In the development of personal conscience, we constantly re-evaluate our past. We examine the consequences of what we did, to determine what we will do. Edwin Black is an historian whose studies have focused on the Holocaust, perhaps because he is the son of Polish Holocaust survivors. Like all historians of the Holocaust, he has made it his work to remind us of things about ourselves we would rather not recall - and must never forget.

Are we not done researching the Holocaust yet? Until the day every one of us can say we see no ethnocentric injustice in our world, I do not believe we have finished re-searching the record of the greatest monument to ethnocentric evil in our history.

One man did not create the Holocaust; nor did one nation. It took billions, around the world, over many decades, to create the conditions for that great tragedy. It will take billions, around the world, many more decades of doing small goods and avoiding small evils, before we have a world where such things never happen again.

In his previous book, IBM and the Holocaust, Black documented the human tendency to prioritize "practicality," expediency, and self-interest over humanitarian principles. IBM itself would like to rewrite history and claim that it lost all control over its branch in Germany, which supplied and aided the identification, enumeration, collection, and extinction of Jews and other "undesirables" by Nazi officials, all on its own authority. Going direct to source documents, Black demonstrates that this is not the truth. CEO Thomas Watson directly supported the business of IBM in 20 countries, including Germany, even while reports of the Holocaust were being written up in U.S. newspapers.

Both legal authorities and historians have pointed out, however, that context is important, and there is a difference between moral responsibility and legal responsibility. Watson cannot be accused of deliberately conspiring with IBM to destroy Jews. He and many others are responsible for narrowing their focus to what they considered "their business" and ignoring the consequences of not interfering in what they considered "not their business."

To this, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

In The Transfer Agreement, Black documented the support that Henry Ford gave the Nazi regime. He also recorded a heart-wrenching question for many at the time: a deal between Zionists and Nazis, in the early years of the war, to transfer a large number of Jews (and their financial assets) to Palestine, in return for an end to a world-wide propaganda campaign against Fascism. The most painful specter that Black raised in this book, however, was the intra-ethnic class divisions that made it possible for the more prosperous Jews to ignore the dilemmas of the less prosperous.

In War Against the Weak, Black documents the history of the eugenics movement - the attempt to eliminate the "unfit" among humanity and breed "a better race," a pseudo-scientific rationalization of racism that began in England and was nurtured to full growth in America before it ever migrated to Germany. Even its full flowering in Nazi Germany was financed and fondly praised by American interests.

Eugenics was driven by class divisions and also by a shallow interpretation of "practicality" and self-interest that justified any degree of harm to others as "for the ultimate good"of "those who count."

Disdaining "different" and "lesser" people (and easily identifying the first quality with the other) and discriminating against them is a basic natural behavior in humans. It is something that we all have to struggle against, that humans have been struggling against since becoming self-aware and may well be struggling against as long as we have flesh.

Historically, most people admire social groups that "take care of their own" -- that help the weak, injured, ill, elderly, or very young. People are held up as most admirable who care for the stranger or the outcast. We sense a moral obligation to help one another, as strong as an obligation not to do harm.

In Western social development, however, these moral obligations became identified with religion. It was the church's responsibility to help the poor. The basis of ethics was faith, not reason, and so being good was a desirable aspiration, not a practical necessity. Practicality more often necessitated being selfish, or even doing things regarded as ethically wrong. This split between ethics and practicality made it possible for us to "be good on Sunday": donate to church-based charity and pay lip service to human benevolence while practicing cutthroat competition and self-centeredness in business and government.

Ethics has nothing to do with religion; ethics is a human matter, pertaining to human interaction with the world and each other. "Practical behavior" is ethical behavior; good government and good business and even good science is ethical government and business and science, and there are ethics that transcend particular political or religious ideologies. But these are relatively new, post-postmodern ideas. Our attitude toward social obligations to "the poor" is only one of the things being affected by this shift on consideration of ethics.

Even as we find a growing number of people recognizing a moral obligation to care for each other, we also find a rising opinion in modern politics, again, that there are "unfit" people dragging down "the national character." The history of pseudo-science - and our own personal memories, if we're passably honest - demonstrates to us how easily we find "scientific" rationalizations for what we want to do. It is especially appealing to find "practical" justifications for something that might otherwise look cruel or inhumane.

I think it is a good time to re-search the Holocaust. It is a good time to remind ourselves what happens whenever "practicality" is placed above humanity.