The summer before I experienced the smoke of the burning World Trade Center sucked into my kitchen by a whirring window fan, I read Jonathan Glover‘s brilliant work, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century.
In it, Glover looked across all of the genocides of the twentieth century to find common attributes — sympathy, empathy and respect — that can help us understand and avoid repeating those atrocities in the twenty-first.
From the NYTimes review:
In Glover’s analysis, the horrors of the century took place when the moral resources were deliberately or accidentally disabled. Again and again he finds that atrocities are accompanied by tactics of humiliation and dehumanization: pejorative nicknames, degrading conditions, humiliating dress. They flip a mental switch and reclassify another individual from ”person” to ”nonperson,” making it as easy to torture or kill him as it is for us to boil a lobster alive. Some of the most indelible images in ”Humanity” are of the ”cold jokes” that brutes all over the world have used to strip their victims of dignity and make cruelty come easier. Those who poke fun at ”politically correct” names for ethnic minorities will be reminded that they originally had a humane rationale.
Sympathy can be turned off by physical distance from the victims, as in aerial bombardment and remote-control warfare. It can also be suppressed by sheer willpower. It is frightening to think that our vaunted ability to subdue emotional urges through the force of intellect and conscience (allowing us to defer gratification and resist temptation) also allowed Nazi guards to overcome their visceral horror at what they were doing and to persevere with distasteful acts that they thought served a higher purpose.
Like sympathy, the moral resource of identity can be insidiously eroded. No one is a saint, and most people calibrate their conscience against a level of minimum decency expected of people in their peer group or culture. When the level drifts downward, people can commit horrible crimes with the confidence that comes from knowing that ”everyone does it.” Euphemisms like ”resettlement to work camps,” phased decisions (in which bombing targets might shift from isolated factories to factories near neighborhoods to the neighborhoods themselves) and the diffusion of responsibility within a bureaucracy can lead conscientious people to cause appalling outcomes that no one would ever willingly choose on his own.
It’s in all of us, both the evil instinct and the tools to resist it:
Glover does not let our species off so lightly. He shows that distinctive patterns of cruelty and callousness pop up repeatedly in history, cutting across times, places and political systems. He insists that ”we need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us,” not to make us pessimists but as ”part of the project of caging and taming them.” For Glover argues that human nature encompasses not just destructive impulses but ”moral resources”: humane impulses that sometimes recoil from the intentions of the monsters. The course of history, and our hopes for the future, are shaped by struggles among these impulses inside countless minds.
The great contribution of ”Humanity” is a dissection of these motives. This is not, as some might fear, an attempt to reduce history to psychology. Glover makes it clear that the motives are responses to the larger community and manifest themselves in different ways in different social and political contexts.
HERE are some of the monsters. Pure, amoral self-interest. Sadism and the thrill of the battlefield. Tribalism, which elevates the group above the individual and turns personal enmity into feuding, war and genocide. Ideology, which can convince people that a struggle between groups — races for the Nazis, classes for the Marxists — is inevitable and necessary for progress. The ”Hobbesian trap,” in which a nation is tempted to attack a neighbor out of fear that it would otherwise attack first, like an armed homeowner who surprises an armed burglar, tempting each to shoot first to avoid being shot.
Glover sees two countervailing moral resources. Human responses — sympathy, empathy and respect — occasionally break through in people committing vicious acts. Sometimes they are triggered by the intellect. A British World War II navigator, safely home after a bombing raid, says to the pilot, ”What about those poor sods under those fires?” Entrenched soldiers say, ”We don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to kill us, so why shoot?” At other times they are triggered by tangible signs of a target’s humanity. A soldier sees a fleeing man holding up his trousers. The mundane detail turns him from ”fascist” to ”person,” and the soldier loses the will to fire. An Afrikaner policeman chases a South African demonstrator, club in hand. She loses her shoe, and chivalry makes him hand it back. Their eyes meet, and he finds it impossible to club her.
The other resource is moral identity, or self-respect — the answer to the question ”Am I the kind of person who could do this?” People sometimes resist the pressure to harm others when it conflicts with how they want to see themselves. A moral identity can come from a religion, a culture, professional mores (like the Hippocratic oath), a cosmopolitan humanism or sometimes just an insistent voice inside us.
In scary times, we must remember we have the moral resources to resist being reduced to our base instincts. We need leaders who appeal to our moral resources rather than those who feed off our basest instincts.