Books and Arts; Book Review;

Stories of resistance;Shades of grey;

Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times. By Eyal Press.

You have a decent job and work hard. You keep your nose clean, respect authority and have never joined a protest march. Suddenly you have the bad luck to face a cruel and seemingly impossible choice. Your superiors tell you to do something outrageous or unacceptable. Do you obey or, at grave personal cost, refuse? In “Beautiful Souls”, a subtle and thoughtful book, Eyal Press, an American journalist, tells the stories of four very ordinary people who, in widely different times, places and circumstances, surprised themselves by saying “no”.

This morally courageous foursome includes a Swiss police official who broke the law in 1938 by giving entry permits to Jewish refugees; a Serb who, at risk to his own life, saved captured Croats from summary execution during the Serb-Croat war in 1991; an Israeli special-forces soldier in the occupied territories who could no longer stomach orders to protect Israeli settlers who were doing wrong, as he saw it, to Palestinian farmers; and a mid-ranking whistle-blower in a Texas investment company accused of fraud.

At first glance, this looks like a jumble of risks and motives. The policeman had to be brave over months. The Serb had to decide in an instant. The Israeli soldier's disquiet nagged for years before he quit. The whistle-blower was fired, whereas the Serb faced being shot. That lack of a pattern, though, is part of Mr Press's point. We recognise moral bravery when we see it. Explaining it is extremely hard.

On stage and in the pulpit, moral dilemmas of this kind tend to have a black-and-white clarity. Working from life, Mr Press brings out the greys. All of the choices he looked at were hard, and only the Serb's involved a clear-cut decision in the moment. The good achieved by each of these “beautiful souls” was small: the few lives the Serb and the Swiss policeman saved were a pittance when set against greater evils they could not stop. The soldier has not stopped Israel's settlement-building, and the whistle-blower did not dent the financial system. So why did they do it?

Without claiming to have firm answers, Mr Press sees three factors at work. One is that these people listened to their emotions. Faced with the unacceptable, their instincts rebelled. Direct confrontation was also important. The challenge to their moral sensibility was face-to-face. This was not true of the whistle-blower, but her conduct suggests to Mr Press a third element. She was not a rebel out to flout authority or change the rules. On the contrary, she acted to protect rules that her superiors flouted.

In leading us through such thickets, Mr Press points to studies in psychology and to philosophical work on moral dilemmas. A drier sort of book might have probed more whether our moral emotions are always reliable and how sure naysayers must be before outright disobedience is their best course. On the other hand “Beautiful Souls” gains much from its storytelling approach. It is rich in personal, circumstantial details that analytical thinkers in search of clear principles may overlook. These are modern instances of ancient puzzles, and Mr Press is wise not to pretend to be offering new wisdom.