run up against brusque and callous rejection.

In the past years there were Germans who demanded martyrdom of us other Germans. We should not silently suffer what was going on, they told us; even if our action remained unsuccessful, it still would be like an ethical prop for the entire population, a visible symbol of suppressed forces. Thus I could hear myself rebuked from 1933 on, by friends, men and women.

Such demands were so harrowing because there was profound truth in them, yet a truth insultingly perverted by the manner of its presentation. What man, by himself, can experience before the transcendent, was dragged down to a level of moralizing, if not of sensationalism. Quietude and reverence were lost.

At present, a bad example of dodging into mutual accusation is given in many discussions between emigrants and others who stayed here—between the two groups we have come to describe as outer and inner emigration. Each has its ordeal. The emigrant has the world of a strange language to contend with, and homesickness as in the symbolic story of the German Jew in New York who had Hitler’s picture on the wall of his room. Why? Because nothing short of this daily reminder of the horrors awaiting him here would let him master his longing for the homeland. The trials of the stay-at-home included being utterly forsaken, an outcast in his own country, in constant danger, alone in the hour of need, shunned by all save a few friends whom he endangered in turn, thus suffering anew. Yet if now one group accuses the other, we need but to ask ourselves how we feel about the inner condition and tone of voice of these accusers—whether we are happy that such people feel this way, whether they set an example, whether there is something of an uplift in them, of freedom, of love, which might encourage us. If not, then what they say is not true, either.

There is no growth of life in mutual accusation. Talking with each other actually ceases; it is a form of the severance of communication. And this in turn is always a symptom of untruth, and so an occasion for honest men to search unceasingly where untruth might be hiding. It hides wherever Germans presume to judge Germans morally and metaphysically; wherever the veiled will to compulsion reigns instead of the goodwill to communication; wherever there is zeal to have the other admit guilt; wherever arrogance—“I am not incriminated”—looks down on the other; wherever the feeling of guiltlessness holds itself entitled to hold others guilty.

Self-Abasement and Defiance

Our human disposition—in Europe, at least—is such as to make us equally sensitive to blame and quick to blame others. We do not want our toes stepped on, but in our moral judgment of others we get excited easily. This is the consequence of moralistic poisoning. There is generally nothing to which we are so sensitive as to any hint that we are considered guilty. Even if we are guilty we do not want to let ourselves be told. And if we let ourselves be told we still do not want to be told by everyone. The greater this sensitivity to blame, the greater, as a rule, is the inconsiderate readiness to blame others. The world, down to the petty circumstances of everyday life, teems with imputations of the authorship of some mischance.

Oddly, sensitivity to blame is very apt to rebound into an urge to confess. Such confessions of guilt—false, because still instinctive and lustful—have one unmistakable external trait: fed by the same will to power as their opposites in the same individual, they betray the confessor’s wish to enhance his worth by his confession, to eclipse others. His confession of guilt wants to force others to confess. There is a touch of aggressiveness in such confessions. Moralism as a phenomenon of the will to power fosters both sensitivity to blame and confessions of guilt, both reproach and self-reproach, and psychologically it causes each of these to rebound into the other.

Hence, philosophically, the first thing required of anyone dealing with guilt questions is that he deal with himself, thereby extinguishing both sensitivity and the confession urge.

Today this generally human phenomenon—here described psychologically—is indissolubly interwoven with the gravity of our German question. We are threatened by the twin errors of self-abasing lamentation in confessions of guilt and of defiantly self-isolating pride.

The material concerns of the moment lead many astray. Confessing guilt strikes them as advantageous. Their eagerness to confess corresponds to the world’s indignation at German moral turpitude. The powerful are met with flattery; one likes to say what they would like to hear. In addition, there is the baneful tendency to feel that confessing guilt makes us better than others. Humility cloaks an evil self-conceit. Self-disparagement contains an attack on others who refrain from it. The ignominy of such cheap self-accusations, the disgrace of supposedly helpful flattery, is obvious. At this point the power instincts of the mighty and the impotent fatally interlock.

Defiant pride is different. The moral attack of the others is the very reason for its stiffened obstinacy. It aims at self-respect in a supposed inner independence. But this is not to be gained if the decisive point remains obscure.

The decisive point is an eternal basic phenomenon, returned today in new form: he who in total defeat prefers life to death can only live in truthfulness—the only dignity left to him—if he decides upon this life in full realization of its meaning. What Hegel showed in his “Phenomenology,” in the grandiose chapter on master and servant, is the necessity which human consciousness would like to obscure in order to evade it.

The decision to stay alive in impotence and servitude is an act of life-building sincerity. It results in a metamorphosis that modifies all values. Here—if the decision is made, if the consequences are accepted and toil and suffering embraced—lies the sublime potential of the human soul. In Hegel’s exposition it is the servant rather than the master who bears the spiritual future—but not unless he honestly follows his hard road. Nothing is given. Nothing comes by itself. The errors of self-abasement and proud defiance can be avoided only if this prime decision is clear; purification serves to clarify both the decision and its consequences.

The presence of guilt, together with defeat, adds a psychological complication. Not only impotence but guilt must be accepted, and the transmutation which man would like to avoid must grow from both.

Proud defiance finds a multitude of points of view, of grandiloquences and edifying sentimentalities, to help itself to the delusion by which it can be maintained. For instance:

The meaning of the necessity to accept past events is changed. A wild inclination to “own up to our history” permits the concealed affirmation of evil, the discovery of good in evil, and its preservation in the soul as a proud fortress held against the victors. This perversion admits of sentences such as the following: “We must know that within us we still bear the primordial strength of will which created the past, and we must also stand by it and accept it into our existence.… We have been both and shall remain both… and we ourselves are never anything but our entire history whose strength we bear within us.” “Reverence” will force the new German generation to become like the previous one.

A defiance disguised as reverence is here confusing the historic soil—in which we are lovingly rooted—with the entirety of the realities of our common past. Far from loving all of those, we reject a good many as alien to our being.

In this affirming recognition of the evil as evil, queer emotional obscurities may admit of sentences such as the following: “We must become so brave and so great and so gentle that we can say, yes, even this horror was and will remain our reality, but we are strong enough to make it over within ourselves, for creative tasks. We know within us a fearful potentiality which once appeared in miserably erring forms. We love and esteem our whole historic past with a reverent affection transcending any single historic guilt. We bear this volcano within us, daring to know that it may blow us up, but convinced that only our ability to tame it will open the last expanse of our freedom and we realize, in the dangerous strength of such possibility, what in common with all others will be the human achievement of our spirit.”

This is a tempting appeal—born of a bad, irrationalist philosophy—to avoid a decision and intrust ourselves to a process of existential levelling. “Taming” is not half enough. The “choice” is what matters. Failure to make the choice immediately revives the possibility of an evil defiance, bound to end up by saying, “Go and sin.” The misapprehension in this appeal to reverence toward evil, even though it is negated, is that it could only lead to an illusive community.

A third manner of proud defiance may affirm all National- Socialism as a matter of “philosophy of history”—in an esthetic view compounding obvious evil and disaster, which should be soberly considered, into an emotional fog of false magnificence:

“In the spring of 1932 a German philosopher prophesied that within ten years the world would be governed politically from two poles only, Moscow and Washington; that Germany, in between, would become irrelevant as a political-geographical conception, existing only as a spiritual power.

“German history—to which the defeat of 1918 had actually opened vistas of greater consolidation and even Great-German achievement—revolted against this prophesied and indeed impending tendency to simplify the world around two poles. Against this world tendency, German history contracted for an isolated, self-willed, titanic effort still to reach its own national goal.

“If that philosopher’s prophecy was right in placing a time limit of only ten years on the beginning of Russo-American world rule, the precipitate pace, the haste and violence of the German countereffort was understandable. It was the pace of an inwardly meaningful and fascinating but historically belated revolt. In the past months we have seen this pace eventually outrun itself in pure, isolated raving. A philosopher lightly pronounces sentence: German history is past; the Moscow-Washington era is beginning. So greatly, longingly devised a history as the German one does not simply say, amen, to such academic resolutions. It flares up; in deeply excited resistance and attack, in a savage tumult of faith and hatred it plunges to its doom.”

Thus, in the summer of 1945, a young man who has my highest personal esteem wrote in a confusion of dismal feelings.

All this is indeed not purification but further entanglement. Thoughts like these—whether self-abasing or defiant—may for an instant evoke feelings as of delivery. You think you are back on your way, and actually you have only come closer to a dead end. It is the impurity of feelings which is here increased and simultaneously consolidated against the chance of a genuine metamorphosis.

All types of defiance feature an aggressive silence. I withdraw when reasons become irrefutable. I found my self-respect on silence as the last power left the powerless. I show my silence so as to hurt the powerful. I hide my silence so as to plan for a restoration, politically by seizing implements of power—laughable though these would be in the hands of men without access to the world’s giant industries that produce the tools of destruction—and psychologically by a self-vindication admitting of no guilt. Fate decided against me; there was a senseless material superiority; my defeat was honorable; within myself I tend my loyalty and my heroism. But the way of such conduct merely augments the inner poison, in illusive thought and anticipating self-intoxication.

Dodging into Specialties Intrinsically Correct

but Unessential to the Guilt Question

We are evading the guilt question if we deviate from essentials into intrinsically correct details—as if these were the whole—or if we persistently seek, and indeed find, fault with others.

In appropriate circumstances, a patient striving for common sense permits the submission of facts and connections to the victor. Now that we Germans are no longer active in the whole of history, we look upon what is and is not done as deciding our fate as well. Yet however correct this line of thought may be, it must not serve to replace or extinguish the guilt question.

The form of evasion most easily understood is the glance at our own woes. Help us, many think, but don’t talk of atonement. Tremendous suffering excuses. We hear, for example:

“Is the bomb terror forgotten, which cost millions of innocent people their lives or health and all their cherished possessions? Should that not make up for what was sinned in German lands? Should the misery of the refugees which cries to Heaven not act disarmingly? ”

“I came to Germany from the South Tyrol as a bride, thirty years ago. I have shared the German ordeal from the the first day to the last, taking blow after blow, making sacrifice after sacrifice, drained the bitter cup to the end—and now I feel accused, too, of things I never did.”

“The misery which has now overtaken the whole nation is so gigantic, growing to such unimaginable size, that one should not rub salt into the wounds. The population, in its surely innocent parts, has already suffered more than just atonement may perhaps require.”

Indeed the disaster is apocalyptical. Everyone complains, and rightly so: those who were rescued from concentration camps or persecution and still remember the frightful suffering; those who lost their dear ones in the most cruel manner; the millions of evacuees and refugees roaming the road without hope; the many hangers-on of the Party now being weeded out and suddenly in want; the Americans and other Allies who gave up years of their lives and had millions killed; the European nations tormented under the terrorist rule of the National-Socialist Germans; the German emigrants forced to live in a foreign-language environment, under the most difficult conditions. Everyone, everyone.

Everywhere the complaints turn into accusations. Against whom? In the end: all against all.

In this horrible world situation, in which at present our distress in Germany is comparatively the greatest, we must not forget the interrelation of the whole. The guilt question keeps leading back to it.

In my enumeration of complainants I put the manifold groups side by side with the intention of making the incongruity felt at once. The distress may as such, as destruction of life, be all of one kind; but it differs essentially in its general connection as well as in its particular place therein. It is unjust to call all equally innocent.

On the whole, the fact remains that we Germans—however much we may now have come into the greatest distress among the nations—also bear the greatest responsibility for the course of events until 1945.

Therefore we, as individuals, should not be so quick to feel innocent, should not pity ourselves as victims of an evil fate, should not expect to be praised for suffering. We should question ourselves, should pitilessly analyze ourselves: where did I feel wrongly, think wrongly, act wrongly—we should, as far as possible, look for guilt within ourselves, not in things, nor in the others; we should not dodge into distress. This follows from the decision to turn about, to improve daily. In doing so we face God as individuals, no longer as Germans and not collectively.

Dodging into a Generality

I feel relieved when I myself become individually unimportant because the whole is something that happens to me without my cooperation and thus without personal guilt. I live in the view of the whole, then, a mere impotent sufferer or impotent participant. I no longer live out of myself. A few examples:

(1) The moral interpretation of history as a whole lets us expect a justice on the whole—for “all guilt is on earth requited,” as the poet says.

I know myself a prey to a total guilt. My own doing scarcely matters any longer. If I am on the losing side, the overall metaphysical inescapability is shattering. If I am on the winning side, my success is flavored with the good conscience of superior virtue. This tendency not to take ourselves seriously as individuals paralyzes our moral impulses. Both the pride of a self-abasing guilt confession in the one instance and the pride of moral victory in the other become evasions of the really human task which always lies in the individual.

Yet experience contradicts this total view. The course of events is not unequivocal at all. The sun shines alike upon the just and the unjust. The distribution of fortune and the morality of actions do not seem to be interconnected.

However, it would be an equally false total judgment to say, on the contrary, that there is no justice.

True, in some situations the conditions and acts of a state fill us with the ineradicable feeling that “that can’t end well” and “there is bound to be a reckoning.)’ But this feeling no sooner puts its trust in justice, beyond comprehensible human reactions to evil, than errors appear. There is no certainty. Truth and probity fail to come by themselves. In most cases amends are dispensed with. Ruin and vengeance strike the innocent along with the guilty. The purest will, complete veracity, the greatest courage may remain unsuccessful if the situation is inopportune. And many passive ones come by the favorable situation undeservedly, due to the acts of others.

In the end, such things as atonement and guilt lie only in the personality of the individuals. Despite metaphysical truth which it may contain, the idea of total guilt and being ensnared in an overall guilt-atonement relationship comes to tempt the individual to evade what is wholly and solely his business.

(2) Another total view holds that finally everything in the world comes to an end, that nothing is ever started without failing in the end, that everything contains the ruinous germ. This view puts non-success with every other non-success on the one common level of failure, and thus, in an abstraction, robs it of its weight.

(3) Interpreting our own disaster as due to the guilt of all, we give it a metaphysical weight by the construction of a new singularity. Germany is the sacrificial substitute in the catastrophe of the age. It suffers for all. It erupts in the universal guilt, and atones for all.

There is a false pathos in this application of ideas from Isaiah and Christianity, serving in turn to divert men from the sober task of doing what is really in their power—from improvement within the sphere of the comprehensible and from the inner transformation. It is the digression into “estheticism” which by its irresponsibility diverts from realization out of the core of individual self-existence. It is a new way of acquiring a false collective feeling of our own value.

(4) We seem as though delivered from guilt if in view of the vast suffering among us Germans we cry out, “It has been atoned for.”

Here we have to differentiate again. A crime is atoned for; a political liability is limited by a peace treaty and thus brought to an end. As far as these two points are concerned, the idea is correct and meaningful. But moral and metaphysical guilt, which are understood only by the individual in his community, are by their very nature not atoned for. They do not cease. Whoever bears them enters upon a process lasting all his life.

Here we Germans face an alternative. Either acceptance of the guilt not meant by the rest of the world but constantly repeated by our conscience comes to be a fundamental trait of our German self-consciousness—in which case our soul goes the way of transformation—or we subside into the average triviality of indifferent, mere living. Then no true search for God awakens any more in our amidst; then the true nature of existence is no longer revealed to us; then we no longer hear the transcendent meaning of our sublime poetry and art and music and philosophy; then all of this may, as past, perhaps become a memory of other nations—nations capable still of hearing the voice of what Germans, once upon a time, brought forth and what Germans were but are no more.

There is no other way to realize truth for the German than purification out of the depth of consciousness of guilt.

THE WAY OF PURIFICATION

Purification in action means, first of all, making amends.

Politically this means delivery, from inner affirmation, of the legally defined reparations. It means tightening our belts, so part of their destruction can be made up to the nations attacked by Hitler Germany.

Besides the legal form assuring a just distribution of the load, such deliveries presuppose life, working ability, and working possibility. The political will to make amends must inevitably flag if political acts of the victors destroy these premises. For then we should not have a peace aimed at reparation but continued war aiming at further destruction.

There is more to reparation, however. Everyone really affected by the guilt he shares will wish to help anyone wronged by the arbitrary despotism of the lawless régime.

There are two different motivations which must not be confused. The first calls on us to help wherever there is distress, no matter what the cause—simply because it is near and calls for help. The second requires us to grant a special right to those deported, robbed, pillaged, tortured and exiled by the Hitler regime.

Both demands are fully justified, but there is a difference in motivation. Where guilt is not felt, all distress is immediately leveled on the same plane. If I want to make up for what I, too, was guilty of, I must differentiate between the victims of distress.

This way of purification by reparation is one we cannot dodge. Yet there is much more to purification. Even reparation is not earnestly willed and does not fulfill its moral purpose except as it ensues from our cleansing transmutation.

Clarification of guilt is at the same time clarification of our new life and its possibilities. From it spring seriousness and resolution.

Once that happens, life is no longer simply there to be naively, gaily enjoyed. We may seize the happiness of life if it is granted to us for intermediate moments, for breathing spells—but it does not fill our existence; it appears as amiable magic before a melancholy background. Essentially, our life remains permitted only to be consumed by a task.

The result is modest resignation. In inner action before the transcendent we become aware of being humanly finite and incapable of perfection. Humility comes to be our nature.

Then we are able, without will to power, to struggle with love in discussing truth, and in truth to join with each other.

Then we are capable of unaggressive silence—it is from the simplicity of silence that the clarity of the communicable will emerge.

Then nothing counts any longer but truth and activity. Without guile we are ready to bear what fate has in store for us. Whatever happens will, while we live, remain the human task that cannot be completed in the world.

Purification is the way of man as such. There, purification by way of unfolding the guilt idea is just one moment. Purification is not primarily achieved by outward actions—not by an outward finishing, not by magic. Rather, purification is an inner process which is never ended but in which we continually become ourselves. Purification is a matter of our freedom. Everyone comes again and again to the fork in the road, to the choice between the clean and the murky.

Purification is not the same for all. Each goes his personal way. It is not to be anticipated by anyone else, nor can it be shown. General ideas can do no more than alert, perhaps awaken.

If at this close of our discussions of guilt we ask what purification consists in, no concrete reply is possible beyond what has been said. If something cannot be realized as an end of rational will but occurs as a metamorphosis by inner action, one can only repeat the indefinite, comprehensive figures of speech: uplift by illumination and growing transparency—love of man.

As for guilt, one way is to think through the thoughts here expounded. They must not only be abstractly, mentally thought, but actually carried out; they must be recalled, appropriated or rejected with one’s own being. Purification is this execution and what comes out of it. It is not something new, tacked on at the end.

Purification is the premise of our political liberty, too; for only consciousness of guilt leads to the consciousness of solidarity and co-responsibility without which there can be no liberty.

Political liberty begins with the majority of individuals in a people feeling jointly liable for the politics of their community. It begins when the individual not merely covets and chides, when he demands of himself, rather, to see reality and not to act upon the faith—misplaced in politics—in an earthly paradise failing of realization only because of the others’ stupidity and ill-will. It begins when he knows, rather, that politics looks in the concrete world for the negotiable path of each day, guided by the ideal of human existence as liberty.

In short: without purification of the soul there is no political liberty.

Our progress with inner purification on the basis of guilt consciousness can be checked by our reaction to attacks.

Without guilt consciousness we keep reacting to every attack with a counterattack. Once we have been shaken by the inner tremors, however, the external attack will merely brush the surface. It may still be offensive and painful, but it does not penetrate to the interior of the soul.

Where consciousness of guilt has been appropriated, we bear false and unjust accusations with tranquillity. For pride and defiance are molten.

If we truly feel guilt, so that our consciousness of being is in transformation, reproach from others seems to us like harmless child’s play, unable to hurt where the real guilt consciousness is an indelible prick and has forced a new form on self-consciousness. Reproached like this, we rather feel sorrow at the other’s unconcern and unawareness. If an atmosphere of trust prevails, we may remind him of the guilt potentialities in every human being. But we can no longer get angry.

Without transillumination and transformation of our soul, sensitivity would only increase in helpless impotence. The poison of psychological transpositions would ruin us. We must be ready to put up with reproaches, must listen to and then examine them. We must seek out rather than shun attacks on us, because they enable us to check up on our own thought. Our inner attitude will stand the test.

Such purification makes us free. The course of events lies not in man’s hand, though man may go incalculably far in guiding his existence. There remains uncertainty and the possibility of new and greater disasters, while no new happiness is guaranteed by the awareness of guilt and the resulting transformation of our being. These are the reasons why purification alone can free us so as to be ready for whatever comes. For only the pure soul can truthfully live in this tension: to know about the possible ruin and still remain tirelessly active for all that is possible in the world.

In regarding world events we do well to think of Jeremiah. When Jerusalem had been destroyed, state and country lost, the prophet forcibly taken along by the last few Jews who were fleeing to Egypt—when he had to see those sacrificing to Isis in the hope that she would do more for them than Jehovah, his disciple Baruch despaired. And Jeremiah answered, “The Lord saith thus: Behold; that which I have built will I break down, and that which I have planted I will pluck up, and seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not.” What does that mean? That God is, is enough. When all things fade away, God is—that is the only fixed point.

But what is true in the face of death, in extremity, turns into a dangerous temptation if fatigue, impatience, despair drive man to plunge into it prematurely. For this stand on the verge is true only if borne by the unswerving deliberation always to seize what remains possible while life endures. Our share is humility and moderation.