A long-standing philosophical habit in the West it to take the Enlightenment view of human nature, which says that human beings are good and they only occasionally fall into evil behavior. That's the optimistic view. Some even in the West take the more somber view that emphasizes the aggressive animal base, the dark, instinctive substructure, which is older than our ego, that dark ground that is implacably reborn with every child. According to that view, our human houses are built over a rough, selfish, presocial animal ground. The substructure is powerful because it does not change. Any thought that two thousand years of Christianity and five hundred years of the Enlightenment had softened its crude and brutal nature had to be abandoned when the first photographs of the camps at Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz appeared. The photographs were a huge shock for Europeans, hardly bearable. Some Americans perhaps did not feel as deeply, because we ended World War II proud of the skill and discipline that helped win it. We seemed to ourselves to be a part of the Enlightenment; but the Europeans and, in a way, the entire world saw in the war the utter defeat of the Enlightenment.
George Steiner, born in Geneva, said:
My own consciousness is possessed by the eruption of barbarism in modern Europe.... This is the crisis of rational humane expectation which has shaped my own life.... It did not spring up on the Gobi Desert.... It rose from within, and from the core of European civilization. The cry of the murdered sounded in earshot of the university; the sadism went on a street away from the theaters and museums.
European civilization had not eradicated the understructure that the camps represented. The archaic brutality resembled a rough, thoughtless animal-being shrugging a small culture bird off its shoulder.