Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest depicts the ordinary, peaceful domestic life of Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz’s commandant, and his family living next to the concentration camp, highlighting the chilling coexistence of familial love and industrialized murder, which is happening just beyond the family’s walls.
Drawing on Hannah Arendt, the essay argues that the moral failure of Nazi Germany was not only a rejection of morality but an extension of bourgeois, conventional morality. This conventional morality prioritizes security and family above all else, and personal responsibility only to one’s immediate circle, not to the broader human community. Morality can enable evil.
People like Höss and millions of others were not moral monsters but “family men” who justified complicity in evil to protect their livelihoods, status, and families. Arendt notes this readiness to sacrifice honour and dignity for personal security as the moral weakness that totalitarianism exploits.
The core issue is not a lack of love but a narrow scope of responsibility. If one’s moral concern extends only to family or tribe, then atrocities against outsiders become permissible or ignorable. Modern society still suffers from this limited view—people prioritize career, comfort, and family advancement, often at the expense of justice or others’ well-being.
Writers like Arendt, Wendell Berry, and James Baldwin suggest that morality must include a sense of responsibility for all humans, recognition of shared guilt and capacity for evil, and an understanding that every child, every neighbour—even strangers—belong to us morally.
The essay suggests that Christianity, at its best, offers a way beyond conventional morality through the recognition of universal human sinfulness (radical humility) and a call to love not just family but also neighbours and enemies.
However, many modern Christians instead express conventional morality—emphasizing strong families—rather than radical self-giving love.
Conventional morality—centred on family, security, and comfort—is insufficient to resist or prevent great evil. True moral action requires:
Expanding one’s “zone of interest” beyond family,
Taking responsibility for strangers and even enemies, and
Engaging in acts of sacrificial love that cannot be explained by self-interest.
Only this kind of expanded, unconventional morality can stand against radical evil.