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Press examines his subjects carefully, alert to the different personalities and circumstances of each individual. He weighs the role of prejudice, idealism and community.
How much or how little does the following description fit Macbeth: “Overcoming his queasiness, the soldier ends up submitting to the order, and is then haunted by the thought that he’s colluded in a crime” (Eyal Press, Beautiful Souls, 7).
He explores the “element of reciprocity” in one case and the “anxiety of responsibility” in another, sees the importance of “mutual support” and discusses the frustrations of being ignored. He reads about oxytocin receptors; he studies David Hume. He makes modest conclusions.
I don’t mean that as criticism. If Press made more comprehensive claims, I wouldn’t trust him. It’s no more possible to explain an act of conscience than it is to dissect a dream. If an act of conscience can be a betrayal, it can also be a tragedy. In his first book, “Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America,” Press told the story of his father, a gynecologist who refused to stop providing abortions even after his colleague was murdered and his own life was threatened. Press admired his father’s decision — and yet when he imagined his father murdered, he found himself wishing he would not be so brave. “Who among us would like to see a parent become a martyr?” Press asked.
“Or, for that matter, become one themselves?”In “Beautiful Souls,” Press interviews Armando, the son of Leyla Wydler, a financial industry whistle-blower who was fired after she questioned the dubious financial instruments that her employer was peddling. Press can see that Armando is proud of his mother but also conflicted; he’s well aware of the risks she took — risks that affected his life as well as hers. “ ‘Do I wish my mother would have stayed there and continued to make money?’ Armando asked me suddenly, as though reading my mind. ‘Kind of, you know.’ ” Press does know. He knows that Leyla feels misgivings, too. He knows that those who act bravely are all the more likely to feel anguished, since they know what’s at stake.
In some ways this book is a thoughtful gesture of support. That might sound like a small thing, but it’s not.
Compassion never is.
On the Swiss border with Austria in 1938, a police captain refuses to enforce a law barring Jewish refugees from entering his country. In the Balkans half a century later, a Serb from the war-blasted city of Vukovar defies his superiors in order to save the lives of Croats. At the height of the Second Intifada, a member of Israel's most elite military unit informs his commander he doesn't want to serve in the occupied territories. Fifty years after Hannah Arendt examined the dynamics of conformity in her seminal account of the Eichmann trial, Beautiful Souls explores the flipside of the banality of evil, mapping out what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention.Through the dramatic stories of unlikely resisters who feel the flicker of conscience when thrust into morally compromising situations, Eyal Press shows that the boldest acts of dissent are often carried out not by radicals seeking to overthrow the system but by true believers who cling with unusual fierceness to their convictions. Drawing on groundbreaking research by moral psychologists and neuroscientists, Beautiful Souls culminates with the story of a financial industry whistleblower who loses her job after refusing to sell a toxic product she rightly suspects is being misleadingly advertised. At a time of economic calamity and political unrest, this deeply reported work of narrative journalism examines the choices and dilemmas we all face when our principles collide with the loyalties we harbor and the duties we are expected to fulfill.